Westminster Hall Sitting of 28 April 2004

Preamble
[MR. JOHN MCWILLIAM in the Chair]

Government Regeneration Programmes
Motion made, and Question proposed, That the sitting be now adjourned.—[Mr. Ainger.]
9.30 am
Ms Karen Buck: I am glad to have secured this debate and to have the chance to raise a few questions about the future of Government regeneration programmes. Before doing so, however, I record my strong support for the overall thrust of the Government's regeneration strategy.
My constituency is not alone in bearing the scars of some ill-judged regeneration programmes prior to 1997. Estates such as Wornington Green in north Kensington were the subject of a city challenge programme, but the thrust of the approach was on changing bricks and mortar. That was one of the defining characteristics of the schemes adopted in those days. The programme was carried out with little consultation with the residents, and ended in a massively expensive redesign of the estate. That resulted in the construction of a number of enclosed and unsupervised communal spaces where youths and drug dealers inevitably congregated, thereby creating exactly the problems that any thoughtful regeneration programme would have tried to avoid.
Similarly, the Lisson Green estate in the Church Street ward of my constituency received state action funding for a 10-year programme that only now is drawing to a conclusion. The scheme was so badly handled that it resulted in construction works being carried out simultaneously in virtually every corner of the estate for almost the entire programme, but with not one penny being spent on community or economic development. I saw that happen again and again in my constituency in the 1990s.
Today, my constituency is benefiting from streams of funding that have an entirely different focus. They include investment in capital infrastructure, particularly money being channelled through two arm's-length management organisations that are focusing on bottom-up development, with consultation and community development.
I have found the neighbourhood renewal fund a particularly useful source of investment for improving community development. The fund is paying for two teams of neighbourhood wardens in the Church Street and Queen's Park wards of Westminster. I expect that my hon. Friend the Minister will say something about neighbourhood wardens, because a new evaluation shows that they can reduce crime by an average of 28 per cent. They have proved to be popular and valuable, and have become a vital part of the wider policing family. In Kensington. the NRF is funding a number of police community support officers in the St. Charles ward, where they are helping to bear down on persistent antisocial behaviour in the Dalgarno neighbourhood.
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I am delighted to say that we recently secured support for a neighbourhood management scheme in the Church Street ward, one of the 10 per cent. of most deprived wards in the country. That money will help develop capacity, which has already been boosted by NRF funds and the support of the Paddington development trust. It has brought together the multiplicity of landlords in the neighbourhood to ensure that they work together and deploy their resources more effectively in dealing with the problems that are commonly experienced by tenants, regardless of who their landlord is.
The New Life for Paddington project has delivered a £13 million single regeneration budget in the Paddington area since 1999. It has proved to be extremely effective in consulting the community, and has delivered a range of services in education and employment—and much else beside.
We also have four Sure Start schemes. They are the best example of regeneration in its widest sense, with a sensible focus on parents and very young children. The children's fund has been helping to deliver programmes to seven to 14-year-olds by paying for much of the summer programme that took place on the streets and estates of Westminster last year. There are many other sources of funding—the single pot, money paid through the regional development agency, the European social fund and much else.
My purpose today is to praise the investment and the approach taken by the Government. It is not enough, and we could ask questions about a number of issues, such as the micro-management of some schemes and the fact that they are often required to meet too many detailed targets. None the less, the thrust of the approach is right and important. That said, I have worries about the future, which will be the main thrust of my speech.
By far the most important question that I shall raise with my hon. Friend the Minister relates to sustainability. Between 20 and 25 area-based initiatives are estimated to be due to end in 2006, including the current programme of European Union structural funds and the neighbourhood renewal fund. It is something of an open secret that mainstreaming is more talked about than done. I look in vain for signs that my two local authorities are committing major efforts and resources to applying Sure Start principles or neighbourhood management principles to wards and neighbourhoods that are not directly targeted and included in the targets for the 20 per cent. most deprived areas.
Yesterday, we had an important and valuable community conference on antisocial behaviour in the Dalgarno neighbourhood, which was attended by my hon. Friend the Minister for Crime Reduction, Policing and Community Safety. We heard that a neighbourhood management co-ordinator would be appointed to facilitate co-ordinated working between the eight different landlords that own property in that deprived neighbourhood. I welcome that unreservedly, but the co-ordinator is being paid for by the NRF, which is due to end in 2006. We have been trying for years to get our landlords working together effectively, and that post will make an important contribution. However, we do not know whether it will have a future after 2006.

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As this Minister knows, only a month or two ago, we had to respond to a crisis in the funding available to us through the children's fund. The crisis arose because the relatively slow build-up to the programme, which is generally a sensible approach, resulted in an over-commitment in the middle of the programme and a subsequent clawing back. There was scurrying around at the end of the last financial year to put together resources to try to ensure that the children's fund would carry on along roughly the predetermined lines. Unfortunately, although additional money was put back into the children's fund after that hiccup, it still means that some of the programmes that I expected to take place in my local neighbourhoods this summer will not now happen.
There are a number of concerns about what will happen to very important schemes and projects that have been developed over the last few years, particularly the neighbourhood warden scheme. There are concerns about whether neighbourhood wardens will be picked up by other sources of funding. Given the pressure on local government budgets and the understandable sensitivities among local councils and the Government about council tax levels, it is unlikely that most local authorities will be able to take up the funding of such wardens. Can the Minister give us a steer on the future of neighbourhood warden projects in particular and on the NRF more widely?
I am well aware that much of the information that I seek depends on the outcome of the comprehensive spending review and, however much I would like detailed responses on these points today, I do not expect them. However, will the Minister at least reassure me that the widespread concern about the longer-term future of the NRF, neighbourhood wardens and the fallout from the possible loss, particularly to London, resulting from the EU structural funds coming to an end in 2006 is being heard, and that consideration is being given to a long-term commitment to those projects after 2006? The approach of building up slowly, taking time and running programmes over a much longer period than was envisaged in regeneration programmes in the 1990s is such a good way to proceed, but there is a shadow hanging over those projects. The sooner we can lift that shadow and allow them the confidence to develop into the future, the better things will be.
My second point, which is very much related to sustainability, involves the concerns over gap funding. This is not a criticism, but rather a statement of reality. A number of regeneration strands come from different Departments—primarily the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, but also from the Department for Education and Skills, the Department of Trade and Industry and others. Because of that, putting together community regeneration programmes on the ground is sometimes like knitting spaghetti. One project will often be dependent on match funding and complementary funding from a number of different sources.
To take one particular example, the neighbourhood nurseries initiative has made an important contribution to creating affordable child care in neighbourhoods where there is a need to allow parents to secure child care at a reasonable cost because of high levels of worklessness. In London, in particular, the initiative has
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not been able to unfold in a way that overcomes the high development and capital costs. To make the neighbourhood nurseries initiative function and to create some sense of sustainability, the London Development Agency has taken a national lead among regional development agencies by putting in gap funding to meet some of the shortfall between real costs and the level of costs necessary to make the care affordable.
What will be the future of gap funding, particularly within the RDAs? Let us suppose that the NRF is guaranteed after 2006 and that projects continue. Unless we can have confidence that there will be future investment in the single pot and that the shortfall will be met, particularly the shortfall in skills and economic development in the EU structural fund programmes, we will find that those projects that are dependent on a multiplicity of sources may become vulnerable as a consequence.
I am not making any secret of the fact that I am talking about London, simply because we know that we have two particular problems in London. We have exceptionally high costs in terms of labour, land and capital, a fact that is widely recognised. However, we also have the highest levels of poverty in the country, with 54 per cent. of children in inner London living in poverty, and we have the highest levels of worklessness despite a tight labour market.
The Thames gateway is an important example of a unique opportunity to close the worklessness gap between areas such as Tower Hamlets and the rest of the country. Tower Hamlets has the lowest employment rates in the country. The gateway provides an opportunity. but things will not happen by themselves. Between 1991 and 2001, 55,000 jobs were created in the docklands area, but people from Tower Hamlets did not benefit because of the lack of investment at the time in skills training and other support mechanisms. We need to be assured that the investment from the single pot and the other funding sources that will complement it will be available to meet the range of needs of that workless population, from skills and employment training through to affordable child care.
As the single regeneration budget comes to a close and the single pot becomes the principal mechanism by which the investment will be channelled, one of my main concerns is to know what the future of community development and capacity building will be. The single pot is focused on economic development, and one understands the reasons for that, but one of the benefits of many of the programmes that the Government have developed over recent years, and one of the benefits of the SRB, was the scope for community development and capacity building. I am anxious to know what future funding will enable us to meet the needs of those highly stressed, alienated communities that require future investment. The new deal for communities, which I am sure my colleagues will talk about, is very valuable but, as we know, it is limited to a relatively small number of pockets of deprivation.
When I applied for this debate, I originally sought to focus on issues surrounding the index of deprivation. I know that the index of deprivation is now imminent and that there is therefore little to be gained by talking about

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it at any great length. However, the Minister will no doubt know that a number of us who represent London and other urban areas felt that the index of deprivation 2000 effectively discriminated against urban areas and that our share of regeneration funding available to those authorities ranked in the 88 most deprived decreased as a consequence. We made several proposals on changing the domains to correct the bias against urban areas. I do not know whether the Minister will be able to say anything about that today, but we very much hope that the index of deprivation will include the crime and physical environment domains, and reflect other important indicators of the level of needs in our communities, such as income measured after housing costs, adjustments for variations in benefit take-up, and pupil mobility and ethnicity as an indicator of diversity.
However valuable the additional funding streams are that have been made available to us in recent years, I know from my own neighbourhoods that there is still chronic deprivation, and that is reflected in the London-wide poverty and worklessness statistics. Boroughs and wards in my area cannot afford to lose the investment that they have been able to secure in recent years. They need the confidence to plan for the future; they need not only the investment that they have already received but continued commitment and a fairer share of the resources that are available.
In summary, we are handicapped a little by the sheer multiplicity and complexity of the funding streams, but buoyed up, too, by a strong, well-managed economy. The Government's regeneration strategy has been successful on many fronts, but we are asking for help for the cities, and particularly for London, so that they can continue to lift their neediest communities. We need to recognise the exceptional challenges faced by communities such as mine, which have growing populations, exceptional diversity and high levels of polarisation. I hope that the Minister can assure my colleagues and me that community and economic regeneration will continue and flourish after 2006 and that urban areas will receive the share of regeneration funding that their needs warrant.
9.47 am
Mr. Iain Coleman: I am grateful for the opportunity to make what I promise will be a brief contribution to this important debate. [Interruption.]
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. John McWilliam): Order. I do not want to interrupt the hon. Gentleman as he gets into his peroration, but I must remind hon. Members that I will not call them if they do not stand up.
Mr. Coleman: Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North (Ms Buck) on securing this important debate. I shall try to highlight the particular concerns of my local authority, Hammersmith and Fulham, and, of course, those of my constituency. As she said, it is important to recognise the significant contribution that the Government have made to regenerating some of the most deprived and poorest sections of London, particularly inner London. I also want to touch on other regenerations as they affect London more generally.
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For the past four years, I have been delighted to chair the north Fulham new deal for communities programme, which is making big improvements in the north Fulham area, and particularly the west Kensington area, which is, without question, the most deprived part of my constituency. The NDC for north Fulham has been granted £44 million over 10 years, and the project is beginning to make a significant difference to local people.
In the last year, for instance, there has been huge support from local people for the excellent community police team and community support officers, who are an integral part of the project. The special designated police force for north Fulham has made a real difference to the area's crime figures, and the initiative has been hugely popular among local people. That model of area-based policing, which includes extra matched resources from the Metropolitan police, must surely be a way forward for similar geographical or ward-based area policing projects.
Other improvements include those around the North End road market, support for breakfast clubs and after-school activities at local primary schools, and a massive refurbishment programme for the previously rather neglected Maystar estate in Star road. The refurbishment of the estate, which had not previously had moneys directed at it for refurbishment, has also been model of consultation and support. The programme has been led by a group of residents from the estate, who have planned and led the entire refurbishment project. The refurbishment has meant that many areas of the estate that were previously hot spots for crime and antisocial behaviour have now been redeveloped in a way that, as many local people, particularly the elderly, have told me, makes them feel a lot safer. They are delighted with the project, which has been possible only because of the close working relationship between the three-star local authority housing department and the NDC north Fulham delivery team.
The partnership between regeneration projects and the local council is a model for similar future schemes. Other projects that have already been given significant support from the local community and approved by the NDC board for the coming year include the development of the new early years centre at Normand Croft school at a cost of £4.5 million and the redevelopment of Normand Park. with the installation of CCTV on the main market and a range of initiatives to improve access to GPs and other health services.
That is all good news, but there are still serious housing problems in Hammersmith and Fulham. The council has a duty arising from the communities plan to influence and establish balanced local housing markets to help promote mixed and sustainable communities. However, the new challenges for Hammersmith and Fulham are testing and it will be difficult if not impossible to achieve those balanced local housing developments. As evidence for that, in 1996–97, Hammersmith and Fulham council accepted a duty to 618 homeless households, whereas last year they accepted a duty to 811—a 31 per cent. increase. At the end of 1996–97, 749 households were placed in temporary accommodation by Hammersmith and Fulham council, whereas at the end of last year, there were 1,798—a massive 140 per cent. increase. It is a

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matter of regret that the council placed a third of those households in temporary accommodation outside the borough, inevitably causing stress and strain to some of the vulnerable households in question. For example, single mothers were removed from their local communities and support mechanisms, which increased levels of stress and isolation for already deeply traumatised and vulnerable young people.
At current rates of supply, Hammersmith and Fulham council cannot meet even the most acute needs, let alone try through normal supply routes, such as council and registered social landlord void properties, to meet the accommodation needs of those on low to middle incomes. Average price levels for Hammersmith and Fulham are 429 per cent. above the national average, which means that the borough has the fourth highest prices in London. The minimum price for a one-bedroom flat in Hammersmith and Fulham is £165,000 and, for a three-bedroom property, the minimum is £325,000.
A recent study undertaken by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that to purchase an entry level home in the borough, a household would need an income of £89,000 per annum. The average income of a nurse at the time of the survey was £22,500 per annum. That hinders the promotion of more sustainable and cohesive communities and results in a greater level of overcrowding because available social housing units are prioritised for homeless households.
Overcrowding has a range of consequences on health, levels of antisocial behaviour and educational attainment. Therefore, it is essential that more work be done to establish a greater supply of affordable housing for rent in the borough. Despite the fact that the local authority has the best record in London for providing such accommodation, it is still a drop in the ocean compared with the vast unmet needs of local people.
The trend of increasing employment and decreasing unemployment rates in the borough is good news, but it has meant that the proportion of high-needs groups seeking work is increasing—for example, lone parents, people with disabilities, refugees and young and older people. The needs of those groups will not be met without continual additional public funding through regeneration projects, such as the NDC and the single regeneration budget.
Since 1997–98, the bulk of regeneration funding coming into the borough has been SRB funding, with significant additional funding from European programmes and the NDC, which I mentioned earlier. However, SRB funding will decline between now and March 2006, and the European funding, which has contributed significantly to projects in the borough since its peak in 2001, is projected to fall after next year. London Development Agency funding is picking up in the area, but there is no commitment that the strategic area programmes will continue after funding ceases. The next financial year, 2005–06, is the final year for the SRB programme and the neighbourhood renewal fund. Objective 2 finishes in 2006–07, as does the LDA funding commitment for the Park Royal-Wembley programme. It is unclear what funding will be available for Hammersmith and Fulham after then.
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In relation to unemployment and skills, 5.4 per cent. of the working age population are claiming jobseeker's allowance and 42 per cent. of those claimants are long-term unemployed. The 2001 census showed that the level of black and minority ethnic unemployment is more than twice that of the white population and that a high proportion of the adult population have no qualifications. Some 25 per cent. of the working age population have poor literacy and numeracy skills.
A high proportion of the population does not have English as a first language. There are serious language barriers and there is low investment in training. In one primary school in my constituency, 62 languages are spoken. In the Phoenix high school, in the north of the borough, 126 languages were spoken when the last survey was conducted four years ago. Along with all that, it is still not unusual for 60 per cent. of the children attending other local primary schools in the area to be on free school meals. There is a mismatch between the skills of the borough's residents and the jobs being created on major new local developments.
To conclude, a lot has been achieved through the Government's commitment to regeneration in Hammersmith and Fulham. Like the local people, I am grateful for that. However, a huge amount still needs to be done. When the Minister sums up, I would he grateful if she could advise the Chamber on what practical plans the Government have to ensure that future regeneration schemes recognise the high needs associated with the deprivation and poverty in areas such as Hammersmith and Fulham, and in other constituencies similar to those of my hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North. Such areas are sometimes classed as wealthy, but, in practice, they are not. The Minister must know that there are still high levels of deprivation and poverty in such areas. Much more work needs to be done to recognise that and to deal with it.
9.56 am
Jeremy Corbyn: I welcome this debate and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North (Ms Buck) for introducing it and choosing the topic. As one who represents a constituency similar to those of other hon. Members who have spoken on inner-city deprivation in London, I welcome the principles behind what the Government are trying to do by putting large sums into urban regeneration. Having spent my time under the previous Administration pleading for money for urban regeneration, estate repairs, housing improvements and all the rest, I am pleased to be able to discuss with this Government how much money we will receive for improvements, rather than how much will be taken from us. That is a marked improvement, and I welcome it. Any criticisms that I raise concerning regeneration programmes are not criticisms of the principle, but I am concerned about the methods of disbursing the money and about the efficiency of the process.
There are, traditionally, high levels of unemployment in my constituency. Most of the time they are higher than the national average; indeed, the level is well above the London average, even now. There are various issues associated with that My constituency, like that of my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Fulham (Mr. Coleman), has a considerable number of families living in bed and breakfast or otherwise inadequate

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accommodation, and we experience the problems of under-achievement in schools that go with that. It is too simple to say that schools are at fault if children underachieve, as there are clearly other factors involved.
I have been a councillor in Finsbury Park in north London and I am now the MP for that area and the neighbouring borough of Haringey. I have seen the problems of the area first hand since the early 1970s. I have always admired the way people in the local community have got together to try to improve the situation, to campaign for adequate disbursement of resources and to knock the heads of three local authorities together. As other hon. Members will understand well, urban constituency and borough boundaries are almost meaningless. The division is often arbitrary; it just goes down a road, cutting communities in half. Finsbury Park is an example of that: three boroughs happen to meet there. The community coalesces around Finsbury Park, but it is represented by three MPs and three borough councils, and it suffers all the problems that go with that. I do not have a simple solution to that, but there must be a willingness to work together and try to co-operate to achieve improvements.
As one who helped to found the initial Finsbury Park working party—my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton (Mr. Love) will remember the days in the early 1980s when we were involved with that—I was pleased when the Government agreed a £25 million single regeneration budget scheme for the area. There have undoubtedly been considerable improvements as a result, and I am not complaining at all. We have seen environmental improvements and enjoyed less crime and better street furniture.
However, we have consistently had problems in getting together representatives of the different modes of transport to discuss Finsbury Park station. We have had more meetings about that station in the last 20 years than about anything else. Unfortunately, it is still uniformly grotty, as hon. Members from the north will know if their trains have terminated early at Finsbury Park and they have had the joy of a journey from that station. If the Minister could ask the Secretary of State for Transport to tell the strategic and national rail authorities and any person with rail attached to his name to do something about it and support what Transport for London is trying to achieve, everybody will be very happy and Ministers will be welcome to visit Finsbury Park in future.
I want to discuss the democracy and openness of the operation of the single regeneration and urban renewal schemes. The problem is that there are many overlapping Government initiatives in inner urban areas—single regeneration, neighbourhood renewal fund, Sure Start—all of which are laudable in their own way. However, their local managers and directors spend an awful lot of time meeting the local managers and directors of broadly similar schemes and those who operate local community schemes and initiatives. They, in turn, spend an awful lot of time writing letters to charities and other benefactors to raise money to secure match funding. I question the efficiency of some of the schemes; I wonder about the time spent by public employees meeting other public employees to discuss achieving the objectives that they have been set by central Government and then reinventing the wheel by
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creating a local bureaucracy to administer the schemes. All that could and should be done by the existing local authorities, acting in a slightly more open way than they did in the past.
In Islington, we have a strategic partnership board, which exists to disburse the large sums of Government money that have come into the borough in recent years. The board is chaired by the leader of the council, and there can be confusion as to whether he is leading the council that is administering services or chairing a strategic partnership board that is disbursing Government money. Because of the way in which that money is disbursed, the public think that a lot of it is local authority money. I ask the Minister in a friendly way to ensure that there is transparency about the amount of central Government money that is supplied for urban renewal and regeneration schemes and to clarify that it is not to be used as a subsidy for existing council services that ought to be funded in the traditional way. It seems that the schemes are being used to subsidise local services, when they should be an add-on to improve the life of the community.
There have been many debates within the strategic partnership in Islington, and two members of its board have resigned, citing as their reason the lack of transparency in the operation of the scheme. I hope that the Minister will understand that, although we welcome the schemes, her Department should make an opportunity to examine their efficiency, openness and democracy and the way we spend large sums of Government money supporting local schemes. Because of match funding, I wonder how efficiently some of the money is disbursed and how well we are using the skills of local community leaders.
Like other hon. Members, I frequently visit community centres and projects. All one ever sees in their offices are stacks of forms waiting to be sent to charities to raise small sums. Is that the best use of people's time, or would they be better employed in making hands-on improvements in their communities and delivering services to them?
I welcome what has been done so far, and I hope that the Government will continue the urban regeneration programme. However, the skills and the structure that already exist in local government are there to be used, and it will be quicker and more efficient to do that than to establish an alternative system.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North said, there is a problem when the schemes come to an end. Local people who have got together and developed skills to support and carry out three, five or seven-year programmes are left high and dry afterwards. There seems to be no end strategy; for example, to pass the programmes on to local authorities or to set up an appropriate trust or a mini-local authority in the area.
We need to consider the problem; of course, we want to continue the improvement that comes from bricks, mortar and money, but safe, sustainable communities, which we all want to live in, come from communities working together and having a local focus. Often when the schemes just disappear, the local focus disappears with them, and the Department would do well to think about that. I say that in a friendly way—I welcome the money but I want it to be spent more efficiently.
10.6 am
Mr. Andrew Dismore: I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington. North (Ms Buck) on securing the debate. Although its title suggests that the issue goes beyond the capital, the fact that every Back Bencher who wishes to speak represents a London constituency shows just how important the subject is to the people who live and work in London.
The hon. Members who have spoken so far represent inner-London constituencies; I represent an outer-London seat, but I regret to say that it has had little support from the Government in respect of regeneration schemes. I question that decision. Parts of my constituency have the same problems of deprivation as areas of inner London. London is a huge city, with rich and poor neighbourhoods side by side, and it is assumed that outer London is full of leafy suburbs. That assumption tends to mask the deprivation in my constituency in areas such as Colindale, west Hendon, Burnt Oak and even parts of Edgware, which is usually thought of as a wealthy area.
My constituency has been told to expect 10,000 extra households in the next 10 years, and I am extremely concerned that there will not be a consequent growth in affordable or key worker housing. There will be more homes for the wealthy people moving into the constituency, but little provision of housing for people who have grown up in the area and want to continue to live near their friends and relations. There are serious prospects of their being unable to do so, largely because of Barnet council's housing policies.
I sometimes question the Government's attitude to the major regeneration projects in the capital. There will be enormous investment in the Thames gateway, but that is a long way down the line. In my constituency, three schemes are on the stocks being worked up and they are pretty well ready to roll, but there has been no real Government contribution towards them.
People want to live in my constituency, which is why all the additional homes are expected. The economy is strong and jobs are available. There are infrastructure problems, but the transport links exist, much though they need improving. In the Thames gateway, all those things must be provided. Why on earth are houses being built in areas when it is questionable whether large numbers of people want to live there, where there are no jobs yet and where the transport links do not exist? The answer, of course, is that to build affordable homes in north and west London is more expensive, because land and building costs are more expensive.
I am concerned that we run the risk of duplicating past mistakes. Many houses were built in the north, for example, but they became derelict because people did not want to live there. That will not be the problem with the Thames gateway, but it would be more sensible to capitalise on existing schemes that are ready to roll rather than anticipating jam tomorrow.
The three schemes in my constituency were originally envisaged by the then Labour-controlled Barnet council, but they have been moved on, and manipulated, by the Conservatives who now run the council. The Spur road-Stonegrove development in Edgware has 600 homes on it at present, of which 485 are rented. There will be 1,350 homes on that site, with no extra affordable
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homes at all. Similarly there are currently 600 properties in west Hendon. Some 2,200 homes will border the Welsh Harp including penthouse suites with wonderful views, but there will be no extra affordable homes. There are 1,800 homes in Grahame Park, of which 1,300 are rented. That number will rise to 3,300 with a net loss of social housing units. It is utterly scandalous. It is a missed opportunity to provide affordable homes in a place where people, want to live. Such homes are desperately needed in my part of London, if not in the capital as a whole.
Matthew Green: The hon. Gentleman has given us some appalling examples of the lack of affordable housing in the new plans. How did that get through the local planning process? Did not the inspector pick up that there was no affordable housing built into those large-scale housing schemes?
Mr. Dismore: The three schemes are currently in the planning process. We will have to see how that develops. The problem is that the local authority gives itself planning consent for its own schemes. Although there is a degree of scrutiny beyond that, I remain concerned for reasons that I shall explain.
I have no objections to regeneration. The people who live on these estates badly need decent housing but, as a result of these schemes, their children will not be able to live nearby and will have to move farther afield. The new homes will simply be for rich people, for whom, frankly, we do not need to make provision in this way. Clearly something needs to be done about tenure mix on these estates. We need to balance them up more to create a more cohesive community. I have no problem with that at all.
Mr. Coleman: I, too, am shocked by the figures that my hon. Friend has given. Such developments would never be allowed by my local authority because the planning department would normally demand a minimum of 50 per cent. affordable housing. However, it worries me that, recently in parts of my constituency, private developers have been submitting applications for blocks of 14 units. In inner London, if there are 14 or fewer units, affordable housing does not have to be supplied. Has that been in happening in Barnet too?
Mr. Dismore: The position is even worse in Barnet, and I will come to that later.
Barnet council is not interested in providing affordable homes. Councillor Salinger, who is the relevant cabinet member, is not unsympathetic, but he is rather lukewarm in his attempts to drive this issue. The real problem is the ideologue behind Barnet council, the deputy leader, Councillor Coleman, who is also the Greater London authority Member for Barnet and Camden. What we have seen, which I will illustrate when I talk about some of the future private schemes, is the beginnings of the gerrymandering of my constituency and parts of Barnet. I do not make that allegation lightly. As hon. Members may know, I used to be leader of the Labour group on Westminster city council during the reign of Dame Shirley Porter. I know the issue of gerrymandering inside out.

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This is not just a question of homes for votes, which everyone knows about. Part of the policy adopted by Westminster council in those days went way beyond the homes-for-votes scandal. It included the use of planning controls to bring in as many Conservative voters as possible through the widespread granting of planning consent for private sector developments without any real push towards social benefit and providing affordable homes. It was probably the more important part—in terms of numbers—of the way in which Westminster council was rigged. I raise my concerns today that Barnet council is potentially going down that route through its manifest failure to deliver affordable homes for people in the constituency and the borough.
Ms Buck: My hon. Friend's remarks worry me greatly not just because of the historical parallels but because. by one of those strange quirks, Westminster is linked with Barnet in the sub-regional housing strategy. There is a general presumption that investment in housing in places such as Westminster is so high cost that we should look to lower-cost areas like Barnet. If affordable housing opportunities are not available there, despite rising homelessness and overcrowding, I wonder where that leaves other partners in the sub-regional strategy.
Mr. Dismore: My hon. Friend makes a valid point, which Westminster council Tories ought to discuss with Barnet council Tories. However, I suspect that we will not see a great deal of progress.
My hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Fulham (Mr. Coleman) raised the question of private developments. There are two major private sector housing developments taking place in my constituency—at the Inglis barracks site in Mill Hill east, which could create 2,500 extra homes, and at the RAF East Camp site in Colindale, which will create 2,000 extra homes. Those will be combined with potential major development schemes for the Colindale hospital and Edgware hospital sites. I am concerned that Barnet council is not pushing as hard as it should for a fair proportion of those homes to be affordable for local communities. Negotiations are under way, but I do not believe that the council is pushing as hard as it could.
My hon. Friend also raised the question of what are sometimes called euphemistically "Infill blocks" of 14. That problem occurs to an even greater extent in outer London, because the threshold in outer London is 24 not 14. A private developer can therefore build a block of flats of up to 24 units without having to provide any social housing. I raised that issue with the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow, East (Mr. McNulty) when he was the Under-Secretary responsible for housing, planning and regeneration, because he experienced the same problems in his constituency. I urge the Government to examine the matter to see whether the threshold for outer London can be reduced, even if not much can be done to address the problem generally in London.
Every time I turn a street corner, I increasingly see a building being demolished and a block of flats being built so that wealthy people can move into the area. On some of the main thoroughfares out of London—the
A41, for example—the old family houses that we desperately need are being demolished and replaced by blocks of shoe boxes. That is not the way forward.
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Barnet council must take a large part of the blame for that, because it has not implemented its own policy. The issue must be addressed quickly.
Matthew Green: The problem of Barnet council is worse than the hon. Gentleman suggests. He quoted the figure of 24 units—it is 14 in Hammersmith and Fulham—but local councils can change that figure if they want to gain tighter control, even though they may have to negotiate with the inspectorate to get those figures through. In my area—south Shropshire, which is not an urban area—the figure is 50 per cent. affordable housing on sites of two or more houses.
Mr. Dismore: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention—he reinforced the point that I was making. Barnet council has not taken action in that regard. When an issue comes before the planning inspectorate—on an appeal against a refusal, for example—it is said. "Well, Barnet council has not adopted the policy, so what can we do about it?" The solution to the problem is for the Government to issue tighter guidelines.
I shall make a few specific points about the problems that we have experienced in regeneration. First, there is the question of the right to buy, which significantly distorts some of the funding issues related to regeneration schemes. As soon as a regeneration scheme appears to be on the cards, the property sharks come round trying to buy up the flats—they give people the money to use the right to buy and then buy them out, knowing that they will get substantial extra money through the compensation arrangements. That abuse must be tackled rapidly, because it significantly distorts the funding and cost arrangements of regeneration schemes.
Secondly, the regeneration schemes in my area currently receive no Government money. In the absence of any major contribution from the Government, it would be helpful for support to be given towards the infrastructure costs—health, education, the utilities, and the roads and transport network, in particular—because those services have to be funded out of the projects. That might give us the opportunity to squeeze some social housing out of the schemes.
Some of the schemes are very good. The west Hendon scheme is potentially brilliant. It involves the replacement of a failing estate, but it is more than a housing scheme. It envisages the comprehensive regeneration of a very run-down neighbourhood, including streets of Victorian and Edwardian housing, which has been blighted for years by poor infrastructure, an appalling road system, lack of investment and the erosion of its commercial base. That is the sort of project that we should encourage. The Government are, to a degree, letting Barnet council off the hook in the matter of trying to make such schemes effective.
Barnet has the appropriate schemes. We could provide more social housing if Barnet council had the political will for that—which it does not—and if we had more help from the Government.
Mr. Deputy Speaker: I assure the hon. Gentleman that I drive up and down the A41 about four times a month.
10.20 am
Mr. Andrew Love: I apologise, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for arriving late. It was not my intention. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North (Ms Buck) on securing the debate and bringing to it her great knowledge and experience on matters of urban policy.
I welcome the debate because we do not debate regeneration as much as we should. I am a strong supporter of the thrust of the regeneration activity that the Government have undertaken and, in particular, the move away from the old bricks-and-mortar policy of simply rebuilding communities and estates and towards a policy that is more dependent on social regeneration. Experience shows that unless we combine bricks and mortar with social regeneration, the benefits will not be sustained in the longer term.
I want to raise with the Minister some of the statistics that are bandied around about economic and social regeneration. We constantly hear about the number of houses being built and jobs being secured and retained. Often, those figures are not sustained in the longer term. We urgently need a methodology that gives us confidence in what regeneration policy brings about and that what is created will be sustained.
I wish to raise several points about regeneration and how we can improve the impact that we are making on some of the most deprived communities in the country. It is a truism among people who are interested in regeneration policy that it must be for the longer term. The idea that long-term sustainability can be created by popping into a deprived area, building a few houses or painting a few doors and then leaving is now understood to be risible. We need more long-term programmes over 10, 20 or 25 years, and that is what the new deal for communities has created.
I understand that we must manage expectations. Undoubtedly, the new deal for communities has created an expectation of change. People are anxious for change as soon as possible. We need to enter into partnership with local communities so that they understand the build-up to a sustained regeneration policy.
There has also been enormous press speculation. The press love to show up the inadequacies of whatever is happening, to point out what huge sums of money will be invested through the new deal for communities and to show that it has not delivered. I know that the Government have been somewhat rocked by some of the press speculation.
I make a strong plea that we hold our nerve, and that plea is based on evidence. Although an early report by the National Audit Office makes some general criticisms of the programme, it is on the whole supportive and to the extent that it suggests that the new deal for communities could be exported to other countries. We must keep faith that our long-term regeneration activity will show real benefits for some of the most deprived communities.
I want also to emphasise something that is already part of Government policy. The communities in which we are trying to carry out the relevant activities must be in the driving seat. They must play a leadership role. We constantly use the word "empowerment" in the context of regeneration policy. It must be made a reality. Experience shows that if the people in a community are
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not involved and are not empowered to have a say in decisions about their community or estate, regeneration will not be sustainable in the long term. We will have to go hack in five or 10 years to do the same again, with little or no benefit but a great deal of cynicism from the local communities involved.
The leadership role must be part and parcel of our regeneration activity. However, to achieve real change in the communities, we need to build capacity. As has been mentioned, capacity building is critical, and there must be greater investment in it for two reasons. First, all sorts of professionals are involved in regeneration activity and they all come with financial and property qualifications, but most have no idea of how to build community consensus. Whether or not it is in the form of a qualification, experience and knowledge of how to build consensus in a community should be given to people who are involved in regeneration activity. The National Audit Office report on the new deal for communities shows consistently that the professionals in charge simply did not know how to create a community consensus. I would be the first to say that it is not always easy—it can be extremely difficult—but unless we give people the necessary training to cope and properly equip themselves, we will not make progress.
The second reason for greater investment is that we need to build capacity in deprived communities. It is no good sitting people around a table and saying, "You're now the board—take decisions." The communities need assistance to achieve that. One reason why the new deal for communities has taken such a long time to gear up is because that capacity has had to be built, and greater effort and investment needs to be made. If it is not made, those communities will not be able to rise to the occasion, take the right decisions and understand the problems as well as the opportunities and benefits that will accrue. If we can create that capacity, they will have every chance of success.
The Government also need to reconsider the rationalising area-based regeneration activities, and I know that they have already done that. Like, I suspect, other hon. Members, I know from my local community that whatever the regeneration activity that takes place—whether it is a Sure Start scheme or the old health or education action zones, for example—everyone at a local level is confused: no one knows who has responsibility, which Department is involved and from where the money arrives. A complex picture is made even more complex at a local level, and we need to look carefully at rationalising our regeneration activity and ensuring that it is focused on what I believe is the Government's overall aim of achieving significant improvement for our most deprived communities.
That brings me to my final point, which relates to the new programmes—the strategic partnerships and the neighbourhood renewal funding—and to mainstreaming or the so-called "bending the spend". That was introduced for two reasons. First, everyone involved, including the Government, recognised that no matter how much is put into area-based regeneration, it will never be enough to do what is necessary for

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deprived communities. Only by involving mainstream funding and getting the huge central education and health budgets into deprived areas will we make a significant difference. The second reason was that the national strategy, which took a long time to develop, showed clearly that the delivery of public services in deprived areas is significantly inferior to that in other areas.
I solidly the support the mainstreaming of public services into deprived areas. My concern relates to the vehicles by which that is done, in particular when a strategic partnership has a local authority in the lead role that does not share either the programme's or the Government's overall objectives. There is a problem with that and the issue must be examined.
We know that there is a variability of neighbourhood renewal funding and partnerships throughout the country. It is too early to take decisions on that, but the Government need to consider the matter carefully to assure communities up and down the country that everything is being done not only to focus activity on their areas, but to ensure that budgets are mainstreamed to get additional resources to alleviate the poverty in those areas.
10.30 am
Matthew Green: I, too, congratulate the hon. Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North (Ms Buck) on securing the debate. It is a shame that there are no Members from other major urban areas. We have had a good representation from London, but large-scale urban regeneration is also happening in places such as Liverpool and Birmingham. It is a shame that we have not heard some of their stories and about the potential difficulties that they are facing. Perhaps we have not heard anything because everything in those areas is sweetness and light, but I doubt that.
Mr. Deputy Speaker: I represent Gateshead, and I assure the hon. Gentleman that if I were able to say something, I would.
Matthew Green: Thank you for that, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
The hon. Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North raised a series of practical questions, which I will not go over again. She was right to challenge the Minister on some practicalities and on the future of the funding schemes, and I wait with interest to hear the Minister's answers. We also heard some appalling stories from the hon. Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore) about Barnet council, and something should be done to ensure that affordable homes are available in that area. The situation is a disgrace, so he was right to raise the matter in the House.
I found myself in particular agreement with the hon. Member for Islington, North (Jeremy Corbyn). He hit the nail on the head with his plea for transparency and for us to use the skills that councils already have as a vehicle for delivering regeneration rather than continually setting up new schemes, with new groups of people trying to run them while often straddling lots of different bodies. It would be far more effective to put the money through councils rather than to keep reinventing the wheel with new schemes. There is a huge amount of experience in councils.
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There is a range of funding schemes, and the Library notes for this debate identify a few. They include single pot funding, the single regeneration budget, Sure Start, the European regional development fund, the European social fund, the new deal for communities, the new opportunities for physical education and sport, the neighbourhood renewal fund, the Heritage Lottery Fund and the children's fund. Those are only the major funding streams; there are even more potential ones, and that is part of the overall difficulty. The Government need to get a grasp of the funding streams. It is right to invest money, but the way in which it is going in is causing some difficulties.
I shall touch on one of the funding streams in particular—the new deal for communities—but I shall not be as kind as the hon. Member for Edmonton (Mr. Love). Again, the money is welcome, but I have concerns about the fund's performance that, in light of its report this month, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister seems to share. It would be helpful to hear from the Minister reassurance that the problems are being tackled.
There is the awful case of Aston Pride, which the Government stepped in and stopped last year. It is worth reminding Members that, in two years, Aston Pride spent only £2.4 million out of the £10 million that had been allocated, and most of that was on administration. It failed completely in its intention of regeneration. The managers failed to do the basic things such as setting up a bank account, obtaining a cheque book and registering with Customs and Excise. There was an appalling lack of basic administration skills. I shall be generous and say that any scheme can include a bad egg somewhere in the country, but there are problems in other parts and other schemes, albeit not to the same extent as Aston Pride, which is definitely the worst case. Those problems should be examined.
One question that the Minister could do well to address is whether the scheme will live up to what it was established to do. The ODPM, when it was the Department for the Environment, Transport and the Regions, said that the new deal for communities was
"designed to reduce the gaps between some of the poorest neighbourhoods and the rest of the country".
Yet the national evaluation by the ODPM in April 2003 stated that the 39 NDCs amounted to only
"perhaps 1 per cent. of the deprived neighbourhoods in England. The Programme was thus not intended to make a major dent in the scale of neighbourhood level deprivation."
Perhaps the programme was sold too much to begin with; people expect it to achieve more than it is likely to.
Overlap is another issue. The new deal for communities is going to areas with an awful lot of other schemes going on. The ODPM found out that an NDC programme sometimes overlaps with as many as 10 other area-based initiatives—the single regeneration budget, health action zones, education action zones, employment action zones, excellence in cities, Sure Start, European Union-funded area-based initiatives, small education action zones, sport action zones, and youth inclusion projects. Often, the same group of people is expected to juggle matters between different boards. We have heard about capacity building, but we must realise that we perhaps ask too much. We might want to streamline some of the problems.

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The ODPM evaluation of April last year reported:
"Where a large number of other ABIs exist … this can impede the involvement of partner agencies, which may find themselves committed to a wide range of neighbourhood initiatives."
The Government recognise the problems, but the solutions have not yet been seen. The evaluation report was published a year ago. We need answers from the Government about where they will go to tackle some of the problems apparently inherent in the new deal for communities.
The main problem takes us back to the points about not going through the existing route provided by councils and the sheer cost of administering the schemes. The average spending on administration is 10.3 per cent. of overall cost. Currently, of the £2 billion that has been committed, £1.14 billion has been spent, of which £117 million has been spent on administration. That is 10.3 per cent. The Aston scheme was on a par with that. Heywood in Rochdale spent £25 million, of which £9.6 million—38.36 per cent.—went on administration. Those are the Government's figures.
The cost of administration is clearly a huge problem. We can realistically expect, with those levels of spending, that if the schemes continue to run and the £2 billion that has been allocated is used, another £88 million will have been spent on administration by the end.
Mr. Coleman: The figures that the hon. Gentleman is outlining are staggering, and I am appalled by them, but do not they represent shameful figures for the organisations that are supposed to be the accountable bodies in the NDCs? Birmingham council is probably one example.
Matthew Green: Part of the problem is that the council route is not being used. The bodies are not directly accountable to councils. I should prefer the funding to go to the councils. I think that even some of the worst, least efficient councils would do the work at a lower administrative cost than can be achieved by setting up new schemes every time. That problem is inherent in the way that the operation works.
To sum up, there are too many different funding schemes, and the Government need to attend to that. There is too much administration because of the way in which schemes are set up. More of that money could be channelled down to where it is needed if existing routes and experience were used. The message must be: trust the local councils. There is always the odd bad council but, by and large, local councils know the problems in their area. Clearly, as in the case of Barnet with housing, they do not always act on that knowledge.
My plea is that the Government should try to push the money more through local councils instead of always setting up new schemes. Otherwise we will see the bad cases that I have highlighted repeated time and again. That will not do anyone—not only the Government, but politics in general—much good in the public's view.
10.40 am
Mr. Robert Syms: I congratulate the hon. Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North (Ms Buck) on securing this debate. I am relatively new to the Front Bench and I found it educational to listen to the range of speeches on such an important topic.
I declare an interest, insofar as it might impact on the subject: I am a director of a family property and building company.
Mr. Dismore: Not in Barnet?
Mr. Syms: No, not in Barnet.
We have heard some interesting contributions. All political parties must pay serious attention to what happens in our inner cities, particularly those areas that suffer high deprivation. We all know of the problems: there is lower educational attainment and higher levels of crime. Even though we have higher levels of employment, many people are still economically inactive through sickness or because of housing and community problems. It is therefore perfectly sensible for the Government to try to improve the situation.
Of course, the most important thing is to have a sound economy. Mercifully, the British economy has performed better than those of our European partners over the past 10 years. [HON. MEMBERS: "Seven."] No, I rather suspect that our economic revival was based on the reforms introduced by Margaret Thatcher and John Major. Nevertheless, it would be churlish of me not to acknowledge that, relative to our neighbours, the British economy has done well over the last decade.
The fact that economic improvement pulls more people into employment and gives them a chance to obtain skills and achieve a much better standard of living will inevitably improve prospects for people in many of the most deprived areas. However, that, in itself, brings problems. As I listened to the contributions of London Members, it occurred to me that some of the difficulties suffered in their wards are a consequence of higher house prices and the investments being made in those areas. Some might not be happy with such investments.
Things might have been different some years ago, when people would have been more focused on employment rather than trying to tear down and rebuild properties in the cities. When we consider urban policy, we need to consider what is happening not only in London but in many provincial cities. However, there are some good signs. Last week, The Economist pointed out that, for the first time in ages, there was a net inflow of population into some provincial and northern cities, which has countered the trends of the past 20 or 30 years.
The Government seem a little too obsessed with building on greenfield sites and with the communities plan, and those of my colleagues who represent seats in Buckinghamshire and Berkshire—and elsewhere—are concerned about the Government's housing targets. I believe that we should focus on trying to keep populations in city areas, rather than moving people out and building on greenfield sites.
If we had a reasonable urban policy, we could have a great deal of success in keeping people in the cities. The evidence shows that if we can get to grips with some of

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the problems, people quite like living in our cities—particularly young people. A number of things need to be done. Politicians should be ambitious for those areas. We should have outlook and ambition. We need to give people hope and certainty. What the hon. Member for Edmonton (Mr. Love) said about the longer term was important.
The hon. Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North asked important questions about what is likely to happen to a number of schemes, including the neighbourhood renewal fund, after 2005–06. I shall give the Minister adequate time to reply to that point. It is important to work with the market on urban regeneration, because it is the only way to achieve substantial change. It is important to think locally and to act accordingly, and to get communities involved.
The point was echoed in the debate that a certain class of well-paid bureaucrat was administering the schemes, and we heard from the hon. Member for Ludlow (Matthew Green) that some schemes are expensive to administer. How local communities are involved is important. I admit that I have a slight prejudice, as I was a local councillor for 14 years. For all its difficulties, local government is one of the best ways of delivering local services. Too often, Governments set up new, headline schemes for political motives—we are all guilty of that—rather than feed money and resources through local authorities, which could often do the job just as well, or perhaps more cost-effectively
It is important to be flexible at a local level, and to allow a degree of difference in different areas, because one size does not fit all. This matter should be given serious consideration and support. That is certainly the approach of my party. To use a phrase that is not often used: for the sake of one nation and consent, we must do our best to ensure that all our citizens have a fair chance in life.
The hon. Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North mentioned design and lighting, particularly of estates, and that point deserves further discussion on another day. If more thought had been put into city estates, it would be much easier to keep a handle on some of the crime and antisocial behaviour in inner-city areas.
Overall, it is important that the Minister answers the specific points raised by London Members. There are some good signs of urban regeneration. Some of our provincial cities are vibrant, but all the people I have spoken to in cities such as Leeds, Bristol and Nottingham, which are doing quite well, feel that there is still a problem in that there is a wine bar culture in one part of the city centre, but deprivation in others. We must ensure that the success and regeneration of such cities, and the money being invested in them, is spread more widely, so that all communities feel that they have a stake in what is going on.
The hon. Member for Ludlow started to read out some of the schemes, and I was tempted to go through the 48 listed by the House of Commons Library. They are all worthy in their own way. Several of those worthy schemes are certainly complex and they involve a somewhat more bureaucratic approach. I wonder whether it would be sensible to rationalise them and to place more focus on giving resources to local authorities.
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When money is linked to a time limit, schemes and initiatives have to end at a certain point. Local authorities then have to pick them up, but we all know that they are not necessarily in a financial position to do that—at least, that is what they tell me, and I suspect that it is true. It would probably be better to have fewer schemes with longer life spans and longer commitments to the communities that they are supposed to help, and to have greater involvement from local authorities.
I will now sit down to give the Minister an opportunity to address the specific points of Members from the greatest city in the world—London.
10.48 am
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (Yvette Cooper): I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North (Ms Buck) on securing this debate, and on using it to raise a wide range of important issues of regeneration, such as support for deprived areas and the future. Many of my hon. Friends raised concerns about London, and I will try to respond to as many of them as possible.
First, I will say a little about the Government's overall approach to the future of regeneration. In doing so, I will pick up on some of the London-specific issues raised by hon. Members, which they will find apply to areas across the country. Over the past seven years, we have focused strongly on improving deprived areas, while recognising that some areas face multiple problems, such as low employment, low achievement in education, poor health, a poor physical environment and disfranchised local people. Such problems are often closely interlinked, and solving one part of a problem without addressing others is not sustainable in the long run.
We have seen substantial increases in investment through the neighbourhood renewal fund, the new deal for communities, the wardens programme, housing and other mainstream programmes concentrating on deprived areas, programmes involving English Partnerships, the coalfield regeneration programmes and housing market renewal. For example, £2 billion is going to the new deal for communities over 10 years, another £2 billion will be made available through the neighbourhood renewal fund over the next five years, and hundreds of millions of pounds will go into additional community investment, neighbourhood management and other programmes.
It is part of our approach, however, that regeneration programmes are not simply about new investment; in effect, the strategy must have three aspects. First, there must be economic regeneration, because if we do not deal with the underlying economic problems that some areas face, such as the need to get more people into jobs, we will not improve things in the long term, no matter how much we do to improve the physical environment—the bricks and mortar. That is why the regional development agencies, as well as the investment in skills and welfare to work, are so important. The hon. Member for Poole (Mr. Syms) conceded that the overall performance of the economy had improved, although he was perhaps a little churlish about giving the Government the credit for the economy's overall stability and the macro-economic changes that have supported that stability and growth.

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Secondly, there are the improvements to the physical infrastructure—the bricks and mortar—including the housing infrastructure and the transport infrastructure, which my hon. Friend the Member for Islington, North (Jeremy Corbyn) mentioned in relation to Finsbury Park tube station.
Thirdly, there are issues around community-led development. That means supporting not only local communities but the people in them and local community groups, as well as community capacity building. At the individual level, it also means helping people to gain the skills that they need to get jobs. We have to do all three things. As my hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North highlighted, too many initiatives have concentrated on just one aspect and have therefore not succeeded or been sustained.
Considerable changes are already taking place as a result of regeneration programmes. There is evidence that the employment gap between the 88 most deprived districts and the average is narrowing, and that the education gap between them is starting to narrow. The first wave of evaluations for programmes such as the warden schemes has shown a 28 per cent. drop in crime in scheme areas, and I shall say more about that in a minute. Sure Start and NDCs are also showing promising signs at the local level. Finally, there is progress on decent homes, with 1 million more homes now reaching the decent homes standard. That means that 1 million more families are not living in cold, damp accommodation.
I want now to address some of the specific issues that hon. Members have raised. My hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North asked about the future of funding after 2006, and many other hon. Members raised similar questions. As they will know, we have attempted to set out funding programmes that are more long term than ever before, and the new deal and Sure Start both involve 10-year funding programmes. We have set out a three-year rolling programme of spending reviews. That is in strong contrast to the previous system of annual funding decisions, which were often taken by central Government. As part of the current spending review, we are considering funding through to 2007–08. Obviously, I cannot anticipate the decisions that will be taken as part of that review, although hon. Members will know that the conclusion of the review and the announcement of the next wave is timetabled for July. However, I can say that we retain a strong commitment to deprived areas, and we are reviewing the way in which we spend much of the investment.
An announcement will be made later today about the index of deprivation. It recognises many concerns, and certainly those raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Fulham (Mr. Coleman) about the need to identify smaller areas within larger wards, where pockets of deprivation may exist next to areas of considerable affluence. The focus of the new index will allow us to do much more detailed work on local areas and, therefore, to target pockets of deprivation in future policy decisions.
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On mainstreaming, hon. Members debated whether the issue was the difficulties with mainstreaming, the need for greater mainstreaming or the need to simplify funding streams. My hon. Friend the Member for Islington, North talked about directing more funding straight to councils. My hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton (Mr. Love) argued for simplification of area-based initiatives. We need to strike a balance, because we are considering a series of different issues. In some areas, we have halved the number of area-based initiatives through the work of the regional co-ordination unit We are considering further simplification of such initiatives to make it easier for local areas to take sensible decisions and not have to deal with competing funding streams.
The funding for many of these regeneration programmes must involve local councils. I agree that they are critical partners in this respect, but equally we must involve other agencies, because councils cannot do the work alone. There must be strong support for local agencies to work in partnership with other agencies, so that they do not have to go it alone or work in isolation. We are considering variations in performance between local areas and what can be done to improve transparency and to address areas where there are poorly performing, local strategic partnerships in contrast with areas where performance is fantastic.
I was asked whether there would he support for community-led projects rather than too much focus on economic projects. Continued support is needed for community capacity building and community-led programmes. There will be changes in the way in which funding takes place as a result of the change from the SRB to regional development agencies. Many of the agencies already strongly support work in deprived areas. However, we must beware of going too far in the other direction and having considerable community-based capacity building in some areas when, at the same time, little is done to address the economic issues that they face. There are areas in the north where we need a greater economic focus, not simply a community focus.
The hon. Member for Ludlow (Matthew Green) raised issues about delivery and NDCs. There were problems with the Aston Pride NDC, which is why the Government acted, but we should recognise the important progress that NDCs are making and the considerable results that they are starting to produce. The fact is that strong community-led regeneration programmes take longer to achieve. My hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton highlighted some of the difficulties. Such programmes require far more work with local people, and we must recognise that the most deprived areas are sometimes those that have the least community capacity in the first place. It can therefore take longer to work with local people to give them the confidence to take control of local changes and make decisions. We should recognise the important progress that some NDCs have made.
We have funded 250 neighbourhood warden programmes across the country, which have proved extremely popular. Indeed, they are probably the second most popular group of programmes after Sure Start. The evaluation results for the first wave of warden areas are startling. They show a 28 per cent. drop in crime. That reflects partnerships, not just the work of wardens, but if only 10 per cent. of the drop is due to wardens, they are proving very cost-effective.

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In response to a point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Regent's Park and Kensington, North, I should say that mainstreaming seems to have been effective with the first wave of wardens. The first wave is running out of funding this April and is expected to move to mainstream funding. More than three quarters have got their future funding sorted out. Many of the remainder are confident that they will do so and are in the last phases of negotiations about that. A small number of programmes are not being continued and a small number of wardens are being replaced by community support officers. However, we reckon that, in addition to the Government-funded programmes, at least a further 250 are being funded with no Government funding. They are testimony to the fact that local areas can adopt effective mainstreaming.
My hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore) raised a series of issues about housing, but I am likely to run out of time before I can deal with them. I agree that we need more homes and affordable housing. We are considering that through the planning system and the spending review. He will know that the Mayor's plan sets out a 50 per cent. target for affordable housing. Local authorities, including Barnet, will have to address issues relating to affordable housing as part of their plans when they come to review the plans in the light of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill. I cannot comment on the individual cases that my hon. Friend raised, which are still in the planning system, but certainly the system should consider such issues further in future.

Dementia Care (Swindon)
11 am
Mr. Michael Wills:
"It is vital that service reform is to be driven from the bottom … What are the key elements if we are really to put the public at the heart of public services? First, it means a continuous drive to increase the scope and scale of choice available to public service users.
Along with choice we must also provide the public with a louder and clearer voice."
Those are not my words, but those of the Prime Minister at Rickmansworth in January, describing a vision that is reflected in the Department of Health's paper, "Building on the Best". I requested this debate to explore how those noble aspirations have played out in Swindon over the last year, with a proposal to improve services for dementia sufferers and their carers.
Nationally, around three quarters of a million people suffer from dementia. There are about 3,500 sufferers in Swindon, most of them elderly. The symptoms can pose severe challenges for carers. It is often difficult to devise appropriate care, because responsibility for those suffering from the illness falls between many local agencies, including the mental health trust, geriatric care and social services. Because of the difficulties of allocating responsibility for care, dementia sufferers can end up at increased risk of admission to hospital, occupying acute beds, which can cause bottlenecks elsewhere.
For those reasons, and because I believe that we need to improve choice and service in the NHS, 18 months ago I convened meetings in Swindon with local agencies, representatives of local carers and my hon. Friend the Member for South Swindon (Ms Drown), to try to develop a new and better mechanism for dementia care. Following conversations in the summer of 2002, we worked together between October of that year and April 2003.
After exhaustive discussions of all the issues involved, the local managers proposed a new system, which would offer carers and users of dementia services a menu of care choices from which they would be entitled to choose items up to a predetermined limit. Current statutory providers would offer the choices, along with any voluntary or private sector providers that might he interested in participating in the scheme. The menu would be drawn up and agreed by a standing committee chaired by a carer and comprising representatives of statutory providers, users, carers and the voluntary and private sectors. To enable users and carers to make effective and informed choices about their care, a new information and guidance service would be established to empower and advise them.
The proposal would deliver diversity of provision and choice, and put users and carers in the driving seat by involving them in the responsibility for service provision. It would also tackle the challenges involved in doing so, not least by finding a new way to encourage collaboration between the various agencies in a way that was equitable for all users. Roger Bullock, the consultant for old-age psychiatry in Swindon, describes the programme as
"a major step forward—nothing else like it is happening as far as I know. It is also based on true socialist values."

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The project could have been operational by Christmas 2003, but that would have required two key things from central Government. First, we needed a relatively small sum, around £100,000—about £3 per year per dementia sufferer in Swindon—to provide an information support line, so that carers could make informed choices or, to use the jargon, to tackle the asymmetry of information. That is one of the challenges in providing choice in health care and something that "Building on the Best" recognises is vital. Secondly, and importantly for the agencies concerned, they needed assurance from central Government that they would not be penalised for their initiative and enterprise.
"Choice" is a word like "motherhood"—nobody could possibly be against it. However, introducing choice into public services effectively requires hard decisions. The muddle that the Conservative party has got itself into with its so-called passports shows how difficult the task can be. Among other things, because users have freedom to make choices, no one can predict in advance the exact outcome of those individual decisions. Therefore, no provider can be certain in advance exactly what resources will be required to provide those choices. That demands either surplus capacity, which is expensive, or highly efficient management able to deploy resources flexibly and swiftly to meet shifting demand.
In this case, because it was unlikely that sufficient extra funds would be available for the new service, even after the Government's unprecedented investment in the NHS, local managers were required to be highly efficient in their management of resources. That was a big challenge, but they all felt that the potential rewards for service users were so great that they were prepared to take it on. They believed, rightly in my view, that their skill and expertise and their knowledge of their patients would enable them to meet demand effectively. The enthusiasm and commitment of everyone who took part in developing the proposals were palpable.
Gillian Barber, manager of Swindon's Princess Royal Trust for Carers, told me this week:
"This proposal is exactly what we need as it gives carers real choices and would enable them to take more control over their own lives. We had hoped it would have been up and running by now and I am sorry that it seems to have stalled in the Department of Health."
All the local agencies felt that although they were doing a good job, they could do still better and this proposal could help them to do so. Although all the chief executives of the various agencies were prepared to commit themselves, they were concerned that their boards would be worried that the new challenge would affect their ability to meet all their Department of Health targets. They needed assurance that if they embarked on this enterprising and imaginative initiative, they would not be penalised by the Department for missing any targets as a result.
I therefore spoke twice to the previous Secretary of State for Health and his special adviser and made those two simple requests of them. They were enthusiastic about the proposals and thought that there would be no problem in finding the small sum needed for the information support line and reaching some agreement on targets.
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I hope that it will be helpful to the Minister, who has not been directly involved, if I recount what happened next. I wrote formally to the Department on 10 May last year, proposing the scheme as a pilot—and received no reply. I wrote again to the Secretary of State on 6 June—and received no reply. The Secretary of State then resigned and I spoke to his successor about the proposal. He, too, welcomed it and asked me to write to him. I did so on 17 June, referring to the earlier letters.
Finally, I received a reply dated 11 July from a Health Minister. It diligently set out the action that the Department is taking to improve dementia services nationally and gave interesting details of initiatives elsewhere in the country. Somehow it managed to overlook the crucial matter of reassuring local managers in Swindon that if they proceeded with the proposal they would not be penalised for being enterprising.
After consulting front-line professionals in Swindon, I wrote again on 31 October asking the Department to reconsider its original response. After sending a reminding letter, I received a reply on 15 December, which attempted to justify the letter of 11 July but still somehow managed to overlook the point of the original correspondence. I wrote again pointing that out. Just before Christmas, by chance, I saw the Secretary of State in the House and pointed out how disillusioning his Department's responses had been for front-line professionals in Swindon. He asked me to write again to his special adviser, which I did on 22 December, offering to engage in dialogue to see whether we could get the proposal moving. To date, I have received no response.
Ms Julia Drown: I congratulate my hon. Friend on his hard work, and I join him in trying to support dementia sufferers in Swindon and their carers. That is difficult when progress is blocked and bidding processes leave people disappointed. Does he agree that we should encourage the Government to say that we should focus on key areas and develop schemes with professionals? Then we will not have to deal with the loss of morale that we have both witnessed when people become excited about a project but it does not come to fruition.
Mr. Wills: Yes, my hon. Friend is absolutely right. She has identified a crucial problem. If we are to make rapid and effective public service reforms, we have to engage front-line professionals. The Prime Minister has made that point repeatedly—possibly in every speech that he has made about public service reform. I hope that the Department will recognise from this episode that it must learn the lessons suggested by my hon. Friend.
I reflected on the saga over the new year and concluded that there might be an institutional blockage, as emerges occasionally, in the Department, stifling the choice agenda and the programme of reform that the Prime Minister wants to pursue. Two months ago I again wrote to the Secretary of State proposing the creation of a new fund for innovation, specifically to enable radical reforms proposed by front-line managers to take place rapidly. On 1 April—I assume that was coincidental—I received an answer that again somehow managed to oven look my proposal and, without any apparent irony, reiterated the importance of providing choice and empowering front-line managers.

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In responding, I hope that the Minister will resist the temptation to reiterate the importance that her Department attaches to choice, to empowering front-line managers and to the need to provide better care for dementia sufferers and their carers. We all agree on that. Instead, I hope that she will reassure me, my hon. Friend, and front-line professionals in Swindon about the way that her Department has handled the proposal from front-line managers to produce a better service and more choice in Swindon.
No one ever expected the proposal to be accepted and funded just like that. If the Department had said, "Thank you very much, it is an interesting idea, but unfortunately we can't proceed with it for x, y, and z reasons", everyone would have understood. Such a response would at least have indicated engagement with the idea. Unfortunately, those professionals who put so much energy and imagination into developing the proposal have not received even the courtesy of a considered rejection of the idea, let alone an active dialogue about it.
I would be grateful if the Minister could supply direct answers to a few questions. First, is her Department prepared to enter into constructive discussions with front-line professionals about ideas that they develop to promote public service reform? Secondly, if so, is it prepared to discuss proposals that arrive spontaneously from the front line, or will it consider only ideas generated within a format determined centrally by the Department itself? Thirdly, if the latter, can she explain how that is consistent with the Prime Minister's view that:
"It is vital that service reform is to be driven from the bottom"?
Fourthly, does the Department recognise that delivering choice can create difficult challenges for front-line professionals in the effective management of inevitably limited resources? Fifthly, if so. does the Minister accept that, within a framework of inevitably limited resources, delivering choice might involve conflict with targets already set by her Department? Sixthly, if so, does she accept that front-line managers may need dialogue and understanding with the Department, at least in the early stages of delivering the new programme of reform, about how to reconcile the imperatives of delivering choice and existing targets?
Seventhly—this is the question to which I hope the Minister will devote most attention—in any event, is she prepared to enable local professionals in Swindon to enter into a dialogue with the Department on how best to drive forward the imaginative and enterprising proposal that they developed more than a year ago? Finally, if so, when? I am happy for her to write to me with those answers, but I would be grateful for any reassurance that she could give me new.
11.13 am
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Miss Melanie Johnson): I congratulate my hon. Friends the Members for North Swindon (Mr. Wills) and for South Swindon (Ms Drown) on raising this subject. The care of dementia sufferers is an important subject that I appreciate is close to the hearts of both my hon. Friends.
I have carefully listened to and appreciated the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon. I start by paying tribute to the staff in
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the local health economy who are, as both my hon. Friends will agree, committed to the improvement of local services. My hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon posed some specific questions and I have a little time in which to respond. I shall set out a little of what the Government are doing to improve the care of dementia sufferers before addressing the points that he raised.
Dementia impacts on the lives of the sufferers and those around them. It can exacerbate other illnesses and have a profound effect on the independence and dignity of those who suffer from it. If we contrast the resources available today with those that will be available in 2006, we see that another £1 billion a year will be spent on social services for older people. The package that is coming on-stream focuses on six main themes: providing faster assessment, stabilising the care home sector, expanding the range of services, providing easier access to community equipment, increasing choices for older people and providing more support for carers. All those services are relevant to older people with dementia.
Those with dementia and their carers need high quality, effective care. About 600,000 people in the United Kingdom suffer from dementia and they receive good care and support. Much of that comes from their family and friends, who work tirelessly to ensure that the partner, parent or neighbour is cared for in the best possible way. That is why, in 1999, we introduced the carers grant to support councils in providing breaks for carers in England. It has been increased to provide an extra £225 million over the past four years. It is worth £100 million this year and will continue at least until 2005–06 by which time it will be worth £185 million, helping an additional 130,000 carers. Councils will be able to use the money to give carers help to take a break from caring and also to give them ongoing support.
It is important that we get the framework and the services in the right place at the right time. That is why we have the national service framework for older people, which we launched three years ago. It is a 10-year plan and contains a standard dedicated to the improvement of mental health services for older people. Standard 7 is designed to ensure that the right services meet the needs of older people with mental health problems and people of all ages with dementia, whether they live at home or in residential care, or are cared for in hospital. It is also there to ensure that older people have access to integrated NHS and local authority mental health services that provide effective diagnosis, treatment and support for them and their carers.
There is an emphasis on the early diagnosis of dementia, and our priorities and planning framework requires that services to meet the needs of people with dementia and depression be given a high priority. By April 2004—which is now—protocols must be in place in all health and social care systems to provide those integrated services. The information that is being gathered suggests that that milestone is being met. That means that health and social care organisations will work together to provide the services that older people with mental health problems need.

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I now turn to my hon. Friend's proposals, which he has outlined and explained. I am obviously aware of his correspondence with my ministerial colleagues about the proposals for services in Swindon. I appreciate that he has been unhappy with the response, but it remains the case that the Department does not give money on an ad hoc basis for projects such as the one that he has described. That is partly a result of the fact that we have shifted the balance of power to a local level by devolving funds to a primary care trust level. The latest round of allocations means that Swindon PCT has £166.7 million for 2004–05, a cash increase of 9.5 per cent.
None of the growth money in the latest round of allocations to PCTs has been identified for specific purposes. That gives NHS organisations the maximum flexibility to use the resources available to meet national and local priorities. Avon, Gloucestershire and Wiltshire strategic health authority, the local SHA, is aware of my hon. Friend's proposals.
Mr. Wills: I did not want to interrupt the Minister's flow, but I was getting the sense that she had formed the impression, despite what I have said and despite my correspondence, that I was unhappy with the response because no money was coming forward. That is not the case. I am unhappy with the response because, despite the extensive correspondence, none of it addressed the key issue that I raised.
The worry locally was not about money; people recognise the Government's enormous investment in health care and are grateful for it, as it is making a huge difference in my constituency. My hon. Friend the Member for South Swindon, too, acknowledges the transformation in Swindon; the PCT is working incredibly well as a result of the reforms and the Government money. There should be no misunderstanding about that.
Local people were worried about what would be required to introduce choice into the local service in caring for sufferers from dementia. No response from the Department in the last year even acknowledged the issues, let alone addressed them or said how the targets would be managed. I hope that the Minister will refer to that issue.
Miss Johnson: I will indeed. I was just coming to the point about the potential conflict in respect of targets. The role of targets in all public services is under examination as part of the current spending round; the Department of Health has said that it wants to consider how targets are set and used throughout health services, and a dialogue is continuing on the matter at all levels.
I understand that my hon. Friend is not saying that resourcing is the issue. I shall explain how a proposal would normally be dealt with, because if the matter is not about funding it is about getting agreement to go ahead with the proposal, as my hon. Friend is suggesting. He will correct me if I am wrong. but as I understand it, the strategic health authority has not yet seen a formal, agreed, detailed proposal on the matter. I appreciate that my hon. Friend seeks reassurance before the work progresses, but the route normally taken is that a formal, agreed proposal, which clarifies the necessary
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governance and accountability arrangements when funds are being allocated, is put to the local SHA for its consideration. Proposals then go into the bidding round for consideration as part of the local delivery plans, which will also include funding allocations from all the participating parties. The SHA might usefully work on addressing outstanding issues—
Mr. Wills rose—
Miss Johnson: If my hon. Friend wants me to answer those points perhaps he will give me a minute to reply; he can then respond if he wants to do so.
On the discussions that have taken place, the question whether there are conflicts between targets and choices is partly a matter of what happens about the targets, but generally there are choices to be made by the authorities who put money into local services. That is principally, in this case, the PCT, but other local authorities may have allocations of money which are relevant to the proposals. It is up to them to take decisions on how they spend the money available to them. We encourage them to be innovative and creative in doing so, within the existing arrangements. There is nothing in those arrangements that would preclude acceptance of the proposal, although it has yet to be considered by the SHA.
Mr. Wills: I am grateful to the Minister for giving way again. As I have come up against a brick wall in my correspondence, I am seizing this rare opportunity to raise these matters. It has taken a year to get this stage.
With respect to my hon. Friend, she has still not quite got the point. What she says may well be so, but that is not what people in Swindon felt. For many good reasons, the hard-pressed but extremely competent and professional front-line managers work within a tight framework of targets, and they were anxious that if they took what would have been a very innovative step—I know of no evidence that it has happened anywhere else—they might be penalised. All they needed was some reassurance that they would not be penalised. They simply needed someone in the Department to say, "We will have an understanding with you about this. Do your best. We will not let you have carte blanche to ignore all the targets because they are set for good reasons, but if we can see that you are genuinely trying to improve service for users and to promote choice, we will not hold you to account if you miss some marginally important target as a result." Managers may or may not be right to be worried, but they simply need some reassurance from the Department. They do not mind hearing the word "No". No one in public service does. They simply want a dialogue with the Department.
Miss Johnson: I am grateful for that further clarification. I understand what the problem is, but I am a little mystified about how it has arisen. That reassurance should have been available through talking

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to the strategic health authority. If the SHA has issues with this, it is initially a matter for local dialogue. I am not aware that that dialogue has taken place.
Mr. Wills rose—
Miss Johnson: I am happy to keep giving way, but there is a danger that I will not be able to make my final points.
Mr. Wills: I want to make one last point. I realise that because I have intervened so often my hon. Friend may not deal with all the points that I have raised, and, as I said, I would be happy if she gave me her detailed response in writing. My final question could be added to her list: why did nobody, in any of my correspondence or conversations, tell me to go to the strategic health authority?
Miss Johnson: As my hon. Friend will appreciate, I have come in only at this juncture. I am at a loss to explain what has gone wrong. There may have been a breakdown in communication somewhere that has been unhelpful to his constituents and the front-line managers who have been doing the work. I appreciate the point that he is making. I am sure that the Under-Secretary of State for Health, my hon. Friend the Member for South Thanet (Dr. Ladyman), will be happy to meet him and my hon. Friend the Member for South Swindon to discuss the matter further.
This has been an unhappy process, as my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon is pointing out. I do not believe that there are any obstacles in the system to prevent the scheme from going ahead. As I said, there needs to be a dialogue with the strategic health authority for the proposal to be approved and included in the local delivery plan. I am sure that we can arrange for a meeting to take place. I cannot promise my hon. Friend how soon it will be—it depends on his diary—but it will be as soon as is reasonably practicable on all sides.
I trust that if my hon. Friends identify similar issues where local managers are uncertain about how much freedom they have, they will reassure those managers that their first port of call is to their immediate line management and then on to the strategic health authority. If uncertainty persists, I hope that we will be more speedy in giving reassurance by saying "Aye" or "No" to proposals such as this one which, I recognise, has been drawn up with a lot of local support and involvement and has the potential to drive forward the choice agenda in Swindon.
11.29 am
Sitting suspended until Two o'clock.

Barker Review
2 pm
Mr. Archie Norman: I welcome this opportunity to discuss the Barker report, and I thank the Minister for giving up her time to be here. I am sure that her response will address our points about the serious issue that rightly received substantive examination in the Barker review.
The Barker report was commissioned by the Chancellor of the Exchequer to develop recommendations on housing supply in Britain. Its conclusions are far reaching and go far beyond current Government policy, and it will be interesting to hear from the Minister the extent to which the Government intend to adopt them as policy and how she envisages the Government taking the report forward. Will it form the basis of legislation, a White Paper or changes in policy? Its thrust echoes substantially the existing direction of Government policy as adopted by the Deputy Prime Minister, in particular the view that centrally driven housing targets must be imposed on the regions of Britain and that the apparatus for achieving them should be regional government.
The report was welcomed by the Chancellor and Deputy Prime Minister, although I noticed that the language in the welcome memo was somewhat uncommitted. However, the Deputy Prime Minister's press release said:
"The Government agrees that to deliver its commitment to stability and affordability needs a significant increase in housing development".
That implicitly confirms and buys into Barker's central thrust, although there are many individual recommendations that go far beyond that point. The Government's reaction to date falls well short of endorsing the report, although the Chancellor promised that there would be ample opportunity to debate it. As we have not had a chance to do so to date, I hope that we can take the matter forward in this sitting.
My advice to the Minister is to adopt a discerning view of the Barker report. Although most hon. Members agree that there are serious problems in housing supply in Britain, it is not clear to me that they are addressed by the report, which draws on data and assumptions that bear a great deal of examination. The report is subjective in its assumptions, which are also highly political. It would be interesting to know whether the objectives that are implicit in those assumptions are shared by the Government. The report is flawed in its analysis and understanding of the household projection and housing demand figures and, as a consequence, highly mistaken in its conclusion. I shall endeavour to touch on each of those points.
I want to start with the background assumptions behind housing need. The Barker report takes as its starting point the assumption that it should be a Government objective to reduce house price inflation. It bases that case on the requirement for not just stability but a redistribution of wealth. In particular, the report refers to a more equitable distribution of housing wealth. It uses as raw material the conventional household projection data, most of which predate the outcome of the recent census.

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Starting with the question of equity and redistribution of wealth, I hope that the Minister will be able to elucidate on whether the Government believe that it should be the role of the central state—and whether it is current Government policy—to redistribute housing wealth in this country. That is an overarching statement, and not something that has been evident in Government statements to date. We need to remember that we are talking about 70 per cent. of the population of Britain: roughly 70 per cent. of households are, in one form or another, home owners. For the Government to set as an objective a reduction in the wealth of 70 per cent. of the population is an interesting idea. That is not to say that there are not problems with people getting on the housing ladder. We all understand that, and I want to come on to that point later. However, it is not clear that building more houses is an effective way of redistributing wealth.
The report is also based on the contentious belief, which it does not properly examine, that it is possible to build our way out of house price inflation. The central assertion is that by nearly doubling the rate of house building, we can, over the years, reduce the average rate of house price inflation to the European average. I shall leave aside the question of whether that is desirable, or whether any sensible comparison can be made between our housing market and that in Europe. Nevertheless, it is disappointing, from an economist's point of view, that there is a comprehensive lack of analysis of the extent to which house prices are sensitive to the number of new houses being built, which, as the report acknowledges, amounts to about 1 per cent. of the housing stock per annum. All the evidence suggests that house prices in the UK are far more sensitive to the level of interest rates, and to the growth in real earnings and the expectation of future growth, than to the number of new houses being built.
Andrew George: The hon. Gentleman makes a strong point. I agree that we cannot simply build our way out of the current housing crisis faced by the UK, particularly in the south. Does he agree that what we should do—the Barker review did not address this matter—is build up an intermediate market for those people occupying the big gulf between low earnings levels and high house prices in areas such as my constituency? Simply building more houses will never make any significant impact on that enormous gulf.
Mr. Norman: I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, and I agree with the thrust of his remarks. There are real problems with housing supply in Britain, both in terms of the ladder of home ownership, and on the question of affordability, particularly in rural areas. I shall address those issues later in my remarks.
The Barker report, by adopting the overall thesis that we can build our way out of inflation, and believing that that is a good idea, loses sight of the underlying problems in housing and housing supply. If it were true that we could build our way out of house price inflation, one would expect the rate to be static in areas of the country where there is a surplus of houses. In fact, recent strong evidence shows that in areas with a housing surplus, house price inflation is just as high as in areas
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where there is a deficit. That is logical, because people are judging what they can borrow and what they can afford to spend on the basis of the prevailing interest rates and their rising average level of wages.
Mr. John Hayes: My hon. Friend makes the excellent point, which is not often made, that the unresponsiveness of the market is about not just the relationship between price and supply, but that between supply and price—it is a two-way insensitivity. Does he agree that the other profound problem with the use of supply-side mechanisms for dealing with price volatility and inflation is that they are a slow and clumsy method?
Mr. Norman: My hon. Friend makes a crucial point. Most of us accept that the objective should be not to reduce house price inflation—that may be desirable, although it is questionable whether it can be delivered—but to reduce house price volatility. That would be of benefit to the wider economy. However, to do that, we would have to create a much better link between housing supply and housing demand, which is difficult to do in a market with such a long lead time for supply. The Barker report makes recommendations on that, in the hope of lubricating and encouraging the flow of housing. However, any practical business man will know that there is a four, five, six or seven-year lead time for triggering new supply into the market. It is arguable that increasing the level of house building throughout the UK will have the effect of increasing volatility, because it will lead to more times of surplus, when people cannot afford to pay, or of deficit.
Mr. Edward Davey: I caution the hon. Gentleman against going too far down that road. It is clear that house price inflation is at least partly caused by demand outstripping supply. He argues that in some areas where there are surplus houses, house price inflation is still increasing, but those surplus houses are in relatively small areas where people do not want to live, so the houses that are not being used do not affect the real housing market.
Mr. Norman: I am grateful for that intervention. The hon. Gentleman is getting into an analysis of the issue that Barker never covered. The review is essentially a countrywide analysis. It does not seek to understand what we should do about areas of surplus housing and housing poverty. It is probably true that if we depress the rate of increase of house prices, we will reduce the chances of releasing land in inner cities or areas of comparative housing poverty, because the level of opportunity for developers will be reduced. That is a more complex issue, and a matter for discussion, but I welcome the hon. Gentleman's point.
Mr. David Drew: The hon. Gentleman is being generous in giving up so much of his time. Does he accept that part of the problem with Barker—he has already alluded to it—is that the attempt to take a global view gives us an over-simplistic impression of the housing market? There is no national housing market. There are differences between urban

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and rural Britain and between the north and the south, and there are different types of tenure. There is a real danger in trying to find a one-size-fits-all solution.
Mr. Norman: I agree. Again, we are getting into issues that are not sufficiently analysed by Barker. Almost all housing is local. House prices may be determined by macro-economic conditions, but affordability, scarcity and housing poverty are local issues and have to be addressed on that basis by agencies and instruments of Government as well as the marketplace. It is about adapting the prescriptions to local needs, and that is the complete opposite of the tenor or many of Barker's conclusions and recommendations.
I shall move on to another aspect of the Barker approach. In her keen endeavours to demonstrate the existence of housing scarcity, which she seems to have assumed before even starting the report, Kate Barker depends almost entirely on historical housing and household projections, most of which are based on, and drawn from, data prepared in 1996 or before and well before the results of the 2001 census. That is important because that census revealed about 900,000 more citizens or members of the population than were anticipated in the earlier projections. At a stroke, therefore, the census places a big question mark over our understanding of the total balance of housing supply and demand and makes a mockery of many of the statistics on which the report draws. However, in the determination to demonstrate a shortage of housing, those housing projections were adopted hook, line and sinker.
The report then draws on dated evidence about housing scarcity and, in particular, lists categories of scarcity and tries to quantify the level of new housing need. Those categories include, for instance, people in temporary accommodation and the 150,000 children who live in dwellings above the first floor. We can all see that there may be issues to address about children living in high-rise blocks, but equally accommodation of that type may be perfectly adequate.
There is undoubtedly a problem of people living in temporary accommodation, but the fact that there has been an increase in the number of people living in such accommodation—incidentally, that happened under this Government—is not necessarily evidence of a total housing shortage or a need to double the rate of house building. Such a situation can be evidence of problems of migration and immigration or of individual local authorities comprehensively failing to address the lack of affordable accommodation for people who need it. It can also be a function of the nature of the economy, the fact that some areas have comparatively high unemployment, and the movements of people between different parts of the country. Addressing each of those categories at a micro level is far more important and insightful than saying that the situation is evidence of a global scarcity and we can build our way out of it.
A useful study commissioned from Europe Economics by the Campaign to Protect Rural England demonstrated that, even if one takes the Barker approach to national statistics, it is hard to demonstrate that there is a national scarcity of housing. In fact, the CPRE study demonstrates—in data quoted in Barker's interim report, which mysteriously disappeared from the final version—that, in aggregate, there is a surplus of
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housing in Britain: there are more houses than there are households. That does not mean that every household can find the house in which it wants to live or should live. However, the surplus has increased, not diminished, in the last 10 years, despite Barker's assertion that there is a shortage of house building and a problem that will be solved by building more new houses by central Government diktat.
Andrew George: I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman's patience in giving way. In saying that there are more houses than there are households, does he accept that in constituencies such as mine, where 10 per cent. of the stock on the mainland and over a quarter on the Isles of Scilly is used as second homes, an extremely valuable local resource is being misused? For us, an effective planning policy would, perversely, be a restrictive one that would enable an intermediate market to develop to meet local need; we should not simply build houses that local people cannot afford.
Mr. Norman: I welcome the hon. Gentleman's point. I shall come on to how to establish what local need really is and how to address it.
We can argue about whether there is a housing surplus or a deficit—the Europe Economics study suggests that the surplus has increased from 2.4 per cent. to 3.7 per cent., but it is over 4 per cent. in the north-east and north-west and, unsurprisingly, just over 2 per cent. in the south-east. However, we know that such statistics are unhelpful when considering the national picture, because they conceal the fact that there are real scarcities locally, and all housing is local. The only conclusion we can come to is that the problem is not susceptible to sweeping global analyses. National household projections have proven to be totally flawed and of limited value, and the belief that doubling the rate of house building will address the problem of inflation is a complete delusion. Tragically, it would fail to address the problems that concern hon. Members.
Let us consider what the household projections reveal if they are analysed in a degree of detail that the report does not even endeavour to understand. Due to a demographic shift in Britain, there is an urgent need to adapt our housing supply. However, nowhere does the report ask what type of housing we will need in future and what the demographics tell us. The 1996 household model, which has become a sort of conventional wisdom in the industry, produces unrealistic outcomes.
Let me give two examples. First, the household projections suggest that there will be no increase in the number of lone parents over the next 10 years. I cannot say whether that is right, but it is a surprising conclusion and we should hesitate before accepting it. More importantly, they show, in the context of a comparatively static population with marginal net immigration, that the signal shift in housing demand is towards single-person households, which increased by 88 per cent. between 1991 and 2001. Such households, in the majority of cases, contain elderly people living alone. The vast majority of the requirement—66 per cent. for 2001 to 2011 and 78 per cent. for the subsequent decade—is for one-person households. That is unsurprising because, with the ageing population, more single, elderly people are seeking accommodation on

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their own. And guess what? We are building exactly the opposite. The vast majority of houses that we have built over the last 10 years are three or four-bedroom houses.
The housing policy pursued by the Government, particularly in the south-east of England, will, exactly as people say, result entirely in the development of executive homes in the suburbs and countryside and fail to meet the real challenge of Britain's changing population. It is a tragedy that Kate Barker's report completely sidesteps the issue of what the household projections—her own figures—really suggest.
In 2003, only 7 per cent. of new properties were one-bedroom houses and 63 per cent. were three or four-bedroom houses. If we can read anything into the available figures, it is that that system is not working very well, and there is a problem to be addressed. The situation is unsurprising: executive homes are driven by the marketplace and are the most profitable thing to develop. They entice people to move out of their existing accommodation to parts of the country where they may have a better quality of life, but the consequences for the housing stock, for the inner cities and for other areas of the country are profound. The Barker report fails to analyse any of that.
I want to move on to the question of the regional and local effects of the report's proposals. A number of hon. Members have raised that issue. My central belief is that the only useful way to consider the housing market is to understand where the problems lie. The problems are local and specific, but the report treats the market as a single entity, aggregates demand for the total, and uses that as a central case to justify new house building. It proposes comprehensive measures to increase supply which run right across the issues of the environment, house building, taxation and so on. If they are implemented, they will inevitably result in a large amount of extra house building primarily in the parts of the country that are most congested and, in many ways, least able to afford it. That particularly involves the south-east and the south-west.
When it comes to the south-east, it is important to remember that the report recommends measures to increase the release of brownfield land. I am sure that most hon. Members would support that. There has been some success, partly as a consequence of Government action over the past few years, in ensuring that more brownfield land is released. However, the reality is that, according to the existing projections, 50 per cent. of new houses in the south-east will be built on greenfield land simply because the capacity of brownfield land is not there. If we double the level of house building, that 50 per cent. will rapidly increase to 60 or 70 per cent. We are looking at a charter for building in the countryside of the south-east of England, the most congested part of Britain.
Bob Spink: I want to take up one point raised by my hon. Friend. He asserted that most hon. Members would be happy for brownfield land to be given up to new house building in the south-east. That is a contentious issue. It is not quite so. We would of course prefer building on brownfield land to building on greenfield land, but even building on brownfield land in the south-east is not acceptable without the necessary
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infrastructure development, especially in the flood plain, which in much of the south-east is under increasing threat. Along with the plans we must have better road and rail systems. There is already too much pressure on the infrastructure and overcrowding on our public transport systems.
Mr. Norman: My hon. Friend makes a good point, which I want to come on to. As soon as we adopt the idea that many more houses are going to be built in the south-east, there are profound implications not only for the environment and public expenditure, but also for migration between different areas of the country. It is important to understand the effect of those implications, particularly on the areas with the highest levels of housing poverty, before we start to move forward. The reality is that the report will result in many more houses being built and in a continuation of the current imbalance, whereby the housing investment in Britain goes, generally speaking, to the more prosperous parts of the south-east and south-west, into building executive homes.
Mr. Andrew Love: I apologise for missing the very beginning of the hon. Gentleman's speech. In the first half of his speech, he seemed to criticise the Barker review for taking only a national view, not a regional and local view. However, in the second half, he seems implicitly to be criticising the report because it recommends massive house building in the south-east and south-west. Was not the idea of the report to make a strong case for an increase in supply, but to leave the debate about how that should be achieved to the House and to Departments?
Mr. Norman: I am glad that the hon. Gentleman has raised that point, because it gives me the opportunity to clarify what I am saying. The Barker report does not make the case for more house building in the south-east, as such; rather, it argues for doubling the rate of house building in aggregate, based on aggregate national statistics. Perhaps I am doing the report an injustice, but I assert that the consequence of that proposal will be a substantial increase in house building in the south-east. At the very least. it is difficult to see how the report's recommendations can be implemented otherwise.
Any nationally driven state programme of house building will have consequences for migration, public infrastructure and the environment. It is important that we understand that the pattern of household movement in Britain over the last 30 years has typically been out of the cities, particularly in the midlands and the north, and into the suburbs. The pattern has also been to move away from the north and into the London conurbation, and out of the London conurbation and into the south-east and south-west. That is vividly reflected in the population statistics. To provide hon. Members with some examples, the population of Hull, where the Deputy Prime Minister has his constituency, has declined by 11 per cent. in the last 20 years alone. The population of other northern cities and areas has similarly declined. For instance, Newcastle's population has, I seem to recall, declined by about 21 per cent.; in Manchester the figure is 16 per cent.; on Merseyside, in aggregate, the population has declined by 10.5 per cent.; and in Middlesbrough the figure is 10.5 per cent., and so on.

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The depopulation of urban areas is a serious problem in other ways, because it results in hollowed-out cities and housing poverty, with areas that are under-occupied. The phenomenon is also part of the syndrome of failing schools and higher crime rates in such cities. It is important to remember that for every new executive home that we build in the south-east, a household will leave another area to move into it. The chances are that that household will have moved out of metropolitan London or, perhaps, down from the north. Yes, there is a new household living in the suburbs of Tunbridge Wells; but somewhere there is an inner city where the school roll is declining, crime is rising, the better-off, more able people are leaving and there is high unemployment and social failure. It is not possible to disaggregate the problems of building in the south-east and regarding the region as the economic powerhouse of Britain from the impact of the north and regional policy as a whole.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr. Norman: I give way first to my hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr. Hayes).
Mr. Hayes: My hon. Friend is right: one of the big holes in the Barker report is the failure to link house building to regeneration in the way that he describes. Will he comment on the notion that the housing policy that one adopts to regenerate cities and the sociological effects that it has on population mix are key elements in reclaiming urban areas?
Mr. Norman: My hon. Friend makes the point much more eloquently than I could have done. If there is a serious housing problem in Britain, involving housing poverty and an inability to provide our children with a decent quality of life, it is in the inner cities, particularly in the north and the midlands. A report on housing supply that neglects to mention that issue misses the point to a degree that is reckless. I give way to my right hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Curry).
Mr. David Curry: The problem now is that one has to be very well off or very badly off to live in the inner cities. For instance, Leeds has some high-quality housing in the centre, but it is expensive. It is the middling sort who find it difficult to live in cities.
I was a little hesitant when my hon. Friend said that part of the pressure in the south was the result of people migrating from the north. I am not sure whether that is true. I think that people are trickling out of the cities in the north into the suburbs. The pressures in the south-east are very much the result of household formation and immigration into London and the outer areas. I think that there is a net migration from the south to the north.
Mr. Norman: My right hon. Friend makes an interesting point. It shows that the movement of population is a complex matter. It is not as simple as saying that people are moving from the north to the south-east; they are not. Typically, when kids leave
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school or go to university they migrate to jobs in London; they get married in London and then move out to the south-east; and they may retire to the south-west. Net immigration tends to create particular pressure points in London.
Understanding the patterns of migration is important. It is a central fact that, although we have heard success stories in urban regeneration, even during the last few years—Leeds is one—the reality is that over the past 20 years, the major conurbations of the midlands and the north have declined in population. That is a serious problem, and until it is reversed—I am not saying that it will be easy—it is naïve to suppose that we can start to regenerate those cities. Regeneration requires holistic solutions.
Mr. Davey: The matter is complex but, whatever the reason. London and the south-east have seen more population growth than some cities in the north. I am not sure of the logic of the hon. Gentleman's argument. I do not wish to misrepresent what he is saying, but he seems to be suggesting that if one builds a house in the south-east or London, someone will move there. Surely, the underlying dynamic of the market is the direction of the economy and the fact that the jobs are to be found where there is economic development. If economic development could be better balanced throughout the country, it would help to achieve a more balanced housing market.
Mr. Norman: The hon. Gentleman is right: it is not possible to address the problem of housing supply outside the context of regional policy. The difficulty is that the Barker report is blind to that. It is not interested in what happens locally, but starts from the assertion that we can solve the problem by building our way out of house price inflation. That misses the important points that are being made.
Of course, there are other ways of addressing the efficiency of housing usage. It could be argued that regenerating the cities of the north, where there are areas of housing surplus, and creating good housing developments as has been done in the centre of Leeds, would be a more efficient way of using our national housing stock than insisting on more and more house building in the countryside of the south-east.
Mr. Love: I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way yet again. This is indeed an extremely complex issue. I refer him to a report in The Economist last week, which said that recent trends suggest that people are moving from London to the cities of the north, and that has been driven by high house price inflation in London and the south-east. The question raised by the report is whether that process would be reversed if house price inflation fell. They are extremely complex issues, and the trends are difficult to predict.
Mr. Norman: They are complex issues, which is why we should be cautious about making sweeping judgments about house-building policy and its impact on the economy. As to whether people migrate from the south to the north, I suspect that the evidence is not yet sufficient; if that were found to be the case, it would be a reversal of the trend of the past 30 years. Some cities in the north have expanded, but the vast majority have

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not. Whereas Cambridgeshire has seen an increase in its population of 20 per cent., Nottingham's population has declined by 4 per cent. Those migrations have profound effects on the local housing market and the local economy.
It is one of the Chancellor's main thrusts that the south-east is one of Britain's business powerhouses, and the CBI and business organisations argue for more infrastructure investment and more housing in parts of the south-east where the housing market is very tight. However, those arguments are very much open to challenge. I was involved in managing businesses in Britain for 27 years, but if I were starting one tomorrow, it would not be in the south-east. If I were looking for a place to run a business, employ people and obtain investment for transport infrastructure, and, indeed, for a place that would provide quality of life, I would head north, and I am sure that the Minister will find an opportunity to agree with me on that point.
The flipside of that argument is that we must be cognisant of the fact that a high level of house building implies substantial investment in infrastructure not only in the areas where the new houses are built but to address problems in the areas that people are leaving. In addition, building more houses in places such as the south-east or London will result in substantial congestion costs, a problem that is addressed nowhere in the Barker report. The public infrastructure costs of house building are formidable. By way of illustration, I point out that the mathematical implication of existing Government projections for the south-east, which are, as I recall, that there will be 900,000 new homes in the next 10 years, is that 3,000 new hospital beds, 300,000 new school places and 900 km of new roads will be required. Very little of that infrastructure is planned for, and, of course, those school places in the south-east will probably replicate school places that already exist elsewhere.
My argument is not that a high level of house building is necessarily right or wrong but that we must understand its implications before making sweeping recommendations such as those in the Barker report. There is nothing in the report to address the problem of public infrastructure or congestion costs. In my judgment and that of most environmentalists, it does not even sufficiently address the question of costs to the countryside and rural England. Indeed, its main contribution in that respect is to recommend that green-belt restrictions be relaxed, presumably to encourage building on the countryside.
As several hon. Members have said, one housing problem that we know exists is the lack of affordable housing and a ladder to home ownership. The report endorses that view and, of course, uses it as a base for some of its recommendations for increased house building. We all know, however, that the problems with affordable housing are a matter not simply of house price inflation but of how we manage the mix of houses that is built. The report signally fails to address that problem. In the past seven years, there has been a dramatic decline in the number of affordable houses
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built and the number of houses built by social landlords. I would venture to suggest that that decline is a function not of any aggregate view of house building but of Government policy on, and funding for, social house building.
Jeremy Corbyn: The hon. Gentleman has been very generous in giving way to many hon. Members. If he studies the statistics for housing construction, he will see that the number of private sector houses developed over the past 10 years was roughly the same each year. The number of developments involving registered social landlords, including housing associations, fluctuates, but it is about 20,000 or 30,000 a year. However, the number of council developments has fallen from a high of about 38,000 in 1990 to virtually zero now. We are missing out on the option of local authorities developing housing to meet desperate social need, and the community pays for that in the housing benefit needed to meet the sky-high rents charged by the private landlords of the leased properties into which homeless people are put.
Mr. Norman: The hon. Gentleman and I can agree that there is a requirement to deal with the problem of affordable housing in most parts of the country, but we will not necessarily agree on the means to achieve that. I do not think that the idea of bringing back large-scale council house-building programmes is a runner, and it will certainly not be endorsed by the Deputy Prime Minister. However, it is clear that it is not only council house building that has fallen under the present Government; building by all social landlords has dropped dramatically.
The Barker report recommends that the rate of building of affordable housing by social landlords should be increased by 18,000 properties per annum. It estimates that the extra cost to the public purse of that would be up to £1.6 billion every year. I should be interested in the Minister's observations about whether the Government will make that sort of commitment to tackle the scarcity of affordable and sustainable housing, the very problem that the Barker report was, according to the Deputy Prime Minister, designed to take on—this is something that he endorses.
The Barker report also makes many practical recommendations. I do not want to give the impression that all of those are wrong or that the report does not contain worthwhile analysis or contribute to the debate. However, some of the recommendations stray well beyond housing into other public policy issues. The Minister may want to comment on that.
The tenor of the recommendations is strongly centralising and redistributive. They convey a centralised view of the world, in which it is thought that the state should intervene in fundamental ways in the house-building market, both to shape that market and to manage pricing.
Mr. Love: In the past couple of years the market has produced the highest house price inflation on record, with the lowest number of completions since 1924. Does the hon. Gentleman believe that there should be some intervention in the market to right that?
Mr. Norman: I am not sure whether the hon. Gentleman was present when I explained the premise on which I base my remarks. The contention of the Barker report is that we can build our way out of house price inflation. Kate Barker asserts that if we double the rate of house building, house price inflation may come down to the European average. That is not a conclusion accepted by most economists, and I would certainly not accept it.
The hon. Gentleman referred to the record increase I am not sure that it is a record—in house price inflation in the past two or three years. That has caused great concern, but he should know that it has been driven by what the Prime Minister likes to refer to as a record period of low interest rates, and by rising real earnings. An increase of 1 per cent. in interest rates would probably have a negative effect on house prices of 10 to 15 per cent. It would take out virtually all the house price inflation. If we are really concerned about house prices, we should deal with those factors. To imagine that we can build our way out of the problem, bearing it in mind that new houses account for only about 1 per cent. per annum of total housing stock, is to defy the laws of economics.
There is no substantive analysis of the issue of house price sensitivity in the report. For something from an economic source, that is disappointing.
Mr. Love: I partially accept the hon. Gentleman's argument. If the UK is compared to Holland, Australia or the United States, similar house price inflation is evident, and I suspect that the reasons for that are similar to those that he has outlined. However, I do not accept that supply does not affect that. It is critical that, in addition to dealing with the other issues that he mentioned, we tackle the supply issue In certain parts of Britain there is a gross deficit in the number of houses per head of population compared with other countries.
Mr. Norman: The hon. Gentleman may say that, but the thrust of my remarks is that the aggregate figures, taking the country as a whole, do not tell the local story. There are local scarcities, which need to be tackled by a Government who facilitate local solutions. That is not the thrust of the Barker report, which takes the view that there is an aggregate national problem, which can be solved with national solutions and a national policy, driven, and cascaded down, to the regions. Conceptually, that is the difference between what is felt by most hon. Members who have spoken in the debate and the focus of the report.
The report advocates other forms of market intervention; for example, taxing houses by value. It would be interesting to know whether the Minister feels that that should become Government policy. The report also recommends the implementation of a development land tax to ensure that the Exchequer reaps the benefit of what is referred to as "windfall profits". To say the least, the implementation of such a tax would be extremely complex, and the motivation behind it is not clear. Whether it is desirable to sequester windfall profits depends on one's political view, but it is highly unlikely to be a substantial source of revenue. It gives the lie to the motivation behind some of the recommendations and the report's underlying tone that developer profits are to be discouraged.
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Another critical element in the recommendations is the report's enthusiastic endorsement of the role of regional government in implementing housing change. To ensure that that happened, new official bodies would be created: regional planning executives with expensive chief executives, for example. I doubt that people in Kent, Sussex or elsewhere would welcome that innovation, and the reaction of local government in most parts of Britain is very hostile to it.
We must consider exactly what the Government want local government to do nowadays. If they are to remove its last substantial remaining power, discretion in planning, they will also remove the ability of local people to influence their environment—for example, how many houses are built where, and the design requirements—and there will be profound implications for the future of local democracy.
Prior to this debate, I talked to some local government leaders, all of whom are extremely worried about the Barker report. I quote Sandy Bruce-Lockhart, leader of Kent county council, who said, rather poignantly:
"I stood in Newcastle watching an estate built just six years ago, with Government city challenge money, being bulldozed to the ground. The area was to be left derelict. It makes little sense simply to rebuild these houses in the south. Much of the prediction of growth in Kent is not for Kent people, it is for migration into Kent, particularly from the north and the cities."
That is the point that I made earlier. That is what people on the ground are seeing and that is what they believe. The imposition on Kent of a regional government with new powers, based in Guildford, which could be the other end of the country as far as people in Kent are concerned, will be greeted with deep local hostility.
I have been critical of the report and I do not want to present an unbalanced picture. As I said, this is a substantial issue that deserves attention, and the report is a major contribution to the debate. I deliberately focused on the areas of disagreement, which are in my conceptual approach and practical recommendations. There are interesting recommendations in the report which we can probably welcome. For example, it contains some suggestions on how to manage larger developments and lubricate the planning process, and on the release of brownfield sites. However, overall the report adds disappointingly little to our understanding of the dynamics of the housing market. It is based on the acceptance, hook, line and sinker, of outdated projections, which have already been potentially discredited, and which fail to demonstrate what the report purports to demonstrate. It is also based on the assumption that state-driven house-building initiatives can redistribute wealth, and that that is a viable goal for Government, and on the belief that house price inflation can be dealt with, and suppressed by, encouraging more house building and imposing it on the regions of Britain.
The report fails to understand Britain's true housing needs, and it fails even to touch on the question of how we can transform and move our housing stock to meet the needs of the growing numbers of elderly people living alone and single people living in our cities. It does not attempt to address the issue of regional policy and alternative policy approaches, nor does it seek to understand the relationship between house building, the

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housing market, the plight of our inner cities and migration from north to south or vice versa. It has a centralising approach and a strong undertone of belief that the state and the tax system can be used to manipulate markets. if implemented, it would result in the wrong houses in the wrong places.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr. Joe Benton (in the Chair): Order. Before the next speaker begins, I should inform the Chamber that I propose to start the winding-up speeches at 3 o'clock, which will allow 10 minutes each for the Opposition spokesmen and the Minister to reply.
2.51 pm
Mr. Kelvin Hopkins: Thank you, Mr. Benton. I shall try to be brief.
First, I welcome the Barker report as a good start. It identifies some of the key aspects of the housing problem, although it does not solve the whole problem. I have a lot more to add to what Kate Barker has said. I have asked the Leader of the House twice in business questions for a major housing debate on the Floor of the House, but we have not yet had one. I hope that the Minister will use her influence on him to bring forward a big debate, because housing is the major crisis facing the people of Britain—certainly in my constituency.
Our key problem is the desperate shortage of housing for ordinary people to rent. The market will not solve that problem. Two thirds of the population could probably get into owner-occupation, or are already in it, but a sizeable proportion of the population will have decent homes only if they are provided at rents they can afford. Such housing can be provided only if there is some degree of intervention by the state. That has been proved over and over again in the past 100 years. The only way to avoid slum dwellings and Rachman-like landlords is to provide social housing, which I believe should be local authority housing. Kate Barker has put her finger on that at least.
We have been in similar situations before, and each time we solved the problem by building houses. Some 50 years ago, when I was a small boy at school, some of my friends were rehoused in council houses which were magnificent because they had superb gardens, three bedrooms and were beautifully built. In the borough of Barnet, where I grew up, they now sell for £300,000 and have all been sold off. That problem was caused by house sales driven by massive discounts, which were paid for from housing accounts rather than the central Exchequer. The problem was then exacerbated by the collapse of house building.
I recently had lunch with representatives of the House Builders Federation, who told me that they want to build executive homes on greenfield sites for profit. They want the developed value. They are not interested in contracting to build housing for other organisations, in building on brownfield sites, or in building social
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housing because the profits would be insufficient. I briefly suggested in business questions that we should reconsider whether the state, or local authorities, should have a house building capacity—sustained by appropriate policies from the Government—in order to carry out such development.
There are thousands of people on the waiting list in my constituency of Luton, North; I do not know precisely how many, but there are 7,000 in the town as a whole. My constituency is interesting because it was at the epicentre of the collapse of owner-occupation for ordinary people in the early 1990s. People who were persuaded to buy starter homes and urged to take advantage of ever rising house prices bought into those small starter homes, which rocketed in price, but then there was a house price collapse and they were left in negative equity of were repossessed. There were more repossessions and more negative equity in my constituency than anywhere else in the country. Thousands of ordinary people at that margin and who had been encouraged to enter the owner-occupied sector could not sustain it and found themselves homeless and in massive debt. We do not want to repeat that. The only way to avoid it is to provide sufficient decent homes to rent, which people can live in out of choice, not simply because they are desperate.
The major problem in my constituency is the lack of affordable housing. I will not dwell on different sorts of affordable housing; I am talking about local authority affordable housing. The attempted marketisation and privatisation of housing over the past 30 years, starting with the Housing Finance Act 1972, has been disastrous. Profound mistakes have been made at every step of the way. Thirty years ago, we solved the problem in Luton. As vice-chair of the housing committee, I battered on then, as I do now, about the need to build council houses. We built hundreds of council houses and, as a result, we housed 700 families in one year. We also bought in the existing private sector. There was a collapse in the mortgage market and house prices were falling. There was a slump in the owner-occupied sector so we helped by buying several hundred houses and renting them out as council houses. That solved several problems. It got people into decent homes and off the housing waiting list, and I am glad to say that the council became popular for doing a good job. It also meant that the owner-occupier market remained relatively buoyant. The policy was regarded as dangerously socialist because it was municipalisation. Subsequently, everything was sold back as people became better off, and big subsidies were given for owner-occupation. We have now lost thousands of houses to owner-occupation, which could have been used to house the thousands of people still on the waiting list.
We could have encouraged people into owner-occupation from the council housing sector by simply giving them a subsidy from the national Exchequer to buy in the owner-occupied sector. That would have boosted owner-occupation and decanted people from council houses so that people on the waiting list could occupy that housing. I urge my hon. Friend the Minister to take seriously the problems of people in constituencies such as mine in south-east England. They

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do not want executive houses on greenfield sites; they want decent homes with affordable rent. It is down to the Government to provide that for them in the future.
Mr. Joe Benton (in the Chair): I am prepared to call the hon. Member for Castle Point (Bob Spink), but I ask him to ensure that he concludes by 3 o'clock.
2.57 pm
Bob Spink: I am grateful to you, Mr. Benton, and I shall try to be brief.
The Barker review of housing supplies was well summed up by Sebastian O'Kelly, the editor of Property on Sunday. Speaking about the Treasury report and the building of 2.5 million extra houses, he said:
"To build them, the Government needs to overturn the planning process that has existed for 50 years: a process that spared us again and again from the most appalling excesses of ill-thought-out, speculative development."
We need more social housing. As I know from my weekly surgeries, we need about 100 units of social housing in my constituency. We must do more to ensure that demand for social housing is met by the housing associations rather than from council new build.
The massive increase in house building is not necessary or appropriate, particularly in the south-east. Let me illustrate the change using, the example of my constituency. We have a target of 2,400 new houses, and although we are well over halfway through the planning period, we have only identified 700 new sites for those houses. We are way behind. That shows how extravagant the target of 2,400 was, yet the Government are trying to increase it to 4,000; that is completely unsustainable.
I shall briefly address the point about local democracy. Under the current system, there is considerable democratic input, with local councils making decisions within local plans that comply with the county councils' structure plans, which in turn reflect the Government's planning guidance. The Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill changes that into a system whereby the Government impose regional spatial strategies, abolishing local control and structure plans completely.
The regional housing boards are sinister. They will ensure the delivery of the Government's massive increase in house building with cram-them-in density and the green belt being destroyed, whether local communities like it or not. I am old-fashioned enough still to believe that local communities know what is best for them and that they should be trusted with such decisions. They should be listened to and not overridden by the centralised, Big Brother controls that the Government are seeking to impose.
I see that we have reached the witching hour of 3 o'clock, so I shall abide by your instructions, Mr. Benton, and finish my contribution
3 pm
Mr. Edward Davey: I start by congratulating the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Mr. Norman) on securing this debate. We have been waiting for it for some time, and I would encourage the hon. Member for Luton, North (Mr. Hopkins) to
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continue his efforts. The issue is of such importance that we need a debate on the Floor of the House, although in the meantime I welcome this chance.
I also welcome how the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells did the job. He certainly taught me a few things that I had not known before the debate, and he helped redress the balance. In the Barker report and some of the commentary before and after it, we heard that the issue was all about housing numbers and how we should he looking for growth here, there and everywhere. The hon. Gentleman did an excellent job in suggesting that there is another way of looking at the subject.
Despite sharing some of the hon. Gentleman's reservations, I still welcome the Barker report for several reasons. First, a focus on the supply side is important. I am sure the hon. Gentleman would agree that we have seen a downturn in the number of new houses being built, particularly in the social and affordable sector—I make no distinction between the two. He was right to point out that we must be far more sophisticated in our analysis of the types of houses that are needed and ensure that the supply side, whether that is the private or subsidised sector, is providing such houses. The issue is not just about numbers, but about ensuring that we get the right type of housing.
I welcome the fact that there has been a report on the problems of the supply side. I have been concerned for some time that the Government's short-term initiatives seem always to be focused on the demand side. For example, some of the key worker housing subsidies for loans seem to exacerbate the situation rather than deal with the fundamental problem, which is providing more houses for certain groups in our population.
I welcome the Barker report because it is also a catalyst for debate and gives us a reference point to discuss the numbers. It is interesting to compare the briefings from the CPRE and from Shelter. Shelter believes that the professor has underestimated the need for house building, while the CPRE believes that she has overestimated it. She might believe that she has therefore got it right. However, whether or not the exact number is right, the key point made by the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells, which I hope the Minister will take on board, is that it is not just the global figure that is important and that we cannot impose anything from the top down.
That brings me to my key concern about the Barker report, which is that it seems to be a centrist solution. The Government have been moving in that direction for some time, and although I am sure that Professor Barker is her own woman, the fact that some parts of her report have rubber-stamped the Government's policy should be acknowledged. I was particularly concerned by recommendation 6, which has two parts to it. I am sure that hon. Members remember it—
3.4 pm
Sitting suspended for a Division in the House.
3.19 pm
On resuming—
Mr. Davey: I was about to tell hon. Members about my objections to recommendation 6 of the Barker

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review. The two things that I find most objectionable concern centralisation. The review proposes that the regional planning bodies, which the Government have yet to set up under a Bill that is before Parliament, and the regional housing boards, which have only just been set up, should be merged. That would create a large, new, unaccountable regional quango with an even less accountable executive—a regional planning executive—with a series of powers and officials. The recommendation is exceedingly worrying. It might be just an outrider for the Deputy Prime Minister's thinking, but it suggests that housing and planning policy is to be carried out by bodies that have no democratic status. That is a key issue in the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill as it ping-pongs between this House and another place, because an amendment has been tabled by the Liberal Democrats—with the support of the Conservative party—to prevent powers from going up from county council level unless and until there is democracy at regional level.
Some of us do not think that the powers ought to be regionalised. In any event, it should be an underlying principle that wherever major powers are exercised, the people who exercise them should be accountable. It is worrying that the Barker review develops one of the Government's unsatisfactory policies. I hope that this House and the other place can kill it at birth. If we do, we will at least ensure that we do not have to witness the death of democracy in respect of planning and housing.
Although I share some of the criticisms outlined by the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells and some others, let me make some positive points about the recommendations. The review proposes a new, tax-transparent vehicle for investment in the private rented sector. That has some attractions. There is probably cross-party consensus that that sector needs to develop. Increasingly interesting and attractive options are being proposed by bodies such as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation to meet the needs of people who could afford near-market rents but for whom suitable properties are not being built by the private sector. It is possible to imagine a tax-efficient vehicle being designed to plug that gap. My concern is that we might return to the bad old days of some versions of the business expansion scheme, under which there was abuse of tax loopholes. I am particularly concerned about abuses in relation to second homes. So, although I welcome the proposal, it is with that caveat, which I hope the Minister will share with Treasury colleagues.
The most disappointing thing about the report is what is missing. There are the underlying macro issues, on which we touched in early exchanges, in respect of regional economic development. I am concerned about the fact that the Government hardly seem to consider regional policy—they seem to have given up on it. One or two policy issues were mentioned in the report, but not really developed. The first—empty homes—was touched on by the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells. Even in London and the south-east, there are many empty properties. It is incumbent on policy makers to find ways in which they can be brought back into socially useful occupation. We have worked hard on that with a few landlords in my constituency and shown that it is possible. However, we need policies to ensure
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that it happens. That can satisfy a slug of the housing need quickly, cheaply and in a sustainable way. It is a key issue that the Government have not tackled. I know that there are consultation papers on it and that I keep bleating on about it every time we have a housing debate, but until we see action we shall continue to push for it.
The second policy issue concerns the perverse tax incentives in the system. It is nonsense to levy no VAT on greenfield development but to charge it on repairs and regeneration. If we could address that, we could send a clear signal to the market and to private sector developers that they can invest in regeneration and in repair and renewal, thereby ensuring that that is where investment goes. I am concerned that, although the report mentions the matter, it is negative about it and its reasons are not persuasive.
Time has caught up with me. I say simply that I hope the Government will give more time to debate this issue and will not press ahead with any of the recommendations until the House has examined and scrutinised the report.
3.25 pm
Mr. John Hayes: This has been an important and strategic debate. I congratulate the Government on encouraging such a debate by commissioning the Barker report. I also congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Mr. Norman) on giving us the opportunity to debate it in Westminster Hall; he made what I thought was one of the most cogent and accomplished speeches that I have heard in this place.
I say that I congratulate the Government, but I introduce a caveat. It seems odd that the Government should have commissioned an independent survey of housing strategy and simultaneously had two relevant Bills on the Floor of the House—the Housing Bill and the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill. Those Bills were debated before the report was published. If the Government want that sort of analysis, they should legislate on the back of it. They should consider the recommendations and legislate only if necessary. In that respect, the Government's chronology is subject to proper criticism.
To a degree, my observations about the Barker report have already been made, but I shall describe them briefly. First, the statistical assessment on which Barker is based is questionable. My hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells highlighted the problem of the 2001 census data, which seems to undermine the very foundation of Barker's measurement of the relationship between dwellings and households. It is also true, as my hon. Friend said, that Barker assumes that social trends will continue unabated, or in some cases counter-intuitively.
The Government's assessment, on which Barker relies so heavily, is that the number of single-person households will decline over time, whereas anecdotal suggestions are that it will grow. It assumes that the current level of immigration will be maintained, although some would say it is unsustainable. It assumes that current social trends—divorce rates, birth rates and so on—will be maintained. The assumptions that underpin Barker are at least questionable.

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In straightforward terms, the unsuitable mix of housing—that is, too little social housing, as we heard from the hon. Member for Luton, North (Mr. Hopkins)—and the problem of affordability, which is related not to supply but to income and mortgage eligibility, may be at the heart of the housing crisis. It is not simply about numbers, as Barker encourages us to believe.
Secondly, Barker assumes that inadequate supply is the main driver in house price inflation and house price volatility. As my hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells suggests, it is a mix of several demand-side pressures that create high house prices and keep them high. It is the low interest rates, the relative unattractiveness of alternative investment vehicles, the level of borrowing secured by housing equity and the disproportionate allure of home ownership in the British culture that have driven up house prices and kept them up.
To apply supply-side solutions to the problem would be to use an extraordinarily blunt instrument. Given that only 1 per cent. of housing is new, and that only 10 per cent. of transactions relate to new properties, the idea that one can affect house prices by supply-side means seems at best hopeful and at worst an illusion.
Mr. Love: Will the hon. Gentleman, speaking on behalf of the official Opposition, say whether he accepts the thrust of the Barker report, which is that lack of supply is a major contributory factor to house price inflation?
Mr. Hayes: That is the very point I am making. In some parts of the country—and in some sectors; I mentioned social housing a moment ago—there is a mismatch between housing provision and housing need. There is no question about it, but the idea that one can affect house price inflation—the hon. Gentleman knows the numbers; he is an expert in such matters—is extremely ambitious. It would require a house building programme of almost impossible proportions. Such a programme would be impossible to carry out because of the restricted availability of land and capacity of the industry, and because of the time that it takes to deliver house building—a point that my hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells made in response to my earlier intervention.
The hon. Member for Edmonton (Mr. Love) may hope that increasing housing supply will have a dramatic effect—[Interruption.] I suggest to him that it will not have an effect in the short term, because one cannot magic houses out of the ether.
Barker's advocacy of large-scale building and relaxed greenfield planning constraints is likely to result in development that will be unsustainable in terms of infrastructure and unacceptable both in terms of housing quality and of local people's desire to see incremental development and the continuation of stable communities.
The Minister might choose to examine the development of a more fluid system whereby people could move more easily through social housing into market housing. She might also consider the adoption of a people-centred, rather than building-centred, approach to affordability, which would take into
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account how to make the houses available more affordable to the people who need them. She also needs to give proper consideration to the problem of empty homes, as the hon. Member for Luton, North said, and to examine the issues of design and quality, so that the worst-off people are not obliged to live in the worst quality houses.
3.31 pm
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (Yvette Cooper): I congratulate the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Mr. Norman) on giving us the opportunity to debate this report, which raises important issues both for the economy as a whole and for individual quality of life.
May I seek your guidance, Mr. Benton, on whether the debate will finish at 3.45?
Mr. Joe Benton (in the Chair): It will finish at 3.44.
Yvette Cooper: Thank you.
I shall begin my remarks by setting the Barker review in context. We should be clear that there is a series of things that are not covered in the review, and that we would not have expected it to consider them. Criticisms of it on that account would therefore be mistaken, although the points made may be important and valid, and we may take account of them in the Government's response. It is important to be clear about the purpose of the review.
The factors that led the Chancellor and the Deputy Prime Minister to ask for the Barker review were similar to those that had already been considered as part of the sustainable communities plan. However, many of those issues were so important, and the links between the housing market and the economy are so important, that it was considered necessary to analyse them further as part of the review.
In 2001, about 175,000 houses were built in the UK, which is the lowest annual figure since the second world war. The number of new houses built in the past 10 years is 12.5 per cent. lower than in the previous decade. The trend rate of house price growth in the UK has been 2.4 per cent. in real terms over the past 30 years, compared to an EU average of 1.1 per cent. In Germany there was no increase in real terms at all, and in France the increase was an average of 0.8 per cent. The latest evidence suggests that the trend rate of house price growth in the UK has increased to 2.9 per cent. over the past 20 years. There are also considerable regional variations in the UK, and there were extremes of volatility in the housing market under earlier Governments.
Although many of those factors had already been considered as part of the sustainable communities plan, the extent of their economic impact is significant. A volatile housing market contributes to macro-economic instability, hinders labour market flexibility and constrains economic growth. The Barker review was also prompted by the Treasury's assessment of the five economic tests and the position of the housing market in relation to Europe.
The review is a macro-economic assessment; it does not go into a series of detailed micro-economic considerations, nor does it examine the wider

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considerations of the planning system in the sustainable communities plan. Importantly, it does not consider the regional position, which we have to recognise must be an extremely important part of the final response to the Barker review.
Jeremy Corbyn: On the regional issue, does the Department expect a specific study to be made of the social and wider housing needs in London, and of increasing planning powers to ensure that we get at least a 50 per cent. proportion of social housing in new developments in the capital?
Yvette Cooper: We are getting under way a wide programme of work in response to the Barker review, including consideration of policy recommendations, consideration of, and consultation on, the underlying methodology used in the review and, in particular, the further regional analyses that are needed. Certainly one thing that we see arising from the Barker report is further work on affordable housing, and we are taking that forward in discussions as part of the spending review. However, the Barker review was aimed at providing important analysis to explain the level of under-supply at macro-economic level, and at identifying the barriers to the housing market as a whole functioning effectively and responding to house prices. We have a programme of follow-up work under way.
Having put the Barker review in context, I shall address some of the points raised by hon. Members. Clearly, the regional dimension to the housing market is extremely important, and we want to do further work on that in light of the report. However, it is completely wrong to suggest, as the hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr. Davey) seemed to, that the Government's overall approach ignores regional policy. The sustainable communities plan constitutes a regional approach. It recognises the very strong regional variations in the housing market and the economy, and considers areas where there are much smaller variations in the market.
We have set out substantial housing growth strategies for the south-east, London and the eastern region, and for addressing low demand in parts of the north—I stress that it is parts of the north. The plan also includes a strong regional economic strategy. Indeed, the most recent follow-on publication from the plan was all about the potential for the northern way. The northern growth corridor is an excellent place to invest. I agree with the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells that there are fantastic economic opportunities in that regard. From a constituency point of view, I can certainly provide very strong recommendations for investment in areas within a 20 or 30-minute radius of Leeds.
The hon. Gentleman seemed to argue that we should allow regional disparities to right themselves. He seemed to say that, left to themselves, the economy or the housing market would right regional inequalities— that the price mechanism would be enough to do that. The truth is that the evidence simply does not bear that out. It was, in many respects, the policy of the previous Government, and regional disparities grew, with all the problems to which such disparities lead.
Mr. Norman: My argument is not that regional disparities will right themselves. It is that if we adopt a
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national approach, advocate a doubling of the rate of house building and fail to address the regional issues, that will worsen the problem, not diminish it.
Yvette Cooper: We have at no time said that the response needs to be a national, top-down approach. We need an approach that recognises regional variations, which is exactly what the sustainable communities plan does and why one of the major pieces of work that we are doing to follow up the Barker review involves considering regional disparities. Nevertheless, it was important to start from an overall, macro-economic analysis of the impact of the housing market on the economy and the relationship between the two. Of course, there is a further regional dimension. That is important, but we must recognise that the sustainable communities plan is very much a regional plan. It is all about the different pressures that different regions face.
Mr. Hayes: But in that macro-economic analysis, which the Minister highlights, Kate Barker makes virtually no comment on the way we should deal with the insensitivity or unresponsiveness of price to supply and vice versa. Indeed, as my hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells says, she glosses over that subject. While the hon. Lady is dealing with that, perhaps she will also deal with the development land tax. Kate Barker recommends it, but do the Government agree with her?
Yvette Cooper: I shall come on to the relationship between supply and price. The Barker review set out a series of different policy recommendations; we are considering them and will say more about our response to individual recommendations in due course.
The right hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Curry) is right to say that there is little net migration from north to south, and it is not a factor in the pressures on the housing market and the variations across the regions. However, there is a regional issue that we very much need to address—it is economic and housing related—and that is exactly what the sustainable communities plan does. We need to develop that work further in light of the Barker report.
The hon. Members for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr. Hayes) and for Tunbridge Wells said that the Government should not be concerned about house price inflation, that it does not reflect under-supply in the housing market and, indeed, that there might not be under-supply. Those viewpoints are fundamentally wrong. House price inflation is clearly a serious problem, particularly in London and the south-east, and people are being priced out of the property market. Of the younger generation, only those who inherit property can easily find their way into the market; those who do not inherit need to earn significant sums to do so. The increasing pressure of house price inflation is therefore to the considerable and unfair disadvantage of some, so affordability does matter.
House price inflation also reflects under-supply. Hon. Members are right to note that housing is a financial asset as well as a consumption good, and the Barker review recognises that. That means that housing is affected by a whole series of other factors, including the performance of other financial assets and interest rates. However, none of that is to deny the fact that housing is

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also one of the most important consumption goods that we choose in our lifetimes. Those who suggest that we can simply dismiss the way in which it functions as a consumption good, and ignore the market relationships, are simply burying their heads in the sand,
Mr. Hayes: Will the hon. Lady give way?
Yvette Cooper: I am very concerned about running out of time, but I will briefly give way.
Mr. Hayes: I gave the hon. Lady two minutes of my time because this is a complex subject, as she will have noticed. She must, however, answer one point. The demand-side changes that I mentioned could be effected very quickly and have an immediate response, but the supply-side changes that she and Kate Barker seem to advocate would take a very long time to have any effect at all.
Yvette Cooper: Of course it can take some time to address housing supply—that is exactly why we should have been addressing the problem 10, 20 or 30 years ago and why we need to address it now. If we do not, we will have even greater problems in the future.
Housing supply has fallen. Demand has increased, and house prices have gone up, but housing supply has not increased in response. It was a fundamental part of Kate Barker's review to identify why housing supply has not responded effectively to house prices and what the barriers in the market might be.
The review also raises issues about affordable housing, and my hon. Friend the Member for Luton, North (Mr. Hopkins) is right to say that it is important. We have increased investment in affordable housing, but we need to increase the amount of such housing, particularly in London and the south-east.

Maternity Services (Wycombe)
3.44 pm
Mr. Paul Goodman: I am pleased to have secured this important debate on maternity services at Wycombe hospital. Perhaps you, Mr. Benton, can indicate whether the debate will get its full half hour if we are interrupted by the Division bell. You are nodding, so that is the case.
I am pleased to have secured the debate, but I must add that I am extremely sorry that I had to ballot for it at all and that it has to take place. Let me explain why. The reason behind the debate is the proposal in the consultation document "Shaping Health Services" to transfer key maternity services—the maternity department, the children's ward and the special baby care unit—from Wycombe hospital to Stoke Mandeville.
As the Minister may know, the plan has met overwhelming opposition, not only in the High Wycombe and Marlow area in my constituency, but in neighbouring constituencies, including that of my hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan), who is present. The major political parties in my constituency oppose the proposal, and so do Wycombe district council, the local race equality council and local midwives, who protested against it at a consultation meeting last Monday. Local people in general and mothers in particular oppose the proposal; already, a petition organised by Janet Milne, chairman of the Wycombe special care baby unit club, has gathered more than 14,000 signatures, and other petitions are circulating. For example, a petition organised by the Wycombe Conservative association gathered more than 1,000 signatures in a single morning. Signatures to petitions currently total more than 20,000, and there is an all-party campaign against the proposal, chaired by Steve Cohen, editor of the Bucks Free Press.
I pay tribute to Janet Milne, whose club has raised more than £70,000 for the special care baby unit since it was set up in the late 1970s, to Dr. Kim Cheetham, who has helped sick babies at the hospital for a quarter of a century, and to all the staff who help to provide maternity services at Wycombe hospital. The department has a good reputation; its results are excellent; its integration between hospital and home is outstanding, and it is larger than many other departments that are not being closed. The staff are a dedicated team and are mostly local, with personal local connections. The service may move, but there is no guarantee that the staff would move, too.
My concern, and that of all who oppose the plans, is not based simply on the underfunding of health services in Bucks, although they are underfunded. As my hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham made clear in a debate that she instigated on the subject recently, every resident of Bucks receives 18 per cent. less per head in health care spending than the national average. Nor is our concern based simply on the consequent deficits that arise from that underfunding, which is expected to run at some £14 million next year, and on the closures that have arisen at least in part from

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that underfunding—the closure of the respite facility at Riversdale and the day-care facility at Marlow day hospital and the threat to the Haleacre unit in my hon. Friend's constituency in Amersham and other mental health facilities in the south of the county.
Mrs. Cheryl Gillan: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for allowing me to intervene in his short debate, and for his references to me. Does he agree that there is concern among all Members of Parliament in Buckinghamshire that our health services continue to be seriously underfunded? There is no hope of the Government putting into the health system what the county and its residents deserve. It is not just isolated examples that are under threat; there is also a threat to Chesham hospital and to the Misbourne ward at Amersham hospital. Many issues are not being addressed because of the lack of funds.
Mr. Goodman: I agree wholeheartedly with my hon. Friend, who has an excellent record of campaigning on these issues. I was going on to say that our concern is not based on the belief of the people of south Bucks that they have paid their fair share in taxes, a phrase my hon. Friend has used, and that they are not getting their fair share in health service spending, nor is our concern about the proposals based simply on the anxiety, difficulty and stress that journeys from the south of the county to Stoke Mandeville would cause. To put it starkly, our concern is based on the fear that babies may die if maternity services go to Stoke Mandeville, and I shall explain why.
The local hospital trust assures us that no babies and mothers will be in danger if they have to make the journey by ambulance or other transport from south Bucks to Stoke Mandeville. It was said in a letter to me that the plan
"will not put women or their babies at more risk".
However, I must tell the Minister that that flies in the face of my constituents' experience. I have time to quote only one of many letters that draw on that experience, which states:
"My sister's first child developed an irregular heart beat six months into my sister's pregnancy … it was basically a 30 minute survival window for this to take place … Thankfully, we were incredibly fortunate and my niece got the care she needed and is now a healthy little girl. But if a 45-minute journey, not to mention the time waiting for an ambulance to arrive was needed, she would not have survived."
I could quote from many more letters on the subject, but the main point is clear: the journey from south Bucks to Stoke Mandeville is long and potentially dangerous for many babies and mothers.
The hospital trust estimates that a non-blue light ambulance journey from Wycombe to Stoke Mandeville takes 36 minutes 47 seconds and that a blue-light journey takes 32 minutes four seconds. That estimate has been met with incredulity by south Buckinghamshire residents and at least one expert. Peter
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Cox, a former paramedic with 20 years' experience of negotiating the road, has said:
"Maybe on a computer that journey can take 30 minutes, but in practice it can often be up to an hour or more. I have driven patients in ambulances both in south Buckinghamshire and abroad and the High Wycombe to Aylesbury road is one of the worst I have ever come across. The time it will take ambulance crews to make that journey will put the lives of sick and dying babies at risk."
In the light of that expert assessment, I want to put the first of a series of questions to the Minister. I do not expect complete answers from her today, although I expect them in due course in writing. I hope that she will assure me that I shall receive them and that she will respond to the full text of my speech, which I shall send her if the debate is interrupted by the Division bell.
What are the actual times for ambulance journeys in peak hours, with and without sirens and lights, at various times of day? What route would be used, and what assessment has been made of the propensity for severe disruption on those routes? Can we infer that Buckinghamshire Hospitals NHS trust is no longer willing to provide maternity services to Marlow and other parts of south Bucks and that people in those areas should travel to Wexham park instead?
There may be disagreement between the hospital trust and others about ambulance journeys, but I hope that there is complete agreement about other aspects of transport. We all agree, surely, that transport is vital. Without adequate transport, my constituents—particularly my poor and ethnic minority constituents who live in the deprived centre of Wycombe; they often do not have a car and may not speak English as a first language, or even speak it at all—will not be able to get from the middle of High Wycombe to Stoke Mandeville easily, conveniently and safely.
The consultation document states that the health authorities concerned are working on detailed transport proposals. It must follow, surely, that if detailed and adequate proposals are not in place by 25 June, when the consultation period is due to end, the strategic health authority will have to reject the proposals.
I understand that with less than eight weeks to go, little progress has been made in discussions between the relevant health authorities and the county council. No wonder that the county council feels, quite reasonably, that it is disgracefully underfunded by the Government, and it fears, also quite reasonably, that it will be forced, with no additional resources, to pick up part of the bill for the NHS and for the plans in question, in particular those relating to transport.
What consultations have taken place to date between the local health bodies and the county council? Who was there? What was decided? When are further meetings planned, and does the Minister agree that if a clear and coherent transport strategy is not in place by 25 June, the strategic health authority will surely have no option but to reject the proposals?
The proposals as a whole have been advanced by the mid and south Bucks health community. The Minister confirms to me in a written answer that
"The body does not exist in law"

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but that the term "mid and south Bucks health community" refers to
"both the providers of health services and the people who use or have access to the health services in the mid and south Bucks area".
The people of south Buckinghamshire will not be pleased to learn that the proposals have apparently been issued in their name. Their response will be, to quote a phrase that has been current recently, "Not in my name."
A question obviously follows. Who will take the final decision if the local overview and scrutiny committee, under the chairmanship of Councillor Mike Appleyard, does not refer the decision to the Secretary of State? I understand that the strategic health authority wants a special committee, made up of members of local health service bodies, to make a recommendation to it. Can the Minister confirm that?
Will the Minister tell us how such a committee will be constituted, and what will happen if there is dispute or disagreement about its constitution? Can she confirm that if the overview and scrutiny committee refers the proposals to the Secretary of State, he will refer them automatically to the independent reconfiguration panel?
My constituents and others will give due regard to the main argument advanced by the hospital trust, namely that the proposals are in part driven by the severe national shortage of paediatric staff. I want to press the Minister on that point. According to the financial framework document that accompanies the main document:
"There are currently 18.8 WTE vacancies for consultant and junior medical staff within the acute trust compared to a funded establishment of 471 staff. At four per cent of the workforce this is a good position compared to other parts of the NHS."
Can the Minister tell me into which medical categories those vacancies fall? In particular, how many of those vacancies are paediatric vacancies? Can she confirm the rumour that only three of the doctor vacancies are paediatric vacancies? Is this risk to mothers and babies and the potential disruption of successful teams taking place for the want of only three doctors?
I have already asked the Minister what efforts the hospital trust has made in recent years to recruit paediatric staff, and I have received only the most general of answers. I do not think that it was good enough, so I would like to put the questions again. How has the trust attempted to recruit? When, where and how often has it advertised? Has it advertised abroad and if so, when, where and how often?
More questions arise about the proposals. Another answer that I have received, which really is not good enough either, relates to risk assessment. Will the Minister guarantee that the clinical risk assessment that has been carried out—I have received details from her about how it has been carried out—will be published in full before the consultation closes? If acute surgery and orthopaedics were to be concentrated at Wycombe and children's services at Stoke Mandeville, that would mean that children who needed surgery or acute accident and emergency treatment would not be nursed in a children's ward or be tended to by children's doctors
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and nurses. Can she say whether the proposal would be compatible with the national service framework for children issued by her Department last year? Is she in a position to confirm or deny the rumour that the strategic health authority—I heard this only yesterday—plans to move the two intensive care beds in the Wycombe special care baby unit not merely to Stoke Mandeville but to the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford in 2006?
Finally, there is the whole question of costs. The strategic health authority argues that the proposals are not driven by the need to reduce the deficits. The consultation document argues that the net effect of option one on income and expenditure would be minus £160,000 and that the net effect of option two would be minus £230,000. Did those calculations cover costs other than income and expenditure? What about each element of capital costs, recruitment and retention costs, travel costs, the cost to the ambulance service and, most important, transport costs? Has a full assessment been made and if so, what is it and where is it?
Of course, costs are not the primary issue at stake for my constituents and people in south Bucks. It is rather the fear that our local health care ecology and the lives of babies and mothers are being put at risk because of a rushed plan that has not been properly thought through and has been made under the shadow of the chronic underfunding of the NHS in Bucks. However, the case against the proposals does not ultimately rest on emotion alone. It also rests on reason and good health service practice.
To date, these proposals offer no cost information, no transport strategy, no publicly available clinical risk assessment and no clear decision-making criteria. The Minister must surely agree that until or unless they do, it is not proper to consider or reach a conclusion on the proposals because they are incomplete. Neither is it proper to consider alternatives, because not all the information needed to draw them up is available. I hope that the Minister will agree that, on the basis of the evidence we have, it would be impossible for the proposals to proceed properly. I look forward to her response.
Mrs. Gillan rose—
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Miss Melanie Johnson): I received no request to speak from the hon. Lady.
Mr. Benton (in the Chair): I am sorry, but unless a specific request was made to the Minister, the hon. Lady cannot speak in the debate.
Mrs. Gillan: I made the request to my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr. Goodman). Briefly, I wish to associate myself with the remarks that he made and to say that they reflect the views of my constituents. I think that the Minister has been most ungracious.
Miss Johnson: I will defer to the hon. Lady and allow her to speak. I merely point out that the House rules suggest that she should approach me as well as her hon. Friend.
Mrs. Gillan: I have made my contribution.
4 pm
Miss Johnson: I congratulate the hon. Member for Wycombe (Mr. Goodman) on securing this debate on maternity services at Wycombe hospital. Before I deal with some of the specific issues that he raised, I should like to take this opportunity to recognise the work done across Buckinghamshire to deliver good quality services and to pay tribute to all the staff who are dedicated to the process. All hon. Members rightly attach the highest importance to developments in the NHS in their constituencies, because local people should have local access to high quality health services, including maternity services. Local staff play a key role in ensuring that that is possible for local people.
National maternity services perform a core function in the NHS. More than 600,000 babies and their mothers in the UK each year benefit from our maternity services, which the NHS provides free, at a cost of £1 billion a year. The Department of Health is committed to improving maternity services by modernising all maternity units, increasing the number of midwives, giving women greater choice over childbirth and ensuring that they receive the highest quality maternity care.
Huge advances have been made in the past few years in improving the experience of women during pregnancy and childbirth. It is now much safer to give birth, and women are much more actively involved in decisions about the maternity care that they receive. The main driver for future change will be the publication of a children's national service framework later this year. Extending access and choice will be key themes of the maternity module, in order to make services more flexible, accessible and appropriate, and to give improved choice to all women and their families.
We have also made available £100 million of additional capital funding over the past two years, to refurbish and modernise more than 200 maternity units in England—including that at Wycombe hospital—to improve the environment in which care is provided and better meet the needs of women and their families. That is the largest investment to improve maternity care that any Government have made and it will help to ensure that women in every area of the country have high quality maternity services, as they should.
In order to achieve the goal of providing high quality maternity services, and as part of the modernisation programme that has been set out in the NHS, many NHS economies and organisations are considering changes to the organisation of their services with their local stakeholders. I am sure that Opposition Members will agree that we should recognise that hospital services need to change if they are to continue to fulfil patients' needs and improve access. Services should not remain static for ever, but should be responsive to local needs. That approach informs part of the work that underlies "Keeping the NHS Local—A New Direction of Travel", which was published in February 2003.
I deal now in more detail with the local services in Buckinghamshire. I beg greatly to differ with the assessment that the hon. Member for Wycombe gave of the underfunding of the Bucks health care system. The health services have received record sums of investment that were partly funded through the increase in national insurance, which Conservative Members opposed. I
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shall therefore take no lectures from the Conservative party about funding the NHS. The service would have been much more poorly funded, with many cuts, had that party's programme of patients passports been implemented. The underfunding that we inherited would also have persisted for a long time.
The funding that the Government have put into the NHS can be seen in the improvement in all the delivery information that we have about the Buckinghamshire health care economy. All waiters over nine months have now been seen. There are now no in-patient waiters over nine months and no out-patient waiters over 17 weeks. Buckinghamshire is ahead of profile on in-patient waiters for the end of March and is on profile for out-patient waiters. There is access to primary care, with 100 per cent. meeting the target of seeing a nurse within 24 hours and 99 per cent. meeting the target of seeing a GP within 48 hours. In the past weeks, the rolling average of people seen in accident and emergency is 96.7 per cent. hitting the target of being seen in under four hours. The ambulance response rates are above performance targets, too.
The overall picture is extremely encouraging, with a much better deal in terms of funding and performance for all of the Buckinghamshire health care economy. I am sure that Opposition Members, whatever their views about the level of funding, which I appreciate are different from the Government's support for more generous funding of the health care system, will welcome the improvements that that extra funding has brought for their health economy.
The hon. Member for Wycombe talked about a wide-ranging public consultation exercise that is being held by the mid and south Buckinghamshire health community into how best to improve the quality and range of health care services. It is considering services for patients with long-term conditions, planned surgical and emergency care, rehabilitation and mental health care. I have been assured by the Thames Valley strategic health authority that none of it, including the maternity review, is about cutting services and that no savings are expected from implementing the service changes. The proposals are about improving the quality of care for patients—we must remember that the patient in some circumstances will be a newborn baby or a would-be newborn baby—improving the use of existing skills and resources and providing sustainable, fully staffed services.
Mr. Goodman: I raised the issue of costs and finance, and the Minister has now alluded to it. I want to respond by simply asking her to answer one question. Will she guarantee in writing to answer all the points that I raised in my speech? I do not expect her to answer them all today.
Miss Johnson: I will endeavour to secure the hon. Gentleman an answer from the Minister of State, Department of Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster, Central (Ms Winterton), who has regional responsibility. I am sure that she will take a keen interest in what has been said today and will want to respond in detail to his points.

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To reiterate, the consultation exercise is not about cutting funding, and it has the full support of the Thames Valley strategic health authority. I am sure that hon. Members will be in contact with their strategic health authority, and although we will endeavour to answer as many of the hon. Gentleman's points as possible, the truth is that the authority is often the best body to ask. It is responsible for what is happening within its area and for working with the local commissioners of health care.
The current consultation is the result of months of joint working within the local health community to come up with proposals to modernise the local NHS, both to improve the quality and range of services and to meet the challenges. Those challenges mean that no change to maternity services is not an option. I understand that there are already difficulties in providing children's
in-patient services, and it has been decided that women and children's services cannot continue in their existing configuration because it is neither safe nor practicable in the long term.
I also understand that the mid and south Buckinghamshire health community has looked at ways of finding an option that offers a safe and sustainable 24-hour service at both Stoke Mandeville and Wycombe hospitals. However, no comprehensive option offers the safety needed at both sites. The proposal—I should stress that what we are discussing is only a proposal—is that in order to provide a service that can be safely staffed, a single women and children's in-patient unit would be developed at Stoke Mandeville hospital. It would include in-patient children's services, a special care baby unit, maternity deliveries, and emergency and in-patient gynaecology. The proposal would also mean that the special care baby unit at Wycombe hospital would close, but were that to happen the unit at Stoke Mandeville would be increased commensurately. I am sure that hon. Members are as painfully conscious as I am of the fact that the principal concern of any parent of a baby in a SCBU is that it is the safest possible place.
The maternity unit at Wycombe hospital would still have an important role to play. All day-time services such as antenatal and paediatric services will continue to be provided at the site. The possibility of establishing a midwifery-led delivery unit at either Wycombe hospital or Stoke Mandeville is being considered. That option would provide local services for women expected to have an uncomplicated birth. The preferred option in shaping the health service is to develop the single women
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and children's in-patient unit at Stoke Mandeville, but it is only a proposal. No decisions have been made. As the hon. Gentleman acknowledged, there is a considerable period of consultation still to run.
A detailed programme is now under way to engage with the local community. The hon. Gentleman reflected many of its views about the future provision of the service. This is the biggest and most wide-ranging consultation ever undertaken in Buckinghamshire. It provides local people with a real opportunity to make their views known about the future proposals and to shape future local health services. People are making their views known in a variety of different ways such as public meetings and focus groups or in response to the patient questionnaires that have been distributed. In addition, a web-based virtual health panel has been developed to encourage discussion and debate. It sounds as though there may not be much need to encourage debate. There have also been local radio phone-ins and a public question time event.
As the hon. Gentleman remarked, the Buckinghamshire health overview and scrutiny committee will be fully involved and consulted to ensure that the due process is followed. The scrutiny committee can refer a decision to the Secretary of State if there is any dispute or difference of opinion. That is obviously a matter for the future because the outcome of the consultation has not yet been determined. Were such a decision referred to the Secretary of State, he could refer to an independent reconfiguration panel if he so decided. The hon. Gentleman was interested in that and so I have taken the time to explain the process to him.
The hon. Gentleman also raised concerns about the distance patients will have to travel to receive maternity care if they are transferred to Stoke Mandeville. These issues have been given careful consideration and are addressed in the consultation document. The county council is working closely with the trust on transport issues and exploring possible solutions. The local ambulance trust would ensure that early transfer and admission for pregnant women were a priority in any event.
In conclusion, I have listened to the hon. Gentleman's concerns. Our policy is that primary care trusts, in partnership with the other local NHS trusts and the strategic health authority, decide the priorities for the NHS locally. They are closest to the provision and that is where the specific local knowledge and expertise lie. It is not appropriate for Ministers to decide.

Mechanically Propelled Vehicles
4.14 pm
John Mann: In rising to raise the issue with the Minister, I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Rossendale and Darwen (Janet Anderson) who has proposed a Bill on this subject. I back it wholeheartedly and wish it all speed and success. I also pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for South Swindon (Ms Drown) for her brief but courteous contribution, in spirit at least, to the debate.
I do not intend to go through the detail of the consultation, but I am aware of that detail, as is the Minister. To repeat what has already been put on public record would be a waste of the debate. Therefore, I intend to raise issues and dilemmas faced by the Minister and to counter myths that exist in some organisations; I will cite certain correspondence that I have received to demonstrate those myths.
There is a straightforward dilemma: many people wish to walk or ride in the countryside to escape the noise and traffic of everyday life. Clearly that would not be possible if they came across someone riding a motorised vehicle—legitimately or illegitimately—on a right of way. We should start by recognising that there is a conflict of interest that will be difficult to resolve. The Minister and I subscribe to the Fabian ethos of gradual change and compromise. In this context, such a compromise can be found. Other hon. Members and I have raised the issue before, and I cite early-day motions supported by a significant number of Members of Parliament on both sides of the House to show the strength of feeling.
Now, I turn to the myths. The key myth is that supporters of change—the Minister, the Government and I—are hellbent on taking away people's rights. Letters to me from constituents refer to the Minister being misled by misinformation. One constituent asks:
"Can you … speak please to the minister to tell him that he has been misled and get his reassurance that the interests of ordinary people … will not be unjustifiably prejudiced, and that he will insist on being better informed by fact-based evidence before taking further action?"
I intend to give him fact-based evidence. Has he spoken to all the parties concerned? The theme of misinformation comes up time and again.
A second letter from a constituent suggests that the Minister
"seems intent on preventing me from following my legitimate hobby by banning the use of motorcycles on the 3 per cent. of country lanes, which I am allowed to ride at present."
I am sure that the Minister will want to respond directly on whether he intends to remove the rights of people throughout the country who are riding legitimately on existing, defined rights of way.
Some myths have been whipped up by hysteria. In an article from the Trail Riders Fellowship, under the heading, "Honesty—the best policy?", the organisation sets out its response to the "draconian proposals". I will not repeat it, because that is where information in my constituents' letters comes from. Having met members of the organisation, I must say that the Trail Riders Fellowship is a legitimate, lawful and well organised group. However, through its website and publicity, it is passing on misinformation about what the Government
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and Members of Parliament are trying to do. I cast no aspersions on trail riders. In my experience, they are honest and upstanding members of society who wish to pursue a hobby and a sport. I have no reason to stop people trail riding. Others, however, are more extreme.
The editor of the magazine, Land Rover Owner, pleads for more green-lane enthusiasts to "wipe the smiles" from ramblers' faces. He wrote:
"You can't beat a wheel-deep wade for generating some big smiles".
The British Motorcyclists Federation says that there is no suggestion of an automatic upgrade, but a loophole in the law allows it—and my constituents cannot object. The only way to stop an upgrade that allowed motorised vehicles on bridleways in my area was if it could be proved that horse-drawn vehicles had no historic rights. In my area, that would include Roman chariots, of which there were quite a number. For example, Blue Stocking lane in Clarborough has been highlighted by the Trail Riders Fellowship and the Ramblers Association as being one of the most contentious of proposals. That historic right of way was initially determined by the Romans.
It is to stop such an automaticity of upgrade that I and others are pressing the Minister; we want a full public debate on the subject. The BMF suggests that the Minister is attempting to make it illegal to drive along country lanes unless they have been used for 100 years by motorised vehicles. He may wish to comment on that assertion. He may wish to comment also on the claim that the intention is to eradicate trail riding and that he cannot differentiate between trail riders and hooligans. It has been suggested that one consequence of his proposal is that motorcyclists would lose access to minor tarmacked roads across the country. He could counter some of those myths.
The fact is that three groups are involved. There are the trail riders, peaceably going along existing routes; there are those who are using bikes, off-road vehicles and quad bikes all over the place and causing havoc; and there are those who are using them through authorised centres. Authorised centres for quad bikes, such as that in Nottinghamshire, are good legitimate businesses. They often use Forestry Commission land and are well organised, but they have been tarred with the same brush as those in Langold, in and around Clarborough, and in Warsop in my constituency who use off-road vehicles, motorbikes and quad bikes ad nauseam—a use that would be illegal.
The question is whether it will be harder to police such vehicles if the rights of way that they use are legitimised. Traffic regulation orders can be made, but I would like to see additional powers—for instance, allowing parish councils to intervene in dealing with the rights of way in their areas. The police have a range of options for dealing with the irresponsible use of motorcycles, not least under section 59 of the Police Reform Act 2002. If it served a purpose, I would like to see zonal orders in Warsop that banned all motorised vehicles—and with them the wanton disruption of people's lives. Such disruption is not legitimate, and it is quite wrong to try to legitimise it by hiding behind the Trail Riders

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Fellowship, organised sports organisations and other appropriate bodies. This issue motivates most Members of Parliament.
Lembit Öpik: We all agree that few rights of way are contentious and that most riders are not irresponsible, and we accept the common concern that the small number of irresponsible riders must be stopped. However, does the hon. Gentleman not agree that the kind of measures that he describes could harm the great majority of responsible and careful motorcyclists in order to try to restrict the few irresponsible ones, and that it would be better to explore a dialogue about regulation with organisations that represent motorcyclists before taking stronger measures?
John Mann: I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention, but I disagree with him.
There are applications to upgrade all the bridleways around Clarborough, potentially causing some of my constituents to be surrounded by a race track. Their rights of appeal against that are nil, because the issue will be determined solely on the basis of whether there is a historic right of way, some of which date back 2,000 years. Clearly, that is nonsense. I would be more satisfied if my constituents, and I, as their representative, were able to put the case before a proper public inquiry, because all the issues could then be taken into account, rather than simply that of whether there was an ancient right of way in a time in which there were no motorised vehicles.
Automaticity is the issue. In the hope that that loophole in the law will be tightened, I ask the Minister what would then happen in areas such as Clarborough, in which proposals have already gone through the normal process with the county council, and therefore cannot be dealt with retrospectively. That would create an anomaly. Traffic regulation orders will have to be the answer, but I am interested to know specifically how. The Minister wrote to me on this matter on 20 February. What powers would he recommend to my constituents to ensure that their lives are not made a misery by off-roaders who carry out their sport in such places?
I also want to ask the Minister about long-distance footpaths. This summer, I shall walk the Pennine way for charity. [Interruption.] From the comments of the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Lembit Öpik), I take it that the sponsorship form will be completed. I will do that walk with my son and nephew—two young boys who will rightly be raising money for an orphanage in Malawi.
The Pennine way is 250 miles in length, and two sections of it have been particularly blighted by off-road vehicles. The blighting of long-distance footpaths by competing and contradictory leisure pursuits must be tackled. Long-established, long-distance footpaths should have an exclusion zone across them, whereas trail riders and others ought to have new rights in appropriate areas, such as on Forestry Commission land, which are agreed by consent, rather than restricted. There need not be a reduction in rights; there could be an apportionment of rights that allows everyone to follow their pursuits without cutting across one another, except on odd occasions.
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The final issue that I want to discuss is that of quad bikes. I do not think that the issue has been highlighted in the House before. For every complaint that I receive about motorbikes, I get two about quad bikes, so I decided to investigate that phenomenon. According to the first website that I looked at, quad bikes bomb down at 30-plus mph. They are the slow and small ones. Driving the Suzuki 160 cc is described as akin to driving a rally car on ice. That would be rather unpleasant for the horse rider, the rambler with their family or the dog walker who meets it. Another website from the quad bike fraternity says that many walkers will be surprised to encounter a large vehicle or four in the middle of nowhere—precisely. At present, 260 cc quad bikes are available for purchase in Britain, and 49 cc quad bikes are specifically aimed at the under-eights.
This new phenomenon is blighting my local communities. There is lunacy as quad bikes go through estates, woods and fields, go down roads and go through car parks—they go everywhere. There are kids and teenagers, sometimes with their fathers, on quad bikes. As we saw with Mr. Ozzie Osbourne, who was riding his quad bike legitimately on his private estate, these bikes can be very dangerous. They can be dangerous not only to the individuals riding them, but to those who come across them. The "quadfathers" are the equivalent to the TRF in the quad biking industry—that gives us a picture of how some people regard this pastime.
Again, there is nothing wrong with organised centres and people making a good and healthy living from organised extreme sports, such as quad biking. Doubtless the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire is the first to want to participate in each new extreme sport. Quad biking is a perfectly legitimate pastime if organised, but having these people everywhere is clearly nonsense. That is the concern of my constituents and those of many other hon. Members. I implore my right hon. Friend the Minister to close the loophole. Indeed, let us go further and ensure that legitimate pastimes are carried on at appropriate venues in order to allow the rest of us to get on with our lives peacefully.
4.32 pm
The Minister for Rural Affairs and Local Environmental Quality (Alun Michael): I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) on the way in which he has raised this issue. I am happy to confirm that my approach is to seek consensus and mutual consideration of interests by users of motorised vehicles and all other users of rights of way. The examples that he cites of the language that has been used and the way in which some users refer to their activities demonstrates why we have something of a problem in getting the right communication and exchange. However, given that I have experience of dealing with a series of issues on which it has been necessary to bring together people with widely differing views, I shall seek to put it to good use on this issue. I agree with my hon. Friend about the need to consider the possibility of providing positive opportunities in appropriate places, so that it is not a question of saying no, but a question of seeing where we can say yes.
My hon. Friend has raised an emotive issue on which there are strong and divided views. The Government have received more than 15,000 letters and e-mails as a result of our consultation paper on the use of

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mechanically propelled vehicles on rights of way. To a considerable extent, that response appears to have been whipped up by a sustained campaign that has, as he suggests, misrepresented what the consultation proposes. That has not helped matters. Many respondents who appeared to be against the proposals were expressing opposition to a total ban on the vehicles, which was suggested nowhere in the document. Apart from factual errors, many letters were phrased in identical style and alleged that I had been misled about the impact of the vehicles on rights of way. In running such a campaign, these enthusiasts let themselves down. They failed to address the serious issues raised during the consultation. That so many respondents described themselves in identical terms, as "careful and considerate" drivers, does not exorcise the problem.
It is a fact that Members of Parliament, the public and various conservation and recreation organisations have expressed deep concerns about the problems caused by the use of mechanically propelled vehicles on some rights of way. The real issues that have been raised in the debate today serve further to demonstrate the problems. There is clear evidence of damage to fragile tracks and other aspects of our natural and cultural heritage, and there is anger about an activity that causes distress to others seeking to enjoy the countryside.
I understand my hon. Friend's point about long-distance trails. I have taken a particular and personal interest in the Ridgeway, in order to understand why it seemed to be so difficult to deal with the problems there. I believe that we have made great progress in trying to find a way of resolving the problems, with the help of Members of Parliament of all three main parties and the local councils. That sort of applied co-operation is essential in protecting our long-distance ways.
One only has to look at some of the motorised user websites and discussion forums to see pictures posted that unashamedly promote activities that are bound to cause damage through irresponsible use of recreational 4x4s. The quotations that my hon. Friend provided similarly underline the need to put the debate on a responsible footing and to discourage that type of incitement to people to undertake the sort of activities that should not be tolerated.
One of the lies to which my hon. Friend referred was the one circulated in recent weeks that I had refused to meet representatives of motor vehicular user groups. In fact, I had made it clear that I would meet them once the consultation period was over, and I confirm today that I have done so. At the meeting, I asked them whether they wanted to be part of the solution or part of the problem. I challenged them because there is no "please all" solution—my hon. Friend is right about that. Tough decisions will have to be taken in order for us to move forward in a sustainable way. It would be best if people on all sides were willing to listen to each other and understand others' concerns. The response of those at the meeting was positive and responsible, and I hope that we will now see a change in their stance in the public debate and in their communications with their members and supporters.
Lembit Öpik: Were motor cyclists' representatives present at the meetings with the Minister and, if not, would he be willing, in the context of seeking a consensual approach, to meet motor cyclists?
Alun Michael: I would be happy to meet such representatives, although I believe that they were included in the meeting—it was a broad group. If there are specific issues related to motor cycling, I am happy to meet a group if the hon. Gentleman would like to suggest one.
The judgment that we must make is how we want our countryside and rights of way to be used—both now, and in the future. Is it right that use by four-wheel drive vehicles and quad bikes and motor bikes for leisure purposes in the 21st century should be determined by the use made by horses or horse-drawn vehicles long before the invention of the internal combustion engine? Is it time for a change in a way that rights are established?
Our consultation paper "Use of Mechanically Propelled Vehicles on Rights of Way"—we specialise in catchy titles—responded directly to those primary issues of concern. As the law stands, the only consideration that can be taken into account is whether that right of way can be shown to have existed in the past. No other consideration, such as the environmental impact, the effect on local people, or the effect on other users can be considered. My hon. Friend is right to pose that challenge. It seems perverse that that is the only consideration, in cases in which the nature of the use has changed fundamentally over the years.
Production of evidence of use by horse-drawn vehicles many years ago—or a dedication for such use—currently gives rise to a public right of way for all vehicles, which is recorded on the definitive map as a byway open to all traffic. That is how most of the road network developed through history, because the use, on those roads, has been continuous and necessary and has kept pace with change. In some cases a six-lane highway follows the route of an historic drovers' road or a bridlepath, but it is difficult to see what that has to do with the principles on which rights for recreational or leisure use are based in the 21st century. It is hard to see the logical relationship between such historic use and a so-called right to use mechanically propelled vehicles on a way that has not been used by any sort of vehicle for many years and may never previously have been used by mechanically propelled vehicles.
The new proposals would limit vehicular rights arising from historic evidence to restricted byway rights—that is. rights on foot, on horse-back or on non-mechanically propelled vehicles—so that the rights claimed over a route reflect the historic usage of the route.
Similarly, we would make it absolutely clear that evidence of use by non-mechanically propelled vehicles in the future—after commencement of any relevant new provisions—would not be sufficient to establish a public right of way for mechanically propelled vehicles. It is important to ensure that property owners or occupiers who rely on unrecorded public vehicular rights in order to gain access to their premises are protected against becoming landlocked, and the proposals would require primary legislation.
However, the solution does not lie solely in new legislation; further proposals recognise the need for better enforcement of existing road traffic and other

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offences on rights of way. Powers are already available under the Road Traffic Act 1988, the Police Reform Act 2002 and other legislation to regulate the use of mechanically propelled vehicles on rights of way. Those powers and offences need to be better publicised and more rigorously applied; that is happening in some parts of the country such as the Yorkshire moors, which I visited recently. I will meet key representatives of enforcement agencies shortly to see how we can move the matter forward.
Better management of vehicular traffic is also needed on rights of way. In the Lake district, an experiment on the hierarchy of trail routes has proved useful, and I am happy to acknowledge that it has been developed with the positive engagement of motorised vehicle users. However, stronger legislative backing is needed to make the approach fully effective, but that co-operation shows the way forward.
We have made a commitment to revise the document "Making the Best of Byways", published in 1997, which provides advice on managing the different sorts of traffic on byways and advocates management measures based on co-operation and agreement. My hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw suggested that the Government were not going far enough; as he said, some groups are very active in researching these rights, and he mentioned evidence of an increase in claims, mainly by the Trail Riders Fellowship, for vehicular rights of way across several local authority areas, including his constituency.
It was suggested that the Government should act to reclassify existing unsurfaced byways as restricted byways, but the use of mechanically propelled vehicles on unsurfaced road byways is not always damaging, nor is it always a nuisance to others. Use needs to be
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regulated according to the sustainability or suitability of particular routes. Where there are problems, traffic regulation orders can be used, or the management techniques that are outlined in Government guidance. I undertake to consider further measures that might be needed in the light of the consultation we have just completed, and any recommendations that arise from the findings later this year of a Government research project into vehicular use of existing byways open to all traffic.
Let us take the opportunity to consider all the comments that have been made on the consultation paper, including those from the users of motorised vehicles. I will seek to build consensus on the way forward, but I cannot do so alone. The representatives of motorised vehicle users need to join us in addressing the problems, rather than denying that problems exist. They also need to inform and engage their members. I hope that those who are interested in legitimate use will help us to counter activities of the type of publicity and website that irresponsibly encourage inappropriate use, to which my hon. Friend referred. Similarly, riders' and walkers' representatives must show a reciprocal willingness to engage.
Given the strength of divided opinion shown by the consultation, it is clear that leadership and action are required from Government, but I hope that that can be achieved through common sense, co-operation and constructive debate, which I am happy to lead. I hope that all users will be engaged in finding the best way forward. My hon. Friend's contribution was helpful—
It being sixteen minutes to Five o'clock, the motion for the Adjournment of the sitting lapsed, without Question put.