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Mr. Prescott: Will my hon. Friend give way?
It is a question of trust. I am old fashioned enough to believe that we should keep our promises. In October 1996, seven months before the general election, my right hon. Friend the Member for Oxford, East (Mr. Smith), the present Chief Secretary to the Treasury who was then Opposition transport spokesman, declared that our air was not for sale. In opposition, our policy was to retain full public ownership of NATS. Given that there are viable alternatives to the public-private partnership, why should we break a clear pre-election promise? Why should we press ahead with a discredited Tory proposal that we rightly opposed before 1 May 1997?
The opposition to the proposal is not confined to the Labour party, or to the people in our country, or to the controllers and the pilots. It is evident in this House of Commons: early-day motion 446 indicated the depth of opposition to the partial privatisation of air traffic control.
Labour Members rightly condemn the Conservatives for becoming ever more right wing. We attack their proposals to privatise the national health service, but we are considering a dangerous and discredited Tory plan, on which even the Tories have gone cold. Even those countries with rampant, right-wing regimes that have privatised everything that moves have stopped short of introducing full market forces into air traffic control. Nowhere else has done that: even New Zealand has a state-owned enterprise, and the United States is planning a Government-owned air traffic corporation with private borrowing powers. As I said earlier, the proposal is a gamble that many Labour Members cannot, and will not, support.
I give way to my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister. [Hon. Members: "He has just left the Chamber.]
There is no financial pressure to go ahead with the sale of NATS. The Labour Government are no longer constrained by Tory spending limits. The economy and public finances are in good health. The public-private partnership would provide only a one-off capital receipt. It would lose the Treasury a profitable income stream of about £40 million a year.
Why has the proposal been made now? Are the Government so desperate for a capital receipt of £500 million that they must proceed with such haste? We know that there are others to deal with the future investment requirements of National Air Traffic Services. I have already mentioned the trust model and the independent publicly owned corporation model referred to in the Select Committee report, but there is also the option of a bonds issue. That mechanism is slightly contentious at present, but it funded the investment requirements of the channel tunnel rail link and it is available for National Air Traffic Services.
I sometimes wonder how we got ourselves into this mess. Perhaps a deal was done somewhere that I missed, or perhaps the proposal is driven by the Treasury. How genuine was the consultation on the various options for the future of National Air Traffic Services? Higher forces than I will have to address those matters, but I urge Ministers to think again. It is still not too late. Listening to Members of this House is a sign not of weakness, but of strength.
Labour Members will have heard, via their pagers, that we have a little local difficulty in London with regard to mayoral candidates signing up to manifestos. I believe that our candidates should abide by the party's pre-election promises. Before 1997, I and many other Labour Members were electoral candidates and we abided by our pre-election promises. We consulted nationally on our policy over air traffic control. In good faith, we told our constituents--some of whom worked at Heathrow or in the airport industry--that no future Labour Government would ever contemplate the privatisation of air traffic control.
Mr. David Heath (Somerton and Frome):
It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Reading, West (Mr. Salter) and I agree with much of what he said. I hope that he re-establishes some sort of dialogue with the Deputy Prime Minister in the near future.
Unfortunately, I missed yesterday's Gracious Speech, for the very good reason that I was seeing constituents in Frome market. Although I studied the proposals in detail later, I intend to review them now through the eyes of my constituents. I shall apply the essential Frome market test to the Government's proposals to determine what is relevant to the people in my area.
That does not mean that I shall turn a blind eye to the wider legislative proposals. I agree with many of them, although some of them--notably the reduction in the access to jury trial--I consider to be retrograde and illiberal. Other proposals, such as those to do with freedom of information, are simply inadequate.
According to the Frome market test, the Government's proposals fall into three categories. There is the legislation that is proposed on the countryside, and the legislation that, by commission or omission, will have an effect on the countryside. Finally, there is the legislation that did not appear in the Queen's Speech.
I shall deal first with the legislative proposals for the countryside. We have already had a fair amount of debate on the matter, and I suppose that all hon. Members would agree that there is a need for better environmental legislation. The perennial problem is to balance the interests of the environment with those of a dynamic rural economy. There is also the need to facilitate proper access to the countryside for leisure purposes that should be enjoyed by those who do not have the privilege of living there. Getting that balance right is crucial to the success of the Bill.
We have argued for some time that there is a need for better protection of wildlife and of sites of special scientific interest. The Deputy Prime Minister has just returned to the Chamber, and I hope that he will say whether the Bill will address the vexed question of interim development orders. They represent a significant problem, in terms of their effect on SSSIs and of the distortions that they make to minerals planning systems across the board.
Many outstanding interim development orders litter the countryside. As a result, companies often have all the aces in their hands when they deal with planning authorities trying to make sense of the environmental and industrial factors involved in minerals extraction. However, I am pleased that those matters are being addressed.
When we have argued for better powers of regulation, we have always made it clear that they would be powers of last resort. They would be used to deal with those who do not co-operate and who do not go along with voluntary management arrangements.
Coupled with the need for better regulation is the need for better and more flexible incentives, so that people who are trying to manage land properly and are sensitive to environmental issues can proceed with their farming businesses. That balance is essential. The same applies to the right to roam. There must be a balance between the interests of those who wish to use the countryside for recreation and those whose livelihoods are bound up in working the countryside to maintain agriculture. In both instances, it is important to develop a right of appeal to an independent arbitrator if there is a dispute. There will be disputes and an unaccountable body should not take the final decision.
We also need to consider liability. Successive Governments have failed to tackle the problem of liability for people injured on someone else's land. I remember an absurd situation when I was on the county council. We were told that we had to put lighting on a closed and locked skip site at night because someone might break in, fall into a skip and break an ankle. If we did not have the lighting, the county council could have been liable. That is nonsense. The same could apply to farmed land and could imply liability on the part of the landowner.
Other measures in the Queen's Speech could have implications for the countryside, such as education. The speech stated that change has been focused on the infant classes. There has been a change and it would be churlish not to recognise that there has been more input into the education of younger children, which has resulted in reduced class sizes, but many problems are still associated with applying rules that were designed on an urban or suburban model to rural situations. Village schools are still threatened. Many such schools do not have flexibility with accommodation, which is a major constraint. I wonder whether the Government have fully recognised the difficulties.
Last week, I visited Bishop Henderson school in Coleford in my constituency, which has applied two years running for the capital spending that it needs to implement the Government's maximum class size policy. It was turned down last year and is hopeful of success this year. It cannot implement that policy without the classrooms to enable it to happen and at the moment the capital expenditure is not available.
There is a panoply of crime legislation. Again, the question is whether it will improve the criminal justice system in places, but only at the cost of reducing marginal expenditure on patrols in rural areas. For many years, there has been a diminution in such expenditure. I speak as the former chairman of the Avon and Somerset police authority, which is receiving a report this very day from the chief constable saying that he will have to reduce front-line services to put in place new Government initiatives. We all support those initiatives, such as DNA testing, but the authority does not have the resources to deal with those and to police adequately the country areas of my constituency.
On transport, we have not yet got right public transport in rural areas and it is possible that we will never do so. It is a major problem. I wonder whether we should look again at the Education Act 1944 and the interplay between school transport, which is a major expenditure for most local authorities, and public transport. There is a difficulty at the moment. Recently, a company that provides services over a wide area of my county has changed hands. One reason for the change was that it has to provide great 50-seater buses for school transport, which are unsuitable for small villages where they are picking up perhaps one or two passengers. The economics are not right and somehow we have to get them right.
Similarly, we must get rural rail services right. We have main lines that are vastly underused and could be used to provide a better rural rail system. However, I do not detect the forward strategic thinking that will make that happen. For example, Railtrack in its wisdom decided a few months ago to demolish a bridge in my constituency on the main London to Exeter line at Temple Combe. Now we have a single instead of a double rail bed, so that that main line cannot be converted to double use. Frankly, that
is absurd and it should not have happened. It is indicative of the fact that Railtrack has still not got the message that we want more investment and more use of our rail services.
I hesitate to use the term common sense about the congestion policies in the Government's programme because it has been devalued by the Conservative party, but we need common sense in applying anti-congestion policies to rural areas. It would be most foolish to apply taxation to areas where there is no congestion rather than applying the remedy to areas with the problem.
Most people in rural areas have to use a car. Car ownership is high in rural areas compared with urban areas, and most households have more than one car. They have to because they cannot operate without them. In general, these cars are also among the oldest in the country, so they are not a measure of relative richness, but of relative necessity. Surely we should consider ways in which to ease the burden for essential car users in rural areas, for example, by adopting a huge reduction in or the removal of vehicle excise duty, which would make an enormous difference to people in such areas at a stroke.
The Queen's Speech mentions a Bill for the Post Office. I will not elaborate on that other than to say that I have serious concerns about the effect of the proposals on sub-post offices in rural areas, which are an essential network. They have such a capacity to provide services in rural areas. At the moment, the income that they have lost from the removal of benefit payments is not being reinstated. All the automation in the world will not do anything about that in the short term. I ask the Government to reconsider that matter.
I also ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer to reconsider his rather surprising announcement last week that he would introduce a punitive regime of daily signing on for people suspected of fraud. How will that work in rural areas? How is someone to sign on 20 or 25 miles away every day and make sense of the social security regime? It is not a sensible measure.
The main thrust of this debate has been agriculture. I cannot add to all the speeches about the desperate agricultural crisis. Perhaps it is not surprising that the Queen's Speech does not contain primary legislation on agriculture--some would say that more legislation is the last thing that we want, as some of the present secondary legislation is more onerous than it should be.
The situation has been more than adequately described by hon. Members who have outlined their experiences. The only thing that is keeping many farmers going for even a few weeks and months ahead is the fact that land and quota prices have held up. That will not continue. The fact that land prices have held up is largely due to non-agriculturists buying into the rural economy--buying a farmhouse with land--and not to bare land prices. The moment that these prices start to reduce, the banks will pull the rug and there will be an enormous number of business losses.
The problems facing the pig industry have been highlighted and are extreme--they could not be more urgent--but the same applies to the dairy and the sheep industries. Yesterday morning, I watched a disposal sale of cattle. A relatively young farmer was selling good stock--black and whites, second or third calving. It was reasonably good-quality stock, but it was fetching less
than £300 per cow--£285 perhaps. Four or five years ago, it would have been twice or three times that. It is a desperately miserable position to be in.
There is no business in the calf rings. On a good day, there may be some bidding for continental calves, but, generally speaking, there is no movement in the calf market. In the sheep pens, no one is bidding for sheep and there are not many there. No one has seen a pig in the market for years. That is the reality.
There is a knock-on effect for all the industries that depend on agriculture. A couple of livestock hauliers at the market told me of their experiences. I will mention their names because they were kind enough to spend time explaining the situation of their businesses to me: Mr. Butt of Charlton Musgrove and Mr. Conway of Bratton Seymour. As a sign of how bad things have got, one of them said that he had calculated his bad debts in June or July at about £5,000 but that by October or November, they had risen to £28,000. That is the state of agriculture. If it cannot pay the downstream industries, those industries will go. In the case of livestock, that is serious because specialists are involved. Not anyone can drive a livestock lorry. Once those skills have gone, they will never come back. All we are doing is inventing jobs for people overseas.
I urge the Government to examine what they can do. I would have liked some minor measures in the Queen's Speech to help tackle the agricultural depression. I would have liked legislation to assist the formation of farmers' markets. The Minister of Agriculture knows of the problems with existing market charters. I wanted legislation to establish an agricultural ombudsman so that we could act on the overload of pettifogging bureaucracy that is often applied far too strictly. The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food is always right and the farmer always wrong even when the matter patently involves a simple mistake that anyone could have made.
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