Madam Deputy Speaker, you and I represent constituencies with an equivalent demography and similar levels of deprivation and dysfunction. My constituency could be characterised as seven enormous former council estate. It might seem odd, therefore, for me to begin by praising
the Bill put forward by my hon. Friend—if I may call him that—the hon. Member for South Norfolk (Mr Bacon) and mentioning Kevin McCloud and his programme “Grand Designs”. I do that because he has popularised the concept of self-build and because it happens to be my favourite television programme. When Kevin McCloud came to the House of Commons to speak to the self-build group, I remember him being deeply unimpressed when I showed him that my phone ring-tone was the “Grand Designs” theme tune. More seriously, however, he has put the concept of individual self-build very much into people’s minds, so we owe him and the show a continuing debt because it opens up a line of thinking.
The line of thinking for me is not building a £1 million house in a beautiful green belt, but, to connect back to my opening sentence, that self-build, custom build or community build could be one of the answers for areas such as my constituency and that represented by Madam Deputy Speaker—places that linger at the bottom of the league table on so many statistical indices, whether it be, as in my case, sending the fewest number of young people to university, or having double the number of single households or double the national average of the number of children entitled to free school meals. I am trying to juxtapose these two extremes, and I think we can do this, which is why I would like to pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk, the chair of the self-build, custom-build and many other builds in the title of the group. If we are extending the title further, I would like to add, in brackets, community-build, because that is where we can bridge into the less affluent areas where the need for housing is just as important. By dint of personal energy and effort, my hon. Friend has raised this issue virtually single-handedly in the House, bringing us to a position whereby I understand that both the Front-Bench teams will support his Bill—quite an achievement, albeit only one of many in his illustrious parliamentary career.