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Christmas Adjournment

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Mr. Turner), who raised some important issues about the planning system, one of which I hope to take up in my small contribution to the debate. I begin by joining the Conservative Chief Whip in praising my hon. Friend the new Deputy Leader of the House in advance of his maiden speech in these debates. I am sure it will be scintillating. He has been one of the usual suspects who have attended these debates in recent years, and it must be the nightmare of any usual suspect that they would end up having to answer the issues raised by hon. Members. I know that we will get a wonderful contribution from the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Angela Browning), who in each of the Adjournment debates before a recess always invites hon. Members to visit her constituency. We have no statistics, though, showing how many take up her invitation . I have no quarries or incinerators to speak about, but I start by thanking the Home Secretary for a decision that she took yesterday, I think, which was obvious in the published version of the Policing and Crime Bill, which received its First Reading in the House today. On Tuesday the Home Affairs Committee took evidence from the Local Government Association and the Association of Police Authorities, and I wrote to the Home Secretary telling her that the Government's proposals for directly elected members of police authorities were fundamentally flawed. Forty-eight hours later, the proposals have been withdrawn. The Home Affairs Committee, of course, takes credit for that decision. The Home Secretary chose, unfortunately, not to make a statement to the House, but instead to announce her changes to Patrick Wintour of The Guardian. Nevertheless, we are grateful for what the Government have done. It surely would have been wrong to give single-interest or extremist groups the chance to get elected to police authorities, thereby aiding the politicisation of the police. There is always politics in policing, clearly, because we have a Home Secretary who is about to choose the next Metropolitan Police Commissioner, but what we were concerned about, and what every group that wrote to the Select Committee was concerned about, was the fact that if we have those elections, there is a danger that the whole police agenda could be hijacked in a particular direction. I thank the Government for what they have done. I am not quite so keen on the statement that the Government put out today concerning the review of the rights of Romanian and Bulgarian citizens to come to work in the United Kingdom. I declare my interest as a former Minister for Europe with responsibility for enlargement. I have always felt that the citizens of countries that join the European Union should be treated as equal citizens, and I could never understand why Romania and Bulgaria were singled out among the 27 for their citizens not to be given full and equal rights to come to work in the United Kingdom. The Government review the decision every year and have just put before the House a written statement indicating that they are not changing their position, and that those who come to work from Romania and Bulgaria will have to continue to work as self-employed people. That is the wrong decision because it results in even greater difficulty in dealing with employment issues, though I welcome the Government's decision to expand one of the tiers to allow more agricultural workers, which will benefit people like my hon. Friend the Member for Selby (Mr. Grogan) and others who represent rural constituencies and have been complaining of the lack of people applying for such jobs. I shall raise three brief points concerning a number of matters which I hoped the Government would have allowed more time to discuss before the House adjourned. The first is a matter that I have raised on a number of occasions—diabetes. I declare my interest as someone who has type 2 diabetes. I suppose it is the way I discovered that I have type 2 diabetes that encourages me to raise the matter in the House at every opportunity, especially as we arrive at the Christmas season. The chairman of the all-party beer group is encouraging Members to visit pubs over the Christmas period—not something that many Members will feel reluctant to do. However, I caution Members who have not had a diabetes test. I do not want to embarrass Members over whether or not they have been tested for diabetes, but as they enter the Christmas spirit and are given boxes of chocolates and sweets and consume a lot of sweet foods and carbohydrates over the next four weeks, they should pause, especially if they are slightly overweight—again, I am not looking at any right hon. or hon. Members in particular. If they have that slight problem, it is vital that over the Christmas period they have a diabetes test. The test takes only a few seconds, and they will then know whether they should consult their GP in order to have further treatment. That is how I discovered I had type 2 diabetes just a few years ago. I am not saying that as a result I am not as overweight as I was five years ago, but that discovery enabled me to take my medication. There are 2.2 million people in the United Kingdom who are diagnosed with diabetes, but 750,000 people are unaware that they have the disease. One of the problems facing us as legislators is that it is costing the Government £1 million an hour to treat people for both type 1 and type 2 diabetes. It accounts for approximately one tenth—10 per cent.—of the entire NHS budget. Let me issue a plea to Ministers, and indeed other Members, to raise this issue in their constituencies. We hear fantastic statistics about the amount of money that the Government have put into the health service—more money than has been invested in it at any time before. I should like that money to be spent on preventive medicine—on screening people and making sure that they are healthy—rather than its being spent on them when they go into hospital, which, of course, is much more expensive. This also applies to young people. Nearly one in four children aged four or five in English primary schools is overweight or obese, and there are approximately 1,400 children who have type 2 diabetes—some as young as seven—as a result of being overweight. Some have inherited their condition from their parents. I inherited mine from my mother, who sadly died of diabetes complications. I also want to talk about mobile phone masts, which touches on the subject raised by the hon. Member for Isle of Wight: the planning system. We all use mobile phones, or most of us do. There are 65 million mobile phone handsets in the United Kingdom. There must, therefore, be mobile phone masts; otherwise we would not be able to communicate with each other through our mobile phones. I am constantly reminded by constituents of the problems that they experience when mobile phone companies erect mobile phone masts without consultation and without taking the views of local people into consideration. If a mast is less than 15 m high, companies do not have to apply for full planning permission; they can make a prior approval application to the local planning authority, which has only eight weeks in which to object. If it does not object, there is deemed planning consent. Leicester's planning department is, I suppose, as busy as any of the other planning departments in Members' constituencies, and because it is so busy, it is difficult for it to adhere to its timetable. As a result, masts are being erected without the support or co-operation of local people. If a mast is over 15 m high, of course, a planning application must be made. At the start of 2008, there were about 50,300 base station sites in the United Kingdom. Two-thirds are on existing structures and buildings. There are now nearly 74 million mobile connections in the United Kingdom, and the number is increasing every day. I am sure that other Members, including the Deputy Leader of the House, have had representations about it. We need to review the regulations very carefully, and stop the mobile phone companies automatically being given permission just because the local authority is not able to reply in time. I urge the Government to look into the issue. The latest such proposal affects a road at the heart of my constituency, the Melton road, which is frequently visited by the shadow Leader of the House, the hon. Member for North-West Cambridgeshire (Mr. Vara), when he comes to see his relatives in Leicester and goes out to buy his bhajias—not budgerigars, as I have been misquoted as saying—in the Belgrave road. When he goes there, he will observe the ambience of the Belgrave and Melton roads. The latest proposal by Vodafone is to erect a huge mast on the pavement of the Melton road, one of the busiest roads in the country. That would spoil the local environment and upset local residents—and, of course, their Member of Parliament and local councillors. It is decisions of that kind that cause so much upset. Representatives of Vodafone came to see me last week, and I told them that I would oppose the proposal. I think it extremely important for us to take account of the detrimental effect that such decisions made by companies have on the appearance of an area. Sadly, I do not have a list of constituents that I can read out at the end of my speech to thank them for all their work—those who have distributed leaflets for me, or who have been particularly kind, or to whom I have forgotten to send Christmas cards. I think, however, that we ought to have a debate about changing the procedures of the House. Perhaps at the end of each day's sitting, when petitions are presented, Members can present lists of constituents who are local heroes and heroines, so that we need not necessarily do so during the Christmas Adjournment debate. May I take this opportunity to wish everyone who works in the House—the staff and Officers of the House, and my own staff in particular—a wonderful Christmas break? We look forward to seeing everyone again in January.