15:17 Roberta Blackman-Woods (City of Durham) (Lab)

That is why we need the new development corporations: to think properly about what it means to have a new generation of garden cities, urban extensions or new settlements. They should enable development based on certain key principles that already underpin the original garden cities. There should be an obligation to have meaningful community participation, not only to undertake consultation. The corporations should consider human health and well-being and look at what sustainable development really means and at how they would tackle climate change. Those would be statutory purposes, rather than policy objectives only. The Town and Country Planning Association has already issued a document to update the new towns legislation. The Government could simply have taken that off the shelf, put it through Parliament in a lot less time than the Localism Act 2011 took, and had something fit for purpose. Such vehicles should inspire community confidence in the delivery of regeneration, because if communities do not like what is happening, they are likely to object, which can slow a process down.

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