Localism Bill

My Lords, I have three amendments in this group. On Amendment 153ZC, which relates to the weight given to emerging documents, I think that that has been discussed and I will not pursue it at this point. I have been reassured that emerging documents are given weight. Amendment 153ZD is relevant to the short debate we have just had about design, which strikes me as being a rather pleasant and agreeable way of spending an afternoon in the Moses Room when the Education Bill is not being discussed there. I do not want to detain the Committee on that, but I am absolutely certain that what my noble friend Lord Hodgson, the noble Lord, Lord Best, and others have said must be right because if this Bill is about localism the vernacular should matter. Local people like their vernacular and they like building that is in keeping, whatever the design is, if that design is good. Local authorities as well as national housebuilders have failed in that respect over the years. I do not mind a little cajoling to them in the Bill, but we have to be careful because design, as I think Lewis Carroll said, is probably ““what I say it is””. There is a problem there. Amendment 153ZD is related to that because it is about how the examiner deals with neighbourhood planning orders. A case in our authority involved the Government intervening on our existing core strategy to say that it must include high-rise building. Notwithstanding that there was cross-party agreement against it and that hundreds of people protested against it, a planning inspector imposed an extension of the ugliest building in our borough on the basis that the existing core strategy provided for such buildings. The local authority, with the strong support of local people, is trying to revise its plans. It takes a long time to revise a local development framework and my right honourable friend Secretary of State has said that he hopes to accelerate it. There will be circumstances in neighbourhood planning where local communities say, for example, ““We do not want any more high-rise””. However, if an examiner looks, as that examiner did, at the previous building and says, ““Your existing plan says let's have some high-rise””, then unless we include a provision such as my Amendment 153ZD to allow a local authority to assent to an order that is not in compliance, we may find that neighbourhood planning is defeated. Perhaps I am being oversuspicious, but there might be circumstances where the will of the local community is clear and the examiner should be able to give weight to that informal opinion. I will deal with Amendment 153ZE very briefly. It refers to the situation in London and the definition of localism. I am simply saying that if an emerging policy is not necessarily in compliance with the higher-authority policy and there is tension between the policies of the mayor and the borough as regards its neighbourhood plans, then the examiner should, in circumstances where those matters are being considered, give greater weight to the more local of the two emerging policies. I do not expect an answer from my noble friend on that or the other amendment to which I referred, but both are significant.