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Ms Dari Taylor (Stockton, South) (Lab): Is the hon. Lady so unaware of what is happening in the north-east, where local authorities with clued-in policies are using stock transfer, derelict land and the arm's length housing associations to renew housing? Has she not visited the area and seen what progressive Labour authorities are doing with the support of a Labour Government?

Mrs. Spelman: I am well aware of what is happening, but I regret the paucity of ambition. So much more needs to be done. I am all the more aware of that having paid a visit to North Tyneside council, which has a Conservative elected mayor and is now run by the Conservatives. We have brought £7.5 million of regeneration money to the area, to provide regeneration that never happened during the long period of Labour hegemony.

So many towns and cities north of Milton Keynes could benefit so much from spreading economic growth up from London and the south-east and more evenly across the country. What is wrong with Birmingham, for example? In common with other cities such as Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, the central business district has been regenerated. We have the exciting new Bull Ring, but it is surrounded by a collar of decay and dereliction. Surely that is where the Government should focus their attention, rather than the easy option of greenfield sites.

The Government have a target of 60 per cent. new build on brownfield, but it is just not happening. To accept the Barker recommendations would be to take
 
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the brakes off planning in the green belt and double the house building target. It will just increase the huge skirt of concrete round our hollowed out cities and destroy for ever the green and pleasant land that characterises this country.

Ms Karen Buck (Regent's Park and Kensington, North) (Lab): The hon. Lady makes a strong case for the development of the north-east. If a Conservative Mayor is elected in London in June, will that mean the cancellation of the housing development in the Thames gateway which is designed to accommodate the projected increase of 800,000 people in the Greater London area?

Mrs. Spelman: We are in an election campaign period and the hon. Lady should await the outcome of the election. As a party we are, of course, optimistic.

The flipside of house building in the countryside is successful urban regeneration, but as the debate in Westminster Hall on this subject last week showed the Government have met real problems with their programme. Some 20 to 25 regeneration initiatives are due to end in 2006 and hon. Members were asking how those projects will be sustained. The House of Commons Library has identified at least 48 different sources of funding for regeneration, and the need to cobble together all those sources locks up project managers very inefficiently. Just because the Government got their fingers burnt in a few schemes, such as Aston Pride, they should not get cold feet. Does it not illustrate a paucity of ambition on the part of the Government that, according to an alliance of the Chartered Institute of Housing, the National Housing Federation and the Local Government Association, only 50 per cent. of the areas deemed at risk of decline are covered by any regeneration strategy and funding?

Dr. Brian Iddon (Bolton, South-East) (Lab): It sounds as though we are entering a period of enlightenment on the part of the Conservative party. However, I remind the hon. Lady that Conservative regeneration policies were sadly wrong, because they were not prepared to tackle the community needs at the same time as regenerating the houses. Is she prepared to support a regional assembly in the north-west, which would attempt all the things that she is preaching to the Government today? More importantly, if the Conservatives ever got into power again, would they put the cash on the table?

Mrs. Spelman: I am glad that the hon. Gentleman finds my speech enlightened, but I have always held these views. I feel passionately about the issue and it is one of the reasons I entered politics. As I travel round this country and see what needs to be done in terms of regeneration, it reinforces my passion to tackle the issue. The hon. Gentleman raises an important point about regional assemblies. In case he has not noticed, I can tell him that my party opposes regional assemblies because we fervently believe that important decisions on planning and regeneration should rest with democratically elected local councillors who are closest to those needs and answerable to the electorate on the doorstep. Regional assemblies would take those powers away from local government, and that is the source of our strong opposition to them.
 
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Fundamentally, those regeneration projects that are under way will fail if the communities do not have ownership of them. Too often Government try to impose projects on a community rather than involving a community from the outset. Without that partnership and roots-up regeneration, so many of these projects are destined to failure.

The insistence by Government on dictating to communities how they should live gets a new twist from the Barker report, which recommends that planning decisions should be taken away from local government and given to new regional planning bodies—and that relates to the point raised by the hon. Member for Bolton, South-East (Dr. Iddon). That would remove an important decision-making power from a democratically elected council and give it to an unelected body, in yet another assault on our democratic rights. I begin to wonder what the Government believe local government is for. Surely a local councillor is better placed to assess the impact of a planning decision on his or her locality than a regional officer who may be literally hundreds of miles away.

Mr. Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (Cotswold) (Con): In fact, the situation is worse than my hon. Friend suggests. Under recommendation 6, Barker recommends that regional planning bodies and regional housing boards should be merged to create a single body to manage regional housing markets and to deliver regional affordability targets. After seven years of failure in housing, all that the Government can do is suggest more layers of government and more bureaucracy. Does my hon. Friend think that that will solve the problem?

Mrs. Spelman: I do not think that it will solve the problem at all; it is further evidence of regionalisation by stealth. The Government will continue to feel our opposition to that as our friends in another place demonstrate their defence of our democratic rights in the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill.

Before Labour were elected, they said that we must not allow our precious green space to become easy prey to developers, yet the Barker report shows that talk really is cheap for the Government. Now we hear that they want to relax green belt planning laws, remove local obstacles to planning and impose huge, environmentally unsustainable house building targets in the south-east. The Deputy Prime Minister even says openly that he is sick of people shouting about protecting greenfield sites.

The fact is that every sod of turf torn up from a greenfield site to make way for new housing development is an indictment of the Government's failed housing policy. It is an indictment of their failure to stimulate economic growth evenly throughout the country. It is an indictment of their failure to regenerate urban brownfield sites as a sustainable alternative location for new houses. It is an indictment of their fixation with centralised decision making and of their narrow focus on supply-side economics as the sole means of addressing affordability.

Mr. Clive Betts (Sheffield, Attercliffe) (Lab): Does the hon. Lady accept that it is also an indictment of the 18 years when her party was in power? That resulted in massive cuts in modernisation programmes for council
 
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housing and the ending of schemes such as enveloping to bring private sector housing up to standard. No attempt was made to regenerate the coalfields, and there were no policies to encourage building on brownfield sites while we saw building on one greenfield site after another throughout the country.

Mrs. Spelman: Labour Members clearly do not like what I am saying, but their arguments are wearing a bit thin. I am not looking backwards but forwards. However, I fought in a Nottinghamshire constituency in 1992 and I recall that it was the Conservatives who set up the coalfields communities campaign, so it is not true to say that nothing was done for those communities.

Mr. Peter Atkinson (Hexham) (Con): As we are looking at the Conservative record, my hon. Friend has no doubt visited the centre of Newcastle upon Tyne and seen the tremendous riverside development there, which has been praised throughout Europe. That was done by the Conservative party, which set up the Tyne and Wear development corporation. If my hon. Friend has visited the historic centre of the city, she will have seen Granger town where a renewal project initiated by our right hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Curry) when he was a Minister has just been completed.

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