My Lords, I was quite surprised to see this amendment, which takes me back to the Commons Committee stage on the Localism Bill when a long succession of amendments were proposed by Labour Members that could be summed up as wrecking amendments designed to disable the process, but they were swept aside. I had thought, from what I have heard from Labour Members in this House and Labour spokespeople in the House of Commons, that it had now become part of the accepted culture of the Labour Party that the neighbourhood planning process is a beneficial one for local communities and should be supported.
That made me look at the numbers which are being talked about. It is 40%. If we divide it by 10, we have 4%, and that would still be more than 10 times as many local residents involved in a local plan than are involved in a district local plan or what used to be a unitary development plan. In fact I could probably add another nought to that because the percentage of local residents in an area who have actively participated in the standard pre-existing planning process is minute. They become engaged only after the plan has been signed off and when a developer puts in a proposal. That is precisely what is wrong with the current situation and is what the neighbourhood planning system is designed to overcome. So there should be no threshold, or perhaps it should be more than the number who contributed from the planning area to the preceding local plan. It would be so small a number that we would not need to consider it.