Gypsies and Travellers (Hertfordshire)

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs. Dean. I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for St. Albans (Anne Main) on securing this useful debate and apologise for missing her opening remarks. All of us in Hertfordshire have a fair amount in common. It is an attractive county, in which there is enormous demand for housing. A lot of people want to live there, although I shall not deliver a travelogue in the style of a maiden speech and dwell at length on my constituency. I do not know whether the Minister knows my constituency, although I do know that she has a cousin who lives in Berkhamsted—at least, she used to live in my constituency. Hertfordshire is an attractive place to live, with small market towns of a manageable size, where people are very comfortable, surrounded by attractive countryside. One of the problems that we face in South-West Hertfordshire is that we are a victim of our success, in that people desperately want to live in the area. There is not the scope for an enormous amount of development, given that we are in the green belt, and the people living in South-West Hertfordshire do not desire it, for understandable reasons. However, that creates tensions for those on a low or even a medium income who want to buy their own property. Politicians will always have to strike a balance between those conflicting desires. What is seen as fundamentally unfair, however, is if a particular section of society receives what appears to be special treatment because a development is designed specifically for them, while the adult children of home owners in South-West Herts do not have the opportunity to acquire their own property. That drives at why so many of our constituents feel as strongly about the issue as they do. That point also relates to the green belt, which my hon. Friend the Member for Hertsmere (Mr. Clappison) rightly touched upon. Most, if not all, of the area available for development in my constituency, whether in Dacorum borough council or Three Rivers district council, is in the green belt. There appears to be a conflict between the desire to provide Gypsy and Traveller sites and Government policy on the green belt. In circular 01/2006, from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, the Government state that they recognise the importance of the green belt, that new Gypsy and Traveller sites are normally inappropriate within them and that they require alternatives to be explored before green belt locations are considered. However, there are no alternatives to green belt development. Perhaps the Minister could dwell on how Government policies on the green belt and on Gypsy and Traveller sites relate to each other. The solution that I suspect we shall see is that areas of land will cease to be designated as green belt and the green belt will change to accommodate particular sites. Again, that relates to the sense of unfairness that residents feel about the problem. There is clearly tension between what the East of England regional assembly has proposed and green belt policy. Let me anticipate the argument that the Minister will use, which is one that I believe the Liberal Democrats essentially support. It is that we need more authorised sites, because otherwise there will be more unauthorised developments and that is undesirable.