Westminster Hall Sitting of 9 January 2001

Preamble
[MRS. SYLVIA HEAL in the Chair]

Government Youth Policy
Motion made and Question proposed, That the sitting be now adjourned.—[Mr. Mike Hall.]
9.30 am
Mr. Vernon Coaker: Good morning, Madam Deputy Speaker. I begin this particularly important debate by thanking Save the Children and its UK advocacy officer, Rebecca Hickman, for helping with policy detail and the drafting of this speech.
The debate is important because the young people of this country are our future, and we need to reflect on our policies in respect of the many challenges that they face. May I also take this opportunity to congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Brent, South (Mr. Boateng) on his recent appointment as Minister for Young People? Given his enthusiasm for a number of Home Office matters relating to my constituency, I am sure that he will prove a keen advocate of young people and the co-ordination of Government policies.
The problems and challenges that confront young people today constitute a chilling and compelling list. As we sit in this beautiful building, we must remember that the statistics that I shall read out this morning relate to real people who live in real communities, some of which are not very far from here. Each year, one in 16 young people leave school with no qualifications, and one in five have special educational needs. Some 30,000 children in year 11 truant for days or weeks at a time; in England alone, about 60,000 truant at least once a week. Although the numbers are declining, exclusions from school remain significant. It is estimated that 100,000 to 130,000 young people are given fixed-term exclusions each year. One in five 16 to 24-year-olds experience homelessness at some time and at least three quarters of the 11,500 15 to 21-year-olds who are in custody will be re-convicted within two years.
It is important to understand the links between the various problems, and the chain reaction that often occurs in young people's lives. Seventy-five per cent. of males aged 16 to 17 who are charged with a crime and appear before a youth court are not engaged in formal full-time work or training. One in two prisoners aged under 18 were looked after children. One study found that 40 per cent. of homeless young women have experienced sexual abuse in childhood or adolescence. Nearly half of all school-age offenders have been excluded from school.
Each year, 8,000 girls aged 16 or under become pregnant. As a male hon. Member, let me point out that teenage pregnancy is the responsibility not just of girls, but of young males. In discussing what should be done, the matter should be treated not just as a girl problem, but as one that affects society as a whole. Both girls and boys have a responsibility in respect of their relationships. As I have said, we are discussing real people with real problems.
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How will the responses to these challenges be coordinated? How can we meet those challenges and monitor the progress of our policies? In our youth policy, we should discuss not only the important challenges that confront us in dealing with disaffected young people, but youth poverty and social exclusion. We face the challenge of ensuring that all children everywhere have the opportunities, facilities and life chances that they deserve. Of course, available resources must be targeted: nobody would suggest that we should not provide additional resources and help for our most deprived communities. However, all children have a right to benefit from Government resources, facilities and policies, so we must ensure that their needs are adequately resourced.
Later in my speech, I shall give examples from my constituency of problems that young people confront every day. People who try to provide youth services and facilities also confront those problems while attempting to meet the needs of youth. My examples concern matter of fact, bread and butter issues, but, in considering their own constituencies, hon. Members will realise that such issues have a significant impact on provision, support and help for young people.
Another important issue concerns the distribution of funding across local council and local authority boundaries. Among the many tasks that hon. Members and I shall debate, the co-ordination of funding policy is especially important. For example, my constituency is adjacent to Nottingham city centre, but it is not covered by Nottingham city council. Although my constituency is one mile from the city centre, it is excluded from funding streams that would be available were it 200 yd down the road. Young people in my constituency need additional resources and we must ensure that funding streams recognise that young people's needs may cross local authority boundaries.
One night a week, more than 100 young people attend Carlton Pentecostal youth club, which is an excellent example of voluntary faith provision. Pastor Darrell Holt does a fantastic job with those young people, but he struggles to raise money to fund trips, to obtain specialist help or to purchase new equipment such as badminton nets or basketballs. That is an issue that we must examine. The Arnold Forum has been trying for more than a year to obtain funding for a drop-in centre for young people. It cannot hire premises because it cannot raise a few pounds. The willingness, voluntary help and young people's need are there, yet we cannot put together a funding package to provide a drop-in centre.
We must consider the provision and availability of youth clubs to ensure that our young people have access to such facilities. There is a huge number of youth sports teams, and I pay tribute to the people who organise them both in my constituency and beyond. However, such teams often find it difficult to obtain adequate facilities. That point was brought home to me yesterday morning, when I visited sixth formers at the Wheldon school in Carlton, who said that facilities for young people were often poor. How can we ensure that such problems do not occur and that young people's activities are sufficiently funded so that they are not forced to abandon them for want of a few pounds?

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The Government are introducing a huge range of initiatives to meet the challenges involved in doing our best to meet young people's needs—for example, sure start, Connexions, youth offending teams, drug action teams, increasing support for voluntary and statutory provision and ensuring that lottery bodies recognise the needs of youth. But who will co-ordinate those policies to ensure that they provide the most effective, coherent, complementary and co-ordinated package for the benefit of all our children and young people?
One of the Government's key new initiatives is the establishment of the children and young people's unit. The Government are often accused of being insufficiently radical, but that should be seen as a radical move. I welcome it and the creation of the children's fund to support such initiatives.
I have some specific questions about the children and young people's unit. Save the Children and other organisations welcomed the unit as an opportunity for the Government to take a more creative and energetic approach towards their work with children and young people. Specifically, it should take the lead in bringing about a cultural shift in local and national Government, involving children and young people in decision making and in playing a key role in coordinating policies.
Does the unit's remit extend to all children and young people or focus only on the socially excluded or vulnerable? If it deals only with the socially excluded, who is responsible for co-ordinating policies to ensure that there is a coherent overall package for all children? What age range does the unit cover?
The children and young people's unit will explore ways of increasing the involvement of children and young people in decision making. One option that the Minister is considering is an advisory group of young people to meet directly with him to talk about policy, which is a tremendous step forward. Beyond that, however, there should be a new culture across Government to provide clear mechanisms for consulting children and young people. The principle of consultation with and participation by young people should be followed not only by the Minister responsible for youth, but by all Ministers in all Departments across Whitehall. That culture should be made real by an overarching strategy that is about not only words, but the delivery of policies. What methods is the children and young people's unit considering for consulting children and young people, and how will it ensure that the process is co-ordinated across all Departments, including the Home Office and the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions?
The Government's children's strategy should ensure that all Departments consider the impact of new policies on children and young people and a children's commissioner for England should be created. Save the Children is one of a number of organisations that believe that a children's commissioner would be beneficial as an independent watchdog, arbiter and champion of children's rights, operating regardless of changes in political administration.
My hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Wyre (Mr. Dawson) is promoting a private Member's Bill to appoint a children's commissioner for England and I
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hope that the Government will support it. Perhaps the Minister will explain the Government's policy on a children's commissioner for England when that important reform has been made in Wales. We need mechanisms to ensure that the children's strategy is part of joined-up government and covers all policies and practices affecting children.
Before concluding, I want to refer to citizenship and partnership. We have had fantastic reports on social exclusion and we need more of them, but it is important that the Government talk to young people about their problems. That is a challenge for all of us. When I am bombarded with suggestions from children in schools and sixth forms, I often find myself saying, "It's not as easy as that," and, when asked why, "You don't understand how complex such matters are." I find myself meandering and almost dismissing their opinions instead of saying, "You are making a good point, which we must consider." Hon. Members expect any points they make to be treated with respect and young people deserve more than being told, "It's not as easy as you think."
Mr. David Drew: My hon. Friend is making a powerful case. Does he agree that personal advisers have a key role under the Connexions initiative that we have launched? It behoves us all to encourage the appointment of young person's advisers or there will be no dialogue between young people and adults.
Mr. Coaker: I thank my hon. Friend. He drew attention to the key role of young person's advisers in the Connexions service, the success of which will depend not only on the number of personal advisers, but their quality.
We must talk to young people who are excluded from school about how we can improve our policies. We must talk to young asylum seekers about the impact of Government policies on them. We should discuss our policies with all young people and I am pleased that experiments are taking place in many areas to expand consultation. Nottinghamshire county council has a two-year plan to set up seven district youth forums with one county youth assembly. It is an impressive programme and I am sure that other local authorities will do the same.
Elaine Bagshaw of Nottingham youth council sent me an e-mail with a list of items that the council had discussed and which she thought were important. There is a desire that young people should become involved in our policies, so what powers and responsibilities does the Minister believe that those bodies should have? If youth assemblies and youth councils do not have real power, they will not be considered to be as important a part of the process as they need to be.
Mr. Lembit Öpik: On that point, does the hon. Gentleman agree that the United Kingdom Youth Parliament will be an important element in the dialogue that he describes, and would he welcome the Minister's willingness to participate in that? Does he welcome the money—£200,000, I think—announced by the Department for Education and Employment to make that Parliament a reality in a few weeks' time?
Mr. Coaker: The £200,000 announced yesterday for the UK Youth Parliament is welcome and another example of an exciting Government initiative. I believe that this morning's debate should be about how we can improve policy initiatives and ensure that they are all brought together.
On consultation, citizenship and participation, I feel strongly that we should consider whether young people should have the vote at 16. We give young people the right to choose their sexuality at 16. They can get married with parental permission, join the armed forces, smoke, play the national lottery and do a range of different things. We need to debate extending the suffrage to 16-year-olds. If they are mature enough to determine their sexuality, they are mature enough to determine how to vote.
People may say that 16-year-olds do not know enough about the political system and do not understand what the different parties stand for, but that is a challenge for us all, not a reason to refuse them the suffrage. We should help our young people to understand what we offer them. We have enough trouble trying to persuade older people that we are worth voting for, but trying to persuade 16-year-olds that we deserve their votes would be an exciting challenge for us all. My local paper, the Nottingham Evening Post, said that extending the suffrage might increase the turnout of voters. We should certainly debate that, along with all the other issues.
When I read policy action report No. 12 from the social exclusion unit, I was slightly concerned. It compared the UK with other European countries, and I think that only our country and Denmark had no ticks in any of the various boxes for a co-ordinated youth policy, a Minister for Young People, a parliamentary committee and so on. The Government have taken a considerable number of steps to address many of those issues. We now have a Minister for Young People, although my view is that he should be a stand-alone Minister, with his own Department, but that can be debated.
This is a fundamental debate, because young people are our country's future and their opinions deserve to be heard on the policies that are supposed to be for their benefit. If we listened to what young people had to say and took on board their comments, we could improve those policies. As many people know, I believe that we should be hard on young people who cause problems in our communities, but not all our young people are delinquents. A small minority cause problems and we need to deal with them, but it is also incumbent on us to reflect on our policies for young people to ensure that they are better co-ordinated, that we have better government and that we deliver better results for young people in all our communities.
9.53 am
Mr. Hilton Dawson: It is a pleasure to take part in the debate, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Mr. Coaker) on securing it. Talking about issues relating to young people is an auspicious start to the new year, but we should discuss those issues every day, every week and every month. I share my hon. Friend's interest in the development of a Ministry for children to ensure that
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their issues receive the proper scrutiny and attention that they deserve. If a fraction of the time wasted on the dome and other matters had been spent talking about children's issues, we could speak more positively about our society. I shall be extremely brief because I know that several hon. Members wish to take part in the debate.
The Government came to office facing a great mess in respect of children's services and youth policy. Frankly, some of the achievements over the past three and a half years have been superb. It would take all day to go through them, but the most obvious are the new deal, the promise of Connexions, the principles of restorative justice, the magnificent work done for children in care, equalising the age of consent and improving educational standards. Those are truly superb achievements, which promise much for the future. Greatest of all is the inspirational aim of ending child poverty, and everything that we discuss about children should be approached in that context.
There remains a long way to go, not just in the coordination, but in the consistency of Government policy. We must stop the remand of young people to adult prisons. We must ensure that restorative justice is properly funded so that we can reduce the number of young people in custody. Frankly, the Government's willingness to maintain a parent's defence of reasonable chastisement seems entirely inappropriate, wrong and out of kilter with everything else that they are trying to achieve. It is also inappropriate to maintain reservations about the UN convention on children's rights, asylum and immigration issues, which has knock-on effects for unaccompanied asylum seekers.
Children are the most powerless people in society. They have no vote-a debate on the voting age would be useful-no voice and a particular vulnerability. Children are extremely vulnerable to abuse, to having their views set aside or ignored and to being entirely overlooked.
Mr. Öpik: I agree with the implications of what the hon. Gentleman said—that the voting age should be reduced to 16. What is his view of the fact that the minimum wage is differential, so that young people have a lower minimum wage than older people? I have always believed that that inequality is difficult to justify.
Mr. Dawson: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, but I do not want to spend too much time on that. I was not making the case for reducing the voting age to 16, although a debate on the subject would be useful. The issue that the hon. Gentleman raised is important to young people and it should be properly debated with, by and for them.
The Government's aspirations are inconsistent with what is happening on the ground. I shall return to my constituency on Thursday, when Lancashire county council will debate the closure of an important resource for young people at Fylde community centre, in the wake of a decision to withdraw from involvement with another important resource for children at Nazareth house, Lancaster. To make progress, we need coordination between the aims and aspirations of the Government and the people who deliver the service. If those people know what the Government want them to do and if they have the tools and resources for the job,

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they will be able to provide the high standard of service that young people need and rigorous action should be taken if they do not.
It is essential that we have joined-up government at the top. I welcome the new Cabinet Committee on children and young people's services and I welcome the living embodiment of the co-ordination of children's services who is here today. I would like the Government to place much more emphasis on the United Nations convention on children's rights. It is a document of fundamental importance that is accepted almost universally throughout the world. We do not need to reinvent the wheel in relation to children's rights because the UN convention sets out a seminal statement to which we should constantly refer. We should ensure that it is embodied in the work that is undertaken with children.
I agree with my hon. Friend that we need massive cultural change in this country. We do not just need a Government who are committed to children, as this Government palpably are. We need a strong independent voice. We need someone who will stand up for children, who will be known to them and who will take on the Government on their behalf. We must ensure that the complaints mechanisms that protect children are there and that the participation of children is promoted, developed and enhanced. I will therefore introduce another private Member's Bill for a children's rights commissioner for England, which would fit in with everything that the Government are trying to do and would reflect what is happening in Wales. If we do not hear this week that we will have a children's rights commissioner and as the Government are not going to keel over in the face of a private Member's Bill, it would be a fine principle on which to go to the country whenever the general election comes along.
I will not say much more, but I repeat that this is an extremely important subject. Our society can only benefit from the meaningful participation of children and young people in issues that relate to their lives. We must get more resources down to ground level and the communities in which they live. If we do that our society will build itself an ever firmer foundation for the future.
10.2 am
Mr. Lembit Öpik: I apologise in advance to the Minister: I have another commitment that I must get to so I shall keep my comments brief. I have three points to make. First, as I said in my intervention, I am pleased that the Minister has agreed to participate in the UK Youth Parliament. It is a tremendously important initiative and an opportunity for people to feel re-enfranchised. It is one of the great achievements of the hon. Member for Faversham and Mid-Kent (Mr. Rowe). Without it there would be no clear mechanism to try to reintegrate young people's thinking in British politics.
Secondly, and this is another point that has already been alluded to, I believe that we should reduce the age of voting to 16. Some people argue that 16-year-olds are not sufficiently responsible to make the decision, but when one looks at the quality of past decision making—this is an entirely party political point—we should
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certainly trust 16-year-olds to be every bit as competent to decide whom they want to be governed by as those over 18. It is often forgotten that 16-year-olds can pay tax, can get married and can fight and die for this country. Surely they should be able to vote for the Government who send them to war. More to the point, a 16-year-old can get married, but can be prosecuted for buying his bride a drink. That is a ridiculous contradiction. If we regard 16 as the age of adulthood, let us make it consistent and ensure that 16-year-olds can also vote in British parliamentary elections.
My third point is the one that I made in my intervention on the minimum wage. It is iniquitous that we should have two minimum wage levels: one for the young and one for those who are older. The United Nations convention states clearly that people doing the same job should have the same income. It has never been clear to me why a 16-year-old can expect to be paid less than a 24-year-old for the same job. The Minister must consider whether the Government really want to sustain a differential minimum wage.
It is great that we are having this discussion and I congratulate the hon. Member for Gedling (Mr. Coaker) on securing the debate. However, we must ensure, when we discuss youth policy, that it is not a separate debate but one that fits into the context of Government policy and thinking. The Minister has a big job to do in focusing the Government's thinking, and he has my party's support in that respect.
10.5 am
Ms Julie Morgan: I shall be brief, as other hon. Members are keen to speak. First, I agree that it is important that all Government policy takes youth matters into account and I welcome the Minister's appointment as Minister for Young People, to ensure that the policies for young people are co-ordinated. It is most important to involve young people in the planning of services and to consult them about all aspects of Government policy. It is easy to say that we must involve young people, but it is hard work. It costs money and involves much preparation to include young people in decision making.
I support the call of my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Mr. Coaker) for a children's commissioner for England. Peter Clarke was appointed as Children's Commissioner for Wales as a result of an amendment to the Care Standards Bill. We hope that there will be a children's commissioner measure in this Session.
We in Wales are pleased to have a children's commissioner. It is important to state how he was appointed because it shows how children can be involved in decision making. Seventeen young people were involved in the appointment and much work and preparation was done. The first day was spent working with the young people, helping them to prepare their method of questioning the prospective candidates and a weekend was spent interviewing the short-listed candidates for the post. The 17 young people were heavily involved in that process.
When the appointment was made, there were two young people with full voting rights on the appointment panel, as well as the political representatives, who voted for their choice as children's commissioner. It is probably the first time that young people have been so

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involved in a public appointment. I worked in the voluntary sector before I became a Member of Parliament and we struggled hard to involve young people in appointments and decision making. However, the appointment of the Children's Commissioner for Wales was a bold step. Those who were involved came from a wide section of young people and some were from disadvantaged communities. They felt very involved in the selection process and said that it had been an historic weekend. I am very pleased that a Children's Commissioner for Wales has been appointed and I support my hon. Friend's calls for a children's commissioner for England.
I welcome my right hon. Friend the Minister's appointment as Minister for Young People. How will he relate to the devolved Assembly? Home Office issues are not devolved to Wales, so it is important to have joined-up Home Office and youth justice policies for all young people. Will the Minister address the matter when he sums up?
It is important—but not easy—to involve young people. In appointing a Children's Commissioner in Wales, we have managed to involve young people in a fairly unique way for a public appointment. How will the Minister work with the devolved Assembly on issues that are not devolved?
10.10 am
Mr. Phil Hope: I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Mr. Coaker) on securing the debate. I am pleased to say that I agree with—and endorse—almost all that he said, including reducing the age of voting to 16. We are introducing citizenship education in schools, so the accusation that when children reach 16 they do not know about the political process will not be valid. They will be able to enact what they have learnt when they reach the mandatory school leaving age. The Government are on track for pursuing that and the all-party group supports them.
Given the short time that is available, I shall raise only two further matters, which have not been mentioned so far. First, I am delighted that a Minister for Young People and an interdepartmental group have now been appointed. I submitted a paper to the Government entitled "The future of services for young people"—which civil servants have no doubt tucked away in their files—asking for precisely that. A Minister for young people and a ministerial group were a achieved three years after the paper was published. Will the two measures that I propose today take another three years to implement?
We may be moving towards joined-up thinking between Government Departments at a national level, but what happens at a local level, between local authorities, social services, health authorities, schools and the police in terms of consulting and involving young people? To underpin national co-ordination of youth policy, we need local co-ordination—local youth development plans. The youth service should be placed at the heart of establishing those plans, by carrying out an audit of local needs and services and by preparing and developing programmes for young people to fill known gaps. At local level, it is easier to involve young people directly in decision making. My first plea therefore is for local enactment of what we are creating through inter-ministerial contacts at national level.
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Secondly, we have discussed political enfranchisement when young people make the transition from childhood to adulthood and Connexions, mentoring support and training as they approach adulthood. Many young people from families on low incomes lack cash. I should like the Government to encourage those young people to develop an asset—a bond or an account with cash. The Government could start by giving every baby £250. In 18 years' time, the amount would have grown, and those young people would have the same as many youngsters from high-income families take for granted: the lump sum they need when they enter the world of work to spend on a house, furniture, a car, training or on building their own business. An asset redistribution policy for young people would give every young person access to a capital sum. That is quite a visionary idea, and I am aware that we are nowhere near considering it yet, but I hope that our new Minister for Young People, in his central role within the Government, will encourage such energetic thinking.
10.13 am
Mr. Tim Boswell: It is right that we should give this subject a wider profile, so in the spirit of the debate, which was helpfully introduced by the hon. Member for Gedling (Mr. Coaker), I shall be brief, to allow the Minister to respond.
As a former Minister with responsibilities for the matter, I recognise many of the constraints under which the Minister operates—such as the different agencies and the interaction of statutory and voluntary services. I considered the Government's Connexions proposals in Standing Committee and, as so often with their claims about joined-up government, I feel that it is a long way from a few aspirations in a press release to effective implementation. I hope that the Minister will not regard that comment as especially partisan, but will take account of the views and concerns of professionals, notably those of the Community and Youth Workers Union, with which we had close contact during the passage of the legislation. I have read the report of what was said about Connexions at its autumn conference, which suggests that it continues to have reservations about, among other considerable matters, the absence of a blueprint and clear purpose for the Connexions service and a proper qualifications framework—and, I would add, a remuneration structure. There is also concern about the fuzzy boundary between professional competence in traditional youth work and in the new service, with its personal advisers.
Those professionals are also concerned, as I am, to probe further the relations between the Connexions unit of the DFEE at Moorfoot in Sheffield—I should explain, for those unfamiliar with the structure, that that is on the employment side—the existing DFEE youth service unit in London, which is based firmly in education, and, of course, the Minister's new children and young people's unit, which reports to him in his interesting translational reassignment as a DFEE Minister for that purpose. As agencies of central Government those need to be joined up, but I should like to put to the Minister a few questions of my own that are primarily geared to Connexions. However, have implications for his new unit and for the continuing delivery of services by local authorities and others.

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Is the Minister satisfied that the complex Connexions proposals are on time and on target? Will he assure us that the six pilots will be properly evaluated and their lessons learned, because the timetable is very compressed? Has the Minister worked out a proper relationship between the continuing activities of local education authorities in relation to youth and community education and those of the Connexions service? For example, does he have in mind a common service framework and standards? More generally, does he accept the importance of making informal education through experienced and dedicated youth workers available to all young people, not just to a section of them—a point to which the hon. Member for Gedling referred in his opening remarks?
Does the Minister accept that the services of a personal adviser should not be mandatory, but that all young people should continue to have access to proper independent careers guidance, regardless of their degree of social exclusion or otherwise? All young people should have the right to what I would call an MOT, which can match their educational attainments with career opportunities, independent of any service provider in the area.
I have no problem with the Minister's wish to help the one in 11 young people who are identified as socially excluded in the "Bridging the Gap" report. That is a useful working assumption, but there would be real dangers in red-lining such people for special treatment, particularly where the claims and voices of authority—including the police force—are involved, instead of trying to blend them back into the mainstream through a variety of informal activities in which all young people can share. In other words, if they are seen to be different, they may well behave, or continue to behave, in as antisocial manner.
I am a strong believer that those whom the present Prime Minister once memorably described as "the forces of Conservatism" should stick together. 1 make no apology for closing with an admirable paragraph from a Community and Youth Workers Union paper that I saw recently:
New does not mean better. Better things usually draw on the strengths of the past. No new profession has ever been created by Government edict and no genuinely new service created by destroying the old. Quality services need years to mature and refine through professional development.
I could not have put it better myself.
10.18 am
The Minister of State, Home Office (Mr. Paul Boateng): This is an important debate. This Chamber owes my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Mr. Coaker) a debt of gratitude. My hon. Friend will recall a visit I paid to Gedling some time ago when I saw at first hand his involvement not only with young people, but with voluntary sector organisations in his constituency and with issues—which were aired this morning—relating to social exclusion and disadvantage among young people. He brings to this discussion his deep and broad experience and wisdom, and we owe him a debt of gratitude for bringing the matter to our attention.
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If I may, I shall begin by discussing something that is central to getting right the co-ordination of youth policy: the question, which all hon. Members who have spoken today have raised, of how to involve young people. We are determined to put young people and youth policy at the heart of our plans—not simply in order to combat social exclusion, but to build strong and sustainable communities. If we are to get matters right, I have no doubt that we must find ways to engage young people in the political process and policy development. All too often, young people have been ignored in that respect and policy has been the poorer for that.
Some errors that were made over many years in respect of young people in care would not have occurred had we as a society been willing to listen to their voices and experience. We did not listen, but it was they who paid a terrible price and our society is still living with the consequences of that failure. That is why Quality Protects—the Government's important response to the crisis in care for young people—ensures that, for the first time, young people's voices are heard in the care system. Quality Protects is already beginning to make a difference. I have a central responsibility to ensure that a way is found to involve young people in the work of the children and young people's unit and in the processes of government. If we fail to do that, we will be unlikely to get matters right.
The problem is a difficult one. My hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, North (Ms Morgan) is right to stress that it will require resources. I am here to say that we will find the resources necessary to enable the voices of children and young people to be heard throughout Government. It is a question of capacity building and of getting right the infrastructure by drawing on the relevant experience of the voluntary sector in a way that will enable young people to access government and policy making at various levels. We are drawing together proposals in respect of access at a national level and we shall shortly make them known. Young people must also have access at a regional level, so that they can contribute to the increasing importance and significance of regional activity and at a local level.
My hon. Friend the Member for Corby (Mr. Hope) made the important point that we must establish how our central Government initiative, which might not necessarily fit at local government level, can be reflected in an appropriate way. I look forward to discussing with local government representatives how best to do that. Following last year's launch, which was attended by a number of my hon. Friends, we have embarked on a series of regional seminars to introduce to a wider audience the children's fund and the operation of the children and young people's unit. Indeed, I shall address one in London this afternoon. The dialogue with local authorities, the voluntary sector and young people has therefore already begun, so that the project can grow at a local level. That will be especially important in rolling out both the preventive element of the children's fund and the local networks, because the working together of those two aspects will guarantee the success of the project. At the heart of the matter is the capacity of children and young people to make effective input into the partnerships that we want to see develop locally in order to deliver change.

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I shall deal with some of the specific points that hon. Members raised. There is an important job to be done in co-ordinating the work of Connexions, sure start and the children and young people's unit. That will be achieved through the ministerial sub-committee that I chair, which involves department al Ministers and draws on expertise from the voluntary and statutory sectors and a wider forum of children and young people. At Secretary of State level, the Cabinet Committee upon which the Minister with responsibility for sure start and I sit is designed to ensure effective co-ordination across Government. Moreover, the unit itself is structured so that, although it is housed in the Department for Education and Employment, it includes civil servants from all the relevant Departments, as well as people seconded from the voluntary sector. I want to see people seconded from the statutory and private sectors too, because that will ensure that we build the right kinds of partnerships on the ground.
Ms Ruth Kelly: I should like to ask my right hon. Friend the Minister about the treatment of child asylum seekers. Can he confirm that although the United Nations convention on the rights of the child gives the United Kingdom a reservation in respect of asylum and immigration, we nevertheless satisfy the requirements of the convention? As several Departments share responsibility for that matter, who has overall responsibility for ensuring that our commitments are met?
Mr. Boateng: I am satisfied that we are fulfilling our convention responsibilities. My hon. Friends the Minister of State in the Home Office and the Minister of State in the Department of Health work closely on those issues.
The structures that we develop to ensure that the voices of children and young people are heard must not merely reflect existing patterns of involvement of young people—which too often tend to be biased towards the articulate and privileged—but include children and young people with the experience of being refugees from migrant and disadvantaged families, so that their voices can also be heard at that level. In giving my hon. Friend the assurance that she seeks, I stress the importance of ensuring that the exercise is inclusive of all children and young people.
Hon. Members asked about the way in which our proposals link with youth offending. Yes, there are links, but I cannot overstate the importance of ensuring that we do not allow any one Department to feel that it has sole ownership of the exercise. Although I am a Home Office Minister, this is not a Home Office exercise. It is a Government exercise that is designed to put children and young people at the heart—
Mr. Barry Jones (in the Chair): Order. We must move to the next debate.

NHS (Somerset)
10.30 am
Mr. David Heath: I am grateful for the opportunity to raise the important issue of the health service in my county of Somerset. The stimulus for so doing was a survey that we carried out last year, involving the delivery of a form to every household in my constituency. Furthermore, my colleagues in other constituencies have conducted similar surveys. Our intention was to gain an overall feel for levels of satisfaction in Somerset, to discover problems that people have recognised and identified in the delivery of NHS services and to provide an opportunity for people to express their appreciation. I was gratified by the level of response to the survey that was, in my experience, unprecedented. We received thousands of response forms from across Somerset, and people were happy to express their views.
I hope that the Under-Secretary of State for Health, the hon. Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Ms Stuart) has received the copy of the principal responses that I sent to her yesterday. If she has not, she will find it somewhere in her Department. I sent it so that she could be aware of our results and I hope that it will assist her.
Why did we conduct the survey after the Government had undertaken their consultation? Not only were our questions slightly different, but the Government's consultation—welcome though it was—reached a relatively small number of people. That analysis was borne out by our results: only one in five of our respondents had seen the Government's consultation paper.
It may help if I describe health services in my constituency, which is a rural area that contains two hospitals. The Verington hospital, which I was happy to visit last Friday, has a general practitioner unit, consultant beds, a small number of psycho-geriatric beds and a day hospital. I welcome its considerably expanded role in the local community; it is doing a good job as a relatively small unit. In Frome, we have the Frome Victoria hospital, in which I declare an interest, as a patron of its appeal to raise sufficient funds to equip what we hope will be a remodelled hospital. We seem to be successful in raising those funds and everything seems on track for the building of a new Frome Victoria hospital in the near future. For major acute services, however, my constituents must travel outside the constituency, either to Yeovil general, which is operated by the East Somerset NHS trust, or the Royal United hospital in Bath. I shall not read out all the survey results—that would be otiose and unhelpful. I simply want to pick out some important points and perhaps illustrate them with specific examples, in order better to make the case to the Minister.
In my constituency, we are well served by our general practitioners and I have little, if any, quarrel with the services that they provide. That view is clearly shared by my constituents, whose satisfaction levels are extremely high: 61.5 per cent. declare themselves very satisfied, while 33 per cent. describe themselves as satisfied. Overall, 94.5 per cent. of respondents are satisfied with their general practitioner. They are happy with provision in the surgeries and with home visits. Indeed,

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those who request a home visit receive it on the same day in 88.5 per cent. of cases, which is creditable in a sparsely populated rural area.
Last Friday, I spoke to a senior general practitioner who is retiring before he is required to do so. He noted that many of his colleagues were also retiring early and expressed concern about the ability to recruit new GPs into the service. If we cannot recruit GPs in Somerset, which has much to commend it to general practitioners, there is a problem. He said that a few years ago, a vacancy in a GP's surgery would have attracted a couple of hundred applicants, but today we would be lucky if there were more than a handful. That suggests concern for future GP recruitment.
Concern has been expressed to me about the effect of NHS Direct. I do not want to criticise it because it is a good initiative, but there is anecdotal evidence that it is increasing rather than decreasing demands on GPs. If people can lift a telephone when they would previously have been unwilling to attend a doctor's surgery and are told that they should see a GP, they will do so. One doctor told me in an irate tone that he had had to make a 2 am visit to someone who had telephoned NHS Direct with a stiff neck, which was nothing more than that.
It is interesting that those who propose that people should pay more often for GP services were given a firm rebuttal by the results of the survey because 89.5 per cent. of those who responded said that people should not have to pay to see their GP. They value the provision that the NHS should be free at the point of delivery and believe that new charges should not be introduced.
I turn to the more acute services and the more difficult cases requiring the intervention of a consultant. A major problem that has been identified elsewhere in the country and was confirmed by my findings is the increasing difficulty in making an initial appointment with a consultant. The Minister will agree that the waiting time comprises two parts: the time waiting for admission to hospital and, before that, the time waiting to see a consultant. Evidence suggests that the former is decreasing, but that the time waiting to see a consultant is increasing. One in three of those who responded to the survey had had to wait more than four months for an initial consultation. Four months is a long time for people who are worried because their GP has identified a condition that merits referral to a consultant. I shall illustrate some of the problems with examples from those who have written to me. I shall not refer to them by name because it was agreed that the survey would be confidential.
A lady from Yarlington in my constituency had two referrals to consultants from her GP. In the first instance, she was seen by a registrar. She was required to return to the hospital on a different occasion for an X-ray and was then required to attend a third time to see the consultant. That prolonged the process to months instead of days and, because she lived a long way from the hospital, she had to make an arduous journey with a difficult condition each time. The same lady had a back problem, which required attention. She saw her GP in August and was told that the earliest she could expect to be seen by a consultant was in January this year. She is still waiting for an appointment.
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A lady from Mells needed to visit the out-patient department of the Royal United hospital on a fairly routine matter. Unfortunately, she ran her own business in Frome—a one-woman operation. She found time to visit the hospital, but when she arrived, she discovered that four people had been booked into each time slot, so she would have to wait for hours. Eventually, she had to return to her business, travelling a 30-mile round trip, without seeing the consultant.
Another worrying case involved a lady from Charlton Mackrell who developed a lump on her throat. She saw her GP and the first referral was on 24 April the year before last. She did not see a consultant until 14 July and she had to wait until 4 February the following year for the thyroidectomy that she required. She had to wait 10 months between first referral and the operation. I do not want overly to dramatise these cases, but they constitute a period of anxiety for individual patients. If someone has a lump and believes that it could be malignant, having to wait for 10 months is a very long time and it is worrying.
Having said that, general satisfaction with consultations is high—91.5 per cent. There is no question of medical or surgical care being in doubt: it is simply the mechanics of the operation that causes problems. All that is thrown into sharp relief by the contrast with the consultation times experienced in the private sector. When we asked people who had recourse to private consultations the same question, we found that 96.5 per cent. were seen within four weeks. Often the same consultants in the same hospitals were involved, which provides much cause for concern about the operation of the NHS.
A family from Frome whose 28-year-old son died last March of hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy provides a tragic case. It can be a hereditary condition and the rest of the family were advised to have an electrocardiogram and a heart echo test at the first opportunity. The ECG was carried out straight away in the local surgery and proved to be fine. However, there was no such early reassurance in respect of the heart echo test. The earliest they were able to book in was March this year—a year later.
In the end, the family decided that they could not wait that long: they had suffered a bereavement in the family and understood the effects of the condition. They went privately to the Royal United hospital and had the same treatment by the same surgeon using the same machine. It cost them £530 to be seen immediately. They ask, quite reasonably, how a routine 20-minute test could be achieved immediately on a private basis, when under the NHS it would take a year—an unpardonably long time.
I congratulate Ministers on achieving some improvement in admission times, but one in four patients still wait four to 10 months or longer for surgical admissions. My casework shows that people have to wait a long time for orthopaedic operations and that there is also a problem in coronary care, which is a priority for ministerial consideration. A few days ago, I received a letter from a gentleman who has been waiting since 2 February last year for admission to the Bristol Royal Infirmary for a bypass operation, for which he is a perfect candidate. He is 62 years old and in good health apart from the problem with his coronary

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arteries. The operation would make a huge difference to his quality of life, but there is no prospect of one because of congestion in the local hospital's cardiac unit.
A lady from East Pennard who has a history of coronary problems was referred to the Royal United hospital on 10 July by her general practitioner, as a matter of urgency. She could not be admitted to the coronary ward because it was full, so she was sent to the accident and emergency department and was extremely complimentary about the treatment she received there. However, she spent the whole night on a trolley because no bed was available at the hospital which is the major acute facility for the area.
I am happy to report that satisfaction with the medical care provided in our acute hospitals is very high—92 per cent. of respondents were satisfied with the medical care that they received. Traditionally, in surveys of this kind, people are very appreciative of nursing care, so I was surprised that 12 per cent. of respondents to my survey said that they were not satisfied with their nursing care. That does not show a lack of ability, enthusiasm or care on the part of nurses; it illustrates the overstretch that nursing staff have to cope with. One lady wrote to me saying that she was heartbroken visiting a relative in hospital because the hospital was
"so desperately short of staff".
A former midwife wrote to me as follows:
The national health service which I have been proud to serve all my working life will not return to the high standards that patients demand until there are enough nurses and midwives who are the backbone to the whole structure.
I entirely agree with that view, which I am sure the Government share. They are taking measures to improve the retention and recruitment of nurses, but they must be careful not to overstate the case. There is much bandying about of the increase in the numbers of nurses returning to the profession, but they are usually part-time, not full-time nurses, which obscures the fact that there are significant shortages in full-time nursing staff in our hospitals.
I fear that the position will gel worse. I do not know whether my constituency is typical, but the profession's age profile suggests that there are more nurses at the upper end of the scale than at the lower end and that they will soon be retiring. Many have retired already.
Although I welcome the new career structures, they are not of great benefit to nurses who are nearing the end of their professional lives. Their only concern is whether they can cope with the job that they are being asked to do, or whether the difficult tasks that they are set stretches them beyond endurance. There is considerable evidence that nurses are finding it increasingly difficult to cope with unacceptable work levels. It is important to re-staff our hospitals to fill the gap in nurse recruitment and provide a structure that encourages the retention of nursing staff.
I must complete the picture on admissions to hospital by reporting my constituents' overwhelming rejection of the idea that patients should pay for what have been described as routine operations: 92 per cent. of respondents rejected that proposition and quite rightly so. It would put a heavy burden on many people who have paid into the national health service and expect to receive treatment when they require it without the need to fork out thousands of pounds for an operation which they probably cannot afford.
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I have raised the issue of dentists many times in the House. In common with many parts of the country, Somerset has a real problem in respect of the availability of NHS dentists. My survey backed up that point because 41.5 per cent. of respondents said that they had found it difficult to register with an NHS dentist. Assuming that a large number of people will already have been registered with an NHS dentist for a long time, that suggests a high level of difficulty. We have seen some amelioration through the Government's initiative. We have a new NHS dental surgery in Frome. I found it extraordinary that there was a queue of people all the way around the market place in Frome on the day that the surgery opened for new registrations. Thousands of people were so keen to put themselves on the list of an NHS dentist.
It may sound amusing, but it is not as it illustrates the need for more NHS dentists. Although the new surgery has helped the situation in Frome, the rest of my constituency does not have that benefit and there is still a great deal of difficulty. I know that the dentists who are still working in the NHS will continue to express their concerns. My dentist wrote to me recently and added as a postscript that I was due for my NHS check-up. I have not yet taken up that offer, but he made the important point that there is still a great deal of dissatisfaction. The loyalty bonuses that have been introduced have not met the need to keep people within the service. Indeed, for those who work part time, and many women dentists have worked part time over recent years within the NHS, the level of reward is, as he puts it, derisory. A bonus of £25 a quarter will not encourage professional people to stay within the system. It is almost an insult to their professionalism to offer such a reward.
My final point about the provision of the service relates to accessibility. This is particularly important in a rural area. Of those who responded to my survey, 96 per cent. said that they had difficulties in getting to surgeries and hospitals by public transport, simply because there is no public transport. At the same time we have had a reduction in the transport provided by the health authority, so people can be very isolated and can feel that they cannot get to a doctor's surgery. Moreover, if they are elderly they are often reluctant to call out a doctor. It is still part of the ethos in my part of the world that a doctor is called out only in an emergency, not for a routine matter. If they need to get to a hospital it can be a 40 or 50-minute round trip. Not only is it difficult for the patients themselves, who may have painful conditions, but it affects their relatives when they have to visit.
The geography of the area presents a problem for accident and emergency responses. I have raised in the House the matter of the ambulance service and the difficulties in, first, reaching the patient in distress and, secondly, getting them to the accident and emergency unit in Bath or Yeovil. We are talking about what can be extended response times, to which there are no easy answers. I am still persuaded that the air ambulance has a role to play, so I am disappointed that the Government appear unwilling to support that provision, which can be invaluable in saving lives. However, other action could be taken and that needs to be borne in mind.
The health authority has had what appears to be a relatively generous funding settlement this year with, I think, an 8 per cent. increase. I am grateful for that

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increased funding as it is a move in the right direction, but I am also realistic about its effects. First, the problem of bust followed by boom makes it difficult to use that funding successfully, and a nursing manager whom I met last week made that point strongly. It is much better to have a steadily increasing budget than a rapidly increased budget for one year. The health authority may have to find ways of using that increased funding effectively when it does not have the staff, equipment or ability to assimilate it.
The second issue is the amount of new money available. Pay and price inflation will take up much of the increase, but that is the case every year. The national clinical priorities, with which I do not argue, will also skim off quite a lot of the money. Therefore, the local health authority's flexibility is limited, but the year-on year 2 per cent. efficiency saving still has to be made. Having been leader of a county council and involved in local government for years, I accept that efficiency savings can often be made year on year and that it is right to build them into a budget, but there is clearly a point at which that becomes counter-productive. There is always a degree to which organisations such as the health service can improve their productivity, but that does not release cash. Increasing throughput and making things work better can improve productivity, but that does not release cash for the budget.
It is too early to say what will happen this year because the budgets have not been formulated and we must wait and see, but I am greatly concerned that what appears to be a generous settlement will, in the short term, involve reductions in services. If that occurred, it would be a tragedy. I shall monitor the situation closely and discuss it with the health authority and trusts in my area, but I give Ministers a serious warning that that may be the result of this year's settlement.
I could have touched on many other services in this short debate such as community pharmacies, which are close to my heart, ophthalmic services—which the Minister may have expected me to mention given my previous career—and chiropody. Time is too short to do so, but I want to leave hon. Members with the clear results of my survey: people in Somerset value the health service enormously and recognise the level of care and the professionalism of those who work within it. They welcome, as I do, the opportunity to express both their appreciation of all that goes right and concerns about what goes wrong or less well than we had hoped. Our common view is that we want to improve, safeguard and develop the health service in Somerset for the future. It is our health service; we value it and want it to succeed.
10.59 am
Mr. Brian Cotter: I start by echoing my hon. Friend the Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) on the value of the health service. The Minister will know that Weston-super-Mare has an excellent hospital. We value enormously the service that it provides: in earlier times, my constituents were dependent on services in Bristol.
I shall be brief, so as to allow time for the Minister's response. I want to deal with four subjects: epilepsy, speech and language therapy, paediatrics and mental health. My views on those subjects are based on contacts with constituents and my various investigations.
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I recently met the Weston-super-Mare branch of the British Epilepsy Association, which expressed concerns about the local and national approach to epilepsy. It believes that the condition of epilepsy has not been dealt with properly—medically or otherwise—for some time. The association believes that the Government have shown little commitment to improving the service in response to the findings of the Clinical Standards Advisory Group report.
Issues raised by epilepsy sufferers at local meetings include the insufficient emphasis on the condition and resulting problems in the health service, as well as over-reliance on self-help therapy, which also applies to other conditions such as autism. Individual sufferers can sometimes be more knowledgeable than professionals. An impersonal response from some consultants is another problem, as is the lack of information about treatment and medicines. A specialist service of nurses is called for.
I see that the Minister acknowledges the problem, but I would like to tell her what a leading Somerset consultant in neuropsychiatry, Dr. Jonathan Bird, said:
I am afraid to say…that the management of epilepsy in Britain, in terms of services offered to people with epilepsy, falls far short of the services given in many other western countries. Our provision of specialists dealing with epilepsy is very much less, per head of the population, than other countries with which we would like to compare ourselves (such as France, Germany, the Scandinavian countries
and others. Dr. Bird went on to make other points. My concern about epilepsy is genuine. There are many such concerns in the health service, but epilepsy requires more attention. The Minister may wish to comment on the recommendations in the Clinical Standards Advisory Group's report.
My second subject is speech and language therapy. I hope that the Minister will have noticed that I tabled an early-day motion recently, for which I received much cross-party support. One of my constituents is a young boy of five with speech difficulties, and the crisis in speech therapy has affected him. The problem does not affect Somerset exclusively, but it is a big problem there. In this case, the family had to wait five months for an initial appointment and then for a statement of special educational needs. The Minister would accept that speech and language therapy is just as important as nursing care, GPs, doctors and so forth. Speech therapy has many important aspects, yet some people have had to wait up to 18 months to receive it. The lives of many constituents, such as that five-year-old boy, could be affected in the long term if they do not receive the hoped-for response.
The Avon health authority and the Weston area health trust are doing their best to tackle the problem, in extremely difficult circumstances. They would welcome details of how the Government propose to tackle the national crisis in speech therapy.
The third issue is that of paediatric services. The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health recently issued new guidelines on quality control and standards of paediatric care. That led, rightly, to the cessation, for a short period, of operations at the paediatric department of Weston general hospital, while the service and quality were assessed. As the local Member of Parliament, I expressed great anxiety about the matter, and so did many of my constituents, as it meant

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that Bristol was the nearest place for children's services. I am glad that after a relatively short time the services at Weston were reinstated but if its paediatric service, which is of great importance, is not given the priority that it needs and is not of a sufficiently high standard, it will have a knock-on effect on hospital services generally.
The vast majority of patients going through the accident and emergency department at Weston general hospital are children. A further problem in Weston is that it is a tourist resort and the number of visits to A & E varies according to the time of year. In that respect, too, the majority of patients are children. If the paediatric back-up were not sufficient—that has never been suggested—it would affect the number of people who go to the hospital and thus the other services. It would be a pity if Weston, which has a good reputation for training and other matters, suffered in that way.
I hope that the Minister will investigate paediatric services at Weston. Although we accept that there must be centres of excellence, we want our hospitals to be viable; that is a key issue for Weston. Various options, suggested by people who are more experienced than I am, are being considered in Weston extended day care, the availability of consultants and so on. I hope the Minister will ensure, when the final guidelines are issued, that there is a first-rate paediatric service in Weston.
My final point is about mental health. For some time, mental health services in my constituency suffered from significant underfunding. The percentage was below the national average, and I can give the Minister the details if she so wishes. That was recognised. The new mental health trust, which has taken over the reins in the past few months, has increased funding of mental health services in Weston, and is advertising vacancies for consultants, nurses, occupational therapists and others.
Mental health in Weston is a live issue. I frequently attend meetings of an organisation called Friend, at which between 20 and 30 people talk about mental health problems. I am encouraged by the fact that more funding is coming down the line, but I am anxious that it will be only for acute mental health conditions and that those with less serious conditions will be told to seek help from charitable trusts or the voluntary sector. There is a danger that some people will miss out. I hope that there will be full mental health services in Weston and elsewhere. Having met so many people with mental health problems, I cannot emphasise strongly enough how important it is to tackle the issue in the national health service.
I look forward to the Minister's response to the debate.
11.11 am
Mrs. Caroline Spelman: It is not in my nature to be discourteous to hon. Members, but I am unable to congratulate the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) on obtaining the debate, which, in his words, was stimulated by a survey. It is important to be aware that the survey contained questions that made untrue statements about Conservative health policy, which the debate legitimises. Question 10 of the survey is:
William Hague's Conservatives want to make patients pay more often in a partially privatised NHS. Do you agree you should pay a fee to see your GP?
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Question 30 is:
William Hague's Conservatives want more patients to pay privately for routine NHS operations like hip replacements, hernias and cataract removals. Do you agree that the NHS should be privatised in this way?
I shall use the debate to refute those allegations about Conservative health policy and to place on record my belief that using a survey in that way and obtaining parliamentary time to legitimise questions that falsify the health policy of other parties is an abuse of the consensual nature of Westminster Hall.
Of course, there are problems with the NHS in Somerset that are mirrored throughout the country. The hon. Member for Somerton and Frome and the hon. Member for Weston-super-Mare (Mr. Cotter) drew attention to some of those problems. I, too, asked the Library for help in preparing for the debate; the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome gave too favourable an impression, if the hard evidence is to be believed. He referred specifically to cardiology and ordinary admissions; according to information from the Library, the position for patients waiting for treatment in Somerset health authority has deteriorated in the past three years.
Three years ago, six patients had waited up to 11 months for cardiology, but now eight patients have waited up to 17 months. I am not sure where the hon. Gentleman found the information that there had been improvement in cardiology. According to the hon. Member for Weston-super-Mare, the position in paediatrics has deteriorated, and double the number of patients in that discipline are waiting for admission.
The debate could usefully be used to highlight some serious problems. I want to articulate a concern that was brought to my attention about the need for a radiotherapy unit in Somerset. Perhaps we shall hear an announcement from the Minister this morning on that point. A local charity called Sure has campaigned long and hard for a radiotherapy unit that would help patients who sometimes have to embark on a 100-mile round trip to Bristol for treatment. The unit is long overdue.
There are specific omissions from the presentation of the state of the NHS in Somerset. There is a substantial problem with bed blocking. The root cause of that problem is that the Liberal Democrat-controlled council has made no extra financial provision for care in residential homes. If we are to take a view in the round of the NHS in Somerset, we should look at that. I acknowledge that there is £25.4 million extra funding this year, but local NHS executives are quick to point out that replacing wartime buildings is extremely difficult to balance with waiting list initiatives within the financial package. So while there is extra money, there are serious concerns about whether there is enough.
I do not want to take more time than I have to, because this is very properly a debate about Somerset health authority and hon. Members wish to hear from the Minister on the matter. I felt, however, that I should clarify some of the damaging material that was sent out in the survey. It is in no small part a political stunt. There will be obvious publicity from it and I should like to make it clear that it falsifies the Conservative health policy. The problems of the NHS in Somerset are part of the wider problems with which we, as Members of Parliament, are all too familiar.

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The Prime Minister has fired the starting gun for the general election following "Breakfast with Frost". We are here to debate the results of a survey that is designed to harm the chances of the candidates of another party. We need to be mindful of what is going on here. In my view this is simply not on. The Government will have to answer for their failure to deliver on the high expectations that they raised of improving the NHS in this country. The Liberal Democrats will be exposed at the general election for their lack of realism about how to tackle the problems of the NHS, as they have no idea how to raise the kind of money that would be required to meet the complete desiderata of their health policy. I am sorry to speak in a harsh tone, but the survey is extremely damaging. It is being produced nationwide and it is important that Parliament should know what it contains.
11.17 am
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Ms Gisela Stuart): I should like to return to the consensual atmosphere of Westminster Hall and to congratulate the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) on securing this important debate. Surveys that show great satisfaction levels are equally valuable as those that show up deficiencies. I was delighted that he put on record the fact that he feels that Somerset is well served by its GPs. They received a high satisfaction rate. He also highlighted some of the areas where further improvement is needed. We readily recognise that. Historically, in common with much of the NHS across England, the health service in Somerset has had its problems.
At this point I should like to mention briefly the contribution of the hon. Member for Weston-superMare (Mr. Cotter). He raised a number of specific issues: epilepsy, mental health, paediatric services and speech and language therapy. I can assure him that health authorities and regional offices read Hansard carefully, so his concerns will have considerable distribution. I will take note of his comments and I shall answer his specific questions in writing.
We have already addressed some of the problems experienced by patients in Somerset and I shall describe how we intend to make progress. We have to deal with the legacy of decades of chronic under-investment in the NHS that left it with too few beds, too few doctors and too few nurses. In addition, services were delivered to patients using systems that were rooted in the past. We are committed to the modernisation of the NHS. Our NHS plan sets out a clear programme for investment and reform, because the two must go together. We must have a health service that is designed around the needs of patients. We are backing that plan with money. In last year's Budget, the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced the largest ever sustained increase in NHS funding. I was delighted that the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome recognised that a long-term, sustainable investment is important—not just a large, lump sum investment. I was also delighted that I did not have to refer to boom and bust—a cycle that does not serve anyone. We have committed ourselves to consistent and continuous increase through the new strategy.
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Somerset health authority has received an initial allocation of around £318 million, which represents a cash increase of 8.7 per cent. and a real terms increase of 6.1 per cent. Importantly, the authority also received more than £3.5 million in special allocations targeted at areas of need, such as the expansion of critical care services, assisting the prevention of delayed discharges, the flu vaccination programme and improving ambulance response times.
The hon. Gentleman raised the issue of the performance of the ambulance service. That service has received an additional £1.5 million to help it reach the new national standards. I am fully aware of the problems experienced by the service, particularly in Somerset and in areas where the geography makes it difficult to fulfil the targets. There have been improvements, but I am the first to acknowledge that considerable improvement still needs to be made. The NHS provides paramedics for ambulances, so it is not the case that we do not fund them at all. The evidence on how helpful air ambulances are is mixed. They often arrive at a scene first so they play a vital part, but the case to prioritise them has not been fully made.
I should like to say more about the two trusts in Somerset because they have also considerably expanded their service. In Yeovil, the East Somerset trust has created an extra 21 beds together with admissions and discharge lounges—an expansion of capacity and of delivery of service—while £360,000 has been used to set up rapid access chest pain clinics with the appointment of a second cardiologist and his team. The Taunton and Somerset NHS trust last year saw the opening of a fifth general operating theatre and a third orthopaedic theatre. Funding for a third ophthalmic theatre was announced in December. However, as the hon. Member recognised, the major constraint on the NHS is no longer shortage of money but shortage of staff.
We need more nurses in the NHS, so we have expanded the number of training places to get more people into the profession. There are 16,000 more nurses working in the NHS than in 1997. The hon. Gentleman is right to point out that not all those nurses work full time. In order to expand capacity, particularly in areas of relatively high employment, it is important that people can come back to the profession after career breaks and fit that in with their domestic patterns. The fact that some of those new nurses do not work full time does not diminish the significance of that increase. It is a question not just of getting new people but of getting people to stay. Retention has been a problem but it is now being addressed. In Somerset the number of nurses working in hospital and community health services increased by 92—an increase of almost 5 per cent.—between September 1997 and September 1999. Over the same period an additional 34 hospital and community health doctors were appointed—an increase of 8.7 per cent. There has also been an increase in the number of GPs.
The hon. Gentleman also mentioned dentistry. Between December 1998 and June this year, the number of dentists providing general dental services in Somerset increased by just over 5 per cent. I was delighted to hear that. Somerset must he one of the few parts of the country where people queue to register with a dentist. I remember once being told that dentistry is the one

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area that no one wants to think about, not because dentists are not terribly delightful people but because of what they do to us.
In Somerset, more than £200,000 has been invested in eight dentistry schemes, which have generated more than 18,000 new registrations. There was clearly a need and we hope to meet it. I understand that discussions are taking place about a dental access centre in Somerset. It has been agreed in principle, but further local negotiations are taking place.
Experienced Filipino nurses who have worked at British and American hospitals in the United Arab Emirates have been recruited, 17 of whom will start work this month at Taunton and Somerset NHS trust. A further 20 will start at East Somerset NHS trust in early February. As a result of the recruitment drive at Taunton and Somerset NHS trust, the number of nursing vacancies has been reduced from 120 in October last year to 56 today. More progress needs to be made, but it is important to note that sustainable progress is being made.
In addition to recruitment, both trusts have made special efforts to improve their levels of nurse retention. They have introduced a range of family-friendly working practices such as new flexible working patterns, term-time contracts and job sharing. East Somerset NHS trust has doubled the size of its staff creche to 40 places, and both trusts are increasing training and career development opportunities for their nursing staff. NHS staff, not only doctors and nurses but all the supporting staff, are our biggest asset. Those trusts have succeeded in reducing staff turnover from some 13 per cent. in 1999–2000 to a projected 8.8 per cent. this year. Again, that is progress.
The NHS plan calls for more consultants, GPs, therapists and other health professionals. We have made announcements about the creation of 1,100 extra medical school places, and under the plan there will be a further increase of up to 1,000 in the number of places. Similarly, the number of nurses and midwives undergoing training has been increased by 6,000 compared with four years ago. By 2004, an additional 5,500 nurses, midwives and health visitors will be trained each year compared with today. That will benefit the whole country, including Somerset.
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From the patient's perspective, the single biggest problem is still the wait to see a consultant or to have a subsequent operation. We inherited huge waiting lists, but it must be recognised that progress is being made on both those areas. Waiting lists must be seen in the context of increased activity. In Somerset, the number of patients waiting for in-patient and day-care treatment peaked in September 1998 at nearly 13,000. It has now been reduced by nearly 14 per cent. With all those improvements, Somerset health community is on course to deliver its challenging waiting list targets for this year. The number of patients who had to wait more than 12 months for treatment was 434 on 1 April last year, and the health authority intends to reduce that figure to 25 by 31 March this year. It is right to say that the maximum wait of 18 months is too long, which is why the NHS plan is committed to reducing that to six months by 2005. The maximum wait for an initial outpatient appointment will be reduced to three months. Improvements are being made gradually.
There have been some good initiatives, such as the joint commissioning by the health authority and Somerset county council of mental health services, and the formation of the Somerset Partnership Social Care and NHS trust, which brings together social services and the mental health NHS in a single provider. We very much welcome such co-operation between health and social services.
I have visited one of the Beacon projects in Bridgwater and opened an A & E department at Yeovil hospital. I have seen many improvements, but it is important to realise that sustainable improvements have been made and that that process will continue. The NHS and Somerset county council have been working closely to minimise delayed discharges, and winter planning has been robust. Most importantly, a solid foundation for the modernisation of the NHS in Somerset has been laid. I echo the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome, who said that his constituents value the NHS enormously and recognise its achievements. The Government's commitment to a tax-funded NHS for everyone, not one backed by private provisions, will be welcomed by his constituents and people throughout the country.

British Indian Ocean Territory
11.30 am
Mr. Tam Dalyell: It can hardly be often that parliamentary longevity allows even so ancient a Member of the House of Commons as I have become to revisit events in which he was deeply and personally involved more than three decades ago. Of course, much of what seemed unsatisfactory—I use a gentle word—to us then has been significantly illuminated by the lifting of the 30-year rule. If I delve into the past, I do so because the past is centrally pertinent to the present. I am referring particularly to Britain's obligations to the Ilois in the light of what occurred in the 1960s and early 1970s, and how we make up for turfing those unfortunate people out of their homeland.
If I may be personal, the story started in Leeds, the city of the Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds, West (Mr. Battle). He may remember Dick Knowles, the Labour party agent, who later became the leader of the Labour group in Birmingham and much else. On a celebrated occasion, he invited me to take part in an educational conference in Leeds. I accepted willingly, not thinking that it was necessary to obtain the permission of the then Yorkshire regional organiser of the Labour party, the formidable John Anson. When John Anson discovered that I had turned up in Leeds without his permission, there was great trouble, which was taken as far as the national agent, Dame Sarah Barker, and the party's general secretary, Len Williams.
Len Williams became my friend in this matter and was subsequently made the Governor of Mauritius—not on account of my activities I hasten to add. After an Inter-Parliamentary Union visit to Japan and Indonesia on which I was lucky enough to go, I came back by Mauritius and stayed with him. He was a formidable figure at that time, plumes and all. His wife Margaret, Lady Williams, a sensitive and extremely nice lady, was interested in what had happened to the Ibis and took me to see some of them. That lasting impression, from more than 30 years ago, made me concerned about their cause.
I should like to go over a letter, of which the Foreign Office has a copy. It is dated 13 November 1970, from the Pacific and Indian Ocean Department to Sir Bruce Greatbatch, Government House, Port Victoria, Seychelles, and is signed by Eleanor Emery. I hasten to add that I am not in any way persecuting those who became distinguished civil servants. Eleanor Emery became an ambassador in southern Africa.
I rang Eleanor Emery in Cambridge after the article by Matthew Parris appeared in The Times to say that I was raising the matter. I also asked the Foreign Office to contact her, which it has done. She said in her letter:
As you will have gathered from Washington Tel. No. 3229 to the F.C.O from the "Times Diary" of 9 November, and from the two P.Q.s in our telegram B.I.O.T. 22 of 10 November, there has recently been a revival of public interest in the British Indian Ocean territory.
The two questions in our telegram received written answers as follows—
I had asked those written questions—
Mr. Maudling: I have been asked to reply.
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The details of my right hon. Friend's exchanges with President Nixon are confidential.
Reggie Maudling is long since dead, but I was friendly with him and he expressed concern about the issue, although there is no pertinent reference to it in his memoirs. The second parliamentary question that she referred to was answered by Lord Balniel, then Minister of State for Defence who said:
None. The British Indian Ocean territory remains available for the construction of defence facilities by the British and United States Governments under the Agreement signed with the United States Government in 1966 (Command 3231).—[Official Report, 12 November 1970; Vol. 806, 239–55.]
I talked to Lord Balniel, now the 29th Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, and gave his ex-directory number to the Foreign Office. It would be proper for the Foreign Office to reveal what he said, unless it was a private conversation. The conversation that he and I had was in my view private, apart from his expression of great unease in relation to the recent court case. Will the Minister comment on that?
Eleanor Emery's letter went on:
Mr Dalyell is not, however, giving up. He has tabled a further series of questions for the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State. On Monday 16 November he is to ask what discussions the Secretary of State has had with the Government of Madagascar on British/United States bases or staging posts in the Indian Ocean.
The Minister will understand very well that to get a question on the Order Paper one has often to use devices such as asking about the Government of Madagascar. That is why I shall ask the present Prime Minister a substantial oral question, which appears on the Order Paper as No. 6 for Wednesday 17 January, requesting pertinent discussions with the Government of the Seychelles.
The letter continued:
The following day he is to ask the Prime Minister if he will discuss with Mrs. Gandhi the development of British/United States bases, staging posts in the Indian Ocean. On 1 December he is to ask the Prime Minister if he will make an official visit to Diego Garcia and, two days later, he will also ask whether the Prime Minister will make an official visit to Aldabra Atoll.
I had again asked that question to get the subject on the Order Paper—if the Prime Minister had made an official visit to Aldabra atoll at that time he would have been away and cut off from British Government for at least a month. Eleanor Emery went on:
We shall continue to try to say as little as possible (particularly until the Congressional hearings are concluded, probably around mid-December at the latest) to avoid embarrassing the United States administration.
That is the nub of the matter. Miss Emery continued:
Apart from our overall strategic and defence interests we are also concerned at present not to have to elaborate on the administrative implications for the present population on Diego Garcia of establishment of any base there. We would not wish it to become general knowledge that some of the inhabitants have lived on Diego Garcia for at least two generations and could, therefore, be regarded as "belongers". We shall therefore advise Ministers in handling supplementary questions about whether Diego Garcia is inhabited to say that there is only a small number of contract labourers from the Seychelles and Mauritius engaged to work on the copra plantations on the Island.
That is being economical with the truth.
The letter continued:

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Should a Member ask about what would happen to these contract labourers in the event of a base being set up on the Island, we hope that, for the present, this can be brushed aside as a hypothetical question at least until any decision to go ahead with the Diego Garcia facility becomes public.
One of my objections is that the questions were indeed brushed aside. Since then the papers have become available from the court case.
Before I say anything else, it is legitimate to ask—as Matthew Parris asked in Saturday's article in The Times that has been studied in the Foreign Office—for at least an explanation from Eleanor Emery and others as to why they did that. If a case can be made for their actions, it is up to the Minister and the Foreign Office to tell us why they did what they did. I suspect that it was about the Anglo-American relationship.
I now turn to the confidential document of 26 July 1968 that was released to the court, signed by Michael Stewart. I should explain that I knew the late Michael Stewart very well. I was his deputy on the first Labour delegation to the indirectly elected European Parliament at Strasbourg. I was asked to write his obituary for The Independent, and later I was asked to write 800 well-sculpted words for the "Dictionary of National Biography". When one is Oven a viva voce on a person by those in charge of the DNB, it means that one knows that person fairly well.
Michael Stewart's document said on page 6:
Resettlement will involve some small expenses but it is not expected that there will be any financial difficulty in this. When the arrangements are complete, and they may be complicated by a recently completed survey which found that 128 individuals (about 34 per cent. of the total population of 389) are now second generation inhabitants of Diego Garcia, we would propose, as agreed at the time of the creation of the British Indian Ocean Territory, to deny, if necessary, the competence of the United Nations to concern itself with a territory which has no indigenous population.
That is just not the case. By any stretch of the English language, there was an indigenous population, and the Foreign Office knew it. I suspect that that is why, on a Strasbourg night, Michael Stewart apologised for the actions taken over the British Indian Ocean Territory.
I also suspect that that is why Harold Wilson, to whom I used to gossip a lot when he was Prime Minister and afterwards, came as near to making an apology as he ever did on anything. I am a great admirer of Wilson, but he was a great self-justifier, and on this issue there was a good deal of embarrassment. Edward Heath ought to feel some embarrassment because on 8 December 1970, oral question No. 6 was:
Mr. Dalyell asked the Prime Minister if he will pay an official visit to the Chagos archipelago in the Indian Ocean.
Mr. Heath said:
I have no plans to do so.
I said:
Are we building a £120 million base in the archipelago?—[Official Report, 8 December 1970; Vol. 808, c. 245.]
There was a curt reply, which was followed up by Frank Allaun and Sir Frederick Bennett for the Conservatives. The issue had been drawn to the Prime Minister's attention. Surely Parliament has some right in thinking that when these matters are dealt with at the highest level some attention will be paid to the truth.
On 16 December 1970, on a point of order—Selwyn Lloyd let me go on and on—I raised the issue and did so repeatedly until an Adjournment debate was held. The
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Minister will be thankful that this debate is not taking place at 3.58 am, as the previous one did on 20 March 1974. The unfortunate late Joan Lestor had to answer it. The issue was brought to the House's attention, not least by a young MP on 25 November 1975, who was deeply interested in these matters:
Mr. Robin F. Cook asked the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs if he will list all the islands in the British Indian Ocean Territories—[Official Report, 25 November 1975; Vol. 901, c. 119.]
Pertinent questions were asked on 13 October 1975, at columns 637 and 558, and so it goes on.
The point of this debate is to establish that there is a moral obligation. In a letter from Sheridans, the solicitors in the court case, Richard Gifford states:
Matthew Parris ("You are never too old to face your lies") rightly highlights the boldness with which Parliament and the United Nations were lied to, before removal of the entire population of islanders. He is astonished that the official was so relaxed about telling her colleagues in the civil service that there was no permanent population. The reason is simple. She was in fact acting under orders originating at the very highest level.
I am afraid that that is the nub of the problem, and indeed the Foreign Office have a copy of the Sheridans letters.
The purpose of this debate is to ask what help can be given to the islanders and perhaps to the Chagos social committee. A feeling is abroad that the islanders should be returned to the place from which they came. To put it bluntly, I think that may be unrealistic. A friend of mine of all those years ago was then a young Ph.D. at Cambridge, and subsequently became professor of geography at that university. Twenty years ago he took up a chair at Berkeley in California because of the facilities that he was offered. He is David Stoddart, an excellent man. I believe that the Minister's officials have been in touch with him. His judgment—and I ought to record that it may differ from that of the lawyers acting on behalf of the llois—is that it would be unrealistic to return people to that part of the archipelago if they are to depend on copra and salt fish. I should like to know whether the Foreign Office hold the view put forward by the lawyers or the view put forward by David Stoddart.
The purpose of raising the matter in this quiet moment of the Chamber's proceedings is to ask what can and should be done. Our country has a moral obligation to do something. I look forward to hearing the contributions of my hon. Friend the Member for Islington, North (Mr. Corbyn) and the hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan), and to the Minister's reply.
11.50 am
Mr. Jeremy Corbyn: It would be remiss of anyone speaking after my hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell) not to pay an enormous tribute to him, both for his incredible memory and for his persistence in sticking with this issue for such a long time. Not many hon. Members are in Parliament long enough to see the 30-year rule come round full circle and be able to tell exactly what is going on. His description of the people of the now British Indian Ocean Territory islands under successive British Governments shows how even-handed my hon. Friend's criticisms are. He takes no prisoners, having despatched three Prime Ministers in the first five minutes of his

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speech. There could be no nicer intellectual jailer than my hon. Friend, to whom we owe an enormous debt for what he has achieved.
We are dealing with a most appalling process of history. The treatment of the people of Diego Garcia and other islands would have done credit to Palmerston or any other 19th-century British Foreign Secretary. An entire population was dismissed in a few lines: the people are dispensable; they will be sent somewhere else; we will take over the islands because we have done a deal with the United States to allow them to develop a naval and airbase there. A frisson goes down my back when I recall the high-level bombing of Iraq, with planes taking off from Diego Garcia to rain down high explosives on that country. We should also remember the shameful way in which these people were treated in the 1960s and the cavalier attitude of Britain and the United States. As a cold war gesture and, I suspect, as a quid pro quo for Britain withdrawing from Suez, Diego Garcia was offered as a base.
At the very least, we should now be offering the peoples of these islands an enormous apology and congratulating Olivier Bancoult and others who campaigned steadfastly for so long. It is disappointing that the right to return to the islands was won through legal action in the British courts, rather than through a political decision taken by the incoming Labour Government in 1997 to put right the wrong done historically. I deeply regret that.
Mr. Dalyell: It is not only the present Government: what about all previous Governments of both political parties? Lord Crawford told me that he never saw the previous Administration's papers and I am sure that the incoming Government of 1974 never saw the crucial papers of the Heath Government of 1970–74. That is a serious matter. I understand why incoming Governments are not supposed to see their predecessor's papers—it is because political capital could be made from them. However, it is surely sensible, in certain matters, for Foreign Office officials to draw attention to what happened in the previous half decade.
Mr. Corbyn: My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Greater transparency of paperwork between successive Governments is important, although I am not sure how to achieve it. This country may be too bound by the 30-year rule. What happened to the people of those islands was hardly a secret. Minority rights groups reports have been prepared and statements have been made by the Mauritius Government and by people who have lived in squalid conditions in Mauritius for a long time. It has just been convenient to ignore what went on. Today, my hon. Friend the Minister has an opportunity to explain what process the British Government intend to follow.
Following my disappointment at the failure of the present and previous Governments to take a political decision to right this wrong, I have again been disappointed by the churlish attitude that has been taken even since the High Court decision. In The Guardian of 13 December it was reported that
The foreign secretary…initially tried to block the islanders' return but caved in after last month's court setback. His office has accepted that it will have to pay the costs of resettling the islanders,
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but it will fight any claims for compensation, arguing that it will have done enough if it meets the costs of making the islands habitable again.
It is not possible to compensate financially for the humiliation of taking people away from their ancestral home to an island a long distance away and telling them, "That's your lot. You will have to make the best of things in Mauritius, instead of being allowed to return." I should hope, at the very least, for a more open approach.
I want to make a few quick basic points to leave my hon. Friend the Minister and the Opposition Front-Bench spokesperson time to say a few words on the matter. First, I reiterate that there is a right of return to the archipelago as a whole. What discussions are taking place with the United States about the right of return, and access, to Diego Garcia itself, from where most of the people were originally taken? Secondly, I hope that The Guardian is wrong and that the Government are prepared to settle a compensation claim rather than just to pay the costs of returning the people concerned to the islands.
Thirdly, I hope that development aid will be provided urgently. Clearly, it will not be possible just to return, without the construction of a landing jetty, housing and, crucially, a method of obtaining fresh water supplies. An airstrip will be needed too. There will also be a need for an impact assessment covering the effect of that development on the island's ecology and a study of what gainful employment could be provided there.
Fourthly, as I am sure that my hon. Friend will be well aware, an assessment is needed of the environmental damage already done to the area in more than 40 years of military activity. That should cover water and land pollution among other things.
Fifthly, during discussions about the court case, the Foreign Office intimated that it believed that the military treaty that was signed in 1966 to allow the construction of the US base on Diego Garcia took precedence over everything else that arose in the discussions. We need to know exactly what status is accorded to that treaty. I support my hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow in his comment that there was something more than a little illegal, and certainly outwith the United Nations charter and principles, in the signing by Britain and the United States of a treaty that denied people in a third country the right to remain and live there.
Finally, the issue arises that, during negotiations on independence for Mauritius, after the principle had been agreed, the British Government announced that what is now the British Indian Ocean Territory could not be part of Mauritius. As I understand matters, the Mauritius Government are now preparing a claim that the islands should be restored to the sovereignty of Mauritius, and that complicates both the original independence legislation passed in the British Parliament and the elation ship between Britain and the United States with respect to the treaty. I hope that the Government will adopt an open approach, give a full, open and frank apology to the people who have been so wrongly treated and act with all speed to try to repair the hurt and damage done. However, if there is a period of bureaucratic procrastination and an unhelpful approach, that hurt and damage will be compounded by the fact that, having won a case in open court, on which

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I congratulate the islanders, it will become a sour process of history in the years to come. I hope that the Minister will give us some hope in that respect.
12 noon
Mrs. Cheryl Gillan: Some events cover politicians and civil servants with glory, but the recent release of documents surrounding the events in the British Indian Ocean Territory will not be numbered among them when the history books are written.
The hon. Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell) made a valuable contribution. The article by Matthew Parris was referred to by both previous speakers and much quoted. The opening line
Cool facts can bear more eloquent witness than yards of overheated commentary
certainly applies to the case that has been presented so consistently in the past 30-odd years by the hon. Gentleman. His unfailing instinct for something wrong or fishy has finally led us to the Chamber today. I shall not take up too much time in the debate as, like the hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for Islington, North (Mr. Corbyn), I want to hear what the Minister has to say on the subject.
The removal of the Ilois was an act of barbarism; they were spread into the Seychelles and Mauritius. People who went overseas for medical treatment found that they could not get home because there was no transport. It was a barbarous act by anyone's standards. I have been to Mauritius. One could not hope to go to a more pleasant island, or meet a more peasant people. The island is doing fairly well economically; it has political stability and a good growth rate. It is a great place to live, but the Bois have never fitted in or prospered there. Only a small percentage of them have made a life outside their poor and impoverished community within Mauritius.
The Ilois have not fared well, but at least their 30-year struggle was rewarded by the latest court ruling. I am pleased that the Government do not intend to oppose that ruling. The past will have to be considered carefully, but I am anxious about the future. I want to reinforce some of the questions asked by the hon. Members for Linlithgow and for Islington, North and add a few of my own for the Minister to field. I hope that he will consider the matter to be significant and of such importance that, if he cannot answer the questions in detail on his hind legs today, either for lack of information or lack of time, he will have the courtesy to answer all the questions in detail, in writing to the hon. Member for Linlithgow and to me.
The possibility of return has been raised and, as we know, the leadership of Olivier Bancoult of the Chagos refugee group has led to that state of affairs. As the hon. Gentleman said, however, what is the real possibility of any of the islanders returning to the outlying islands? It is obvious that they will not return to Diego Garcia. What evaluation has been carried out of the numbers of Ilois who wish to return and what are their views? What type of compensation are they seeking? Do they want their situation to be improved in situ, or elsewhere in the world, or are they requesting infrastructure, buildings, and support to return to the outlying islands? How realistic is it to expect fishing and coconut farming to
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support a population there? Is it not pie in the sky to think that tourism, in the immediate future, could be an income earner for a returning population?
Back in November, the Minister said that he was carrying out a feasibility study and that it was too early to say when it would be ready but that it would not be less than a year. Well, perhaps after 30 years a year is not a long time, but it is a study not of the former Soviet Union but of a small archipelago. What can possibly take more than a year and who is carrying out the study? What are the terms of reference? Who is paying for it? How much is the contract worth? Is there any way in which the contract can be speeded up and more emphasis put into it?
Mr. Bancoult is reported to have applied for £500,000 of British and EU development funds for building up the refugee group. What is the status of the application? Where has it got to? What is the reaction within the European Union and indeed within Government to any application that might have been made or may be forthcoming? The hon. Member for Islington, North touched on the subject of sovereignty. Mauritius believes that it has a right to this group of islands. What discussions has the Minister had with the Government of Mauritius? What assessment has been made in the Foreign Office of any likelihood of success of a claim of sovereignty over the islands?
We have a special relationship with the US and long may it continue. I understand that Madeleine Albright visited Mauritius last month. Has the Foreign Office spoken to the US Secretary of State about her discussions with Mauritius? Has the Foreign Office ascertained the US position? Have the Government spoken to the US Government since the court ruling? The US letter of 21 June to the Foreign Office said:
A resident population … could well imperil Diego Garcia's present advantage as a base.
Is that still the position? Are the US Government still against any return to any of the outlying islands?
The lease on Diego Garcia expires in 2016, which is not so long ahead in terms of the 30 years that we are covering in this debate. What intentions do the Government have for the base in 2016 and for the renegotiations with the Americans as to whether they wish to use it? What security implications would result from the decommissioning or abandonment of that base? If that were the case, what studies have been done into the clean-up and reinstatement that would be necessary to enable regular habitation of the island?
The Ilois have been compensated. I believe that £650,000 was paid in the initial stages and then there was a trust fund of £4 million. I understand from the answers in Hansard that no assessment had been made on the distribution of that £4 million as of last month. What further assessment has now been made of the distribution of those compensation funds? To whom did they go? How were they passed out? What did they achieve? I understand that there are further legal actions, potentially in the United States and in the UK. Could the Minister update us on that?
The past is not covered in glory. Some amends have been made but there is an awful lot more work to be done. Justice Laws said that he was pleased with the openness of the Foreign Office. Like the hon. Member for Islington, North, I hope that that openness will be

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continued by the Minister today. What does the future hold for the Ilois and what are the Government's plans to put right a great wrong?
12.8 pm
The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Mr. John Battle): I have listened attentively to the debate. The contribution of my hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell) was as usual outstanding. He has spoken about and followed these issues for over 30 years. It is rare that an hon. Member can read the papers which include his contribution to the issue when they are released 30 years later. It is typical of his usual—and, I am tempted to say, unusual—exemplary diligence as a Member of Parliament that when he raised these matters back in the 1970s he said:
I believe that to go ahead with this project would sow the seeds of trouble for some years to come—[Official Report, 20 March 1974; Vol. 870, c. 1267.]
That was very prescient.
When my hon. Friend spoke about the roots of his interest going back to meetings in Leeds—I have to say, courteously, that that was slightly before my time—he quoted a phrase that was used of him: "Mr Dalyell is not … giving up." He is known for sticking at things and for sticking at them in detail, with a patience and courteous tenacity that embodies the best practice for Members of Parliament in our parliamentary democracy. I thank him for his presentation of the subject, which has provided the opportunity for another contribution to the continuing debate and pressure for action. The process cannot rest here: this debate is another step along a road that my hon. Friend has followed diligently.
My hon. Friend the Member for Islington, North (Mr. Corbyn) also has a great and commendable record of championing and campaigning for international justice, and for speaking up for neglected and oppressed minorities.
In preparing for the debate, I had a conversation with my hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale, East (Mr. Goggins), who recommended that over the next few days I should read a book by Philip Gourevich called "Stories from Rwanda", in which the author says that power is the ability to make others inhabit our story of reality. That ability to get people to live in one's own version of the truth rather than theirs, or on one's own terms rather than theirs, is relevant to the history of this debate.
My hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow has spoken about the British Indian Ocean Territory for more than 30 years, and few Members of Parliament have his knowledge of, or long experience of campaigning for, that remote overseas territory in the middle of the Indian ocean. Much has been said and written over the past three decades about the history of the creation of the British Indian Ocean Territory, some of which has been accurate and some of which has been fanciful. We have inherited an historical legacy. My hon. Friend the Member for Islington, North referred to the "appalling process of history", which allows other people wrongly to be written out of the script. History has brought us to where we are, and we have to deal with the situation in which we find ourselves.
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Although I do not intend to go over all the historical ground in detail, I should like to make a couple of points in that context. I assure hon. Members that neither I nor the Government seek in any way to justify the past actions of successive Governments. As my hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow regularly points out in his even-handed way, both Labour and Conservative-led Administrations have, since the mid-1960s, played a part in the formative years of the creation and development of the British Indian Ocean Territory. In November, in the aftermath of the High Court action that was brought by one of the Ilois, my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary said:
The Government has not defended what was done or said thirty years ago … We made no attempt to conceal the gravity of what happened.
I hope that that will act as the context for the continuing debate and campaign.
Mr. Dalyell: Will the Foreign Office contact Eleanor Emery—who is now 82 and with whom I had a nice conversation—to find out what she has to say about the matter? Matthew Parris's question must be answered. There are many others from whom it may have been more to the point to ask for explanations, such as some permanent secretaries at the Foreign Office, and our distinguished Labour colleague, the late Sir Tommy Brimelow. I am curious to know what was said and whether an attempt was made to find out about Miss Emery's version of the story.
Mr. Battle: The straightforward answer is that the Foreign Office has contacted both Eleanor Emery and Mr. Stoddart, to whom my hon. Friend also referred. The unpacking of the past, if I might put it in those terms, continues as we try to unravel what happened.
With regard to the islands' economic potential and survival, there had been a relatively short period of economic activity before the British Indian Ocean Territory was created from the islands of the Chagos archipelago and other islands that were subsequently transferred to the Seychelles. In fact, the islands depended entirely on the production of a single crop: copra. By the mid-1960s, the industry was in decline and the islands' population was falling. It was a low-wage, not a prosperous, community, based on plantation agriculture. Standards of living were supported by subsistence fishing and the keeping of poultry and other small stock in back yards. As a letter published in The Times on 20 December pointed out,
the Chagos islands were not paradise in the past.
Although that does not justify the situation, it does provide a little context.
Nor should we forget the geo-politics of the time.
Mr. Dalyell: Ah, yes.
Mr. Battle: The cold war was all too real, and the Russian navy was a significant presence in the Indian ocean. We had retained sovereignty since 1814, and our American military alilies had resources. It should be pointed out that it was agreed that some land should be made available to meet strategic interests. That was the truth of the geo-politics of the time.

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Why and how the decision was taken to establish the American naval facility on Diego Garcia, which is the largest atoll in the archipelago, has been debated in this House, in the courts and in public. Our Government have done more than any other at least to illuminate those questions, rather than run from them. We have trawled the files and papers of the period and made them available for scrutiny. We have not tried to cover up matters that reflect badly on Governments or officials of the day. We have not shirked from putting in the public domain correspondence that I am to tempted to label racist in tone. As was said, that correspondence shows a certain economy with the truth. Indeed, I can do no better than to quote Lord Justice Law's judgment in the High Court action brought by an Ilois, Mr Bancoult, in November last year. Lord Justice Laws said:
I wish to commend the wholly admirable conduct of the relevant government servants and Counsel instructed for the respondents who have examined and then disclosed without cavil or argument all the material documents contained in the files of government departments, some of which (as will be obvious from the narrative I have given) are embarrassing and worse. This has exemplified a high tradition of cooperation between the executive and judiciary in the doing of justice and upholding the rule of law.
That is a view with which Mr Justice Gibbs has associated himself, and I am sure my hon. Friend would agree that it suggests that the current attitude differs somewhat from that of the past
Mr. Dalyell: That is true.
Mr. Battle: The Government lost the case in the divisional court. However, we should note that the case concerned the validity of the territory's immigration law, not the rights or wrongs of the way in which the Ilois were removed from Diego Garcia and the outer islands of the archipelago. Although we were given leave to appeal against the judgment, we decided not to do so. We took that decision not because we accepted that our legal case was unsustainable, but because the Government had no wish to continue to contest the claim of the Ilois to return to parts of the Chagos archipelago where such a return might be feasible.
An analogous case arose during my time at the Department of Trade and Industry On behalf of mine workers, a case was brought, and won, against the previous Government in respect of compensation claims. This Government could have appealed against the decision, but we did not do so because we took the view that the mine workers should get that compensation.
I hope that we have provided tangible proof that our Government are taking an approach that differs from that of their predecessors. It differs because of the respect that we give to the human rights of peoples everywhere—at home and abroad. If we had to face the problems that Governments of the late 1960s dealt with in respect of the Chagos archipelago, we might handle them very differently, not least because of the diligence and campaigning work of Members of Parliament.
My hon. Friend referred to the correspondence with Miss Emery, and much has been made in the press and in the House of a few of the hundreds of letters that go back to the 1970s that we disclosed to the courts. He made clear his own reaction to that correspondence—it was a mixture of concern about people being deceived
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and aggrieved and distaste at what he described as cynical lying by the Government of the day. I hope that we can now conduct public affairs in a way that does not attract such epithets.
We are mindful of the treaty obligations, which my hon. Friend the Member for Islington, North questioned and asked us to re-examine. I want to assure hon. Members that, as the courts have recognised, the Government have administered the affairs of the British Indian Ocean Territory in as honest, open and transparent a manner as they can, and they will continue do so.
Mr. Corbyn: That is an important point. I imagine that the Minister will confirm that there is a treaty obligation between Britain and the United States concerning Diego Garcia. There is an agreement on independence between Britain and Mauritius that specifically excluded the Chagos islands from the Mauritian independence arrangements. There is now a court decision that the Government have said they will no longer contest, which gives the islanders a right of return to the islands. Which has priority: the deal with the United States military or the case of the Chagos islanders to return to all the islands of the archipelago?
Mr. Battle: That question was raised previously. I shall come to the relationship with the United States on the treaty, and if my hon. Friend is not happy with my explanation, he can question me again and I will try to respond more fully. We confirm that the islands will be ceded to Mauritius when they are no longer required for defence purposes, subject to the requirements of international law. That is our long-term vision, but although we have differences with the Government of Mauritius over the sovereignty of the islands—which are not affecting our relationship with Commonwealth colleagues in Mauritius—there is a context in which we can work for the future. It is complex and not easy, but my hon. Friend rightly points to the legacy of the past. Because of the treaty being in the way, Diego Garcia has been exempted from the conditions, and perhaps that does not reflect the injustice of the original decisions.
The chief treaty obligations that are of relevance to the future of the islands and the interests of some of the Ilois in returning to them are those related to the use of the territory for strategic defence purposes. That is at the core of the point made by my hon. Friend. We are committed to allowing our American allies to develop and use facilities on Diego Garcia. Their value was referred to in the High Court action. Lord Justice Laws said:
There is no doubt but that the defence facility which the base provides is of the highest importance. In a letter of 21 June from the US State Department, it is described as an "all but indispensable platform" for the fulfilment of defence and security responsibilities in the Arabian Gulf, the Middle East, South Asia and East Africa.
Mr. Dalyell: I do not seek an instant reply, because that would be silly, but before I ask the question of the Prime Minister on 17 January, could the Government reflect on the request that Sheridans have made, that there be a joint tribunal between the Americans and ourselves on the question of compensation?
Mr. Battle: I take note of my hon. Friend's request. He courteously always gives notice to allow

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Government and officials to anticipate his questions and to work out a considered, reflective reply. We shall work with him to ensure that he can tailor his question to the Prime Minister so as to obtain the details that we can helpfully make available. I am more than happy to work with him on that basis.
I want to say a few words about compensation in general. We have relaxed immigration controls on the entry of members of the Ilois community who want to return to the territory. They are free to return to it without the need for an entry permit, unless they want to go to Diego Garcia. Control of entry to that island is a treaty obligation and is necessary for security and safety reasons. However, there is no reason why the Ilois cannot seek employment with any of the employers of civilian labour on the island of Diego Garcia.
Mrs. Gillan: Has the United States agreed that the islanders may return to any of the outlying islands? The letter of 21 June stated that that could imperil the base's status. Has that now changed?
Mr. Battle: I stand to be corrected, but I am clear in my mind that the answer is yes. The only debate concerns Diego Garcia. The Ilois can go to Diego Garcia for employment and there is no legal barrier to their employment on the same basis and conditions as other Mauritians.
My hon. Friend the Member for Islington, North referred to the environment. The outer islands to which some Ilois now want to return have been uninhabited for 30 years. Such undisturbed environments are rare, and the outer islands are acknowledged by international scientists to be one of the most important remaining examples of pristine coral atolls in the world, so we must exercise a duty of care. We have done as much as we can to learn about them and we shall continue to do so over the years and to protect them. A major scientific expedition in 1965 added to information about the natural ecology of the islands, so there has been research into the environment. We are mindful of our responsibilities, and previous Governments have been reminded of them regularly by hon. Members.
The core question concerns the feasibility study for resettlement, to which the hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan) referred. She made her point well and asked why the process cannot be speeded up. I cannot give her the details now of who has the contract and how much it will cost, but I shall send them to her. There is no secrecy about the feasibility study.
Environmental matters are at the forefront of our mind as we consider the future, including the availability of water. There are scientific questions to ask about resettlement. Those questions will form part of the work programme for the independent consultants who have
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been asked to assess the feasibility of resettlement of the outer islands of the territory. There is much that we must learn before we can say with confidence whether a settled, self-supporting community capable of generating a decent standard of livelihood for itself is possible on those tiny islands in the middle of the vast ocean.
I have not visited Diego Garcia, but I have visited other Pacific islands and some of the key questions concern the economic viability of communities that are isolated and under pressure. Tremendous environmental problems of pollution and degradation arise when trying to provide places for survival, whether in Kiribati or Tuvalu. We shall press on with the work and the feasibility study. We have been advised that a significant time will be required before we can obtain the data to judge whether there is enough water to sustain a settled population. The alternative to a natural water supply is desalination, which would undermine the economics of some potential investment and increase the cost to any society of trying to maintain itself. There are problems.
We do not know how many Ilois might want to return to the territory. They are not a monolithic community. Most are Mauritian citizens, but some are citizens of the Seychelles, as well as being British dependent territory citizens. Hon. Members will recall that in 1999 a White Paper on the overseas territories "Partnership for progress and prosperity" suggested that British citizenship should be offered to those in the overseas territories who do not have it. We regret that it has not so far been possible to find parliamentary time to introduce the necessary legislation, but I want to take the opportunity to confirm our commitment to making good that pledge as soon as practicable. That would have an impact in this case.
In the White Paper we said that the offer of citizenship would not apply to citizens of British dependent territories who had that status as a result of their connection with the British Indian Ocean Territory. I confirm that we are reconsidering that, and I hope that we shall be able to offer British citizenship to Ilois citizens of British dependent territories. I mention that because it is part of the full equation. We must analyse the situation scientifically to find out who wants to return.
We have been put on notice that the Ilois will be seeking compensation for the 30 years of displacement and distress that they have suffered. They are also taking advice on whether they can instigate claims for compensation in the American courts. In addition, they have asked for immediate help from Britain in the form of pensions and other income support for older, poorer members of the community in Mauritius. We want to look forward—
Mr. Eddie O'Hara (in the Chair): Order. It is time for the next debate.

Unit of Student Funding
12.30 pm
Mr. Tim Boswell: This Adjournment debate has had an unusual genesis. In my view, it need not have taken place, but for the triumphalism and intransigence of Ministers in the Department for Education and Employment in declining to answer some simple questions tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May). In a point of order on 19 December—the Tuesday before Christmas—she drew the House's attention to their extreme reluctance to give straightforward answers to specific questions. She commented, drily but fairly:
I have received a reply to each of my questions, but I have yet to receive an answer.—[Official Report, 19 December 2000; Vol. 360, c. 208.]
She was invited to pursue the matter through other parliamentary channels.
This debate, which I requested and was fortunate enough to be granted, seeks, al least initially, to draw out specific facts that should have already been established in response to questions. I pursue them not in a spirit of partisanship but because it is important that Ministers answer questions front both Government and Opposition Members. In addition, these are important issues that affect all universities higher education institutions and the 1.5 million students, and their families, who are scattered across every constituency.
I shall begin with the narrow issue of student funding. On 20 December 2000, my hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead, who has now joined us in the Chamber, elicited an answer from the Under-Secretary of State for Education and Employment, the hon. Member for North Swindon (Mr. Wills). Although he does not always deal with higher education, we should appreciate the fact that Ministers work together. That answer was a late entry in the parliamentary lists, just before Parliament closed for the recess. Following eight days of thinking time, and after a holding answer had been given, she elicited that, of the claimed £1 billion increase in higher education funding over the next three years—a claim made by Ministers—a significant proportion, around 10 per cent., is to be funded by students in the form of tuition fees, rather than by the Treasury. At this stage, I shall only comment that, if the Treasury treats that as part of planned public funding, it is ipso facto conceding that student tuition fees are, in effect, a tax on students, and not a charge for services rendered.
Getting information about the unit of funding has proved difficult for my hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead. On 30 November, the Minister who will reply to this morning's debate said simply, though rather extensively:
Between 1989–90 and 1996–97, under the previous Government, the unit public funding for higher education students in England fell by 36 per cent. In 1997, the National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education chaired by Lord Dearing stated that planned further rapid reductions in unit funding were not achievable without putting quality unacceptably at risk, and that efficiency improvements should be limited to 1 per cent. a year for the following two years. Now, for the first time in over a decade, there will be a real-terms increase in funding per student in 2001–02, and that level of funding will be sustained in the following two years.—[Official Report, 30 November 2000: Vol. 357, c. 811W.]
A further question from my hon. Friend on 14 December was simply referred back to that answer.
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It is of some interest to Parliament that, although the Government were prepared to be selectively precise about the record of their Conservative predecessors and to quote large chunks of the report of the inquiry chaired by Lord Dearing—for whom, I am happy to say, we all have great respect—they declined to answer the question. They failed to give the actual figures on which their own projections and assertions about the maintenance of the unit of student funding were based—hence the perhaps understandable disappointment of my hon. Friend.
I can report a further, late twist in this matter. Only yesterday, the hon. Member for City of Durham (Mr. Steinberg) asked the Minister about publicly planned funding for higher education institutions in a series stretching, broadly, from 1995 to 2004. In doing so, he elicited some interesting answers. The information was not usable, as it were, for the purposes of the earlier inquiry, because it brought in capital. If nothing else, we need to be told what is actually going on.
The Minister knows that, on the whole, he and I have had pleasant personal relations, and I do not wish to sever them this morning. However, this is not the first time that Ministers have been, shall I say, less than helpful in this area. As an example, I shall recall an incident of some 12 months ago. In another place, my noble Friend Lord Baker of Dorking asked a written question that probed the trend in the proportion of gross domestic product that is spent on higher education—a similar, although not identical, issue. The figures that he was given included science budget expenditure, so I took the matter a stage further and tabled a separate question, asking that science be excluded. Ministers may have become tired by their labours since 28 February 2000, but at least their answer of that date compared figures including science with those excluding science. It also showed that, as a proportion of GDP, the trend was still downward.
This is a matter of ministerial conduct. From time to time, Ministers put spin on their words and seek to make presentations in the most favourable light. These Ministers are not the first ever to do so, although they are perhaps the first to do so on this scale. At no point in my ministerial career did I seek to avoid answering a direct question. To be frank, the Ministers involved have been giving my hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead the runaround.
I turn to wider issues. As was explained, Ministers are taking the line that the downward trend in the unit of student funding in the past decade—in other words, the trend under both this and the previous Government—is to be reversed by a real terms increase in funding per student in 2001–02 that will be sustained in the following two years. We understand the triennium for planning of public funding, so I ask for no further extension. However, it should be remembered that the pressure of unit funding under the Conservative Government, which was referred to in the previous ministerial answer, was accompanied by a rapid increase in total student numbers that preserved the overall envelope of funding. As a result, expansion of student numbers was at least feasible, and it manifestly took place. In 18 years of Conservative government, the percentage of young people involved in higher education virtually trebled.

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Let us consider the Government's responsibilities and what happens next. The issue is whether the Government can simultaneously meet their claim to increase the real terms unit of student funding and finance the expansion of student numbers from roughly 30 per cent. to 50 per cent. of young people by 2010, as again they plan to do and claim to be feasible.
That would require an increase in total student numbers of the order of 25 per cent. Even to maintain the unit funding at real 2000–01 levels must mean increasing publicly planned funding by the same 25 per cent. as student numbers, requiring a real increase in funding of around £1.5 billion over the decade. Conversely, if the higher education budget stays constant in real terms and that expansion takes place, the unit of funding would fall in line with increased student numbers by 20 per cent., or around £1,000 at current prices.
These calculations are derived from figures supplied to us by the Library of the House of Commons. I should mention that Universities UK, the former Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals, drawing on a study carried out for it by London Economics as part of its analysis of university funding, suggests a lower cost progression of £260 million in annual extra requirement from 2004–05—not quite half a decade. However, it also points out that the extra academic and pastoral costs of those from disadvantaged groups, as one reaches further into the pool of potential students, were estimated at a further £50 million per annum. Whichever of those figures is right, substantial extra funds are required and Ministers should give us an explanation.
The question also arises as to whether there is already a funding gap. The London Economics report estimates it at £1.4 billion by 2004–05. The issue may well become buried or confused among other factors, including the funding increases that the Government have announced, the cost of implementing the Bett report—which may well be upwards of £1 billion—and the need to address anti-discrimination issues in employment as well as the separate cost of compliance with the inclusion of education as currently covered under the Disability Discrimination Act 1995.
There is also a problem with pay scales, particularly at the start of academic careers, especially as many lecturers have transferable skills, with a market value either in other sectors of employment or in academic employment abroad. I pass briefly over the issue of student support itself. The recent Callender and Kemp South Bank university report commissioned by the Department itself must have made uncomfortable reading for Ministers.
I do not suggest—nor does anyone else as far as I know—that these are easy issues, inviting an easy one shot solution. There is no strain gauge in higher education that could indicate imminent danger of failure, nor is it possible to specify the nature of any such failure. More likely, I fear, is a gradual process of decline, disappointment and disillusion. The Government's present policies seem to be leading inexorably to a solution through top-up funding, even if
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not—in his memorable phrase, uttered at Greenwich university last year —in the lifetime of the present Secretary of State.
What is required from the Minister today is a bit more than mere euphoria about statistically circular funding increases. This is where we came in. First, we need simple answers to the fair questions posed by my hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead about the unit of funding. What is it now and what, on reasonable assumptions of expansion, will it be over the next three years? Secondly, and no less importantly, we need a wider perspective on how Ministers intend to balance their claims to maintain or improve the unit of funding with their wish to expand student numbers and with the wider need to sustain quality and excellence in our universities.
12.44 pm
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education and Employment (Mr. Malcolm Wicks): I hope that the hon. Member for Daventry (Mr. Boswell) will not find me euphoric if I wish him and his team a happy new year. I extend that to all others present.
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this short debate on university funding. He asked about the Government's plans for funding universities and higher education colleges, especially in relation to the amount of funding per student. I am happy to respond to his questions. The Government have nothing to hide: the figures are published regularly in our annual departmental report. Indeed, I am bound—not in a spirit of triumphalism, but in the interests of historical accuracy—to set the Government's record against that of the Government of which the hon. Gentleman was a member. We do very well out of the comparison.
The hon. Gentleman mentioned some of the background facts, but they are worth repeating. Between 1989 and 1997, under the previous Government, planned public funding per full-time equivalent student fell by more than 36 per cent. from just under £7,600 to just over £4,800. That was the pathetic record that we inherited. As a result—as the hon. Gentleman reminded us—Lord Dearing's national committee of inquiry into higher education concluded in 1997 that higher education institutions could not absorb the further reductions is of more than 6 per cent. in the unit of funding per student that were contained in the previous Government's plans.
Mr. Boswell rose—
Mr. Wicks: I think that an apology is coming up.
Mr. Boswell: I assure the Minister that there will be no apology. However, in order not to give an incorrect tone to the debate, I should say that I am grateful for, and reciprocate, his wishes for a happy new year.
Does the Minister accept that any reduction in the unit of funding would be likely to have a progressive effect over the years, because efficiency gains may be easier to secure in earlier years—especially when expansion is taking place—than later, after the unit of funding has been scaled down? Does he further accept that the expansion and dynamism of the university

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sector that was shown under recent Conservative Governments has not been so evident in a world that includes tuition fees for students?
Mr. Wicks: Although I do not expect an apology—I was jesting about that—I am puzzled by the hon. Gentleman's professed concern, which is, I am sure, sincere, about the need to maintain the unit of funding, given that the Conservative Government oversaw a record decline in unit funding.
The Government responded positively to the Dearing inquiry's recommendation that higher education institutions should not be asked to deliver more than a 1 per cent. reduction in costs in 1998–99 and 1999–2000 while student numbers continued to expand. We built that recommendation into our funding plans and put it into our plans for a further year. Since last year's spending review, which provided funding for higher education to 2003–04, we have announced that, for the first time in over a decade, the unit of funding per student will rise in real terms in 2001–02 and will be maintained over the next three years. That means that the total additional investment in hither education since April 1998 will be £1.7 billion—an increase of 37 per cent. in cash terms over the six years to 2003–04. That is an 18 per cent. increase in real terms.
Mr. Boswell rose—
Mr. Wicks: I am happy to give way to the hon. Gentleman, but I should like to answer the questions that he has already asked.
Mr. Boswell: It is a very short question. The Minister repeated the assertion that the unit of student funding is to increase. How much will it be?
Mr. Wicks: One of the hon. Gentleman's new year resolutions should be patience. I am coming to that point. The overall increase in public funding for higher education in England, which will total more than £7 billion a year by 2003–04, is clearly significant.
To return to the question, we acknowledge, as does the hon. Gentleman, that the process of calculating funding per student in higher education is complex. I cannot cover all the details now, but I shall write to him setting out the figures that I cite today and how they were arrived at. There are one or two important caveats. It was for those reasons that I was reluctant to give a more detailed answer to the parliamentary questions tabled by the hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May).
This short debate gives me an opportunity to explain the position at greater length. [Laughter.] Perhaps the two hon. Members will share the joke with me later, but I hope that it did not come from a Christmas cracker, because I may not find it funny. This short debate gives me an opportunity to explain the position at greater length without the risk of misleading anyone.
On the caveats, the figures are projections based on the best data available to the Government. Inevitably, the figures will change over time, for two principal reasons. First, the Government's projections of student numbers will be replaced with more up-to-date figures based on the number of students in the sector and the
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precise proportions of part-time and full-time study. Secondly, better estimates of the GDP deflator will be available over time, affecting the conversion of cash into real terms figures.
My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State wrote to the Higher Education Funding Council for England on 29 November setting out his plans for funding higher education in England from 2001–02 to 2003–04. There are cash increases of £412 million, £268 million and £298 million over those three years. Coupled with the projections for increasing student numbers to make progress with the Prime Minister's aim for participation, that implies annual increases in publicly planned funding of 3.2 per cent., 2.5 per cent. and 2.9 per cent. per full-time equivalent student, which, in turn, implies real terms increases in funding of 0.7 per cent., 0 per cent. and 0.4 per cent. over the next three years. That is the Government's best estimate and I am confident that, for the first time in more than a decade, the funding per student will increase over the three years covered by the announcement.
It is fair to ask who will pay for the extra funding. Overwhelmingly, it will be the Government on behalf of taxpayers. Only 10 per cent. of the increase will be in the form of tuition fees paid by students and their families, and those tuition fees are paid only by those who can afford them.
Caroline Flint: I have written to my hon. Friend about an anomaly in the system whereby tuition fees are based on household income. Parents who remain together until their children go to university are liable for the full cost, but when there is marital breakdown, the absent parent is not required to pay anything, unlike the formula for educational maintenance allowances which is designed for lower-income families.
Mr. Wicks: These are important questions and we are considering them. I am conscious that whatever the Government do—our approach to educational maintenance allowances is different from student finance for higher education—will be controversial. I am conscious of the need to strike an equitable balance between the stable, natural family providing for young people and the circumstances when there has been a family breakdown. That is another debate and relates, for example, to the Child Support Agency—but we are actively considering the issues.
Some 40 per cent. of students pay no tuition fees and that proportion will rise to 50 per cent. next autumn when the income thresholds in the means test are raised.
The hon. Gentleman asked why the figures included tuition fees paid by students and their families. The answer is that that is the income that the universities will receive. It would be peculiar to leave that income out, because it would distort the picture. On the matter of university finance, we need to see the whole picture.
Universities raise income from a variety of sources. On average, only 40 per cent. of the income of higher education institutions comes in the form of grant from the Higher Education Funding Council for England. Universities will benefit from the £1 billion of funding to support improvements in the research infrastructure in 2002–03 and 2003–04. An additional £250 million in

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recurrent funding is available for research through the research councils, which universities will be able to bid for.
Adding those sums to the HEFCE grant shows that universities will do well over the next three years. That extra funding will help to fulfil the Government's commitment that places should be available to all who have the capacity to benefit from higher education. Following increases in total enrolments at UK higher education institutions in each of the past two years, we are on course to achieve our aim that, in time, 50 per cent. of young people will have been able to benefit from higher education by the age of 30.
In summary, the higher education funding situation that the Government inherited was somewhere between a shambles and a crisis, and the hon. Gentleman has said nothing to refute that. We, however, have set higher education funding on a far firmer footing. The significant increases in funding made under this Government mean that the HE sector can now plan with greater confidence than for more than a decade. That has been recognised by the HEFCE and Universities UK, which said:
the increases announced today are clearly good news.
That, of course, is also good news for prospective students.
The Government are determined to ensure that, as the number of young people going to university increases, quality will not be sacrificed—unlike the pattern during the Tory era. That is why the unit per student is such a crucial indicator. The settlement is good news also for industry and the country as a whole, but it must be bad news for the Conservative party. It was extraordinary today—I hope that it continues during the next few months—to hear the Opposition drawing attention to their underfunding and neglect of the universities and allowing us to contrast that with our positive approach to funding British universities while maintaining unit funding per student. That must be the first political own goal of 2001.
It was noteworthy that, while the hon. Gentleman looked in some detail at our plans for funding, he had nothing to say about the Conservative party's plans. The more we hear from the shadow Chancellor, the more we understand why the shadow Education team is wholly silent on the point.

A5225
12.59 pm
Mr. Neil Turner: May I say at the start that I have the support of my right hon. Friend the Member for Makerfield (Mr. McCartney) and my hon. Friends the Members for Leigh (Mr. Cunliffe) and for Worsley (Mr. Lewis), whose constituencies are in the Wigan borough? My hon. Friend the Member for Bolton, West (Ms Kelly) will contribute to the debate, because the route also affects the Bolton borough.
The history of the A5225 goes back to the 1950s and a Lancashire development plan for the roads in the area. The plan included the M6, the M60, the M58, the M56 and a road called Route 225—which is how the A5225 got its name. It was designed to link the north Merseyside and Seaforth container docks via the M58 to the M6, then through the A5225 from junction 26 on the M6 to the M61, and thence to the primary route network through the M62 to Yorkshire and Humberside. At that time, it was seen as a northern relief route for the M62 and part of the primary route network.
Plans for the route made good progress, and in the 1990s reached the stage of being worked up into a proper design and presented to a public inquiry, which came out in favour of its being built. Unfortunately, it was lost in the reviews that happened periodically over the course of 18 years in which Mr. Boom and Mr. Bust came along to interrupt the necessary investments in our country.
Since then, the need for the route has not only persisted but been enhanced. I shall deal with the route in three broad aspects—first, its role as a regional link as part of the national primary route network; secondly, its importance as an economic regenerator for the region and sub-region; and thirdly, its significance in terms of the national, regional, sub-regional and local public transport infrastructure.
The Highways Agency is considering opportunities to improve the transport route network. As part of that process, the north-west steering group is examining several areas in the north-west region. Its current proposals state that
Routes proposed for consideration in future Studies
include
M6 Junctions 21a to 31…Between junctions 21a and 26.
That is the Orrell junction at the M58, where
traffic flows exceed 100,000 vpd—
vehicles per day—
of which 13,000 are heavy goods vehicles. North of junction 26, although traffic flows are slightly lower, this section of the M6 is beginning to show signs of stress during peak periods, and in the vicinity of the Charnock Richard Motorway Service Area there is some concern about the poor safety record.
Indeed, just before Christmas there was a fatal accident at that very point.
The proposals go on to suggest that there is a need to include
the potential for multi-modal solutions—
this is an important point to which I shall return—
to the use of the motorway by local traffic movements in the Warrington/Wigan/Preston Corridor.

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In transport terms, there is clearly a national and regional requirement for the route. The M6 south of junction 26 is under extreme pressure, and pressure is increasing to the north. The M62 is often blocked simply because of the volume of traffic. The A5225 would, rightly, be seen as a northern relief route.
I want to talk about economic regeneration. Not so long ago, when people thought of Wigan, they naturally thought of coal. Unfortunately, that is no longer the case. Once, thousands of people were involved directly and indirectly in the coal industry—now, about 150 people are indirectly involved through the design of coal-cutting equipment in the constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for Makerfield. This is a classic case of an area that needs help to switch its economy from the overwhelmingly coal-based economy of the 1950s and earlier into the much broader-based economy that is required in the 21st century.
The coalfields task force that was established by the Government considered specific instantes in which help could be given in regenerating such areas, and recommendation 20 of its report stated that the Government should consider how roads could play a part in that process. It highlighted seven roads, one of which was the A5225 regeneration road in Wigan. The task force clearly saw the road as a vital part of coalfields regeneration—in fact, it was the only one in the entire former Lancashire coalfield area that it mentioned. Recommendation 20 stated:
The government should give priority to developing and implementing these key coalfield regeneration roads in partnership with the projects' sponsors.
In reply, the Government said:
It is for local authorities to determine their priorities in submitting bids for funding. The Government will carefully consider bids for coalfield regeneration roads according to the criteria set out in its draft guidance on local transport plans.
Indeed, that route was included for potential development in the local transport plan, which I shall discuss in a moment.
The areas of land that are available for development are enormous. However, they are locked in because of inadequate or non-existent access to the primary route network. The site of the former Pemberton colliery has been derelict for more than 20 years. It borders Pemberton itself, which is the most deprived area in the Wigan borough and one of the 200 most deprived wards in the country. There is also the Westwood power station site, which consists of 30 hectares, and the site at Kirkless, which also requires completion. Those sites are in the constituency of Makerfield, so I am unsure whether I or my right hon. Friend the Member for Makerfield should be discussing this issue. However, the economies of our two constituencies are so closely integrated that, if he is kicked, I limp. Of course, I am not suggesting that anyone should kick him.
Other areas could be opened up. To the north is the site of the former Turner and Newell asbestos factory, which consists of about 15 hectares. About 25 hectares at the former brickworks and opencast site at Gadbury
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could also be opened up for regeneration. Gadbury is one of only two former opencast sites in the entire country that have not been redeveloped properly because the organisation concerned has gone into liquidation. The second site is also in the Wigan borough, so it is incumbent on the Government to help to ensure that they are properly redeveloped.
In turning to transport issues, it would be as well to describe in a little detail the relevant areas of this former Lancashire coalfield area. It consists of a series of former pit villages and towns that are scattered throughout south Lancashire. When one looks at the map, they resemble a starfish: roads have spread from the town centre, and terraced housing has developed along them in linear form. The narrow roads wind between country areas and contain many terraced properties, so road widening is not possible. Moreover, because of the nature of terraced housing, local residents often have nowhere to park other than the road itself, which causes major congestion problems.
Wigan and Leigh are the two most densely populated areas in the Wigan borough, but there is no direct link between them. Because the six-mile route to Wigan along the A577 is so badly congested, I often drive to Leigh by taking the 10 or 12-mile diversion along the M6, the A580 and the Leigh bypass. We are talking about areas with substantial populations. Between Wigan and Leigh are the towns of Ince, Pemberton, Hindley, Atherton and Westhoughton, which have populations of 30,000 or 40,000. They are congested, and it takes a long time to travel between them. The obvious solution is to create a bus lane, but that cannot be done because of the narrowness of the road, the congestion caused by development along it, and the need for people to park.
What is the solution to the local transport problems? It is the Wigan integrated transport system, which collects together the existing railway stations in Wigan—the Wigan North West railway station, the west coast main line station and the Wallgate station, which serves the line to Southport—on one site, along with a new bus station and park and ride schemes. That scheme would have the support of Manchester international airport because it would allow through-ticketing on to the airline. It also has the support of the Greater Manchester passenger transport authority, Virgin and Cross Country trains and the bus operators.
The scheme is not simply a transport solution. It links into the point made earlier about economic regeneration of the area, including a £400 million development within Wigan town centre, a commercial development of up to 2 million sq ft. It is important for change in the local economy because we need the higher-value employment that would be attracted. Despite the fact that we have an excellent education authority, producing children who are better educated than the national average, the best leave to take jobs in other areas of the country. This commercial development will attract organisations into the area and, through the availability of better jobs, keep well-educated people within the borough, which, in turn, is important for regeneration.
The Government response to the north-west regional transport plan says:
In addition there are a number of schemes on which we do not yet have sufficient information to form a view. The Government is keen to work with the authorities concerned to assist them in

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completing the work necessary for each scheme to be evaluated by Government against New Approach to Appraisal (NATA) criteria. The schemes in this category are:
and it goes on to list about 10, one of which is the Wigan integrated transport scheme. It is clear that the Government see WITS as vital to the solution of transport problems, as well as to the regeneration of the economy.
The need for the road is clear. It is already designed and has gone through a public inquiry, so those aspects will not need to be repeated, and we own the majority of the land and property that will be affected by it. It has a major regional road link, the support of the north-west regional development area and it would help to provide public transport solutions to both local and regional difficulties. It is difficult to envisage a scheme that would fulfil the Government's public transport solutions better than the Wigan integrated transport scheme. It links national rail, local bus and park and ride schemes and has immense public sector leverage. The developer has said that he will be willing to put in substantial funding for the A5225. As I said earlier, it also has the support of all the train and bus operators and of Manchester airport.
It would be a major regenerator for the local and sub-regional economy in former heartlands areas with mining communities. Both my right hon. Friend the Member for Makerfield and I represent areas with the longest continuing Labour representation in the House since 1906. That is the depth of the commitment of people in our area to the Labour party, and they would like some payback in the form of help for regeneration.
I should like the Minister to give the go-ahead for this route today, but I know that Christmas has gone and I am not likely to get that. We would, however, like protection of the route for at least two years while the various ongoing schemes that I have spoken about are completed, and a meeting with MPs and the local authorities affected before any decision is made, so that we can put further points to the Government if necessary.
If it is not to be a Highways Agency road, we would like it to be a local authority road, supported by either supplementary credit approvals or the local transport plan. Frankly, if this route is not protected it will be the end of WITS, and we shall be at our wits' end to understand it.
1.14 pm
Ms Ruth Kelly: My hon. Friend the Member for Wigan (Mr. Turner) has made a powerful case for the proposed A5225 road. I want to support his comments and to add some observations of my own. I shall not repeat his remarks concerning the potential benefits of economic regeneration, because it would primarily benefit the Wigan area, although there would of course be knock-on benefits for my constituency. Although most of the proposed route is in Wigan, it runs to the east of Westhoughton in my constituency. Indeed, the need to link the M6 and M61 with the new road was one of the first issues brought to my attention when I became the prospective parliamentary candidate for Bolton, West in 1996.
I shall discuss the potential transport benefits for Westhoughton and Bolton, West. As my hon. Friend pointed out, the scheme went to public inquiry in 1994.
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When the inspector reported in 1996, he concluded that it was clear from the traffic appraisal that the local network was approaching saturation and that unless a substantial improvement was implemented, traffic conditions and the environment along the A577 and A58 would become intolerable. He predicted that the new route would dramatically reduce traffic flow along the A577 and A58, and substantially reduce the number of accidents across the network. It was extremely disappointing that the then Secretary of State agreed with the inspector but ordered that no further work be done and that none of the side road orders be made. Later the deleted the scheme from the trunk roads programme.
After a high-profile campaign by Wigan and Bolton councils, the then Secretary of State conceded that the route should be protected while private finance was sought. That protection is still in place, so planning applications along the route are automatically refused. The need for the road is even greater today. Traffic, especially in Westhoughton and along Park road, is, as the inspector predicted, intolerable. Since the inquiry took place, Westhoughton has experienced huge housing developments that have been accompanied by new cars. The volume of traffic generated by new housing has led to misery among the residents.
Save Westhoughton Act Now, an active and effective local campaigning group, has managed to halt new housing development, which demonstrates the strength of local feeling. In the Daisy Hill area there are problems with heavy goods vehicles driving past a primary school, which could be avoided if the new route were in place. The volume of pedestrian traffic along Park road has also increased significantly with the opening of a doctor's surgery and a supermarket. The new route could significantly improve pedestrian safety and the environment, while reducing congestion.
My hon. Friend made some powerful points about the new scheme's importance in terms of public transport. It is almost unique that the building of a road could lead to significant improvements in public transport infrastructure. The scheme would, for the first time, allow prioritised bus routes in the Bolton and Wigan areas, which is an important consideration.
While the route under consideration may not be as ambitious as the initial scheme, it could still significantly reduce congestion and help the residents of Westhoughton and Wigan. I, too, ask for continued protection for the route. In addition, I urge my hon. Friend the Minister to reconsider the need to inject public funds into the scheme to match the private sector contributions that have already been obtained. Perhaps he will agree to meet me, my hon. Friend, other hon. Members who are interested in the scheme and local councils, so that we can put our case to him.
1.19 pm
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Environment, Tranasport and the Regions (Mr. Chris Muffin): I had intended to go into slightly more detail, but time permits me to cover only some of the points raised.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan (Mr. Turner) on securing the debate and thank him and my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton, West

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(Ms Kelly) for setting out the case so clearly. Integrated transport is a high priority for the Government and I am pleased to hear that it is treated seriously in Wigan and Bolton.
The long history of the A5225 goes back to 1949 and I could speak at length about it My hon. Friends referred to the recommendation of the inspector in July 1996 when the scheme was given a longer-term categorisation because it was not considered to be of the highest priority within the national trunk roads programme. The previous Government then decided to withdraw the longer-term scheme from the programme in November 1996. In February 1997, AMEC proposed a modified version of the scheme using private finance. That was considered by the Government in 1997–98, when they concluded that the proposed M6 to M61 link was not of sufficient strategic national importance to merit inclusion in the core trunk road network. The Government invited Wigan and Bolton councils to consider whether they wanted to promote the AMEC proposals as part of their local authority transport plans.
The proposed scheme would be expensive. In 1994 it would have cost £117 million and it would cost a lot more today. I shall explain what has happened during the two and a half years since my noble Friend Lord Whitty wrote to the councils suggesting a local scheme. A bid for local transport plan funding was made for the final section of the Wigan town centre relief route, but the appraisal material presented was not sufficient to allow us to assess whether the scheme would pass the tests to determine eligibility for Government funding, nor was it clear what relationship, if any, it had to the proposed Wigan transport hub.
The Government are keen to work with the local authority to resolve any outstanding issues and to assist with the completion of a full scheme appraisal. To enable Ministers to consider the scheme in December for funding from the local transport planning reserve, we would expect a full appraisal to be submitted by July. I understand that the proposals for the Wigan transport hub interchange are still being discussed by the local
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authority and a developer. It is a large and ambitious programme and we look forward to receiving a planning application, which I understand has been some time in preparation.
The link road from Wigan to the M6 would incorporate the western section of the earlier A5225 bypass proposal—about one third of the complete route—and provide access to the proposed hub. The local authority must decide whether and how it wishes to promote the scheme. Officials from the Highways Agency, the Government office of the north-west and Wigan council have met to discuss the matter on several occasions. It will be for the relevant local authorities to decide how and whether to promote the A5225 scheme in full to aid regeneration of the whole corridor.
There is no suggestion that any part of the Wigan to M6 link should be a trunk road scheme and there are no firm proposals in the draft regional planning guidance, regional transport strategy or local transport plan for the construction of the A5225 in its entirety.
It is unfortunate that the situation has persisted for so long. It is two and a half years since Lord Whitty invited the councils to consider a local scheme. The route protection cannot be maintained indefinitely. The Highways Agency owns 67 properties on the route with an approximate resale value of £4.5 million. It has continued to bear the cost of maintaining that estate and of an increasing number of blight notices.
Ministers have ruled out the A5225 route forming part of the national strategic core trunk road network and the scheme is not in the Highways Agency's targeted programme of improvements. The initiative to pursue the scheme, in part or as a whole, rests squarely with Wigan and Bolton metropolitan borough councils. Time is running out. Officials at the Highways Agency and the Government office of the north-west will try to bring the matter to a satisfactory conclusion. I hope very much that the local authorities will be able to find a way forward, and I shall draw this debate and the points that have been made to the attention of my noble Friend Lord Whitty, the Minister responsible.

New Forest National Park
1.25 pm
Mr. Desmond Swayne: The Minister will be aware that I have had profound reservations from the very beginning about his plan for a New Forest national park. I have been corresponding with him for some time about the administrative arrangements and their effect on existing bodies in what will become the national park—particularly the Court of Verderers. In the last letter that the Minister sent me, just before Christmas, I detected a note of tetchiness creeping into his correspondence. I am therefore pleased today to be able to move on to what will be regarded as more consensual ground, where there is scope for greater agreement.
It will give the Minister some satisfaction, given the extent to which people entertain reservations about the fundamental case for a national park, that most of the representations that 1 have received—and I assume most of those received by the Minister and the agency—are from people keen to get into the national park, rather than to get out of it. The Minister has a powerful marketing tool for his policy on the national park. If he can generate enthusiasm about the proposed boundaries, and support for them, greater enthusiasm than has so far been felt in the forest for the concept of a national park may be generated.
I do not intend to spend time saying in what respects I agree with the Countryside Agency's proposed boundaries. I want to save the time of the House by referring only to my reservations. I begin in the northern end of my constituency in the Avon valley at Breamore. Breamore marsh has been included in the proposed boundary, but the rest of Breamore village has not. There does not seem to be any logic to this change: the whole of Breamore parish at present is in the New Forest heritage area. I cannot see a reason for splitting the community and village, which have an integral part in the history and make-up of the New Forest. I ask the Minister to ensure that the agency will pay particular attention to the submissions of the Breamore parish council.
Further south down the Avon valley, south of Ringwood, is Harbridge, where the situation is similar to that in Breamore. Harbridge has been separated from the remainder of its parish of Elligham, Harbridge and Ibsley. Again, there seems to be no logic to that. Harbridge church should certainly be in the boundary of the national park, but I ask the Minister and the agency to pay attention to the submission of the parish council, which has argued that the boundaries should be extended to include the surrounding land with all its historical and archaeological significance.
The south-eastern corner of Bransgore parish has been excluded. I believe that the draft boundary should be extended to include Walkford brook. It should run along the railway line to encompass Meeting House plantation, Walkford Moor copse, the brook and the land up to Walkford lane, up to the B3055, including Beckley common and Beckley itself. The whole parish of Bransgore would then be united in the proposed national park, together with the footpath network that gives access to the forest from the south. That would also have the advantage of bringing within the planning
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authority those areas earmarked in previous local plans for gravel extraction. That would provide no guarantee that there would be no gravel extraction in future, but it is important in this environmentally sensitive area at the fringe of the park that any gravel extraction be determined by the national park authority rather than by any other planning authority.
Dr. Julian Lewis: While my hon. Friend says that the boundaries might not guarantee that an unpleasant development will not occur, does he agree that the ageney should be praised for including Dibden bay within the proposed boundary, which might make it a little harder to build a container port on the edge of the forest with devastating consequences for the inhabitants, the environment and the forest itself?
Mr. Swayne: I entirely concur with my hon. Friend in congratulating the agency on its robust and proper decision to include Dibden bay within the proposed boundary of the New Forest national park.
Mr. David Atkinson: My constituency is adjacent to the south-west of the area proposed by the agency as the draft boundary of the New Forest national park. My hon. Friend the Member for New Forest, West (Mr. Swayne), and also the Minister, may like to know that I shall be using the comment form in the consultation document, which must be completed by 19 January, to propose that the park should also include the outstanding coastal area of Hengistbury head in my constituency. Back in 1956, it was designated a site of special scientific interest. It is now a nature reserve notable for its internationally recognised monument, geology and habitat, including marsh land and mud flats. It is similar to Calshot, which the agency included in the south-east draft boundary of the park. I hope that the agency and the Minister will agree that the park should include Hengistbury head in my constituency, as that would receive the enthusiastic support of my constituents.
Mr. Swayne: My hon. Friend makes a powerful case. It is difficult to draw lines on the ground when the coastline countryside is so similar and so deserving of the status sought by my hon. Friend. My proposal is consistent with the criteria for setting the boundaries, outlined in the agency's document, "the New Forest National Park Draft Boundary". I emphasise that before I move on to expound why Ringwood and Milford on Sea should be included within the boundary.
First, I draw attention to the Milford on Sea parish council's own submission, signed by Major Chris Beaton, who was for many years the district councillor for Milford and is presently a parish councillor. I also have a letter of 30 December from Colonel Hutcheson, another longstanding parish councillor and a former planning inspector In this brief debate, I cannot do justice to those submissions, but I draw the agency's attention to them because they make powerful arguments on economic, historical and cultural grounds.
I should like to draw the Minister's attention to section 2 of the agency's document, particularly table 1, which sets out the criteria of natural beauty and their interpretation in establishing the boundary. I shall not

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quote from the extensive discussion there, but Milford on Sea meets all the criteria: from Hurst spit through to the edge of Barton on Sea, it is a mixed landscape of woodland and rolling farmland interlaced with footpaths. The parish is layered with areas of conservation, special protection areas and sites of special scientific interest and has been designated as an area of outstanding natural beauty. It includes 13 proposed sites of importance to nature, together with numerous listed buildings. Given its flora, fauna, beauty and history, there is undoubtedly a case for including it within the boundary.
Section 2(g) of table 2 on page 7 of the report states:
Towns or villages should not normally be cut in two by a National Park boundary.
The parish of Milford is being cut in two. Milford, which will be outside the proposed boundary, is being split from the hamlet of Keyhaven, which is within it—they form one community. On those grounds alone, there is a clear case for considering the inclusion of Milford.
Section 2(d) of the table states:
Boundaries should include land and settlements which contribute to the rural economy and community life within the Park.
An explanatory note at the foot of the page says:
This may include a contribution to the Park's economy and community life, and a value for visitors; eg. provision of accommodation, access to public transport, information or other services.
Milford on Sea does precisely that. It provides its buses—access to public transport—its extensive free parking and its retail centre around the traditional village green. It also provides a caravan park at Shortfields, numerous hotels and guesthouses, extensive beaches, which draw tourists in summer, and a renowned summer fete. Those facilities all provide an economic service to tourists and to the community of the forest, and I submit that they would be vital in managing recreational activity in future.
As the Minister will be aware from my initial discussions with him at the very outset of his plans for a national park, my principal concern was with recreational activity. I have always stressed that recreation is a greater danger to the future of the New Forest than commercial forestry. I feared that we were planting a flag that said, "Come and see Britain's newest national park, the New Forest." Considerable worries have been expressed—especially by the Verderers—about the level of recreational activity that the Forestry Commission is taking on, almost as a substitute for forestry.
I am glad that the report takes those worries into account. Appendix E, on page 57, states that measures should be encouraged such as:
co-ordinating the recreation strategy of the coast and the Forest;
moving car parks, camping sites and visitor centres away from sensitive areas to the more robust areas on the Forest fringe;
using the Solent Way and the Avon Valley Path as alternatives to walking in the Open Forest;
It will not have escaped the Minister's notice that the Avon valley path runs through Ringwood and that the Solent way is intimately connected with Milford on Sea.
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The report continues:
integrating the rights of way network of the enclosed landscapes with that of the central parts of the New Forest to reduce erosion by walkers and riders and to encourage local residents to visit on foot rather than by car;
developing new attractions, such as country parks, outside the Forest to help direct pressure away from core areas.
Appendix E concludes that
To optimise this potential and to protect the Forest's traditional quiet, pastoral character, the Forest core, the coast and the peripheral landscapes of the Forest need to be managed as a whole. The area proposed may offer new scope for meeting recreational needs in a sustainable way, especially those of local residents and day visitors, and alleviating pressures on the Forest core.
If the Minister were to read that carefully—perhaps reading between the lines—he would recognise that the author has a clear message. Reading between the lines it says to me, in black and white, that Milford on Sea and Ringwood should be included within the boundaries of the national park, precisely to facilitate that sort of recreational management to take the pressure off the core of the forest.
Moving on particularly to the case for Ringwood: again, starting with the argument for natural beauty, as set out in the document, Ringwood should be included precisely because of its beauty and its history as a New Forest market town, the character of which still reflects its association, and long relationship, with the western part of the forest and the Avon valley. Again, I cannot do justice to the history of Ringwood and its intimate involvement with the forest, its economic links and so on, but I draw to the attention of the Minister and the agency submissions to the agency that I have received, in particular a letter from Mr. and Mrs. Keating dated 30 October. Mr. Keating was a long-serving New Forest district councillor, with experience of the planning committee. He makes an excellent submission, which deserves intense scrutiny.
Mr. Christopher Chope: Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the problems is that people write to the Countryside Agency asking specific questions, to which they get very woolly responses? For example, my constituent, Mrs. Robertson, of St. Leonard's in Ringwood, asked the specific question:
If people in and around Ringwood are not happy with future exclusion from the New Forest national park, will you then amend the boundary to reflect this?
The answer was:
Your views on this are very welcome.
Mr. Swayne: I am glad that the views are welcome. I hope, when the period of consultation concludes on 19 January, that the agency will spend a great deal of time going through the submissions that have been made. Seeking submissions from the public by sending a document to every household within the proposed boundaries has been a very costly exercise. I trust that the submissions will be treated with the weight that is due to them. It is for precisely those reasons that I have drawn particular attention to those that I have received myself, which will bear much greater examination from the proper authorities at the appropriate time.
I have already referred to section 2(e) in this document, which says that communities and towns should not be split, but the effect of the boundary as

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proposed will split the town of Ringwood. Hightown, Hightown Hill, Hightown Common, Crow, Picket Post, Picket Common, Poulner Hill and Hangersly Hill, which are all part of the Ringwood community, will be within the boundary and will be separated from the town centre with its church and market—the heart of the ancient community—which, of course, will be outside the boundary.
I know that section 2(e) goes on to say that, where urban and industrial developments have taken place, those parts should be excluded, but that is not a description of Ringwood. It does not describe Ringwood to me at all. The main reason given in the document for excluding Ringwood is on page 22, where it says that
Ringwood has been isolated from its landscape setting within the Forest by the A31 and no longer contributes to the Forest character.
Again, on page 30, it says that
the townscape is now dominated by the A31T and by extensive modern development.
I know Ringwood intimately and that is not a description of God's own town by any stretch of the imagination. I challenge members of the agency to come to look at Ringwood for themselves, to stand in its market square and see that the A31 does not impinge upon it at all. If the A31 is to be an argument for exclusion from the national park, half the forest—either the northern or the southern part—should be excluded from the boundary, because the A31 bisects the entire forest.
The A31 should be presented as a virtue—a reason for bringing Ringwood within the national park boundary—because it is via the A31 that visitors and tourists will be able to drive to the fringe of the New Forest, park their cars in Ringwood's extensive free parking facilities and then use the forest in precisely the way suggested on page 57 of the document, as a means of managing the tourism and pressures on the core of the forest. Those visitors will be able to make use of Ringwood's many hotels, restaurants, pubs and free car parks. These attractions are, of course, already enjoyed by visitors, many of whom use Ringwood as their stopping point for their visit to the New Forest by bus, bike, horse or on foot. That is something that we need to encourage and the Countryside Agency document stresses those points in appendix E and on page 57. There is a first-class case for including Ringwood within the boundary for precisely those reasons, in addition to its historical claims to be at the centre of the New Forest.
We have a once in a generation opportunity to get the boundaries of the New Forest right and, particularly in respect of what my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr. Chope) said, it is vital that due consideration be given to the submissions that have been made. The Minister should come to the New Forest and look at those areas that are now matters of contention as to whether they should be within the boundary or not, particularly the two main ones to which I have referred, Ringwood and Milford on Sea. I am certain that that experience will convince him of the strength of the case that I have made.
1.46 pm
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions (Mr. Chris Mullin): First, I thank the hon. Members for New Forest, West (Mr. Swayne), for New Forest, East (Dr. Lewis) and for Christchurch (Mr. Chope) for setting out their case so robustly and with their customary good humour. They are all fortunate to represent such a beautiful area.
I am sorry if the hon. Member for New Forest, West, who proposed the debate, noted any tetchiness on my part in some of the et correspondence that he has received. I do not think that I am regarded as one of the more tetchy Ministers, though he might have detected a certain weariness at making the same points repeatedly. I have followed the lively correspondence in the local press about the virtues or otherwise of a national park and, as he says, it is very good to know that there are communities fighting to get into rather than out of it.
I cannot go into detail about the particular places that he mentioned, for reasons that I am sure he will understand, but I will say a word or two about the process, which began in October 1999. The agency will complete it later this year and if at that point it concludes that national park status is appropriate, it will produce a designation order for the Secretary of State's confirmation. He will consider any representations that he receives on the order, and if necessary he will call a public inquiry to enable all views to be fully aired. There is a considerable way to go yet, and there will be ample opportunity for constituents and colleagues to make representations.
The Countryside Agency has been holding meetings with the New Forest Panel, local authorities and town and parish councils and mounting public roadshows. Many people have attended those events to discuss particular aspects of the proposed boundary. While none of the meetings or roadshows held so far has been in Ringwood itself, no deep significance should be attached to that. I am advised that the Countryside Agency will attend a public meeting in Ringwood on 15 January, so people will have plenty of opportunities to ask questions then. I also understand that people from Ringwood have been active in the meetings that have been held.
The three-month public consultation period, which started on 19 October, is due to end in 10 days' time, on 19 January. The agency will then analyse the comments that it has received and reconsider the proposed boundary. The plan is to hold formal consultations with local authorities on the proposed boundary, which will be revised as necessary following the public consultation. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will understand that, because the draft boundary is currently out to consultation and given the role of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State in the process, I cannot comment on the merits of specific boundary issues. I can only emphasise that the Countryside Agency is eager to hear people's views and urge anyone who has not done so to provide them to the agency as soon as possible.
The hon. Member for Christchurch referred to a postcard. He has been a Minister, so he will understand that questions such as that posed by his constituent cannot be answered until the inquiry has reached its conclusions.

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The hon. Member for New Forest, East referred to Dibden bay and, again, he will understand that I cannot comment on that because the issues largely concern planning, which will have to be considered separately. However, I pay tribute to his ingenuity in getting the subject into the debate, considering that he opposes the whole concept of a national park—unless he has changed his position since we last discussed the matter.
Running concurrently with the boundary considerations, the Countryside Agency will formulate advice on the administrative arrangements for the forest. The agency has set up individual local working groups to examine specific issues focusing on governance, land management, recreation and tourism, and planning. The hon. Member for New Forest, West referred to concern that the area may be flooded with visitors. We have discussed the matter previously and he will know that the national parks are very good at
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managing visitors The problem is not to increase the number of visitors but to manage the existing number. I am confident that there would be an improvement in existing practice were there to be a national park.
As with the boundary, the agency will draw together its proposals for the administrative arrangements, which will be put out to wider consultation later this year. A lot of work is needed on both the boundary and the administrative arrangements. Careful attention must be paid to the views of all concerned, but I am optimistic that it will be possible to achieve an outcome that fulfils the majority of people's aspirations for the forest, for its future protection and for our enjoyment of it. I look forward to many stimulating discussions on the subject in the months ahead with the hon. Members who have spoken.
Question put and agreed to.
Adjourned accordingly at eight minutes to Two o'clock.