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Local Government (Devon, Norfolk and Suffolk)

I think that I find myself in a unique position in the House, in that at the forthcoming election I will be fighting a new seat, and if I am successful, I will have Exeter city council, East Devon district council and Devon county council to look after—and I am perfectly satisfied with that, because they work extremely well together. I wish that we were concentrating on making life better for the people of our county. The right hon. Member for Exeter (Mr. Bradshaw), who is here today, knows as well as anyone about the problems facing Bicton college, in my constituency, and Exeter college, in his, and the fiasco over the attempt by the Learning and Skills Council to change the conditions for the hardened merger of those two colleges at the last minute. That is a vital issue for East Devon. We should be working together on such matters, rather than mucking around at the 11th hour trying to change and gerrymander boundaries. Nobody wants that. In the Prime Minister's amendment, the Government talk about recognising""the benefits that will accrue to the people of Exeter and Norwich, and to the surrounding areas of Devon and Norfolk"," but as we have heard during this debate, at no stage has any Minister or, indeed, anyone speaking from the Government Benches, even attempted to outline the methodology, to identify the compelling reasons for change or to show any evidence or business plan—anything that would stand up as evidence in any business situation—to justify the proposed changes. In the extraordinary letter that we received from the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Stevenage (Barbara Follett) this afternoon, headed "The Future of Local Service Provision in Devon", she kindly offered to appoint a senior official to act as a champion in Whitehall for all the Devon councils. One can only hope that that would be the old friend of the right hon. Member for Exeter (Mr. Bradshaw), the permanent secretary Mr. Peter Housden, who is so cynical and nervous—and on the record publicly as such—about the entire series of changes. We do not think that people in Devon need champions in Whitehall: they have Members of Parliament who are championing them right now, and those seem to be mainly on the Conservative side of the House. At no stage has a Minister accepted that the enhanced two-tier system is working; and, because it does not suit their naked political purposes, at no stage have Ministers said that for East Devon, which is about to share a chief executive and other officers with South Somerset council, the winner in all this will be the East Devon taxpayer. Instead, through political gerrymandering, the Government are trying to appease an existing Cabinet Minister and a past Cabinet Minister—the only two members of the Labour party who are satisfied with what is proposed. When we speak about Exeter expanding, I would be grateful if the Under-Secretary of State could share with the House her views on where Exeter is going to expand. Perhaps she could have a quick word with her colleague on her left to identify some areas. If she or any of her colleagues take the trouble to find out, they will find that all the significant growth in the Devon structure plan is outside the city—that is, outside the city today, and outside it even if unitary proposals go ahead for Exeter. The growth is planned to the east of the M5 in my constituency, in Cranbook, a new community of at least 3,000 dwellings, which will include a 30-hectare business park—Skypark—a 25-hectare science park, an inter-modal freight terminal, the expansion of Exeter international airport and a further 500 dwellings in East Devon, an area that covers 315 square miles, and not in Exeter, a city covering 18.5 square miles. We are talking about the economic benefits to our city, but it is our county city. I share the view of my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Devon (Mr. Streeter) that to strip out our county city from our county is at best a dereliction of duty, at worst political vandalism. However, to strip out Exeter from the county will not benefit the people of Exeter at this time, and it will manifestly not benefit the rest of the people of Devon either, because as we have heard, there is no provision for additional funding for any restructuring costs incurred by the rest of the county. It will fall to the council tax payers to make up the deficit, and I suspect that a deficit will indeed be incurred in setting up Exeter as a unitary. Hon. Members should not take just my word for that. They could perhaps take the words of the leader of the Labour party on Devon county council, who was closely involved for many years with Exeter city council. Councillor Saxon Spence has said in evidence that there is effectively no way that Exeter can be set up as a unitary without central Government support. If the money is available to set up an Exeter unitary, and if we accept that central Government support will be needed, that means, ergo, that there is Government money around somewhere. As a Devon Member of Parliament who is satisfied with the status quo, please may I bid for that money, for my hard-pressed social services, for the survival of Bicton college, the only land-based agricultural college in the south-west, for the potholes in our roads, so that people can get about, or for capping council tax, which our hard-pressed pensioners are finding it increasingly difficult to pay? That is not just my view: if Ministers talked to anybody representing a constituency in Devon, from any party other than the Government party, or to any Member of Parliament representing a Norfolk seat, I suspect that they would say the same. However, because this Government have squandered the golden economic legacy that they inherited—[Laughter.] The right hon. Member for Exeter laughs, but it is true. Otherwise, why are we in the worst recession that any of us has ever seen or is ever likely to see in our lifetime? At the moment, there is no money to waste on Government schemes to shore up the political careers of two Ministers—or rather, one ex-Minister and one soon-to-be ex-Minister. This proposal should have no place. The Government have run out of time, and it will be a disgrace if they force it through. I pray that when the election eventually comes, the people of Devon will recognise it for what it is.