Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)

I thank the Minister for presenting the regulations. I am afraid I am going to break the harmony. The Minister will recall our debates on the previous legislation that my noble friend Lord Lansley rehearsed. I go back to the time I was first elected to the other place—on the same day as my noble friend—in 1997, when the Labour Government introduced regional planning and a regional spatial strategy. I ask the same question now that I asked then: where will the voice of rural areas be heard? Which space will rural areas be occupying? The population of North Yorkshire is 11% of the total population of the region of Yorkshire and the Humber, and yet, with the replacement of districts and boroughs with a combined authority and a mayor, I would say that the rural areas have lost their voice. Over the years of the previous Labour Government—perhaps the next Prime Minister was quite a dominant part of that— I saw that the rural voice was pretty much extinct. To give an example of why it is important that we consider the rural voice, there is a trend of building four-bedroom or five-bedroom homes, whereas in rural areas what we really need are one-bedroom or two-bedroom homes. Obviously, it is not necessarily of interest to developers to build that type of housing stock. The question then arises: what consultation will there be when these spatial strategies come out? I have been looking at the pages on North Yorkshire and the surrounding area—York, East Riding and Hull. They have produced a spatial framework looking ahead to 2035 to 2050. I am aware of rural house prices being higher but, until I read that framework report, I was not aware that urban house prices in parts of North Yorkshire and Hull are higher. It will not have escaped the Minister’s attention that the incomes are predominantly lower in these areas, so there is the challenge of lower wages and higher house prices. I would like to ask two questions. What consultation will there be, both at national level and at a more strategic level and how, in that consultation, will the rural voice be heard? As we now have a Mayor of York and North Yorkshire—I do not see mayors mentioned, but there must be an answer of which I am not aware —what will the relationship of the mayor be to producing answers to a spatial plan? I echo my noble friend Lord Lansley’s request that the Government publish the responses to the National Planning Policy Framework. An underlying concern in all of this is that we do not develop areas on the functional flood plain of zone 3b.