Members wish to curtail our activities means that it will not be long before one has to declare in such a debate that one has a couple of Christmas trees in the garden. No. 61 is not that it uses imperial measurements that people understand. I rise to give my hon. Friend another opportunity to mock me on the matter of imperial and metric measurements. He has already quite fairly prayed in aid planning legislation, and town and country planning legislation can direct that one can have a fence of up 2 m in one's rear garden without planning permission.
Friend obviously does.
However, I do not think that hedges are equivalent to fences. To return to a point that I made earlier, town and country planning legislation introduced the requirement that one would have to obtain planning permission to put up a fence above a particular height. However, if walls and fences above that height are already established, town and country planning law does not say that, unless one applied for permission for them, one might face sanctions because they were above the height of the fences for which one would have to seek planning permission if one wanted to erect them today. My concern is that we are talking about not just new hedges, but established hedges. That is why the need to obtain planning permission to put up a new fence of up to 6 ft 6 is not equivalent to the need to respond to complaints from neighbours if one already has an established hedge that is more than 6 ft 6 inches high.