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Sustainable Communities Bill

If the House will allow me, I will first put forward some arguments and then take as many interventions as I can; I do not want to be accused of delaying the debate. Under our approach, each area has three key documents. The sustainable community strategy, which sets out the overall vision for a given area, is already in place, and Members in all parts of the House will doubtless engage with their councils and constituents in that regard. Secondly, the local development framework—what we used to call the planning report; however, the framework goes much further than that—takes forward the spatial element of that vision. The third document is the local area agreement, which I have already described. The first two documents are already embodied in legislation, and the Bill before the House on Monday will—if the House agrees to its Second Reading—strengthen the third. Placing a statutory duty on public sector agencies to co-operate with those plans will take the ability of local elected representatives to influence their areas and the various priorities much further down the line.