My Lords, I was relieved to hear the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, say that this was a probing amendment. It is on that basis that I hope that the Minister will at least undertake to examine the possibility. All three noble Lords who have spoken in favour of the amendment have much more recent experience than I of local government service. It is more than 50 years since I was chairman of the housing committee of a then London borough which is now part of the London Borough of Haringey. It was then called Hornsey—I should say that it ends “sey” for the benefit of Hansard, which usually spells it like the Lincolnshire town. However, I was the chairman of housing and the problem existed then. In an inner London borough, one was very much of aware of the shortage of available land. We had a substantial slum clearance programme and I was very much concerned about where we were going to put the residents while the building was going on. That was a problem and I lost my seat on the council before it was solved, but that is a different story which my noble friends in the Liberal Democrat party perhaps do not wish to hear. However, within six weeks I was the prospective parliamentary candidate for Woodford, so I did not mind very much.
There is a real problem with surplus land. For me, by far the most important objective that this clause is intended to achieve is speeding up the whole process of getting surplus public land into development. The test that I hope my noble friend’s department will be able to apply to this is: does this amendment actually promote that objective? The objective is not necessarily to allow local councils to retain land because I suspect that some of them have a good surplus of public land, which they somehow think they may want to develop in future. Such is the housing crisis in this country—as we have said, it is a crisis particularly in London but I think it is elsewhere as well—that the important thing is to get the land into use now. The test that ought to be applied is whether this amendment would help to achieve that or not.