I appreciate having an opportunity to raise what is a topical issue, given that the campaign by the cyclists lobby and the Evening Standard to get more bikes on trains is in full swing.

If one stands outside a railway station and counts the number of people who turn up on their bikes, what one sees will say an awful lot about a country. In some countries, one sees masses of bikers cycling to work along cycle-only routes and putting their bikes in massive cycle parks outside stations. In Denmark and Holland, 35 per cent. of people who arrive at stations do so by bike, and even in Germany, the figure is 15 per cent. In the UK, however, it is 2 per cent., and we would need a tenfold or fifteenfold increase to reach the levels considered normal on the continent. I am tempted to say that we need a step change, but I fear that that would be a very pedestrian analogy, so let me say that we need a gear change to reach the necessary levels.

Let me assure my hon. Friend the Minister that this is not a moan against the Government, and I am not saying that they have done nothing—far from it. Ministers have been enthusiastic supporters of bike and ride and have led the way in many respects. Nor is this a moan against the train operating companies, many of which have also been enthusiastic. In East Anglia, they have been pushing for measures for a long time and have managed to increase the number of people arriving by bike to a massive 3 per cent. The Bittern and Wherry lines community rail partnerships, which must be somewhere in Norfolk, have not only fitted cycle racks and cycle lockers in every station, but have a discounted cycle hire scheme for train ticket holders.

Many local groups are also campaigning for measures to be introduced. In my area, I have campaigned with some success with the Wandsworth Cycling Campaign for more cycle parking at stations, and we now have a lot more cycle parking at Clapham Junction station, although there is not yet enough. We have also campaigned for wheeling ramps on the stairs, although so far without success, and I shall return to that. I pay tribute to those involved in the campaign, which has just won the cycling for adults award at Transport for London’s cycling communities awards for an innovative scheme to give professional cycling training to local opinion formers. Indeed, my hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Mr. Khan) and various councillors have benefited under the scheme. The campaign is very active. The Cyclists Touring Club and the Evening Standard are also running a nationwide campaign on bike and rail in the run-up to the introduction of the Government’s White Paper on rail.

The purpose of this debate—I am glad to see that hon. Friends who are keen cyclists are here to take part—is to give a parliamentary focus to the campaign to introduce appropriate measures. It has been organised by the all-party group on cycling, and I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for Islington, South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) will succeed in catching your eye, Mrs. Humble, because she has been at the forefront of the group’s work.

What do we want? We have a very short shopping list to start with. We want wheeling ramps on steps, and that sounds like a small point, but it is quite important. We want much more cycle parking, cycle hire at stations and a national approach to cycle carriage. We want better information about when people can and cannot take their bikes on trains, when and where they may need to make reservations, which trains have specific places for bikes and where on the platform we must stand to reach such places. We also want more consistency between train operating companies.

One of my beefs is that the railways do not make it easier to go cycling in the country. One of the most pleasant ways for my partner and me to spend a summer weekend is to cycle down winding country lanes past village greens and country pubs, with scarcely a car to be seen. Occasionally, we might cross a busy road, but then we are back into the idyll of rural England. Generally, people who want to cycle in the country have to get there by car; they have to put a rack on the back of their car and drive off to the country. However, they could easily get there by train if the railway system advertised cycle routes at stations and allowed round-trip reductions. Given the way in which the ticketing system works, people have to pay quite high fares unless they do a round trip.

The important starting point for this debate is to recognise that the different kinds of cyclists who use trains have differing needs. Commuter cyclists bike, park and ride; they cycle to the station, leave their bike and catch a train. They need much larger and more secure cycle parks, and most stations should be thinking about a threefold or fourfold increase in their present cycle parking facilities.

Some commuters bike, ride and then take a second bike; they take their bike to the station, catch a train and then use a second bike at the other end—at a London terminus or wherever. That would be an argument for having cycle hire shops at stations and for having cycle parking on platforms. In that way, people could get off a train and use a second bike to cycle to work. There is acres of space on the platforms of London terminuses which could be used for that purpose.

The third category of commuters are the doorstep-to-doorstep cyclists, and their problem is carriage. They take their bike to the station, put it on the train and then take it from the station. They need to be able to get their bike on the train, and that is not a problem if they have fold-up bikes. However, most people do not want to ride fold-ups, but to get on a train with a normal, assembled bike.

I said that I would return to the point about wheeling ramps, and the quickest hit that the Minister could make would be to force all stations to install them on stairs. The cost would be next to nothing and they would take up no space, because they can be fitted under a handrail, where no one can walk in any case. Give me a few hundred pounds and I could do Clapham Junction in a morning—it is that simple.

To take one example of the problem, my partner took her 10-year-old daughter cycling this weekend by the Thames. It was a lovely weekend, but the hardest bit was getting the cycles up the stairs at Clapham Junction. A 10-year-old cannot carry her bike up, and my partner, strong though she is, cannot carry two bikes up at the same time. A simple wheeling ramp to enable people to push their bikes up the stairs would solve the problem. Network Rail will think up lots of reasons why it cannot instal ramps, but I can assure the Minister that they are rubbish. Installing ramps is easy, practical and cheap and could be done straightaway.

The next problem is where to put the bike on the train. In the old days, of course, one would just look for the guard van, which could carry up to a dozen bikes without any problem. Now, however, that is pretty well impossible for commuting cyclists because cycles are banned in the rush hour. At Clapham Junction, that applies not only to trains going into London, but even to those going out of London. That policy derived from the Strategic Rail Authority—may it rest in peace—which laid out cycling policy three or four years ago in its cycling policy consultation document. The SRA had all the best intentions, including maximising the number of cycles on trains, but the document was laced with weasel words such as

“so far as reasonably practical”

and

“subject to the availability of appropriate space”.

The problem comes down to the fact that cycle carriage is treated as a luxury. Providing access for wheelchair users and parents with prams is regarded as an obligation, but cycle carriage is regarded as a luxury. A survey of commuters showed that 1 per cent. would take their bikes with them if they could, but that 28 per cent. thought that it was a bad idea to allow bikes on rush hour trains, because they would get in the way. It concluded:

“It is difficult to legitimise a worsening of conditions for 28 per cent. of passengers for the benefit of 1 per cent. of passengers.”

Stated like that, it sounds quite reasonable, and that approach led to the view that the train operating companies should each decide their own policy and, indeed, that they should feel free to charge up to the price of a single ticket for bicycle carriage.

We need to look beyond that. There is a problem of mindset. The authority accepted the need for space for pushchairs and wheelchairs. It would never tell mums or parents that they could not take their children on a rush hour train, or tell wheelchair users that they could not use rush hour trains, but it happily tells cyclists that. Of course it is not essential for people to cycle, but let us look at the question another way. The number of people who live within 10 minutes of a station is 15 times greater if those people are cyclists than if they are people who walk to the station. That is the simple application, I am told, of pir². A walker must live within half a mile of a station to be there in 10 minutes; a cyclist need only live within two miles of the station. Using pir² it is found that the area in which cyclists are within 10 minutes of a station is 16 times greater. In other words, if we want more people to travel by train, we must encourage them to come by bike and bring their bikes with them. They will get to work quicker at the other end, too.

At the moment each train operating company has its own policy. They all have totally different and confusing rules, and I shall give a few examples of those. Eurostar has a complete ban on bicycles. Its rules state that Eurostar does not have traditional brake or baggage vans and therefore cannot accept accompanied cycles unless they are folded. In Scotland things are a bit more liberal. First Scotrail says that the London to Scotland Caledonian Sleeper can accept up to six cycles, except for the Inverness to London service, which can accommodate three. Rather mysteriously, it says that a special road vehicle will carry cycles between Inverness and Thurso during the summer of 2006. On Hull Trains there is a different system again, in which up to two cycles can be conveyed, which must be stored in the train manager’s office in coach D. People must know the rules of their local line. On the Isle of Wight, the Island Line reserves the right to restrict the carriage of cycles when the punctuality of the train may be jeopardised. Ominously, the rules state that implementation of the restriction is at the conductor’s discretion; I have visions of trying to get on a train at Cowes. The Stansted Express carries only bikes that are flat packed for air travel. That is an example of a train operating company that bans normal commuter bikes completely.

A single national rule would be much better for cyclists. The CTC has suggested four spaces on existing trains and six on new or refurbished trains, and then one more place for every 24 seats after the first 100. That provision would be split so that half would be dedicated provision for cycles and half would be flexible—seats that could be folded up for people to park bikes. At least one space should be available for tandems, tricycles or trailers, which are usually ignored in cycle provision. The CTC also wants places to be provided on replacement bus services. At the moment, a cyclist who gets on a train at the weekend, when engineering works are being done and a bus service is provided, must get on their bike instead of the bus and see whether they can keep up with the bus on the way to the next station, because bikes are not accepted on replacement buses. A simple national rule would be that all train companies should be forced to provide space for at least 10 bikes per train. That would be a good start.

The European Parliament has taken a lead on this and in January MEPs voted for a specially designated area to be provided on every train, for bicycles, baby carriages and sports equipment; they wanted this to happen by 2008 on international trains and 2012 on domestic trains. I hope that the Government will not resist that demand, which seems a good starting point for getting what we need. We should not be negative about bike and ride. We should welcome the power of cycling as, apart from anything else, part of the battle against climate change. We should make bike and ride easy, because it is a match made in heaven. Bikes and trains are the two most sustainable forms of public transport; they create a perfect synergy for clean, green travel, and they are quicker and cheaper at the same time.

There are some signs that things are going in the right direction, and others that they are not. At St. Pancras, for instance, only 30 spaces have been provided for bikes; but I see that next door, at King’s Cross, there is a planning application for a cycle storage area that would accommodate 800 bikes—much more like it. The Department for Transport referred in its last White Paper to providing 2,900 additional cycle parking spaces, of which, so far, 2,500 have been provided. That is a great advance, although something of the order of 10,000 is more like what will be needed.

The same patchwork of arrangements applies to reservations. Three train operating companies allow bikes to be put on all their trains, with no reservation. Another six allow them to be put on all trains, but require a place to be reserved. One company allows bikes only on off-peak services, but without any need to reserve a place, and there are 15 companies that permit bikes only on off-peak services, and require a reservation. That is another aspect of the matter in which a much simpler, national approach would be appreciated. Pre-booking should always be available as an option, but it should not be mandatory, because that is difficult for cyclists to live with.

I probably do not need to stress the health arguments for the approach that I am advocating. Regular cycling can halve the chance of heart disease and reduce resting heart rate, obesity, high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes; it improves strength, stamina and posture, and typically gives people the fitness level of someone 10 years younger. The members of the all-party group on cycling provide a testament to that. It adds two years to life expectancy, as well as creating no air pollution and very little noise pollution. More important, perhaps, from the point of view of individual cyclists, is the fact that not only can people beat the bus on a bicycle; they can plan their day better. They know when they will arrive and can time their day better, as they are not at the mercy of waiting times for buses and trains. They also make time in their day for exercise without having to sacrifice anything else. As hon. Members on both sides of the House will, I am sure, attest, cycling can cut London commuting times by up to an hour.

I urge the Minister to go with the cyclists on this. An important first step, although it may sound like one of the least important, would be the setting up of a UK national cycle-rail forum. Cyclists themselves are in the best position to advise on ways of increasing the bike and ride rate. If we all agree that the rate in this country is too low, as I think we do—the Minister is convinced of it, the Government are trying to raise the bike and ride rate, the train operating companies, by and large, have an interest in gaining more custom in that way, and everyone agrees that it would be good for health—we should listen to cyclists and find out what is inhibiting people from using bike and ride.

Will my hon. Friend accept that a real barrier, which is not mentioned anywhere, is that when people put their bikes on a train—particularly on a First Great Western 125—they have no idea how long they have to do it? By the time they have put it in the guard’s van and tied it up, and run to the carriage, they must sometimes literally jump on the train. There is surely a need for some consistency about the physical aspects of putting a bike on a train, and that point seems never to be made. I wonder if my hon. Friend would like to comment.

I take that point entirely. There should be cycle racks in the guard’s van. If there is dedicated space for bikes on a train, there should be racks on which bikes can be put easily, rather than being slung up against the side. There should be a system whereby bikes can be parked quickly and efficiently. On most trains, the guard’s van is connected to the rest of the train by corridor, so the problem that my hon. Friend mentions must be a quirk of First Great Western trains.

It is important that we address this matter at this level of detail and understand what the inhibitors are. Everyone agrees on the goal for this area of policy, but worries about the practical difficulties. To overcome those difficulties, we need train operators, cyclists and the Department for Transport to sit around a table and discuss them so that we can remove the impediments and let the number of cyclists increase.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Battersea (Martin Linton) on securing the debate and on his eloquence in speaking on behalf of the country’s cyclists. As he said, the debate is timely, as the Government are drafting their White Paper and our constituents are e-mailing us asking for a more friendly interface between cycle and rail. It is also timely, because London is preparing to host the start of the Tour de France on 6 July.

I was interested to read in Hansard an earlier debate on this subject, at the end of which the responding Minister said:

“I hope that we shall return to this subject many times in the future and that this debate will have the effect of encouraging Ministries and local authorities to adopt a forward-looking policy.”

That debate was in 1975, and the Minister, Denis Howell, was replying to an Adjournment debate initiated by the then hon. Member for Ealing, Acton. I am delighted to see my successor-but-two, the hon. Member for Ealing, Acton and Shepherd’s Bush (Mr. Slaughter), in his place this morning.

At that time, I was also the chairman of the all-party group on cycling. In the intervening 32 years, I have progressed to become a patron of that august group. I am sure that I was not nearly as active a chairman as the hon. Member for Islington, South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) has been in putting forward a programme for parliamentary colleagues. We did, however, start a parliamentary cycling pool in the 1970s, to encourage back on to two wheels Members who had lost the habit of cycling and did not want the hassle of buying and maintaining a bicycle. The pool had a large number of members, who each got a key to a box in the Members’ cloakroom. In the box they would find another key to a padlock, which gave access to a bicycle on which they could be let loose on the streets of London. The pool encouraged a large number of Members back on to two wheels, but it was not an unmitigated success because many bicycles migrated to Members’ constituencies and we never saw them again. In 1979, anticipating the Thatcher reforms, I privatised the cycle pool and sold it off to its members.

The 1975 debate was answered not by a Transport Minister, but the Minister for Sport, which reflects that cycling was then seen more as a recreation than as a valid means of transport. In that debate, the villain of the piece was British Rail. Like the hon. Member for Battersea, I had a shopping list of requests, one of which was for

“a bicycle unit within the Department of the Environment…which could advise local authorities, British Rail and others on measures to encourage cycling.”

The Minister replied:

“I cannot accede to the request that my Department should set up a separate cycling advisory unit.”

Happily, we have had alternative Administrations in the meantime, and that particular deficiency has been put right.

I went on to ask for a cycling allowance. I said that if the Minister wanted a trial scheme,

“he could start with Members of Parliament, many of whom need some gentle daily exercise to keep them in proper condition.”

The Minister replied:

“Speaking on behalf of 98 per cent. of hon. Members who find the present mileage allowance totally inadequate to cover the cost of driving their cars on parliamentary business, I must say that I cannot encourage the hon. Gentleman in that direction.”

He also said,

“I do not think that hon. Members generally would support that proposition.”

Of course, we now have a cycling allowance, although I have never claimed it. I hope that the Minister who is responding today has a different speech writer from the one who drafted the ministerial reply back in 1975.

I also asked for cycle routes through the Royal parks and for cyclists to have a head start over cars at traffic lights, and I am happy that some progress has been made in those areas. I then had a go at the specific subject of this morning’s debate—cycle-rail integration. I said:

“No debate on improved facilities for the cyclist would be complete without paying tribute to British Rail’s fearless campaign to keep bicycles from its stations and off its trains.”

I went on to mention inadequate parking facilities, high tariffs and inadequate carriage facilities—some of which have been mentioned by the hon. Member for Battersea today—but I made little headway. At that time, British Rail was, of course, a nationalised industry. However, in his reply the Minister said:

“Thankfully, the Government have no responsibility for the individual management policy of British Railways. I have very little hope or confidence in an organisation which forces the travelling public to drink coffee out of cardboard cups”. —[Official Report, 11 July 1975; Vol. 895, c. 1018-30.]

He then invited me to approach British Rail directly myself to see whether I might make better progress. It is a paradox that Ministers appear to have more control over the now privatised rail industry than they had over the nationalised industry some 30 years ago.

This morning, we need to outline some short-term measures, as the hon. Gentleman has already done, and some medium-term measures. In the short term, we need clarity, certainty and, where possible, consistency. We need clarity as to what the rules are and to be able to find that information easily. I accept that those rules might have to vary between train operating companies in the short term, depending on their capacity and the configuration of rolling stock.

We need certainty that when a traveller is told that he can take his bicycle on a train, he can do so, rather than getting there and being told by the conductor that he cannot. I agree with the hon. Gentleman that we need the ramps that he mentioned.

In the medium term, we should consider rolling stock and franchise agreements with a view to tilting the terms of trade more towards the cycling railway traveller. We need more flexible rolling stock in which seats can be tipped up to make more space for bicycles. We need more cycle-hire facilities at main railway stations and more convenient cycle racks. At Waterloo, one has to walk halfway to Clapham Junction, along platform 12, to access the cycle racks. As franchise agreements are redrafted and train operating companies are invited to bid, the Minister would do well to insert into those agreements some of the items on the CTC’s shopping list, which indicates how we might make progress.

I hope that the Minister will reflect on at least one item on that shopping list. Some 10 years ago, a small sum of money was available within the Department as part of something called cycle challenge. People could bid for that money to develop innovative cycling schemes to promote cycling. That encouraged best practice and brought forward a wide range of ideas. The CTC has talked about a cycle-rail innovation fund. I do not think that it matters particularly what such a model is called, but it is a useful model that the Department might consider to raise the profile of this issue, put some money on the table and encourage exciting new ideas.

My final plea is for the tandem rider. If the cyclist has been gently persecuted by the railways for decades, the tandem rider has been martyred. My wife and I had to ride an extra 20 miles one day, because the conductor would not allow a tandem on a train that allowed bicycles. I therefore join the hon. Member for Battersea in not ignoring tricycles, trailers and the rest. The challenge confronting the Minister is in unlocking potential. We do not want to make people cycle to the station, but many people would like to if it were easier, safer and more convenient. That is what we need to do. I cannot guarantee that I will still be here in 32 years, but I hope that any debate on this issue in 2039 will be able to point to this debate as the time when the campaign to promote better cycle-rail integration really took off.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Martin Linton) on securing this debate. On paper, this may seem a minor technical subject, but it definitely is not. People say that they use their cars because it is convenient to do so and because they get a door-to-door service, but a proper mixture of bikes and trains would be the alternative door-to-door service—it makes perfect sense.

Last year, one of the most heavily supported early-day motions was one that I tabled on behalf of the all-party group on cycling. It was on bike-rail integration and was signed by 170 Members. How will we go about getting such integration? I speak as the chair of the all-party group, which has been working with the Cyclists Touring Club and the London Cycling Campaign to promote bike-rail integration in the hope that it will receive serious consideration in the various policy papers that the Department for Transport is planning to publish this summer. We believe that this is a great opportunity to improve our transport system.

Over the past few weeks, many hon. Members have met local cyclists—I see that many of the Members concerned are present—and undertaken an audit of the state of their local station’s parking facilities for cyclists; I know that many hon. Members have been very shocked.

I am glad to see that the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young) is present. He is a former chair of the all-party group and one of the first to campaign on proper cycle-rail infrastructure. I understand what he says about how bad things were in the past, but inconsistency has increased since the privatisation of the railways.

Recent questions from various hon. Members have elicited a response from the Department that suggests that it is awaiting a report from Cycling England on the role of cycle-rail integration. I hope that the report will be useful and will provide support, but I would suggest to the Minister that Cycling England was never intended to be an advisory body; it was meant to be a body that delivered improvements for cycling, rather than a policy body first and foremost. Perhaps Cycling England would be best off if it were provided with a special cycle-rail innovation fund. That could build on existing best practice and test new ideas.

Personal car use has increased significantly in the past 20 years, and while the majority of households have access to cars, a significant minority—nearly 50 per cent. in my constituency—do not. Transport alternatives to the private car must be provided, both for the sake of social inclusion and for the wider agenda of reducing car use for all the environmental, health and road-safety benefits that doing so will bring.

Cycling and the railways could play a much greater role than they do. As has been said, 60 per cent. of UK households are within a 15-minute cycle ride of a station, but according to the Department’s statistics, just 2 to 3 per cent. of all rail trips include cycling in the journey. Part of the problem is the structure of the rail network. Train operating companies arbitrarily choose cycle policies. There seems to be no rhyme or reason behind them. Such policies are often supported by ludicrous franchise agreements with the Department—yes, I said ludicrous.

I shall give an example of that. First ScotRail agreed to provide cycle parking at every station. People might think that a laudable aim, until they realise that stations such as Corrour in Lochaber are included. It has no road access and no permanent inhabitants within 8 miles of it, yet it has four cycle parking stands.

Network Rail, which ultimately owns the system, leases stations and car parks back to the train operating companies, but will not allow them to remove car parking spaces, even for cycle parking, without a formal agreement and penalty clause. That is hardly a supportive structure for cycling.

I want to pick out three different types of rail passengers, who represent most of the traffic on the network: commuters; long-distance business travellers; and tourists. Each of the passenger types could benefit in different ways from improved bike-rail integration. Commuters are presently the heaviest users of the rail network—half of all trips on the railways are commuting trips—and in recent years the large increases in both rail users and cyclists in London have led to the imposition by train operating companies of peak-time bans. As we have heard, that policy was agreed by the Strategic Rail Authority in its cycling policy, recently reissued by the Department.

I understand that trains running in excess of capacity cannot really allow cyclists to take up what would otherwise be standing space for commuters, but the bans are inflexible and fail to offer an alternative. They vary greatly between six-hour daily bans in all directions on Southern and four-hour bans on First Great Western. Southeastern, which is run by the same company as Southern, has recently decided to ban all cyclists from its trains during the three days of the Tour de France. That is hardly supportive of cyclists and it hardly encourages cycling.

Many commuters have resorted to buying small-wheeled folding cycles, such as Bromptons, a practice which has been promoted by the operating companies. Why is there such a demand for commuters to carry their cycles on trains? The simple reason is that there is nowhere to leave bikes at stations. In Holland, there are similar blanket bans on cycle carriage before 9 am, but they do not stop many more cyclists using the railways. In fact, up to a third of all passengers in Holland get to the station by bicycle, the difference being that it has adequate parking facilities, whereas we do not.

In a presentation that I attended six months ago, the Dutch national rail company explained how a small station in Holland could put in 1,000 bike parking spaces. Even Britain’s most successfully integrated bike-rail station, York, has just 1,000 spaces. If we could just make more effort, we could provide many more spaces. The bike parking spaces in all of the London mainline terminals add up to less than 1,000. If commuters were offered plentiful and secure cycle parking at stations, they would not feel such a strong need to carry their bikes with them everywhere. I know that improvements have occurred at regional stations. In 2003, the Department started a project that brought in an additional 2,500 cycle parking spaces. Those spaces are greatly welcome, but we must remember the figure of 1,000 such spaces for one tiny station in Holland.

Franchise agreements have brought some improvements. First Capital Connect, which run trains in my constituency, has a commitment in its latest franchise to spend £100,000 on cycle parking in 33 stations. Unfortunately, the Department has not specified which stations should be included or what the quality of the parking should be. First Capital Connect has decided to concentrate on those stations where cycle use is already high and where facilities will be covered by CCTV.

Cyclists should be confident that when they leave a bike at a station it will still be there when they come back, but, unfortunately, cycle crime is soaring at our stations. Whereas motor vehicle crime at stations has fallen by 50 per cent. since 2000, reported theft or vandalism of bicycles has increased by almost 80 per cent. Nearly all of that crime—3,000 instances a year—is in London and the south-east. I wrote on behalf of the all-party group to British Transport police asking why they thought that that worrying trend was occurring. They say that it is because of the increase in cycling witnessed in London. I would say that that is right, but that the problem could be tackled. I believe that the trend results from the failure of Network Rail and the train operating companies to provide decent facilities.

If we are to encourage cyclists to leave their bicycles at stations, we need to provide them with secure parking and ensure that their bike is still there when they get back. Six out of 10 people who have had a bike stolen do not immediately go back to cycling, but instead return to driving, thus reducing revenues for the train operator, with all the resulting environmental problems.

While the bans on peak-time cycle carriage spring from the train operating companies, the solution to the problem—providing adequate parking—is stalled by another, entirely unrelated, organisation, Network Rail. Of course, it is in neither of their interests to help one another, so we have the ridiculous example of South West Trains, which has excellent cycle parking facilities at many of its stations, running trains to Waterloo, the UK’s busiest station, where cycle parking facilities are terrible. When I once tried to park my bike at Waterloo I was nearly knocked over by a taxi. The facilities are dangerous, badly looked after, not secure and full of abandoned bicycles.

Clapham Junction is the UK’s busiest station.

I stand corrected, but I would be interested to hear what the state of Clapham Junction’s bike parking is.

The authorities at Waterloo have recently started removing some of those bikes, but the poor layout is as bad as it ever has been. I am sure that many cyclists would be prepared to pay a small charge to ensure that their bikes are still where they left them when they come back.

In Holland, 90 out of 387 cycle shelters are guarded. They offer secure parking and repair facilities at low cost in co-operation with bike shops and local councils. The automated and secure cycle storage area at Finsbury Park costs 50p for 24 hours, which is much cheaper than a single return tube fare and things are just as fast. Such schemes should be replicated in the central London terminals. Transport for London has even offered funding for schemes at mainline stations, but Network Rail has turned it down. I am told that the Minister could provide a structure through something called the high level output specification, which would make Network Rail treat passengers and cyclists better. If that is right, will the Minister please do it?

No one would allow a dead car to sit around in a station car park for months, not least because of the lost revenue, so why are abandoned bicycles allowed to remain for so long? They should be removed regularly and recycled to local groups. First Capital Connect has agreed to do exactly that in the stations that it controls—good for them, but why do not other stations and other companies do that? Let us start with Network Rail.

In Britain, many business men and women are unlikely to want to turn up at a meeting having travelled on a train, but there are some. We hope that the culture is changing, and that more business people will be able to make longer journeys, so why do not we provide a network of flexible cycle hire schemes. One scheme in operation in west London allows people to borrow a bicycle by mobile phone. Again, and perhaps inevitably, the Dutch are way ahead of us with almost 100 stations offering cycle hire facilities. The bikes are bright blue and are standardised throughout the country, and the facilities are operated by the Dutch equivalent of Network Rail. It is unimaginable that Network Rail would do that, but it should be pressed to. It costs only €3 a day to hire the bikes with a smartcard and, guess what, in Holland, half of all customers are business people, who go to meetings by bike, which they hire at stations when they have meetings out of town. A similar scheme could be trialled by Cycling England through a cycle-rail innovation fund. Will the Minister please consider that?

My final category is tourists. Rail users should be able to carry their bicycles on trains for short distances outside the rush hour, just as they can carry any other large object. They should be able to turn up without reservations and be able to put their bikes on the train. Hon. Members have made suggestions about how that could be done. I will not repeat what they said, but it is not rocket science. I simply ask that, whatever is done to integrate bike and train, it should not be bolted on afterwards as an afterthought. It should be designed into all new rolling stock at an early stage and should be integral in trains so that we know where we are, and it should be standardised. Without help, I would not have had the faintest idea of what South West Trains’ class 455 rolling stock is, but I have been enlightened and have even been shown photographs. The refurbishment is a joy to behold. It was carried out in consultation with cycling organisations and meets cyclists’ needs perfectly. It is not rocket science. It can be done and it should be done.

On long-distance services, the location of the cycle carriage should be displayed clearly on the platform, and someone should tell the platform staff where it is. The reservation structure should be clear and flexible because there are many stupid examples of where it breaks down.

First ScotRail offers bargain berth tickets on its Caledonian sleepers, which I know the Minister is well acquainted with, but those tickets can be booked only online. If he wanted to travel with his bicycle he could book his ticket online, but the only way to put his bike on the train would be by making a reservation in any way other than online.

A constituent of mine, Mr. Bankes Jones, had planned a surfing trip to Devon and did not want to drive. Two days before travelling, he booked his ticket online, but he could not book a bike space through the same medium. After being transferred from organisation to organisation by phone, he finally acquired a reference number, but not a ticket. At Paddington, ticket staff found that the reference number was wrong and that the reservation had been made out to a Mr. Bonkers. After all that fuss, no one bothered to check his reservation on the train. On his return trip, after four days’ surfing, he found waiting for him at home a reservation for the first leg of his journey in the name of Mr. Bonkoes.

Cycle-rail integration in this country has failed to keep up with the increase in the number of people and the quality of service that has been achieved on the rail network. Instead of trying to force cyclists off trains at every opportunity, we should encourage them to use trains by providing better parking and flexible carriage space, or cycle hire at major stations. I have spoken today as chair of the as all-party cycling group and have tried to take an overview of the problem, so I have not addressed particular issues in my constituency, such as the inadequate planning at Farringdon to cope with Crossrail, or Kings Cross and St Pancras or Highbury Corner. I would have liked to have time to draw the House's attention to some of the outstanding examples of good practice, such as the great work at York station. Although I have taken the mickey out of Scotrail, I wish that other train operating companies were more like it.

Northern Rail and Merseyrail should also be mentioned in dispatches. There are experts out there, and I hope that the Department will take the time to learn from them, and that this summer's policy publications will provide a framework whereby more than just voluntary codes and supportive gestures are offered to cyclists using the rail network. If there were only two messages I could give to the Minister they would be to beef up the franchise agreements on cycling and to force Network Rail to take cycling seriously now.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Martin Linton) on securing this important debate. I have two bicycles: one in London for commuting to and from the House of Commons, and one in York. I take my bikes on the train between London and York, usually when a major service is needed. I am sure that there are people in London who do excellent servicing of bikes, but when one finds a good provider, one tends to stick with him, and that is what I have done. My supplier for major servicing of bikes is in York.

Because I use two stations, I can compare and contrast. There is no doubt that facilities for cyclists are a great deal better at York. We have not 1,000 parking places—unless the railings that people tie their bicycles to are included in addition to parking stands—but 450. Waterloo is one of the busiest railway stations in the country and deals with 480,000 passengers a day, but I am told that it has only 200 parking spaces for bicycles. The station is run by Network Rail, which is bidding for authority to manage York station. I would rather see the station’s management rest with the operator of the east coast main line service. The current operator, GNER, has invested heavily in the station for cyclists and other purposes, and it has a strong commitment to its flagship station.

If Network Rail is serious about its bid to take over York, it should be serious about improving cycling provision at all its stations, including York, because although 450 spaces may sound a lot, it is not enough. Sometimes, it is difficult to find somewhere to park my bicycle because the racks are full, despite GNER adding 100 or so extra spaces every couple of years. The cycle parking area is conveniently situated for GNER trains to London, but not for daily commuters from York to West Yorkshire. Whoever runs the station in future should put some cycle parking racks there.

Cycle hire is also available at York station, although it is rather expensive compared with the cost of hiring bicycles at railway stations in the Netherlands. Nevertheless, it is available and I congratulate Europcar, which operates the concession. There is also secure overnight storage for cycles, which people pay for, and that highlights the security problem. My bicycle is tatty and old enough not to be attractive to thieves, but some people have bikes that cost hundreds of pounds, and sometimes more. They need to be kept secure, so security for cycle parking at stations is as important as the provision of cycle parking.

Other things need to be changed at York in addition to the amount of cycle parking. We have a good network of cycle lanes and paths in and around York, but they do not connect directly to the station. It would be relatively easy to connect to the station, because one of the cycle paths runs beside the River Ouse, which is almost next to the station. There should be collaboration between the station manager, Network Rail or the east coast operator, and City of York council to make that connection.

Turning to the White Paper, will the Minister consider introducing a common system for booking? Cyclists who use trains are confused, because each train operator has a different system. Some require reservations, others do not; some charge, others do not; some take a large number of cycles, others will not; and some let cyclists take their bicycles on the train during rush hour, while others do not. When the railways were privatised some 14 years ago, one criticism of the privatisation plan was that it would lead to fragmentation. One area of fragmentation is the range of different services that different train operators provide for cyclists, and I hope that the White Paper will propose a common regime.

When a rolling stock company or anybody else designs a new railway carriage, they should aim from the start to meet the needs of cyclists as a matter of standard practice. As part of the brief for the east coast main line refranchising, would-be franchisees must trial and prove in-service some new trains, which will replace the InterCity 125 rolling stock, one of the fleets of trains in use on the east coast line. I welcome that brief, but I ask the Minister whether the design for the new fleet of trains has examined how serviceable and usable they will be for cyclists.

I have had the same problem as my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew). I, too, have found it difficult to get my bike into the guard’s van on an inter-city train and return to my carriage during the time that the train is stopped at a station. The difficulty with GNER’s current trains is that one has to wait until a member of staff arrives with a key to unlock the guard’s van. They have to wait while one secures one’s bike, they relock the van, and then one has to return to one’s carriage. It is a cumbersome and labour-intensive way of loading and unloading bicycles, and the new fleet of trains ought to be more easily accessible to cyclists.

There ought to be more provision for bicycles in the guard’s van, too. With better design, one could fit in many more bicycles. There would be fewer occasions on which cyclists were turned away because all the available storage space in the guard’s van had been taken. The same points apply to commuter trains. My hon. Friend the Member for Battersea has pointed out that if there were a reasonable number of folding seats on commuter trains, in off-peak times it would be possible simply to wheel on a bicycle and to hold it during a short journey from one station to another. It is not a solution for inter-city trains, but it is clearly possible for commuter trains. I should like the White Paper to stipulate bicycle accommodation in the design and commissioning of all new passenger rolling stock.

Northern Rail is, to its credit, the first UK operator to set up a proper cycle users’ forum and to produce a cycling strategy. It is an important step forward. However, it is a shame that other train operators have not followed suit, and it should be a requirement of all train operators.

I had a puncture recently on the Strand. It was late at night, I had been to the theatre and I wanted to repair the puncture at home in Victoria. I do not know what the law says about taking bicycles on buses, but very nicely, the bus driver let me take my bike on the bus, which saved me wheeling it for half an hour until I got home. I do not know whether he was bending the rules, but since more and more buses are designed for buggy and wheelchair access, one ought to be able to take one’s bicycle on buses, too.

I wrote to the Minister a few weeks ago about the White Paper. I hope for a positive reply to my letter, and I hope for a positive reply to this morning’s debate.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Battersea (Martin Linton) on securing this very interesting debate, and I congratulate the other Members present on their important contributions. I was particularly interested in the contribution of the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young), who reminded us that in 32 years, not an awful lot has changed with trains and bicycles.

I do not intend to repeat what other Members have said, particularly as they know a great deal more about bicycling and rail than I do. However, I shall make a few suggestions. I am aware that the Minister is a cyclist; indeed, shortly after he was appointed to his current post, the first event that he and I attended was the national cycle-rail awards.

We all accept that the policy that was written by the Strategic Rail Authority and adopted several years ago is not working. There are more than 30 rail operating companies, but there is no clarity or uniformity. People are not encouraged to use bicycles to travel to railway stations, to put them on the train or to use them when they arrive at their destination. The policy must be rewritten urgently, and I agree with the suggestion from the hon. Member for Battersea that a UK cycle forum should be established. One of its first tasks should be to ensure that there is a uniform policy.

The Department for Transport is reviewing many regional and national networks. The review has recently been extended to include the provision of parking and CCTV at rail stations. I have read the document for Greater Manchester, and in the rail utilisation strategy, proper plans have been drawn up to ensure adequate parking and CCTV at our rail stations. I put it to the Minister that one immediate extension that he could make to the strategy would be to ensure that the review included provisions for cyclists.

I accept and understand that the number of bikes that can be accommodated on today’s heavily overcrowded trains will be strictly limited. I understand CTC’s wish to increase the number of bikes that can be accommodated on a train, but the number is likely to be limited. However, if we can develop policies so that people can leave and hire bikes at all main railway stations, we will encourage more people to travel by bike and unite bikes with rail travel. The White Paper is an opportunity to include that policy, and the ordering of additional carriages is an opportunity to ensure that it is built in.

Earlier this year, my hon. Friend the Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr. Carmichael) asked the Minister about the Department’s assessment of local transport plans’ inclusion of cycling. As expected, the response was that all local authorities are expected and encouraged to include cycling as part of their plans. That stops at the railway station. There is no point encouraging local authorities to develop cycle routes and get more people on bikes if there is nowhere safe for cycles at major transport interchanges. That point was brought home to me last week at Rochdale station. I bumped into someone who had left their bike for a few minutes and returned to find that it had been nicked during that time. We will simply not encourage people to travel by bike to stations if there is no secure storage.

The debate is about rail and cycle integration. That is the correct terminology. I hope that the Minister will take hon. Members’ comments on board and that the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire will not have to wait another 32 years before we see some progress.

I welcome this important debate, which was excellently introduced by the hon. Member for Battersea (Martin Linton). In her role as the chairman of the all-party cycling group, the hon. Member for Islington, South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) was right to commend cycling as healthy and environmentally friendly and, often, as the easiest way of getting to our destinations or the railway station.

In the course of my research for this debate, I found that there are an estimated 22 million bicycles in Britain and that an estimated 60 per cent. of the population live within a 15-minute ride of a railway station. However, the proportion of all rail journeys that start with cycling, as opposed to car, bus or walking, is only 1 per cent. Internationally, that figure is extraordinarily low. The Department for Transport has stated in a number of policy documents that it wants cycling to be integrated with public transport. The rail operators say that they are keen to encourage cyclists. A number of lobbying campaigns, such as the London Cycling Campaign, grownupgreen and others, have pushed the need for bike-rail integration in particular.

How can we make our rate of 1 per cent. of rail journeys starting with cycling more akin to the international norm? The hon. Member for Battersea talked about the rate in other countries and rightly mentioned Denmark, with 35 per cent., and the Netherlands, with 38 per cent. Even Germany has achieved 15 per cent., which is a relatively new and modest movement. A number of other hon. Members who have spoken broke the analysis into two parts. First, how do we encourage more people on the journey to and from the station? Secondly, how do we get more facilities for cyclists on trains?

Unfortunately, the journey to and from the station has become a problem in a number of instances. As a local councillor before becoming a Member of Parliament, I remember Transport for London saying that it would introduce measures to encourage cyclists to get to stations. Unfortunately, many of the processes have not been undertaken with proper consultation. For instance, TFL proposed a 20 per cent. increase in my constituency, but it was then told that that was unrealistic and that the modal shift was more likely to be 3 or 4 per cent. Also, TFL forgot, first, that its great idea was a contraflow cycle lane up the middle of the Broadway, which quickly became known colloquially in Wimbledon as the wall of death and was never introduced. Secondly—and most importantly, as a number of hon. Members have mentioned—was the failure in the plan to provide secure cycle parking places at Wimbledon station. Those were the obvious reasons why that plan failed. I am therefore pleased to see that the operator and TFL have had another go since, and that there has been an increase in the provision of cycle parking at Wimbledon station.

Cycle access to stations is clearly space-efficient, too. We live in a country with a high density of population. Car parking is always likely to be restricted, so the more that we can do to make cycle parking at stations available, convenient and secure, the better. The key point is security. Several hon. Members have talked about cycle theft, including the hon. Lady. In many cases, cycle parking seems to be about just putting a rack of stands outside the station. That is simply not good enough. Why should cyclists place one of their most precious assets on a rack of stands outside a station where there is no security?

If cycle parking is to be done properly, it must be protected outside stations by CCTV or, more properly, it should be in a secure area or a locked room within the bounds of the station. The simple provision of racks is not enough. It will not satisfy the cycling lobby and I am sure that it will not satisfy the Minister, either. Equally, as my right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young) mentioned in his example of Waterloo station, the racks should be convenient. Cyclists should not be penalised by having to walk miles and miles to collect their bikes. The whole point is that if we are to encourage more rail journeys to start with cycling, we must make it easier for cyclists so to do.

I have been particularly struck by what is included in the local transport plans. Should not safe cycle routes to stations be considered essential prerequisites in those plans? The Minister will of course be aware of the Sustrans “Safe Routes to Stations” initiative, which involves developing safe and direct routes that link town centres, business districts and residential areas with stations, and give cyclists and walkers priority over traffic. The initiative also involves converting flights of stairs to runways, which the hon. Member for City of York (Hugh Bayley) mentioned, so that steps at stations are easier to overcome. The Sustrans campaign aims to upgrade 30 stations a year. It is a laudable scheme and we should support it. Indeed, it has support from the Government, local authorities and the rail industry.

However, can we not do something to ensure that that initiative is speeded up? One way to do that would be to encourage local authorities to include those proposals in their local transport plans. Will the Minister be able to give some indication today of what the Government intend to do to further the increase of cycling to stations? Will the Government make some statements in their announcement on the high-level output specification or in the White Paper, which are due in the near future, on how they might encourage local authorities, Network Rail and the rail operating companies to write into schemes that cyclists and their parking should be protected at stations? Might the Government also consider prescribing that provision in franchise renegotiations or, as I have suggested several times before, in the next round of funding associated with the local transport plan phase 2 or the transport innovation fund? I look forward to the Minister’s response on that.

Several hon. Members have already mentioned the cycle hire schemes that are available, which we should also encourage. Cycle hire schemes in this country have suffered previously from a lack of trust and, frankly, from theft. The onset of mobile technology has made schemes both practical and practicable on rail journeys and in cities. Anything that we can do to encourage local authorities to place such schemes alongside city car schemes should also be encouraged, and I hope that the Minister will give us some encouragement on that.

The journey to the rail station is only one part of the journey. If we are to see more bike-rail integration, we must focus on the second part of that, the facilities on trains for cyclists. If we are to be honest, the current reality is that cyclists are seen almost as a nuisance. As has been said in a number of contributions, many of the TOCs have banned cycles on peak services. Also, the design of many—but not all—modern rail carriages has reduced space for bikes. What we need to see from the operating companies and the rolling stock companies, in conjunction with the Government, is a change in attitude, as well as a change in practice.

That is actually quite easy to achieve. I cited the example of Germany earlier. Less than 10 years ago, Deutsche Bahn actively promoted and encouraged what it called the bike-rail option. The company set up a bicycle hotline to answer questions about cycling, rail travel and reservations and introduced a complete “bike and Bahn” procedure and website, which provide information on which services carry bicycles. Interestingly, the company has in the past 10 years doubled the number of bikes carried on trains per annum. It has also required new rolling stock to carry more cycles. The same is true of the Swiss railway company SBB, which was the first in the world to produce a rail-cycle co-ordinator, and that is key.

A number of TOCs recognise the needs that we are discussing. The train operator One, formerly Anglia Railways, has had a comprehensive pro-bike strategy for the past decade and has increased the number of people using bikes. There has been approximately a 15 per cent. use of bike rides in East Anglia. That is consistent with one or two of the international examples: management persistence and the appointment of a project manager so that cyclists have dedicated services and know where they have to go.

One is by no means the only TOC to have done such a thing. If we want further integration of bike and rail services, the key is the provision of information from the TOCs. What services carry bikes, and where are the spaces? What can be reserved? The appointment of a bike-rail co-ordinator by the TOCs would be a sensible, small measure that would make serious inroads into the problem. The issue could be addressed easily with little financial consequence.

As has been stated, the big challenge for the railways is that of capacity. However, that does not mean that cyclists’ interests should be forgotten. Modern train design has tended to leave relatively little space dedicated for cyclists. The hon. Lady cited the example of the new class A on South West Trains services; only recently, I used it with one of my cyclist constituents and was impressed by it. We need to recognise that in future negotiations the design and conditions of the carriages need to be cycle-friendly and cycle-dedicated. I hope that the Minister will discuss what he is doing to force ongoing discussions with TOCs and ROSCOs to ensure that any new carriage orders will take that on board.

Finally, I should like to mention the laudable safer cycling campaign launched by the Evening Standard. Clearly, there has been a huge increase in cycling in London since 2003, but still only one fiftieth of London journeys are made by cycle. If we consider that only 1 per cent. of those are journeys to the railway station, we see what a small percentage that is and what more could be done. I was particularly encouraged that in its campaign, the Evening Standard isolated the issue of bike-rail integration, which we are discussing this morning. It made the point that adequate bike parking was needed at railway stations. I hope that in its articles on safer cycling in London, the paper will make as big an issue of the need for safer cycling and secure cycling places at railway stations as it has of the need for manning stations in the evening and other campaigns. That would be a huge step forward in London, and I commend the Evening Standard on its campaign and wish it well.

To encourage bike-rail integration and increase the number of rail journeys that start on a bike, we need the three s’s: safe routes to stations, secure parking at stations and spaces on trains available and dedicated to bikes. That should be the underlying principle. I commend the hon. Member for Battersea on having secured this fascinating debate and look forward to the Government’s response to the issues that have been raised.

I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Martin Linton) for initiating this debate and giving me my first opportunity to speak in the House on this part of my remit. There have been many debates in this Chamber on the rail side of my remit, and I hope that today’s debate will finish with a more consensual and friendly mood than some of those previous debates have.

I shall begin by referring to comments that have already been made. My hon. Friend talked eloquently about the case for improved rail-cycle integration. He mentioned the need for wheeling ramps at stations. I trust his judgment that that would be a relatively cheap innovation at stations. I understand his cynicism in anticipating a negative response from Network Rail. I intend to seek a response from the company and shall keep him and other Members present informed of it. I accept that such ramps seem a fairly straightforward—and, I hope, cheap—solution to the problem that my hon. Friend raised.

However, my hon. Friend equated the need for capacity to carry cycles on trains with the needs of wheelchair users and parents with prams. I hope that he will forgive me if I suggest that that argument is difficult to make for various reasons. I would not say to a wheelchair user that he or she had the choice of whether to bring their wheelchair on a train. However, it is arguable, although not in every case, that those taking their bikes on a train do so as a matter of choice. I do not mean that as a point of principle or policy, but I hope that my hon. Friend will at least recognise that the circumstances are different and not immediately comparable.

I do not say that the two sets of circumstances are socially or morally equivalent, merely that there is an equivalence. Often disabled people do not catch a train if they are not confident that they can get their wheelchairs on. Parents of young children will not catch a train unless they can be certain of getting the buggy on it. It is also true that many who want to cycle to the station, take their bikes on the train and cycle to work will leave their bikes at home if they cannot be certain that there will be a place for them on the train. There is an equivalence in that sense: each of those groups is dependent on space on the train to be able to make their journeys.

I agree with my hon. Friend’s point and am grateful for that clarification.

Is my hon. Friend aware that the mobility of some people is restricted, given that they find it difficult to walk and easier to get around if they can use a mixture of train and bike? They can cycle further than they could ever walk. I appreciate that such people are a tiny minority, but bikes are a mobility aid for them.

That is why I deliberately qualified my comments and said that someone who cycled would not in every case necessarily have the option of not cycling.

Like the hon. Member for Rochdale (Paul Rowen), my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea talked about the need for a national, uniform policy on cycle-rail integration. My hon. Friend said that for a start all TOCs should be forced to accommodate at least 10 bikes—per train, I imagine. I shall come back to that. He also talked about the need for a cycle-rail forum. I assume from that that he is to a certain extent unhappy with the work being done by Cycling England, with the train operating companies, on behalf of the Department for Transport. I am very satisfied with how Cycling England is operating and shall be happy to comment later on the progress that it has made.

I am delighted that the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young) is present. I regularly see him coming up Millbank on his bike of a morning as I pass in my ministerial car; that is more a confession than anything else. The right hon. Gentleman said that the paradox was that I seemed to have more control over train operating companies than my predecessor had over British railways when they were nationalised. As a former Secretary of State for Transport, the right hon. Gentleman is informed about many areas of rail policy, but I caution him not to believe everything he reads in Conservative central office press releases. The influence that I have over train operating companies is certainly far less than that which Rail Ministers—or indeed Sports Ministers—had over British Rail in 1975.

The right hon. Gentleman talked of the need for a cycle challenge fund. Many of the outputs that he would anticipate from such an innovation are already being achieved through the cycling demonstrating towns that Cycling England is promoting. I am happy to say more about that later.

My hon. Friend the Member for Islington, South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) has talked extremely passionately on the subject, not only in the House but to me over coffee in Portcullis House on a number of occasions, and I listen carefully to what she says as she is extremely knowledgeable: she is not only a cycle user but chair of the all-party group on cycling. I look forward to joining her and other colleagues on the annual Westminster cycle run, which I think will be next month. She mentioned that Southeastern Trains has decided to ban all cyclists from its trains during the Tour de France. That was raised with me on Friday by a member of the Cyclists’ Touring Club. I understand that that is not actually the case and that Southeastern Trains—I am prepared to be corrected—was approached by the organisers and asked to lift its existing restrictions on cyclists, and that it refused to accede to that request. Without commenting on that decision, I suggest that that is not the same as introducing a new ban on all cycles during the Tour de France.

My hon. Friend might want to clarify the point, but she criticised First Capital Connect for installing new bike parking at stations that already had CCTV coverage. She suggested that perhaps the Department for Transport should have specified the locations for the new cycle parking and went on to express concern about the increase in bike crime. I do not have an in-depth knowledge of First Capital Connect’s policy, but it seems sensible that if any train operating company is going to try to combat the increase in cycle crime and cycle theft, it should install new cycle parking where it is most secure. It seems that the best place would be in areas that were already covered by CCTV.

I agree absolutely, and I agree that simply installing a cycle rack is not sufficient. My concern was that the contract with the Department seemed somewhat random: the company was given a lump sum of money and told to introduce a certain number of cycle parking places and it was left to it to decide what standard of parking to have and at which stations to introduce it. That was the point that I was making—the contract did not appear to have been agreed in any strategic way. It could be criticised as a case of simply, “Let’s tick that box; we have provided that amount of cycle parking.”

I understand my hon. Friend’s point. I am more comfortable allowing train operating companies to make their own operational decisions about where cycle parking is best placed. I have nowhere near the depth of knowledge that First Capital Connect does, for example, about the level of demand for cycle parking at any of its stations. I accept that my hon. Friend’s concern is genuine.

My hon. Friend asked about the HLOS—the high level output specification, for the uninitiated—which will be announced in July. The HLOS is specifically about high level outputs, so it will not talk in detail about policy to support the amount of money that the Government will spend over 2008-14. However, alongside the HLOS we will publish a 30-year rail strategy, which will discuss some of the issues about rail and cycle integration about which my hon. Friend is concerned.

My hon. Friend the Member for City of York (Hugh Bayley) talked about the design of new rolling stock, and of course the Department is involved in the design and delivery of the new inter-city express programme. It is at a very early stage at this point, but I will take what he has said back with me. He talked about bikes on buses, and I am afraid that I will not be able to illuminate him very much on that point. I am delighted that the bus driver was able to bend the rules—I suspect that he was bending the bus at the same time. My hon. Friend mentioned that he had been at the theatre, and I am intrigued to know which theatres in central London have bike parking. That seems an excellent innovation.

The hon. Member for Rochdale inadvertently misinterpreted the comments of the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire, I think. I do not think that the right hon. Gentleman suggested that in 32 years nothing has changed, which is what the hon. Gentleman thought that he said. I am sure that the right hon. Gentleman was being far more post-ironic.

The hon. Gentleman suggested, as other hon. Members have, a uniform policy on cycling. My hon. Friend the Member for Battersea suggested the same thing. We have 20 or more rolling stock companies, a number of different types of rolling stock—inter-city, commuter and everything in between—different capacity challenges at different parts of the network and different areas are served, whether they are urban, suburban or rural. It would therefore be incredibly difficult, even if the Government were so-minded, to impose a standard access policy for cycle-rail integration throughout the network. I shall have to disappoint colleagues from both sides of the House—the Government do not plan to enforce a uniform policy—

Will the Minister give way?

I have four minutes left, and so I hope that the hon. Gentleman will forgive me if I try to make some progress.

The hon. Member for Wimbledon (Stephen Hammond) talked about local transport plans and safe cycle routes to stations. The Government encourage train operating companies to work closely with highways authorities to ensure that that is exactly what happens.

I know from my postbag at the Department, as Minister for both cycling and rail, that many cyclists are passionate about the subject and we are working hard to try to integrate such modes of transport. I want to take the opportunity to confirm our overall cycling policy. Let me first establish what that policy is, because that will help to put our bike and rail policy into context.

Many people have an interest in cycling whether they cycle now or not. Most of us have cycled at some time—since becoming the Minister with responsibility for cycling, as the hon. Member for Rochdale said, I have been seen on a bike on a number of occasions. I am not sure that I would go quite as far as to say that I am a cyclist, but I have certainly been seen on a bike. As you can see from my badge, Mrs. Humble, I successfully passed my stage 3 Bikeability course a number of weeks ago. I encourage all hon. Members to do so, particularly the hon. Member for Wimbledon—of course, he is not the cycling spokesperson for his party, but perhaps he will encourage his shadow colleagues to take it up. I am more than happy to organise that for him and to arrange for the media coverage.

The Government want to encourage people to cycle more, but how do we turn non-cyclists into people who will consider using a bicycle for short journeys? The basic advantages of cycling are clear and have been set out in the debate: convenience, health, cost, the effect on the environment and enjoyment. Put simply, cycling contributes to a better quality of life and, importantly, improves one’s fitness and health while one simply undertakes regular commuting—it involves no expensive fees or trips to the gym.

The Government are committed to reversing the decline in the number of cycling trips—40 per cent. of all trips are under 2 miles, and in many cases they could be cycled, particularly in the case of trips to school and work. Good work is being done in London, where Transport for London reports an 83 per cent. increase in the number of cyclists. I want, too, to pay tribute to the Evening Standard campaign. Whatever criticisms the Evening Standard has of TFL, and those issues are worth debating, TFL has done a tremendous amount in the past few years to provide that step change—to use a pedestrian-friendly phrase—to encourage more people to get on their bikes. It is good that we are now in a political environment where a politician can say to people, “Get on your bikes”, without being lambasted for it.

Good work is also being carried out by Hull, York, Bristol and Brighton. Brighton is of course one of our six cycling demonstration towns. If we are to attract people out of their cars and on to two wheels, we have to make cycling as safe, easy and as convenient as possible. That also applies to bike and rail journeys. That is why we have given Cycling England—our delivery and advisory body on cycling—a remit to see how we might better integrate bike and rail journeys. It will report later this year, and I am sure that we all look forward to seeing that report.

Some cycle commuters use their bike for only part of their journey to work, combining the bike with public transport, which mostly means a bike and rail journey. Such journeys are important as they allow the bike to be used as part of a longer journey—

Order. We must move on to our next debate.

I am grateful for the opportunity to raise the subject of caste and human rights in India with the Minister, who I hope will share many of my observations and thoughts. I say from the outset that I speak first and foremost as a friend of India, with huge affection and respect for its people, culture and history and a profound sense of optimism and excitement about its future and emerging role on the global stage.

I have had the privilege to visit this amazing country on numerous occasions, including a 10-day visit there last year with the Conservative parliamentary friends of India during which we benefited from wonderful hospitality from the Ministry of External Affairs and the Confederation of Indian Industry. I have previously spoken in the House about the importance of our relationship and trade with India and the need for the UK to do far more to capture a greater share of India’s enormous increase in foreign trade.

I speak in a spirit of friendship and respect, but true friendship does not mean shying away from difficult issues, and caste-based discrimination is one such issue. What moved me to seek the debate was a trip to India in February with David Griffiths of the human rights group Christian Solidarity Worldwide. The purpose of the visit was to consider the issue of untouchability and to see what challenges and barriers Dalit communities face. Dalits are the so-called “untouchables”—the 170 million people who fall outside the four main Hindu caste groups.

I went in February with a critical mind, keen to separate the challenges common to many developing countries in south Asia from specific examples of discrimination or human rights violations resulting directly from caste-based identity. During my short trip I was presented with an enormous array of evidence of persistent, systemic human rights abuse on the basis of caste, which results in the life chances of Dalits being severely curtailed. It is a practice that goes back perhaps 3,000 years and continues in many forms in the world’s largest democracy, whose constitution and body of law does not just outlaw discrimination on the basis of caste but contains specific legislation to protect scheduled castes and tribes.

Where does one start? I should like to start in Khairlanji, a village in the state of Maharashtra. On 29 September last year the wife, daughter and two sons of Bhaiyalal Bhotmange, from that village, were dragged from their home and lynched in full view of neighbours and other villagers. After they were bludgeoned to death by a mob, their mutilated bodies were dumped in a nearby canal. There was strong evidence to suggest that the female family members had been gang raped and suffered extreme sexual violence before being murdered. That was never proved because of the inadequacy of the police response.

At the heart of that horrific case was a village property dispute fuelled by a toxic mix of caste-based jealousy and prejudice. The Bhotmange family was one of just three Dalit families in a village dominated by a higher caste. The attack on the family cannot be explained away as a typical village feud, and the negligent police response cannot be explained away as mere bungling. Caste goes to the very heart of that horrific and troubling case. The police took several hours to respond to the initial call by the father of the family, who reported his family as missing and reported a suspected murder. Their initial investigation was wholly inadequate. They arrived three hours later, at 10 o’clock at night, dismissed the claim and demanded a fee of 500 rupees for coming to the village. Despite the report of missing persons, no search was undertaken, resulting in the loss of what might have been crucial evidence including that of gang rape.

The following day, officers at the local police stations refused to register a case, and the incident received full recognition only when the body of the teenage daughter was recovered from the canal. Despite seeing evidence of an attack in the home, police dismissed the allegations as rumour. On the following day, when Mr. Bhotmange attempted to file a first information report at the local police station, the inspector initially refused to do so.

The Khairlanji killings and the woeful response by the local police and judiciary led to violent protests by Dalit activists, and in the past eight months the case has received significant international attention from the media and human rights groups. It has thrown a spotlight on an issue that many Indians feel uncomfortable talking about. On my visit to India in February, with the permission of the local police, I was taken to Khairlanji by a group of Buddhist activists who had helped to disseminate information about the massacre in the days afterwards. I later met Mr. Bhotmange, who is now living under police protection and fears that justice will never be served on those who murdered his family. Recent reports that I have read in the press about the progress of the trial do not fill international observers with confidence that all those complicit in the massacre at the end of last September will be punished appropriately. The case has become massively important.

Will the hon. Gentleman acknowledge that one of the great problems is that although caste discrimination is wrong under Indian law and there is theoretically complete protection for people, in reality there is no access to justice through either the police or the judicial system because few people are prepared to represent victims of caste discrimination? The authorities do not get the whole message all the way through, so it remains unsaid and unreported. It is a vile system.

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention and echo his sentiments. The problem is the huge gulf between the text of the legal documents that provide theoretical protection for Dalits and the implementation on the ground, which is wholly inadequate, particularly in rural areas.

I encourage the Minister to raise the Khairlanji case with the Indian Government and inquire about the progress of the trial. Of course I understand the sensitivities of inquiring into judicial proceedings in another country, but will he affirm that it is a case of international concern that he will raise at his next meeting with the Indian high commissioner?

Khairlanji was not unique in its core elements. In another landmark case, in February last year, a Dalit man named Bant Singh was brutally attacked after seeking justice for his daughter, who had been raped by higher-caste men in the village. He eventually secured the prosecution of three men, but the upper-caste men in the village then beat him in retribution.

In yet another case of retributive caste violence, which was reported in The Independent last November, a 15-year-old Dalit girl named Asha Katiya was raped by a higher-caste man from her village. She reported the incident to the police. Because she would not withdraw the claim she was burned to death in her bed. It is thought that the man whom she accused of raping her was responsible for her murder.

Official records show that the rate of atrocities against Dalits continues at about 26,000 a year. That figure is enormous but is unlikely to represent anything like the true extent of caste-based violence against Dalits. A seminal study last year, “Untouchability in Rural India”, found that in 28 per cent. of villages surveyed Dalits faced discrimination in entry into police stations and that in 32 per cent. they encountered discrimination in how they were treated in police stations. The testimony shared with me on my recent visit to India corroborates those statistics. Bhaiyalal Bhotmange told me that the tragic massacre in Khairlanji was initially dismissed out of hand by the local police. Other people stressed that Dalits face considerable social pressures from higher caste members in their communities not to register cases against them.

It is tragically true that women often suffer the brunt of caste violence, as happened in Khairlanji and to Bant Singh’s daughter and many others. Given the stigma associated with sexual abuse, it is highly likely that many cases go unreported. Sometimes the attempt to seek justice leads to further violence. Khairlanji is just one example of the systemic caste-based human rights abuse that still exists in India despite a constitutional and legal framework in which the manifestations of the caste system are abolished.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way. He is making a moving and telling speech, to which I am listening attentively. On his trip to India, did he come across any problems with anti-conversion laws? Given that the Dalits, the lower-caste people, are born into the system, they face discrimination from the moment they are born. One way they can get out of the system is to convert to a different religion, but in many states they are hampered in doing so. Did my hon. Friend manage to conduct any investigations into that aspect?

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. Yes, I did come across that issue. I understand that seven states in India at present have anti-conversion legislation either on the statute book or in the process of being passed. My hon. Friend is right to say that many Dalits seek to escape from their caste-based identity through conversion, often to Islam, Buddhism or Christianity, yet in numerous states they come up against the barrier of anti-conversion laws. I shall return to that point later in the discussion.

Our concerns involve not only caste-based violence. Dalits are also subject to the worst forms of labour exploitation as a result of their caste, and are particularly vulnerable to trafficking, sexual exploitation and bonded labour. In the UK, considerable attention has been devoted to those issues in recent weeks, following the bicentenary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. Bonded labour—debt bondage—is a massive problem in India. Although it was outlawed under the constitution and the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976, it is still widespread, with estimates of the number of people who are affected by it ranging from 10 million to 40 million.

One striking feature of the Indian caste system is the extent to which it overlaps with the practice of bonded labour, by which people are forced to work as security for a loan that they cannot repay in any other way. Bonded labourers are extremely vulnerable to exploitation. Entire families may be bonded, and debts may be passed down through the generations. The vast majority of the victims of bonded labour are landless Dalits whose susceptibility is heightened by poverty, exclusion from education and caste attitudes.

During my most recent trip to India, I visited a settlement near Hyderabad that is colloquially referred to as “pipe village”. It is populated entirely by the work force of an adjacent factory that produces concrete pipes, and around half of the families are, in effect, enslaved to the bosses of the factory through debt bondage. Each family of workers inhabits one of the discarded concrete pipes, most of which stand at approximately waist height. The village is isolated, there are few facilities for its inhabitants, and no education is available for the children. Water is provided, but the villagers told me that their electricity supply, which is mediated by the factory, was cut off last year on the grounds that it was intended only for lighting but was being misused by workers who wanted to use kettles and televisions.

The typical working conditions that the labourers face are extremely severe. Some of them described to me their experience of working alternate 12-hour day and night shifts for a daily wage of some 70 rupees, or approximately 80p. Obviously, they considered their working conditions to be extremely poor, and they described the poor safety precautions in the factory.

Human trafficking, which is often described as a modern equivalent of the slave trade, is another problem that we see in a new light when we look at it in the context of caste. I heard testimony from an activist in Nagpur who works among trafficked women in the state of Maharashtra. The situation was simply described as, fundamentally, “a Dalit problem.” In February last year, the Bihar-based non-governmental organisation Bhoomika Vihar found in a local survey that 98 per cent. of trafficked women belonged to Dalit communities, low castes or religious minorities, many of whom are themselves of Dalit background.

A closely associated form of exploitation of Dalit women and minors is the devadasi system of temple prostitution. Although traditionally considered a noble vocation, the experience of its victims is that it is a highly exploitative and degrading practice. Commonly, devadasis are minor girls who have been dedicated to a temple god. They serve as concubines to the priests and as prostitutes for temple users. They are often sold into prostitution after serving an open-ended tenure in the temple, and their children may suffer a similar fate.

India has several laws to prevent sexual exploitation, including the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1956, which specifically prohibits the procurement of any person for the purpose of prostitution. However, the implementation of such laws was described by the activists whom I met as being very weak indeed.

Millions of Dalits fall prey to those most severe forms of labour exploitation, yet a greater number still are blighted by the continued association of caste with occupation. The jobs that are specifically reserved for Dalits, who are, literally, the outcasts of society, are the most menial, dangerous and, frankly, disgusting jobs. There is no escape from their occupation, which is dictated by birth. According to the most recent official figures, nearly 700,000 Dalits in India have the occupation known euphemistically as “manual scavenging”—the cleaning and removal of human excrement with the hands. Again, women are the worst affected.

The problems are worse in rural areas than in urban centres, where the new India is being forged. Segregation is a reality of life for many Dalits in rural areas. The report that I referred to earlier, “Untouchability in Rural India”, states that in 73 per cent. of villages surveyed, Dalits cannot enter non-Dalit homes; in 64 per cent. of villages, they cannot enter places of worship; and in 48 per cent. of villages—nearly half of all villages in rural areas—they cannot use the same water source as non-Dalits, on account of their supposed polluting influence.

Perhaps one of the most alarming statistics is the one revealing that segregation is not absent among today’s young generation: in 39 per cent. of schools, Dalit and non-Dalit children did not eat together. During my trip to India in February, I visited the village of Garipalli in Andhra Pradesh, where I saw non-Dalit children refuse to eat the food prepared by Dalit cooks. That is a sad reflection of the pervasiveness of caste attitudes even among the generation of tomorrow.

The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination recently expressed concern that, despite the formal abolition of untouchability by article 17 of the Indian constitution, de facto segregation of Dalits persists, particularly in rural areas, in respect of places of worship, housing, hospitals, education, markets and other public places, and water sources. The committee urged the Indian Government to intensify their efforts to enforce the Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955, especially in rural areas, by effectively punishing acts of untouchability, by taking effective measures against residential segregation and segregation in public schools, and by ensuring equal access for Dalits to places of worship, hospitals, water sources and any other places or services intended for use by the general public. It is worth noting that an estimated 700 million people in India live in rural areas. The majority of the Indian population live in rural communities.

Against that backdrop of continuing caste-based discrimination, it is no wonder that Dalits are one of the groups that endure the worst socio-economic conditions in India. The estimated proportion of Dalits below the poverty line is 35 per cent. in rural areas, compared with 21 per cent. among other groups, and 39 per cent. in urban areas, compared with 21 per cent. among other groups. Those figures are based on the most recent large-scale national sample survey, which was carried out by the Government of India in 2000. The overall proportion of the population living in poverty was assessed as 35 per cent.—360 million people in total—according to the international definition of poverty, which is based on income of $1 or less a day.

Child mortality for those under five years old among Dalits is 83 per 1,000 live births, compared with 22 for the general population. In fact, on virtually any statistical measure of well-being that one may choose, the figures for Dalits are much worse than the national average.

I appreciate that the Minister is not responsible for international development, but perhaps he could shed some light on whether any of our aid to India is targeted specifically at Dalits, with the aim of closing the gaps between life outcomes for Dalits and those of the wider community.

Dalits experience violence committed with impunity, severe labour exploitation and modern forms of slavery, and discrimination in almost every sphere, yet escape from the shackles of the caste system is beyond the realm of imagination for millions of them. Freedom from the identity conferred on Dalits and low castes by the caste system is crucially important, and they have long seen the embracing of new faiths as a route for escaping from their identity. Of course, to say that is not to identify the caste system wholly and exclusively with the Hindu religion. It is practised by every religious group in India, including Muslims and Christians.

I recently met a well-respected Dalit activist, Dr. Kancha Ilaiah, who stressed to me that religious freedom is a vital right in the struggle for self-awareness and identity among the Dalit people, but that that right can be severely curtailed through legislation and social pressures. Dalits who embrace Islam or Christianity lose their eligibility for the benefits of the reservation policy that reserves certain jobs in the public sector for Dalits. State level anti-conversion laws are an increasingly prominent way of obstructing freedom of religion and are in force in seven states; further laws are expected soon. I would welcome hearing the Minister’s thoughts on the use of anti-conversion legislation in India. What discussions have he or his colleagues had with the Indian Government about such laws and does he think that they are compatible with the ideals and aspirations of the new India?

India is a beautiful and wonderfully diverse nation. It is also a truly remarkable liberal democracy. Human rights issues in India relate to a fundamentally different set of problems than those associated with the authoritarian regimes of Burma and North Korea. There is freedom to debate the issue of caste in India and an increasingly critical media respond to the new aspirations and values of young Indians. Earlier this year, a BBC World Service poll found that 55 per cent. of Indians think that the issues relating to caste are holding their country back.

Last December, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh became the first sitting Indian Prime Minister to openly acknowledge the parallel between the practice of “untouchability” in India and apartheid in South Africa. He described “untouchability” as a “blot on humanity” and added that

“even after 60 years of constitutional and legal protection and state support, there is still social discrimination against Dalits in many parts of our country.”

Opponents of that view in India maintain that, unlike apartheid in South Africa, the constitution in India does not endorse or tolerate any form of discrimination. Other Indians prefer to think that the situation facing Dalits is comparable to that faced by blacks 40 years ago in the southern states of the United States when, even though Supreme Court rulings had outlawed segregation, the reality of daily life for many was de facto segregation, barriers to advancement and continuing poverty.

When discussing possible remedies to the effects of caste-based discrimination in India we need to tread carefully and respect the fact that these are fundamentally questions for Indians themselves to resolve. However, I will put a number of questions to the Minister about what the British Government can do to assist the Indian Government and people in addressing this difficult issue. What assistance are we giving to organisations in India that represent and provide a voice for Dalits? Are we providing any specific assistance to organisations that are trying to raise the issue in India itself? What advice and assistance can we offer to help the machinery of Indian Government—the judicial system and the array of public services—to stamp out caste-based discrimination and to work more effectively for Dalits and those of lower castes? What encouragement and assistance can we provide to UK investors in India explicitly to recognise the plight of Dalits? How can UK companies build into their investment plans and corporate social responsibility plans a commitment to seeing their investments deliver real gains for Dalit communities?

At the end of March this year, the Conservative party’s human rights commission hosted a hearing at Parliament with Dalit representatives from India to take evidence on this subject. One of the strongest calls from that group of people was for greater English-medium education for Dalit children. In the new India, the ability to speak and write English is more important than ever, so what assistance can the Government provide to enable the expansion of English-medium education to Dalit children?

The nature of our relationship with India was described in a Foreign Office briefing paper as “strong, wide and deep”. Shared interests with India across many different fronts bind our two countries together: economically, commercially, strategically and environmentally—in the way that we try to tackle climate change—and through our shared language and history. Most fundamentally, we are connected to India through our shared humanity and commitment to freedom.

Will the Minister and his team make a commitment today that they will not allow a single opportunity pass them by to encourage our friends in the Indian Government to renew their efforts to end all forms of caste-based discrimination? I also ask the Minister not to let our common European position on India prevent us from raising the issue vigorously and on a bilateral basis. We should not let sensitivity about our colonial past prevent us from robustly raising the issue and we should not be fearful of undermining commercial and economic interests. As a good, critical friend of the Indian Government, we should offer whatever assistance we can to help stamp out caste-based discrimination.

I am hugely optimistic about India’s future, but we know that the societies that are likely to do best in the 21st century are those in which the conditions of freedom and social mobility are maximised. Human capital is India’s greatest asset and yet almost a quarter of the Indian population are held back by systemic discrimination, segregation and human rights abuse. Caste-based discrimination constrains the life chances of approximately 200 million people and must have no place in the new India.

In conclusion, I ask the Minister to express his strong commitment to working with the Government of India to challenge, not least through education, the persistence of a degrading and pernicious system that threatens the social stability and economic progress of India.

It is a great pleasure to follow the wonderful speech of the hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Mr. Crabb). I speak as an unpaid trustee of The Dalit Solidarity Network UK and regard myself as a critical friend of India. I am aware that millions and millions of Hindus in India and around the world, including the UK, object to casteism and consider that it entrenches discrimination based on work and descent. The hon. Gentleman mentioned that Dr. Manmohan Singh has recently likened casteism to apartheid and called it a “blot on humanity”. That is a significant step forward.

Hon. Members often discuss poverty in Africa, and rightly so. However, there are more poor people in India than in the whole of Africa. One of the main causes of poverty in India—although it is not the only cause—is casteism because it holds people back from development. Some of my points have already been raised by the hon. Gentleman in his excellent speech, but one aspect that was not mentioned has a huge bearing on the UK as an international power: it is what was said to me and other hon. Members when a group of Dalit leaders visited the House this spring. We were told that there is a significant risk of civil war in India unless the Dalit issue is addressed—and I do not say that lightly.

For the past 35 or 40 years there has been an incipient naxalite rebellion, particularly in the north-east of India. That rebellion is spreading because of the frustration of Dalits at their lack of life chances and with the daily discrimination, violence, poverty and rape that they face. A growing number of Dalits do not believe that those issues can be adequately addressed within the constitutional framework of India. I dearly hope that they are wrong. I do not believe that engaging in violence provides a tit for tat solution for the daily violence suffered by Dalits and I stress that that is not the way forward. However, I understand why, 60 years after independence and after a huge number of laws have been passed to address Dalit discrimination, a growing number of Dalit in India feel that the laws and the constitution are simply not working.

A civil war in India would be a disaster for India and its residents, but it would also be a disaster for other countries, including the United Kingdom, as we have close family and historic ties with India—it is the leaders of the Dalits, not me, who are giving that warning. I emphasise that they are not in favour of a civil war, but that they recognise the risk of it happening. The pot is starting to boil and things must change.

If we are honest, one of the many difficulties is that the rule of law in India is, to put it mildly, somewhat weak. The Dalit are excluded from enforcing their rights and victims of anti-Dalit action often find that the police will simply not investigate their complaint. If they do record it, they do not investigate it.

Education is part of the reason. Police officers must be better-educated perhaps than the average person in India, which means that it is harder for Dalits to become police officers. All too often—not all the time—the prevailing culture of the police is anti-Dalit. All the laws in the world giving people rights are almost useless if people do not observe them and there is no effective sanction for breaking them, which happens in India all too often.

Coupled with that is corruption, which is still far too widespread in India. Naturally, it is not confined to the private sector, but leaks into the public sector, including the police and judiciary. Dalits face another obstacle even if they manage to get the police to record and investigate an incident: in many parts of India, proceedings in the higher courts are still conducted in English. Owing to a lack of educational opportunities, the vast proportion of the overall Indian population are not fluent in English, but that proportion is disproportionately large among Dalits. The courts in their own country are conducted in a foreign language. That is most regrettable.

The lost opportunities for India’s economic development resulting from the blocked potential of hundreds of millions of Dalits can be highlighted by the example of one of my political heroes, who is well-known to my hon. Friend the Member for Islington, North (Jeremy Corbyn)—Dr. Ambedkar. He was born a Dalit—an untouchable—in 1893, but through patronage he became an incredibly well-qualified polymath in the social sciences, economics and law.

Dr. B.R. Ambedkar chaired the committee that drew up the Indian constitution, behind which he was the driving force. He had help, but effectively he wrote the constitution—certainly, he set the tone. Many of us in the Room have visited India—I have done so on two occasions. Across the country, one can see—rightly—statues of Dr. Ambedkar. He rose from his humble background to great heights. In 1956—the year of his death—he converted to Buddhism. He was frustrated after more than 50 years of trying to get his countrymen—principally, but not exclusively Hindus—to recognise and act against caste-based discrimination.

Hundreds of millions of people in India have that potential, but they do not receive the kind of patronage that Dr. Ambedkar was fortunate enough to have in his youth. They do not get to travel to America to study, or to London to become a barrister at the Inns of Court. They do not receive the same education. That affects UK businesses operating in India as well, because the pool of labour—often educated labour—from which they would like to draw is correspondingly smaller than it should be, owing to those blocked opportunities.

I pay tribute to companies such as Cobra Beer, headed by the noble Lord Bilimoria, which has tried to address that problem. In particular I pay tribute to Richard Stockdale, the chief executive officer of Lloyds TSB plc in India, whom I met in Mumbai and again when he came to London, partly in order to push issues concerning Dalits. Such companies should be encouraged by the Government to observe what are rightly—I think—called the Ambedkar principles, which were launched in London, last July, at a meeting of the London School of Economics. I had the pleasure to be at that meeting, along with Baroness Royall who was representing the Government.

I shall not read out all of the Ambedkar principles, but refer briefly to them, if I may. They state that companies should have an employment policy that reflects

“the unacceptability of caste discrimination”,

that they should develop

“and implement a plan of affirmative action, including training on caste discrimination”—

we would call that “awareness”—

and that they should ensure that they and their suppliers

“comply with all national legislation”.

I stress the word “comply”. The legislation exists, but too often it is honoured in the breach.

Fourthly, companies adhering to the Ambedkar principles should recruit fairly. Fifthly, they should take

“full responsibility for their workforce…including the supply chain”.

That is very important because globalisation, including in India, brings long supply chains with component manufacturers and so on, and too often the large corporation at the top of the chain is not aware of the employment practices further down.

Sixthly, a company should provide comprehensive training opportunities, particularly for Dalit employees, who all too often, owing to their position in society, have been denied them. Seventhly, a company should designate a senior manager to carry out those policies and—this is the tenth principle—appoint a specific board member for overview. Eighthly, there should be

“effective monitoring and verification mechanisms”

Most importantly, from the United Kingdom’s perspective, the ninth principle states that the company should publish an annual report on its progress so that UK businesses operate transparently in India and other countries and we know what progress is being made.

That is likely to affect UK businesses, not only now, but particularly in the medium term, if the growing demand in India for reservation in the private sector is met, which is possible. Currently, there is job reservation in the public sector for Dalits. We might call that affirmative action. It is to ensure, as far as regional state Governments and the Union Government in Delhi can, that the work force of public sector organisations are reflective of the population that it serves.

In the last 15 years, however, the proportion of the population covered by public sector reservation has been shrinking owing to privatisations. That has corresponded with India’s welcome economic growth, although sadly it is confined mostly to urban areas and has not extended to the 650,000 villages inhabited by 750 million people—one hopes that it will get through. Of course, the private sector is growing without reservation, but the public sector, where that protection exists, is shrinking.

I acknowledge the value of the reservation system in the public sector. However, does my hon. Friend acknowledge that one of the problems has been that although the reservation system has led to employment for some Dalits, anti-Dalit attitudes remain among high-level management throughout the public and private sectors? Great difficulties remain for Dalits in breaking into other non-reserved jobs in the public sector. Obviously, if the same thing applied in the private sector, we might have the same problem.

I agree wholeheartedly with my hon. Friend. Often there are difficulties with anti-discrimination legislation, although I support it entirely—we have it here. The Government, on the basis of the democratically expressed will of the people, can try to set the tone, but in every workplace, household, village and so on, there will be different manifestations as to how deeply that goes. One has to press for a change in attitudes. The legislation sets the tone, but my hon. Friend is right that in too many workplaces there is a ceiling. I do not know whether one would call it a glass ceiling in India, but there is a ceiling, and cold-shouldering and similar things are going on.

If it comes to pass that there is reservation in the private sector, that will affect UK business. I have mentioned some good examples, but to the extent that UK business has not already done so, it should be gearing up for that; otherwise it will come as a tornado for those businesses and they will find it very difficult to adjust.

With regard to the Ambedkar principles, I have the honour to be a member of the Select Committee on Trade and Industry. We visited India in March 2006 as part of our preparation for a report on trade with India. I pay tribute to my fellow Committee members who were on that visit for the patience that they accorded me when I persistently asked business leaders and others whom we met about caste-based discrimination in India. I have to say something about the body language and sometimes the verbal response of those of whom I was asking the questions, none of whom I strongly suspect was a Dalit, although I do not know, partly because I did not know their names sometimes. Their response was too often negative—as though I was asking them an unseemly question such as how often they washed their underwear. People should not ask such questions, whether they are foreigners or people within India—that was the tone of too many responses that I received.

In the Trade and Industry Committee report, published in June 2006, we said in recommendation 30:

“We recommend that UK companies operating in India should be careful not to break the letter or spirit of the laws protecting Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Preferably, they should take note of the ‘Ambedkar Principles’, launched by the International Dalit Solidarity Network, and look carefully at their recruitment and employment policies in India.”

May I say to my right hon. Friend the Minister that I was very pleased with the Government response to the report? That response, published last October, referred to Baroness Royall going to the launch of the Ambedkar principles in the UK and mentioned certain big corporations in the UK that are supporting the Ambedkar principles, including Lloyds TSB, which I have mentioned, Standard Chartered, HSBC and Barclays. The Government response also stated:

“Under the UK Presidency the EU-India joint action plan was agreed, identifying key areas in which the EU and India agree to work together including human rights. The British High Commission in New Delhi has also discussed the issue of caste discrimination with the Indian National Commission for Minorities and National Commission.”

I am pleased with that response. As supplicants such as myself always do, we want more, and I will come to that, but the UK Government are starting to move on the issue, which affects not only hundreds of millions of people in India of course, but people in places such as Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Japan, parts of Africa, Yemen and so on. I am referring to discrimination based on work and descent. However, we are focusing today on India. I pay tribute to what the Government have done thus far, but we need to recognise, if you will allow me a little latitude, Mrs. Humble, the risk of caste-based discrimination in the UK.

There are thought to be 50,000 Dalits in the UK. We do not have numbers because we do not collect figures. However, the Dalit Solidarity Network-UK, of which I am a trustee, published a report last July called “No Escape—Caste Discrimination in the UK”. I have passed that to my hon. Friend the Minister for Women and Equality and she is looking into it, because as well as trying to encourage India and assist India as much as we can to move on from caste-based discrimination, which to say the least is an affront to humanity and is an historical anachronism, we need to have a look at our own backyard to ensure that we do not import caste-based discrimination into the UK.

When we are unifying legislation through a single equality Act in the UK under the Commission for Equality and Human Rights, based in Manchester, we should consider having caste-based discrimination as one of the threads of discrimination that that unifying legislation, which will be very welcome, should address. Were we to do that, we would set a tone around the world, because I think that we would be the first country outside India to be dealing with the matter, in respect of what is very much a minority population in our own country, and I think that it would improve relations with India.

Many powerful people in India support caste-based discrimination, but growing numbers of powerful people in India oppose it, and that is the case from the top down. The Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh, to whom we have referred, is, as his name suggests, a Sikh. Guru Nanak founded Sikhism as a religion of equality, and one of the founding tenets that he and the subsequent nine gurus espoused, was to be against caste-based discrimination. Sad to say, that has not worked out fully, although there is much less caste discrimination in Sikhism. Dr. Manmohan Singh comes from that background. As an Indian, he will of course be aware of the issue of caste, but as a Sikh he will have a particular angle on that, so although the United Kingdom and Her Majesty’s Government always have to be careful about how they seek to transmit views, and about the views that they transmit, to a sovereign foreign country, which India happily has been for 60 years, we should also be aware that some of the nuances mean that to some extent we may be pushing at an open door, and that will be in the interests of our country, as well as in the interests of hundreds of millions of people in India.

I shall finish by posing some questions, in time-honoured fashion, to the Minister who will reply to the debate. First, what encouragement are the UK Government giving UK business to ensure that UK business, when operating in India, observes the spirit and the letter of the laws of that country on caste-based discrimination? Secondly, how frequently does the UK raise with the Government of India the issue of Dalits?

Thirdly, what steps do the UK Government take to seek to ensure that aid in India, whether it is what one might call routine aid or emergency aid, is not distributed on a caste basis? There were widespread reports after the hurricane in Orissa, the earthquake in Gujarat and the tsunami, for example, that aid from abroad, including from the UK, was not distributed fairly. A major reason for that—I can tell my right hon. Friend that there is very good evidence of this—was not any action of the UK Government, but inaction. Again, when it comes to education, it is often the case that Dalits have less education, not because they have less potential but because they are blocked, as I have termed it. People distributing aid tend to be higher up the social scale and therefore more likely to give in to caste discrimination, perceiving it to be in their own interests and in the interests of their family and friends to preserve the social hierarchy and ensure that aid goes higher up the social scale rather than to Dalits at the bottom of the social scale. What steps are we taking to try to prevent that from happening?

Fourthly, do the UK Government agree with the resolution passed by the European Parliament, in January I think, on the human rights situation of the Dalits in India? Fifthly, will the UK Government assist with English-language education programmes in India, as asked for by Dalit leaders, if the Union Government of India ask for such support? Clearly, it is a delicate issue. As a former colonial power, we cannot swan in and say, “We’re going to teach you all English”—that would be an unacceptable affront. However, can my right hon. Friend assure us that the UK Government would step in to assist with English language training—within our means, of course—if the national Government in Delhi asked us to do so?

I finish by welcoming the cross-party consensus that we are starting to build on this issue. My hon. Friend the Member for Islington, North has been toiling on a long and lonely furrow in seeking support in the House, although the same is not true of support outside the House. Our numbers are expanding, and to my knowledge there are now three MPs—myself, my hon. Friend and the hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire—who are very much seized of the issue. I hope that we can get other right hon. and hon. Members to take it up and encourage the Government to do even more to address this ongoing, abhorrent atrocity in India and other countries.

I commend the hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Mr. Crabb) for securing the debate and for what he said. By way of a declaration of interest, I should say that, like my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Rob Marris), I am a trustee of the Dalit Solidarity Network, as well as its honorary chair. I hasten to add that no fees are paid for either of those positions; indeed, if anyone wants to make a donation to the network, that would be extremely welcome and well received.

As my hon. Friend said, a small number of hon. Members have regularly taken up this issue, including myself, my hon. Friend and the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Andrew Stunell). I take this opportunity to invite the hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire to join the Dalit Solidarity Network and attend our meetings in the future. What he has done today has been of enormous help to the network’s cause, and I thank him for that.

I have been involved in the issue for some time, and it is hard to describe to anyone who has never witnessed it the way in which Dalit people are so grossly discriminated against, not only in India—although it is the main place—but in other countries. It is also hard to describe the sheer verve and exuberance of Dalit campaigners in India, who are doing their best to overcome the most appalling discrimination and suffering.

I have had the great fortune to go to India on a number of occasions and I was a guest speaker at the World Social Forum in Mumbai in 2004. The event was preceded by a Dalit rights march throughout the country, which was designed to be equivalent to the great marches that Gandhi organised in the 1930s. When the marchers finally arrived at the former factory where the World Social Forum was being held, there was a fantastic sense of joy and exuberance among the Dalit people, not only because they had achieved something by having the march, but because, in the confines of the World Social Forum centre, they could be treated like normal, decent human beings like everybody else. That experience is not part of the daily life of Dalit people in India or elsewhere.

As part of the World Social Forum, Rodney Bickerstaffe, the former general secretary of Unison, Rev. David Haslam, who has done fantastic work on the issue, myself and many others addressed a Dalit rights conference. We were joined by the vice-chancellor of the university of Mumbai, who is himself a Dalit. Again, there was a sense not only of injustice, but of joy at the achievements of Dalit solidarity campaigns around the world and at the fact that people in other places recognised exactly what was going on.

It is hard for anyone outside to understand just how huge the issue is. At some point, everyone in this room will have campaigned against apartheid in South Africa. It was an evil and pernicious system if ever there was one, and many of us spent an awful lot of time campaigning against it. Fortunately, it is now behind us in legal terms and, largely, in reality. However, for at least 260 million people around the world—mainly in India—the caste discrimination system is alive and kicking. It discriminates from cradle to grave, and the fact that it is so discriminatory means that that journey from cradle to grave is unfortunately very short for most Dalit people. Discrimination exists in education, health, employment, daily life and, of course, the legal system.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, South-West said, the Indian constitution was drafted by Dr. Ambedkar, a Dalit, who later renounced the Hindu religion and adopted Buddhism as his faith. Article 14 provides for “equality before the law” for all citizens. Article 15(1) refers to non-discrimination on the basis of caste and gender. Article 21 deals with the right to life and security of life. Article 46 relates to the protection of Dalits from

“social injustice and all forms of exploitation”.

The Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 does much the same. It is therefore clear in Indian law that caste discrimination is completely illegal, but it happens in every aspect of life there.

Caste discrimination is also illegal under the terms of the universal declaration of human rights of 1948. Article 6 states:

“Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.”

Article 7 states:

“All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law.”

The universal declaration was followed by the international covenant on civil and political rights and the international covenant on economic, social and cultural rights of 1966, the international convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination of 1965, the international convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women of 1979 and the declaration on the elimination of violence against women of 1994.

However, those of us who attend the United Nations Human Rights Council—formerly the UN Commission on Human Rights—will find that as soon as one wishes even to raise the subject of discrimination on the basis of work or descent—in effect, discrimination against Dalit people—one is met with the most ferocious objections from Indian delegations. When the subject was raised at the millennium summit in Durban, there was enormous opposition from the Indian Government even to discussing it. It is not anti-India or anti-the Indian Government, but pro-human rights to demand that everyone be treated equally before the law, wherever they are on this planet. That, surely, is what the universal declaration of human rights is all about and what it was designed to achieve.

Would my hon. Friend, like me, find it difficult to support India becoming a permanent member of the UN Security Council until it started fundamentally addressing this huge human rights issue?

It is hard to see how one could believe that a country should be on the Security Council permanently to defend human rights around the world if it was clearly doing nothing like enough to address caste discrimination in its own society. My hon. Friend makes a strong point.

As my hon. Friend and others have said, the problem exists not only in India. If I may crave your indulgence for one second, Mr. Conway, I should like to mention the related issue of Dalit discrimination in Nepal. Last year, in this very Room, I hosted a representation by Dalit women from Nepal and colleagues from India about Dalit discrimination. For those women, who had been abused and forced to work as prostitutes, and whose lives had been destroyed by the very fact of their place of birth as Dalit people, it was an incredible achievement simply to be able to present their case in this hall in the Palace of Westminster.

We owe it to those brave women, who have stood up against caste discrimination, and to many others to do our best to do two things. First, we must ensure that the Government do all that they can to support measures to eliminate caste discrimination. Secondly, we must get the message across to the Government and lawmakers in India and other places.

The Hague declaration on the human rights and dignity of Dalit women was made in November last year. It pointed out the vast numbers of people involved, and made a series of demands, including identifying the millennium development goals with the cause of Dalit women, and placing the focus of international development on the elimination of caste discrimination. It made recommendations to the international community, the United Nations and the European Union. Recalling that India, like many other countries, is a signatory to the universal declaration of human rights, it called for a reduction, as quickly as possible, in the large gap in living standards between Dalits and other people, particularly women and girls. It called on the

“United Nations Human Rights bodies and mechanisms, the United Nations organisations, intergovernmental institutions and organisations...to give full recognition and effect to the content and the recommendations of the Hague Conference on the Rights of Dalit Women”

and on the

“international community to express its outrage against the caste-induced, systematic practice of untouchability and atrocities against Dalits in South Asia in general and against Dalit women in particular”.

It continues by calling on the Human Rights Council to address the issue; perhaps the Minister will be able to help with regard to the UK Government’s doing all that they can to ensure that that happens.

In parenthesis, one of the problems with the UN Human Rights Council, as with several UN agencies, is that too often we hide behind a bland Euro-formula, in which the European Union speaks for all 25 member states, but the reality is that there is hardly any verve in the contribution, for fear of offending any one of the 25. I wonder whether it might be an idea to opt out on this occasion, and say something a little stronger, if that is possible.

The International Labour Organisation’s annual report on fundamental labour rights specifies adherence to the policy of no child or forced labour, non-discrimination in employment, and the right to association and collective bargaining, but for Dalit people in India the idea of being active in a trade union and ensuring that their employment rights are complied with and wage demands met is a difficult one. I hope that, again, our representatives at the ILO will ensure that those demands are met.

In 2002, the UN Committee on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination drew substantial attention to the issue of caste discrimination, and suggested that the state parties should take several courses of action, including to

“identify those descent-based communities under their jurisdiction who suffer from discrimination”.

That is a requirement on all member states, including Britain, not just India. Secondly, it suggested that they should

“consider the incorporation of an explicit prohibition of descent-based discrimination in the national constitution”.

It is very unclear what part of British law would apply if it could be argued that descent-based discrimination was happening in this country. I say that without hostility towards the Government; however, issues of discrimination against Dalit people do arise in this country. As well as calling on the state parties to

“review and enact or amend legislation to outlaw all forms of discrimination”

the committee demands a comprehensive national strategy to carry out the actions identified.

To conclude, discrimination against Dalit people in India is an outrage of the first order and must be dealt with, so pressure must be put on the Indian Government. Following the raising of this question with the Department for International Development it has been made clear to us that there is no discrimination on the basis of caste or descent associated with any British aid going to India. I am very pleased about that and ask for as much aid as possible to be directed particularly towards education in Dalit communities. It seems that discrimination is strong throughout, but particularly in education.

My hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, South-West helpfully quoted the Ambedkar principles. The Dalit Solidarity Network has done a great deal of work in promoting them and hosted a conference last year on private sector involvement with them and the attempt to encourage foreign investors in India, who are now quite substantial, and substantially involved in employment, to adhere to the principles. That initiative is supported by the Amicus trade union, Lloyds TSB and others. It will be helpful if the Government also give full support to that approach.

We all today applaud the abolition of the slave trade 200 years ago, and at this very moment Kofi Annan is about to speak on that subject. It was an incredible achievement, although unfortunately slavery went on for several decades after that. However, we must ask hard questions. When a Dalit child is making carpets or bricks, or working in whatever other horrible occupation they are forced into, denied education, health care and childhood, is not that slavery in another form? We should not be too self-congratulatory. We have a long way to go to ensure that the UN declaration of human rights of 1948 means something to the people for whom it was intended to mean something—those at the bottom of the pile, suffering centuries of discrimination and the horrors that go with it. We must do all that we can.

I am grateful to you for presiding this morning, Mr. Conway, and grateful to see the Minister for Europe here this morning. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Mr. Crabb) on his comprehensive, mature and knowledgeable introduction to the debate. Although it is not particularly well attended this morning—and we particularly mourn the absence of any Liberal Democrat representation—the subject is an important one. The fact that it has been raised again in this Parliament shows that the issue is increasingly recognised on the international stage and that the Indian Government will increasingly have to act to deal with the dreadful problem that hon. Members have described.

There is not much time and I want to give the Minister plenty of time to reply so I shall make my remarks brief. My hon. Friend the Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire chaired the Conservative Human Rights Commission earlier this year, as he mentioned in his speech, and, to show what I think should be the tone of the whole debate, I shall quote his public statement:

“We conducted the hearing very much in a spirit of friendship with India, recognising the long-standing and special relationship between our two countries. But we would not be a true friend to India and its people if we did not raise these very serious issues.”

He is right: a true friendship involves telling one’s friend when they have got it wrong, and the Indian Government do need to take action over those serious problems.

India is, nevertheless, one of the world’s largest democracies. It is reckoned, by Freedom House, to be in the free category. It allows public assembly and has a relatively impartial judiciary, particularly at senior levels, and, above all, it has a relatively free press. Without that free press it would not be possible to report some of the atrocities happening to Dalits, such as the Khairlanji incident that he referred to. I think that that free press will eventually bring about change in the system for Dalits.

I was a little concerned about the remarks of the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Rob Marris). Violence is never the way to bring about change. Change should be brought about by peaceful means and campaigning, and people in a democracy and those who believe in democracy should respect that.

The plight of Dalits continues to be a serious concern. Amnesty International has termed India’s caste system the hidden apartheid, as many hon. Members have mentioned this morning. The Indian caste system has historically prevented the Dalits, or untouchables, as they are called, from doing any but the most menial jobs. Today’s speeches have highlighted the very real sense of discrimination against Dalits that still exists, particularly in rural areas. Dalits continue to face socio-economic discrimination, abuse and sometimes torture and indeed death, simply because of their family descent. As I said in an intervention, those people are born into the system and discriminated against from the very time that they are born. That is quite unacceptable.

It is estimated that the system affects up to a fifth of the population in India—so up to 200 million people. Most of those affected are based in India, but not all of them, as we have heard from the hon. Member for Islington, North (Jeremy Corbyn), who met Dalit representatives in Nepal—as, indeed, did I when I went there last year.

The United States Department of State 2006 human rights report notes that:

“Social acceptance of caste-based discrimination remained a problem, and for many, validated human rights violations against persons belonging to lower castes.”

The Select Committee on Foreign Affairs heard testimony that

“25-30 per cent. of the population that is ‘dalit’…is, despite positive discrimination, extremely poorly educated, still fighting contemptuous treatment and generally confined to sanitary work, agricultural labour and construction sites.”

Amnesty International estimates that at least two thirds of bonded labourers in India are Dalits. It says that redress is limited, and that

“dalit communities continued to be victims of violent backlash when asserting their rights”

under the law. Amnesty claims that as well as facing problems in seeking redress for abuses from other castes in their communities, Dalits may have problems accessing the criminal justice system.

As I said earlier, in an intervention on my hon. Friend, there is a problem with the anti-conversion laws. Dalits who seek emancipation by converting to a religion that does not have a caste system face tough punishments. As Christian Solidarity Worldwide states in its 2006 annual report:

“This is obstructed by so called anti-conversion legislation, which has become closely associated with the political agenda of Hindu nationalist groups”.

Article 17 of the Indian constitution states that the practice of untouchability is abolished and forbidden, and the Indian Government introduced the Protection of Civil Rights Act as early as 1955. That Act was followed in 1989 by the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act and in 1995 by harsher penalties for breaching the law, but the abuses still continue.

There is good transatlantic support for ending this discrimination, and that is hardly surprising given India’s position as the United States’ largest trading partner and key regional ally. On 3 May, Republican Congressman Trent Franks of Arizona introduced a concurrent resolution

“Expressing the sense of the Congress that the United States should address the ongoing problem of untouchability in India”.

If India wishes to become one of the world’s foremost international powers, it must address the dreadful stain on its character of Dalit discrimination. Our Government have made positive statements about India’s application to become a permanent member of the Security Council. I agree with the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West that if it really aspires to that position, it must do something about this dreadful problem.

I end by asking the Minister to reply to one or two short questions. What representations have the Government made to the Indian Government on this matter? What Department for International Development projects are targeted specifically at eliminating Dalit discrimination in India? What action has the Minister taken to bring this issue to the attention of British companies that trade with India? We have heard about some of the more enlightened, large companies that trade with India which adopt better practice, but many do not. Finally, what action are the Government taking to raise this matter in international forums? The Minister for Trade places great store in the new Human Rights Council. Will the Government strongly pursue this issue at that council, so that together, on an international basis, we can put more pressure on the Indian Government to do something about one of the greatest human rights abuses that remains in the world today?

Human rights remains at the core of the agenda of the Department of Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, and we should seek to expose and end all abuses of human rights, wherever they are committed. The debate is both timely and relevant, and I thank the hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Mr. Crabb) for securing it. I also congratulate all hon. Members who have spoken in the debate: they gave a series of extremely good speeches and I shall do my best to maintain the standard that they have set.

A caste system is one in which an individual’s occupation and marriage prospects are determined by his or her birth. Such discrimination perpetuates social exclusion and keeps large numbers of people in poverty. India has what is, perhaps, the best-known example of a caste system, in which up to 250 million Dalit and tribal communities traditionally form the lowest layer of Indian society. There is a debate as to whether any caste system is, de facto, automatically, an abuse of human rights, but I shall not enter into that debate today. Some argue, on the contrary, that the caste system can provide a sense of community. Speaking entirely personally, I must say that I have difficulty in accepting that argument.

I hope that we in this House and the people of India and the wider international community can all agree that we oppose all forms of discrimination, whether on the grounds of race, religion or of descent—as the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has labelled caste-based discrimination. On that note, my hon. Friend the Member for Islington, North (Jeremy Corbyn) raised a very interesting point about the position in UK law regarding discrimination based on descent, to which I shall give further thought.

As we have heard, the Dalits in India suffer multiple forms of discrimination including racism, social exclusion and poverty. For centuries, they have been segregated from mainstream society and their employment options have been limited. Shortly after independence, the Indian Government made efforts to redress that age-old discrimination. The Dalits are no longer known as the untouchable caste. The concept of untouchability was abolished in 1950 in the Indian constitution, which also prohibits discrimination on the grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth.

Also in 1950, the Indian Government introduced a series of practical measures, through the Constitution (Scheduled Caste) Order, to reverse the Dalits’ historical position. As scheduled castes, Dalits have quotas of reserved places in the central and state governments and in employment and educational establishments. They also have preferential access to low-income housing and agricultural land. Dalits have produced remarkable men and women throughout Indian history, and it is worth noting that since independence both an Indian President and Chief Justice have been Dalits.

The positive discrimination in India is not without its critics, but that must be set against the fact that discrimination against Dalits remains endemic throughout the sub-continent. Whilst we welcome the legislation that is in place and the initiatives that the Government of India have to address caste-related issues, we remain concerned about reports of continuing discrimination against Dalits. One example that has been highlighted today is the Kharirianji massacre, and our high commission continues to monitor that case closely.

There are further practical problems with the practice of bonded labour. The word “dalit” does not mean untouchable, it means downtrodden, and the majority of bonded workers are Dalits. They are not the only victims of that contemporary form of slavery. Bonded labour was legally outlawed in India in 1976, but it is still widespread. However, the Indian Government are taking steps to tackle the problem. They have established regional vigilance committees, they provide grants to rehabilitate bonded labourers and last year they banned the use of child labour for domestic help.

As India moves towards becoming a global player, it is even more important that it continues to focus on its international obligations. It has signed and ratified all six of the core UN human rights treaties except the convention against torture, which it has signed but not ratified. Its election to the UN Human Rights Council last year was a clear indication of the importance that it places on human rights. We welcome its active role on the council and are keen to maintain an active dialogue with it on human rights issues both within and outside India.

India has ratified the international convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination, and we therefore trust that it will take on board the committee’s recommendations that discrimination based on descent should form part of its reporting obligations. Throughout the EU, there is regular dialogue with Indian officials on human rights. The issue of minorities was discussed at the last EU-India human rights dialogue in December 2006, at which both sides agreed to continue discussions on this issue. In March, a seminar was held in Delhi that focused on the discrimination against minority groups in both the EU and India.

Several hon. Members have asked about the UK’s role. We remain determined to address these issues through a combination of political dialogue and practical support. Our high commission in New Delhi has raised our concerns about discrimination against Dalits and other minority groups with the Indian Government and will continue to do so. High commission staff have called on the National Human Rights Commission, the National Commission for Minorities, the National Commission for Women, the National Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes and various state level authorities.

I was also asked about the role of the Department for International Development. It has worked with the Indian Ministry of Health and Family Welfare to develop targets for Dalit and Adivasi women and children in its child health programme and supports similar initiatives in education. The UK Government also fund a number of programmes to tackle the issue of bonded labour. We are helping civil society organisations in the 100 poorest districts to address discrimination against Dalits and to educate marginalised groups on their entitlements. We also support the Andhra Pradesh rural livelihoods project, which offers credit to poor families in drought-prone areas and sets up village-level sub-committees to address issues of bonded labour, child labour and child marriages.

The issue of UK companies investing in India has been raised. We want them to work to combat caste-based discrimination, and it is important that they take their responsibilities seriously. The UK Government are dedicated to promoting the corporate social responsibility agenda in India and in all other markets around the world. We have actively encouraged UK companies to adopt an approach that recognises the wider contribution that businesses can make to communities.

Will the Minister tell us whether UK Trade and Investment, which is part-sponsored by the Foreign Office, takes any specific measures to inform companies that are trading with India about the Dalit problem?

I cannot answer that question specifically, but, obviously, UKTI certainly emphasises corporate social responsibility, which includes the whole question of discrimination and the way in which our major companies have a responsibility to those whom they employ in other parts of the world.

Technically, the employment of Dalits or other minority groups by UK companies is governed by local laws and regulations. We have rightly heard that the law in India is clear about employment discrimination on the basis of caste. The UK will continue to encourage the Government of India to enforce rigorously those laws and seek to ensure that minority groups have an equal opportunity to share in the growth of the Indian economy.

The hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire, like all of the hon. Members who have spoken, was right to draw attention to this issue in the House. The UK recognises that there are still areas of concern regarding the treatment of Dalits and other minorities in India. While we welcome the Government of India’s commitment to addressing human rights issues, we will continue to raise concerns with the relevant authorities and look for further opportunities to work with non-governmental organisations to tackle them.

I speak on behalf of Bill McKnight and other Royal Navy personnel who served in the Suez campaign from October 1951 to October 1954.

First, I apologise to the Minister that, having said that I would give him my notes prior to the debate, I could not do so because of the bank holiday. However, the issue has been much discussed and I am sure that there will be no surprises in my speech.

In 2002, the Government asked the Committee on the Grant of Honours Decorations and Medals to review whether the Suez campaign was worthy of the award of the general services medal. A sub-committee was set up under General Guthrie to investigate that. It did so, and after consideration agreed that an award should be made. The Sub-Committee issued a paper setting out the detailed criteria for the award of the medal and the covering letter in 2003 referred to the

“Paper in respect of Suez, which has been cleared by the Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of State for Defence.”

One cannot get much higher than the Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of State for Defence.

The paper is very detailed, which is important, and went into a number of areas. Paragraph 7 detailed the length of service, paragraph 8 the geographical area, paragraph 9 the eligible personnel, paragraph 10 the qualifying period, paragraph 11 the type of award that should be given—the general services medal—and paragraph 12, on aggregation, says, “Service can be aggregated.” Paragraph 15 summarises that by saying in sub-paragraph a that the award should be for personnel

“on the posted strength of a Ship…for 30 or more days for operations…within 3 miles of the Egyptian coast”.

Sub-paragraph d says:

“Service may be aggregated and any day, part of which was spent as defined above, will count as a qualifying day.”

Those issues are important, and I remind the Chamber that they were cleared by the Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of State.

In December 2002, the sub-committee reported to the HD committee, concluding that the case had been made and that the qualifying service should be 30 days. It did not mention that the service should be continuous or aggregated. Its conclusion was merely that

“The sub-committee therefore recommends that those who served in the Suez Canal Zone between 1951 and 1954 for a period of at least 30 days should be eligible for the award of a Canal Zone clasp to the GSM (for Royal Navy personnel the 30 days should have been spent ashore, not at sea).”

That is important.

In October 2003, Command Paper 5999 was approved by the Queen and presented to Parliament. Paragraph 4 covers the length of service and makes a major change. It states:

“Qualifying service for each of these categories will be thirty days or more continuous service in the Suez Canal Zone.”

That is a dramatic change from the original papers and has been questioned ever since by Royal Navy personnel, so it is important to look at the nature of the operations.

The Mediterranean is a short sea; it is not an ocean. Mediterranean fleet ships were able to leave the canal zone and return to Malta for refuelling and replenishing. The commander-in-chief at the time was Lord Mountbatten, who was very active and wanted his ships to have plenty of sea time. He did not want his ships tied up in port longer than necessary. The national archives file WO216/900 states that Lieutenant-General Sir George Erskine, commanding officer of British troops in Egypt, said:

“The operation of the Suez Canal by the royal Navy in spite of opposition, was of major importance”.

That was due to the Egyptians withdrawing all their labour. A further quote is:

“In order to keep the Port Said, Adabiya, and Fanara (the latter being two purely military ports) in a position to meet the basic military requirements, steps were at once taken to supply essential service from service sources. This was greatly helped by stationing of H.M. Ships at Port Said, on Lake Timsah and at Suez”.

Clearly, the Navy was an important part of the whole operation. Royal Navy personnel, as is normal, undertook shore, transport and escort duties in areas subject to conflict and ambush.

My constituent, Bill McKnight served on HMS Glasgow and his service was not atypical with seven stays in port not on patrol, totalling 72 days, the longest three being of 18, 20 and 27 days, in total 240 per cent. of the aggregate criteria, but none reached the 30-days criteria.

There are two critical questions. Is there a precedent for the 30-days or for aggregation? In other words, is the request usual or unusual? Clearly, it is usual. The point has been made in a number of areas. In Palestine, the Aden peninsular, the gulf of Suez, South Arabia, Northern Ireland and Lebanon the period was 28 or 30 days, not necessarily continuous. Thirty continuous days is not a requirement for a clasp to be awarded.

The second question is: why was “aggregate”, as approved by the Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of State for Defence, changed to “continuous”? It has been much more difficult to find the answer to that. A Cabinet Office letter of 20 July 2005 says that

“it was clear from the sub-committee’s discussions that their intention was that there should be a requirement for continuous service and the published qualifying criteria were drafted accordingly.”

That is the criteria in Command Paper 5999. The letter continues:

“The requirement for Royal Navy personnel to serve for 30 continuous days ashore was to ensure that naval personnel would not qualify for the award while serving at sea in the Canal Zone theatre of operations, i.e. off shore, or for service not in direct support of activity in the interior of the Canal Zone.”

That was covered by the criteria on the geographic area, and the answer was rather feeble.

The MOD letter, reference D/US of S/TW 3015/06/L/sb, from Tom Watson to the Solicitor-General, my hon. and learned Friend the Member for North Warwickshire (Mr. O'Brien) on 27 June 2006 gave a further excuse when it stated that it was

“inappropriate for the Royal Navy or the Royal Air Force to have any less rigorous eligibility criteria”

than people in the Army who bore the brunt of the service. That is a canard. At no time has anyone suggested that the service qualification for Royal Navy personnel should be any different from that for any other service. All that we are asking for is that the whole period should be counted as aggregated service rather than continuous service.

A letter to Mr. L. Golder, MBE of Bolton on 30 May 2006, reference D/DS Sec/1102/10, answers the question about who and attempts to say why. It says that

“the word “continuous” was inserted by Mrs. Catto instead of “aggregated”, as it reflected the decision of the chairman and the sub-committee.”

No it did not. It was clear that the declaration was “aggregated” and that that criterion was approved by the Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of State. An earlier Cabinet Office letter on 16 June 2006 to Bill McKnight said:

“The sub-committee report recommended that service of at least 30 days would be required. It did not indicate whether eligible service must be continuous or aggregate...The HD committee, on the advice of the sub-committee, with agreement from MOD, and as confirmed by Lord Guthrie, took the decision to set the qualified criteria at 30 days continuous service.”

That is quite different from the documentation.

A further letter from the Cabinet Office to the Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Kennedy on 30 June 2006 said that the report by the sub-committee

“did not contain and was not intended to contain a detailed account of the eligibility criteria.”

It continued:

“No Ministry of Defence staff members had been present at the discussions of the sub-committee; they were therefore not aware that the sub-committee had agreed that the service should not be aggregated but continuous.”

There is clearly a problem with the differences between the two.

There are two broad reasons for opposing the change from continuous to aggregate service. First, there are the differing criteria. I do not think that anybody wants them, so we do not need to discuss them any further. As I said, it is an absolute canard, and frankly, I hope that the Minister will not bother dealing with the issue. There is also the issue of the reflection of the advice from the sub-committee’s discussions. And secondly, the sub-committee’s criteria were not detailed.

The only evidence that we have is a written submission from the sub-committee, which clearly says that service should be aggregated. It cannot be clearer: four words make it clear that service should be aggregated and not continuous. If the criterion was to be continuous service, why did no one say so? It is not a subtle change or a minor issue; it diametrically opposes Command Paper 5999. It is as different as black and white, as up and down—as aggregated and continuous. The only evidence that has been presented to me is hearsay versus clear documentation, and in a court of law documentary evidence would take precedence over hearsay.

The evidence in the document that the sub-committee produced and sent to the committee is also more detailed than in Command Paper 5999. As I have said, the Command Paper was approved by the Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of State for Defence, and changes were made—apparently without their knowledge. Perhaps we are being asked to believe that the Secretary of State signed it on the understanding that continuous meant aggregate and that aggregate meant continuous. I cannot believe that. It is stretching credulity too far to believe that the Secretary of State and the Chiefs of Staff did not understand that the documentation meant aggregated and not continuous service.

Why was the Secretary of State not informed of the re-documentation and the changes that were made? Were the Chiefs of Staff informed? I do not know; I have not found any evidence to say that they were or were not informed. If they had been notified, would they have approved it? I doubt that they would, because of the nature of the Mediterranean fleet and of the operations in the Mediterranean sea. The change would have meant that, in effect, every single Royal Navy sailor serving in the Mediterranean sea was denied the opportunity to add a clasp to the general service medal for Suez canal service.

I do not expect my hon. Friend the Minister to say that he can make a change today; I know that that is not how things work. However, I ask him to consider the case very closely. He should not deny the case today; he should have a clear look at it, and consider all the papers. I am sure that he has more available to him than I do. He should also try to obtain the answers to my questions. If he is not satisfied that the case has been made, and if he is satisfied that the Royal Navy and all other service personnel who served in that theatre for 30 days’ aggregate service should be awarded the clasp, he should ask the HD committee to review the case. Only then will the sailors feel that their service for our country has been properly recognised, and that the dangers that they were placed in have been understood. They will then be able to take their place with pride alongside their brothers in arms in the Royal Marines, the Royal Air Force, and the Army, who served our country in a difficult and dangerous time.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan (Mr. Turner) on securing the debate and providing me with an opportunity to speak about this emotive issue. My hon. Friend is a strong supporter of veterans and he takes great interest in veterans’ issues. He has done so for a number of years. I hope to address the issues that he has covered today, but I may not be able to do so in the time that I have available, so I shall write to him about the issues that I do not cover during my response.

It may be helpful if I explain the current position. In July 2002, following protracted representations from veterans who had served in the canal zone in the 1950s, who said that their service had not been recognised by the issue of a medal, the Government set up a sub-committee of the pan-departmental committee on the grant of honours, decorations and medals, known as the HD committee.

Since the end of the second world war, the HD committee has maintained the policy that it will not consider the belated institution of awards and medals for service given many years earlier, because it cannot put itself in the place of the committee that made the original decision, which would have been able to take account of the views of the Government and other interested parties at the time of the decision. In response to requests for the institution of belated awards, the committee has made it clear on a number of occasions that it will not change that policy. If an exception were to be made for one case, it would be almost impossible to refuse to reconsider every other claim for the retrospective institution of an award or medal.

The case for the Suez canal zone, however, was considered unique. Although there was some contemporary evidence to indicate that a request for a campaign medal had been submitted, there was no conclusive evidence to prove that the matter had been considered at the time. As a result, and in view of the exceptional circumstances, the HD committee established a special, independent sub-committee to look specifically at the case for a medal for service in the canal zone in the early 1950s.

The sub-committee was chaired by General Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank, a former Chief of the General Staff and former Chief of the Defence Staff. Lord Guthrie’s sub-committee also included Field Marshal Sir John Chappie, also a former Chief of the General Staff, Air Vice Marshal Keith Filby, and Sir Max Hastings, the noted military historian.

The sub-committee, in reporting its conclusions, recommended that those veterans who had served in the Suez canal zone between 1951 and 1954 for a period of at least 30 days should be eligible for the award of a canal zone clasp to the general service medal. With regard to Royal Navy personnel, the sub-committee indicated that the 30 days should have been spent ashore, not at sea.

The sub-committee’s report did not contain, nor was it intended to contain, a detailed account of the eligibility criteria. The main focus of the report was on the justification for the institution of a new medal. The report merely indicated that the sub-committee recommended that service of at least 30 days would be required. It did not indicate whether eligible service must be continuous or aggregated. The report, however, drew a parallel between the circumstances surrounding the award of a medal for service in Palestine, which required 28 days’ continuous service, and the Suez medal question.

Subsequently, the full HD committee discussed the question of eligibility for the Suez award. On the advice of the sub-committee, as confirmed by Lord Guthrie and agreed by the Ministry of Defence, the full HD committee took the decision to set the qualifying criteria at 30 days’ continuous service. The recommendations were duly submitted to Her Majesty the Queen, and in October 2003, the Government were pleased to announce that Her Majesty had graciously agreed to the institution of the canal zone clasp to the 1915 naval general service medal and the equivalent Army and RAF medal, the 1918 general service medal, to recognise service in the canal zone in Egypt between October 1951 and October 1954.

There are no contemporary lists of naval ships that served in the canal zone between 1951 and 1954. The decision was therefore taken that the assessment of “unit eligibility”—that is to say, “Was a ship in the zone, and if so for how long?”—would have to rely in the first instance on naval veterans applying for the medal. Once veterans began to apply, a list of potentially eligible ships was established. Using the list, it was possible to investigate whether the ship had been present in the canal zone.

Establishing whether individual naval personnel met the qualifying criteria was much more difficult. Neither naval records nor surviving ships’ records were found to be sufficiently precise. They had not been created to support applications for medals—certainly not some 50 years after the event—and available records did not specify whether ships’ personnel had served ashore in the canal zone. The decision was therefore taken that, providing it could be confirmed that a particular ship had been present in the canal zone for a period of 30 continuous days, and providing the applicant’s personal records confirmed that he was serving on the ship at the time, an assumption would be made that he had been subject to a similar degree of risk and rigour as personnel serving ashore.

The qualifying area was Port Said and Port Faud in the north and Port Suez in the south, or in the lakes or waterways of the canal between the ports, although not for ships in transit through the canal. An assumption was made that many naval personnel, whose ships were in the area, would have gone ashore on duty or for other purposes, and that when ashore they would have been as vulnerable as their colleagues in the Army and RAF.

It is probable—although it has not been possible to validate this—that some ships’ staff would also have been employed in an internal security role or on sentry duty, guarding their ships and other naval facilities and installations. Based on the applications received from naval veterans so far, the records of more than 140 naval units have been assessed. From that, it has been established that 30 or so ships meet the requirement of having spent 30 continuous days in the qualifying area.

The individual eligibility of naval veterans for the canal zone award has been assessed by the Ministry of Defence medal offices, initially at the Royal Navy medal office in Gosport and latterly at the joint-service Ministry of Defence medal office at Innsworth. I fully acknowledge that some veterans have indicated their disquiet that, in so far as the Navy was concerned, the 30 continuous days’ service was overly restrictive. Concern has been expressed that the deployment pattern of Royal Navy ships at that time was not fully taken into account when the qualifying criteria were under consideration, and that in some cases ships had limited capability to remain on station in the canal zone. The point has also been made that had the qualifying criteria been 30 days’ accumulated service rather than 30 days’ continuous service, more naval veterans would have been eligible for the award, as my hon. Friend has made clear.

Can my hon. Friend the Minister confirm that the membership of the sub-committee that considered the issue did not actually include any personnel with naval experience?

I can confirm that there is a range of people with military experience on the HD committee. I am not aware of anyone with naval experience who sat on the sub-committee at that time, but I mentioned Lord Guthrie, who is obviously a distinguished person who served the country as the Chief of Staff, and others. The selection of members to serve on the sub-committee is not a matter for the Ministry of Defence, as my hon. Friend knows, and the brunt of the service fell on the Army and the RAF in that case, as he also knows.

I recognise all those concerns. It is, however, a matter of historical record that the brunt of service in the canal zone fell on the Army and the RAF, whose people operated and lived in close proximity to the threat. Of course the Royal Navy made a worthy and important contribution in the canal zone; but it was the view of the HD committee, as advised and informed by experienced senior military officers, that a period of 30 days’ continuous service was appropriate to qualify for the award. I am sure that the Chamber will agree with me that it would be inappropriate for Royal Navy personnel to have any less rigorous eligibility criteria than their Army or RAF colleagues. My hon. Friend has made the point that he does not consider that to be the main issue, but it is worth re-emphasising.

It gives my officials no satisfaction to turn down applications for the medals. It may be appropriate at this point to quote Winston Churchill on the very issue of medals and awards. He said:

“The object of giving medals, stars and ribbons is to give pride and pleasure to those who have deserved them. At the same time a distinction is something that everybody does not possess. If all have it, it is of less value. There must, therefore, be heartburnings and disappointments on the borderline. A medal glitters, but it also casts a shadow. The task of drawing up regulations for such awards is one which does not admit of a perfect solution. It is not possible to satisfy everybody without running the risk of satisfying nobody. All that is possible is to give the greatest satisfaction to the greatest number and to hurt the feelings of the fewest.”

I understand entirely the disappointment of those who have not been able to receive the award. They feel passionately about the case that they have made, and my hon. Friend has made that point passionately, too. However, I should like to make it clear that the position in no way undermines the important contribution that people such as his constituent made to the conflict. We hold them in high esteem for their service to the country during a difficult time.

We have no plans at this stage to review the eligibility criteria for the award. I recognise that that will be disappointing, but I shall reply to my hon. Friend with details on one or two of the issues that he raised. However, at this stage I cannot hold out any hope for reviewing the eligibility criteria.

Order. As the hon. Member for Southport (Dr. Pugh) and the Minister who will reply to the next debate are here, it will be possible to move on without waiting until 1 o’clock. Therefore, when Members have managed to settle themselves into their respective places, we shall move on.

I apologise in advance for spoiling your lunch, Mr. Conway, and probably that of the Minister. It will not displease me if we do not take the full allotted time, but get straight to the point. I am glad to see the Minister here, because our careers have crossed in a very helpful way. He went from the health team in the Labour party to the transport team, whereas I passed the other way but on the Liberal Democrats’ side. He also knows my area—he has certainly visited it on a health matter and he has a personal connection with it. He also represents the seaside, so I could not ask for a better Minister on this occasion.

Under the old system of developing road schemes—it was long before my time, and probably long before yours, Mr. Conway—one simply sidled up to a Minister a few years before an election and emphasised the fact that one represented a marginal constituency. Road schemes then simply happened, through the whim and desire of the Department for Transport.

Fortunately, those bad days of patronage, skulduggery and political manipulation are obviously behind us. They were replaced by the epoch of the local transport plan, whereby passenger transport authorities were asked to put together schemes for road development and, sometimes, rail development in their area. The plans had a learning curve and schemes were graded as good or bad by Ministers, who scrutinised them and made announcements. LTPs were judged on an annual or sometimes triennial basis by the Government, and they were funded according to whether they reflected the policy flavour of the month or were well constructed, well argued for and seemed to deliver some of the benefits that they claimed.

There were extraordinarily wide variations in the quality of work done in LTPs by passenger transport authorities. Some, as supplicants to the Department for Transport, were genuinely deeply puzzled as to why their LTP had enjoyed so little success and received so few approvals to spend. Others were only too delighted to see the good efforts in their LTPs well rewarded. In my area, Merseyside passenger transport authority did particularly well on local transport plans. In comparison, just down the road, Lancashire county council did surprisingly poorly in terms of the amount of funding that it received, yet Lancashire probably covers a wider area than Merseyside.

Nowadays, we have a new system of regional prioritisation. Regional prioritisation is done by regional forums appointed by regional assemblies, yet without the essential element of regional government. I found out about the process relatively late, almost as it was occurring. As a member of the Select Committee on Transport, I was standing in for the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody) in a debate in this Chamber. I remember being surrounded by all sorts of experts, journalists and so on in the transport field, and breaking to them the news that regional transport schemes were being funded and were well advanced, and that they were proceeding in an almost secret, secluded fashion. Most people locked on to the schemes fairly late. They did not really recognise the process for what it was until it had more or less happened. That was the Government moving to a fairly fast time scale.

In a sense, one might see the regional transport forums as a positive development. There was a predefined allocation, apparently based on a relatively fair distribution of resources, on a per capita basis. Will the Minister confirm that? In respect of prioritisation, the process transparently has to be evidence-led. The company W.S. Atkins was employed in the north-west to score the schemes sent in by the passenger transport authorities and evaluate them on an objective and fair basis. That is how big schemes happen at the moment. The process is new and we are getting used to it, but it is one of the few games in town. Superimposed on that is what are referred to as the transport innovation funds. PTAs, or whatever body is involved, have to promise to inflict pain—a congestion charge for residents, or whatever—to reduce traffic, before securing funding for genuinely popular projects such as trams. Under the system there is, if you like, no gain without pain. I understand that the negotiations take place between the Department for Transport and various transport bodies. By and large, the transport bodies try to inflict as little pain as possible to secure as much gain as possible—“gain” meaning funding for popular transport projects.

The problem is that there is a substantial omission in the system. Good, popular, needed and affordable schemes that do not have pan-regional significance get left out of the system altogether, particularly if they cost more than £5 million, which I think is the current limit. If they cost less than that, they can be done by the local transport authority, but if they cost more they must go to regional prioritisation.

I am delighted that the hon. Member for West Lancashire (Rosie Cooper) is here, because I am about to talk about schemes such as the Ormskirk bypass, which is Lancashire priority No. 2, but relatively low in the current regional prioritisation. The bypass passes all the tests that one would expect a good scheme to pass. It certainly impresses me and the hon. Lady. It impresses my constituents and hers because it offers real benefits, and it impresses West Lancashire district council, which is controlled by the Conservative party, from which neither I nor the hon. Lady come. The bypass scheme also impresses the people of Ormskirk, who have long wanted it and have thought that they might get it for almost 30 years. Hopefully, it will impress the Minister on objective criteria.

There are some very good reasons for the scheme. First, it would take considerable pressure off the town of Ormskirk. Secondly, it would appreciably improve access and transport between Southport and Formby district general hospital and Ormskirk and district general hospital, which operate under the same trust; from past experience, I know that the Minister is very familiar with it. The two hospitals were merged and their services configured as a result of a report written by a Professor Shields.

As I have probably told the Minister, the report had a very telling line. It said that the service configuration was supported by Professor Shields and the like, but that there were transport difficulties, which, it went on to say, were not within the remit of the health service. The health service did not need to consider those difficulties; that was for somebody else. There is an important public service aspect to the road, given that it could facilitate transport between two relatively small hospitals that are not as well linked as people in Ormskirk and Southport would wish them to be. Increasingly, people have to travel between the two clinical centres and find that problems with access are less than tolerable.

There are other reasons, unconnected with health issues, for the bypass. Southport’s economy is unquestionably expanding. The Minister may have been lucky enough to catch the last edition of the programme presented by Sir Trevor McDonald, which was about coastal towns. As an example of genuine regeneration and expansion, Southport was contrasted with other coastal towns. All the research by bodies such as the Southport Partnership has identified that there are only two limits on further successful economic expansion, which would help the north-west in general: housing, which I shall not go into now, and transport links. The hon. Member for Pontypridd (Dr. Howells), in his previous capacity as the Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, travelled around all the coastal towns. When he got to Southport, I asked him what his conclusion was. He said that every town that he had been to, with the possible exceptions of Bournemouth and Blackpool, wanted a better route into them. We do not simply want a better route; we have an economic case for having one.

I am pleased to see the hon. Member for West Lancashire in her place; she is slightly more optimistic than I about how quickly the Minister will respond to my supplications, requests and well reasoned arguments.

The hon. Gentleman rightly says that I am more hopeful than he. That is because we have secured a promise from the Minister that sub-regional priorities will be considered again in 2009. The county council should be congratulated on working with us and ensuring that the scheme will go ahead for planning permission in July this year. It has even allocated a spot for a public inquiry and done the environmental impact study. The message for the Minister is that we will be ready and waiting to make the scheme work.

Furthermore, as a result of my discussions with the regional development agency, I believe that the rather non-transparent way in which the Atkins evaluation of regional priorities took place will not happen again. The information is now to the fore and there is acknowledgment of how much the scheme is needed. Yes, I am much more optimistic that the Government, the regional development agency, W.S. Atkins and others involved will recognise that unless the scheme picks up money from slippage or regional priorities next time round, the economies of my constituency and that of the hon. Gentleman—West Lancashire and Southport—will suffer greatly. The scheme is absolutely necessary and the work that I have done in 18 months—

Order. I am sorry to interrupt the hon. Lady. I have allowed her a long intervention because of the constraints on Adjournment debates. However, Dr. Pugh must have the Floor.

I am grateful for the hon. Lady’s intervention and her clarification of the Government’s promises. Obviously, I wish to see them firmed up and delivered.

Clearly, the effects of there not being development can sometimes be negative. I recall going to the Government office for the north-west in the company of the then deputy chief executive of Blackpool Pleasure Beach Ltd to discuss the case for better road links. As the Minister will be aware, one of the few negative things to have happened in Southport recently is that Blackpool Pleasure Beach Ltd has withdrawn from Southport. Obviously, one element of that decision was that, because of the transport issues, the company could not see the increasing flow that its investment had led it to expect. It is probably wrong in that suspicion, but that is how it has perceived the situation.

We seem to be on the cusp of some interesting developments. The chief executive of the Southport and Ormskirk Hospital NHS Trust wrote recently to the hon. Member for West Lancashire and me, suggesting that the problem needs to be addressed. We have been addressing it for some time, but none the less his intervention is helpful. He is suggesting that the hospital trust will not sit back any longer and simply expect transport arrangements to take place, but consciously wants to work with others to try to accommodate such arrangements. That attitude reflected that of the previous chief executive, who had a particular interest in transport. Ultimately, the economic and health cases stack up, and the issues connected with the health service are increasingly to do with access.

We are between a rock and a hard place. What happens to pan-regional schemes that are not genuinely pan-regional but cost above the limit allowed for local schemes? Frankly, not a lot of tarmac can be bought with the money that local schemes are allowed to spend. The Ormskirk bypass will probably exceed the limit, however it is done and however costs are pared down.

I do not think that my suggestions are unique. The Minister might find himself in an Adjournment debate soon where an hon. Member from another part of the country makes an analogous claim, although the hon. Member for West Lancashire and I like to think that our case is particularly robust and well supported by the evidence provided. However, the predicament is common to many good schemes. Many schemes that the Minister will have to deal with will involve an appreciable amount of local opposition, but there is zilch opposition to this scheme. Everybody in the area wants it, but the problem is simply how to acquire the funding under a regime in which we fall between two stools. That is the question that I want to put to the Minister.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Southport (Dr. Pugh) on securing the debate. He and my hon. Friend the Member for West Lancashire (Rosie Cooper) have made a powerful case for the Ormskirk bypass, as part of the hon. Gentleman’s more general comments about the regional funding allocation process. The hon. Gentleman is right to say that I have a connection with the area—I was born in Ormskirk hospital, which makes me wonder why anybody would want to bypass the place. I would have thought that everybody would want to go there, perhaps to see the blue plaque that my hon. Friend is arranging to have put on the hospital wall any day now to honour my place of birth.

Before I address the specific points that have been raised, I hope that the hon. Gentleman will forgive me if I make a few points about the contribution that the Government have made to local transport schemes and to schemes such as the one that he mentioned. There was significant under-investment in local transport, so in 2007-08 we have provided more than £1.25 billion of transport funding to local authorities, including £683 million for highways capital maintenance to improve local road conditions and £571 million for smaller transport improvement schemes. That represents a trebling, in cash terms, of Government support for council investment in local transport projects since the late 1990s.

The north-west region—the hon. Gentleman mentioned once or twice that the sum that it had received was not as large as he would like—received £76 million in 1997 and £213 million in 2007-08, an increase of 180 per cent. That is being translated into delivery on the ground, and it has enabled councils to deliver far more projects for the benefit of their areas. Across the country, there have been 2,889 new junction or junction improvement schemes, 210 new or improved access roads with specific regeneration or social inclusion benefits, and considerable increases in the length of cycleways and bus lanes as well as corridor improvements.

I will certainly not argue with the Minister’s well informed statistics, but he would probably acknowledge that a large percentage of that money has been spent on a small number of large projects, so some of the smaller projects might have to wait in a much longer queue.

That is certainly an issue, and I shall come to it in a moment. However, my remarks highlight the rationale of the regional funding allocation process. To be fair to the hon. Gentleman, he acknowledged that it is an improvement on the previous arrangement. It is more transparent. The way that we did it first time round might not have been perfect, but it beat the heck out of my sitting in my office in Whitehall making all the decisions by myself without any reference to local people and stakeholders. Under those circumstances, big road schemes that seemed to distort local priorities were often prioritised. Sometimes, the Minister of the day thought that it would be politically better to have lots of small schemes and no big schemes—again, that was a distortion of priorities. It is far better to ask local people about their priorities for the region. That is what the regional funding allocation process was set up to do.

We intend to continue to deliver sustained improvements to the transport infrastructure. We announced in July 2005 that each English region would be given indicative regional funding allocations for transport, housing and economic development in each year up to 2015-16. That covered major transport schemes costing more than £5 million promoted by local authorities and by the Highways Agency on trunk routes of regional importance and funded by specific grants from the Department. The hon. Gentleman mentioned that and talked briefly about the distribution of funding. Before we introduced the funding formula through which we decided how much money will go to each region, we consulted all the regions about what they thought was the most appropriate way to distribute the money. We accepted that advice, and the money is basically distributed per capita around the country.

The process has given us an opportunity to see how the interrelated areas of transport, housing and economic development could be better aligned. Each region’s schemes were assessed by the respective regional development agency, regional assembly, local authority partners and other key interests against regional, sub-regional and local transport policy criteria, as well as value for money and deliverability criteria. In that way, a realistic, prioritised and affordable programme was developed to meet those objectives.

The regions devoted considerable care and effort to developing their advice and to securing a consensus on what needs to be done to improve the transport infrastructure. In January 2006, each region submitted advice to the Government setting out those transport projects that it considered should be given priority for funding in each year up to 2015-16. We announced our response in July last year. It included formal approval for various transport schemes in each region, as well as a list of further schemes that the Government expect to fund over the 10 years. Largely, we accepted the advice from the regions. In the case of one or two areas, we went back to the region, made comments and asked for comments back before we confirmed the advice. In the north-west, we accepted the advice that we received following clarification from that region.

The advice has identified the further schemes that the Government expect to fund over the next 10 years. For example, the regions recommended a further 39 local road schemes that could be delivered over the next 10 years to 2015-16, subject to a satisfactory business case being submitted and all necessary statutory approvals being secured. We also accepted the advice to slip a number of schemes to later start dates, as well as not to prioritise a number of other schemes that were already in the programme. In responding to the regions, we also explained that we expected to seek further formal advice on transport priorities within the next two years.

Both points are important. On the advice of the regions and of local people, we were prepared to slip back schemes that were moving forward and had been put into the programme by ministerial diktat. We have acknowledged, too—my hon. Friend the Member for West Lancashire made this point—that we need to ask the regions to go back and have another think within two years of the original advice to see whether they feel they have made any mistakes and whether any schemes they have suggested for later in the period could be brought forward. The Ormskirk bypass is clearly one such scheme, so the region might want to reconsider it.

The regional funding allocation process has been generally recognised, and the hon. Member for Southport has acknowledged that it is an improvement on ministerial diktat. However, I recognise that it is far from perfect. That is why we carried out a consultation seeking views on how it could be improved for the next round. That consultation ended on 31 October 2006 and the Department is now considering the responses received, a number of which shared the hon. Gentleman’s concerns about how the process affected schemes of predominantly local importance that were not identified as regional priorities.

We are also considering options for taking forward the wider regional funding allocations exercise as part of the sub-national review of economic development and regeneration, which will report to the Chief Secretary to the Treasury ahead of the comprehensive spending review for 2007. For the first round of the regional prioritisation exercise, it was the responsibility of the regions themselves to determine their own methodologies for prioritising schemes within the overall framework set out in the guidance issued in July 2005. It was therefore open to regions to decide whether they wished to set aside some funding for smaller, locally important schemes. That is one issue that we will consider before seeking further formal regional advice in the future.

When will we be given some indication of when we will know about the priorities that my hon. Friend mentioned? In the previous round, the big city regions grabbed the funding and had their paws on the major part of it. Sub-regional priorities were way down the list. The Ormskirk bypass, for example, was in the third quartile. Everyone acknowledges that the process is subjective and that the project ought to have been much higher up the list. If my hon. Friend is saying that there will be a cut-off or an amount of money set aside, when will we be given an indication of when that might happen?

That is not quite what I am saying. The consultation that we have been doing in recent months and are now analysing was about how the regional funding allocation process works. Our understanding in the Department for Transport was that people out in the regions understood that they could decide such matters for themselves. If they wanted to top-slice some money for local schemes, they could have done that before making their prioritisation. The feedback that I have been receiving is that some regions did not realise that they could do that, so they put all the money into one big pot and prioritised it from there. That perhaps led—I am not saying that this is definitely the case, but it is arguable and hon. Members have argued it today—to the big city regions dominating the taking of that money out of the pot so that there was not enough left for smaller schemes.

I hope that we will indicate some time this year how we believe the regional funding allocation process could be worked better. Perhaps it will simply be a case of us explaining that we are happy for the regions to make decisions for themselves before they do their prioritisation, and maybe we will give clearer guidance on the best way they can do that. It will then be for the regions to go away and produce new advice, which I expect from them next year.

Some regions have not stopped the process and have taken the view that they want it to be continuous. They continue to discuss their priorities and progress on the schemes that they have advised us to follow, and they write to us from time to time telling us what is happening and how their minds are changing. Other regions have taken the view that they were asked to do it last year and will be asked to do the review next year, and that there is nothing in between, so they have not continued to meet and discuss the matters. At the moment that is entirely a matter for the regions to decide for themselves, and if my hon. Friend the Member for West Lancashire thinks that it would be good for the regions to have interim meetings in the run-up to the next decision point and the next set of advice that we are to receive, she is free to suggest through her county council, the regional assembly or the regional development agency that people should get together again and chat about how things are going to ensure that they understand her priorities for the Ormskirk bypass.

We accepted the advice of the north-west region that the Ormskirk bypass should not be a priority for funding in the period up to 2016, and I understand that that was disappointing to the hon. Member for Southport and my hon. Friend the Member for West Lancashire. I emphasise that that does not prevent Lancashire county council and other supporters of the scheme from making the case either for funding to be made available from the regional funding allocation in the longer term or for the scheme’s inclusion in the region’s priorities at an earlier date should that become possible, which could happen in three ways.

The first is that we may give out some more money. I am not sure whether that will be the case, because we are already working to tight spending guidelines, but who knows? Future Governments might make more money available. The second way in which it could be done sooner is if there is slippage in other schemes and the region decides that it is the best one to bring forward. The third is if the hon. Member for Southport and my hon. Friend the Member for West Lancashire win the argument in the region that their scheme is more important than one of the others, so that it is give priority. I encourage them to make such a case.

The Minister is being constructive and helpful, and he is giving us some hints as to how we can make progress. However, there is a fundamental problem. To win the argument we have to consider objective criteria, and one that will come up every time is whether a scheme is of pan-regional economic significance. Every local scheme will fail that test again and again unless there is an exception that raises the limit for local schemes—in other words, an excepted small schemes fund within the regional transport allocation—or it becomes easier to achieve small schemes through the local transport plans. One of those things needs to happen, because at the moment we are between a rock and a hard place.

I understand the hon. Gentleman’s point but the key thing to recognise is that, as he identified, local transport plan schemes have a £5 million threshold. People have interpreted that threshold as being absolute. It is absolute in the sense that the regional funding allocation process will not normally be interested in schemes of less than £5 million. However, it does not prevent a local authority from going ahead with schemes of more than £5 million from its own resources, if it will pay the bills itself either from the integrated transport block or through developer contributions to subsidise a regeneration scheme. That is nobody’s business but the local authority’s, and there will be no appraisal of such a project by central Government. If the local authority thinks that it represents value for money, fine—it can go ahead and do it.

If a local authority wants to make a case that money from the regional funding allocation should be set aside by the region for local schemes, it can do so before the next round of prioritisation. If that is agreed to, as seems to be happening in some regions, that could be a separate source of funding for such schemes.

My hon. Friend has given us three options. The first was this Government or the next giving more money. The second was essentially that we need to get some money set aside. I assure him that we are putting a great deal of pressure on the regional people and making a strong argument that our scheme definitely needs doing. On the third option, which involves the county council, by going ahead with the planning, setting aside time for a public inquiry and doing all the impact studies we are doing everything in our power to ensure that the scheme happens for the benefit of our constituents. I promise my hon. Friend that I am optimistic and will not give up until that Ormskirk bypass is there.

I never had any thought that my hon. Friend would give up on the Ormskirk bypass. I am sure that her constituents have no thought of that either. She and the hon. Member for Southport are doing absolutely the right thing—making the case locally either for money to be set aside by the region to be prioritised by the local authority or for the scheme to be given greater priority by the region. If they work together on that, they will hopefully succeed in making their case. The hon. Member for Southport pointed out that some schemes are more—

Order. I am sorry to interrupt the Minister mid-flow, but time has expired on him. We now have to move on to the next debate.

It is a great pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr. Conway. I am sure that you, as a former Member for the constituency of Shrewsbury and Atcham, will be keen to hear what is happening in Ironbridge. As they say, once a Salopian, always a Salopian.

I want to take this opportunity to raise the issue of land stability at the Ironbridge Gorge world heritage site. As you know, Mr. Conway, Ironbridge gorge, which is in my constituency, is one of the UK’s world heritage sites. It is numbered among the most important heritage sites around the world. The area’s connections with the birth of the industrial revolution through the work of innovators such as Abraham Darby I and the Darby family is well documented. The area still contains many of the buildings, structures and artefacts from that period, including the iron bridge itself, which is a symbol of the industrial revolution that is recognised around the world, and which is one of the icons of England. I am proud to represent the area.

The bridge was built in 1779 and opened in 1781. Richard Hayman and Wendy Horton say in their book, “Ironbridge History and Guide”, that the bridge was eulogised in the Houses of Parliament. I would not want to stray from that tradition some 300 years later. The bridge is absolutely fabulous, and it attracts an enormous number of tourists to the gorge every year. It was built by Abraham Darby III. His grandfather, Abraham Darby I, stands as one of the giants of British innovation. The environment of Ironbridge gorge inspired generations of innovators such as William Reynolds, William Ferriday and my favourite, Iron-Mad John Wilkinson, who is reputed to have had himself buried in an iron coffin—not something that I would particularly recommend. I love the phrase, “iron-mad”. It is tremendous.

There has been a tradition of iron smelting in the gorge since 1709, when Abraham Darby I smelted iron with coke for the first time, thereby inspiring the industrial revolution. The tradition continues today: Aga cookers are manufactured in Telford—indeed, they are manufactured a few hundred yards from the place where Abraham Darby I first smelted iron with coke. We are proud to have Aga-Rayburn in our area.

The Ironbridge Gorge world heritage site is the focus of a thriving tourism industry in Telford and Wrekin. Each year, 2.5 million visitors come to the area. They spend more than £100 million in the local economy, which helps to support more than 3,000 jobs. The Ironbridge gorge has a thriving living and working community. It is home to more than 4,000 people and is a much sought after place in which to live.

World heritage status clearly brings great benefits to an area. It attracts visitors and promotes economic growth, and it can endow the area with a sense of historic significance, which, in turn, stimulates civic pride among people in the local community. However, it also brings responsibilities. This nation and our local communities are entrusted with the care and protection on behalf of the wider world community of the 27 world heritage sites within our borders. That is something that we committed ourselves to when, in 1984, the Government ratified the UNESCO 1972 convention on the protection of the world cultural and natural heritage. The state signed up to protecting world heritage sites via its commitments to UNESCO. I shall return to that issue in a few moments.

The problem in the Ironbridge gorge is that the world heritage site is under serious threat. Flooding and land instability act on the natural features of the River Severn and the gorge’s geology, which were the very reasons for the area’s emergence as the birthplace of industry in the early 18th century, and threaten the long-term future of the site. There has been significant investment in respect of the flooding problem by the Environment Agency in recent years, and the new pallet barrier, which is used on the Ironbridge wharfage when flooding occurs, has been extremely successful. However, there is an ongoing problem with land instability, which is the real focus of this debate.

In geological terms, the gorge is fairly new at just 13,000 years old. It cuts into rocks that are in excess of 280 million years old, and is still forming by the process of landslides. The natural valley formation process has been accentuated by past mining activity and the weight of development, and by tipped waste materials that were placed on the hillsides and river banks during the great explosion of industrial expansion in the 18th century. That particularly relates to coal mine tipping and tipping associated with iron production but also tipping associated with clay, pottery and tile production. Waste material was dumped directly outside manufacturing environments, often on the banks of the Severn.

The process of land instability is also accentuated by heavy rainfall and flooding, which I have already mentioned. They are occurring more frequently because of climate change, and that problem is likely to grow in coming years.

What have we been doing in recent years to tackle the issue and deal with it? Over the past five years, significant advances have been made in our understanding of the causes, extent and impact of the land instability. The principal local authority, Telford and Wrekin council, has been working with world-renowned consultants to quantify the extent of the problem and the risks that it presents to the historic environment and human life.

In 2001, the world heritage site management plan highlighted the need for action to address land instability in the gorge. Since then, the council has accessed European, national, regional and local funds to undertake a range of investigations and works, including a site-wide land instability study in 2003, which was followed in 2005 by more detailed ground investigation and ground behaviour studies of the areas that we think are at greatest risk. Stabilisation of Jiggers bank, one of the main approach roads to the world heritage site, took place in 2002. Phase one of the stabilisation of The Lloyds, which is a major route through the site, is ongoing. An emergency plan and residents’ land instability information packs were produced in 2004 and 2005, and ongoing ground monitoring is taking place to measure the speed, amount and direction of ground movement in the gorge.

Within the past month, the situation has deteriorated significantly, which is why I welcome the opportunity to raise this issue today. Further landslide activity is happening at The Lloyds and on the opposite side of the river at Lloyds Head. The latter serves as the access road to a major museum site and to homes and businesses. However, because of distortion and fissuring of the highway, and the risk to life and property posed by slippage, the council has been forced to close sections of the road, which has resulted in a detour for local and tourist traffic.

To date, some £7.3 million has been spent on investigative and stabilisation work in the gorge. Throughout the past five years, the local authority has worked closely with local and regional partners, including, for example, the Government office for the west midlands, which has assisted in sourcing funds for the works undertaken to date. However, the scale of funding now required to provide a comprehensive and long-term solution to land instability in the gorge requires a national response.

So, what further action is required? As I have mentioned, consultants have identified the areas of highest risk that require priority action, which include, The Lloyds, where stabilisation work has commenced, and Lloyds Head, which I mentioned a few moments ago and which is the location of the recent slippage and road closure. In addition, other works have been identified as necessary to protect the long-term future of this world heritage site. I am aware that the leader of Telford and Wrekin council, Keith Austin, wrote to my hon. Friend the Minister on 3 May and outlined the on-going concerns of the council about the situation. He told the Minister that the Government office had visited the gorge on 5 April, inspected the situation and listened to the technical assessment undertaken by the council. It was interesting that the chief executive of the council told me that when the Government office officials went into the gorge, they had to be moved back from the river bank at one point because a crack emerged as they were talking. That is how serious the problem is around The Lloyds and Lloyds Head area. I am sure that the Minister will respond to the leader of the council’s comments in a few moments.

Our current basic knowledge of the scale of the problem indicates that a further £86 million is required to address areas of known high risk, including an investigation into the built-up areas of Ironbridge. At this stage, it is unclear what an investigation will reveal, but, on the basis of current knowledge, significant further expenditure is inevitable, which is likely to take the total cost to more than £100 million.

The priority areas of instability that require urgent funding of approximately £30 million are: Jackfield, which requires stabilisation of the only road access to a community of homes and businesses and where there is an important tourist site—the Jackfield museum; Lloyds Head, which requires stabilisation and re-opening as it is an important route through the world heritage site; and central Ironbridge, which requires completion of ground investigation. Central Ironbridge is the largest urban area within the world heritage site and its stability is dependent upon numerous retaining walls, including, most importantly, the wharfage retaining wall, which sits alongside the river. In addition, The Lloyds requires further work and the completion of phase 2 of the stabilisation works to protect a key route though the world heritage site.

Evidence and history suggest that without intervention, at some stage, a major landslide will occur in the Ironbridge gorge. Major events of that nature took place in 1773, 1952 and 1982 and the Ironbridge gorge museums hold footage and photographs of landslips that took place over that time, all of which resulted in partial blockages of the river and the loss of roads and buildings. This is a serious matter as it involves a world heritage site that, in terms of significance, sits alongside places such as the Taj Mahal and the Grand Canyon. It is one of the most significant sites on the planet and the iron bridge and the gorge are an icon for this nation. It is up to the state party to play a role in ensuring that this world heritage site is properly protected as it is part of our commitment as a nation to UNESCO to protect such sites.

We know much more about the causes and likely impact of land instability because, through the work of the local authority, we have assembled the technical expertise to manage the process and to ensure that we make the gorge a safe environment for the coming years. The scale of funding required cannot be found locally and it is not fair that local tax payers should pick up the tab. It is clear that local residents, businesses and the entire community across Telford and the Wrekin should share some of the cost, but the lion’s share clearly must fall to regional, national and possibly European Government. It is important that we continue to ensure that, after ratifying the UNESCO world heritage convention commitment, we deliver on those commitments. Under the UNESCO world heritage convention the Government have committed themselves to

“ensure that effective and active measures are taken for the protection, conservation and presentation of the cultural and natural heritage situated on its territory.”

The convention refers to the “duty” placed upon each state party and the obligation to do “all it can” to utilise “the utmost of its resources” in carrying out its duty. By bringing together a range of partners such as, the local authority, regional government tiers, Departments at Whitehall, local businesses, parish councils, and the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust, we can ensure that local residents realise that the protection of the gorge and of their homes and environments will continue long into the future. We can also ensure that one of this nations great tourist assets and destinations is preserved for the future.

The gorge gave the world industrialisation. It has a unique place in the history of humankind and we have a responsibility to secure the long-term future of this unique asset and to ensure it is enjoyed and appreciated by generations to come. We should also ensure that those who live and work in the gorge are satisfied that their homes and communities are protected.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Telford (David Wright) for introducing this important debate about the land instability of the Ironbridge Gorge world heritage centre. It is important to put on the record that by its very nature, this issue is of paramount importance, not only for the long-term preservation of a unique place, but for the safety, well-being and reassurance of the people who live there.

As you are familiar with the area, Mr. Conway, I will start by saying that my Department leads on world heritage for the Government. We are responsible for ensuring that the UK fulfils its obligations under the world heritage convention for the conservation and protection of our world heritage sites. It is an important responsibility that, of course, we take very seriously. We recognise the need to react positively and quickly to the sort of environmental threats potentially facing Ironbridge today.

Ironbridge Gorge is one of 27 outstanding world heritage sites in the UK, of which there are a rich variety geographically and in terms of type. Ironbridge has a unique place in world history because of its role in the birth of the industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries. It has made a significant contribution to the rapid development of the industrial economy of the region. The bridge itself was the first constructed of iron, and had a considerable influence on developments in the fields of technology and architecture. Today it is under the ownership of the borough of Telford and Wrekin local authority, which manages the site. It is also maintained by English Heritage.

The bridge and the other attractions in the gorge area are, of course, colourful and are key visitor attractions. As the hon. Gentleman said, they play an important role in contributing to the regional economy, but, more importantly, the location is home to around 4,000 residents, and over the coming months, we must seek to safeguard homes, schools and livelihoods.

On the environmental threat, the effects of land instability, coastal erosion, and flooding all threaten the long-term preservation of our world heritage sites and any other area in this country today that faces such pressures. Dealing with such threats is generally beyond the means of the local communities within which such sites are located. That point underlined much of what the hon. Gentleman said. Some local authorities consider that the primary responsibility for ensuring the protection of these sites rests with central Government. In this case, central, local and regional government are working together, and have been for some time, but it is imperative to understand fully the position, the issues involved, the nature of the threat and possible solutions.

We are aware, of course of the problem of land instability at Ironbridge. It is not new—it has been a problem since the gorge was formed some 10,000 to 15,000 years ago, and it is impossible to predict if and when further movements will occur. Indeed, only recently, erosion caused ground movement at the Lloyd's Head site leading to emergency repairs to the road and its temporary closure.

Flooding and land instability pose a real threat to local residents and their homes in and around the gorge—I sympathise with them. My hon. Friend has brought to our attention the pressure and stress on the minds of many of his constituents. It is of great concern. Remedial works have been identified and early indications are that costs will reach some £28 million in the short term, and that a longer-term stabilisation programme could reach in excess of £90 million. But the analysis is still being tested. However, the problem is unlikely to be solved entirely because the natural and relatively young geological structure makes the land inherently unstable. Matters have been worsened by the extent of past mining, the frequency and extent of flooding and the potential impact of climate change.

What is being done? Considerable efforts have been made to manage this serious problem. The Government office for the west midlands has been proactive on behalf of my and other Departments in working with the local authority to better understand what local, regional and national partners—including the utilities—can do to address the problem. I understand that consultancy work has been undertaken by EcoTec consultants for Telford and Wrekin borough council and is due to reach a conclusion shortly. Furthermore, in December 2005, £1.8 million was released from the region’s local transport plan fund for urgent maintenance on a road in the gorge, and a further grant of £2.4 million from the European regional development fund has been secured specifically for land stability works.

We are keen to support Ironbridge in its efforts to find a solution to the land instability problems at the gorge. Although my Department has no funds to contribute to a land stabilisation program, as the champions of world heritage in Whitehall, we must and want to be involved in discussions with the appropriate people in the Government, local authorities and other agencies in order to minimise the risks—as far as possible—and to find a practical and sustainable solution. Meanwhile, the local authority will be encouraged—I hope—by the approval of £154 million for the stabilisation of the Combe Down quarries in the city of Bath, which is a world heritage site, announced by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister in 2005. Where a need has been identified, and where we have been able to engage with national, regional, local and other partners, we have acted. That should continue.

The potential impact of any landslip on the unique cultural heritage of Ironbridge, tourism and the local economy would be considerable. However, the prime consideration must be public safely. The world heritage convention, which the UK signed in 1984, and to which I and my hon. Friend referred earlier, has proved to be an enormously effective and positive force in bringing together nations all over the world in order to act collectively and to safeguard sites of outstanding universal value at a global level. Those are powerful partnerships and we need to ensure that we follow the same approach at home in order to secure a sustainable future for Ironbridge.

We are not complacent about our responsibilities. Today’s debate has highlighted some critical issues that need to be faced urgently. There is much that we can do at national, regional and local levels. Of course, I shall respond to the local authority that wrote to me in the last few days, but before doing so I shall write to appropriate ministerial colleagues in Whitehall.

I say to my hon. Friend who brought these facts before the House today that I am happy to meet with him in order to secure an inter-departmental response in partnership with the local authority, when the latter has identified fully the costs of consultancy work and so on, and in order to ensure that the world heritage in his constituency is preserved for future generations.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at three minutes to Two o’clock.