I see the Minister nodding and hope that, apart from my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley, we can move by consensus in that direction.
The third reason—the main reason—why I rose was to speak to new clause 5, which I tabled. I am grateful to the Minister for meeting me and talking through the proposition. I tabled the new clause in the hope not that it would be accepted immediately, but that it would induce the Department to bring forward an array of policies—I doubt it can be just one—to solve a particular problem. The new clause would help to solve it in a particular way, and I hope that the measure might come back in some form as a Government amendment in the other place.
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The problem is cognate with the one that my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs talked about—it is another aspect of the same problem. As he rightly pointed out, the formation of a neighbourhood plan is quite a complicated and arduous undertaking. Those of us who are passionate about neighbourhood planning believe that, in the long run, those plans are the way to resolve the tension that has hitherto existed between the desire to maintain communities and the appearance of the places in which we live, and the need to house our people. The problem that neighbourhood planners face in trying to achieve that noble goal is that they are all too often daunted by the immense amount of work involved.
The only way in which that problem can really be resolved is for neighbourhood planners to employ professionals, particularly of two kinds. The first type of professionals can help with knotty questions of law and planning guidance. It takes someone who is fully paid up and knowledgeable to guide those involved in a neighbourhood plan through the questions that have to be answered: what are the strategic elements of the plan that will have to be observed; what constraints related to areas of outstanding natural beauty and sites of special scientific interest have to be observed; and how does the whole thing have to work to cohere with law and guidance?
The second type of professionals whom neighbourhood planners need to be able to employ are of a quite different kind: those with the imagination to enable people who are not in any sense experts, but who have a feel for their neighbourhood, to envisage what a particular set of policies in a neighbourhood plan, and ideally in a neighbourhood development order, will produce on the ground. Such professionals can conceptualise and draw what that will look like—literally, on pieces of paper or for display on overhead projectors—and work with the neighbourhood interactively at meetings. They can enable people to see what they cannot yet see so that they will know whether it is what they were looking for. That is actually quite a talent. Many hon. Members spend time in neighbourhoods talking about these things, and they will know how difficult it is to engage in conversation with 100 or 200 people who are all stirred up about local planning, to calm the atmosphere, to engage emotionally, to be imaginative, and to end up with something that the neighbourhood actually likes.