Eco-Town (Harborough)

I am grateful to Mr. Speaker for granting me this Adjournment debate. He knows that I have been attempting to get Ministers to account to the House—and, through me, to my constituents—for an utterly unexplained piece of Government policy. He must have been driven mad by my persistence. I do not wish to draw Mr. Speaker into the issue of the merits of my arguments, or any of those that may emerge this evening from the mouth of the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr. Wright), but he has come to the aid of a constituency Member who has a grievance to express on behalf of his constituents, and thus has enabled the House to perform one of its proper constitutional functions. I thank him for that, as I am sure does my hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Melton (Alan Duncan), whose constituents are as affected by the issue as mine, as a result of boundary changes. I am also grateful to the Minister for being here to respond to the debate, and to his colleague, the new Minister for Housing, who has agreed to meet my hon. Friend and me very soon. Tonight is the first occasion on which the question of the rightness or wrongness of the Government's eco-town proposals has been exposed to anything resembling a public debate. There is somewhere in the Government's digestive system a list of 57 eco-town sites which, we are told, will by some process not yet made known to us be reduced to 10. The specific subject of tonight's debate, the Co-op's proposal to build a so-called eco-town the size of Hinckley or a town twice the size of Market Harborough within Harborough district and for it to be one of the 10 chosen sites, has never been debated in Parliament or in the chambers of Leicestershire county council, Harborough district council, Leicester city council, Oadby and Wigston borough council, the East Midlands regional assembly or the East Midlands Development Agency. That of itself is extraordinary, as the Prime Minister's eco-town policy, which was announced late last year, has the potential to do a lot of good, although it also has the potential to do a lot of harm. If this is such a good idea, as the Government must believe it is, why have they discouraged discussion on the public stage and confined outside input to meetings such as the one held last Friday in Market Harborough, attended only by officers of Harborough district council and civil servants from the Department for Communities and Local Government? At that meeting a civil servant from the DCLG grandly opined that there is no over-supply of housing in Leicestershire, and added that there is still demand to be met. Is that the opinion of someone who has been to my constituency before, or is it the imperial prejudice of some Whitehall mandarin who thinks he knows best? He sounds like a man from the 19th century Colonial Office who spends his waking hours drawing lines across maps of far-away places. Before I am accused of advancing nothing more than a nimby argument, it is worth asking whether that person, who presumably advises the Minister, has ever taken the trouble to see for himself the land in question and how it relates to its hinterland, urban and rural, or taken into account the fact that 80,000 new dwellings are already in the plans under the regional plan for Leicester and Leicestershire in the next 18 years, which will mean 7,000 new dwellings for Harborough alone. If the proposal goes through, we will have to withstand and absorb an additional 15,000 to 20,000 new houses, which will mean a new town of perhaps 40,000 to 50,000 inhabitants. Arrogantly to treat Leicestershire as though it were no more than a geographical expression is to fail utterly to understand why the proposal is so flawed and why it will cause a lot more harm than good. Each district within the county is different from the next; each has a different relationship to the city in the middle of the county and to its district and county neighbours. Harborough is the biggest district in terms of area, but it is one of the least well served in terms of public infrastructure and infrastructure funding, particularly with regard to public transport and road systems. Outside its farming economy, it is a prosperous area, with high levels of skilled labour, home ownership, employment and car ownership—the last a necessity for business and leisure purposes. The unemployment rate in my constituency, within both Harborough district and the borough of Oadby and Wigston, is under 1 per cent. The same low rate applies to my hon. Friend's constituency, Rutland and Melton. I would not be surprised if the rate in the villages that will be swamped by the proposal is even lower. The detail of the proposal and the process by which it will be resolved, however, be it for or against, is a total mystery to me as the MP for Harborough, to my hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Melton, to the county councillors for the eco-town site, Dr. Kevin Feltham and Mr. Simon Galton, as well as to affected Harborough district councillors and to councillors from neighbouring authorities whose constituents will be affected by the eco-town. Let me add to the background of this extraordinary state of affairs. The Co-operative Wholesale Society or CWS, through its many tentacles—I am not being legally precise—is not just the owner and manager of shops, funeral services and a bank, or just the supporter of Labour MPs, but a large agricultural landowner. In addition to farmland elsewhere in the United Kingdom, it owns through one of its divisions just under 5,000 acres of farmland, the Stoughton estate, between the A6 Market Harborough to Leicester road and the A47 Uppingham to Leicester road. This farming estate lies about 5 to 8 miles south and east of the city of Leicester. It is classic Leicestershire farmland, partly arable, partly grazing, and it lies on some of the most attractive rolling acres of Leicestershire. It sits within about eight or nine parishes, some encompassing quite big communities such as the villages of Great Glen, Thurnby and Bushy, which are now in reality one village, and Houghton on the Hill, each with populations of between 1,000 and 3,000, as well as some much smaller villages such as Little Stretton, which has a population of about 10, Great Stretton, Burton Overy, Gaulby, Frisby and Stoughton, whose populations vary between the high tens to the mid-hundreds. When I became the MP for Harborough in 1992 the Co-op ran an 800 to 1,000 dairy cow milking unit on the estate. It has since closed because the economics of dairy farming no longer allowed it. Of course, the economics of farming across the board in mixed-farming areas such as mine have become increasingly difficult in the past decade or so; it is not surprising that enterprising farmers look for opportunities to maximise the return on their capital from outside farming. Development is an obvious solution, and the Co-op cannot be accused of avoiding the obvious. When I succeeded Sir John Farr in the early 1990s, he had been, and I soon became, engaged with our constituents from across the seat, but particularly those in the part of the constituency that I am talking about, in beating off a proposal from the Co-op to build a new town on the very same farming estate. In those days, of course, it was not called an eco-town—the phrase had not been invented—but the proposal was accompanied by some attractive brochures with colour pictures of birds, bees and other flora and fauna. We were bombarded with public relations material from the Co-op and with political pressure from the right hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz), who wanted the proposal to come up with an outer-Leicester ring road across the Co-op's land to relieve traffic congestion in his constituency. He had a perfectly legitimate interest in making the case for the outer ring road to help his constituents, and the Co-op wanted, entirely legitimately, to maximise the return on its money that was tied up in the land. Farming houses is more lucrative than farming crops or cattle.