Communities and Local Government/Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

It is a privilege to follow the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman) who gave an expert speech on a range of issues. He reflected the quality of the speeches in this debate and I associate myself particularly with his comments on prison reform and rehabilitation. As shadow Minister for young people, I went round many young offender institutions. I do not understand how we can expect a young person who is put in a 9 ft by 5 ft cell with someone else for 18 hours a day, with little access to education or reading and no chance to better themselves or learn a skill, to come out a better person. There is a disjuncture between punishment, which is a necessary part of the system, and rehabilitation, which is equally important. We also need to address mental health issues in our prisons. It is a scandal that so little is done on the matter. That was highlighted last year by the inquest on Zahid Mubarek’s death in Feltham and the case in my constituency of Daniel Meehan, a young man who committed suicide at the age of 29 after failing to receive the right mental health support in prison, which he was entitled to expect. I hope that the Mental Health Bill can be adapted to look at the mental health needs of people in our prisons. Turning to the issues confronting us today, there was a remarkable contrast between the speeches from the Front Benches. From the Secretary of State there was a sense of tiredness, of boredom perhaps, that this was another Queen’s Speech and there was not a huge amount to say. She did not seem to have a great deal of enthusiasm for her subject or indeed a sense of direction. On the other hand, my hon. Friend the Member for Meriden (Mrs. Spelman) gave us a sense of direction and an understanding of the issues involved and the urgency of dealing with them. Like my hon. Friend, I very much welcome the climate change Bill but, as with so many such things, the devil will be in the detail. In just a year, there has been a huge change. A year ago, we were still debating whether action was necessary and whether there genuinely was climate change; now the whole debate is about what we can do to make changes more quickly so that we stop climate change happening at all. I am not sure how much we can achieve by voluntary agreement. If things are left to the good will of property developers and the builders of new housing, it is doubtful that the necessary changes will happen in time. We have to recognise that new build is only 1 per cent. of the housing stock and if we truly want change much more needs to be done through building regulations to bring existing housing stock into line over time so that it, too, can make a contribution. There are unique opportunities for the United Kingdom and its businesses. My constituency of Wealden in Sussex was a significant farming area, but farming has almost died out in the south-east and in areas such as Sussex; the value of land and farmhouses has gone up so much that people can no longer afford to buy them as farms. There are tremendous opportunities for farming to make a comeback in areas such as Sussex through growing biomass, but that will happen only if there is a structure that encourages investment in biomass activity. The cornerstone of that will be to put a price on carbon, to cap carbon emissions each year and to require people to buy certificates if they emit carbon during the generation of electricity. Over time, that will make it more attractive to invest in other forms of renewable electricity and generation. At the same time, we must remove some of the absurdities in the system. My right hon. Friend the Member for Fylde (Mr. Jack), in his extraordinarily impressive contribution, spoke about aviation. As a north-west MP, he is a regular user of Virgin trains, which are powered by red diesel taxed at 6p a litre, yet if biomass, which is taxed at 47p, were added to the diesel, not only it but the red diesel would be taxed at 47p a litre. We have an absurd system in which the moment that people try to do the right thing environmentally, they have to pay a higher cost. We wanted other issues to be addressed in the Queen’s Speech, but they are not covered by the Bills proposed so far. I welcome comments about devolving power to local government, but we are sceptical about how what is possibly the most centralising Government ever run things. Regional assemblies are a case in point: all the powers for the regional assemblies were taken away from district and county councils, rather than genuinely devolved from central Government. I hope that we shall not go down the route of further reorganisation, which would be massively expensive: £3.5 billion that could be spent on local services would instead be spent on reorganisation itself. Above all, reorganisation is unloved and unwanted. It would mean getting rid of a genuinely popular tier of local government—either the county councils or the district councils—to give more power to regional assemblies. There is no demand whatever for that in our communities. The Government failed to get through their referendum in the north-east, which may be the only area in the country where there might have been popular support. In the end, there was massive feeling against that degree of change. Having failed to achieve that through democratic means, there is now a desire to try to push it through in legislation instead. We in the south-east do not have that sense of regional identity that the Government wish to believe that we have. In the Government’s mind, the south-east spreads from Dover to Portsmouth, to the outskirts of Cheltenham and the fringes of Oxfordshire and up to Milton Keynes. No one in my constituency in East Sussex believes that someone in Oxfordshire or Buckinghamshire lives in the same region. It is an artificially created structure, and we should be considering abolishing it, rather than seeking to give it more powers. Nothing gave greater clarity to the division of approaches between those on the two Front Benches than the issue of infrastructure and development. The Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government does not seem to recognise that the extent of overdevelopment that is proposed is causing a massive infrastructure deficit. Indeed, it is estimated that, to bring the infrastructure of the south-east up to the level required for the number of proposed houses will cost £45 billion—£1 billion for every local authority. Clearly, when put across the whole nation, the figure becomes astronomical. In March 2006, the South East England Regional Assembly proposed that 28,900 new houses should be built in the south-east annually. The Government are considering a figure that may be 60 per cent. higher, but the infrastructure investment is absolutely woeful. Set against the deficit of £45 billion, the Government’s plans for the infrastructure in London and the south-east amount to just £295 million. Things will get worse if section 106 agreements are replaced by a planning gains supplement, which will become yet another aspect of the Government taking funds away from the south-east and redistributing them to other parts of the country. The Government should require, through legislation, an infrastructure audit to be carried out on all significant new developments, so that we can ensure that the implications for the infrastructure will be met. We find great anger in our constituencies not just about the sheer number of houses that are proposed, but about the fact that the infrastructure will not exist by the time that the houses are built. When the houses are built, people will say, ““Where will the children go to school? Where will people find a dentist? How will they get the water to come out of the taps?”” Unless we consider the infrastructure first and foremost, we will end up with a massive imbalance. We must therefore consider a number of different aspects, the first of which is health. It is estimated that a further 1,300 acute hospital beds and 600 general hospital beds are needed in the south-east over the next 20 years to cover new housing growth, but what are we seeing? At the three hospitals that serve my constituency—the Kent and Sussex in Tunbridge Wells, the Princess Royal in Haywards Heath and Eastbourne district general hospital—there is a massive question mark over the future of their accident and emergency units and maternity services. We are seeing the greatest ever threat to hospital provision in the south-east. We should be considering what new investment is required to ensure that those who live in the new homes that will be imposed on us have the required health care provision. For the past 18 months, there has been a hosepipe ban in my constituency, which may be lifted this winter—after the rain over the weekend, it should be lifted pretty soon—but we cannot provide the amount of water that our existing homes already use. If hundreds and hundreds of new homes are built every year, those problems will become even worse. The great irony is that the people who do not want those new houses to be built will be the ones who have to pay for the investment in the water system to supply them with water, even though that will take many decades to carry out. Flooding links closely with water supply. We have heard reference already in the debate to the number of houses that are planned to be built on floodplains. The Environment Agency says that 34,000 of the new houses planned will be built on floodplains. Some 30 per cent. of the houses planned for the south-east will need to be built on them. Almost exactly six years ago, Uckfield in my constituency experienced a terrible flood, yet six years later, we have not seen one penny piece spent by the Government on flood defences to stop it happening again. The former Minister, the hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Mr. Morley), pledged that things would be done and the Prime Minister had a reception in Downing street to tell local authority leaders that he would personally ensure that flood defences would be put in place. Six years on, as I say, nothing has been done. If we are continuing to build on floodplains, it is ridiculous that steps are not first taken to prevent flooding from happening as it has in the past. We should also consider further investment in our transport infrastructure. Road traffic is expected to increase in the south-east by 25 per cent. between 2000 and 2010. In East Sussex, we have not a single motorway and only eight miles of dual carriageway, so if the Government impose the expected volume of housing on the area, it will lead to massive pressure on our already overburdened roads. More importantly, it will lead to massive pressure on some of the most environmentally special parts of this country. The areas of outstanding natural beauty of Ashdown forest, High Weald and the south downs surely need to be preserved as special places for our children—and subsequently for their children, grandchildren and beyond—but if too little attention is paid to the infrastructure, it will be difficult to invest in those areas. As a result of massively improved rail services provided by Southern, we have seen a significant increase in rail traffic in the south-east, but we are already seeing huge overcrowding. Without further investment in the railway lines and rolling stock, that situation will simply get worse. There is a very clear message in all this: the south-east is expected to take all the pain of the new housing, but not to get any of the gain of investment in the infrastructure. The Government should therefore introduce an infrastructure audit Bill to assess the needs for health provision, water, sewerage and flood prevention and to ensure that there is sufficient capacity in our schools and in our road and rail services. We face a massive imbalance and the measures proposed in the Queen’s Speech will not address it adequately. I hope that the Minister will take that into account and examine what can be done to ensure that, if we must have the housing growth that he plans to force on us, the infrastructure will be in place to support it.