I welcome the opportunity to debate the important subject of accident and emergency services, and to question the Government on their national strategy. As we witnessed in the tragic events of last week, the national health service is brilliant in emergencies. All the emergency services rose to the occasion in Potters Bar, and for that we are most grateful.

I want to focus on the national picture, but I speak also from personal, local experience. In my constituency of Meriden, the local accident and emergency department has already been radically downgraded. Solihull hospital is a relatively new hospital; it was opened in June 1994 with an all-singing, all-dancing accident and emergency department. In 1997, after the merger with Heartlands, the Minister of State at the Department of Health, the right hon. Member for Barrow and Furness (Mr. Hutton) pledged the future security of services at the hospital, particularly the A&E services. The present Minister was given a copy of that pledge in a letter from my hon. Friend the Member for Solihull (Mr. Taylor).

Over the years, however, doubts have been raised about the future of A&E services at the hospital. When we questioned the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health, the hon. Member for Salford (Ms Blears), on the strength of that pledge in a debate on Solihull, she said:

"I am not in a position to say that the position"—

the pledge—

"will never change".—[Official Report, Westminster Hall, 20 March 2002; Vol. 382, c. 130WH.]

I know that my constituents and those of my hon. Friend will be listening closely to the Minister to discover whether that pledge is now worthless.

Doubts were raised about the need for a 24-hour service on such a scale. Ambulances were asked to take emergency cases straight to the sister hospital, the bigger Birmingham Heartlands hospital, because there was no longer an emergency surgeon on duty at Solihull. Solihull was undergoing a downgrading by stealth, and the manoeuvre became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The local hospital trust argued that figures for A&E treatment in Solihull were too low to justify keeping it open, and organised A&E services, including the ambulance service, to make it true.

When local people started to get wind of that, it caused dismay. Dismay has turned into anger, and the issue has become one of the hottest in my constituency. On 25 March, protesters from five other areas of the country that are similarly threatened—Gosport, Penzance, Kidderminster, Canterbury and Crawley—marched on Downing street to deliver a letter to the Prime Minister, to which as yet there has been no response. However, the Secretary of State for Health, who received the same letter, did respond. Someone from his Department replied saying that it is a local matter and that it must be addressed with the consent of local opinion.

The question is: what is local opinion? Local people, the potential patients, have made their views entirely clear. It is something that people feel passionately about; to them it is a life or death issue. It can also make the difference between keeping or losing a parliamentary seat, as the Government know only too well from their experience in Wyre Forest. It is not something that the Government can afford to ignore. The Government's response suggests that they do not have a national policy.

Is not another interpretation that the Government have a policy of rationalisation, but they are not prepared to admit it and are implementing it by stealth?

My hon. Friend comes to the heart of the matter. It is the tension caused by the hidden and unpopular policy that we want to bring out today.

I do not want to dwell for too long on Solihull hospital, because the debate is about the national strategy. However, before I move on to that, and with the memory of the Potters I3ar train crash in mind, I shall make one further point. Such an emergency could happen in Solihull. There has recently been a huge increase in the area's daytime population, in part because of the new and popular Touchwood centre, which attracts 60,000 shoppers every day from outlying areas. Solihull is also at the confluence of the M42, M40, M5, M45 and the M69, and near Birmingham international airport and the national exhibition centre. One does not want to be a harbinger of doom, but it is as well to be aware of such salient facts when considering decisions about accident and emergency services at our hospital.

My job is to represent my constituents, who have said loud and clear that they want Solihull accident and emergency department kept open 24 hours a day and properly staffed, so that it can deal with any emergency. The local hospital trust may have genuine reasons for believing that that would not be a good idea and that it could not justify restoring the department to full strength on clinical grounds. It may also have genuine reasons for thinking that such an approach would not be in local residents' best interests and that it would not be safe or practical. If that is so, it has not succeeded in making its case.

The hon. Lady will know that I share her concerns about the hospital. In the interests of accuracy, however, will she confirm that the accident and emergency unit at Solihull has never taken all cases? Paediatric cases, for example, have never gone there since the outset.

The hon. Gentleman will be aware that, when the hospital opened in 1994, the local population collected sufficient charitable moneys for a paediatric ward. At the outset, a full range of services was supplied, but they have been withdrawn over time. Nothing is more shattering for our constituents than seeing the charitable money that they raised for a paediatric ward put to no use.

This issue will not quietly go away. The Government are committing themselves to extra cash for the NHS.

My hon. Friend has come to the matter of resources. Most of the recent Budget was smoke and mirrors, but one thing was clear: heavy Government receipts in the form of increased national insurance contributions from our constituencies will be targeted at national health service provision. Given the opening position at Solihull—including the charitable contributions to it—and the enormous amount that is now being raised through national insurance contributions, is it not clear that we should resource 24-hour accident and emergency provision at the hospital, which services our constituencies?

My hon. Friend comes to the same conclusion as I: extra money is being raised specifically for health, and constituents want additional resources to be spent on keeping accident and emergency units open 24 hours a day. That is the message that they want the Government to get loud and clear from this debate. If it is not feasible to fund such a service, the Government must properly explain why, and make the experience of going to Solihull's sister hospital at Heartlands more pleasant and convincing.

I must, however, move on to the wider issue of accident and emergency strategy as it affects the country generally. In their emergency care report, which was updated in April, the Government produced a plan called "Reforming Emergency Care: First Steps to a New Approach". At this stage in their term in office, however, such an approach is a little tentative. People want improvements that they can see now, but the report reads a little like a wish list, with targets such as:

"By the year 2004 no-one to wait for more than 4 hours in an A&E department before their case is dealt with".

I picked that example almost at random, but the paucity of the ambition is striking. Anyone who has had the misfortune to use a typical accident and emergency facility in a large hospital knows what an unpleasant experience it can be, yet the goal is to reduce a patient's wait to four hours in two years' time. Surely another model for dealing with accident and emergency admissions should be studied and taken on board.

In a previous debate, which was specifically about Solihull hospital, I brought to the Minister's attention the findings of a working group of the Royal College of Physicians. The group's radical proposals reversed current thinking, and advocated that accident and emergency facilities be no more than 10 minutes away from the patients that they serve. I commended that report for consideration by the Government some while ago.

The Government also refuse to believe that any system in any other country is worth studying and learning from. Their report notes that the NHS is second to none in responding to major emergencies, and I have applauded that fact. To be fair, however, the report also admits to failures in the system. Under a general heading, it deals with patients having to wait too long from care to treatment at each stage of the emergency care system. It starts with the time that it takes to get an appointment with a general practitioner, and goes through to inadequacies in the system that compound delays, including the notorious bed-blocking scandals with which we have become familiar.

The report offers various solutions to those problems, but no radical approaches. The main recommendations are for more money to be allocated, but within the same system. I am passionately committed to the ideals of the NHS, but that does not mean that better practice elsewhere cannot be incorporated into the service. The Wanless report found that accident and emergency departments in Germany, for example, see patients in a couple of minutes—we can dream on.

The report claims that things have improved and that, for example, nearly 80 per cent. of all accident and emergency patients spend four hours or less in A&E units. I checked on Heartlands hospital, to which our constituents are now sent, but the latest figures tell a different story. Some 74 per cent. of patients are seen within four hours, which leaves 26 per cent. waiting for longer, and I have heard of waits of up to eight hours.

Those figures are backed up by the Audit Commission's report on A&E waits, which was published in October 2001. In 1996—an important reference year—89 per cent. of patients were admitted within four hours, but the figure had fallen to 76 per cent. by 2000. The percentage of patients seen by a doctor within an hour was 73 per cent. in 1996, but 53.5 per cent. in 2000. So, despite the Government having been in power for five years, the situation has got worse.

The anecdotal evidence is also far from happy. Ambulances must often queue outside Heartlands before even an initial admission. Once there, patients find that the conditions are crowded and impersonal, which is not conducive to helping people who are in pain and distress. Ambulance crews are, however, subject to a local protocol. A letter that I have just received from the West Midlands ambulance service states that, in respect of

'"999' emergency calls, Solihull Hospital will ONLY receive `Adult Medical' patients and 'Maternity' cases, and that ALL `Paediatric' cases and 'Adult trauma' patients are taken to Heartlands Hospital".

That will continue unless, of course, those responsible are confronted by people power.

A local councillor has told me that ambulance drivers are increasingly meeting fierce opposition when trying to take patients to Heartlands. One ambulance crew was on its way to admit an elderly woman who was having her cataracts removed at Heartlands—that, in itself, was a strange decision—but she demanded to be taken to Solihull. Eventually the ambulance men allowed her to contact her consultant, who agreed with her request to have the operation in Solihull hospital, and that is where she was taken.

I secured this debate partly because certain questions have still not been answered.

My hon. Friend is delivering a powerful oration, and the pattern that she describes is, sadly, repeated elsewhere. There is pressure on ambulance crews to take people not only from Canterbury, but from a range of settlements in east Kent, to the Kent and Canterbury hospital, where the number of beds has been reduced. Crews face pressure when they try to take people to other hospitals, which are being expanded.

My hon. Friend gives another example of downgrading by stealth. We want to bring that issue into the open today so that it can be properly debated.

In a written question, the Minister of State, Department of Health, the right hon. Member for Barrow and Furness was asked how many nurses are employed in accident and emergency departments in England. His response was:

"It is not possible to separately identify nurses employed in accident and emergency (A&E) departments.—[Official Report, 10 April 2002; Vol. 383, c. 490W.]

The emergency care report says that the number of nurses working in accident and emergency will increase by 600 by 2003. That seems a little delphic in the circumstances. Asked about both ambulance response times and the proportion of patients seen by a doctor within an hour of arrival at accident and emergency in the last six years, the answer was the same:

"The information requested is not collected centrally."

That all seems a bit haphazard. For the Government to have an effective national accident and emergency strategy, the figures must be collected centrally. Otherwise, how do the Government have any idea whether targets are being met?

There is also the matter of what constitutes an accident and emergency department. In some local hospitals—such as Solihull—it is proposed that accident and emergency departments should be run by specialised nurses who are able to treat minor accidents and emergencies. However, that is not the public's perception of an accident and emergency service. Clinically, doctors would argue, that might be the way ahead; but that is where the public and specialist medical opinion seem to part company.

In preparing for the debate, I consulted the independent organisations that represent accident and emergency specialists. They took a pragmatic approach. They told me that having an all-singing, all-dancing accident and emergency department in every town was what the public wanted—they are aware of the demand. However, it is not clinically safe, given the number of available doctors, staffing restrictions and the Government's strategic direction. As an analogy, Ian Anderson, who is president of the Faculty of Emergency Medicine, said that keeping an under-staffed, under-qualified accident and emergency department open would be like a shopkeeper using all the staff to serve customers in the front of a shop and no one to replenish the stock behind the scenes. It is difficult to get away from the fact that there is a constraint because of the lack of adequately qualified doctors. However, the Government have been in power for five years and the matter could have been tackled at a much earlier date.

The jury is still out in Solihull—there is a formal consultation process to go through—but strength of opinion is running high. We must listen to expert independent opinion in order properly to inform the debate. However, as politicians, we must also listen carefully to the wishes expressed by our constituents. Ultimately, they fund this public service provision.

Given that we are considering plans for the future of a service that is of vital importance to my constituents and to those of other hon. Members—many of whom will speak in the debate—the Government's report and some of the debate in Parliament can seem far removed from reality. The bottom line is that unless the people who actually use the facilities are happy with them, they are not working and all the wish-lists, reports and vague promises made by the Government will cut no ice.

Councillor Don Blake, chairman of the health service monitoring sub-committee in my constituency, is waiting for answers to the following four questions. Why, unlike coronary heart disease, services for older people, mental health and so on, is there no national service framework for emergency care? How do the changes at Solihull hospital fit in with the wider plans for accident and emergency provision within the Birmingham and black country strategic health authority? How will the proposed changes affect accessibility to accident and emergency in our part of the west midlands? How do ideas about accident and emergency fit in with plans for the long-term development, of Solihull hospital on the principle of one hospital on two sites?

If those questions are not answered satisfactorily, people will increasingly take power into their own hands by protesting or forming action groups or, like my constituent, by blind refusal to adhere to protocols that seem to ignore patients' wishes.

This is a timely debate, because thinking about accident and emergency units is changing. The old thinking was that every accident and emergency unit should be part of a major hospital where every specialty was available because, for example, a child might be brought in who needed paediatric care or specialist treatment such as vascular surgery might be required. If every specialty is offered, it is not just a matter of having one consultant; three or four must be available in order to provide 24-hour cover.

There was also a strong feeling among the royal colleges that there could be no joint-site working. The consultants had to be working at one hospital in order to get accreditation. Doctors and nurses could not be accredited if they were working in smaller hospitals with no leading consultants available to advise them. For all those reasons, the old certainty was that an accident and emergency unit could only be part of a district general hospital. Increasingly, across the whole of the country, accident and emergency units have been closing and specialisation has been focused on the larger district general hospitals.

That model—very large district general hospitals with accident and emergency units—has proved to have significant disadvantages. The first is that not every patient who is taken by ambulance to the accident and emergency unit at a large hospital some miles away needs to go there. A significant proportion of those who are taken on the blue light into the large, distant, district hospital prove not to require its care. The problem then is what to do with such patients. Either they have to be sent back to local hospitals, or they have to be admitted and it is difficult to discharge them because—for reasons known to medical science but not to non-specialists—district general hospitals and local hospitals have different cultures and it can be difficult for a district general hospital to discharge patients to the local hospitals.

Secondly, because of the Government policy of tightening regulations on nursing homes, fewer nursing home beds are available, so suitable patients cannot be discharged from district general hospitals back into the community or to local care centres.

Medical and technical advances now enable diagnosis to be made at a distance: telemedicine has advanced considerably. In my constituency, the Royal Hospital Haslar treats patients around the world through telemedicine. The armed forces cannot have leading specialists available in every area served by their personnel. Telemedicine allows specialists to advise on patients in Cyprus, Bosnia or Sierra Leone. Such advances also make it possible to treat patients in local hospitals rather than taking them all the way to a district general hospital. There can be considerable advantages in taking a patient quickly into a local hospital. In medicine, the priority is often not to have long-term highly specialised care, but to stabilise the patient, particularly in a cardiac case. Once the patient is stable, he or she can be moved in comfort to a larger hospital where specialist care can be administered.

The final reason why the old model of large accident and emergency units attached to district general hospitals has proved to be disadvantageous is the one that has been spelled out so well by my hon. Friend the Member for Meriden (Mrs. Spelman). People do not want it. They want their medical care to be provided as locally as possible, because an extremely important part of medical care and well-being is the opportunity for family and friends to visit. People do not want to run the risk of lying in the back of an ambulance that has to make its way through busy traffic to a district general hospital some miles away. They want medical care to be provided locally.

Therefore, plenty of thought is being given to a new model. The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health, the hon. Member for Salford (Ms Blears), is kind enough to nod at that. The word "reconfiguration" prevailed during a meeting of residents from Gosport who came to see her. The reconfiguration of our medical care is being given much thought, to see whether further medical care can be provided locally and through telemedicine and split-site working. The idea of specialists working in more than one hospital was thought to be unpopular. Certainly, the Royal College of Surgeons was opposed to it at one point, but increasingly specialists are aware that good medical care can be provided through split-site working, with some provision made in one hospital and other specialist experience provided in another. Reconfiguration can lead to improvements in medicine.

I shall apply those general arguments to my local case. On 10 December 1998, a date never to be forgotten, the Government announced their proposal to close the Royal Hospital Haslar in my constituency. It is and has been the only Ministry of Defence hospital, but a committee in the Ministry of Defence that included no one with any medical skills decided to close it. To put it mildly, there was disagreement locally. We formed the Haslar task force and the "Save Haslar" campaign, which I have chaired since its creation. We thought that our rally and march would attract only a few hundred people, or perhaps a thousand or two, but 22,000 came to demonstrate their concern about the retention of Haslar hospital. It is thought by the House of Commons Library to be the largest demonstration ever in support of a hospital.

The official plan for Haslar—hon. Members should suspend their disbelief—is to increase the number of out-patients from 55,000 a year to 60,000. A new accident treatment centre is now available there for suitable patients, and the hospital has recently been nominated as the new diagnostic and treatment centre for south Hampshire. That will involve some of the best operating facilities in the United Kingdom. The official plan says that all those advances and improvements will happen and that Haslar will close in 2007. It beggars belief to suggest that the closure of such superb facilities makes sense, but that is the official policy.

We are working in the right direction. The accident treatment centre is a good step. The diagnostic and treatment centre will be an extremely valuable facility to reduce waiting lists for cold surgery, and the increased use of Haslar for out-patients is fine. We agree with all those steps, but we do not agree that the hospital should close in 2007, when the nearby Queen Alexandra hospital at Cosham is rebuilt under private finance initiatives.

We hope and believe that plenty of support will be given to the retention of Haslar and the continued use of its site and outstanding facilities, including the operating theatres and telemedicine equipment. We want to encourage the use of the accident treatment centre and expand the range of emergency medical conditions that can be referred to it. Also, we want a fundamental review of the plan to close Haslar after 2007. It makes no sense, and we want to give Haslar the certainty and confidence that it needs for the longer term by confirmation that the hospital will remain after 2007.

I have not yet referred to defence medical services. There is no doubt that Defence Costs Study 15, which reduced the number of hospitals in the defence medical services from four to one, dealt a blow to the service and a blow to the morale of those who work in it. However, that was nothing compared with the decision to close Haslar. In the key specialties of general surgery, orthopaedic surgery, anaesthetics and general medicine, there are now gaps in the establishment as high as 75 per cent. In other words, in some of those key areas, there are only a quarter of the required number of specialists. There is no doubt that if the armed forces were deployed in strength, their capabilities would be restricted by the inability to provide adequate medical back-up. That is extremely serious from a defence point of view, so I hope that, for that reason, as well as for the support of the local civilian population, the decision to close Haslar will be reviewed.

I begin by congratulating the hon. Member for Meriden (Mrs. Spelman) on securing the debate.

I very much agree with the hon. Member for Gosport (Mr. Viggers) about the need for earlier assessment of patients and greater or more flexible use of available resources. It strikes me that that will be one of the major shifts in medicine in future. When the hon. Member for Meriden was telling us about the origins of Solihull hospital, I reflected that, had we known what medical provision would be available, we might have looked differently at how we configured all our services, although that is not a criticism of what was done when Solihull hospital was built.

I shall give one simple example. In my constituency in south Birmingham, we are examining proposals for a new medical centre at Green Bank, combining several GP practices. If it is successful, it will provide several localised services for people in Hall Green and, I suspect, for some people in Solihull, including provision for minor day surgery. That will assist people who would previously have gone to hospital. In that context, any future plan for A&E provision should have a national element but should also take account of local considerations. I should be interested to know what the primary care trusts in the area are proposing, so that we can consider their proposals in the context of the overall provision of hospital and other medical services.

I share the concerns that have been expressed about Solihull hospital. I have been at pains to establish with the trust authorities that there are no plans to close the hospital. I am reassured on that front because I understand that about two thirds of the population of Meriden, Solihull and Hall Green currently use the hospital, and that is unlikely to change. There is tremendous scope for joint-site working, and I am not sure that the trust authorities have considered that as seriously as they might. With the advent of telemedicine, there is much greater scope to share key personnel, and I hope that that, too, will be carefully considered. However, I am aware that the trust claims to have advertised at least 11 times for senior house officers and is having some difficulty attracting staff. I would not want, in pursuit of any campaign to defend a local service, to ignore a reality such as that. The hon. Member for Meriden referred to issues of clinical safety. Much as I want to protect and defend local services, I would personally find it extremely difficult to take the risk of sending someone to a unit where the level of treatment could not be guaranteed.

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that it is perverse to expect recruitment of high-quality personnel to the accident and emergency facility at Solihull hospital when ambulance crews are under strict instructions to take patients to Heartlands hospital? It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If nobody goes there because ambulance crew are instructed not to take them, who will apply for a job there?

It depends where we start with that issue. If the plan starts with a decision to downgrade a unit and to instruct ambulance crew not to take patients there, the hon. Gentleman is right. However, if there is already a shortage of key medical personnel and that gives rise to some level of clinical risk, and in individual cases judgments are made to take people elsewhere, that is a different matter. It will take some time to recruit the additional doctors and nurses that we need. In the meantime, my instinct is that the trust should consider making greater use of the existing personnel across the sites. We should make the best use of the facilities that we have.

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. I am sure that he is aware that the previous management had an arrangement to rotate its doctors between the two sites and secured the agreement of the royal colleges for that to be acceptable for accreditation. With a change of management, that appears to be no longer possible. Does the hon. Gentleman accept that the emergency surgeons were removed without any consultation with the public? That had a massive demoralising effect on the accident and emergency staff, who saw their department's remit being downgraded before their very eyes.

I hope that I have made it abundantly clear that I think that there should be greater sharing of staff. That seems a perfectly reasonable way to proceed. However, we should also achieve a balance between the level of treatment and the skill of the personnel available. If I were making a judgment on behalf of an injured friend, that factor would weigh on my mind.

Is the hon. Gentleman really saying that recruitment difficulties are sufficient reason for downgrading or closing A&E departments? If so, that would make the situation difficult in areas such as my constituency in Hertfordshire. The area is very expensive and it is difficult to recruit, but we still need our A&E departments.

The hon. Gentleman misunderstands me. I am saying that where there is a shortage of key personnel, the judgment must concern how we use the resources at our disposal. It would be ludicrous to argue that a facility should be kept open and available all the time if there is doubt about levels of clinical safety. That would be absurd and I cannot imagine any constituent signing up for it. My understanding is that people want good local services as close as possible to their immediate environment, but they want to balance that with the level of safety and treatment that they would reasonably expect. That is all that I am saying.

The hon. Gentleman's point is important. My understanding is that he is suggesting that we should have a geographically two-tier NHS: in areas where it is relatively easy to recruit staff, we should have the kind of provision that we expect at the moment, and in areas such as that represented by my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald), we should pragmatically reduce the provision because we do not have the staff. That seems a rather bankrupt philosophy, to which I hope that he does not genuinely subscribe.

Mr. McCabe: The hon. Gentleman has either misunderstood me or is talking about a personal fantasy, because I am not saying that at all. In areas where there are staff shortages, we should maximise the use of the existing provision as flexibly as possible. On occasions, that may mean that establishments must share doctors. We all want acceptable minimum standards that apply throughout the country. The hon. Member for Meriden told us that Labour has been in power for five years, which no one is disputing. However, as Stephen Thornton, the former chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said, the health service experienced decades of underfunding before that. The question is whether the new investment proposals and the direction suggested by the Wanless report will provide the route to improving the long-term efficiency of our health service for everyone, or whether we should switch to an as yet unspecified alternative, which the hon. Member for Meriden flirts with but will not spell out. Until we know what that alternative may be. we have to wonder at the crocodile tears that the Opposition are spilling over the health service.

Would the hon. Gentleman accept that any party in opposition has the perfect opportunity to consider the statistics and the question of supply and demand and plan for the changes that it wants to make? It does not have to wait five years until it is in a position to implement changes.

I make three obvious points in response. First, the hon. Lady's party has a history of trying to destroy the health service. Secondly, the Conservative spokesman on health has admitted that he has a stealth plan to wreck public confidence in the health service. Thirdly, it seems absurd for the Opposition to refer to alternatives if they are not prepared to disclose to the public, in the interests of allowing them to make choices about health, what those alternatives are and how much they will cost.

My final point for the Minister is that we need to strike a balance between what is locally viable and desirable and what resources can be used, set against a national framework for A&E. Will the Minister tell us how the Commission for Healthcare Audit and Inspection will work on that problem? Recently, there was a dispute about the long-term future of heart transplants at the Queen Elizabeth hospital in Birmingham, and at other hospitals. The resolution of that dispute came in setting standards to be monitored by the Commission for Health Improvement, so that services could be provided on the basis that treatment would be safe and reliable. Some similar guide to the operation of A&E treatment centres and units would be useful.

I thank the hon. Member for Meriden (Mrs. Spelman) for securing the debate and for referring to a national strategy. We must consider the national outlook for A&E provision before we relate it back to our own areas.

My presence in the House is entirely due to the importance that local people put on A&E services. People are prepared to travel for high-powered elective or emergency treatment, but not for bread and butter emergencies. If they live in or move to an area with local emergency services, they do not expect them to be taken away.

As the hon. Member for Gosport (Mr. Viggers) said, recognition is coming for local people's priorities. The first glimpse of that recognition came with the Scottish review of acute services in 1998, which states that

"the critical mass needed to achieve the benefits which might flow from this increased volume of activity can come through managed clinical networks rather than the centralisation or concentration of services."

As recently as May last year, the Northern Ireland acute services review tackled the question of A&E. The report suggested that there should be three grades of A&E. Of course, we cannot all have the top grade—the all-singing all-dancing provision for major head injuries and major chest and cardiac surgery. The second grade is represented by the sort of A&E department that commonly exists at the moment, which does not deal with the major procedures. The third grade is lower, but is more than a minor injuries unit because a doctor is always present. In Northern Ireland, they have begun to consider making some sensible alterations.

After last year's general election, the Royal College of Physicians realised that there must be a rethink and, along with the Nuffield Trust, began to consider a model that would keep emergency services local in the first instance. A lead article in the BMJ from 4 August 2001 sums up the situation when it states:

"The first advantage of such a system"—

that is, emergencies going locally first—

"would be that patients with emergencies would reach hospital within 10 rather than 30 minutes. Links with primary care would be better. Those who didn't need admission could be quickly discharged home, which seems to be logistically impossible to achieve in one day with the current arrangements. Some patients need never go to the central hospital. Those who did would not need to be assessed again, and transfer could be faster because fewer transfers would be needed overall."

We were tremendously helped by the admission from Sir George Alberti, the president of the Royal College of Physicians, that medicine could exist without surgery. That made a huge difference, as most emergency services are medical.

The greatest step forward, however, is contained in the Darzi report from County Durham. Professor Ara Darzi is part of the NHS Modernisation Agency, so he speaks with authority. He takes into account local and staffing issues and what it is and not possible to achieve.

Country Durham and Darlington have three acute hospitals between them: in Durham in the north, Bishop Auckland in the middle and Darlington in the south. The Bishop Auckland hospital is the smallest, is 12 miles from Darlington and 13 miles from Durham, and serves a population of less than 40,000. Clearly, it would not be possible to run all services at Bishop Auckland, but Ara Darzi's suggested model includes a doctor-led A&E service and most of medicine, along with a diagnostic and treatment centre, which is a modern idea that has much to commend it as it separates much elective surgery from the emergency work that blocks beds. Such a model might be applied to many hospitals that are under threat.

Will the hon. Gentleman confirm that he is basically talking about an A&E with everything except major trauma facilities?

The details of the facilities in each area would be decided according to local opinion and decisions. I shall return to that later, as it is the most important point of all. As I read it, the Darzi model would not be exactly the same in other places, but it gives a flavour of what is possible with medical staffing and local desires. It is incredibly important.

Something has to be done politically, as my presence in the House shows. Far more importantly, something has to be done for the patient. The three A&Es in Worcestershire have been reduced to two, and I have received many letters that suggest that that change is not working. I could talk for many hours about trolley and ambulance waits, staff stress and ambulance distances, but I will not. However, I will give one fact. Before the downgrading of facilities in Kidderminster, the monthly mileage of the Wyre Forest ambulance service was 8,000 miles, but is now 24,000 miles. Change must take place, and it could be made on the Darzi model.

I shall end with some pleas to the Minister and her colleagues, the first of which is that they consider the Darzi model.

The hon. Gentleman is talking about the Darzi model, based on the views of that expert gentleman. Did he say that the hospital in Bishop Auckland served a mere 40,000 people? Did I hear him correctly?

That is the population of the town, but the hospital serves a large rural area, which makes the population that it covers much greater. We would see from a map that Durham, Bishop Auckland and Darlington are on a north-south line. The people in the country to the west will not be that much further from Durham to the north than Darlington in the south. The Darzi model must be considered as a blueprint for a national strategy.

I was grateful to the hon. Member for Meriden for mentioning the Secretary of State's response. On the Floor of the House, he told me that local matters must be decided by local opinion. I ask that that be the case, without pressure from the Department of Health and its Ministers. Makers of local opinion—that must include citizens as well as members of the professions—should be given freedom.

Given the democratic deficit in local decision making on the health service, does the hon. Gentleman accept that there is some merit in still being able to refer significant changes such as hospital closures to the Secretary of State, because it means that someone in an elected position takes responsibility for the result of policy or the general financial picture'? That is perhaps the only merit of referring such decisions. I say yes to local decision making, but we have to make it more accountable if we are to dispense with the taking of responsibility by politicians elected at a national level.

I could not agree more that there must be local accountability. That is why I am desperately sad that it seems that community health councils, which have some democratically elected members, will disappear. I believe that the Government are sincere about trying to involve local people in decision making. I remind the Minister that she wrote in a letter last September that

"The views of patients and citizens should be not only valued but listened to and acted upon as well."

If my pleas are heard, crises will be avoided, and in Worcestershire, the devastation of hospital services forced by the now abolished health authority could be undone and repaired.

Before I call the next speaker, I should tell the House that I intend to call the Liberal Democrat health spokesman at 10.30 am. I call Dr. Murrison.

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in this timely debate. The tragic events of last Friday have highlighted the importance that we place on front-line services and there is no doubt that casualty departments are at the forefront of the national health service. I pay tribute to the dedicated professionals of Barnet general hospital.

The six months that I spent as a senior house officer in the accident and emergency service were the most exhausting months of my career, but they were some of the most fulfilling. I am sure that other hon. Members here today who are medically qualified would share those sentiments. My hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Mr. Viggers) raised the subject of telemedicine at the Royal Hospital Haslar and I remember offering medical advice to patients many thousands of miles away during my time as a casualty officer in that hospital. I agree with absolutely everything that my hon. Friend said.

I know that the Royal United hospital at Bath that serves many of my constituents has recently been taxing the minds of Ministers. However, if we set aside end-of year deficits, suspensions and fiddled waiting lists, we are left with a hospital that provides a remarkable service to my constituents in Wiltshire. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the hospital's casualty department.

The Minister is a keen admirer of community health councils, so she will be delighted to note that our debate coincides with a meeting of the RUH standing group of the Bath and district community health council. As luck would have it, the council is debating as we speak the hospital's accident and emergency department, and particularly the council's recent survey of patients and carers attending the casualty department. The survey gave people the opportunity to comment on a raft of issues, with 35 detailed questions on issues such as travel and car parking, A&E waiting times, and the support given to patients and carers on discharge. I regret that our debate and that meeting are simultaneous, as it prevents me from conveying the council's findings, which I know will be illuminating.

While we can, we should draw upon our community health councils because, if the Minister has her way—I hope that she will not—they will shortly fall silent. Today's CHC agenda is a treasure-trove of useful activity. We learn for example that the council will participate in the nationwide casualty watch exercise on 20 May. There is a detailed critique of the plans for a new casualty dept in Bath; and the CHC asks several questions. It asks about the drop-off car parking facilities for the unit; we should remember that the hospital serves a vast rural area, so it is extremely important for those of my constituents who have to use the hospital. It wants to know whether the toilet facilities are adequate, and particularly about access for disabled people. It also asks whether the bereavement suite is fit for the task and whether its relationship to the mortuary is sympathetic. Those are down-to-earth questions, which planners forget and neglect— particularly planners of casualty departments—but community health councils give a powerful voice to local people on such important matters.

The council has been advised that it may not be possible to change the plans on which it has commented without causing undue delay or expense. What a shame that is, because it is a useful catalogue of concerns from an organisation with its ear to the ground. It is a shame that those comments were not used to inform the decision-making process at an earlier stage. The NHS machinery appears to be running down our community health councils already. That is lamentable in the extreme, but what a fantastic demonstration it is of the value of community health councils. I know that all Conservative Members will join me in condemning the Government's plans for closing community health councils and for proving completely recalcitrant to the wise words of Conservative Members, during the Committee stage of the National Health Service Reform and Health Care Professions Bill, that CHCs should be reformed, not abolished.

Last year, I attended a major accident on the A36 in my constituency, in which four people lost their lives. I saw at first hand the superlative quality of our emergency personnel. The weak link is a system that obliges ambulances in certain parts of the country to stack up outside casualty departments, waiting to discharge patients, like aircraft at Heathrow. or to circle district general hospitals like planes on a holding pattern. Is anything more likely to demoralise all the health care professionals involved? Despite the best efforts of our health care professionals, the NHS front-of-house is in crisis. It is no wonder that community health councils feel obliged to take a special interest and that the Government are hell-bent on silencing them.

As the hon. Member for Wyre Forest (Dr. Taylor) said, we are all grateful to the hon. Member for Meriden (Mrs. Spelman) for giving us the opportunity to debate some of the wider issues beyond individual hospitals. We heard an interesting debate between the hon. Member for Birmingham, Hall Green (Mr. McCabe), who made some valid points, as well as some contentious ones, and other hon. Members.

I remember meeting some of the staff at Solihull hospital and noting their concern, and that of local people, about its downgrading. Indeed, this weekend, I visited West Cornwall hospital in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for St. Ives (Andrew George), who cannot be with us today, which drew my attention to the fact that threats to the provision of local services occur in rural areas as much, if not more than, in urban and suburban areas. I know that the hon. Member for Gosport (Mr. Viggers) has been active on the issue of Haslar hospital, along with my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth, South (Mr. Hancock) and the hon. Member for Portsmouth, North (Syd Rapson), so many campaigns are cross-party. I know of the work done by the hon. Member for Canterbury (Mr. Brazier) in relation to the Kent and Canterbury hospital, which I have also visited. It is remarkable that many of those hospitals are not found in the constituencies of Labour Members. Indeed, Bishop Auckland general hospital, which is due to be reprieved from threat because of its size, is in the middle of a Labour constituency. It is questionable whether that is a coincidence.

As the hon. Member for Meriden said, much stealth and shifting the blame is involved in the closure of hospitals. We touched on that issue in our discussion about whether decisions are truly local. If decisions are to be made locally, they must be democratically accountable. Governments, who generally seek to centralise praise and decentralise blame, like proposals to be led by local managers, who can be, and all too often are, demonised, although the buck should stop with the politicians who make policy decisions. In relation to the health service, that means Westminster politicians, including those who make the financial decisions. It need not be that way, but it is. Until we have an accountable tier of politicians helping to run the health service on a regional and local level, politicians at Westminster will rightly continue to debate such issues and the Minister and her colleagues will be held responsible.

Hospitals are being closed by stealth, bit by bit. First, one part of the service is lost, and that is deemed to make another part of the service unsustainable. If we are to have an open approach, we must ask the Government, through their proxies—the local managers who come up with the proposals—to set out a clear plan, which can be debated, at the outset. We know that many closures are financially driven and hidden behind allegations about the need to provide a safer service. The issues at stake can be directly financial, as they were in Worcestershire, where closure was required to fund a private finance initiative, or financial by proxy—a shortage of staff may well be related to the inability of successive Governments to fund the necessary consultant expansion.

Financial decisions are hidden behind issues related to the working time directive and junior doctors' hours. I used to work in that field as both an expert on a national basis and an employee on a regional one. There was no problem with junior doctors' hours that could not be solved by the adequate provision of a consultant-led service, with the training and the creation of new posts that go with that.

Those who make the point that patient safety is the key issue must provide evidence. Our approaches must be evidence-based. It is not just a question of the provision of adequate back-up and specialties leading to a safer service. There is also the issue of travel time for casualties going to hospitals. If all small units are to be closed, we have to balance the alleged safety gains of that measure against the worries about increased transit time for people who are not yet stabilised. It is not sufficient for decisions on patient safety to be handed down from on high without adequate debate and scrutiny. Such scrutiny needs to be much more explicit. Reports produced by the royal colleges are informed by expert opinion, but have baggage attached to do with the working patterns of consultants. They need to be debated. They should be published, and the basis on which they are formed should be scrutinised. We need elected politicians to take responsibility, preferably locally.

We must remember that safety has many aspects. It was not a lack of access to surgery that caused the disasters in Bristol, but too much being done by specialists beyond their competence and with insufficient regard to the suitability of patients for particular procedures. That is one of the best examples of a failure of patient safety. It arose not from inadequate medical cover, but from too much medical interference.

When we consider the staffing problems that underlie some of the stresses placed on smaller hospitals, we must recognise that we are dealing with the legacy of underfunding, which lasted until at least 1999. Medical staffing levels were determined by a decision taken not by the previous Conservative Government, but by the last but one. The failure to invest in medical schools and medical student numbers in the early 1980s and the failure of successive Governments to expand the consultant grade—

Is the hon. Gentleman aware that, perversely, there is a wave of redundancies in our medical colleges, at precisely the moment at which the Government claim that they want to increase the number of students?

We need now to be at the point at which the Government claim we will be after five years of expansion of medical schools. That expansion will produce the junior doctors needed to staff the departments, but a shortage of junior doctors is only partly due to a shortage of newly qualified people. There is also a shortage of consultants to provide the training opportunities upon which responsible expansion of junior doctors' posts is based.

It is no good creating new senior house officer posts and sucking people in from South Africa or Australia if no adequate training is to be provided. That is why the provision of adequate medical staffing begins and ends with expanding the provision of consultants. I have said that again and again, but until very recently there has been a complete failure to increase the number of consultants.

I entirely agree that small hospitals can be supported in the provision of senior house officers by rotation through larger hospitals. It happens in Banbury in my constituency, with rotation from the Radcliffe infirmary, and it happens in Solihull. It should be a question not for local hospital managers but for the postgraduate deans charged with ensuring adequate training. The neutering of those deans by service-driven reforms to medical work force planning—introduced by the previous Government and added to by this one—has damaged flexibility.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

I do not have much time. I come finally to accident and emergency departments being treated as scapegoats in relation to waiting times. If those are anybody's responsibility, they are not that of accident and emergency departments. They see patients and treat them, but then cannot move them to other parts of the hospital because of a lack of capacity due to under-bedding or delayed discharges.

What we see in accident and emergency departments is a fiddling of the figures and delays in starting and premature stopping of the clock when it comes to the time between decision to admit and finding a bed. Because 75 per cent. of people have to be seen within four hours, minor cases are seen quickly while the more complex ones are seen later. That is a terrible distortion of clinical priorities. The hon. Member for Meriden spoke of the Government's inability to specify how many accident and emergency nurses there are. That was a case of adverb substitution—those figures are not "not collected centrally", they are "not collected deliberately". We now see noun substitution as well. Such data can only be provided at disproportionate embarrassment to the politicians, not "disproportionate cost". Changes might have to happen, but I advise the Government to sort out the capacity problems in the larger hospitals before they start closing the smaller ones.

I start by echoing the point made by a number of hon. Members—including my hon. Friend the Member for Meriden (Mrs. Spelman) whom I congratulate on having secured the debate—that we should thank the staff in the accident and emergency departments of hospitals, particularly Barnet, who did such a wonderful job following the Potters Bar crash.

In opening the debate, my hon. Friend the Member for Meriden pointed out that the accident and emergency department in Solihull hospital had been downgraded by stealth through the instruction to ambulance crews to take patients to another hospital and by the removal, without notice, of a surgeon. The effect, over time, was to damage the ability of Solihull to deliver accident and emergency services. My hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Mr. Brazier) intervened and said that the same thing was happening to the Kent and Canterbury hospital: patients were being diverted away from it, against their wishes, by ambulance.

The loss of 90 beds due to the closure of the satellite geriatric hospital at Nunnery Fields resulted in queues in our accident and emergency unit that made the national press again and again. The vicious circle described by my hon. Friend the Member for Solihull (Mr. Taylor) is happening. When they are told that there is no capacity, the morale of staff, particularly nursing staff, is affected and they become overloaded. The rotten plan put forward by the local health authority is then fulfilled.

My hon. Friend reflects the sort of comments that were made in the report on east Kent by the Commission for Health Improvement, which quoted one member of staff who did not know how long patients had been in his accident and emergency department, or what day it was, because of the sheer stress of numbers and the chaos in the department. The hon. Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon (Dr. Harris) said that the same was happening in west Cornwall. My hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Mr. Viggers) then told us about the Royal Hospital Haslar, a famous defence hospital, which had also been downgraded. He explained that the old thinking that the large accident and emergency department is best had led to the change in his local hospital, and pointed out some of the problems caused by that thinking— beds blocked and modern methods ignored.

The hon. Member for Birmingham, Hall Green (Mr. McCabe) shared the concerns about Solihull hospital and agreed that people want good local services. The hon. Member for Wyre Forest (Dr. Taylor) told us that his hospital—as we know—had seen services downgraded, and he spoke of the latest thinking and of the County Durham report. My hon. Friend the Member for Westbury (Dr. Murrison) paid tribute to the work of community health councils in standing up for patients.

What is the Government's policy on rationalisation of accident and emergency departments? It cannot be coincidence that across the country— we have heard about many constituencies today, and many others are relevant—A&E departments and the supporting specialties seem to be in the process of reconfiguration by stealth. The Government document entitled "Reforming Emergency Care—Practical Steps" refers to access to emergency care being simplified and the extension of streaming of patients. However, it does not mention closing down A&E departments and developing minor-injuries units instead, or merging medium-sized units, but that is what is happening.

The argument for such measures, locally and in medical circles, is that rationalisation improves standards. Hospitals in which more than 50,000 patients use the A&E will apparently tend to have a full, 24-hour supporting service. It is said that they are more cost-effective, their doctor training is better and rostering and the quality of outcomes can be improved.

Do the Government want the rationalisation that is taking place? What guidance have they given on the subject? How has it been disseminated? What is the evidence for it?

Everything that the hon. Gentleman says rings true with what has happened over many years, rather than in only the past five years. He referred to the hon. Member for Gosport (Mr. Viggers) and the difficulties with the defence medical services establishment. The Princess Alexandra military hospital at Wroughton closed in my constituency under the Conservative Government, despite huge passion and support for it. The same pressure that the hon. Member for Gosport is bringing to bear was exerted on the Conservatives when they were in control.

Can the hon. Member for North-East Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald) offer the Government any lessons that he may have learned from that time, or suggest any changes in policy that he may wish that there had been? The issues have been the same for many years.

The Government are in the position to conduct all the research in the world and tell us what the evidence is. The hon. Lady is right to say that A&E departments have been closed before, but the process seems to be gathering pace. Even in my county, Hertfordshire, a consultation exercise on reconfiguration is taking place, and there is rightly much local unhappiness at the thought that hospitals that are much at the heart of people's security—how people feel about what would happen if they were ill—might be in danger of closing or losing their A&E departments.

Is there any evidence of improved outcomes following the closure or mergers of A&E departments? If so, will the Minister publish it so that we can all consider it? It is often said that such measures are cost-effective. What evidence suggests that there is a release of resources as a result of them? If there is such evidence, will she publish it so that we can have an informed debate on the issue?

Is the Minister taken by the accounts that we have heard today of new thinking? The hon. Member for Wyre Forest described the experience in Durham, and my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport gave an example about combining diagnostic and treatment services with a form of accident and emergency in his local hospital. What is the Government's policy? It would be wrong for them simply to shuffle the blame on to local health managers, and say, "Oh well, they are just doing what seems right locally." There must be a plan for the whole country, or at least a network provided by the A&E departments. If so, the Government must have a policy on it.

The state of accident and emergency departments has declined rapidly under this Government. When he spoke to the National Association of Health Authorities and Trusts in 1996, the Prime Minister said that we would see an end to trolley waits and the causes of trolley waits. Since then, however, the number of patients seen within an hour has declined from 75 per cent. to 50 per cent., and the number admitted within four hours has fallen from 90 per cent. to 75 per cent.

The Audit Commission report described a host of organisational and managerial problems; and we have also heard evidence from nurses, including from the senior nurse who addressed the recent Royal College of Nursing conference. He spoke of grieving relatives being kept away from untended corpses that had been

"dotted about in various offices and cubby holes".

He also spoke of people waiting for hour upon hour, and about the recent protest at Liverpool, where people had been waiting for 40 hours. What does the Minister say about the appalling decline in emergency services?

First, I join others in paying tribute to all the emergency services, which responded magnificently to last week's rail crash. That is the case in every major emergency. I am sure that the hon. Member for Meriden (Mrs. Spelman) knows that if such a terrible event were to happen in her community, the emergency services would again respond magnificently, and I confirm that there is a major contingency plan for her area. The hon. Lady put forward the possibility of an incident in her area, and explained that the growth of shopping and tourism mean that a large number of people are there during the day. I can give her the strong reassurance that the emergency services are prepared and able to cope with matters excellently for local people.

The debate has been passionate on both sides. That delights me, because it shows how much local services, particularly emergency services, are valued. The fact that so many hon. Members attended today, contributed to the debate and made their views clear gladdens my heart. I was quite surprised, however, to be criticised by the hon. Member for Meriden for humility; our document "Reforming Emergency Care: First Steps to a New Approach" was a deliberate attempt to deal with a complex matter. We do not have a magic wand, and the position cannot be resolved overnight.

As many hon. Members said, the pressures on accident and emergency departments have existed for many years— and many of them suffered also under previous Governments. However, the debate should not be about accident and emergency departments only, but about the whole system of care. Many hon. Members highlighted the fact that it is also about primary care, access to general practitioners, social services, the overall capacity of hospitals and the effective and proper discharge of their duty— and the fact that if one part of the service is not working properly the effects are inevitably felt most acutely in A&E departments. Hon. Members have made it clear that the problems in overstretched A&E departments are sometimes the result of pressures that are not under their control but which they are unfortunately left to deal with and involve a complex set of interlinked and interrelated matters.

The contribution of the hon. Member for Meriden was in stark contrast to the more thoughtful speech by the hon. Member for Gosport (Mr. Viggers). I had the opportunity, with the hon. Gentleman, of discussing with local councillors and members of the local community their real concerns. We talked about the way in which emergency services are changing, and whether it will be possible to provide more services closer to home. However, we recognised that they will not always include full a trauma service with a complete range of critical care back-up. because it is not realistic that it should be available within 10 minutes for everyone in the country. I hope that Opposition Members will be prepared to engage in a realistic and mature dialogue with their communities about that. Yes; we want to provide as many services as we can as close as possible to people's homes, but that aim will always be tempered by issues of clinical safety, organisation, resources and training, and by the need to ensure that the royal colleges can accredit such circumstances. The picture is complex; it is not simply a matter of having a full range of accident and emergency services within 10 minutes of where every single person in the country lives.

Respectfully, I need no lectures on how to keep in touch with my community, having been born there and having had a continuous mandate from the people of Solihull for 31 years. I should, however, draw the Minister's attention to the perversity of justifying the downgrading of accident and emergency provisions on the grounds of lack of throughput, when throughput has been intentionally diminished by instructions to ambulance crews.

The hon. Gentleman knows that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hall Green (Mr. McCabe) said, a variety of services has been available at Solihull and Birmingham Heartlands over the years. There have been different protocol referrals, according to the needs of the patients who were being transported and referred. That links with the issue raised by the hon. Member for Wyre Forest (Dr. Taylor). If we are to explore different kinds of accident and emergency treatment and provision, it is crucial that we get the protocols right, so that the right patients go to the right place for the right treatment by the right members of staff. That will ensure that people do not end up being processed through one place before being transferred somewhere else, which would create difficult delays for patients.

rose—

I want to respond to the other points that hon. Members have raised, and I have four minutes to do so, so I want to press on.

My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hall Green made an important point about ensuring that there is a local dimension to such issues. A wider range of facilities is beginning to appear. There are not only accident and emergency departments, but nurse-led minor injury care centres and one-stop primary care centres, and walk-in centres are being developed. All those are about providing different elements of emergency care. We must challenge ourselves to think more imaginatively and more creatively about the provision of emergency care. We should think not only about the A&E department, but about the whole system, and it is crucial to ensure that it is interlinked.

Will the Minister respond to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Meriden (Mrs. Spelman) about providing information? When provision at St. Albans was merged with that at Hemel Hempstead— against strong opposition from locals and myself— we were told that the move was necessary to improve health outcomes. Since then, evidence of such improvements has not been forthcoming. We have asked that Ministers carry out a nationwide study of mergers to clarify whether they have produced better health outcomes, before further mergers, including the possible closure of half or three quarters of the accident and emergency units in Hertfordshire, are carried forward. Will the Minister promise to provide that information, and if not, why not?

What is important is that we are talking about what local people can decide to do for themselves. The hon. Member for Meriden will know that there were about eight options for various configurations of emergency services in her area. No decision has been taken on which options will go out for public consultation, but it is crucial that the detailed weighing-up of what is best for the local community and what combination of services will properly provide for local people is done at the local level, with the primary care trusts in the lead. It is crucial that we bring together clinicians, local patients and all those who make up the neighbourhood. It is not simply a case of the Government coming up with a national template—a top-down solution— that will act as a blueprint for everyone. Local communities must be involved.

On a point of order, Mr. Taylor. Is it in order for the Minister to misrepresent the words of my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley)? He asked whether she would publish the evidence on whether mergers and reconfigurations make a difference.

That is a matter for debate, not a point of order.

Thank you, Mr. Taylor. In the minute that I have left, I should commend the emergency care strategy to hon. Members. It is complex, and refers to streaming, extra investment and reform. It is key.

I challenge Opposition Members to be more creative and more imaginative in their approach to the issue, and I urge them to read the strategy. It has the full support of the British Association for Accident and Emergency Medicine, which looks forward to implementing it with the Government. The strategy was formulated with local people, so local communities have had a chance to ensure that it can work.

Opposition Members should not take such a simplistic view of emergency care. It is a complex issue and all the services are interrelated, but the arrangements can work. As usual, Opposition Members are being harbingers of doom and gloom, and feel that nothing can ever improve. I can promise that things will improve, however, provided that the strategy is properly implemented.

As you well know, Mr. Taylor, there is no doubt that farming is facing serious difficulties at the moment: farm incomes have been very low for the past Live years, the commodity price cycle is depressed, and the pound is very strong against the euro. To compound all that, there have been great difficulties, first, with BSE and, last year, with foot and mouth disease. The memory of the pyres and the pain of foot and mouth disease may well have brought people to the point where they are beginning to look for change in the farming industry.

I believe that a new consensus for change in the funding of farming is emerging. That mood of change is strengthened by a desire to reform the common agricultural policy. I am not entirely sure whether the entry of candidate countries such as Hungary and Poland will bring about major change. One school of thought suggests that that will cement the status quo, but there is an argument that the accession of those new member countries will at least provoke debate. The midterm review, which will take place shortly, gives us another opportunity for discussion.

I simply wish to tell the Minister and other colleagues that CAP reform is long overdue. It is no good just to wish for reform; the Government must be a key player—an active partner— in those debates. The Government, who want to be at the centre of Europe, have an opportunity to produce and influence change, but at the end of the day the £3 billion spent on the CAP could be spent more effectively.

The Curry report is another driver for change. It is important to recognise the fact that that report, "Farming and Food: a sustainable future", did not just magically appear; there was a manifesto commitment at the last general election to create such a policy commission. What is important is not the change itself, but the scope, scale and timetable for change.

The CAP will not be reformed overnight. Some voices have argued that we should follow the New Zealand example and get rid of subsidies overnight. That is a false view—it is unachievable for a member of the European Union— but there is a feeling among the public at large, the consumers of food, that we ought to scale down the food subsidy support that we give. However, we can embark on a process that has already begun— the process of switching funding from food production subsidies to payments for environmental gain and benefit. That process is not new; stewardship encapsulates it in a sense.

Of course the English rural development regulations allow us to transfer money—as they say in the trade—from pillar 1 to pillar 2. At the moment, that is funded by modulation at a rate of 4.5 per cent. The Curry report acknowledges that and argues that we must do much more. The Government have taken the Curry report seriously. They have broadly welcomed it, and the Prime Minister hosted a summit at Downing street not long ago. There will be further reaction to the report after regional discussions in September.

Some important initiatives have already been taken—for example, on the need to have benchmarks, to set up demonstration farms and to shorten the food chain. Lying behind the Curry report is an understanding that it is not just farming that brings wealth and investment to rural areas. The big lesson from the foot and mouth outbreak, when the countryside was closed, is that small businesses— pubs, bed and breakfasts and tourist attractions—faced very real problems. One of the important roles of farming and landowning is to develop a countryside and landscape that people are keen to visit. The notion of farmers and landholders as stewards of a changing countryside is very important.

However, there has not been much progress on the important recommendation in the Curry report to the effect that we need to continue to move away from subsidising crop production to payments for environmental gain and benefits. There are real problems with doing that, but I want the Minister today and the Government in the next few weeks and months to provide some clear signposts and milestones against which to measure change. We now have an opportunity—it may not come very often—to take forward that consensus for change.

In my own county. Nottinghamshire, farmers know that change is inevitable, and they are beginning to plan and influence change. My friend John Clarke, who is the chairman of the Nottinghamshire branch of the National Farmers Union and who farms at the White Post in Farnsfield, has convened a series of meetings involving farmers from north Nottinghamshire and, significantly, the East Midlands development agency to try to take some of the Curry theory and put it into practice in Nottinghamshire.

I notice that large business farmers in Nottinghamshire—people such as Tony Strawson, for example, who farms at Featherstone farm—have entered into stewardship in a big way. I noticed, too, when I was talking to him the other day, that he recycles the water and debris produced by washing his carrots and beet back on to his fields. He is also involved in short-term rotation coppicing. Just down the road, Richard Thomas, a large potato producer, has moved into stewardship and is moving quickly into organic production.

The central issue remains to be resolved: how can we achieve the Curry recommendation to have a broad and shallow environmental scheme? Curry suggests the only approach now available— the only show in town —which is to modulate not at 4.5 per cent., but at 20 per cent. by 2006–07. The difficult issue for the Minister and the Government is how to fund that change. Modulation has to be match funded and the price tag on that proposal is £500 million over three years. The key issue is how that £500 million lever for change can be matched against the Government's other spending commitments and priorities. I mention that as we move quickly into the current spending review.

I believe that the Curry report is welcomed not just by most elements of the farming and landowning community. but by the lobby groups and interests groups. It is significant that this week the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the Woodland Trust and 15 other organisations have launched a postcard campaign called "Invest in Our Countryside Now", in which they argue strongly that this opportunity to transfer funding into environmental gain and benefits is the way forward.

Sir Don himself is anxious that his report is not cherry picked, but seen as a whole. The Country Landowners Association is strongly in favour of moves towards payments for environmental gain and benefits.

In that context, the position of the NFU is interesting. When the report was launched, the NFU was a staunch opponent of modulation. However, if we read the small print and look at what NFU members are saying in the south-west, for example, we see that there is a growing awareness that this kind of approach may have real possibilities. My challenge to the Minister is that, given this opportunity, it is important that we set out signposts and mileposts. The mileposts that 1 would like us to set for the next financial year, 2003–04, would be to move to modulation at 10 per cent. That would be a big step change. I estimate—perhaps the Minister will correct me—that that would cost about an extra £150 million. If we are serious about wanting change, and I believe we are, spending of that kind would provide a significant indicator that that is the route the Government want to take.

What is important for farmers and landowners at the moment is to have real understanding and real knowledge about the way forward. People cannot live with uncertainty. They want to know the direction of travel. If the modulation proposals and the move towards a broad and shallow scheme are not taken forward, there will be real despair and disillusionment in the countryside. We must not let this consensus overwhelm us, however, as there are clear difficulties with this kind of approach that need to be overcome. Our commitment to the philosophy underlying Curry should not underestimate some of the practical difficulties of implementing such an approach.

First, if we are to move towards payment for environmental gain, we need to be able to measure success. A very real issue is how we define public goods, which this kind of approach entails. Different organisations will have different opinions of the public goods that they want delivered. The RSPB has a firm view of the way forward, as does the Woodland Trust. Their priorities may be complementary, but there might be concerns within the access lobby—in the Ramblers Association, for example, of which I am a member— that a desire for payments for greater access could put conservation in difficulty. We overcame those difficulties in the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000, and we can overcome those difficulties again. The issue is how we measure the output from this kind of approach and how we put a value on the environmental good, whether it is a plant, wildlife, hedgerows, access or new walls. Of course, for a payment of £150 million, one would need to be able to demonstrate clear outcomes.

Secondly, experience of agri-environment schemes shows that they can be complicated and have a heavy administrative cost. Any broad and shallow scheme of the kind that Curry has recommended should, in relative terms, be fairly simple. It needs to have easily defined goals, and the farmers and landowners involved in it need to have some degree of self-assessment. There may be a case for a whole farm approach towards environmental gain.

The hon. Gentleman is opening this debate and taking it forward in a thoughtful and useful way. My constituency contains a large proportion of the Peak District national park, which he knows well, and it therefore attracts a huge number of visitors to the Peak district. Some farmers say to me that they do not want farming to be seen as a museum, and that agriculture is very much an industry. Although I fully accept that new arrangements need to be introduced, we should be careful not to make them over-complicated. My slight worry about some of the hon. Gentleman's suggestions is that they might be a little over-prescriptive in telling farmers how to farm. I hope that he can address that in the rest of his remarks.

I visit the hon. Gentleman's constituency frequently, tramp the footpaths and look at the farming practices there. When I take my children up into the countryside to look down over the surrounding areas, they say to me, "Isn't it marvellous, Dad, it's never changed", but the countryside is always changing. It is man-made—we create it. It is how we handle and manage that change that is important. The lesson of the last year, during which I have not been able to go to the Peak district, was clear: the tourists and visitors to the countryside provide the real wealth. The other side of the coin is that farmers and landowners have a real role to play in creating a countryside that people want to visit.

I take the hon. Gentleman's point: it is a persistent complaint, as I have just acknowledged, that some of the agri-environment schemes can be very bureaucratic and over-prescriptive. I do not want us to fall into a trap—we have an elaborate system of CAP payments, through integrated administration and control system payments and the rest, and we must be careful not to move into a green system of payments that is similarly difficult and similarly over-complex. The reason that I argue for 10 per cent. modulation in 2003–04 is that that would give us a chance to experiment. We should not set these initiatives in stone; we should be relaxed about change. As I said, the countryside is always changing, and it will continue to change.

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that with greater bureaucracy there must be a responsibility on Government to set up the right mechanisms to ensure independent arbitration or the intervention of an ombudsman when there is a problem? It seems that, all too often, when the Department makes a decision, it is right, whatever the circumstances, and the farmer is wrong. We have all had that experience with IACS, but it is becoming increasingly clear that that also applies to the sort of schemes to which he refers.

I, too, have heard those concerns, and on several occasions I have taken up concerns about payments, late payments and wrong payments. My experience is rather different—I have found the Department willing to look at issues. It is a year since the creation of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and although much remains to be done in that new organisation, significant changes are taking place, which we need to encourage further.

I want to make a third point about the difficulties of this kind of approach. A broad and shallow scheme must be overlaid by other schemes. The environment has different hierarchies; in a sense, there is a pyramid of things that we need to protect. For example, if we want to protect limestone pavements or the dales, or if we want to protect ancient forest, as the Woodland Trust does, or, if we want to create new heathland in Sherwood forest in Nottinghamshire, such initiatives will cost more than the broad and shallow scheme. A big challenge for Government is to explore the urban fringes, where cars are dumped and abandoned and where antisocial behaviour occurs. We need to look imaginatively at how, using funding mechanisms, we can create informal places that people can visit. I therefore welcome the review of agri-environment schemes currently taking place. I hope that they will become simpler, but they need to mesh strongly with the broad and shallow scheme set out by Curry.

The final practical difficulty is the urgent need to demonstrate the consequences of the approach set out by Curry, which switches from payments for subsidies to payments for the environment. The Curry report was produced in the early part of the year. Farmers and landowners are looking for a message, one of which could well be: what is the consequence of taking that approach? Will farmers in the west country, for example, stand to gain more than large arable farmers in the eastern part of the country? We urgently need a model for the approach. The difficulty for the Minister is that our thinking is at an early stage, but it will be important for academics and the Government's resources to propose a series of ideas—examples—of what might happen if we proceed with Curry.

I began by saying that farming faces severe difficulties. The severity of the problem has opened up a real debate about the way forward for agriculture. There is an opportunity to change things and, after five very bad years, a determination to find a better way forward. The emerging consensus is that it is right to switch from subsidies on production to a system that makes direct payments for environmental benefits. Such opportunities do not arise often. There is a danger that unless the Department and the Government show leadership now and make the switch, farmers and landowners will face genuine despair. The programme is challenging, but I strongly believe that we should take that challenge and make the changes that I advocate.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Sherwood (Paddy Tipping) on securing the debate. In particular, I appreciate the thoughtful way in which he introduced it. He, at least two other Members in the Chamber and, indeed, you, Mr. Taylor, are members of the Select Committee on the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which is exploring the issues raised. That attention needs to be paid to the future funding of farming is beyond doubt. If there had been any doubt about that, the impact of the foot and mouth crisis and the outbreak of classical swine fever in East Anglia illustrated in a truly appallingly vivid way to urban and suburban areas just what happens when the rural economy collapses. It certainly surprised some people in high places who thought that rural Britain was a minority pastime.

An article published in The Sunday Times on 28 August 2001 pointed out that the average family farm income has fallen in five years from £80,000 annually to £8,000, and that farmers and farm workers are leaving the industry at the rate of 450 a week. As the chairman of the National Farmers Union put it to the Select Committee last week, that is like closing down Vauxhall Motors twice a year for two years.

The same article asked: who needs farmers? It said:

"In a global economy where anything can be imported from anywhere, chicken from Brazil, pork from Poland, beans from Kenya, production will always gravitate to where it is cheapest. And cheapest is rarely going to mean British. So why shouldn't food follow industries that have gone the same way, steel and coal for example?"

The article continued:

"There is a superficially attractive argument in favour of letting farming die. We won't starve. Raw materials can be brought abroad and we can still earn huge profits from processing them."

It is to challenge such assumptions that I welcome the chance to participate briefly in the debate.

It is obviously nonsense to suppose that if Britain stopped farming, food would handily come into the country in raw material form, leaving our processing intact. From Thailand would come not chicken, but chicken McNuggets, chicken Kiev and all the rest of it; from Eastern Europe would come not milk powder, but various desserts and milk shakes. Leaving aside the human and animal implications for health of such an import policy—although in passing I point out that most experts believe that the foot and mouth epidemic and classical swine fever outbreaks originated in imported infected food—it is clear that if the British farmer goes down, with him go millions of jobs in food processing, packaging, labelling and haulage. That sector of the national economy amounts to 14 per cent. of the total. Only the foolish would suggest that that can be jettisoned without national harm.

Is the right hon. Lady aware that in the past three years there has not been a single prosecution in respect of meat imports? Does not that suggest that there must be something wrong with the Customs system that monitors meat coming into England?

The hon. Gentleman—indeed, anyone interested in such matters—will know that that subject has been raised a number of times in the House. Back Benchers have exerted great pressure on the Government to clarify what they are doing in the face of our anxieties. Perhaps the Minister will address that in his response.

I support what the hon. Member for Sherwood said about the importance of the countryside for rural tourism and the part it play s in the national economic effort. Some 80 per cent. of our land is farmed. Rural tourism accounts for 6 per cent. of the national economic effort. We have to ask who would come to view a rural wasteland, yet that is what we may come to see as land is abandoned or farmed in ever larger parcels, and as farmers, who are more and more financially squeezed, cut out the care of hedges, headlands and drainage—in short, when they no longer care for the rural environment because they cannot afford to do so.

Will the Minister comment on the de facto restructuring in the industry? Anecdotally, and in my county, huge farm holdings, amounting to many thousands of acres, are being broken up, returned to tenancies or given over to contractors or to share farming. I know that it is difficult to collect statistics on that, but such practices will have an impact on the environment. Some of the land that is being broken up will be well farmed, but some will not. Indeed, in my county, the contractor who has undertaken to farm thousands of acres is also under severe financial pressure.

It is beyond debate that farming is essential economically and environmentally. However, one of the fascinating features about the debate in this country is that the public want to have it both ways. They want cheap food; one has only to map the price wars between rival supermarket chains to see that. As we heard in the Select Committee, although the supermarkets and other lobby groups claim that people are deeply interested in how food is produced— whether it is imported, organic or whatever—I see scant evidence of that in my weekly shopping. In any case, what explanation is there for the shocking fact that five years ago 4 to 5 per cent. of all chicken consumed in Britain was imported, and today that percentage is 40 per cent. and rising? How does our determination to have cheap food square with the other demands that we are told we make for high standards of landscape and environmental management?

There is certainly no shortage of literature devoted to the matter. When the Select Committee interviewed representatives from the Countryside Agency, we were interested to learn that no fewer than 62 organisations are devoting their attention to the problems of the rural economy. To those we must add a plethora of other bodies that will emanate from the proposed regional assemblies. Let us hope that their advice will be more welcome to the agriculture industry than the example given by the chairman of the East of England development agency who, at the Norfolk NFU annual meeting in March this year, pointed out that the agency's principal help to the sector over the past year had been a project to market pickled herring. I am sure, Mr. Taylor, that you can imagine how well that went down.

I also hope that the enormous amounts paid out by the agency will be better used in future than the resources it devotes to publicising the excellent publication that is before me. It gives 10 case studies of farmers coping with their difficulties and was produced in my constituency. When I rang up the offshoot of the agency to tell it how excellent I thought the publication was, I also asked how the agency was distributing it, but it did not have the least idea and did not have a database of farmers.

Order. May I ask the right hon. Lady to refer to the title of the document so that the record will be clear?

Certainly, Mr. Taylor. It is called "Managing the Future", and I am happy to hand it in with my notes.

As we are debating the future funding of farming, it is worth looking at the current situation. I hope that when the Select Committee produces its report it will focus on the product—that is to say, on food, other crops and then public good. That would be a welcome change because our experience in the Committee has been that too much debate is devoted to structures and systems. There needs to be a drastic simplification of the bodies, grant aiding and otherwise, concerned with farming. Both the Country Landowners Association and the NFU advocate a simplification, not to say a great reduction, in regulation for farmers. Greater clarity in planning law is needed if farmers are to be encouraged to diversify, and in the absence of other agencies and organisations that are able to do so, DEFRA should examine the economic and environmental impact of the current restructuring, no matter how difficult that is. There is a lot of talk about the food chain. Farmers producing our food should be closer to the food chain. It is difficult for mixed farmers, who have to see to everything, to engage in discussions on the price of wheat when that is not under their control.

These observations are minor and circumstantial. It is of more strategic interest to the industry that farmers know what view the Government take of their interests. What do Ministers think will be the future of the CAP? What influence can they have on its development and future shape? What can they practically achieve in the face of strongly nationalistic attitudes to agriculture in some EU member states, not to mention the current attitudes in the United States?

Do Ministers think that farming has a global future? If so, how will they ensure that the regional assemblies, where they exist—and if they exist—will give proper weight to rural issues, because their forerunners, the regional development agencies, certainly have not done so? What is to be done about food imports and labelling? Should farming move to a market-oriented system, and if so how soon?

Farming, in its creation of our rural landscape and its production of high-quality, healthy food, has served this country well. It is for this generation of Ministers and this Government to demonstrate that they value the contribution that farming has made to the well-being of Britain. The ball is in their court.

Members rose—

Order. There are seven Members standing, and I intend to call the first of the Front-Bench speakers at 12 o'clock, so if hon. Members could confine their remarks to five minutes or so, the great majority of them will be called.

I am grateful to be called in this important debate. Sometimes it is helpful to think about how we came to be where we are, and although I do not propose to go back to biblical times, some reflection on past centuries will not be unhelpful.

All of us who represent rural constituencies will have spoken to old boys whose grandfathers came to East Anglia in the 1930s, when land was effectively being given away. One could lease land rent-free for three or five years, just so that the landowner could have it farmed. In the '20s and '30s agriculture was in an absolutely appalling state. It was essentially rescued by the second world war —occasionally, good comes out of bad. We appreciate how important it was at that time to have our own agriculture and not to rely on the idea, which the right hon. Member for South-West Norfolk (Mrs. Shephard) read from a newspaper, that we can buy what we like from anywhere in the world. That did not seem to be the case in 1942. As a consequence of that we came to certain conclusions.

The Labour Government after the war enacted the regime of subsidy and support which has been carried on in essence to the common agricultural policy. Probably most of us have heard the story of the East Anglian farmer who in 1949 applied to join his local Conservative club. The secretary said, "You have to be a Conservative." The farmer replied that he had always been a Conservative, and when the secretary asked, "So why haven't you joined?", he said, "Well, it's only since the blessed socialists have been in that I can afford the membership fee." The moral of that story is alleged to be that the condition of farming substantially improved, as indeed it did, from the second world war onwards.

There are now other trends in the world that will affect support and subsidy in any event. The World Trade Organisation has certain views about what it perceives to be uncompetitive practices, and by moving a certain amount of support into environmental schemes, one may at least elude or evade too much of its investigation. My hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood (Paddy Tipping), with whose comments I substantially agree, apprised us of the difficulties of too rapid a move in that direction.

We must be aware that environmental subsidy and support is a fine thing, but we need to ensure that the overwhelming majority of it goes to support the continuation of farming and is not frittered away on the fringes and—in saying this I do not in any way denigrate cake shops—on things that are not integral to the rural economy. We appreciate the value that farming puts back into the community. It is common to quote the figure of £3 billion—I believe that it was higher than that at one stage—that is spent in support of farming in this country.

I do not like to use phrases such as "added value" because they are inherently meaningless, but there cannot be much doubt that the boost that tourism—just to name one industry—receives from farming is immense. If there were no farms in lakeland and elsewhere in this country, the land would be different and tourism would be that much poorer. It is almost impossible to calculate the immense value that farming adds to other industries. We need to ensure, therefore, that in any movement towards environmental support, the money goes into farming.

I can contemplate nothing worse at this time, when farming has been laid low by a series of worldwide economic problems and inherent internal disasters such as foot and mouth, BSE and classical swine fever, than saying that there may be some merit in the New Zealand model. In my judgment, for this country there is no merit at all in the New Zealand model: we are not comparing like with like. That model could not be continued in this country.

There is a limit to what we can do with environmental support. The Curry report attempts to overcome some of the difficulties by using the phrase "broad and shallow". If I have a criticism of the Curry report it is that it has slipped into using the jargonese that so bedevils all government practice, particularly for farming. I first thought that "broad" and "shallow" were two different choices, but they are probably the same choice. As I understand the proposal, put simply, it is for a basic initial environmental payment to all farmers based on acreage. That is the lowest level of environmental support that would be given, but additional payments could be made if there were specific schemes, such as the present stewardship scheme.

The problem with the stewardship scheme is that it is almost as hard to get into as it is to get into Parliament. I believe that only 14 per cent. of farmers are members of the scheme. Its administration is by its nature very costly, so I am not certain that it always delivers rapidly the exact results that we want. We have all been to farms in our own divisions and seen the remarkable conservation that takes place. It happens not because there is a conscious attempt to conserve, but because farming has always been done that way.

I recently went to a very small farm on the edge of my division where there are splendid mixed oak and small-leaf lime woods. I asked the farmer whether he got any financial support to keep the woods in that condition, and he said, "No, they've always been there. We don't cut them down or plough them up. We keep them." I told him that he could go into preservation and he said that he was thinking of doing so. We should reward farmers who have, for generations, preserved the most attractive aspects of the countryside, rather than paying those who have been less conservation-minded in the past to introduce new schemes.

I shall not delay the Chamber for too long, but I saw a particular danger in the remark of the right hon. Member for South-West Norfolk about breaking up large farms and using contractors. "Contractor" reveals nothing about the qualities of the man himself: he has no interest whatsoever in conservation in the area that he is contracted to farm. He is paid to carry out a particular function; he may be sorry if he ploughs up a rare plant or destroys the nest of a ground-nesting bird, but his position is entirely different from that of the resident or tenant farmer. We need to devise a scheme, perhaps based on the Curry report—a good light for the future—which ensures that money going into agriculture goes to the farm. That would enable farming to remain a vital industry in this country and, at the same time, ensure that we gain benefits from genuine conservation and environmental improvement.

Set-aside initially meant leaving fields fallow in mediaeval times, but many such fields are an abomination today and serve no useful conservation purpose. The set-aside scheme should be based on Curry's recommendations, which would need quite a lot of money. However, subsidies would not be taken away but redirected to where they are needed. All farmers should be eligible, not just those who farm in picturesque locations.

Farming incomes in Wales are derived mainly from milk, beef and sheep, which comprise 87 per cent. of the gross output of Welsh agriculture, and are clearly under pressure. Farmers in Wales seek to diversify, but as we saw in the foot and mouth crisis, diversifying into tourism can be of limited value. Farming incomes are crucial to the rural economy, so their decline is a disaster, not only for farmers but for agricultural communities as a whole. Those incomes are low, whatever certain newspapers and hon. Members say. The National Assembly for Wales' forecast for net farm incomes in 2001–02 in Wales is £5,300, not more than £8,000 as quoted earlier; that is £5,300 for working hard all hours.

Wales experiences out-migration, made worse in many rural areas by its crushing effect on the vitality of the Welsh language. We must foster and develop new and traditional agricultural skills, but young people, the carriers of those skills for future generations, are leaving the country in their thousands, pulled away by the lure of the city and pushed away by the low returns from persevering with farming that they see everywhere. They are also pushed away by the growth in the size of holdings and the resulting difficulty in getting started.

I want to raise an issue that is not always prominent in discussions of the future funding of farming—the lessons to be learned from farming in developing countries. Yesterday, I had the inspiring experience of attending the launch of the Christian Aid campaign, "Listen to Africa; please forgive the obvious plug, Mr. Taylor, but this is Christian Aid week. Christian Aid has produced a document called "Listen to Africa" which I commend to all hon. Members. I shall quote a few points from a section engagingly headed "The Blair plan for tackling poverty", which states that the Prime Minister

"called for more open markets in Europe and North America to help tackle poverty by allowing in more products from poor countries such as Ghana. He also criticised farming subsidies paid by rich nations to their own farmers. These subsidies total £230 billion annually—more than the GDP of the whole of the African continent … In March 2002, Christian Aid put the Prime Minister's theories to the test, during a fact-finding trip".

Is the hon. Gentleman aware that the Americans are introducing a Bill to give an extra £123 billion to just under 2 million American farmers in the next 10 years?

The hon. Gentleman makes a telling point, to which I shall return later.

As I was saying, Christian Aid put the Prime Minister's theories to the test. Its report states:

"The clear and overwhelming message from those working to combat poverty in the north— and from poor people themselves—is that access to markets in rich countries alone will not help."

Christian Aid says that the benefits of globalisation are dubious, which must strike a chord with farmers and consumers in Wales and the United Kingdom, and perhaps also with the Minister, in his heart of hearts. The picture is not simple. Developing countries can benefit from certain types of trade. Ghana, for example, benefits from trade in pineapples and organic bananas, but I suspect that there are few banana or pineapple plantations on the wind and rain-swept uplands of my constituency in Eryri. Christian Aid estimates that the more open markets in the rich world would benefit the 49 poorest countries to the tune of only £1.5 billion. I therefore plead for less piety from people pushing the panacea of open trade.

In response to the hon. Member for Bridgwater (Mr. Liddell-Grainger), I shall quote the Christian Aid report, which states:

"35 to 40 per cent. of Ghana's imported rice comes from the USA. If the new US Farm Bill is passed, the USA will pay US$171 billion agricultural subsidies to its farmers."

Rice farmers alone could benefit from more than $8 billion, a sum greater than Ghana's gross domestic product. Farmers struggling to survive in Wales and the UK, including hill farmers and dairy men whose incomes have tumbled disastrously, have much in common with people in other countries threatened by globalisation. The villain of the piece is not to be found in the developing world, where people are prevented from subsidising their agricultural production, but elsewhere where people can afford to ignore the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

In conclusion, there is no need to be too pessimistic. Farmers are enterprising and adaptable, but Welsh agriculture is subsidy-dependent as a result of our geography, climate and topography. The National Assembly for Wales estimates that for every 1 per cent. reduction in direct farm subsidy, farm incomes are reduced by 1.5 per cent. I am grateful to the Farmers Union of Wales for drawing that fact to my attention. Insufficient consideration has been given to the effects of cuts in general farm subsidy on farm incomes in the build-up to the CAP mid-term review. The Minister should realise that the modulation framework adopted by the UK is clearly detrimental to the future of the family farm structure in Wales.

I have taken careful note of your remarks, Mr. Taylor, and shall try to speak for about five minutes to give other Members an opportunity to contribute. I shall therefore make only two points.

I shall start by looking, like other hon. Members, at the background to the current crisis, the extent of which is suggested by the fact that the income of British agriculture is some £2 billion below break-even point. The crisis has three obvious causes: the value of the pound; overproduction across the developed world, resulting in low prices for the past three or four years; and, in our own case, although we are not unique, the number of animal disease breakdowns and their implied costs.

I shall address the reform of the common agricultural policy and an issue that the Select Committee on the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs tried to tease out last week. If we are going to subsidise the industry, we need to consider what we mean by public policy, which is the key to understanding what may make this industry different from others. If it is different, we need to identify what we need to support and what we do not.

I shall make some provocative remarks about the CAP. While the Curry report is interesting, it is minimalist. It only identifies where we are and outlines the need to inch along to make changes, subject to our membership of the CAP, our obligations to the WTO and so on. The CAP doubtless served a purpose and had three aims: to increase production to ensure food security; to support farm incomes; and to provide affordable and accessible food for the population of western Europe. Only the third of those aims can remotely be seen as being achieved. There are those of us who believe that because food poverty remains a problem in western Europe, as it does in the rest of the world, even the third aim has not been fully achieved. In recent times the other two aims of the CAP have resulted in unmitigated disaster. There has been massive overproduction, which is unnecessary and undesirable, and farm incomes have been at rock bottom. One wonders how anyone could design such a scheme, whose aims are mutually incompatible. Clearly, we must get away from the current design.

Subsidies to support production have five undesirable consequences. First, they give the wrong market signals. There is much evidence to suggest that because of the way in which the food chain has operated, subsidies give farmers the wrong message and make it easy for the all-powerful supermarkets to get what they want.

Secondly, the subsidy regime is anti-co-operative. There is little evidence in farming of the co-operation that exists in other parts of the economy. I know that cooperatives are stronger in other parts of Europe—as a Co-operative Member, I will always stress that. We need to understand that the co-operative system has not worked in this country, and 1 attribute that largely to the operation of the subsidy regime.

Thirdly, subsidies are often paid to the wrong people. They go to some of the richest farmers in this country, who could endure market strictures, and to people who farm as a hobby. I do not intend to be pejorative. It is a myth that we have fewer farmers, if we define farmers according to the definition currently used by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, but there are people who come on to the land and receive subsidy without adding to the food chain. They may have a bit of land and a few animals, but it is wrong that they should receive subsidies, while people who desperately need help to remain in farming do not receive sufficient support.

The fourth undesirable outcome of the subsidy regime is fraud. I shall be careful what I say, in view of my recent remarks. However, no one can pretend that the CAP has not led to excessive fraud. Fifthly, as the hon. Members for Caernarfon (Hywel Williams) and for Bridgwater (Mr. Liddell-Grainger) pointed out, the subsidy regime gives the Americans all the justification that they need for offering billions of dollars to support their farmers. They say, "It's all very well being lectured by the Europeans, but they are worse than we are." That is unacceptable.

We should identify those whom we need to support in the countryside, why we need to support them and how we will do it. I am not against environmental payments, but we should not see that as the only answer. Other speakers have made that point clearly. We should support certain types of farmers, whether Welsh hill farmers or tenant farmers. I have a long history of speaking in this place on behalf of tenant farmers. If those are the people whom we need to support, let us support them and let us be open about it. Let us give them a decent standard of living so that they can farm properly.

There are other farmers who can access the market satisfactorily, and they should be encouraged to do so and to build co-operative relationships with the processors and with other producers so that they can take on the supermarkets. That is much more radical than Curry's conclusions. We need to reform the CAP. We should give our partners in Europe an ultimatum: either we reform the CAP or we repatriate much of the money going into that basket. Finally, our public policy in regard to agriculture needs to be much more sensible and much more creative than it is.

If the Government truly intend to move on in their relations with the farming community, they need to regain some of the confidence that they have lost among that community. On reflection, I believe—and this view is almost universally shared in the west country—that it was a mistake on the part of the Secretary of State to dismiss rather haughtily the findings of Professor Mercer's investigation of the foot and mouth outbreak in Devon. There are lessons to be learned by all those involved in farming and tourism. That was a missed opportunity.

The mistrust is further exacerbated by the recent extraordinary idea contained in the statutory instrument on animal health, which many of us see as giving the Government increased powers to enter property and slaughter animals without their owner's consent. No doubt the Minister will deal with that in his concluding remarks.

No discussion of farming and the funding of farming can take place without reference to enlargement and the common agricultural policy. We seem to be moving towards a consensus that we need to deal with that sooner rather than later. There is much of interest in the Curry report, particularly its talk of modulation. However, there are two aspects of farming in this country that need to be considered: how existing farms are to survive, and how they are to prosper in the future.

Talk of second pillars and agri-environment schemes is appropriate in some areas, and I concede that such schemes have a large role to play, but environmentally sensitive areas and the countryside stewardship schemes apply to only a limited number of farmers. Currently, only 14 per cent. of farmers in England are involved in such schemes.

For the dairy farmers of Devon the immediate problem is nothing to do with agri-enhancing schemes of one sort or another; it is simply farmgate prices. Many milk farms are going out of business each week. The price of milk is at an almost historic low—farmers are getting about 15p per litre, but that is a premium price. By the time they have given a further halfpenny per litre towards a milk scan and another halfpenny towards a cell count, many farmers are receiving 13p per litre. Under planned reforms of the European export market, the price of milk in shops will be slashed and even smaller farms will be forced out of business. That is supported by the Government's own findings.

I turn to the livestock industry in my part of the world and its future. In reply to a question from me in March this year about the impact of the regulations governing animal movements on the viability of livestock markets, the Minister conceded:

"Livestock markets have an important role to play in the marketing of farm animals between the various stages of production and some are developing a broadened range of services to farmers."

The Minister continued:

"We will be considering carefully the recommendations from the Policy Commission on future developments in livestock marketing."—[Official Report, 7 March 2002; Vol. 381, c. 480W.]

The problem with the biosecurity regime is that it means, certainly to one of the markets in my part of the world, doubling the number of staff, mainly to keep records of names, addresses and registration numbers of buyers attending, plus a man on the gate to wash the wheels and another on the wash-out. That is at least five extra staff.

There is a further problem, which I ask the Minister to address. While the livestock markets were closed because of foot and mouth, many farmers made alternative arrangements with slaughterhouses throughout the country. We can criticise the supermarkets for the price that they are paying the farmers for milk, but will the Minister also look into the relationship between the slaughterhouses and the supermarkets? Tesco now controls many of the slaughterhouses. It is unwise for farming to be so dependent on the supermarkets. Indeed, the relationship between farming and supermarkets warrants careful investigation. I hope that the Minister will address that in his concluding remarks.

The west country looks the way it does because it has been intensively farmed over the years. That is why people come and spend their holidays with us, and why we have twice as many tourists in the south-west as in Scotland and Wales. Any debate on the future of farming should take those factors into account. We should have spent a little more time this morning discussing how the industry can recover its confidence, not least its confidence in the Government, and how a level playing field can be created, especially in respect of imports.

In conclusion, diversification is to be encouraged, but it must always be an add-on, not a replacement for farming.

I shall highlight one specific point for the Minister's attention, as I do not have much time.

The Exmoor Trust was launched on the back of foot and mouth disease, and has raised £84,000 from the people of Exmoor to be spent on farming. As a keen ornithologist, the Minister is well aware of the problem in Exmoor: the lack of resources put into such areas from the centre. National parks have been mentioned; Exmoor is a national park and it needs resources. When local people are left having to raise money on their own, it is clear that there is something fundamentally wrong with the state of farming in this country. The money should come from the centre outwards.

The latest National Farmers Union figures for farming incomes show a decrease of one third in respect of cereal farmers, virtually no change for hill livestock farmers and a slight increase in milk incomes, which is evident only because of the distortion caused by foot and mouth. Modulation can work only if we continue to support farmers. Otherwise there will be no farmers to support, as they will not be able to afford to work in farming.

12 noon

I congratulate the hon. Member for Sherwood (Paddy Tipping) on securing this debate.

We are discussing the funding of farming, but we often seem to miss the idea that farming, like any other industry, is supposed to make the profits that are fundamental to the continued success of any business. Profits are vital not only in terms of paying wages and so on, but in two other very important ways: continuing a business and ensuring that it expands. If investment is to continue, a return must be gained on what has already been made, and if a business is to become more efficient and expand, further investment will be necessary.

My speech will concentrate on profitability. Although we talk an awful lot about grants, subsidies, diversification and so on, it is fundamentally the profitability of farming that will sustain it in the longer term. Members of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee will remember that Sir Don Curry came to the Committee to speak about his report. Under questioning, he agreed with me that there was sufficient profitability in the total food chain to provide everybody in the farming link with a decent and fair return on their investment and a reward for their labour. When he was pressed a little further, he accepted— I think that he was somewhat embarrassed to do so—that the links in that chain are very differently organised, so not every link is receiving its due profitability.

It is no great coincidence that we see tables demonstrating that farmgate prices have declined over 10 years while consumer prices for products on the shelves have risen in real terms, and that farm incomes have been decimated and supermarket profits have risen. We could consider every individual aspect of the situation, but those broad facts are correct, and they are not coincidental.

There has been talk of creating a food chain centre, and I hope that links and relative profitability in the food chain might be one of the things that such a centre would consider. To my mind, there is a distinct possibility that we shall put in public subsidy at the bottom end of the chain to support our farmers, merely to find that that funding transfers upwards through dividends to the shareholders of large supermarket operations. That cannot be a reason for us to try to support farmers; they need genuine profitability, and to be paid properly for the investment that they have made and rewarded for what they do.

It is not only a question of the increased profitability of supermarkets; an increase in subsidy has a greater effect in raising land prices and tenants' rents.

That is partly true, although the tax system probably has an even greater effect on current land prices, especially through capital gains tax regulations.

I agree with all the previous speakers about the common agricultural policy, but the fact is that it is not within our gift to change it, and major changes are unlikely to be made in next year's mid-term review. Perhaps the Minister will comment on that, but we have seen in the past that such changes are unlikely to be made in that way. We must look for engines of change that are within the Government's gift, and think about what they can do now.

There may be two or three things that the Government can do. First, Sir Don Curry talked about modulation, which was the principal part of his engine for change. We would like the Government to give some indication that DEFRA will fight to ensure that in any comprehensive spending review, moneys will made available to support Sir Don Curry's proposals. If not, the whole modulation exercise will have no effect and make no change whatever.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

I have only five minutes, so I would like to continue.

Secondly, we have revisited the idea of an early retirement scheme on many occasions. The scheme can currently be introduced within the CAP. The Government have resolutely set their face against that proposal, but it is clear that for real change to occur, we need to allow some farmers to retire with dignity, to allow new blood and fresh ideas to come in.

Thirdly, we need to restore profitability to farming, which will encourage those who work in the sector. It is no good introducing an early retirement scheme and hoping that young people will come in and new money will be invested in an industry that has no real chance of achieving profitability in its own right, but is simply a means of attracting grants and subsidies, and perhaps a marginal increase in the value of land assets. Those proposals are within the Government's gift. They do not require radical overhaul of the CAP, and they can be implemented—but political will is required for that to happen.

One sector has not yet been considered in any great depth. We often talk about milk, beef, sheep and so on, but I want to talk about the egg industry. I must declare a constituency interest, as a very large egg producer is based in my area. Those in the industry have to take some very clear investment decisions, as it still faces considerable uncertainty about the future of conventional egg laying, especially in relation to the cages that will be permitted under current EU legislation until January 2012. Thereafter, the so-called enriched cages, containing a nest box, perch and so on, will be required.

It is vital that UK egg producers be given clear assurances about the availability of each production system, to allow timely investment decisions to be made. Such decisions cannot be made one year before the regulations take effect. Farming is a long-term business that needs clear guidance. The farm animal welfare regulations that will implement the EU directive will be introduced at some stage.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

I am sorry, but I really do not have much time if the Conservative spokesman, too, is to speak.

The costs for the egg industry will be heavy, at a time when it will find them extremely difficult to afford and even to plan for, especially as market access for third country eggs is set to increase as a result of Doha. The egg industry is important, but is not subsidised and has made enormous investments, not least in improving health following salmonella, including the introduction of the little lion displayed on its products and so on. The industry is still competing, but it needs a steer from Government on their proposals.

I recognise that the Minister will be short of time, but I should like to ask a few questions. If he cannot respond, may I implore him to write to me? I hope that he will be able to do so. First, will the Government clearly support the Curry report by seeking the cash that is needed from the Treasury in the comprehensive spending review? Will they reconsider the potential for introducing an early retirement scheme to provide an engine of change?

As for the egg industry, will the Minister give some categorical assurances that if the EU directive is to be implemented, it will be introduced without any amendment so that it is evenly applied throughout the whole EU? We must get away from thinking that we can do things better, and that we should try to lead Europe on such matters while at the same time sacrificing the industry that we are trying to support.

Will the Minister also ensure that there is proper consultation with the industry on the future of enriched cages? The industry needs to understand the Government's thinking on that issue, as big investment plans are being held in abeyance. If the industry cannot implement those plans in a timely fashion and get the money together, it too will be threatened by further imports, and we will see another part of UK agriculture begin to wither.

I start by congratulating the hon. Member for Sherwood (Paddy Tipping) on securing the debate and on the extremely thoughtful and constructive way in which he introduced it.

The hon. Gentleman was right to say that British agriculture is at something of a turning point. Successive crises concerning animal disease and the severe and prolonged recession in all sectors have led many people in farming to wonder whether there is a future in farming enterprises—not only for them, but for their children and grandchildren. That is happening at a time when there are major international pressures on the United Kingdom to change the system of support that we have applied until now.

It is important to bear in mind the dire state of farming. According to evidence recently given to the Select Committee on Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs by the Institute of Agricultural Management, total income from farming in this country is now less than the combined value of arable and livestock direct payments. So whenever we debate in Parliament transferring money away from direct payments into environmental payment schemes or other alternatives, we are talking about transferring money away from businesses that in most cases do not have any financial cushion left to secure themselves against the risk of such changes resulting from Government policy.

It is vital to keep at the forefront of our minds the fact that farming is essentially a business, and that we should try to secure the conditions whereby it can again become profitable. I hope that the Minister will be able to assure us that the Government will accord the Curry report recommendations that propose ways of making farming not only sustainable but profitable the same degree of importance and urgency as the parts of the report that deal with changes to support schemes and a shift towards environmental payments.

International pressures have reinforced the domestic crisis in farming, causing people to reflect on the future. I should be interested to hear the Government's view on whether recent developments in the United States are likely to make a difference to the World Trade Organisation pressures on us. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgwater (Mr. Liddell-Grainger) said, the proposed massive increase in subsidy for United States farmers would give them considerably more subsidy per head than farmers in the European Union. That must have an impact on the future of international negotiations.

I have a similar question about the scale of the impact of the forthcoming enlargement of the EU. As soon as applicant countries become full members they will become entitled to direct payments. Will the delay in effecting enlargement mean, as some have suggested, that there is more scope under the current budgetary ceilings than had been previously assumed for those payments to be made without bankrupting the whole common agricultural policy—at least not in the immediate term?

I shall now move on to the question at the centre both of the debate and of the Curry report—the proposal to switch from direct payments to farmers to a system based on environmental support. Do the Government think that modulation is the best method? The debate centres on that idea at the moment, but even in the period of less than a week for which I have held my current Front-Bench responsibilities, I have become aware of farmers who question it. They suggest that cross-compliance, which means making direct payments conditional upon environmental outcomes, might be a better way of approaching the subject.

Modulation is just a word—a piece of jargon—that could be applied in several different ways. Do the Government expect the Commission to propose a compulsory scheme of modulation throughout the European Union? If so, do they expect such a scheme to be based on the United Kingdom model of a flat-rate system or the French model, in which there is a different scale depending on the type of farm involved? That decision will have a considerable impact on certain agricultural sectors, especially the arable sector.

Although the Curry report is a good read and its proposals are stimulating, it has one serious flaw: it provides no detailed analysis of the costs of its recommendations either for farmers or for taxpayers. As regards farmers, Sir Don Curry told the Select Committee that there would be very few losers by his proposals, but he did not produce any sectoral analysis of how those proposals would affect different parts of agriculture.

Given that the Government have had four months to reflect on the Curry report, they should have been able to conduct that type of analysis themselves by now. I hope that the Minister will be able to tell us that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs will shortly issue the detailed analysis that is essential if Parliament and the agricultural industry are to be able to make an informed assessment of proposals made by the Commission or the Department. An obvious question to ask is whether it is true that sectors such as pigs, poultry and horticulture, which do not receive direct payments, will be eligible for the proposed broad and shallow environmental payments scheme. If so, the money will be spread more thinly among the farmers from whom the direct payments will have been taken away.

There are similar questions about the impact of the modulation proposals on taxpayers. Curry suggested a total figure of about £0.5 billion, but he admitted in evidence to the Select Committee that that was a starting point—a ballpark figure—and that factors such as extra checks for imported meat would probably necessitate more Government expenditure on top of that. It is difficult to assess the impact of proposals for environmental payments without knowing whether the Government are prepared to provide the match funding that Sir Don Curry proposed. He argued that without that match funding, the shift to 10 per cent., or even 20 per cent., modulation would not be a practical option.

I referred in my opening remarks to the need for us all to remember the fundamental importance of seeing farms as businesses, and that we should see it as our duty to do whatever we can to restore British agriculture to profitability. That may necessitate positive action and initiatives by the Department. It also means that the Department must reflect, pause, hesitate and cease to impose additional costs on agriculture, especially at a time when farmers have no spare cash with which to meet those extra regulatory burdens. The implementation of the nitrates directive will impose enormous costs on British farmers. The Government are floating ideas about disease insurance, which the Curry report said was likely to be prohibitively expensive for agriculture unless controls on illegal imports—a clear responsibility of the Government—are stepped up considerably.

I hope that the Government will take seriously the Curry proposal that the Department should undertake an annual assessment of the regulatory burden that it is imposing on British agriculture. That exercise would be a salutary discipline, and I hope that it would be followed by swift action to reduce that regulatory burden and the costs for our farmers.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood (Paddy Tipping) on securing the debate and on his thoughtful and comprehensive speech, which was appreciated by hon. Members from all parties. It dealt with serious and complex issues surrounding the future funding of farming in this country. I welcome the hon. Member for Aylesbury (Mr. Lidington) to his new responsibilities. If he is shadowing my portfolio, I expect to see him regularly at Adjournment debates and in Standing Committees on statutory instruments. I am sure that we shall exchange views regularly.

In the time available, I shall try to deal with some of the points made by my hon. Friends the Members for Sherwood, for Braintree (Mr. Hurst) and for Stroud (Mr. Drew), the right hon. Member for South-West Norfolk (Mrs. Shephard), and the hon. Members for Caernarfon (Hywel Williams), for East Devon (Mr. Swire), for South-East Cornwall (Mr. Breed), for Bridgwater (Mr. Liddell-Grainger) and for Aylesbury.

I concede that in this country, there is a consensus for change in the operation of the common agricultural policy. That encompasses farming, countryside, environmental and, indeed, political organisations. How do we achieve that change? The Food and Farming Commission report has been published, fulfilling a manifesto commitment. It was a good thoughtful report that identified many of the problems in the sector. The Government acknowledge that agriculture is suffering from undoubted difficulties, but many of them are not new. Structural problems have existed in the industry for many years, and we need to tackle them.

I was especially struck by a comment in the Curry report about the commission's identification of what it terms a "disengagement" of agriculture from the market and from consumers. There is a need to re-engage.

Will the Minister give way?

I am normally happy to give way, but I have only nine minutes to answer all the questions and my time is therefore limited. I apologise to the hon. Gentleman.

Part of re-engagement is the move away from production subsidies, which have distorted the market so greatly. My hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood wanted a clear time scale. The milestones in our approach include several regional meetings; last week I attended the Epsom meeting for the south-east of England. Their purpose is to get some feedback from stakeholders about the Curry report. We are also working hard on preparing the shape of a broad and shallow scheme, and considering its operation.

The recommendations entail significant financial implications. The match costs of modulation alone are £275 million and we have to make the case for the resultant benefits for the industry and the wider community. The spending review 2002 does that. Through consultation and the spending review, we expect to be in a position to make announcements about the way forward by the autumn. That is the road map for dealing with the proposals.

We take the proposals seriously. They are important and we can get on with several of them straight away. For example, we have set up the organic action plan, and, as I said, work on the broad and shallow scheme is under way. The nature of modulation and the whole farm approach are being considered now.

I greatly appreciate the interest of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee. Its involvement has been constructive and thoughtful. I have always had a high regard for it, both in opposition and in government. Its findings help shape and guide Government policy and thinking and I look forward to its reports on the matters that we are discussing.

I appreciate the points about total income from farming, but we need to be careful about the presentation of some of the statistics, and that includes current figures. According to our figures, total income from farming increased by 11 per cent. last year. We must be careful about interpretation. For example, the average subsidy for a livestock farm is approximately £30,000 a year, but after payment to the farmer and the family, it produces a net farm income of about £8,000. Such poor returns on that sort of subsidy clearly show that there is a problem with the system.

Large subsidies do not necessarily help the sector. In many ways, they distort the market and do not help farmers to get a return on their income. That applies to the milk sector among others. There are several reasons for low milk prices, but intervention sets a floor in the market that is not always helpful. There were predictions of a big drop in milk output after foot and mouth disease, but that did not happen. Production increased, and one of the problems with price is caused by supply and demand. That should even out, but I acknowledge the current pressures on the milk sector.

Let me deal with some of the questions about the shape of farming and change. There has been a longterm trend of consolidation into bigger agricultural units. Despite an overall decline in the number of farms, bigger farms have increased. It is difficult to measure some recent trends, but I shall give the right hon. Member for South-West Norfolk my views. I believe that small farms are holding on and may even be increasing. That is partly because people with other forms of income are prepared to buy smallholdings. They do not therefore rely on a small farm for their total income.

Newcomers in the sector often have the freedom to innovate and show great enterprise. I have seen some good examples of that. For example, a person with a horticultural holding, which was not especially small, was voted horticulturist of the year. His background was not in farming but in the music industry. He decided that he wanted to go into farming and he has been innovative and successful.

There is a trend whereby medium-sized farms come together to co-operate and reduce their margins. That is all to the good because there is a need for greater cooperation, which we want to encourage. The Curry report acknowledged that. There is also growth in contract management, although it is difficult to specify its scale.

Hon. Members mentioned globalisation. There are pressures on our producers and their standards. Quality assurance schemes, marketing and consumer education have a strong role to play. Educating consumers about what they are paying for when they support British producers—such as animal welfare, countryside management and a range of attendant benefits—is valuable. We can do more about that, as the Curry report acknowledged.

The global market is a fact of life. It is constantly distorted, and I believe that the American announcement on subsidies is most unhelpful. It is an example of the Americans saying one thing and doing another about the free market and world trade. Those matters must be resolved in talks in the World Trade Organisation. Doha had a positive outcome because it paved the way for the sort of framework that we support.

As the hon. Member for Caernarfon said, there are international implications because subsidies in rich countries cause distortions in developing countries. The problem with the EU and other countries is that surpluses in the market depress not only our prices but those of the international market. That brings down world prices even further. It must stop, and most people recognise that.

The hon. Member for Bridgwater made a succinct intervention. I support the work of community groups, such as the Exmoor Trust, that come together. There is a range of possible support, not only from DEFRA but from the Countryside Agency and national parks. I hope that they will explore all the options.

I stress to the hon. Member for South-East Cornwall the fact that there are food chain initiatives, and I agree that the industry must engage more downstream. The laying hens directive will be tabled in full and unaltered. There is a need for discussion and engagement with the industry about, for example, enriched cages. However, the directive will be tabled unchanged. Any discussion about change will entail a full public consultation and the industry will have a chance to participate in it.

I hope that I have dealt with many of the main points. We have considered an important subject and we respect the work of the Curry commission, which points the way forward. There is much work to be done in the mid-term review of the CAP, and we are working on that and on the review of the agri-environment schemes. This is an exciting and challenging time for agriculture, and we intend to move forward through engaging with the industry and with other partners.

I am delighted to have an opportunity to raise an issue of the greatest importance to my constituents. I am glad that the Minister is present—as is my hon. Friend the Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath), with whom I share the South Somerset district council boundary.

Although I am focusing on a restricted area, and only on crime, I expect we shall find that many of the issues that arise are common to areas well beyond not just South Somerset but Avon and Somerset. I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for Somerton and Frome will speak about some of those issues, as well as the local issues.

My main reason for initiating the debate is the startling rise in the Somerset and South Somerset crime statistics that has taken place over the past year. In Avon and Somerset as a whole, crime has increased by more than 19 per cent. There have been even larger increases in particular categories: burglary from dwellings has risen by 22.5 per cent., robbery by some 63 per cent., and thefts from motor vehicles by 22.2 per cent.

The increase in crime has occurred not just in the traditional problem areas in Avon and Somerset such as Bristol, but in more rural parts such as the South Somerset district council area, the constituency of Yeovil and the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Somerton and Frome. Over the past year crime has risen by 29.6 per cent. in Chard—an astonishing figure—and by 33 to 34 per cent. in the sector covering Chard, in the west of my constituency. Those are dramatic increases, which must concern the Minister as well as all who live in that part of the country.

Much of the crime has fallen into economically related categories—for instance, car theft, burglary and robbery. There is also a significant amount of retail crime, and a strong feeling that the Government are not doing enough to deal with it in all parts of the country.

What can have happened over one year to bring about such dramatic increases? It is difficult to believe that criminals have become that much more effective, or the police that much more ineffective, during a single year. Senior local police officers to whom I have spoken in the past week tell me that there are two principal reasons for the increases in South Somerset and throughout Avon and Somerset. Their first and main worry is the increase in the amount of drugs entering the area and, indeed, the country—especially crack cocaine, which is arriving in large quantities from countries such as Jamaica. It is expensive and highly addictive, and seems to be increasing the amount of crime that is necessary to fund a habit in which more and more people are becoming involved.

The second problem must be of great concern to Ministers, and should be taken into account in the making of policy on crime. Over the past year there has been a shift to what local police describe as an ethical reporting approach, which means that more crime is now being recorded. That may be the reason for the apparent extraordinary increases in some economically related crimes such as vehicle interference and burglary from non-dwellings, which in the past might have been reported to police but not recorded as crime statistics.

That might, in a sense, make us feel more relaxed about the increase in crime. The police consider that about 10 per cent. of the 20 or 30 per cent. increase in parts of Avon and Somerset may be due to the changes in reporting practice. If the police are now able to present the full picture rather than the limited picture we saw before, however, we have reason to think about the crime levels and about what our response should be.

I want to say something about the concerns raised by the police, and how we should deal with them. The police say that drugs, particularly crack cocaine, are the most important issue for them. The Minister will have seen recent articles in national newspapers, including one that appeared in The Mirror about a week ago reporting the activities of the customs and immigration services in respect of flights from Jamaica. Recently two Air Jamaica planes were stopped and thoroughly searched as they arrived in the United Kingdom, and 27 of the 440 passengers were found to be carrying drugs. A large number were turned away because they had criminal records, or were travelling with false papers. The customs and immigration services are clearly overwhelmed by the sheer number of people who are trying to bring drugs into the country illegally, often for extremely large rewards.

The local police say that, although many of the drugs are coming into the London airports, they are rapidly spreading to areas such as Bristol, and thence to smaller market towns such as Yeovil, Chard and towns with even smaller populations. The police say that the Government should take tougher action, and give the customs and immigration services more resources.

Throughout Avon and Somerset, and probably throughout the country, we are doing far too little to give those who are involved in drugs-related crime, and who suffer from a serious addiction, a chance to overcome that addiction and return to non-offending behaviour, without relying on such substances as crack and heroin. There is a major addiction problem even in areas such as Yeovil and Chard, outside the main conurbations. I have recently talked to parents and young people with experience of the problem, who say that much more effort should be made to help people conquer their addictions so that we can stop them from offending for ever, rather than simply locking them up in prison at considerable cost.

The Minister will not be surprised when I say that another problem is that of police numbers and investment in the police. No doubt he will say that, as a result of the crime fighting fund, Avon and Somerset is gaining some 200 additional officers over a three-year period; but between 1997 and the beginning of 2001 there was no increase at all in the area, and only in the past six months or so have we seen an increase of 51—51 officers to serve an area containing 1.5 million people. That is one extra officer per 30,000 inhabitants, even if we assume that all the officers are available at any one time. Given that they probably have to spread themselves across five shifts, it is likely that in practice one extra officer per 150,000 inhabitants is available at any one time.

There has also been a dramatic reduction in the number of special constables —some 38 per cent., from 629 to 391, since 1997. No wonder the local police are struggling in terms of resources, and no wonder many of my constituents—and, no doubt, those of my hon. Friend the Member for Somerton and Frome—feel that they cannot receive an adequate response, not just when they report crimes that can be dealt with over time rather than as emergencies but even when they report emergencies such as burglaries and violent crime in progress.

I welcome the new wardens, two of whom will come to Yeovil. I think they will help to deal with a fair amount of the lower-level crime and antisocial behaviour that take place in many parts of our constituencies. Nevertheless, we still need Government investment in more police numbers throughout the country. The Government should not rest on their laurels after their announcement of a 5,000 increase which, in practice, is not having the dramatic effect across the country for which the Minister may have hoped.

Since 11 September, many of our local police officers have had to be deployed at Bristol airport to deal with the potential terrorist threat. Police locally are concerned that that has taken out of circulation several officers who could have been deployed to bolster police numbers in areas such as Frome, Chard and other parts of South Somerset. The diversion of those resources means that the Government's extra allocation is not resulting in an increase in officer numbers in many parts of South Somerset. Can the Minister say—either today or in writing—whether it is possible to classify Bristol airport, and to discuss with the airport authority its contributing to policing costs, so that police resources can be released for areas such as Chard, Yeovil and the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Somerton and Frome, in which crime is increasing dramatically?

Before I finish, I want to mention two other issues of great importance, the first of which is sentencing policy. In Yeovil, a hugely disproportionate amount of crime is committed by a very small number of people, who are well known to the police. The introduction of the antisocial behaviour order has been immensely helpful in assisting the police in coming to terms with those individuals, and it has been used well in South Somerset and Somerset as a whole. However, those well-known individuals continue to commit many crimes, and they remain difficult to deal with—even through ASBOs—not least because of the problems associated with getting witnesses to make statements, given the serious intimidation that is often involved.

That draws attention to the need for the police to have the resources to carry out proactive work, so that they can gather the evidence necessary to take decisive action against the small number of people who commit a disproportionate amount of crime. If we can get 10 or 20 people who are well known to the police off the streets of towns such as Yeovil, we will contribute enormously to reducing actual crime and the fear of crime. As Yeovil's MP, I would therefore welcome any action that the Government can take to strengthen ASBOs, and I hope that they will continue to work closely with the police and local authorities to consider what further action can be taken.

A few weeks' ago in the other place, Lord Rooker seemed to step slightly out of line when he commented on the Home Office's frustration with the Chancellor's unwillingness to release funds—given pressures on the Home Office's budget, including police pensions—not just for policing, but for long-term projects to tackle the causes of crime. Nobody in my constituency believes that the fundamental and underlying problems of crime can be tackled solely through measures such as rehabilitation. Assistance must also be given to those who are most at risk of getting involved in the world of crime at a very early age, and I should like the Home Office and the Department for Education and Skills to co-operate in trying to address that problem.

I want to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Yeovil (Mr. Laws) not only on securing this debate, but on putting such a cogent and powerful case on his constituents' behalf. As was said, I represent the other part of South Somerset. I would love to be able to say that the problems that my hon. Friend described do not exist in Somerton and Frome, but that is undoubtedly not true. There has been a substantial increase in crime and the perception of crime in several small towns in my constituency— Somerton' martock, Bruton, Wincanton—and across South Somerset. Empirically, the figures are undoubtedly less than for a large city, but as regular visits from my constituents have demonstrated, in rural areas such statistics often have a greater effect on perceived security. I have expressed those concerns to Chief Superintendent Shearer in Yeovil, and 1 am happy to say that he has arranged a meeting with my constituents in the near future.

My hon. Friend's key point concerns police numbers. I, too, congratulate the Government on their determination to increase numbers, but we should be absolutely clear about this. As former chairman, in 1996, of the Avon and Somerset police authority, I know that police numbers in Avon and Somerset have only just returned to their 1996 level. There has been no net increase. The problem for rural areas is that cities inevitably act as a magnet for resources, because they are where most crimes are committed. Chief constables have no choice in the matter—they must deploy constables to areas where crime levels are greatest. As a result, rural areas are denuded of police officers, and patrol activity, which is sometimes regarded as marginal but which I consider crucial, is reduced.

My plea to the Minister is to recognise that we still need extra police officers. I take a very old-fashioned view on this matter. I believe that extra police officers are an effective deterrent against crime; they certainly encourage a feeling of well-being among the population. We need extra resources—civilian support and equipment—to assist those officers, and a criminal justice system that complements the police force's efforts without distancing itself from the daily problems of our constituents. A current example of such distancing is the closure of local magistrates courts.

Has the Minister given further consideration to the case—for which I have argued with his predecessors for many years—for retained police officers in rural areas, which would assist in the recruitment of extra police officers? They are analogous to the retained firefighters who do such a good job in Somerset and elsewhere. The Home Office seemed to be considering the idea, but we have heard little about it lately. Is the Home Office still actively considering it?

I congratulate the hon. Member for Yeovil (Mr. Laws) on securing this debate. Nothing is more important to all our communities than policing, crime levels and confidence in the criminal justice system in general. The hon. Gentleman expressed the concerns of his constituents extremely well, and I hope in the brief time available to address some of the issues raised by him and by the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath). If there are any points that I cannot consider properly today, I shall write to the hon. Member for Yeovil giving further explanation.

Modernising the criminal justice system, to ensure that the end-to-end process has the confidence of local communities and the public, is absolutely essential. We should not view parts of that system in isolation. The public, who are often the victims and witnesses of crime, have to understand the entire process—from detection, to court, to sentencing. They must be kept informed of that process and be supported through it, so that they can participate in it. That way, we can restore confidence in the criminal justice system and ensure that we bring more offenders to justice.

On sentencing, I agree with the hon. Member for Yeovil that a relatively small number of persistent offenders are responsible for the overwhelming amount of crime in our communities. The Government intend to target them and to bring them to justice. They have a disproportionate impact on our local communities, not only through crime itself, but through the fear of crime that they engender in local people. If we can bring more persistent offenders to justice, the impact on the number of offences committed will be dramatic.

I welcome the hon. Gentleman's offer of clear support for antisocial behaviour orders, the more effective and efficient use of which the House is currently considering. I know from the experience of my own Manchester constituency that the well-practised implementation of an antisocial behaviour order by the various agencies involved can have a dramatic impact on a community. Its effects can range much wider than just the individual family involved or the street where it is targeted, and it can prove much more beneficial than many other current measures.

I take the point that we have to look more closely at how we can stop people getting into crime in the first place. Interventions at the earliest possible stage, with families and school —and using our communities to support families and young people—are the way to bear down on that issue and that has to be a priority.

I turn to some of the specific points raised by the hon. Member for Yeovil. The first is the issue of Bristol airport and drugs. According to the chief inspector of North Somerset police, one sergeant and nine police officers were seconded to Bristol Airport Authority from September 2001. From 31 March 2002, that number was reduced to one sergeant and five police officers, who will stay until the end of June 2002 when their position will be reviewed.

As the hon. Gentleman will know, Bristol airport is a non-designated airport, so it is not obliged to pay for any policing arrangements but only for its own security. It is apparently reluctant to pay for policing, as it will have to pass on the costs to the airline industry. The Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions and the Association of Chief Police Officers are currently in negotiations with UK airport authorities about policing. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will wish to link into those discussions to see what impact they will have on Bristol airport.

Can the Minister say a little more about the designation criteria? What prospects are there for a change in the designation of Bristol so that the policing costs fall on the airport and air travellers—with some reason, perhaps—rather than on the communities in Avon and Somerset?

The hon. Gentleman will appreciate that the designation of airports is not in the direct remit of the Home Office. On the hon. Gentleman's behalf, I shall refer that query to the relevant Minister at the DTLR and ensure that he or she contacts him, so that the discussions on that issue may be progressed on behalf of his constituents.

I fully support the concerns expressed by the hon. Gentleman about the amount of trafficking in drugs through our airports. We have to be more diligent on that point, and as a Manchester MP I am well aware of the problem because of m} local airport. However, I am told by officials at Customs and Excise that there is no intelligence to indicate that Bristol airport is a significant entry point for class A drugs into the UK. Several cash detections have been made in excess of £10,000. However, after investigation, none of those were found to be drug-related.

I should have clarified the point in my speech, but the local police do not suggest that drugs are coming directly into Bristol airport. They are coming into other major national airports and being moved to the south-west. In the article last week in The Mirror that recounted the story about two planes from Jamaica being prevented from entering the country, it was found that of 11 passengers carrying cocaine in their bodies—acting as "mules"—six had destinations in Bristol, even though they were caught in London.

I understood the point that the hon. Gentleman makes, but I wished to give him some assurance that the information I have been given is that direct entry through Bristol airport is not the problem. I entirely accept that once drugs have been landed in this country they can be moved anywhere, including to his area. We need a more robust system in place to track those movements and to alleviate the problem.

Customs and Excise drug dogs are regularly deployed at Bristol airport to screen passengers and their baggage, and are supported by an anti-smuggling team who arrive unannounced and in sufficient numbers to conduct in-depth checks almost every day. I hope that the hon. Gentleman appreciates the level of security provided in that respect.

The hon. Gentleman also mentioned crime levels in Avon and Somerset. I accept that numbers for particular offences have risen, but I hope that he will accept that overall levels of crime in Avon and Somerset have fallen by 13 per cent. since 1997. I accept that the area has seen an increase in street crime—robbery and muggings. In response, the Government have launched the street crime initiative to target particular problems in hotspot areas. Avon and Somerset is one of the 10 areas in which that initiative has been launched.

The initiative builds new measures on top of plans that were already in progress to ensure co-ordinated action across all parts of Government to bring street robbers to swift and effective justice. As the hon. Gentleman will know, street crime is a predominantly urban phenomenon and is concentrated in relatively small areas within force areas. While Avon and Somerset are part of the drive to tackle street crime, it should be noted that the levels of robbery and street crime in the area of Yeovil and South Somerset are relatively low.

While I appreciate that in the past two years crime has fallen in Avon and Somerset, my concern is that in the past year we have seen a dramatic rise of 20 per cent. in Avon and Somerset as a whole, and of 30 per cent. in many areas. Has the Minister carried out any analysis of that increase and does he share the view of the chief constable that it is because of the extraordinary increase in the incidence of crack cocaine across the south-west, as well as reporting changes?

I am aware of the concern about drug-related crime in the area and the Government wish to ensure that young drug users get the help they need. The crucial aspect of the issue is the need to support young people so that they do not get into the drug culture and, subsequently, crime. Working closely with the substance misuse worker on the youth offending team, a new young people's service, "On the Level-, provides specialist services for young people experiencing problems with their drug use.

Both hon. Gentleman raised the issue of police numbers. At the end of January this year, Avon and Somerset constabulary had 3,086 officers—92 more than in March 2001. Between March 2000, when numbers were at a low of 2.934, and January 2002, police strength increased by more than 5 per cent., or 152 more officers. Liberal Democrats regularly call for additional resources for more police officers on top of the money that the Government are already putting in through the crime fighting fund, but they also want more teachers and hospital workers. Let us see their sums and whether they add up.

I will write to the hon. Member for Yeovil on the other matters. We have had a brief but worthwhile debate, and I look forward to further debates on the issue in the future.

There have been a number of gas leaks and gas explosions in the north-west, the most recent of which happened over the weekend in Nelson. Fortunately, there were no fatalities. I do not want to dwell on the possible causes; however, the fact that explosions happen causes massive concern in local communities.

In November last year there were two significant explosions in Manchester. One, in Tameside, the neighbouring borough to my constituency, led to fatalities. The other occurred in Newton Heath in my constituency. Although it caused massive damage to property, it fortunately inflicted only minor injuries on people.

A second gas leak occurred in Newton Heath some time later. I shall say more about that in a little while, but people in such a small community are bound to be worried that there is something systemically wrong with the provision of gas in urban communities when two gas leaks occur so close together, with one leading to an explosion.

My hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Mr. Heyes) will speak about events in his constituency, but I shall deal with the explosion in Newton Heath, and draw to the attention of my hon. Friend the Minister a number of questions that go to the core of the matter. We need to determine whether the system is operated safely, whether existing procedures are adequate in the event of an emergency, and whether investigations of the causes of a leak are acceptable. The answers to such questions need to be in the public domain.

The Newton Heath explosion happened on a Saturday. Local people have told me that gas could be detected from early morning. Transco found out about the leak only much later in the day-I am not seeking to claim otherwise—but it is certain that the gas had been escaping for a considerable time. The gas build-up was a danger long before the explosion actually happened. If the explosion had happened earlier, instead of loss of property and minor injury there could have been a major human catastrophe, with deaths on a large scale. The area is densely populated, and an explosion big enough to destroy houses is surely big enough to destroy people. The scale of the leak is therefore a matter for concern. I do not know whether Transco can do more in terms of early detection, but there are questions that need to be addressed.

I want to place on record my appreciation of the role of the emergency services. The police and others acted quickly to move people out of the area once the extent of the leak became known. The various statutory services and the local authority ensured that the evacuees were housed overnight. One or two boundary problems aside, the population of the area were treated relatively well, given the extraordinary circumstances.

However, once it had been informed of the leak, Transco took some hours to begin the process of shutting the system down. The system had not been shut down even by the time the explosion took place. I am not competent or expert in these matters so I do not know whether that is in the nature of the system that we operate, but most people would hold the common-sense view that, once a leak is identified, the necessary safety valves should be turned off and the system closed down in a way that rendered it at least safer. When the gas that had escaped already had dispersed, the system would be safe.

Clearly, that is not what happened in the Newton Heath explosion. Is my hon. Friend the Minister satisfied that Transco had installed the necessary technology? Is the company able to close systems down as quickly as humanly possible?

I accept that, in some circumstances, the process cannot be immediate, but we need to know, beyond peradventure, that the system on that day was being closed down with all possible speed. As I said, it is not clear to me that it was.

The second matter that concerns me has to do with the inquiry that was held into the explosion. I contacted the Health and Safety Executive immediately after the explosion. I was told that the HSE did not play an active role in the leak investigation, but allowed Transco to carry that out.

We know that self-regulation can work in some areas, but we also know—to our cost—that it is not always helpful, especially when official regulators do not put pressure on those who regulate themselves to drive the case for safety hard and efficiently. We have seen that with the railways. Is my hon. Friend the Minister satisfied that it is right and proper that the HSE does not consider a life-threatening explosion such as occurred in my constituency sufficiently important to require that it move in and take over the investigation to guarantee public confidence in the results?

I have seen a copy of the official report. I am grateful to Transco and the HSE for making it available. However, it does not reach a definitive conclusion. As far as I understand it, it says that the pipe that fractured had suffered from corrosion over the years, and from road vibration. Those and other factors led to the pipe cracking, ultimately, with the result that gas escaped.

Worryingly, the report does not suggest that the leak was a one-off accident that occurred to a unique pipe in a unique set of circumstances. People need to be confident that Transco's stock of piping is not riddled with the faults that led to the leak and explosion in my constituency. Much of the piping network was laid at roughly the same time, using contemporary techniques and technology. Does my hon. Friend the Minister believe that a lot of the piping stock has become time-expired? If so, a genuine, broad-based risk exists. If not, we need expert and independent reassurance that we can sleep safely, and that the same problem will not arise again with pipes that lie under roads which carry heavy traffic.

To give the company credit, Transco has paid out small amounts in compensation for the inconvenience caused to people. Such people include those who lost the contents of their freezers when the electricity was shut down and they had to leave their houses. I understand that such compensation was paid out pretty much on the nod.

However, Transco has not yet responded to people whose homes were destroyed in the blast. I understand that it has not accepted responsibility for the explosion. That defies common sense. Mrs. Dennisor and Mrs. Charlesworth resided in homes that were destroyed. Six months on. they are entitled to feel that real progress should have been made with their predicament.

Finally, I wish to turn briefly to the second leak in Newton Heath, which occurred some months after the original explosion. Once again, my constituents were evacuated from their homes and taken to emergency centres. Again, the emergency services and the local authority responded well. Fortunately, there was no explosion as Transco was able to work on the leak and close the system down. Nothing untoward took place, but it is clear that the potential existed for a major gas leak causing major damage.

One of the rumours abroad is that the pipe was supposedly disused and that Transco's own records had it down as no longer carrying a gas supply. I cannot emphasise enough the sense of the bizarre and the human tragedy that could be caused if our urban and other areas contain pipes that are full of gas but are believed to be empty. Those pipes, by definition, would not undergo maintenance or routine repair because they presumably do not exist on the repair and maintenance record books. This is a matter of fundamental importance. If the rumour is wrong, can the official situation be put on the record independently? Can we know what really did take place?

Gas is a necessary part of our lives. No one wants to disinvent the supply system. What we want is a Transco that is commercially successful and technically competent. However, the supply of gas carries with it a price, and that price is made much higher if the technical system and its maintenance are such that we cannot sleep comfortably at night. We must be able to believe that we can sleep without gas explosions becoming a feature of our lives.

I do not know what the pattern of leaks and explosions is and how the recent events tie in with Transco's record over a longer period. Perhaps because my hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne and I have recently been exposed—almost literally—to these problems, we have become sensitised. In any event, these important issues must be satisfactorily answered and put in the public domain. Without that, my constituents will continue to believe that they are in peril. I need answers—I need to be able to tell my constituents that they are not at risk and that they live in a safe environment. That has to be done in a way that is transparent and seen to be independent.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Central (Mr. Lloyd) on securing a debate on this most important subject and for giving me the opportunity to make a brief contribution.

My hon. Friend's constituency and mine share a border. Many of his constituents in Clayton and Newton Heath have kinship and workplace connections with mine in Droylsden and Failsworth and other parts of my constituency. We share the same accident and emergency services—Greater Manchester fire, police and ambulance—and in the context of today's debate the same gas emergency services from Transco.

The terrible events that my hon. Friend referred to and which took place on 17 November in his constituency were preceded just a few days earlier by a horrific gas explosion and fire just a couple of miles away in my constituency. In that incident, about 300 residents were evacuated from their homes in Cavendish Mill after reporting a smell of gas. After a few hours, Transco engineers declared the building safe and allowed residents back in. Less than an hour later, a massive explosion occurred, as a result of which many residents were made homeless, several were injured and, tragically, one man lost his life.

In the knowledge of this incident, it is easy to understand the heightened sense of alarm and enormous loss of confidence in the gas emergency services felt by my hon. Friend's constituents and, indeed, by many others across Greater Manchester and throughout our region. The explosion in north Lancashire this week will have rekindled that sense of alarm among our constituents.

I do not want to pre-empt the outcome of the Health and Safety Executive's investigations into these incidents. Indeed, I understand that the coroner will, this week, receive the final reports of the fire service and the Health and Safety Executive into the Ashton-under-Lyne case, so their findings should soon be in the public domain. However, it is clear that something went terribly wrong to produce the sequence of events that led to the tragedies in Newton Heath and Ashton back in November. and some very serious questions need to be answered.

The Health and Safety Executive says on its website of the gas supply pipes:

"Within 20 or 30 years, parts of the network could, conceivably, reach the end of their reliable mechanical life."

It goes on to say that if that point were reached, a rapid increase might occur in both the rate of failure and the number of incidents, some of which could well involve multiple fatalities. I am sure that many of my hon. Friend's constituents, like mine, feel that that point has been reached already.

The big question is what the regulatory authorities—Ofgem and the Health and Safety Executive—and Transco are doing to deal with the problems and to eliminate the risk. The track record of Transco in particular does not fill me with confidence about its willingness or ability to deal competently with the issue. Obviously, the answer is for substantial investment to go into the replacement of worn-out gas supply pipes and installations. The wrangle over the true cost of funding and the appropriate length of the replacement period goes on between the regulator and Transco but, ultimately, the integrity of the supply and the safety of the public is in the hands of the gas engineers and fitters who install and maintain the pipework.

Five years ago, Transco made 1,000 engineers redundant as part of a cost-saving programme. Now we hear from industry experts—Transco admits that this is true—that it is 1,000 engineers short of the number needed just to maintain the network. The recruitment and training of apprentices has been slashed. The leader of the General, Municipal, Boilermakers and Allied Trades Union told the Public Administration Select Committee just a few months ago:

"We now have half of the skilled gas workers in this country going to retire in the next five years with no substantial plans for replacing them".

The time taken to repair gas leaks is on the increase, as my hon. Friend has mentioned. We hear that Transco does not have proper records of its supply system. Subcontractors carry out 60 per cent. of Transco's maintenance work, with serious questions being asked about the standard of some of that work. There are reports of skilled engineers working hours massively in excess of the legal limit just to keep up with the emergency call-out work. It has been claimed that they work 16 hours without a break at weekends and try to snatch a few minutes' sleep in their vans.

Investing in the skills of the work force requires a long-term view, but all the indicators are that Transco is preoccupied with short considerations, aimed at splitting its assets in preparation for yet more sell-offs and fragmentation in the industry and driven by the need to maximise shareholder value at the expense—potentially—of public safety.

One engineer was quoted in the press last year as saying:

"there's a Hatfield waiting to happen in the gas industry".

Another said:

"It takes a bang for people to sit up and listen".

Sadly, we have had our bangs in our part of Greater Manchester. My hon. Friend and I are listening to the concerns of our constituents. However, I am far from convinced that the industry regulators and the powers that be in Transco have really got the message and that we are not on the verge of a collapse of public confidence in the safety of the gas industry even greater than that witnessed in the railway industry.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Central (Mr. Lloyd) on securing this debate and raising a number of important points of concern. My hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Mr. Heyes) made a number of wider points about gas safety and the future of the gas industry in general. These deserve a clear response, although today my comments will relate specifically to the gas leaks and explosions referred to by my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Central.

My hon. Friend spoke of the gas incident in his constituency at Crawford street on 17 November. I reaffirm the Government's commitment to ensuring that Transco implements its programme to replace all iron gas mains at risk—that is, within 30 m of property—including those in excess of 12 in in diameter. That programme was recently reviewed and has been accelerated in agreement with the Health and Safety Executive, which will regulate compliance. I hope that the comprehensive information about the incident on 17 November that the HSE and Transco have already made available to my hon. Friend and their offer to meet him has helped an understanding of the cause of the incident and the subsequent action taken by Transco.

My hon. Friend noted that Transco investigated the incident and reported back to the HSE but he is concerned about the adequacy of Transco's response to the gas leak and, indeed, its management of the subsequent evacuation. I reaffirm that the HSE is satisfied that Transco met its statutory obligations in those areas, although both my hon. Friends raised wider issues about the nature of those obligations.

I am content that, in this case, the HSE acted appropriately in not launching its own immediate investigation into the incident. Under current legislation, Transco has a duty to investigate such incidents and report back to the HSE. On being informed of the incident, Dr. Johnson—the head of the unit with overall responsibility within the HSE for gas pipeline safety—immediately contacted Transco and satisfied himself that it had already taken the action required under the emergency response arrangements: the emergency services were present; the situation was being brought under control; and, importantly, that no further people were at risk.

I also note the reference made by my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Central to the gas leak on 23 March this year in his constituency at Weir Pumps Ltd., Ten Acres lane. I shall also address the issues relating to that incident.

The explosion at Crawford street occurred because of the fracture of a 15 in spun iron main. Mains of that type were introduced after the second world war to transport gas between holders and keep the network in balance— they are much larger than ordinary mains supply pipes. They make up less than 2 per cent. of the total iron mains population of about 116,000 km, and historically they have given rise to very few incidents. However, as there were three similar incidents in the Manchester area in a short space of time—my hon. Friend drew attention to that point—the HSE charged Transco with conducting research to determine the risk from such mains and the priority for their replacement.

Against that background, and in given the specific points that my hon. Friend made today on the incidents in question, I assure him that we view all gas escapes as potentially serious. Transco has risk assessment procedures in place to ensure that resources are targeted at urgent preventive work and to provide an efficient response when serious incidents occur, many of which cannot be foreseen. In this instance, however, the research has specifically charged Transco with examining pipes with a diameter of more than 12 in to determine whether they are of greater concern than the rest of the iron network.

It is important that I reaffirm for my hon. Friend the key details of the incidents, as advised to me by the HSE. The HSE established that Transco logged the first report of a gas escape at 19.42 hours. The HSE has investigated statements that gas escapes were reported earlier but has found no evidence that such a report was made to Transco before 7.42 pm. At that point, a Transco competent person was dispatched to deal with the report, which was classified as an uncontrolled escape. Consistent with the seriousness that Transco views such reports, that competent person arrived at Crawford street 12 minutes later. He then assisted the police with evacuating houses in Crawford street and Briscoe lane. He also called for a distribution team to attend, as he suspected a serious escape from the gas main running down Briscoe lane.

I am satisfied that, in relation to that incident, Transco met its obligations under the Gas Safety (Management) Regulations 1996 to attend an escape as soon as reasonably practicable and to stop it within 12 hours of the first report of the leak. Those actions are necessary to protect both the public and Transco workers.

My hon. Friend referred to the switching off of the gas main. It is certainly true that the police and Transco initially concentrated on the protection of the residents and the houses near the leak, evacuating about 100 people in the initial stages of the incident. Those actions undoubtedly prevented major injury, but I think Transco acknowledges that it could have started to depressurise the gas main more promptly after the escape was reported. As a result of the lessons learned on that occasion, its procedure has been changed.

Depressurising a main is far from simple, however. If the process is not properly managed, the whole connected gas network could be at risk. It took about seven hours to complete the process of reducing the pressure, so it is unlikely that the outcome would have been significantly affected if the reduction had been started earlier.

I shall move on to Transco's investigation of the incident and the HSE's responsibilities. My hon. Friend will be aware that the Gas Safety (Management) Regulations place a duty on Transco to carry out a thorough investigation of the circumstances of an incident and to send a full report to the HSE. The HSE's experience of such reports is that they are open and frank about the facts.

The HSE and I are satisfied that Transco acted promptly in initiating the investigation of the causes of the Crawford street incident and in establishing remedial action, including instructing Advantica Technology to undertake the necessary forensic work. I understand that my hon. Friend has received copies of both the Transco and Advantica reports for his information.

I am also satisfied that the HSE's initial response, on being informed of the Newton Heath incident, and its decision not to launch an immediate investigation were appropriate, taking into account the fact that Transco had taken all the necessary action and that the emergency services were in attendance. In those circumstances, the HSE's actions were consistent with its policy on the investigation of incidents.

The decision not to launch an immediate investigation was based on the duty placed on Transco by the Gas Safety (Management) Regulations to carry out a thorough investigation of the circumstances of the incident and to send a full report to the HSE. Arguably we might want to consider those arrangements, but they are the provisions under the current regulations.

My hon. Friend suggests that we might want to examine those arrangements. I have no doubts regarding the competence of the consultants who carried out the investigations in relation to Newton Heath. However, the public in general and I in particular would feel much happier if we knew that those who commission such investigations are independent of the operator. The question that must be answered was put by my hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne: is Transco making an adequate investment in safety, or is it putting commercial pressures ahead of the safe operation of the system? Only an independent regulator can give the public the reassurance that the balance is being properly maintained in the public interest.

That is an arguable point. The arrangements under the Gas Safety (Management) Regulations are that Transco carries out the investigation and makes a report to the HSE. The history of those arrangements shows that the investigations and the reports are thorough but, as my hon. Friend points out, independent investigation might reinforce public confidence in the process.

The HSE has assured me that it will continue to monitor Transco's implementation of the recommendations in the report on the Newton Heath incident. My hon. Friend may also want to know that two vacant inspector posts dealing with pipeline safety in the north of England have recently been filled through recruitment and transfer, thereby considerably increasing the total number of inspectors.

The HSE will be holding a meeting with Transco on 21 May when progress on the actions will be discussed. I have asked them to update my hon. Friend on the outcome of their meeting.

I cannot comment on the Cavendish Mill incident on 17 November because the HSE is still considering the issue of legal proceedings. An investigation is under way into the Weir Pumps incident on 23 March. I understand that that incident was the result of vandalism. When the report is received, the HSE will review it and consider whether further action is necessary.

I want to talk briefly about Transco's mains replacement programme. As hon. Members will know, the responsibility for maintaining and replacing pipes falls to Transco. Some of the pipes are extremely old, dating back to the Victorian era, but there is an accelerated programme—agreed with the HSE—to replace all iron gas mains located within 30 m of buildings. Within 30 years, 91,000 km of iron mains will be replaced—five years earlier than if the mains had continued to be replaced at the rate that has prevailed since 1977.

The detail is available for everyone to see. The HSE has made a proportionate response to managing the risks presented by iron gas mains. That sends out the message that we understand public concern and will continue to respond appropriately.

I have listened carefully to the points raised by my hon. Friend and recognise his understandable concern for the health and safety of his constituents. I reassure him that the HSE has carefully considered its obligations in respect of the Crawford street incident and has offered to meet him to discuss his concerns. I confirm that the offer remains open.

On 25 April, I took the Red Jet service from Southampton at 7.30 pm and reached home in Cowes at about five minutes to 8. Within minutes the following message appeared on my pager, "News flash on TV. All emergency services on Isle of Wight down because of communications breakdown. Don't know when back up. Just thought I'd let you know." The message was signed by my assiduous assistant who was visiting friends on the mainland. She had seen the reports on television.

My repeated attempts by BT landline and by mobile phone failed to establish communication with my assistant or with my agent, who had also contacted me by pager. Eventually, I turned on the television and saw the caption that advised, "If you need the emergency services, go to a police station." I went to the local police station in Cowes partly to find out exactly what was going on, but it was closed as it usually is in the evening. Indeed, most police stations on the island are closed in the evening, so I used the direct call facility outside the police station to contact the Winchester call centre of the Hampshire constabulary which, as the Minister will know, also covers the Isle of Wight.

The call centre explained to me that Netley, which is the location of the command and control centre, was down but that 999 calls to the police were being routed to the Dorset constabulary and then relayed back by radio to the control room at Netley. I then tried to telephone the local radio station, Isle of Wight Radio, as it is the normal source of information on the island. I tried by mobile, because the telephone box on the street outside the police station was not working, and I was surprised to discover that the problem did not affect the fire or ambulance services on the island. That was my first intimation that what appeared to be a 999 service problem was, in fact, a BT problem.

Although I am sure that the Minister is aware of this, I should explain that the police for the island and for Hampshire share a call centre at Winchester and a control room at Netley. The ambulance service in Hampshire has a control centre at Winchester and on the island at Newport. The fire service has a control centre at Eastleigh, with back-up at Winchester for the mainland. The centre for the island is at Newport. The Coastguard service, which is another important emergency service that I would not like to be omitted from the debate, has its control centre at Lee-on-the-Solent and it covers the island, Hampshire and other parts of the south coast.

I was eventually able to contact my assistant on the mainland by mobile phone and she reported to me that she had spent 35 minutes with the operators trying to establish what was wrong. After that, she called the operators at 9.40 pm and got through to Birmingham. She was then put on to Inverness and then passed to someone purporting to be a manager in the chairman's office who turned out to be a "technical coach"—whatever that might mean—in Birmingham who said that he had, "no up-to-date information". He added that BT had identified a fault in the transmission equipment and that the repair team was at the incident site and would be working around the clock to repair it. He clearly did not know when the system would be back up and the information that he gave had been posted on his system at 6.30 pm, but we received it at 10.19 on the Thursday evening.

My assistant was told that there was no one in Southampton with whom she could communicate. However, at her request, a press officer later called her from Newark. He said that many people on the island were unaffected but, when he was asked why blanket advice to go to a police station if one wanted an emergency service had appeared on the television, he said, "Nobody at BT has said that the emergency service is unavailable." Asked if he was sure of that, he said, "As far as I am aware." He then said that people should try their BT phone and, if that is not working, they should try a mobile. When he was asked where the information to go to a police station had come from, he said possibly the police and emergency services. He said that he would call back with further information.

The press officer called back at about 11.5 pm to say, "There is a problem with the power supply to network installations in Southampton.", so he was asked why there was no back-up. He said, "There is a back-up system but it has not prevented the problems that you are experiencing." He said that sorting out exactly what had gone on would take "weeks rather than hours" and that the "service is progressively being brought back up although the situation is not totally resolved." When asked how many people had been affected, he refused to give any answer other than "a lot". At five past midnight, he called to say that all customers were now back on service.

Three clear problems are apparent. First, there was no picture of the problem or of the causes of the problem available not only to me, my assistant or any other member of the public who might have called, but to the press or media locally. I put in a request to BT the following day, but I regret to say that there was no response until this debate appeared on the Order Paper. BT then asked me—I thank Tim O'Sullivan of BT for this—what I wanted to know.

The second problem is that BT did not take responsibility for notifying the public of the breakdown of the 999 service. In response to my request, it replied:

"The emergency services normally inform the public and media of loss of 999—we understand the Police did so on this occasion …Media messages to the public were being given after 20:00 on TV and radio. The BT Press Office was also dealing with media enquiries throughout the evening. The usual liaison with BT prior to any message going out was hampered by the communication problems … This subject will be part of our review of the incident with the emergency services locally."

The third part of the problem is that the back-up system did not work. BT said that

"it is not practical to provide duplicate or alternative facilities and the problem at Southampton is one such case. The strategy used here is to prevent failure as far as is reasonably possible, in this case by 3 methods that have until now been successful: provision of stand-by capacity, battery back-up and the use of alarms. Detailed investigation has shown that a number of crucial components failed at the same time. Although battery back-up did operate and protect against failure of these components for a period, the alarms that are designed to reveal such problems well before the batteries expire were also not operating. In this situation both resilience measures failed at the same time which is highly unusual and unexpected."

It was certainly unexpected

My hon. Friends the Members for Havant (Mr. Willetts) and for Gosport (Mr. Viggers) have asked me to express their concerns about what happened. Parts of south Wiltshire were also affected, and my hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury (Mr. Key) pointed out:

"South Wiltshire was blacked out … there were security implications because of the number and density of military establishments"

in that county. He added:

"Although they run a separate military communications system it is in constant interface with the BT network and when that crashes, there are consequences …Secondly, in exactly the area of Central Southern England in which BT failed its customers, there has been the biggest loss of their market share to NTL and other cable system offering telephone services—which with new technology were unaffected. It will be interesting to see how the market moves as a result of BT's failure."

My hon. Friend the Member for Fareham (Mr. Hoban) told me that he was out that evening and that he was unable to use either his mobile phone or his BT landline at home.

There were three problems but, worse still, is the advice that was given. If one lives in rural west Wight—let us say at Brighstone—and one is told by the television not to make 999 calls, the natural next step is to drive to Yarmouth or to Ventnor police station, which are at least a quarter of an hour's drive away. Let us imagine what would happen if one needed an ambulance and one was told that one could not dial 999. The time taken to drive to Ventnor police station would mean that it would be difficult for an ambulance to deal with a life-threatening crisis such as a heart attack.

When I spoke to people at the BBC the following day—in fact, they volunteered to communicate with me as a result of something that I said on Radio Solent—they told me that all the telephone lines were down and that they were visited by a police officer from Southampton who said that there was an emergency on the island and in Hampshire and south Wiltshire and asked for advice to be broadcast from the Netley control centre, on radio and on television. I assume that that advice was broadcast.

As late as 1 May, the chairman of the Hampshire police authority was reported on South teletext as saying that

"questions need to be asked over BT's performance."

South teletext also says:

"A full explanation of the BT failure is yet to be received by the authority."

Assistant Chief Constable Ian Reed, who is responsible for the communications system at Netley, also reported dissatisfaction. I spoke to him earlier today, and he told me that the Hampshire constabulary had arranged separate wiring for the Netley command and control centre, so that messages were brought in and out on two independent systems. One of those systems goes through Oxford; the other through Gloucester, but it is clear that they were both subject to the same breakdown at a single point of failure. That is not acceptable. Hampshire constabulary and the island's taxpayers have paid for what Assistant Chief Constable Reed calls resilience, but BT has not delivered that resilience.

We have to ask why the BT system failed. Why did the alarm and back-up systems fail? I understand that Assistant Chief Constable Reed has asked Oftel those questions and that it will conduct inquiries into the incident. We also have to ask what might have happened, or what might happen in future. It is very easy to portray the incident as a small millennium-style problem and to say that not many people were injured. Thankfully, not many people were injured, but it is our job to consider what might happen in future.

Assistant Chief Constable Reed is certainly concerned about the loss of radio, mobile and other telephone links and internal network computers through seven out of 11 components of the Southampton Bargate exchange. He says things were kept going simply because of the availability of VHF radio communications. BT intercepted 999 calls, where they could be made, and sent them to Dorchester, and Dorset constabulary relayed them back to Netley via VHF. He asks what would be the implications when the national airwave solution is introduced, because he tells me that that solution relies entirely on BT systems. I am sorry that I did not give the Minister notice of this question earlier, but will he carefully consider the implications of introducing the national airwave solution for the effectiveness of the police communications system?

I asked Assistant Chief Constable Reed what arrangements were made to deploy additional police officers. He said that they faced the same problems as everyone else, so they could not make telephone calls from Netley to bring in additional police. They had to visit police officers' homes by motorcycle to alert them of the need to report to Netley. Members of specialist firearms and public order teams had to go to Netley so that they could be deployed in an emergency, and I should like to record my gratitude to those policemen and women.

Assistant Chief Constable Reed assigned additional police officers who were on duty to the front desks of those police stations that were open, but he could not bring in additional police to patrol the streets because of the communications failure from which we all suffered. It was only by the greatest of good luck that people were able to establish telephone contact with Winchester because the Winchester 0845 number happened to be one of the four out of 11 components that did not fail at the Southampton Bargate exchange.

Several serious issues arise from all that, the first of which is the concentration of emergency services at Winchester. It is clearly dangerous if police, fire and ambulance services can all be accessed only through Winchester. That is not an island versus mainland point; clearly, the same problem could arise if they were all accessed via Newport. Secondly, I hope that the Minister will carefully consider the national airwaves solution.

I should like to record my appreciation of the work that the police and the other emergency services did on that occasion, but they were hampered by BT's lack of available information.

I must congratulate the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Mr. Turner) on bringing this matter before the House. He mentioned several of his hon. Friends who are also concerned about the events of 25 April. I ought to include myself among that number, as I was making my way to my constituency on the evening of 25 April and repeatedly attempted to ring home and got what appeared to be an engaged signal. Indeed, when I arrived home, I undertook the same sort of information-gathering exercise as he did into how the incident happened and in what circumstances. Like him, I found the total breakdown of the telecommunications system, on which we increasingly rely, very frustrating. It was certainly very distressing for all those in Southampton and the wider area to feel that they were out of communication in the event of any emergency or for any other reason.

We are justifiably proud in this country of our 999 arrangements. The number is universally known and children are taught almost as soon as they walk or speak that that number will bring immediate assistance in an emergency. The telephone operating companies therefore pay particular attention to the resilience and robustness of their 999 services. There are special facilities in their networks and call centres to ensure that those calls are protected and given priority handling.

Conditions in the telephone operating companies' licences, which are regulated by Oftel, require them to take all reasonably practical steps to maintain to the greatest extent possible the integrity of public telephone systems and public services provided, paying particular regard to the needs of emergency organisations. That involves the protection of the physical and functional operation of such systems and related services against malfunctions or failure.

The BT network supports some 28 million lines throughout the United Kingdom and to maintain continuity various approaches are used to protect against problems with, for example, equipment failure, cable breaks or power breakdowns. Those protections include using alternative network routes; providing stand-by capacity; duplicating crucial components; alarms to give early warning of failures; overload protection; back-up facilities, such as electricity generators or batteries; active network monitoring; and using portable equipment.

The arrangements for handling 999 calls are agreed voluntarily between the emergency services and telephone operating companies within the 999 liaison committee forum, which is managed by the Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions. The forum's membership includes representatives of all the telephone operating companies, including BT and Cable and Wireless, representatives of the emergency authorities and representatives from the appropriate Departments, including the Department of Health and the Home Office, as well as Oftel.

The committee has agreed a code of practice that sets out arrangements for dealing with 999 calls. The code is published on the DTLR website and is regularly reviewed and amended to reflect the changing needs of the public and the service providers. It recommends that emergency authorities have contingency arrangements to cover the receipt of emergency calls during conditions of serious breakdown in the public network or the emergency authorities' communication systems. Those arrangements should be tested periodically to ensure that staff are familiar with them.

BT undertakes to notify the affected emergency authorities as soon as possible after a failure is identified or anticipated. In 2000, BT issued guidance on the loss of access to its public 999 service to the emergency authorities. Despite the size and reach of the network, there are relatively few failures that affect 999. Such losses are monitored closely by Oftel, and substantial incidents are always subject to rigorous internal inquiries so that further resilience improvements can be made. During any such incident, BT informs those emergency authorities that cover the affected area and keeps in contact until the incident is resolved. It is worth noting that, because of the range of network routes used, it is very rare for the emergency services' control rooms to be affected. All that is, as it were, despite the events of Thursday 25 April.

On those specific events, as the hon. Gentleman recalled, a fault occurred in equipment at Southampton. BT has stressed that a highly unusual sequence of events occurred that resulted in a failure affecting a wide spread of people. The failure occurred in the power supply equipment for switches and network links that serve mainly the Southampton area, but also some other switches scattered throughout Hampshire, but not on the Isle of Wight.

Mr. Andrew Turner: That is a matter of some curiosity, as, clearly, I was on the Isle of Wight when I attempted to make the calls from my landline.

The hon. Gentleman makes a strong point, and it is a matter of some curiosity for me. I shall speculate on that circumstance in a moment. I am giving a factual account of the technical nature of what happened to those switches and links.

A further point to consider is that, as the hon. Gentleman mentioned, although battery back-up did operate and protect against failure for a period, there was then a failure of the alarms that are designed to reveal problems in the main supply before the batteries cut in. BT engineers were therefore unaware of how long the batteries were lasting and the time scale in which emergency action needed to be taken before those batteries expired, as they did.

I am assured that there is a regular testing regime, but that could not anticipate the equipment fault. Corrective action has been taken at Southampton, and an urgent review is being carried out within BT and with its suppliers to examine solutions that will ensure no further recurrence at any BT site. No subsections on the Isle of Wight were affected. Seventy-seven subsections across Hampshire and south Wiltshire lost services, and I understand that BT has written to apologise to, among other people, the MPs whose constituents were affected.

During the incident, the BT call centres that answer 999 calls quickly liaised with the emergency services and arranged to implement contingency plans. I understand that Hampshire and Isle of Wight police made immediate contact with radio stations in Southampton and across the area and guidance was broadcast on the radio and on television. Throughout the evening, BT did answer many 999 calls from the Hampshire area from both fixed and mobile phones, as, even though some customers in, for example, Winchester, were unable to make 999 calls, other Winchester customers could do so. Those who could make those calls were connected to the neighbouring emergency services in Dorset for the police and ambulance services, and in Berkshire for the fire service, and they could pass the information back to the responding local services. The hon. Gentleman has mentioned one way in which that was done using, for example, radio links. The Coastguard control centre on the Solent was unaffected, so there were no emergency arrangements as far as it was concerned.

I am assured by BT that the 999 service remained available to all Isle of Wight residents. During the period 6.30 pm to midnight on 25 April, 23 calls to 999 from the Isle of Wight were connected to the emergency services. Three calls were made to the fire service, nine were to the ambulance control rooms on the island and the remainder were to the police, initially to the Dorset police, but, from 9.15 pm, to a standby control room established in Basingstoke.

I understand from BT that the hon. Gentleman should have been able to make calls from his home in the Isle of Wight throughout the period as they would have been routed through the Portsmouth exchange. That is the curious circumstance that the hon. Gentleman mentions. It is possible that the breakdown could have had an indirect effect: because so many people were testing their phones at that time, all the available lines through that route may have been engaged. I believe that he is in contact with BT, and I shall be happy to pursue the matter further with BT if he does not get a satisfactory reply to what I agree is a curious set of circumstances.

However, some callers in Hampshire and south Wiltshire would not have had access to 999 on their BT lines and may only have been able to make local calls, although some will also have been able to use their mobile phones to call 999. The emergency services cover such circumstances with extra patrols, stationing vehicles at strategic points and advice through the media. BT assures me that it did everything it reasonably could to restore normal service as quickly as possible and to mitigate the impact on the emergency services, such as the police, with whom they liaised throughout the incident.

Hampshire and Isle of Wight police managed to keep every police station open until normal telephone operations were resumed. I am informed that that included the station at Cowes, but the hon. Gentleman mentioned specifically that he visited that police station and it was closed. I am happy, therefore, to investigate whether that circumstance was an aberration or whether there was wider non-coverage by police stations. BT engineers responded immediately and worked through the night to return the situation to normal, and 80 per cent. of customers had been restored to service by midnight. Almost all others were restored by 3.55 am at the latest.

When we consider the question of resilience and contingency arrangements, we must recognise that the failure of the telephone system on 25 April—in the hon. Gentleman's area and my area, unfortunately—was unprecedented. It revealed that, although contingency arrangements agreed with the 999 liaison committee were adequate, at least for more limited failures, there was a need to review them against what happened in Southampton and to examine what further changes needed to be made. Consideration will need to be given, first, to whether BT can help provide even more protection for the network links to its control rooms; and, secondly, to what other lessons can be learned regarding contingency plans for such failures, particularly with regard to communication with the public in these unusual circumstances. Among other problems, of course, one cannot use the phone to call people out to cover for contingencies or to alert people of contingencies in the first place.

Since the failure, BT has been in discussion with Hampshire and Isle of Wight police and the Association of Chief Police Officers about the changes that need to be made to BT's systems and to contingency arrangements to ensure that the public are protected against similar failures in the future. The solutions being examined will be judged by the improvements that can be offered, which include alarm strategy, changes in working practices and changes in component design.

BT will report to Oftel on the reasons for the failure on 25 April, on its impact on the 999 service and on the steps being taken to mitigate failure in the future. In turn, Oftel will be monitoring the action taken to ensure that BT meets its licence requirements. The main effect, on which the hon. Gentleman and I can agree, was to cause many members of the public great concern about their well-being in the event of an emergency in the areas affected by this catastrophic failure of telephone services. There is no evidence that there was any practical and irreversible adverse impact on the public. The contingency arrangements worked, although it is right to review them on the basis of the experience gained. BT has made it clear to me that it is concerned that this failure occurred, it apologises for the problems caused, and it is determined to prevent a recurrence. Clearly, that determination should include reviewing the procedures for publicising advice when such incidents take place. That is one of the matters under review.

I assure the House that all those involved in the 999 arrangements take their responsibilities very seriously and are acutely aware of the importance and value that the public place on an efficient and effective service that will guarantee a rapid response from the police, the fire service, the ambulance service or the coastguard when there is a serious threat to life or property.

The hon. Gentleman raised the issue of the move to airwave for the police service. I cannot give him an immediate answer on that, but I shall write to him on the points that he raises.