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Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

That is the case. Tenants in my city voted against a transfer some years ago. However, those tenants desperately need money to be invested in their properties. A lot more affordable housing needs to be delivered in Durham city. The absence of such housing is partly due to the fact that the Lib Dem council has built and delivered little in the past few years. Nevertheless, we must consider improved mechanisms to deliver more social rented housing. Paragraph 3.130 of the Red Book gives a commitment"““to ensuring that the planning system delivers the housing and economic development the UK needs in a way which is sustainable and consistent with the Government’s wider objectives including on climate change””." That is much to be welcomed, as is the support for the Eddington and Barker reports. We obviously need more transport and investment in buses. In areas such as mine, which is a largely rural community, investment in bus services has reduced. Alternatively, investment increasingly goes towards subsidising services that do not meet the needs of the local population. We also need more investment in trains, especially local trains that can transport people throughout the region more efficiently than those on the main line. I want to pay particular attention to Barker. We are told that there will be a White Paper later in the spring on improving responsiveness and efficiency in land use planning. That makes me very nervous. I realise that it is sensible to take a more strategic approach on economic development and the need for planning. Positive planning for economic development needs to happen and an improvement in the processes of economic development is required. However, planning, by its nature, is a very blunt instrument. Different places have different economic development needs. I hope that the White Paper will acknowledge the difference between areas. My constituency is a historical town, and while it needs economic development, it needs a particular sort of such development to protect and enhance its heritage. Having read Barker, I am not convinced that that will happen. Many people in my constituency are fed up with the increasing number of blocks of luxury flats, which do not meet housing need and impact negatively on the heritage of the city. That movement has to be stopped. Planning policy statement 3 is a step forward, but the regional spatial strategy needs to address that issue in the north-east. We need additional housing if there is to be growth in the north-east, but the area needs to be developed sensitively. My last point but one is about the planning gain supplement, which is another subject that makes me nervous. I agree that we should have a betterment tax; in fact, I have long argued for one, but I am worried about local authorities being given incentives to approve planning applications. A percentage of the money will come back to them, but that is a dangerous thing to do, because it could allow local authorities to sell every bit of green space and brownfield land that they have for development, as they will get a percentage of the money. Of course it is important that money should be spent on infrastructure, but I was concerned about paragraph 3.150 of the Red Book, which says that all local authorities and partners will have to work together locally to improve the infrastructure. That does not happen often at local authority level, particularly where there are different tiers of government. It is bad enough if the tiers of local government are of the same political party, but if they are of different political parties, it is just not likely that they will work together to increase infrastructure. I would appreciate it if the Government took that proposal away and looked again at how money from planning gain can be allocated sensibly throughout the country to support development. My last point is about child poverty. I am proud that the Government have set ambitious targets to reduce it; it is better to have very ambitious targets and not meet them than not to have any targets. Ideally, we would like to meet the ambitious targets, but we should recall that under the previous Government, child poverty more than doubled. It will be difficult to reduce child poverty to the level of the Government targets, but I am pleased that that is firmly on the Government’s agenda, and that measures in the Budget will improve the incomes of the poorest families by about £425 a year, and of all other households with children by about £250 a year. In conclusion, we should applaud the Chancellor for the Budget, which is about investing in education and science and helping us to deliver the skills base that we need for the future if we are to be competitive in a global economy. However, it also looks after the needs of pensioners and the poorest families with children, and we should all welcome that.