I beg to move as an Amendment to the Lords Amendment, in line 28, at the end, to insert: and thereafter the land shall not be so designated again until after the end of five years from the expiry of the said six months. This Amendment concerns the subject that we were discussing earlier, the designation of land for compulsory purchase under a development plan. I have acknowledged the improvement effected by the Amendments moved in another place, and I am sure that this Lords Amendment is also intended as an amelioration of the lot of the owner whose land is designated for compulsory purchase. What it does for him in effect is to give him a remedy if his land is designated but is not acquired within 12 years after such designation. If that period of 12 years elapses without the designated land having been acquired he can demand that it should be acquired and, if it is not, at the end of six months it is automatically free from designation altogether under the proposed new Clause. The intention of that is obvious and beneficial, but I am moving my Amendment in order to make sure that the purpose of the Government in agreeing to this new Clause is not rendered nugatory in this way.

My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Daventry (Mr. Manningham-Buller) drew the attention of the House to the machinery which exists in the Bill for the amendment of development plans. One feature of that power of amendment is that it can add land not previously designated for compulsory purposes to land which is already in that category. The short point which my Amendment seeks to secure is that if it is desired to make this new Clause a real safeguard for the man whom it affects, then it is necessary to provide against an authority which has designated the land, and against whom the 12 years and six months have run—the land thus being free from designation—amending its development plan in order to redesignate the land on the following day, to take an extreme case. If that were done it is clear that the machinery for freeing the land which is laid down in the new Clause would be quite worthless. No doubt some control could be exercised by the Minister, but we consider that it is better to have the posi- tion of that land stated in the Bill. The Amendment proposes that if land has been designated and has not been acquired within 12 years and at the end of that period the owner invokes the procedure of this new Clause and the land is free from designation when six months have elapsed, then there shall be a period of grace of at least five years during which the land shall not be redesignated.

I submit to the House that this is an eminently reasonable suggestion. Hon. Members will remember that the 12 years have run and that the local authority has had the power to acquire the land for 12 whole years. It has not done so at the end of that period, its attention is drawn to the fact that the land is designated by the owner's application, six months go by and nothing is done. The land having once been free, who can say that there could be a case for such an authority amending its plan and redesignating the land? There can be no case for it, and I conceive that the Minister will tell us that if he himself were exercising the power of Minister—although we have to look 12 years hence and it is impossible to prognostigate who will be in his place then—he would be very reluctant to approve the redesignation of the land in circumstances such as those which I have described. Something similar was said by his colleague, when this point was raised on a similar Bill applying to Scotland, but I think his reluctance should be so great as to make him agree that, if land has run on in this way for 12 years, and if all the appropriate steps which he himself is indicating have been taken, then there should be a period of at least five years of grace for that particular land. Otherwise, if the power of amendment of development plans makes the power to reimpose designation a perpetual one, then, although this provision seeks to lift the shadow, the shadow will be there unless my Amendment is accepted.