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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Environment (Mr. James Clappison): My hon. Friend makes detailed comparisons of amendments. I may not have the proper answer to his question but I shall have a stab at one. The Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Bill and the Bill that we are debating serve somewhat different purposes. The former sought to qualify a houseboat for the purpose of a home repair assistance grant. The latter relates to the preparation of reports by the local authority and, in that context, the issue of whether the houseboat moves around is important. The original definition in the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Bill is somewhat--
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Janet Fookes): Order. The Minister is making a miniature speech rather than an intervention. It would be better for him to restrain himself and speak at a later stage.
Mr. Luff: The Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Bill definition is vastly superior to the one that we are debating because it would include more houseboats and go further towards meeting the objectives of the hon. Member for Nottingham, South. The amendment is unnecessary and would create a huge burden for local authorities. I wish that I could oppose the amendment without destroying the Bill.
Mr. Keith Vaz (Leicester, East): I remember the speeches that the hon. Member for Worcester (Mr. Luff) made at Cambridge university Conservative association. He should change his speech writers, because his speeches have got worse over the years. It is shocking that an hon. Member who seeks to promote a private Member's Bill should filibuster for more than 20 minutes on the definition of houseboats.
Mr. Luff: On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Is it in order for the hon. Gentleman to accuse an hon. Member of filibustering when I was simply debating a detailed amendment to important legislation that is legitimately on the Order Paper?
Madam Deputy Speaker: If, in my opinion, it had been a filibuster, the hon. Gentleman would not have been allowed to continue.
Mr. Vaz: The Bill is excellent and the amendment was moved just yesterday in the other place by the Government. The Bill has been presented by my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, South (Mr. Simpson) and I pay tribute to him for his work in bringing the Bill to this stage. He is one of the most urgent and hard-working Members of the House. He was right to pick this important subject for his Bill. I am certain that what he has done will mean that many people throughout the country can work together to conserve energy.
I do not wish to detain the House much longer because there are other important matters before the House. Mr. Nelson Mandela is about to enter South Africa house for the first time. There are important national events going on. We support the Bill. We wish my hon. Friend luck in taking it through to the end of its stages today. I hope that the Minister will respond equally swiftly and support it.
Mr. Bernard Jenkin (Colchester, North):
I am grateful to catch your eye, Madam Deputy Speaker, as I can remain in the House for only a short time because I have to attend to matters in my constituency. I support my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr. Luff) in the matter that he raised. It is a disgrace that the hon. Member for Leicester, East (Mr. Vaz) has spoken and walked out of the Chamber. It is obvious that he does not want to be here and wants to go off and do something else. It is a disgrace that he did not respond to any of the points made by my hon. Friend in his speech.
Mr. Stern:
Will my hon. Friend give way?
Mr. Jenkin:
It is incumbent on me to be as brief as possible, especially as I cannot stay in the Chamber long, for which I apologise.
Legislation such as this raises my suspicions at the best of times. My hon. Friend the Member for Worcester described houseboats as having their own means of propulsion and said that they cruised around. Legislation of this nature tends to have a similar propensity. It takes on a life of its own. The logic of such legislation becomes hairier and hairier as it is extrapolated.
I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Nottingham, South (Mr. Simpson) for his diligence in introducing the measure, but the issue of houseboats underlines how difficult it is to evaluate the benefits of what it seeks to
achieve. The easy way to evaluate the benefit of energy conservation is to measure how much money it saves in the long run. What is the return on the investment in terms of reduced energy cost? Such evaluation is a pattern of behaviour that every individual and business follows. I have never understood why it does not apply to home owners or why we need legislation to encourage home owners to carry out that natural process, which must be in their interest.
The matter becomes a little more difficult when we seek to evaluate the activities and expenditure of local authorities in energy conservation. Every time officials spend time and effort, moving their cars around, switching on their computers and burning the midnight oil, they use energy to conserve energy. That does not go into the equation. We are discussing an amendment here with all the lights switched on. I can feel a cool waft from the air conditioning system. The whole Palace is geared up to discuss this tiny amendment which seeks to save energy in a few thousand dwellings.
We do not have a clue how houseboats may be constructed. I have taken a holiday on a longboat on a canal.
Mr. Luff:
A narrowboat. Vikings had longboats.
Mr. Jenkin:
I am sorry. My celtic background is obviously seeping into my buttresses.
Most narrowboats are constructed of steel these days. They have large windows. I have no idea how one evaluates the benefit of energy conservation measures retrofitted to such a boat. As canals are out-of-the-way places, my guess is that it would be hugely inefficient to spend too much time and effort applying energy conservation measures. We should rely on the medium of exchange--money--to evaluate conservation measures, because that is the medium by which we evaluate the cost of materials, labour and everything else.
I enter a small plea to resort to a rational system of evaluating what we do and why we do it, and to use the natural messages that the price mechanism sends to individuals, corporations and local authorities to demonstrate their efficiency. Resorting to legislation and grants is, you can bet your life, less efficient than if the thing had been left alone--as the amendment graphically illustrates.
Mr. Stern:
I follow the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester, North (Mr. Jenkin) on the action of the hon. Member for Leicester, East (Mr. Vaz). There used to be a convention, particularly on Friday, that if an hon. Member--particularly a Front Bencher--had to leave before the end of a debate, he would apologise in advance to the others present. It is regrettable that that convention seems to be departing from the House.
Mr. Ian McCartney (Makerfield):
On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. My hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, East (Mr. Vaz) advised other hon. Members behind the Chair that, as a consequence of attempts by Conservative Members to extend the proceedings longer than expected, he had to leave to represent my party at another function. My hon. Friend did not intend to cause any embarrassment to Government Members or to my hon. Friends. The House should accept in good faith that my hon. Friend left to represent the House elsewhere.
Mr. Stern:
Unlike many of my hon. Friends, I broadly welcome the amendment, but I have some doubts. My hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr. Luff) dealt with definition. We seem to be getting ourselves into a horrible tangle by introducing a particular definition.
In an intervention, I referred to the definition of a houseboat contained in tax legislation. It appears in the Finance Act 1988 but originates in the 1960s, when a houseboat had to be defined for the purpose of what has become mortgage interest tax relief. In those days, the Committee stage of a Finance Bill was held on the Floor of the House, and hon. Members debated at length how to define a houseboat. They ended by throwing up their hands in horror and saying that it was virtually impossible to define a houseboat by structure--as the amendment attempts.
Therefore, for the purpose of tax legislation, a houseboat was defined by use rather than structure, as someone's principal private residence. That is at least a workable definition, but my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester rightly pointed out that the amendment's limited definition is likely to create considerable legislative difficulty--which will lead to more money being made by lawyers, which is invariably a bad thing.
The amendment's definition of a houseboat relies on the craft
"not having means of, or capable of being readily adapted for, self-propulsion".
My hon. Friend the Member for Worcester pointed out that boats have engines or generators for the purpose of producing power. Unlike my hon. Friend, I am not an expert on narrowboats, but I am told that it would be possible for a sail to be attached to the chimney stack of a narrowboat and, if the wind were in the right direction, for the craft to be capable of self-propulsion. I am quite sure that even the engine without a sail can be adapted, with the addition of an outboard motor, to move the houseboat in a particular direction. So we have a definition that cannot work by demonstration if challenged in the courts.
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