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DCMS Annual Report

The Minister knows only too well the number of times that he has said ““soon””, and I have waited nearly a year to get an answer, as was demonstrated recently in a debate on a statutory instrument. Will the Minister give me greater precision than ““soon””, ““very soon”” or ““imminent””, which are words that he frequently uses when speaking to me? What is happening about the reduction from 0.4 to 0.2 hectares? Secondly, and equally importantly, what about the bizarre rule that allows a field that is fenced-off, and therefore not used for a period of up to five years, to be exempted from the rules? That needs to be changed. Again, I have had assurances that it will be changed, but absolutely nothing has happened. Finally on playing fields, may I pay a huge tribute to Fields in Trust, which has done a tremendous amount of work since 1948 to protect playing fields in this county? In discussions with me, it has expressed real concern that when fields are sold off and the money goes into sports—rightly, sometimes it does—there is a huge disparity, because for every £1 that is spent on an outdoor playing field and the facilities that go with it, around £2 is spent on indoor facilities. That needs to be addressed. The creative industries are crucially important but, as I have said, although I welcome the rhetoric, I am not convinced that there is any real action on the ground. Indeed, the PSA targets on the creative industries have not been met. When the Minister replies, will he say more about what he is going to do about the creative industries? For example, what about the computer games industry, which has been overtaken by Canada from a position of third in the world? That happened because tax breaks were given to that industry in Canada. I am not saying that tax breaks are the way forward when it comes to helping the computer games industry, but they should be seriously considered. We give tax breaks to the film industry, for example, and we ought to consider doing so for the computer games industry. That is one of the many examples I could give. I echo everything that the hon. Member for Bournemouth, East has said about tourism. This Government do not take tourism anywhere near seriously enough—the cut to Visit Britain was a stark example of that. There is a problem, as I said in an intervention, when the Prime Minister pretends to be interested and announces money, only for us to find later that the money is not the Government's, but other people's. That does not send out the right signals. We must start taking tourism seriously. I am not going to talk about the Olympics or gambling, because the Minister and I will have the opportunity to do so in more detail later, so I shall talk finally about heritage. Someone mentioned Stonehenge, but heritage is hardly ever mentioned in our debates. There has been a significant cut in the money available to heritage. Heritage Lottery Fund money has decreased tremendously, and it now rejects some 80 per cent. of applications that meet its criteria—they are good applications. There are nearly 30,000 properties on the at-risk register, and there has been a real reduction in the number of young people visiting stately homes on school visits and the like. We must take the heritage of this country much more seriously. There is hardly any talk of heritage within the Department—there is at least a lot of talk about tourism—and the final insult was for the Department to drop, or allow to be dropped, the heritage protection Bill from the Government's programme. That was the final for blow for anyone who felt that the Government are interested in heritage; they clearly are not. Dropping the Bill has let the heritage sector down. I began by saying that there have been a number of improvements, which I welcome. There is a lot of work still to be done, and there is a degree of complacency in the way in which the Minister has so far taken us through the report. I hope that he will now rebut some of the challenges that have been made, or at least explain why the Department has failed in quite a large number of areas.