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AMENDMENT OF THE LAW

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend, and I would love to find his rural garage that is charging only £1.12 a litre. I am paying considerably more than that. It will be exceedingly hard for people who must rely on their own cars, unlike the situation in London. London buses no longer come in threes—they come in dozens and most of them are empty, which has a serious impact on congestion in London. I notice that there are mixed messages coming from the Government about road pricing. As we understand it, the Secretary of State for Transport has withdrawn road pricing, yet the Chancellor is putting money into developing road pricing. It will be interesting to get some response in due course about what is happening with road pricing. The Budget ignores the big picture and focuses entirely on small issues. I want to examine some of the issues that I picked up from the Chancellor’s speech. There was a mention of a contract between the Government and families in an attempt to get parents into work. I am having a hard time envisaging how such a contract would work. Is it a series of separate contracts, such as those that parents had with schools to ensure that the children turned up at school? Is it a contract with the jobcentre, whereby people agree to take the first job they are offered? Is it a contract with the local authority, whereby people accept lower housing benefit and council tax, provided they get a job? What is the contract? Will there be red tape coming out of the ears of families who just want to get back to work, because the Government think it might be a nice idea to have a contract and make people responsible, even if they do not agree with the Government’s objectives? There is a promise about business red tape and a limit on regulation. Again, I have difficulty working out how that will happen, given that every time the Government introduce a Bill, it increases regulation. Does that promise mean, for example, that at Report stage on a planning Bill, we will see the Treasury finally releasing its grip on planning gain supplement and tabling an amendment to repeal entirely the Planning-gain Supplement (Preparations) Act 2007? That would be a serious step towards reducing red tape, and a simple one, because the Government say they do not intend to introduce PGS at all. Why keep the Act on the statute book? Let us have a gesture of good will. What is the limit on regulation and how will it work? The Government want to encourage zero carbon homes. We all share that aim, but anybody who talks to the building industry will know very well that zero carbon homes are technically impossible at present. It is possible to have, on balance and using a very complicated formula, zero carbon communities, but not zero carbon homes, as I understand it. The Government are trying to sound as though they are developing some serious strategic thinking on green taxes, so there are proposals on vehicle excise duty and the first year tax rate. My problem with the Government is that they like red tape. They like producing pieces of paper that limit people’s scope, rather than encouraging it. If there is one message after 10 years of the Government, it is that they are unable to trust people to respond and to act positively in their own and their community’s best interests. If the Government want to put over a message about green issues, people will not respond to taxation on their vehicles, particularly because of the need, as my hon. Friend the Member for Ribble Valley (Mr. Evans) pointed out, to use cars in the countryside. We should be ensuring that manufacturers and scientists work together to develop the science. There are exciting opportunities in environmental sciences. The Chancellor referred to that, although it was the usual glancing reference. The best way to make us green is through technological development, not by dragooning people into patterns of behaviour. Have the Government, after 10 years, not learned the law of unintended consequences? The minute anybody is forced into a pattern of behaviour, they find ways out of it. It is much better for people to decide willingly to go green than to force them.