  A Conceptual Design Report (CDR) for the Large Hadron Electron Collider, the
LHeC, is being prepared, to which an introduction was given for the plenary
panel discussion on the future of deep inelastic scattering held at DIS09. This
is briefly summarised here. The CDR will comprise designs of the ep/eA
collider, based on ring and linear electron accelerators, of the interaction
region, designed for simultaneous $ep$ and $pp$ operation, of a new, modular
detector, and it will present basics on the physics motivation for a high
luminous Tera scale electron-nucleon collider as a complement to the LHC.
