My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend for her response. I thoroughly appreciate what noble Lords opposite have said. The winners of the Wolfson Economics Prize in 2014 were big schemes, but they were very much supported locally. They clearly did not go through the processes that are envisaged in my amendment, but the Oxfordshire scheme was 150,000 houses. It was supported by Oxford City Council in its generation, and the Shelter scheme in the Medway was of a similar size. These are transformative schemes and it is quite difficult, I am told by those who supported them, to see how one fits them within existing planning law.
At the same time, we do not want, as the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, says, to completely reconstruct planning law bit by bit. I do not lay claim personally to deep expertise in this area, but my intention is that we should not be doing that. We should allow local areas to operate as standard bearers to look at something that really makes sense to them and has strong support locally, to take that forward and see how it goes. If they get it right then we will all learn from it and have a process that helps us advance planning law. If they do not get it quite right then it is what they wanted and they did their best but the planning arrangements for the rest of us remain as they were. I am for innovation and encouraging, above all, localism and letting local communities really have a say in what is happening to them and an ability to tackle things on a large scale where that is needed. That is something we should encourage.
I am depressed that it looks like my children will live in smaller houses than I did, and I live in a smaller house than my parents did. I think that that is pretty standard across the country. We ought, as we get richer, to have better and nicer places to live in. We need more innovation and more understanding to work out how all the conflicting demands of the environment and us as a society and individual people can best be met. I am a great fan in that context of local innovation. I am comforted by what my noble friend said. I do not pretend that this does not require further thought and consideration and I am certainly open to all suggestions on this.