I am pleased to have secured this debate and to have the chance to question the Government closely on the aims of their transport policies. Everyone recognises the need to do something about congestion and traffic. The Government's recent White Paper, "A New Deal for Transport: Better for Everyone", and their consultation paper, "Breaking the Logjam", are welcome, and make constructive suggestions about how to improve public transport, increase cycling and achieve a modal switch. However, "Breaking the Logjam" has introduced an element of confusion about whether the proceeds from road user charging will be entirely given over to transport projects. To underline that point, I shall quote the document, which says that the Secretary of State will be given powers

"to require a proportion of the revenue to be paid to central government."

That does not sound as though all proceeds will be spent on public transport schemes.

I hope that there will soon be an opportunity—perhaps by way of another Adjournment debate—to discuss the most practical ways of cutting car use. Indeed, hon. Members may refer to such measures during the debate. I am seeking to establish the degree of the Government's commitment to achieving road traffic reduction. I want to ask crucial questions and, to ensure that the Under-Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions, the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr. Raynsford), is able to respond to them in detail, I faxed them to his office yesterday. I look forward to his comprehensive responses.

Labour fought the election promising that it would reduce traffic levels. Its promise—which appeared in its policy handbook, on the election website and in policy briefings—was that it would

"reduce and then reverse traffic growth."

It was clearly a two-stage promise: first to reduce traffic growth, and then to reverse it. The second stage of that promise was crystal clear.

Labour's White Paper was also crystal clear, if somewhat unsatisfactory. It referred to setting the framework to reduce road traffic growth. That does not deliver on the second stage of Labour's election promise.

It is true that the Government have promised to reduce traffic in specific areas. Paragraph 1.35 of the White Paper says:

"We also want to see an absolute reduction in traffic in those places … where its environmental damage is worst."

That is welcome, but it still forgets the earlier, clear promise to cut the total level of traffic.

Further impetus has been given to the need for traffic reduction by the findings of Sir Donald Acheson, the former chief medical officer, who has just completed his inquiry into inequalities in health. Sir Donald recommended further measures to reduce the use of motor cars so as to lessen health inequalities and social exclusion in three areas. He said that reducing traffic would

"decrease air pollution and probably also reduce road traffic accidents. The benefit of the decreases is likely to be gained most by people experiencing disadvantage."

That is true, and those suffering most disadvantage are the poor and the socially excluded. Sir Donald went on to say that reducing road traffic would also reduce deaths in young men, and would improve the health of ethnic minorities. He found that areas

"with high proportions of ethnic residents … are associated with a high rate of traffic accidents amongst children from some minority ethnic groups."

Will Labour keep both parts of the promise that it made before the election and reverse traffic growth? Will it heed Sir Donald's advice and reduce traffic, and put health first and cars second? I should also like the Under-Secretary to clarify statements made by the Deputy Prime Minister, and to explain apparent contradictions between those statements and others released by his Department. The Deputy Prime Minister has been admirably clear about his intentions in his current job. Shortly after coming to power, he told The Guardian:

"I will have failed if in five years time there are … not far fewer journeys by car. It's a tall order but I urge you to hold me to it."

After the publication of the White Paper, in the House, I challenged the Deputy Prime Minister specifically on his words in The Guardian and on Labour's promise to reverse traffic growth. He said:

"I agree to keep to that commitment: judge my performance in five years."—[Official Report, 20 October 1998; Vol. 317, c. 1071.]

I was pleased to hear him confirm his promises. However, since then, others in his Department have undermined that promise. Fourteen days later, the Minister for Transport in London in answer to a parliamentary question, said:

"in order to tackle the congestion and pollution that is caused by road traffic, we need to reduce the rate of road traffic growth."— [Official Report, 3 November 1998; Vol. 318, c. 458.]

On 13 November, she wrote to me ostensibly to clarify what the Deputy Prime Minister had so clearly told me. However, the letter did not clarify it—it changed it completely, saying that Labour intended to reduce the rate of growth in traffic, although it stated that there would be an absolute reduction in traffic in those areas where the most environmental damage is done.

indicated assent.

The Minister is nodding his head, but the letter failed to restate the crucial second stage of Labour's election promise to reverse traffic growth so as to reduce the overall level of traffic. On 3 December, Lord Whitty, the Minister for Roads and Road Safety, publicised a speech that he was making at the Chartered Institute of Transport. His press release yet again failed to confirm Labour's pre-election promise to reverse traffic growth. It did promise traffic reduction in some areas—again—but, as I have said, that does not deliver Labour's promises.

At the end of his press release, Lord Whitty introduced a new phrase. He promised:

"The New Deal for Transport and the two Road Traffic Reduction Acts will help to provide the framework for the Government's commitment to deliver a real reduction in road traffic."

The contradictions in his speech continued. In the third paragraph, he restated the formula that there would be a reduction in traffic growth, and an absolute reduction, but only in some areas; in the fourth paragraph, he confirmed that the Deputy Prime Minister's promise in regard to reducing car journeys had not changed.

Cynical people have suggested that that could be setting the stage for a ridiculous U-turn: that the Deputy Prime Minister aims to cut the number of journeys made, but will allow those that remain to become twice as long. If that is the case, the Deputy Prime Minister will not only look ridiculous, but still be breaking the promises that Labour made before the election, and the personal assurance that he gave me in the House on 20 October that he would keep both those promises.

Let me ask the Under-Secretary some more questions. Do the Government still intend to keep the promises given by the Deputy Prime Minister—in the House, and to The Guardian—to reduce traffic, or does the so-called clarification in the letter that I received from the Minister for Transport in London mean that those promises have been abandoned? Can the Under-Secretary confirm that—as the Deputy Prime Minister made clear in answering my question—the Government intend to reduce absolute traffic levels in the United Kingdom, and not just to cut the number of journeys without ensuring that that results in an absolute reduction in traffic? Can he confirm that real traffic reduction, as described in his Department's press release, means that there will be less traffic on our roads?

Let me list some pledges of support for traffic reduction given by other Ministers. I shall begin with the Under-Secretary himself. On 30 October 1996, he wrote to a constituent in order to

"just reiterate my support for traffic reduction, both locally and nationally."

After the election, in August 1997, he wrote to his local newspaper—the Greenwich Mercury, of which I have a copy here—

"I have always made my views clear … our overriding priority must be to reduce the total volume of traffic".

I stress the words "total volume of traffic." The Under-Secretary's position certainly was clear, but, as the White Paper has confused the issue somewhat, I ask him to confirm that that is still the case.

The Minister for Transport in London has also made her position clear, and, because of her particular responsibilities, has had far more opportunities to put her views on record. In Hampstead high street, during the run-up to the general election, she made it plain to her constituents that she supported traffic reduction; during the same period, she also signed early-day motion 289. Both declarations went further than what has been said by the Under-Secretary, as they expressed support for a target of a 10 per cent. traffic reduction by 2010.

Since taking her current job, the Minister for Transport in London has repeatedly stated her support for traffic reduction. During the passage of the Road Traffic Reduction (National Targets) Bill earlier this year, she restated that commitment no fewer than seven times. On Third Reading, she said:

"The country cannot continue as it is—there must be a reduction in road traffic."—[Official Report, 24 April 1998; Vol. 310, c. 1119.]

Will the Under-Secretary confirm that his colleague will keep those promises, and will go further than she did in her letter to me, which states merely that the Government will reduce the rate of traffic growth?

The Minister for the Environment told the "Today" programme in December last year that Labour would deliver

"a major change in the use of transport and the reduced use of cars and vehicles on the road."

He had previously told his constituents that he supported the same 10 per cent. targets as the Minister for Transport in London—and her early-day motion—although, unlike her, he had not signed the early-day motion, because of his position on the Front Bench.

Can the Under-Secretary confirm that the Government will deliver on those promises? As a Back Bencher in opposition, he was able to sign early-day motions, and did so—again, making his position very clear, and supporting a reduction in traffic.

The newest arrival at the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, the hon. Member for Mansfield (Mr. Meale), also supports traffic reduction. Just two days before the general election, he wrote to a constituent who had asked for his views on a Bill to set 10 per cent. national traffic reduction targets:

"Many thanks for your letter … I would support such a Bill."

I have the hon. Gentleman's letter here. As a Back Bencher, he stuck to that promise, and, in further letters written in July and September, he told constituents that he had signed early-day motion 18 and assured them that he would support the national targets Bill on Second Reading. I have those letters as well. In the event, there was no vote, but the hon. Gentleman's intentions are clearly set out in letters to constituents. Will Labour deliver on his promises, and all those of other Ministers in the Department?

In the Labour party overall, more than 40 Ministers have declared their support for 10 per cent. traffic reduction targets. Eighty per cent. of Labour Members have supported those targets, and even more have declared support for traffic reduction without specifying a figure. Will the Government keep the promises made by all those Members of Parliament, or will they be abandoned by a policy that, rather feebly, aims only to reduce traffic growth?

Those questions are crucial. According to the very first paragraph of Labour's White Paper:

"the way we travel is damaging our towns and cities and harming our countryside."

That refers to current traffic volumes, not the even-greater volumes that we shall experience in future if the Government merely reduce traffic growth and ignore the damage that traffic is causing to our children, our industry, our health and our economy.

There is enormous support for traffic reduction. Support has been expressed by, among other organisations, the Townswomens Guild, the Womens Institute, the British Medical Association, the British Lung Foundation, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the National Asthma Campaign and the Childrens Play Council. The list goes on and on. The Government know that, because they received 7,300 replies to their consultation document on transport policy. Page 12 of "The Government's Consultation on Developing an Integrated Transport Policy: A Report" states:

"Almost everyone wanted to see a reduction in road traffic."

We need traffic reduction. In the wealth of statements that the Government have issued since the White Paper, we have seen endless variations on phrases using the words "traffic" and "reduction", almost always spoilt by the addition of words such as "growth" and "in some areas". However, the Department's press release of 3 December introduced a new word: "real". It stated:

"The New Deal for Transport and the two Road Traffic Reduction Acts will help to provide the framework for the Government's commitment to deliver a real reduction in road traffic."

My final question to the Under-Secretary is this. Does "real" traffic reduction mean an increase or a decrease in the amount of traffic on the roads in the United Kingdom? He ought to tell the people of Britain exactly what his Government are planning, and not hide behind even more ingenious and tortuous phrases that avoid making their plans clear. He should answer this question, yes or no: does the Government's "real reduction in road traffic" mean fewer cars on our roads?

I congratulate the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Mr. Brake) on the eloquence with which he has put his case for traffic reduction, which is the crucial environmental issue of our time. However, his case was undermined by his all-pervasive cynicism about the motivation of every Minister, past and present. I am sure that the Under-Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions, my hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr. Raynsford) will put him right in regard to the Government's motivation.

I also think that the Liberal Democrats would help their case more if they were consistent across the country. One of the major planks of Government policy—a policy instigated by the last Government—to secure traffic reduction is the fuel price escalator. Liberal Democrats in certain parts of the country are always saying that that is fine for urban areas, but not acceptable for rural areas. I feel that, if the Liberal Democrats wish to present a consistent policy nationally, they should not only put the case for their own areas—as they do, quite legitimately—but start talking to their colleagues who represent rural areas, and who do not yet seem convinced of the argument for the fuel price escalator.

Can the hon. Gentleman produce any evidence at all showing that increasing fuel prices affects the way in which people use their cars?

If the hon. Gentleman looked at work by the transport studies unit at Oxford university, he would find considerable evidence.

The real issue in rural areas is rural poverty. Not applying the fuel price escalator to rural areas does little about the core problem of rural poverty, which is far better addressed by wider economic policies and by the adjustment of standard spending assessments in the local government settlement to give an advantage to low-income families in rural areas and to compensate for the effect of any fuel price increase.

I shall be brief because I know that other hon. Members want to speak. I want to reiterate the arguments for road traffic reduction, however we define the precise means by which road traffic is reduced. First, it is critical that we reduce road traffic for reasons of mitigating pollution. We have accepted stringent targets following the Kyoto protocol. As a Government, we have put forward even more stringent targets voluntarily to meet targets on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Cutting the use of the private car is one of the crucial means of reaching those targets.

Secondly, we have to reduce congestion to improve the quality of life for people in urban areas. The most recent report about traffic speeds in London tells us that, in some parts, the average speed of the private car is 10 miles an hour. That is no different from the average speed of vehicles 100 years ago. What is the purpose of developing the technology and that vast industry if all we are doing is clogging up the roads and turning our motorways into moving car packs?

Thirdly, we have to reduce traffic for reasons of health. Everyone is now aware of the chronic rise in asthma cases, particularly in urban areas. There is a direct relationship between the rise in road traffic and the rise in asthma and other respiratory diseases. Fourthly, we have to reduce road traffic for reasons of efficiency. It is not economically efficient to move people around the country in the way that we do, with such domination of the private car and with the consequent traffic jams, delays, missed appointments and additional expense.

I congratulate the Government on their latest statement, yesterday's Green Paper, which fulfils their promise to introduce action specifically on business parking in town centres and city centres and which gives local authorities the power to introduce congestion charging. Those are two admirable policies that further progress the Government's action, although there is more to do. There are three points particularly that I should like the Government to take on board. I am sure that many hon. Members would agree with me on those.

First, it is regrettable that, as yet, we have not extended the principle of taxation on town and city centre car parking spaces to out-of-town supermarkets. One of the most disastrous social and economic developments of recent years has been the rapid growth of huge out-of-town hypermarkets, which destroy the lifeblood of many of our small town centres and shopping centres. The point is that we do not have a level playing field because, in most small town centres, there is a car parking charge, but there is no car parking charge in the huge out-ofcentre hypermarkets. The overwhelming majority of hon. Members would argue for a level playing field to give town centres a chance of survival, particularly small traders in town centres.

Secondly, I urge the Government to look again at the company car tax regime. Everyone knows that the way in which the system operates provides incentives for company car owners to do more mileage. The system has to be changed. The thresholds have to be adjusted to provide an incentive to do less mileage.

Thirdly, I ask the Government to look again at the fuel tax escalator. It was brought in at 5 per cent. a year by the previous Government. It was increased to 6 per cent. a year by the present Government. Since then, oil prices have fallen to their lowest level since 1970. Is the 6 per cent. a year rise having sufficient effect, given the fall in oil prices, and the increased fuel efficiency that enables motorists to get more miles per gallon out of modern vehicles? The level of the fuel tax escalator needs to be kept under constant review.

An additional point relating to the fuel tax escalator is that it is a progressive tax, the reason being that 30 per cent. of the population are not affected by it. Thirty per cent. of the population do not own vehicles. By and large—there are some non-car owning families among the professional and managerial classes, but not many—it is the poorest third of the population who do not own vehicles. Therefore, they are not affected by the rise in petrol prices.

Wealth can be defined by not only the ownership and usage of vehicles, but the miles travelled by the vehicle. The richer a person is, the more likely it is that that person will own one or more cars and travel large distances in those cars. Therefore, the application of the fuel price escalator is a progressive measure in taxation terms. I appreciate that progressive taxation is not attractive to all hon. Members, but it should be to Labour Members.

For 100 years, we have defined the growing wealth of society in terms largely of the growth in material possessions and the motor car is the central material possession. We have defined our gross domestic product according to the number of motor cars produced. Our GDP increases the more cars we produce. It also increases the more car alarms and anti-theft devices we produce.

Is the dominance of, and reliance on, the motor car as a central economic indicator a sensible way in which to define the wealth and prosperity of society? That is not an issue for this debate, but it should be taken up in another debate. The time has come to review the way in which we define GDP. It is time that we considered other things in measuring the wealth and prosperity of a nation, the level of crime and the quality of the environment being two prime indicators that should be included.

I welcome the debate. The hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington has raised important points and asked important questions. I congratulate the Government on their achievements to date, but there is much more work to do.

I had some sympathy with the Under-Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions, the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr. Raynsford), as he listened to the past two speeches, as the Government are in a tangle because of manifesto commitments somewhat recklessly dispersed. I can understand the Minister for Transport in London, on the pavement, according to the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Mr. Brake), saying those things. As someone who went to that constituency in the last general election, I know that Hampstead high street is completely jammed seven hours a day. As people came up to her, complained and said, "What are you going to do about it?" she would say, "Oh yes. We are committed to traffic reduction," just as Labour was committed to reducing animal experiments in laboratories. It is having a bit of a problem on that commitment, too.

I will tell hon. Members how to reduce traffic: engineer a recession. That will reduce it fast enough. The first indicator of economic recovery is always a rise in traffic volumes. Traffic can be reduced in the same way as cash flow into supermarkets or holiday bookings with tour operators can be reduced: ensure that less money is circulating.

Of course, hon. Members do not really mean that they want to reduce traffic. They do not want to stop people moving about; certainly the Government could not possibly want to stop people moving about. What they mean is that they want to reduce use of cars because, for various atavistic reasons, socialists and interventionist liberals do not like the motor car. They want public transport, and what is public transport? It is assembling a group of total strangers, putting them in a metal container, making them start from a starting point that was not their choice and conveying them to a destination that is inconvenient.

There was something to be said for trying to improve public transport and raise standards while it was genuinely public but, thanks to measures taken by the Conservative party—but not when I was in this place—there is no longer any such thing as genuine public transport anywhere. It is simply a monopoly that is determined to extract as much profit as possible from those who use it. As a result, quality has not improved. If anything, it has fallen because, instead of a monopoly dominated by the trade union movement, so one could not complain, and run for its convenience, there is now a monopoly run to enhance the profit of shareholders—those who own so-called public transport, by which I mean the metal containers that convey total strangers from destination to destination. Therefore, public transport is as dirty, squalid, inefficient and unreliable as it was in the old days. Public transport is a complete chimera.

I have read with great anxiety that some of the taxes that are to be levied on cars will be hypothecated to local authorities, which will be directed to use the money for public transport. In other words, it will be used to enhance the profits of Stagecoach, Branson and so forth, at the expense of imposing great inconvenience on the car owner and private individuals who like to get about under their own power, according to their choice and at their convenience by making the best use of technology.

The hon. Member for Bury, North (Mr. Chaytor) mentioned pollution, and his argument was valid. The pollution generated by old cars is probably high. The Morris Minor, which is the most favoured transport of the sandal-wearing brigade, generates far more pollution than a modern Audi and is also extremely difficult to drive while wearing sandals—I have tried it and it is dangerous.

I shall listen with care to the Under-Secretary's reply, as he has quite a juggling act to perform. Everyone wants to reduce traffic in their immediate vicinity, naturally. All our constituents want to "reduce traffic" in particular locations within the constituency boundaries. However, people do not face up to the principal element of the argument, which is that traffic volumes are an indicator of economic prosperity. The argument is used as a cover for getting at the car.

The fact is that car use emphasises everything that is congenial and acceptable in today's political climate. It has elements of freedom, choice, mobility, convenience, technology and, I admit, elements of a certain competitive consumerism, which is highly economically generative, as the hon. Member for Bury, North said.

Naturally, hon. Members have every interest in ensuring that car use is responsible. We are here to legislate for that. However, we cannot legislate it out of existence, or even attempt to do so. If the Government do, they will not only add enormously to the economic burdens felt by practically every citizen, but—as the Under-Secretary and his colleague the Whip are probably aware—in the long run, they will make themselves electorally extremely unpopular.

Far be it from me to try to elaborate on the description that my right hon. Friend the Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Mr. Clark) gave of public transport, but another inconvenience of travelling by that means is the chance that one has in winter of catching a nasty cold or some other disease. That always happens to me when I use public transport.

I am amazed at the sanctimonious humbug talked on these occasions and I think of the old adage, "Make me pure, O God, but not just yet." If we ask people who speak against the motor car how many their family owns, they usually um and ah, but admit finally that they have one for themselves, of course they use it only occasionally, one for the wife, who only goes shopping in it, and one for the other grown-up members of the family, who use it only in the evening.

It is true that this country has a large number of private cars, but when I have discussed the subject with, for example, Ford and have asked, "How can you possibly sell all those new cars?" I am told that people buy them not merely to drive but as status symbols. The car sits on the front drive, the neighbours admire it and everyone knows that one is going up in the world. That is part of the joy of owning a car.

Although there are, apparently, 20 million cars on our roads, they are not all on the road at the same time—far from it, some hardly leave the garage except once a year for a visit to relatives at Christmas, for example. The number of cars owned is irrelevant to the amount of use to which they are put. Everyone knows that one can buy a good used car, which someone has owned for a year but which has only 90 miles on the clock—a bargain, I believe.

An awful lot of nonsense is talked on the subject and there are a lot of myths. First, on the pollution myth, particulates—the little bits of stuff that come out of the exhaust—emitted by modern motor cars have been reduced by about 90 per cent. Modern technology is such that motor cars will soon not pump much out of their rear ends apart from fresh air. Of course, there will be some products of combustion but, as I have said so many times in the House that I feel I am almost becoming boring, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere amounts to such a tiny quantity that it is not a great threat to our atmosphere and environment.

If the hon. Lady really believes that carbon dioxide levels in the environment are no threat, can she explain why all nations are conscious of the need to act against greenhouse gas emissions? Why did they meet 12 months ago in Kyoto to negotiate a difficult programme of action and two months ago in Buenos Aires to negotiate the further details of means by which they can reduce emissions? Does she completely reject the argument that greenhouse gas emissions cause an unacceptable build-up of carbon dioxide and impact on global warming and climate change? Who else in the world shares her view?

A great many scientists share that view. There are about 300 parts of carbon dioxide to 1 million in the atmosphere, which is the equivalent of throwing a sugar cube in Loch Lomond. Carbon dioxide has been targeted because it is a product of certain industrial activities that people dislike, so it is an easy substance to blame. Water vapour is far more important as a so-called greenhouse gas, but no one complains about that as it is obviously foolish to try to do anything about it because water covers three quarters of the globe. Perhaps we should have the science lesson on another day.

We talk about our streets being congested, but everyone knows that it is easy to get around at certain times of day. It is not congestion but congestion of use that is the problem. During the school holidays, we can all drive much more freely because mothers are not taking their children to school. We must devise ways to spread traffic and one way is road pricing—an idea that never seems to be taken up because it is deemed to be difficult to implement. I know people who will not cross the Dartford bridge because they have to pay £1. They would rather go all the way round to save £1, which tells us that drivers are price sensitive. If they were required to pay for the amount of road used on a journey, it would make them decide whether that journey was necessary.

I shall briefly describe the experience in other parts of the world, as I have lived in the United States, Canada, Mexico and Australia and I often travel to the continent, for example to Germany, and have taken an interest in traffic problems for years. For example, New York did away with parking meters in the heart of the city, which meant that traffic could flow freely. Anybody travelling through Soho or Mayfair or the centre of any city in the day will see narrow roads with parking meters on both sides, reducing access to a narrow central lane. They must think that we are crazy because we are blocking our arteries for the sake of a few measly pounds. I know that Westminster city council regards the revenue from parking meters as a nice little extra, but it is not necessary or sensible to allow parking on our streets.

Most people who live in New York do not own cars. They use public transport during the week—mostly taxis—and hire cars at the weekends. That is the way of life of the well-to-do in some big cities.

Many cities in Germany do not allow lorries to stop between 7 am and 7 pm. There is no parking, no long-term deliveries and no stopping for five hours while builders put up scaffolding. All that has to take place during times when roads are less busy. Staggering the use of the roads reduces the problem. That is another sensible example. Instead of using the roads on an ad hoc basis, we should spread their use over different times of the day.

The lorry industry is having a bad time at the moment because of the fuel tax here. Fuel is very much cheaper on the continent and we are pricing our lorry drivers out of business. There are something like 250,000 lorries in British ownership, but far more come from the continent every day bringing large quantities of consumer goods, food and so on.

I use the M2, which runs from Dover to London and is crowded with lorries travelling nose to tail, all going into central London in the middle of the day. Although lorries are relatively few compared with cars, they are huge. I made some inquiries of the lorry owners and the big companies that use them. They told me that, because the great new lorries that are part of the EU requirements are so enormous, it is now cheaper to keep the goods on the lorries and keep them moving around our roadways 24 hours a day. In the old days, they took the stuff to a warehouse where it was unloaded on to smaller vehicles and taken to delivery points. We have created a position where lorries are moving around our main highways 24 hours a day because it is cheaper than stopping and unloading the cargo for distribution in small vans, perhaps at more convenient times.

We are not using our roads sensibly, so we can reasonably complain that congestion is difficult to manage at certain times of the day. I congratulate the Under-Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions, the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr. Raynsford), on the number of red routes in his constituency. I have written to him to congratulate him on the one from Blackheath to New Cross. I hope that it is extended. Many of the main arteries into the centre of London become congested during the day because they have only single yellow lines. Taxi hire firms keep all their vehicles waiting along the road, half a dozen people are loading and unloading, somebody is putting up scaffolding and somebody else has popped down to the corner shop for a packet of tea. All that traffic is allowed to congest and disturb our roads, so it is not surprising that we have these debates from time to time.

Finally, our country is not covered with roads. If all the towns and streets were whacked together, they would represent only 15 per cent of the land mass of the United Kingdom. Therefore, we are a country that is largely rural and there is still plenty of space. The hysteria that we hear whenever anybody wants to improve the roads in Britain should be dealt with sensibly by setting out the facts.

We should have more and better roads. The lunatics in some Labour boroughs who widen the pavements for no good reason, and just reduce the space for motorists, ought to be curbed. We should come to terms with the fact that, these days, people prize their freedom and independence which, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Kensington and Chelsea said, is represented by their ability to jump in the car and take the family out for a nice day in the sun, or, for women, by the convenience of not having to drag bags of shopping from the local high street home on the bus. I remember doing that as a young woman and I would not want to go back to it. I use the out-of-town hypermarket precisely because it is so convenient and I hope to goodness that none of these curmudgeons are ever allowed to stop those developments. I hope that the Under-Secretary, who has the powers to make good and sensible use of our roads, will apply common sense and not the hysteria and humbug that we hear in attacks on the motorist.

We have heard some interesting speeches being made with genuine feeling, although I disagree with some of them. The hon. Member for Bury, North (Mr. Chaytor) said that the Liberal Democrats had not consistently supported the fuel price escalator. We have always taken the position that as the fuel price escalator produces more income, it will provide the opportunity to cut other taxes. I have always used that equation. We have argued that vehicle excise duty should be abolished for two thirds of vehicles—all small-engined vehicles. The Government decided to increase the fuel price escalator, although they could well have argued that they did not have sufficient room to manoeuvre as the existing fuel price escalator plans had been budgeted in for forward spending. In increasing the fuel price escalator, they could have applied a joint equation, but they did not. I consider that to be a failure because of my wider concern about environmental taxation becoming unpopular if it is used simply as a way to increase taxes.

I agree with the hon. Member for Bury, North about charging for parking at out-of-town shopping centres. I regret that that proposal was removed from the White Paper at a very late stage. I represent some rural market towns that suffer considerably as a result of out-of-town developments that were allowed by the previous Government, on appeal, against the wishes of the local community. They have had an enormous impact on town centres, particularly St. Austell which is now very run down.

I also agree with the hon. Gentleman that we need to keep the fuel price escalator under review. Although the Conservatives now kick up a lot of fuss about it—despite the fact that they introduced it in the first place—it has not had a measurably large impact at the pump, simply because the raw material price has been falling. If the price of the raw material rises and there are sharp increases at the pump, there will be strong public opposition to that and to the tax. Perhaps we should consider an escalator system that ties into the fuel prices at the pump rather than a simple percentage. It may be easier for the Treasury and the Government in terms of forward planning, but it may not produce the outcome that they seek in either direction. It may not lever up fuel prices gradually as intended; they may go up too fast or not at all, depending on the raw material costs.

The right hon. Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Mr. Clark) suggested that socialists and interventionist Liberals were anti-car. I am not. I like cars and I like driving, but I do not like traffic jams, congestion and pollution. If we are honest, we all know that we sometimes use the car when we do not need to, but perhaps more often we are forced to do so when we do not want to. Out-of-town shopping is a good example, as is the lack of public transport in some areas for getting to work.

The hon. Member for Billericay (Mrs. Gorman) referred to the number of cars which is a real problem in urban areas. In towns such as Truro, traditional terraced streets do not have the capacity for people to park outside their homes. The problem will get worse and will change the way in which people use cars. Quite irrespective of Government policy, the convenience of the car is considerably diminished if people cannot park outside their homes, and that is already causing fights. People put bollards outside their homes to stop people parking and neighbourhood disputes break out, yet the current level of car ownership is relatively low compared with the number of adults who could potentially own cars and say that they would like to in future. However, for the most part this is a debate about car ownership, not about car use. The hon. Member for Billericay acknowledged that.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

I will not, because the hon. Lady spoke a moment ago. I have not said anything with which she would disagree and I am conscious of the time. She mentioned road pricing, which I will come to.

I want to anticipate an attack that we have heard previously from the Conservative Front Bench, although we have not heard it, interestingly enough, from the Back Benches today. The Conservative Front-Bench team has swung around entirely on its previous course and now puts itself up as the great opponent of the road fuel price escalator. When challenged on that, spokesmen say that it is the 1 per cent. that Labour has added that makes the difference, but in all their propaganda, they talk about the fuel price escalator as a whole. For the record, over 18 years, the Conservatives increased excise duty on fuel by 600 per cent. Between 1992 and 1996 alone, they raised £58 billion from fuel tax, of which £25 billion directly resulted from the imposition of the escalator.

In addition, the Conservatives sold off public transport services, took no action to stop the loss of rural bus routes and cut the money for transport packages for local authorities. They introduced deregulation of bus services, which has been an abject failure in improving rural bus services, which continue to decline. Privatisation of the railways has brought increased fares, massive increases in the number of complaints, massively increased overcrowding and, as the regulators themselves say, deteriorating services in many areas. The fuel price increases were not used to improve public transport services. Rail fares increased by 50 per cent. and bus fares increased by 40 per cent.

Will the hon. Gentleman acknowledge that during most of the period when we were increasing fuel excise duties, road fuels in this country were cheaper than on the continent, whereas now they are significantly more expensive, which is beginning to create market distortions? I should have thought that the hon. Gentleman's party was in favour of harmonisation of this sort of thing, being a pro-federalist party. When does the hon. Gentleman think that the fuel escalator ought to come to an end? No other country in the EU has a fuel escalator and if we keep it indefinitely, it will create more and more of a distortion.

The previous Government did not give a timetable for ending the road fuel price escalator. It was budgeted in for the whole of the current period under Conservative plans. If it is now the policy of the Conservatives to stop it, perhaps they should say why it was not their policy before the general election and how they would make up the huge budget deficit that would result. I presume that they would do so by cutting the health and education improvements that have been made, which is, of course, what they have said they would do. However, they have said that they would do it to meet an existing tax deficit, not a new one.

The fundamental answer is that all countries, especially European countries, are now committed through the Kyoto agreement substantially to reduce carbon dioxide emission increases in Europe. Countries will have to follow paths that lead to reductions in fuel use. I congratulate the Conservatives on pioneering the road fuel price escalator. It is rather pathetic that they have reversed their position to court popularity now that they are out of office. I believe that they will find that the policy will be adopted by other countries.

Road traffic reduction has overwhelming support in this place, as has already been said. It has overwhelming support among Labour Members, let alone support from the Labour Front-Bench team in the past. I trust that if a road traffic reduction Bill with national targets was introduced, the Minister would not use his offices or the offices of the Labour Whips to prevent its being passed. No doubt there would be negotiations about the detail. There might even be negotiation about the target, but there should be no negotiation about the principle of road traffic reduction because it was a specific commitment in Labour's manifesto.

The arguments in the House have moved on a long way from when road traffic reduction was first proposed by the hon. Member for Ceredigion (Mr. Dafis) in 1994. We then saw local targets introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Bath (Mr. Foster). The House is now far more in agreement on such issues, but the remaining areas of concern—economic damage, unrealistic targets and the possible regressive nature of traffic reduction—are still spoken about. It is our job to present the counter-arguments.

We have to remember that almost one third of households in Britain do not own a car. The majority of those people are poor, sick, disabled or elderly. The process of cutting unnecessary traffic growth and investing in public transport directly benefits those very poor people. In rural areas, we see some of the highest levels of dependency on cars and some of the highest levels of inability to afford them and of people without a car. The policies that have promoted the car have a direct and materially devastating impact on people in rural areas. If we introduce measures to make it less necessary to travel, such as more support for local schools and shops, and better planning so that road use is not built in as estates and shops are developed, we make it easier for people in both rural and urban areas to drive less. However, the main target of road traffic reduction will be urban areas.

I welcome the fact that the Government have built road traffic reduction into the London government Bill. It is crucial that that works; it will be a pioneering effort. If it is done right, it will show that more can be done across the rest of the country, so we give that measure support and we look for more. We hope to see a Bill for the rest of the country soon, but above all, we hope that the Government will stand by their manifesto pledge and back national road traffic reduction, not simply a reduction in the growth of road traffic.

I apologise to the House for not being here at the beginning of the debate. I declare an interest in the Register of Members' Interests. I am chairman of a small Irish medium-tech company that counts cars going in and out of car parks. That is not relevant to the debate, but it is worth putting on the record. The hon. Member for Truro and St. Austell (Mr. Taylor) spoke about the railways. One of my brothers-in-law runs a railway company.

It is worth noting that the increase in the use of the railways has not come from the provision of extra railway lines. We are going to have more railway lines. We have had many more stations opened in the past 10 years than probably at any time in the past 80 years, but it is worth noting that it is possible to achieve greater transport use without creating more infrastructure. The people who have looked on the roads debate as one that suggests that the increase in the number of roads has led to an increase in the amount of traffic have got it completely wrong. Growth in traffic and in movement comes in the main from prosperity and from emancipation.

In the 1930s, the people who had cars were white, middle-aged men in full-time occupations. As soon as pensioners, students, ethnic minorities and women start to have their own car, people start to say, "Let us bring in a system of road pricing." Such a system would cut out the pensioners, the students, the poor, women and ethnic minorities. We are left with white, middle-class men in full-time occupations with a fistful of fivers in their back pocket who can continue driving. That is one of the reasons why direct charging in a conventional sense is wrong.

The debate today is not about road pricing; it is about road traffic reduction. I am one of those who has supported road traffic reduction Bills from the beginning, in part because it is the kind of thing that I supported when I was a Minister at the Department of Transport 13 years ago. This Government go around sloganising and saying that the previous Government went in for predict and provide. We did not. We built only some of the roads, which were essential. We did not go around building roads that were merely convenient.

For example, anyone who claimed that the Okehampton bypass was just a desirable thing did not understand what the problems were there. In some of the London boroughs, town centre bypass schemes, often strongly desired by local authorities, help to provide civilisation for people who otherwise have to compete, when they are shopping, going to school, going to church and living, with through traffic. Traffic, whether on railways or roads, should be, in effect, in traffic canals. That helps to reduce risk and improve the environment.

How can we sensibly reduce road traffic? Let us assume that Britain continues to grow at 2 per cent. a year for the next 100 years. That implies a material standard of living seven and a half times greater than now. Keynes told us that in his piece "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren", published in "Essays in Persuasion". We ought always to remember that, even at 2 per cent. growth, which I argue is slightly below trend, many more people will be provided with the opportunity to own many more things. They will be able to own more homes and more cars, go on more holidays and do all sorts of things that are denied to many of them now. But I am talking about them not about us. We have a five-storey car park in the House of Commons. I am talking about the people whom we represent, who are among those who make 60 per cent. of their journeys on foot. My hon. Friend the Member for Billericay (Mrs. Gorman) asks why we widen the pavements; it is probably to make it more convenient for those who use them.

When people start talking about benefits from congestion charging, they should remember the example of the City of London. What level of road pricing would have been needed to achieve what sensible traffic planning achieved in the City with the so-called plastic bollard approach, which would have been implemented even without the IRA bomb? What level of charging would have excluded private traffic from Oxford street where, even now that there are only taxis and buses, pedestrians can move faster than traffic? The answer is not simply to charge.

One of the biggest changes since I became a Member of Parliament in 1975 is that most teachers then did not drive to school, whereas now most teachers do; then, most pupils were not driven to school, whereas now most are. Instead of telling pupils that they should not be driven to school, we should ask how we can identify the proportion of teachers, governors and pupils who come to school in ways other than by car and so have the figures, year by year. Then, we can start thinking about incentives: for example, if we go on improving schools, more people will go to the school that is nearer to them, instead of to one that is further away.

Perhaps we should do as the all-party cycling group suggested last evening and, instead of making pupils who go home by bike wait for 10 minutes until all the cars have gone, let pupils on bikes go 10 minutes early and hold back the pupils who will be collected by car. We can use small market signals such as that. It would certainly be worth putting on the national news the impact of the cycling provision in Oxford, which has led to almost a 40 per cent. reduction in cyclist casualties even before the extra benefits of having cycling helmets and reasonably well-maintained bikes are taken into account. In all those ways, we can begin to make a difference.

I have proposed before that the gates of the House of Commons car park should be locked, at least for one day a year and preferably for a week a year.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

I think that the hon. Gentleman must have his car parked here.

To pick up on the hon. Gentleman's point about the House of Commons car park, does he agree with me and a small number of other Members of Parliament that it would be entirely consistent with Government policy if a charge were imposed on car parking spaces in the House of Commons car park?

Perhaps, but I suspect that hon. Members would find some way of including the charge in their office cost expenses.

We have done one good thing in getting rid of the crazy system, which I opposed when it was first introduced, under which the bigger a Member of Parliament's car, the greater the mileage allowance given. We must remember that, if we point a finger at someone else, three fingers will point back at us, so we should first try the measures ourselves. For example, rather than ask the Fees Office to disclose the exact mileage claimed by each Member of Parliament, it might be a good idea to publicise the number of miles that Members of Parliament as a group claim each year, and then try to ensure that that figure decreases. It would be marvellous if the Deputy Prime Minister, instead of getting publicity for stopping to help elderly couples who break down on the motorway, got publicity for helping pensioners with suitcases to get down from a train. There are all sorts of individual measures we could take, but we should try them out ourselves first. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Mr. Clark) said, people like cars. I have nothing against cars—indeed, our household has two.

Unless we recognise the need for mobility of those who do not have access to a car, we shall not achieve our underlying goal of increasing people's well-being, which is a mixture of wealth and welfare, and helping them to have choices. In the City of London are some of the better-paid people in this country, yet 80 per cent. of them come to work by public transport, not because they cannot afford to drive—indeed, they are more likely than other people to own a car—but because it is not in their interests to drive. The option they take is a better option than driving. We must fix on that, for if our aim is to aid the mobility of those to whom choice is currently denied, we are far more likely to develop an attractive alternative for individuals who currently have a choice, but who too often choose to use their car.

I would caution the House against swallowing measures that are merely a passing fashion. An example of that is the Greater London lorry ban, which was introduced in the mid-1980s. As my hon. Friend the Member for Billericay said, in a rather perverse way people were told that they could not use the roads 24 hours a day and make their deliveries at suitable times. To be exempt from the lorry ban, a firm had to fill in a 10-page document; 20,000 firms did so, so 200,000 pages were filled in. Those documents had to be read by the checking authority and, if approved, the firm got an exemption. Two thousand signs were put up; the scheme cost £250,000 to begin with and, by its end, was costing £750,000.

The number of lorries that were denied an exemption was four. The Greater London council did not even bother to discover that until I got someone to ask the question. In the last month of the life of the GLC, it gave out the information that the number of lorries that did not get an exemption was four. I would not accuse the Government of putting on such a gloss, because they have not been in office for long enough, but if they start doing that sort of thing, they will be subjected to the same sort of inquisition. They must find better ways to make progress.

In my view, we can make progress in reducing the growth in traffic and, in many cases, we can reduce the amount of traffic. However, we shall achieve that only by introducing sensible measures that work, not by doing things to get a short-term round of applause.

I hope that I do not start my speech by embarrassing my hon. Friend the Member for Worthing, West (Mr. Bottomley) with a piece of one-upmanship, but my family is only a one-car family and I have taken to cycling around London. Doing so saves quite a lot in taxi fares and allows me to feel that I am doing my bit to improve conditions in central London.

The hon. Member for Truro and St. Austell (Mr. Taylor) balanced the ticket for the Liberal Democrats in the usual way, by saying that he was pro-car when their policy is obviously anti-car. I do not recommend that he sends his speech to A-level students in his constituency, because they might spot some of the inconsistencies in his answer to my question.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Mr. Brake) on obtaining the debate. I thank him for sending his questions in advance to the Minister, if only because it will be interesting to see how the Minister starts the process of getting out of some of the more ridiculous commitments that the Labour party made in opposition. It underlines the cynicism of new Labour that its leaders were prepared to make manifesto commitments to achieve utterly ludicrous objectives, when any sensible person would have known that it is unrealistic to aim for overall reductions in traffic volumes nationally.

The flexibility of the United Kingdom labour market has a great deal to do with people's being able to travel longer distances to work. The lifeblood of the economy is the ability to transport goods: whatever one's prejudices about the high street versus the out-of-town shopping centre, there is nothing one can buy in either a high street shop or a hypermarket that has not arrived by truck. It is ludicrous to suggest that we can return to buying local produce in local markets, because that would significantly reduce the quality of what was available. No Government will choke off economic growth by simply legislating for a reduction in traffic, and it is difficult to imagine how that aim would be achieved even if they did so.

The Government are having a go at gesticulating in front of their original objectives, but the fuel duty escalator, which they have increased, will not deliver. Research produced by the Centre for Economic and Business Research suggests that it would be necessary to increase the cost of petrol to £17 per gallon before it started to have any significant impact on traffic volumes. In the meantime, it would be the most vulnerable road users who were driven off the road, such as women in second cars and pensioners, who are one of the fastest-growing road user groups. The last thing pensioner couples in particular want to give up is their car. Low-paid people—particularly those in rural areas—who need to use their cars will be driven off the roads. They will lose their jobs and end up on benefit. Other groups, such as the disabled, who have no alternative but to use their cars will have to pay the excess fuel duties that the Government have levied.

The previous Government had to introduce the fuel escalator, but this Government have imposed substantial new taxes elsewhere—such as the £5 billion a year pensions tax. The Government's first two Budgets have imposed the largest peacetime taxation increases seen in this country. It is ludicrous to plead that those increases were necessary: the Government have simply lost control of public expenditure.

In their manifesto, the Government spell out the legitimate and beneficial objective—which we support—of cutting congestion and pollution. That should be achievable, but the problem requires proper analysis. There has been virtually no growth in inner-urban traffic. The hon. Member for Bury, North (Mr. Chaytor) has pointed out that road traffic speeds in central London are virtually the same as 100 years ago, and the same probably applies to the volume of traffic in inner London. The growth of inner-urban traffic in London is not the problem. By aiming at relatively small market segments in their transport policy—such as the school run and the journey to work—the Government are not tackling the real problem of traffic growth.

The document published yesterday by the Government, entitled "Breaking the Log Jam", starts from the completely wrong premise. It is introduced with a totally dishonest prospectus. Let us analyse the sequence of events properly. The first document produced as part of the Government's great transport policy was the comprehensive spending review. The Secretary of State was prevented from issuing his White Paper until the Chancellor had had his say and got his way in the spending review, which cut transport investment. The previous Conservative Government spent an average of £1 billion a year over five years on motorway and trunk road infrastructure improvements. This Government have cut that sum by two thirds, to only £300,000 a year. Only one bypass will be started in this financial year when there are all sorts of very good environmental reasons for building bypasses all over the country.

That is a very interesting—and absolutely disgraceful—statistic. As a consequence of the Government's policy, more people will be killed on the roads. It has been established by every relevant statistic that one could encounter that motorway journeys are the safest mode of travel. By restricting the growth of motorways, the Government will ultimately and indirectly raise the number of road deaths.

My right hon. Friend makes an extremely valid point. The Government are also benefiting from reduced rail subsidies—one of the dividends of privatisation. In addition, they are phasing out Treasury support for the tube.

Those measures were announced in the spending review. The Government then released the White Paper and recently published the Greater London Authority Bill, which contains skeleton provisions regarding congestion charging. They have also delivered a consultation paper—yet another one—on that issue. Even though the Government assume in the comprehensive spending review that they will collect revenue of £1 billion a year by 2005, that consultation paper asks who will pay congestion charges and how they will be collected. It is no surprise that Friends of the Earth has described the Government's transport policy as a case of "carry on consulting".

The Secretary of State has clearly been rolled over by the Treasury. The congestion and car parking charges will not mean extra money for transport. [Interruption.] I have clearly excited the Minister—I must have touched a raw nerve. That extra revenue will not mean extra money for transport; it will merely make up for the cuts. The tube cannot survive without a degree of subsidy. The Conservatives subsidised the tube to the tune of £400 million a year. The extra charges will simply transfer the tax burden for subsidising the tube from the Treasury to the motorist.

There will come a point when motorists—who already contribute more than £30 billion a year in taxation through fuel duties, value added tax and so on when less than one fifth of that money goes to transport—will begin to question whether the Government have produced a fair and proper transport policy. The Government are using the urban congestion argument as an excuse for collecting more taxes—the revenue will not go to transport—because they have lost control of the social security bill and have no welfare reform programme. That was evidenced last night with the introduction of the Road Traffic (NHS Charges) Bill.

As if finally to give the lie to the assurance that the extra money from the new charges and taxes will go to transport, paragraph 6.30 of the paper to which the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington referred says:

"the legislation will not restrict expenditure entirely to transport related matters".

The objective should be not so much reducing traffic overall, but cutting congestion and pollution, which was Labour's manifesto commitment. That makes sense, and we will seek to hold the Government to that commitment. We do not have excessive traffic overall, but too much of the wrong traffic in the wrong place. There is unsuitable traffic on unsuitable roads. While traffic growth in inner-urban areas is virtually nil and the volume of traffic is growing in suburban areas by 2 or 3 per cent. a year, there is real growth in inter-urban traffic. Yet the Government have not produced a single policy item to deal with or reduce that growth in traffic.

Where is the long-awaited consultation paper on land use planning that was promised in the White Paper and foreshadowed originally before the election? Labour has been in office for 20 months and we still have no guidance as to how to improve land use planning. I put it to the Minister that that is the hardest nut to crack. We will look positively at any proposals that he might produce—but, as yet, there are none.

How is improved land use planning consistent with the Government's strategy to build 2 million new homes on green-field sites by 2016—each one a pretty little box with a double garage? It is ridiculous to suggest that so much green-field development is consistent with reducing traffic growth. We need to divert traffic to more suitable places. I recently drove down the A3 to Winchester.

Portsmouth.

I beg your pardon—I did reach the correct destination. There is a dual carriageway virtually all the way to Hindhead, a single carriageway through Hindhead and then a dual carriageway again. It is not rational to have no bypass around Hindhead, but the Government do not have the money to build one. They are presenting their transport policy as rational when it has clearly been screwed by the Treasury.

Privatisation presented huge opportunities to develop alternatives to the car, such as rail transport. For example, English, Welsh and Scottish Railway Ltd. plans to treble the number of rail freight movements in the next 10 years. There is huge investment in Railtrack. However, we need new investment in roads as well, and the roads system must be managed better.

The environment must be a prime concern when formulating transport policy. If we are to protect the environment, we must also protect economic growth. The White Paper raised great hopes, which have now been dashed. Those involved in commenting on and formulating transport policy—that is a great many people—are extremely disappointed by the dithering, delay and endless consultation that is the Government's excuse for inaction.

The Government have no authority. There is no transport legislation in the Queen's Speech. All we have had are cuts in the roads programme which will increase congestion and pollution, and at the next general election, voters will judge the Government's transport policy on whether it achieves cuts in pollution and congestion.

The debate initiated by the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Mr. Brake) has addressed an issue that is at the heart of the Government's policies to tackle traffic congestion and pollution. His concerns that the Government are backtracking on our commitments are completely unfounded. I wish that he would spend more time considering all the actions that the Government are taking rather than resorting to extraordinarily detailed textual analysis designed to try to prove that there might be some possibility of backtracking. I assure him that there is not. Our objectives are unchanged.

The Government's recent White Paper, "A New Deal for Transport", makes it clear that we need to do more than just reduce the rate of traffic growth. Where the problems of pollution and congestion are greatest, we need to achieve an absolute reduction in traffic levels. More importantly, we are making good progress in implementing the policies necessary to deliver on our promises.

I want to be absolutely clear on this point. I want the Minister to put on record whether the Government's policy is to achieve an overall, absolute reduction in traffic. Yes or no?

The hon. Gentleman ought to contain himself. I am trying to answer several questions that he gave me notice of and asked in his speech. I have just said clearly that we do not regard a reduction in the growth of traffic as sufficient. I have stressed that in areas that have serious congestion and pollution problems, we must achieve traffic reduction.

I put it to the hon. Gentleman that in other areas of the country—some of them are represented by his hon. Friends—there is no need to achieve traffic reduction because vehicles are not causing serious pollution. There are rural areas where that is the case, where the motor car is a lifeline and where there is no great environmental or other reason for pursuing traffic reduction. There is a need to tackle the serious congestion and pollution problems in cities, and that will be at the forefront of the Government's policy.

It is right to have regional and local strategies rather than blanket policies at a national level which are not sensitive to local considerations. I should have thought that the hon. Gentleman would be the first to recognise the importance of well-developed local transport plans, worked out by local authorities and local communities in response to the specific needs of their area. That is precisely what we are seeking to encourage.

In our first 18 months in office, we have published and taken significant steps to implement the first comprehensive White Paper on transport policy for more than 20 years. It is the first White Paper to integrate transport policies with other key related policies on the environment, land use planning and health. The hon. Member for North Essex (Mr. Jenkin) complained, on the one hand, about us producing too many consultation papers and, on the other, that we have not yet published a consultation paper on the changes to PPG3. I have to tell him that changes to PPG3 will be announced shortly. The Government take that matter seriously and recognise the need for integration of land use, transport and environmental policies. We created the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions to achieve that integration.

We have also secured in the comprehensive spending review the means to deliver our integrated transport strategy with an extra £1.8 billion over three years for public transport, traffic management and road maintenance.

The Deputy Prime Minister has made it clear that doing nothing is not an option. Congestion is costing our country billions of pounds a year. The Department's 1997 road traffic forecasts made clear the scale of the future challenges that we would face without the Government's policy changes. Traffic was forecast to increase by more than a third over the next 20 years. That would seriously undermine our ability to achieve our legally binding Kyoto targets on CO, reduction. It would also set back action to tackle local air quality and the adverse impacts on people's health of the way in which we travel. It would lead to significant worsening in congestion.

We must not forget the three in 10 households that have no access to a car. They are totally reliant on other forms of transport such as public transport, cycling and walking.

Our policies aim to encourage more responsible car use and to extend the choices available to all groups in society. The White Paper sets out how we will achieve that.

The Deputy Prime Minister said last year that we want to be held to account for our achievements in reducing car journeys. That position has not changed. The White Paper promises that we will report on the success of the new deal. The two recent road traffic reduction Acts provide a specific framework for reporting progress in tackling road traffic and its impacts at local and national level.

Our policies will encourage people to drive less and to walk, cycle and use public transport more. They fully address all the recommendations of Sir Donald Acheson on mobility, transport and pollution, to which the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington referred. Our approach is based on integrated policies with action at national, regional, local and individual level to deliver the reductions in traffic that we need.

I want briefly to highlight some of the key policies that we are implementing which will make a difference. The first is local transport plans. Delivery of our objectives depends, to a large extent, on action at a local level to tackle local needs. That is why the new five-year local authority local transport plans are at the heart of the new deal. They will be comprehensive, integrated transport strategies. They will contain measures to co-ordinate and improve local transport provision to tackle congestion and pollution, and support economic development in urban and rural areas.

London boroughs will have to produce local implementation plans giving effect to the mayor's integrated transport strategy for London. Production of the strategy will be a key priority for the mayor in his or her first few months in office.

We are providing authorities with the additional resources to do the job. We have secured an additional £700 million over the next three years for the implementation of local transport plans. We are removing unnecessary constraints on how local authorities can spend the money allocated to them.

We published draft guidance on local transport plans on 12 November. We are encouraging authorities to set targets so that we and they can judge performance. Clearly, if targets for road traffic reduction are to have any meaning, they need to be considered in the context of local transport strategies setting out how traffic growth can be tackled. We are, therefore, implementing the Road Traffic Reduction Act 1997 in step with implementation of local transport plans.

We have listened to the concerns of local authorities about the time scale for the preparation of robust plans. We have asked for provisional plans by the end of next July and full five-year plans in 2000. Authorities will submit their statutory traffic reduction reports as part of the first full local transport plans in 2000 and produce non-statutory interim reports as part of their provisional plans. That phased implementation will enable a greater degree of standardisation to be achieved in the local measurement of existing traffic levels and forecasts so that the national implications can be assessed. As I am sure the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington will recognise, it is critical that there is a standard approach so that we do not have varying figures for different areas which are difficult to co-ordinate.

We shall give local authorities important new powers to allow them to charge road users or to introduce new charges on workplace parking as part of the package of measures in their local transport plan. In London, it will be for the mayor to consider the role of such measures as part of the integrated transport strategy. We propose to give powers to the boroughs as well as the mayor, but borough powers would need to be exercised in line with the mayor's strategy.

The Greater London Authority Bill, published last week, includes the necessary powers to enable such charges to be introduced in London. We are committed to the introduction of those powers nationwide. Yesterday, we published a consultation document seeking views on the details of how such schemes might operate.

Revenues raised will be used locally to benefit transport serving the area where charges apply. Investment in improving the alternatives will be critical to the success of schemes in reducing traffic.

To tackle road traffic growth, we need to widen the choices available for those who have a car and those who do not, so we are improving the alternatives to the car. Public transport is crucial but so, too, is the need to encourage walking and cycling, and that is on the Government's agenda.

I want to address the question of national road traffic targets. The Road Traffic Reduction (National Targets) Act 1998, which became law in July, requires the Government to report on the case for national targets for road traffic. The Government must also publish further reports on progress in reducing the impact of road traffic and towards any targets set. We have said repeatedly that we will produce our first report on the case for targets by the end of next year. That is an entirely reasonable time scale given the analysis that we need to undertake. I referred to the preparation and co-ordination of local plans. We need that analysis to assess the impact of the new deal's measures on traffic.

We have also set challenging targets on, for example, CO, emissions, air quality, cycling and road safety—

Order.

I am delighted to have been successful in the ballot for today's debates and to see so many colleagues here. We are about to debate a subject that is of tremendous importance not only to those of us who represent the north-west in Parliament but to the country as a whole, because the north-west is such an important region, economically and culturally.

The north-west has the second largest economy in the United Kingdom. It is one of the most densely populated areas—5.5 million people live in Lancashire, Cheshire, Cumbria, Greater Manchester and Merseyside. We have 140,000 businesses and currently benefit from £370 million from the European structural funds, which we would like very much to keep. We also have £375 million from the single regeneration budget challenge fund.

Although manufacturing has declined in recent years, it is still a major source of output and jobs in the north-west. It accounts for 27 per cent. of the north-west's output and 22 per cent. of its employment. Our manufacturing is concentrated in four main sectors: chemicals, textiles and clothing, food products and engineering and, of course, the very important aerospace industry.

Manufacturing has been hard hit in recent months, which is why it is so important that the regional development agency should begin its work of drawing investment into the region, preparing its business plan, setting up strategic sites, and working with the regional chamber of commerce and all the local authorities.

Time and again, it has been shown that partnership is the key to economic success and to social regeneration. In the north-west, we have a tremendous record of working together to achieve results. In Greater Manchester, the city pride project involves Manchester, Salford, Trafford and Tameside working together to regenerate the city-centre core. MIDAS, the new Manchester investment development agency service, is drawing jobs and opportunities into the area. We are all working together to bring the Commonwealth games to the region, which would be of enormous benefit economically.

Some regions say that they do not feel close-knit or that they do not have a real affinity with their neighbours. That is certainly not the case in the north-west, where we share our history, language, literature, geography and, I believe, our sense of humour. That is why the north-west needs a voice as a region. I want a democratically elected regional government to shape and focus our growth and development, bringing decision making closer to the people and the communities that we serve.

How many letters has the hon. Lady received asking for an elected authority for the north-west?

We have been consulting the communities, and many say that they want decisions to be made at a local level. The hon. Gentleman might be in favour of remote government, but I am sure that that is not popular in his area.

I was talking about being closer to the people, and I want to say a little more about what is happening to regenerate my city of Salford, which is becoming more exciting by the day. The past 20 years have not been especially happy for Salford and its people. We based our economy to a large extent on manufacturing and full-time, high-quality jobs, but the Tories put paid to all that.

We had two devastating recessions which decimated manufacturing and knocked the heart out of many local people. However, in the 18 months since the Labour Government were elected, we have begun to see a revival in the city's fortunes—a new beginning. I hesitate to say that there is a Salford renaissance, but that is how it is beginning to feel.

We have an education action zone and a health action zone, and we have pathway status for our regeneration projects. I shall give a couple of examples of local partnerships working on the ground—real regeneration from the bottom up. Just last week, we submitted the action plan for the regeneration of Seedley and Langworthy, one of the most difficult communities in Salford. The bid was for £25 million for the city as a whole but focused on that particular area. The bid contains some genuine innovations which could inform regeneration projects on a wider scale.

One proposal is for a community housing company, whereby local people decide on the design, management and lettings of property and have a stake in the growth of the community. Another proposal is for a community trust, again led by local people, which will be an agent to draw in funds and resources from the new deal, Europe and elsewhere to provide jobs and opportunities.

Most exciting of all, there is to be a community financial institution. Banks and building societies have withdrawn completely from the inner cities, so there is very little access to financial services in those areas. We are to have our own community financial institution—a people's bank, if you like—which will provide loans and start-up grants to local businesses and bring financial opportunities back to the inner city. That is what sustainable improvement is all about. It is not about being here today and gone tomorrow; it means improvement, week by week and month by month, changing and growing, so that once again the community becomes strong, self-confident, vibrant and caring—somewhere where people are proud to live and where they want to bring up their families.

We need to tackle the problems of private rented property and absentee landlords who do not have a stake in the community. I want the Government to examine the regulation and licensing of private landlords to make sure that they meet their social responsibilities to the communities in which they have property.

We have to invest in community capacity. We have various regeneration projects, but we are asking the same group of local people to get involved. People have their own lives, families and jobs, which makes it difficult for them to participate in a range of projects, so we need to glean the necessary skills and talents from a wider group of people.

We need real, joined-up government. We have all the various initiatives, but we cannot have people spending time on administration and bureaucracy only to find that they are bidding against each other for funds. We have to ensure that the different initiatives mesh and integrate. We shall then have the opportunity to show that we can provide the best value for the extra money that we invest and can renew the fabric of the communities forgotten by the Tories.

I shall highlight a couple of other local projects, the first being the development of the Lowry centre in Salford. It is the national landmark millennium project for the arts, involving £127 million of investment. It is unique in bringing together funding from the national lottery, the Millennium Commission and Europe—a real partnership which, in 2000, will deliver the most wonderful, breathtaking cultural centre anywhere in Britain.

Just last week, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport topped out the centre with the final golden bolt. He was awe-struck, not only by the building itself, but by the concept of bringing together a performance space for large productions—there is seating for 1,750 people—a flexible studio theatre, galleries for Lowry's paintings, a digital world centre, and a centre for virtual reality linked with the university. The final accolade was the receipt of £2 million in sponsorship from Electronic Data Services, a major information technology employer. That is initiative and enterprise.

I pay tribute to Salford city council, which had the ability and vision and was prepared to risk taking the project forward. The best return on that risk will be the fact that local people, especially children and the young, will be able to take part in, enjoy and appreciate performance and art. Salford is packed with creativity and talent. At long last, we have a Government who recognise that and want it to flourish.

Our examples of regeneration are quite breathtaking. Salford Quays now employs more than 7,000 people, more than when the docks were operating at their height in the 1950s and 1960s. The latest development is Century 105, the north-west's newest commercial radio station, which is investing £2.5 million in a high-tech studio and creating more than 50 jobs. The metrolink extension goes through Salford Quays into Eccles. There is a major project with English Partnerships to regenerate Chapel street, which is the main A6 corridor into the city.

Only last week, we announced the building of the only five-star hotel in the region, which will bring jobs for local people. We are also examining the possibility of a popular music centre in the Chapel street area to build on the creativity and talent of local people. There is also a housing and leisure development at the old hospital site. There is a huge development at Chapel wharf with the Calatrava bridge, which has won international awards, and 2,200 staff are based at the new Inland Revenue headquarters.

In fact, some £875 million of capital investment, public and private, is planned for Salford over the next five years. That could support up to 35,000 local jobs. To cap it all, there is an application to build a snowdome in Salford—who would have thought there would be skiing in Salford? It is hard to believe, but it is true. That, too, will provide jobs and opportunities for local people.

A few weeks ago, some out-of-date research was published. It compared Salford to the Titanic, alleging that people were leaving the city and abandoning ship. That research is nine years old—from the depths of the third Tory term, when our city was at its lowest. Today, nothing could be further from the truth. The city is becoming an exciting and vibrant place in which to live and work.

I do not have time to say everything that I want because many colleagues want to speak, but I shall say this: north-west Members are a force to be reckoned with. We shall be working together for our region and the people whom we are here to represent. We shall be ensuring that the north-west's voice is heard at the very heart of government. We know that our Government want to encourage regeneration; we have made a wonderful start. We will be watching very closely to ensure that that regeneration continues, for the benefit of north-west people.

I am grateful to be called so early in this debate. I congratulate the hon. Member for Salford (Ms Blears) on the enthusiastic way in which she gave a one-person commercial for Manchester and Salford. Judging by the number of her hon. Friends who surround her, I am sure that she would be the first to admit that the north-west does not comprise only Manchester and Salford. Although she is brimming with the natural enthusiasm of a new Member under a new Government, I respectfully remind her that the development in Salford Quays, together with many regeneration projects in Liverpool, Trafford Park, other parts of Manchester and all over the north-west, began under the previous Conservative Government.

I must also remind the hon. Lady that the previous Conservative Government introduced a broad-scale scheme known as city challenge, in which we provided money on a co-ordinated basis to places such as Blackburn. Her rather selective retailing of what is happening now does not properly reflect some of the measures that we undertook when in government. I would be the first to admit that I wish that we had done more. I do not think that there is a party difference between us on the need to invest more resources in dealing with the many problems in inner cities and urban parts of the north-west, although the hon. Lady perhaps gave the impression that the previous Government did nothing.

It is a little rich for the hon. Lady to talk about economic and industrial matters without mentioning the burdens with which north-west industry has had to cope since this Government came to power: high interest rates, a high pound, pressures on manufacturing industry, the advent of things such as the social charter, and so on. I shall not dwell too long on those matters. Suffice it to say that the idea that the north-west and its business suddenly hit calm, tranquil waters on 1 May 1997 is a travesty.

I would not necessarily have expected the hon. Lady, who advocated the benefits of Manchester and Salford, to mention the north-west's most important industry: aerospace. [Horn. MEMBERS: "She did."] I apologise if she did; perhaps she did not go into it in quite as much detail as I should like to. Aerospace is one of this country's most dynamic industries. It underwent a difficult period in the early 1990s, but is now working positively for the future.

The hon. Lady will be aware of British Aerospace, the importance of civil aviation to the north-west's economy and the generation and development of civil aviation through new technology. When I asked the Minister for Energy and Industry at Question Time last week for a straightforward answer to a question about the civil aviation research and demonstration programme, which brings £20 million to bear on seedcorn development, all I heard was rubbish. So interested was the Minister in giving me a sensible answer that all he could say was, "We are doing more than you were doing."

I wanted an answer to that question because the programme represented the seedcorn funding for much of the work that developed the airbus wing. The hon. Member for Salford will know the importance of the airbus wing to British Aerospace's work. I hope that the Minister will give a straightforward answer on the Government's intentions. Without such technological development and such a lead, many of the hon. Lady aspirations for the north-west economy will not be fulfilled. I should like assurances on the matter.

In the light of the right hon. Gentleman's comments on the north-west business community, does he recognise the strong—indeed, unanimous—support among north-west businesses for the region's submission on regional government? Have not businesses throughout our region been strongly supportive of the creation of a regional development agency because they recognise the role that such an agency can play in the regeneration of our communities?

From the companies to which I have talked, I do not sense a great deal of enthusiasm about this issue—but then business is pragmatic: it would not turn up its nose at new channels through which resources can be directed for the benefit of the north-west. The proof of the pudding will be in the eating—when RDAs start their work. There are some problems on the horizon. There will be tremendous competition between RDAs for every one to be a winner and a success. They will also face competition from a Scottish Parliament and a Welsh Assembly. They will be hard pressed to match some of the successes of regional appeals which the previous Government were able to deliver.

Will the Minister reassure me that one of the most crucial factors in ensuring that technologies in the north-west aerospace industry remain at the forefront for the benefit of its regeneration is FOAS—future offensive air systems? A great deal of work is being undertaken in some new technology development at the margin—unique in this country, and, in fact, in Europe. Without continuing Government support for such programmes, which the UK and French aerospace industries are exploring, our north-west industry will not be able to remain at the forefront of technology. It is important that the Government reassure us that they recognise that, because the north-west aerospace industry accounts for 40,000 jobs.

Last week, there was a debate on seaside towns, of which the north-west has quite a few. One of the most important is Blackpool. Since we are debating matters connected with regeneration, I should like an answer from the Minister to a question that has been bothering me.

One factor that might be inhibiting further development of the Blackpool and Fylde coast is the blight that has hung over the area for some time as a result of North West Water's inability to achieve recognition of its meeting the European Community bathing water directive standards.

In late September, the Minister for the Environment made some pretty strong comments, amplifying some of the problems and ignoring work to be undertaken as a result of the investment of a further £100 million by North West Water in projects approved by the Environment Agency to enable the waters to meet the bathing water standards, so removing a blight from the Fylde coast and sending the signal that it is a good place for a family holiday. Which schemes does the Minister for the Regions, Regeneration and Planning support and believe will do the business for the north-west's principal tourist location? It is easy for the Minister for the Environment to rubbish the Fylde coast at the Labour party conference. The damage to a very important part of the north-west economy caused by such ill-considered comment is serious and must be addressed in today's debate.

My right hon. Friend will doubtless recall how keen the Labour party was to stop holding its party conferences in Blackpool, which has had a serious effect on Blackpool.

Indeed. My hon. Friend will be aware that a new private sector partner has bought the facilities, including the Winter Gardens. The fact that more money will be invested will be a testimony to private enterprise, but it will also be a test of the Labour party—will it be prepared to back Blackpool again when the new facilities are installed?

Does the right hon. Gentleman recall that, at the end of the 1980s, when North West Water said that it did not consider further treatment of sewage on the Fylde coast necessary, and said that it would simply build a longer outfall pipe to put still-polluted sewage into the sea, Lancashire county council fought a major campaign, supported by the European Commission? As a result, treatment is starting to be implemented on the Fylde coast. That programme is not yet complete, and tertiary treatment may be required, but does the right hon. Gentleman recall that he, and the Government of whom he was a member, refused to accept that any further treatment of sewage was necessary on the Blackpool coast?

In a spirit of reckless generosity, I was hoping to agree with some of what the hon. Lady said, because, as leader of Lancashire county council, she was a doughty fighter for an important development on the Fylde coast. I would fall out with her only on the last part of her intervention, because she is right, in a sense. All of us, on both sides of the political spectrum, had to battle with North West Water to persuade it that the long sewage outfall was not the answer. I remember that we won that battle, but that progress could not have been made had we not privatised the water industry. We occasioned £500 million of investment—now £600 million—to deliver the systems which, I hope, will lead to a solution for the Fylde coast.

In fact, the Select Committee on the Environment went to Fleetwood to consider the argument made by Lancashire county council, and held an evidence session on that at Rossall point. The Government changed their opinion on long sea outfalls for the whole country as a result of that inquiry and the campaign that had been fought.

The hon. Gentleman bears out my point that the success in getting that investment made was the sum total of the parts. The former leader of Lancashire county council may be distorting history slightly in taking all the credit.

I shall now talk about the transport infrastructure in the north-west of England. Although it is absolutely right to explore every opportunity to make the best use of all modes of transport and, whenever possible, to move freight on to the rail system and to develop our rail system, all that the hon. Member for Salford hoped for for the north-west may be more difficult to achieve if the Government do not seriously consider the condition of the M6. To suggest that the Birmingham northern relief road will solve all the problems of that vital transport corridor is to ignore reality.

Some people suppose that our position on the western side of the United Kingdom, when the majority of our export business goes to Europe, puts us at the wrong side of the country. We must not give the impression abroad that we are in any way cut off because the M6 is becoming an almost intolerable route. That would be the worst thing that we could do. The Minister for the Regions, Regeneration and Planning smiles, but those who use that motorway know that it is a nightmare road at times. I hate to think of the environmental damage being done by vehicles stuck in endless queues on that motorway, and of the loss of business time because the capacity of the system is not big enough and there are no plans to develop relief for some of the pinch points.

I could not agree more with the thrust of the right hon. Gentleman's argument, but why, under the Administration of whom he was a member, was there no investment in the west coast main line or—more important, and more relevant to the specific point that he is making—in rolling stock for the freight industry? Ludicrously, we are still in the situation that we inherited from his Administration: V6 engines leaving a very successful Vauxhall plant in Ellesmere Port are being exported to Europe by road because his Administration left no rolling stock for the freight industry.

In reply to the first part of the hon. Gentleman's intervention, sadly, the investment that should have been made in the west coast main line depended on the tilting train working, and it did not. [HON. MEMBERS: "Oh."] I always try to be fair. If there is a fault, those of us who were part of the previous Government should acknowledge that. However, because the tilting train did not work, all the railway investment went to the east coast main line.

Yes, there may well have been a dearth of investment in freight, but we should consider the progress that English, Welsh and Scottish Railway, the new freight company, is making in its purchase of 300 locomotives and new specialist facilities. Had freight services remained nationalised, none of that investment would have been possible. It is a pity that the hon. Gentleman is not prepared to acknowledge the benefits that have already flowed to the north-west economy—its routeways and roads—as a result of the transfers to rail freight that EWS is making. The Conservatives set the industry free.

I do not want to go into details, but I hope that, when the Minister reflects on the debate, he will not forget the Importance to the region of agriculture, especially horticulture. The horticulture industry still employs a large number of people. If the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, Lord Donoughue, read the comments regularly made in Grower magazine, he would understand why the Government have a poor reputation in the horticulture industry. It is time that the Government developed a proper strategy for the development of the industry, because it is vital to the north-west.

I close on a point about the human capital of the north-west—its people, whose ability or otherwise to make an economic contribution reflects the condition of our health services. At present, a small group of people is inhibited from making its contribution to the economy because of the poor state of renal services in the Royal Preston hospital. I should like the Minister to convey to his friends in the Department of Health my earnest wish that the work being undertaken by the Department of Health and by Sir Leslie Turnberg in a review of regional services—including renal services—in Lancashire, will gel together to enable an early decision to be taken on the need to expand renal services in Preston. The people who are affected by the current pressures on those services might be able to make a better contribution to the north-west economy if decisions were taken on the expansion of those services.

I hope that I have been able to paint a broader picture of the north-west economy, drawing attention to some of the challenges that must be met by hon. Members and Ministers if we are all to ensure that the north-west region, which we represent in the House, prospers in future.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Salford (Ms Blears) on securing the debate. I shall persuade my wife to read her speech in Hansard. Perhaps she will then stop pestering me to take her to Paris, and instead we shall nip down the East Lancashire road and visit Salford. It would be an awful lot cheaper.

Undoubtedly, after years of neglect of the north-west, there is now a steady overall improvement, which is continuing, despite the trading difficulties experienced by much of manufacturing industry. I welcome the strides that the Government have taken, but I shall draw attention to many issues that should be addressed to allow the momentum of economic improvements to gather pace.

One of the things that most irritates me as I look back on the past 20 years is the tendency of Government in London to regard deprivation and social exclusion as primarily a matter to be addressed in the inner cities. Deprivation and social exclusion also exist in smaller towns—those that have lost traditional industries, such as textiles, or suffer from levels of disadvantage similar to those of inner Liverpool or inner Manchester.

Towns such as Barrow, Burnley, Preston, Rochdale, no doubt Ellesmere Port, and Skelmersdale in my constituency do not receive the automatic attention that they deserve. It is true also, as the right hon. Member for Fylde (Mr. Jack) said, that the incidence of social exclusion and economic failure in rural areas is not negligible. Systems to tackle that difficulty are only just being devised.

It is important to remember that Cheshire, Lancashire and Cumbria are predominantly rural areas and that they are about to lose their objective 5b status. Skelmersdale is a town of about 45,000 people. It experienced some of the most violent effects of recession during the Tory years. In recent months, the tide seems to have turned for the town. Unemployment, which was more than 13 per cent. when the Tories left office, is now down to 8.7 per cent. However, that is still twice the national figure.

The economy in Skelmersdale is becoming more exciting and stimulating. New businesses are moving in to the extent that we have run out of industrial and commercial business land. Investment in Skelmersdale is growing rapidly and that is due to three factors. First, it is due to regional selective assistance and assisted area status. Secondly, the local partnerships that have been formed have been tremendously successful, largely thanks to the energy and intelligence of West Lancashire district council, in this context at least. These are the partnerships between businesses, public agencies, community groups and the county council. Thirdly, there is the expansionist mood of several key industries in the town, to which I shall refer.

Assisted area status as we know it is up for significant change, and Skelmersdale is in danger of losing it. Most of west Lancashire is in the Liverpool travel-to-work area; it is on the northern edge of Merseyside. Many workers move in and out of Merseyside and Skelmersdale for their work, which makes more sense as their travel-to-work area than a Lancashire countywide area would. To use different criteria for designating assisted area status for Skelmersdale would damage a town that has, as I have said, twice the national rate of unemployment. It would damage also the local partnerships which have hitherto been very successful in attracting continuing investment into the new town.

Other problems have been created by the way in which Department of Trade and Industry grants have been used to underpin foreign investments in some new plant in the region. We all welcome such new investment in the region, but it seems foolish to put taxpayers' money into, for example, a new paper mill in Trafford Park. I wish no harm to Trafford Park and its development. However, A and M Paper in Skelmersdale has invested huge amounts of its own money in expansion in the town, and Kimberly-Clark has similarly put massive investment into a paper mill in Barrow, and each of those indigenous firms will find themselves in regional competition from heavily subsidised rivals.

The same is true of a firm called Europanel in my constituency, which makes Contiboard. It faces competition from a Portuguese firm, Sonae, which has been subsidised to move an identical factory in Kirkby, about four miles away. It will operate in a sector of production in the country that is already oversupplied. I know that the DTI is not the responsibility of my hon. Friend the Minister for the Regions, Regeneration and Planning, but in my view the DTI should tighten up on those investments, and I hope that that will be a function of the regional development agency in the near future.

The north-west is one of the country's premier agricultural areas. Two thirds of the region is rural. It is the region that was most damaged by the BSE tragedy. Cheshire and Cumbria—particularly Cumbria—were hard hit by it. Similarly, Lancashire has many pig, poultry and egg producers. They are again in deep recession. My right hon. Friend the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food has had some remarkable successes in Europe and in his negotiations with British retailers, all of which have been deeply appreciated by the agricultural community in the north-west. However, the depression in the industry is still with us. It spreads outwards to have an effect on rural life generally in the region and it is unlikely to be resolved for some months.

Each of the factors to which I have referred adds up to a compelling case for the RDAs to get cracking as soon as possible and for the Government to start planning for full-blown regional elected government. The RDA must get a grip, perhaps sector by sector rather than area by area, of the strategic planning for the north-west. That would help us avoid unhelpful decisions about the assisted area map or about DTI grants, which can damp down regeneration in the north-west's most disadvantaged areas.

Equally, the RDA must, as a matter of urgency, tackle the region's transport infrastructure. I agree absolutely with what the right hon. Member for Fylde said about the M6, through Lancashire particularly, and about the west coast main line. It is clear that the mixture of private rail and coach companies is entirely unable to sort out transport in the region. That must be a job for the RDA.

In my view, the RDA must impose on itself a rural filter. A rural representative on the board is not enough—indeed, it might be counter-productive. Every decision that the RDA makes should be viewed in the context of how it enhances or diminishes the lives of people on low incomes, especially those living in rural areas, as well as how it enhances or diminishes the rural environment.

Above all, the RDA must reflect all the region. It will be too easy for it to be dominated by Manchester. I say that with all due respect to Manchester, which has a lot of muscle. I accept that it would be strange if it did not use that muscle. I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will consider closely the composition of the board to ensure that it properly reflects the entire region. I hope also that in the not-too-distant future we shall start examining regional representation in the new House of Lords, further to strengthen the north-west in that place.

Finally, I suggest to the Minister, who I know has his heart in the regions and in regional development, that he will receive huge support from the 64 Members of the north-west parliamentary Labour party in his work towards the development of RDAs and regional government. The Opposition have been making many noises recently about the terrors of our moving towards a Europe of the regions. Speaking for myself, I would positively welcome such a move. I think that there are tremendous advantages in the regional structures that our European partners have and of which we are deprived. I look forward to the strengthening of those structures in the not-too-distant future.

I am grateful to be able to contribute to the debate. I must offer congratulations to the hon. Member for Salford (Ms Blears). The hon. Lady has not quite persuaded me that Salford is a tourist destination, but she has done very well as a start.

My constituency is tucked in the extreme south-east corner of the north-west region. However, I assure the House that there is a strong sense of identity and community over the issues that affect the whole region.

It is perhaps worth emphasising briefly the context in which the region finds itself and what has happened to it over the past two decades. If we are considering the coal industry, the steel industry, the textile industry or even investment in the rail industry, we must recognise some of the difficulties that have had to be overcome and some of the wounds and bruises that have been left on the regional economy. It is perhaps no surprise that within that context, there have been major population shifts and changes. A recent estimate is that the population of Merseyside is set to decline by about 10 per cent. and that of Greater Manchester by 2 per cent. in the next census period.

At the same time, as the hon. Member for West Lancashire (Mr. Pickthall) has said, our connection to Europe has become more and more important. Therefore, I shall devote the rest of my contribution to examining how we might exploit and develop that connection and how we might heal the wounds and bruises to which I have referred. The hon. Member for Ribble Valley (Mr. Evans) intervened to ask how many letters had been received about an elected regional development agency. I have received the same number of letters about that as I have about the setting up of single regeneration budgets. Stockport council has sought vigorously to participate in the SRB process, but—like many other public bodies and institutions in the north-west—has become snagged in a nightmare bidding regime. That is an inheritance from the previous Government that I hope that this Government will get rid of as quickly as possible.

Stockport made bids in three consecutive years and spent more than £100,000 on bids that were unsuccessful. We have now got some single regeneration budget money and we are grateful for it. However, when the council submitted in priority order the 27 projects for the reduction of class sizes that it believed should be supported by the Department for Education and Employment, the Department took no notice of the council, its education experts and the head teachers, allotting the money apparently on the random rolling of the dice. That is another example of the bidding system failing to support investment in the north-west in the most appropriate and targeted way.

The citizens of Stockport contribute £30 million a year to the national lottery, but they do not receive anything like that—

It's a lottery.

They do not receive that amount in prizes or projects. The national lottery receives 20 bids for every one that is successful. We should end the bid culture and bring back to our region the responsibility for taking decisions about spending resources.

The Liberal Democrats are very pleased that we are to have a single regional development agency for the north-west. Regional accountability is important, and we want to see the development of an overall economic strategy for the north-west. Is the Minister yet able to announce the membership of the RDA? We expected to learn that in October, but we have not yet done so. The RDA must swing quickly into action, but how will it be linked to the training and enterprise councils? We need to consider carefully how to develop training in the north-west. I remind the Government that if we seek successful models of regional development, both Spain and Germany provide excellent examples. Strong, democratic and locally accountable regional bodies are the source and the essence of their success. Will the Government think again about democratic accountability for the RDA?

We need two sorts of infrastructure for success in the north-west. We need what I call software infrastructure, including democracy and devolution on the one hand and enhanced training and education on the other. Investment on a grand scale in the hardware infrastructure is important, but so is investment in the software infrastructure. In other European countries, democracy and devolution enhance the value of spending and investment in the public and private sectors. Training and education are also important and the north-west has an enviable reputation for the development of engineering skills. Indeed, Hazel Grove is the birthplace of Fred Williams, the co-inventor of the first functioning computer in the world, which was developed 50 years ago at Manchester university. Despite our innovative engineering skills, Microsoft and Sanyo are not based in this country, let alone in the north-west. We are not good at exploiting our assets.

We also need investment in hardware infrastructure. I support what other hon. Members have said about investment in the west coast main line, but I go further and ask the Minister for a quick decision on the application to start the Eurostar service from Manchester. The trains are sitting in the sidings and the company is ready to operate, but the Government decision remains long awaited. We also need confirmation that the channel tunnel rail link connection will be made on time, because rail freight and rail passenger services from the north-west to Europe will be crucial in the next decade. We also need local public transport infrastructure decisions.

At the conclusion of a previous Adjournment debate, the Minister boasted about the publication of a transport White Paper, but we need transport action. In Stockport and, especially, in Hazel Grove, the issue of access to Manchester airport will become crucial with the opening of the second runway. Passenger numbers will increase from 16 million a year to 30 million, but the infrastructure to cope with that increase is not in place.

The north-west offers a high quality of life to those who live there. It offers a high quality of environment to many, but not all, who live there. It also offers a good quality of economic activity to most of us who live there. For the future, we need to ensure that those benefits are extended to all. That will need this House, the regional development agency and the local authorities and councils to work together.

Over the past seven years, the public, private and voluntary sectors in the north-west have developed strategies on economic development, transport, training, innovation and the environment, working through the North-West Partnership and the North-West Regional Association. Now that the Government have appointed the regional development agency with executive authority to act, supported by the North-West regional chamber, we can move from developing those strategies piecemeal to a more focused effort to bring investment to the north-west. That will help to change the situation in which the north-west has one of the lowest gross domestic products per head in the country and contains many urban deprived areas, including Liverpool, which ranks first for urban deprivation in England and Wales.

I wish to draw attention to a major opportunity that has arisen to develop trade in the port of Liverpool, the area that I represent, and the whole of the north-west. The Good Friday Irish peace agreement has opened up new opportunities to develop the growing trade between the Irish Republic, Northern Ireland and the north-west through the expanding port of Liverpool. It is part of an initiative to develop east-west trade, linking both parts of Ireland with the north-west and developing a corridor creating a gateway to northern and central Europe.

The development of a regional development agency, speaking for the north-west and with authority to act—working together with the north-south ministerial council to be set up in Ireland, the British-Irish Council and the Northern Ireland Assembly—means that we are now in a unique position to develop that expanding trade.

I was pleased to chair and help develop an important new trade group between the north-west and Ireland which met in the House of Commons three weeks ago. My hon. Friend the Member for Bootle (Mr. Benton) and I held a meeting with the Irish Businesses and Employers Confederation, the Northern Ireland Confederation of British Industry, the Bank of England, the North-West chamber of commerce, the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board, the Warrington Project and other industrial and commercial groupings, together with the chairman designate of the RDA.

That group was set up to develop trade between Ireland, the north-west and northern Europe. It recognises the growth in trade between both parts of Ireland and the north-west, and the fact that 30 per cent. of goods from Ireland come to the United Kingdom. It also recognises that, in 1997, 2.5 million tonnes of freight passed between Liverpool and Ireland. That is part of the development of Liverpool and the expansion of trade and the generation of wealth there.

To develop that trade link between Ireland, the northwest and northern Europe we must look for opportunities to develop exports. We need to identify new markets by researching different sectors, to identify and remove barriers to trade and to consider policies for backing small and medium enterprises, both as part of this initiative and more generally.

We must consider investment in SMEs, the need for new technology and communications, investment in the west coast main line and in the Liverpool-to-Hull rail line, and the development of the port of Liverpool. We should also consider co-operation between education institutions.

Does the hon. Lady wish to pay tribute to the vital role of the abolition of the dock labour scheme in the development of the port of Liverpool, without which it could not have gone on to expand its trade in the way that she has described?

I am pleased to see increased investment in the port of Liverpool and the hard work being done there by all parties. I welcome that expansion. This initiative is an important part of developing trade and wealth in Liverpool while developing trade opportunities for businesses throughout the north-west.

The sectors already identified for the expansion of trade generate wealth and jobs and include the food and tourism sectors. In the north-west, tourism generates £1.5 billion and 200,000 jobs—6 per cent. of the north-west's work force. In Merseyside, 16,500 jobs are generated by tourism and £500 million is spent through tourism in that economy. This is a major opportunity for the expansion of tourism, as for other sectors of industry where research is required.

Does the hon. Lady agree that her last few remarks are a tribute to the work undertaken by my right hon. Friend the Member for Henley (Mr. Heseltine) when he took such a special interest in Merseyside and its problems?

The right hon. Member for Henley (Mr. Heseltine) made many promises, but delivered little. It is the hard work of the people of Liverpool and Merseyside, together with the investment that has been attracted, that is starting to turn the area round. We must not forget that Merseyside still has the lowest GDP per head in the whole of the United Kingdom, which signifies that we have a long way to go, despite new investment, major efforts and increasing prosperity.

The setting up of the north-west and Ireland trade group presents an excellent chance to focus on new opportunities. The North-West regional development agency provides an executive body which can support SMEs, trade and communications, and lobby for and attract further investment and training in the region.

I hope that all sectors will support this new initiative. I hope that the Minister, through his Department and in discussion with other Departments, will support it. It is about investment, communications and the generation of wealth and much-needed employment.

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in this important debate and I, too, congratulate the hon. Member for Salford (Ms Blears) on securing it.

Listening to the contributions of Labour Members, I was disappointed that, so far, there has been no reference to the importance of education in regenerating the north-west. That is a special interest of mine on which I would like to spend a little time this morning.

The north-west has some fine schools, both state and independent. Manchester, in particular, has excellent independent schools—Manchester grammar, Manchester high and Withington girls' school, among others. But the tragedy is that in many parts of the north-west, the state education sector fails to live up to the standards which the people there have a right to expect.

Will the hon. Gentleman acknowledge that Cheshire has delivered a higher standard of education than Kent, despite Kent being full of grammar schools? Perhaps he could explain why that is so.

You would doubtless rightly call me to account for departing as far as Kent, Mr. Deputy Speaker. However, I am happy to take the hon. Gentleman a little closer to home to my own borough of Trafford, where schools perform rather better than those in Cheshire, and rather better than in any other part of the north-west. Last year, we had the best A-level results in the country and our secondary modern schools—not just our grammar schools—are achieving outstanding results. The hon. Gentleman may wish to consider the Ashton-on-Mersey school in my constituency, which the Secretary of State for Education and Employment has declared a beacon school—an example of how to educate our children in the north-west; a secondary modern school which is performing better than most comprehensive schools.

The hon. Gentleman may also care to consider the Jeff Joseph college in Sale, a city technology college, which is now recognised as being the most improved state school in the country over the past year, again, in a selective system, not a grammar school but a secondary school achieving fantastic results.

Labour Members would be wise to reflect, not on the ideology, but on what it is that achieves the highest standards in education in the north west. The hon. Member for Wirral, South (Mr. Chapman) has grammar schools and the hon. Member for Wythenshawe and Sale, East (Mr. Goggins) is privileged to have Sale grammar school in his constituency. Many of us represent excellent schools which should be defended and protected. In the interests of our children in the north-west, we should be looking to spread that example, not only by maintaining the excellent schools that we already have in some parts of the north-west, but by trying to learn something from them.

One of the great missed opportunities of the early days of the new Government in the education sphere was that they tended to focus their activities on undermining the very best schools rather than trying to build up the bad schools which are letting down our children in many parts of the north west.

I come now to the economy and industrial relations. The hon. Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs. Ellman) was gracious in her tribute to the previous Government for the abolition of the dock labour scheme. I think that the import of her remarks in reply to my intervention was that she recognised that the port of Liverpool could not have achieved any of the growth and expansion to which she alluded had the dock labour scheme still been in place.

The hon. Gentleman is mistaken. He draws the wrong inference from my comments.

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for pointing that out. I am deeply sorry to hear that I have drawn the wrong inference. Perhaps I was being too charitable to her. Apparently, she has missed the fact that the port of Liverpool could not have developed in the way in which it has without the abolition of the dock labour scheme. I hope that she will talk to those who run the port and ask them their views on that. I suspect that she will find that they agree with the inference that I chose to draw from her remarks.

Liverpool has been dogged by bad industrial relations performance—more, perhaps, by the perception of bad industrial relations on Merseyside—and that has to be tackled. My hon. Friend the Member for Ribble Valley (Mr. Evans) suggested that there is a battle between Manchester and Liverpool. I would not want that, although one thing that the regional development agency will have to address is long-standing rivalry between, not only those two great cities, but the other parts of the north-west. Cumbria, which never considered itself to be part of the north-west, has been brought into the same RDA zone, which will cause problems for the RDA.

It was slightly unfortunate that no hon. Member representing Liverpool gave true praise to my right hon. Friend the Member for Henley (Mr. Heseltine).

He is a pro-European.

My right hon. Friend is certainly a great supporter of the city of Liverpool and of Merseyside. If the hon. Gentleman visits Merseyside as often as I do, he will know that its people retain great affection for my right hon. Friend.

They talk of little else.

Very little else; my right hon. Friend is right to point that out. The people of Merseyside feel that there has been a void in the past 18 months, and they might like someone to fill that role.

The role that has been performed so ably by the development corporation—in Liverpool, as in other parts of the country—also deserves a mention. There was a rather sad aspect to the speech by the hon. Member for Salford. I have great affection for her, as she knows, and she spoke with great enthusiasm about Salford, Manchester and the north-west, but she was wrong to suggest that the investment to which she alluded—at some length—was all achieved by the new Government and to give so little credit to the previous Government for their important role in building the economy of the north-west so effectively.

In the same vein, reference was made to why investment in the west coast main line did not happen sooner. Labour Members should reflect on the fact that the massive investment in that line—and in trains, in which Virgin Trains is taking part—would not have happened had it not been for the privatisation of the rail network. Modernisation started some time ago, but, sadly, it will take a little while to achieve the benefits. I hope that the hon. Member for Salford, and her hon. and right hon. Friends, will not take all the credit when that happens. Investment by private companies, and achieved because of the freedoms that the previous Government gave to them, will bring enormous benefits to the north-west.

The north-west is a land of enormous opportunities. My constituency perhaps has greater good fortune than some other parts of the region. We have excellent education, a nice environment in which to live and a vibrant small-industry sector. I am also privileged to represent many of the people who make businesses work across much of Manchester and much of the north-west. They perform an important role.

What concerns me about the new Government's policies, proposals and approach to business and the economy is that, sadly, the whole thrust of their economic and employment policies will make the work of the people who I represent more difficult. It will make it harder for businesses to justify investment in their operations and to make a profit, increase the costs of employing people and discourage investment and the creation of jobs. I fear that, in the coming years, the result will be more lost jobs and less investment in the region.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Salford (Ms Blears) on ensuring that the debate has taken place. It is funny that the Opposition do not seem to remember the 1980s for the decline of the north-west and the complete destruction of jobs and industry. The way of life in the north-west was totally threatened by the previous Government. We must look to the new millennium and to the new Government to ensure that the fortunes of the north-west are redressed and that the balance comes back to the north from the south.

The north-west has always been the engine room of the country and of the economy. It has stimulated the country and has always responded, as it will continue to do, but we must ensure that the north-west has a strong voice. That will come through the regional development agency. Some of us believe that it should be elected; that will come, when we have seen its worth.

The north-west will have to compete against the Welsh Assembly and the Scottish Parliament. It has to stand together and be united, and there is no better place to look than Lancashire, and what it has to offer. In Chorley, we have a former Royal Ordnance site with 800 acres of brown-field land ready for redevelopment and ready to play a crucial role. What better place is there than Chorley to host the headquarters of the new RDA'? It would be an ideal position, because it is central to the north-west.

We must not lose sight of that, and we must also remember that we have farming in Lancashire. Thankfully, the Government are addressing farming issues and ensuring that farmers will continue to farm in the north-west, which was the second most affected region because of bad management by the previous Government. The Government are addressing that. They will continue to do so, and they will continue to be supported.

The north-west Members of Parliament stood together against the decision to move to Wales the headquarters of 101 Battalion, the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. We will continue to fight that, because it would mean redundancies in the north-west. That is not acceptable.

We should be pleased that we have an important role to play in ensuring that the north-west has a main line link to Europe. We must not lose sight of that and we must stand together to ensure that we get a direct link—it is crucial. We want further investment in the west coast main line. Would not it be nice to see the InterCity trains that we lost in the early 1990s going back into Blackpool regularly? We do not want one-offs, but regular journeys that start at Blackpool.

We also want further investment. That will come from my hon. Friend the Minister, who believes in the north-west. He will support it and continue to ensure that we get a fair crack of the whip, which we failed to get under the previous Government.

Health is important, and there have been new challenges with the link-up of Chorley and South Ribble district general and Royal Preston hospitals in clinical services. That will create a better response and better ability to treat people's needs. We must also remember that renal services are important. They were failed in the 18 years of the previous Government, but I believe that the Government will address that and will continue to do so quickly. Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for allowing this debate.

I am grateful for the opportunity to take part in the brief debate. I am not sure whether Walt Disney has heard of the hon. Member for Chorley (Mr. Hoyle)—some of the stuff that came from him was complete fantasy. We should start concentrating on the great potential and opportunities that exist in the north-west, although there are distinct problems as well.

I refer the hon. Member for Chorley to the latest Confederation of British Industry report, which says that "considerable pessimism" still exists in the north-west. We rely a lot on manufacturing, and manufacturing jobs have declined in the past 18 months. My right hon. Friend the Member for Fylde (Mr. Jack) talked about British Aerospace, which is vital as an engine for skilled defence jobs in the north-west. Hundreds of small businesses throughout the north-west feed into British Aerospace. There are skills in British Aerospace at Warton in my right hon. Friend's constituency and at Salmesbury in mine, and at Royal Ordnance in Chorley. There is a tremendous skill base, and we want it to increase.

The hon. Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs. Ellman) spoke about manufacturing jobs and the need to export, but we have high interest rates compared to the rest of Europe and a strong pound because of that. It is difficult for manufacturing industry in the north-west to get those new markets about which she spoke, because it has to compete with industries in the rest of Europe. It is a great shame that she does not take such opportunities to lobby Ministers and persuade them to produce different economic policies. I do not think that anyone would dispute the fact that we are in a recession created by Downing street. The problems faced by industries in the north-west are the Government's responsibility, because of their economic policies.

The hon. Lady's answer to the problem is an elected regional chamber. Does she really believe that the people of the north-west are clamouring for yet another elected body? Where will it all end? We have elections to Westminster, European parliamentary elections, county council elections, borough elections and parish elections, but she wants yet more elections. The Labour Government understand bureaucracy and red tape, but they do not understand business.

When we have elections in the north-west, my side wins and the hon. Gentleman's side loses. That is why we like elections.

At least all the Lancashire Conservative MPs have turned up for the debate. After the next election, when we have another debate on the north-west, many more Lancashire Conservative MPs will be sitting on the Government Benches, and the hon. Gentleman and his hon. Friends will be sitting on the Opposition Benches.

Has it occurred to my hon. Friend that only 10 out of the 64 Labour MPs who represent the north-west are present? That is not a good performance.

I suspect that the others are busy putting advertisements in next year's Yellow Pages, so that they, too, can get another job.

Tourism is vital. As has been said, it is important for Manchester and Liverpool. I represent a rural constituency, 75 per cent. of which is an area of outstanding natural beauty. We want more tourism in the north-west, which could feed into Blackpool. It is a great shame that the new Labour Government's attitude to Blackpool is so snobbish. That seaside resort attracts many millions of people, and instead of slamming Blackpool, the north-west Labour MPs should have spoken up on its behalf.

I invited the Minister for the Environment to come swimming with me in the sea at Blackpool, such is my confidence. I make the same offer to the Minister for the Regions, Regeneration and Planning, who may take it up when he winds up the debate. He could come up to Blackpool and we could have a nice little dip. The hon. Member for Salford (Ms Blears) referred to the Titanic. I do not know whether the Minister will float or sink, but I assure him that no harm will come to him from what is in the sea at Blackpool. That is proved time and again by the many millions of people who are not as snobbish as the new Labour Government and come to Blackpool in their droves.

Millions of pounds have been spent on the pleasure beach, which attracts tourists from Britain and Europe. Granada studios are in the north-west, so that will ensure that this clip is not on "North Westminster" on Sunday. We also have Alton towers. Many tourists come to the north-west, and we want tourism in the region to develop further.

Transport infrastructure has been mentioned time and again. We want new investment to alleviate the clogs and jams on the M6. Hon. Members who travel back to their constituency by road know that there is a problem. Publicity during the Labour party conference highlighted the severe problems with the trains. One of my constituents has written to me about her experiences. She travels every week between Preston and Euston, and told me that the majority of the trains are late. We need new investment in infrastructure to ensure that the north-west will survive and, as a result of regeneration, prosper into the future.

I welcome the debate. I am pleased to see my right hon. Friend the Member for Fylde (Mr. Jack), my hon. Friends the Members for Altrincham and Sale, West (Mr. Brady), for Ribble Valley (Mr. Evans) and for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Mr. Collins), and, for a time, my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Mrs. Winterton), who have listened to all or part of the debate.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Salford (Ms Blears) on her enthusiastic opening speech, and on her obvious pride in the city of Salford. I enjoyed listening to her as she took us on a Cook's tour of the achievements in her constituency. I do not want to enter a sour note, but I thought that she was a trifle churlish in suggesting that this new Jerusalem began in the early hours of 2 May 1997. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Fylde aptly pointed out, many of the measures that have led to the regeneration of Salford were introduced by the previous Government, but one would not expect to get that message from the comments of Labour Members.

Between 1979 and 1997, the previous Government's policies helped to secure record inward investment, not least in the north-west. During that period, inward investment in the north-west helped to create or to safeguard more than 80,000 jobs. Conservative policies brought Sony to Merseyside. In the teeth of opposition from the Labour party, our policies enabled BNFL to flourish: it is a major contributor to the economy of the north-west. The current Government's economic policies jeopardise the progress that has been made.

The Conservative regeneration strategy helped town and country alike. The hon. Member for West Lancashire (Mr. Pickthall) referred to rural and agricultural life. The single regeneration budget combined into one pot 20 separate programmes previously operated by five different Departments, and provided a flexible fund for local regeneration. In the three years from 1995, the SRB provided some £4 billion, with more than £800 million from the challenge fund for new regeneration projects. The emphasis on competitive bidding ensured that funds were targeted on the schemes most likely to produce tangible results.

In 1994–99, the Merseyside objective 1 area has received more than £350 million in funding from the European regional development fund. Meanwhile, the Rural Development Commission and our rural challenge scheme promoted a range of programmes supporting economic and social regeneration in rural areas. We established the 230 business links across England, which provided one-stop training, advice and information centres for business. I hope that that puts the position into perspective, because these measures did not begin on 2 May 1997.

I do not have long, and I do not want to eat into the Minister's time, but I must pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Fylde. He referred to the numerous regeneration projects in the region, and brought up the important subject of British Aerospace and the aerospace industry. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Altrincham and Sale, West, who described the crucial role of education, which is a fundamental part of the regeneration of our cities, towns and rural areas. It is vital for people to have the proper education and training to be able to compete in and contribute to a highly competitive economic environment.

I am not sure how the Minister will respond to the challenge of my hon. Friend the Member for Ribble Valley, tempting as some people may find it. My hon. Friend raised the important issue of tourism in the region. He also made a valid point, which I know Labour Members do not like hearing. Given that Labour Members have paid lip service to Blackpool, which featured prominently in the debate, why did their party kick the town in the teeth by deciding that it was not good enough to host its conference every other year—although, presumably, it is good enough for other people to visit for their holidays? Clearly, Labour is not the servant of the people but the overclass, and the hotel and tourism facilities that Blackpool has to offer are not good enough for new Labour.

I fear that the threat posed by the Government's current economic policies—by relatively high interest rates, and the level of sterling—to manufacturing and other industry will hinder, rather than help, the further development of the north-west.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Salford (Ms Blears) for initiating the debate. She is a great champion of the north-west, and of Salford in particular. As many speakers observed today, she does justice to the region, and I have no doubt that, in the not too distant future, she will become a great agent for tourism.

The debate has featured a notable contrast between the constructive and the destructive. Hon. Members have suggested that we should adopt a constructive approach to the problems that we inherited from the last Government, implying that, during their 18 years in office, that Government did no damage to our economy. Other genuinely constructive suggestions have been made, however. My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs. Ellman), for example, described efforts to promote trade with Ireland. I know that the chairman-elect of the regional development agency has been involved in those efforts. Others have referred to the need to ensure that the economy of the north-west is handled in the way that should be expected of a Labour Government, and to deal with the economic deficit that is the legacy of the last Government.

The right hon. Member for Fylde (Mr. Jack) mentioned the aerospace industry. There is no doubt that the industry is a jewel in the crown of British manufacturing, and the north-west has played its role. In the early 1990s, I chaired the Select Committee on Trade and Industry for four or five years. We produced two reports on aerospace, in which we pleaded with the Administration of the day to provide launch aid similar to that provided by our continental partners and by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in America; but we did not get a dime out of that Administration. As the right hon. Gentleman will see from column 1036 of Hansard, he was told in a parliamentary answer on 3 December that the Government were investing up to £323 million in launch aid for the British aerospace industry.

Will the Minister give way?

No.

That is in marked contrast to what was done by the last Administration. The same applies to economic regeneration. The last Administration dealt only with the symptoms, not with the cause. A classic example is provided by an interview with the right hon. Member for Henley (Mr. Heseltine) about development corporations in the Financial Times. When the right hon. Gentleman, then President of the Board of Trade, was asked how he would control the corporations, he replied, "It is very easy. For as long as I have a pot of gold on my desk, they will beat a path to my door." That is an example of the arrogance of centralised government—the wish not to devolve power to people so that they can find real, sustainable solutions to their problems, but to ensure that everything is dictated from the centre.

Throughout their 18 years in government, the Conservatives took powers from local authorities and partnerships, and domiciled them in Whitehall. This Government are dealing not just with the symptoms, but with the underlying problems that we have inherited. We are bringing together regional development agencies—which will be business led—and other partners, in the hope that they can deal with the fact that not one English region is now performing, in terms of gross domestic product per capita, as well as the European regions are on average. When it comes to wealth creation, that is the legacy of the last Administration.

We intend to tackle the problem. We shall do so by devolving real powers and resources to the regions, so that they can take a strategic overview of local problems—in this context, the problems of the north-west. The initiative has got off to a flying start with the appointment of Lord Thomas as chairman of the regional development agency in the north-west, and the appointment of a chief executive. We shall announce the membership of the boards in the next few days. The hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Mr. Stunell) suggested that we had said we would do so in October, but we did not have an Act of Parliament until November.

We want the partnership that we are establishing not just to address the economic deficit in the regions, but to develop further strategies with the regional chambers. Most of that will happen in the public sector, but we hope to build on partnerships in every region, particularly the north-west. The north-west has blazed a trail in establishing a partnership between the regional development agency and the regional chamber. At its inaugural meeting on 3 July, the chamber announced the constitution that would govern the partnership, which I understand has been signed by all those involved.

The regional chambers will play a role in strategic thinking that has not existed in the past, in regard to land use planning, spatial planning and the transport planning that was outlined in the White Paper announced some weeks ago by my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister. They will try to deal with, for instance, the problems of the west coast main line and the conurbations surrounding Birmingham, which will have a major impact on the ability of the north-west to transport, and import, goods and people. Such problems will be dealt with in a much more strategic way.

I assure Opposition Members that the proposals have been welcomed by all the stakeholders in the north-west. They may deride the role of the CBI, the chambers of commerce, regional branches of the TUC, local authorities and the community; but such derision explains why we have so many more Members of Parliament than the Opposition. We have listened to all those people.

My hon. Friend the Member for Salford mentioned the regeneration initiatives that have been used so effectively in Salford, which will no doubt continue to bring about sustainable development. This Government take seriously the need to provide resources and develop policies in a more holistic way to tackle regeneration problems in the regions. Our new deal for communities commits £800 million over the next three years to dealing with some of the worst problems in 17 English estates. I acknowledge that, as has been pointed out, it was an advance on the part of the last Government to combine the spending power of four Departments, and make it effective in terms of delivery.

We have committed some £3.8 billion to regeneration, the bulk of which will be provided through the single regeneration budget. Eighty per cent. will be targeted on urban areas, and 20 per cent. on, in particular, rural areas. As some of my hon. Friends pointed out, two-thirds of the north-west is rural.

We will co-ordinate most of those policies in the middle of next year, when we publish our urban White Paper—the first for 20-odd years—and the rural White Paper, which will clarify the links between urban and rural areas. We believe that we are tackling the real, underlying problems of the north-west by launching partnerships. Again, I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Salford for instigating today's debate.

I am glad to have an opportunity to raise a matter that causes much concern throughout the country. It is a pleasure to see the Minister for London and Construction in his place. I hope that he will be as helpful as he normally is when answering in debates.

The public just do not believe that 4.4 million new houses need to be built between 1991 and 2016. They distrust the science of prediction. The Office for National Statistics says that it makes sensible predictions based on the facts that are available to it. The problem is that its estimates become a self-fulfilling prophesy. It is wrong to take the 4.4 million figure and assume that everyone will want to live in the same place as before or, indeed, that all those people should live in the same place as before.

More than 90,000 units were handed down to Devon by the region. Devon cannot trade with, for example, Cornwall, which has to build only 48,000 houses. Even if the statisticians predict correctly nationally, the Government parcel out the regional allocations using calculations that have been set by historical precedent. The figures are based on past demographic and housing trends. The inability of the regions to trade outside or within themselves means that the historical housing numbers continue unchallenged.

On the basis that we cannot change the figures—they are set in concrete—the task is to accommodate those new housing units throughout the nation without destroying the countryside any further.

I appreciate the hon. Gentleman giving me the chance to make a short intervention. Does he agree that there is a need to look at alternative methodologies, in particular ones that take account of the regional dimension, which can completely change the way in which the figures are calculated?

That is a helpful intervention. I thank the hon. Gentleman for the courtesy of letting me know that he wanted to intervene. The whole science is questionable. The statisticians have been getting away with a historical perspective that has allowed them to predict and provide year after year, without challenging the science.

I have much sympathy with what the hon. Gentleman says. Does he agree that another flaw in that bogus science is the fact that huge allowance is made for, say, divorcing couples, but no allowance is made for the fact that divorced couples team up with other people thereafter?

This is a debate about housing, but the hon. Gentleman is right. Divorce is part of the problem with the housing allocation figures, because the statisticians presume that people are going to go on divorcing at the present rate and living with partners at the present rate. The statisticians go on predicting and providing down that ugly path, which is usually incorrect.

Why do housing projections continue to follow the predict-and-provide model when the Government say that they are ignoring it and another type of planning, which is used for road planning, abandoned the model a long time ago? We have found out that, if we predict traffic levels and build the roads to accommodate them, traffic volume increases above and beyond the projected levels; the M25 is a classic example.

Why should we build more roads if the effect is simply to increase traffic and gridlock? Infinite car usage is not financially, environmentally or socially sustainable; building 90,000 new houses in Devon is not sustainable either. Why on earth do housing planners and statisticians not realise that? No one can stop the planning juggernaut, except the Minister. He alone has access to the brake pedal.

If we build 4.4 million units of housing, they will be occupied sooner or later. What about the effect on the housing market of all that building? Will it not erode the value of existing properties, again creating negative equity for some householders?

The statisticians believe that many of those additional housing units will be used to accommodate the fall-out from family break-ups, which the hon. Member for Torridge and West Devon (Mr. Burnett) mentioned. Divorce accounts for about a third of the 4.4 million units of new housing required. Again, we are told that 30 per cent. of those new housing units are intended for occupation by an increasing number of single people and by elderly people who are living longer. In addition, there is the movement of people taking or seeking work in another region.

There is also another reason. Statistics from South Hams, which is part of my constituency, show a massive in-migration from outside the county. Between 1981 and 1997, the population of South Hams increased by 15 per cent. By contrast, that of the whole county of Devon increased by only 5 per cent. Therefore, the population increase in South Hams has been out of all proportion to the increase in the county as a whole.

In the three months ending March 1998, 8,233 additional people moved into Devon, and about that number have moved in nearly every quarter since 1988. There is massive in-migration to Devon of 35,000 people a year. Current policy makes provision for all those people and is based on a liberalism and permissiveness that make some feel obliged to respond automatically to all social demands, regardless of the devastation that it wreaks on existing communities.

Having predicted, should we provide? South Hams has among the highest number of designated beauty and conservation areas of anywhere in England and Wales. On being told that it must build 12,000 new units by 2016, South Hams will have to build the equivalent of three or four new towns, all on green-field sites. Even Dartmoor national park, which is also partly in my constituency, has to find room for 800 more houses.

We are faced with the fact that the number of units that are planned for the principal conurbations in Devon—Plymouth and Torbay—is just a fraction more than the number for the countryside of South Hams. Torbay is having 6,300 new houses built, Plymouth 7,000. Between them, Exeter and Plymouth are to build the same number of houses as those planned for the South Hams countryside. If we build houses in one of the most beautiful areas of the United Kingdom, there will always be a queue of people to live in them—until the buildings destroy the beauty of the area.

Does my hon. Friend accept that it is the same in the north-west, in my constituency? The ridiculous predictive figures mean that Whittingham will have to provide for an extra 1,000 houses, when only 500 houses exist in the village, and Calderstones and Grimsargh several hundred extra houses. Those small villages will be dwarfed by the new developments.

My hon. Friend puts it in his normal lucid and imaginative way. Villages will be swamped and destroyed. That is what the Government have to face.

It is town versus countryside. Even if it is too late to stop the 90,000 units being built in Devon, it is not too late to ensure that housing units are contained within existing urban areas. Cheap and pleasant housing should be made available in our principal cities: Plymouth, Exeter and Torbay. We should rebuild the inner cities to include single-person flats. Young people living in them will help to rejuvenate our city centres.

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that it is important that, to make our cities attractive, they should be able to keep open spaces for use as parks, and so on? May I take the opportunity to assure him that Plymouth has been doing everything to look at where it can build houses or find new houses? Is he also aware of the structure plan working party of elected Members from our areas, which has looked at the figures? Far from their being handed top down, as the hon. Gentleman has suggested, the working party has agreed that, with some modest adjustments, it will be able and will have to provide for the number of houses that are planned. It is a case of plan and manage, rather than predict and provide.

It is all very well the hon. Lady saying that Plymouth can absorb all the extra houses. Of course it can, because the figures for Plymouth and Torbay together are only slightly more than the number for the countryside of South Hams. Plymouth does not have a large number.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

I will not give way any more.

rose—

I will not give way to the hon. Lady. Plymouth does not have a large number of houses. The houses that are going to damage Devon are the houses that have been allocated to the district councils; they will destroy the countryside. I apologise, but I must get on.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

I am not giving way again.

On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker.

I do not think that the hon. Lady really has a point of order. She has made a little speech and I think that she has done very well.

Indeed, but the hon. Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen) said that I had said something that I did not say—that Plymouth could cope with providing the houses. It will have great difficulty in doing so.

Order. There is no right of reply. It has to be remembered that this is an Adjournment debate, where a Back Bencher brings a case to the House to allow a Minister to reply. There may be another occasion when the hon. Lady can put the record straight.

I hope that I will be given an extra minute, Mr. Deputy Speaker. The intervention by the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton (Mrs. Gilroy) took a minute and delayed the progress of an excellent and important speech.

City centres have been emptying into and on to the suburbs since the 1960s, with green-field sites taking the strain. Nottingham and Liverpool illustrate that trend. Inner-city schools are closing down because of lack of demand, while rural and suburban schools try to cope with increasingly unwieldy class sizes. Many built-on sites are under-utilised. The approach roads to Plymouth are lined with one-storey shops—something should be done there.

In Devon, why not concentrate on building the 90,000 new units in the cities? Enough land is left to accommodate those units, whether it be unused, underused, vacant, dormant or derelict. It is all there, but no one will take the lead. Of course, it is easier and cheaper for developers to build on green-field sites, but we must not let builders concrete over green-field land simply because it is cheaper for them to do so than to rehabilitate brown-field urban land. We need to increase the tax on green-field building and give tax incentives for brown-field site development. The present projections are that nearly 1.5 per cent. of England's total land area will be swallowed up by urbanisation by 2016. That means 2,750 acres of the countryside being built on each year.

As for infrastructure, the 90,000 new housing units in Devon will place strains on the sewerage system, water supply, schools, hospitals and so forth. Even where houses are not being built, the ripple effect will impact throughout the county. There will be more cars, schoolchildren and recreational requirements. More general practitioners will be needed, more water will be consumed and more sewage treatment will be needed.

Even the airwaves are already full—so much so that south Devon cannot receive Channel 5, although that may be a blessing in disguise. We simply do not have the environmental capacity to accommodate in Devon everyone who may like to live there. The effect on the environment and the damage to well-established and happy communities would simply be too great.

Predict and provide is a top-down approach and does untold damage. The Government must reverse that policy, which is based on the premise that what has gone before is the yardstick for what should happen. The Government must review the way in which their central housing figures are distributed among the regions. The districts, counties and regions must be prepared to object to the housing figures that are handed down to them when they have the opportunity to do so. It is no good doing what the Liberals did in Devon last July. They voted for 90,000 new units and the very same evening launched a campaign claiming that, if the houses for which they had voted that afternoon were built, untold damage would result and much of the countryside would be suburbanised. That was the action of not merely Liberals at the county level but the Torbay Liberals, the South Hams district council Liberals and the North Devon Liberals, who all voted for the housing figures that they were given, which they admit would destroy the countryside. They vote and then they weep crocodile tears. I see the hon. Member for Torbay (Mr. Sanders) rising and I will give way to him if he will make his intervention short.

I will make it as short as possible, but I do not understand how Liberals in Torbay, a unitary authority, could have voted on those figures for the county. The figures that they chose were below those that the Secretary of State said he had rejected. He is imposing a higher figure and so the hon. Gentleman should address his remarks to the Secretary of State, not to councillors. Also, the right hon. Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer) introduced predict and provide when he was Secretary of State in a Conservative Government.

I am delighted that the hon. Gentleman will join me in campaigning against the Secretary of State, as the figures are disastrous for Devon.

The Government should review all county structure plan figures. They should create tax incentives for brown-field building and tax green-field developments. Our priority must be to rebuild the cities and save the countryside. As it is, many of our cities resemble doughnuts with no jam left in the middle. Regions should be able to trade housing numbers with other regions and, within them, counties should be able to do the same.

The Government may predict, but they must not automatically provide. If they do, they should allocate housing units to the less populated areas and should not allow the south-east and the south-west to bear the brunt of the housing explosion. The Government must heed a warning from all parts of the country that the countryside is in peril. There is widespread discontent about the housing figures and their allocation. The Government must listen—as the Conservative party is listening—because the people have spoken.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen) on raising this subject and I am grateful to him for asking me to take one minute of his time to endorse what he has said. I do not think that he has left me a full minute, so I will be as quick as I can.

First, I agree with everything that he said about predict and provide. I also agree with most of his conclusions, apart from having some reservations about his passing reference to tax. I rely on my hon. Friend's judgments on matters that affect Devon and will not debate them with Liberal Members, although they endorsed what he said about the methodology of predict and provide, and I think that we all agree about that.

Similar consequences have occurred in Nottinghamshire. One can substitute different place names in the analysis, but similar problems arise. I hope that, in his reply, the Minister will show that flexibility for which he is sometimes known and will say that the policy will change.

My district of Rushcliffe is having 14,400 new dwellings imposed on it by a county structure plan that predates the general election. Nothing has changed since then, except that all the road building has been cancelled and the new Government policy is that 65 per cent. of new homes should, where possible, be built on brown-field sites, although our area has only a minuscule number of those. I hope that the Minister will endorse my hon. Friend's suggestion that districts should be allowed to revisit the figures.

The city of Nottingham wants more dwellings than it has been allocated; Rushcliffe wants fewer dwellings. Several of the districts could come to an agreement. The Minister for the Regions, Regeneration and Planning has already said that he may be flexible if the county council is flexible. I hope that we will have a helpful response from the Minister.

I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen) for allowing me a minute. As a colleague from Devon, I congratulate him because, as he knows, I have fought for more than 20 years to stop the spread of the concrete jungle into the countryside, in particular in Devon.

The projected figures for Devon would mean an increase of more than 30 per cent. in its population. Does the Minister believe that we can do that without ruining much of the environment of the area? My constituency is a prime example. When I fought the 1967 general election, the electorate was 63,000. Since then, the size of my constituency has been cut three times, but if I had now the same parishes that I had then, the electorate would be 122,000. That is the sort of increase that we have already had to put up with. The projected increase would have a terrifying effect on the environment and the countryside—it is not possible. I absolutely support what my hon. Friend has said and I am delighted that he has been able to instigate this debate. The Government must listen. They must revise the figures that they are making the countryside bear.

I am grateful to the hon. Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen) for raising those issues. A number of other hon. Members have also expressed concerns about household growth. The hon. Gentleman also raised this matter in the recent debate on the report on planning for housing by the Select Committee on the Environment, Transport and Regional Affairs. He knows from that debate that the Select Committee has carefully considered the validity of the household projections not merely once, but twice. It looked into projections methodology in 1995 and again this year. I cannot do better than to quote the hon. Gentleman's hon. Friend, the Member for North Wiltshire (Mr. Gray), who is a member of that Committee. He said:

"On the number of houses that we will require between now and 2016, I do not agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen), who went to great lengths to rubbish …the figures. In Committee, I went to some length to try to find holes in the figures produced by my former colleagues, the excellent civil servants in the Department of the Environment, but no amount of effort on my part could produce an argument to show that 4.4 million was necessarily wrong."—[Official Report, 22 October 1998; Vol. 317, c. 1426.]

The hon. Member for North Wiltshire served on the Select Committee and looked at the figures critically and carefully. Given the implication of the figures, his view is not surprising—4.4 million sounds a horrendously large figure, but as an annual rate of housing provision it works out at about 175,000 homes a year, which is about half the housing that was provided in the 1960s and is below the trend for the post-war period. It is a relatively low level of new housing provision compared with what occurred previously. That is why it is important to put it in perspective, as the Select Committee has done.

On the methodology point, the demographic pattern is falling as is the number of people living in Britain. There are also other phenomena to which I referred in my intervention on the hon. Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen). For example, divorcing couples do not necessarily produce two households. In addition, the area does not have the infrastructure to cope with vastly increased numbers.

I am rather sorry that I gave way to the hon. Gentleman, as it is clear that he has not looked carefully at the methodology. The demographics are not falling, the population is not falling and a trend of household increase has persisted throughout most of the post-war period. If the hon. Gentleman had done his homework, he would know that most previous housing forecasts have underestimated, not overestimated, the extent of household formation. Hon. Members who have examined the issue carefully—as the Select Committee has done—have reached that conclusion, although some of them did not want to do so. I urge the hon. Gentleman and others who are suspicious of the figures to do their homework; they will then know why so many people have reached that conclusion.

Let us accept the figures. Will the Minister now address how we should deal with them?

That is exactly what I intend to do.

The household numbers are not something that the Government simply dream up. They were not even produced by the present Government, but were produced by the previous Administration. We would have no reason to support them if we did not consider them to be soundly based. We have no reason to change them, and nor does the Select Committee.

People continue to form households almost regardless of the prevailing economic situation and we ignore trends at our peril. We are not talking about speculation. All the people who are considered in need of housing by 2016 have already been born. Are we to deny them decent housing?

The hon. Gentleman referred to migration. I accept entirely that it is a difficult issue for Devon, but as we do not live in a Maoist society that can ban migration, it cannot be ignored. The hon. Gentleman himself migrated to Devon some years ago when he decided that South Hams was more congenial than Liverpool, Wavertree, his previous constituency. Responsible government means that we have to manage population movements as best we can.

Will the Minister give way?

No. I have already given way more than enough and I am running out of time.

Pulling up the drawbridge or pretending that the problem does not exist is not responsible government. Providing fewer homes would create difficulties. It could worsen housing conditions such as overcrowding, increase homelessness and contribute to house-price inflation. It could also work against the interests of local people with modest incomes, as incomers with large disposable incomes would probably bid up house prices and squeeze out local people. We have to address the issue.

For that reason, we have proposed moving away from the traditional approach of predict and provide, which we did not regard as a satisfactory basis, towards a more bottom-up approach with local authorities playing a key role through regional planning conferences on the principle of plan, manage and monitor rather than predict and provide.

The fundamental point is that the new approach is being developed through the new round of regional planning guidance which will provide the first opportunity to take account of the household projections published in 1995. The draft guidance will set new figures for the region, as well as for the counties and unitary authorities. The figures will also be tested in a public examination, exposing them to considerable public scrutiny, which is obviously sensible. Each region will develop a comprehensive monitoring arrangement to scrutinise the effects of the eventual level of housing which is agreed. Each region of England is currently engaged in the process and in the south-west the regional conference of local authorities is already well advanced with its draft. We need to work together in ensuring that the new approach is developed in as constructive a context as possible, and I hope that the hon. Gentleman will join us in developing the new approach.

I now turn to the hon. Gentleman's points about the Devon structure plan and the proposed new settlements adjoining Exeter and Plymouth. As I have mentioned already, household growth is a fact and it is for the local authorities in each area to produce the best solutions they can to manage the growth in the most sustainable way. The structure plan with which the hon. Gentleman is concerned is based on existing regional planning guidance containing housing figures agreed by the authorities in the region back in 1994. That is the guidance to which the structure plan must therefore have regard.

As the hon. Gentleman will no doubt know, the Government have made their concerns clear about the Devon structure plan and it is now for the authorities to decide what action to take in the light of those concerns. The Government wish authorities to be realistic and responsible in allocating land for housing. The main aim of our new approach is to ensure that as much new housing as possible is located on previously developed land. That is why we increased the national target to 60 per cent., although what can be achieved will vary from region to region. In the south-west, only a third of all land used for housing was previously developed. Although I acknowledge that there are particular difficulties in parts of the south-west, nevertheless we will expect a more ambitious target in the new regional planning guidance from the south-west region.

If authorities suggest quite radical approaches such as new settlements, the Government expect the proposals to be sustainable. We have as much interest as anyone in maintaining and enhancing the countryside—especially in beautiful parts of the country such as Devon. We have stressed that the need for any new settlements must be thoroughly justified.

The way forward lies in building on the consensus that lies at the heart of the debate. There is far more common ground than there are differences of views. Everyone wants as much land recycling as possible. Everyone wants more sustainable patterns of development. Everyone wants to protect the countryside and regenerate our urban areas, and I think that everyone wants to ensure that people are adequately housed and not left homeless or in bad housing conditions.

I do not mind too much what the Minister is saying, but he has said nothing about how we can stop 12,000 new housing units being built. According to the Library, South Hams is one of the most beautiful constituencies in England and Wales. How does he propose to stop 12,000 houses being built there when the same number is expected to be built in Plymouth and Torbay? How can he switch it so that the countryside is not ruined by too many houses?

As I have said already, we have made observations in our response to the Devon structure plan and it is now for the county to reach its conclusions before submitting proposals to us. I hope that the hon. Gentleman recognises that in the circumstances I cannot make any further comment. However, I have stressed the importance of maximising the amount of development on previously developed land.

The Government are trying to develop that agenda—which I believe is shared—as fast as possible. We made it clear in "Planning for the Communities of the Future" that our first choice for new development is that it should be on previously developed land, preferably within urban areas. We believe that a sequential approach is long overdue and we want authorities fully to explore that option before they propose urban extensions or the release of other green-field sites. The Select Committee supported our national land recycling target of 60 per cent. There is much work to be done to help authorities develop the agenda. We have set up the urban task force, under the guidance of Lord Rogers, to examine the practical issues involved in making better use of brown-field sites.

Work is progressing on the national land use database—the equivalent of a Domesday book for the 21st century—to identify previously developed sites that are available for new housing and we will soon have a much clearer picture of the opportunities to take forward that higher target for recycling.

We have a full programme of revising the relevant planning policy guidance notes. We are currently updating the guidance on planning for housing—PPG3—which will be published for consultation early in the new year. We are also preparing an urban White Paper, which will be published next year. It will set out the most comprehensive and far-sighted programme for urban renewal since our last White Paper in the 1970s.

I am delighted to have been given a slot on a Wednesday morning, although I am a little concerned that the original title of the debate—competitiveness in the retail sector—was vague. I have had journalists and lobbyists ringing me up and asking me what the debate was about, and I think that the Minister was a little confused initially about what my concern was.

Apparently the confusion was caused by a problem of the House. I put in for a debate on the growing power of the supermarkets and the threat that that poses to the consumer. Unfortunately, the Table Office said that the rules of the House would not allow that. Perhaps the Modernisation Committee could look into that at some time in the future.

Overcharging by British supermarkets is nothing new. As far back as 1991, when I was a member of the Agriculture Select Committee, I was part of a high-profile campaign to reduce the price of food in British supermarkets. The campaign was led by The Sunday Times, and both sides of the Chamber were involved in the debate. We had some success: soon after our campaign began, a price war broke out. But then, as these things happen, peace was soon declared.

Seven years ago, we had the highest prices for food in western Europe. Today, we have the highest prices for food in western Europe. So nothing has changed. In reality, things have got worse. The supermarkets try to bamboozle people by introducing gimmicks such as loyalty cards. They charge customers inflated prices, then give them back a pittance in tokens that have to be spent in the supermarket. As a spin-off from loyalty cards, the supermarkets obtain great knowledge of the buying pattern of customers, and people get junk mail through their doors as a result.

I was pleased that, on 30 July this year, the Office of Fair Trading announced that it would look into food prices. I am sure that they will endorse my claim that supermarket companies are not playing fair with the consumer or the supplier. I was led to believe that the report would be out by the end of this year, but I understand that, as a result of public pressure about a detailed report, it is not likely to be available then. Perhaps the Minister can clarify when we are likely to receive the report.

May we now examine the situation in which we find ourselves, especially here in England? There are 3,200 supermarkets. One in three are called superstores, which are premises of more than 25,000 sq ft of selling space. Four companies dominate the market. They have 60 per cent. of the market and 83 per cent. of the superstores. The companies are Tesco, Sainsbury, Asda and Safeway. The development of supermarkets in the 1960s and 1970s killed off the smaller shops, and in the 1980s and 1990s the supermarkets are giving way to the superstores, many of them in out-of-town locations.

The concentration of power in a small number of retailers has given rise to exploitation in various ways. They have a dominance in the market which enables the retailers to negotiate large discounts from the food manufacturers and suppliers. No food company in Britain can afford not to do business with the big chains. As the British farmers know to their cost, the discounts are often not passed on to the customer.

The supermarkets use special offers, whereby they sell products at a very cheap price. By the time the customers have been round the supermarket, they have paid for the cheap price two and three times over. Superstores tend to be on their own site. There is no competition on that site, so people buy the product in that superstore or not at all.

Supermarkets have now developed their own-label brands, which many people think is fair enough. However, they are not all a plus factor. They mean that the retailers have a conflict of interest. They are agents for a manufacturer, yet they are competitors to the manufacturer as well. That has led in many areas to fairly well-known secondary brands not finding a place on the supermarket shelves and disappearing altogether, thereby reducing customer choice. To quote a publication from the British Brands Group:

"the strength of private label has altered the trading relationship between the manufacturer and the retailer—the trading relationship is no longer equal—the retailers possessing a significant competitive edge".

The British Brands Group is made up of many very successful, very large companies, including Unilever, Procter and Gamble, Mars, Nestle and Kellogg. If they are saying that the retailers have an edge over them, the customer has a real problem.

There is also the problem of look-alikes. This is where own-label products masquerade as a product very similar to a well-known brand. The customer may take it by mistake or believe that it is produced by the same manufacturer and therefore that it is good but a few pence cheaper. In reality, few look-alikes are produced by the manufacturer of the branded goods. Again, customers are being misled. In the long term, customer choice will be reduced. Companies will not invest in new products if they believe that their ideas will be copied and they will not receive the payback.

There is limited competition between the supermarkets. There is undisputed evidence that, while the big four have seen off the smaller competitor, they will not engage in true price competition among themselves. In a recent survey by The Grocer magazine of 33 articles, half were identically priced in all the shops. The rest differed by only a few pence.

Will my hon. Friend explain why he believes that there is no competition between the big four companies? Is it profiteering? It is greed? What is the motive?

My hon. Friend will have to listen to the rest of my speech for the answer.

The price of a popular brand, Heinz tomato ketchup, was identical in Asda, Tesco, Sainsbury's and Safeway. There is no competition whatever.

Not only is there little competition among the British supermarkets, but the consumer is paying over the odds in comparison with Europe. A recent survey by The Sunday Times compared Tesco prices to those in Europe. The figures do not make happy reading. There were 22 items in the shopping basket. In the United Kingdom, the cost was £81.59. In Holland it was £49.55, in Belgium it was £50.67, and in Italy it was £60.20. The survey showed that the prices of many popular foodstuffs were at least 40 per cent. higher in the United Kingdom than in America or on the continent. Even when Tesco did its own survey, the prices were still higher than in the majority of European countries.

It is interesting to note that, while prices to farmers and food manufacturers have fallen in the past 12 months, the price of food in British shops has risen by 1.6 per cent. So food costs are higher in the United Kingdom, and supermarket profits are higher. Supermarket profits are about 6 per cent. in the United Kingdom, about 2.6 per cent. in France, and about 2 per cent. in America. So profits in the United States are a third of those in the United Kingdom. Charging higher prices to consumers and paying lower prices to the supplier means that there is only one winner. The statistics prove that both consumer and supplier are being systematically exploited.

The crisis in British farming is well documented, but I want to draw the House's attention to one or two points. Andrew Dare of Milk Marque told me yesterday that, four years ago, 68 per cent. of the price of a pinta went to the farmer; now, that percentage is down to 56 per cent. The problems are similar in respect of pig meat: prices paid to farmers have plummeted, yet supermarket prices have hardly decreased. The prices paid to sheep farmers are at their lowest for 20 years, but supermarket shoppers would hardly notice the difference.

The supermarkets are not passing on cost reductions to the consumer, and the price differential between consumer and supplier is huge. I accept that there are middle-man costs—for example, transport, abattoir and butchering costs—which must be paid, but the chief suspects for capitalising on and exploiting the situation must be the supermarkets. I was pleased when the Office of Fair Trading decided to investigate the excessive profits of the big four, but already a report commissioned by the OFT has highlighted the fact that the big four are using their dominance to extract discounts from suppliers that are used to swell their coffers, instead of being passed on to the consumer in the form of savings.

The case I have made today means that the Government must take action. The supermarkets' immense economic power is a growing threat to the consumer, not a benefit. People talk about the price of petrol, but the proportion of the family budget spent in supermarkets is probably second only to housing costs.

The fear is that supermarkets will increase their stranglehold by expanding in other sectors, such as pharmaceuticals, banking and insurance—I understand that Tesco might even start to sell new cars. What is to be done? We cannot expect the supermarkets to curb their own appetites, because that is not in the nature of the beasts: they are profit-making organisations, and they will exploit their position as best they can. Therefore, the Government must act.

There must be no more mergers or takeovers by the big four. I understand that a merger between Safeway and Asda is being considered. The Government should tell them that that is not on—we do not want any increase in the dominant market share of the big four.

Next, we must consider the problem as it affects regions or cities. If a particular supermarket chain has several stores in an area, to the extent that it dominates the area, we should follow the example set by the Monopolies and Mergers Commission when it investigated the brewers.

When it was decided that one chain had too many pubs in an area, it was told to sell off some to a competitor. That is what needs to be done with some supermarket outlets.

Certain supermarket practices described in the recent "Panorama" programme should be outlawed. I shall give only one example, so that the Minister has time to reply. A supermarket company tells a manufacturer that it must buy its packaging material from company X, or the supermarket will not take the product. The manufacturer could probably buy cheaper packaging from company Y, but company X gives a kickback to the supermarket. That cannot be right, and must be stopped.

The main challenge facing the Government is to ensure that the supermarket companies compete on price, even though, in an ideal world, we would not start with four big companies whose growth we were trying to restrict. The companies set up a price watch system to check prices in other supermarkets, but not so that prices can be kept low; instead, they price their goods similarly to other supermarkets in the area, so that there is no competition or price war. That cannot be right.

We must find a way of monitoring prices, so that we can tell when something is wrong and step in to ensure free competition. The supermarket bosses are too clever to go into a big room and hammer out a cartel agreement; instead, they use the price watch procedure to achieve the same results. We have to represent the customer. The Department of Trade and Industry has to tell supermarkets that there must be true and fair competition, so that the housewives of the United Kingdom can benefit from cheaper prices.

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the four supermarket companies to which he refers are complex monopolies? Each company consists of a huge number of single-store local monopolies, and therein lies the problem: each supermarket is, in itself, a local monopoly—a fact that is not recognised under current OFT rules.

I covered that point when I spoke about superstores. They are the sole occupants of a site, to which the consumer has driven three or four miles. There is no competition nearby—probably the nearest competitor store is on the other side of the city—so the consumer buys from the superstore. The DTI must now give some guidance to the companies, and tell them, "The game is up. We know what you are doing, and it is going to stop."

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Carlisle (Mr. Martlew) on having raised an important subject. It currently occupies a great deal of space in our newspapers, and rightly so, because it has an impact on every family in the country.

I find it amazing that, until the hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr. Hayes) arrived a few minutes ago, there was not a single Conservative Member, Plaid Cymru Member, or Scottish National party Member in the Chamber, despite the fact that they all paint themselves as the farmers' friends. I do not know about theirs, but my front room in Pontypridd has been full of farmers complaining about the buying power of supermarkets. If Opposition Members were that concerned about the issue, they would have turned up for a debate on a subject that we rarely have the opportunity to discuss.

That is why I am here.

I am glad that one Conservative Member is here—that is more than usually show up for debates such as these.

In no uncertain terms, my hon. Friend has emphasised the image of supermarket chains as market tyrants. I shall try to deal with the subject from the point of view of the Department of Trade and Industry. He has described how the big four—Tesco, Sainsbury, Asda and Safeway—have been able to dominate the buying market, especially the market for farm and primary products, and how they have moved into other areas.

My hon. Friend knows as well as I do that others would paint the supermarkets, especially the big four, as market heroes, citing as evidence their ventures into selling designer goods at low prices. Recently, the chief executive of one chain asked me, "Where is the sense in my being able to go to New York and buy a pair of top-range Levi Strauss jeans for $30 or $40, when they are sold in the high-street specialist outlets in this country for £55 a pair? There is something wrong with that." His chain is now selling those designer jeans at £30 a pair, and I am glad about that.

I glad that the supermarkets are pushing the edges of the envelope by exploiting the possibilities offered by so-called parallel or grey imports—terrible phrases, but unavoidable. They are introducing real competition into the markets for such goods. The high streets are no nirvana for shoppers. I am sure that an enormous amount of careful price calculation goes on—I was going to refer to price fixing, but as a Minister I can no longer use such terms.

Retailers are looking carefully at what the market can bear. Companies trading in well-known branded images and products can make a good profit in countries such as Bulgaria. However, those of us who are very naive and have simple views about these matters wonder why UK companies can buy those products in Bulgaria and sell them in this country—whether in the supermarkets or on the high street—at prices lower than those in retail outlets, and still make a profit. One wonders about the profit margin of those retailers that pitch the original price in this country. We must ask some serious questions, and my hon. Friend can rest assured that, as the new Minister for Competition and Consumer Affairs, I shall ask those questions every day. I want to uncover the real situation.

My hon. Friend asked about comparisons between United Kingdom prices and those across Europe and the United States. The DTI does not have a section that deals with pricing issues. I was amazed—I suppose I should not say that as a Minister who speaks on behalf of the DTI. I was told that such matters were too complex to examine, but I think it is about time that we had that information. I open newspapers every day and see price comparisons, some of which my hon. Friend mentioned. Where is my database that will allow me, as a Minister, to say what is and is not true?

The excellent officials in my Department are beginning to construct a prices database so that we will know where we are. Price information is very important for families in this country. I have seen articles and editorials in the Sunday Times that refer to "rip-off Britain". I am very glad that those reports have been published. Someone should try to compare the prices of goods in the United States, France or Canada with those in this country. That is an excellent policy for newspapers to adopt, and I shall respond as best I can.

My hon. Friend and the hon. Member for South-East Cornwall (Mr. Breed) have raised some interesting and important points in this debate. The definition of the boundary or extent of a market is vital. My hon. Friend's constituency of Carlisle is very much like many constituencies in Wales: it is a mix of urban and rural areas. It is easy for supermarkets to dominate a particular region or locality without having a dominant share of the UK market. We must examine that situation carefully, because dominance can easily distort markets, in terms of prices or selling power and so on.

I am extraordinarily glad that the right hon. Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Mr. Clark), and the hon. Members for Salisbury (Mr. Key) and for Mid-Norfolk (Mr. Simpson)—three very distinguished members of the Conservative party—have just entered the Chamber. It is excellent to see the hon. Member for Salisbury, for whom I have great regard, on the Front Bench. That is welcome news, because this is an important debate.

We are determined to ensure that there is transparency of pricing for all, whether it is the farmer trying to sell his farm produce to supermarket chains or the shopper trying to secure the best bargain. I think that that is what my hon. Friend is seeking. There are many variables involved in the selling equation. There is no question that supermarkets have revolutionised retailing. I will admit from the Dispatch Box that I quite enjoy shopping at my local Tesco. I like the fact that I can drive there and do my shopping for the week or the fortnight. There is wide choice inside the supermarket, and it is convenient. Unfortunately, the appalling car parking situation in my home town makes it difficult to shop in the town centre.

Does the Minister accept that, although dominance in the marketplace is not illegal as such, the abuse of that dominance is a concern? Companies may dominate the market, so long as they trade fairly.

The hon. Gentleman has put his finger on the problem. We must discover whether this country's great supermarket chains are abusing their dominant positions.

My hon. Friend mentioned that the Director General of Fair Trading, Mr. John Bridgeman, is currently examining this matter. His team at the Office of Fair Trading is investigating the profitability of the major supermarkets in the grocery sector, focusing on whether competition between the majors has been distorted to the detriment of consumers. Mr. Bridgeman is due to report early in the new year, and I am sure that all hon. Members are looking forward to those findings.

In the meantime, what evidence do we have of abuses of market power? It depends where we look. The farmers who were in my front room complaining about the situation will tell us that, yes, the market is being distorted and abused. We approached Tesco and pointed out that, although the current market price of a steer is £490, the shelf prices of the products derived from that steer total £1,124. We asked where that extra cost had come from.

The supermarket told me that it costs £634 to process the steer into saleable meat. It gave us a breakdown of that sum. It said that 63 per cent. of the steer is waste and must be thrown away, and that the remaining 37 per cent. of the steer must sell for an average of £5.13 per kilogram—or £2.33 per pound for those of us who still use the imperial system—in order to cover costs. Tesco also told us that £4.83 per kilogram is its average selling price, so it is making a 30p per kilogram loss on beef sales. [Interruption.] Hon. Members are groaning—and I can understand why. Those figures should be examined in light of the declared profits of some supermarket chains, and the OFT, under John Bridgeman, will do just that.

I do not think that it is easy to compare the profitability of United Kingdom supermarket companies. A report published this week by Verdict Research claims that there is no easy way of making that comparison. The report states:

"Verdict does not believe that Britain's grocers are overcharging … the market is too highly competitive for that to happen and competition is intensifying. The average operating profit margin of the four leading grocers has fallen by nearly one fifth, from 7.2 per cent. in 1992/93 to 6 per cent. in 1997/98. British grocers are not more profitable than their Continental counterparts once factors like longer European supplier payment terms, and the preponderance of leasehold property, are taken into account. UK retailers are all quoted and have traditionally sought to maximise their profitability to attract investors. Most Continental retailers are privately owned and minimise their reported profits in order to pay as little tax as possible. This helps give the impression that they are giving customers a much better deal than British companies."

My hon. Friend raised many issues in his short and very pertinent speech. Although we recognise the extra choice, convenience and lower prices that supermarkets have provided for consumers in the past 20 years, and although we welcome the entry of supermarkets into the retailing of non-food goods such as clothing and electrical products—which will strengthen competition in those sectors—I stress that, as Minister for Competition and Consumer Affairs, I shall continue to champion the rights of consumers. I welcome the OFT inquiry into the profitability of major supermarkets in the grocery sector. We will ensure that, at long last, the DTI becomes the consumers' champion.

I am grateful for the opportunity to have this Adjournment debate concerning Major Joyce. I requested the debate because, over the past 16 months, my hon. Friends and I have failed to gain satisfactory answers from Ministers about the Major's future and because his case strikes at the heart of the important principle that our armed forces do not actively participate in party politics.

As the House will recall, in August 1997, Major Eric Joyce of the Adjutant-General's Corps published a Fabian Society pamphlet under the heading, "Labour in Action", entitled, "Arms and the Man—Renewing the armed services". He did so without first seeking permission from the Ministry of Defence, as is required by a serving officer under Queen's regulations. As Major Joyce said in an interview in The Times on 4 August 1997:

"you can't get radical ideas like this into the public domain if you go through the chain of command".

The Ministry of Defence was rightly concerned about what Major Joyce had done, and Members of Parliament should also be concerned. Much was made at the time by Major Joyce, through media interviews, of the fact that he was criticising senior Army officers as being class-ridden public school products.

I read his pamphlet with great interest. He touched on many issues, including recruitment, training, ethnic minorities and civil liberties. Much of what he said was controversial; some of it was interesting; some of it was obviously plain wrong and some of it was eccentric. It was really a political polemic.

We should ask two questions. Why was it necessary for Major Joyce, a serving Army officer, to publish his views in a Labour party publication? Why not use, for example, one of the in-house Ministry of Defence journals or one of many academic journals? The Major's action meant that the issue immediately became party political.

In the few months leading up to autumn 1997, we heard more from Major Joyce about his case and the possibility that he would face disciplinary charges. His wife was reported in The Sunday Telegraph on 12 October 1997 as saying that, if he was threatened with court martial, he would take the Army to the European Court of Human Rights. What emerged from those exchanges—it seemed that Major Joyce was hardly out of the media—was the fact, that despite being repeatedly warned not to speak to the media about his views, Major Joyce continued to do so.

I understand that Major Joyce believes that he has a basic right to air his views and that the Army was being old-fashioned and restrictive, but he is not living in the real world. Most public and private organisations maintain official and unofficial codes of conduct for their employees or members. Major Joyce continued to criticise senior officers and expected to have the right to do so. I put it to the House that most organisations, after giving warnings, would tell an employee that, if he continued his actions, they would reluctantly have to "let him go", to use the current management jargon.

In late October 1997, we learned through the press that Major Joyce could keep his job, provided that he did not again breach disciplinary codes, and was to keep his views on the state of the Army to himself. He was given permission—for which he had urged very strongly in his pamphlet—to publish a journal called "The Armed Services Forum".

Why did the Army and the Ministry of Defence make that decision? We learned, once again through the press, that the Lord Chancellor had written to the Secretary of State for Defence advising him not to take action against Major Joyce because of the fear that, if the officer took his case to the European Court of Human Rights, any ruling would come up in the run-up to the next election, which

"would not be good timing".

Whatever right the Lord Chancellor has to involve himself across the board in departmental matters concerning the law, the letter has, to say the least, a party political spin, which is totally objectionable.

Ministers appeared to back Major Joyce when the Secretary of State for Defence said at a Fabian Society seminar—some coincidence there—on 13 November 1997 that he wanted to increase the number of officers from state schools. The Daily Telegraph on 14 November said:

"Mr. Robertson and other ministers are known to be sympathetic to Major Joyce's views."

There is an irony about the background of officers, MPs and Ministers and what kind of school they attended. Given Major Joyce's criticism that senior officers were out of touch with people because so many of them went to public schools, it is ironic that the Under-Secretary of State for Defence and the Minister for Defence Procurement—50 per cent. of the Ministers in the MOD—attended public schools. So what? We judge Ministers on how competent they are, not by their background, and it seems ironic that Major Joyce should not have taken that into account.

By the end of 1997, Major Joyce had successfully and repeatedly contravened Queen's regulations, but the Lord Chancellor had intervened on his behalf, there had been sympathetic noises from the Secretary of State for Defence and the Major had been told that he could continue his career and publish a journal but that he had to refrain from further public utterances. A number of his friends would have said that that was a reasonable compromise and, in many respects, from his perspective, he had won a political victory.

At that point in the case, party politics raised its head. When Major Joyce published his Labour party pamphlet in August 1997, he was already known by many Army friends at Upavon as a supporter of the Labour party. Indeed, he had helped the party during the general election. He told people at Upavon that he had thought about standing as a Labour parliamentary candidate in Scotland. In response to a question, the then Minister for the Armed Forces admitted that he had met Major Joyce twice before the general election.

From the new year onwards, Major Joyce's activities became less covert and more overtly party political. Despite being told not to speak to the media, he was quoted in The Sunday Times on 1 February 1998 as saying that he was definitely new Labour. On 14 June 1998, The Sunday Times told us that Major Joyce had been selected for a shortlist of Labour candidates for the Scottish Parliament. Through parliamentary questions in the summer, I learned that, despite blatantly breaking Queen's regulations, which state that service personnel should not take an active part in party politics and should resign if they want to stand as parliamentary candidates, no application to resign had been received from Major Joyce.

In November, Major Joyce appeared on Scottish television, where he was named as speaking on behalf of the Scottish Labour party. We learned in The Times on 25 November 1998 that Major Joyce is to be summoned before the Army Board and might face administrative discharge. On 29 November, in The Sunday Times, a rather emotional Major Joyce said that he might well take his case to the European Court of Human Rights. At that point, he lost not only his script, but any support or sympathy that he might have received from service personnel.

I suspect that Major Joyce would like to portray himself as the "Upavon one" or a latter-day Captain Alfred Dreyfus. He is neither. Even when given the benefit of the doubt when he published his pamphlet, he had his own political agenda. As a serving officer, he has openly been a Labour party supporter and, for the past four months, he has been actively seeking to become a parliamentary candidate. Not only has he repeatedly and blatantly broken every agreement that he has ever made, but he has become party politically partisan. He is honour bound to leave the Army and pursue his political career.

The case not only raises fundamental questions about the armed services not becoming involved in party politics, but casts serious doubts on ministerial judgment. My hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Mr. Maples) has written to the Secretary of State for Defence asking why Major Joyce has been able to flout the rules and regulations and openly participate in party politics. I know that the Minister took up his appointment only in the summer of this year, but I emphasise to him that many members of the armed services believe that Major Joyce has had "political top cover". That may not be true, but that is the impression among many service personnel.

I ask the House to consider what would have happened last year if a serving Army officer who had openly talked about becoming a Scottish National party candidate for the Scottish Parliament had written an article in a Scottish newspaper questioning the relevance of our nuclear deterrent. I suggest that he would have been out of the Army forthwith.

What would have happened this summer to a serving Army officer who intended being a Conservative Euro-candidate but who wrote an article for The Spectator criticising cuts in the Territorial Army? He would have been out. We know that for a fact because, in November, General Sir Michael Walker, Commander-in-Chief Land Command, wrote a letter warning all service men that, if they were caught leaking any information about the TA, they would be court-martialled. It seems that there is one rule for one act of indiscipline, and perhaps none for Major Joyce.

Ministers have got themselves into a mess. Service men are now somewhat bewildered about what they can and cannot do. There has been political interference in the Army by the Lord Chancellor. The Government are in danger of losing—

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

I am sorry; I am winding up my comments.

The Government are in danger of losing the confidence of our service personnel. All hon. Members should support the principle that serving service personnel do not involve themselves in party or partisan politics.

I assure the House that, if any serving officer who intended becoming a Conservative candidate wished to criticise the Army, I would advise him immediately to leave the Army and pursue his point as far as he could in a political career. That is now a well-established tradition. In the past, serving personnel were allowed to sit in Parliament. That was to the detriment of the services, and it caused all kinds of disruption and, indeed, some disloyalty. It also threatened civil-military relations.

This case is about not only Major Joyce—he will do what he wants to do—but a very important principle. Service men are entitled to hold political beliefs. They express them very strongly to us, as it is right and proper that they should, but we should defend the principle, set out in Queen's regulations, that, if a serving member of the armed forces wishes actively to join a political party or to pursue a parliamentary career, he should resign. That is what Major Joyce should have done.

I am grateful to the hon. Member for Mid-Norfolk (Mr. Simpson), who has allowed us the opportunity to explain the Army's handling of the Major Joyce case and to reiterate the Government's position on the issue. The hon. Gentleman mentioned the letter from the hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Mr. Maples) to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Defence. I hope to deal with some of the points covered in that letter, in addition to those raised by the hon. Gentleman.

I must say at the outset that I reject absolutely any suggestion that there has been any "political top cover" in this case. I shall cover some of the principles involved in the case and then give a brief account of the events of the Joyce case.

Major Joyce is a serving officer of the British Army. He is the author of a discussion paper from the Fabian Society—a society, which, incidentally, is not a Labour party body—published in August 1997 and entitled "Arms and the Man—Renewing the Armed Services". The personal views contained in that paper are, in a number of respects, critical of the present management of the Army.

The action being taken by the Army against Major Joyce is of an administrative rather than a disciplinary nature. I am sure that the House will understand that, in my comments today, I must take care not to prejudice the outcome of that management action.

Major Joyce's actions were of concern to the Army not because of the content of his article, or, indeed, of his subsequent articles, but because the manner of its release showed complete disregard of Queen's regulations and of his commanding officer.

Will my hon. Friend confirm that a consultation process on the strategic defence review was about to begin at the time in question and that that consultation process itself was still under discussion? I recall going to a meeting with his predecessor and commenting on how it could be improved. In those circumstances, was it not reasonable for an officer to put his views in the way that Major Joyce did?

There is a clear distinction between the responsibilities of an Army officer in discharging his duties, expressing his views, being consistent with Army policy and seeking approval for the expression of those views in any form, and the privileges that a citizen of this country has in being able to express views on any subject that he wishes. An Army officer, like any citizen of this country, has the right to free expression, but he must be able to draw that distinction. It is an important distinction, which I hope that all our Army personnel would recognise. It is certainly one that I confirm as crucial in the execution of the Army's responsibilities.

The Army is, after all, a part of society, and its values must reflect those of society. However, it is a cohesive and disciplined force. Its effectiveness—and, ultimately, the safety of every individual soldier in it—depends on individual and collective respect for that discipline.

The sort of requirements imposed by Queen's regulations on serving personnel are not novel. They mirror those that apply throughout the civil service and elsewhere in the public sector. They require that anyone wishing to publish views and opinions seek permission in advance. The regulations pertaining to political activities by serving members of the armed forces have been clearly explained to Major Joyce, and it is therefore disappointing that he has chosen not to act in accordance with them.

The decision to investigate the authorship by Major Joyce of a publication and some newspaper articles which were critical of aspects of defence policy and recruitment was taken by the Army chain of command. Such action simply followed established Army procedures. Ministers were not at any time involved in either the decision to investigate Major Joyce's actions or in the course that the inquiry took. The temporary suspension of Major Joyce in August 1997, while an investigation was conducted, was not a disciplinary action, and was not recorded as suh.

The completed investigation report was forwarded by Major Joyce's chain of command to the Army prosecuting authority for consideration. The report was not copied to, or seen by, Ministers. I should like to reassure the House that the Army prosecuting authority is independent of, and cannot be directed by, the military chain of command or, indeed, Ministers on any cases that it is asked to consider. It is subject only to legal oversight by the Attorney-General.

Will the Minister give way?

I shall give way, but the hon. Gentleman is taking up some of the time that I need to explain the background to the case.

Will the Minister confirm that the Lord Chancellor's letter was seen by the Army prosecuting authority before it came to its decision?

I cannot confirm that because I do not know what information the Army prosecuting authority had in examining whether there was a case against Major Joyce. It is quite rightly a matter for the authority, not for Ministers.

The decision whether to prosecute a case referred to the Army prosecuting authority is based on the realistic prospect of obtaining a conviction based on the evidence, and on whether a prosecution is in the interests of the public and the service. It will depend on an assessment of all pertinent legal, evidential and procedural issues. The tests are essentially the same as those applied to the Crown Prosecution Service. I hope that the hon. Member for Mid-Norfolk agrees that it would not be appropriate to disclose the basis on which the Army prosecuting authority reached its decision not to court-martial Major Joyce. Indeed, it would not be appropriate for Ministers to be aware of that basis, let alone disclose it.

Major Joyce returned to work in September 1997, when he was posted to a job appropriate to his rank in the Adjutant-General's Corps at Worthy Down. That move was deemed necessary because Major Joyce had irrevocably undermined the confidence of his former employing officer. Major Joyce continued to seek and receive media attention in continued disregard for Queen's regulations. That behaviour led, in October 1997, to a formal warning.

In February 1998, Major Joyce was formally interviewed by his commanding officer, in which he was informed of his commanding officer's recommendation to the military secretary that he should not be employed further in the Army. Major Joyce was then sent home. He has remained away from work since that time. He has made no application to resign or retire from the Army. The recommendations made by Major Joyce's commanding officer to the Army chain of command concerning his future in the Army should be properly confidential between the two parties. However, I would reassure the House that Ministers have played no part whatever, either formally or informally, in the process, which is on-going.

The time taken to conclude the review of Major Joyce's future in the Army is regretted, but not without explanation. The procedure is considered and measured, and gives the individual the fullest opportunity to make representation at every stage of the process. Until the process is complete, an officer properly continues to be paid, and his terms and conditions of service remain extant.

The matter is being considered at Army board level by two non-ministerial members of the board who have not previously been involved in handling the case. Major Joyce has seen, and had the opportunity to comment on, all material before the board, save only for legal advice. He has been offered the opportunity of an oral hearing with the board later this month, at which his solicitor may be present if he so wishes. The decision on Major Joyce's future in the Army will be taken exclusively by those Army board members. Ministers have no involvement in the process unless Major Joyce is dissatisfied with the Army board's decision in respect of redress of a complaint and petitions the sovereign. In that case, the Army's submission would be forwarded to the Palace through the Secretary of State.

Many things can be said on this issue. I want to make it clear that I reject entirely any suggestion of a political cover-up or of any inappropriate ministerial involvement. Inevitably, there have been discussions between Ministers and between Ministers and officials on the handling of the public and parliamentary aspects that have arisen in the case, but in no other regard has there been any involvement, as has been suggested. The treatment of Major Joyce by the Army chain of command has been entirely fair and reasonable.