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Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The House must come to order. The right hon. Gentleman is addressing the House.[Hon. Members: "We are enjoying it."] Well, perhaps hon. Members will enjoy the speech in silence.
Mr. Curry: I would hate to have been greeted entirely in silence. I do not mind terribly from which side of House the silence and which side the noise comes.
This is a Government who are supposed to be liberating local government. I am trying to give them one or two hints on how they might manage that. So far, it is all rhetoric and little action, as the hon. Member for
Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen), who is the Government Whip on the Local Government Bill, will be able to testify.
The hon. Member for Leicester, East (Mr. Vaz) was right when he talked about planning delays. They are enormous. It can take more than a year for an inquiry to get under way, even after a call-in. That freezes development comprehensively. The Government have had nearly two years to start getting that right and it is about time that they did so.
If the Government are serious about regeneration--another matter that is also very much part of the DETR's patch--and about local government playing a central role in that, they should revise the local government finance system and its indicators, so that they are less a reflection of the static side of a community and look forward to the dynamic that a community is supposed to be undertaking. At the moment, that is not the case, and local authorities find it difficult, when they really wish to be ambitious--few of them do wish to be ambitious--to carry that through into practice.
The Government need to ensure that education action zones and other such initiatives are co-ordinated with the regeneration programmes so that the right hand knows what the left hand can do. If the Department for Education and Employment can be elbowed, kicking and screaming, into the regional office structure, that would do a lot of good.
The regional development agencies will be in charge of medium-term planning and the regional planning will be on the longer term. Those need to work together. Getting the local authorities and the development agencies on the same side, pushing in the same direction, will not be an easy task. They will have to have a focus. If they try to spread their efforts everywhere, they will do nothing but irritate over a wide area. If they are sensible, they can be effective; but they will have to make difficult choices to do that.
The Minister for the Regions, Regeneration and Planning (Mr. Richard Caborn):
The contribution of the right hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Curry) was spoiled at the end. It has been good to listen to him. I do not know how the Opposition passed the hat around this afternoon to determine who would reply to the debate. I hope that what the right hon. Gentleman said will begin to be reflected in Conservative policy. When he was talking about taxation, the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Mr. Norman) went white, because he could see it costing his old business a few bob. When we read Hansard tomorrow, we shall be able to contrast the opening contribution from the hon. Member for West Chelmsford (Mr. Burns), who said that he was initiating the fourth debate on behalf of the Conservatives, with the winding-up speech, and we shall see quite a difference.
To put the record straight, the motion is ill-informed because the regional development agencies will not be involved in land use planning. I am surprised that the right hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon mentioned that. Those agencies are not involved in land use or transport planning; they will be left in the democratic process and will be done through the regional planning guidance.
I shall deal first with the 60 per cent. target in respect of previously developed land. I must tell the Liberal Democrats that we have been systematically examining land use, transport and spatial planning to make sure that, when we publish our proposals, which we will do on PPG11, PPG12 and PPG3, they will all dovetail and that is exactly what the hon. Member for Truro and St. Austell (Mr. Taylor) was asking for. I assure him that the consultation process, which has been wide and in depth, will ensure, once and for all, that we get it right. We are dealing with some very difficult problems. The Opposition have been playing gesture politics, whereas we are genuinely trying to tackle the structural problems that we inherited from the previous Administration.
Let us go back a few years and consider the arguments deployed by people such as Lord Tebbit, who told people to get on their bikes, come to the south-east and get a job. Well, people did that in the 1970s and 1980s, and there is now tremendous overheating--[Interruption.] The hon. Member for Mid-Sussex (Mr. Soames) went on the rabbit run--or was it the chicken run?--from Crawley. No doubt, he has added to the housing demand there.
We will meet our 60 per cent. target, and we will do so by having, for the first time ever, a land use database. Yes, we will be reflecting on what Lord Rogers is doing in the task force; yes, we will be introducing new regional planning proposals; and yes, we will have land use change statistics. When all that is done, we will not only meet the 60 per cent. target, but go further and make sure that each region has the ability to make sure that happens.
The only way we shall end predict and provide is by putting proper planning practice into operation. We will make sure, through the regional development agencies, that we address the under-utilisation of the economies in many parts of the United Kingdom, and England in particular. Unfortunately, another legacy of the previous Administration is that no English region outside London is performing, in wealth creation terms, to the average of the European regions in respect of gross domestic product per capita. Cornwall in the south-west is down to 69 per cent. of the EU average; Merseyside is down to72 per cent.; and the whole of the north-east is down to 80 per cent. That economic deficit is the Conservative legacy that we are trying to tackle. It was in part the result of the type of policy pursued by Lord Tebbit when he encouraged people to get on their bikes. We will be following through in terms of those planning guidance documents--
Mr. Lansley:
Will the Minister give way?
Mr. Caborn:
I shall give way to the hon. Gentleman because I gave him a promise when I spoke previously on these matters.
Mr. Lansley:
The Minister is on exactly the right point, and I am grateful to him. He is repeating his speech of 22 October, but not the point where he promised that he
Mr. Caborn:
I can give the hon. Gentleman an answer and offer him an apology that I did not get out a draft PPG3 before the examination in public in the eastern region. The hon. Gentleman has made about the best contribution this evening from the Opposition Benches. That shows the shallowness of the Opposition's arguments. I accept that we have not brought out PPG3. However, I am sure that, when it does come out, the hon. Gentleman will recognise that it dovetails into an area that we have been examining extremely seriously--introducing regional planning guidance that will integrate transport, land use and spatial planning.
The process has proved a little more difficult than I envisaged a few months ago. However, we will get it right. We will ensure that we do not have the mistakes that we had in the past, which were made by previous Administrations. I hope that, in the next few weeks, we shall bring out planning policy guidance notes 11, 12 and 13. As for PPG3, I think that we will be responding positively by giving tools to local authorities to ensure that the sequential test, as embodied in PPG6, is in PPG3 as well. There will be a comprehensive review of that planning, as we promised in "Modernising Planning". We shall also consider how we can factor in the spatial planning perspective that comes from the European Union.
Mr. Matthew Taylor:
If the Minister takes the view that the 60 per cent. target for brown-field sites cannot be given over to each individual authority, which it surely cannot, what mechanism will the Government use to ensure that, overall, that target is reached?
Mr. Caborn:
As I have said, my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister gave that commitment, and we are genuinely working towards it. When we came into office, we were amazed, given the previous Conservative Government's rhetoric on brown-field sites, that there was no land use databank to tell us what brown-field sites we had in the United Kingdom. The lack of hard statistical data on which to base any decisions was amazing. Those data were not in the Department. We have had to go systematically through the information that is available and we shall bring that in. We hope that the database will be available to us by the end of March. That will be a starting point. We are thankful to local authorities that have enabled us, through English Partnerships, to make this progress.
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