Examination of Witnesses (Questions 760
- 779)
WEDNESDAY 10 NOVEMBER 2004
MR ELLIOT
MORLEY AND
LORD ROOKER
Q760 Chairman: Where are you proposing
to put the new reservoirs?
Mr Morley: There are sites identified
for new reservoirs in the next 25 years, although they are long
term, and there is a great deal of other action that can be taken
in terms of reducing water leakage, for example, before you would
need those reservoirs.
Q761 Chairman: In the ODPM's response
to the Egan recommendations, you state, "The ODPM is considering
the links between sustainable communities and sustainable development
via a ministerial subgroup of the central local partnership."
Can we take from this that over a year and a half after publishing
the Sustainable Communities Plan you still do not know what the
links are?
Lord Rooker: You seem to think
that we published the plan on 5 February last year, as we did,
and everything happened the day after. Life is not like that.
This plan transcends generations. We are talking about decades.
This is not a plan for five or 15 years. Figures in the plan were
going up to 2021 and beyond. Therefore, putting issues in place
to get the plan working as we want, to get it right, is going
to take time. It is a bit like assembling the delivery vehicles
in the growth areas. Less than half of them have been set up and
are running. We think that is going pretty great guns after 18
months.
Q762 Chairman: I appreciate it takes
time but if you do not ask the right questions in the first place
you are not going to get the right answers. It is a little surprising
that you are only considering the links between the Sustainable
Communities Plan and the principles of sustainable development
which were supposed to be at the very heart of government.
Lord Rooker: That is why we asked
John Egan to do his work after we published the plan, so that
there was a big picture, a road map as it were, that people had
to see what we were planning to make happen overall. There is
a lot more that has flowed from that which we do not have the
answers to at the present time.
Mr Morley: It is also why we had
the joint working group with the Local Government Association
jointly chaired by Defra and ODPM. To quickly go back to the Environment
Agency, it was the regional report, not the national report, in
relation to the issues which were identified, which are exactly
the same issues that we have identified as a government. If nothing
was done, there would be those consequences they are predicting
but that is not going to be the case. There is no difference between
us in terms of the south east Environment Agency assessment and
the government's assessment in the potential implications of development,
which is why we will take steps to deal with it.
Q763 Chairman: Do you not think that
sustainable development should be the context from which everything
else happens, not just something to have links with or to consider?
Mr Morley: It must be the heart
of policy, yes.
Q764 Chairman: You are convinced
that this whole sustainable communities' project is being taken
forward with sustainable development as it is properly understood
at the heart of it?
Mr Morley: In terms of the way
it has been approached in the ODPM, government generally, the
LGA, the long term strategies, sustainable development has been
put within the strategy in a way it has never been put before.
Like Jeff, I would not claim that everything is perfect or that
there are not issues that we need to address that have long term
implications. Nevertheless, they are being addressed in the context
of sustainable development which is not how they have been done
in the past in many cases.
Q765 Chairman: If sustainable development
is at the heart of this process as it should be and at the heart
of everything that the government does, why was the Sustainable
Communities Plan launched outwith the context of sustainable development?
You are playing catch up now.
Lord Rooker: I do not accept that.
You are twisting history. You are rewriting history to suit your
own purposes, for whatever reason.
Q766 Chairman: I have no purpose
in this Committee other than—
Lord Rooker: If you look at it
purely from a context of sustainable development, you might take
a view that we do not even want to consider extra homes for the
population of this country. We will just let it wither on the
vine, leaving aside the fact that hundreds of thousands of people
are homeless. You say, "We only want sustainable development
but we cannot do it with the population we have because there
is too much population." Government cannot take that view.
Our view is to go for sustainable communities in the round with
environmental, social and transport infrastructure to make it
the most sustainable, using different techniques to those that
have been used in the past by governments of both parties, to
ensure the ingredients and the building blocks of those sustainable
communities are sustainable developments which start from that
way round.
Q767 Gregory Barker: Why did you
focus them all in the south east?
Lord Rooker: We have not. If you
had read the Sustainable Communities Plan, which is in the vote
office, you would know it has nothing to do with the south east.
It is a national plan. It is the south east, the north, the pathfinders,
urban and rural. If you think it is all about the south east,
I invite you to go and have another look at it.
Q768 Mr Challen: We are talking about
sustainable development and I want to probe whether there is something
different about sustainable growth because I suggest to you that
those Lancashire towns that have been mentioned already probably
experienced growth but it was not sustainable.
Lord Rooker: It did not show at
the time.
Q769 Mr Challen: We did not have
an enlightened government of the day, I do not suppose, but do
you see a difference between sustainable growth and sustainable
development?
Lord Rooker: We are not going
to have growth without the infrastructure. That is my mantra to
the partners, whether it be in the pathfinder areas of the north,
the north east, the north west or in the growth areas in the wider
south east, because we know it will not work. If you grow too
fast it is not sustainable. You will not have the schools, the
hospitals, the green belt or the country parks that are needed.
You will have the jobs in the wrong place. You will have massive
communities and traffic jams, so it is possible to grow too fast.
I fully accept that. Therefore, we do need to have a step change
in production because every home in this country at the present
time has to last on average 1,200 years. That is the reality.
It must not go ahead of us being able to make sure it is sustainable
for future generations.
Q770 Mr Challen: You would say that
the economic considerations maybe should not run ahead of the
environmental? You said earlier on that we do not pick and choose
between these things. Perhaps I could put to you a comment in
the ODPM's submission to the Committee at paragraph seven where
it says that there are important environmental dimensions but
they are not to be regarded as placing an effective veto on addressing
the problems of supply. Could you give an example of an important
environmental dimension which is not to have any influence on
the decisions of government in relation to sustainable communities?
Lord Rooker: No. I meant what
I said. We are not having growth without infrastructure. First
of all, people will not believe us. Most of the growth, by the
way, is going to be put there by the private sector. The money
from central government and its agencies is astronomical but it
is quite small compared to what would come over a 20 year period
from the private sector. They will not invest unless they know
we have a sustainable plan. I was on a site this morning in the
Gateway that is half way finished. It was designed 15 years ago.
It looked very modern but it did not look as modern as some of
the ones I have seen since the plan came off the drawing board.
These things take quite a while. I am not sure what that paragraph
would allude to, only in the sense that there was some economic
criterion, either for jobs or some particular project, and the
infrastructure was not there at the time. Presumably, the project
would not be economical.
Q771 Mr Challen: What this paragraph
is saying, in other words, is that supply is a more important
consideration than important environmental dimensions. You would
ignore important environmental dimensions if issues of supply
were deemed to be so crucial?
Lord Rooker: No. This comes back
to our previous conversation. If you took the interpretation of
that paragraph to be that sustainable development was the key,
our view is we want sustainable communities, but we start from
a premise in government. We have to have a step change in production.
It is not a housing programme. We do not have the jobs and we
do not have enough homes in the right place. That is happening
now. There is growth going on that is unmanaged. This is why part
of the communities plan is to get a grip on getting it managed
so that it has sustainability, so that we can organise the infrastructure.
You could start from the premise of saying, "We do not want
the homes. There are too many. We have all the empties up north.
We do not want a system of moving people round the country in
that way." I do not accept that interpretation of that paragraph.
Q772 Mr Francois: You said your mantra
is constantly that the infrastructure must come first but it self-evidently
has not.
Lord Rooker: It has not in the
past, no.
Q773 Mr Francois: It certainly has
not now either because most of the district and county councils
now have all of their housing targets up to 2021. They have been
told how many thousands they have to accommodate but they have
not been told where the new reservoirs are going to be. They have
not been told where the new roads are going to be. They have not
been told where the new rail links are going to be and they have
not been told where the new district general hospitals are going
to be built. They have all the housing numbers but they do not
know where the infrastructure is going to be. When will they find
those details out?
Lord Rooker: In time before the
houses are lived in. I mean that seriously. You may laugh but
the planning for where there are new district general hospitals
or whether we need new district general hospitals, as opposed
to adding to the ones we already have, because there is a central
point there—if you are not very careful, you do not get
the consultants in the right place with enough throughput into
them—the planning for that, particularly in the growth areas,
is already going on. In one growth area alone, there is a major
programme of work of roughly just under £1 million to make
sure that the health infrastructure is in the right place for
what we envisage will happen within a 20 year period at the same
time as work going on to see whether road links and indeed railways
links, some closed by Beeching, can be reopened because they go
east west rather than north south. It is very difficult to move
around this country east west. North south it is generally much
easier. That planning is going on now by the relevant agencies
and the Department of Transport at a regional and subregional
level. It is not as politically sexy as house numbers and therefore
it does not get reported in the sense that the views of regional
assemblies do. I understand people have rightly said in the past
that the infrastructure was not there on time and has not kept
pace. It is our task to ensure that we can convince people we
have learned the lessons from the past—I genuinely mean
that—the lessons from Milton Keynes mark one and London
Docklands mark one. Those are burnt on everybody who is involved
particularly in growth areas and trying to learn these lessons
for the housing market and pathfinders in the north.
Q774 Mr Francois: I want to give
you a practical example because I am not going to let you off
the hook that easily. If you look at the Thames Gateway, with
which I am quite familiar, a lot of house building is going on
already. There is massive house building envisaged. Everybody
in the area knows there has to be at least one new district general
hospital. That is almost without dispute. Everybody knows the
lead time for doing that will be quite a few years to decide a
site, to lay it out, to build it, to staff it and then for it
to go live and accept patients. No one yet knows where it is going
to be. It is going to take years as it is. Why do they not know
where it is going to be, as a real practical, hard example? Secondly,
with regard to rail links, we had Sir John Egan here and he said
that we needed to increase capacity on the rail lines going into
London from the Gateway. It was vitally important to do that.
When we asked him exactly how that was going to happen he said
he did not have a clue.
Lord Rooker: On the hospital,
I do not know what part of the Gateway you are referring to. You
obviously know the Gateway a lot better than I do, I freely admit.
I did the Gateway in a helicopter two and a half years ago.
Q775 Mr Francois: The northern bit
of the Gateway, south Essex.
Lord Rooker: I was there again
today. It is not part of my daily role now so I am not so familiar.
What I do know though is that the way the Gateway has been developed
is not on one great big block. There might be an overviewing partnership
arrangement but it has been split into 14 areas of change. There
are a couple of UDCs in there. All the others are by and large
partnership arrangements led by local authorities, not exclusively
involved in the private sector, in looking at their orbit of influence.
These are quite large areas, as you can imagine. We are talking
about large numbers of dwellings. Within the context of that work
that is going on, the planning for the health services, the road
network and indeed the rail network, part of which I was looking
at this morning at Ebbsfleet, is going on apace now. I went to
the Gateway two years ago, having not been at all familiar with
it, and saw brand new, waterfront developments. Great. They obviously
were planned. Planning permission may have been ten years ago.
It was true that the Gateway was designated by Michael—now
Lord—Heseltine some time ago but it was never managed. You
can find growth areas where developments are going on now that
had planning permission ten years ago, not part of the Sustainable
Communities Plan. Our problem is to explain to people that growth
is happening anyway. If we do not get it managed then we do not
stand a chance of getting the hospitals, the schools and the road
network.
Q776 Mr Challen: Regarding Defra's
role in the Sustainable Communities Plan, can I ask Mr Morley
whether or not sustainable growth has now been adopted as Defra's
aim in regard to this. I notice in the Defra submission the five
strategic priorities for creating sustainable communities do not
include any kind of environmental reference at all. Is the
more economic interpretation superior to the environmental?
Mr Morley: No. The definition
of sustainability is the three strands of sustainability: economic,
social and environmental. Therefore, you have to have those three
strands in the approach that you take. The three strands are certainly
there within the Sustainable Communities Plan. We are working
on that basis, trying to put in the sustainable development approach
on all aspects of this and in fact all aspects of government policy.
Q777 Mr Challen: You would not agree
with the charge then that Defra has been sidelined since the Barker
review and with the development of this housing agenda Defra has
failed to make its mark?
Mr Morley: I do not agree. Defra
has commissioned the Entec report, for example, which is very
useful. It needs further work which is why we have now commissioned
further research jointly with ODPM. In relation to defining a
long term strategy in relation to sustainable development and
sustainable communities, we are working with the LGA, quite an
appropriate body to work with because they are a very important
part of delivering the equation on this, and also with ODPM, which
is why we have a joint chair of the working groups with Keith
Hill and Alan Michael.
Q778 Mr Challen: You mentioned the
Entec report. It was referred to as an initial assessment.
Mr Morley: That is right.
Q779 Mr Challen: That was some time
ago. How is it being followed up?
Mr Morley: By commissioning further
research to refine some of their findings and look at the impacts.
The Entec report was a wide range of very broad scenarios. It
was a useful report. I found it quite interesting in looking at
the quite considerably reduced impact of development by applying
different standards of eco-building in particular.
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