My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate for their contributions. Perhaps I can reassure the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, that this is not intended to be a top-down micromanagement to parish level but is about setting broad frameworks that would give local communities, people and landowners more security in making decisions about their land for the future. It is not intended to be prescriptive in any way. The experience in Scotland and Wales, where they have these frameworks, is that it does not cramp farmers’ style. You can imagine that farmers in Wales and Scotland are not exactly pushovers, so if they are not complaining, it probably means that there is not too much resistance to it.
I absolutely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Deben, that this needs to be cross-government. Alas, the convention in Bills is that when you say “the Secretary of State”, in reality you mean the Government. This is not intended to be a Defra proposal; it is supposed to be a cross-government initiative, because it will need not only land in rural uses but the involvement of the Transport department, housing, the planning system and the Treasury—a whole variety of different government departments. The amendment is very much what the noble Lord is calling for. Indeed, the text I have used is the text that the Scots used in their climate change Act, which is where this provision is enshrined in Scottish law. He will be glad to hear that, as the noble Duke, the Duke of Montrose, suggested, I took out some of the overenthusiasm that Scotland has evinced on certain issues, which I thought probably would not go down a bundle in England.
I absolutely accept that Defra is trying to keep a strategic approach to all the things happening in rural land use, but I am proposing that we need a strategic approach that covers rural and urban development. Both are looking for the same land these days and, unless we get a cross-government approach at strategic level, taking account of all land use pressures, we will continue to see not only potential conflict at a national level but the conflict we have seen on individual planning and other proposals, where there is lack of clarity regarding the comparative priority of housing, infrastructure, agriculture, forestry, nature, et cetera. We all know about them; we are all part of them; we have all fought them on our local patch.
At this stage in the game, I will say simply that I thought a little bird had told me that we were reaching the tipping point whereby the Government would embrace this as something really required. Of course, we now have a new Secretary of State at MHCLG, so my little bird may have been shot and buried somewhere.
We have the opportunity of the planning Bill. I hope that I get my special Select Committee agreed to but, in the meantime, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.