§ Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. David Hunt.]
12.16 am§ Mr. Tony Lloyd (Stretford)I am grateful for the opportunity tonight to raise the problems and talk about the future of Trafford park. The many hon. Members who have remained to hear this debate will appreciate that the problems of an area such as Trafford park represent not just a local constituency matter but are problems which threaten the whole conurbation of the Greater Manchester area and are central to the future of that area.
I trust that the Minister will take on board the simple fact that the knock-on effect of the decline of Trafford park has not only affected my constituency and those areas bounding it but has had a dramatic and traumatic effect across the whole of Greater Manchester.
I shall be referring later to the inner city partnership, but at this stage I should point out that of the jobs still existing in Trafford park, about 20 per cent. are filled by people who live in the Manchester and Salford inner city partnership areas, and that is significant in terms of the relationship between those areas and the problems of Trafford park.
More widely, the travel-to-work area within which Trafford park currently operates is huge, much bigger than probably any comparable industrial estate in Britain. Trafford park is not just any industrial estate. It is the heart that, historically and to this day, pumps the lifeblood into the Greater Manchester area, into the city and into the commercial heart of the area and of the region.
The Government's response tonight and in the future to the problems that I am outlining will be critical in deciding not simply whether the industrial estate per se has a future but whether the whole of that area has a future, including the social consequences if the Government decide not to grant it that future. There is an overwhelming case—one that is supported across party political lines and across industrial lines; trade unionists and industrialists support it — for saying that Trafford park should receive assistance from the Government in the very near future.
I am proud of having been born and raised in the area. I am justifiably proud of Trafford park, not only because it was once the largest industrial estate in the world, not only because for the bulk of the 20th century it has been the heart that has driven British industry, but because from one generation to the next it has been the mechanism by which the skills on which Manchester thrived were passed on and one generation after another learnt that tolerance and comradeship and the dignity of labour of which the Labour movement in particular is proud.
Sadly, the area began to decline in the post-war years. It declined simply because of the decline in general of manufacturing industry, and particularly of the heavy engineering base on which Trafford park was built. That decline has been central to the problems not only locally but throughout the conurbation. It is not remotely unfair to say that Mancunians feel extremely bitter at the indifference of Whitehall — not just of the present Government but of Governments in general — to the plight and decline of that industrial base.
Perhaps I can bore the House slightly with some statistics that accurately measure the pace of that decline. About 170,000 people had to leave the north-west between 264 1965 and 1981 simply because work was not available. Those people had the traditional skills on which the northwest was based. It is estimated that a further 250,000 people will leave during the 1980s. In 1965, less than 20 years ago, Trafford park employed about 52,000 people. By 1975, that figure had dropped to a little under 38,000. I hope that Conservative Members will bear in mind that that decline was arrested under the previous Labour Government—although not reversed—when employment dropped to a little under 37,000. But since then the pace of decline has been spectacular and disastrous in every sense of the word.
§ Mr. Churchill (Davyhulme)Will the hon. Gentleman allow me?
§ Mr. ChurchillI am obliged to the hon. Gentleman for giving way. Until a few moments ago I was in complete agreement with him. There is complete agreement among the three hon. Members who represent the Trafford district that Trafford park should be included within the partnership area as it has many problems in common with Salford and Manchester. However, the hon. Gentleman sought to bring in party politics by suggesting that the decline accelerated at a particular moment, and by doing so he trod on very dangerous territory. He should not forget that in the late 1960s, under a Labour Government, 8,000 out of 16,000 workers were made redundant at GEC alone in Trafford park. At that time no help was forthcoming from the Labour Government, who were very strictly controlling industrial development certificates to ensure that even those firms that wished to expand in Trafford park were not allowed to do so. That has been a problem——
§ Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Ernest Armstrong)Order. An Adjournment debate is very short and the hon. Member for Davyhulme (Mr. Churchill) has already made a long intervention.
§ Mr. LloydI am sorry that I wasted the time of the House by allowing the hon. Gentleman to intervene. However, those of us who were born in the area need no lessons from anyone about the history of Trafford park or the Stretford area. I have far better credentials than some hon. Members to speak about the area from the heart.
As recently as 1980 only one in 25 of jobs lost: in Greater Manchester were in Trafford. By 1982, that ratio had increased to one in seven, mainly as a result of the decline of Trafford park. The list of companies that have left Trafford park reads like a roll of honour of international companies: Kraft, Spillers, Ingersoll Rand, NEI, Schreiber, and ICI. I should add that CPC has suffered massive redundancies but has not closed.
Leading international companies have made massive redundancies. I mention in particular—as did the hon. Member for Davyhulme (Mr. Churchill) — GEC. That company is still one of the most eminent and efficient in Britain. But without Government assistance it faces collapse, because there has been a collapse of the power engineering industry. I hope that the Minister will pass on that message to his colleagues in the Department of Trade and Industry.
The reason for the collapse is not hard to find. Trafford park depends on manufacturing industry. In 1978, 77 per 265 cent. of the jobs in Trafford park were in manufacturing. Regardless of whether the hon. Member for Davyhulme likes it, there is a political point to make, because under this Government we have seen the collapse of manufacturing industry. There has been a 15 per cent. decline in manufacturing output, which has inevitably meant a very sad toll for Trafford park. Where the nation has been hammered Trafford park has quite literally been crucified. That is an indictment of this Government and their policies. They do not understand what happens when manufacturing industry is allowed to go into almost terminal decline.
§ Mr. Terry Lewis (Worsley)I also have good credentials when it comes to speaking about Trafford park. I spent 30 years of my working life there, including CPC. That firm has not closed and is thriving, although many good jobs have been lost. I think that my hon. Friend will agree that GEC has always been at the hub of Trafford park. It is within the Government's power to save that firm there and thereby to go some way towards saving the whole of Trafford park, including CPC.
§ Mr. LloydMy hon. Friend is right. GEC now represents about one fifth of all jobs in Trafford park and, if it is allowed to fold, the impact will be disastrous. We should consider the impact of the collapse of manufacturing industry. Clifford ward in the borough of Trafford, which I still represent, has adult unemployment of above 30 per cent. and youth unemployment is in excess of 40 per cent. The figures are even worse in Moss Side, which is in the inner-city partnership. It would be incredibly naive for the Minister or anyone else to argue that there is any prospect of re-employing Old Trafford or Moss Side without the revitalisation of Trafford park.
We have an inheritance of dereliction, obsolete buildings, derelict land, poor services, roads which are literally clapped out and docks which are effectively dead. The size of Trafford park compounds those problems. I emphasise that it is no simple industrial estate but a huge estate of some 2,000 acres. Its boundaries, put in terms of London so that the civil servants and the Minister can understand, would stretch from Horseguards parade to Notting Hill gate and from Sloane square to Westway. It has 21 million sq. ft. of floor space, of which some 2 million is vacant. Local industrialists are adamant that the poor environment militates strongly against any possibility of revival because it militates against investment.
The problems are compounded by the indifference of Governments. We have witnessed the taking away of intermediate area status. That was a serious blow to Trafford park. There has been complete lack of recognition in the home county-dominated Government of the real scale of the problem. We have also witnessed the illogicality of the partnership scheme boundary. I hope that the hon. Member for Davyhulme agrees with me on that. It is obvious that neither the private sector nor the local authority can cope with the scale of the problem. We must insist that Government assistance is made available to overcome it. The borough of Trafford and Trafford park cannot compete with the special development areas and the new towns which have massive resources for advertising and attracting inward investment. However unpalatable it 266 is to the Government who are determined not to spend money, however worthy the cause, resources are the name of the game and the only possible solution.
I do not doubt that the Minister will cite assistance that has been given to Trafford park such as derelict land grant and urban development grant. They have minimal impact and are irrelevant to the scale of the problem. We have an enterprise zone, about which I still have mixed feelings, that has created 1,100 jobs. We are grateful to everyone, but compared with the scale of the problem it is irrelevant. We need assistance on a realistic scale that will cope with the legacy that Trafford park has inherited. We need resources to ensure that existing firms can improve their facilities and expand and so that vacant and derelict sites can be developed. We also need resources to enable the local authority to undertake wholesale environmental improvements.
We need the powers afforded by the inner-city partnership—rent relief, interest relief grants, industrial improvement grants and grants for improving properties and the environment. They can only come from the inner-city partnership scheme but we are denied them simply because of the bureaucratic rules that are drawn up by people who do not understand how local economies work. They think that it is possible simply to draw a line through local authority boundaries and that, because Manchester and Salford are average and afford a poor standard of living for their inhabitants, parts of Trafford should be ruled out because, on average, it is more affluent. I would be the last person to deny that Trafford is a relatively affluent borough. I have often complained in the council about its meanness in other areas, but Trafford council cannot cope with its problems and certainly not Trafford park. We need the powers that I have outlined because people in Salford and Manchester depend just as much as people in the borough of Trafford on Trafford park. I say that with no edge because my constituency straddles the inner-city partnership area of Manchester and parts of the borough of Trafford.
We are facing the collapse of an entire conurbation, not just one industrial estate. We are not asking for anything unreasonable—it is simply not possible to do the job without Government assistance. We are paying the price of our legacies but the cost of the Government's indifference will be socially cataclysmic. That is why Manchester is rightly demanding that some action be taken to assist Trafford park.
§ The Under-Secretary of State for the Environment (Sir George Young)I am grateful to the hon. Member for Stretford (Mr. Lloyd) for drawing the attention of the House to the problems of Trafford park, an area about which he spoke with pride and concern. Those problems are not unfamiliar to the Government. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and other colleagues have visited the area, and not so long ago I spent the day in the borough. My officials recently met the chief executive of Trafford to discuss the borough's excellently produced "Case for Action", which I have read with great interest. My hon. Friends the Members for Davyhulme (Mr. Churchill) and Altrincham and Sale (Mr. Montgomery) have both written to my right hon. Friend pressing the case for special status for the borough.
§ Mr. Fergus Montgomery (Altrincham and Sale)I am glad that my hon. Friend mentioned that point. In fact, the 267 representations cross party lines, and there has been a joint effort by the council and the chamber of commerce and trade. There is a united front from people who are determined to try to do something for Trafford park. It is ironic that, where Trafford touches Salford, one side of the local government boundary should get so much help whereas our side, with exactly the same problems, should get nothing at all.
§ Sir George YoungI have been very impressed by the representations. Many firms in the area have also written in support of Trafford's case. I shall refer in a moment to the problems of the boundary.
The problems are all the more familiar through being mirrored in other areas in which traditional industries have declined. This decline is all the more difficult to reverse because, as the hon. Member for Stretford said in his analysis, it has taken place over a long time and on a large scale. The buildings and land occupied by the older industries are often totally unsuited to the more modern technologically based industries.
In the area, many buildings occupy tens of thousands of square feet and are hopelessly uneconomic to maintain. Much of the land is encumbered by obsolete infrastructure or has been spoilt by industrial processes. Roads and other communications in the area have become inadequate and can be replaced or uprated only at great expense.
These problems are such that they cannot be solved simply by redrawing a partnership boundary here or pumping in public money there. They cannot be tackled without a substantial commitment from everyone concerned—central and local government, industry and local people. The hon. Member for Stretford seemed to think that there were some instant solutions. Frankly, there are not. There is a role for the Government to play, and I am optimistic about the future of the area. The Government believe that those public resources that are available should be used to encourage investment back into the areas.
We are prepared to take the lead, but we cannot stay in the lead for ever. We wish to build up the impetus and momentum to get the area back on to a recovery route. Once recovery in an area such as this is under way, the Government would like to withdraw and let the private sector take over. I hope to say in a moment how we are now trying to provide that impetus in Trafford park, but let me first deal with the Manchester-Salford partnership and the incorporation of Trafford park. This raises an important issue regarding our approach to the regeneration of the inner cities.
As the House will know, in two areas in England we have concluded that the scale and intensity of the problem are such that it was beyond the power of existing authorities to reverse the decline. In those areas —London and Liverpool docklands—we created the urban development corporations. Elsewhere it has been fundamental to our approach that we operate within the existing framework of local government, because the local authorities have the most detailed knowledge of the needs of their areas.
We must, therefore, allocate the resources in accordance with the needs of each authority. As the hon. Member for Stretford knows, the Government carried out a full review of the list of designated districts, including 268 the partnership authorities, last year in the light of the detailed information on deprivation derived from the 1981 census.
We made a number of changes, and some difficult decisions had to be taken. It was not possible, given the limited resources of the urban programme, to bring all areas with pockets of deprivation within its scope This means that in isolated cases a main road or canal can divide a derelict strip of land between one district which is designated and another which is not. That has happened in the case of Salford and Trafford because the designation must take account of the scale and intensity of deprivation in the district as a whole. There are a number of even stronger contenders than Trafford. This was recognised by the previous Labour Administration, which did not extend this status to Trafford.
As the hon. Member for Stretford said, much of Trafford is attractive and prosperous, and there is no disagreement between us on that. There are a good many other districts spread around the country that border on deprived areas and where the deprivation does not respect the local authority boundary. Some, like Trafford, are good housekeepers and do not spend public money lightly. I do not underestimate the difficulties faced by local authorities in keeping their expenditure down to the levels that are necessary for our national economic strategy, but the special resources of the urban programme have to be concentrated on the authorities whose total needs in aggregate are the greatest.
We are not indifferent to the needs of Trafford park, and we recognise the real problems of dereliction. The hon. Gentleman mentioned that Trafford park lies within the enterprise zone. The largest part of the zone is in Trafford park, and this can bring substantial benefit. In particular, it brings the important benefit of access to the urban development grant, which is a major new development within the urban programme. It does not present a total solution to such problems, but it has a role to play.
The broad principle behind the urban development grant is to attract private sector investment back into inner cities by injecting a sufficient public sector contribution to cover the gap between the costs of the projects, including a reasonable allowance for developer's profit, and the expected return. It is for the local authority and the developer together to work out proposals. If they are approved, the Government pay 75 per cent. grant-aid on the local authority contribution.
Since we launched the scheme, 125 projects have been approved, representing capital investment of over £300 million. Many of the projects are in areas just like Trafford park, where there has been precious little private development of any kind for many years. Although only a handful of such schemes have been completed, there am pointers to the type of scheme that could successfully be undertaken in Trafford park. Projects need not take place on municipally-owned land—in Dudley, for example, a firm has been helped by the council to expand its operation and more than double its work force with the aid of UDG.
I am anxious, following the representations that have been made by all parties, to take further initiatives, and later on today I shall be writing to the Manchester chamber of commerce, the Trafford park industrial council and large firms in the area to draw their attention again to the 269 benefits of UDG. So far the local authority has put forward only three proposals for UDG, and there is scope for many more.
The hon. Gentleman mentioned the enterprise zone, which brings real benefits, such as exemption from rates on industrial property, exemption from development land taxes, a greatly simplified planning regime, 100 per cent. tax allowances on industrial and commercial buildings, and various other incentives to economic activity.
Some 68 firms have settled in the Trafford zone, representing investment of about £5 million and about 1,100 jobs. The firms include Lucas CAV, Mobil Oil, Don International, Reed Windows, Photoplus Processing—in other words a wide range of manufacturing, service and warehousing operations representing a stable base on which the future prosperity of the zone and of the area as a whole can be built.
There is a lot of scope for further development in the Trafford park area of the zone. Recent monitoring carried out for my Department by consultants shows that progress has been held up by the relatively slow release of privately owned unused land on to the market. This is also a problem in other parts of Trafford park. In some cases land values may be pitched unrealistically high, in others a lack of infrastructure provision may be hampering development, and, in others, firms may be holding on to land in the expectation of future expansion.
§ Mr. Terry LewisI am interested in the Minister's statement that land values might have been put rather too high in the Trafford park area. I suspect, and I should like the Minister to comment on this, that the land values have risen in direct proportion to the enterprise zone, and this is a criticism of some of the activity that is taking place there. Will the Minister address himself to my intervention in the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford (Mr. Lloyd), and concentrate some of his comments on the problems of GEC and what help the Government are likely to give, or can be persuaded to give, to that company?
§ Sir George YoungThe particular problem of GEC was not raised by the hon. Member for Stretford and it does not feature in the title of the debate. The Government recognise fully the contribution which the turbine division of GEC has made. It is one of the largest employers in Trafford park and one of the largest land holders. I shall write to it again in terms which I shall outline to try to make some further progress over the issue of the land. The need to put land to good use rather than hold it for a rainy day was part of the thinking behind the Government's introduction of land registers, which identified publicly owned land which could be released at realistic prices and developed. It might benefit some private companies with large unused land holdings to adopt a similar approach. As a further initiative in response to the representations which have been made by local Members, I shall be writing today 270 to the Manchester chamber of commerce, the Trafford Park Industrial Council and large firms in the area, including GEC urging them to explore what might be done to improve the availability of land for redevelopment. From my understanding of the area, there is real scope to release on the right terms land which could be developed to provide jobs for those who live in the area and goods and services which the country needs.
There are two other, relatively modest, ways in which development can be encouraged in Trafford park with direct help from central Government. There is the derelict land grant and the traditional urban programme, which are bid for competitively by local authorities. They do not represent a comprehensive answer to an area's dereliction but can provide the initial impetus to improvement. As with other initiatives, there is a strong element of trade following the flag; once one site is developed, additional investment can be attracted to adjoining ones. Trafford council has not applied for traditional urban programme support for any commercially or industrially oriented schemes in recent years.
I should also mention the question of Trafford park's status under regional industrial policy. Last December the Government published a White Paper, Cmnd. 9111, about regional industrial development, inviting comments on a proposed new framework for regional development grant. The closing date for comments is 31 May 1984, and I know that the hon. Gentleman and Trafford council itself have put forward Trafford's case.
Trafford park represents almost a case study of an industrial area in decline, but it is an area with a great deal to offer. It has much infrastructure already in place. It has the resources of many firms which the hon. Gentleman mentioned which are household names and well established. But, above all, it has the human resources of a large skilled work force.
The Government are very willing to do what they can to help within the resources available to us and the priorities set by the needs of different areas. Officers of the borough council are in touch with my Department's regional office and the UDG appraisal team.
I am making contact with local businesses and I know that my hon. Friends the Members for Davyhulme and Altrincham and Sale as well as the hon. Gentleman will do what they can to support the Government's initiatives to encourage local businesses to come forward with UDG schemes and to consider again the derelict land which they do not need directly. If we can develop these initiatives and pull together the energies of all those who want to see Trafford park revived, we have the potential to arrest and then reverse the decline which the hon. Gentleman has mentioned. I look forward to substantial progress in Trafford park over the next few years.
§ Question put and agreed to.
§ Adjourned accordingly at seventeen minutes to One o' clock.