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Housing (Hertfordshire)

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I cannot understand why Ministers are being so foolish. They could make their own jobs easier if they dealt with such matters and analysed them in a professional way. Instead, we get platitudinous nonsense that does not solve the problem for any of us. We wish to be co-operative in this matter, but are unable to do so when we receive that kind of advice. That is not the only issue on which we feel that the Government have failed. There is the question of Harlow North. The Secretary of State proposes that that speculative development should proceed, and that instead of the original idea of 10,000 houses on the site—which, I should add, is 3,000 acres of green fields—there should now be up to 20,000 houses. Given that the scheme has been rejected twice by the planning process and was completely removed by the Minister’s own panel, why does she now believe that Harlow North should proceed? Then there is infrastructure. When presented with the initial list of key projects, which included improvements to the roads and railways that we have heard are so congested, the Chancellor refused to fund more than 75 per cent. even of those initial schemes. In other words, the Government would like us to have 200,000 more people in Hertfordshire, but they are prepared to pay for infrastructure for only 50,000. That is just the basic capital project. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden and my hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead (Mike Penning) mentioned, our schools, hospitals and essential services are not being improved. They are being squeezed and in some cases closed. If the substance of the Government’s housing plans is poor, the way that they have been imposed is even worse. Frankly, it is a tale of incompetence and political chicanery. I wish principally to focus my remarks on how that plan and the housing targets in it were set. We have heard about the failure to provide an appropriate environmental capacity study, but that was not the only failing. First, the consultation process was fundamentally flawed. The East of England regional assembly failed to print and distribute sufficient copies of the plan on which it was supposedly consulting. The result was the nonsense whereby in Bishop’s Stortford, for example, a town of 35,000 people, we were provided with—