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Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill [Lords]

Despite her current difficulties with The Daily Telegraph, with the Prime Minister and with various other people, I confess to sometimes having a bit of a soft spot for the Secretary of State. Anyone who can run for the deputy leadership of the Labour party under the slogan "I'm nuts about Hazel" deserves some credit for adding a bit of colour and life to British politics. She was absolutely right in some of her opening remarks. There is anger at politicians at the moment, and it should be channelled, if possible, into practical changes. We do need a vibrant and thriving local democracy. We do need more empowerment and civic participation, and she said all that. However, the Secretary of State and her Ministers must understand that those words sound appallingly hollow to people in my constituency, who have enjoyed endless opportunities to "have their say" during the five-year progress of the south-west regional spatial strategy, from development through to, we hoped at some stage, implementation, and then abolition. There has been an extended, extravagant, and doubtless very expensive pantomime of consultation, which has had virtually no impact at all on the strategy as it has developed. Sadly, my impression is that the Bill will make regional government less democratic, less accountable and even more vulnerable to diktat from the Secretary of State and Ministers. As the Secretary of State and her Ministers have refused to discuss the impact of individual regional spatial strategies in detail, perhaps they can be forgiven for not actually knowing what really happened in the south-west, and why they have 35,000 public comments, most of them objections, on their desks for consideration. That is part of a total of nearly 100,000 comments—again, mostly objections, as far as Government offices for the regions can tell—nationwide. That may be why the Bill does not remotely address the real problems of local democracy. Let me explain what has happened locally during the progress of the south-west regional spatial strategy. In 2005, we had our first opportunity locally to "have our say", in the words of a document produced in Cheltenham. It set out some of the direction of travel of the emerging regional spatial strategy. I went along to a consultation meeting that was held, before I was even elected as a Member of Parliament. There was pretty much unanimity among local community and elected representatives there. We supported more affordable housing, resulting not just from a trickle-down from the private sector, but from giving powers to local councils and, in our case, arm's length management organisations such as Cheltenham Borough Homes, to buy and build more council housing. There was acceptance that quite high numbers of houses should be built in urban areas such as Cheltenham. I baulk sometimes at accusations of nimbyism from Labour Members who talk about us opposing all new development. They ask, "Where will people live?" but we have accepted consistently the numbers that were set out in RPG10—regional planning guidance note 10—which suggested that as many as 8,100 new homes be built in the urban area of Cheltenham. That figure has received fairly wide acceptance across all parties. It is a very challenging number, but we believe it is potentially deliverable. What we opposed were the absence of environmental considerations, and the discussion of growth that went far ahead of local population growth. It was apparently based not on population growth in our immediate area, but on a general model handed down from on high that seemed to imagine enormous migration into the south-west, presumably corresponding to some kind of depopulation of the north of England, and that would be concentrated around only specific towns and cities. We specifically opposed the extra housing going into urban extensions. As I said, those urban extensions do not equate to all the extra housing, so it is possible to oppose the urban extensions and still support a great deal of extra housing. The original consultation document about those urban extensions contained comments such as this about the green belt between Cheltenham and Gloucester:""It includes some pleasant countryside, which is of lesser landscape significance when compared to the adjoining areas of the Severn Vale or Cotswolds. In reality, it is quite affected by transport corridors, such as . . . the M5 motorway. Parts of this area are very close to the urban centres of Cheltenham and Gloucester, and could provide logical urban extensions in terms of easy transport access. Other parts of the Green Belt are more rural in character and remote from existing development."" Apart from being staggeringly patronising, that is fundamentally wrong. The importance of green belts and other treasured spaces that have been repeatedly rejected for development was not that they were chocolate box Cotswold villages—[Interruption.] It would be great if Ministers could listen to this part of the argument, which is important. The importance of green belts is not that they are chocolate box Cotswold villages, but that they are sometimes modest green spaces next to urban populations. In my constituency, it is the urban populations of areas such as Leckhampton, Up Hatherley, Swindon village, Springbank and Hesters Way, which include at least one of the most deprived areas in the south-west, who value the green belt spaces.