| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
9.34 pm
Mr. Brian White (Milton Keynes, North-East): I do not have much time, so I shall be brief. However, if this were such an important debate for the Conservative party, why did so few Tory Back Benchers from the south-east speak? In fact, none of them did.
One of the policies put forward by Conservative Members tonight suggests that the concept of developer roulette will continue. It is the system whereby developers put in planning application after planning application after planning application and they need to be successful only once. However, a community must win every time to protect itself. Their policy does nothing to address that. It is a lose-lose situation for communities.
It is interesting to note that all the Tory shires complain loudly, but my hon. Friend the Minister might be interested to know that, behind closed doors, the same Tory shires that shout the loudest are doing secret deals to protect their area from development and to move it into neighbouring areas. That continues the pattern of how several Tory shires have operated for some years.
The way in which the concept of the green belt has been mixed with that of green fields continues the way in which the Tories have tackled the debate over the past two or three years. They have not gone beyond the issue of what is green belt and what is green field. In addition, they never achieved the target that they set in government.
One of the things that worries me about the vote by Serplan is that a deliberate plan for less than one home per household means deliberately planning for homelessness and overcrowding, with all the social consequences that they bring. It means to plan deliberately for a shortage of labour in areas of economic growth and it means a reduction in housing choice. That is the message that has come from the Tories tonight.
I was going to discuss the regional planning guidance and consider what the Tories have done. On every issue--whether it is the sequential approach, the land take or urban capacity--they have not yet gone behind the issue of sloganising. Nothing demonstrated that more than the speech of the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Mr. Norman).
One key point that must be borne in mind is that we must protect the green lungs of cities. We must ensure that there are trees and that playing fields are not lost as a result of the increased use of land on brownfield sites.
Major development in the south-east is possible only in a few areas. Unfortunately, one of them is around the brickfields between Aylesbury and Bedford. I recognise that market forces will put pressure on Milton Keynes to have major development. The Government have taken the right approach in recognising that and in planning for the future. To take the Tory approach is to take the ostrich approach and just to hope that such development will not happen. If we did that, we would face the problems again.
Tonight in Milton Keynes, 800 families are in temporary accommodation, and that does not count the people who cannot get on to the list. Tory policies would do nothing to address the needs of those families.
One way in which the problems can be dealt with is through the role that English Partnerships and other Government agencies can play. They have started well, but there is much more that they can do. The Tories suggest that, because new jobs create pressure for growth, we should take the high unemployment and stagnation route. That is the approach that the Tories took in the early 1980s when we had high unemployment and areas were left to rot. We know the consequences of that.
I conclude with a plea to the Government. The regional planning guidance is a good start for the south-east. It lays the foundations for sustainable development, but I hope that the Government recognise that many more things need to be done. The tough choices that the housing Green Paper highlighted are ones that we need to tackle. Issues such as housing benefit need to be sorted out if we are to get more people out of poverty. The Government must be prepared to intervene more and to set more rules for house building. I welcome what the Government are doing and I hope that they take the tough choices that the housing Green Paper identified.
9.39 pm
Mr. Nigel Waterson (Eastbourne): This has been an interesting debate, but perhaps not as interesting to some hon. Members as the noises off of a particular football match. The last I heard was that it was not going too well from our point of view. The opening speech of the Minister for Housing and Planning was obviously affected by that event; he certainly referred to it. His combination of clumsy abuse and chanting his usual mantras from the terraces, as it were, seemed entirely in keeping with the match that has been going on at the same time as this debate.
As usual, the Minister started off with a bit of clumsy abuse about my hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Mr. Norman), before making a complaint about the number of debates that we are having on the subject and quoting in extenso from my right hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer). The Minister's speeches follow a predictable pattern, and today's was no exception.
The real issue is whether there is any truth at all in the Government's mantra that the old predict and provide policy is gone, only to be replaced by a new policy. I shall return to the Minister's speech, especially his discussion of the Serplan controversy. The hon. Member for Portsmouth, South (Mr. Hancock), who spoke for the Liberal Democrats, gave a rather long history lesson, but he shared our concerns about Serplan. As is usual and traditional for Liberal Democrats, he distributed his abuse equally between the Government and the official Opposition.
The hon. Member for Gillingham (Mr. Clark) spoke about the need for leadership and made a powerful case for changing the planning system. However, like most Labour speakers, he seemed allergic to speaking about anything in this context post-1997. My hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen) brought his usual authority to the subject; spoke movingly about his private Member's Bill; and made an especially important point about the recent EU ruling, which I hope the Under-Secretary will deal with in her winding-up speech.
The hon. Member for Hampstead and Highgate (Ms Jackson) complained about the previous Government. However, as a former Transport Minister, she must surely bear some of the blame for the current state of standstill Britain.
My hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley) talked knowledgeably about pressures in his own region and his reservations about the way in which the whole planning process affects his area. He also talked about the lack of joined-up thinking which, on the one hand, encourages cluster developments in and around Cambridge but, on the other, cuts important road links from the roads programme.
The hon. Member for St. Albans (Mr. Pollard) spoke graphically about the pressures on property prices and availability in his own constituency.
My hon. Friend the Member for Altrincham and Sale, West (Mr. Brady) reminded us of the importance of protecting the green belt and pointed out that the present Government are spending less on urban regeneration than the previous Government. He also spoke about the need to encourage families back into the inner cities.
Finally, the hon. Member for Milton Keynes, North-East (Mr. White) made unfair criticisms of the Serplan process. I have visited his constituency, with his knowledge, and do not think that he should assume that all his constituents welcome with open arms any new development in his constituency, as he apparently does. There must be a limit, even for Milton Keynes, and some of the hon. Gentleman's constituents have views that are different from his.
Since the election, Ministers, especially the Minister for Housing and Planning, have made a lot of noise about the alleged end of predict and provide. It turns out that that is just meaningless rhetoric. As we have heard, after carefully weighing all the evidence, Serplan came up with a figure. Professor Crow then came up with a much higher figure. Ministers have tried to present themselves as heroes by pulling out of the air a so-called compromise figure which, following further careful consideration, Serplan voted against before confirming its earlier figure. The result, as we have seen, is near hysteria from Ministers.
I do not want to intrude in the running battle between the Minister and some sections of the media. However, on any view, it would be fair to say that the Minister expressed his unhappiness with the result of the Serplan vote only the other day. He told us a great deal about Serplan and how the Government have allegedly improved the procedure for what he called more meaningful participation. However, all the Government have done is split the difference, in effect. There were one
or two tell-tale comments in the Minister's speech. For example, I have written down his remark that Serplan came to its decision for reasons best known to it. That suggests that he is preparing the ground for taking not a blind bit of notice of what Serplan thinks.The Minister talked about Serplan's failure to reach a consensus. Although he will accept the vote, he will also take account of minority views. Perhaps he would prefer to make the vote the best of three. I assume that if the Conservative party had taken a similar attitude the day after the general election, he would have accepted that as well. Even though Serplan represents grass roots feeling and opinion across the region and even though there was a clear vote and a clear majority the other day, the truth is that, despite all the rhetoric, he clearly has no intention of considering himself bound in any way by Serplan's conclusions.
In a recent interview, the Minister said of our policies:
- Ordinary people would be priced out of the market . . .
- neither these nor the new regional development agencies will make much difference.
- A clear pattern is emerging whereby current policy intervention rolled-out from London is undoubtedly having the effect of widening regional disparities.
It is a year since the Rogers report was published, yet what progress has been made towards a so-called urban renaissance? On that as on almost every other aspect of the responsibilities of the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, Ministers have been rolled over by the Treasury--on urban regeneration, on housing repairs and renovation, on the VAT regime for development and on new infrastructure for those areas where the Government want to impose all the new housing. What are they doing about streamlining the planning system so that it is quicker and cheaper and reflects more closely the views of local people? Conservative Members think that the whole planning system needs a thorough overhaul.
The Minister and Lord Falconer have one thing in common--their fondness for talking about ordinary people. However, we are not talking about Labour Members who are whisked from one luxury residence to another in the back of a chauffeur-driven Jag. We are talking about people who have worked hard all their lives and moved to an area whose natural beauty attracted them, or perhaps about those who were born in such an area and have lived there all their lives. No doubt Ministers would disparagingly refer to their concerns as nimbyism, but I prefer to regard them as positive parochialism. Those people are right to be worried because they know that, often, services in their locality are already stretched to breaking point and not getting better under the
Government. They know that schools, health services and transport infrastructure--let alone natural resources such as water--are under pressure.Interestingly, when the Deputy Prime Minister was interviewed on "Breakfast with Frost" the other day, he said, "What they want is an intelligent discussion, but take the Tories: they have gone to their Tory friends in Serplan and said, 'Vote against this because we want to make it an election issue.' Well, if they want to say there should be more executive homes at the expense of perhaps decent houses"--[Interruption.] Ah, the Minister for Local Government and the Regions has joined us. I recognise the timbre of her voice.
The Deputy Prime Minister concluded, "I am on the side of the many, not the few." The message for most people is, "The many not the few will be coming very soon to a greenfield site near you." I say to the Minister for Housing and Planning that he, the Minister for Local Government and the Regions and the Deputy Prime Minister will not be at the controls when the bulldozers move in to concrete over the countryside, but they may as well be. I promise them that those who have to live with the consequences of the Government's broken promises and their own broken dreams will know whom to blame. They will exact their revenge on Labour Members and Labour councillors who have failed to stand up for their local communities. I urge my right hon. and hon. Friends to support the motion.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |