in the Chair]

It gives me great pleasure to begin this morning's debate on one of the great issues of our time—the proposed enlargement of the European Union.

The enlargement of the EU is not new. It was enlarged in 1973, when Denmark, Ireland and the United Kingdom joined what was then the European Economic Community. Greece joined the European Union in 1981, Spain and Portugal joined in 1986 and Austria, Finland and Sweden joined in 1995. Significantly, the enlargement anticipated in 2004 will be bigger and more ambitious than any we have seen before: it is hoped that eight countries from central Europe—Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Slovenia—plus the islands of Malta and Cyprus will join the EU.

The other three candidate countries are Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey. Negotiations with Turkey have not yet begun because it does not meet the so-called Copenhagen criteria, and Romania and Bulgaria are some way behind the other applicant countries. Although Romania and Bulgaria will not be joining the EU in 2004, we should not forget about them because progress is being made in both states. Equally, we should not link them because differentiation is vital. Bulgaria is way ahead of Romania in its negotiations and the number of chapters that it has closed in anticipation of entry.

You may wonder, Mr. Deputy Speaker, why I have elected to debate enlargement. Some may think that it is an esoteric subject, and others may think that it betrays the obsessions of the European anorak brigade. However, the enlargement of the EU is of tremendous importance to both this country and the present EU, and its importance cannot be exaggerated.

I am passionately in favour of enlargement for three reasons, the first of which is economic. Enlargement will create a huge single market, the size and significance of which will dwarf the United States and Japan put together. It will have more than 500 million consumers. There will be huge economic benefits for us. It has been estimated, for instance, that the gross domestic product of the United Kingdom alone will increase by £1.75 billion as a result of enlargement. It has also been estimated that, through enlargement, 300,000 new jobs will be created in the present European Union, the economic worth of which cannot be legitimately doubted.

Secondly, I strongly support enlargement because it will give us an opportunity to develop broader policies for co-operation and co-ordination on a pan-Europe basis in a way that has never before been possible. As we often say, pollution knows no national boundaries, because what happens in one country inevitably affects other countries. Crime is increasingly developing on an international basis, and if we are serious about creating safer communities we must take a pan-Europe approach to tackling it. In a more positive sense, there is tremendous scope for developing cultural and educational opportunities across eastern, central and western Europe. For those reasons, I am strongly in favour of enlargement of the EU.

My third and final reason for believing that the process is so important relates to the need for peace and stability throughout the European continent. It is opportune to end the artificial division between western and eastern Europe. The appalling events of recent years in the former Yugoslavia emphasise the need to work consistently and diligently for peace and stability in our continent. Enlargement alone will not achieve that, but it will make a huge contribution.

Enlargement is in the mutual best interests of the citizens of the European Union and applicant countries. We may discuss the process of enlargement and how we anticipate and hope that it will happen in 2004, but the reality is that the process of bringing people closer together is already happening. Yesterday, I was in Poland where I addressed a conference in Sopot just outside Gdanz. The conference examined how links can be developed between local authorities and other local organisations in Poland and Britain. I learned that 36 twinning projects between local authorities here and in Poland already exist, and the number will increase with enlargement. Nottingham is linked with Poznan, Southend is linked with Sopot, where the conference was held, and in Wales links are being established between the National Assembly for Wales and Silesia, two areas with much in common, not least their previous reliance on heavy industry. The British Government are actively pursuing various links and some senior civil servants are regularly seconded to help Poland and other countries prepare for enlargement.

Although I am a fervent advocate of enlargement of the European Union, I recognise that others have reservations. Some fear "floods" of people coming to the EU from the east, but the reality is that most people in central Europe want to stay in the countries where they were born and brought up, and have no great desire to migrate. When enlargement takes place, transitional phases will ensure that the free movement of people is introduced gradually.

Some people fear that footloose capital from the EU will move eastwards and we must acknowledge that some firms have relocated from Britain to central and eastern European countries. South Wales has experienced that. However, that process is the result not of anticipated enlargement but of globalisation. We must seize the nettle and ensure that our industries are truly competitive and our work force have the skills and adaptability to ensure that we retain capital investment and attract more inward investment. We must face that challenge whether or not enlargement takes place.

Some people have expressed concern that present recipients of structural funds in the European Union and particularly in this country will lose out as those funds are reallocated to central and eastern European countries. However, after 2006 there will be an opportunity to renegotiate the financial perspective and the structural funds, and I am sure that tough negotiation from the United Kingdom will ensure that adequate transitional arrangements are made for recipient areas, particularly of objective 1 funds. With sensible decisions, I am sure that we can reach a financial agreement that will benefit central Europe as well as existing members of the EU.

Those are some of the reservations that have been expressed about enlargement. However, the obstructionists who have seized on the issue and attempted to raise obstacles to enlargement have raised two issues in particular. The first is the ratification of the Nice treaty. I believe that that is a sensible treaty for taking Europe forward. It contains a realistic extension of qualified majority voting and a re-weighting of the votes in the Council of Ministers that benefits the United Kingdom. It takes reasonable and moderate steps to ensure that smaller states cannot outvote larger ones. Those measures are necessary for the enlargement process to take place and be successful. I hope that the Irish people will endorse the Nice treaty in their forthcoming referendum.

As well as opposition to the Nice treaty, there has been an attempt to suggest that the common agricultural policy must be reformed before enlargement takes place. I am sure that none of us questions for one moment the need to reform the CAP. Changes have been made, but more radical ones are required. However, we cannot make CAP reform a precondition for enlargement—if we do, enlargement will not take place for a generation. That is the clear fact of the matter. That would be tremendously detrimental to this country's national interest and to the interest of the whole European continent.

My hon. Friend suggests that we should not reform the CAP before enlargement. Can he say whether the CAP will apply to new member states, or whether they will be insulated and kept out of its arrangements?

There will certainly be transitional arrangements. Some negotiations on the most difficult chapters have begun, agriculture being one of those. The European Commission has proposed modest subsidies for farmers in eastern Europe, which are contentious in terms of Poland, which has the greatest concentration of farmers. However, transitional arrangements are being negotiated and, at the same time, a marker is being put down, not least by our Government, about the need radically to change the CAP in the future.

There is also an acknowledgment in all central European countries, not least Poland, that the CAP must be reformed. That is because of pressure from not only the European Union but the World Trade Organisation. The old agricultural regime simply cannot continue in the modern world, as most people now recognise. A momentum for change is undeniably building up, and it will ensure that the CAP is fundamentally changed once and for all.

On agricultural policy, is my hon. Friend not concerned that the chapter on access that has been closed with the Polish Government allows direct payments to Poland, although it was quite clear that that would lock new countries coming in under enlargement into a system that was being phased out, and had to be phased out, in the interests of agriculture throughout Europe?

Tough negotiations on the agricultural chapter are quite rightly taking place. However, if enlargement is to proceed according to the timetable set out, we must recognise the need to accept the acquis communautaire and the rules that currently apply, including agricultural regulations. Equally, as part of the negotiation process, an earnest debate is taking place on how those regulations can be reformed. We must move away from a common agricultural policy based on subsidy and encouraging overproduction to one more akin to a rural policy, which will bring about the transition of rural economies, making them more efficient and more realistic about the demands of the modern world.

I commend members of our Government who went to Poland and engaged in that debate, while those negotiations were taking place. The current twin-track approach is a realistic way forward to secure enlargement and bring about meaningful change at the same time.

Progress is being made on that and on other contentious areas. The negotiation chart that was drawn up at the end of last month shows that, of the 10 countries that are actively engaged in negotiations, eight have closed some 23 of the 29 chapters that have been opened. That is very significant. I take great comfort from the fact that Poland, which is the largest of the applicant countries, has successfully completed one of its most difficult chapters, which dealt with land ownership and the free movement of capital. Colleagues who were in Poland only a few weeks ago were involved in some of the detailed negotiations. We know full well the sensitivities at issue, so the agreement that has been reached with European Union negotiators on that extremely contentious matter is a huge success that bodes well for the future.

Informal as well as formal negotiations are taking place. Applicant countries must adapt their social and civil infrastructure to ensure that they are able to implement EU policies, and there has been a great deal of success with that as well. However, although it is right and proper for the EU to negotiate a whole raft of policies and, inevitably, for us to take into account our own national interests, we should also bear in mind that the applicant countries, as well as securing a deal with us through negotiation, must sell the package to their electorates in referendums.

Generally, recent Euro barometer opinion surveys show that support for EU membership among applicant countries is holding firm. However, there is cause for concern in some countries. For instance, only 33 per cent. of the Latvian electorate are in favour of joining the EU. Much will depend on the terms that their Government are ultimately able to negotiate with the EU. If we are genuinely committed to the enlargement process, we must keep in mind not simply our own needs and negotiating positions but the need to secure the support of the applicant countries' citizens.

I am optimistic about the enlargement process. There is a very strong chance that it will take place in the near future, probably in 2004. All of the applicant countries already engaged in the process of developing links with EU countries are also contributing to the debate about the future of Europe, which focuses on the work of the convention. A little while ago, our Prime Minister made a statement with the Prime Minister of Poland, which was published on The Guardian website, if not in the newspaper itself. It set out several areas of common ground between Poland and Britain. For example, both Prime Ministers emphatically said that they did not want a European superstate, that intergovernmental co-operation was very important and that the role of national Parliaments was absolutely central to Europe's development.

Leading politicians in Poland are contributing to the debate about the future of our continent. One of the most significant speeches about the future of Europe that I have read for a long time was made last month in the Royal Palace in Warsaw where, in 1791, the first European constitution was officially launched and published. The President of Poland said:

"The most important decisions cannot be taken by politicians alone, or panels of experts in the seclusion of their offices. The unification of Europe must not be solely a matter for the political, elites or groups of technocrats: it should be the concern of all citizens"—

of Europe. Those words are important, and as politicians we should always remember that enlargement is not about what we want, but about what the people of Europe want.

In echoing those fine words, I believe that the enlargement process offers us a monumental challenge and a huge opportunity. It gives us the chance to create a European continent built on the principles of democracy, respect for human rights and good governance. It also gives us a chance to create a peaceful and prosperous Europe. Let us ensure that we grasp that opportunity.

I praise the spirit in which the hon. Member for Caerphilly (Mr. David) moved his address. He recognised the number of problems relating to the successful integration of applicant countries into the European Union. Part of my case is that if the EU moves too quickly with its agenda of more centralised power and an ambition to cover an ever-wider number of policy areas in greater detail, the task of applicant countries will become more difficult.

During the EU's development there has always been tension over whether it should open its doors more widely to countries that are properly part of the continent of Europe, or whether a limited number of countries should rapidly press on with centralisation to create a type of grand federal Germany at EU level. That tension is seen today: on one hand we have a convention under way that is trying to create a constitution for the European fifteen; on the other, there are the detailed and difficult negotiations of several applicant countries, which have been sketched by the hon. Member for Caerphilly. Those would dearly love stronger links with our democracies and our prosperous trading system in the west, but they are finding the hurdles of the current 15 difficult to leap, let alone the hurdles that integrationists are keen to put in their way.

I remember being moved at the end of the 1980s and in the early 1990s when the Berlin wall came down and many brave people led peaceful, but decisive revolutions for freedom, enterprise and democracy in eastern European countries. At the time, I was privileged to be a Minister of the Crown, and went on several journeys to welcome peoples and their interim Governments into the community of European democracies. The first thing that touched me then was that, on more than one occasion when I was travelling in an ambassadorial car that was flying the United Kingdom flag, people saluted or even kissed the flag because they were so impressed that this country had stood against Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s, and against communism in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. They loathed those systems, as I do, because they both eclipse freedom, damage prosperity and make the lives of people who wish to have independence of thought and movement a misery.

I was impressed by the first impulses of those countries as they began to grasp the heady atmosphere of freedom. They wanted two things before anything else: the restoration of their national flags because for so long they had not liked being under the Soviet colours; and, however small the countries, the restoration of their old national currency, because that was seen as a symbol of more control over one's destiny. Small countries decided that the rouble monetary union was not a good idea for them, and that they would rather have control over their own independent monetary system as an expression of their national sovereignty. I urge Her Majesty's Government to understand those feelings. I am keen that we should extend the European family and community ever more widely.

Is the right hon. Gentleman suggesting that when other member states join the European Union, they will be less willing to join the single currency because they would want to retain their own currencies as a symbol of their modern freedoms?

If one consulted their people, many would remember the very deep and strong feelings that they had some 10 years ago when they grasped their freedom from the Soviet empire. I am suggesting that our Government—above all others in the current 15—should be sympathetic to that and understand that the single currency is becoming a barrier to the successful conclusion of a wider union rather than an open invitation. After all, the Government welcome the single currency in principle, and believe that it is a good idea.

We have suffered under, or enjoyed, this Government for five years and they are still unable to pop the question to the British people because they understand how unpopular the idea of the single currency is in Britain. Many people deeply understand that controlling the currency is not just a symbol—it is not just about keeping the monarch or Head of State on the coin of the realm—but something very real concerning democratic political power. It gives current and future Ministers the opportunity to control interest rates and have an influence on borrowing or the exchange rate, and therefore to influence imports and exports. That control and influence would be lost if our currency were taken away.

If the hon. Member for Luton, North (Mr. Hopkins) will forgive me, I do not wish to get diverted into a debate on the euro. The debate is about European enlargement, and the euro is one of many hurdles that the European Union is placing in the way of the applicant countries. The hon. Member for Caerphilly said, quite rightly, that there were questions to be resolved concerning agricultural policy, and possible movement of capital and people. I share his vision of agricultural policy getting away from subsidy and over-provision that causes considerable expense to the taxpayer. Indeed, if I can believe the Government's policy statements, it is one that they share. Unfortunately, the Government are unable to deliver it given the current configuration of the European Union.

The hon. Member for Caerphilly should understand that we cannot leave the common agricultural policy on one side. The CAP is the biggest, most important and most expensive EU policy. That leads one to question how many more of those centralised policies we want, given the infernal mess that the EU has made in recent years of many parts of the agricultural industry in Britain and on the continent. The CAP is expensive to the taxpayer and to the consumer. That is a remarkable contribution of bad luck—we pay twice. People pay more in the shops and as taxpayers, and the policy is not very good for British farmers either.

I am not an advocate of the common agricultural policy in its present form. However, does the right hon. Gentleman at least recognise that changes are taking place in the European Union? For example, a year ago there was a change of agriculture ministry in Germany, which made a significant difference in pushing the reform debate forward. Does the right hon. Gentleman welcome the fact that the rural development part of the CAP is growing? We must ensure that it grows at the expense of the traditional part. Rather than being defeatist about the matter—not to say that the right hon. Gentleman is—and saying that we cannot secure change, we should be part of the great momentum for change that exists.

I am suggesting that we should be more forceful and persuasive because change is much needed. I welcome any changes on the continent that move in the right direction, but as the right hon. Lady conceded in her intervention, it is relatively easy to set up another subsidy scheme on top of the scheme we already have, which is not working. It is far more difficult to tackle the underlying problem: a subsidy scheme for farming based on wrong propositions, which conspires to be bad for taxpayers, consumers and farmers in a relatively advanced agricultural society like the United Kingdom, whatever its impact might be elsewhere.

Does my right hon. Friend agree that if the CAP were fundamentally reformed to make it less intrusive on the taxpayer and on countries in Europe, that would open the door for even further enlargement and put a light at the end of the tunnel for countries like Turkey? That would add to the great benefit of Europe about which the hon. Member for Caerphilly (Mr. David) spoke—that is, to spread security and stability across Europe, which is what it should all be about.

I agree that the lower we can make the barriers, by reducing the cost and complexity of common policies at federal level, the easier it is to bring other countries in. My ideal would be a European Union of independent national democracies co-operating together. That is a good alternative model, which the UK should advance at the constitutional convention. It is wrong for us to give credence to the idea that tame proposals are likely to emerge from that convention; that the aim is not the creation of a superstate. We all know that the agenda is to create an EU-type state, modelled along German constitutional lines. The lines might be perfectly democratic, but it will be a superstate. We should say that Europe is not ready for that—it is not suitable for all its different peoples, nations and traditions— and that we shall get on better together if each country has room for its own national aspirations and forms of democratic expression.

It is crazy that the people of the countries that we seek to invite into our midst risked and gave so much to recreate their old nations some 10 years ago, yet we now expect them to take on an enormous amount of central power in Brussels, designed by countries at different levels of development and with different attitudes. The tension that occurs in enlargement negotiations is always resolved in the EU by going for more centralisation. The centralisers, or federalists, always say that if more participating countries are brought in, that will slow the thing down. Therefore, they say, we must at the same time take more central powers to avoid such slowing down. Indeed, they often aspire to speed it up.

What are they trying to accelerate? What are they trying to prevent from slowing? They are trying to stop the deceleration of the great legislative machine—the centralising machine that trundles on day by day. I have sympathy with those who wish to slow down or stop that machine. There must come a point where there is enough European law. My constituents do not wake up in the morning and write to me saying, "We feel that we need more European laws. Please prod the Government into getting more," whereas I often receive letters from people who say, "We do not want a European law on this or that. We want to trade with our partners in Europe and to be friends with them; we want to see whether we can reach agreement on mighty matters relating to foreign policy or the environment, but the last thing that we want is a legislative machine churning out hundreds of directives and regulations."

The centralisers always say that we need more laws in order to complete the social or environmental area or the single market, to have a common foreign policy or to prepare for a single army. They fear that the admission of different countries such as Poland, Hungary or the Czech Republic would get in the way of the pursuit of their agenda of more laws and more central control, with more trappings and more power going to the superstate in the making. I should like the British Government to say that this enlargement should be different. We should say that we joined a common market—the British people voted for that and British Governments past and present have been supporters of the minimum level of law needed to create a common commercial and trading area to spread prosperity through trade, but I do not see why the British Government should sign up to extending European government power into so many more corners. If we were a strong and clear voice for a genuine Europe of nations, in which we did together those things that everyone agreed needed doing without constantly pressurising countries and peoples into accepting laws that they did not want and which they had voted against, we would stand for something good and true, which could advance, rather than set back, the cause of European integration.

That brings me naturally to the curious case of the treaty of Nice. The British Government have consistently argued, often in a partisan spirit, that the treaty of Nice contains the minimum that is necessary to complete the arrangements for the applicant countries, but anyone of independent mind who reads the treaty can see that it is mainly concerned with giving more central power to European institutions. It is about removing vetos that we currently enjoy and replacing them with qualified majority voting. It is about creating a series of new common policies, some of which are set out in the recent Government document, "Realising Europe's potential: Economic Reform in Europe", and there are parallel measures for the common foreign policy and the common military policy that is being evolved.

The treaty of Nice is more about centralising than about enlargement. Of course, some items in the treaty are necessary for enlargement. It is necessary to rebalance votes and determine the numbers of Commissioners—I do not disagree with that; it is a necessary part of enlargement—but because the treaty goes so much wider and includes chunks of centralising agenda, it hit the buffers when it was put to a vote in Ireland. Who would have thought that Ireland would object to such a treaty when Ireland has been a great beneficiary of subsidies and trade with the European Union, which one would have thought would overwhelm any demerits that Irish people might see in the scheme? However, the Nice treaty was so centralising and claustrophobic that the Irish decided that they could not live with it. I hope that member states will learn from that lesson and understand that free peoples and democracies are likely to respond "No" to such a centralising treaty. The British Government would not dare to put the treaty of Nice before the British people because they know that we would run a rattling good campaign against it—making the points that I have made, that the treaty is about not only enlargement but centralising and grabbing power—and that we would win.

Given what the right hon. Gentleman says about this Government, why was the Maastricht treaty never put to the British people?

I would have liked it to be. As the hon. Gentleman may remember, I resigned from the then Government over several issues, including the handling of the single currency and the Maastricht treaty, which I wanted to be put before the British people. However, I was very pleased that we obtained an opt-out from the main point of the Maastricht treaty—joining the single currency—an opt-out which I am delighted this Government are still using and, I suspect, will continue to use for the rest of their life. That abated the problem, but there is no opt-out from the Nice treaty, so the Government do not have the excuse that the Conservative Government had in the case of Maastricht.

The Government should understand that the people of western Europe—and. I suspect, the peoples of eastern Europe—now desperately need a voice in the powerful councils that meet behind closed doors in Brussels and other leading centres to say that they do not want more centralised power, but want their national democracies to be respected. We think that we can get on better with each other if we are allowed a little freedom and some looseness, rather than having everything controlled centrally.

The Minister may like to comment on how he sees the negotiations on agriculture going, because he must concede that, far from settling all the important issues that must be resolved before enlargement, the Nice treaty leaves out the most important issues: the handling of agriculture and of the budget. We need to know how much enlargement will cost existing members. What are we prepared to pay for it? We all want to enlarge the Union, but we need to know whether the own resources ceiling will be increased and whether there will be big tax increases for people in Britain, France and Germany. If there is not a big tax increase to pay for enlargement, we need to know which elements of the budget will be cut. As soon as we bring new and poorer members into the Community, they will naturally—on the basis of proportionality and population—receive more than their fair share of money for agriculture, transport and infrastructure projects from the social fund. That will mean less money for the western countries. While that may be perfectly fair, I would like to see the numbers.

I would far rather achieve enlargement by amending the budget than by a big tax increase. I do not think that a big tax increase for the western European peoples would be a good idea at the moment. There may be more to be said about that tomorrow, once the tax-raising Chancellor has disclosed his domestic requirements. If, on top of domestic requirements, we are to face a big requirement for enlargement, we should at least know the numbers and have an opportunity to debate such an important matter.

Will the Minister use the opportunity for renegotiation that enlargement offers to sort out fishing? There are some sensible words on fishing in the Government's latest document. However, the British fishing industry is being destroyed. The common fisheries policy is another example of a centralised common policy that does not work for Britain. Now that everything has to be renegotiated because we are considering proper enlargement, can we please dig in and get some common sense and a better deal for our fishermen?

The Minister may also like to comment on the Government's recent statement that one of the European Union's main aims at the moment is to

"reach an agreement on the tax package as a whole as soon as possible and no later than by the end of 2002."

Will the Minister tell us what that package is likely to comprise? We are now well advanced into 2002. Are the negotiations well advanced? How many more new taxes will emanate from the European Union and how much control of our tax policy is envisaged under the new tax proposals? Those matters will make it even more difficult for the applicant countries, because they will now learn that they are joining a club that has not only very centralised agriculture, fishing and social policies but substantial ambitions to transfer some of the powers of taxation from national democratic assemblies to the centre, the federal core, which may or may not become more democratic.

Will the British Government on this occasion speak the truth and speak out for a Europe of nations where we respect each other's differences? Will they speak out for a Community in which we do things together where we wish to do so and are able to reach voluntary agreement? Will they speak out against a more centralised Community? Will they speak out against a Community that wishes to tax us more and involve us less? Will they speak out against a Community that thinks that the treaty of Nice is the answer to enlargement, when the real answer is sorting out difficulties such as the budget and the common agricultural policy?

Will the Government speak out for a Community that believes that democracy, freedom and enterprise can best be spread by making more decisions locally than centrally and by encouraging the brave, democratic forces in the eastern European countries, rather than trying to take powers away from them and give them to bureaucrats at the centre? Above all, will they take on board the message of the Irish referendum and be prepared to face the British people on the issue by putting the resulting package to a sensible referendum test?

rose —

Order. I remind right hon. and hon. Members that it is the custom in Westminster Hall to start the three final speeches 30 minutes before the end of the debate. As you will see, there are 17 minutes left and four Members seeking to catch my eye, so I hope that hon. Members will bear in mind the lack of time in terms of their own delivery and when considering whether to accept interventions.

I take note of your advice, Mr. Deputy Speaker.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly (Mr. David) on securing this debate. I also congratulate him on choosing this subject and on the way in which he introduced it, with which I strongly agreed.

The right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood) mentioned the tremendous exhilaration and hope that we all felt when the Berlin wall fell at the end of the 1980s and wonderful, undreamed-of changes took place across our continent. We have moved on from those days, of course, and in many respects we now face problems rather than opportunities. That is particularly true now that we are in the most difficult phase of the enlargement negotiations, but the hope and optimism that we all experienced at the end of the 1980s should give us a sense of purpose as we approach the issue.

I could not quite tell from the contribution by the right hon. Member for Wokingham whether he was in favour of enlargement; he certainly emphasised all the problems. Although it is right to be realistic about them, we must maintain a sense of purpose and a commitment to enlargement, which practically everyone across our continent is in favour of.

Although enlargement is a complex issue, good progress is being made. The European Commission is making good progress through its structured approach of breaking down the policy issues into different chapters. Several applicant countries have also made good progress, despite the huge legislative programmes and administrative burdens that they have had to adopt to meet the enlargement criteria. We should congratulate them and recognise the progress that they have made, but we should also ensure that they properly tackle issues on which further progress is needed. There have been welcome changes in their approaches to nationality and minority issues, although their records are not perfect, and one or two countries still need to make progress. None the less, the overall balance sheet is increasingly positive.

My hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly rightly referred to issues that are likely to influence public debate in applicant countries and EU member states. If enlargement is to be successfully completed, there must be a positive outcome in member states and applicant countries, which are trying to show their populations that EU membership is a positive move. That is particularly true of countries that hold referendums.

My hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly raised some tricky issues. On immigration, he was right to stress that people on the whole want to live and work in their countries of origin. We should recognise that previous enlargements have successfully ensured that that has happened. When Spain, Portugal and Greece joined the EU, many people used emotive language to express their fears about waves of immigration into existing EU member states. In fact, the opposite has happened, and it has been good to see those countries make economic progress and become increasingly able to provide satisfying living and working conditions for their people and to welcome people from other member states and elsewhere.

My hon. Friend was right and honest to say that there are worries about structural funds, particularly among present recipients. In negotiations on the issue in 1999 in Berlin, however, the Government achieved a good settlement for Europe and the United Kingdom. That resulted in good transitional arrangements and good settlements for objectives 1 and 2. People in Ireland have had difficulty with that, but we must be realistic about the fact that entitlement to funds cannot remain exactly the same as countries rise up the prosperity league—that is the honest approach. However, I would not be happy if enlargement meant that no structural funds remained for existing member states. Michel Barnier, the European Commissioner for regional policy, said that the EU's regional policy is an important sign of solidarity with many regions in existing member states with structural problems. It is extremely beneficial for the European Union and its member states to have an active regional policy and help in that process. I have seen the benefits of that in my own part of the United Kingdom, the north-east of England.

Agriculture has been mentioned, but, given your strictures, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I shall not discuss it in great detail. I merely express the hope that my right hon. Friend the Minister will work with other Governments to ensure that the rural development funds available for applicant countries are used more effectively than they have been up to now. Rural development is the way forward for the common agricultural policy, and it is important that we make better use of those funds, here and now.

I refer to a remark made by the right hon. Member for Wokingham. He seems to regard the convention on the future of Europe as a centralising plot, whereas it is much more complex than that. Rightly, it includes representatives from all the Governments, from national Parliaments, the European Parliament and from the kaleidoscope of political parties that make up the European Union. [Interruption.] I am being reminded that some members of the convention take a critical view of the existence of the European Union itself. I see no reason why the convention should not consider areas that are over-regulated in the European Union.

The agricultural policy is one area in which greater flexibility is needed for countries and for regions within countries, and in which there has been too much centralising. However, it is unjustified to approach the convention with the fear and dread implicit in the right hon. Gentleman's remarks. I am glad that the candidate countries are associated with that convention process, as they will be able to play their part in the reform process.

Finally, I cannot believe that the applicant countries are interested in creating a European superstate. They value their newly-won freedom and independence too much for that, and they know that they are entering an association in which they can play their full part, so they would not want to be subjugated by some superstate based in Brussels.

rose —

Order. I appeal once again for brief contributions, otherwise some hon. Members will not be able to speak.

I shall be as brief as possible. I congratulate the hon. Member for Caerphilly (Mr. David) on securing the debate.

I welcome the enlargement of the European Union. When I was a student at the London University School of Slavonic and East European Studies, it would have seemed incredible that some of the countries now applying could be in such a position. Some of them were not even independent countries. The advances made in democracy in those countries amaze me, and anything that we can do to help preserve those democracies will be welcome.

I am not an expert on agricultural policy, but I take the view that the inexorable move to industrialisation of agriculture, caused in part by the common agricultural policy, has resulted in the deterioration of the environment in many countries. That has happened in the United Kingdom, western Europe and Hungary, which I often visit, and it may well be happening in Poland, too. We must be careful of that as we progress towards enlargement.

As my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood) said, the danger of enlargement is that if we are not careful we shall fall between two stools: either it will become too easy to join the EU, in which case it will become a meaningless organisation; or the EU will become too restrictive and centralised, in which case it will become an exclusive club. The peoples of those countries and their Governments see membership as a positive move not only for economic reasons but to preserve and strengthen their relatively recently found democracy.

It will become important for small states—some of which are already applicant countries and others of which, such as Macedonia, will hopefully apply much further down the line—to be members of the EU if they are to exist as states. I also hope that Yugoslavia—it may well be the Republics of Serbia and Montenegro—will apply in a relatively short time. I hope that the Minister will tell me that the Government will support Yugoslavia's application to join the Council of Europe. I have studied Yugoslavia and have spent much time there. One of the problems in Yugoslavia, which was after all a federation, was that it was too centralised. Old rivalries and hatreds ran very deep, and it might be necessary for that region to be encompassed in the EU to solve some of those difficult problems.

Those countries must not regard EU membership as a panacea, otherwise people will be disappointed when some of their dreams do not become reality, and disappointment will become resentment. As my right hon. Friend said, we must recognise that there is a strong feeling of nationhood and independence in those countries. We must work together to make sure that we preserve that feeling of independence.

Three minutes is insufficient time in which to do this subject justice. I have some interests to declare: my father-in-law, who was a member of the Polish air force, flew with the Royal Air Force during the second world war. I strongly believe that this country owes a huge debt of honour to him and his fellow veterans. I also want to tell hon. Members that his uncle was President of the Polish Government-in-exile.

I do not declare those interests lightly, and I speak as a member of the all-party Polish group, of which my hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly (Mr. David) is also a member. Along with my right hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead. East and Washington, West (Joyce Quin), we visited Poland in January. The changes that I saw in Poland compared with my previous visit 10 years ago with an Inter-Parliamentary Union delegation showed how determined that country is that EU enlargement will go ahead. We have heard a great deal this morning about historical background, such as the Berlin wall and people's experiences when Stalin annexed part of Poland. I want to remind hon. Members of the words of Winston Churchill, who on 1 October 1939 said:

"The soul of Poland is indestructible and she will rise again like a rock, which may for a spell be submerged in a tidal wave, but which remains a rock."

On EU enlargement, we must do what we can to address the outstanding concerns on the chapters that have not yet been completed, particularly in relation to Poland's accession. I was impressed by the progress that has been made in respect of the chapters that have been closed.

We have heard a great deal about agriculture, and I urge my right hon. Friend the Minister to take into account the wealth of information, not least that supplied by my right hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West, who was formerly a Minister with responsibility for agriculture. We need to use all information, expertise and specialisation—especially environmental specialization—to make sure that a twin-track approach is taken in reforming the CAP while ensuring that it will be relevant to Poland.

I was heartened to see that great progress has been made in respect of the chapter on the judicial system. Poland has increased capacity, so those concerns no longer exist. I hope that we can secure a resolution on that matter, so that Poland can take part in the European elections in 2004. If all goes to plan, Poland will be a fully fledged member of the European Union and will take its place alongside other Governments. I think that Poland will be a particular friend of the United Kingdom. We must work closely with fellow EU members, via all the twinning arrangements, to take account of Polish interests and ensure that our vision of European enlargement makes practical sense in terms of delivery in the United Kingdom and Poland.

This has been a very important debate, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Caerphilly (Mr. David) on securing it. As others have remarked, he made a genuinely upbeat presentation of the benefits and importance of enlargement, which I endorse.

We have heard the usual wide-ranging set of opinions about the meaning of enlargement. We all seem to agree that it is a good thing, even if our analyses of what it means for the European Union vary significantly. The Liberal Democrats have been strong supporters of the process of enlargement for a long time. We recognise the historic role of the European Union in advancing security, democracy and prosperity throughout a part of the world that has characterised most of its modern existence by fighting bloody wars. It has lived through many forms of government, with too many parts of it living under regimes that are other than democratic for a long time. As the cold war fades from memory, it is important not to lose sight of the progress that has been made.

The hon. Members for Uxbridge (Mr. Randall) and for Stoke-on-Trent, North (Ms Walley) highlighted the Polish example. I cannot claim such close connections to that country. However, 20 years ago while I was still at school and Poland was under military rule, I recall campaigning on behalf of the Solidarity trade union, wondering whether Lech Walesa would ever be in a position to challenge General Jaruzelski. It is incredible that in a relatively short time, Poland has become a democracy. It no longer poses a security threat in its wider association with the Warsaw Pact countries, and its economy is much improved. I believe that European Union membership will strengthen and enhance those trends not just for Poland, but for many other applicant countries.

Enlargement is important for longstanding members of the European Union, such as this country. The negotiations cannot be taken for granted. As with everything in Europe, the process of the negotiations has been slow and, at times, painful. Undoubtedly, more pain will be experienced. In recent weeks, the Minister has been responding to parliamentary questions, explaining how the different chapters of the negotiations have been successfully concluded. However, we appreciate that the timetable is pretty unforgiving, and many issues have yet to be resolved. Before we get to that point, there is the small matter of the ratification of the treaty of Nice. The conclusion of that process is fundamental to the success of enlargement, but we cannot ignore the fact that last June's Irish referendum result represents a major stumbling block to the process. European Union leaders confidently stated after the referendum result that the enlargement process was irreversible, but it is important that we hear from the Minister today how he anticipates the Irish can be persuaded to reverse that decision. There is an election campaign in the Republic, and he may pray that in aid for not meddling in another country's affairs, although we know that he is a brave Minister who often pushes matters further than some of his colleagues want. Perhaps I can tempt him this morning to comment on that issue.

Does the hon. Gentleman believe that it is a good democratic principle that if people vote no in a referendum, they must vote again, but if they vote yes the result is accepted? Does he recognise that as being democratic?—[Interruption.]

As the hon. Member for Moray (Angus Robertson) said, it is for the Irish to decide how they want to proceed, but I suspect that that helps his argument for independence in Scotland, so I shall not push it too far.

If the Irish reject the treaty a second, third, fourth or fifth time, there will be a serious problem. We know that it is technically possible to get around enlargement, but what will happen if ratification is not forthcoming? The difficult issues in the Nice treaty will be academic for applicant countries if negotiations are not concluded. A number of issues affect individual countries and the whole European Union generally. Three broad categories of eligibility criteria cover politics, the economy and administration.

With the exception of Turkey, candidate countries have passed the political test, but they have demonstrated mixed success with their economies and administration of judicial capability. Political eligibility is sometimes taken for granted, but we must not overlook issues that are causing concern to the enlargement debate. It would be helpful to the House to understand the Government's current view on the situation in Cyprus, the prospects for resolution of the long-standing and difficult dispute between the Turks and the main island of Cyprus, whether there is any prospect of a resolution and, if not, what procedures will follow for Cyprus. Likewise, in the Czech Republic the Benes decrees have caused concern to surrounding countries. There has been an inconsistency in the enlargement Commissioner's view of whether that is crucial to its entry, and it would be helpful to understand the Government's position on that.

The economic position in each country varies, but we must not lose sight of the fact that the economic opportunities are at the heart of the appeal of EU membership. I shall touch on a couple of issues that have been raised in this debate.

Agriculture was the focus of earlier contributions and there is no doubt that the common agricultural policy is a key focus for all negotiations. We are in the early stage of those negotiations and the gloss may be wearing off for some applicant countries. Great concern has been expressed in recent months about the way in which they might be integrated into the CAP, the nature and time scale of entitlement to subsidies and the period preceding their eligibility for full membership. My view is that an unreformed CAP is damaging and unsustainable for existing member states and those who seek to join. A mid-term review of the CAP is under way, neatly seeking to dodge the French, if not the German, elections this year, which will be fundamental to the conclusion of negotiations with candidate countries. Again, it would be useful to understand the Government's attitude to that. They have not earned a great deal of credibility among Britain's farmers in recent years for their commitment to agriculture and for what they seek to do about it. It is important that we understand their attitude to the agricultural policy.

Will the countries concerned be second-class citizens in the CAP? Does the Minister see any danger that the nature of the negotiations might delay those countries' anticipated involvement in them?

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

No, because I can speak for only one more minute, or I will be in trouble.

On regional funds, I echo the point made by the right hon. Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West (Joyce Quin). Unless we look seriously at how British regions will be affected after enlargement, there will be much difficulty in selling that proposal to the UK.

I hope that the Minister can give us some positive signs of progress on the important issue of EU enlargement.

I warmly congratulate the hon. Member for Caerphilly (Mr. David) on initiating the debate. He has a very considerable knowledge of, and interest in, European Union enlargement.

Enlargement is not only about economic benefits or politics; it is a moral obligation. For years, the European nations east of Stettin and Trieste were excluded from the freedom and prosperity of the west. Thanks to the west's victory in the cold war, through the firm leadership of such people as my noble Friend Baroness Thatcher and the American Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, and through the bravery of such people as Lech Walesa and Vdclav Havel, eastern Europe is now free.

The Conservative party feels its obligation towards accession with particular strength because of its experience in government at that time. I echo the sentiments of my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood) on that. I pay tribute to previous Ministers and Foreign Secretaries who did everything possible to ensure that the peoples of Europe knew that Britain was their friend in those difficult times. That has greatly redounded to Britain's credit. I freely acknowledge that this Government have carried on that process, but I have been personally touched by the gratitude expressed to me by so many diplomats, politicians and others from the accession countries who have acknowledged the special role that we played. They know of our continuing, passionate but practical commitment to the enlargement process.

We can all be well satisfied that in this country, unlike in some member states, there is virtually no opposition to enlargement. Of course, we can expect enlargement to impact on the British economy. Because of the lower wages typical of many candidate countries, there can be little doubt that some sectors of the British economy will face stiffer competition after enlargement. We are all interested to hear from the Minister what steps the Government are taking to ensure that British business and the British public are prepared for the impact of enlargement, despite the transitional arrangements in place. I do not believe that the British public are as well informed about enlargement as they should be. I look forward to hearing how the Government will help prepare the country for that development.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

I hope that the hon. Gentleman will understand and forgive me if I do not take any interventions.

Let me turn to some of the obstacles to enlargement. Does the Minister agree that it is essential that the broad outlines of common agricultural policy reform be agreed before 2004? We cannot afford for that failed, costly system to carry on as it is, never quite at the top of the EU's priorities. Unreformed, we know that the CAP will be an unsustainable burden on our budgets as European enlargement unfolds.

No one wants the accession of the candidate countries to be hindered by the mess that current member states have made of the CAP. None the less, the problem must be resolved, and soon, if the great task of enlargement is to succeed. To that end, can the Minister explicitly assure us that reform will be under way by 2004? Does he agree that the Commission's phase-in proposals can be no more than a holding line? I appreciate that CAP reform should not become a central negotiating issue for enlargement, but the Government must recognise the dangers inherent in lack of reform in the longer term.

Several hon. Members have discussed structural funds. Here, too, the Commission is proposing only a temporary solution for dealing with the problems that enlargement throws up for EU subsidies. Without reform, expenditure on structural operations will increase from about 32,000 billion euros to more than 68,000 billion euros by 2010 because of enlargement. I hope that the Minister agrees that we cannot afford such growth in expenditure. What are the Government doing about that particular aspect of enlargement? We look forward to the Minister's comments. He expressed his interest in the matter last month in European Standing Committee B, but we have heard little about it from the Government.

We expect a third report from the European Commission early next year. What do the Government desire to see in the report? We need a reformed system of structural funding that is fair to existing member states and to those in the accession process. There must be no second-class members of the European Union.

The Minister will reiterate the charge that, by opposing the Nice treaty, the Conservative party is against enlargement. We warned when the treaty was made that hastening integration rather than preparing the EU for enlargement was not helpful to the candidate countries, and I believe that we have been proved entirely right. The Irish may ratify the treaty, but there is no guarantee that they will. Given the importance of enlargement, what will happen if the Irish again reject it? It would be intolerable if enlargement were held up yet further because of a lack of a plan B. I assure the Minister of our unqualified support for provisions that are genuinely necessary for enlargement, such as the redistribution of votes in the Council of Ministers.

The imminence of enlargement brings our attention to what may lie beyond. What are the European Union's potential limits? Do we foresee a day when Belarus and the Ukraine, or countries such as Russia and Georgia, have closer links to the EU? When the matter was brought up in European Standing Committee B last month, the Minister declined to discuss it, but the issue is becoming more and more important. Clearly, there will have to be closer engagements with neighbouring countries as the EU expands eastwards. We should take as an example the positive and constructive discussions on 9 April at Weimar between Germany and Russia about Kaliningrad.

I wish to mention the issue of the accession application of Cyprus. It is one of the best prepared of the candidate countries, but there is an unhealed split between the island's two communities. We hope that discussions between the leaders of those communities will bear fruit. The split should not be a barrier to the country's entry into the European Union. We welcome Turkey's intentions to become a member of the EU and call on it to use its influence to help construct a process that will solve the problem of Cyprus divided. An end to the tragic conflict would be another most welcome by-product of the enlargement process and must be a priority for Britain because of our historical and present links with the island, because it is a fellow member of the Commonwealth, and because of the importance of the Greek and Turkish communities in the United Kingdom. We also very much welcome the accession of Malta, another valued Commonwealth member, to the EU.

The process of embracing the countries of central and eastern Europe into the European family of democratic nations has been long and difficult, but I hope and believe that we are almost there. The architecture of an enlarged European Union is hugely important, but that is an argument for another day.

I welcome you to the Chair, Mr. Deputy Speaker. The hon. Member for West Suffolk (Mr. Spring) made a very good speech. I agreed with most of it, but he will not be surprised to hear that I did not agree with his comments on the Nice treaty.

This year, 2002, is the year of enlargement, and I welcome the initiative of my hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly (Mr. David) in holding this debate. As he said, it is one of the great issues of our time. He was the distinguished leader of the European parliamentary Labour party when he was an MEP, and he has done much work with Bulgaria, which is a candidate nation. I agree that it is ahead of Romania on its track to European Union membership—it has already closed 14 chapters. We hope that such progress will be encouraged.

I welcome the contribution of my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent, North (Ms Walley). I had the privilege to meet her father-in-law, who was a distinguished wartime pilot in the battle against the Nazis. She spoke eloquently about Poland's application, which we strongly support. Under the new Polish Government, the country has made much progress and has closed 22 chapters. We hope that that will accelerate.

On the question about Ireland from the hon. Member for Tweeddale, Ettrick and Lauderdale (Mr. Moore), I remind him that at last month's Barcelona summit the Irish asked for a statement during the Seville summit in June that would address the concerns that were raised by many at the Irish referendum, specifically confirming that the Nice treaty does not affect Irish neutrality. I am confident that such assurances can be given and that an opportunity will be paved for a fresh referendum should the Irish Government choose to call one. I hope that they do, because Ireland must ratify the Nice treaty for it to come into force.

I acknowledge the work that my right hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West (Joyce Quin) has done with Belgium. She has done valuable liaison work with the Belgian Government and the Belgian political system. I also acknowledge the work of my hon. Friend the Member for Preston (Mr. Hendrick) who does similarly valuable work with Romania and Slovakia, two accession countries that we want in the European Union.

We want the European Union to conclude accession negotiations with as many countries as are ready by the end of this year, which is in eight months. That will be the culmination of many years of hard work by this Government, and—above all—by candidate countries that have transformed their economies and societies in the aftermath of the collapse of the Berlin wall. They have been waiting in the queue to join the EU for more than a decade; now the EU must act decisively to bring them in. To do otherwise would imperil the credibility of Europe in the eyes of the candidates and the world.

I agree with the hon. Member for West Suffolk on the question of CAP reform. Its quick reform is imperative, and it will not bear the weight of enlargement without it.

The Government have been a champion of enlargement and I acknowledge that the Conservatives in government were far more constructive than they have been in opposition—I freely acknowledge that they moved enlargement forward. However, negotiations with the first candidates began under our Government during the British presidency in 1998. To remain on target, candidates must keep up with their reforms, not only by introducing new laws and systems required for membership, but by making them work on the ground. We need to know that our citizens' rights will be protected by the police forces, and upheld by the judiciaries, of new member states. The food circulating in the wider single market—the largest single market in the world—must be safe for our citizens, and border controls must be effective. Candidates have made huge strides in those areas.

We have bilateral action plans with each candidate country that will finance projects designed to support the accession process. Under the EU's twinning programme, British experts have been involved with more than 100 projects, and many of them have been seconded to work alongside their counterparts in candidate countries to help implement European legislation and standards for border management, the environment and tackling corruption and crime.

Enlargement is good for Britain and for Europe. We are doing a favour not just for the candidate countries but for ourselves. As my hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly argued so eloquently, enlargement builds peace and stability in our continent. In preparation for European membership, candidate countries have had to build good neighbourly relations and respect for their minorities, from Russian minorities in the Baltic states to Roma minorities in central Europe. Their performance in such areas is monitored closely. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West said, there is considerable progress as a result of the succession momentum.

Last week, I saw for myself in Cyprus how the prospect of enlargement is encouraging both sides to try to mend historic divisions. The hon. Members for West Suffolk and for Tweeddale, Ettrick and Lauderdale asked about progress. There is progress. I said to Mr. Denktash that he must get more closely involved in the detail of the negotiations, rather than just in the meetings—at which we welcome his presence—because that is his best opportunity to get a deal for the Turkish minority on the island that protects their security and their interests. Equally, when I met President Clerides and Foreign Minister Kasoulides, I said that it is important for the Government of Cyprus to continue to make progress on the negotiations and to come up with constructive ideas. They are doing so. We want a united Cyprus to come into the European Union. It would be damaging for all concerned if that were not the case.

The prospect of enlargement has helped to resolve causes of tension and conflict. It has created stable, democratic partners for the future. It costs European citizens far less financially, politically and socially to help a neighbour country to make the transition to democracy in a market economy than it does to rebuild it after conflict. One need only consider the contrast between a candidate country such as Slovenia and Milosevic's Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, both parts of the former Yugoslavia, to recognise that truth.

The hon. Member for Uxbridge (Mr. Randall) invited me to comment on the prospects of Serbia and Montenegro for EU membership. We see them as potential candidates. I hope that that will accelerate modernisation and democratisation in that part of the world.

Enlargement will enhance prosperity. Every enlargement has given a boost to EU economies, including Britain's. This one will boost our economy by about £1.75 billion, or some £100 for each British household. That is a great opportunity for us. British exports to central Europe increased by 19 per cent. between 1999 and 2000 in anticipation of enlargement, and by as much as 25 per cent. to the Czech Republic and Hungary. It is estimated that enlargement will create 300,000 jobs across the EU, including thousands in Britain, as companies take advantage of trade opportunities.

Enlargement will enhance co-operation, helping us to tackle problems that do not recognise borders, such as pollution, drug smuggling and people trafficking. My right hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West was right. The same fears were expressed about the accession of Spain and Portugal. In fact, the reverse was the case. People went back to Spain and Portugal as those countries gained prosperity through membership of Europe.

Industry in the candidate countries is starting to implement EU environmental standards, improving the air that we breathe and the water in Europe's rivers and seas. The beaches in Cyprus, which attracted some 1.5 million UK tourists last year, will have to meet EU standards for cleanliness and safety.

The candidates are not just our partners of tomorrow. They are already our partners today. We co-operate with many of them on the European convention, in respect of which I represent the Government, to shape the European Union of tomorrow. Having found their own sovereignty, they are in no rush to lose it. Like us, they want to keep decision making at national level wherever it is best to do so.

I welcome the contribution of the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood). He is an under-used talent on the Conservative Benches. However, it is important that we dismiss his idea that enlargement will create a grand federal Germany. It will not be anything like that. We are building a European Union of freely co-operating, independent nation states. That is the Government's vision and the vision of all the candidate countries that have recently gained their national independence, free from the Soviet yoke of oppression. They are in no rush to give up that independence, and we share their vision.

We look forward to all the candidate countries joining us in a Europe of full employment and social justice, a Europe that can master the threats to our environment, a Europe of stability and prosperity, peace and security, that guarantees food safety and consumer protection, a Europe of human rights and independent nation states, not a federal superstate, a Europe of the people, for the people, by the people, in which every candidate can take its place proudly as an equal among equals.

I am pleased to have the opportunity to introduce this debate, especially as I made three or four applications before I was successful. My reason for initiating it relates specifically to a constituent, Mr. Christopher Read, who teaches at the Hewett high school in Norwich, the largest school in Norfolk, which has 1,800 pupils and about 115 full-time equivalent teaching staff. It was not until I had been successful in my application for a debate and started to talk to colleagues about the subject that I became aware of how widespread the problem faced by my constituent is. I shall start with the particulars of his case, and then move on to discuss the more general themes that it illustrates.

Mr. Christopher Read, who lives in my constituency and works in the city of Norwich, is a qualified electronic design engineer. He worked for some 30 years for a local engineering firm, and has an impressive curriculum vitae. For example, he designed electronic control systems for Trident nuclear submarines. He also designed the electronic vane control systems for the Heysham and Torness nuclear power stations, as well as working on projects for clients such as the Ministry of Defence, the Royal Air Force, British Aerospace, British Steel, British Coal, BP, ICI and the former Government Department, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food.

Mr. Read was made redundant from his engineering firm some time ago and decided that before the end of his career, he would like finally to do what he had always wanted to do at some point—go into teaching. We have all seen the advertisements that the Government have sprayed liberally over every medium known to man, including newspapers and cinema, asking people to go into the teaching profession. He responded to that call and, having a background in physics, he was particularly suited to help meet the shortage of teachers in maths and science subjects. The only problem was that because he had an HND, not a degree, he could not be taken on as a fully qualified teacher, but would have to work within the school environment towards fully qualified teacher status.

An additional problem was that because Mr. Read took his HND in 1968, it is not regarded by the Open university, with which he would need to study to gain the required number of points to obtain full teacher status, as attracting the same number of points as a more recent HND. Apparently, that is because before 1971 the HND was not modular—one had to learn everything and sit the exam at the end of the course—so it is said that there is no sensible way of comparing the old and the new HND. I may not be alone in thinking that that may be a point in favour of the old HND, and that it required more intellectual accomplishment than the new modular HND.

Indeed, in a widely quoted book, "Class War: The State of British Education", Chris Woodhead mentions the subject of modularity on pages 14 and 15. He says:

"The move to 'modularity' is a second, highly significant development. Nowadays many, if not most, GCE and A-level syllabuses are divided up into modules, or units, of work. The candidate is tested on each module once it has been completed. Headteachers worry about the impact this has on teaching and learning and extra-curricular activities. Most feel that the introduction of the AS examination has reduced the sixth form to a treadmill that allows no time for anything other than preparation for the next wretched assessment. Many worry that a student who is unhappy with the grade he has achieved in a particular module can take the assessment again in the hope of achieving a better mark. Mr. Timms needs to tell us whether he thinks this new facility has made public examinations more or less intellectually challenging".

The Department told me last Thursday that Mr. Timms, the Minister for School Standards, would reply to this debate, but as he cannot be with us, I hope that the Minister for Young People and Learning, who is here in his stead, will answer my question. I am sure that young people are delighted that he represents them. [Interruption.] Indeed, do they know that he does? Can he tell us whether the introduction of modularity is an advance in creating an intellectual challenge?

My constituent is being discriminated against for the simple reason that he took a course and completed an HND before the introduction of modularity. In his case that has a particular effect, as he is 55 now—he was 54 when he began teaching. As a result of his HND not being valued as it should be and as a more recent HND would be, it will take him three to four years, rather than the 12 to 18 months that it would otherwise take him, to gain an honours degree equivalent and then the additional qualified teacher status—which would take him only two or three months, because of his extra experience. Mr. Read will be 58 or 59 by the time he achieves qualified teacher status. In the interim, not only will he be paid less than a fully qualified teacher—although I imagine that his greater experience allows him to impart more to physics students than some younger teachers can—but his job will not be secure because his "instructor" status means that he does not have a permanent contract.

The statutory instrument that deals with the matter is the Education (Teachers' Qualifications and Health Standards) (England) Regulations 1999. Paragraph 3 is about

"Instructors with special qualifications or experience".

I should have thought that being trusted by the nation to design electronic components and control systems for Trident nuclear submarines qualified Mr. Read under that heading. The paragraph says:

"This paragraph shall apply in the case of an unqualified teacher appointed, or proposed to be appointed, to give instruction in any art or skill or in any subject or group of subjects…the teaching of which requires special qualifications or experience if, at the time of his appointment…the local education authority…are satisfied as to his qualifications or, as the case may be, experience; and…no suitable qualified teacher, graduate teacher or registered teacher is available for appointment…Such a teacher may be employed at a school to give such instruction as aforesaid, subject to paragraph (3), for such period as no suitable qualified teacher, graduate teacher or registered teacher is available for appointment or to give the instruction."

The effect of that is that the school is not empowered to give him a permanent full-time contract as a teacher, and was recently obliged to advertise his post. Mr. Read had to apply for his own job, despite being trusted by the school and the head teacher and providing a valuable service to the students. Five people applied for the job in addition to Mr. Read, one of whom was interviewed. Mr. Read was also interviewed and, I am pleased to say, was successful in being awarded his own job.

Hon. Members may find that laughable, and it is rather extraordinary. The Government have a stated commitment to encourage more people to go into the teaching profession. Indeed, when one opens the broadsheet newspapers or goes to the cinema one cannot fail to see their advertisements, which show glowing pictures of people saying how much they owe to their teachers, and ask whether those in the audience have ever thought of going into teaching. In the light of all that, we should consider the ludicrous situation in which Mr. Read and others find themselves.

Mr. Read's head teacher at the Hewett school, Mr. Christopher Wade, says that there is much hype about the graduate teacher programme, through which a graduate without a teaching qualification can train on the job. He says, however, that in fact it is hype about nothing, because it is virtually impossible to obtain the required funding, unless it is for English or maths, and also in an education action zone. There are only 235 fully funded places across the country. He goes on to say:

"You can do it if the school funds it itself '—

and that his school is doing that with two of its teachers—

"But if there were teachers out there we wouldn't be doing it. We are not primarily a training establishment."

None the less, many schools have been turned into training establishments, paying out of their own budgets to train the teachers they need.

As a result of securing this debate and talking to colleagues about it, I became aware that the problem was not confined to my constituency. A colleague mentioned a case to me—I have not had an opportunity to speak to the individual involved, so I will not identify him. The case concerned a 49-year-old retired police officer who wanted to be a teacher, preferably in a junior school.

The local education authority concerned sent a letter to all parents asking for help from people wishing to enter the profession. The man duly contacted them in the hope that he would be able to join the registered training scheme for those who do not have a degree but have attained a good educational standard. He was informed that the RTS exists in name only—no school in the LEA concerned has taken on a teacher under the scheme because it is too expensive.

The Government have the system in place to solve the teaching shortage, at least in part, but they are unwilling to finance it. They must either pay up or shut up. As an aside, the individual concerned said:

"From what I've seen the possession of a degree doesn't necessarily make a good teacher—some experience of life would be more useful to those that have only gone from school to university and then back to school again."

One cannot help thinking that a 49-year-old police officer would have a lot to contribute to a classroom, especially as the first requirement in any classroom is the maintenance of discipline, without which there is no possibility of learning.

Another hon. Member mentioned to me another constituent, to whom I have spoken. This lady does not wish to be identified in case it should hinder her future prospects of employment. She is a qualified teacher with 17 years of classroom experience. It is my understanding, based on what she said at Education Question Time, that the Secretary of State, too, had 17 years' teaching experience when she took her career break to go into politics.

The lady whom I have mentioned took a career break to have a family, then, in answer to the nation's call for more teachers, applied and was told that she had to have recent classroom experience. She pointed out that she was a fully qualified teacher with many years of experience but, as she says:

"I seem to be in an impossible situation. I am disqualified from even applying for the work that I would like to do, because my qualifications and experience are unacceptable, yet I cannot fulfil their requirements for registration without having worked."

There are many other examples. I shall quote that of Mr. Stuart Ballantyne, the head teacher of Diss high school, in my constituency. Diss high school is one of the best comprehensive schools in the country. It has been named twice by the chief inspector of schools in his annual report as one of the top 60 schools in the country. Mr. Ballantyne received an expression of interest from a police officer with years of experience and a master's degree in biology. I am pleased to say that that person is teaching at the school. However, he had to be given an enormous amount of reassurance by the headteacher because of the temporary nature of the contract under which Mr. Ballantyne was forced to employ him.

Mr. Ballantyne nearly lost the services of this individual on a number of occasions because he was so fed up with the runaround that he was getting from the Teacher Training Agency. According to Mr. Ballantyne, the forms that he has to fill in for teachers seeking qualified status are 26 pages long, and even after he has gone to the trouble of completing them, officials from the Teacher Training Agency telephone him and ask for information that has already been provided. He says that the service is neither impressive nor slick, and is not what one would expect.

Mr. Wade, at the Hewett school in Norwich, told me that coping with teacher job applications more or less required the attention of a full-time senior member of staff—someone who should, of course, be preparing and teaching classes. Mr. Ballantyne told me about a female modern languages graduate who had been working at a school in a clerical capacity for seven years. She had thought for some time about becoming a teacher because of her gift with modern languages and her degree. With the school's encouragement, she applied for the requisite programme, but the Teacher Training Agency turned her down flat, with no adequate explanation, despite the fact that the school had come to know her well over several years and wanted to take her on.

The Government talk about autonomy and about trusting schools and professionals. Paragraph 1.6 of the White Paper "Schools—achieving success" lists the secondary education reforms that the Government are dedicated to achieving. They include:

"Giving successful schools the freedom they need to excel and innovate."

Paragraph 5.17 makes a similar point:

"Where schools are successful, well-led and have a record of school improvement, we want to free them from those conditions and regulatory requirements which they tell us stand in the way of yet higher standards and further innovation."

The Secretary of State makes the point again in a pamphlet published by the Social Market Foundation called "Professionalism and Trust—the future of teachers and teaching". When I first came across the Social Market Foundation, it was run by a friend of mine, who was a good Conservative, but things have moved on, and it now publishes pamphlets by Labour Cabinet Ministers. In the foreword, the Secretary of State says that the pamphlet

"signals a new era of trust in our professionals on the part of Government."

She goes on to say:

"Recruitment and most especially retention remain a real concern."

I was prompted to take an interest in this issue partly by a front-page article in The Guardian on 28 August 2001, which appeared under the headline "Teacher shortage worst ever". I then read the chief inspector's report when it was published on 5 February 2002, and it alluded to serious problems in the recruitment and retention of teachers. The single biggest problem is not recruitment but retention. Many people want to go into teaching.

I have read the recent study published by the Centre for Education and Employment Research, and I am grateful to the National Union of Teachers for supplying it. This study, entitled, "Teachers Leaving", whose authors are Smithers and Robinson, says that teachers go into the profession overwhelmingly because of the prospect of "intrinsic satisfactions". It states:

"The most important reason, accounting for about a third of all responses, was 'working with children/young people'. This was particularly the case for primary teachers who gave this as a reason. About half the secondary teachers did so. Some teachers expanded the point as 'the pleasure of seeing children learn', 'wanting to do something useful', or 'wanting to make a difference'."

In other words, people enter the profession with a strong sense of vocation. Love of the subject—the desire to convey knowledge and the excitement and pleasure of teaching the subject to young people—came second.

Yet people do not stay. The study noted:

"About 12 per cent. of those admitted to PGCE courses, or reaching the final year of BEd courses, do not successfully complete. But this pales beside an inexplicable post-training wastage of over 30 per cent. Of every 100 final year students, 40 do not make it to the classroom. With the initial teacher training budget currently standing at £245 million this represents an annual loss of £100 million."

I have spoken to the National Audit Office about that shockingly huge figure. Like me, my hon. Friend the Member for Tatton (Mr. Osborne) is a member of the Public Accounts Committee, and I am sure that he will be as interested as I am in understanding how the Government can spend so much money on training teachers who do not stay in the profession.

That raises the question of why teachers are not staying in the profession once they have entered it. The Smithers and Robinson study identifies that among secondary teachers the most frequently given reasons for leaving were work load, 57.8 per cent., pupil behaviour, 45.1 per cent. and Government initiatives, 37.2 per cent. It is interesting that salary is not mentioned in the first three. It is included in the survey—it is fourth, with 24 per cent.—but it is clear that money is not the main motivating issue. Issues such as work load, pupil behaviour and Government initiatives are far more important.

I am again grateful to the NUT, which supplied with me a copy of a study by the Warwick institute of education, which quotes a teacher who said:

"I have the right to work without being abused—in industry it wouldn't be accepted, yet day after day it's now just 'part of the job'".

I was recently sent a poster by the Norfolk Mental Healthcare NHS trust. It is running a campaign called "NHS zero tolerance", saying:

"Staff working in the NHS do so to care for others. They do not go to work to be victims of violence or threatening behaviour."

Where are the Government schemes for the education system, highlighting the fact that teachers go to work to teach, not to be the victims of violent or threatening behaviour?

My hon. Friend may be interested to know that when I tried to ascertain the figures for teachers who have been assaulted either inside or outside the classroom, I was told that those figures are not collected. What does he think about that?

It shocks me. It seems to me that there is no possibility of doing something about a problem unless one measures its scale. On the other hand, if I were speaking for the Government, which fortunately I am not, I would probably say that the numbers are so scary that it is best not to collect them, because they might frighten the horses, and even fewer people would be encouraged to go into the teaching.

The recruitment and retention of teachers is a serious problem, and I have identified pupil behaviour as the single biggest problem. The current state of discipline in schools is a direct result of the policy, which the Government promoted for several years, of having targets for exclusions. It meant that fewer difficult children were excluded from schools, and as a result discipline problems increased. I am pleased to say that the Government have recognised that that policy was flawed and have reversed it. Until they take the question of discipline in schools seriously and make it clear to teachers that they are backing them, rather than pupils who are violent or disruptive, there is no serious hope of improvement. That is a sine qua non for an improved situation.

Secondly, the amount of bureaucracy, paperwork and Government initiatives must be reduced. The Government say that such paperwork is necessary. At a recent Education Question Time, I think I heard the Secretary of State say that less paper was not the answer. That shocked me, and I have also heard my hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Mr. Green) quote a similar line from her in a recent speech. I am sure that my ears were not deceiving me. If the Government do not believe that the answer must include reducing the amount of paper and trusting teachers more, they have a long way to go before they have any chance of restoring the education system. If there were ever a time to be creative in appointing teachers, it is now. From what I have seen, and according to the teachers to whom I have talked, the Government do not seem to take that problem seriously enough.

There is one further issue that I feel that I must mention: spending. Yesterday I was flicking through last Friday's Hansard, and more or less by chance came across a question asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Ashford to the Secretary of State for Education and Skills about whether she would

"list the (a) title, (b) subject and (c) associated funding of each (i) project, (ii) scheme, (iii) initiative and (iv) policy announced by the Department for Education and Employment since 1997".

The Minister for Young People and Learning, who is here today, took it upon himself to answer the question for the Secretary of State. His answer was:

"Information is not held in the format requested"—

that will not surprise my hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge (Mr. Randall)—

"and generating it would incur disproportionate cost."—[Official Report, 10 April 2002; Vol. 383, c. 160W.]

It did not seem to me to be that odd to ask about the costs of each project, scheme, initiative and policy run by the Government. Without an accurate record of what is being spent and what it is being spent on, it does not seem very likely that education can be successfully managed.

I have been flicking through the appropriations accounts for the Department for 1999–2000, the most recent figures available, and some of the detail will assist my hon. Friend the Member for Ashford a little, although perhaps not quite as much as he would like. On page 8, under the headings "Class 1, Vote 1" and "Central government's own expenditure", an item is given as:

"Ensuring that all young people reach 16 with the skills, attitudes and personal qualities that will give them a secure foundation for lifelong learning, work and citizenship in a rapidly changing world".

The cost of that is given as £83.625 million. However, from the second column, one can see that the Government actually spent only £64.336 million on it.

On the next page, the item of expenditure given involves:

"Developing in everyone a commitment to lifelong learning, so as to enhance their lives, improve their employability in a changing labour market and create the skills that our economy and employers need".

That was to have cost £340 million, but the Government spent only £312.967 million. And so it goes on. Mr. Syms, my hon. Friend the Member for Poole, asked about the total underspend in the Department for Education and Skills. Those figures might be one reason why the total underspend in education spending overall, both capital and current, for the most recent available year, 2000–01, was £1,454 billion.

There is degenerating discipline in schools and pupil behaviour is cited as one of the single most important reasons for teachers leaving the profession, because of the Government's flawed policy on exclusions. The Government continue to bombard teachers with paperwork, despite huge evidence that they want to be left to get on with the job and be trusted to do so—one only has to go round one's constituency and talk to teachers, as I have, to find that out. Experienced people coming in from the outside—such as people who have designed electronic control systems for nuclear submarines or who have worked for 20 years as police officers, dealing with more dangerous behaviour than one would ever hope to find in a classroom—are stymied at every turn before they are allowed to get on with the business.

I apologise for not intervening on the hon. Gentleman earlier when he was talking about Mr. Read and the Hewett school in Norfolk, but as he has returned to that subject again in winding up his speech, will he say what the Conservative party's policy is for solving the problem that he has rightly identified? It is a very real problem, but what is the solution? Is it to allow anyone to join the teaching profession simply because they have good skills and abilities? Would that qualify David Beckham, for example, to become a PE teacher?

I certainly hope that someone who is probably one of the most valuable footballers in the world would be qualified to be a PE teacher—subject to his foot being healed, for which we are all, of course, praying. I would have thought that any school where he were a PE teacher, in either the maintained or the independent sector, would have substantially higher applications as a result.

To answer the hon. Gentleman's more serious and general point, plainly one does not want to take simply anyone off the street—but the danger is that we have almost been in that position. Another facet of the issue is that so many higher education institutions are now keen to get Government funding that they are offering education degrees in the hope of attracting students who might not have made it on to any other degree course.

In a recent conversation that I had with a head teacher in my constituency, I asked where he was getting his teacher applications from. He said that he was lucky if he got a decent number to select from, and that when candidates come through the door, he, like other heads in a similar position, is more or less obliged to insist on watching them teach a lesson. That is because it is no longer possible to establish on the basis of the recommendation and reference that comes from the institution attended—in many cases, an institution of which one has not heard—that someone has undertaken a reputable teacher training programme and can be relied on, either as a teaching practice candidate or as a full-time employee.

The situation has got much worse. The hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Mr. Willis) is right to say that it requires much thought. Taking people from industry and other backgrounds, such as the police service, is not the only answer. However, that is almost certainly part of the answer. People with much experience of life have a lot to impart. My personal view is that people should not seek to become teachers, even if they have a vocation for it, until they are in their late 20s. I worked as a teacher for seven months, which I did not do until I was 29. I worked in East Berlin, teaching East German factory workers just after the Berlin wall came down. I am sure that I was better at doing that in my late 20s than I would have been at 21, just out of university.

Part of the answer is finding people from other backgrounds, but we should also ensure that people who have a vocation for teaching and obtain a teacher training qualification actually then choose to go into teaching, because they see it as an attractive profession rather than one from which they are scared off because they are likely to be attacked, abused or have low professional status.

Teaching is one of the most important professions in this country. It should be one of the first careers that bright graduates from the best universities should consider. That is not the case at the moment. The Government's present policies mean that it is not likely to be the case, either, and it is about time they woke up to the seriousness of the situation and started to do something about it.

rose —

Order. It might be helpful if I offer hon. Members two small pieces of advice. First, it is a common convention in the House to refer to fellow Members by their constituency rather than by their first or family name, unless a Member is occupying a Chair. Secondly, we shall commence the three winding-up speeches 30 minutes before the end of the debate, so we have 28 minutes left for speeches from the Floor. I ask hon. Members to bear that in mind both when making their own contributions and when seeking to intervene.

The hon. Member for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon) made several valid points. However, he party-politicised his arguments too much, which took away some of their force. It is ridiculous to argue that the problem of classroom discipline can be resolved simply by recognising its scale. We know that there are problems of classroom discipline, and they need to be dealt with institution by institution, not by some longitudinal study of this country. Nevertheless, the hon. Gentleman made several important points, which I hope that the Minister will take on board.

There are problems in teacher training and recruitment, and I would like to illustrate how they relate to inner-city areas such as my own, which is sometimes described as a challenging area, in which it is difficult to teach. It would not be adequate for us to recruit people with no aptitude for the vocation of teaching, however skilled they may be in other areas. That is not a good basis for the imparting of education to young people. I grew up in a generation when, because of shortages, many people had come into teaching, particularly in specialist subjects, with no formal teaching qualification whatever. They may have been excellent physicists, engineers or whatever, but they were useless as teachers. We need to say that loudly and clearly. We want teachers who are competent, as well as those with the requisite skills.

Schools in my area have queried the nature of the current training process. I ask my hon. Friends to take on board the fact that there is still a strong feeling that teachers coming out of the training process are not properly trained to go into the classroom environment. It is a common observation that the present training process leaves them without practical preparation to take on the role even of probationary teacher. They do not have proper experience of the classroom environment, particularly in inner-city areas where there are difficulties with classroom discipline and behaviour.

I have been told that those people do not have an adequate background in the Government's strategies—for example, they do not have proper knowledge of the literacy and numeracy strategies. In some subjects that are sometimes thought of as the ephemera of education, but are not—such as gymnastics, PE and dance—new teachers have sometimes not had proper access to how those subjects fit in in schools. If such problems arise for those with BEd degrees, they arise even more for those who take the PGCE route because the length of their training is so much shorter. Newly qualified teachers face problems when they come into the classroom.

Everyone agrees that intensive mentoring is necessary for newly qualified teachers, but that is resource-intensive. Mentoring requires the resources of other trained and skilled staff. Probationary teachers already incur resource costs because they normally have non-contact time of half a day a week, so schools must consider carefully the prospect of employing newly qualified teachers.

However, most of the teachers and school managers to whom I have spoken say that newly qualified teachers have many advantages, particularly in inner-city areas. A newly qualified teacher who is properly mentored becomes a better teacher in such schools than teachers who come in from different kinds of schools with different expertise, and receive mentoring at a later stage of their career. The point that is made consistently is that mentoring must be provided by people with experience of a difficult school environment. There is no point in mentoring being "academic", or based on different experience. It must be relevant to inner-city schools.

My next point concerns newly qualified teachers who do not continue to teach, but disappear from schools after a couple of years. Retention of staff is a problem in inner-city areas and perhaps elsewhere. Teachers who find job satisfaction in inner-city schools can also find job satisfaction in schools in leafy lanes. The head teacher of a very good inner-city school told me that a quarter of the staff in her school were planning to leave and were looking for something more compatible with their lifestyle in the suburbs.

There is an overall problem of teacher shortage in inner cities. Jobs in such areas are more challenging, and the behaviour in schools there makes them much more difficult, so it is more difficult to recruit and retain teachers. Such schools are generally grateful for initiatives such as the school achievement awards, which are a signal to all those working there that their efforts are improving the quality of education.

Education is improving in inner cities. Opposition Members have failed to accept the fact that there was no golden era under Conservative Governments. The quality of education in inner-city areas has risen significantly because of some of the Government's policies. The school achievement awards are welcomed because they recognise the contribution of different people to the raising of standards. However, we should also consider retention allowances or city allowances for schools in hard-pressed areas. There used to be a social priority allowance, which allowed schools in social priority areas to retain teachers by providing incentives for them to stay on.

One point that the hon. Gentleman has made is wrong: not only inner-city schools but rural schools have a retention problem. My constituency, which is deeply rural, also has problems with teacher retention. They are not comparable with those of the inner city, but they are none the less real. When the hon. Gentleman refers to his constituency, he should bear in mind the fact that retaining teachers in rural areas, too, is a serious problem, although of a different nature.

I am not saying that there are no retention problems elsewhere. We would be very stupid to pit teacher shortages in one area against those in another. We must recognise where the problems exist. As an inner-city MP, I have a responsibility to the schools and young people that I represent to point out the retention problems that relate to certain well defined features—but that is not to deny that problems exist elsewhere.

The hon. Member for South Norfolk referred to a group of people whom we should encourage back into education—those who have experience of different walks of life. They should feel that they have something to offer, and enter teacher training.

I hope that the Minister will also consider another problem that crops up among my constituents: the benefits system deems people to have taken student loans. For somebody with a family, and a partner who is already working, loans have an impact on how they can use the benefit system. I know of families whose whole finances are derailed because it is deemed that they have access to, or take advantage of, the student loan system. We should not pile on extra disadvantages by adding a financial disincentive for those who want to re-enter the world of work and contribute to teaching where their experience will be relevant. I hope that the Minister will take on board those issues, both in the city of Manchester and elsewhere.

I begin by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon) on securing the debate. We serve together on the Public Accounts Committee and see many examples of Government waste. Later, I shall move on to the waste in the Department for Education and Skills budget and the way in which the Department tries to recruit and retain teachers.

My hon. Friend began with the example of his constituent—the man who worked on the electronic control systems for Trident nuclear submarines—who was trusted with our nation's defences, but not with teaching our nation's children. That is a powerful, if anecdotal, illustration of the problems that many public servants find on re-entering public service. I know of a nurse who had a similar experience. She worked for several years and then took time off to have a family. When she tried to rejoin the nursing profession in my county, which is short of nurses, she found that she would be forced to requalify and go through a year's training.

As my hon. Friend said, that experience suggests at least one explanation for the chronic shortage of teachers and nurses; another is the despair felt by many in the teaching profession. Politicians talk about teacher morale, but when one visits schools in one's constituency, one finds a sense of despair. National Union of Teachers press releases and comments from the Conservative Opposition do not create that. Teachers are deluged by red tape, Whitehall directives and Government initiatives, which are substitutes for substantive Government policy. Within minutes of walking through any school's door, one is told about the latest Government initiative, piece of red tape or forms that teachers are required to fill out. The performance-related pay scam is a classic example: anyone who jumped all the hurdles and filled out the paperwork got the pay. Head teachers spent days completing various Government forms. The only performance being measured was whether they could fill all the forms in, which is, I suppose, what teachers need to do these days.

The hon. Member for Manchester, Central (Mr. Lloyd) touched on the problems with classroom discipline. They have not emerged in the past couple of years, but are of long standing. It is definitely the case that teachers feel that they are being second-guessed and that their authority is being undermined. The problem has been made worse by unnecessary exclusion targets, which have encouraged certain behaviour in schools. I recollect a recent newspaper story about a head teacher who expelled two children for drug dealing. The local authority put them back in the school. We all know how a classroom works and how children can sense whether teachers have authority. I imagine that there is a serious discipline problem in that school, to which pupils were returned after being expelled.

Public servants in all public services are alternately bullied then praised by Ministers, including the Prime Minister. The crisis in teacher morale is unprecedented, and the problems of education are spelled out in the extraordinary book by Chris Woodhead, which was referred to by my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk and which I have had the pleasure of reading.

To the Department for Education and Skills and, perhaps, some teachers, Chris Woodhead is now public enemy No. 1, but one should not forget that a few years ago, in 1997, he was a great hero of the incoming Labour Government. They reappointed him, he sat next to the Prime Minister and he was held up by new Labour as a totem of how serious it was about improving school standards. Now he has come back to bite the Government with his extraordinary book, which is subtitled, "The Book Every Parent Should Read". Certainly, every Minister in the Department for Education and Skills should read it. Perhaps the Minister will tell us his thoughts.

The current state of affairs developed under a Government who said that "education, education, education" was their priority. I know that the Government's priorities change every year—it was transport, now it is health—but they began by saying that education was the priority. The Minister will tell us that more money is going into education to recruit more teachers and refer to the various targets that the Government have set, but I expect that the Department will not do as well as some others in tomorrow's Budget, partly because of its extraordinary underspend, although we must wait and see. My hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk touched on that point towards the end of his remarks, and I hope that the Minister discusses it.

Yesterday, Andrew Dilnot of the Institute for Fiscal Studies treated Conservative Members to an excellent presentation on the Budget. Labour Members have the same opportunity today, I believe. According to Andrew Dilnot, the total Government underspend in 2000–01 was £6.2 billion. As my hon. Friend said, that is the last year for which we have figures. In other words, the Government did not spend £6.2 billion that was allocated to them. The Department for Education and Skills underspend was £1.4 billion, which is a quarter of the total and the largest sum for any Department.

Labour Members cheered when the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced all the extra money in the Budget a couple of years ago, but they did not realise that the Department was not going to spend it. I believe that the underspend amounts to about 7.6 per cent. of the departmental budget. That is what Andrew Dilnot said, and he is generally right about such matters. According to "The IFS Green Budget 2002":

"Underspends in these areas of education, transport and health will make it more difficult for the government to succeed in delivering significant improvements in these services".

One reason suggested by the IFS for the underspend—a reason that certainly makes sense to me—is that the Government are finding it almost impossible to recruit the teachers for whom money is available. It is not the money that is lacking; it is Government education policy.

Given the earlier remarks from the Chair, I shall obviously take careful note of the time. The debate has enabled a useful airing of issues and I congratulate the hon. Member for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon) on the first part of his important speech. It introduced many issues and failure to address them would represent a lost opportunity.

I must comment on the latter part of the hon. Gentleman's speech and on that of the hon. Member for Tatton (Mr. Osborne). I taught for 10 years and then spent 10 years in teacher training, facing year after year of cuts in teaching staff and resources, so I do not enjoy being lectured about the problems involved with having more money to spend. Was morale better then? I visit my schools regularly, and I do not think so. The morale of the teaching force is affected by many issues, some of which have been mentioned, and the fact that my area is at or near full employment—people can easily move in and out of the teaching profession—makes a dramatic difference to recruitment and retention.

I entered teaching on the basis that I would be a 40-year time-server. I hope that that is not a derogatory term. For many who entered teaching with me, that was the nature of the job. One entered it as a vocation; it was for life. That is not the case any more, and we must reflect on that when considering how to recruit and retain staff. We must take account of the fact that people move in and out of teaching much more frequently.

I take little notice of the bouquets being thrown to the former Office for Standards in Education chief inspector. Some Labour Members were more than unhappy when he was reappointed and tried to persuade our colleagues that the sooner he went the better. He was not an outstanding success in the classroom. There is a view that one should appoint those who have seen the other side of a job, because their insight will inform their decision making, but, with the benefit of hindsight, I do not think that his tenure was the great period that some, let alone he like to pretend it was.

I want to touch on issues unearthed by the debate, which we need to examine in more detail. Changes in our society have, understandably, affected teaching as they have affected all other aspects of life. The most important is that the majority of people now enter teaching as mature students. The balance between younger and older entrants changed in the 1980s and it has continued to shift dramatically towards mature people for some time. We must recognise that people enter with experience—that is a good thing, as previous speakers have acknowledged—and consider carefully how to help those people to enter the profession and how to retain them.

I am pleased that we have considered retention, because we must recognise that we have to make the job worth while. People must be rewarded and, whether we like performance-related pay or not, more money is going into teachers' pay packets. However, we must also make the job one in which people see a career path. We are recruiting many more teacher assistants, and a jolly good thing too. I hope that some of them become the teachers of tomorrow.

We must ensure that assistants can make the transition from entering the classroom to do one job to using their skills to advance to another, if people realise that they would make good teachers. That will involve a period outside the classroom, and I am sure that we can think about that carefully. I denounce the derogatory comments about people who are now entering classrooms. They are not a "mums' army" or people who are taken in off the streets. They are dedicated people who can bring an awful lot to the job that they do now, and to the jobs that they may go on to do.

I want to discuss recruitment and how to deal with a diversified intake. I am pleased to see the Minister in his place because, among other things, he has responsibility for the 14-to-19 curriculum. Although we are bringing the age of vocationism forward, we should realise that not everybody wants to pursue a purely academic curriculum. That obviously backwashes into who should be recruited into teaching. As someone involved in teacher training and who specialised in business education, I know that some teachers were very undervalued, perhaps because they had worked in an office or as typists. They took all their experience into teaching, but were never paid appropriately for the job that they did.

As we start to allow different ways to enter teaching, and other jobs, we should ensure that everyone is properly rewarded. We do not want to dilute standards, but we should consider the structures to ensure that such people have access points. My experience is that some of the best entrants to secondary education came through the old two-year BA course, which was sometimes still referred to as a two-year BEd course. They came with a rich diversity of experience, and they had the necessary teaching qualifications. It may have been hard for them to make the transition, but they brought richness to the classroom. We must encourage that and build on it.

The fact that teaching is an ageing profession brings its own pressures. Some classrooms are heavily skewed and the retirement of a number of staff at the same time may cause difficulties, so we should always try to achieve a balance of ages. I have always warned of the dangers of early retirement—not that I begrudge it, as friends and, indeed, relatives have taken early retirement. Nevertheless, the ongoing cost has an impact and we must grapple with that problem at some stage, just as we are trying to grapple with the problems of the police pension scheme.

On the next issue—maths and English requirements—I do not say that we should wash them away, but some who wish to teach have not acquired either English or maths. I know that equivalence is involved, but I ask the Government to look at that question again—not to get rid of it, but to consider whether it bars some people who would otherwise make good teachers. We must consider other ways of letting them enter the profession and ensuring that English and maths skills are brought up to an appropriate level.

Subject relevance is important, and my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Central (Mr. Lloyd) made it clear that those who come with the best academic records are not necessarily the best teachers. Although people can choose from a diversity of degrees, they may have to narrow their subject and even specialise. That will not make them any worse as teachers. They must prove capable in their subjects, but for heaven's sake let us realise that the world has moved on. The quality of teaching is paramount, but that does not mean that we should dilute the subject content for secondary school teachers. For primary schools, first and foremost is the ability to teach, and subject knowledge comes second. That may be slightly different for secondary schools.

We have something to be proud of in our schools. The Government have raised teacher numbers—not quickly enough perhaps, although that is partly due to economic success in other areas—but there is no substitute for quality and we must continue to build it in, especially in training. There is a bias towards on-the-job training. Although I do not deny that that is the sensible way forward, good teaching is not only about doing the job.

That is recognised not only in teacher training, but in the ongoing training that takes teachers out of the classroom and allows them to build their subject knowledge and other skills, which in turn enable them to handle some of the difficult issues that have been alluded to. As one who did the job for a long time, I do not deny that such problems exist, but I do not think that they have got worse. They sometimes appear to have done so, however, and they must be grappled with, which means that the Government must get it right and members of the teaching profession must support each other.

This has been an interesting debate, and I hope that when the hon. Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew) spoke about time-serving, he was not referring to my 34 years in the profession. I can assure him that people get less for murder.

The hon. Member for Manchester, Central (Mr. Lloyd) spoke, as ever, with enormous common sense. The problems that face us in our classrooms did not arrive overnight and it will take a lot of time to address and work through them. He mentioned an aspect of Government policy towards teacher recruitment and retention that causes me great sadness—we are failing to get our inspirational teachers to the areas where they are most needed. None of the parties has a solution to that problem, but we must find one if children are not to be denied access.

The hon. Member for Tatton (Mr. Osborne) should buy another book besides Chris Woodhead's diatribe against his former employers and the world in general. I have no doubt that he could found his own organisation if he wanted to. If the hon. Gentleman talked sensibly to the teachers in schools in his constituency, he would find out that Chris Woodhead, with his regime, did more to undermine morale, turn teachers from our schools and send them packing than any other individual in the history of education—except John Patten.

The introduction to the debate provided by the hon. Member for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon), particularly on people without regular qualifications gaining access to the teaching profession, is an important contribution. He deserves credit for raising it on behalf of not only his constituents, but a significant number of other Members' constituents. However, he spoilt his speech by attacking the trainee teachers emerging from our training establishments.

My experience in meeting newly qualified teachers all over the country is that they are the most dedicated, highly qualified and motivated group of entrants that I have ever seen. In the 1980s, and during the 20 years that I was a head, I would have died for the opportunity to recruit some of the people who are entering the profession now. There are not as many as we would like—I accept that point—but please do not denigrate our training establishments and training schools, because superb work is being done.

Like most Conservative Members, those present suffer from selective memory syndrome and fail to recognise that all those problems existed, but none was tackled, in the 18 years under the Tories. The greatest disservice that the Tory Administration did to education was having no policy for teacher recruitment and retention. Their main policy was to put the economy in recession, which they did very successfully between 1991 and 1994. That was the only period in which the number of people applying for teacher placements increased significantly, which is rather sad.

The previous Administration's second policy, which the right hon. Member for South-West Norfolk (Mrs. Shephard) introduced in 1996, was to stop early retirements. The hon. Member for Stroud might not have got his—he looks far too young for that scheme—but I was eligible in 1996–97. If I had not been downgraded and come to the House of Commons, I would probably have taken advantage of the scheme before the right hon. Lady could stop me.

Every year from 1979 to 1997, when the Conservatives left office, with the exception of the three years from 1991 to 1994, the training targets were missed. In key subjects such as mathematics, even in the years after the recession in the early 1990s, the number of people entering teaching fell by 33.4 per cent. I am grateful that the hon. Member for South Norfolk now reads some of the National Union of Teachers' excellent literature.

Those problems were disguised in that period, during which there was a massive increase in the number of students, particularly in secondary schools. Numbers rose from 7.5 million to 7.9 million in one year before the Conservatives left office, and teacher shortages were disguised by a massive increase in class sizes. We should not return to that situation, and I compliment the Government on recognising the problem and at least trying to make progress.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

I prefer not to, as I want to use my remaining time to complete my remarks.

We knew about the problem, because in 1996 Sir Malcolm Thornton, the Chairman of the Education Committee, wrote a good report on teacher shortages and retention. The Minister for Lifelong Learning, as the Chairman of the Select Committee in 1997 when new Labour came to power, published a back-to-back report on the subject. Both reports pointed to the fact that we needed solutions desperately. Sadly, Labour's record in office is absolutely lamentable in that respect.

The Minister will no doubt say that the number of teachers has risen dramatically during that period in office—to 457,890 in January 2001—and that it will rise again this year. He would be right to do so, but I hope that, as he is a very honest young man, which is appropriate for his brief, he will admit that the number of full-time teachers has barely changed. In secondary schools, the number of teachers has risen by little more than 2,000 during Labour's time in office, despite an increase in pupil numbers of more than 190,000. To accommodate that number of students in secondary schools, using the Government's ratio of 1:17, requires another 11,188 teachers. That statistic shows the discrepancy between what has been achieved and what is needed.

The Government are fiddling around the edges. The idea that one can simply introduce classroom assistants to supervise classes and the belief that that is a recognised policy for dealing with the situation are ludicrous. The hon. Member for Stroud is right to say that classroom assistants do an invaluable job—indeed, I compliment the Minister and his Government on targeting an extra 20,000 places in our schools—but they are not substitute teachers. Recently completed research from Europe, the Social Market Foundation and the Institute for Public Policy Research states that most classroom assistants do not want to be teachers. They do not want to face full classes of youngsters, so we should knock that idea on its head.

The Government have given us a plethora of silly little initiatives, such as fast track. An enormous amount of money—£4.3 million—was invested in that project in its first year, but it recruited only 111 people to training. Eleven of those have gone and of the 100 who remain, at a cost of £43,000 per entrant, at least 10 are not going into teaching at all. Some are taking up jobs in the private sector. Before the hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale, West (Mr. Brady) intervenes, I should say that they are entitled to do so, but fast track has been a huge flop. Recruiting a person costs £17.68 through the graduate teacher registry scheme, but £43,000 through the Government's fast-track scheme. That is nonsense, but it happens over and over again.

Work load, initiative overload and Government directives are central to teacher retention. Unless the Government carry out research to find out how many teachers are required over the next 10 years, we shall continue to fail. We have constantly asked them to conclude the curriculum and staffing survey, but they refused to do so in 2000 and have refused to do so since. We asked Baroness Ashton in another place why that is, and she told us that there are not enough bureaucrats. I rest my case.

I begin by congratulating not my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon), but the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Mr. Willis), who kept perfectly to time. That is probably a first, and we are all grateful to him. I should also congratulate my hon. Friend on securing an excellent and important debate, during which we have heard good and useful contributions.

The hon. Member for Manchester, Central (Mr. Lloyd) spoke about the problems of the inner cities, and we fully accept his point. To start on a note of harmony, my party must get to grips with those problems and have a convincing policy to tackle them. Indeed, all parties must recognise them.

The hon. Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew) spoke about Tory cuts, but if he is fair, he will accept that there were no education cuts under Conservative Governments. In the same way, I am prepared to accept that more money has been available under the current Government. However, my hon. Friends the Members for South Norfolk and for Tatton (Mr. Osborne) alluded to the genuine problem of failure to spend the education budget, which is largely due to the failure to recruit.

One issue that has not been dealt with, perhaps because of time pressure, is the consequence for other countries of the Government's panic response to the teacher recruitment and retention crisis. The attempt to fill teacher vacancies from countries such as South Africa, New Zealand and Jamaica has been referred to as plundering the world's schools.

The hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough said that, in his experience, the newly qualified teachers appearing in our schools today are the most dedicated entrants to teaching he has ever seen. That begs the question, what is going wrong when a cohort of dedicated, committed and predominantly young people going into schools translates to record numbers leaving the profession for a variety of reasons?

My hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk sought the debate not least to air his concerns about his constituent, Mr. Christopher Read. Mr. Read is obviously an impressive man with a strong CV, and we should be delighted that he wants go into teaching, as I am sure the Minister will confirm.

My hon. Friend threw down an important challenge to the Department in terms of dealing with this problem. Mr. Read is not alone, and the hon. Member for Stroud referred to examples that we all come across—people who want to teach history or drama, but who are precluded from doing so by the lack of a maths O-level or GCSE. He asked the Minister to consider the way forward, and I concur that the Government have an important challenge to meet. People with an enormous amount to contribute in our schools cannot do so.

If we try to get an impression of the scale of the problems in our schools, we find that the number of teachers without qualified teacher status has grown steadily. A response to a written question that I tabled last October confirms that the number of teachers who do not have such status has risen from 2,940 in 1997 to 5,620 this year, although the Department was unable to say how that figure is constituted. Nor could it say how many people are on the graduate teacher programme, how many are on the registered teacher programme, how many are licensed teachers or how many trained overseas. If it does not know how that body of people in our schools is constituted, it is difficult to see how it will find solutions to the problems identified this morning.

We have a serious crisis. There is an exodus of teachers from the profession as well as a flight of qualified teachers from our schools and from normal, contracted, permanent full-time status to supply teaching. Some supply teachers provide an excellent standard of education but some, of course, do not. There is an accelerating trend of teachers teaching outside their subject, and a vast number of qualified teachers are choosing not to teach. Last year's figures for supply teachers in one local education authority area, Luton, show that more than 20 per cent. of full-time teachers were supply teachers. As Ofsted reported this year:

"Nevertheless, the percentage of unsatisfactory or poor lessons taught by temporary supply teachers is significantly higher than the figure for qualified teachers with more than one year's teaching experience. The figure is twice as high for primary schools and four times as high for secondary schools."

So, real problems result from the situation that the Government have allowed to develop. I am sure that we all accept, intuitively, that that is also a problem for children, who all too often encounter a succession of different teachers, one day after another, or one week after another, and are unable to develop a relationship with their own class teacher.

There is a crisis in teacher recruitment. The Ofsted report says:

"There are real problems in recruiting teachers and in retaining them, and these problems have got worse over the past two years."

Recruitment and retention of primary school staff is

"no longer just an inner city issue, but is beginning to affect schools in all regions and all kinds of locations…More teachers are being asked to teach outside their specialism."

We see the number of vacancies rising, as well as the number of teachers who are not teaching.

I return to the question of why teachers leave. My hon. Friend the Member for Tatton referred to disciplinary problems. A recent National Union of Teachers report found that 45.1 per cent. of teachers leaving the profession cited pupil behaviour as the reason—a worrying statistic that underlines the problem of discipline in the classroom. My hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge (Mr. Randall) referred to the Department's failure to get a grip on what is happening in schools. That is underlined by the response—perhaps failure to respond is more accurate—to a written question that I recently put to the Minister for School Standards, asking how many teachers in maintained schools have been victims of serious assaults by pupils or parents in the past five years. The Minister replied:

"My Department does not collect this information"—[Official Report, 10 April 2002; Vol. 383, c. 195W.]

For the Department not to know how many assaults have been carried out, when 45 per cent. of teachers leaving the profession cite classroom behaviour as the reason, is a matter of huge concern.

Of course, many teachers leave through ordinary retirement or early retirement on health or other grounds. The number of those taking early retirement has fallen dramatically as the natural result of the changes to the early retirement rules, but the number leaving for other reasons has risen steadily in each of the past four years from 18,000 to 23, 000 to 24,000 to more than 26,000 in the last year for which I have figures.

The Government face huge challenges if they are to tackle those problems in our schools. They must stem the exodus of teachers from the profession and tackle the disciplinary problems in our classrooms. They must back up the supposed conversion on the road to Damascus that Ministers experienced when they recently reviewed the failed policy to reduce exclusions.

The Government must get to grips with the problem of the huge non-teaching work load—the weight of bureaucracy and paperwork—being piled on teachers. They are storing up new problems for themselves in the need, which they recognise, to train more teachers in vocational specialisms and for more language teachers. They know that they have those problems to deal with but, according to recent replies that I have received from Ministers, have no idea how to tackle them.

There is a consensus on both sides of the House that the quality and number of teachers is central to any common objective of achieving the highest possible standards of education in this country. This debate is central to that objective, and we must pay tribute, as always in such debates, to the work of teachers at the chalk face throughout the country who are making a real difference to our young people's life chances and opportunities. It is important to start from that perspective.

There have been several interesting contributions. I congratulate the hon. Member for South Norfolk (Mr. Bacon) on securing the debate. He raised important issues, and in particular the case of his constituent. We can understand that gentleman's frustration and feeling that the situation is not working as it should. On the other hand, I thought that the hon. Gentleman's contribution was completely spoiled by his politicisation of the debate, and by an almost complete absence of memory concerning the history of why we have got to this stage with teacher recruitment and retention.

It is interesting that the Conservative party always scoffs at the title "Minister for Young People"; I can assure Conservative Members that young people do not do so. They see it as an important representation of the fact that the Government are determined to re-engage with young people in a whole variety of policy areas. Those of us who care about the future of democracy should welcome that re-engagement between politicians, or the political process, and young people.

In the context of the debate, it is right to achieve an appropriate balance between a minimum threshold framework and the need to recruit the maximum number of teachers. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew) said, this must be about quality as well as quantity. It is not good enough simply to rush to recruit as many teachers as possible and sacrifice quality in the process. The analogy that the hon. Member for South Norfolk made was interesting. He suggested that because a retired police officer sought to become a teacher, he would inevitably be good at maintaining classroom discipline. I was going to use the David Beckham example as an analogy—although as a Manchester City fan, that would have made life difficult for me—but I have found a better one. It is a bit like saying that the underperformance of boys would be corrected if we had Britney Spears or Kylie Minogue teaching in our classrooms.

Some of our former political colleagues, whom we can all remember, have CVs that show that they were extremely distinguished—but would we want them to teach our children, just because they had a distinguished record in public life? No, we would not. That is not a reflection on the gentleman on whose behalf the hon. Member for South Norfolk raised the issue. I can see, not only from his CV but because he is already actively filling the role of a teaching instructor—a role in which he is valued and to which he has been reappointed—that he is making a contribution to the education system, and I pay tribute to that. However, there must be parameters—a framework in which to determine quality.

The hon. Member for South Norfolk said that schools were increasingly becoming training institutions. I must say to him that all good schools are constantly training, and that we want them to train not only new teachers but experienced teachers, classroom assistants and learning mentors, too, to ensure that our young people have access to the best possible quality education. I would also say to the hon. Gentleman—he did not refer to this in his contribution—that his own local education authority received more than £0.5 million from the recruitment and retention fund in 2001–02 and is due to receive more than £1 million over the next twelve months.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Much as I would like to give way to the hon. Gentleman, I do not have the time. My hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Central (Mr. Lloyd) raised several important issues concerning inner cities, such as low aspirations, the lack of opportunities for young people in those communities, and the behaviour and discipline problems with which teachers have to deal. He talked about the special nature of teaching in the inner cities, and the special challenges there. I am sure that he would agree that the additional support through education action zones, excellence in cities, and the influx of learning mentors—all warmly welcomed—is making a significant difference to the quality of education in those inner-city schools. We have done a lot, but I acknowledge that there is a tremendous amount left to do.

The hon. Member for Tatton (Mr. Osborne) paid great tribute to the former chief inspector of schools. Even if one thinks, as I do, that that person was a necessary evil rather than simply evil, as some hon. Members think, one cannot say that he did much for teacher morale. I have never met a teacher who has had anything positive to say about the rhetoric that he used about education and teaching—and it was not always the policies introduced or the work of Ofsted itself that they criticised. The general flavour of the chief inspector's comments about the state of the teaching profession in this country did a tremendous amount to undermine teaching morale, even if he was a necessary evil.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

No, I am sorry.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stroud raised several important points. He welcomed the Government's commitment to restructure the teaching profession. While ensuring that there are more adults, such as classroom assistants, learning mentors, Connexions personal advisers and teachers, in the classroom, in the interests of young people we must also ensure that the balance of contribution is right from each of those professionals—and, indeed, that they are all professionals. My hon. Friend raised some important points about our determination to raise the status and esteem of vocational education. No Government have been able to crack that nut in the past, and it is an important challenge that we must face up to on a consensual basis.

I did not agree with all of what the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Mr. Willis) said, particularly the bit about the Government. However, I did agree with him on one point, which is linked with what the hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale, West (Mr. Brady) said. The reason for the current difficulties is, to a large extent, the fact that there has been no long-term planning in our education system for personnel and staffing needs. Since we came to power we have introduced a whole range of powers to tackle that problem. One may disagree with the measures, but from day one we have acknowledged the need to encourage more people to get into the teaching profession, and to do something about teaching retention.

In a whole range of public service areas, the crime of the party that was in government before was that there was no long-term planning, no investment, and no strategic approach whatever. It is not just in teaching that there is a serious shortage of skills or workers. There are shortages across the public services, because this country has not planned on a long-term basis, and during those years we did not invest in public services.

All the evidence suggests that we must address serious issues: for example, behaviour and discipline in secondary schools. That is one of the reasons why the Government have prioritised tackling the performance of secondary schools in this term of office, and in direct relation to that, discipline and behaviour matters, such as learning support units, pupil referral units and Connexions personal advisers. The idea that discipline and behaviour is a problem in our schools because of the Government's policy on exclusion is nonsense. It is due to complex social, community and family problems that have scarred children's performance for years.

During the 18 years of Tory Government there was a greater division in our society than ever before and social problems increased, which is one reason for some of the behaviour and discipline problems in schools today. We are determined to support teachers because we are not prepared to accept unacceptable behaviour, and we believe that parents should have greater responsibility in supporting teachers in that context. However, we are not prepared to take the blame for the fact that young people who grew up during the Thatcher years are now behaving badly.

My task today is to outline my view of the future of the Selby coalfield. To do so sensibly, I must examine the context of both British Government and European policy.

The coal industry in general and Selby in particular have had a real friend in this Labour Government. Time and again since 1997, when questions have been asked about the future of the Selby coalfield and the industry in general, the Government have responded with policy initiatives. The coal lobby has always had to argue its case hard with Ministers, who have never been slow to challenge our assumptions robustly, but that is as it should be. The demand has always been for fairness, not favours.

The argument that British coal has a significant role in the energy mix, not least so that the nation does not become completely dependent on imported gas, has won the day. It was this Government who gave the industry a vital breathing space by imposing a temporary moratorium on new gas-fired power stations while the electricity trading market, which was rigged against coal-fired power stations, was reformed. It was this Government who introduced a scheme of coal operating aid, which expires in July this year and has paid out more than £140 million to the coal industry—I understand that the figure will be £170 million when the scheme expires—and more than £40 million to Selby. There can be little doubt that without that aid Selby would now be closed. It was also this Government who steadily addressed the legacy of issues of basic justice in the coalfields, notably by introducing the largest ever industrial compensation scheme in the world to provide assistance to miners affected by vibration white finger and chest disease.

The Selby project is the largest deep coal mining project ever undertaken in the world. It covers about 110 square miles in the Vale of York and when it was developed in the 1980s productivity was five times that of the national average for United Kingdom mines. It took 20 years to plan and bring the complex into production. The project included the sinking of 10 shafts and driving some 124 miles of underground roadways at a cost of about £1.3 billion. The shaft sinking and access drifts had to pass through heavily watered ground, involving major ground treatment at different horizons and in different conditions. The mining engineers involved produced innovative solutions to those problems—solutions that had never been seen before but have since been copied all over the world.

The Selby mining complex is an example of a highly technological, flexible, modern industry. It is an example of which new Labour should be proud, and I urge my hon. Friend the Minister and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State to visit it.

All the coal produced at the original five mines—Wistow, Riccall, Stillingfleet, Whitemoor and North Selby—is brought to the surface at one point, Gascoigne Wood, from where it is prepared and dispatched to Drax, Eggborough and other major power stations in the region. Its direct work force, supplemented by contractors, totals more than 2,500, making a major contribution to the local economy in rates, wages and the provision of goods and services. Last year, wages, salaries and related costs were more than £100 million.

Wistow was the first of the five mines to begin production in 1983. At its peak in 1993–94, the Selby complex produced 12 million tonnes of coal a year and was the jewel in the crown of the coal industry. Output and productivity records were set as the complex harvested coal from the single Barnsley seam that it was authorised to work. As The Times commented only last month,

"unlike so many big British industrial and infrastructure projects in the second half of the last century, including the Vale of Belvoir coalfield, Selby fulfilled its promise and became one of the world's most productive coal mines".

However, in the face of increasing geological disturbances, some reserves had to be discounted and production began to tail off in the mid-1990s. Whitemoor and North Selby mines merged with their close neighbours Stillingfleet and Riccall to concentrate mining activities in areas with more favourable geology and fewer uncertainties.

By the millennium year, annual output, which five years earlier had been 11.4 million tonnes, was down to 4.4 million tonnes. That was also the output for 2001, by which time the Selby complex had produced 110 million tonnes of coal since production first began. Reducing output and falling coal prices have turned the once-profitable Selby mine into a heavy loss-maker. If UK Coal received the same value for its coal as the previous owners, British Coal, it would receive more than £40 per tonne, which would be about half the cost of mining 1 tonne of coal in Germany. However, UK coal prices are now less than £30 per tonne. As a result, the Selby complex lost more than £35 million last year, bringing losses in the past three years to £93 million.

On Thursday 7 March, I met the chief executive of UK Coal, Gordon McPhie, at the House of Commons. I received much the same briefing as union officials in Selby had received from UK Coal management some days earlier. UK Coal does not see the Selby complex being economically viable beyond 2005 at the latest. At about that time, Wistow mine will be exhausted. It would be possible to access some new reserves from Riccall and Stillingfleet, but the huge costs of maintaining Gascoigne Wood, which was designed for five mines rather than two, would mean increasing losses. Wistow coal is essential to the composition of the overall mixture offered to Drax, and Gordon McPhie could not rule out closure taking place much earlier than 2005.

Over the following weekend I pondered what to do. There are still millions of tonnes of coal left to mine at Selby, but with high standing charges and increasing geological risks, unit costs increase as output diminishes. More than 2,500 miners and contractors and their families are currently living with desperate uncertainty, and they expect the worst. Many of them told me that they fear a closure announcement within weeks, with a closure date of autumn 2003. That would mean that the industry's relatively generous redundancy terms would no longer apply, as UK Coal has guaranteed them only until March 2003.

Men who have rejected redundancy offers, in some cases on three or four occasions, in order to keep working in the industry, would lose their jobs with only the minimum state redundancy terms to fall back on. An early closure announcement would bring chaos to the Selby coalfield. Electricians and engineers, whose skills are crucial to managing the complex, would bail out and secure alternative employment as soon as they could, and the complex would shut itself. The legacy would be one of bitterness and hardship, and Selby's economy would have to brace itself for an abrupt and devastating blow to its very foundations.

I had further telephone conversations with UK Coal in which I stressed that it was imperative that the coalfield stays open until at least 2005. It agreed to submit a further application for a subsidy to the Government to enable that to happen. On Monday 18 March, Gordon McPhie wrote to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry asking for a meeting to discuss a package of closure aid for the Selby coalfield. He said that the company needed to come to a decision on how it proposed to operate the Selby coalfield in the next three months; the first of those three months is nearly up.

I have agreed to back the principle of closure aid, although I want the Coal Authority to undertake an independent analysis of whether 2005 is the economically viable limit for the Selby coalfield. Closure aid is an important weapon in the French, German and Spanish Governments' armouries to provide assistance to coalfield communities. It is allowed under the existing coal and steel treaty, which expires in July, and will be an important part of any new coal aid regime. We should embrace it and not shun it, not least because of its flexibility and practicality.

Devastated former mining communities do not exist in the rest of the European Union as they do in Wales, Scotland, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire, which is largely because of closure aid. As The Times business leader recently put it:

"it is more civilised to run operations down in an orderly way over the next three years so that miners and other workers can be retrained and new employment can be attracted into the area. By smoothing the process and avoiding the disruptive shocks that have so damaged many mining towns and villages what is gentler might also prove cheaper in the long run for taxpayers".

Or, as the Yorkshire Post put it:

"The Government could sit on its hands and do nothing to avert the unfolding economic and human calamity. But Tony Blair whose maiden speech eloquently chronicled the devastation that pit closures can have on tightly knit communities knows that it is the role of Government to help to manage the decline of traditional industries in a way that minimises suffering and gives workers the chance to respond to new opportunities. It is for this reason that he should listen to those who are now asking him to provide so called 'closure assistance' to the miners of Selby. Such assistance which other Europeans make regular use of…would be used to allow Selby the time it needs to adjust to life after coal."

As far as I am aware, UK Coal has not yet had a reply from the Secretary of State. Indeed, a brief perusal of the press seems to indicate that she needs to be convinced of the case for further state aid to the coal industry, perhaps more than other Ministers do. It is time that serious discussions started between Department of Trade and Industry officials and UK. Coal in preparation for such a meeting. Mr. McPhie's letter makes no mention of the precise cost of any closure aid scheme. The costs and benefits need to be fully explored, and the Government, whom I support, owe it to the miners and the community of Selby to start the discussions.

In the rest of the European Union, redundancy payments are an essential element of closure aid. The miners in Selby who have worked in the industry from pre-privatisation days are still entitled to a relatively generous redundancy scheme, worth £900 for each year worked, with a cap of £27,000. The scheme was inherited by RJB Mining, now UK Coal, and was subject to Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 1981 until 1998. The company has guaranteed to honour the redundancy package but only until March 2003. It would cost the Government just short of £40 million in closure aid to guarantee the redundancy payments.

The average age of a Selby miner is 44. Many have refused redundancy on several occasions to keep working in the coalfield. After a lifetime of undertaking what is still a physically demanding, back-breaking job, some are of an age that they are unlikely to work again once the mine is closed. However, for younger miners, resources will be needed for a closure aid package to fund the most ambitious retraining scheme ever seen after closure of a British coalfield.

We need time to make such a project effective. The Selby bypass is due to be completed by Christmas 2003. It will open up a huge amount of development land at the edge of Selby town with the potential for creation of a large number of jobs. On behalf of Selby district, I plead with my Government to give us time to bring those jobs on stream before the coalfield closes. If we had until at least 2005, perhaps we could avoid the despair, family breakdowns, hardship and suicides that have been a feature of other pit closures. Every miner must be offered a personal interview to examine the options for the future and then be assisted to seize that future. Every expert I have consulted tells me that it will take two or three years for such a project to be effective. If Selby mine closes abruptly, we will be left with a sticking plaster of regeneration and retraining money that cannot cover the gaping wound in the local economy.

As part of a comprehensive closure aid package, the Government should be prepared to consider further subsidies to UK Coal itself. As the complex moves towards closure, it may be that the current losses will diminish as development costs decline. Moreover, if a closure aid package is agreed, it is likely that morale will improve and productivity will increase. Clearly, the Department should carefully scrutinise UK Coal's projections, but it must get around a table to do so.

The Secretary of State for Trade and Industry forcefully asks why the Government should pick up the tab for closure aid. What is different about the coal industry or Selby? Just because it is good enough for Jospin and for Schroder, why should new Labour get involved? Such robust questions deserve robust answers. There is a joke—sort of—going around the pits in Selby. I overheard it in a local pub recently and felt a deep sadness. "What is the difference between Mrs. Thatcher and Patricia Hewitt? At least when Mrs. Thatcher closed the pits she made sure the men got their redundancy money." At that point, I stoutly defended the Secretary of State's honour, saying that that was a premature judgment, but the joke may be a salutary warning to us. How the Labour Government respond to UK Coal's request for closure aid for Selby will have a resonance across Labour's Yorkshire heartlands. I am grateful to my Yorkshire colleagues for being here to support me on the day of a one-line Whip. If our values mean anything, we cannot pass by on the other side of the road. We must close Britain's largest remaining coalfield in a way that gives our movement pride—in a better way than occurred in the 1980s and 1990s.

Why should Selby be the first British coalfield to receive closure aid? None has ever asked before. For me, it is a credit to the local community that it is prepared to face up to its future. It has always been apparent that when Selby closed, because of its size, Government help would be needed to honour the redundancy payments.

Moreover, we have noticed in Selby that the Secretary of State is quite prepared to finance generous redundancy payments for postmasters and postmistresses. If we say no as a Government, and say that it is all the company's fault, what good will all the regeneration in the world be to a 55-year-old miner whom I know, who has worked most days of his working life down the pit, and tells me that there has never been a day when he has not dreaded it, despite the camaraderie of good mates? What shall I tell him when I say that he cannot have the redundancy of £27,000 that he has counted on and that, unlike his manager, he will have to wait until he is 60 to claim a pension? The Secretary of State for Trade and Industry needs to provide me with a better answer than that he should apply for a computer training course and write a letter of complaint to UK Coal.

The Government must ensure that ordinary miners get a full pension at 50, if made redundant, as the pit deputies and the management currently do. At the time of privatisation, in order to try and keep the management on board, the Tories ensured that the British Coal staff and supervisors' pension scheme was more generous than the miners' pension scheme. It is simply unjust that if the Selby complex or the Prince of Wales colliery shuts, management get a full pension at 50, but the miners who labour at the coal face do not.

If a Selby miner can leave the industry with guaranteed redundancy terms and a full pension at 50, it will be with dignity. He will continue to be able to spend in local shops and the local economy and consider his options for the future. If he is thrown out of work next year with no additional redundancy or pension rights, many families will suffer badly. It will not just be mining families who feel the pinch, as turnover in local shops and pubs declines sharply and with little warning. The cost to the pension fund of making this change has been estimated by the actuary to be £99 million. The Government incidentally are currently receiving about £200 million each year in surplus from the miners' pension scheme—enough by itself to fund a closure aid package and to give a full pension at 50 if made redundant.

I have spoken today largely about closure aid, but as secretary of the all-party group on coalfield communities I am equally passionate about the need for investment aid. I hope that the Minister will be able to confirm that the Government are arguing in Europe that for the first time it should be possible to provide finance to help open up new seams and faces rather than simply to cover losses. Such investment aid would provide jobs at other mines for some men from Selby.

It is worth noting that, according to the European draft regulations, all Governments must say by October 2002 which mines will be given what type of aid between now and 2010. All closure aid must expire by 2007. The Government's stance that they will consider whether to give further aid to the industry at the appropriate time will not carry credibility much longer. They need to get involved and engage with the issues pit by pit. That is why I have written to both the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer seeking meetings with coalfield MPs. That is why the all-party group will be organising a seminar in May in the Commons on the future of coal, and why a delegation of Selby miners and the wider Selby community will be coming to the House of Commons.

Our first challenge as a coal mining group was to persuade our own communities to face up to the future: to campaign for both investment aid where possible, and closure aid where necessary, in order to achieve a sustainable industry. Our next challenge is to persuade the Government to change their policy. Dylan Thomas famously wrote:

"Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

In Selby, I hope that there is enough rage and righteous anger to persuade the Government to change their mind. Before the current children of miners in Selby's primary schools are fully grown, mining will have ceased. The proud memory of the craft and toil that went into making this huge project a success will long linger. The memories of the strike will linger, too, as will the many contributions of miners and their families to our community and our civic life. The current leader, chairman and vice-chairman of Selby district council work in the mines, or did so in the past. I hope that a final memory that will linger will be the way in which it all ended—not in chaos, despair and hardship but with dignity, planning, courage and foresight.

I associate myself totally with the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Selby (Mr. Grogan), who speaks with passion and knowledge about the industry and is a distinguished advocate for his constituency. There is anger in communities that were devastated by Thatcher and the Tories, and have still not recovered. I represent villages that have never recovered from the pit closures, and that the present Government have barely touched yet in terms of regeneration. Those villages now face further job losses. My constituency still encompasses many miners who work in the Selby complex, and I estimate that about £75 million a year in wages is paid into the Yorkshire coalfield from Selby alone. The prospect that the Government would tolerate early closure and the sterilisation of resources is too horrendous to contemplate, yet rumours come from the Secretary of State's office that she intends to allow it to happen.

I am angry, as are the communities that I represent, that a Labour Government should betray the party's historic mission to regenerate those communities and to protect coal reserves. It will cause devastating political damage. I warn the Minister as gently as I can that the anger will spill over not only into the Chamber—I shall express my anger on every available opportunity should the Government proceed down that course—but into the streets. Demonstrations will take place the like of which we thought we had seen the last of when we saw the end of the Tories. I shall join those demonstrations—I believe that other hon. Members will, too—and damage will be done to the Government in the heartlands. I do not wish to see such damage, but it would be self-inflicted if the Government proceed as rumour suggests.

I associate myself entirely with my hon. Friend's comments on pensions for manual workers and miners. It is a question not only of coal closures but of justice. It is not right that white-collar workers who have never worked down a pit should be able to retire at 50 on a full pension, but that manual workers who have worked for 30-odd years should not be similarly entitled. I ask the Minister, in all justice, to consider that issue.

I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Selby (Mr. Grogan) on securing this debate. It has been an interesting one, although it was slightly curious in adopting a somewhat different tone from that which I had expected. I point out to the wider audience that it is somewhat unusual in that my hon. Friends the Members for Selby and for Hemsworth (Jon Trickett) have already taken 21 minutes, which leaves me only nine minutes to reply. However, I shall do my best within those limitations.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Selby was good enough to acknowledge, no one can seriously question the Government's commitment to the coal industry. We introduced reforms to the electricity market that were designed to correct some of the distortions that were, among other things, penalising coal. To help the United Kingdom coal industry over particular short-term structural and market problems, we introduced the coal operating aid scheme. As has been said, approximately £140 million has been paid out under that scheme so far. Selby has been a major beneficiary, with £23 million in the first tranche of aid and another £20 million in the second.

When UK Coal applied for subsidy under the scheme, it appeared that Selby had a viable future without aid beyond July 2002. On that basis, it satisfied the scheme criteria to comply with European rules on coal state aid. In the light of expert mining advice, Selby was judged to have a realistic prospect of a viable future without aid.

The chief executive of UK Coal wrote to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry on 18 March requesting a meeting to discuss, among other things, the possibility of the Government supporting a closure aid package. We have replied agreeing to such a meeting. As has already been suggested, however, it is fair to say we shall have a lot more to discuss at that meeting than closure aid. That letter was the only formal approach made to us by UK Coal—we were given a few days' warning that the letter was coming, but it is the only indication that we have had that the company is carrying out a review, which is expected to be completed within three months.

That, formally, is the position as far as the Government are concerned. We have put in £43 million of aid under the scheme, and we have now been told in a letter of 18 March that UK Coal is reviewing the future of Selby, and a meeting will be held. The Secretary of State and I will be happy to participate, and we shall presumably hear more then about the thinking of Selby's owners.

The case for operating aid under the scheme that is now drawing to a close was that it would create a future for pits such as Selby, which had clear longer-term prospects of profitability and viability. My hon. Friends have referred to closure aid, but that raises very different issues. It is claimed that it could soften the blow for the Selby area by allowing a phased reduction in jobs. As my hon. Friend the Member for Selby said, it would be the first time that such an approach had been taken, and we would obviously have to ask many major questions before going down that road.

Would closure aid really be the most cost-effective way of dealing with the issue, if and when it arises? We should note that the benefits would go primarily to the company, not to those who suffer the redundancies. There must also be a read-across from Selby to other pits where the same questions will arise for geological reasons that are beyond the control of any of us. There is also the valid point that closure aid gives companies a direct incentive to shut down mines, so the very subsidy that is designed to help the industry and those who work in it could bring about its demise earlier than might otherwise have been the case, and we must take account of that when considering the arguments for such aid. None the less, I understand my hon. Friends' attachment to closure aid at this juncture, and I shall be happy to hold further discussions to hear the case for it—assuming that the context set out in the letter of 18 March remains the same when UK Coal comes back to us.

There has been widespread support for the idea of investment aid, and I can confirm that we are continuing to negotiate in Brussels to put in place a framework for possible national subsidy schemes after July 2002. Our aim is to secure an outcome that gives us the flexibility to put in place arrangements if they become necessary in specific cases. It is not certain that we will succeed in the EU in securing provisions for the payment of investment aid. Just as some countries are very much attached to different kinds of subsidy schemes, others are very much opposed to investment aid. However, we are pursuing the ability to pay investment aid when the current scheme expires. If we are successful, we can expect it to be limited to a proportion—perhaps 20 per cent.—of the investment costs associated with a project. Even if we are able to pay such aid, further work will need to be undertaken to ascertain the circumstances in which it might be applicable.

There are many issues on which I would like to comment, but let me briefly say something about cleaner coal technology. As my hon. Friends will be well aware, the Government believe that the future of coal is very much tied up with the movement towards cleaner coal. A review that ran parallel to the energy review considered the issue and concluded that the case for building a demonstration plant was weak, but that funding and support for specific technologies that are retrofittable to existing plant may be appropriate. It will be for those interested in demonstrating such technologies to make their case to the cleaner coal technology programme. We are also investigating several important geological, engineering, economic and legal issues around carbon dioxide capture and storage to ensure that it is a feasible option.

To summarise, as matters stand, we have had one letter from UK Coal. We gave the firm £43 million in subsidy under the present scheme in the belief that that would give it a viable long-term future. If the situation has changed, UK Coal will doubtless inform us, and we shall take discussions from there. Frankly, however, some of my hon. Friends' statements about the Government's attitude to the coal industry and some of the direr warnings that I have heard are utterly incompatible with the Government's record. I hope that in the future we may be able to proceed on a more measured basis to achieve what we presumably all want—the best possible future for coalfield communities.

For reasons that have nothing to do with the Government, and in spite of the aid that they have given to the deep coal mining industry, other difficulties may arise as the context changes. Let us proceed on the basis of what is best for the industry and the communities, bearing it in mind, as my hon. Friend the Member for Selby said, that few of the pits would still be there if it were not for the scheme introduced by the Government. If—

Order. Time is up.

I am very pleased to have this opportunity to raise the subject of Borehamwood Care Village, the future of which has been a source of great concern for my constituents. The Minister is already aware to some extent of that concern through correspondence with me, and I am grateful to have the opportunity to meet her with a group of representatives from the home, including residents and family members. By coincidence, that meeting will take place later this afternoon, so what I say now is something of a preview.

Borehamwood Care Village is an important care setting for almost 100 elderly people in my constituency. It offers 40 residential places and 39 nursing bed places, as well as places for 16 close care tenants. It is a modern facility that was opened only 10 years ago, as I know, having opened part of it when I became the Member of Parliament for Hertsmere. It was opened as a modern facility offering continuity of care for people who, as they got older, were looking for stability more than anything else.

I should make it clear that the residents and the family members have no complaints about the fabric of the care village, nor about the quality of the care that they receive from staff. Indeed, I pay tribute, on their behalf, to the care and dedication of the staff, who have been as concerned as anyone about its prospects.

Just before Christmas last year, the residents and staff received the startling news that the home's proprietor, Assured Care Centres, was planning to close it. The company intended to sell the site to developers Bryant Homes for residential property development. That caused the gravest concern to the residents, their families and the wider community in Borehamwood and Hertfordshire, who all joined in a campaign to save the home.

In many ways, the name of the campaign tells us what we need to bear in mind. It is called STOP: Save the Old People—the action group working to save Borehamwood Care Village. The campaign has been vigorous, imaginative and well justified. It began with a packed public meeting in the Hertsmere civic offices, which was attended by a wide variety of people, including family members, councillors from both the borough and the county councils, representatives of the local churches and civic dignitaries, including the mayor of Borehamwood. The meeting was very well supported, reflecting the amount of interest in the matter in Borehamwood.

The campaign later held a march through Borehamwood, which was also very well supported and drew tremendous support from the people of the town. It was moving to see shoppers and shop workers coming out to give their support to the march. The people threw their full weight behind the campaign to save the facility.

There followed a widely publicised visit to Downing street by a delegation of residents and family members, who took with them a petition containing thousands of names of Hertfordshire residents. That delegation included Miss Rose Cottle, who is 102 and a remarkable old lady, and who is present for the debate, along with other representatives from the STOP campaign. Following the impact of that visit, both ACC, the proprietors of the home, and Bryant Homes, the would-be purchasers, showed a desire to draw back from their proposals and made public statements to that effect.

Before turning to those statements, I pay tribute to all those who have played a part in the STOP campaign, including Mr. Bryan Mayson, its chairman, who is also present today, Councillor Martin Heyward, the mayor of Borehamwood, Rose Cottle and the other elderly residents of the Borehamwood Care Village, all of whom contributed remarkably to the campaign.

I should like to report that this story has a happy ending in that the home's future has become assured, but we are not quite at that point. Several issues need to be resolved, which I shall highlight through the debate. On 26 March, Bryant Homes wrote to Mr. Bryan Mayson, the chairman of STOP, stating:

"We have asked Assured Care Centres to release Bryant from the contractual agreement relating to the site of Borehamwood Care Village, and are currently in negotiation with them."

Bryant says that it cannot withdraw the planning application because of contractual arrangements that require the firm to consult the planning department of Hertsmere borough council.

Assured Care Centres, the proprietor, says that it accepts Bryant's offer to withdraw, but must observe legal requirements. The company says that it is discussing the sale of the care village with other parties who would retain it for its present use, which is what we all want to happen. We want Borehamwood Care Village to continue in its present state and to provide much-needed residential and nursing care.

I have no wish to pry into the legal arrangements of Bryant Homes and ACC, although I note that they are both expressing the same intention—one saying that it wants to be released from having to sell the property and the other saying that it wants to withdraw from buying it. It would be helpful if they could both make it clear that they have no plans at all for the sale of the site or any part of it for residential development and want to withdraw altogether from their original proposals. It would be helpful, too, if the issue of the planning application could be resolved as soon as possible, because, notwithstanding what they have said, the application remains extant and is still with Hertsmere borough council. It is clearly in the interests of the residents of the home, when they are being reassured about their future, that that planning application should be withdrawn and that ACC should go on to discuss the future of the home with other would-be purchasers who want to continue its present use, providing residential and nursing care.

What is happening in Borehamwood is part of a wider picture of what is happening in Hertfordshire and the rest of the country, in relation to nursing and residential care. The Minister may be familiar with the survey by Laing and Buisson, which reported that there had been a substantial loss of long-term care places since 1996. The loss of some 50,000 residential care places stands in contrast to the needs of an increasingly ageing population. Nursing home bed losses have been particularly serious, with 22,000 nursing care beds lost since 1998.

Hertfordshire represents no exception to that worrying picture. Nursing home beds have been lost, and the losses are continuing. The most recent market analysis by Hertfordshire county council states that 103 nursing home beds were lost in Hertfordshire between April and November 2001 alone—November being when the most recent survey was concluded. Hertfordshire could ill afford the further, substantial, loss of 39 beds in Borehamwood.

The corollary of nursing home bed losses is the problem of delayed discharges from hospitals and the difficulties that flow from that. The Minister may be familiar with the surveys and statistics relating to delayed discharges. Her own Department suggested towards the end of last year that, at any one time, 6,000 beds in NHS hospitals are occupied by people whose discharge has been delayed. Whatever the figures, it is clearly a serious problem, and leads to other problems, such as cancelled operations and longer waiting lists.

Those problems have been evident locally, as I witnessed on NHS day in February, when I visited Potters Bar community hospital, a facility valued for its care. I was told that 12 out of the 45 beds were occupied by patients who would not have needed a hospital bed if one in an appropriate care setting had been available. That is confirmed by Hertfordshire county council, which said:

"The high occupancy rates within Hertfordshire homes mean that it is increasingly difficult to find affordable care home vacancies for elderly people whether those people are awaiting discharge from hospital or the community."

Earlier this year, the Government announced £200 million of additional spending to deal with the problem of bed blocking, about £3 million of which will come to Hertfordshire. However, spending money will not solve the problem if nursing home beds continue to be lost. On the steps of Downing street, Rose Cottle drew attention to the connection between the loss of nursing home places and the wider problems in the health service. As she put it:

"What's the point of clogging up hospitals with people like me?"

On this, as on so many other things, Rose and the residents of Borehamwood Care Village are the voice of common sense. We can ill afford the loss of such nursing and residential care places. Such a loss would be a tragedy for the very elderly people there—people who have entered that care facility on the basis that it will give them stability and reassurance in the later stages of their lives—and for their families. It would also have a serious effect on the wider community and on the health service, bringing problems of which we are only too well aware today.

We owe it to Rose Cottle and the wonderful elderly people like her to keep open homes such as Borehamwood Care Village. That is my plea to the Minister. We need to keep such nursing home and residential care places available. We need to safeguard the future of the Borehamwood Care Village, and to have the proposals and planning application for residential development there withdrawn. It must be transferred into hands that will keep it open as a much-needed residential and nursing care facility, offering high-quality care to people who deserve no less.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Hertsmere (Mr. Clappison) on having secured a debate on a subject that is important and significant to his constituents. I, like many others, have been impressed by the vigorous campaign run by STOP, and moved by the eloquence and dignity displayed by Miss Cottle throughout a period of undoubted distress for both her and her fellow residents of Borehamwood Care Village, and I am looking forward to our meeting this afternoon, when we shall be able to consider the background to the issue in more detail.

Nothwithstanding the hon. Gentleman's concerns, I am pleased that the residents' position now seems to be much more secure and there seems to be more certainty that they will be able to remain in their present care home. It seems that, in this case, good sense has prevailed. I understand that several organisations are willing to purchase the home as a going concern, which will provide some important certainty and continuity for those living there. He made some important points about issues that must be resolved elsewhere, regarding the position of ACC and Bryant, as well as the planning applications. I am sure that those points will have been heard and hope that they will be acted on.

We appreciate that the independent care home sector is facing a number of challenges at present. The Government are very aware that the closure of any care home causes considerable anxiety and disruption to its residents. I want to touch on the wider context and the particular actions being taken to ensure that, in Hertfordshire, it is possible to provide the range of provision and capacity necessary for older people to have security, stability and independence.

Many care homes are private businesses, and as such, each must take its own decision about how to conduct itself, including whether to close. However, when it comes to the standard of care provided in a care home, the Government have an important role. The new regulatory system introduced by the Care Standards Act 2000 provides stronger powers to monitor the financial viability of homes and contains requirements for residents to have contracts that specify their rights. I am concerned that any decision to close a home should be handled as sensitively and appropriately as possible. Councils and care home owners must work together to ensure that closures take place in a planned way, with maximum notice being given. Although it seems unlikely to happen in this case, in the event of a home being forced to close, the council should reassess the needs of those residents for which it has responsibility and arrange an alternative placement or service promptly and with as little distress to the residents and their families as possible. Even where people are funding themselves, councils should be able to offer advice on arranging alternative accommodation.

Does the Minister agree that, however good the regulatory provisions are, and whatever other arrangements are made, it is desirable to keep very elderly people in the same home whenever possible, and to avoid moving them at that stage of their lives?

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, which is why I hope that, in this case, there will be the continuity that he outlined. I was just trying to point out that when homes have to close, it is crucial that the process is handled sensitively and appropriately.

Both today and on other occasions, attention has been drawn to the issue of funding and the ability of local authorities to meet the fees that are necessary to maintain capacity. There have been substantial increases in the level of funding provided for local authority social services departments in recent years. Since 1996–97, the overall level of funding for social services increased by just over 20.4 per cent. in real terms. That equates to an average real-terms increase of 3.1 per cent. per annum. However, we recognise that more is needed, and we are considering the future funding needs of social services as part of the current spending review, the results of which will be announced later this year. Hertfordshire county council has received above-average increases in its personal social services standard spending assessment allocation in each of the past two years. In 2002–03, its allocation increased by 5.7 per cent., compared with a national average increase of 4.9 per cent. That was on top of an increase of 7.6 per cent for 2001–02, compared with a national average increase of 4.7 per cent.

Last autumn, the Government further recognised the need to maintain and develop capacity in the care sector and to ensure that delayed discharges from hospital were reduced—a problem that the hon. Gentleman highlighted—by allocating not, as he suggested, £200 million, but an additional £300 million to local authorities. Hertfordshire county council is one of the authorities targeted for extra money from that £300 million. It received £1.7 million for the last financial year and will receive an additional £3.6 million this year.

My right hon. Friends the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Health recognise that it is crucial that local authorities, in their commissioning of services, maintain the fee levels necessary to ensure continuity in the capacity necessary to provide our older people with the care that they need. We accept that local authorities need the resources. I welcome the fact that Hertfordshire has been able to use some of the additional £5.3 million to increase residential and nursing home fees above the inflation rate for 2002–03, and has undertaken to review the pricing structure in 2003–04.

I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will be pleased to know that that extra investment has produced an important result: Hertfordshire has met its target for reducing delayed discharges—a planned reduction of 25 per cent.—since last September. I recognise his concern that the whole system—the health service and the care system—should work together. The fact is that the extra investment and the reforms and new capacity have brought important results.

I take issue with the hon. Gentleman's repetition of the Laing and Buisson figure of 50,000 care beds being lost. That survey showed a net loss of about 19,000 care beds since 1996–97: the 50,000 figure takes no account of those that have opened or been extended. The most recent figures suggest that there are now more residential and nursing care places in Hertfordshire than there were in 1997. I realise, however, that it is an important matter. The demand for placements in the county has been rising over the same period, so I am pleased that the county council is actively working with its partners in care commissioning and provision—the district councils, primary care trusts and the independent sector—and using the extra resources made available by the Government to maintain and stimulate the market across the whole spectrum of care.

A number of projects are under way to develop additional community services such as intermediate care and extra care. I shall give two examples. I understand that a 40-place extra care housing scheme is being developed in Borehamwood in partnership with a housing association and the district council. I was recently able to announce an additional £46 million investment into intermediate care over the next two years, including support for a 60-place intermediate care facility to be developed in partnership with South East Hertfordshire primary care trust and the independent sector.

Intermediate care, although clearly not fulfilling the same function as residential care, can provide a crucial bridge between hospital and home. It can ensure that older people are able to regain independence. Since the base line of 1999–2000, there has been provision for an additional 1,188 people to receive intermediate care services in the Hertfordshire health authority area. Hertfordshire also has in place plans to increase the number of intensive home care packages that can be offered to support people in their own homes.

It is the Government's policy to promote independence for older people wherever we can and to enable them to remain in their own homes whenever possible. The number of people receiving intensive domiciliary care is increasing—about 76,400 households benefited in England in 2001, an increase of 6 per cent. on the previous year—and we want to encourage that trend where it meets people's needs.

Clearly, some people are too frail or vulnerable even to be supported by an intensive domiciliary care package, and they will need residential accommodation. However, we must not get bogged down in judging the success of policy simply by the number of people in residential care and nursing homes. The policy of community care, which I know that the Conservative party supports and implemented when it was in government, is designed to ensure that people can live in their own homes with intensive support. We must also provide effective, high-quality residential accommodation where necessary—it is a matter of getting the balance right for each local community.

Since the Minister is quoting a mass of statistics, may I draw to her attention Hertfordshire county council's claim that since 2000 the number of nursing home beds has gone down from 1,272 to 1,045? Does she agree that it makes no sense to lose modern, purpose-built facilities such as Borehamwood Care Village when the population is getting older and frailer?

I accept, and have already said, that it is important to maintain the necessary capacity to provide stability for older people.

The care home sector can be assured that its services are very important and will continue to be needed in the future. Authorities need to do some long-term, sustainable planning. Short-termism is difficult for providers in the care home sector. It is important for commissioners and local authorities to have a strategy in place in order to provide care services for local people for years to come. That is why we established the strategic commissioning group, which I chair and which aims to give much greater direction to the commissioning of care services for adults—in particular, for older people.

We recently published an agreement between all the parties involved in the planning and delivery of care services in a document entitled "Building Capacity and Partnership in Care". That details the responsibilities and expectations of central and local government, providers and the NHS. It stresses the need for long-term contracts to ensure that there is planning in the system and that we do not end up with precipitate closures, such as that threatened for Borehamwood Care Village, which can have a very damaging effect on residents.

The document also seeks to push those involved to be a little more imaginative and to think of new ways of providing care that can help people to maximise their independence. I would like to underline the importance of that. It is time to move the policy on and to stop squabbling about how many nursing homes have or have not closed. All our efforts, and the extra resources made available by the Government, need to be concentrated on planning to deliver the services that older people want—not just the services traditionally provided—in the right amounts and at the right time.

I give the hon. Gentleman my commitment that the Government recognise the need to develop new capacity so that older people are able to maintain the independence that many of them have told us they need. I have given examples of how the additional investment in Hertfordshire is enabling that to happen. At the same time, we must recognise that what is crucial to the provision of services, whether it is from local authorities or the private and independent sectors, is the stability and certainty felt by older people. In conclusion, I join the hon. Gentleman in commending the campaign to safeguard the important provision of Borehamwood Care Village. I hope that a common-sense way can be found to ensure that residents receive the stability and continuity that we would all want for them.

I am pleased to have secured this Adjournment debate on consumers' rights and the housebuilding industry. My request for a debate was stimulated by two examples that arose in my constituency, but that, after close examination, raised wider issues that deserved an airing in Parliament, and action from Government. I shall focus on issues for which the Westminster Parliament has responsibility. In Scotland, some issues raised by local concerns are the responsibility of the Scottish Parliament, so I shall try not to overlap those two elements. No doubt, the Minister will pass on to our Scottish colleagues matters that fall outside our remit.

I shall provide details of the specific problems that have arisen in my constituency, and that have led me to table this debate. Both examples relate to new housing developments in my constituency. The first case is in the Granton mill development, which has been built by Wimpey Homes in Scotland, or a company associated with Wimpey Homes. The residents spoke for themselves when they wrote to me saying:

"The problem that the majority of us are experiencing is the lack of any drainage system on the estate. Our gardens, front and back are totally water-logged…We have everything from gardens sinking, paving that has sunk, people unable to go into their back gardens because of the water that has gathered at their back doors, water lying against people's houses and stagnant water lying for weeks on end all over the gardens."

They have further complaints about the development that relate to driveways, roads that are too narrow, unfinished boundaries and various other external issues, which I do not have the time to go into.

The second local example arose from a complaint from a resident of the Sovereign court development. That development was constructed by Barratt, East Scotland, or a company associated with Barratt. A constituent complained about a defect that the builder would not put right because the building company said that it was not a construction defect. However, the property management company, which had been contracted by the builders to provide the maintenance, said that it would not repair it either, because it was a building defect—a clear Catch-22 situation in which wherever the purchaser turned she was told that the problem was no one's responsibility. Over the past few weeks, that instance has now been satisfactorily resolved. Nevertheless, it raises the issue of the relationship between the home buyer of new housing and the management company appointed by the developer, and between the home buyer and the developer. The issues may be different, but they have a similarity in that they deal with the position of the individual purchaser of new build housing in relation to the developer that has built it.

The purchaser of such housing is in a different position from someone who buys an existing property from its owner. In the latter case, there are two parties with roughly equal bargaining power, and the purchaser can see the house that he or she is buying. In the case of new build, the situation is different. The purchaser is an individual, but the vendor is normally a large organisation with financial resources many times greater than those of the individual purchaser, and with the ability to call on legal and other professional advice that the individual purchaser does not have. After occupying the new house, the individual is hardly in a position to move out should it turn out that they do not have the property for which they had bargained. It is a classic case of unequal bargaining power. As that is a case in which the consumer is in a much weaker bargaining position than the supplier, it is a prime candidate for the position of the consumer to be strengthened by legal intervention and/or voluntary codes of practice by the industry. In the limited time available, I want to suggest a number of ways in which the position of the consumer can be strengthened in what is for most people the most important purchase that they will ever make.

The industry's current voluntary schemes, which are designed to protect the rights of purchasers, need to be available to the consumer at a much earlier stage. In both the cases that I have described, the National House Building Council guarantee scheme, which is generally very good, was of no benefit to the consumers concerned, even in cases that at first sight would fall within it. In the first of my two examples, Granton mill, the developer did not dispute liability on many of the defects. Instead, it simply did not get round to dealing with many of the complaints. The current scheme ought to be strengthened to ensure that developers deal with complaints speedily, and if that does not happen that very delay should be a ground for compensation to the purchaser.

In the second case, Sovereign court, the delay in having the complaint dealt with led to another problem, which I want to highlight. Because of the delay in getting any action from either the builders of the property or the management company, the purchaser concerned eventually carried out the repairs herself. As she did not wait long enough to have the matter dealt with by the builders, however, it could no longer be dealt with under the NHBC scheme, even though she had made repeated complaints over a lengthy period. If that is correct, the NHBC scheme clearly has other shortcomings that need to be attended to. If the scheme cannot be changed as I have suggested, the Government need to consider other ways in which such changes can be made.

There needs to be a mechanism to give house purchasers an opportunity to obtain satisfaction when there are problems in areas that are not covered by the existing industry scheme provided by the National House Building Council. That issue was particularly important in the case of Granton mill. Most complaints in that development relate either to external works to properties that have, in the view of residents, been carried out incorrectly or not at all, or to work that needs to be carried out or completed in the public areas of a development, such as roads and other common areas. Neither of those types of problem seems to be covered by the current voluntary arrangements provided by the industry, but they should be. There needs to be a mechanism whereby complaints about such issues can be made to an independent body, and when they are not satisfactorily resolved, steps can be taken to ensure that they are dealt with or that compensation is paid to the purchasers affected.

Something needs to be done to redress the imbalance between the bargaining positions of the purchaser of a new house and the developer that sells it. The first of my two cases is a very good example of that problem. The purchasers saw a show house, as the actual houses had not been built, which is a very common situation with new developments. When the purchasers moved into their houses, some of them discovered something unsatisfactory. In such circumstances, sometimes the only remedy for the purchaser is to refuse to proceed with the purchase. In many cases, such a remedy is of little use to potential purchasers because they have probably sold their old house, bought furniture and made all the arrangements to move in, in which case not proceeding with the purchase is not a real option. It might be said that the purchaser should deal with such problems by making detailed provisions in the contract to ensure that nothing is left unclear, but the nature of the bargain is that it is for a house that is unbuilt, and developers do not normally enter into negotiations over terms, which means that that is also not an option for the purchaser.

I know that that is a complex matter, especially in the Scottish context. Although consumer rights and sale of goods and services law is reserved to Westminster, property law is devolved to the Scottish Parliament. There is a real problem here that must be addressed. The purchasers of new houses need to have stronger rights when they buy property, and I ask the Minister to consider how that can be done.

The relationship between the purchaser of a new house and the property management company appointed by the developer must be investigated and clarified. I have described my concerns arising from the example of Sovereign court in my constituency, and add that those are not just my concerns. I note that the Scottish Executive's recent report "Issues in Improving Quality in Private Housing" states:

"In some cases, owners may consider that the professional manager concerned has been imposed on them by the developer…In these cases, there may be questions about whether the management agent is sufficiently independent or accountable to the owners…Owners may also be concerned about the quality and cost of the management services provided."

That excerpt from paragraph 100 of the report says it better, perhaps, than I can.

I call today for investigation, and if necessary action, by the competition authorities, which come within the responsibility of Westminster, to ensure that such arrangements are fair to purchasers and do not tend to favour the interests of developers and the management companies that they appoint. A management company might have several contracts with the developer and therefore have an interest in maintaining good relationships with it beyond the interest of a particular instance in which a purchaser has complained.

To clarify the relationship between property management companies and new purchasers on one hand and builders on the other, I suggest that, first, such management companies should, after the initial period, be selected by the purchasers collectively and be fully accountable to them. Secondly, there must be complete transparency to the owners of a property about the charges levied and the expenses incurred by such management companies. Finally, there should be a system that allows property owners to raise complaints about such management companies and that also provides for ensuring compliance and awarding compensation when mediation fails. That scheme should, perhaps, be similar to the NHBC scheme, which, in my view, is very good as far as it goes.

I am aware that such policy areas are complex, and involve competition policy, a reserved matter, and property law, a devolved matter. However, they need to be tackled by the Government at Westminster and in the Scottish Parliament. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to raise this matter today. I ask the Minister to examine what I have said and consider what further action can be taken. Most immediately, will she take up with the industry bodies the matters that require changes and improvements to the relevant voluntary codes, and pass on to and discuss with her Scottish colleagues any matters arising from this particular case that she considers would be better dealt with by the Scottish Executive and Parliament?

I emphasise that the issues that I have raised are not just local issues, of concern to a few residents in my constituency, or of Scottish concern alone. There are numerous new developments in my constituency, as in many other parts of Edinburgh, in which similar issues have already arisen or will arise in the future. As I have said, the purchase of a new house is often the single biggest financial transaction undertaken by a consumer. First purchasers must have rights, and an ability to take advantage of those rights that reflects the importance of that transaction to them and their families. That is why I am glad to have had the opportunity to raise the matter here today, and why I hope that the Minister can give an idea of what action she can take in response to my concerns.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, North and Leith (Mr. Lazarowicz) on securing the debate and on choosing a subject of real concern: consumer rights in the housebuilding industry. He focused in particular on the problems for people buying new houses.

My hon. Friend may be aware that in February 2002 the Housing Forum published its second national customer satisfaction survey, which highlights the standards of consumer care in the housing industry. It backs up some of the wider messages about customer care that the industry needs to take seriously and to which he referred.

To put my hon. Friend's concerns in a national context, the survey shows that new home buyers remain generally satisfied with the design, amenities and value for money of their homes, but that those positive aspects are countered by a much less favourable view of build quality and after-sales service, about which he was concerned. Figures show that nearly half of those who buy new homes are neutral or critical of the builder, one third are not satisfied with the after-sales service, and only 54 per cent. want another new home or one from the same developer. That is a measure of the concern that he drew from his constituency experience.

My hon. Friend raised local issues, but the survey shows that there is a nationwide need for better quality and after-sales service in the new homes sector.

If he is prepared to write to me with more details of the cases that he cited, I shall ensure that they are taken up with the National House Building Council to discover whether lessons can be learned.

I want to examine some of the wider issues that my hon. Friend raised concerning new homes and consumer rights. The key to more consistent quality in the building of new homes lies with builders' quality management systems. The work of the Housing Forum is contributing and grew out of the "Rethinking Construction" initiative, which has been under the aegis of my hon. Friend the Minister for Industry and Energy since June last year. The forum is showing the way in which to improve quality in housebuilding through the dissemination of best practice. Warranty schemes such as the NHBC's Buildmark scheme also have an important role to play in helping builders to achieve better build quality. Those schemes should first and foremost help to prevent defects, but they should also help owners to reach a quick solution when defects come to light after handover.

Ministers in the Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions keep in close touch with the chairman and senior management of the NHBC. We encourage them in their objective of continuous improvement in the terms and operation of the Buildmark scheme. The NHBC has made useful changes in the coverage of its scheme over the past three years or so, including contaminated land cover and 10-year cover for double glazing failure.

My hon. Friend said that the NHBC scheme does not cover various external features. He also referred to management issues, and I shall deal with those later. In fact, the scheme standards include a section on drives, paths and landscaping, and the definition of "home" in the Buildmark agreement includes common parts for which an owner shares legal responsibility with other owners. The definition also includes shared paths, drives, garden areas and paved areas. That means that in some circumstances defects in such areas can be the subject of claims against the builder under the Buildmark scheme.

My hon. Friend also raised concerns about defects that come to light some time after the occupants move into their new house. Changes have been made to the rules of the NHBC scheme relating to disputes between owners and builders when defects come to light within two years of completion. Those changes provide for the NHBC to intervene at an earlier stage to undertake remedial work in place of the builder if the builder is slow to carry out repairs that have been recommended by the claims investigator.

My hon. Friend referred to delay by builders in carrying out remedial work. The current NHBC procedures should mean that delays will not arise if the repair work has been recommended by the NHBC following a dispute resolution process.

My Department has no specific locus in cases arising in Scotland, but I will ensure that the NHBC examines the specific cases to which my hon. Friend referred.

My hon. Friend called for Government intervention in problems of defects in new homes. I very much appreciate that buyers of new homes may experience distress and inconvenience if defects arise after handover. However, from my perspective at the Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions, I prefer to give the industry an opportunity to take voluntary action. Its efforts, aided by the work of the Housing Forum and by schemes such as the NHBC's Buildmark, should lead to better consistency in build quality, better after-sales service and higher customer satisfaction levels. Obviously, we will look for evidence of that in future customer satisfaction surveys and in other ways.

My hon. Friend raised issues about the management of common parts and about some of the management schemes for external areas on housing estates. As he said, the law on property management is different in Scotland. However, in England and Wales, several remedies are available under existing legislation to people who buy properties under leasehold and who pay for the upkeep of common parts through service charges, including the right to ask a leasehold valuation tribunal for a determination of reasonableness of service charges, and the right to seek the appointment of a new manager if they feel that the existing one is providing a poor service. Service charges are payable only to the extent that they are legitimate and reasonable. That should provide assistance for some property owners in dealing with such issues.

An LVT will be able to consider whether the costs in question were reasonably incurred and whether the relevant services or works were of a reasonable standard. It will then determine what amount should be paid by the leaseholder. The Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill, which applies to England and Wales, introduces several changes in respect of service charges, including widening the definition of service charges and simplifying and strengthening leaseholders' rights to be consulted on major works and long-term contracts.

The Bill also makes a significant change to the rights of leaseholders who are subject to an estate management scheme. Since estate management schemes were first permitted under the Leasehold Reform Act 1967, Parliament has legislated to provide protection for tenants in respect of service charge payments. Leaseholders who pay service charges have rights and protections against unreasonable charges. The Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill will improve and extend the rights, and introduce comparable ones for administration charges made under a lease.

However, there are no similar provisions in respect of charges made under estate management schemes. At present, anyone who enfranchises and is subject to a scheme will move from having protection against unreasonable charges under their lease to having no protection against unreasonable charges under the scheme. The Bill will provide that charges under estate management schemes should only be payable to the extent that they are reasonable and that an LVT will have the power to determine the extent to which such charges are reasonable.

It is worth mentioning that some protection already exists for buyers with respect to property misdescriptions. Hon. Members may be aware that it is an offence for a property developer to misdescribe any of 33 matters relating to the sale of property that are listed in an order made under the Property Misdescriptions Act 1991. As my hon. Friend may know, the Act also applies in Scotland. The matters include aspect, view, outlook or environment. If the surroundings of a new property are misdescribed in a brochure or on plans, for example, the property developer may be subject to prosecution under the 1991 Act by the local authority.

My hon. Friend discussed at some length the position of people who buy new properties. In some instances, properties may be bought off plan: in effect, unbuilt homes are sold. He gave examples of the problems that can occur in such cases. Buying off plan is a popular method of buying and selling new homes. It can have a number of advantages for the developer and the home buyer. It might help if I mention some of them. For the developer, the main advantage is that a buyer is lined up at an early stage, which helps to ensure that the transaction can be completed quickly on completion of the building work.

For the buyer, buying off plan can provide more choice—for example, over plot location, fittings and fixtures, and appliances where the house is being sold with a fitted kitchen. Buying off plan provides buyers with early certainty that the home will be sold to them, and not to someone else, when it is completed. As my hon. Friend may know, in England and Wales, there are problems of gazumping—the law in Scotland is different in that regard—and buying off plan allows breathing space for buyers to sell their present home.

Often there are problems of uncertainty for off plan home buyers. Such uncertainties will decrease as construction progresses, but in the early stages they can involve issues that are particularly important for a prospective buyer. For example, the developer may not be prepared to give a firm completion date, either because of the vagaries of the weather or because of reliance on the availability of construction materials and skilled craftsmen to get the work completed on schedule. Whether or not that is acceptable to a prospective buyer will depend on the extent of uncertain matters and the priorities of individual buyers. It is a question of trade-off between the advantage of early certainty that the home is theirs when built and the possibility that in the interim there may be changes to the development that could impact on their enjoyment of their new home.

Uncertainty can also feed into price. House values can change markedly between the time a home is reserved off plan and the time it is completed. Therefore, particularly during early stages of construction, the developer may be prepared to give only an indicative price to a buyer seeking to reserve a home, in exchange for a small, non- returnable deposit. Professional advice is particularly important in identifying potential obligations and liabilities that will pass to the buyer. Such obligations are not always apparent from the initial sales material.

One of the issues that will help in ensuring that property buyers have more rights will be our manifesto commitment to introduce a seller's pack, which will help in England and Wales. We will introduce the necessary legislation as soon as parliamentary time allows.

My hon. Friend raised the issue of managing agents and expressed his concerns about how some of them operate. He might want to know that on 8 April my Department issued a consultation paper on improving the standard of residential leasehold management. Although the scope of the consultation is limited to England and Wales, he may well have some views on the matters contained in that document, which considers various options on how best to improve standards, including voluntary controls regulation. I would welcome the input of all hon. Members, and especially my hon. Friend.

We have no current plans to legislate specifically in England and Wales on the position for buyers of new homes, although there is the seller's pack that I mentioned. Most of the relevant legal framework in Scotland is different, and is a matter for the Scottish Parliament and Executive. I can assure my hon. Friend that my Department liaises closely with the Scottish Executive. We are open to the possible lessons that we can learn from each other in this area. We share a common objective, which is a better deal for buyers of new homes. I will ensure that his views and concerns are passed on to colleagues there.

The efforts of the industry, aided by the work of the Housing Forum and by schemes such as that of the National House Building Council, should lead to better consistency in building quality. We will be looking for this in future repeats of the Housing Forum customer satisfaction survey.

Once again, I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate and raising this important issue, which has been raised previously in Westminster Hall. I believe that raising the profile and repeating the concerns is one of the measures that ensures that the industry is aware of the concerns of MPs and the public, and it is one of the ways in which MPs can realistically increase pressure and ensure that standards are improved for the benefit of their constituents.