My Lords, I support what the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage, said, as well as what my noble friend Lady Pinnock had to say about this.
I need to start by saying that I worked in the architects’ department of a new town for 13 years and lived in that new town during its raw development stage. Noble Lords will not be surprised to hear me say that I believe that the development corporation model has a proven track record, usually of building communities with all the essential infrastructure in a joined-up way. The Government are right to see the development corporation model as one means of accelerating necessary development, and I welcome the presence of these clauses in the Bill.
However, I will just briefly reflect on my experience. During the 1960s and 1970s, the new towns were very top-down in conception. The New Town Act made the development corporation I worked with simultaneously the client, the designer, the planning authority and the funding channel for the delivery of the projects I worked on, which was a very cosy situation for those of us working on the projects but not so good if you lived next door or sometimes literally underneath where we were developing. The later generation of urban development corporations mostly paid better lip service to local democratic institutions than that.
However, there are deficiencies, and my noble friend Lady Pinnock has put her finger on one of them. It is good that the relevant clauses inform a model whereby development corporations spring from local government initiatives and are not to be imposed by somebody with a map sitting in Whitehall. That brings me to my first question to the Minister. Clause 156(2) still reserves the power to declare urban development corporations independent of any local proposals—the Secretary of State can in fact sit behind a desk in Whitehall. Do the Government have in mind making any such designations, and if not, why do we have Clause 156(2) in the Bill?
My second question relates to the consultees listed in Clause 156(4), which inserts new provisions. Indeed, the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage, refers to that in her Amendment 407. A very good part of that clause says that local government is to be involved even if it is not the commissioning authority. There is then a less good list of what local government consists of. Very surprisingly, it does not include parish and town councils. They are not listed as statutory consultees, although district and county councils are. There is a parallel provision in the legislation for the urban development corporations to what we might call the green belt ones. In each case, parish councils are left out. In any normal use of language, they qualify as local government, do they not? They also qualify as legislative and statutory as well, so it is a great puzzle to me why they are not there. An important point is that they will probably be the best informed about their areas, and at a detailed level which certainly will be missed by county councils, for instance. I therefore want to hear from the Minister why parish councils are not statutory consultees.
The Minister may say that there is a catch-all here;
“any other person whom the proposing authority considers it appropriate to consult”
is among the consultees. However, that is an option for the consulting authority, not a statutory consultation partner. If you want to rely on that catch-all, why not rely on it for county councils? If it is blindingly obvious that you would always consult a parish council, and therefore you do not need to say it, it must surely be blindingly obvious that you need to consult the county council, so you do not need to say that. If you are mentioning one, why not the other?
Secondly, what led to the omission of town and parish councils? If it was an oversight, will the Minister please correct it on Report or at least tell us that the inevitable statutory instrument will make it unambiguously clear that any town or parish council in or in the vicinity of a proposal should be consulted as a matter of course? I would be very happy to receive an answer by letter, if that makes it easier.