Energy Bill

My Lords, this is a very important amendment, not least because there are other aspects of planning that should lead one to take this seriously. My noble friend has talked about the commercial and industrial needs of London, but there are also the housing needs. It is estimated that we could build 2 million homes in London with the aim of dealing with our housing shortage. There is no doubt that the sustainable way of development is to use land that has already been used, that we really should try not to build on greenfield sites and that we should do our best to ensure that our cities are increasingly the centres that they ought to be of people living together and of great enterprise. It is very difficult to say whether cities or civilisation came first, but there is no doubt that the two are intimately connected. I believe that there is a real issue about the supply of electricity.