Hertfordshire Housing Target

It gives me great pleasure to congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley) and other hon. Friends on securing the debate on housing targets in Hertfordshire. I congratulate, too, the hon. Member for Stevenage (Barbara Follett) on her contribution. I feel somewhat hesitant about speaking in a county-wide debate. However, I can go back further than my right hon. Friend in my memories of the county of Hertfordshire, because we had close family friends in Berkhamsted, and I remember 40 years ago taking the dogs for a walk on the hills around the town. I doubt that I could do so now, as over the years one has watched Hertfordshire fill with housing as its towns and villages have expanded. I can understand why there is such concern among my right hon. and hon. Friends about the pressure on the county. Largely, it has been centrally directed by the Government and by their poodles, the unelected regional assemblies. My party is on the record as saying that we would abolish those assemblies and allow local people to decide the make-up of their communities. I absolutely believe that local people know how their community could and should function, and that they are prepared to accept expansion and new housing to a capacity that they feel is consistent with their own needs and demands. One basic problem that we all face is the pressure on infrastructure and the need to increase the density of housing. I have the same problem in my constituency, an outer-London suburb. The Minister with responsibility for London has stood in this Chamber and said that Bromley should double its housing density, so I sympathise with and understand the problems that Hertfordshire residents face. The key problem is infrastructure. I am sure that if the county council and others were given the opportunity, they could solve it. Indeed, they have volunteered to meet the housing targets that they feel capable of delivering. I have a Scottish accent, as hon. Members may have noticed, and quite apart from knowing Berkhamsted from many years ago, in the 1960s I spent an enormous amount of time as a Young Conservative working in Easterhouse, that fabled housing estate outside Glasgow which was built with no facilities or infrastructure whatsoever. That community is still not a coherent one, 40 or more years on, and it still has serious social problems, the like of which it will take a Hercules to solve. Enormous resources have been put in, so I absolutely understand the concerns about forced housing targets being set without the commensurate infrastructure. It is a question not only of schools, houses and hospitals, but of roads, transport and water. It is easy, as the hon. Member for Stevenage pointed out, to say that every house in the UK should have a cistern built underneath it that is the same size as the house. Would that we had, but we are where we are. I have never built a swimming pool, but I understand the problem of shifting the earth, and that is without there being a house on top of it. It is cloud cuckoo land to think that every house in this country could be built with such a cistern. However, we sympathise entirely with her objective, which we share, to save and gain rainwater. There are plenty of methods of doing that without building cisterns under houses—we can do it much more efficiently. If fundamental infrastructure is not done right or properly funded from the beginning, it will produce dislocated communities, however sophisticated they are. As we see in the Thames Gateway, in my constituency of Beckenham, or in the situation hon. Members are facing in Hertfordshire, if the infrastructure is not there, fractured communities will result. My right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden alluded to another issue, on which I wish to take a different line. I accept entirely that at present there is a net outflow from London and the greater south-east to the other regions of the UK. However, we should address the reason why other regions are not generating real wealth in the way that they should, given that the bulk of the Russell group universities—the great research universities—are outside the greater south-east. I do not understand why those areas are not more economically successful. I accept that in places such as Scotland or the north-west there is an increase in wealth, but that does not rely on fundamental new wealth creation.