Hertfordshire Housing Target

I, too, congratulate the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley) and the hon. Member for St. Albans (Anne Main) on introducing the debate. Housing is an extremely controversial subject in Hertfordshire. I must agree with the right hon. Gentleman and the hon. Lady that the way in which we reach our housing targets—the current target is estimated to understate the problem by about 30 per cent.—is clouded in mystery. I do not understand some of the processes by which Hertfordshire county council arrived at the figures that have allowed it, over the years, to obstruct development to the west of Stevenage and extra development around new towns in Hertfordshire. As a result, house prices in Hertfordshire are among the highest in the country, and many young people—particularly those born in the county—are without homes. Like the right hon. Gentleman, I spend a lot of time looking at this problem and trying to defend my constituency. Unlike him, I moved there only about 15 years ago, but like him, I have come to love the county. He and I work together on quite a lot of issues because we share a concern to maintain the beauty of this very green and pleasant patch of England. However, constraints on building and the constraints imposed by the green belt are leading to infilling in some of the most beautiful villages in my constituency, including Datchworth and Codicote. People there are building in their back gardens and parking is at a premium because people cannot get out of the constraints on them. As a result, people are infilling. At the minute in Hertfordshire, we have town cramming, not town planning. The same is happening in Stevenage, where back gardens are being built on. At one stage the county council—to the derision of most of my constituents—proposed that we start building on the Fairlands Valley park to provide much-needed housing. Of the 18,000 or so cases currently on my books, the third biggest category is housing. Every day I turn away people and say we cannot help because, thanks to the right-to-buy legislation, with which I have no disagreement, many of Stevenage’s council houses have been bought. We had, I think, 30,000 in the 1980s, and we now have 8,500. On top of that we have a housing waiting list of 3,000 and 250 homeless families in the town itself. All that is in green, leafy and fairly wealthy Hertfordshire. There are more and more families, and more and more children being born, with nowhere to go. They must either go to the north or they must live, as many do now, with their parents, in increasingly overcrowded accommodation. I am glad that the hon. Members for Hertford and Stortford (Mr. Prisk) and for St. Albans and the right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden have all acknowledged that we have a problem; we do. There is some movement towards solving it. However, I disagree with the picture set out by the right hon. Gentleman of our eating into the green belt to concrete over the space from Stevenage to St. Albans. As I understand matters, the authorities propose to take only 3 per cent. of the green belt between now and 2031. They propose to put 5 per cent. back in, in a different area. I think that some of that will be in the right hon. Gentleman’s constituency. It makes sense. It is a little like what happens when some men get fat; they do not recognise the need to let their belts out, and they just drop their trousers more and more down their hips, until they reach a precipitous point. Hertfordshire has reached the precipitous point.