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Adjournment (Whitsun)

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. It seems to me imperative that, rather than looking individually at the three current applications and responding to them on the semi-local basis on which they would normally be dealt with, the Government should them aside for the time being while a comprehensive strategy emerges. It needs to emerge fast, so that they do not, as it were, hijack the agenda and hijack the strategic development of ports by just granting or not granting individual applications. So I definitely will welcome the hon. Gentleman’s support because I intend to ask the Government to look very quickly at the formation of a national ports strategy. There has been some resistance in the locations of the southern ports applications to expand. As the hon. Gentleman knows, in Shellhaven there have been complaints that they do not need any more jobs there, and there have been complaints about threats to nature reserves and important historic sites elsewhere. However, if there is a strong view around the Shellhaven development that they do not need any more jobs there, it makes an interesting contrast to my own cry in my local press, where the potential of 7,000 new jobs was offered to Teesside, that this is capable of almost putting an end to our very local unemployment problems—so we have it in a nutshell why some development is urgently needed. It is a rational way to expand ports and not have the whole proposition jump-started by the granting of ad hoc consents. The Northern Way, a strategy backed by £100 million of development cash, recommends that we introduce a national ports strategy and that we take the opportunity to expand the share of cargo using the north’s ports. Clearly, PD Teesport’s planned expansion directly supports that important policy. The purpose of my speech this afternoon is to say how excited we are in my constituency and in Tees valley by this proposition; to point to the need for a strategy that will permit the careful consideration of where the development emphasis should be; and to put the Government on notice that I and my four colleague MPs in Teesside intend to campaign very forcefully for a national ports strategy soon. Because we believe that the business case for Teesport is absolutely clear, our aim is to ensure that this great development—which can reverse, even more fully than the Government’s economic stability over the last seven years has done, the decline that my part of the country suffered under the preceding Government, and can be a huge contributor to making the economy of Tees valley much more dynamic—comes about. We shall be campaigning on that for the next few months.