Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Baroness Young of Old Scone and Lord True
Lord True
My Lords, I will be brief and I will not repeat the rather impassioned speech I made another day on why these wretched registers cannot be more dynamic and give local authorities a bit more power and action to get on with the job.
The thing I am rather curious about is: what happens as time progresses? If we are to list on a register land that is said to be suitable for housing and over time there is a great demand for free schools and population growth in urban areas—it is very tight—the local authority might look at that and say, “Well, actually, that could be a school. That might be better than what we were thinking of before as housing”, and might want to delist and deregister. Once it is on the register, in a sense it acquires a “resi-value” because it is listed there as being for housing. But planning is dynamic and evolving.
I do not necessarily expect my noble friend to answer now, but I would like to know how these clunking registers are manoeuvrable when local needs and priorities change—or is it that once it is there for housing, it has to be housing for ever and we just have to get the numbers? Where is the flexibility in changing?
Baroness Young of Old Scone
My Lords, perhaps I may comment on Amendment 97C, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, in which he quoted the comments on “specified” and said that it was a nonsense. A lot of this, alas, arises from the fact that so much of the Bill is going to have to be made flesh in subsequent secondary legislation. We now have available in the Printed Paper Office the outline of the subsequent secondary legislation that is being planned by the Government, including the timetable for consultation on it and when it will be brought before this House as regulations. Some 34 separate pieces of secondary legislation are envisaged, which will come before your Lordships’ House but not, may I say, until the autumn. So we are, regrettably, in a position where we have to buy a pig in a poke on many occasions. I sympathise with the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, that new Section 14A(6) appears to be the sort of nonsense that pigs in pokes produce.
While I am on my feet, I should say to the Minister that I am still looking for my flow chart. It is not in the Printed Paper Office.