My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and she very conveniently takes me on to the next point, which concerns the pressure placed on local authorities by the regional spatial strategy.
When this Government came to power, they said that they wanted to end the "predict and provide" approach to housing. Like me, many hon. Members will remember that statement. I thought, "There we go. I'm not going to be able to disagree with everything that this Government say." However, they have not only reinforced that approach, they have regionalised it. They have reinforced it by making it a requirement to build 3 million extra houses over the next 20 years or so, but how did they know that we would need that many houses in that period? Why has the power to decide how many houses are needed, and where they should go, been handed to the regions? The decisions are almost site-specific, but I do not know who is making them. It is not local councillors, because if it were we could go to them and say, "We disagree with you and we're going to boot you out next time because we don't like what you're doing." We cannot do that with the RSS.
In my constituency, the proposal in the RSS is to build more than 14,000 houses. How on earth can we find space for all those houses when the area concerned is a flood risk? I do not care whether we are just on one side or the other of a line on a map, because that is not what is important. As the hon. Member for North-West Leicestershire (David Taylor) mentioned, the planning process does not take account of the theory of water displacement.
It is not only a matter of whether the new houses flood. When the hon. Gentleman visited Tewkesbury, the new houses flooded as they were being built, but the other problem is that they also displace water and send it somewhere else. The water in Tewkesbury is, as we speak, resting on green fields. It does that quite frequently, as certain parts of the fields in the town flood several times a year. That is not a problem, but concreting over those green fields causes that water to go somewhere else.
I was never big on science at school, but the theory is pretty obvious—the water is going to go somewhere else. It is profoundly wrong, and dangerous, for the RSS to propose that 14,000 houses be built in my area. The people who put the strategy together do not live there and obviously have not studied it, because they do not know what they are talking about.
It is not just in my area that there have been objections to the RSS. The Secretary of State will know that in the south-west region there have been 35,000 representations about that document, for very many different reasons. The document is fairly technical, and is not necessarily something that people wake up with in the morning. People do not normally get involved in responding to the RSS, but 35,000 have.
Energy and Climate Change and Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
Proceeding contribution from
Laurence Robertson
(Conservative)
in the House of Commons on Tuesday, 24 November 2009.
It occurred during Queen's speech debate on Energy and Climate Change and Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
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501 c457-8 
Session
2009-10
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