Communities and Local Government/Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

The hon. Gentleman and I shared a train this morning and we also share a borough. Stockport borough is currently left with 11,000 council houses and has 7,000 families on the waiting list. Regional planning policy dictates the amount of home building in Stockport and sufficient permissions have been granted to reach the regional planning target. It therefore suffers the inverse problem of local authorities in the south-east, which write to me—and doubtless other hon. Members—complaining that they are compelled to accept extra houses. Stockport cannot do that. Let us consider the implementation of a measure that I steered through the House and is now the Sustainable and Secure Buildings Act 2004, the responsibility for which rests with the Secretary of State. If sustainability and climate change are to be taken seriously, it is astonishing that there are no proposals to implement that Act. I hope that the right hon. Lady will ask someone in the Department what has happened to it and when it will come into force. I am sure that the climate change Bill will feature in the second part of our debate today. I listened carefully to the right hon. Member for Oxford, East (Mr. Smith), who made some important points. We, too, welcome the climate change Bill but it is a pity that it will have no targets. What happens year by year needs to be monitored and matched with the intended performance for each year. One can call that setting ““targets”” or all sorts of different things but, unless we have them, we will be in the same position as we are with Kyoto. Year after year, the House and the Government contented themselves with saying, ““We’re on track with Kyoto, but actually we are not.”” We need to have targets and the policies that are likely to achieve them quickly. I hope that the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs will explain why he has chosen not to proceed with the marine Bill.