| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Heald: The point is that Hertfordshire had a consultants' report that said that every single one of the 65,000 houses could be provided within the envelopes of towns. Then, Labour-controlled Stevenage borough
council offered to take 10,000 houses. That offer was grasped. Does the hon. Lady agree that, when considering the green belt, it is important to recognise that the land between Hitchin and Luton that is to be designated as green belt is prime agricultural land that is protected anyway?
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael J. Martin): Order. The hon. Gentleman knows that he should not make a speech during an intervention.
Barbara Follett: I shall respond to the hon. Gentleman's point. The reason why Labour-controlled Stevenage council was not keen to have the houses built within the envelopes of towns was that they would be built mainly within the envelope of Stevenage, which is already overcrowded, and on the recreation park that I mentioned.
We hear a lot about 10,000 houses being built to the west of Stevenage. Phase 1, which should be complete by 2011, accounts for only 3,600 houses, and there is the potential for a further 1,400 houses to be built after 2011. There is no certainty that the other 5,000 will be built, but they will be built only if they are needed. I shall outline what Hertfordshire county council wants to do with the development west of Stevenage.
Hertfordshire has a proud history. It is where the first garden cities were developed by Ebenezer Howard--Letchworth in 1903 and Welwyn Garden City in 1919. Through the development west of Stevenage, Hertfordshire wants to build another garden city. Under the garden city 2000 project, the council has conducted a lengthy consultation with local people, especially those who are against the development. Last weekend, at the John Henry Newman school in my constituency, 330 people met for two days to draw the outline plan for the development and to discuss what it could and should contain. I welcome that initiative by Hertfordshire county council, which is exactly what the Government want to encourage, as it involves local people in local plans at an extremely local level. We are putting in place measures to preserve the environment and to ensure that the countryside and the town merge.
I know that Conservatives are as concerned as I am about the erosion of the green belt. I have a great deal of respect for the hon. Member for North-East Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald) and I know that his views are sincere. I shall work with him to do as much as possible to make the new garden city development a good one.
However, we know that the problem is serious. It is predicted that, overall, there will be 23 per cent. more households in Britain by 2016. There will be 29 per cent. more households in the eastern region, where my constituency is situated, and 29 per cent. more in the south-west.
Mr. Blunt:
Does the hon. Lady accept that those projections are amenable to change by social and fiscal policies?
Barbara Follett:
I do, and I know that the auditor's figures show that the projections can vary by as much as plus or minus 3 per cent. The projections are difficult and not particularly reliable, and, at some stage, we must consider how they can be reformed. However, we have to
Mr. David Curry (Skipton and Ripon):
It is a pleasure on this guest appearance to see that the Government are fielding such a distinguished team. The Minister for the Regions, Regeneration and Planning apparently has a new role as First Minister for England, while the Minister for London and Construction is a putative but bashful candidate for mayor of London. Such luminaries do not often share the Front Bench to reply to a debate. I have been looking up, in the Evening Standard, all the non-endorsements for the Minister for London and Construction in the campaign that has not yet started on his behalf.
I regret that the Deputy Prime Minister is not present, but I know that he will be extremely familiar with the inner city, because he flies over it so frequently--no doubt on his way to a spot of wealth creation.
Dr. Ladyman:
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Curry:
No, not for the moment, although I will later.
The House agrees that, if we are to save the green belt and do our best to ensure that development in the countryside is minimised, we must be serious about developing the inner city. The two go together; they are not options.
If we are to recapture the city and reuse the land, we must do it without starting from the basis of illusion. There is a belief that, if one improves schools and transport in the inner city and makes sure that the streets are safe, people automatically will want to live there. Some will, and doing that much will make it easier for people to live there. However, a strong aspirational element is also at work, as the hon. Member for West Lancashire (Mr. Pickthall) pointed out: people want to move out of such areas because they consider that that will better their condition and, perhaps, their status. That has happened throughout our history, and politicians must be careful before they decide that there is a point at which that process must be brought to an end.
The city must be made to work. A long time ago, I read a book by Jane Jacobs called "The Death and Life of the Great American City". It is one of the great formative books on planning. Her central thesis was that the city had gone wrong because we had started dividing it up into different functions. As a result, we lost much of the cohesion--the informal supervision of people--that obtained in the middle of a city. We had been required to police and manage the city because we had denied the community the ability to police and manage the city itself. If we can get back to some of those concepts in our development, we will save ourselves a great deal of trouble. It is an expensive business, and it would be foolish to pretend that it could be done easily or on
the cheap. Lots of land in cities is contaminated, having had gasworks on it. The Minister for London and Construction represents Greenwich, and he will know better than most the history of munitions and chemicals and the sheer amount of work required to put land right.
We must make sure that we have the right players, playing the right game. The players are the Government, through their regional proposals and their planning rules; the new development agencies which are about to come into existence; the local authorities; housing associations and voluntary groups; and the private sector.
I agreed with much of what was said by the hon. Member for Truro and St. Austell (Mr. Taylor). The figure of 4.4 million hovers over our debate like a dark and threatening cloud. However, that figure reflects what is happening in our society--longevity, divorce, people who have never married. I would love to be able to wish the figure away and to think that it is fundamentally wrong, but all the history suggests that it may be too modest rather than too great. We may be lucky to get away with that figure.
That is an example of how aspirations run up against the needs of the wider community. The devolution of decisions to the regions will not help matters. That does not alter the problem; it merely alters the number of people who can take decisions. The danger is that we are passing the parcel. The places where people want to live and the places where the used land exists do not coincide with all the happy convenience that the Government would wish.
I used to go around the country to find people saying, "Let them live in Liverpool." There was an enormous enthusiasm for living in Liverpool among people who knew that they would never be asked to do so. It is amazing that Liverpool has not been repopulated at colossal speed, given the enthusiasm of people to send others to live there. The hon. Member for West Lancashire has pointed out, however, that some people may actually want to move away from Merseyside, an area that is depopulating.
We must recognise the real problem. The achievement of individual aspiration sometimes comes up against the interest of the community. The whole planning problem is about how we get those two things into sensible equilibrium. The community itself often wants sensitive economic development: people in the area around Cambridge would not want not to have the economic success that has happened there, but it has brought its problems. Planning is about reconciliation, compromise and equilibrium.
At the same time, people have palpable concerns. When people set up home in a new environment, it is natural that they become defensive about it. My hon. Friends the Members for Mid-Sussex (Mr. Soames), for North Wiltshire (Mr. Gray) and for Tunbridge Wells (Mr. Norman) have talked about the sheer sense of permanent uncertainty that surrounds people, and about the sheer length of time it takes before decisions are taken. There is also a sense of despoilation of the very environments to which people move, and the resulting choking of services. Often, the environment that is being quit is not improved, and the environment to which people move is also degraded. That is the worst of both worlds.
The Government can do some things to accelerate the process of making inner cities more developable and livable, an idea that lies at the heart of their argument. We do not have to wait for Lord Rogers to decide.
First, as my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire said, there is the value added tax on house repairs. There is 17.5 per cent. VAT on 800,000 empty homes in England and Wales, but zero VAT on building on green-field sites. Not all those homes are where people want them to be, but they should be coupled with sensible social housing policies in areas such as the north-east. Frankly, there is a persuasive case for stopping building new social housing in Newcastle, given the empties there.
Secondly, housing associations are major players in the city centres and their permitted purposes could be changed to encourage them into regeneration. They should get out of social security, and into economic development, building more houses for the marketplace and for selling. They are in business, they are successful and they bring in private sector funding. They are capable of developing economic regeneration in the cities.
Thirdly, we should see an accelerated programme of housing transfers, perhaps to community trusts. Transfers do not have to go to the private sector or to housing associations. That notion was regarded as scandalous when the previous Government introduced it, but people in Liverpool, Manchester and other places are falling over themselves to have houses transferred because they know that there is no ghost of a chance of the Exchequer providing the public funds that would put those houses in order.
9.37 pm
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |