Sustainable Communities Bill

I understand and respect my hon. Friend’s point. I should make clear that the Bill is not at all prescriptive at this stage; it simply says that we need to give local communities more influence and power over what shapes them. The Bill makes an honest and almost certainly imperfect attempt to address what I have tried to show is a real social problem—the cost attached to the decline of our communities. It combines two of the most pressing themes in politics today, the need to give people more power and the need to pay more attention to the protection of our environment. I believe that all three main parties subscribe to those priorities. The Bill tries to give them legislative shape, so that we can begin to deliver on them. Its purpose is not merely to send a message: we want to see it on the statute book. We must therefore answer the question that the late great Eric Forth would certainly have asked were he in his place today. [Hon. Members: ““Oh, he is!””] I suspect that, in some form or other, he may be. The question that Eric would have asked of the Bill is ““Why is it essential?”” The answer is, quite simply, ““Because there is no coherent Government strategy to deal with the problem.”” Yes, there have been plenty of programmes and initiatives and plenty of documents with the word ““sustainable”” written on them, but they do not hang together in a coherent and focused whole.