---

Employment, Universities and Skills and Housing

I congratulate my hon. Friend on visiting the prison in his constituency. I always urge hon. Members to visit the prisons in their constituency—or, if there is none, the one nearest it. My hon. Friend the Member for Reading, East (Mr. Wilson) is a frequent visitor to Reading prison—[Interruption.] I am in danger of taking myself too seriously. However, it is important that constituency Members visit prisons in their own constituencies; otherwise, the issue becomes a closed book and we invent public policies on criminal justice that are wholly inept and incapable of dealing with the problems that we face. I have two prisons in my constituency. I want to solve the problems I have identified for the benefit of my constituents—as taxpayers, as victims of crime, and as human beings who want the condition of people to be improved, not depressed by how we conduct this aspect of public policy. I want to turn to housing—in particular, an aspect that was touched on by my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury. I can see that the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr. Wright), is really looking forward to what I have to say, because he is a keen student of my criticism of how the Government have handled the vexed and vexing subject of eco-towns. I have in my constituency a site that has been earmarked to some extent by the Government, but certainly by the Co-operative Wholesale Society, for the building of a new town of approximately 40,000 residents—about twice the size of Market Harborough, the biggest town in my constituency. In order to achieve this, the CWS, which owns approximately 5,000 acres of prime farmland in my constituency, wishes to convert that farmland into an eco-town. ““Eco-town”” sounds so much more attractive than ““new town””, but the fact is that the CWS would like to make a lot more money out of farming houses than it does out of farming crops. As a capitalist, I fully understand that it is entitled to make the best that it can out of its assets in order to return the money, if not to its shareholders, at least to its members. I know that Members of this House are members of the CWS and also members of its political branch, which I appreciate is a different organisation legally, although they are closely related. In the city of Leicester and county of Leicestershire, there are about 10,000 empty dwellings, yet the Government seem backward in coming forward in encouraging the city council—most of the empty dwellings are in the city—to repair them to make them habitable. I am sure that financial and other instruments could be used to make it easier for private and public sector landlords in the city to bring those dwellings back into habitation. Equally, I am sure that the district councils that surround the city could be encouraged to bring back into habitation the lesser number of unused dwellings in the county. It is a waste of those 10,000 dwellings when there are, I am sure, plenty of people across the county and in the city who would like to go and live in them, particularly if they could be rented or bought at prices that they could afford. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be happening, and the CWS is crashing on like a bull in a china shop, demanding of the people in my constituency and that of my neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Melton (Alan Duncan), that it should be entitled to build this vast new town all over a piece of agricultural scenery. Let me give an idea of the problem that we are up against. As I have said before—possibly in a debate responded to by the Under-Secretary—extracting facts out of the CWS is rather like extracting teeth. It is very reluctant to tell us precisely what it wants to do. I thought that I might get something out of it when, during the course of the summer, it produced a document—its piece of propaganda, or sales sheet—on its latest design for this town of 40,000 people. It described its vision in this way:"““The flexibility of the eco-town enables the desensification of residential plots that occur at an individual level, with the opportunity to create the value (rather than incur the cost) that this implies.””" That is total balderdash. It means nothing. It is sales-speak and it will not get to grips with the real issue that concerns my constituents—the wholly inappropriate siting of a new town of 40,000 people in the middle of rural Leicestershire, which will have the following adverse consequences. It will suck the regeneration budget out of the city of Leicester, and I know that the right hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz) and the hon. Member for Leicester, South (Sir Peter Soulsby), who are closest to my constituency, are concerned about that, and it will destroy the chance to give new life to the retail centre in Oadby, the part of my constituency closest to the city. Oadby lies directly between the new town and the city of Leicester. This town of 40,000 will knock out two perfectly good commercial centres: Oadby and the city of Leicester, as well as causing a massive drain of development money from those centres into the new town. The new town will also cause the most appalling problems for transport infrastructure. If it goes through, the 40,000 people who will live there will need public transport and access to private vehicles, but both public and private vehicles need something to drive on. At the moment, the roads are already crowded, particularly during rush hour. The Co-op says, ““Don't worry. Nobody will move out of this new town. They will all be so excited about living there that they will want to stay there. Indeed, all the jobs that we will create will encourage them to stay there.”” That is a nice thought, but I do not think that it will happen. The Co-op is also going to ensure that there is only one car park space for every two houses. That is wholly unrealistic, and it will cause trouble. The Co-op hopes to persuade the Government to give it permission to push on with its ludicrous plan on the basis that it will build a tramway between the site of the eco-town and the city centre of Leicester. It has not been candid enough to tell us what the precise cost of that will be. Calculations vary between £1 million and £2 million per inch of tramway—that is an awful lot of money. I am not sure whether the Government will come up with the money to make the difference between the few hundreds of thousands of pounds that the Co-op says that it is prepared to give and the total cost. We will end up with a transport mess. Of that 40,000 population, how will the adults who have to work get out of that new town to get to the main centres of business in the east midlands where jobs are to be found? Those 12,000 jobs will not arrive in this new eco-town just because the Co-op says it wants them. There will be massive overcrowding on the already overcrowded road system. It is 30 to 45 minutes from the site of the eco-town to the site of the most vibrant economic and job-creating development in Leicestershire by junction 21 of the M1, just south of the constituency of the hon. Member for North-West Leicestershire (David Taylor), which is right on the boundary of the junction with the M69 and the M21. Only 300 jobs a year have been created in that area. On those figures, it will take about 50 years to create the new jobs needed in Pennbury; we are going to have to wait an awfully long time for those jobs. I am concerned that the Government and the Co-op have been very unclear about the public sector funding needed to bridge the gap between what the Co-op says it will put in—in so far as it has given us any detail—and what will have to come from local and central Government. The section 106 agreements simply cannot be written, because we do not know what the Co-op will provide or what central and local government will be required to provide. We need detail if we are to engage sensibly and rationally with the bullying, which is what I call it, that we have seen from the Co-op. Finally, I should like the Minister to give some indications in respect of the judicial review that has been granted in relation to the site at Middle Quinton in Warwickshire, just south of Stratford-on-Avon. In my area, the campaign against the Stoughton Co-op eco-town, or CASCET, is chaired by county councillor Dr. Kevin Feltham, who has been waging a highly effective and rational campaign against the Co-op and its madcap scheme. CASCET has sent a letter of formal support to the court in relation to the Middle Quinton review. Mr. Justice Collins granted that judicial review in September last year and I believe that the Government have granted a six-week extension, from February 2009, for responses to the latest consultation on the eco-town at Middle Quinton. That extension should apply to all the other applicant sites currently under discussion. If it does not apply to them all, let me urge the Minister to ensure that it should at least apply to the Co-op site in my constituency. I apologise for speaking for so long, but in the Co-op application for a so-called eco-town—the misuse of language is just appalling, as one sees from the propaganda piece that I quoted a moment ago—the poverty of the language reflects the poverty of the case. None the less, my constituents' concern grows by the day, as the Government and the Co-op fail to understand the terrible threat that we face. I am grateful to the new Minister for Housing, who has agreed to meet me and my neighbouring parliamentarians at her Department, I believe on 20 January. I hope that we can persuade her that the scheme proposed by the Co-op is not just silly, but highly damaging and will destroy the economy and the environment of Leicester and Leicestershire. When the Minister who is here responds to this debate, I urge him not simply to say, ““I'm thinking about it and we'll do something next week,”” or the week after that, but to come up with some firm proposals that would put the Co-op back in its box.