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Adjournment (Summer Recess)

I shall try to be fairly brief, Madam Deputy Speaker. There are a number of issues that I think the House should debate fully before the recess. One, the middle east, has already been touched on. I ask the Deputy Leader of the House to reassure us that Parliament will be recalled during the recess if the situation in Lebanon deteriorates, but also if the situation in Iraq deteriorates and the country ends up in full civil war, and also if our relationship with Iran deteriorates. Those are all serious matters that need to be dealt with in the House. We now have a two and a half month period in which we cannot hold the Government to account. That period was shorter in the past, because we sat in September. That sitting should be reinstated so that we do not go quite so long. We still have time off during the rest of the year, but we no longer make up for it in September, so the sooner we reinstate the September sitting, the better. To return to the current crisis in Lebanon, I have heard reports that the Israelis are using a new type of shell, the shrapnel from which is not detectable on X-ray. That makes it very difficult for the doctors who are treating the injured to remove the offending particles from the body. I hope that the Government will look further into that matter and find out whether those reports are true. I trust that the Minister will pass that on. Domestic matters are important to my constituents and none less than water charges. South West Water has its annual general meeting this Thursday and MPs and councillors will be protesting at that meeting about the high level of water charges in the south-west—the highest in the country. As has been put on record before, 3 per cent. of the population is still paying for cleaning up 30 per cent. of the country’s beaches. The high water charges are not just the responsibility of South West Water. They flow from the mechanisms of privatisation, whereby there is no method for spreading infrastructure costs across the country, so they have to be borne by the individual water companies. The costs in the south-west are disproportionate. With above-inflation council tax rises as well as excessive water charges, pensioner households in the south-west are spending between a fifth and a quarter of their income on those costs alone. That, quite frankly, is unacceptable. I want to make just two further brief points. First, affordable housing is a real problem in the south-west. We need a proper debate about when the Government are going to tackle the problem of affordable housing in Devon. In Teignbridge, the cost of housing as a percentage of income is higher than anywhere in Surrey: the Government will provide assistance for emergency and other workers in Surry, but no such aid or assistance comes to Devon or to my constituency. Lastly, I want to say a few words about planning. My background is in architecture and over many years I have watched towns being blighted by poor planning decisions. I am talking about coming into a town and having to see the back end of a supermarket because the planners were not prepared to opt for a more attractive front. The Government are able to help in respect of Government and local government buildings, and I urge them to improve the planning quality of some of their buildings. To provide one example, a fire station was built in Teignmouth in a prime location for tourists entering the town. It is a beautiful spot. There is nothing particularly wrong with the design of the fire station; it is competent enough, but being in such a prime location, it should have been a lot better. When I argued that the fire authority should provide a better design, it said that there was no time or money to do so. That was nonsense and the problem is that the station will be there for years to come.