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Housing and Regeneration Bill

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his support; that is exactly the point that I am making. If we fail to trust the people and empower such organisations simply to walk into other areas and bully and threaten people, the barriers will go up and people's nimby instincts will come out. Voices ignored so far in local areas mean that local people will become determined to shout louder. The numbers that the HCA and others will be involved in handing down from the Department are not locally determined and are based on models about which many questions that were asked two years ago by the then Select Committee on the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, of which I was a member, need to be answered. The truth is that some of those models might all be for nothing—that is, we need only change a few parameters in them and they might not even deliver the affordability at the macro level that they are designed to support. Indeed, one parameter has spectacularly changed, namely the growth assumptions behind such large numbers of new houses. The growth assumptions behind the numbers in the south-west are based on an annual economic growth rate of between 2.8 and 3.2 per cent. sustained consistently over 20 years. However, those are the kind of growth rates that the Chancellor can now only dream of, so I would be interested to hear the Minister's response on that. According to the Treasury's own projections, those numbers are now simply wrong. However, as a result of new growth point status initiatives, to which I hope Cheltenham's Conservative administration will not sign up—although the signs are not good—greenfield sites may well be developed first and not last, because the growth points focus on greenfield development. I hope that the Minister can spare the time to respond to that point. If we are not careful, when the economic crisis bites, greenfield sites may well end up being the only land that is developed. That is why the amendments that refer to sustainability and the prioritisation of greenfield sites over brownfield sites are so important. The measures have implications for quality of life and for the environment, in terms of climate change and flooding. The Foresight report from a few years ago identified urbanisation as a key factor in the increased likelihood of flooding—a factor high up the priority list for many of my constituents, as 600 properties in Cheltenham flooded last year. The South West of England Development Agency responded in its regional spatial strategy by increasing the number of houses in the Cheltenham and Tewkesbury area by 3,700, and now yet another unaccountable, unelected quango is being created under the Bill. There is nothing in the Bill that persuades me that the Homes and Communities Agency would ever side with local people who have local knowledge, or with local elected representatives.