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Listing Buildings

I, too, will not detain the House for long, but I am grateful for the opportunity to speak. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey) on securing the debate, which is relevant to the draft Heritage Protection Bill. I believe that the listing process has, in principle, been very advantageous in guaranteeing the protection of many of our industrial sites. I agree that it should be brought up to date, but I think that without it many parts of Britain would be much poorer. I feel that heritage is important, and like other Members I actively promote it because if its economic benefits. However, there are other stronger, deeper reasons why we promote heritage. My constituency is not one that the uninitiated would automatically assume had a range of listed buildings, but it has many, which people might find surprising. A lot of those buildings tend to be industrial. There is the Washington ““F”” Pit museum; Washington old hall, the ancestral home of George Washington; and Penshaw monument, which was built to commemorate Lord Lambton, or Radical Jack as he was known because of his support for the 1832 Reform Act. There are many examples in the constituency where listing has helped. It would be remiss of me not to mention the brave campaign of the Ryhope allotment holders, who a decade ago won listed status for their pigeon cree—the world's only listed pigeon cree. We use the term ““cree”” in the north-east, but many will know it as a loft. The honourable Tony Banks, a former Member of the House who is no longer with us, supported and secured that listing. I dread to think what would have happened to that early example of a pigeon cree without it. There has been tremendous support for the cree. The men were particularly heartened on Christmas eve when they held a vigil in support of the pigeon cree, and the Prime Minister congratulated them on the 10th anniversary of its having received listed status. The Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport visited earlier this year and met the men involved. Last week, I received a letter with American stamps on. When I opened it, I found it was from a Hollywood superstar and his wife, who had appeared in panto in Sunderland and had read about the Christmas eve vigil that we held with local children to support the cree. That letter was from Mickey and Jan Rooney, who are still going strong and who are of a ripe old age. They wrote to me, and via me to the men, to say how much they supported the campaign and that they would be more than keen to do anything that they could to help. I have given those examples for a reason. In what is a fast-moving world, particularly for young people, listing and our industrial heritage provide a compass point. There are fewer and fewer things that unite us, because it is a disparate world that we live in. Heritage is incredibly important, not just for the physical representation but for what that physical representation means. People see the winding gear at Washington ““F”” as a symbol. The pit heaps and other traces of our industrial past may have gone, but what lives on through communities is the sense of comradeship and belonging, and the values that were strong in years gone by. That is why I support the Bill that is coming before the House. There has been an explosion of interest in heritage. It has been great to see locally that miners' banner groups have been formed in Washington and Herrington Burn and are putting on displays. Local people are getting involved. A local school is celebrating its centenary: last week, I visited the John F. Kennedy primary school, where local children have worked with pupils who attended the school in the 1930s and they have all come together to support their heritage. Heritage is important as it can give us that sense of community. In many ways, changes in society mean that we do not always have as strong a sense of community as we had in the past.