Lord Lansley (Con)

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 140 and 144 in my name and say a quick word about Amendment 145A before the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, has a chance to introduce it. I will be brief, but not because I think that this is not terrifically important; I emphasise that there is a great deal I could say, but I am not going to say it. We may need to return to this on Report. Amendment 140—I have the benefit of having anticipated that my noble friend Lord Jamieson will agree with me on this—would introduce a requirement to specify within the content of a spatial development strategy the amount of distribution of commercial, employment, logistic and industrial activity that is anticipated across the strategy area. The simple proposition is that the Government and all of us are focused on trying to deliver investment, employment and growth. The reason why we have to specify specific levels of housing is often because there are significant increases in employment. The Government themselves suggested in their devolution White Paper that the strategic authorities would be best structured around economically functional areas. The economic component of the development strategy is absolutely integral to an understanding of what the requirements for housing and affordable housing are going to be, because this is about where people who travel to work can live and how they can travel. I know that, in replying, the Minister will no doubt also be aware that, in local plan-making, the best approach to creating an understanding of what the housing need looks like is often to understand what the employment growth in an area looks like. This is no less the case when it comes to thinking about strategy areas and strategic development strategies—indeed, it is potentially even more important. I hope, therefore, that this is one of those amendments that the Minister might agree to consider rather than resist. I likewise will not elaborate on Amendment 144, but I might do so when we come back on Report. As I understand it, trying to write a spatial development strategy for a substantial area while not taking into account the underlying land values in the respective parts of that strategy area—as well as the extent to which those land values can support viable development, developer contributions and infrastructure levies— is a pointless structure of consideration. If you go about this without understanding all those things and incorporating them into the process of strategic plan-making, you will end up simply drawing on a map lines that are filled with optimism, hope and the like but are without any reality that is rooted in deliverability. Deliverability is absolutely essential. We do not need to invent this. The London Plan, which is a strategic development strategy, does it this way. It looks at viability and deliverability and relates them back to land values, developer contributions and receipts from the mayoral infrastructure levy. This, of course, relates to my noble friend’s amendment—Amendment 136A, I think—on funding infrastructure; it forms part of the exact same point, so I very much agree with him. I have one last point on Amendment 145A. We had a debate on design. Exactly the same principles apply here; they are just at a level of vision rather than a level of detail. We should not discount the possibility of many strategy areas working together on big design guides. Essex, a large county with 1.5 million people, has a design guide that is very successful. The idea that there should be a design guide in a strategy area in the long run seems to me to be a very desirable thing.