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Mr. Paul Tyler (North Cornwall): On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. The hon. Member for South Suffolk (Mr. Yeo) may have unwittingly misled the House. He said that he and his Conservative colleagues would be voting against the order. Perhaps he was guilty of misunderstanding the situation or was misinformed. Certainly, he and his colleagues did not vote against the order. Perhaps he would like to explain why he unwittingly misled the House.
Mr. Richard Ottaway (Croydon, South): Further to that point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I believe that my hon. Friend has been misinterpreted. He said that he would not vote for the order.
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Alan Haselhurst): I am sure that that explanation removes the need for any ruling by me.
DELEGATED LEGISLATION
Mr. Deputy Speaker: With permission, I shall put together the motions relating to delegated legislation.
Motion made, and Question put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 118(6) (Standing Committees on Delegated Legislation),
Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.--[Mr. McAvoy.]
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Alan Haselhurst):
Will hon. Members please leave the Chamber as quickly as possible, in fairness to the hon. Member who has the Adjournment?
Dr. Stephen Ladyman (South Thanet):
Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I am also grateful to Madam Speaker for selecting this topic and giving me the opportunity to bring some of the problems facing Thanet to the attention of the House. I regard it as a great honour to have secured this debate.
I have made my home in Thanet, having lived there for six years even before I became its Member of Parliament. It is one of the few places in which I have found the same warmth of welcome as on my native Merseyside. It is a great honour for me to represent the people of the area and to present some of their problems to the House.
There is a great deal of misapprehension about Thanet. Because it is in the south-east, it is sometimes mistakenly thought of as a prosperous area. Indeed, only this week, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health referred in a television interview to "the prosperous south-east". That rather innocuous remark upset many of my constituents, who are far from prosperous.
I happen to know that my right hon. Friend knows Thanet well--he even visited me during the general election campaign--and I am certain that he intended to say, "the prosperous parts of the south-east", but none the less his remarks added to a picture which suggests that Thanet is not really the problem area that we make it out to be.
I want to bring some of the facts to the attention of the House. There is considerable economic deprivation in Thanet, which leads directly to social deprivation. As it happens, only 80 per cent. of my constituency is in Thanet, the other 20 per cent. being in the Dover district, but Thanet's social deprivation is exported throughout the constituency, so everybody suffers from it.
In June this year, unemployment in Thanet was 10 per cent., down from 10.7 per cent. in May. One should compare that with unemployment in the south-east as a whole, at 3.7 per cent., and in Kent, at 5.4 per cent., and with the national average, at 5.6 per cent. Our unemployment is higher than that in Glasgow or on Merseyside.
The problem is even worse than those figures suggest, because Thanet has a large tourist industry and a large agricultural industry, so unemployment is depressed in the summer months as a result of seasonal work. The figures later in the year will show our unemployment to be as high as 14 per cent.
Eight of the wards in Thanet--large, three-member wards--are in Kent's top 50 for social deprivation. Some of the wards in my constituency have male unemployment as high as 60 per cent. There are 4,015 children in Thanet who receive free school meals. Despite above average A-level results, the number of students going on to further education is half the Kent average, as a result of the low wages in their households.
In Thanet, 51,852 homes lack the exclusive use of a bathroom; 70 per cent. of council tenants receive rent rebates; 30 per cent. of households include a council tax benefit claimant; and there are 900 empty business premises. The statistics go on and on. One, which I discovered only this week, really horrified me: 41 per cent. of the households in Thanet have a total income of less than £10,000 a year. To put that in perspective, Members of Parliament receive £12,000 a year just to cover our additional costs for having to live away from home for a few days a week. My constituents have to live on that money for the whole year.
Progress has been made; there is no question about that. The first step along the route to progress was that the European Union recognised our problems and granted us objective 2 status. That embarrassed the previous Government, who granted us assisted area with development area status. We have also managed to make some successful single regeneration budget and lottery bids, and further progress was made in May 1995, when the good people of Thanet, for the first time, overwhelmingly returned a Labour council.
That council has begun the business of transforming Thanet. It first transformed its financial management, and I shall come to the significance of that later. We built a superb regeneration and economic development unit in the council. The overriding aim of our manifesto was to create jobs. In that endeavour, we have received wonderful help over the past 12 months from the Government Office for the South East. When we first got objective 2 status, I do not think that GOSE or the then Conservative council knew how to exploit it. Since 1995, we have learnt together, and over the past 12 months, the office has come up trumps.
The council has transformed itself into what we call a quasi-local development agency. Now it can start to attract inward investment. The council created two business parks. One, which was entirely in private hands, was created by threatening compulsory purchase, although we were willing enough to work with the developer to make progress.
The council also purchased 10 acres of land from its meagre resources to build a second business park, known as Thanet Reach. The two parks are now built, serviced and ready for jobs; Kent international business park has already attracted an investment from the Cummins group, and the building of its factory has been started, which is good news indeed.
We have attracted some other major investments. Holyman-Sally is to invest £85 million in catamarans, to run from Ramsgate; Dreamland Ltd. has started to refurbish the fairground at Margate and to construct, in an adventurous arrangement with the local council that will lead to the renovation of a large area of Ramsgate, a designer outlet called Ramsgate Boulevard, which we hope will attract thousands of people to the town.
I want to say a little more about the governance of regeneration. Although the economic development unit and the efforts of GOSE have been a step forward, we have been less successful in some other areas. There has been little democratic membership of the regeneration partnership, at the direct instructions of the previous Government. We fought long and hard, and now we have eventually been allowed to put some councillors on that partnership. The council would also like the local Member
of the European Parliament to be on it. I hope that the Government will one day make it clear that they will allow him to be on the partnership.
Some of our endeavours suffer from a lack of support from some of the quangos that should be helping us. English Partnerships has always talked a good fight, but backed away from it at the last moment. For the first few years of its life, East Kent Initiative seemed more interested in the channel tunnel than in Thanet, and for the past few years it seems to have been misdirected and looking for a mission in life. Now, it merely stands between us and inward investors. A new organisation, Locate in Kent, has been set up. I hope that the regeneration unit of the local council will be able to deal directly with that organisation. It can attract the inward investors, and the council can then turn that contact into real development.
I met the chief executive of Locate in Kent yesterday. It was a helpful meeting and I was encouraged by what he said. He gave me his corporate brochure, which I read before making this speech, and I was horrified to see that it does not mention the Thanet Reach business park or include one of the major roads into Ramsgate, which I do not find encouraging. If Locate in Kent does not tell the whole story about Thanet, who will? I hope that he will put that right.
I welcome the Government's proposals for regional development agencies, but I hope that the Minister will ensure that when they are set up, they report to a Minister, that they have full democratic control and that the regeneration unit of Thanet council will be able to work directly with them. I also ask that we work out what the council and the regional development agency should each do and ensure that they do not stand on each other's toes and duplicate effort.
We have some serious infrastructure problems, which need to be tackled. I shall take the House on a quick drive into Thanet. The A299 is being dualled, which is a step forward, but the dualling terminates on the A253, so there is no dual carriageway into Ramsgate. Furthermore, someone driving a 40-tonne lorry into our port has to go through the heritage town and round a hairpin bend--in fact, there are two sharp bends--which was intended for the horses and carts of Wellington's army, not a 40-tonne articulated truck. The Ramsgate harbour approach road is badly needed. The tragedy is that it is fully funded, it had been through all its planning processes and the archaeological work had started, when the new Conservative county council, elected on 1 May, decided to put the project on hold. All that the county council has succeeded in doing is to worry our inward investors. I ask the Government to do whatever they can to give the county council a kick up the pants and tell it to get on with building that road.
When one comes into Ramsgate and turns right on the A256, one leaves Thanet, but quickly comes to the jewel in our local crown--it is also one of the jewels in the United Kingdom crown. Pfizer is a pharmaceutical and animal health company--the largest animal health company in the world and the fastest-growing human medicine company. It is the fastest growing because it has the most successful research organisation, and the most successful component of that research division is in Sandwich. Several thousand people work there and another thousand will work there in five years, but not unless we upgrade the roads to the Pfizer site.
The company has already decided to move 300 jobs to the M25 corridor. That will be the thin end of the wedge, unless we give it the infrastructure improvements that it needs.
If one turns left from the A253 on to the A256, one can see that we also need to improve the road to Thanet Reach. We also desperately need a decent rail link. I call upon the Government to work with Railtrack to build a fast link from Thanet to Ashford, to join the high-speed rail link to London. The joke is that Pfizer came to my constituency in the mid-1950s because of the high-speed rail link that existed then. Unfortunately, it is the same high-speed link now, only a good deal dirtier and less well kept.
Grants are important if we are to attract inward investment, but inward investors tell us that they are typically offered £16,000 a job to invest in Thanet, whereas they can get £30,000 a job to invest in Wales. I realise that there will be some dispute over those figures. The Minister may even challenge them, but that is what inward investors are telling us, so either the figures are correct or their perception is wrong. We need to deal with the problem, whichever it is.
We need quality jobs with decent rates of pay. I was horrified to find out that GOSE offered someone a lower grant than he ought to have had because it thought that he would pay too much. He wanted a trained and motivated work force. GOSE thought that he should have a low-paid work force. That was some time ago. I hope that GOSE does not have that attitude now, and I call on the Minister to confirm that it does not.
Council finance is another important element. Because of our large housing benefit problem--we pay out about £40 million in housing benefit to low-paid people and suffer from what is sometimes called dole by the sea--the net cost to the council is £3 million a year. That £3 million, which the Secretary of State of the time said would not fall on councils, comes out of the general fund budget of only £15 million. If we had that money, we could spend it on local business, small businesses and tourism. As we do not have it, those businesses suffer. I call on the Government to keep a promise made by the previous Government, who said that they were going to deal with that problem.
This week, we heard that RAF Manston is to close. I should be pleased if the Minister responsible was prepared to meet me and others from Thanet to discuss the transition to private use. The closure will upset many people in Thanet--they remember Manston when it was the front line of the battle of Britain, so they have a sentimental attachment to it. If it has no military use now, we could at least make it into a private, specialised airfield, which could create thousands of jobs.
I must briefly mention health care, because East Kent health authority has today launched a review of health care throughout east Kent. I was disappointed with a written answer that I received tonight from the Department of Health, which tells me that clinical need will be "a major component" of the priorities considered by that review. It ought to be the primary component. I call on the Minister to say so.
That the draft Asian Development Bank (Sixth Replenishment of the Asian Development Fund) Order 1997, which was laid before this House on 26th June, be approved.
That the draft International Fund for Agricultural Development (Fourth Replenishment) Order 1997, which was laid before this House on 26th June, be approved.
That the draft Contracting Out (Metropolitan Police and Civil Staffs Pensions) Order 1997, which was laid before this House on 30th June, be approved.--[Mr. McAvoy.]
Question agreed to.
7.20 pm
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