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8.22 pm
Mr. Mike Hancock (Portsmouth, South): I hope that the Deputy Prime Minister's mother recovers well, and that he and the rest of the family are aiding that recovery as we speak.
I was disappointed that the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Mr. Norman) did not allow me to intervene when he suggested that the Government had to tell the people--that the people needed answers to some of his questions. I was going to ask whether he could answer one of my questions, which has baffled the nearly 2 million people who live in Hampshire. They would be interested to know why the county was singled out for special treatment under 17 years of Tory rule. [Hon. Members: "18."] No; the Tories came up with a policy that changed the plan slightly in their last year of government.
The Tories missed the point when it came to Hampshire. There was hardly a planning application refused by the county council or the district councils that the Government did not back on appeal. Tens of thousands of houses are built on greenfield sites; not a single brownfield site was developed with the Government's support during the time when they were in control.
Mr. White: The exception was when the site in question was in Nicholas Ridley's backyard.
Mr. Hancock: Obviously there were exceptions, but they were small exceptions, and there were not many of them. The price that we paid in Hampshire, as a community, was one that many generations will regret in years to come.
If we are honest, we must look back a bit further even than the Conservative misrule of the years between 1979 and 1997. Coming from Portsmouth as I do, I know at first hand why the situation there deteriorated--why the city chose to build outside. It built the largest council
estate in Europe outside the city boundaries; but that decision was made in the aftermath of war. Many of our great cities had to go through the same process, because the only option available to them was to build outside.We built communities containing greenfield gaps. It became convenient for developers to look at those gaps--gaps between the large council estate outside the city, and the city. They felt that filling the gaps was a developer's dream. Successive Governments fell into the trap of allowing that development--that sprawl--to take place.
If we accept that it was inevitable that the inner-city industries would decline--I think that few would deny that--we must also accept that, in the 1960s and 1970s, we should have planned to ensure that the sites were reused. If that had happened, the rape of the green belt that took place during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s could have been stopped.
There are three more good reasons why we are in the mess we are in today. The three issues involved were the direct responsibility of the Conservative Administration who ruled the country in those years. First, there was the right to buy, and the selling of good council houses with no proper replacement policy. It was nonsensical to allow local authorities to dispose of property, believing that the solution would be provided by the powerful Housing Corporation and housing associations when those bodies would manifestly never be able to deliver what was required. They were not capable, financially or practically, of delivering what local authorities have been able to deliver. Opportunities have been lost, and some of the problems that we now face in inner cities result directly from that policy.
Secondly, there was the Conservative Government's failure to continue one of the success stories that they inherited from Labour when they came to power in 1979. The general improvement programme was built around the aim of rejuvenating properties, many nearly 100 years old, which would be guaranteed a 25-year life span. It brought life back to the cities. I remember campaigning in my ward to stop the bulldozers. The campaign was successful: 30 years on, people are still living in those houses and enjoying having a back garden and a front door with neighbours alongside them, in a friendly community. Those benefits have been denied to thousands of others whose houses were cleared under the slum clearance policy.
Sadly--and neglectfully, in my view--the Tory Government dropped that programme. They allowed the process of improvement to be retarded, and presided over the adoption of a negative approach. Only developers with ready cash could obtain grants; young first-time buyers were dissuaded from taking on the challenge of improving older inner-city houses.
The third factor--which caused most of our problems in inner cities such as the one in which I live--was the fact that the Government, for all the right educational reasons, allowed polytechnics and further education colleges to become universities, and allowed them to encourage a massive increase in the number of students without providing the resources that were necessary for students to be housed. Consequently, there was another bonanza for landlords in inner-city areas. They could now consider a flat-fronted, three-bedroomed terrace property in the centre of Portsmouth. Following the relaxation of the rule that no more than three unrelated adults should
live in one property--"three" became "six"--in cities throughout the country, six students per house are paying £50 a week for a room. The owner of the property would be buying a five-bedroomed house on a greenfield site, while still making a handsome £1,200 a month and being able to pay two mortgages.In different ways, the Tories encouraged the development of those three problems, and the Government failed to recognise the enormous damage that they were doing. Between 1979 and 1997, local authorities sold nearly 2 million properties. In how many cases were the properties needed to meet the needs of local communities in inner cities, built by those capable of building them?
Local authorities were the one agency that was denied the opportunity. They were not allowed even to repair their housing stock properly. The country now faces nearly £17 billion-worth of repairs just to bring up to standard housing that is still owned by local authorities, while billions of capital receipts were left in the bank and we were not able to use them.
What did Serplan try to do? The Minister slightly hedged his bets when he suggested that the Government had looked at the figures carefully. I think that most people would say that they looked at the original figures, looked at the Crow report and split the difference. Within a very few points, the figure is the mean difference between the two figures. It is not wrong for people to look rather cynically at that issue.
Mr. Steen: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I hesitate to raise a point of order, but I have just been in the Lobby and the hon. Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon (Dr. Harris) has been using a mobile phone there. I wonder whether there is a view on whether mobile phones should be used in our Lobby.
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Alan Haselhurst): I think that a ruling has been given on that recently. It is certainly nothing to do with the occupant of the Chair in the course of a debate. If the hon. Gentleman wishes to take the matter further, I suggest that he does so in a letter to the Speaker, but I think that there has been a recent relaxation of the rules.
Mr. Hancock: Serplan was bitter in a way because it felt that its view, the local view, had not been taken seriously. The only action that it could take to resist what was going on was to express a view that the figures were flawed and that it would come up with a figure that justifiably could be satisfied within the communities that it represented.
I am a former member of Serplan. I know from long back that its chairmanship and membership have always been taken seriously. Serplan has always performed credibly, no matter who was running it. It was looked at as one of the prime movers in getting planning right, but Serplan can succeed only if the Government listen to it with an open mind and give it the opportunity to put its message across in such a way that it can be respected, with its view talked through purposefully. Sadly, that dimension is gone. It needs to be rebuilt.
Serplan is about local accountability. It is about local people getting elected and representing local views. Is the Minister serious in what he is presenting to the House in
the Green Paper? The Government themselves talk about the need to ensure that local people make those decisions. There can be few bigger decisions that local communities make than the number of people they want to live around them. We must look at whether the figures stack up.As I said in my intervention on the Minister, when he was courteous enough to allow me in, it is no good arguing a good case for the use of brownfield sites in inner-city areas if, at the same time, the nation as a whole has nearly 750,000 empty houses. Sadly, I did not read much in the Green Paper to lead me with a lot of enthusiasm to believe that that situation was going to be easily accommodated. It is not.
The figures do not apply to just one place. There are nearly as many empty houses in the south-east as there are in the west midlands or in the north-west. There are even more of them in London. One wonders why house prices are so high in areas with so many empty houses, yet it appears that house prices continue to escalate.
In the south-east alone, there are 94,000 empty properties. That in itself is a national disgrace. We should not allow a single greenfield site to be developed until a proper battle plan is drawn up that addresses that issue. It cannot be right. Most reasonable people whom we represent, of whatever persuasion, cannot be convinced that there is a way forward when we fail to address that issue.
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