I am very glad to have the opportunity to open a short debate on the problems of policing in Nottinghamshire. I see, looking around, a good turnout of my fellow Nottinghamshire Members of Parliament, so I shall try to keep my contribution brief.

I am sure that those hon. Members are all here because their recent experience has been the same as mine. There has been an upsurge in feeling about policing standards in the county, to a level that I do not recall for many years. I have experienced occasions previously when crime and disorder problems have featured large among my constituents, and I campaigned on that issue at the last general election. However, during the past six to 12 months, strength of feeling in many towns and villages in my constituency has risen again. I do not recall having received for many years such representations about the levels of service that people are receiving from the Nottinghamshire police service.

Tomorrow evening, 12 December, a public meeting is to be held at Harry Carlton school in East Leake, at which the chairman of the police authority will be present to try to reassure my constituents. Bingham town council has asked me to arrange a meeting with the chief constable to address the public in Bingham on the problem. My correspondence as a constituency MP and my regular contacts with my neighbours and the residents of my constituency make it obvious that this problem has come to the fore, and that people feel disturbed about it.

My constituency is rural and suburban, and my constituents have a high regard for the police service and for the policemen who serve them. I think that, like me, they enjoy the company of policemen. They support the police service, feeling that it is something that all responsible citizens should back. However, there is discomfort about the way in which the service is being delivered at the moment and a sense that people do not have good enough protection.

The background is that the Government are making much of the reforms of the police and criminal justice system that they are instituting. They are setting vast numbers of targets and seeking to demonstrate that they are raising the level of service across the country. It is therefore rather suitable to be having a debate in which we can ask why no sense of achievement in that field is getting across—to the residents of southern Nottinghamshire, at least.

I have been Home Secretary in the past, so I have views about how the police service should be reformed and improved. I continue to hold the view that the problem with policing in this country is not primarily one of resources. It is inevitably the case when discussing most public services that, because they find it difficult to think of anything else to say, people automatically say that problems must stem from a lack of money and resources. I really do not think that that has been the case with the police service in this country or in my county for many years. We have never had so many policemen in the county nor so much money spent on the police service. It is the effectiveness with which those resources are disposed of that really counts.

Sadly, I read in the local newspaper that the chairman of Nottinghamshire police authority is, as is the case with police authority chairmen up and down the country, only too inclined to put problems down to lack of resources. After this year's settlement he is calmly saying that the police precept is likely to go up by 27 per cent. next spring. If that goes ahead, I fear that it will add to my constituents' anger because in recent years, percentage council tax rises in Nottinghamshire have usually been in or near double figures, and they seem likely to be next year. I hope that the Minister will address himself to the organisation of the police service, not just turn it all into a demand for more money.

I never put too much emphasis on the theme of bobbies on the beat, which is a focus group approach to policing. If one asks an ordinary member of the public who has no personal experience of how to organise a police service what they think should be done, they tend to answer, "There should be more bobbies on the beat." As a result, at every general election all parties commit themselves to that. Nowadays, especially in rural areas, it would be nice to think that one could go back to the old police house in the village and visible foot patrols, but that is neither possible nor the best way of dealing with modern criminality. However, I do not totally dismiss the concept of beat policing in the sense of a feeling of the ready availability of the police service. My constituents do not feel that, and that is what most disturbs them. They do not really expect to see a policeman walking down the main street of Ruddington at most hours of the day, but they do want to feel that if they need help it is quickly available—that there is contact and the sense of security and protection that the police service should be able to provide. People do not feel that that ready response to their problems is available.

The Minister will almost certainly be aware that the Nottinghamshire police service has genuine problems, both in its history and with current problems of criminality, as I readily acknowledge. Although no form of statistics is less reliable than crime statistics, the area is said to have the second highest crime rate in the country in terms of offences per 1,000 of population. There are certainly parts of the county that are not quite lawless, but troubled by serious crime. My constituency goes up to the boundaries of Nottingham city, parts of which have very serious crime problems that the police have to concentrate on tackling. We have a serious drugs problem in the middle of the city; we have gunfights breaking out in the city; we have a lively city centre that creates problems to which the police have to give high priority. Because that area has to be the No. 1 priority, people outside it in the towns, villages and suburbs often feel that they have lost their access to help and response. That is a problem that I am now seeing as Member of Parliament for Rushcliffe.

Recently, we had a new chief constable, Mr. Stephen Green. I met him soon after he was first appointed, and found that he was determined to introduce a process of reform of which I wholly approve. Although the Nottinghamshire police service has never been exactly bad, it has never been particularly distinguished or remarkable. I believe that the last national league tables rated it as second from bottom in terms of effective police services in England. The new chief constable is determined to tackle that through a reform programme, which I wholly support. I was extremely impressed by his declaration of his intention to turn round the baseline performance of his police service in key areas, to undertake a more proactive style of policing and to target his service more effectively. The police and the chief constable assure us that that has not resulted in any transfer from rural to urban areas or vice versa. That makes it all the more puzzling that my rural constituents feel that that is precisely what has happened—that the problems of the Meadows and St. Annes, including gunfights and highly publicised major crime, have led to lower responses in the areas in which they live.

I have already mentioned the rurality of my constituency. It is actually suburban and rural, but the geographical area is largely rural. The biggest troubles arise in the larger rural villages cum towns that are a feature of my part of Nottinghamshire—places such as Bingham, Ruddington, Keyworth, East Leake and Cotgrave. There are also problems in the suburbs of West Bridgford and Edwalton.

My constituency's geography is rural, but Nottinghamshire does not benefit from the Government's rural policing fund and does not have any particular rural policy of which I am aware applied to it. Given that policing is meant to be community-based, it is unclear to some in my constituency exactly how policing is meant to be delivered in the large towns in particular. At one point, for example, a contact point, at which six or eight officers would be based, was going to be set up in Keyworth, but my constituents have told me that those officers have recently been moved away and are back in West Bridgford.

In rural areas and in the suburbs it is inevitable that, in 2002, people expect to use the telephone to get the response that they require. If one cannot have a policeman walking past one's gate and cannot expect to see a police car driving down the village street regularly, one expects to be able to speak to the police on the telephone. A feature of representations to me over the past 12 months has been that almost everyone complains that no one answers the telephone when they try to make a non-emergency report. There has been controversy about responsiveness, which has been quite high and is getting better, to 999 calls. The real problem occurs when responsible citizens do not misuse the 999 service, but try to call what they believe to be their local police station or the divisional headquarters to report a routine incident, which is serious to them, in which they have been a victim of crime or have witnessed vandalism or rowdiness. I have been told over and over again that it is a waste of time trying to telephone the police because frequently no response is available or, if a response comes, it is very late. When the response comes it can be extremely unhelpful, with someone merely saying, "Nothing can be done to send anybody out to deal with the incident that is taking place."

I can understand the difficulties in providing a telephone response service in today's world, because everyone now carries a mobile phone. In the old days, people could phone the police only by going to the considerable trouble of finding a telephone. Now everyone has a telephone in their pocket, which means that the propensity to ring the police has greatly increased. That means that staffing must be increased because those calls are very important to the people who make them.

In the early part of this year, responsiveness to phone calls of any kind fell to dreadful levels. I could not find the figures for the early part of this year, but by August matters had apparently improved as 39 per cent. of non-emergency calls were being answered within the target time. Of course, 39 per cent. is an appalling figure, but the situation was worse before August. I have been told that staff are being recruited and trained, and now 75 per cent. of calls are being answered within the target time, but that is still a fairly dismal performance. The Minister will no doubt explain the targets that the Government expect police services to achieve in response to the telephone. My constituents' experience has not adjusted to this so-called improvement because I have not yet found any falling away in the number of people telling me that it is a waste of time telephoning the police. It is also sometimes a waste of time going to the large police station in West Bridgford, which was once a divisional headquarters, because often the desk is not manned or the door is closed and no one is available to provide a service.

What subjects do people ring up about? In rural areas, people suffer to a lesser extent than elsewhere the problems of burglary, which is carried out by slightly more sophisticated burglars who travel out to rural areas. There is also car crime, which has decreased in recent years. Joyriding is not as fashionable as it once was among the young delinquent population of my part of Nottinghamshire, and although cars are still stolen, they are burnt out less frequently. [Interruption.] It sounds as though the delinquents have moved to the Nottingham, North constituency.

Antisocial behaviour of a semi-criminal kind is the real problem in my constituency, particularly in the large villages. I do not recall a time when things have been quite so bad. Large numbers of young people hang about in key places: in the centre of large towns and villages and small towns or in set places, such as cul-de-sacs and the edge of villages near fields where motor bikes can be ridden. Those young people make a general nuisance of themselves and commit crime. The crime in question is often vandalism; it can be petty and can constitute little more than abusive and difficult behaviour towards passers-by and people living in the locality. However, it can be quite serious and if the behaviour is repeated it has a most damaging effect on the quality of life of those who have the misfortune to live in places where it occurs, who happen to use the shopping centre that is regularly vandalised, or who find that the centre of their village is unusable.

I shall return to the subject of the transfer of resources and what is being targeted. I am not sure whether the police service has almost given up on the type of behaviour that I have described. At the moment, its response is not very adequate. I acknowledge the difficulties: more serious crime is being committed in the centre of Nottingham and it is quite difficult for the police to deal with large groups of unruly and antisocial youths because they need evidence of a criminal offence against an individual before they can move in and effect an arrest and turn to the criminal justice system. However, that does not mean that the problem can simply be abandoned. If it is, people are left feeling that there is no visible police presence and that no police will attend to improve the situation and perhaps persuade the delinquent young people to disperse.

Surely special constables could have more of a role in this area. I trust that the Minister is aware of the problems that exist in relation to special constables. Numbers have collapsed and recruiting is difficult. I have always thought that we should pay special constables. We need to acknowledge that that is the best way to persuade that type of volunteer—if they were paid, they would be volunteers with inducements—to enter the service. There are many people who would readily serve.

The Government lay great stress on the introduction of community support officers. The officers are meant to have limited powers to deal with minor crime. I cannot think of anything more suitable for them to deal with than rowdyism in the middle of Cotgrave. Apparently, 12 community support officers are planned for the enormous county of Nottinghamshire; my constituents will not be able to take much comfort from that. I should like to know when the idea will be tried out on an effective and bigger scale so that it might make some difference to the perceived level of the service.

Those are the problems that I want to raise. I am conscious of being surrounded by other hon. Members who wish to join in. It will reinforce my case, and everyone else's, if the problems that I have mentioned become a recurrent theme because other Members of Parliament have experienced the same increase in public disquiet and the same problems in different parts of the county—the south seems particularly well represented, so that area clearly has this difficulty.

I cannot forbear from reminding the Minister that while we are in the middle of the problem that I have described, his Department proposes to put an asylum detention centre in Newton. I mentioned Bingham as one of the places that suffers from criminality and vandalism. Bingham is about three miles away from the proposed centre and the residents do not welcome the prospect of 750 asylum seekers being put in a large camp where they will have little to do during the day but wander into Newton and encounter those who are already causing trouble in and around the market place in Bingham. If the building of the centre goes ahead, there are obvious implications for the police service in Nottinghamshire. I do not see how anyone plans to address the policing implications of putting a transient population of 750 people in the middle of the area that I represent.

It is important that we see delivery in Nottinghamshire of what are supposed to be national priorities, of which I strongly approve. First, we must get some speed into the criminal justice system because when dealing with young delinquents it still takes far too long from arrest to any type of disposal in court. That is a persistent weakness in the criminal justice system in our county. I will not open up on that theme because I have already taken some time.

If one is going to improve the effectiveness of the police service and make better use of our police men and women, the Government's drive to reduce red tape and paperwork should be improved. I approve of that because I had a similar drive when I was Home Secretary 10 years ago. We have talked about reducing paperwork and the demands on the police service. I blame my successors for the fact that the problems seem to have got infinitely worse since I announced my drive, and I see no sign of improvement in the near future. It is a problem for all police services that in any shift, the time in which a policeman is available to carry out any duties of a serious policing nature is greatly reduced by the amount of time spent filling in endless forms and paperwork and the sheer bureaucracy that has descended on the police service in this country.

I am sure that hon. Members and the Minister have got the flavour of the complaints that I am trying to raise on behalf of my constituents, who think that the Government's rhetoric, which always sounds quite stirring when it comes to raising the quality of the police service in this country and achieving reform that will make it more effective, contrasts starkly with the reality in the villages and suburbs of southern Nottinghamshire.

Having explained the problem, and the perception that it has got worse during the past 12 months with a deteriorating service, I look forward to hearing what encouragement and response my constituents will get when the Minister replies.

I advise hon. Members that the winding-up speeches will commence at 20 minutes to 11. If hon. Members are concise with their remarks, more may be able to catch my eye.

I am pleased to speak in this all-party debate. There is a majority of Nottinghamshire Members of Parliament from all parties present in the Hall at the moment. I am also pleased to speak in a debate convened by someone born in the heart of Nottingham, North, in Bulwell. I am pleased to pick up on some of the themes of the opening speech.

Several facts are beyond doubt. First, the Nottinghamshire police force has more police officers and more money than at any time in its recorded history. Secondly, the public in Nottingham, North feel that our streets are less protected than ever before. They ask me, "If we have all these extra officers, where are they? What are they doing? Why are they not there when we need them?" I ask those questions of the chief constable. I should like to raise several important issues about the management of the police service, all of which have had dire consequences for my constituents.

My hon. Friend mentioned the record number of police officers. Will he also confirm that over the past four months, crime has been falling each month consecutively in Nottinghamshire?

I intend to discuss the perception of crime and whether the perception and reality are the same. I shall also mention the amount of time invested in putting out a public view about the crime statistics that has often been totally at odds with my constituents' experience in the last four months, regardless of whatever the statistical finesse may be.

Like the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke), I could recite the contents of letter after letter and phone call after phone call from constituents who have seen that perceptible deterioration in law and order, for example in Bulwell, where my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood (Paddy Tipping) did many years of valuable service. Each Saturday, I hold an open meeting in my constituency that people can attend to raise any issue that they like. Traditionally, topics have ranged from global warming to housing repairs. Those meetings are now almost entirely monopolised by frightened constituents, those who have suffered individual incidents or a reduction in their quality of life due to antisocial behaviour, and those with stories to tell about bad recent experiences with the police.

Over the past 15 years in this House. I have totally supported the police in the extremely difficult job that they do. My commitment to the constables, sergeants and inspectors who serve Nottingham, North remains absolute. I have enjoyed good relations with chief constables since 1987 when I was first elected—including the present incumbent.

My surprise was therefore all the greater when, in May of this year, I heard from officers in my constituency that the chief constable was proposing to abolish the individual beat officer—the bobby on the beat to whom the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe referred—in the Nottingham division, but nowhere else in Nottinghamshire. One of the four inspectors in my constituency, who had carefully constructed a beat system, immediately requested a transfer from his existing duties. The impact on morale of the beat bobby has been catastrophic: some applied for a job in April only to be told that they were irrelevant at the end of May. Where does that leave the Government's rhetoric on community policing? Everyone pays lip service to the concept, but the reality is that a chief constable can on a whim do away with whatever he declares is not operational. Home Office Ministers are impotent to do anything about it; there is no redress.

We all live on rumours about what will happen next. To this day, I am not privy to a clear plan of action of what the chief constable is trying to achieve. If there is one, I would appreciate a copy and it should be put in the public domain so that everyone can debate it. I accept the need for change, and I endorsed the chief constable's desire to see it; one can hardly object to the word change. However, if there is to be change, the most basic management textbook would suggest that some effort should be made to discuss that with the public, and with the officers who are due to implement it.

The core question is, what is the right balance between reactive and proactive policing? Of course we need both. We need preventive policing; we need the community; and we need people doing what is often called proper policing, which is detecting and arresting criminals.

If I understand the chief constable correctly, his reason for establishing a centralised response team for the whole of the city of Nottingham was to respond and so leave officers based in local stations to be longer term and proactive. However, the majority of officers in the local stations were individual beat officers who were already doing longer-term policing. Those are the very people who are now leaving in droves because their jobs are soon to be abolished. Should beat officers be doing longer-term, proactive stuff, or more reactive policing? What should the mixture or balance be? That needs to be made clear to all of us who are consumers of the police service. We also need that expectation to be clearly established between the chief constable and the divisional commander. It sometimes seems that we are receiving mixed messages.

In place of a professional personnel policy, an insinuation has been spun to anyone who questions the decision that individual beat bobbies did not do their fair share of responsive policing. People are given a nod and a wink—or something more clearly disparaging—that bobbies just wanted a soft nine-to-five job. If that were true—I doubt that it is—it is a reason not to abolish the concept of the individual beat officer in the community, but to get stuck in to making the management of police officers more effective at local level.

The other smokescreen put up to conceal recent performance is the idea that we need more funding. Until the record amount of funding and the record number of officers are deployed competently, no one should seriously expect the Government to throw yet more money in our direction. We must be able to handle properly the extra and large amounts of money that we have in the Nottinghamshire police force.

If the idea was to build a proactive capacity in the local stations, we must ask, why move officers out of each of the Nottingham stations into the centralised response team, which is reactive? That is happening at the same time as stations in Bestwood, Bulwell, Basford and Strelley are each losing a sergeant and two experienced officers to the street crime initiative. I fully understand the problems in city centres of large-scale movements of young people, particularly at weekends, because of the entertainments and bars in city centres, and the other very difficult problems of the inner city, which are often related to drug and gun crime.

However, to adopt a totally undifferentiated policing strategy for the whole city of Nottingham, including my outer-city council estates, which are white, working-class areas where an older generation lives, and to assume that the problems faced by my constituents are the same as those in Rushcliffe or other parts of the city of Nottingham is a nonsense and a crude way in which to manage a police force.

These are not academic questions. The hollowing out of my four local stations has got the hyenas circling. Burglars, drug pushers and yobs know where their best chances are and they move to where the police are not.

It would at least be some consolation if the response team worked properly, but the failure of the centralised response team has resulted in blameless officers who remain at local stations becoming the butt of public resentment. The obvious question is why the master plan—should one exist—which has not been published and on which there has been no consultation, was not tested on local officers or at least piloted in such a way that it could be corrected as it was rolled out. Rather, it has been imposed and is resented. It is a failure—in the chief constable's words, it is "not working properly"—and has required a permanent process of tinkering since April.

Yes, I know all the management-speak about change being painful, but change introduced without anyone in the service or in our communities buying into it, and without ensuring the maintenance of basic policing services, is unnecessarily excruciating for my constituents, who depend on us, and for the loyal, hardworking and long-serving local police officers who see only decline and demoralisation in local policing and, frankly, deserve a lot better.

Leaving aside the J curves, police college jargon and crossed fingers, the question to which we have never been given a clear answer is, on what date can we expect the system—whatever it is—to be working properly? How long do we give it before someone says that enough is enough?

As I understand it—I am not privy to any plan, should one exist—individual beat officers in my constituency have had seven months of drift since April and May, in which they have been told that their jobs are redundant but have been given no clear idea of what is to replace them. I now understand that they are at some time to be replaced by "sections"—a new word—which are much larger areas with five or six officers attached to them. The chief constable said in a recent letter to me that he had come to the conclusion, "with hindsight", that 60 beat officers were not enough.

Despite the fact that the Nottinghamshire constabulary has more police officers available than ever before, it is now evident that the deployment strategy was based on guesswork, was not supported by consultations with Nottingham's police officers, the crime and disorder partnership or local representatives, and is still being made up as we go along. The centralised response team is now being cut into four parts. Well, let us give that a try for a couple of months and see whether it is any better. Law-abiding citizens in my constituency are being treated like lab rats in an experiment.

While we still have time, let us not depend on hindsight to judge the effectiveness of sections. We can make a judgment about them now. If we do not give individual officers clear personal responsibility, the result in my constituency will be pass-the-parcel policing. In reality, sections are likely to become mini response teams with less and less connection with the public or the beat and more and more responsibility for picking up the leftovers from the response team that failed to get to the scene the night before. Every hon. Member of every party in Nottinghamshire knows what is happening on the ground. They know, as local inspectors do in the local stations, that that is the truth of everyday experience.

The chief constable, rather surprisingly, asserted in a letter to me recently that there is no shortage of information coming to the Nottinghamshire police. I hope that that does not mean that the police feel that they can afford to pass up masses of intelligence from a public who have learned not to call the police any more; or ditch experienced beat officers and their painstakingly built up networks of information. Some of those officers have been five years on the same patch and are known to the community, feeding valuable leads and intelligence from local community activists who personally know the number of an individual officer. I hope that in January Her Majesty's inspectorate of constabulary will discover why this incredibly valuable asset has been deliberately bled out of our local policing in Nottingham, North. People are applying to join traffic or antisocial behaviour teams or to be dog handlers, having spent years building up intelligence on the good families and bad families in my constituency. We cannot afford to dispose, although we are disposing, of that talent. I hope that HMI will ask whether this has been by accident or by design; either answer will raise very serious questions that need answering.

I am afraid that there is a massive loss of confidence in policing by the public in Nottingham, North and my colleagues will refer, if they wish, to the same phenomena elsewhere in the shire. The public find that it takes longer to get through, that there is a longer wait for a response and that they receive a poorer quality of response when it is finally forthcoming.

However expert the spinning of the statistics and of the media—I must tell the Minister that that is one area of massive improvement in the last couple of years—the chief constable knows, I know, local police officers know and the public know the reality on the ground. Those ill-conceived and poorly implemented changes have had an appalling impact on the police service in my constituency and on my constituents, whose lives are blighted by the inability of good, sound police officers to he allowed to get on and do their jobs effectively.

Yes, there is a massive cultural problem in the police service, which must be tackled. Sadly, the way in which the chief constable has imposed and poorly managed change exemplifies rather than eliminates those cultural problems. I hope that if, even now, the chief constable will listen, not to Members of Parliament but to his own officers and to the Nottingham public and the communities to whom he is duty bound to provide a service, the guesswork and secrecy that have brought such a loss of confidence can yet be substituted with careful planning, patient involvement and confidence-building.

I am not starry-eyed about my constituency. As someone born and bred in it, I know that it has always been a tough, hard place, but I also know that the vast majority of my constituents are law abiding, want to help the police and are the salt of the earth. I genuinely feel that my constituency has little time left if the degeneration that we have all witnessed over the past year is to be halted and we are to restore acceptable levels of law and order in the outer estates of Nottingham. We have been the subject of an experiment. It has failed and it will take a big man to change direction now. I have to ask the chief constable, or he must ask himself, whether he is that man.

I congratulate my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) on securing the debate. I also congratulate the hon. Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen) on a powerful speech.

I fear that I shall sound like a stuck record. Although I shall talk not about south Nottinghamshire but about north Nottinghamshire, many of the problems that we have heard about in both speeches are common to those prevailing in my constituency. My constituency, not unlike that of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe, is a rural, market-town constituency, which suffers from a level of crime similar to that of other rural areas. However, there is no doubt that during the year and a bit that I have been in Parliament the majority of the contents of my mailbag reflects police and policing difficulties. The majority of my time as a new Member of Parliament has been spent trying to deal with those problems. That has been exacerbated—or helped, whichever way one likes to look at it—by my personal knowledge of the chief constable, whom I have known for more than 30 years, and by the fact that in a previous profession I was closely associated with the police. I hope that I have brought some empathy to the problem, but I have been bombarded with complaints at every opportunity about the way in which Newark, in particular, is policed.

I start by congratulating Inspector Gary France and Inspector Gerry Butler and their policemen and women on their efforts in Retford and Newark to contain a difficult situation. My support lies entirely behind the lower ranks, the officers on the beat, the sergeants, the inspectors and the chief inspectors who do so well in an increasingly difficult job. My support has been unswerving for these officers; my admiration for them is huge. and so is that of my community, but that is being put in danger now by the problems that we face.

As the Minister knows, I have been pestering him and the Home Secretary for improvements in funding in Nottinghamshire. I have mentioned several times the 21 per cent. rise in police precept in Newark and Sherwood, which council tax payers in my constituency greatly resent. I have pestered the Minister for the Home Secretary—and the Prime Minister—to visit the constituency; the Prime Minister has never done so. The Minister knows that this is a particular subject of mine; I have pointed out several times that Nottinghamshire constabulary has about half the officers of Merseyside police, and about half the funding, despite the fact that 9,000 fewer crimes are reported in the Merseyside area; 160,000-odd crimes are reported in Nottinghamshire.

I am grateful to the Minister that in the next financial year we may receive a rise of 4.9 per cent. in police funding. However, like my hon. Friends I am not convinced that that money will be spent wisely. As has been said in both the previous speeches, it is not simply a matter of improvements in crime figures or in response timing, or in extra sums of money given to the police; what is crucial is the ability to communicate those improvements to the average man and woman on the street who feels that their police officers are not doing the job for which they are paid and perhaps resourced. It is the essential element of reassurance of constituents that is so badly lacking.

I want to thank the chief constable for the time that he has spent in my constituency; he is not Newark's or Retford's but Nottinghamshire's chief constable. I pay tribute to the fact that he has listened carefully to what we have to say, but the fact remains that although improvements are undoubtedly being reported, particularly by Newark police, there is a general lack of assurance and faith from my constituents in the job that is being done.

I understand Nottinghamshire's needs. I understand that the chief constable must put his resources where they are needed, in the big crime hotspots such as Nottingham, which, as we heard, faces the problems of gun crime—which is largely absent in Newark and Retford—and drug crime. However, the constabulary is about to get extra resources and I am not sure why the chairman of Nottinghamshire police authority is saying that it will make little difference and is calling for another rise in council tax of perhaps 27 per cent. in the forthcoming financial year. Like my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe, I believe that that will be deeply resented by my constituents.

To avoid confusion, does the hon. Gentleman agree that the 27 per cent. is 27 per cent. on the police precept, which is a small proportion of the total council tax?

Yes, of course I agree, but that is 27 per cent. on top of a 21 or so per cent. rise, or in other words an enormous rise in the overall proportion of the council tax. I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman's intervention.

Improvements have been made in the way in which calls are handled. Speed of response has increased considerably. However, I am not sure that the advice that my constituents receive at the end of a telephone is always well considered. The chief constable has gone through that with me at length, saying that the staff for the new call centres need to be properly trained and to become familiar with the areas. They need to understand that Skegby is a hamlet just north of Normanton on Trent, not a considerable town near Mansfield. Clearly, the problems will take time to iron out, but the fact remains that they have not been ironed out yet. I very much look forward to my visit to a call centre to assure myself that things are improving.

I reiterate the words of my right hon. and learned Friend: if there is one problem that can be solved, it is the speed of response to telephone calls. That would go an awfully long way towards reassuring—I use that word again—my constituents.

In my day, when I worked alongside the Royal Ulster Constabulary, it worked on three pillars: attrition, deterrence and reassurance. I am reasonably convinced that, under the new strategy that the chief constable has introduced, attrition is being considered in some detail. Prevention is better than cure, and no doubt professional police officers have well and truly understood that lesson. However, deterrence and reassurance are the two pillars of the structure to which I am referring. If they are not implemented properly, that leads to a lack of faith and a wholesale fear among constituents that they are not getting the protection that they deserve from the officers whom they pay, however indirectly.

There has been a certain amount of flim-flam behind this issue. There have been sensational stories in the Newark Advertiser about anonymous police officers complaining about the way in which the police service in the county is handled. It is open to my constituents to judge whether that is helpful. It certainly spreads a huge amount of alarm and it is based on the authoritative voice of ex-police officers. I look to the chief constable to try to reassure those ex-officers and serving officers.

I echo the hon. Member for Nottingham, North about consulting the officers who will have to implement the changes. I hope very much that when the inspectorate is involved in January, the system under which Nottinghamshire is asked to do its policing will be considered in detail.

I reiterate the points about special constables. My view is that community support officers are not a good idea. However, they are here to stay. I regret the fact that the chief constable has been unable to produce more CSOs than the 12 whom we are offered, due to the fact that his funding is unsustained. I ask the Minister to consider that in detail.

In conclusion, we have excellent policemen and women, who are trying to do an extraordinarily difficult job. We are told that we have more money and more police officers in Nottinghamshire than we have ever seen before. In my constituency, however, we seem to have fewer police officers. It is being bandied around that we used to have 42 but we now have 29. It is the chief constable's job to ensure that my constituents are aware of a job being done better. He must reassure them that they can sleep safely in their beds. Above and beyond everything else, the wedge that has been driven between the people and the police force must be removed with speed.

I agree that there is disillusionment throughout Nottinghamshire. It is important that we examine why that is the case. As has been said, police numbers in the county are at a record high and crime is falling once again. Why is there that lack of public confidence? The right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) spoke about the problems with the telephone. That is a key issue. People cannot get through on the telephone. There is no response—I have experienced this myself—and their disillusionment increases. To be fair to the Nottinghamshire police, the response has improved but we need to look at quality, not just quantity. The qualitative response from the telephone operators is abysmal at the moment. We must work harder to ensure that people who ring up in need get an appropriate response.

There has been some talk about the problems caused by the reorganisation. All reorganisation is dysfunctional, but over a number of years the Nottinghamshire police force has been remarkably complacent. Until recently it has been on a progressively downward spiral. Change was necessary. As the hon. Member for Newark (Patrick Mercer) said, some police officers have found that extremely difficult, but those who go anonymously to talk to the Newark Advertiser are doing the service no good at all. I do not believe the Nottinghamshire crime statistics. I travel the country fairly widely and the notion that Nottinghamshire has the second highest crime statistics is inconceivable. There have been problems with the way that Nottinghamshire has recorded the figures in the past. The Minister needs to look at how crime is recorded across the country.

I want to make one essential point directly to the chairman of the Nottinghamshire police authority. The precept went up 20 per cent. last year. This week he is threatening that it will go up by 27 per cent. next year. He described last year's settlement as inadequate. Let us just consider it. It is a 4.3 per cent. increase. It represents £5 million extra in the budget, but that is not all. What needs to be considered is the extra money, particularly from the crime fighting fund. If all the specific grants are taken into account, such as those for tackling street crime, which is a real problem for my colleagues in Nottingham, the budget of the Nottinghamshire police would rise from £118 million this year to £130 million next year. That is an increase of £12 million or nearly 10 per cent.

I must tell the chairman of the police authority and the chief constable that unless performance increases—unless we get increased output from the Nottinghamshire police—there can be no suggestion that any Nottinghamshire MP will campaign for more funding for the Nottinghamshire police. The focus should be on making best use of the resources that are available, rather than crying in the dark for resources that will not come. The chairman of the police authority is doing his force and the community in Nottinghamshire no favours whatever.

I shall be brief so that others may speak. I want to highlight three or four main points about policing in Nottinghamshire. We have heard about many of the challenges that face the police. Many of the complaints that hon. Members have made are similar to the those that my constituents make. The telephone system is the focus of one such complaint. It is improving, but it needs further improvement.

The plea that is made to me most often with regard to the police is for a visible police presence—to see more police officers on the streets. The intention underlying the change introduced by the chief constable and the chairman of the police authority was to try to achieve that, and I am sure that people will welcome it.

We heard about the importance of local beat officers in reassuring the local community, and we must make them the focus of our efforts. It is important to reiterate for the record that police numbers in Nottinghamshire are at an all-time high. By March 2003, the number will be 2,434 compared with 2,204 only three years ago—an increase of 10 per cent. We should welcome that increase, but Nottinghamshire and the rest of the country still need more police officers. While I am a Member of Parliament, I will repeat the demand that my constituents make to me for more police officers because they want a visible police presence on the street.

I agree that effective management and the efficient use of resources are important, and those responsible for them should be held to account where they are lacking. Since I was elected in 1997, however, my fundamental belief has not changed a jot that this country needs a considerable number of extra police officers on the streets in addition to the extra numbers that the Government have made available. I shall continue to argue that point.

The right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) made the important point that, as well as increased numbers of police officers and better management, we, as a society, need to consider how to tackle the scourge of antisocial behaviour and criminal damage in our communities, which are very real problems. We need to consider the role of special constables and increase their recruitment and retention. I agree with the right hon. and learned Gentleman that specials should be paid for the work that they do. The Government have relented and are to consider pilot schemes for paying them. I ask the Minister to consider choosing Nottinghamshire for such a pilot scheme, if the chief constable and the chair of the police authority believe it to be appropriate, so that we may determine whether we can use special constables to work alongside police officers.

I also want there to be more community support officers, not only in the city, but throughout the county. Why is Nottinghamshire not one of the areas in which we may pilot giving community support officers the power to detain people for 30 minutes? Community support officers in six areas have that power; it should be available to ours, too.

I want the Government to put more pressure on councils to tackle some of the problems that they have with antisocial behaviour. The police are continually called to deal with antisocial tenants and other such problems, but it is the councils' responsibility to deal with such problems, and they should do so much more effectively.

Will the Minister ask the Lord Chancellor and those people who are responsible for the courts why persistent offenders are still being bailed? Months ago, we said that the courts would not bail persistent young offenders, yet police officers continually tell me that they do. What does it do for morale and reassurance in the community when a police officer catches people who are then bailed by the courts? When we say that courts should not bail persistent offenders, we should ensure that they do not and that we support our police.

Finally, would it be appropriate, following reflection on our debate, for a delegation to meet the Minister privately to discuss the key issues in more detail? We need to talk them through and find a way forward that both supports the police and addresses the identified problems.

I am an avid reader of the Newark Advertiser and would love to exchange the problems of Newark and Rushcliffe for the problems of Worksop and its surrounding area. I represent a 360 square mile area and my mailbag is also bulging. After analysing the problems, I know that road humps and traffic are higher on people's agenda than policing. That is a fact. I have found that every time one of the 80 parish councils meets and has a police officer present—as they nearly always do—the councils, unsurprisingly, want to discuss policing. When an expert on traffic is present, they unsurprisingly want to discuss transport.

I urge the chief constable to stop sending an officer or himself to every parish council. I cannot get around all 80 of them. They should be grouped together, perhaps 10 at a time, and in those circumstances I would offer my services to chair meetings at which traffic and police issues could be discussed at the same time. Indeed, a correlation exists between them.

Management of change is always difficult. I spent many years trying to negotiate change in the car industry. Without people biting the bullet of change and without the advance of technology, we would have no car industry left. I want to state in the strongest terms that, however painful the change, I want the police service in my area to have the most advanced technology. Many of my constituents still hold dear the concept of PC Plod travelling around the 360 square miles on his bike, but we cannot go back to that notion. I want the police service to use the most advanced technology and I congratulate the force on the changes that have already taken place. Major teething problems have occurred, but they resulted from the way in which the new technology was first introduced.

The management of change will also be painful for local officers. I should like to see fewer phone numbers: I have never known an area in which it is so easy to bandy around different numbers of the local police station. When people ring the local police station and are dissatisfied, who is blamed?—the Government. The police say that they do not have sufficient resources to deal with problems. That occurs throughout the public services. Everyone likes to blame others and ask for more money because it is an easy way of getting rid of people on the other end of the phone. In the management of change, that must be a top priority. I constantly receive feedback from people saying that there are not enough police. How do they know? Because, they say, the police told them that they did not have enough resources for effective policing. It is a critical part of the problem.

I frequently say to parish councils nowadays, "You complain, so you show me the people who are volunteering to be specials." Of course, the Home Secretary has the advantage of a much stronger economy these days, which should help to pay for change. Doubtless the absence of a strong economy was why it was turned down in the past. I should like to see closed circuit television paid for by my own parish council and others in order to deter; it might dislodge criminals to other areas without CCTV. I applaud the Government's efforts and would like even more money invested in CCTV

About 95 per cent. of recorded and unrecorded crime in my area is caused by drugs. I ask the Minister for my area to be piloted under the Criminal Justice Bill: let us quantify the savings to the police service resulting from diverting criminals into treatment. I suspect that they would be substantial, not to mention the large savings to legal aid budgets. Please make us a pilot area.

Police funding is increasing by 10 per cent. this year, so the number of police officers—2,434—is the highest that Nottinghamshire has ever had. However, the context is important, and we must recognise that Nottinghamshire has the second highest crime rate—in terms of the ratio of crimes per 1,000 people—and the highest ratio of crimes per officer in the country.

I represent an inner-city constituency in which the bulk of crimes are committed. We must understand current policing demands and what the police are being asked to take on. Since April, robberies in Nottinghamshire have increased by 18.6 per cent. There have been 31 shootings and three fatalities. There have been 150 arrests for drug or gun-related crimes, 31 of which resulted in deportations. One killing was of a young man who grew up in my front room, and I feel very angry about the nature of his death.

It is wrong, however, to say that all that is the fault of the chief constable. His arrival in Nottinghamshire was one of the best pieces of news that the county had had in a long time. When he arrived, the safest place to be in the county was police headquarters, which was not surprising because of the number of officers who were tied up there. One thing that the chief constable has done is make a commitment to devolve resources and put officers into the communities that they are supposed to be policing. There are problems with that, and with a resistance to change, but my constituents welcome the deployment of police in different ways.

I do not want to repeat the points that have been made about the answering of telephone calls to the police. Those are legitimate criticisms, but I want it to be recognised that some of the issues thrown at the police have to be set in a different context. We live in a society that faces rising crime. Despite that, police in Nottinghamshire have the highest ratio of arrests to charges in the country. For that, they should be congratulated.

Those police also have a background record of much more substantial involvement in diversionary and antisocial behaviour programmes than we have yet seen. The most successful scheme is a project called Wheelbase in my constituency, which has an incredible record of deflecting young people away from patterns of crime. The tragedy is that the scheme has to survive on a hand-to-mouth funding basis, for which we all have a responsibility, rather than the police who set it up and whose support underpins it.

I shall list four challenges in relation to Nottinghamshire police that I hope that the Minister will consider. Clearly, the central issues are drugs, guns and crime. The connections between the three are pivotal to crime in the county. We must accept that the community is often afraid not only of crime, but of coming forward to identify crime. Witness protection is crucial to detection rates. We should consider a gun amnesty, but only on the basis of introducing a statutory five-year sentence for the possession of guns.

Finally, I urge the Minister to think carefully before we charge down the path of 24-hour licensing in cities, because that will mean 24-hour provision of emergency services, and I am not sure that we have the capacity or cash to provide that at present.

I congratulate the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) on securing the debate and on his measured introduction. I agree with 99 per cent. of what he said. The paradox is that the level of crime has been falling over the past few months and, indeed, since 1995, but we perceive that it is getting worse. I believe that the reason for that perception is the undoubted rise in antisocial behaviour. Most people do not see burglaries regularly, but they do see antisocial behaviour and they infer that all other crime is also getting worse.

There is little time to speak because we need to let those on the Front Benches have a go, so I shall restrict myself to a couple of comments.

I should be grateful if the hon. Gentleman would give his opinion on what the police authority in Nottinghamshire should be doing. Some of the problems that we have heard about could perhaps be tackled more proactively by ensuring the right balance. Having made that comment, I waive my right to speak, so that the hon. Gentleman has a little more time.

I am extremely grateful to the hon. Lady for her helpful intervention in both senses. She makes an important point on the role of the police authority. We do not have a great sense of democratic accountability, because of the indirect election to the authority, so it is all the more important that it is seen to be taking a lead. I support the police authority's efforts to get the Government to reconsider the way in which police funding is allocated to different areas, because there are paradoxes. If we make comparisons on population and number of crimes, we see that Nottinghamshire appears to be underfunded in relation to a number of other areas. I ask the Minister to reconsider that.

I shall focus on what we are asking the Government to do. First, they must consider the funding formula and ensure that Nottinghamshire gets its fair share. I am launching a petition in my constituency to gather support for that move.

Secondly, I understand that the chief constable is reluctant to introduce too many community support officers before he has commitments on long-term funding for them. Obviously, he does not want to recruit and train them, only to let them go again a couple of years later. That is one reason why only 12 are lined up. It would help if the Government showed a long-term commitment to the concept.

Thirdly, I was talking to Lord Falconer at a conference on identity cards. There is very wide support for those among my constituents, to back up the police. Fourthly, I support the efforts to reduce paperwork and waiting time in court so that the police that we do have work more productively. I am concerned about the slow introduction of links between computer systems. I understand that a year or two ago, it was still the case that a police officer might have to enter the same personal data about suspects 16 times in different systems. That figure has decreased a little, but it could come down much more.

Finally, I join my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) in volunteering my area as one where the new compulsory treatment for offenders on heroin is introduced. That will he of very substantial benefit, and we should like to be part of it. I look forward to the Minister's comments.

I congratulate my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) on securing the debate. The strength of feeling about the situation in Nottinghamshire has not gone unnoticed by those of us from other counties who take an interest in police matters. Before the debate, several hon. Members representing Nottinghamshire constituencies had already expressed their concerns in the Chamber and elsewhere. We have heard many different views, and it is not for me as an MP from another county to presume to comment on the detail of policing in Nottinghamshire. However, I want to make a few points that I hope will be helpful.

Most hon. Members have mentioned resources. Understandably, many Labour Back Benchers have said that there is a record number of police officers in Nottinghamshire at present. That is perfectly true, and I would not take that away from them. However, it is interesting that during Labour's first five years in government, numbers in Nottinghamshire fell by 65. One hon. Member even compared the figures with those for three years ago, as though the previous three years did not count.

There are record numbers of police officers, but it is not just a matter of numbers. As my right hon. and learned Friend said, it is a matter of how resources are used, and an issue of organisation. I sympathise with hon. Members who said that the police do not always help themselves. I, too, have heard of police officers telling victims of crime, "I'm sorry, but we can't get there—we're the only ones on duty in 500 square miles." That certainly does not help the public perception, whatever the truth may be.

Telephones and response times have been mentioned. It is time to consider having a second tier of telephones, as they do in many parts of the United States for the less urgent calls—not emergency calls. I have recently been a victim of crime, involving the loss of property worth several thousand pounds. On reporting it, all that I received was an incident number. It is now three months later and I have still not seen a police officer. I have explained that to my force, and it knows my views on that, but that demonstrates that we are all open to the problem of not getting the response that we expect from telephone calls.

I also want to refer to the term that my right hon. and learned Friend used: "bobbies on the beat". He referred to that as a focus group concept, and I am well aware of his attitude to focus groups, which I largely share. If that is seen, as some chief constables have said to me, as purely a matter of reassurance because people want to see bobbies on the beat, then I share my right hon. and learned Friend's cynicism; it is a pointless exercise. However, I contend that bobbies on the beat could provide not merely reassurance but effective policing—[Interruption.]—if such police officers are proactive, as the hon. Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen) is saying sotto voce, by gaining intelligence on the ground. Other officers can then bring intelligence together, using modern technology to develop pictures of crime areas and views on the causes of crime and the factors leading to it—perhaps environmental factors, or factors such as licensing, as the hon. Member for Nottingham, South (Alan Simpson) mentioned. The two can work together. To have people out there on the streets, looking after their own patch and leading the search for intelligence, is a major way of addressing, especially, more minor crimes such as the antisocial behaviour to which so many hon. Members have referred.

I would argue that such work is not a job for special constables. There is not time to debate specials now, but being out there, dealing with the community, is such a crucial job that experienced front-line police officers should be doing it. Decisions about that should be taken locally. The Government should not and cannot enforce that kind of policing. However, they can set about stimulating it by removing barriers and obstacles, and encouraging and enabling the necessary co-ordination.

Antisocial tenants were mentioned. That problem highlights the role of an effective community officer with very close organised links with all public agencies involved in an area, including housing agencies and authorities. The Government have much more work to do to make such community policing happen. Yes, decisions must be made on the ground by local police chiefs, working with police authorities where there is room for considerable improvement; but the Government should not shuffle off all responsibility. They should facilitate those developments, get rid of barriers and build partnerships. That will lead to more effective policing on the ground in Nottinghamshire and throughout the country.

I congratulate the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) on securing the debate and on the manner in which he presented his case. It was up to his usual standard, on this very important matter.

Two themes emerged from the debate. One was the gratifyingly high level of concern and commitment from all hon. Members who contributed; I congratulate them on that. The other was that although some concerns are shared there is a real diversity of view on some of the basics, and there are different opinions about what is and is not being achieved and the chances of success.

There was a request during the debate for a delegation to meet me to discuss the problems again. Hon. Members are aware that Her Majesty's inspectorate of constabulary will have some involvement in Nottinghamshire in the near future. I can tell hon. Members from all parties who have expressed heartfelt views on this matter that if they feel that such a delegation—I am here picking up the point raised by the hon. Member for South-East Cambridgeshire (Mr. Paice)—would help to draw together the various opinions in the county without trying to second-guess what is not the Government's job, or is HMI's job, or is the local chief constable's job and the local police authority's job, I should be more than happy to undertake that.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) said, change is hugely difficult. It is proving to be difficult and painful for individuals in the force and in the wider community in Nottinghamshire, and I am prepared to do anything that might assist with that. I cannot speak for the Minister for Policing, Crime Reduction and Community Safety, who is unable to be here, but I am sure that he would be equally willing— and perhaps a more appropriate person—to meet such a delegation. Between us, we are prepared to try to sort it out.

I shall try to deal with the points that have been raised. I do not expect to be able to do justice to them all, but we shall take away all the issues that have been aired and try to be as constructive as we can.

Nottinghamshire police authority has not fared badly under the provisional funding settlement. For 2003–04 it was allocated general grant of £123.7 million—an increase of 4.3 per cent., or £5.2 million. In addition, there are several specific grants, including £4.32 million for the crime fighting fund. Taking into account the crime fighting fund, as well as grant funding, Nottinghamshire police force will benefit from an overall increase of about 4.9 per cent. No hon. Members have disputed that. On top of that, there is £1.13 million towards the cost of Airwave and £0.85 million to tackle street crime. In the current financial year, capital provision rose by 26.2 per cent., and the notional credit approval of £21.4 million was given for the public-private partnership contract signed last year for the new traffic wing and supply and maintenance of vehicles.

Street crime has fallen in Nottinghamshire by 14 per cent. during the course of the initiative. Street robbery has increased significantly in the constituency of the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe. As he would accept, however, he does not live in the most dangerous part of the county, or indeed the country—quite the reverse. I do not know whether that is all down to the representation that he manages to provide. I am sure that he recognises that despite the rise in street crime, the problems that his constituents face are dwarfed by those in other parts of the county.

There are concerns about how resources have been redeployed in the county. The chief constable tells me that there has been no denuding of posts around the county for the sake of Nottingham city centre. Posts remain as budgeted on 1 April. Because the proportion of probationers in the city division was significantly higher than in any other division, experienced officers were transferred into the city division. However, the proportion of probationers in Nottingham is still higher than in the surrounding divisions.

Another matter that has been the focus of much comment this morning is the programme for change that the chief constable launched on 1 April. It will include a review and is intended to reduce demands on resources, to realign basic command units with local authority boundaries, to support partnership and to ensure that community-based problem solving is at the heart of the policing culture. The chief constable tells me that resources have been devolved to the basic command units and that 52 officers have been devolved to divisional operations from the HQ departments. He tells me that Operation Roman, in utilising scientific support, has seen a 20 per cent. increase in DNA and fingerprint identification from the extra 20 per cent. of crime scenes visited.

Operation Stealth has been concerned with the problem of firearms in the city of Nottingham; it has seen 150 arrests, of which 31 resulted in people being deported. Doubtless Nottinghamshire Members will be aware of much more being done. It is important to recognise that it takes time for the results of any change programme to come through. I recognise that there are varying degrees of confidence as to whether the change programme will work; along with the chief constable and the police, we shall try to take that into account.

Hon. Members know that HMI will be involved in the force in the near future. In January, there will be a pre-force inspection, and a best value review inspection of Nottingham city basic command unit. Later, in March next year, HMI will be formally inspecting the force based on the earlier inspections. The report will be finalised within five weeks, and it will be available to allow us to assess the performances that concern several hon. Members who have spoken this morning. HMI plans to write to all the MPs concerned in the near future to alert them to the inspections, to give them details of what it intends to do and to invite them to state their views on the problem.

I cannot respond to the many individual issues that were raised. The right hon. and learned Gentleman and many other hon. Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood (Paddy Tipping), raised the issue of response times. The right hon. and learned Gentleman is absolutely right that there have been improvements and response times are below the national average, which is one thing that HMI and the police authority will want to consider to see whether improvements can be made in that area.

On CSOs, a variety of opinions was expressed. The Nottinghamshire force has been given what it bid for. If it makes further bids, they will be considered. The right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe and other hon. Members support the concept of CSOs but are impatient for the roll-out of the programme. A great deal of scepticism was expressed by Conservative Members during the passage of the Police Reform Act 2002 about whether we should be going down that route. I was amused by the report this morning that the hon. Member for Newark (Patrick Mercer) does not support CSOs but that he wants funding stability to enable an ongoing commitment to them. He knows, because he served on the Standing Committee, that the Opposition attempted to slow down the giving of powers to CSOs, and to have CSOs piloted rather than rolled out quickly. Any diminution in our ability to roll out CSOs as quickly as we would like is partly due to opposition expressed in this House.

Will the Minister give way?

I do not have time, because we are coming up to the wire.

Another issue about which hon. Members are greatly concerned applies not only to Nottinghamshire but elsewhere. It is antisocial behaviour. The Government have plans to deal with that in the new Session. All hon. Members will want to have an input into the plans to ensure that they are as effective as possible.

On local issues, I am more than happy to meet a delegation if people believe that it will be constructive and will help to bring people together. Judging from the debate, I am certain that every single Member of Parliament for the county passionately shares the underlying desire to improve policing in Nottinghamshire for the benefit of all the people who live there.

I am delighted to have secured a debate to discuss the common agricultural policy in relation to the Copenhagen summit. I follow a debate secured by the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke); Westminster Hall is clearly becoming the venue for former Cabinet Ministers to continue to tread the boards. I hope that this debate proves as interesting as the one on policing in Nottingham.

I welcome to the Front Bench my hon. Friend the Minister for Europe. Many of us were delighted by his appointment. He has shown a deep interest in Europe, not only during his time in the House, but for many years before that. I know that he will be a strong and forcible advocate for Europe both within and outside the House. I look forward with interest to his response to the debate. I think that he is covering the main debate in the Chamber later today, so it will be a busy day for him. I apologise for that.

What about the shadow Minister?

I never apologise to shadow Ministers. That is one of the few things that I have learned during my time in the House.

Most importantly, the Minister will be able to deal with the CAP and the extent to which it may be debated at the Copenhagen summit. I say "extent" because, as many of us are aware, there was a fair degree of discussion about the CAP at the European Council meeting towards the end of October. Some decisions were taken there and they have set the framework within which any changes or reform will take place.

The Copenhagen summit will primarily be discussing enlargement—something that is very important for the future of Europe. It just so happens that many of the candidate countries for entry into an enlarged European Union have extensive farming interests. However, farming in those countries is outdated and inefficient. Enlargement and the nature of the agricultural sector in the candidate countries mean that there will need to be changes in the CAP. We should use enlargement as an opportunity to drive through major changes. Perhaps we should even reconsider the idea of giving subsidies for production, which has led to many of the present difficulties.

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for securing this important debate. I checked the EU website this morning and found that the CAP is not on the agenda to be raised formally at the meetings of the European Council in the next couple of days. Does he share my concern that the only debate will be in stand-up rows in the withdrawing rooms? Which language does he recommend that those stand-up rows be conducted in?

From my former experience, I know that even though there is a formal agenda at such gatherings, the Heads of State discuss a range of relevant issues. I do not doubt that there will be friendly discussions—I cannot say "comradely" now, given the nature of the political complexion in France. I have to say that the Prime Minister speaks very good French. He would have no problems speaking in French if he wanted to, but I am sure that he will speak in English. Enlargement will be raised both formally and informally in the context of the agreements made in the European Council in Brussels and I make that point because we now have the parameters for any changes that need to be made to the common agricultural policy.

I want to raise three issues in this debate. First, I want to consider the high price that taxpayers and consumers in the United Kingdom are paying for the CAP. Secondly, the way in which the CAP works at the moment threatens the livelihoods of some of the poorest farmers in the world. Thirdly, if the argument for the CAP is that it safeguards the future of small farmers in the United Kingdom, the latest figures from the European Commission show that that is not the case because they are not benefiting from the way in which it operates.

The Brussels conclusions at the end of October resulted in one decision being taken and one being deferred. The first decision was that there would be an agreement on the overall level of spending on the CAP in line with the Commission's recommendations for 2006–13. The decision assumes that there will be an inflation rate of 1 per cent.—the single European currency is working well and I doubt whether inflation will be down to 1 per cent. for all those years—and therefore there will be a real-terms reduction, which was agreed in Brussels, in the amount that will be spent on the CAP.

The clear area of disagreement was reform because, as part of the deal on the capping of spending on agriculture, it was argued that there should be no reform of the CAP before 2006, which means that the status quo should apply until 2006. That was not agreed, but it was accepted that any reform should be part of the mid-term review, which will be conducted in line with the conclusions of the Berlin summit in 1999. The mid-term review will go ahead, and reform must form part of it.

It is very important that the European Union gets its act together and makes urgent progress. We all know of the failure of the World Trade Organisation talks in Seattle, and many lessons were learned as a result. As part of the European Union, the United Kingdom Government were in the forefront of arguing that there should be a new ministerial meeting, which should consist of a development round of trade talks. At the Doha meeting 12 months ago, we managed to reestablish and restart the trade talks. The round of talks will concern development, but as part of the deal it was recognised that agriculture had to change within those trade discussions.

The European Union is the only one of the main trading blocs that has not put its proposals forward. As part of the Doha process, it has quickly to put its proposals forward for change on agriculture. If it fails to do so—it probably has to do so by the end of this year or in early January at the very latest—it will derail the Doha talks, so it must make urgent progress. Even if it happens informally, I hope that the urgency of making progress on submitting our proposals within the European Union for change to the WTO will be realised and that that will take place at Copenhagen. If we fail to do so, we will carry a very heavy burden indeed.

I mentioned that I wanted to tackle three issues. I am pleased to see that the shadow spokesman is taking notes of what I am saying; he might learn a good deal. The hon. Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry) has just passed him a pen. The fact that the shadow spokesman did not bring a pen shows his remarkable state of readiness. Even the Minister is lending a pen—a better quality one, of course. I shall speak slightly more slowly, so that the shadow Minister can take full note of my contribution.

On the cost to consumers and taxpayers, it was interesting that when I secured the debate and it appeared on the Order Paper, someone contacted me to ask, "What is the relevance of this to your constituency?" Tyneside, North is an urban area with very little farming and few farmers, so the conclusion was that the subject was not terribly relevant to my constituents. However, it is relevant. Many of my constituents are concerned about the effect of the common agricultural policy on the developing world.

A few months ago, I attended a very good meeting organised at St. Bartholomew's church in Benton in my constituency. Many people who attended were concerned about the way in which the CAP operates and its effect on the developing world. Another concern—perhaps, a more self-interested one—is the fact that people in my constituency pay to fund the CAP. About £3.30 a week for every man, woman and child in the country is paid to the CAP, either by consumers through higher prices or by taxpayers through their taxes. From my constituency, £270,000 a week goes to the CAP—a total each year of £14.9 million.

Is not it also in the interests of the right hon. Gentleman's constituents that the CAP has produced food security for several years? That is as important as the other issues that he has mentioned.

The hon. Gentleman's comments show the time warp in which some of the debate takes place. Food security may have been an issue 20 years ago when the CAP was in its infancy, but it is not the issue that it was. There is now overproduction in many parts of the world, particularly because of the way in which the CAP operates. If there is a need for a common agricultural policy, surely we could get away from a system that supports overproduction in the United Kingdom, which is dumped on small farmers in the developing world. I shall deal with overproduction shortly, particularly in the sugar and dairy sectors. If there is an argument about food security, it is one on which I have yet to be persuaded. The CAP as presently constructed does not address food security—perhaps there should be a debate about how it could be reformed to reassure the hon. Gentleman.

The pensioner and the young mother doing her shopping pay higher prices to support the CAP. That goes down badly with shipyard workers and miners who have lost their jobs, because there was no Government subsidy for their industries. They have gone through the painful process of redundancy, and have retrained, learned new skills and found work, only to pay higher taxes to support the CAP, which provides subsidies to very rich farmers in the UK. They resent paying higher taxes to subsidise the farming sector.

The right hon. Gentleman referred to very rich farmers, but I represent a constituency in which hill farm incomes have sunk to about £4,000 per annum. That is not rich by any definition. I hope that he is not intent on giving a false impression about farmers. I agree that there is a need for drastic reform, but it is not the case that all farmers are fat cats.

I accept absolutely the hon. Gentleman's point. For family reasons, I know his constituency very well. I shall later disclose figures that show how payments under the CAP are made to farmers in Great Britain, which will confirm the hon. Gentleman's point. Many farmers—small farmers and particularly hill farmers—are struggling in very difficult circumstances. If they receive €5,000 a year from the CAP they are doing well. Others are paid more than €500,000 a year. A few farmers and big businesses are doing very well out of the CAP, but many small farmers are struggling and are not receiving any benefit from it. That is the self-interest issue and why consumers, shoppers and taxpayers are paying heavily.

The second issue is the effect on farmers in the developing world. For understandable reasons, much of the debate about helping farmers and countries in the developing world has focused on increasing the amount of aid that we give to those countries and on writing off debt. Those are important initiatives and I do not decry them, but a greater prize is available, to us and to those countries, from liberalisation and greater trade. It has been calculated that if Africa increased its share of world exports by just 1 per cent., it would generate $70 billion going into Africa. That is five times the amount received in aid.

The issue is not just one of breaking down barriers and tariffs. I admit that it was a mistake on my part, but when I considered the matter in the past, I saw it as the European Union breaking down tariffs to open up the EU market. That is important and we are taking steps to do that. I applaud the fact that some of those tariffs are coming down, albeit a bit too slowly, but at least they are moving in the right direction. However, the real problem for many small farmers in the developing world is the way in which subsidies are used to support certain sectors of farming in the United Kingdom. The result is overproduction, which is then dumped in those countries at a low price. The two worst sectors for that are dairy and sugar. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development estimates that in 2001 the European Union dairy sector was subsidised to the extent of €16 billion. That is equivalent to more than $2 a day for each of the 21 million cows in the European Union when 100 million people in Africa live on less than $2 a day. That must be the ultimate obscenity of the common agricultural policy, yet some European leaders argue for no change and want the status quo. They do so for a simple reason: their view is that change to the CAP will cost them votes. However, the message is clear: the way in which the CAP works is costing lives in Africa.

Further to the point raised by the hon. Member for Meirionnydd Nant Conwy (Mr. Llwyd), does the right hon. Gentleman agree that more than half the amount either supports export subsidies or goes to processors and trading companies, not farmers? Does he also agree that many of the subsidies do not help farmers in this country; they help large companies and exporters to dump on the third world and undermine the livelihoods of small farmers in countries about which we are all concerned?

Free from the constraints of ministerial office, I now have the opportunity of attacking big business, which my hon. Friend the Member for Luton, North (Mr. Hopkins) will applaud. I do not intend to do that because, rather than attacking big business, which sees a system that it can use to its own advantage, we, as politicians who are accountable to people in our countries, must ensure that we change the way in which the CAP operates. The hon. Member for St. Ives (Andrew George) is right; it rewards a few at the expense of many. I shall carry on with my speech, as many hon. Members want to take part in the debate.

Dairy products are being dumped on developing countries and Jamaica is a good example. In the past 10 years, its imports of milk powder from the European Union have increased fivefold; the European Union is spending about €4 million a year to subsidise production in Jamaica. As a result, Jamaica's own milk production has fallen by 35 per cent. in the past two years. Local producers now supply only 12 per cent. of the domestic milk market. That is a good example of how subsidies to dairy producers in the European Union act against the interests of developing countries.

There is a similar tale to be told about sugar, which was brought home to me recently when I visited Peter Makokha, who farms 10 acres of land in western Kenya, just outside a town called Mumias on the border with Uganda. He farms mainly for his own use for produce for cattle and sheep, on which his family live. He has one cash crop: sugar cane. He uses the money he gets from selling the sugar to send his children to school, for health care and to buy fuel—the simple, basic necessities. With the other farmers in Kenya, Peter produces white sugar at €280 a tonne; the cost of production in Europe is €670 a tonne. Peter's worry is that he is being denied access to his own local market. He will not be trading his sugar in the European Union or the United States. For Peter and the other farmers in Kenya, what really matters is the local market 10 miles down the road or the bigger market in a regional centre. These are the poorest farmers in the developing world.

In the light of his experience at the Department of Trade and Industry, will my right hon. Friend reflect that, if no more European or American subsidised products were dumped in Africa, as I would wish, and Peter, to whom my hon. Friend referred, could sell his products locally, how would we handle the problem of Australia and New Zealand, which can produce unsubsidised sugar and other commodities at even cheaper prices? The last time I checked, those two countries were not among the poorest nations in the world.

They are not, but as the figures show, when the cost of transport and so on is added, Kenya, Nigeria and other developing countries would be competitive when one compares the amount and cost of sugar coming from those other countries.

Peter is affected because the European Union is subsidising sugar. In the last year for which information is available, Kenya imported $2 million-worth of sugar from the European Union; it exported only $11,000-worth of sugar to the European Union. The effect of dumping goods subsidised by the CAP on the developing world is clear. Some people say that that is the consequence of liberalisation and open markets. What I find offensive is that the European Union is a great advocate of opening up markets and its members do so behind the comfort of pretty hefty tariffs. We tell the developing world that they must open up their markets, then we hide behind big tariffs. The reality is that immediate liberalisation—leaving it to market forces—has not worked for many of those developing countries. There must be an incremental approach—in the long term, that will be best—in which markets are opened up, but in a way that is compatible with development goals. That needs to be phased in and it needs active assistance from Government.

The third issue is that of the benefits to UK farmers from the common agricultural policy, which has already been raised by a number of hon. Members. There would rightly be concern about changing a common agricultural policy system where large amounts of money go into the farming sector. Small farmers, who have been through difficult times in recent years, are worried that they might be adversely affected by any changes to the CAP. We are all sympathetic to those concerns. We must examine where the money from the CAP goes. There is an assumption that it is spread around pretty evenly, but hill farmers in north Wales, for example, have to leap through bureaucratic hoops to receive very little.

When we dig down and get the details of where the money goes, it makes fascinating reading. This information is not easy to get hold of. Some 166,000 farmers in Great Britain receive some money from the CAP. Let us see who gets what: 41,000 get less than €1,250 a year in CAP payments. Those will be the hill farmers the hon. Member for Meirionnydd Nant Conwy (Mr. Llwyd) mentioned. Another 11,000 get between €1,250 and €2,000. Another 25,000 farmers get between €2,000 and €5,000. Another 22,000 farmers get between €5,000 and €10,000. The big winners, although they are probably more agribusinesses than farmers, are the 376 who get between €200,000 and €500,000 a year. The real winners in this expensive lottery are the 80 farmers who get more than €500,000 a year.

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving way. I, too, congratulate him on raising this important issue. He will no doubt be aware that one of the proposals in the mid-term review of the CAP was that there should be a limit of €300,000 per farmer. Does he agree that that limit is far too high and that if there is to be real reform, the limit should be set at a much lower level that reflects the needs of farmers and sustainable rural development rather than the needs of a big agribusiness?

I accept that absolutely. That proposal is a sign of tinkering around at the edges, rather than the fundamental and radical reform that many Labour Members want.

To reinforce the right hon. Gentleman's argument, 380 farmers receive up to €500,000 per annum. The comparable figure in Italy is 70 and only 10 in Portugal. There is an urgent need in the UK for reform.

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point about the way in which the system operates here and in other countries in Europe. A small number of big businesses—sometimes multinationals—are scooping the pool while the farmers in the hon. Gentleman's constituency, who would win public sympathy, are not benefiting by anything like as much. Most people would assume that the money would go to the small hill farmer in north Wales who is struggling to make a living in difficult conditions.

The right hon. Gentleman quotes some interesting figures. Perhaps he will reflect on the fact that some of the farmers who receive small amounts are not commercial farmers but people who run smallholding operations and probably have other employment too. The support for farmers should perhaps be directed to the commercial farmers rather than those who receive only small amounts.

The hon. Gentleman introduces an interesting debate about the role that farmers—even those with other interests—play in maintaining the countryside. We could begin to tackle some of those issues if the CAP were more flexible and not based solely on production and subsidies for production.

Finally, the figures show that 78,000 farmers earn less than €5.000 a year, but fewer than 500 earn more than €200,000. Under the CAP, taxpayers, consumers and shoppers are now paying billions of pounds for a failed system that benefits only a small number of farmers, who receive a significant amount of money from it. It also leads to higher prices in our shops and to greater taxes for those people who pay them.

The livelihood of small farmers in developing countries is being put at risk. About 100 million people in Africa live on less than $2 a day and any regime that spends more than $2 a day on every cow in the European Union—there are 20 million of them—is simply unacceptable and has to change. Change will not be easy; it will require political leadership. Many hon. Members and people in this country expect that political leadership to come from the Government.

I do not disagree with anything that the right hon. Member for Tyneside, North (Mr. Byers) said. Many hon. Members want to take part in the debate, so I will try not to repeat any points that he made.

For a short while, I was fortunate to have been a Minister in the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. On occasions too numerous to mention, Ministers made speeches about the need to reform the CAP. Of course, some Members represent fringe agricultural areas and their constituents need to be protected, but there is almost total unanimity in this House on the need for that reform. We were always being told that we should not worry: enlargement would make everything all right, because the current CAP system would not be able to cope when Poland, Hungary and the other countries joined the European Union. Many of us went along with that and hoped that the process would change on enlargement.

In his reply, will the Minister tell us what the impact of the shabby deal between France and Germany has been? To most of us, it appeared to be a disgusting attempt to stitch up reforms to the CAP. In the halcyon days when it was permissible for the Conservative party to have a close relationship with the Christian Democrats in Germany, I made a fraternal visit to the Christian Social Union in Bavaria. Franz Josef Strauss, who led the CSU, told us that Germany had been bribing its farmers for their votes for generations and did not intend to stop.

I understand that Germany and France want to continue to bribe their farmers for their votes, but that policy is costing people dear, and not only in this country. On the "Any Questions" programme last weekend, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry said that the CAP cost a family in the United Kingdom about £16 a week. If the CAP was a cost only to us, we could make our own judgment about it. However, it costs the poorest of the poor very dear. In no way can we meet the millennium development targets of taking people out of poverty if that wholly unfair system is allowed to continue. The economies of many countries are based on agricultural production and the need to ensure that more of their agricultural produce can enter European and other developed markets.

I was fortunate enough to be Chairman of the Select Committee that visited Ghana and Nigeria earlier this year. They face not only the difficulty of exporting cocoa at a fair trade price into Europe, but the effect of dumping. Supermarkets in Ghana are full of tomato paste dumped from Italy, but Ghanaian farmers cannot sell their tomatoes on street corners. Three Secretaries of State—for—International—Development,—for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and for Trade and Industry—wrote an excellent letter that appeared in The Independent on Sunday. That newspaper is a good one, but there is a limit to how much one can cope with on a Sunday, so I hope that the Minister will arrange for the letter to be copied to every hon. Member. I suspect that no Member would disagree with it.

We cannot keep having this conversation among ourselves, however. It is nice and friendly, gives us all a warm glow, and we go away saying that we all want to reform the CAP, but we must move on, as must nongovernmental organisations such as the Catholic Fund for Overseas Development. CAFOD must persuade the Catholic Church and Catholic NGOs in other European countries that they should lobby their Governments. Christian Aid should do likewise with the Protestant churches in Germany, France and elsewhere.

We must work out how to engage with parliamentarians in other member states, from whom we have become almost totally divorced. Members of the European Parliament have this discussion in debates in the European Parliament, but MPs do not. The International Development Committee managed to find its equivalent in every EU member state, and under each presidency the chairmen of those groups at least have a meeting. That is a slow and basic start, but it is a step forward. Parliament needs to develop mechanisms for expressing our views to colleagues elsewhere in Europe, otherwise this discussion that we have among ourselves will continue this year, next year and beyond.

We need to ensure that parliamentary colleagues in France, Germany and other member states recognise that we are appalled at the stitch-up that their countries are trying to perpetrate, not only against the consumers of Europe, but more importantly against the poor of the world. If we do not start to take that action, all the talk at Johannesburg and at other meetings about reducing the number of people who live in poverty will be for nothing. I must say to NGOs in this country that it is no good continually berating us. They are pushing at an open door and instead must help us to persuade Parliaments in other parts of the EU that the time for the reform of the CAP is long past, but it must happen now. As the right hon. Gentleman said, consumers will have lower prices, member states will pay fewer subsidies, but most importantly, developing countries will have a level playing field, and we can take more people out of poverty.

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Tyneside, North (Mr. Byers) on securing this important debate and, even more importantly, on the quality of his contribution, which was excellent. I agreed with it almost completely, which surprises me. That unanimity bodes well for the future and not only for the Government.

I shall base some of my remarks on what my right hon. Friend said. I suggest that the real subject of the debate is the abolition, not the reform, of the common agricultural policy. Reform can mean many things to many people and some of our European Union colleagues would no doubt suggest that a slight change means reform and that we can all go home and carry on with the CAP as usual. Reform is unspecific and can be relative; my right hon. Friend referred to tinkering at the margins, which is what has happened so far. The proportion of the total EU budget spent on the CAP is reduced, but it is still there, as large as life, and is still causing the damage that it has always caused. We need to abolish the CAP and repatriate agricultural policy to member states, subject, of course, to international agreements. However, if we want to sustain agriculture nationally, we can do so selectively, and using our own mechanisms.

As we have heard, the CAP grossly distorts agricultural markets. It is bad for the EU and for eastern Europe. It also puts enlargement at risk, as some countries in eastern Europe are becoming very unhappy about the CAP and could vote against joining it—today's edition of The Times even carries an article to that effect. Above all, the CAP is bad for the poor countries of the world. The developed world has been considering ways in which to assist the poor, but it has not tackled that fundamental problem.

My hon. Friend puts forward an interesting notion. Can he enlarge on the point about allowing member states to have their own individual rights to change tariffs and subsidies for their farms? That would make it more difficult for developing countries, which would have to enter into more bilateral agreements instead of multinational agreements under the World Trade Organisation. They do not have the capacity even for multilateral negotiations; moving to bilateral agreements would make the situation worse. Given that they will be up against powerful countries such as ourselves, France and Germany, their chances of achieving any success will be even lower than they are now.

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention; I appreciate her point. I shall be making some suggestions on how we can move forward. We must accept that in future we will concentrate to a greater extent on other forms of production, relative to agriculture. At the same time, we have to sustain our farming community, at least for the foreseeable future.

The perverse redistributive effects in the EU are significant. Denmark benefits enormously, Ireland benefits considerably and the United Kingdom is a net contributor. That bears no relation whatever to the relative prosperity of those countries. Denmark is a more prosperous country than the UK, and Ireland is now comparable, but they receive substantial net fiscal transfers as a result of the CAP. That cannot be right.

If agriculture is to be subsidised, member states should do it on a selective and targeted basis according to their own national needs. The hon. Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry) mentioned his friend Franz Josef Strauss and his desire to bribe his farmers. That is fine, if he chooses to do it within the confines of Germany. At the moment, however, German farmers are being bribed with money taken from the taxpayer in Britain and elsewhere and through the high prices that we pay for our food, which also goes to subsidise the farmers of Germany and other EU countries.

We should move away from price maintenance arrangements for subsidising agriculture. That is the core of the problem. If a relatively high price is set, producers know that they are guaranteed to get that price however much they produce. There is no demand curve at all; they just carry on producing and surpluses arise. The developed world wastes on subsidising agriculture resources that could and should be concentrated more on the poorer countries of the world. The former Member of Parliament for Boston and Skegness wrote a fine book saying that we were losing our industry at a rate of knots because we had failed to look after it, and that we were subsidising European agriculture when we should be tackling our industrial problems.

I am not suggesting that we should starve our farmers. Agricultural subsidies should be targeted in certain areas and based on a deficit funding system, which we had before we joined the European Common Market and the European Union. That system would guarantee income to the farmer, but would not have the CAP's distorting effects on the market. We could provide stable farm incomes, especially for hill farmers. There is no reason why we should not choose to sustain small farmers who may not be very efficient or profitable, but are essentially part of our culture and help to maintain the countryside. Small farms are important for animal life and the natural life of our countryside—hedges and so forth. The CAP has led to the disappearance of wildlife in eastern England—my region. Hedges have been destroyed and there is mass industrialised agriculture, which has caused terrible devastation to our environment. There is everything to be said for selective subsidies for our farmers.

We should be able to import cheap food if we wish. That would have a tremendously beneficial effect on prices in the shops for consumers. My right hon. Friend the Member for Tyneside, North mentioned that. My constituency, like his, contains no farmers because it is purely urban, but it has taxpayers and consumers, many of whom are poor, who are paying high prices for their food when they could pay lower prices if the CAP were abandoned. Above all, that would benefit the poor producer nations, which is the primary concern.

We can overcome the political problem of abolition if we have sensible transitional arrangements. A big bang would clearly cause a political explosion, which would not be realistic. We ought to introduce a tapering system of fiscal transfers, and we could look at the current situation and introduce a 10-year taper. The countries that are joining the European Union will be subject to a 10-year taper towards the CAP. The amount by which they will benefit from the CAP will initially be limited to 25 per cent., but by 2013 they will receive the full benefit—if one can call it that. Why not introduce a tapering arrangement in that period to overcome the problem of fiscal transfers? In time, the distribution of the budget in the European Union should be determined by the relative levels of prosperity in the different nations of Europe. The rich would pay more and the poor would benefit, in which case we would not require our rebate because the system would be fair for all nations.

In the short term, we must, of course, protect our rebate because we are unfairly big net contributors to the European budget, but we could overcome all those problems over the 10-year taper period. We know that our colleagues in France are very upset about the prospect of the CAP being abandoned, but let us consider the national effects that France experiences in terms of fiscal transfer and how they could be dealt with. It could choose to subsidise its small farmers; indeed, I hope that it continues to sustain certain elements of its small-scale agriculture, in particular the producers of good wine, which I am sure we would all continue to enjoy.

Anti-EU sentiments are growing in eastern Europe, which is a problem. As I mentioned, an article in The Times today refers to Poland, where a supermarket, which sells western European produce at lower prices than those at which Polish farmers can afford to produce, has been threatened. The threat is serious because if that idea takes off and there were a referendum, Poland might vote not to join the EU. That is its choice, with which we may or may not agree, but it is a real threat. Anti-EU sentiments are also growing in Estonia and, to an extent, the Czech Republic. If we do not deal with those problems, enlargement may be threatened. Enlargement will force us to rethink the CAP, which we should rethink now rather than later because enlargement may not happen if we do not think about it now.

I do not expect my hon. Friend the Minister to respond immediately, but I hope that my suggestions are taken seriously in the private councils of government. I hope that my suggestions will at least be debated intelligently with some of our colleagues on the continent of Europe and elsewhere in the EU. The abolition of the CAP is the way forward: we should face up to it.

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Tyneside, North (Mr. Byers) on obtaining the debate and on the fair and balanced way in which he put forward his case. It is clear that there is almost unanimous support in the House for the reform of the common agricultural policy because it is damaging not only for domestic agriculture, the consumer and the environment, but for third-world farmers.

The process of reforming the CAP has gone on for a long time, although I shall not take everybody back to the corn laws, which obviously predate it. The Agriculture Act 1947, which was introduced by the postwar Labour Government, was seen to be beneficial. The hon. Member for Luton, North (Mr. Hopkins) referred in passing to the deficiency payment system, which provided a substantial income for farmers, and reasonably priced food. Because Britain was not self-sufficient at that time and did not produce excess foodstuffs, the system had little or no effect on the world market and therefore had little impact on third world farmers.

Food security was an issue at that time. Although we seem to feel today that Britain has access to almost unlimited food, food security issues can still arise suddenly for nations and Governments. What with wars, rumours of wars and the full effect of climate change on food production not really being understood, food security should still command some attention.

We entered the European Union with the treaty of Rome at a time when policy was based on intervention buying to keep the price up for farmers in the EU. That was the worst system of all because it led to high prices for consumers, and specifically to the beef and butter mountains and wine lakes, and various other commodity surpluses, that were dumped on the word market with subsidies that we paid almost directly to commodity traders and food processors rather than to the farming community. The MacSharry proposals in the early 1990s started to move policy away from such support and intervention towards something less harmful to the market, directed at the breeding of animals rather than supporting a commodity.

We may now see a positive reform of the common agricultural policy. A lot depends on the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and its work in the EU, in arguing a case along the lines that the right hon. Gentleman described. It needs to do so in a forceful, rigorous and positive way. Recent criticisms that have been made of the Department by Select Committees lead us to suppose that it does not have the heart for the job. I hope that it does, as so much depends on it.

It could be a win-win-win situation. It could be a win for farmers. Over the past few years, they have been unable to run their businesses as businesses and have been locked in a bureaucratic nightmare of accessing subsidies. A typical livestock farm in my constituency would be involved in the beef special premium, the Buckler cow premium, the sheep annual premium, the extensification premium and Tir Mynydd, which is the Welsh equivalent of the hill livestock compensation scheme. Those schemes mean that farmers are involved in retention periods for animals, keeping extensive records—quite properly as they are in receipt of public money, so an audit system is required—

I am following the hon. Gentleman's speech carefully and I agree with him. Does he share my concern about DEFRA's gold-plating of the regulations? I am not saying that rules should be dodged, but there is not a level playing field across the EU for the way in which the regulations are administered. DEFRA is keen to administer them, but if there is a slight mistake the subsidy is lost.

I take the hon. Gentleman's point on board. As he, too, represents a rural constituency, I am sure that he comes across tragic cases of farmers who have been deprived of support because they have made minor mistakes such as entering numbers wrongly.

Proposals to decouple support from production and use a different basis will allow farmers to run their businesses as businesses and to make commercial judgments rather than judgments on how they can access subsidies. Decoupling will also help the consumer because it will mean readier access to British markets to food from other sources, and farmers being able to compete on a level playing field.

The right hon. Gentleman said that it was up to the European Union to make its proposals for the trade round very quickly. However, he should also accept that America has almost undermined that trade round by its action in giving massive subsidies to its own farmers. At this stage, we should be more and more critical of America's double standards in such matters.

There could be a win for the environment—for the British countryside. The money that has gone to support production will now be available to farmers to enhance the environment and provide access for people to the countryside. There will also be a win for third world farmers. The right hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry) made their points on that very well. When the fair trade lobby came to Parliament from my constituency, I undertook to write to DEFRA, pointing out the importance of CAP reform in the support of third world farmers.

Today's debate has been useful and points the way forward. Considerable cross-party support for radical reform is gathering, and we look to DEFRA to lead the country in those efforts.

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Tyneside, North (Mr. Byers) on securing this debate and giving a speech, during which he took a large number of interventions, that took a consistent line. I entirely agree with that line, and strongly support his analysis. He expressed the frustrations shared by all parties that the common agricultural policy, although it has been blatantly in need of radical reform, has become almost unreformable because of the processes needed. That is frustrating for us all.

We are today again seeing the benefit of having the right hon. Gentleman on the Back Benches, especially if he is prepared to use that freedom to say some of the things about big businesses that he was not able to say before. He was very much a victim of shoddy treatment and of a tawdry media feeding frenzy of the kind that we have had to endure over the past few days. I hope that, with so many more important things going on around the world, the media will concentrate on matters of substance rather than poking their noses into people's private affairs.

The key issue due for debate during the next couple of days is not the common agricultural policy but enlargement. As the hon. Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry) said, that provides a good opportunity for reform, but there is a problem with the message being given to potential accession countries—a diplomatic issue that the Minister must deal with. The enlargement countries are getting the idea that, rather than the time scale for CAP reform being coincidental, or its being a convenient opportunity to push forward more rapid reform, it is in fact a conspiracy against them before their arrival in the EU. The Government must overcome that diplomatic problem.

Whether the EU is enlarging or not, now is the time to reform the CAP. The CAP has been blatantly contradictory and achieved the opposite of what it set out to achieve in relation to protecting and promoting the interests of rural communities, small farmers and the rural environment. The Government's official figures released about a month ago show that during the past year more farmers have been forced out of agriculture—they have gone out of business—than at any time since the second world war. More than 15,000 farmers in Britain have been forced out of business—they have not left voluntarily—during the past year. That figure is all the more dramatic because we are talking about declining numbers since the war. Most of that figure will comprise small farmers. The CAP is clearly failing, if its purpose is to defend farmers.

The Government are working very closely with Lord Haskins, who has connections with the processing business. They are being advised by him about reform of the agricultural sector. He uses the word "restructuring"—a euphemism for getting rid of small farmers. I find it rather difficult—as do the farmers—to accept the advice of a man who is intricately connected with the processing sector, which has done rather well out of the CAP.

As farm-gate prices have fallen in relation to retail prices during the past few decades, we must ask what the processing and retail sectors will do to ensure proper support for farmers in this country. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Brecon and Radnorshire (Mr. Williams) that it is desirable to have a policy that provides food security and an element of self-sufficiency. Clearly, we cannot be self-sufficient in bananas, but we can be self-sufficient in domestic produce. That may be desirable, but we must assess that against its cost. As it would impoverish the rest of the world and result in large taxes on consumers, it is not a desirable policy in itself. It is possible to construct an argument that moves in that direction, but we need to weigh up the balance of how we would achieve it, and the cost that we would be prepared to pay.

The key issue on the right hon. Gentleman's domestic questions is that if production supports continue into the future, we will end up with a British landscape that is predominately prairie and ranch. Small farmers will be pushed out as it becomes uneconomic to maintain small farms, field patterns and rural communities. We will have an agricultural industry that is divorced from rural communities. They will become so small in number that the farm lobby will cease to exist.

The thrust of the hon. Gentleman's argument is that we need nationally determined policies that can be sensitively adjusted to the needs of the third world and our own farmers, but that the answer is neither the protectionist and rigid CAP, which has all the dreadful effects he mentioned, nor the complete free market, which would destroy the farming industry.

The hon. Gentleman tempts me down another route, but I cannot go there. I am concerned about agriculture and landscape throughout Europe. The issues apply to Europe as a whole at present. We need to think carefully about the impact on the industry itself and on the rural landscape. The hon. Member for Edinburgh, North and Leith (Mr. Lazarowicz) raised the issue of whether we should lower the proposed ceiling below €300,000. On the basis of the figures that were presented by the right hon. Member for Tyneside, North, there is indeed a strong argument for reviewing the ceiling.

In world trade terms, we need to move away from blue box subsidies towards green box subsidies. In other words, we need to move very rapidly away from supporting production, which can create millionaire subsidy junkies in the farming industry, to supporting the bedrock of rural communities, such as viable small farms.

The right hon. Gentleman raised several development issues, particularly in relation to the dairy sector and sugar. He made his points extremely well. It is important to recognise that some of the main beneficiaries in the dairy sector, for example, are the processing and trading companies and not farmers. Such companies receive more than €1 billion each year from European taxpayers in export subsidies alone. It is impossible to get a breakdown of those figures, because apparently the information is commercially sensitive. However, we do know that some of the very large companies do extremely well out of the system.

What assessment have the Government made of the costs of maintaining CAP subsidies, given the current levels of enlargement? Is it sustainable to maintain them? Is it the Government's position that enlargement can proceed without reform of the CAP? Have the Government taken legal advice on the available avenues for challenging the legal basis of the current CAP? If so, what was the response? How do they propose to build a case for reform among fellow member states? What efforts have they made to build a negotiating bloc in favour of reform? That reform must be rapid.

First, I warmly congratulate the right hon. Member for Tyneside, North (Mr. Byers) on securing the debate and putting forward a number of important arguments. I was in Kenya a few weeks ago, so I was particularly struck by his argument about market access. He was absolutely right to say that the current structures in the world cost lives. Indeed, the terms of trade have swung against primary producers in the past generation and that has led to attendant problems.

Repeatedly, it has been demonstrated that Europe cannot isolate itself from the problems of famine and agricultural difficulties in Africa and the right hon. Gentleman was right to make that point. Opening our markets is crucial. That argument was taken up by my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry), who is the distinguished Chairman of the Select Committee on International Development and who has enormous experience of agriculture in the third world. I agreed with the point about discussions with fellow parliamentarians in the European Union—such discussions have been lacking. The hon. Member for Brecon and Radnorshire (Mr. Williams) took up some of the themes relating to problems in the third world and market access and I agree with him.

The hon. Member for St. Ives (Andrew George) paid the right hon. Gentleman a rather backhanded compliment when he said that his contributions from the Back Benches are valuable. I hope that, after today's contribution, the right hon. Gentleman is soon in a position to re-climb the greasy pole.

The CAP is an important topic and the debate is timely. The CAP dominates farmers' lives and the European Union's budget. With the forthcoming enlargement of the EU, it will assume an even greater importance. As the hon. Member for Luton, North (Mr. Hopkins) pointed out, the CAP may account for a diminishing percentage of the EU budget, but that is still a colossal sum of money. We are talking about more than €44 billion: that is a vast sum.

The CAP's greatest weaknesses are that it has not produced prosperity for our farmers, it is inefficient and bureaucratic and it is harmful to the developing world. As the hon. Member for St. Ives said, the agricultural economy is effectively now in crisis and, like many areas of national life, needs reforming.

It is worth recalling that in July, Commissioner Franz Fischler presented proposals for reforming the CAP. The main tools proposed for reform were the uncoupling of subsidies from production and the introduction of compulsory modulation, which would reduce progressively all direct payments by 3 per cent. per year for a seven-year period, starting in 2004 and reaching 20 per cent. overall.

It is absolutely central to the work of the Copenhagen summit that is taking place this week that the agreements for EU enlargement should be finalised. Critical to the success of enlargement are CAP direct payments and quotas. Whether they are addressed centrally or on the fringes, they simply cannot be passed over. As the Minister will know, the Danish presidency has made its own specific proposals on how to deal with the problem of agriculture in particular and the acceptability of the European Union in the accession countries.

We must not forget that farms are businesses. Their core function is to make a profit by producing food that customers want to buy. The Commission's initial proposals to shift support from production subsidies to environmental payments are right in principle, but we all accept that the devil will be in the detail. An overwhelmingly urban and suburban electorate will be more ready to support the rural economy through taxes if payments are clearly linked to public benefits such as preservation and enhancement of the landscape.

However, elements of Fischler's package would discriminate against British farmers. That point has already been made this morning. For example, capping payments to individual farms at €300,000 would hit UK farmers particularly hard because of the size and scope of their production, whereas the smaller farms of Italy, France and Portugal would still receive the same amount of subsidy. Such inequity would be difficult to overcome.

There is a case for money for environmental schemes to be allocated locally and with as much flexibility as possible. The UK's agri-environment schemes must be reformed, as they are generally regarded as far too complex. We must have a system that reinvigorates and sustains our rural economy and environment, allows our farmers to earn a decent living and deals with the trade barriers that have been imposed on third-world farmers with devastating effect.

The forthcoming EU enlargement is the catalyst for CAP reform. We can analyse ad nauseam the faults of the CAP, but there really is a demand for leadership in the European Union and from the Government to try to resolve the problem. For example, we were told that in practice nothing could be achieved before the French and German elections. They have been held. As my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury pointed out, we were really stitched up in Brussels. We were told that the Government were working behind the scenes on the outlines of CAP reform. I am afraid that the situation in Brussels was hijacked and we were left standing on the sidelines.

The truth is that we have to grasp this nettle and that leadership is required. I hope that the Minister will have something constructive to say about this, because the vacuum that has been left is now being filled in a way that works against effective CAP reform, which is absolutely essential in the long term.

The result of not putting out clear guidelines for reform at Brussels the other day is that additional pressures are put on the accession countries. It was agreed that the CAP budget for direct payments and pillar l market support would remain at 2006 levels until 2013. That may reduce the relative amount of money, but it does not deal with the essential issue of reform. Such support will remain a huge burden on the EU's budget at a time when Germany, which is the largest contributor to the EU, is in serious economic trouble. What does the Minister think will happen to the EU's finances if Germany suffers a prolonged recession?

It is also not true that the Brussels deal is a short-term fix that will prepare the ground for a huge argument on payment distribution around 2008, when the new countries will be receiving half the standard direct payments. A limited direct payments budget will have to be redistributed among the farmers of 25, rather than 15, countries. That could be difficult and divisive.

I echo the point made by the hon. Member for Luton, North: regrettably, there is an increasing sense of antagonism towards the EU, particularly in a country such as Poland, which has to face a referendum on the issue. As was the case in the election in Serbia the other day, there is a 50 per cent. cut-off point in Poland, so the issue is important. Unless we set out the tram-lines of reform and consider with some flexibility how we will deal with that, Poland may unfortunately reject EU entry. That is why I hope that the Danish presidency's proposals, which offer a way out, can be considered in Copenhagen in the next few days. Again, I hope that the Minister will reflect on that.

We desperately need leadership on this issue. It has been a matter for discussion for many years, but we are now on the brink of enlargement and we cannot deal with it any more by avoiding central reform. Other countries such as the Netherlands and Sweden have been keen for CAP reform, but we have been unsuccessful at persuading the Germans. There is a vacuum to be filled. For those of us who want a successful and viable EU, that challenge simply must be addressed.

I, too, congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Tyneside, North (Mr. Byers) on securing the debate, which has been wider ranging than some of our CAP-bashing moments in the House. I thank him for his kind words on my appointment. I share the view of the hon. Member for West Suffolk (Mr. Spring) that over the next two or three Parliaments, as Labour stays in power, my right hon. Friend will resume his place in the leadership of our national council.

In all discussions on the CAP in the House and the country, we have to start from the famous Irish perspective that it is impossible to know where to start, except that one would never have started from where one began to get where we are. Surely the fundamental point for our country is that we were not there when the CAP was born. It was born in the 1960s, when the broad outlines of the CAP were laid down, and because Britain was absent from the scene, we were not able to shape it.

The best message that the House can send to our friends in Poland is a united message, from all parties and almost all hon. Members, that EU membership and wholehearted participation in the EU is a good thing, even if on the CAP and other areas, we have criticisms. If we want to shape the rules of a club, we have to be members of it.

CAP reform is a long and arduous process. I like to run marathons now and then and have foolishly entered myself for the London marathon next spring. CAP reform must be seen as a marathon, not a sprint. In 1980, the CAP took 73 per cent. of the total EU budget. In 2002, it will take 45 per cent., so there has been a reduction. However, it is absurd that any budget that is part of the governance of all our European nations devotes almost half to just the agricultural sector.

We will keep up the pressure for reform. My hon. Friend the Member for Luton, North (Mr. Hopkins) called for the absolute abolition of the CAP. As a social democrat, I am in the reformist camp. My hon. Friend is a revolutionary figure—I mean that in a complimentary sense—and wants sharp upheavals. We have to find ways of speeding up the process of reform.

I gently urge all hon. Members campaigning on CAP reform, including the three Ministers who wrote that very good article in The Independent on Sunday to which the hon. Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry) referred, to stop making speeches or writing articles and pamphlets in English because we have won the argument in our own country. I do not have to persuade hon. Members and I do not have to be persuaded by them on the need for CAP reform. From the Socialist Worker on the far left, to The Daily Mail on the right. everyone is agreed that the CAP should go. The Conservative party thinks that the CAP needs reform, so do we, and so do members of the Liberal Democrat and nationalist parties. The Confederation of British Industry and the National Farmers Union think that it should be reformed. It is no use our talking to each other, however. We must take the argument to our friends and partners in Europe. Oxfam and the other development bodies that rightly criticise the CAP for its impact on the agricultural economy in poor countries should learn French, Spanish, Italian and even Irish and talk directly to the politicians, the non-governmental organisations and the churches in those countries and elsewhere in Europe to explain the need for CAP reform.

We also need to do more with our friends in Poland, Hungary and the other applicant countries because when they enter the European Union in 2004, as I hope will be confirmed this week, they will start sending large cheques to the agricultural multinationals and big farmers in the rich countries of western Europe, including our own. In 2004, the first full year of membership for the enlarged Europe, the new member states will contribute €990 million—a euro is about the same as a US dollar at the moment, so that is nearly €1 billion or $1 billion—to the CAP receipt of France, Germany, Italy and Spain. France is the main beneficiary. In 2004, it will receive €300 million from the incoming countries in east Europe—Spain will receive €200 million and Italy €175 million. Ireland will receive a transfer of about €50 million to its agro-industry from the Exchequers of Lithuania, Slovakia and the other poor countries of east Europe. Even Luxembourg, one of the richest countries in the world, is a net beneficiary under the CAP. Can anything be more absurd than the taxpayers of Poland and the other new member states, with an income per capita that is one third that of Belgium and Luxembourg, having to send yet more money to the farmers of western Europe?

I have been visiting applicant countries as busily as I can since my appointment and I know their sense of disappointment at not receiving a more generous cash offer from Brussels—a matter to which the Opposition spokesman, the hon. Member for West Suffolk referred. I told them that that was in part because nearly half of the EU budget of €90 billion goes to subsidise farming and to allow products thus subsidised to swamp the markets east of the Oder-Neisse line. In addition to learning to make the arguments for CAP reform in French, Spanish and so forth, we also need to teach ourselves Polish, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Czech and Slovak to explain to our new partners why CAP reform should be high on their agenda once they are full members of the European Union.

I very much agree with hon. Members' comments on the need to connect with our political parliamentary colleagues in Europe. The House allows each hon. Member to make three visits a year to the capital cities of the European Union and the applicant countries. I urge hon. Members who are interested in CAP reform to visit and make the case.

I welcome the return of Her Majesty's Opposition to the mainstream of European Conservative parties. They can now be there and argue face to face with Herr Franz Josef Strauss's political descendants on the need for CAP reform. Mr. Stoiber, the right's candidate at the last German election, is now coming out against Turkey joining the EU and, during the campaign, he was against giving American planes the right to fly over Germany in any conflict with Iraq. He is a staunch defender of the worst aspects of the protectionist agricultural policy. I urge the hon. Member for West Suffolk to go to Germany and explain how wrong-headed his opposite number is in so many aspects of politics.

We will be doing that.

I am glad to hear the hon. Gentleman say, from a sedentary position, that he intends to do so. Well, keep it up. I hope to see all the Conservative parties of Europe supporting CAP reform in the next year or two.

My right hon. Friend provided some powerful figures on the impact of dumped CAP-subsidised products in Africa. We must think of the third world when we discuss the need for reform. Oxfam recently produced an excellent report, which I commend to all hon. Members. As I suggested in a brief intervention, we must examine CAP reform in Europe and engage with our American partners to encourage them to remove their excessive subsidies and tariffs. According to the Wall Street Journal, American cotton farmers receive a subsidy of more than $1 million a year, and we do not want them to dump their subsidised product on the cotton markets of Africa.

The Minister is touching on the American approach and we are all concerned about the farm Bill. Australia and New Zealand are major players. In the context of the Doha trade round, they all announced what changes would be made to the agricultural sector. The European Union is the only main trading bloc that has not yet made proposals. The context of world trade is critical. From his ministerial position—and, hopefully, at Copenhagen—can my hon. Friend stress the importance of the EU submitting its proposals so that the trade talks will be successful and not be derailed?

Indeed, I can give that reassurance. The Prime Minister won the fight at the Brussels Council after it was agreed that CAP payments would be frozen at present levels plus 1 per cent. to 2013—spread over 25 rather than 15 recipient countries, that means a bearing down on the CAP budget. As I said, it was the Prime Minister who fought so hard for it. In the newspapers, it became "le row" over the need for the final declaration to refer to the Franz Fischler proposals and mid-term reviews, and the Doha round. I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend's leadership in implementing the Doha round: for the first time since world war two, agricultural subsidies are on the agenda of world trade discussions. Britain is in the van of taking that forward.

When three British Ministers wrote an article in The Independent on Sunday, making a case for CAP reform, seven European Agriculture Ministers responded with a large piece in the Financial Times a few months ago, effectively saying no to our ideas. That is why we should be engaged in Europe and why I shall continue to make the case for CAP reform. I urge other hon. Members to declare their full support for the EU and for participation in all of its economic and agricultural activities. Only by being members of the club and at the heart of Europe can we argue our case for a progressive direction for CAP reform.

The House will appreciate that the recent floods in Moray were a terrible event, which wrought misery close to Christmas for a great many of my constituents. May I express my appreciation for the opportunity to raise this important constituency issue at greater length than normal and to hear the Government's response? I start with a word of commendation for the Minister's officials who have been very proactive and understanding in seeking advance notice of various questions so that she can give a full and informed response. I also declare my interest: I am patron of the Moray flood relief fund, although I am not directly involved in the dispensation of assistance to flood victims. I should also like to put on record my appreciation to the Lord Lieutenant, Air Vice Marshal George Chesworth and the other trustees and committee members of the fund who are doing such an important job.

Before coming to the debate, I sought the views of a great many people in Moray, especially the victims. That includes many residents who have lost literally everything and business men and women whose commercial future is in doubt. I spoke to community representatives such as Councillor Pearl Paul of Rothes who represents one of the worst hit areas, and only this morning I spoke to Roma Hossack, the convenor of Elgin community council. I held meetings with the council, and this morning I discussed issues with the chief executive, Alastair Keddie. I spoke to the emergency services, the RAF and volunteers who assisted when the waters were rising, then dispersing, and in the clean-up operations. There is a tremendous appreciation for everyone who worked hard to help the flood victims and to prevent the waters from damaging even more. I pay tribute to them all again.

On 15 and 16 November 2002, the third flood in five years devastated parts of Moray when the rivers Lossie and Spey and the Mosset burn burst their banks causing flooding in the county town, Elgin, as well as in Rothes, Forres and a number of villages and rural areas. At its worst, the Lossie was flowing at 140 tonnes per second through Elgin. After bursting the riverbank, water swamped Boroughbriggs, parts of Kingsmills, South Lesmurdie, Pansport, Ashgrove, the Tyock industrial estate and other areas. In Rothes, waters flooded much of the town, swamping houses and causing structural damage to roads and bridges. In Forres, the Mosset burn burst its banks on to the streets.

Hundreds of residents, especially in Elgin and Rothes, were forced to leave their homes, losing many of their possessions to flood damage, and a considerable number of businesses have had to cease trading because of the floods. I am pleased to report that a number of those businesses have worked extremely hard to try to get their operations back on track in the busy build-up to Christmas. There is a great appreciation for the work that has been done, much of it by volunteers and customers of those businesses. I have visited most of the affected areas, several times in some cases. Despite the waters receding, the damage is still clear to see. Many streets have skips outside every house, which are full to overflowing with discarded and often irreplaceable family possessions. A great number of businesses are still closed because of the damage to their stock, their machinery, their records and the wherewithal to trade.

It is impossible to put a price tag on the damage caused, or to calculate exactly what might have happened if various other policy options had been pursued before the floods. Certainly there are still outstanding questions about the reallocation of millions of pounds of flood prevention investment by Moray council, which has not been spent on measures that could have made a difference. Nevertheless, the task before everybody in authority at present is to act swiftly and decisively to ease the plight of so many people in Moray. That is why I am glad to be able to put the case for maximum Government assistance here today.

Much of the response to the floods has to come from Moray council and the Scottish Executive, as local government and flood issues are devolved to the Scottish Parliament, where Margaret Ewing, the Moray MSP and my Scottish National party colleague, has regularly raised the question of flooding. I am glad that she and Bruce Crawford MSP, the shadow Scottish Minister for the Environment, have been pushing for a national flood strategy in the Scottish Parliament. I hope that the Labour-Liberal Democrat Executive reconsider their opposition to that in the light of the Moray experience.

In the meantime we need to consider how the UK Government can best respond through key areas such as social security, Treasury powers over landfill tax, the financial services industry, military aid to the civil power and Scotland's representation within the European Union. Those are all reserved matters to Westminster. The Minister will appreciate that I would far rather that all those questions could be resolved in Scotland, just as in any other normal independent European country. This debate is not about political difference, but rather to secure a joined-up response to this disaster.

As I mentioned, the floods seriously affected parts of Elgin, Rothes and Forres and other villages and rural areas. It was the third flooding in five years. This is a double whammy for the constituency, as coastal communities brace themselves for massive cuts in fishing, which, together with the floods, will cause untold misery and job losses. Recently at Prime Minister's questions, I asked:

"Will the Prime Minister outline what the Westminster Government will do to assist, how long that will take and whether he will visit Moray as a matter of urgency to see the devastation at first hand?"

The Prime Minister replied:

"First, Moray council will apply to the Scottish Executive for assistance under the Bellwin scheme … Secondly, people who have no other safety net can apply to the Department for Work and Pensions for immediate emergency assistance through the social fund. Thirdly, Her Majesty's Customs will work with businesses on VAT payments and other problems".—[Official Report,20 November 2002; Vol. 394. c. 241.]

I was grateful to the Prime Minister for outlining the help that will be offered, although I was disappointed that he did not refer to my request to visit Moray to see the damage at first hand. This is an extremely serious issue and the people of Moray need to know that Government at the very top in both Edinburgh and Westminster are doing everything possible to assist.

This debate is extremely important so that Moray residents can hear in detail exactly what the Westminster Government are doing to help them. Social security is one mechanism that the Westminster Government can use to assist. A great number of victims live in low-income areas. According to a recent survey by the General, Municipal, Boilermakers and Allied Trades Union, Moray—not central Scotland or urban inner-city Scotland—has the lowest average weekly income of any constituency in Scotland. The floods occurred in areas of the lowest income in Moray.

The Minister will appreciate that social security can play a key role. For example, officials in the Department for Work and Pensions can assess requests sympathetically. I am aware that staff locally intend to do that, and I would be grateful if the Minister could give an overview of support to victims such as crisis loans and social fund payments. How many people have been seen by Jobcentre Plus staff in Moray in connection with the effects of the floods? Does she share my concern that there is a lack of flexibility in the rules when dealing with clients who have already reached a £1,000 ceiling on social fund grants or loans? Are clear instructions being given that would allow for a generous but responsible handling of claims by such flood victims?

The Minister might not be aware that the two current social security offices in Elgin are in the process of being unified into one office. That single office is in the middle of one of the worst-hit flood areas in Boroughbriggs. Does she share my concern for the future, that if, God forbid, there is another flood, staff will find it almost impossible to assist at all, unlike this time?

Another major area where the Westminster Parliament holds reserved powers is in connection with the financial services industry. That encompasses insurance, which is a critical guarantee for residents and businesses alike. In a written answer in the Scottish Parliament to Margaret Ewing, MSP, on 28 November, Minister Alan Wilson, who visited Moray after the floods, said:

"Recent guidance from the Association of British Insurers is that the industry will look to continue to provide insurance cover in areas with defences in place or where these are planned to be in place by 2007."

The Moray council intends to have improved flood defences in place by 2007, but there are a great many people who already cannot secure insurance in Moray. Many businesses and householders had a major problem getting insurance even before the most recent flood. Most residents and business people think that that will get worse, with serious knock-on effects for residents and the housing market, for the viability of businesses and for jobs.

The difficulties are great for residents as access to mortgages is endangered and people cannot properly insure their property. It is not dissimilar for businesses; one must consider the losses from the recent flood which, in the case of one distillery alone, amounted to more than £500,000. Massive losses were suffered by other businesses too, and there are fears that many more enterprises and residents will not be able to secure insurance cover. There are huge question marks over whether there will be any cover at all in the future, regardless of the premium. That, of course, has a knock-on effect on employers' liability.

At a meeting in Elgin last night, one insurance broker said that an insurance company had informed him that the framework agreement on flood cover by the Association of British Insurers does not apply to Scotland. Does the Minister have any knowledge of that and does she agree with me that insurance companies need to take their responsibilities seriously, regardless of where in the UK people live? She will appreciate that with the level of destruction, a great deal of material from people's homes and businesses is beyond repair and needs to be disposed of. As I said earlier, many streets have skips outside every house.

Moray council has made arrangements for the pickup and disposal of the material, which will cost more than £50,000, and it is not certain that the Bellwin scheme will compensate the council. That is why I have already asked the UK Government to look at landfill tax and to suspend charges in connection with flood damage. They have said that they have no plans at present to do so. Why not? It would make a major difference to Moray. Is no discretion available to Ministers to suspend landfill tax in extreme circumstances? If this is not such a case, I do not know what is.

Despite the fact that I would far rather Scotland had normal representation and was able to make applications for funding directly, we are reliant on Westminster Ministers to apply for European Union funding. That is why I raise the matter in connection with this issue. Recently, European Commission President Romano Prodi wrote to my SNP colleague Ian Hudghton MEP. In that letter, he said that a considerable range of options are open to the member state to apply for special funding to areas that have been flooded or where flood prevention measures are set to be constructed. I should be grateful to know what the UK Government have done, or will be doing, to ensure that maximum benefit can be derived for flood-hit or flood-prone communities such as those in Moray. On the basis of what President Prodi said, has the Commission been contacted since the Moray floods to discuss those possibilities, and if so, what was the outcome?

The third flood in five years in Moray was devastating for many people throughout the constituency. It came only weeks before Christmas, and families have lost their homes and possessions and businesses have been washed out. The United Kingdom Government have the ability to make a difference. They can act in key areas such as social security, to give people on low incomes a helping hand; the Treasury can assist with the suspension of landfill tax; Ministers can remind the insurance industry of its responsibilities to cover households and businesses; and the Government can access European Union funding to help Moray.

It is in times of crisis that Governments need to act if they are to have credibility. The floods in Moray are such a crisis, and it is time for the Government to act.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Moray (Angus Robertson) on looking after his constituents so assiduously in this regard. I am not surprised that he is doing so, because of the consequences of the floods that he described. As he said, it is not the first time that his constituents have been in the situation in which they found themselves on the weekend of 15 and 16 November. It was clear from his declaration of interest that he does everything he can to assist his constituents, as one would expect. I commend him for doing so and for taking the opportunity of this debate to raise the matter on behalf of those of his constituents who are affected by the flood.

I take this opportunity to say directly to the hon. Gentleman's constituents, many of whom have lost everything in this event, how concerned the Government are to do what we can to assist them. I shall do my best to respond in the debate to the issues that he has raised with me. However, if I cannot deal with all the points that he made in the inevitably restricted time available, I undertake to contact him further.

We are well aware of the efforts that were made by volunteers, by the statutory services, by the emergency services and by the forces to try to deal with the sudden inundation that overtook parts of the hon. Gentleman's constituency. I pay tribute to the efforts that were made, whether by people who were only doing their job or by those who just turned out to help. Such efforts were deeply appreciated by the community and by the constituents who were affected.

When considering the efforts made to cope with these sudden problems, I was impressed at the success of our staff in Jobcentre Plus. Despite the fact that their office was flooded, they were able to maintain a service for customers on the Monday following the floods, which showed me that our contingency planning in respect of such matters worked well at a time when it was tremendously important that it did so. The hon. Gentleman referred to the low level of income of many of those affected. It was vital that people could get their benefits, pensions, or whatever we were due to pay them, as speedily as possible. I am glad that our contingency arrangements worked so well.

The hon. Gentleman asked me to give an overview of the support that people who have been affected by these events might obtain from the Department for Work and Pensions, especially from the social fund, which is one of the funds designed to deal with such contingencies. The social fund can provide emergency financial help to those who are affected by flooding or other such disasters. He referred to crisis loans, which are indeed available to people with limited resources to protect their health and safety and to meet the cost of essential items that are urgently needed to replace those lost or damaged through floods.

Community care grants are the other resource within the social fund to which people can turn at such times. They are available to people receiving income support or income-based jobseeker's allowance. They can help people to rebuild their homes after a natural disaster such as a flood by meeting the reasonable costs of replacing destroyed or damaged household items, such as carpets, cookers, beds and furniture.

The hon. Gentleman asked how many people had been seen by DWP staff in Moray in connection with the effects of the floods. There have been 29 crisis loan applications as a consequence of the floods, and all have been allowed, to a total of £2,968.71—he wanted me to be precise. The loans have been made, and the average was £100. Two community care grants have also been awarded, totalling £744. A further six are being processed as speedily as possible, and the amount applied for is £10,369.

The hon. Gentleman will know better than anyone that 400 to 500 households were affected in some way by the flooding, so those numbers may seem small to him, but we expect more applications, particularly as people return to their homes over the next few months. In many ways, that is the time when one would expect them to make applications. We will do our best to ensure that they are dealt with as speedily and sympathetically as possible.

The hon. Gentleman asked what lessons could be learned from the reaction to the floods. As I said, our staff and our business continuity planning certainly kicked in and worked quite well. That is probably because we devolved responsibility to the lowest level that we could. Each of our business units not only devises its business continuity planning but is responsible for implementing it. They are the best people to have that responsibility and power: they know what the situation is locally. We were pleased that Jobcentre Plus staff in Elgin were able to continue to deliver a service to customers straight after the floods. That is a testament to their success.

We were able to visit elderly and perhaps more vulnerable people in their homes to ensure that they received their pensions. To the extent that they did not quite know where to go to get their payments, because of the floods, we ensured that they were all made. I am pleased that we were able to do that.

The hon. Gentleman asked whether more could be done on insurance. I am aware from what he said and from my briefing for the debate that this is not the first time that his constituents have been affected. Living on a flood plain, they appear to have had a number of problems. Quite rightly, he spoke about how people can ensure that they are protected against the financial loss that repeated inundations can cause them, whether they are businesses or individuals.

I can confirm that the Government have been talking to the Association of British Insurers about those issues countrywide. The hon. Gentleman reported that an insurance broker in his constituency had suggested that those discussions, and the agreements reached between the ABI and the Government in an attempt to ensure continuity of insurance cover for people living on flood plains where there have been problems, did not apply in Scotland. That is right in the sense that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Treasury and the Environment Agency have been working closely with the ABI this year and talking about the issue with the aim of ensuring continued availability of affordable insurance. However, the Scottish Executive have held similar discussions with the ABI relating to flood issues specifically in Scotland.

Those discussions are ongoing, and we think that they are likely to reach the same conclusions and the same kind of agreement as in England. In that sense, there should not be a big difference between arrangements in England and those in Scotland.

My question is a bit unfair, because the Minister is not responsible for this matter in Scotland, but she says that discussions are ongoing in Scotland to try to establish the same system that exists in England and Wales. Does she not share my concern that some insurance companies might use the fact that no agreement exists in Scotland as an excuse not to fulfil for the people of Moray the obligations that they would—rightly—have to fulfil in England and Wales?

I understand the hon. Gentleman's point. As ever in debates touching on reserved and devolved issues, I have to be careful not to step on the toes of others who have responsibilities. I often do not know as much about what is happening as they do. I say that with some care. I am unaware of the latest state of ongoing discussions.

In discussions with the ABI, the aim of the authorities, whether the Scottish Executive or the Westminster Government, is to prevent petty avoidance of responsibility for issues that must be dealt with. We found that the industry was willing to discuss problems and come to some agreement. The industry has gained a reputation for trying to avoid its responsibilities: we all know of instances when the small print is referred to. We hope that that will not continue, that the discussions will be constructive and that no one will seek—on the grounds of the current state of negotiations—to avoid responsibilities for paying out to those who should be paid. The Scottish Executive expect, and we hope, that similar sensible arrangements will be made in Scotland.

Reference was made to the Bellwin scheme, which was established under the Local Government and Housing Act 1989 as a means of offering financial support to local authorities that have to deal with disasters or emergencies. It is obviously relevant to our concerns. These are devolved matters, so the council's application will go to the Scottish Executive.

A meeting is being held today between Scottish Executive officials and those of Moray council to discuss the level of claims. A claim has not yet been submitted, but the amount requested is likely to be about £1 million. The scheme is intended to provide additional support when exceptional incidents take place. Local authorities should plan for the unexpected. Floods have broken out before, so it is likely that the council has built contingency planning into its reserve balance arrangements.

I seek clarification. Was I correct in hearing that Moray council has applied for £1 million under the Bellwin scheme? In 1997, it applied for £2.5 million.

No, I said that a claim had not yet been submitted. A health warning is necessary: neither the Westminster Government nor I are involved in these negotiations, which are a matter between the Scottish Executive and the Moray council. I said that although a claim had not yet been submitted, it was expected to be in the order of £1 million. Doubtless the Scottish Executive and the council will agree a suitable figure. I have no knowledge beyond what officials discovered and informed me about for today's debate. I cannot assist the hon. Gentleman about whether the sum is sufficient, but the Bellwin scheme has certainly been activated and invoked, and further discussions about additional help are ongoing.

The hon. Gentleman referred to the possibility of benefits from European funds. He mentioned a letter sent to an MEP colleague by the Commission President, Romano Prodi, which states:

"Furthermore, a number of current regional programmes, including those of the UK, enable European funds to be used for the financing of a wide range of measures in the area of flood protection. Prevention programmes can also benefit from the additional funds available for the performance reserve, which could be earmarked to support projects in areas affected by natural disasters."

The hon. Gentleman has been assiduous in seeking sources of funding to deal with the problems debated today. I understand that decisions on the distribution of European funds are a devolved matter and that Moray council could make an application for funding to the Highlands and Islands development partnership.

I hope that I have answered some of the hon. Gentleman's questions. He asked several other detailed questions that I will not have time to deal with, but I undertake to write to him to clear up those issues. I finish as I started, by expressing my sympathy with his constituents who have been affected—and not for the first time. I hope that all agencies of Government—statutory authorities, volunteer forces, emergency services, MPs, MEPs or whoever—can do their best to help alleviate their plight.

The National Football museum in Preston is, as the name suggests, a museum of national significance. It is the national museum of the national game. It was awarded national museum registration status by Resource, the Government body for promoting standards in museums, libraries and archives. It is also of international significance, preserving England's and the world's finest football collections. It has more than 25,000 items, including the FIFA museum collection. FIFA chose the National Football museum of England as the permanent home for the FIFA museum collection because England is recognised worldwide as the birthplace of the game.

The museum has recently been nominated for the European museum of the year award 2003. Following the success of the museum's exhibition in Japan during the World cup, it will be mounting an exhibition in China during the women's World cup in 2003. UEFA has approached the museum with a view to creating a display to mark UEFA's 50th anniversary in 2004. It is in discussions with FIFA regarding several projects, including an exhibition to mark FIFA's centenary. The museum has advised the national football museum projects in Norway, Germany, Wales and Mexico. It has been used extensively by the British Tourist Authority to attract overseas tourists, by the use of museum displays, for example, at the trade fair in Frankfurt.

I would like the Minister to be aware of the media's reaction to this wonderful museum that is housed in Preston. The Times said:

"It is a fantastic place. Yes, fantastic".

The Mail on Sunday described it as "brilliant". It has also had excellent support from great names in football. Sir Bobby Charlton said:

"It's a world first. I've never seen a better football Museum … a most marvellous museum".

Alan Ball said it was "fabulous, unbelievable." Mark Lawrenson said:

"The best football Museum in the most appropriate place".

Denis Law said:

"It's important to have something like this. It is for the future and hopefully it will give inspiration to the youngsters of today".

Gordon Taylor of the Professional Footballers Association said:

"The museum will be with us as long as football exists".

I have some key questions for the Minister. The Government have a policy of free access for all to national museums. That being the case, why are they not providing free access to the National Football museum—the people's museum of the people's game? It would cost as little as £400,000 per annum for Department for Culture, Media and Sport to allow free access to all. Why are the Government allowing that exception to their policy to continue?

Will the Minister clarify what the definition of a national museum is? Does DCMS consider the National Coalmining museum to be a national museum? If it does, why does it not also recognise the National Football museum as a national museum? It has met the same registration standards with Resource as the National Coalmining museum. If it does not, why then does it give the National Coalmining museum £2 million of revenue funding per annum, including funding for free access for all? Why does DCMS not provide funding to the National Football museum when it provides substantial funding to a number of non-national museums, primarily located in London? For example, the Horniman museum receives £3.1 million, the Geffrye museum £1.1 million and the Museum of London £5.2 million.

I have two quotations from my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. The first is:

"The restoration of free access will enable the greatest collections we have…to be available to everyone, no matter what their income or background."—[Official Report, 5 November 2001; Vol. 374, c. 66W.]

The second is:

"My right hon. Friend will be aware of our determination to ensure that national museums and galleries have the necessary funding to maintain the popular public policy of free entry, which has seen the number of people going to our national museums and galleries increase, in some cases, by up to 75 per cent. He will also be aware of our clear aim to increase the level of investment in regional museums and galleries—a long neglected quarter."—[Official Report, 22 July 2002; Vol. 389. c. 651.]

I shall give the Minister a chronology of developments concerning the museum during the past 18 months. On 22 June 2001, my right hon. Friend the Minister for Sport wrote in support of the museum, at its opening. He said in his letter:

"The National Football Museum will provide a testimony to how football has and can inspire and engage people of all ages and from all walks of life…lt is an important initiative".

On 29 November 2001, the museum was awarded national museum registration status by Resource, the Government body for promoting standards in museums.

On 11 and 21 January 2002, the museum submitted briefings to the Minister for Sport, following which he and I had a meeting on 23 January. That is when the museum began to seek funding from DCMS for free access, following the award of national status. On 6 February and 5 March 2002, the museum submitted further briefings to DCMS. On 8 May, DCMS was represented at a round table meeting at the museum to consider the North West Development Agency-sponsored study into future funding for the museum.

On 22 May 2002, the Minister for Sport and the Minister for the Arts, Baroness Blackstone, had a round table meeting at DCMS to discuss the museum's future funding with me, museum managers, the North West Development Agency, officials from the Football Foundation, the Heritage Lottery Fund and the North West Museums Service.

On 11 September 2002, DCMS was again represented at a round table meeting at the museum to consider its future funding. On 29 September, the Secretary of State herself visited the museum and wrote in the comments book: "A real inspiration—excellent!" On 8 October, I wrote to her to tell her how urgent a decision on the matter was. On 31 October I received a reply from Baroness Blackstone, the museums Minister, which gave no firm commitments.

That whole process started in January this year, and we are now in the middle of December. The future of the museum is still uncertain. Throughout the year, I have listened to comments from Ministers such as, "Football should fund the museum." But football will not or cannot provide funding. To date, the museum has received from football £300,000 towards a capital project cost of £15 million—a meagre 2 per cent.—and

£100,000 towards revenue costs. Why should football be expected to fund the museum in any case? Museums are not in general funded by their associated industries. The National Museum of Science and Industry is funded by DCMS, not by science or industry.

It has also been commented that the museum is a private initiative: that DCMS did not decide to set up the museum, and therefore has no obligation to fund it. The Minister will be aware that most of the national museums—and non-national ones for that matter— now funded by DCMS were originally private sector initiatives.

I wonder whether the position would be different if this national museum, which is based in Preston and is of benefit to the northwest, were in London? Does my hon. Friend think that the Government would have a different attitude in that case, and would find funding tomorrow, just as they have for Wembley?

My hon. Friend can speculate about that. I decline to comment.

As a London Member who represents a borough in which the Horniman museum is based, adjoining the borough represented by the Secretary of State, I say to my hon. Friend that many of us support the National Football museum in Preston. We think that it is in the right place, as the north-west was the birthplace of football in England. I hope that he would equally support our bid to have the Olympics in London.

I would certainly concur with my hon. Friend, and I support an Olympic bid for London.

As I said, many museums were previously funded by local authorities, rather than Government, such as the Horniman museum, the Geffrye museum, the Museum of London and national museums and galleries on Merseyside. Most of the national and non-national museums now funded by DCMS were originally private initiatives: the Tate gallery, founded by Sir Henry Tate, Sir John Soane's museum and the Horniman museum. There are many precedents for Government funding museums that they did not initiate. The museum is an independent charitable trust, created thanks to public funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

I have also heard it said that, worthy though the National Football museum is, DCMS does not have any funding available. DCMS has been able to find £2 million per annum to fund the National Coalmining museum for England in Wakefield. It provides £200,000 per annum to the non-national Design museum in London. It provides substantial funding to a number of non-national museums, primarily in London, as we have already mentioned. If the Department is saying that the National Football museum is not a national museum as defined by DCMS, and cannot expect to be funded. I put it to the Minister that DCMS did not define the National Coalmining museum for England as a national museum before deciding to fund it. Subsequently, it was given funding to allow free access for all.

DCMS provides substantial funding to several museums that it defines as non-national, primarily those in London. It is Resource, the DCMS-funded body for promoting national standards in museums that has awarded the National Football museum its national status. There is a complete lack of clarity about what DCMS defines as a national museum and why it funds some museums—national and non-national—and not others. I hope that the Minister will clear that up.

If DCMS is saying that the National Football museum is not currently a success because its visitor numbers are disappointing and it does not deserve funding, I say that that is all the more reason to provide funding for free access for all, which would significantly increase the number of visitors, as has happened at the other national museums. The museum's target for the current financial year is 42,000 paying visitors. Free access will significantly increase the number of visitors. According to DCMS figures, attendance at the national museums that have free access has increased by up to 75 per cent. Attendance at the National Football museum would very likely increase to at least 60,000 per annum.

I quote the Minister, who in a written answer said:

"There are no plans to extend free entry to museums beyond free entry to the permanent collections of the main museums and galleries in England to which the Government are committed to ensure universal free access."—[Official Report, 5 March 2002; Vol. 381, c. 267W.]

That statement in itself does not detail which museums have been selected or why. It is also notable that the Welsh Assembly and Scottish Parliament take their own decisions regarding free access to museums.

I have heard it said that the museum should move location to attract more visitors in order to meet its costs. That is the view of some people in the sporting establishment who want to get their hands on the collection. The longer DCMS delays its decision, the more likely that is to happen. It would be a slap in the face for the new city of Preston, which has been awarded city status in this jubilee year by the Queen.

The museum is located in Preston for outstanding heritage reasons. In 1889, Preston North End was the first winner of the world's oldest football league, and it was also a founder member of the Football League. The museum is at Deepdale stadium, the home of Preston North End since 1878, which makes it the oldest football league ground in the world that is still in use today. Next year will be the 125th anniversary of football being played at the stadium. which will be a world first. Moving the museum would waste £9 million of public money that has already been invested, and cost many millions more.

On a recent visit to the museum, Sir Alex Ferguson said:

"As a founder member of the English Football League, Preston is an appropriate place for the National Football Museum and Hall of Fame".

The museum and I are making a plea to the Government for the support that it deserves. I ask the Minister for that support in deeds as well as words.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Preston (Mr. Hendrick) on securing this important debate. I raised the issue in April this year in early-day motion 1138. At that time, I sought to draw attention to the need for national funding of the museums in Preston, Wrexham and Glasgow—the English, Welsh and Scottish football museums. The motion attracted extensive support from across the UK.

Most football fans are not museum goers, and it is important that we do everything we can to encourage the initiatives at Preston and elsewhere. The museums are excellent and they need all the support they can get. It is up to the Department to take on that responsibility to ensure that the funding is there and that the museums are encouraged and supported. One cannot establish museums within two, three, four or five years. They need to be given proper funding so that in time they become known, people can access them and they grow popular, which is the way forward.

The English museum deserves support, but it is not the only national museum. The Scottish Football museum in Glasgow has been running since 1994, and it has struggled with many of the same problems as Preston and Wrexham in trying to get established without support and core funding. The Department needs to address that issue if it is going to talk about supporting football across the UK. Today's debate should initiate a wide-ranging discussion among not only football fans but parliamentarians about the importance of those museums, which supply employment and provide a facility for people, and especially young people, who would usually never go near museums. It may be that going to Wrexham, Preston or Glasgow gives young people a love for museums in general. I hope that the Minister's response will encourage museums throughout the UK.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Preston (Mr. Hendrick) on giving us the opportunity to debate the issue today. He has led parliamentary support for the museum since its financial problems became apparent late in 2001. He met Ministers at my Department on 22 May with museum representatives and other interested parties to discuss funding options. As he will know, my right hon. Friend the Minister for Sport would have been here, but he is in Moscow playing his part in trying to cleanse sport of drugs.

At the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, we agree that the National Football museum holds the world's most important collection of football artefacts and memorabilia, including the FIFA and Football Association collections, and Ministers are therefore as anxious as anyone involved to ensure that it is not broken up. My hon. Friend made an important point in that respect.

Moreover, we do not underestimate the wider value of the museum, because we are aware that the project embraces social inclusion through football, high-quality educative work and regional regeneration. Despite the institution's very poor performance in terms of attracting paying customers—it has been a great disappointment, as I am sure my hon. Friend will admit—we want to play a part in trying to save it. However, the scope of Government action is limited. The DCMS museums budget is hard pressed. In May, my noble Friend the Minister for the Arts explained those pressures to the museum and to others, including my hon. Friend, and I have to repeat that direct Revenue funding is not an option.

My hon. Friend asked about free museum entry. That policy applies only to museums directly sponsored by DCMS and/or museums established under parliamentary legislation. DCMS does not provide revenue funding to the National Football museum, and is not therefore constitutionally tied to the free access policy in that respect. That is an important point. The museum accepted that arrangement when it was set up. It accepted that it needed to charge at the outset of its career, and that remains the case. DCMS Ministers had no part to play in the Heritage Lottery Fund's investment of £9.5 million—a very substantial sum. Frankly, it would be disingenuous to suggest that the Government have no interest in safeguarding that investment of public money—of course we do. The bulk of it went into fitting out the museum, and in the event of its closure, it is extremely unlikely that the fund will recover much of its investment. There are no immediately apparent alternative uses for the high-quality galleries and other facilities included under the stands at Deepdale, Preston North End's ground, and Ministers are well aware that, should the museum close, much of the fund's investment would effectively pass to Preston North End football club at little or no cost.

The Minister has not addressed several important points that I raised. Is he willing to say how these other museums came to be sponsored? I am sure that they were sponsored not from the year dot but because Governments took a decision to take them on. Why cannot the Government do that in this case?

I cannot say why certain museums were included in the initial list and others were not. Many great museums are not on the list, some of which are doubtless called national museums. I tried to explain the original criteria and why the National Football museum was not included on the list, and that that discussion can continue, but if my hon. Friend wants me to answer his questions about funding, I shall try to do so. He must admit that there have been many attempts in Preston to try to turn the situation around, but they have not succeeded.

Free entry to a museum might be successful, but how on earth would it help on a day when it had seven paying customers? That will not turn a museum around—7,000 paying customers a week might have helped. It would be a huge burden for DCMS to take on, so I cannot give a carte blanche answer right now.

We have considered the role of the Football Foundation as a possible source of funding. The foundation is after all the primary funding body for football.

Does not the Minister agree that the Government's policy of making national museums free for all has meant that the general public are now not willing to pay to go into museums? The museum has become the victim of a policy introduced by the Government, however much he would like to paint a picture that they are trying to help it.

I am sure that my hon. Friend would not want to reverse the policy of free entry to museums. It has been an enormous success story, but it has a downside: paying customers will decide where they want to go. Clearly, some museums will lose out as a consequence, and we are addressing that. As tourism Minister, I have been to many institutions—museums, theme parks and so on—that have had enormous success, despite the fact that people have to pay to go into them. That could be for many reasons: their location, they are convenient to reach, there is something special to see there or perhaps the institution has taken time to think about how it treats its customers.

I have not been to the museum so I cannot say why visitor numbers are so very low. However, even if, as my hon. Friend suggested, the figures increased to 60,000, I recall that the agreed break-even figure was 80,000.

It was 40,000.

Very well, I shall pass on that one.

My right hon. Friend the Minister for Sport first asked the Football Foundation to assist the museum earlier this year. At that time, the museum sought £1.5 million to allow it to offer free admission until 2004. That would have meant the foundation devoting a large proportion of its entire budget for community and education projects to the museum for two and a half years. The board was understandably unable to agree to a solution that could have endangered the funding of its successful community projects around the country. Nevertheless, the foundation wrote off £200,000 of the museum's debts earlier this year, and lent it £300,000 in May, which was secured on one of the principal exhibits, the Thomas Webster painting "Football". My right hon. Friend the Minister for Sport intends to ask the foundation to consider the museum again.

All those involved in assisting the museum must take a frank view of its prospects. There was a good historical reason to locate it in Preston, at the home of one of the Football League's original member clubs. However, we must recognise that location has played a part in the museum's financial difficulties. At the suggestion of my right hon. Friend the Minister for Sport, the North West Development Agency commissioned a report on the museum's prospects from Jura Consultants earlier this year. Jura submitted its report in May. I know that the museum disagreed with some of the report's conclusions, but there was agreement on the overall assessment of visitor numbers: 30,000 visitors against a business plan target of 80,000 for the year left an immense hole in the museum's finances; it was better, but still well short of the break-even point.

The museum, and those who want to assist it, must be imaginative in considering alternative sources of funding. My right hon. Friend the Minister for Sport has bent over backwards to try to find ways in which to provide funding for the museum. Officials in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport have been fully involved with the steering group that was established earlier this year to consider funding options. My right hon. Friend arranged a fundraising dinner at the House of Commons on 23 July. It was well attended and he said that we would find funding to match commercial sponsorship funding, pound for pound, up to a maximum of £250,000. I understand that the museum has obtained £80,000 from sponsors to date. That is an encouraging start, but I am sure that my hon. Friend agrees that we need further substantial donations if we are to meet that match funding target, and—

Order. Time is up, and we must now move on to the next debate, in connection with which I congratulate the hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan) on the photograph that appeared in a broadsheet newspaper at the weekend.

Thank you for your generous welcome to this debate, Mr. Deputy Speaker.

I welcome the Minister to her place, but I must put on record my disappointment that her colleague, the Minister for E-Commerce and Competitiveness, who handles these matters, is unable to be here to reply, although I am sure that the hon. Lady will give as generous a reply as she can in the circumstances.

Last Friday lunchtime, more than 150 ordinary people left the comfort of their homes to stand in the pouring rain to protest about the closing of a precious asset in their community—their post office. I am grateful to Mr. Speaker for giving me the opportunity to give them a voice in Parliament and to give the Minister the opportunity to show that she cares about our community and to lend her weight to keep this valuable facility open.

The first post office in Chesham Bois was established in Percy Carter's cottage around 1905 and has been there ever since, providing not only post office services but a coffee shop, a meeting place, a shop, banking services and a vibrant centre of our village. It provides employment for Heather, Sheila, Olwyn, Yvonne and Denise during the week and the Saturday crew, Kat and Alice, as well as Tom, who goes there after school three days a week. Pauline, Betty and Ann make the cakes and Maggie runs the shop superbly. Many local businesses use the post office's facilities and many of our pensioners and families carry out their personal financial transactions at the shop and use it regularly. People also come from other villages as far away as Coleshill and the shop has attracted a petition of more than 500 signatures from people who want to keep it open as an operating post office.

County councillor Pauline Wilkinson, district councillor Mimi Harker—no less than the chairman of Chiltern district council—councillor Ian Gomm and the redoubtable parish council, led by Ernest Newhouse and the clerk, June Gosling, have all been fighting to keep the post office open. I pay tribute to them for all their hard work and indefatigable efforts.

All our local media have backed us. The Bucks Examiner ran a save-our-post-office campaign, the Bucks Free Press gave us front-page coverage and, as you rightly said, Mr. Deputy Speaker, even The Sunday Telegraph featured our campaign at the weekend.

I have asked questions in Parliament. I have presented a petition. I have even successfully invited a member of the Post Office board to visit us and meet us on site to see how successful the shop is in providing services to the community. Does that count? Apparently not. Not one person wants the post office to close and hundreds want it to remain open, but Post Office headquarters has decided that it must close and our wishes count for nothing. Indeed, yesterday I received the branch closure letter from the Post Office. However, we are not giving up. I am calling on the Minister today to take action to reprieve that village post office and I hope that I can convince her that it is worth saving.

I shall examine several issues: the classification of the post office as an urban post office, the code of practice under which it is being closed, the alternative post offices available to the community, the commercial viability of the branch and the potential for judicial review.

So-called urban post offices are subject to and targets for closure at the moment. In Chesham and Amersham, 15 branches are classified as urban, so if Chesham Bois post office goes, I stand to lose at least four more. Of the country's 9,000 urban post offices, 3,000 are under threat of closure. It is not only people in Chesham Bois who will suffer. but worried people up and down the country.

Chesham Bois is not urban, it is rural: it thinks it is a village, behaves like a village and would be eligible for help under certain rural schemes, such as the vital villages plan. I appreciate that the Post Office has adopted a certain classification, but why can that classification not be wiped out and replaced? The Minister for E-Commerce and Competitiveness, who is away at the moment, made much of an announcement of help for rural post offices and of the attempts to keep them open. Why cannot such support be extended to the post office in Chesham Bois, which has been placed in a certain category as a result of an accident of classification?

I thought that the Minister's Department ordered the Post Office not to close branches unless it was absolutely unavoidable. Surely it is avoidable in this case. Chesham Bois is an area of about 3,000 people. The post office could easily be reclassified as rural to reflect the reality of the situation and then it would qualify for help, not extinction.

From the outset, the parish council has felt that the classification of the post office as urban is a key issue. The Post Office has said that it is bound by Government guidelines when making a definition. The parish council has not had the advantage of seeing those guidelines, but from every other perspective, Chesham Bois exactly matches the categories that the Secretary of State described a week ago on Monday. The Secretary of State believes that post offices play a vital role in many rural communities and thinks that the money from the rural help programme will ensure that village post offices remain firmly at the heart of the community. Well, Chesham Bois is a community and the post office is at its heart.

The work that the parish council is doing on village revitalisation and appraisal, the views of Chiltern district council and the support that Chesham Bois is getting from Buckinghamshire Community Action point to the rural nature of the community. The Countryside Agency cannot give us a definition of urban and rural. Chesham Bois could be rural. Let us give Chesham Bois the benefit of the doubt and save the post office.

I am grateful to Alison Naisby—and to the hundreds of other constituents who have written to me—for her analysis of the code of practice, under which the proposed changes to branches are to be handled. Section B of the code of practice, which deals with the closure of a post office branch, states:

"Closure can happen in one of two general ways, either because a Post Office branch is thought to be no longer needed in that locality, or, much more commonly, because no suitable applicant and/or premises can be found to operate it."

Neither of those things apply in any way to Chesham Bois. First, there is a volume of evidence from the community that the branch is needed. Hundreds of residents have expressed their views to the Post Office or have signed petitions or attended protests. More than 300 small businesses use the branch and they have made personal representations of dismay to me at the removal of this local facility.

The premises are eminently suitable for a post office. Indeed, they have served the community for many years. There is a suitable applicant to run the premises in the shape of Maggie—Margaret Joyce—who offered herself for the position this January. She is partly trained and ready and willing for the final stage of training. but she has not had her application acknowledged and was told that the Post Office was not taking on any more applicants for training courses, which is patently not correct.

The code continues that when there is a proposal to close a branch, the people concerned need to consider

"The distance which customers will have to travel to other Post Office Branches",

the "trading hours" of those branches, their convenience, including

"parking, public transport, pedestrian access"

and whether the surrounding area is hilly or flat.

I have a lot of concerns in relation to that part of the code. The closure letter that I received from the Post Office acknowledged that there were a number of concerns about the availability of public transport and car parking facilities. The letter states:

"A member of our network team has personally visited the area and walked the ground, obtaining information on local bus timetables and car parking for the nearest, most convenient alternative branches."

I presume that the network team are young and fit and think nothing of hopping on and off a bus, waiting for half an hour, or having to walk half a mile. The residents of Chesham Bois, however, are ladies with children and people in wheelchairs. Some people with white sticks, who do not see quite as well as the Minister or me, turned out for that picture for The Sunday Telegraph. There were also some senior citizens.

There are no parking facilities near Amersham post office. It is positioned in a particularly dangerous place at a very busy junction. On foot, I will concede that one could get to Amersham or Amersham Common post office on quite a flat path, but to get to Waterside, Chesham involves a very steep hill. Those routes are not easily travelled by people not quite as agile as the network team.

I should also like to know what consideration has been given to disabled access and disability discrimination legislation. It strikes me that Chesham Bois post office is perfectly placed because one can park immediately outside. Access to the so-called alternative post offices is not so convenient. I believe that two of them do not come up to the standards required by disability discrimination legislation. Can the Minister comment on that? Members of my community will be disfranchised from using their post office if the closure goes ahead.

The commercial viability of Chesham Bois post office is also a key factor in determining the future of the branch. The Post Office has always concealed that aspect from us under the guise of commercial confidentiality. The closure letter from Drew McBride tells me that

"the closure of this branch will give the remaining network, in the immediate vicinity, the opportunity to gain business, which is vital for their long-term sustainability. This is particularly relevant in the current climate with the very real financial threats our organisation is facing. We announced a loss of £163 million last year and, in addition, when the Department for Work and Pensions starts to move benefit payments from passbooks to bank accounts, there will undoubtedly be fewer customers using our network of Post Office branches despite the introduction of new services and products."

I cannot believe that this sub-post office is not viable. If it is not, why has the Post Office already invested in the electronic keypad to enable people to draw their pensions and benefits when the change to bank accounts finally happens? This branch has had some major disruptions recently. There was resurfacing of the pavement outside the shops and post office in Bois lane, then installation of gas pipes by Transco and subsequent road resurfacing. Both involved reducing the road to one lane, traffic lights right outside the premises and a total loss of the front parking spaces. That has now finished and everyone can, and does, use the branch freely again.

At the last demonstration, I spoke to someone who had just opened an account for her business for which she could use the post office, specifically because of the proximity of that branch and the ease of access for her. Under the quaintly titled "reinvention" of the post office network, the Post Office claims that the closure will save other post offices—which, I might add, will also be under threat of closure—by transferring business there.

I read the Subpostmaster magazine and I saw in it a letter from a sub-postmaster, Mr. Spinks. It completely knocks the claims on the head, saying:

"Mr Mill states: 'Many urban SPMs can't make a profit because there are too many branches for the amount of business available'. That is not true. The truth is that SPMs can't make a reasonable profit because they do not receive sufficient payment for the work they already do."

He writes that his office is a

"five counter, very busy office with no retail side. I employ seven part-time staff, work over 56 hours a week myself and we struggle to cope on busy days. Why in that case would I want more business from offices that are closed down under reinvention?"

What is certain, so far as commercial viability is concerned, is that if this post office closes on 29 January there will be not only an effect on that shop but a disastrous effect on the other businesses in the parade. Their future should be on the conscience of everyone forcing this closure on our community.

Quite where the cost savings will come from, I do not know. Amersham post office, offered as an alternative to this post office, has been consistently undermanned. Vacancies have been advertised, two as recently as October. If another counter clerk is required, how will that help the balance of payments in the Post Office? It is only right that the Post Office should now reveal the exact financial position of the branch and the savings it expects to make, and give the community a chance to help if the figures do not add up. The parish council wanted to know if it could make a contribution to keep

the branch open, but that was dismissed out of hand in the branch closure letter. I think that the Post Office should at least sit down with the parish council and explore what could be done and how they could work together to save the branch.

The village of Chesham Bois is now looking at the possibility of judicial review. Perhaps the Minister can advise me on that. The Post Office has already tried to put me off judicial review and has included a long and complicated paragraph in its letter telling me why the closure of the branch is not subject to it. If that is the case, can the Minister tell me how can we obtain justice for our post office? What process of appeal is there? How can the voices of my community be heard?

To summarise, the Chesham Bois post office is a much-used, much-needed and much-appreciated asset in the village. The enormous depth of feeling among the community has been expressed through marches, petitions, newspaper campaigns and even a demonstration at the Royal Mail area headquarters. The post office provides employment, and the heart will be ripped out of this Chiltern village if it closes. The alternative post offices suggested do not provide a viable substitute for the present service, and I believe that Royal Mail should relent on its closure notice and redefine this branch as rural.

The Post Office's headed notepaper announces that it is

"an essential part of everyday life".

Those words are blazoned across the front of its letter. It is ironic that the closure notice just says "Branch closure"—the strapline about everyday life does not appear.

The Department of Trade and Industry and the Ministers must help us to take the appropriate action to ensure the continued operation of this post office. Comments of the Minister's colleague, the Minister for E-Commerce and Competitiveness, were faithfully reported by Christopher Booker in The Sunday Telegraph:

"'Where it can be avoided it will be avoided,' Mr Timms said on Today, 'and we've imposed that requirement on the Post Office.'"

The Minister of State has repeatedly used those words and I hope that the Department will stand by them. If the Minister does not act now to save our post office, we will know that the voices of ordinary people do not count and that the words of the Minister of State were hollow and meaningless. I ask the Minister to give the people of Chesham Bois a Christmas present and save their post office.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan) on securing this debate. She has shown her commitment to her constituents' concerns about the future of the Chesham Bois branch by raising the matter with my hon. Friend, the Minister for E-Commerce and Competitiveness, in the Post Office urban reinvention debate in the House on 15 October, and by presenting a petition to the House on 24 October. I welcome the opportunity to respond to the points that she raised, and do so as the granddaughter of a sub-postmistress of many years ago.

I want to assure the hon. Lady that we fully recognise the importance of the Post Office network. We are committed to maintaining a nationwide network of post offices and are aware of the importance of such outlets as a focal point of local communities, particularly for the elderly and less mobile. She made that point eloquently.

However, I must make it clear that since 26 March 2001 the Government's role in the Royal Mail group has been that of a shareholder in a public limited company. Under the Government's reforms, the group has been given greater commercial freedom, and an arm's-length relationship has been established so that the board can run the company on a commercial basis as it sees fit. Indeed, it has been the policy of successive Governments since 1969 that matters regarding the day-to-day running of postal businesses, such as decisions relating to individual post offices, are the responsibility of the company's management.

If the Department has no say in the day-to-day running of post offices, why did the Minister for E-Commerce and Competitiveness say—I gave the quotation earlier—that where closures can be avoided, they will be avoided and that the Government have imposed that requirement on the Post Office? Surely shareholders have a voice in the running of businesses.

It would be helpful if the hon. Lady waited until I come on to the question of the urban regeneration reinvention programme, which is separate from the closure of the post office in Chesham Bois. That post office is not being closed as part of the programme because the closure was instituted before the programme's advent.

In light of the 1969 policy, it is not appropriate for the Government to intervene, because we do not have a role to play in individual closures, but I appreciate the depth of feeling in the hon. Lady's constituency. The proposal by Post Office Ltd., which is responsible for the post office network, is clear. I understand that since the departure of the previous sub-postmaster in November 2001, a temporary sub-postmaster has operated the office in Chesham Bois. Such arrangements are costly for the company, and they can be unsatisfactory for customers because of the inherent uncertainty over the temporary cover being maintained. During that period, the Chesham Bois office, which has a relatively small customer base for its location, has seen levels of business fall at double the average rate.

In August, Post Office Ltd. decided to review its long-term position on that office. The Post Office's review concluded that it was difficult to see a viable future for the Chesham Bois office, and it therefore put its proposal to close it to public consultation. Although the Post Office was fully mindful of the disappointment that its decision would cause, it remains of the firm opinion that the area is well provided for, and that the community of Chesham Bois will not be seriously disadvantaged by the closure.

Was the financial viability assessment carried out in the period when the post office was prevented from trading in its normal fashion by the works that I mentioned?

I cannot answer the hon. Lady's question, but I can undertake to write to her with whatever information may be at my disposal as a Minister. That information is obviously held by Post Office Ltd., and I am not sure whether it will be available. I will, however, share with her any information on that question that is available to me.

As the hon. Lady is obviously aware, in considering such issues, the code of practice on post office closure and relocation, which has been agreed by the independent consumer council Postwatch and introduced in November 2001, is followed and formal public consultations are undertaken. Under the code, the Post Office wrote to various parties, including the hon. Lady, on 30 August to notify them of the proposal and request their representations.

In the case of Chesham Bois, the hon. Lady mentioned that the nearest branch is the Amersham office on Sycamore road, which is roughly half a mile away. There is also an office at Amersham common, which is a mile away down the hill from Chesham Bois. Other branches exist at Waterside, Chesham and High street, Chesham, which are about a mile and a half away. All those offices can be accessed by bus services and have nearby car parking.

On the question of disabled access, I am advised that the nearest branch at Amersham is half a mile away and offers level disabled access. The Post Office has determined that there is ample room for wheelchair users inside the office, and it stands ready to discuss accessibility at other branches in the area because it is a live issue.

By virtue of what the Minister has said, she is admitting that some branches in the vicinity, which have been put up as alternatives, cannot be accessed by the disabled, which means that people who are disabled have a choice of only one post office. If such people live at the other end of Chesham Bois, the one post office is certainly not half a mile away from them. The post office with disabled access may be half a mile away from the post office that is being closed, but it is not half a mile away from their homes. The disadvantage to my constituents is therefore growing by the minute. and the financial advantage to the Post Office is diminishing, owing to the cost of the work that it will have to carry out at the other post offices. Surely it would be more sensible to leave the Chesham Bois post office open.

I believe that the Post Office stands ready to discuss disabled access, and I can only leave it up to the Post Office, the hon. Lady and her constituents to thrash out the details.

I turn to the classification of Chesham Bois post office, which has been defined as being located in an urban area. I know that that has been a particular bone of contention. Although the Post Office analysis of an area as either urban or rural is broadly defined by whether the post office branch is located in a community of more or fewer than 10,000 inhabitants, the broad definition was adopted by the Post Office in autumn 2000, when the formal requirement to prevent avoidable closures in the rural network was first placed on it by the Government. Post Office Ltd. has since developed a sophisticated geographical mapping model that measures population in terms of contiguous or very close agglomeration. In classifying Chesham Bois as urban, the model reflects the fact that it lies within the continuous urban catchment area of Amersham, which has a population of more than 10,000. I can appreciate that the residents of Chesham Bois consider themselves a distinct community, as the hon. Lady says. Because of that concern, the Post Office rechecked its analysis and confirmed its classification of the office as urban. Post Office Ltd. has adopted a consistent national approach to classifying its entire network. It compiles a list of branches by parliamentary constituency as of 20 April 2002, showing their classification. A copy of that list is held in the Library.

The hon. Lady asked about Chesham Bois at the urban reinvention debate on 15 October. It is important to clarify that the Post Office's proposal is not part of its programme to restructure its entire network of urban post offices and that it was announced before the urban reinvention programme had begun. It must be recognised that there may be isolated occasions when, in accordance with the normal running of a network of more than 17,000 branches, circumstances arise that necessitate considering the closure of an individual post office. As with Chesham Bois, however, such instances will continue to be considered in accordance with the code of practice that I mentioned.

The Post Office faces several challenges. People are not using post offices as they used to. Some 42 per cent. of benefit recipients now access their benefit payments via bank accounts rather than by order books, compared with 26 per cent. in 1996. Over the past five years, the number of retirement pensions and widow's benefit payments paid by order books and giros has decreased by more than 1 million—from slightly more than 6 million to fewer than 5 million—although the total number of pension recipients has risen by more than 1 million during that time. Incapacity benefit payments at the Post Office have fallen even more dramatically—from more than 2.5 million to fewer than 1 million.

Similarly, over the past five years Girobank transactions at post offices have fallen by 37 per cent., as has the number of stamps sold. Last year, Post Office Ltd. lost £160 million and the business as a whole lost more than £1 million per working day. The ability of sub-postmasters to sell on their businesses—the way in which people have moved on in the past—has taken a severe knock.

I am very interested in all the facts and figures on the Post Office, but if the Minister is not going to help us to keep the post office open, will she tell me before the debate ends how we can appeal against the decision and how we can buy more time to have it thoroughly looked into?

I cannot give the hon. Lady legal advice about such matters as judicial review, because I do not have it to hand. I undertake to write to her with whatever advice I can, but I cannot say what it will be or whether there will be much of it.

There is overprovision in urban areas, but the matter that we are discussing is not part of the urban reinvention programme. The Government want a profitable Post Office with branches that offer services that customers want, located in the right places. That is the reason for restructuring. However, this is not about restructuring but about a consideration of the viability of an individual post office that had started before the programme came into being. Post Office Ltd. believed that there were powerful reasons for dealing with it as it did, and closure was recommended. That is an operational matter for Post Office Ltd., and has always been considered thus. It is important that the company carries out its programme efficiently and consistently and ensures that the comprehensive consultation process has taken place for representations to be made to it before it takes such decisions, which we recognise are very important and difficult for local communities.