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10.42 am
Mrs. Gwyneth Dunwoody (Crewe and Nantwich): It is always a delight to follow the hon. Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen). He adds greatly to our entertainment and it would be a sad day if, for any reason, his idiosyncratic delivery were ever lost to the House of Commons and we could no longer hear his speeches, which are interesting not least because of his ability to perform a 180-deg turn within the confines of one of them. The hon. Gentleman is a living example of the principle that he now appears to believe is most important: that is, having fled Liverpool for the delights of the South Hams, he believes that what happens in urban areas should be strictly divorced from anything that happens in areas such as the one he represents.
Long before the hon. Gentleman thought of moving to Devon, I was a councillor in the very area that he now represents. I hardly like to remind him that there have been not one or two Conservative Members of Parliament for that area, but hundreds of them. During their tenure, the very infrastructure that he now demands has never
been made a priority. The sad story of Dartington primary school is well known to me, because my children went there. I was also, for my sins, a Dart commissioner, so I know that Devonians have, for many generations, been slinging their muck into the Dart. There was no functioning sewerage works until the 1960s. It used to be well known that most of the streams leading from the Dart and most of the springs in Totnes were so alive with every known bacterium that families had to have lived in Totnes for five generations to acquire any immunity to the water. People who lacked such an immunity came to a sad end. One of my favourite aldermen used to say to me, "There's nothing wrong with that spring, my dear--nothing wrong with it at all", but when we had it analysed, we discovered it was so solid with bacteria that they nearly walked out of the water on their own. Therefore, I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will forgive me if I do not echo his calls for Devon to get new infrastructure; it has needed new infrastructure since the time of Drake, but none of its Conservative representatives have ever done much about it.
We should discuss seriously the issues of housing and the balance between rural and urban areas. The hon. Gentleman had difficulty with the word "suburbia", meaning the bit between rural and urban areas. However, most of us understand the implications of an expanding population and accelerating social change. It is no use wanting four generations to live in one house. Most of the working-class houses of my youth did not have room for four generations of one family, even in the highly insanitary conditions in which many people were then forced to live. The notion that people will do that now is not realistic: I have 10 grandchildren, I love them all, and I am delighted when they go home with their mothers and fathers.
Planning policy is now attempting to reverse the events of 20 years. Conservative Governments were happy to let developers buy bits of land wherever they could and put up little boxes. They paid no heed to locating those developments near transport facilities, schools, shopping or other useful infrastructure. They were quite happy to allow the development by private enterprise of any packet of land it could get its hands on, without making a correlation between such development and the interests of rural or urban areas. That could not be allowed to continue. Because of those policies, we in Cheshire now face real difficulties: the expansion of market towns has been such that it will soon be difficult for people to find school places, road space, shops and other facilities essential to a good quality of life. That is not because of changes that have occurred in the past three years, but because of the expansionist policy pursued by Conservative Governments.
For the first time, planning guidance makes a sensible attempt to ensure that serious consideration is given to the location of desperately needed new housing, how it will relate to other developments, and what developers should provide to enhance the quality of life of the people involved. All planning guidance emphasises that, if developers build estates in areas that have no public transport, or that are divorced from public transport routes, a car-using populace is thus created. People have no choice: Crewe has large estates where there are no shops and where, to get a child to school, a car must be used, no matter how
broken down it is, because of the distance to be covered. Inevitably, that has an impact on the quality of life experienced in the whole area. PPG3 and the other guidance notes try to weave the different strands together in a coherent whole. That is a difficult task.
I believe that, today, we should not be considering the likes of the Bill--which, apart from anything else, does not appear to be the one to which the hon. Member for Totnes was speaking. We should be telling the Government that, having set out the three-dimensional jigsaw and having stated how they want all the pieces to fit together, they must take care to ensure that their demands for the future match up with the plans of the building and transport industries. That is not an easy task. Most developers hold land banks covering the sites they want to develop for as far as five years ahead. They think constantly about how to make a profit, which is their reason for being, and sometimes their interests will not match those of the local community. Most sensible developers are aware of their greater responsibility, and there has been an encouraging extension of dialogue between developers and central and local government. They are trying to concentrate on local needs and plans, and to relate what they are doing to the in-depth discussion that will inform the future of planning. However, there are still genuine problems, of which I shall highlight one or two.
Transport is essential to the argument. Schools are obviously vital, but transport is so fundamental that we should be putting tremendous pressure on developers to think about sites in relation to the way in which people move about. It does not matter how green the policies are, how middle-class the population is, or how many members of well-known pressure groups are involved; if every house becomes a two-car household, an instant problem is created.
That will be addressed only by the provision of good public transport, and someone must pay for it. In many areas, buses are disappearing. The problem is not just that bus services do not extend into new estates--they simply disappear. In his attempts to bring back rural buses, the Deputy Prime Minister rightly said that there should be support for new services, and he has now agreed that maintaining the network of bus services is almost as important.
The Government recognise that, but do the transport companies? Do members of the Association of Train Operating Companies realise that they must stop thinking in narrow terms about protecting their own tiny bit of the system, and start thinking about how they can get many more people out of their cars and back on to the train system? They will not do that with their present fare structure and their existing attitude towards the development of new, flexible services, and they will certainly not do it unless they get new rolling stock and a little more responsibility for planning their services.
Having thought through the problem, the Government are suggesting that the crucial issue is not only infrastructure in the sense of roads and transport facilities, but the development of jobs. Something that the hon. Member for Totnes did not say this morning, which he might have said, is that rural and market towns face a problem when they look for existing brownfield sites, not because they do not have them, but because such sites are used by facilities that may be marginal, but provide jobs.
If small businesses are constantly subjected to pressure and told that they will be given £250,000 to shut down so that five houses can be built on their wood yard, that produces two results: development takes place on brownfield sites, certainly, but the local population is deprived of some form of employment. That balance must be considered with far greater urgency than some of the arguments that we have heard today.
The Government must seriously consider their attitude to what they call "clusters". I understand their desire for a developing--especially a high-tech--industry to attract others of its ilk, to set up a centre of excellence and to provide jobs for the future, because such new industries are capable of replacing older ones and attracting new investment. The difficulty is that the Government, in the person of Lord Sainsbury of Turville, have said that they believe that a cluster cannot be created, but must be nurtured. Lord Sainsbury gave evidence this week to one of the Select Committees. I believe that he ought to have reconsidered his position as a Minister.
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