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Mr. Waterson: I am listening carefully to the hon. Gentleman. Given his view on the figures, does he think that there is any prospect of the Government meeting even their present 60 per cent. target for brown-field development?
Dr. Whitehead: The answer to that relates to the need to plan ahead over a period, as the previous Government demonstrated by failing miserably to meet their targets. To achieve a much higher target we must put policies in place, as the Government have been doing. I believe that that target is eminently achievable by careful analysis region by region and by developing policies that work towards it over time. It cannot be done in the way that the Opposition appear to suggest.
The Opposition made the grand statement that they had raised the target to 66 per cent., as though that would make anything happen. There was even a dispute among Opposition Members about whether their target was 75, 66, 62 or 61 per cent. They changed their target within weeks. They remind me of a bunch of Trotskyist sects declaring the date of the world revolution when they cannot make it happen.
The truth is that although the new housing projections are slightly lower, the crucial element missing from the argument is that the figures for the south have barely gone down at all. The pressure is on in the south of England, where there is a combination of fewer green-field sites and considerable immigration. That should make us realise that the necessary strategy is not fundamentally different for that part of the country. That is precisely set out in PPG3: we should build on brown-field sites where possible.
I caution the House that setting up a register of brown-field sites will not solve the problem. Some brown-field sites are in the deep countryside, such as former mental hospitals and airfields. Building on such sites would lead to unsustainable deep rural communities
that would become commuter dormitories. We must consider urban and rural sites and how to combine them with a policy of urban renaissance and sustainability by minimising transport corridors and, wherever possible, adding to existing town and city developments so that their resources and transport facilities can be used. That would develop a sustainable pattern of housing, while providing the necessary number of houses to ensure that the House and the Government will be able to say that we have not mortgaged the future for the sake of a quick fix. That is our real task. We will not achieve it by skating over the figures and drawing easy conclusions.
We cannot join the hon. Member for South-West Devon (Mr. Streeter) in saying that Plymouth council should tear up the sea front and build houses on it. As my hon. Friend the Member for The Wrekin (Mr. Bradley) said, we must do two things in analysing housing, both urban and rural. Urban areas require a denser pattern of housing, but they also need their green lungs. They must be liveable, or we will repeat in future generations the problems of previous ones with cities emptying and people moving to the countryside.
Mr. John Wilkinson (Ruislip-Northwood):
We had a contribution of righteous indignation from my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Mrs. Browning) and one of admirable brevity from the hon. Member for Elmet (Mr. Burgon), which I shall use as my model. He cited the efforts of a particularly public-spirited lady in his constituency who had helped preserve the green belt in Thorner. I thought of another equally admirable person--perhaps even more admirable, given the scope of his responsibilities--Mr. Ronald Smith, chairman of the London Green Belt Council, of which I have the honour to be president. Assiduity in addressing highly complex planning issues can achieve successful results.
Notwithstanding the partisan contributions, I hope that we are all in this together. We have a duty and obligation to keep this a green and pleasant land. The pressures on the south-east, to which the hon. Member for Southampton, Test (Dr. Whitehead) referred, are enormous. It is noteworthy that, in the revised projections for 1996 to 2021, the number of households in the south-east is expected to increase by no less than 26 per cent., or 900,000, and in London by 21 per cent., or 600,000. Those pressures are growing all the time and are accentuated, as the hon. Gentleman rightly said, by migration from the north to the south for economic reasons. There is also migration for reasons of social demography, with people gravitating to the south, especially the south coast, to retire. There is inward migration from the influx of refugees and the legitimate immigration of the dependants of immigrants from
overseas. All those factors make the pressures on London and the south-east the greatest. We must pay particular attention to them.
There are some aspects of the Government's policy as outlined in PPG3 of which I must be critical. An emphasis has been placed on transport corridors. In the Stevenage case, that was the justification for gobbling up large tracts of green belt and open countryside for the development of housing. In the south-east, the transport infrastructure needs are so great that the Government's emphasis can have a major impact.
There is the Central Railway project to run freight and passenger trains from the north-west and the midlands along the Chiltern line, across London and to the channel tunnel. If it is constructed, with passenger stations along the line, it could provide an opportunity under the provisions in PPG3 for new housing communities to be established in a particularly sensitive green belt in a corridor beyond the M25. There are plans for a transport exchange associated with the projected road-rail freight facility at Colnbrook and for the Parkway station near the M25 with the Great North Eastern Railway. All around the M25, there are pressures on the countryside and green belt associated with transport facilities.
The Government say in PPG3 that facilities for car parking and the density of housing should be such that more emphasis is placed on public transport than the motor car, so the risk of public transport facilities impinging on housing development to permit more extensive housing in areas that otherwise would be countryside becomes greater all the time.
There is also a predisposition to allow existing communities to expand at the edges, rather than to permit the development of new towns or communities in the countryside. This is all very well. I understand the thinking behind it, although there are exceptions to it, as my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton graphically exposed in the case of the new town in east Devon, but the policy has grave implications for the London area. There could be a tendency to allow development all the way to the M25. We already see development around the M25 and it is but a short step to take it even further into the countryside beyond.
I urge Her Majesty's Government to live up to their rhetoric and pay much more attention to urban renaissance. There is a great deal of talk about it, although how it is to be achieved is not explained. At the same time, there is talk--this is the contradictory aspect--of more infilling, more use of derelict land and more use of compulsory purchase powers, which always gets me worried. Socialist local authorities in London have used those powers in a malign fashion more for social and political engineering than for creating communities in which there is a good balance of open space and housing. If we put all that together, there is a real danger that the urban renaissance envisaged by the Government will not provide the quality of life which they claim is so important in their planning document.
Mr. Nigel Waterson (Eastbourne):
This has been a good debate. Some Opposition Members, including Ministers, have made the criticism that this is the fifth such debate that the Opposition have called. I have some bad news for Ministers. There will be more of these debates. We will keep dragging them to the House so that they can explain the fiasco.
Mr. Raynsford:
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Waterson:
In a minute. I should like to get through my first paragraph or so.
The Government have finally produced draft PPG3 and the revised household projections, but they have dithered and delayed for two years before so doing. That means that we have to look forward to see what the prospects of the Government's policies working are and backwards to see what damage has already been done by their drift and inaction. All that the Minister could do was stagger from meaningless slogan to meaningless slogan.
The way in which the revised household projections have been handled is particularly curious. Only last year, a Select Committee described the previous estimate of 4.4 million as
What of the figures themselves? My hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (Mr. Gray) spoke with his usual authority on the issue. I am sure that the Minister accepts that small variations in underlying assumptions such as interest rates and GDP could make a dramatic difference to the projections. I understand that the figures make no allowance for economic factors. The Minister for London and Construction is looking at me as though I am telling him something new.
We have already heard about the shameful decisions made in Stevenage, West Sussex, Newcastle and Sutton Coldfield. We have heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Mrs. Browning) that two new towns are being dropped in the middle of east Devon. Will Ministers now reverse all or some of those decisions? It seems that, if the figures are correct, they were based on outdated information.
We have heard how county structure plans have been forced through on the basis of the old PPG3. The Council for the Protection of Rural England has pointed out that,
in the south-east, 800,000 of the 900,000 houses planned between 1991 and 2016 have already been built, or sites have been earmarked for them.
"the best one there is."
At last September's party conference, the Minister for London and Construction said that all previous estimates of household figures had fallen short of the actual number of households. Until fairly recently, unnamed Ministers were hinting that the figure of 4.4 million was, if anything, on the low side and numbers such as 5 million or even 5.5 million were muttered darkly. Then the new thinking was rushed out at about the same time as PPG3, but without the detailed data which have been promised for later in the year. The hon. Member for Southampton, Test (Dr. Whitehead) made a brave, but doomed, effort to defend the figures.
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