My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin. He has said much more eloquently than I could what an extraordinarily important new clause this could be, were the Government to accept it. It really does reflect a very different approach to the creating of communities from the ones that inspired the new towns of the past. Those were, essentially, pragmatic attempts to rehouse populations which were in distress or in stress. We have a much more humane and intelligent appreciation of what it is to create communities these days. The noble Lord spoke eloquently about Liverpool but, in the case of new towns, one is of course creating a community. That means creating a sense of identity and belonging from the first steps up. In my opinion, it should begin with the nature of the community and the sort of infrastructure that sustains the community once it is in place.
That is why there is emphasis in this clause on key words such as, for example, “sustainable development”. That is one big change from the world that we were in 30 or 40 years ago when we were talking about growth and new towns. The notion of sustainability should underpin everything that we construct, whether in the demography that needs to be housed, the way in which we build or what sustains the community in terms of its well-being, such as the emphasis here on cultural and artistic provision, which is vital for creating a sense of belonging and opportunities for people to get to know each other and share a culture and indeed many different cultures.
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Then we have this really important emphasis on the natural historic environment. Many of our new towns were suddenly created on brownfield sites—sometimes greenfield sites, in fact—where the natural history, let alone the archaeology and history of the place, was completely overlooked and overridden. We know that
in the most absent landscapes there is a rich history, and it is part of the function of the town planner to be able to articulate and enhance that so that when new communities move to new places they are aware of what has gone before, the communities that lived there, their impact on the landscape and their own contribution to a succession of human development. These are extremely important elements making up the notion of social, economic and cultural well-being. The clause is hugely intelligent, and I congratulate the TCPA as well.
Then we come to the processes, which should not need mentioning. We should automatically be able to create decision-making strategies that are open, transparent and so on, which are managed in the long-term interest. If you say that in the Bill, though, you are sending a signal. First, you are saying that planning is an enormously creative and positive force; too often it is derided as negative and restrictive, but it is not. When one is talking about the making of new towns on fresh sites, one is looking at huge opportunities for the planning community to show what it can do. Secondly, it is about delivery and engagement with those very communities that are going to move in, not least with the development community itself, and setting very high standards for the development community in the way that it approaches the making of communities and its engagement with potential communities.
This is all good stuff. Every generation, when it approaches the challenging question of creating new ways of living in new places and new spaces to live, has to come up with appropriate machinery. The old delivery mechanisms are not going to be sufficient. We really need to look at some of the powers and resources that are going to have to be put into the hands of the new development corporations. The Minister is very open-minded about these things, and I hope that she will give this a fair wind and that we might see it somewhere between here and the end of the passage of the Bill.