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Mr. Adrian Sanders (Torbay): I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this debate. He says that houses should be built not in South Hams, but in Torbay, of which he represents a quarter; and no doubt he does not want those 3,000 to 6,000 extra houses to be built in Brixham, Galmpton or Broadsands. The hon. Gentleman is being honest, so he is saying that those houses should be built in areas such as Occombe valley, Cockington or Preston Down road. The hon. Gentleman nods his head; I am grateful to him for that confirmation.
Mr. Steen: If I was nodding, it was because I was getting bored with the hon. Gentleman's remarks.
The "not in my backyard" principle is a good planning principle because it expresses self-interest and there is nothing like self-interest to ensure that the right decision
is reached. Clearly, the right decision is that it is better for those new homes to be in the hon. Gentleman's constituency than in mine.
Mr. Paul Tyler (North Cornwall):
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Steen:
I shall give way when I have dealt with the points made by the hon. Member for Torbay(Mr. Sanders).
There are many badly designed homes and buildings in Torbay, as the hon. Gentleman will agree. Torbay has grown like Topsy. If there was better planning and better design, the space could be used more productively.
Mr. Tyler:
I am sorry that the hon. Gentleman has abandoned his main thesis, which concerned the inadequacy of the predict-and-provide approach. We all now realise that the previous Government's failure to move away from that principle is why we are in the current position. Will the hon. Gentleman turn westward and consider the circumstances of his hon. Friend the Member for South-West Devon (Mr. Streeter), who is determined to have an even larger development on green-field sites than is currently proposed? What does the hon. Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen) say to his neighbour?
Mr. Steen:
The hon. Gentleman raises a perfectly acceptable point. I must not be drawn too far from the thesis of predict and provide, as he was clearly following it with interest. I hope that the Minister will withdraw his unnecessarily unkind remarks about my not getting involved in a serious discussion. I see the Minister smiling. I am sure that he was overcome momentarily and is now back to his normal, happy self.
It is not for me to answer the hon. Gentleman's question. My hon. Friend the Member for South-West Devon (Mr. Streeter) is well known for his oratory, clarity and good sense. I am sure that, when the time comes, he will be able to respond to that point.
Mr. Gary Streeter (South-West Devon):
The time has come. Does my hon. Friend agree that the real glory of Devon is to be found not just in Dartmoor, in the rolling hills of South Hams--which he and I are privileged to represent--or in our coastline, but in our beautiful, picturesque villages? We do not want a new town or to see existing villages overwhelmed by new building. We must protect and preserve our existing villages in south Devon at all costs.
Mr. Steen:
That is the right answer. The only snag is that, in the 1960s and 1970s, the planners and the county council in Devon said, "We want to protect villages and hamlets, but we realise that we can do that only by ruining one area completely by building a new town". I used to represent that new town of Ivybridge, which is now in my hon. Friend's constituency. It was a tiny hamlet of 1,500 inhabitants but now has 12,000 or 13,000 inhabitants. If that was the only place ruined, one could accept it. However, the planners not only ruined Ivybridge but have continued to build in all the villages and hamlets that they
I do not want to be drawn too far away from the point that I was pursuing. We must find a way of forcing developers to consider building in towns. I mentioned Plymouth, Torbay, Exeter and Bristol before the hon. Member for Torbay jumped up. Unlike their American counterparts, our cities are grey, often unfriendly and not fun places because they empty at the end of the working day when everyone rushes home to the suburbs. British cities are like doughnuts: they have empty centres where the jam used to be. Jam is made by combining a mix of ingredients: by including all ages, lifestyles, earning levels, types of marital status and so on. Our cities need to be vigorous, vital and exciting places in which to live and work.
That will not happen if developers continue to build on green-field rather than brown-field sites. By doing so, they make the urban sprawl worse--compounding the problem by attracting the more upwardly mobile members of society out to the suburbs, leaving behind the poor, the elderly and the ethnic minorities. Many of our cities are drab and dreary because of permissive planning policies that encourage building on green-field sites, which constantly robs the cities of the kind of people who could invigorate them--the upwardly mobile. We must ask what building by numbers is doing to our countryside as well as what it costs the taxpayer to build the extra infrastructure required by green-field developments.
The Devon county structure plan demands that two new settlements be built on green-field sites. One of them would be built near Plymouth and the settlement of 2,500 housing units would constitute 35 per cent. of the current demand from Plymouth. However, will that local demand be met given that, despite the fact that its supposed aim is to meet existing demand, the new town will be advertised all over the country? If taking up the Plymouth overspill is the real aim, why not build on existing vacant land and fill existing housing in that city? Why not put under-utilised sites to better use? There are many of them: shops with a vacant upper storey, vacant land in both public and private ownership, and disused dockland sites. Plymouth is a good example of an unplanned city that has grown up by accident rather than design.
Why are we not regenerating our cities? In the 1960s and 1970s, the then Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, launched several urban development initiatives, including the urban programme, the community development project, the education priorities and the young volunteer force, of which I was a director. Those initiatives switched the rates from rural to urban areas in order to finance the needs of rundown inner cities. The Labour Administration in the 1970s switched the rates from rural areas to urban areas in an attempt to regenerate them, and I welcomed that move.
In the early 1980s, my right hon. Friend the Member for Henley (Mr. Heseltine), then Secretary of State for the Environment in the Conservative Government, launched a crusade to regenerate our cities. Fortunately, I was the Member for Liverpool, Wavertree at the time, so I
benefited from that policy. Yet our inner cities continue to empty outwards simply because people can move into a never-ending supply of housing built on green-field sites.
Green-field development prompts the need for schools, shops, sewerage, telecommunications, transport, medical and hospital services and leisure facilities. Who pays for that? It is not the developer. The developer simply connects the houses to the local sewerage system and possibly installs a few telephone and electricity lines. There is a myth doing the rounds that green-field development is much cheaper than redeveloping rundown areas in the towns. It is not cheaper: it is a question of who pays.
Green-field development is not cheap for the taxpayer, who must pay for all the services that new communities require. The only person for whom such development is cheap is the developer, who buys the land, builds the buildings and connects them to the main services. That is why green-field building land is so expensive to buy. I am told that Plymouth brown-field sites sell at about £50,000 per acre, while green-field land outside Plymouth sells for £800,000 an acre. The fact that it is so disproportionately expensive should alert us to the fact that something is wrong. Developers must be, and are, making good profits--so much so that the high cost of green-field land is worth paying.
It is left to the public authorities to pay for the long-term infrastructure and employment provisions of new communities. The council tax payer and the central taxpayer pay. Who pays for the buses that will have to serve the new areas? Is it the developer? No, it is the taxpayer. Who will pay for a new sewerage plant that might have to be built? Is it the developer? No, it is the water rate payer. Who will pay to resurface the roads and build new ones to cope with the extra traffic? Is it the developer? No way. It is the taxpayer, through the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions.
When the new green-field developments are advertised in the national newspapers and people--many of them retired--flock to the west country, who will pay for the extra hospital services needed to cope with the influx of elderly people or for the schooling of young families? Is it the developer? Of course not, it will be the taxpayer. Moving people from the cities to the suburbs costs taxpayers money. Who pays to decommission schools and other services in the town and set up new ones in the suburbs? It is not the developer, but the taxpayer.
Why should the taxpayer be drawn in behind the developer who makes the profit on green-field land development, leaving behind problems of declining cities and infrastructure costs for others to deal with? If developers want to build on green-field sites, they should provide the necessary infrastructure. However, there is another problem: developers can pay only if the development is big and profitable. They can pick up the cost of green-field development only if that development is large enough to generate sufficient money. That is why planners advocate building new towns: two dozen starter homes will not make enough money to enable a developer to build a road or a school.
The infrastructure is already in place in our cities. So why build on green fields, destroy the countryside and create endless unnecessary problems when pleasant homes can be built in the towns at less cost to the
taxpayer? It is only bureaucracy that is preventing such development: the bureaucracy of handing down housing figures from Whitehall based on the predict-and-provide policy, the refusal to allow local authorities to trade with each other and the Government's failure to implement their brown-field sites policy.
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