---

Housing and Regeneration Bill

Perhaps I may throw one more thought into this discussion on which the Minister may care to comment. Over the years, we have had a progressive tightening of housing densities. In the good old, bad old days when life was civilised, when I first began in local government, and my noble friend first began in the business of government in the other place, 10 houses per acre was considered to be high-density development. But now, the standard has been raised to 50 houses per hectare, which is 20 houses per acre, which gives rise to a lot of the pressures and reactions that we are hearing about. One consequence is that people are trying to make historic development—heaven help us—into modern development with a completely different density where the original architectural layout was for a completely different purpose. This is a real issue; perhaps the noble Baroness would take it into consideration in her response or give it some thought and come back later. It relates very much to the amendments tabled by my noble friend.