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Dr. Lynne Jones: I do not understand why there is a difficulty. In a letter to me, the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys said that, on average over the past 10 years, there have been 30 applications for corrections to the sex recorded at birth, and added that most have been granted. Furthermore, before the Corbett v. Corbett case, it was normal for birth certificates to be changed.
Mr. Horam: A number of changes have been made, but only after it has been recognised that a mistake was made at birth. Indeed, it is normal to wait until after the sex is clear before a birth certificate is issued as a safeguard. Occasionally, errors have occurred despite those precautions and a subsequent correction has been made. There has never been a case where a correction has been made because someone's sex has changed during his or her life--a point to which my hon. Friend the Member for South Derbyshire (Mrs. Currie) referred. There are real problems in making the change perhaps 20 or 30 years after the birth, but there have been instances when it has happened very shortly after the birth. I shall skip some of the points that I intended to make to deal with this particular point, which is obviously a matter of concern to hon. Members. Apart from the complex policy and legal implications, which are manifold, there is also the problem of how to provide tangible public recognition of the new civil status of a transsexual.
To date, the campaign by transsexuals has focused heavily on birth certification. Many transsexuals appear to believe, in my view wrongly, that if the Registrar-General would only agree to amend their birth certificates, that would suffice to change their legal sex. I acknowledge that the Bill does not entirely take that line. The hon. and
learned Gentleman attempts to go further. He proposes to change birth registrations as one means of giving effect to a wider objective. However, sadly, his method of doing so would undermine the basis of birth registration in Britain. I shall explain that.
The entry in the birth register is a record of the facts as they were at the time of birth. It may be changed by annotation of the original record if the facts--
It being half-past Two o'clock, the debate stood adjourned.
Debate to be resumed on Friday 9 February.
Order for Second Reading read.
Second Reading deferred till Friday 16 February.
Order read for resuming adjourned debate on Question--[26 January]--That the Bill be now read a Second time.
Debate to be resumed on Friday 9 February.
Ordered,
Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.--[Mr. Ottaway.]
Mr. James Couchman (Gillingham):
May I first say how pleased I am to have been granted a debate, at the first time of asking, on a subject that is of crucial importance to the future prosperity of my constituency and those of my hon. Friends the Members for Medway (Dame P. Fenner) and for Mid-Kent (Mr. Rowe). I am delighted that my hon. Friend the Member for Medway is in her place today and will wish to speak later in this debate. Had he been able to rearrange his day, my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Kent would have sought to reinforce the dismay that I intend to express at the deferment of the Gillingham northern link and the Wainscott northern bypass, two legs of the Medway towns northern relief road.
The Royal Navy withdrew from the royal naval base and dockyard, Chatham in March 1984. A part of the closed dockyard was almost immediately disposed of to the then Medway Ports Authority, which formed a subsidiary, Chatham Dock Company, to operate a commercial port with roll on/roll off ferries. One of the port's first tenants was the Norfolk Line/Kent Line and we were immediately faced with some 300 large lorry movements each day and through the night through narrow residential roads and streets in Gillingham more suited to traffic of an era pre-dating the motor car.
The result was a nightmare for my constituents and those of my hon. Friends. The deep bitterness at the Government's closure of Chatham dockyard was compounded by the realisation that any redevelopment of the 500 acres of the dockyard site was likely to involve a replacement of the Navy's previous mainly waterborne servicing of the naval base with road transport, including large lorries. There was a substantial outcry from those affected and from Gillingham borough council.
There was at that time an embryonic plan to build a northern relief road, but to say that it had not even reached the back burner, let alone been accorded any priority by Kent county council, would be to understate its then insignificance. I became something of a lone voice crying in the wilderness for Kent county council to start working up the scheme and to accord it some priority in seeking funding approval, but there was little enthusiasm at county hall, as was evidenced at a meeting in December 1983.
By the time the Navy left, English Industrial Estates, later English Estates, and now English Partnerships, had been engaged to prepare a strategic plan for the redevelopment, management and re-use of the large part of this vital site which had been in the Royal Navy's hands for more than 450 years. Excluded from the land handed over to English Partnerships were the area taken by the dock company and the largest concentration of ancient monuments in Europe collectively known as the Chatham historic dockyard, the management and exploitation of which was entrusted to a distinguished trust.
Early in English Partnerships' tenure, it became evident that good road communications would be crucial to the successful redevelopment of what would become known
as Chatham Maritime. The Medway towns northern relief road gradually became, with much prompting from me and my hon. Friends, a more and more desirable project.
The dockyard closure, with the loss of several other major employers during the early 1980s recession, raised unemployment to nearly 20 per cent. The designation of 60 acres of Chatham Maritime as an addition to the north-west Kent enterprise zone in February 1986 helped to increase interest in the development, but still the poor road communications hampered English Partnerships in its efforts to market the site.
At about that time, in January 1986, the county council issued a feasibility study for the third element of the relief road--the new third crossing of the Medway. Out of three options, an immersed tube tunnel was preferred, after consultation, to a high or low-level bridge, notwithstanding the additional cost. By July 1987, the county had issued a consultation paper for all three elements with an estimated total cost, including the tunnel option, of about £70 million.
By August 1988, so urgent was it considered to make a start on that vital scheme that the ancient and perhaps unique Rochester Bridge Trust sought to promote a private Bill to construct a new road tunnel under the Medway using novel funding from English Estates--as it then was--Kent county council, Rochester-upon-Medway city council, Gillingham borough council and the trust itself. The trust was ultimately to own the new crossing as it has owned crossings since mediaeval times.
The Bill made slow progress through the House and, although lodged in November 1988, did not achieve Royal Assent until July 1990. In the event, the mixture of public and private funding for the tunnel fell in May 1991 as an unintended victim of section 48 of the Local Government Act 1989, which had been designed to prevent creative accounting by spendthrift councils.
Good news, however, arrived at Christmas 1991 when Kent county council achieved transport supplementary grant--TSG--for the tunnel. Tenders had been received pending the outcome of the failed exotic funding proposal. It is worth noting that my right hon. and learned Friend the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, then the Secretary of State for Transport, expressed the hope, in a letter dated 5 May 1991, that the northern relief road would come about, although he was less than forthcoming about where the money--by now more than £100 million--would come from. However, as I said, Kent county council included the scheme as top priority in the transport policies and programme--TPP--bid for 1992-93 and the tunnel element of the scheme achieved TSG. The feeder roads, as they were called by my right hon. and learned Friend, were given credit approvals, but without TSG. Kent received--for the first time--a huge settlement in that year and the Medway towns northern relief road appeared to be on its way.
There was token expenditure on the tunnel in 1992-93, but by 1993-94 the major construction had begun in earnest and proceeded apace. Three enormous concrete sections of the tube were cast. The 1993-94 settlement, however, had not brought TSG for the Gillingham link road and the Wainscott northern bypass and, between March and July 1993, the Secretary of State's inspector conducted public inquiries into the two roads and the orders attaching thereto. Those inquiries were to prove fateful and may be the reason why we are here today.
I shall have more to say later on the way in which the inquiries were conducted, and especially about the reporting.
By mid-1993, English Partnerships was becoming anxious about progress on the two roads and was hopeful that the decisions from the two inquiries might be made by the end of that year. It pressed very hard. By now, my right hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk(Mr. MacGregor) had become Secretary of State for Transport and I was urged to try to progress TSG for the following year, 1994-95, in the confident expectation that construction would start in that year. Kent county council duly submitted the two schemes in its TPP submission as a
On 15 December 1993, my hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury (Mr. Key)--then a Minister--wrote to me with the details of the TSG and supplementary credit approval settlement for 1994-95. In another huge settlement for Kent, both Gillingham northern link and Wainscott northern bypass had been approved for TSG in the sums of almost £40 million and nearly £56 million respectively, with substantial tranches for a start on both in 1994-95. With the Medway tunnel--now estimated at£57 million--the Medway towns northern relief road, with a price tag of £152 million, was the largest non-trunk road scheme in the country.
A start for both roads in the summer of 1994 was confidently expected by my hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury. My hon. Friends the Members for Medway and for Mid-Kent and I, with the various councils, the Rochester Bridge Trust and English Partnerships, enjoyed our Christmas turkey for 1993, quietly confident that it had all been worth while. All the pain and frustration was at an end.
Or was it? We had all forgotten what I might call the buggeration factor--1994 came and went, but answer came there none from the inspector. Rumours abounded that he had gone sick, or worse. At the urging of English Partnerships, my hon. Friends and I were in regular contact with Ministers. One major relief came at Christmas 1994, when the schemes--by now totalling £157 million--were still included in the TSG settlement for 1995-96 in view of the expectation of substantial expenditure in that year. That was just as well, for by now the Medway tunnel was beginning to take shape and the prospect of its opening before the bypass roads was viewed with mixed feelings. It was realised that traffic might use the tunnel as an alternative route to London, causing worse problems than we already had.
Finally, the Secretary of State's decision on the Gillingham northern link was received on 12 April 1995. With minor adjustments, the county council could proceed with that element. Preliminary works were started, but still there was no word on Wainscott, despite myhon. Friends and my constant badgering of our hon. Friend the Under-Secretary who is to answer today's debate.
There was some correspondence between the county council and the Department on the side road orders and other minor issues and at least some of the delay seems to accrue from tardiness in the council's providing information, but there also appears to have been a process of "decelerated progress" at a technical level in the Department.
It was not until 8 January 1996--three weeks ago--that the affirmative decision on the side road order and compulsory purchase for Wainscott northern bypass was announced, 34 months after the public inquiry began. By now, however, catastrophe had struck. Christmas 1995 had brought a much less generous TSG settlement nationally and, although Kent received by far the largest settlement of £36 million and a £81 million total spending allocation, it was about £30 million short of its needs.
Worse though, was the news that, having been embarrassed by its inability to spend its previous allocation because of the interminable delays in the Secretary of State's decision on the Gillingham northern link and Wainscott northern bypass, the county had taken the decision during 1995 to proceed with the provision of dual carriageway for the Thanet way, A299, and a scheme on the A256 at Whitfield.
Furthermore, the 1996-97 TSG settlement--unusually given to Kent as a block grant, as opposed to being scheme specific--was so much less than needed that it would barely cover the contractual commitments on the two alternative schemes. I am told that only £8 million of the block grant of TSG is uncommitted and, although that might allow letting of the contracts on Wainscott and/or the Gillingham northern link and a token start being made on site during 1996-97, without the assurance that a sufficient TSG settlement for subsequent years will be available the county is unenthusiastic about putting itself at risk of having to abort contracts once committed.
What is more, the county has three other approved smaller schemes on which it could commit the uncommitted £8 million. It is holding its decisions, pending the outcome of discussions of what might be done to progress with confidence the Medway towns relief road; this debate is a part of that exploration.
So what is to be done? English Partnerships has committed £150 million--including its contribution to the tunnel--to the development and attracted a similar sum from the private sector; if one includes the remaining cost of the tunnel, about £300 million or more has been invested in the redevelopment of the former dockyard.
Despite some notable coups, such as the letting to the Overseas Development Natural Resources Institute of the former naval barracks and the letting of a superb headquarters building to the Colonial and Mutual insurance company, the marketing of some splendid new buildings is still bedevilled by the uncertainty about road communications.
The proposed widening of the poorly built M2 between junctions 1 and 4 raises the spectre of more traffic being diverted through the towns over Rochester bridge, which already carries some 50,000 vehicle movements a day. Memories of the legendary solid traffic jams from Strood to Rainham on the old A2--Watling street in the charabanc days before the M2 was built--come flooding back. We are regularly reminded of such horrors when the two-lane M2 is blocked by an accident. The historic dockyard is not receiving a just number of potential visitors because of poor access.
That the Speaker shall--
(1) at the sitting on Tuesday 6th February--
(i) put the Questions necessary to dispose of proceedings on the Motion in the name of the Prime Minister relating to General Practitioner Fundholding not later than Seven o'clock, and
(ii) notwithstanding Standing Orders Nos. 14B (Proceedings under an Act or on European Community Documents) and 15 (Delegated Legislation (negative procedure)), put the Question on the Motion in the name of Mr. Tony Blair relating to the Collective Redundancies and Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) (Amendment) Regulations 1995 not later thanTen o'clock; and
(2) at the sitting on Thursday 8th February, notwithstanding Standing Order No. 14B (Proceedings under an Act or on European Community Documents), put the Questions on the Motions in the name of Mr. Secretary Hague relating to Local Government Finance (Wales) not later than Seven o'clock.--[Mr. Ottaway.]
2.30 pm
"resubmission for future commitment and TSG".
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