I know you have kindly expressed an interest in my occupational history previously, Mr Speaker. At one point very briefly many years ago, I practised planning law. I remember two things about it. First, it is incredibly technical. Secondly, as adverted to by the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin), it seems to change. Like criminal law, we seem to have an annual Bill on planning or matters relating thereto before Parliament. This year we have had a bumper year and two Bills, one of which is now the Housing and Planning Act 2016.
I hope we can have a brief discussion at least on amendments 24 and 25, which are part of this group, and which urge planners to take into account the needs of older people and people with disabilities. That is important anyway in terms of equalities, but it is relevant to planning matters when we have a changing population. The population is getting older. With that, but not just
because of it, it also has a higher rate of disabilities, some of which are susceptible to being accommodated, in both senses of the word, within the planning system.
I cannot resist making some brief remarks about the speech of the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell). I remember, as he might or might not, that before 1974, when I was a lad, Sutton Coldfield was not part of Birmingham. It was subsumed within Birmingham—against its wishes, I suspect, but I was not that old, so I do not recall—in 1974 and now has the town council. I was not clear—I might have nodded during his speech when he referred to the 6,000 houses—whether Sutton Coldfield has a local neighbourhood plan. He rightly referred to the concerns of Sutton Coldfield residents—concerns shared by residents elsewhere, I am sure, including in my natal city, Wolverhampton, which I represent and where I live—that there should be sufficient housing for coming generations.
The right hon. Gentleman also mentioned the 45,000 houses and Wolverhampton garden city. Wolverhampton is already a garden city, of course, having as it does more trees than almost any city in Europe, relative to its size, but we welcome more gardens and more people, and we are trying to build. As he might know, however, and as I know from visiting relatives in Sutton Coldfield, it is an awfully long journey, temporally, from Wolverhampton to Sutton Coldfield, so it cannot be a Sutton Coldfield overspill. On a more serious note, however, I find it strange that he berates Birmingham City Council for its spending on transport infrastructure, when Governments of which he was a member and which he continues to support—broadly—have cut its total income in the last six years by over 40%. He is right that there are transport infrastructure problems in the urban west midlands and within the city of Birmingham, as administratively constituted, including in Sutton Coldfield, but some of those problems—not all of them, but some of them—come from the huge Government cuts that he broadly supported.