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Mr. Gordon Prentice (Pendle): I do not know how the right hon. Gentleman has the incredible brass neck to berate us for out-of-town developments. Permission for 50 per cent. of all out-of-town hypermarkets was given under his Government in the five years between 1986 and 1991. Is that not just hypocrisy with a capital H?
Mr. Redwood: Why does not the hon. Gentleman save his breath and ensure that his right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister understands that he must not relax the rather good planning policies that we put in place in the 1990s? The hon. Gentleman says that he is so worried about it, but he ought to have the courage and honesty to say that his argument is with those on the Government Front Bench, who are thinking of undermining a rather good policy--which I think he supports and which the Conservatives introduced. The Deputy Prime Minister also favours building more houses on green fields throughout the south-east to accommodate the mass migration from the northern cities.
The Chancellor always taxes when he can. He now thinks that he is on to another good thing to raise some money. He has decided that he wants to tax any motorist who succeeds in getting to work by car if that motorist dares to park when he gets there. That is on top of the £150 extra in fuel duty being paid already by the average motorist as a result of the swingeing increases in fuel duty imposed by this miserable Government.
I wonder whether the Government understand that people who live in rural areas often have no choice of travel. There are many villages with no bus services, or with only a few buses a week. People have to go by car if they are going to travel. For them, new Labour's transport policy is going nowhere fast. The difference is that the Conservatives did not make it impossible for people to use cars in those rural areas--this Government are making it impossible for people to use their cars, as well as denying--[Interruption.]
Mr. Deputy Speaker:
Order. I am sorry to interrupt the right hon. Gentleman, but there are far too many sedentary comments, and some of them are coming from those on the Government Front Bench.
Mr. Redwood:
Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
Mr. Robert Key (Salisbury):
Does my right hon. Friend agree that there was never a golden age for buses? It is ridiculous to suppose that buses alone are the answer for rural transport. Buses do not go where people want to go, which is between village and village; they go down arterial routes. It is missing the target for Labour Members to bay at us that buses are the only answer.
Mr. Redwood:
My hon. Friend makes a powerful point from his own experience, with which I entirely agree.
Do the Government realise that some people who live in urban areas also have little choice about travel? The station car park may be full or vandalised. What are they going to do about that? The train or bus service may not
take people out of town to the places that they wish to go. It may go nowhere near one's home, so one has to use the car to go to the station, if one wishes to use the train. Cross-country train services are either slow or non-existent in many parts of the country.
It is high time that Ministers woke up to those realities and stopped living in the past. It is high time that they stopped throwing jibes about Conservative Governments long ago and did something now. The British public are angry now and they are angry with this Government. They have already expressed their views on the previous Government. We have learned and listened and we have exciting new policies to get Britain on the move; this lot opposite on the Labour Benches have not a clue about how to get Britain back on the move.
Mr. Christopher Leslie (Shipley):
I am interested to know about the solutions that the right hon. Gentleman is offering. Can he say what his policy would be to improve bus services?
Mr. Redwood:
I am glad that Labour Members want to learn from the Opposition, because we have much better ideas than the Government. I will come to ideas about how we can improve the position later, but I can give him some immediately--scrap the M4 bus lane, make the motorway safer, and get more people along the M4 in the morning peak time. That may not be so convenient for the Prime Minister, but it would be a lot more convenient for the rest of us.
Now, there is a spat between the Deputy Prime Minister and his boss. The Prime Minister is bitterly undermining his deputy through press briefings. He is letting it be known, in the usual backhand way, that he holds him to blame for stand-still Britain. The Prime Minister is determined that, as Britain grinds to a halt, it will be his deputy who is in the political jam.
The Deputy Prime Minister is not taking all that lying down. For once, I do not blame him--in fact, I find myself becoming extremely sympathetic towards to him--[Interruption.] Oh yes I do. He has been more spinned against than spinning. He protests that he is being blamed for implementing the Government's manifesto policies. Surely, he whispers, the Prime Minister should take the blame for the bash-the-motorist policies, for they are the policies of the Labour party as a whole.
I think that the right hon. Gentleman is right to take that view. Why blame the steward when you can blame the man who threw the party in the first place? For once, I admire the fact that the Deputy Prime Minister is the real thing; he oozes hatred of the motorist--[Interruption.] Hon. Members think that I went to a public school. I did not go to a public school; I went to a direct-grant school on a free place, which was rather different. It was that or the grammar school.
At least Two-Jags John is the real thing--he oozes hatred of the motorist and revels in the higher charges and taxes on motorists. He loves to see the rest of us struggling beside the empty bus lane, running the gauntlet of the growing selection of humps, cameras, chicanes,
traffic lights and coloured lines that now deck out many a main route under his description of an integrated transport policy. It is, of course, a disintegrating transport policy.
Mr. Andrew Reed (Loughborough):
Is the right hon. Gentleman trying to tell us that the Conservatives are against chicanes, bumps and speed cameras, all of which are measures that save pedestrians' lives? Is he against all bus lanes? Perhaps he should consider the experience of people in Loughborough, where a bus lane was introduced only five months ago, and bus usage increased dramatically--by at least 15 per cent. Is that not an example of the sort of integrated transport system that is required? By rejecting all those matters, the right hon. Gentleman is not talking about a real integrated transport system; he is making cheap points that have no relevance to the debate on transport that we need.
Mr. Redwood:
I advise the hon. Gentleman not to send those remarks to Downing street; they are definitely off-message. We do not want those impediments on through routes, red routes or main roads. There are uses for traffic-calming measures in residential areas, but not on main routes. Labour Members are getting muddled as to when, where and how such measures should be used. What they are doing is reducing the amount of available road space.
Jacqui Smith (Redditch):
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Redwood:
Usually, I should do so, but I am short of time and many hon. Members want to speak.
Mr. Graham Allen (Vice Chamberlain of Her Majesty's Household):
We are getting some good stuff out of this.
Mr. Redwood:
I am glad that the hon. Gentleman thinks that there is good stuff in my remarks. He is quite right. It is much better than he will hear from the Treasury Bench.
The Deputy Prime Minister is being undermined by his boss at the very point at which he is succeeding in bringing the motorist to boiling point. That is what the Government planned; they wanted to infuriate the motorist, and they are succeeding. That is the one pledge they intend to keep. New Labour promised us joined-up government, but one branch of the Government is spending £150 million to get more cars made in Britain by subsidising Rover, while another is trying to stop any of them being driven when they have been produced and sold. That is not integration, but contradiction.
There is another spat or three over Labour's approach to big business. It looks as though "Just call me Steve"--the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry--the Chancellor and the Prime Minister want to relax planning controls to allow genetically modified food companies more scope to plant, and to permit more new superstores to be built out of town. However, we know that the Deputy Prime Minister wants to restrict all of those, reflecting his good, old-fashioned distaste for big business and all its works. We all know who will win. The deputy Prime Minister has lost many times before; doubtless he will lose again. He should now watch out for more undermining from the centre, as the Government cosy up more closely to the supermarket barons and the genetically motivated Lords.
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