Lord Lucas (Con)

My Lords, I very much support the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett. That is not always the case, but we are lucky in this House to have the remaining two sane members of the Green Party. In this amendment, her colleague is advocating gentle density—the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, mentioned the Georgian squares of London and how much density and beauty you get from them. You also get a city that can thrive as a city. You get an ability to hold a variety of retail and entertainment premises. You get transport systems that work. Where you get something much more scattered—such as in the town I live in, Eastbourne—you get ridiculous inability to manage public transport because everything is spread out all over the place, the roads are all higgledy-piggledy and nothing hangs together or works. That is why I have proposed Amendment 159. Land readjustment schemes have been immensely successful, particularly in Japan, where they found a role after the war. About 30% of the urban land in Japan has been subject to land readjustment schemes. These schemes enable a bit of urban land that has been seriously sub-optimally developed to be transformed into something much better. You have a promoter, who can put together a scheme that creates a large amount of additional value. You then work with the local authority and the local people to the point where the local authority is happy and at least two-thirds of the people who will be affected are voting for you, and then you do it. It is not an instant thing—it takes the best part of a decade to go from start to finish—but it is immensely effective in transforming urban landscapes and making good the car-borne optimism of the past, so that we can have something that we are likely to be able to live in today. I encourage the Government to look at this as a potential way forward. If it does not find a place in this Bill, I hope that it will at least find a place in discussions and that the Government will be open to a meeting to pursue how this might become part of future policy.