My Lords, I rise to move this amendment on behalf of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, who is unfortunately disabled by a herniated disk. He is flat on his back, which is probably exactly where most of us would like to be. He is probably tucked up in his bed, which is entirely sensible. He might be watching on telly, although I doubt it, but it is perforce, rather than for any other reason.
The reason I agreed to bring this forward is in many ways illustrated by the debates that have been taking place on this Bill. The longer I have been in Parliament, the more I have seen legislation prescribing in detail on a huge range of issues that back when I was selected were not prescribed in legislation. There are all sorts of reasons for Parliament to take the legislative approach, but it creates a situation in which it is very difficult to experiment.
Here I should declare that I have a number of interests in planning. I have worked on policy in the planning arena for many years, I am now visiting professor of planning at Plymouth University and I have worked with successive Governments of all colours on planning policy. One thing that arises when new ideas are being put forward is that we very quickly get to a point where ideas have been welcomed and people would like to see them experimented with, but we are then told that that will require primary legislation. At that point it is immensely difficult to move things forward. Primary legislation does not easily get a slot, but, also, something brought forward through primary legislation is generally rolled out for the country as a whole, and quite rightly in debates like this—as we have heard over the course of the debates on the Bill—people will query how well it has been thought through, whether it will work, and whether it is appropriate to do it. But we cannot do it unless we legislate.
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The intention behind the amendment is to raise the following thought and no more than that, and I hope that the Minister will take it away and consider it positively. We are all aware of the diversity around the country of very different communities and different sizes of planning authorities, areas of enormously high cost housing and those where you cannot give a house away, and where the issue is how you can regenerate communities. There are also places that are fundamentally industrial in character and those that are fundamentally rural in character. It is very difficult to legislate for one size fits all, and the Government agree with that, placing great emphasis on city deals, localism and doing things differently.
I have had this experience, as have the Government. Back in 2008, I did a report on rural housing for the then Government and talked about empowering parish councils to bring forward proposals for affordable housing in their communities themselves. The Conservative Party, then in opposition, brought forward its own paper, Open Source Planning, which picked up on many of those issues, and eventually we got Neighbourhood Planning. That has been a thoroughly good thing. Would it not have been great if it had been experimented with?
The proposal here suggests that where a local planning authority—a local elected council—wants to bring forward an experiment of that sort, the Secretary of State should have the ability, in a limited number of cases for a limited period of time, to allow such experiments to take place in ways that would not normally be allowed by the planning rules. That would help to evolve policy in a more sensible way. My own view—I did not write this amendment—is that there should be the potential for some parliamentary checks on that, so something might have to be brought forward so that Parliament could scrutinise it if it wished, and some fundamental things about the planning system should not be set aside. The need to deliver homes to meet the requirements of individuals is fundamental and there should not be a discretion around that. However, the principle of finding a mechanism in the Bill that would allow those experiments to take place would be helpful and might even mean that on a future occasion there was less need to debate for so many days at such late hours, and we could all be tucked up in our beds at a good time.