---

Housing (Hertfordshire)

I am very careful not to stray beyond Surrey Heath when it comes to signing petitions, but I am always anxious to recognise effective campaigning work, and in that context in Hertfordshire there is no one better equipped than my hon. Friends the Members for St. Albans and for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps) to teach us all about defending the interests of our constituents. It is perhaps appropriate that we are debating housing in Hertfordshire this week and that we should note briefly the passing of Robert Jones, the former Member for Hertfordshire, West who was a Member of this House from 1979 to 1997 and served latterly for three years as a Minister in the Department of the Environment with specific responsibility for housing, planning and the environment. One of the themes of the debate has been the way in which those three issues are interconnected. Robert Jones was a model Member of the House, passionately committed to extending the free market principles on which his party had been elected, and at the same time defending the environment of the country that he loved. I know that many hon. Members will want to take the opportunity to attend his funeral, or indeed to write to his widow, and I am sure that we all want to pay tribute to the contribution that he made to his constituents, and the causes that he believed in. All the speeches in the debate so far have been of very high quality. I mentioned the campaigning skill of my hon. Friend the Member for St. Albans. In her speech she passionately and effectively made the case for improved local democracy, and for taking account of quality-of-life considerations as well as economic ones when making housing and planning decisions. She also drew to the Minister’s attention very effectively the two key quality-of-life problems that her constituents face—the way in which flatted developments are eroding the historic character of St. Albans, which makes it such a cherishable place to live in, and crucially, the way in which environmental considerations do not have the status that they should have in the Government’s deliberations on housing and planning. That theme was picked up by my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley). He rammed home the point that the Government have failed, in the matter of conducting suitable environmental capacity studies, to ensure that their plans for housing are genuinely sustainable. That is not an argument that is restricted to Conservative Members. A former Minister for Housing and Planning, the right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr. Raynsford), recently wrote something called ““Blueprints for Green Homes: a Housing and Energy Policy for the 21st Century?. In it he asked what guiding principles should be the foundations of a progressive Labour housing policy. By asking that question he implied that the current housing policy was far from progressive. How did he answer it? He said:"““We should never again allow preoccupation with numbers to override issues of quality. Housing policy does not exist in a vacuum but must be developed together with wider economic, environmental and social policies to secure sustainability.?" That is at the heart of the case that my right hon. and hon. Friends have made. I know that it is fashionable on the Labour Benches to characterise Conservative Members of Parliament as nimbys, but as my hon. Friend the Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr. Prisk) pointed out, in Hertfordshire a significant level of house building has been embraced—positively welcomed—by Conservative members and delivered by Conservative local authorities. As my hon. Friend—who, as a chartered surveyor, has a passionate commitment to the built environment—pointed out, it is Conservatives who build, whereas the Labour party prefers simply to condemn. We can see from the historical record that in every year in which the Conservatives were in power, more social and affordable housing was built than in any year in which Labour was in power. Only in the last two years has the level of market housing under this Labour Government come anywhere near the lowest level under the previous Conservative Government. The hon. Member for Cheltenham has a sincere and long-standing commitment, which predates his entry into the House, to environmental matters, and those parts of his speech that touched on the environment were the most impressive. I welcome his sentiments, although not all the policy recommendations in his speech, and I am grateful for the way in which he acknowledged the campaigning energy that Conservatives in Hertfordshire have devoted to this cause. Uniting all the comments from Liberal Democrat and Conservative Members so far in this debate has been scepticism about the way in which the Government seek to balance our genuine need for new housing with other criteria, specifically environmental, but more broadly quality-of-life issues. The Government tend to blame local authorities for the failure to meet housing targets and they argue that the only way in which to meet those targets is by ramping up the numbers that they lay down through their regional spatial strategies and other means. However, as I pointed out with reference to the number of houses built under this Labour Government relative to the number built under the previous Conservative Government, that centralised, statist and, with respect to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Stalinist approach simply has not worked. We know that it has been deleterious to the quality of life in areas such as Hertfordshire, but we also know that it has not brought on stream throughout the country the level of new housing development that we need. That is because our planning system at the moment is broken, overly bureaucratic and insensitive to both democratic and environmental needs. Those are not my observations, although I passionately believe them; they are the observations of Kate Barker, who was commissioned by the Chancellor of the Exchequer to examine the planning system. She pointed out that under this Government planning has become hugely bureaucratic. The planning encyclopaedia is composed of 12,000 pages—eight volumes—backed up by 201 statutory instrument. That brings costs, not only for those who are attempting to navigate the planning system to defend their local environment, but for taxpayers. In one year, 2004-05, Departments, local government and other public bodies spent almost £100 million simply on planning consultants to negotiate the maze of red tape erected by this Government. No one benefits from that system.