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Amendment of the law

The hon. Gentleman is, of course, correct. I am happy to clarify the policy. I am not saying that we should not increase landfill tax, but if we place such burdens on local authorities, we must give them the corresponding support to develop recycling; otherwise the result will be exactly what we face in Gloucestershire, where the Conservative-controlled county council is pursuing incineration, which will contribute toxic fly ash to the waste disposal site at Wingmore Farm near my constituency. We do not want to force local authorities in that direction. I do not necessarily disagree with an increase in landfill, but we must have compensating support for local authorities to enable them to meet that in an environmentally responsible way. Where is the investment in railways? Last year, the Office for Rail Regulation turned down millions of pounds of railway schemes. One of the schemes would have been built near Doncaster, and the Swindon to Kemble line would have improved railway services to the whole of Gloucestershire and helped reliability for the whole network in the west country. In our "Green Road out of the Recession", we suggested as an alternative to the £12.5 billion VAT cut that the money might have been better spent delivering almost the entire list of projects turned down by the Office of Rail Regulation for lack of funds. That would have provided not only a fantastic short-term stimulus, but support for business and local economies, which would have been a long-term investment in this country's future. It could have been extended to include high-speed rail to Scotland or Wales and the west country. There could have been more investment in innovative ideas such as ultra-light rail, which would work in not only urban areas, but mixed urban, rural and suburban areas such as Gloucestershire. Instead, we have had the very hyped announcements on electric cars—a very new Labour idea. The Liberal Democrats suggested years ago that the EU might be crucial in directing the whole of the new-car market towards electric and zero-carbon vehicles. However, we also said that a short-term investment in the railways would do much more to reduce CO2 than would subsidies to the car industry for vehicles that, although more efficient, would still run on fossil-fuel powered electricity for years to come. Where was the investment in housing? The Chancellor announced a few hundreds of millions of pounds for energy efficiency in housing, but if we had not been wasting money on cutting VAT we could have invested billions in providing energy efficiency and insulation for a million homes for some of the least well-off families in the country. We could also have subsidised investment in energy efficiency for a million more. While the Liberal Democrats and the Government argue about how the money for stimulus measures should be spent, at least we agree that there had to be stimulus measures. The Conservative party could not pay for any of the green stimulus that we propose, because it would not have had any sort of stimulus package. Perhaps its interest in the environment is waning anyway, as it is unashamedly pro-nuclear and pro-incineration, and many of the interesting proposals from its quality of life policy group never made it into party policy. There is, however, a bigger picture. Do we need to look more fundamentally at how we measure the quality of our economy and society? The hon. Member for Brent, North (Barry Gardiner) made a speech yesterday that might not have been widely noticed but which I consider to be very important. In it, he said:""What if today's financial crisis were something more fundamental than merely a serious and deep recession? What if 14 September 2008—the date on which Lehman Brothers was allowed to go belly up—represented the point at which the whole architecture of a consumption-led, growth-based economy collapsed? Perhaps this crisis is telling us that a system predicated on limitless growth must inevitably hit boundaries—boundaries that are not only economic, but ecological."—[Official Report, 22 April 2009; Vol. 491, c. 298.]" It has been a Liberal party and Liberal Democrat theme for many years that the environment contains the economy, and not the other way around. Will recovery without clear environmental performance indicators and the recognition of constraints on well-being lead us straight back to the obsessive boom-and-bust model perfected by the Conservative party and executed with rash panache by the Labour Government over the past decade? We need a new model of sustainable prosperity that allows us to meet people's aspirations for a decent quality of life, decent homes and a clean environment in a truly sustainable way.