Christmas Adjournment

The Christmas pantomime at the Northcott theatre in Exeter this year is ““Cinderella””. We can all predict that it will have a happy ending and Cinderella will marry her prince. However, the outcome for the theatre is much more serious. We have recently heard that Arts Council England intends to withdraw all its annual funding of some £547,000 a year. If that is withdrawn, it is almost certain that the theatre will close. My next-door neighbour, the hon. Member for Exeter (Mr. Bradshaw)—the Minister of State, Department of Health—has set out clearly the reasons why, in his words, Arts Council England has made a most perverse decision. I agree, because although the theatre is on the campus of the university of Exeter, it is valued by the wider part of Devon, particularly eastern and mid-Devon, which I represent. I spoke only this morning to a theatre critic from the west country who has described the work of the Northcott theatre over the years as of quality. The performances at the Northcott are of a high quality. The reason why the hon. Member for Exeter described the decision as perverse is that we have all been invited to a launch of the newly refurbished Northcott theatre in January—£2.1 million has just been spent on refurbishing it, of which Arts Council England contributed £100,000. It continued to pay more than £500,000 in revenue costs while the theatre was closed for refurbishment. Exeter city council, Devon county council, the university and private funders managed to raise £2.1 million to refurbish the theatre on the basis that Arts Council England supported and expressed confidence in the future of the Northcott. It would be remiss of me, on behalf of my neighbour the hon. Member for Exeter and other Devon MPs, not to draw the House's attention to a decision that he has rightly described as perverse. In that part of Devon, we value the quality of work at the Northcott. It is well attended, with 80 per cent. attendance, which is very good for a provincial theatre. I hope that the Deputy Leader of the House will pass on to the relevant Minister the fact that opposition to Arts Council England's decision has cross-party support in Devon. We stand shoulder to shoulder and will oppose the decision, because the loss of the Northcott would be a severe blow to the people of Devon. I shall now move on to the subject of drugs. In certain cases, people have serious medical conditions and health care professionals believe that they should have access to drugs, but for one reason or another they are either denied access or, again rather perversely, even prevented from making some contribution, if they so choose, to help to pay for the drug. I recently had a case in Devon where a young mum had a severe but rare condition. The difference in cost between the drug that she was allowed and the drug that her consultant in London prescribed—the condition is so rare that her case is overseen by a London consultant—was £6,000 a year. Although she was turned down on appeal by doctors who clearly could not have had any knowledge of the complexity of her condition, I took the matter up with the chief executive of our primary care trust and I am pleased to say that she has now been allowed the drug that her consultant prescribed. MPs and other such people should not be the only route to obtain drugs that health care professionals believe necessary. We have seen in the press only this week the rather bizarre situation in which people who pay a proportion of their costs when they have a life-threatening or severe condition are then denied any access to the rest of their treatment on the NHS. That cannot be the fairness and justice that the Government talked about when they came to office in 1997. I am sure that the House will want to return to the subject. I shall certainly shall, not least—as hon. Members who, like me, represent English seats will know—because of the battle to get Lucentis prescribed for our constituents with wet-eye age-related macular degeneration. I notice that the Prime Minister was asked about that point a week or so ago at Prime Minister's questions. Ironically, the Prime Minister will not have the sort of postbag about this that I do, because his constituents in Scotland get the drug; mine go blind. In the interests of fairness and justice, I ask the Deputy Leader of the House: what is the point of research companies that produce wonderful, ground-breaking drugs that make such a difference to people's lives if people in this country cannot afford them? Health care professionals say that those drugs are the help that people need, but, perversely, they cannot be obtained even if people are prepared to contribute some of their hard-earned money to help to pay for them. There is something seriously wrong with drugs prescribing in this country. I ask the Deputy Leader of the House to look into that. Finally, I want to come to a point that I hope to bring back to the House in the new year. However, I must ask for the help of the Deputy Leader of the House. I wrote to the Minister for Housing, who is responsible for home information packs, on 19 October on behalf of my constituent, Mr. Dyke of Dunkeswell, who is aware that I shall raise the matter today. Mr. Dyke owns the kind of property that will be familiar to people who understand Devon architecture: a Devon longhouse. They are very old, very beautiful houses. This particular one was built in about 1500. He wanted to put his property on the market. Of course, since 1500 significant alterations and improvements have been made, including some to the thatched roof, and an additional part has been added to the building. I do not think that any of us would oppose energy certificates in principle, although my party rightly opposes the whole of the home information packs operation. When the energy inspector arrived at Mr. Dyke's house, he spent 15 minutes inspecting the property and asked no questions whatever of the home owner. Mr. Dyke was worried about that, because it is a complex building, and he volunteered certain information to the inspector and even walked him round, pointing out things that the inspector might have missed. The inspector made one or two notes and went away. The property contains a solid fuel Rayburn, a Nouvelle Heatranger. On receiving the inspector's report, and finding that he had received an F category energy certificate, my constituent was sure that the inspector had not taken account of the real fabric of the improvements that had been made to the property. Mr. Dyke obtained a copy of the assessors handbook produced for people carrying out such inspections, and—lo and behold—solid fuel boilers and heaters were not listed. Only gas and oil heaters were mentioned. Nor, for that matter, was there any mention of a building material with which we in Devon are very familiar: a substance called cob, which has quite beneficial insulation properties. I do not have time to go through the whole list of omissions. My constituent has rightly described this situation as a farce. In the end, he had to ask for someone with more experience to come out and do the whole inspection again. So someone who until recently had been a chiropractor turned up to look at the construction of Mr. Dyke's house. In the list of recommendations subsequently produced, my constituent was advised to fit a heating programmer, despite the fact that the system already had one. He was also advised that thermostatic radiator valves should be fitted, even though every radiator already had one. He was told that the hot water tank had no thermostatic regulator, although there was one. The list went on and on. My constituent wants to sell his property, which is not unnatural, yet he is still being plagued by bureaucracy and inefficiency in what he has described as a farce. I wrote to the Minister for Housing about this in October, and I have sent her chasing letters since then. I have still not had the courtesy of a reply. Given Mr. Dyke's experience, it appears that the people who are given the task of carrying out these inspections are not qualified or experienced enough to deal with older properties, but are trained to deal only with modern construction methods. I live in a house built in the 1600s made of wattle and daub—and I do not suppose that wattle and daub appear anywhere on the list of building materials that the Government deem it necessary to inspect. Even worse is the way in which the Government have set up these certificates, with an inspection matrix that allows certain tick boxes and not others, obviously not taking account of the diversity of property construction, especially in parts of the country such as Devon, with a great mixture of old traditional properties containing a wide range of building insulation and materials. The Government really must intervene on this issue, and I would like the Minister to respond to this point. My constituent Mr. Dyke has spent a lot of money improving the insulation and energy efficiency of his very old property. No one who has looked at it so far has been capable of giving the building a true assessment. It is outrageous that such people should have to undergo all this additional stress, anxiety and bureaucracy when they want to do something as simple and straightforward as selling their home.