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Thames Gateway

The trouble with section 106 agreements, certainly in my patch, is that they are never implemented. They are a bribe to tell the developers, ““Hey, build us the school””—or the village hall or the pub—but they actually build more houses. The problem is that section 106 agreements cannot be enforced legally. Section 106 helps the developer, not the citizen. However, the hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point about having a tariff: 500 houses equal a school, a swimming pool, a village hall or whatever. Of course, as soon as a house built, people pay council tax, but they have no facilities until the last house is built and the road is adopted. They can wait four years for that to happen, which does not seem fair either. So I also have some planning anxieties. Hon. Members have mentioned the Olympics. I chair the all-party Olympic committee. I hope that, as fast as possible, we can get all the RDAs to produce an audit of what is needed. In the south-east, we hardly have any Olympic facilities. It is a shame, but that shows the extent of the weakness of the sports infrastructure built over the past 50 years. Although we have brand-new football and rugby stadiums and cricket has improved at the top level, at the bottom level, we do not have 50 m swimming pools, athletics tracks, badminton halls or proper facilities for gymnastics, dance or many other things. We could be smarter with schools—I know that a White Paper is due next week—and, as the specialist sports schools develop, we could allow them to become the hub for the Olympics locally by letting them have that infrastructure so that it can be used 24 hours a day. With breakfast clubs and homework clubs coming into the mix next April, this is the time for us to be brave about how we use our schools, and develop the Olympic infrastructure across the country. Finally, I want to commend something to my hon. Friend the Minister. We have introduced Sure Start. I can honestly say that Sure Start and the minimum wage are the two finest things that the Government have done—those are the measures that I am proudest of. Sure Start has changed people’s lives in Sheerness in a way that we never expected. A couple of years ago, we asked mums and dads whether they would help with a newsletter, but they said that they could not because they could not read and write, and we have now got them reading and writing. On 7 November, we will have a meeting at Sittingbourne community college in my patch because we are trying to put together a pilot for sure finish. At the moment, we are letting too many people aged 14 to 16 truant. They do not go to school—they do not find school a place that they like. They are excluded for whatever reason. For the reason that we have begun Sure Start, we cannot let that 20 per cent. go. I ask the Minister to look at that pilot scheme and consider whether we can seed fund a proper pilot for a sure finish scheme, so that we can start to consider those students and give them back their dignity because they have none at the moment.