On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. Have you had any requests from the Foreign Office to make a statement on the weekend's events in Iraq and the difficulties between Iraqis and the coalition forces?

I have had no such approach.

On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. I wish to raise the issue of the recent activities of the hon. Member for Argyll and Bute (Mr. Reid) in my constituency. I have given you notice in writing of this point of order and I have spoken personally to the hon. Gentleman today and told him that I intended to raise the issue in the Chamber. Our exchanges have been both courteous and friendly, but given the complaints I have received from different constituents and members of different parties, I wish to place the matter on the public record. I ask you to make a statement on the conventions that apply when one Member visits the constituency of another without notice and engages in activities.

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving me notice of his point of order. I should like to take this opportunity to refer to the letter that I sent to all Members on 24 February 2003, in which I set out the conventions and courtesies of the House. That letter has helpfully been reproduced as an appendix to the recently published Procedure Committee report on "Procedures for Debates, Private Members' Bills and the Powers of the Speaker". In that letter I made it clear that individual Members should notify colleagues whenever they intend to visit a colleague's constituency, except when such visits are entirely private.

I also invite the House to recall the ruling of Madam Speaker Boothroyd, which was reported in Hansard on 22 February 1996 at column 520. I, too, deprecate the activities of any Member who interferes inappropriately in another Member's constituency. I know that the hon. Members for Dumbarton (Mr. McFall) and for Argyll and Bute (Mr. Reid) are mature and sensible enough to have resolved these matter; between themselves, but I want to make it absolutely clear that the conventions and courtesies that I set out in my letter of 24 February are there for a reason, and that is that they enable all right hon. and hon. Members to go about their business in a proper manner. Once again, I commend those conventions and courtesies to all Members, and I hope not to have to listen to any similar points of order again.

I am pleased to see that the Curry shadow Cabinet has turned out in full today. On Wednesday, the Prime Minister set out our strategy for legislation and reform. The Government's legislative programme for the next session will enhance economic stability, further reform and improve public services, and create a fairer, more secure and more just society. The measures that my Office will bring before the House build on those objectives.

Our housing Bill will protect the vulnerable in our society by tackling unscrupulous landlords. Our planning Bill will speed up the delivery of new homes, schools and hospitals—the very infrastructure that creates sustainable communities—and the fire and rescue services Bill will improve our security by enabling the service to respond to the threat from terrorism.

Over the past 25 years the role of the fire and rescue service has changed fundamentally. That role will continue to change in the future, in particular in response to the new threat from terrorism. The fire and rescue services Bill will be the first substantial piece of legislation to modernise the fire service for 50 years. It will reflect our White Paper published in June and the findings of Sir George Bain's independent review of the fire service. The Bill will create a service better able to protect the public and respond to changing demands.

Is the right hon. Gentleman aware of the widespread concern about local fire services being told, on the one hand, to consider sharing control room and other facilities with other emergency services, such as the police and ambulance units, and on the other, to desist from that and consider regionalisation policies and their impact on fire services? Is he aware how much confusion that is creating?

The hon. Lady will be aware that one has to take a regional approach to the process of change and meeting new demands, particularly the threat of terrorism, and the fire authorities and the police are already doing so. We propose certain legislative changes to meet those new demands. I agree that a certain amount of confusion may be caused while the debate is ongoing, but change is certainly necessary and the fire and rescue services Bill will give us the power to get on and do what is needed.

I give my fullest support to firefighters, whose dedication and courage is evident every day of the year. Indeed. I am sure that the House will welcome Friday's overwhelming decision when, on a high turnout, 75 per cent. of the Fire Brigades Union voted in favour of continuing with the process of modernisation and reform agreed in June this year. I do not see any of my hon. colleagues who used to be critical about that matter, but I will claim the ballot in my favour.

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My hon. Friend is always here.

Together, we can build a better service that saves more lives and offers a rewarding career for everyone who works in it. The fire and rescue services Bill will underpin the process of reform by repealing outdated legislation and putting in place a legal framework that reflects the wider role that the service now has. It will create a new duty for fire and rescue authorities to respond to serious civil emergencies, ranging from flooding to terrorist incidents. The hon. Member for Vale of York (Miss McIntosh) well knows the importance of integrating the emergency services with regard to flooding. Such integration happens at the moment, but it could be done better.

The fire and rescue services Bill will also create a duty to promote fire safety, recognising the role that firefighters have long played in preventing as well as fighting fires. For far too long the service has operated in a vacuum. Successive Governments have failed to provide it with clear direction. We will therefore shortly publish a new national framework for consultation, which will provide the strategic direction that the service requires. Within that framework, fire and rescue authorities will have greater flexibility to set priorities locally, and they will work together regionally. That will reduce bureaucracy and ensure that functions are carried out at the appropriate operational level, releasing more resources to be spent on fighting and preventing fires. The Bill will help to save lives.

The other two Bills that my Office will introduce will address the quality of people's lives in and out of their homes. Eighteen months ago, the Prime Minister established the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister with responsibility for creating sustainable communities by delivering radical improvements in housing, planning, regeneration and local and regional government. The House will recall that when I published the sustainable communities plan in February, I made it clear that for decades all Governments have failed to meet housing need in this country. We did not invest enough in housing and we used land wastefully. The communities plan set out my Office's programme to reverse that. The Bills that we will introduce will drive forward the delivery of that programme.

We have already done a great deal. We are on course to reduce by about 1 million the number of non-decent social homes by April 2004, and we will have helped more than 9,000 key workers into home ownership through our starter homes initiative by the same time. We will provide about 100,000 new or improved homes for low-cost renting and home ownership by 2004. We have already exceeded our target to provide 60 per cent. of new homes on brownfield land. We are funding about 1,500 wardens, mostly in deprived neighbourhoods, and most hon. Members comment favourably on them, saying that they help to improve security.

I applaud all the policies that my right hon. Friend describes because they have had a major effect in my constituency, but I want to take this opportunity to remind him of some crucial figures for my borough that are typical for London: 260 new units of accommodation last year, 15,000 people on the waiting list and almost 1,200 homeless families. May I impress on him the continuing need to address the housing shortage in London, while applauding him for the fact that so much has been done?

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for those comments. Indeed, she is absolutely right: we are putting more resources into London's housing than before. Tonight, I shall visit her constituency as part of a national conversation, where housing will be an important element, and I look forward to debating that as we continue our discussion with the people.

We have introduced new freedoms and flexibilities for our best-performing local authorities and there will be referendums next autumn on elected regional assemblies in the three northern regions.

To pull the right hon. Gentleman back to a very serious note, does he accept that there are now record numbers of homeless people in this country, and at the same time there are three quarters of a million empty houses that should be brought into use? Why has he not addressed that in his legislation?

We are doubling investment over these years, but the hon. Gentleman points to a fair concern—there are an awful lot of empty properties. That review is under way at the moment. English Partnerships, working with the Housing Corporation, is looking at precisely how we can utilise those properties to meet the housing demand. He is right to point that out. It is a pity that his party did not do anything about it when it was in office.

The Deputy Prime Minister talks about empty homes, and his Department has a consultation paper on compulsory leasing. Why is that proposal not being included in the housing Bill that is due to come before the House, as the Select Committee recommended?

I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman's comment. That was a recommendation of the Select Committee, which largely welcomed this Bill, for which I am grateful. The Law Commission report, which we are studying, deals with some aspects of tenancy and compulsory purchase that we will be considering. Perhaps that point will be made during the progress of the Bill, and we will look at it again.

The achievements that I have mentioned are within the framework of the £22 billion sustainable communities plan, which committed us to increase the provision of high quality and affordable housing in areas of high demand, particularly in London and the south-east; to regenerate deprived communities; to address housing markets in decline, especially in the northern areas; to bring all social housing up to a decent standard by 2010; and to improve the efficiency of the planning system while protecting the countryside and improving the local environment.

The housing Bill announced in the Gracious Speech will help to create a fairer and better housing market and protect the most vulnerable tenants, particularly in the private sector.

I commend my right hon. Friend on everything that he has said so far. However, are not the Government in danger of missing a great opportunity to reform the law on park homes as part of their housing legislation? The work has been done, the working party has reported, and the Government have pledged themselves to reform. Should not we take this opportunity to protect the most vulnerable people living in the private sector?

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. He is well known for doing an awful lot in this area, and has been campaigning for park homes to be covered by this legislation. I do not mean this as an excuse, but we gave serious consideration to the matter, and again it is affected by the Law Commission's report, which we are considering. I have no doubt that he will be as active making exactly the same points when the Bill comes before the House. At present, however, we have made the choice not to put the matter in the Bill.

I am grateful to the Select Committee on Housing, Planning, Local Government and the Regions for its report on the draft Bill. It has once again demonstrated the value of pre-legislative scrutiny—there is no doubt about that, and anyone reading the report can see how it adds to the value of the Bill. I am pleased that the Committee broadly welcomed the Bill's aims. In our response published on 10 November we were able to respond positively to 40 of the Select Committee's recommendations, out of approximately 72, and to its conclusions, including those on houses in multiple occupation, the right to buy and the possible phased introduction of home information packs.

The housing Bill will provide new powers to tackle problems and inequalities in the private housing sector. Many of the most vulnerable in our society live in private sector accommodation, often in conditions that we should not tolerate. In some parts of the country, areas are suffering from housing market collapse, which can often be attributed to the actions of bad landlords and antisocial tenants. The Bill will give local authorities new powers to license selectively private landlords when there is a particular problem such as antisocial behaviour. If a landlord is not fit and proper, a council will he able to take over management of that property until a decent manager can be put in place.

Houses in multiple occupation represent some of our worst properties. They are often badly managed and in poor physical condition. We therefore intend to fulfil a manifesto commitment and introduce a licensing scheme for the highest risk houses in multiple occupation. Licensees will need to show that they are "fit and proper" to manage the property and that arrangements are in place to ensure that adequate management standards are met. Responsible landlords, decent tenants and the local community will all benefit from those provisions.

Perhaps only my right hon. Friend and a few others in the Chamber understand the depth of appreciation that the Bill is to come before the House. The devastating effect that houses in multiple occupation have had on certain communities is shown by the way in which he described his intentions. When considering such issues, it is important to bear in mind the devastating consequences of a high concentration of houses in multiple occupation and the way in which my constituency of Leeds, North-West has been seriously damaged by the transfer of 60 per cent. of its housing to houses in multiple occupation.

My hon. Friend has made those points many times and we intend to do something about that. I think that I am right in saying that we had hoped to implement a relevant measure in a Bill that fell after negotiation between the two Houses during the previous Parliament. The sound arguments that we made then are applicable now, which is why we are bringing forward the Bill. It must be implemented because there is great need for it.

The House is aware—this is connected with my hon. Friend's point—that there is a close link between poor housing and poor health, which is a point that has been made for some time. Our proposals, together with the new housing health and safety rating system, will help local authorities to target the properties in which health and safety hazards and risks to residents are greatest.

The housing Bill will also continue the modernisation of the right-to-buy scheme and will tackle abuses and reduce profiteering. Both the Select Committee and the home ownership taskforce, under the very able chairmanship of Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde, welcomed the provisions in the draft housing Bill. However, they called for more, so we amended the draft Bill to give social landlords the right of first refusal if owners wish to resell a property within 10 years of exercising their right to buy. The provision will not be retrospective. In addition, we will suspend the right to buy from properties that are scheduled for demolition. That is especially relevant in areas in which regeneration schemes are proposed, because if people want to make a quick buck that will be prevented.

It is our duty to ensure that we get value for money from funding for new affordable housing. The Bill covers both England and Wales and will thus provide for the Housing Corporation and the National Assembly for Wales to pay grant to organisations other than registered social landlords. That will encourage competition and increase the supply of affordable homes. Private developers who receive such grants will be required to reach the same high standards as registered social landlords.

More people than ever own their own homes and that trend has been evident for decades. In 1940, 32 per cent. of homes were privately owned and that figure rose to 57 per cent. in 1980. The figure today is 70 per cent., and the housing stock has doubled from 10 million to 21 million homes over that period. However, the process of buying and selling a house is shambolic and stressful for many people. It gives consumers a raw deal and nine out of 10 people are unhappy with the process. The Consumers Association strongly supports change. We therefore intend to make provision for the introduction of home information packs. Our research so far indicates that making key information available right at the start of the process will make home buying and selling easier and more transparent and successful.

I am aware of concerns about the cost of home information packs. The main components will be a search, a home condition report, an energy efficiency certificate and legal fees, although people have to spend money on many of those items within the current process. That said, we recognise the Select Committee's concern and we are discussing with consumer and industry stakeholders the possibility of a phased introduction of home information packs as part of a national roll-out.

The housing Bill will improve the quality of people's lives by making a difference to where they live and by protecting the most vulnerable. Above all, it will contribute directly to the creation of sustainable communities. The delivery of new housing and sustainable communities will require a flexible and quick planning system, as we set out in the 2001 Green Paper.

On the question of housing, my right hon. Friend knows that in Bolsover a considerable amount of money—millions of pounds—has gone into renovating some of the old Coal Board properties, which is welcome. However, there is a problem—which is, I suspect, the big conversation in Bolsover—namely, council houses. I was up there the other week discussing how there could be a level playing field for authorities such as Bolsover and others that do not want to hand over their council housing stock on principle.

Can I have a guarantee, a little bit better than what was said on 18 June this year, that no local authorities will be penalised if they hang on to their council stock? In other words, if money is to be given for handing over the stock, there should be an equivalent amount for keeping it.

When I visited my hon. Friend's constituency, the tenants made it absolutely clear that they lived in an area that they liked and they wanted to stay there, but they wanted the properties improved because they were all clearly in desperate need of a great deal of investment. We have developed a whole range of policies: some authorities have transferred housing functions to private finance initiatives or trusts—

We do not want that.

I am well aware of that.

In addition, the policy on arm's-length management organisations recognises that local authorities can, if they wish, borrow money and keep housing under their control. In the case to which my hon. Friend is referring, the housing stemmed from the coalfield communities and the coal industry and, as he knows, we are discussing with the council a number of options for meeting the capital requirements necessary to improve the properties. [HON. MEMBERS: That means no then.] Discussion with the Tory Administration may have meant no. If hon. Members look at the record they will find that the Tories had no money to put into housing, but we have made resources available. I have been looking at the record of the right hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Curry), one of about six shadow Secretaries of State. I cannot keep up with it, but I think that he is the leader of the group of shadow Secretaries of State. Over five or six years when he was in office housing investment halved, but it has doubled in the same amount of time under this Administration, and I am happy to point out the fundamental differences between us.

The Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill is part of the wider strategy to reform the planning system, making it fairer, faster and more predictable. It will bring clarity, certainty and a new sense of strategic direction to the planning system. It will also make the compulsory purchase system simpler, fairer and quicker. It will support investment and major infrastructure and regeneration. Most importantly, the Bill will put sustainable development at the heart of a system of regional and local plans.

In the debate on the Gracious Speech, my hon. Friend the Member for Keighley (Mrs. Cryer) expressed concern about community involvement in the planning process. Our proposals will open up the planning system by introducing local development frameworks, local development orders and statements of community involvement. That will strengthen the opportunity for local people to make their views known and to have a say in the future of the area in which they live. The new statement of development principles will govern the development of planning agreements such as those to which my hon. Friend referred in her speech.

How does the Deputy Prime Minister reconcile those remarks with what he is planning to do with regional planning frameworks, which will effectively bypass, or get rid of, county councils?

We have made it clear that regional planning frameworks should not be in the hands of the counties. We now have regional planning and spatial development. The county council will still be entitled to have a discussion about that, but in the main planning will be done at a regional level. That is what we have always said, and we will continue to do so. The regional spatial frameworks and the local frameworks will fit together to achieve sustainable community development.

Does not the Deputy Prime Minister feel a little uncomfortable taking power away from elected bodies and giving it to unelected regional planning boards?

I cannot make up my mind where the Liberal Democrats stand on regional elected assemblies, but in the north, where we will be giving people the opportunity to choose such assemblies, if they say yes the democratic accountability will exist. That choice may come later to other areas, but at the moment indirectly elected bodies or assemblies will be consulted on regional spatial development. I have not noticed Liberals or Tories being unwilling to clamber on board the idea for an assembly, and quite right too. I support them in that; it is just their national parties that find themselves in a quandary about whether they can support it, but what is new?

There is one other change in the Bill that I should cover—it seeks to make the planning system more acceptable and transparent for all. It will increase the predictability of planning decisions and speed up the handling of major infrastructure projects, and not before time. I am sure that the House will also be pleased to note that the Bill removes Crown immunity from planning control, and it will now apply to planning as to everything else.

On planning obligations, the Bill contains provisions to deal with abuses of the planning system by business—[Interruption.] Is that the normal Liberal-Tory line—to check things with each other?

We are having a conversation. [Laughter.]

That is a new dimension-the Liberals and the Tories working together on conversation.

The Bill also contains provision for the new business planning zones. At present, major planning applications are accompanied by complex and slow negotiations regarding the provision of infrastructure and other community facilities by the developer. Known as section 106 agreements, it is generally recognised that they could be made to work better—I think that that view is shared across the House. That is why we proposed new changes to section 106 in the consultation document we published on 6 November. The House will have a chance to debate our proposals, which are additional to those contained in the original draft Bill. They will be debated on Report, which I believe is to take place next week.

We will reform the section 106 process by making provision for a new optional planning charge, which will give developers a choice between the current negotiated approach or paying a pre-determined fixed amount.

Will my right hon. Friend reassure me on one point? Currently, if part of a section 106 agreement is that social housing be provided on a site, the social housing can be integrated with the other housing. However, if the developer pays a fee, the social housing will be built separate and distinct from the other housing. That causes me concern.

That is a valid point. However, the matter can be part of the process of negotiation, or decided separately. Both parties are involved in the decision.

The legislation and our wider programme to create sustainable communities represent a comprehensive and powerful agenda for change, backed by significant resources. Our proposals will enhance economic stability, promote prosperity and jobs, further reform and improve our public services, and create a fairer, more secure and more just society. I commend the proposed Bills to the House.

First, I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his welcoming words in reference to my team. Occasionally I think I have more disciples than The Almighty, but let me make it clear that none of us is a miracle worker.

Secondly, my family home is near Saffron Walden; therefore when I make references to the communities plan or to airport expansion, it should be clear that I shall be affected by those policies. I just wanted to put that on the record so that there should be no misunderstanding.

Most of my remarks will, perhaps eccentrically, be addressed to what is in the Queen's Speech, but I shall start with what is not in the speech. Something very important is missing: any mention of the draft Bill on regional assemblies. Both the right hon. Gentleman and I represent constituencies that will be affected by that policy. The Prime Minister can hardly contain his enthusiasm for the idea, and it will be interesting to learn how many people participating in "the big conversation" came and spontaneously said to him, "Prime Minister, I just want you to know what a bloomin' good idea these regional assemblies are." I have to say that people making such a demand have not been crowding out my constituency surgeries.

A decision has been made to hold referendums in the three northern regions, based on expressions of interest that were so meagre as to be practically subliminal; and now we have preliminary proposals on the reorganisation of two-tier government in those areas—with no price tag attached, of course. We know that that reorganisation will be unwanted, unnecessary, disruptive and expensive.

I am interested in finding out the right hon. Gentleman's policy on regional government. Last week on Radio 4's "Any Questions?" he said that if powers

"were genuinely devolved from London, I would be much more sympathetic than I am now."

When did it become Conservative party policy to favour stronger regional government than that which is currently on offer? Precisely which powers would he transfer to the regions?

The hon. Gentleman listened to "Any Questions", which came from Stockton-on-Tees. He will be happy to know that Jonathan Dimbleby conducted a poll of the audience immediately after the question. He asked how many people were in favour and how many people were against: 20 were in favour and more than 200 were against. That is in the Labour heartland of Stockton-on-Tees. My position has always been clear. To save trouble in future, I have always said that if the regions were offered devolution in the same way as Scotland, we would be bound to consider that to ascertain whether we could benefit from it. However, as there is not a snowball's chance in hell of the Government offering anything like that, the question is purely academic.

The right hon. Gentleman mentioned that perhaps the referendum Bill or the regional assemblies Bill does not appear in the proposed legislation. He must be well aware that I have promised that after the referendum takes place a Bill will be brought before the House that spells out the proposed powers. That is the proper way to proceed. [Interruption.] It makes sense to proceed in that way after people have voted, rather than introducing proposals beforehand. The right hon. Gentleman will have a chance to tell us whether the proposed powers are sufficient for him to give them his endorsement, along with the regional assemblies and regional Bills.

The right hon. Gentleman has said something absolutely extraordinary. He has said that people will be invited to vote and then will be told on what they have voted. It is like going to the polls without being told what parties are in contention to form a Government. That is what the right hon. Gentleman has said.

The position is exactly the same as in Scotland and Wales. We have produced a White Paper that spells out the proposed powers and how things will be done. We have promised the House to produce the Bill in the July before the referendum takes place in the autumn. That is precisely what happened in London and it is precisely what happened in Scotland and Wales. That is the proper way in which to proceed.

The right hon. Gentleman has spent a lot of time today talking about planning. I invite him to consider the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill, which will conclude its passage in this place next week. Let him consider the initial shape of that Bill and the concluding shape. The two shapes are almost unrecognisably different. If people must come to a conclusion on whether they want regional assemblies, they must know clearly what they are to vote for before they vote. They will then discover what a meagre and puny bunch of assemblies they have been offered. We know that because we have a little document from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister that tells people in Yorkshire and Humberside about elected regional assemblies. It is a profoundly misleading leaflet. It was produced at public cost and it argues only one side of the cause. The only suggestion that people might say no is a handful of little thumbs pointing down.

Of course, there are some things that will set pulses racing in Skipton. There is the reference to a regional cultural consortium. That certainly has them seized in Skipton. We are told that there might even be a civic forum. I am sure that we will all be grateful for small mercies. However, the document is misleading when it comes to powers. The impression is given that there will be executive decisions. It is misleading as to the competence of the assembly because it is said that there will be a Government grant. The Government always refer to Government money. They seem to forget where the money comes from. There will be a Government grant so that expenditure of £570 million can be controlled. That is £1.5 million a day. Identifiable public expenditure in Yorkshire and Humberside in the year 2001–02 was £25.5 billion, and it is ignored. That is £70 million a day. In other words, the assembly will control, to use the Deputy Prime Minister's words, £1.5 million out of £70 million a day, which is 2 per cent. of public expenditure. That shows how flimsy, insubstantial and token these bodies will be.

The Deputy Prime Minister has even hinted at a great northern alliance to squeeze more money out of the Government. Whether the Chancellor of the Exchequer has approved of that is not very clear. The situation is also misleading when it comes to accountability. The councillors who are nearest to the people are district councillors. What happens when there are 30 to 35 regional members who represent constituencies? I am taking the Scottish example, on which I assume the electoral system will be based. They would each represent about 250,000 people. In north Yorkshire, for example, there would be two assembly people representing an area stretching from the Cumbrian border to Scarborough.

I think that the right hon. Gentleman was a Member of the European Parliament. How many people did he represent as one person?

One reason why elections to the European Parliament have always been disappointing is that people do not make a connection between them and anything being at stake, such as a change of power. The right hon. Gentleman knows that is the case, given that the Government and everybody else are currently anguishing about election turnouts. I invite the Deputy Prime Minister to accept a wager hat turnout does he think there would be at the second set of elections for regional parliaments? That turnout would make the turnout for European Parliament elections look positively torrential.

I should like to find out where the right hon. Gentleman stands on regional government. A few minutes ago, in response to an intervention by my hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham), he said that if the Government offered the English regions the same powers as the Scottish Parliament the Opposition would have to take that seriously. However, as that is not going to be offered, he said that he would not deal with the question. Is he therefore suggesting that a future Conservative Government whom he served as Secretary of State would offer the English regions the same powers as the Scottish Parliament? Does he favour a stronger position on regional government than he has been advocating?

No. I was asked about the views that I had expressed on the subject, and I told the House honestly what they were. It is as simple as that. The policy of the Conservative party is to be against regional assemblies and reinforce the power of existing councils. I am entirely happy with that policy.

The right hon. Gentleman has been a local government Minister in the past and knows all about the costs of reorganisation. One thing that concerns me is the fact that we are going to embark on a hugely expensive reorganisation of local government. Does the right hon. Gentleman have any idea of how much that reorganisation will cost; and does he agree that when voters come to put their cross on the ballot paper there should be an estimate of the cost to local government of the reorganisation?

That should certainly happen, and the Government should spell out clearly what will happen if there is either no consensus in the ballot on the shape of local government to succeed the two-tier system or if there is only a small majority on a low turnout. When we debated the issue in the House the Government's reaction to the possibility of such a turnout was utterly obscure. We need to know how they would respond before people go to the polls.

Does the right hon. Gentleman not accept that the Northwest Development Agency is doing excellent work in the north-west and is involved in many important projects in constituencies such as mine? There is only one fault at the moment—there is no democratic accountability. I welcome the opportunity for democratic Accountability that my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister is proposing.

The total amount of public expenditure in the north-west is £36 billion. Nobody pretends that the regional assembly would have more than a tiny fraction of that sum, nor do I accept that that there is no accountability for that money. There is accountability to Parliament, where the estimates originate. I do not buy the hon. Gentleman's argument, even though I usually have a high regard for him.

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I shall make some progress before accepting interventions.

The Deputy Prime Minister said that the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill would create a fairer and faster planning system, with greater community participation. Nobody can object to that ambition, but can it be delivered? After all, the Bill has been around for a long time. It is supposed to democratise planning, but does the regional framework make that process more, rather than less, remote? The right hon. Gentleman dismissed concerns that the removal of the county role would reduce local democracy, and did not spell out whether there would be any statutory consultation role for councils. He said that they would have their say, but that should be a practical consideration, not merely an aspirational goal.

The measure is supposed to speed things up, but there is an extraordinarily complex web of schemes, including a local development framework, a local development scheme, a local development scheme document, local development plan documents and development plans and policies, each with their own timetable for community involvement, revision and appeals. The unhappy Minister for Housing and Planning is no doubt the parliamentary porter who have to carry all that excess baggage through the House next week.

The Bill, of course, is not the last of the major planning changes. I am glad about what the Deputy Prime Minister said about proposals to commute section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 and give developers the option of paying a fixed tariff. It was not clear whether he intended that to be covered by the Bill, because the consultation, I believe, does not finish until 8 January. It is therefore not clear whether things that flow from the consultation will come into the Bill.

As the hon. Member for Sheffield, Attercliffe (Mr. Betts) said, there are enormous implications for the provision of affordable housing. If a developer can buy himself out of the right to put a certain proportion of affordable housing into a development, there will be a danger that he will buy the right to deal with the easier developments, while the housing associations will be left to deal with the more difficult ones and will find that their ability to cross-subsidise has been affected. We do not want to return to the ghettoisation of social housing.

Given the right hon. Gentleman's concern about affordable housing, does he still support the Conservative policy on right to buy for housing association tenants? In the rural part of my constituency, that will take out yet another swathe—the remaining swathe-of affordable housing for rent. The environment in the area is the most protected in England and Wales, so building more housing is not an option.

I shall come to the right to buy in a moment, and the hon. Gentleman will no doubt wish to pay attention to what is said about it.

Does my right hon. Friend accept that the Welsh have had the common sense to reject the approach that will be imposed on English local authorities, which involves all the complications that he has just listed?

Given my new responsibilities, I am much more sensitive to the sense and intelligence of the devolved Administrations than in the past. I am delighted that the Welsh have set such a sensible example, as the Scots so often do.

The right hon. Gentleman is dealing with a serious point. The Housing, Planning and Local Government Sub-Committee encouraged us to include in the Bill enabling powers to deal with changes made in respect of section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. He can be assured that we will be able to answer in the proposals on guidance and regulations some of the questions that he is posing. None the less, it was right not to miss the legislative slot in making the changes, on which everyone agrees.

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman. Provided that we have a proper opportunity to discuss the very serious implications that are involved, I shall be content to proceed in that way.

We also welcome the are services Bill. I agree with what the right hon. Gentleman said about the result of the ballot. I am pleased about that result and the fact that some of the militants may have been thwarted on this occasion. Everybody wants firefighters to get back to work, including them. We also agree that it is important to refocus the service on prevention. We notice that some powers are being devolved, although they are often controversial locally, while the national framework of strategic controls stays with him.

The Opposition are concerned about what is happening offstage with regard to the fire services Bill. If it is intended to save lives, it is difficult to know why a target of achieving a 20 per cent. reduction in accidental fire deaths in homes by March 2004 has now been pushed forward to 2010. New Zealand managed to halve the number of such deaths within four years. The target of cutting the incidence of deliberately started fires by 30 per cent. by 2009 has now been cut to 10 per cent. by 2010. While a Bill is being introduced to deliver more effectively on prevention, the targets on prevention appear to be becoming much more lax, and I find it difficult to square those two issues.

I agree with a great deal of what the Deputy Prime Minister said about housing. Some extremely important issues are involved. The hon. Member for Bolsover (Mr. Skinner) mentioned the transfer programme, which is one of those issues, where it is still in place, following the setback in Birmingham and some large authorities' withdrawal from it. Will the transfer of 200,000 houses a year that the Government anticipated in their Green Paper on housing still be realised? How will they establish a divide between the classical transfer and arm's-length companies? What are the implications for each of those approaches, according to how the split happens? Does the arrangement mean that the Government will meet the decent homes target? A great deal depends on the continuing transfer movement, as the private sector money will not be delivered without it.

I agree that we must address the problems of housing failure not only in the north, but in the midlands and other areas; indeed, there are serious social problems in parts of the south. That means that housing must he stitched into a much wider regeneration programme. All the indications suggest that the best form of regeneration is a job.

Unless the Office for National Statistics has managed to misplace large numbers of people, we appear to face a continuing drain out of the cities into the suburbs and beyond. The statistics indicate that the only big northern city that is resistant to that is Leeds—the others are experiencing, to a lesser or greater extent, a continuing move outside. Until we can anchor the jobs in those inner cities, we face a continuing social problem of enormous proportions.

The Deputy Prime Minister has put a great deal of emphasis on his communities plan. The needs are undeniable, as is the imperative of sustainability. However, sustainability is not a quasi-religious notion that descends mystically on a community: it is, especially where attempts are being made to build new communities, a very practical physical quality that depends not only on good design and good behaviour, but crucially, on the delivery, as the settlement grows, of basic services such as hospitals, schools, waste disposal, water, transport, policing and the maintenance of a safe environment, so that they become knitted into the fabric of that community. Some dangers are involved, however.

Will my right hon. Friend reflect again on affordable housing? In my constituency, there are several schemes that are subject to section 106 agreements, and parish councils tell me that they would like to have more say in their allocation to ensure that they are genuinely for local people.

When large volumes of new housing and population are introduced into areas, the danger is that the people who lived there in the first place might feel disempowered because they see an expansion that will necessarily mean the total transformation of their environment. As far as they are concerned, what might seem to be an opportunity for somebody else appears to be the loss of the very qualities that made them want to live there.

There is also the danger that the whole programme will add to the overheating as people continue to spill out of London into the south-east, which continues to feel the pressures of immigration, as well as of people moving out of the cities: those twin factors are at work throughout the region. Of course, that brings a new demand for housing, along with sociological issues such as the multiplication of households that has already been experienced. The Cambridge-Stansted corridor is already earmarked as one of the four major areas for housing development. If the Secretary of State for Transport goes on to identify Stansted as the airport that is to take one or more new runways, that will create a serious potential for overheating in the area, reproducing in the future the problems that it has faced in the past.

As far as the Bill is concerned, I am not sure whose pet obsession sellers' packs are.

They are supported by the Consumers Association.

I note that and will make no comment upon it. I have listened to the Consumers Association's comments on a number of issues, none of which I intend to mention now.

Sellers' packs are like the mother-in-law—they keep turning up and one hopes that they will not stay for too long before they go away again. My advice to the Government is, quite simply, "Forget it."

Does the right hon. Gentleman accept that sellers' packs would be a great boon to first-time buyers?

I disagree—it is as simple as that.

While my right hon. Friend is on the subject of consumers, is he aware that it has been estimated that this Government policy would cost consumers some £322 million a year, as well as creating additional regulations and the possibility of their being able to break yet another law?

Not only have sellers' packs been inadequately tested and shown no great outcome when they are tested, but they will be bureaucratic because an army of staff must deliver the surveys and provide training. Moreover, the £700 or £800 may not be enough even when added to the perverse effects of stamp duty in leafy suburbs. In inner city areas and areas under stress, there could be a genuine burden. Some hon. Gentlemen have argued that areas of low-cost housing should be exempt. Indeed, I recall the hon. Member for Burnley (Mr. Pike) saying months ago that perhaps sellers' packs should not have to apply to the bottom tier of housing. However, that would severely affect some housing by stigmatising it as almost unsaleable.

I argued that, but the concept of the housing pathfinder renewal project has been introduced since then. I am waiting to see exactly what that will deliver. Everything is relative, but it would be pointless not to touch the market as it exists now. I hope that it will change.

The hon. Gentleman substantiates my point. Although pathfinder schemes are welcome, they are not universal and large areas are not covered by them.

The right hon. Gentleman simply dismisses sellers' packs, but is he content with the current position whereby the majority of people buy their home with nothing more than a building society survey? They do not get a proper survey of their property. Sellers' packs would introduce that, and I hope that he welcomes that important aspect.

The question arises of whether people should take proper care when purchasing homes. Should it be the Government's responsibility to provide for that or should people have the sense to do it themselves? It is not the Government's job to step in every time an individual makes an imprudent decision. The damage that that will cause to many people outweighs the benefits to a limited number of people. Many questions remain about how long sellers' packs will be valid and whether they will thwart the efficiency gains of modern technology.

I fear that we are considering a tax on mobility; not facilitation of the market bat an impediment to its functioning.

The right hon. Gentleman makes some serious points that have been discussed inside and outside the House. We have now accepted that we can roll out the scheme in some areas to see how it works. Does he support that?

If the Government carry through their programme and the schemes become law, it makes sense to trial them effectively. So far, only the little, inconclusive trial in Bristol has taken place. It would make sense to trial it more effectively, if the Government get their way.

I agree with the right hon. Gentleman. The Government wish to make the sellers' packs compulsory. I believe that hon. Members of all parties would be happy if a standard were set for the home information packs and people could choose to have them, but making it illegal to market one's home before paying £600 to £1,000 to get the pack is absurd.

The hon. Gentleman makes an effective point.

I have listened to the right hon. Gentleman with great interest, as always. However, he misses a crucial point. What would he say to a constituent of mine who tried to purchase a house two years ago? He paid for three surveys on three houses because the first two attempts to buy fell through. The owner of the first property was merely testing the market and my constituent's second attempt failed because he was gazzumped. How can we simply say to him, "I'm sorry you lost your money but we haven't got a better way of doing business in this country"?

But how does the hon. Gentleman respond to people who consider selling their homes but may be deterred by the cost of providing the sellers' packs, and do not know how long they will last and how often they must be reproduced? One cannot build good law on isolated cases of things going wrong. That is not a practical proposition for legislation.

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way again. I do not know whether he read the Select Committee report on the subject. The Bristol experiment included a scheme to pay the costs at the point of sale, not up front. The Select Committee had all the evidence, which shows that that scheme could be rolled out nationally.

I have read the Select Committee report, which states that the scheme is half baked, not thoroughly worked out and not properly tested. If the hon. Gentleman believes that the Select Committee endorsed the scheme, he has not read the report.

The Deputy Prime Minister mentioned developers' social housing grant. He answered one important question about whether there would be a level playing field for private developers and housing associations on the standard of the homes. It is important that housing associations are regulated by the Housing Corporation, the Audit Commission and the Charity Commission. That is an expensive business. It is important that the regulatory framework for the private sector should ensure that competition is effective between them, and it should be possible to play any benefits that the private sector gets back into the housing association sector.

It is quite clear that the Treasury thinks that housing associations have become rather lazy on the fat of the land and that there is an efficiency gain of about 15 per cent. to be achieved by bringing in the private sector, although it remains to be seen whether that is the case. However, it is important that it should have the same terms in order to compete.

The right to buy is a crucial part of the proposals. The Housing Corporation study, "A Home of My Own", has been praised by the Deputy Prime Minister, and I am happy to praise it as well. It is a sensible, efficient document, which contains some clear and good recommendations. It shows clearly that right to buy is the most accessible, affordable and efficient route to home ownership for social housing tenants. It is simple, it works and it makes a big contribution to creating mixed communities, whose importance has been demonstrated by the Rowntree Foundation. Incidentally, right to buy has also brought about what has been virtually a social revolution in the United Kingdom.

I do not dispute that circumstances differ across the country. The Heriot-Watt study, which the Deputy Prime Minister commissioned to consider the question of abuse, said that most users of companies for right to buy do so either because they cannot get a conventional mortgage, so they have to go for what I think is called in the trade a sub-prime offer, or because they wish to purchase property that the conventional market finds unattractive-high-rise buildings, for example.

I accept that there has been abuse—I do not pretend that there has not been any—but the Deputy Prime Minister has already tightened the rules significantly to the point where it may even be that sales are being strangled completely in London. We do not know whether that is a fact, whether a lot of sales took place before the cut-off point, which is what is being reflected in the low level now, or whether the market will resume. However, there is at least a danger that there is a strangulation in those schemes. Perhaps the discounts are now too small to bridge the affordability gap.

I want the Deputy Prime Minister to give the clear assurance that he is seeking solely to deal with abuse, not to deliver under the cover of tackling it a death blow to a scheme that still marks the fulfilment of aspiration for about 50,000 people a year. I commend the Housing Corporation study to the House. Some ideas are interesting and the unification of the schemes to promote affordable housing across the social sector, the rationalisation of the range of schemes and the means of getting value for money in social and cash terms are all important conclusions. The policies that have eased people into affordable housing may need to move forward by a generation as well.

On houses in multiple occupation, I accept the need to tackle problems of poor standards, bad landlords and nasty tenants. The difficulty I have is that what is proposed is potentially very confusing. The Deputy Prime Minister outlined three schemes: the mandatory national licensing scheme, which addresses the areas of highest risk; discretionary licensing in problem areas; and selective licensing to deal with bad landlords and antisocial tenants in areas of low demand or serious social dislocation.

The difficulty I see is the danger of a heterogeneous and variably enforced regime in different parts of the country, and perhaps an exodus from the small landlord sector. We know that the private rented sector is the smallest in the western world, yet it is a crucial element of housing provision in the UK. We know equally that where there have been new standards in care homes, we have seen an exodus of people from that sector as they were unwilling or unable to meet those new standards. There is a serious risk there.

We must also consider whether there might be some perverse deterrence risk—will the provision catch people it was not intended to catch? For example, some parents buy property in university towns when a child is going to university. They rent the spare rooms to colleagues of their children. Will they be caught? [Interruption.] The Minister for Housing and Planning expresses some surprise, but that habit is much more widespread than perhaps he recognises.

Does the right hon. Gentleman accept that the practice to which he refers leaves great numbers of houses not registered in such usage, which can be seriously detrimental to the surrounding community? I refer to the parent who might have bought for a student.

I am tempted to say that some parents can obviously afford property that is rather better than that which can be afforded by other parents. I do not wish to mention Bristol too much in this context.

My point to the Deputy Prime Minister is that the Bill should not have an unintentional effect and deter a practice that is providing accommodation. That is the crucial thing here.

I find myself in great agreement with the right hon. Gentleman. We would not want to discourage the private rented market, as that is one of the difficult areas in our housing provision. The Bill allows greater flexibility because the problems in the south are different from those of the north and because there are areas of low demand and high demand. We hope to deal with the right hon. Gentleman's points in the advice given about the operation of the schemes.

One huge question is presented by the right hon. Gentleman's proposals and by the legislative programme, and that concerns the capacity of local authorities to deliver. Some 16 Bills in the Queen's Speech have implications for local authorities. Some—the housing Bill for example—have enormous implications where local authorities will be in the front line. The Bill on school transport is smaller, but nonetheless has implications. The planning Bill has enormous implications for local authorities. In this complex, modern world—in which a lot depends on forecasting technologies—we are discovering that the capacity of public bodies to deliver is under-stressed.

Until recently, I was the chairman of the Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which dealt with complex environmental legislation. There was a problem of capacity in terms of translating that into national law and administering it, especially when complex statistical or econometric calculations were required to create quasi-market mechanisms. Local authorities will be under immense pressure to deliver the mechanisms from the legislative programme. That is on top of the already severe demands from the army of gendarmes mobilised by the Government for inspection. Local authorities need resources, skills and capacity.

Local authorities will be under severe financial pressure this year. The Minister for Housing and Planning has been having fun, telling everyone that capping will be back for local authorities. Yet many will find that increasing council tax by two or three times the equivalent rise in the rate of inflation is inescapable. We know that district councils and those services closest to the citizen will be under pressure because of the general 2.2 per cent. increase.

Some local authorities might increase council taxes more than might be necessary. No one has ever denied that a local authority, having some limited freedom, occasionally might try "swinging the lead", but, for many, there is no choice. Bills will rise and resentment will rise with them, at a time of continually mounting demands on local authorities.

The Government talk about lots of local authority freedoms, but they are imposing a large number of responsibilities on local authorities. Authorities will not wish to repudiate those matters and will be happy to undertake them, provided they get the means to do so. It is for the Government to make sure that they get the means.

The right hon. Gentleman skipped rapidly over the issue of school transport. Are we to assume that he is in favour of local authorities extending their provision for school transport, or not?

I was illustrating the degree to which the Queen's Speech was imposing new obligations upon local authorities. I am sure that the environmental implications of those measures on school transport will become clear during the winding-up speeches.

The right hon. Gentleman has been generous in giving way. The financial situation for local authorities during the period in which I have been responsible can be compared with a similar period—1992–97—when he was the Minister responsible. Does he accept that the financial resources given to local authorities were cut by 7 per cent. in real terms during his period and that they have increased by 29 per cent. in real terms under this Administration?

First, the obligations on local authorities are infinitely greater now than they were then. Secondly, alongside his table showing the grant increase, the right hon. Gentleman should set another table showing the council tax increases equivalent to those earlier years. He will find that, under the last Conservative Government, the council tax was under nothing like the strain that it is under now as a result of the massive increase in public expenditure. For every increase in spending that the Government require but do not meet, local authorities must increase council tax by 4 per cent. to raise 1 per cent. of the deficit in funding.

That has been the heart of the problem for the past few years. It is the Government 's demands that have put local authorities under such pressure, and which have caused local taxpayers to feel such a strong sense of resentment.

This Queen's Speech is a bit of a rag-bag. It does contain some sensible measures that we welcome, and where we do welcome them, I shall not hesitate to say so. Where the detail requires examination in order to find out how a particular Bill will work in practice, we will focus on such scrutiny. There are, however, some measures that we oppose, not because of any ideological concern, but simply because they are daft, will not work and are unnecessary. There are other measures that we oppose because they are ill-conceived and will do nothing but damage. I look forward to having that debate with the Government.

This Government are losing their way and the Prime Minister is losing his grip. The Deputy Prime Minister even referred to the Administration as being his. I knew that there was one other contender for power; I did not realise that there were two.

This Queen's Speech is widely regarded as one of the most important, and possibly the last entire Queen's Speech that will address the Sessions before the next general election. Frankly, I hope that that does not prove to be the case, because I rather approve of Sessions that run until a reasonable point at which we can get on to the statute book all the changes that we require. But given that it could prove to be the case, it is remarkable that this Queen 's Speech contains very little about transport. That may be a sensible acknowledgement on the part of Her Majesty's Government that they have committed large sums of money to reorganising the rail industry, to road building and to changes in other forms of transport; however, there are some aspects that concern me greatly.

I hope to discuss school buses and buses in general, but perhaps I might begin by dealing with private finance initiatives, particularly those relating to transport. In Whitehall today, we were informed that the Gershon review is looking to all Ministries to implement considerable savings in the next spending round. That concerns me, not least because public transport is becoming an increasingly large part of the budget. That is understandable, because as anybody in their right mind knows, major infrastructure projects will always have to be funded by the state. It is quite ridiculous to suggest that bankers or those who speculate will make large long-term investments in infrastructure if they are not to be guaranteed a considerable rate of return—one greater than that which they normally receive—or if they cannot protect their investment in some way.

In the past five to 10 years, it has increasingly been suggested that private finance can inject enormous change into major transport structures, not just in the culture of how we plan and anticipate the creation of new and efficient transport systems, but in terms of how we look at transport. The reality is, I am afraid, rather sadder. It is vital that we know, for example, why the Gershon review does not include PFIs. If we want to make savings right across is Whitehall, why are we not looking at the money that the Government are currently spending on underwriting PFIs? If it is true that we have had a clear demonstration of the initiative, brilliance and lateral thinking of private finance providers in creating new transport schemes, I am afraid that I must have missed it. Somewhere along the line, those schemes seem not to have arrived.

Let us look at what happened with the channel tunnel. In the final analysis, when considerable difficulty arose, public provision was made. My Select Committee identified difficulties with the PFI for the London underground. There were very real problems, and clear indications emerged that PFIs require more monitoring, rather than less. Does what happened with Railtrack and the provision of monitoring for contractors on the overground railway constitute a clear demonstration of a successful system, or of the fact that the railway industry has been pushed into losing total control of its overheads? In the meantime, private companies walked away with increasingly large sums of money, and the railway system did not benefit.

Indeed, the acknowledgement by firms such as Jarvis that it was necessary to pull out was not just a matter of saving the face of the directors, whoever they might be. It was really an acknowledgement of the fact that firms could not provide a history of efficient operation of high-quality services or a clear pattern of development that would have enabled them to prove that private finance initiatives were the only way forward. Why, then, are we not examining in today's debate what private finance initiatives are costing the taxpayer, which would be an extremely revealing exercise?

Would the hon. Lady admit that PFI is a good idea, but needs two things to make it work properly? First, it needs a clear brief from the public procurer who administers it and, secondly, it needs to pass risk to the private sector, so that failure to conform to the brief will hit the contractors' pockets. That is how to make it work.

I would be happy to know that sanctions were available to the public sector that hit the contractors in the pocket for not achieving results as efficiently as they should. However, the history of these arrangements shows that the public sector loses out irrespective of whether it is a big problem for the private sector to pick up the entire bill, a medium-sized problem for it to pick up half the bill or even a small problem to pick up the major part of the arrangement.

For example, last winter the contractors providing services failed disastrously in their task of gritting the roads. They failed to provide even a minimal standard that was acceptable in respect of either road safety or protecting motorways. What happened? My Transport Committee discovered that the Highways Agency had absolutely no sanctions to apply to these people who were responsible for performing such a disastrous service. Indeed, we were told that the contractor had many people working for him and that he had no way of reaching them himself because the radio system that he used was out of action. The Department had no way of dealing with the contractor's responsibilities and did not conduct day-to-day monitoring. In the final analysis, large numbers of people ended up sitting on motorways for up to 11 hours doing nothing. What sort of efficiency record is that? If the hon. Member for Cotswold (Mr. Clifton-Brown) is looking for further examples, I could introduce him to my well-known friends Virgin Rail, to whom I devote larger amounts of my time than I do to any other man in the world-and, frankly, with even less profit than I usually obtain. If he is not worried about that, I could take him through virtually any other PFI arrangement in the transport sector.

Certain factors always prove central in respect of PFI. First, the initial contracts always provide a much higher rate of return than they should. Secondly, whenever there is a problem, the PFI provider almost inevitably comes back to the taxpayer or the ratepayer, asking them to underwrite the fact that the contractor is not operating properly. Thirdly, the total benefits to taxpayers, ratepayers and passengers are infinitesimal and almost impossible to see. So why are the costs of PFI and the supposed advantages not being properly examined in the debate?

rose—

I shall give way to the right hon. and learned Gentleman, whom I hope I may call my friend.

I agree with the hon. Lady, whom I am pleased to call friend. She is probably in agreement with my hon. Friend the Member for Cotswold (Mr. Clifton-Brown)—that PFI is fine, but only so long as there is a proper transfer of risk. Does she appreciate that PFI has gone wrong because of what happened when the Government first took office? They were suddenly in favour of PFI, but said that no schemes were advancing at an adequate speed. Negotiations on PFI tended to be held up because private contractors wanted to resist the transfer of risk. The Government were so anxious to get all sorts of capital investment flowing along and off balance sheet that they altered all the rules. Suddenly, the sort of contracts about which the hon. Lady rightly complains, were being entered into in many different sectors with the result that we now face mounting financial liabilities and no means of obtaining a higher quality of performance, which was the original object of the whole policy.

I have the greatest respect for the right hon. and learned Gentleman. However, for the past 30 years, I have disagreed with most of his views with great aplomb and I disagree with him again today. In all the PFIs, business writes the contract itself, no safeguards for the taxpayer are negotiated and we end up with inadequate schemes that have, in some instances, put passengers at risk. That is wholly unacceptable.

The Government already have the power to reorganise transport rapidly and with some efficiency—presumably that is why the matter was not mentioned in the Queen's Speech. However, that requires a greater degree of savagery from the Department for Transport than we have seen so far. In the rail industry, the Strategic Rail Authority is apparently renegotiating franchises, yet it still does not take into account the fact that about eight railway companies are operating under management buy-outs and that a large number of the other companies are not, apparently, producing suggestions for their franchise that will change the situation. Indeed, what is worse is that where the franchise has been taken back due to the inadequacy of the company, it is still seriously suggested that we look for another private supplier. When will Ministers get it into their heads that backers and investors will not put their money into such schemes? Nor will they support a railway system that is more than 100 years old; they are looking for quick, large returns and they will not get them from the railway industry.

We need a clear steer from the Government as to how they expect the SRA to proceed. We are putting more and more burdens on to the SRA. We expect it to fit in with regional planning initiatives. Quite right. It should take note of the important aspects required by the regions. We expect the SRA to provide links between vital economic developments—for example, between our ports and our major cities—yet it has stated clearly that it has neither the money nor the ability to undertake such work quickly. We expect the SRA to plan for forward development by providing infrastructure for connections with the aviation industry, yet there is no evidence that it has the personnel, the ability or the clarity of vision that would produce such changes.

We are also told that other bodies such as the Health and Safety Executive are dysfunctional. I do not know what a dysfunctional HSE is, but it frightens the hell out of me if it means that the people who should be planning and monitoring the efficient working of transport projects are incapable of delivering the degree of day-to-day care that is essential. We have a rail industry where the SRA, the railway executive, the rail regulator whose role is still unclear to me-and old uncle Tom Cobley and all are arguing and squabbling in a happy little private world and they are not delivering the care that we need. When will we look into that?

I do not want to take too much of the House's time so I shall gallop rapidly on. Why is there nothing in the Queen's Speech about a new plan for buses? Of course, most people do not find bus services interesting; they are used mainly by women and people in the lowest quartile of the employed so they do not have a high profile in this place. However, that is all the more reason why we should state plainly what we intend to do about them. Bus companies are taking the ratepayers to the cleaners. In more and more local authorities, the provision of bus services depends on deals with bus companies, which roar with laughter when reminded of the responsibilities of the local planning authorities.

Does my hon. Friend agree with the Minister who wrote to me, when I suggested that we have a strategic bus authority, saying that there was no demand for such a thing?

Well, it is ridiculous. More and more, people run services that we know to be viable and then go back to the local authority and say, "Whoops, we have changed our minds. We are not going to run that service any more, unless you give us a big pot of gold to keep it going." Companies change services without proper notice and leave local authorities in intolerable situations. For example, my own county frequently has to provide substitute services, at considerable expense. It often cannot find a company to tender for certain routes. Unless the Government urgently face up to the problems of the bus industry and how it is failing the passenger, we will be in considerable difficulty.

The Queen's Speech mentions school transport and that will provide an opportunity to address the issues that I have mentioned. It is suggested that school buses will increase road safety and provide a much better service. Most people accept that the three-mile rule is no longer viable and, in fact, causes considerable difficulty. If we are seriously to consider using school buses in the middle of the day for social services or hospital work, we had better be clear that hospitals—like schools—like to have their patients delivered as they begin work. We cannot say to consultants, "Whoops, we are terribly sorry, but your bus is nipping around the back streets because it had to do two school runs and a college run before bringing your patients in." Let us have some clear thinking on that and face up to the responsibility. We should now plan a complete revolution in buses, because the system is failing and it is expensive.

My last point is also a negative one, but it is a wet Monday and it seems appropriate. All Secretaries of State, especially those with responsibility for transport, are allowed one mistake. The present Secretary of State for Transport is widely regarded as a responsible and hard-working Minister. He has produced some good results and is pulling together several disparate policies. I admire what he is trying to do and believe that he sincerely wants to make the system work. That is why it is sad that the suggestion has leaked that Stansted will get the new runway. That is nonsense. The local people do not want it, the airlines do not want it and the passengers do not want it at Stansted. I am not sure who does want a new runway at Stansted or where the money will come from.

On the whole, the Government have a good record of taking fairly sensible decisions and trying to make them work. However, if we fail to grasp the nettle of development at Heathrow, which is essential for our economic development, we shall do for aviation what we did for ports and what we may be doing now for railways. Because we have been prepared to allow the infrastructure to decline and have ignored opportunities for development, we have handed much economic—quite apart from social and political—development to our opposition on the continent, in this case, and to anyone who wants to pick up a market that we have apparently abandoned, in other cases. There is no case for the development at Stansted. It is a barmy idea. I know that and the Government know that. The Government are sensible, so why not—for once—risk saying something that is not popular? Giving the runway to Heathrow would not make the Government much loved by obsessive lobby groups, but it would be in the interests of the United Kingdom to develop extra capacity at Heathrow. If that is not acceptable to European institutions, perhaps we could break the habit of the past 20 years and tell them where they can go, along with some of their other colleagues.

It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody), who makes her point with her usual grace and vigour. I hope that the Prime Minister will have one of his big conversations with her. She achieved the impossible by making me feel sorry for Richard Branson, which I never thought would happen. She is right about the need for the public sector and the Government to give a lead on big transport infrastructure projects. The desire to push everything on to the private sector without the Government taking responsibility is why transport infrastructure projects have been continually delayed. I think that she would agree that we need clear Government leadership on Crossrail—the prime example—particularly if the sustainable communities plan is to work, especial] y in the Thames gateway.

There was a fascinating development in today's debate: a new Conservative policy. We now hear that the Conservatives favour regional parliaments rather than regional assemblies. The right hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Curry) told us that, if regional assemblies had the power of the Scottish Parliament, he would be more interested in considering the idea. That puts him on the extreme of British politics with respect to regionalism because even the Liberal Democrats, with our desire to have regional assemblies, would not wish to give them the power of the Scottish Parliament. We would not want them to have primary legislative capacity and competence or the many other abilities of the Scottish Parliament.

I welcome the fact that the Conservatives are now at the cutting edge of the pro-regional devolution debate, but I wonder whether the right hon. Gentleman has had a chance to speak to any member of his own team about the issue. I debated the Regional Assemblies (Preparations) Bill with the hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Mr. Hammond), and the best that he could do was to admit that the people of the north-east had regional aspirations, but he was not prepared to say how the Tory party would meet those aspirations. I am pretty sure that the hon. Member for North Essex (Mr. Jenkin) could not be described as a regionalist. I shall be interested in how that policy develops. It was the first case of an own goal in the first five minutes of a speech that I have seen for some time.

Although there may be confusion on the Conservative Benches about that important policy, I am concerned about the Government's approach and how it relates to their whole approach to the responsibilities of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. There was no vision in the package of measures proposed today. Ministers' rhetoric sometimes has vision and includes devolving power from Whitehall, as well as a new localism and strengthening local government. They talk about decentralisation, but when we consider the Queen's Speech, none of that rhetoric is included in the programme of the ODPM.

The Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill clearly shows that such powers will not be passed down but will come up from elected bodies to unelected bodies, which is the complete opposite of the Deputy Prime Minister's rhetoric on such issues. Even with Bills such as the fire and rescue services Bill and the traffic management Bill, Government press releases and press comments show that the Government will keep or increase central powers and that they intend to have draconian reserve powers. That is not new localism, and it does not bear up to the rhetoric.

As the right hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon said, there was a major omission. We had been promised a draft regional powers Bill. We want to know what powers the regional assemblies will have, and he was right when he said that just publishing the White Paper is no use because we all know that huge things can change between the White Paper, the draft Bill and the Act.

The Deputy Prime Minister made a very important point. I should be interested to know whether Ministers could confirm whether this was a full announcement, but he said that we would have a draft regional powers Bill by July. If so, that is very welcome. If that is a pledge that the House will get that Bill by July, it is good news because the Government have not been definite about that until now, but we want to know what powers will be included. Have the Government changed their mind?

The right hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon was right to say that a very weak form of devolution is on offer, and we can understand why people are hardly excited about it. Where are the powers on transport? There was a time when the Deputy Prime Minister was a real supporter of using regional transport policy to encourage economic development, but no transport powers will be devolved.

One would have thought that the learning and skills councils should come within the ambit at least of the regional development agencies, but they are being kept under the control of the Secretary of State. Linking the two would have made sense, but again, those powers are to be kept at Whitehall. It does not make sense. There is no vision, and the omission of the Bill from the Queen's Speech is much to be regretted, despite today's announcement about July.

We hear that the Government are going to have a big conversation. I wonder whether that explains why there was not more on devolution in the Bill-the Government seem to have lost their way and their courage. I looked at the website to find out what questions on local and regional government the Government intended to ask in their conversation with the British people. They want to know,

"How do we do more to connect politics and people?"

That is a fair enough question, but we look at their manifestos and we thought that we had had an answer. They say:

"So we need to ask where we go next on constitutional reform".

I thought that regional devolution was the next step, but, clearly, it is not in the Queen's Speech.

The questions also include,

"how to re-engage people in our democracy, how to renew local government, and how to strengthen civil society."

As they are the Government's questions, one would have thought that the Queen's Speech would have had some answers.

We are concerned not only about the lack of vision and direction, but about the priorities that the Deputy Prime Minister has chosen for his package of Bills in the Gracious Speech. Some of the priorities for local government are not even mentioned in the Queen's Speech. Talking to councils and councillors up and down the country, it seems to me that the top issue is the unfair council tax. That did not get a single mention in the Queen's Speech—no plans to reform it, nothing. We have been told that the Government intend to ape the Conservatives' capping regime, but the proposal for capping legislation did not get into the Queen's Speech. I have done a little research on capping, because the Labour Opposition were not too happy about previous capping legislation. The Prime Minister, the Chancellor, the Deputy Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary and the Home Secretary, in previous guises, all voted against capping legislation proposed by the right hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon. How the tables have turned. No wonder people are so cynical about this place.

Let me refer Ministers to what the Foreign Secretary said back in 1993 about capping:

"The Labour party is wholly And unequivocally opposed to the capping of a council's budget. It is an abuse of central power, it demeans democracy, it undermines the right of local people to decide what services they are ready and willing to pay for, it is in breach of one promise after another".—[Official Report, 9 June 1993; Vol. 226, c. 385.]

We will remind Labour Members about breaches of promises on capping over the next few weeks and months.

Does the hon. Gentleman recognise that, even in government, circumstances can change, and now we have hundreds of profligate Tory and Lib Dem councils that need to tie reined in?

The hon. Gentleman says that even in government things can change. Let me take him back to last May, when the Minister for Local Government, Regional Governance and Fire told the public that councils deemed as excellent by the comprehensive performance assessment and the Audit Commission review would not be capped. Three months later, he changed his mind. What are we supposed to make of ministerial pronouncements if they can change at three months' notice? How are councils expected to approach long-term planning if they are subject to such change? Back in 1998, the Deputy Prime Minister said:

"This is the last year in which I intend that the crude capping principle of the Tory party should apply."—[Official Report, 5 February 1998; Vol. 305, c. 1254.]

If only that were so. I am afraid that in this Session we will consider capping legislation, even though the Government said that they opposed it.

Does my hon. Friend recall that, in 1992, when I first came to this place, Gloucestershire county council, on which I was a councillor, was capped three years out of four? We are still recovering from those terrible capping days. Does he think that those Labour MPs who voted with me against capping then should vote against any new capping introduced by their Government?

My hon. Friend is exactly right. The problem with capping is that the cuts imposed by central Government are indiscriminate. They hit the vulnerable and lead to sudden cuts to programmes that people had put in place years earlier and looked after, which can wreak havoc on local services.

If the hon. Gentleman does not want the Government to impose capping, will he talk to Liberal Democrat councillors such as those on Weymouth and Portland borough council who seem to want to face both ways? That is extraordinary for Liberal Democrats. They say that the council tax should not increase by much but, at the same time, they oppose every attempt to streamline services and achieve the savings that we want to keep the council tax down.

The hon. Gentleman seems to be advocating service cuts. Liberal Democrats advocate replacing the council tax because it is unfair and prevents local authorities from taking control of their budgets. I hope that he agrees that this year's settlement is imposing huge pressures on local authorities throughout the country. Some 297 out of 387 local authorities have received a non-education grant increase that is less than inflation, which is astonishing. If he becomes cognisant of that, he will realise that there are huge pressures on authorities to put up council tax. We argue that fundamental reform by getting rid of the council tax and introducing a fair local tax system will allow us to move on.

The hon. Gentleman said that the Government should have all the answers instead of asking questions. His party has had a policy of replacing council tax with a local income tax for a long time. Will he tell me whether there is a fully worked out and costed local income tax proposal from the Liberal Democrats that deals with such issues as whether people should pay their taxes in the area in which they live or the area in which they work?

The hon. Gentleman should calm down. We shall publish detailed proposals, as we did in 1989, 1990 and 1991 during the poll tax years. In fact, our party was the only one that produced such publications because his party failed to engage in the debate on poll tax by producing any worked-through proposals. We are borrowing on experience from American states, Switzerland, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Japan and many other mature western democracies. They have solved the problem of local government finance by adopting a local income tax.

May I return to the Queen's Speech and talk about the housing Bill? The Bill contains several measures that we welcome in principle. The proposal to review fitness standards for housing is welcome, as are many reforms to the right to buy. We welcome the proposal to regulate houses in multiple occupation and the selective licensing proposals in part 3 of the draft Bill, especially those that deal with antisocial behaviour. There will be cross-party support for those proposals. We will debate whether there is too much regulation and whether the detail of the regulation has the right balance. I am especially worried about the proposals for fitness standards in version 2 of the new standards in the Bill, although that is perhaps too detailed for this debate. Version 2 has not been tried out, so local government officers are worried about whether the system will work. Nevertheless, it is right to change the old fitness standards in principle.

One of my main problems with the Bill is what has been omitted from it, which was picked up in the report by the Housing, Planning, Local Government and the Regions Committee. The Government have consulted on a statutory tenancy deposit scheme and there is widespread agreement that it is time to introduce such a scheme. Private tenants put millions of pounds into deposits. They get no benefit from the money because it stands idle for years, and they often do not get the money back at the end of their tenancy because unscrupulous landlords keep the cash and the interest accrued from it. It is time to change the system. Landlords hold nearly £1 billion of private tenants' money on deposit, so the Government should act.

The Government make excuses by saying that they must wait for the Law Commission to comment and for this and that report, but the scheme is well thought-out and they have already consulted on it. There is no reason for delay, so they should go forward. I hope that the many Labour Members who have signed early-day motions on the matter will work with us—and perhaps Conservative Members, although I do not know their position—to push Ministers to get a statutory tenancy deposit scheme in the housing Bill.

Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the groups worst affected by the lack of such legislation is students? The National Union of Students is keen that we make progress along those lines.

My hon. Friend is right. I am glad that he mentioned student housing, because that is one of the omissions from the regulation of houses in multiple occupation. That is not covered by the licensing regime. I have heard no plausible argument why students should not have quality housing.

I am also concerned about the omission from the Bill of compulsory leasing schemes. The Government are consulting on those schemes, which are important for dealing with empty homes. In my constituency, private landlords own a large number of empty homes. In two streets near the Hook roundabout just off the A3, there are 27 empty family properties, and some have been empty for three or four years. The local council is trying to work with the landlord and his advisers, but it has little leverage. We need empty property management orders soon, so that we can start tackling the shortage of affordable housing in areas such as mine, where houses prices are high and it is difficult for the council and registered social landlords to meet demand. I hope that the Government can fast-track the consultation on compulsory leasing schemes and include them in the Bill, so that they become law as soon as possible.

There is one policy in the Bill with which we fundamentally disagree, and I think that we have that in common with the Conservatives. Sellers' packs are a nonsense. They are a solution in search of a problem. Whether one is purchasing or selling, the housing market works pretty well. That is why hundreds of thousands of homes are bought and sold every year. If there was a problem, we would find that the market had seized up, and that is not the case. To argue that in the odd case a purchase did not go through and people lost their money is not a good way to produce law: hard cases make bad law. We need to look at the vast majority of house purchases and sales, which happen without a problem.

The hon. Gentleman should bear it in mind that some 30 per cent. of house sales fall through; that that is estimated to cost would-be house purchasers and, for that matter, sellers £350 million annually, not to mention all the personal heartache and anguish that results; that nine out of 10 house purchasers favour a reform in the law; that the Government will roll this out, as they say nowadays, on a regional basis and in an entirely pragmatic fashion when all appropriate certification, training and insurance arrangements are in place; and that the measure has been enthusiastically endorsed by the Consumers Association and even, I might add, by Halifax Estate Agents.

Methinks the Minister doth protest too much. I recommend that he read the report by the Housing, Planning, Local Government and the Regions Committee, which could not be clearer. It says:

"At this stage we cannot recommend that Home Information Packs are made compulsory"—

the exact point that I made earlier. It also says:

"It is unclear to what extent the Pack will serve the Government's objective of speeding up the process of residential property sales, and of reducing the proportion of sales falling through."

There is no logic behind the proposal. The Minister can quote the Consumers Association, but many other bodies are against it. The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors has grave doubts.

It would have.

Absolutely not—the reverse is the case. One would have thought that chartered surveyors would have been in favour because the proposal would give them more work. The fact that those who would be the main professional beneficiaries are against it ought to make Ministers think twice. Other professional bodies are against it, including the National Association of Estate Agents and the Council of Mortgage Lenders. They are all concerned that the proposal will mean a huge degree of market intervention, which will make the market seize up and lead to higher house prices and moving costs. It is a regulation too far.

Does the hon. Gentleman recognise that the second most important and valuable investment that most people make usually comes with an MOT certificate? Why should not a similar logical approach apply to the largest investment that they make?

The building society or lender will always take out a survey, because they do not want to lend money on a substandard property, so there is always a test. A financial institution will not lend thousands—in some cases, hundreds of thousands—of pounds secured on a property that might be about to fall down. It wants to be sure of its security. Anyone who has had dealings with banks and building societies knows that they want more security than any other institution. They ensure that their lending is secure. There is already protection.

I am concerned by the hon. Gentleman's suggestions; in fact, he has convinced me that the Minister is right. He suggests that building societies, rightly, will not lend money unless the purchaser has paid a huge fee to find out whether the property is overpriced. How many people have to pay such fees? If the position were reversed, the seller would have to pay the money, and buyers would not lose money willy-nilly.

The problem is that the legislation will result in a huge number of surveys—far more than are carried out now. Many people who have surveys will not go on to sell their house, and some buyers will not trust a survey carried out by the seller's agent and will insist on their own. The professionals in the field are worried that there are not enough trained people to do that work, with the result that there will be long delays and bottlenecks while people wait for their survey. That will slow the process. The Government tell us that their proposals will speed the process, but their logic has been found wanting yet again.

The hon. Gentleman quoted selectively from the Committee report. He did not point out that the National Association of Estate Agents said that, if the scheme was to go ahead,

"we believe it should happen on a regional basis".

That is precisely what Ministers are now saying. The one pilot of any size was conducted in Bristol and run by independent estate agents. In that pilot, the drop-out rate was 5 per cent.—95 per cent of sales went through to completion. That seems to show that where packs were provided, people had greater confidence in the system and sales went through to completion at a greater rate than they do under the current arrangements.

My reading of the report is that the Select Committee was rather more damning of the proposal. The hon. Gentleman may be a member of the Committee, but I have read the report. That Labour-dominated Committee does not think that a compulsory scheme should be introduced.

Let me be clear: I have no problem with a voluntary scheme, or with the Government setting out what an information pack should contain. Those sellers who want to have a pack because they think it will speed up their sale can get one.

If people speak one way then recommend another, they get sore heads.

The hon. Gentleman is not listening. It will be up to the seller to decide whether to take that route. It is the compulsory element that is wrong.

The muddled thinking in housing legislation is also detectable in the sustainable communities plan, which often reveals that the Government are not joined up. We are told that the plan is about bringing different Departments together, but in reality nothing like that is happening. To draw an example from transport, I said to the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich that Crossrail is a huge part of the Thames gateway development jigsaw, but it is not clear whether the Government will support it. We face the prospect of the Treasury leading the whole project, driven by concern about numbers, not about quality of build or sustainable communities. Treasury Ministers seem to want all the houses to be built tomorrow without having to worry about building the underpinning infrastructure.

Let me give an example from Milton Keynes. Ministers at the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister asked Milton Keynes council and local partners to provide 70,000 new homes in the Milton Keynes area in the next few years. When they talked to the council and the partners, they promised that funding would follow the scheme to build local support for that huge increase in population.

However, that promise has not come through in the local government finance settlement for Milton Keynes.

The settlement is 7.3 per cent.

The Minister says 7.3 per cent., but all that money is earmarked for education. There is nothing for social services, nothing for all the other services that Milton Keynes council has to provide for its population, and the population data that have been used for the settlements are two years out of date. That means that Milton Keynes has lost £5 million just on the population data issue. The fact that it has hit the ceiling means that it has lost £5.44 million as well. The Minister may say that it is a great settlement for Milton Keynes, but I can assure him that the council tax payers of Milton Keynes will not look too happy. The Minister is forcing council tax payers to pay for the Minister's huge expansion.

I ask the Minister to say, if he will pay attention, whether he is prepared to meet the leaders of Milton Keynes council to work out how they can proceed. Are the Government prepared to consider extra support to ensure that sustainable communities can operate successfully in Milton Keynes?

I move on to the proposed fire and rescue services Bill. Lest Ministers think that we are against the whole of their programme, I can confirm that we are largely in favour of the measure. It builds on the White Paper as it does on the Bain report. Members on both sides of the House will welcome many of its proposals. The new risk assessment procedures, community fire safety work and the non-fire emergency work that will become the statutory responsibility of fire authorities for the first time are exceedingly welcome. However, we have concerns where things in the Bain report have not filtered through from the White Paper to proposals that will be set out in the Bill. I have sprinklers in mind especially. It is clearly important to have sprinklers, misting systems and other new technology in new build to facilitate fire prevention. However, we are waiting to see whether the Government are committed to such regulation. I hope that they will be.

We want the details of the new charges that fire authorities will be able to impose on businesses. Will it be restricted to false alarms, repeat offenders or negligent businesses, or will there be charging left, right and centre? There could be some worrying perverse incentives. We want to ensure that businesses are prepared to install fire alarms and smoke alarms and are not deterred by the charging regime. I am sure that our concerns can be dealt with, and I salute the Government on their bold approach to modernisation of the fire service.

There are one or two other issues that do not feature in the main part of the Queen's Speech. There is concern about the way in which the Government are approaching local government finance. There is a need for drastic reform. The Government have set up a balance of funding review but there is a lack of urgency. Local services must be properly financed so that local authorities and local communities can take power over their services. I do not see that the Government are prepared to tackle that properly.

The Queen's Speech contains nothing about the environment. We thought that the Government had realised that the environment was a key issue for the country, for the population and for the planet. It was bizarre not to find one measure on the environment. My hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Norman Baker) sends his apologies for his absence because he is in Hartlepool looking at ghost ships. He wished me to put it on record that the Liberal Democrats will challenge the Government on their failure to give a strong lead on the environment. We will challenge the Government time and time again on the Bills that will be put before the House by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. They do not have the vision and they do not have their priorities right.

I wish to say a few words about the Gracious Speech before talking about local government, the environment and transport.

The Queen's Speech is challenging and historic. It is challenging because it proves that the Government are certainly not afraid of tackling the big issues, including top-up fees, asylum and many other issues, which we will not duck, but meet head-on. We are certainly not affected by special interests or vested interests. The Queen's Speech is historic because this is the first time that a Labour Government have presented their seventh legislative programme and my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister is the longest serving Labour Prime Minister in the history of the Labour party. This is therefore an historic moment for Labour Members. I have no doubt about the importance of most of the measures in the legislative programme, and I shall strongly support them.

Turning to the matter at hand, housing, local government, transport and planning certainly affect our communities. I want to concentrate on the parts of the Queen's Speech that relate to Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill, much of which deals with technical matters, such as changes to the patterns of development plans. It also adds a regional dimension to the planning process by introducing changes to regulations affecting the handling of public inquiries and reforms to the system of planning obligations. However, I want to focus on the provisions on greater community involvement that should be at the heart of the Bill. I shall make some small suggestions about the way in which that aim can be achieved.

Community involvement was highlighted as a key test in a Green Paper called "Planning for Change":

"A key test of the planning system is the extent to which the community trusts it. Its workings have to be honest and transparent and allow access by the people who want to engage in the process of planning the future of their community. That trust depends not only on the formality or length of the process, but whether it allows the community's influence to be felt".

We have now formalised that aspiration in a dramatic fashion. For the first time ever, a Government have decreed that all planning authorities will have a statutory duty to state a policy of public involvement in the planning process. That duty and requirement will have a lot of resonance in communities where large scale development is under way, including areas experiencing new growth, such as parts of the south-east, and, perhaps more importantly, communities undergoing fundamental change as part of the housing renewal process. My own area of Teesside falls squarely in the latter category.

We all know what housing market failure means—empty houses and communities where antisocial behaviour problems follow the physical desolation to which abandoned housing leads. The Government have taken the bold step of saying that they will resolutely face up to housing market failure and the problems that are hindering their drive to achieve decent homes for all. In the north-east, significant amounts of money have been put into programmes run by the new North East Housing Board that are designed to mark the rebirth of communities and offer freedom for people to choose new forms of decent and affordable homes. New master plans for estates suffering from the planning and architectural mistakes of the '50s and '60s are being drawn up and implemented, and there are new master plans for communities made up of the terraced housing built in the century before last—the cheap and nasty two-up, two-downs thrown up by 19th-century mine owners and manufacturers to house the new urban population. For historical and social reasons, much of the north-east is made up of such housing. Despite the new building of the past 20 years, such stock still accounts for much of Teesside's housing.

A large rate of demolition is being envisaged. A report commissioned for the Government office for the north-east and conducted by the centre for urban and regional studies at Birmingham university identified the scale of the issue. It found that more than 200,000 dwellings in the north-east could be at risk of clearance due to dilapidation, low demand and decay, including 59,400 in my area. Such dwellings are concentrated together in areas of Teesside and spread across the whole of the Tees valley and its five council areas.

Those problems are not made by the people living in those communities, but are caused by changes in population distribution and new patterns of social and occupational mobility. Such patterns affect some communities positively, but they affect many negatively, and the people living in such communities face real problems in their day-to-day lives. They are proud of their communities, but concerned about what they see around them. If we are truly to build new communities on the foundations of the old, we must take those people with us.

When we are planning for the new Teesside, we need to plan for communities that are the result of the conscious choice of the people in them. That lies at the heart of the duty of community involvement set out in the Bill. The mistakes of the past were rooted in the fact that planning was seen as a top-down bureaucratic exercise. Although that exercise was often carried out in the spirit of a desire for change for the better, it was seen as the exclusive preserve of the planners and architects, and the civil servants in Whitehall and the local town hall. People naturally reacted against that elitism. At that time, ordinary people were trying to tell the planners and politicians that living in the sky in a tower block was not always sensible or sustainable. The splitting of old communities and their fragmentation into new estates that were often situated many miles away on greenfield sites, with few, if any, services, was not an exercise that would keep neighbourhood solidarity alive. Treating people as the passive recipients of state policies is not the best way of encouraging what we now call active citizenship.

We must guard against the bypassing or minimising of the new obligations that we are introducing. We need a concept of involvement and participation that goes further than merely allowing people to let a planning committee know their views about a project that has, for the best part, been predetermined. We need to guard against the syndrome of community revolt that blazes up after someone has read a statutory notice tied to a lamp post or posted on a wall—a revolt fuelled by a feeling that they are the last to know about something important to their lives. We need a form of community involvement that will allow communities to shape their own lives.

We need to look at the basics of the planning process and see how best we can integrate community feelings and demands into a master plan from day one. There are ways of doing that. I commend some areas of good practice that we can build on, such as the work of planners and architects who have developed community involvement strategies around what are called "planning for real" exercises, carried out with community forums and groups. In such exercises, proposals are thrashed out and debated in an open forum and people know that they are communicating with agencies of power on an equal footing.

The new and developing technology of virtual reality is being applied to the planning process. Such technology can allow interaction between developers, planners and communities. It allows the virtual image of a possible new development to be projected in order to show its potential impact on the surrounding community. The image can be revised on-screen to accommodate ideas and suggestions that come directly from the host community.

I commend the extension of the planning aid service across the UK, especially in areas such as mine that will be subject to vast change. At present, planning aid is managed by the Royal Town Planning Institute on a voluntary basis, whereby planners acting in a voluntary capacity can give advice on third-party rights and on the merits and demerits of planning applications to communities and individuals who are concerned about the impact of such proposals. Crucially, that advice is given by a planner who is employed by an authority other than that which covers the local authority area that is the subject of the application—an approach that guarantees genuinely disinterested and proper information and advice. The planning aid service and its ethos was endorsed in the planning Green Paper, which stated:

"Individuals and community groups often feel in need of independent and impartial advice about how to engage properly with the planning process. They are often people who lack the resources to use planning consultants. They want help to develop planning advocacy skills and they need access to better training and planning advisory services."

Planning aid must go deeper if we are successfully to tackle housing renewal issues. The Minister for Housing and Planning, my right hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Mr. Hill), recently attended the Royal Town Planning Institute's planning aid conference. He will have picked up some useful ideas—one of which, I am sure, was the extension of the service to allow a planning aid team to be "embedded" into a community that is undergoing physical change, where they can act as community advisers and technical assistants at all stages of the renewal process, from the first draft proposals for clearance, through to the compulsory purchase order stage, and onwards to the physical planning of the new community that will be born. That, I would argue, is planning in the real sense: it has at its root the betterment of the community and all who live in it; and, bearing in mind that a new community will be set in bricks and mortar for possibly a century or more, a betterment of life for those as yet unborn.

In concluding with those thoughts, I warmly welcome the Queen's Speech.

The Government made the usual efforts to find a theme for this Queen's Speech: as far as I can recall, they came out with some flannelly language about the future and fairness. I agree with those who said that it is impossible to find a theme, and that it merely shows that, as they get towards the end of their second term, the Government have lost their sense of purpose and direction. A very mixed bag of measures has come before us, most of which are ad hoc—either the latest bright idea from some think-tank that happens to be close to the No. 10 policy unit or an old departmental idea that has been taken out of a cupboard and had the dust blown off it to be brought forward to address one issue or another.

I agree with the hon. Member for Middlesbrough, South and Cleveland, East (Dr. Kumar), whose speech I enjoyed, in only one sense. If the Queen's Speech is in any way historic, as he suggests, it is because it contains two measures that could prove to do lasting damage to the fabric of our society. I strongly disapprove of the proposals for changes to access to higher education—I shall return to that in a few moments—and I strongly object to the proposals for constitutional reform of the upper House. The measures on top-up fees and the House of Lords have, rightly, dominated the discussion so far; and they are the two measures that will do the most damage if Parliament is unable to stop or to modify them in the course of the next few months.

Much of the Queen's Speech was dull but worthy. I begin with the subject that was chosen for today's debate and on which Front-Bench Members concentrated: planning, housing and fire. That is all dull but worthy and was introduced by a most unlikely character—the Deputy Prime Minister, for whom I have a high regard and who is certainly not dull. I do not regard his politics as worthy—indeed, he and I have disagreed politically on every subject that I can envisage and for as long as I can remember; his politics and mine resemble each other like chalk and cheese. He loves the red meat of politics and political controversy, which showed when he read his brief on the Bills that happen to fall within the extraordinary remit that has been created for him and is called the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.

The right hon. Gentleman reminded me of one his heroes, Mr. Michael Foot, who, when he was put in charge of a worthy measure, read the brief carefully, left the Chamber as rapidly as possible and trusted that his junior Ministers would sort out the consequences in his absence. The difficulty with that approach is that we are considering important matters, not least in a constituency such as mine, and serious dangers can be tucked away in what do not appear to be the most controversial measures.

Rushcliffe is a constituency like many others: largely rural, largely suburban and around and between great conurbations. All the arguments about planning and housing centre on the pressure on the green belt and greenfield sites and on getting the balance right for development without destroying the environment.

I listened to the Deputy Prime Minister speaking about his subjects and he did not entirely reassure me, but left me with some fears that he might be taking things in the wrong direction. The planning structure is too bureaucratic, too remote from the population and often too remote from local needs. The current process of structure planning has never worked properly. We have a long process of regional structure plans, county structure plans and so-called public consultation, which attracts only special interest groups to make representations and comes to life only when the most local authority—the district authority—deals with an individual planning application and the local residents suddenly become aware of what might happen and start to react.

Having listened to the Deputy Prime Minister's description of his Bill, I fear that the distant and regional aspect is about to be strengthened and that the process is likely to become more, not less bureaucratic. He strengthened my view that planning, like most other features of local government, is best delivered on the smallest scale possible and nearest to the population who will be affected. The more power that can be given to the local planning authority and the less that can be moved up to regional level, the better.

I represent part of Leeds, which was mentioned earlier. We started a unitary development plan in 1992 under Conservative arrangements. It took 10 years to get to deposit that plan and the problem is that by the time it affects the public, the original thoughts behind it may be long forgotten. I therefore appreciate much of what the right hon. and learned Gentleman says. However, the problem in Leeds arose under Conservative arrangements. Will he therefore accept that the current system is not perfect?

Far too many of my political remarks take on a touchingly non-partisan aspect. I accept that the strategic planning that I am criticising goes back to the time of Conservative Administrations. As with the example in Leeds, so in the east midlands and Nottinghamshire. The process can take a long time to get from the spatial planning, about which my east midlands development association continues regularly to bombard me with glossy documents, to the reality years later, when many original concepts have undoubtedly changed. I regard what has been said about that with suspicion.

I heard the fashionable emphasis on affordable and starter homes. which I accept are necessary. Until recently, there was a huge gap in the provision of affordable housing, especially for young and for single people, which has to be filled in urban and rural areas. Again, the problem is best tackled locally. The increased provision of suitable housing for single people, who like living in cities and bring them back to life, is one of the best aspects of what is happening in cities. In rural and suburban areas, it is often easier to get planning consent for so-called affordable housing. The result is that high-density planning applications succeed and the properties that are available on the market are unaffordable to anyone looking for a starter home.

That merely distorts the development that takes place in areas where there is no doubt that the market will drive the price up beyond the affordable level. Again, in all the structural planning I am deeply suspicious of that.

I am interested to hear what has been said about multiple occupation, and I agree with those who have already said that the problem with student accommodation should be addressed. Nottingham has become a great student city, and I am glad to say that large numbers of students look for accommodation in the suburbs, which I represent. They add life and quality to the area, but there can be sudden influxes of student occupiers. That is not always strictly multi-occupation; they are merely put in a house by a landlord, which they share, so there is little control over the change of use that takes place. We need greater control over the extent to which whole neighbourhoods can suddenly change, with implications for services. I also think that students are entitled to whatever protection is going to guarantee the quality of multi-occupied accommodation as well. I hope that the student accommodation problem is addressed.

On home information packs, I echo exactly what has been said by Liberal and Conservative spokesmen. This is an old idea that has finally been given in to, and I believe that its main effect will be to add to the cost and to increase the delay that occurs in the housing market when there is no need to do either. That measure also brings home to me—as does the fire Bill, worthy though that is—the dangers, under this Government particularly, of ever more and costly regulation being imposed on most transactions and quite a lot of business activities.

This Government just love regulation, all of which is produced and driven by worthy purposes and worthy bodies, whether that be the Consumers Association or people interested in food safety or health and safety of various kinds. In this case, I do not think that most purchasers would be well advised not to have their own survey done because a home information pack has been produced. In the end, the proposal will add to the cost of the housing transaction. Also, it will probably give rise to more litigation, not less, as people dispute whether the property matches up to what they were told in the home information pack. It is yet another regulatory activity that will serve no worthwhile purpose.

Fire Bills always do the same thing, but no one will oppose anything put forward in the name of fire regulation because one is instantly accused of wishing to see most of one's neighbours fried to a frazzle if one resists any suggestion that comes back from the fire service or the fire prevention authorities. We should consider the compliance cost of what is proposed. The cost in relation to the risk that is being averted is usually staggering. Although I have not looked at this particular Bill, such measures are usually one of the sources of highest cost and most difficulty to many property owners and many small businesses. I am quite sure, however, that the Bill will go through the House completely unopposed, because nobody ever challenges any advice on fire prevention.

Is the right hon. and learned Gentleman aware that for £1,000 most buildings could have an efficient sprinkler system? Such a measure would have saved £9 million-worth of expenditure on a school that I have just lost—it has been completely destroyed—and would have meant that the school could have begun to operate that same day.

That might be defensible if someone, at the same time, was looking at the cost of the existing regulation and trying to get rid of other things already done in the name of fire prevention, which cause a great deal of cost.

This is an area where it is impossible to resist pressure for more statutory requirements—to protect against fire, of course. However, that impossibility to resist also leads to ever mounting requirements, none of which is ever removed, and ever greater cost for people undergoing all kinds of activity.

The home information packs illustrate to me the fact that the Government are also a bit of a sucker for any lobby that walks through the door. One thing they will always give in to is pressure from any well-organised group. That leads me on to at least one of the measures that I particularly object to in the Queen's Speech—the proposals on higher education.

The two measures that I have already identified as most objectionable to my mind are those on top-up fees and on House of Lords reform. Both have something in common, although they relate to different areas of political activity.

The first thing is that neither would be in the Queen's Speech were it not for the personal insistence of the Prime Minister. I do not believe that many Government Members have great enthusiasm for what is proposed on student finance. I do not believe that many Labour Front Benchers have great enthusiasm for an all-appointed House of Lords. It is the personal determination of the Prime Minister to make those proposals a test of his leadership that has resulted in them being put into the Queen's Speech. I hope that the test proves a particularly examining one.

The other thing that the measures have in common is that both are things that the Labour party committed itself against at the last general election when it consulted the public. Both are in defiance of clear manifesto pledges; earlier, we saw the Liberal Democrat spokesman, the hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr. Davey), getting a Minister to go through hoops in trying to explain how the measures complied with the manifesto. The measures deserve the most serious opposition because, in both cases, the damaging effects on the opportunity to go into higher education and on the constitution of this country and the ability to hold the Government to account will last far longer than all the other dull and worthy measures presented to us last week.

Top-up fees are an old idea that has been debated for the last 10 years. They have always been an enthusiasm of some of the vice-chancellors of some of the universities with the highest reputation, who have urged the proposal upon successive Governments because they have not received the public money that they require to finance their expansion. Failing anything else, the vice-chancellors have decided that top-up fees are the only way of getting an income to meet their needs. If the proposal comes into effect in 2006, most of the money raised will go on increasing academic salaries. When pressed on what is required to maintain high academic standards, most dons reply in terms of their salaries, making the comparison with senior teaching staff and the surge in public sector pay that has gone on in every sector save theirs. They have a case—one that is better than most—and I agree that they are in something of an international market.

The Government defend the proposal as the only means of financing their target of 50 per cent. of the population under 30 going into higher education. They stick to that target doggedly, but they should not do so if they cannot come up with a better way of financing or affording it. However, the idea is being put forward on the basis of increased take-up. We have always accepted in this House that there is a case for students and their parents making some contribution towards a student's time at university. I well remember frequently debating student loans, against the bitter opposition of the entire Labour movement, when we introduced them. The argument was, "Why should the dustman's taxes subsidise the living standards of the trainee doctor?" It was one that I used frequently—as did most of my hon. Friends—to defend the introduction of student maintenance grants for living costs.

Up to a modest level, the living costs of a student at university should be borrowed, on favourable terms, and paid back; the terms of that measure have become reasonably settled. However, having introduced the principle of loans—this is what Labour used to say to us—the danger is that the Treasury will want students and their parents to pay for a lot more. We crossed the rubicon when the Government accepted the idea of paying tuition fees. Now we have a proposal that people should borrow to pay not only for their living costs, but for their tuition fees. The fees are set arbitrarily; the universities bid for £5.000 and are now to be given £3,000. The cost of going to university is now a tax, and the total burden imposed on students from ordinary families will be much greater.

My argument has always concerned the ordinary student from an ordinary, average-income family who will get an ordinary degree and go into an ordinary job. I wholly approve of such people, who will improve the quality of their own lives and of society. But they will not have enormous sums of money, or be able easily to handle huge burdens of debt. The very poor will find that all their problems are solved, because the universities will give them bursaries and the Government will tweak the scheme to make sure that such people are helped. However, the very poor will not go to university in great numbers because the school system is not good enough to prepare many such people for higher education. The very rich will not mind because they already take the student loan and put it into investment clubs. Their parents buy a flat for them when they go to university as an investment, which is realised when they leave.

Those whom we must consider are, for example, the two children who live in a household in which the parents have a combined income of about £25,000 a year, and who emerge from three years of university—with perhaps a rather poor second-class degree—get a job and, by their early 30s, are earning some £25,000 a year. In fact, they are the solid citizens of most of our constituencies. What is proposed is that they will leave university with some £20,000 to £30,000 worth of debt, depending on the circumstances and the course that they take. I regard that as an unreasonable social burden; and if it is the best that we can come up with by way of subsidising higher education, it is also an admission of defeat.

I want to offer one or two more warnings. We should not believe that the figure will stick at £3,000. I concede that the Labour party was right to attack us by describing student loans as the tip of the iceberg. The vice-chancellors nearly persuaded the Government to sign up this time to the figure of £5,000. They have settled for £3,000, but they will go further. I do not agree with those Labour Members who think that it does not matter, so long as all universities charge the same. I am afraid that the status of the university of Cambridge is slightly higher than that of the university of Derby, and with the greatest of respect to my hon. Friend the Member for West Derbyshire (Mr. McLoughlin)—he is listening to me—I doubt whether that comes as a great revelation to the outside world. Once the limits are pushed up, the university of Cambridge, the London School of Economics, the university of Bristol and various others will undoubtedly push their fees very high indeed. The university of Derby will eventually get caught and will have to keep its fees down. It will have more and more working-class students, fewer and fewer of whom will go to the LSE, because of the adverse effect on the ability of people of ordinary income to contemplate such debt.

The Government's response is to create another regulator to control access. As I have said before, the Government are obsessed with regulation. The Labour movement may have changed in every other way, but social democracy still spawns regulation on a grand scale. There are more than 100 regulators of various types, and we will have another one—"Oftoff", or whatever it is to be called—to regulate access to university. But in fact, the mechanics of debt will make sure that the better off will tend to dominate in the better universities, and that the poorer will not.

I say to those vice-chancellors who disagree with me—who think it dreadful that I resist the increase in tuition fees that would give them more income—that I hope they do not think that the Treasury will let them get away with this. It is nonsense to imagine that in every future spending round, the Treasury will allow the Department for Education and Skills to increase public sector, taxpayers' support for universities, regardless of the fact that universities will be receiving loan income. The Treasury will be very keen on this issue, because in terms of higher education the pressure on it will be taken off. Every time that the Education Secretary wants more money for higher education, he will be told to go away and see how far he can tweak the tuition fees upwards, and to get people to borrow more money. I am strongly against the proposal and I see no reason why the Conservative party should support it. We Conservatives have always believed in equality of opportunity; this proposal goes in quite the wrong direction.

What should we do? It is obvious that, first, we should drop the 50 per cent. target, which was arbitrarily chosen. I am all in favour of opening up access to the university system, but in terms of this country's population we do not have a particularly low graduation level. Not only do I doubt whether the school system is yet capable of preparing for real higher education 50 per cent. of the population; I seriously doubt whether universities can cope with such a continuing rapid rate of expansion, without damaging the quality of some of the courses offered.

I rely on the statement of the previous Minister for Lifelong Learning and Higher Education, the right hon. Member for Barking (Margaret Hodge), who said that there were already too many Mickey Mouse courses in the universities, so there was no point in hitting targets by creating more.

The proposal may not pay for the good quality higher education that is required for existing students, and I admit that that lack is a weakness. The Government may well have to contemplate including higher education establishments in the list of institutions that have to be taken into account in the public spending rounds. That is where we have gone wrong over the last 10 years and it means that we Conservatives have to say what we would not spend equivalent moneys on.

It is appropriate for me, having heard all the talk today about regional government, regional development agencies and the regional aspirations of the Labour party, to say that I am quite unreformed on those matters. I would not regret the abolition of the regional development agencies. I believe that the Department of Trade and Industry dispenses money on countless schemes as if it has gone out of fashion, a practice that the Secretary of State is trying to rationalise. I share all the enthusiasm of the hon. Member for Middlesbrough, South and Cleveland, East for urban regeneration and reviving the economy of the north-east, an effort which has been spectacularly successful in some places. However, I do not believe that the expenditure of vast sums of public money on such projects should be protected when higher education has been so neglected by successive Governments over recent years.

The right hon. and learned Gentleman attacks us for trying to fund the universities, but does he recall that when his Government were in power the universities suffered the loss of billions of pounds of support, which we had to put right when we came into office? We had to invest £2 billion in the sciences, which the Conservative Government had underfunded so much. Does not the right hon. and learned Gentleman recall his own Government's record?

We did make some mistakes. We also expanded the numbers of students attending universities quite dramatically and we increased expenditure on higher education, but we squeezed the funding per student. We did so because we believed that British universities should move away from being wholly dependent on taxpayers' money and develop assistance from endowments, links with private industry and local industry—in short, to follow the example of the better aspects of the American higher education system.

With hindsight, I can say that we produced some beneficial changes—universities now look much wider for their sources of income and have much better contacts with industry and the outside world than they ever had before—but we overestimated the pace at which the universities could achieve them. Given that we overestimated, there is absolutely no point in driving on with an even faster rate of expansion, to be paid for by students and parents. That is a bigger mistake than any that we made. The time has now come to consolidate, to lower the targets and ensure that we can finance existing provision without opting for top-up fees.

Finally, I should like to make a few brief comments about the House of Lords. It is a disgrace to see before the House a Bill to change the House of Lords. My specific reason for saying so is that I wasted much of the previous Session attending the Joint Committee on House of Lords Reform, whose purpose was supposedly to discuss the final stages of reforming the House of Lords. I do not know why I served on that Committee, as I realised that it would be a complete waste of time. It was simply another means of using up another 12 months while we talked about a variety of schemes. Although we all contemplated an elected element in the upper House, we ended up with a complete horlicks, largely because of House procedure. A full range of options was finally presented to the House of Commons and it was obvious that a majority wanted an elected element in the upper House, but there was no majority for any one solution. That enabled the Government to return to what we all knew was the Prime Minister's favourite option of a wholly appointed upper House.

The Prime Minister has brought us here. It was certainly not the responsibility of the previous Leader of the House or, indeed, of anyone else. In the end, the Prime Minister decided that he had two objectives. The first was to secure a majority in the upper House, because it was holding his Government to account too firmly. The second was to secure a wholly appointed upper House through some quango of nice establishment people who could appoint their friends steadily to the upper House while allowing him additionally to appoint a few party people. That would lead to an altogether quieter and less troublesome House of Lords.

I shall not argue the case all over again, but in any other developed country the idea that the upper House of Parliament should be wholly appointed for life by a combination of party leaders and some quango would be regarded as ridiculous and unacceptable—as it is in this case.

Parliament must be strengthened. I am in favour of a wholly elected upper house, although I would settle for 80 per cent., or even 60 per cent., but I am certainly not prepared to settle for the current proposal. If it goes through, the House of Lords could last for decades in its present state. In 30 years' time, people will be saying of some elderly peer, "Why has he been a legislator for 40 years? Can anybody remember how he got here? Why is he still sounding off about legislation?" The reply will be, "Don't you remember, he gave a financial contribution to the Labour party's campaign in 1997, and 40 years later he is still sounding off about the legislation of the land".

The current proposition is dangerous. Many people on both sides of the House believe in a stronger Parliament and in parliamentary reform, and I hope that many Members from all parties will stop the Government in their tracks and prevent them from moving to a wholly appointed upper House.

Although I shall direct my comments to the subjects chosen for debate today—planning, housing and transport—I shall end my speech with a few words about pensions and top-up fees, on which I hold particular views.

I welcome the fact that the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill is coming back. The rollover procedure is entirely sensible; we have already spent so much time debating the Bill that it would be nonsense to start the process all over again. That is certainly a welcome benefit of the modernisation procedure.

I welcome, too, the Government's commitment, to which the Deputy Prime Minister referred, to ensuring that every local authority has a proper consultation procedure for planning applications, whereby those in the community who are especially affected will be able to check that their local authority has followed a properly set down procedure. I hope that will put an end once and for all to those deplorable situations where local residents find out, or, more often, do not find out, about planning applications that affect their lives and the lives of their families from a notice stuck on a lamp post near—or, sometimes, not very near—their home. The measure will deal with that.

I am glad that it will no longer be possible automatically to renew an approved planning application year after year after year. Some time ago, a neighbouring authority to my constituency, Rotherham district council, agreed a planning application for an out-of-town store. It did so before PPG6 was changed by the previous Conservative Government—one of the few good things they did during their 18 years in power. As a result of that change, new out-of-town stores were no longer allowed at sites such as Catcliffe in the Rotherham district council area. However, as the application had been approved and renewed several times before the change to PPG6, with changes to the original application, the Morrison supermarket group was given permission to build a new out-of-town store.

As a result, Morrison closed a store in Darnall, an inner-city part of my constituency, and the shopping centre no longer has a food store. Pensioners and others cannot get to the out-of-town store, which is several miles away and has no direct bus service, so there is almost nowhere for them conveniently to do their food shopping. The heart has been knocked out of the shopping centre and—to make a non-planning point—the Morrison group is being especially unhelpful by refusing to come to a reasonable agreement with the local Co-op, which was prepared to move in and set up an alternative food store for the poorer local people, the pensioners and others who do not have their own transport. The new store could have opened by Christmas, but Morrison prevented it. That example shows the need to prevent planning permissions from being rolled on into the future, irrespective of national planning guidance changes.

I have some sympathy with some of the points made by Opposition Members in the Standing Committee, of which I was a member. We should not have a general third party right of appeal and the Government should look into the issue again. Such appeals slow the planning process and far too many applications are referred on for an inspector to determine. In general, I am in favour of such applications being determined at local council level, but in cases where a local authority makes a planning decision that is contrary to its local plan, especially where the planning authority itself has a financial or other interest in the decision—for example, where the land is owned by the local authority and it would gain a capital receipt from its sale-local residents should have the right to appeal.

Any overextension of the decision-making process could be dealt with by saying that when an authority makes a decision that is wholly in line with its local plan, the applicant should not have a right of appeal. If Ministers addressed that point, they could do away with many appeals and give democracy back to local councils that act wholly in line with their local plans. I hope that we will be able to debate such issues further when the Bill comes back on Report.

I look forward to seeing the wording for the new arrangements for the payment of fees. At present, section 106 agreements are negotiated for the provision of social housing by a private developer and the social housing is integrated into the scheme, but if the private developer simply has to pay a fee the social housing could be removed off site or to the back of the site, with an exclusion zone separating the private housing from the social housing. We had some assurances on that point from my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister and I look forward to seeing the wording.

I welcome the housing Bill and I especially support the Government's attempts to provide additional resources for social housing. We in Sheffield have benefited from that and my right hon. Friend will visit us shortly to see how the local council, in a genuine consultation exercise with council tenants, has raised money to meet the decent homes standard. One possibility is a city-wide arm's length management organisation—or ALMO—and some tenants have voted for that. It is a genuine consultation process. That is the proper way to hold a conversation with people, and the Labour party nationally might learn from that.

I also welcome the provisions on the licensing of houses in multiple occupation, which many hon. Members have advocated for many years. I remember sitting on a Committee several years ago with the right hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Curry), the then Minister responsible for housing. I asked the previous Government to introduce licensing for HMOs, because it would do so much to protect some of the most vulnerable people in our society who often live in some of the worst housing. I hope that Ministers will look carefully at the details of any proposals. In principle, licensing is right, but if the detail is wrong enforcement will be very difficult. The Committee that considered the draft housing Bill said that it thought that the definitions of HMOs were confusing and complicated. The Government have accepted that and will reconsider. As the draft Bill stood, if a property had no shared amenities, but consisted of several bedsits, it would not be classed as an HMO. Some landlords would use that to get round the licensing requirements. The Government have so far refused to accept that they should change the provision that a property should be at least three storeys high before being defined as an HMO for the purposes of the licensing scheme. That worries me, because in Sheffield we have many two-storey houses that could contain five or more bedsits but would not fall under the definition of an HMO as the Bill is drafted. I hope that the Government will reconsider. As has been said, licensing for HMOs will be an expensive scheme for local authorities to operate. It must be done properly, with adequate enforcement and inspections, either with a fee system or extra grants to ensure that local authorities are recompensed.

I welcome the new proposals for the licensing of landlords in areas of low housing demand. Many of us have pathfinder schemes in our constituencies, and Darnall and Tinsley in my constituency fall in one such area. None of us who went on the Committee's visit to Burnley and parts of Lancashire and saw the appalling abuses by many landlords could fail to support the Government's proposals.

We had an interesting debate about the sellers' pack. I was fairly neutral about the idea and the Select Committee on the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister tried to undertake a genuine investigation into the scheme. In my view, the Select Committee thought that it had some good points. It particularly liked the idea that people could fall back on the fact that houses would be surveyed properly before they bought them. To some extent, the Government have a responsibility to protect people from their own worst excesses—for example, people sometimes skimp on an initial survey and later rue the cost of doing so.

The Committee was concerned about the practicalities of implementing the scheme all at once. For example, we were concerned that next year the Government would simply say, "This scheme will come into effect at the same time throughout the country", but we have had welcome commitments from Ministers that the scheme will be rolled out regionally. We have also been assured that inspectors will be thoroughly and properly trained and that enough inspectors will be in place before the scheme gets the go-ahead.

We have had assurances that there will not be one big bang before sufficient inspectors are trained and that, in many respects, the scheme will be easier—there will be only one search and one survey on which everyone will be able to rely. We have also been assured that the buyer will have redress against the inspector, despite the fact that, technically, the seller pays for the inspection. That point has apparently been cleared up.

Estate agents will clearly become increasingly important in buying and selling houses. The Select Committee felt that there is a case for licensing estate agents, and I hope that the Government will take another look at that. We do not allow unlicensed people to sell financial products to consumers, so when people are buying something as important and expensive as their homes—probably the biggest, most expensive purchase of their lives—they ought to be able to rely on the advice given by estate agents. A licensing scheme and ensuring that estate agents are properly trained ought to be considered.

I agree with the hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr. Davey), who speaks for the Liberal Democrats, that a proper tenancy deposit scheme should be introduced at some point. Whether the Government do so as part of the housing Bill or whether they wait to consider the whole issue of tenants' rights and provide one type of tenancy agreement for all forms of tenure throughout the country is a moot point, but we need to protect tenants in the very near future. The cost-benefit survey on tenancy deposit schemes said that there were costs and benefits. The sums involved may often be very small to the large landlords involved, but they are very significant to relatively poor tenants, who can lose out because of unscrupulous treatment by landlords.

I very much agree with what my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody) said about the fact that the Queen's Speech does not mention the bus transport industry. I have spoken in the House before about bus transport. Although the newspapers and the rest of the media concentrate on rail transport, the reality is that most of my constituents who use public transport travel by bus or, indeed, tram in Sheffield, rather than on the rail system. The tragedy is that, apart from in London, the number of people who use buses has fallen in each of the 10 years since deregulation. In London—the one place where the bus transport system is regulated—1 million more passengers a day now use the buses than three years ago. That is not so in Sheffield where passenger numbers continue to fall, which is not surprising given the fact that bus passengers want consistency.

People want to know that they can catch a bus to and from work, to take their children to their grandparents as part of their child-minding arrangements or to visit an elderly person in an old people's home. If, however, at 42 days' notice, their bus service is changed or stopped altogether, there is not the consistency or reliability of service that ensures that they will regularly use buses even if they have cars available. That is one of the main issues that we have to consider.

Why are local authorities not using the quality partnership or quality contract arrangements? I urge more local authorities to have a go at using them, but they seem to think that they are far too bureaucratic and complicated. Certainly, one of the criticisms is that the quality contract arrangements—a form of regulation—take more than two years to implement and that, meanwhile, an area's bus services can disintegrate completely. I ask Ministers to consider introducing either regulations that could shorten the time taken to introduce quality contracts, which the Scottish Executive have done, or a completely different system—a form of franchising, as in London, or even area franchising—that will provide stability and reliability and ensure that public authorities lay down the service framework and the fare pattern and quality of buses provided.

I accept that some good things are happening in the bus industry. On Friday, I launched a new fleet of buses that First Mainline purchased for one of the local routes in Sheffield. Of all the public services that were privatised by the previous Conservative Government, bus transport is probably the only one without effective competition or effective regulation. We ought to address that, as it is important to many people, and as my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich said, it is often the poorest—women, single parents and pensioners—who rely on that form of transport most.

I very much welcome the new pensions measures and the protection for those workers who, through no fault of their own, find that their pension entitlements have been removed altogether or substantially reduced—often when they are in their 40s and 50s and can make no alternative provision—for the simple reason that their firm has gone out of business. Those measures are very welcome, as were the previous changes in regulations to protect would-be pensioners whose employers decide to terminate their final salary scheme. The issue remains, however, of those workers whose firms have already gone out of business or whose schemes have already been shut down, who are not covered by the new regulations and will not be covered by the new legislation. Is it not possible for the Government to find some way to help them at least partially? When people are coming into our surgeries who are 55 years of age and who thought that they would retire on a pension that was around half their salary but who find suddenly that they will get less than half that and that all their plans for the future are being thrown out of the window in one go, we must address that. The Government are right to introduce the pensions Bill, but that unsolved problem needs to be addressed.

I signed the early-day motion on top-up fees, and I have reservations. I agreed with some of what the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) said a few moments ago. I do not agree that we should not be trying to expand the numbers going into higher education. I want more of my constituents to get into higher education—standards in my secondary schools are improving, and many of them will be well able to meet the challenge. I do not think that 50 per cent. is an unreasonable target. It is an acceptance of our failure as a nation if we cannot manage to deliver places for 50 per cent. of our young people to go on to higher education. I do not agree with the Lib Dems' position either—the House would probably not expect me to do so—and if we are to have a successful numeracy strategy we should at least try to include the Lib Dems within it. Their Front Bench's answer to everything is: we will pay for it out of taxation. Of course, they never cost all the promises that they make, and they never add them all up and explain to us the percentage increase in income tax that would result.

I accept that we must find a way whereby those who benefit from a university education make some extra contribution. I am worried that the student fees and the loan element that that will produce will deter some people. The right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe was right to say that it will deter people in the middle-income groups. We can probably help the poorest, and it will not really concern the rich. The people in the middle are the ones who will probably be put off and will probably suffer. My concern—I would like to have a proper debate and a conversation about the alternative idea of some form of graduate tax—is that if people are to pay more, it should be related to their income. One of the problems with the current proposals, as I understand them, is that in each year those who earn not quite so much, such as £20,000, will not pay as much as those who earn £30,000 or £40,000. In the end, however, they will pay back the same amount of loan—they will simply pay it over a longer period. Some people, particularly if they have periods out of work to look after a family, may find that they are paying such loans off right up to the age of retirement. We must address those concerns.

I have read the press this weekend and the Government are probably now listening and starting to address some of those concerns, but the one concern that they are not addressing is the differential element of fees. The right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe was again right to say that that will not stay at £3,000 but will be extended and extended. At the top end, universities could charge £10,000, and at the bottom there will be a struggle for people to pay £1,000 for a course at a different institution.

There are problems with the proposals, and I hope that the Government will listen, as there are great concerns among Labour Members. I hope that they will be willing to consider alternatives. We should keep the 50 per cent. target, and people who benefit from university education ought to pay more. There may be other ways of doing it, however, and I hope that the Government are in listening mode.

Having expressed a few concerns about some issues in the Queen's Speech, I should say that I thoroughly support many other proposals, such as those in relation to planning and housing, and I hope to make further contributions when those Bills appear for their Second Reading.

I remind the House of my interests as recorded in the register.

There is always something to welcome in the Queen's Speech and I certainly welcome proposals on domestic violence and the modernisation of child protection law. I was hoping to welcome a Bill to speed up banking and payment transactions because that seemed to appear in the publicity that surrounded the Queen's Speech, but I cannot find a reference to it in the speech. Perhaps the Minister will enlighten me about whether that measure will be introduced because such a Bill would certainly be good news for small business and it is some time since it was recommended by the Cruickshank report.

The rest of the Queen's Speech, as has been said, lacks a clear theme. It is hard to understand how several of the measures will help my constituents. I hear few calls for the urgent reform of hereditary peers or the update of legislation on same-sex couples. In all my time in Parliament, I have not received letters complaining about those things.

I want to talk about measures to improve the quality of life and behaviour and also tuition fees. I must tell my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke)—my former Secretary of State—that I do not wholly agree with his remarks on tuition fees. I shall come to that in a moment, although I fear that that may mean that he will have to listen to the end of my speech.

Quality of life matters to all our constituents, as does their total environment. I wish that there were more evidence of joined-up thinking behind measures to improve the planning and housing system and those that are being introduced to try to tackle criminal behaviour yet again. Huge swathes of doughnut housing have been pressed for by developers and built around our towns because people want to move out of the centres to escape drugs and high crime rates. There is less of a problem in inner cities because a lot of regeneration is going on there. The housing and planning legislation that the House constantly passes must be considered alongside the need to improve policing and security inside our town centres or constant pressure will be caused by those who can afford to do so moving out of town centres while more deprivation and disorder is left in such centres.

Those of us who represent high-cost areas in the south-east experience specific problems with security and policing. The Government have had to wrestle with those problems and much of what they have done has been a mess. Police officers are resigning in droves from West Kent and North Kent police because they can continue to live in their houses yet earn an extra £3,000 or more by crossing the border to do exactly the same job for the Met. We experienced the same problem with nurses. After a long campaign, Ministers eventually listened and our health authorities were given more money so that the subsidies offered in London were equalled. The problem needs to be tackled more broadly. My constituents should not be underpoliced, so I would have liked to hear about genuine measures for police reform to allow chief constables to vary local rates of pay so that it could be ensured that high-cost areas—even those within county constabulary borders—would be able to pay the necessary amount to recruit and retain the police whom our constituents need.

Similar reform for schools is not contained in the Queen's Speech. We all welcome specialist schools, of course, and I especially welcome the fact that almost all the non-selective schools in my constituency enjoy specialist status. However, status alone is not enough because it has not yet been accompanied by genuine reform and deregulation to promote more performance-related pay and to encourage schools to deploy their staff better and compete at the edges in the way in which they deliver and design the education that they offer. I would like more of the regulatory reform measures that were promised at the end of the Queen's Speech to be applied to the Government themselves so that some of the nit-picking regulation that applies to schools could be swept away to allow head teachers and governors to get on with designing the public service that they believe their local communities need.

That is equally true in the national health service. I now read that Ministers are going to get rid of half the quangos that they set up in their first three or four years in government to regulate, as my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe said, and to provide accountability. Quangos are to be merged or abolished. There is an equal failure on the part of Ministers in the Department of Health to measure the effect of the legislation to which they are signing up.

My hon. Friends will have read in the weekend press of the long-term effect of the working time directive, which will hit junior doctors and those NHS trusts that employ them particularly hard. But it will hit even harder those trusts, like my own, that have multiple sites. In the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS trust, for example, we have two hospitals, the Kent and Sussex and the Pembury hospital, both of which serve my constituency. It will be financially impossible to meet the demands of the working time directive if they are not ameliorated to deal with the particular circumstances of trusts with two or three sites.

I turn now to what the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) in a debate the other day called "the politics of behaviour". We need to think more radically about behaviour. I am struck by the increasing numbers of my constituents who, in their letters or in the advice bureau that I, like all MPs, hold, complain about the unreasonable behaviour of other people, such as their neighbours. I notice that slowly but surely in this House Ministers are trying to get to grips with that. We are now to consider a third Bill dealing with antisocial behaviour orders, and we see in the Queen's Speech the suggestion that there should be more and more fines, including on-the-spot fines. There is also a proposal for identity cards, to identify people who are behaving badly. Those policies require more and more Acts of Parliament.

We need to think a little more deeply about how we tackle the politics of bad behaviour. It seems to me that we have not yet quite realised that if everything is legislated on and regulated, and the gap narrows between what is compulsory and what is forbidden, there is less support for the norms of public behaviour that used to apply. I do not mean the fashionable causes of private behaviour that we are all enjoined to support; I mean behaviour in public space, towards one another and towards those who serve us, whether in the public services or the private sector.

The Queen's Speech has picked out one aspect of that. It says that more powers will be given to head teachers and schools to deal with difficult children and so on. Head teachers do not talk to me about difficult children; they now talk to me about difficult parents: parents who are unreasonable, who take their children out of school without notice, who park unreasonably and all the rest of it. As well as passing all these laws-none of which ever seems to quite do the trick, so every Queen's Speech must contain another one—we need to look again at what we can do to re-establish the private contract.

One of this Government's biggest mistakes was not to make the home-school contract legally enforceable and give head teachers the power, which would apply in the independent sector, to reject children whose parents are not prepared to conform to the contract that they have signed. In other words, it is not so much the relationship between the state and the individual that applies here, but the contract between the individual and the service to which he or she is contracting.

Finally, in order not to detain my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe, I move on to tuition fees. He is right: we should call this a student tax because that is what it is and that is how it should be labelled. However, I do not think that the argument about the level of fees that will rage throughout the House over the next few weeks and months, and the balance to be struck between individual and general advantage from going into higher education, should obscure the equally important issue of institutional freedom. With great respect, I do not think that my right hon. and learned Friend attributed sufficient importance to that.

Universities in the United States, some of which, as my right hon. and learned Friend said, are of a high standard, flourish; they manage to educate a higher percentage of the age profile than do ours: and they certainly are able to attract much more money into higher education.

Why is that? In essence, it is because they are not run by the Government. In this country, all such institutions are, in effect, run by the Government—or, as my right hon. and learned Friend implied, mis-run by successive Treasuries. We must get away from the one-size-fits-all Government idea of a university. If that is no longer the right model for secondary schools, it seems odd to continue to insist that it is the right model for universities.

I offer the House a lesson drawn from practical experience—a rather rare experience for a former Minister. In 1993, I was made a board member of the Higher Education Funding Council, so I had the unique experience of being one of the Ministers—not the primary one—in the Department that drew up the Further and Higher Education Act 1992, and then, outside the House, of being one of those who had to live with its consequences.

The HEFC for England was set up to fund higher education, but we ended up not simply funding it, but directing it, homogenising it, and centralising it. It was a fallacy of the 1992 Act that all the new universities that my right hon. and learned Friend and his colleagues created were somehow immediately equal with the old ones. We were encouraged to believe that and we responded to that belief. Sure enough, in the fulness of time, almost all the 100 universities, new and old, made their various research proposals and treated themselves as though they were as good as the university of Cambridge, to which my right hon. and learned Friend referred. Ultimately, that was a deception—a deception perpetrated above all on the students who followed the path into those universities that all degrees are of equal academic rigour and practical usefulness, and all will be equally acceptable to future employers. I do not believe that they are, or that they can be, or that they necessarily should be.

If we continue on our present course, we will have a university system in which overall—of course, the best will always survive—standards will continue to decline. Rather than apply to the great universities of this country, more and more of my constituents will apply to universities elsewhere—to Princeton, Harvard and Brown—as they are already beginning to do. Our universities will fail in competing for the staff they need. As my right hon. and learned Friend said, the market for university staff is increasingly international, and he concedes that academic salaries are important.

It is up to Ministers now to explain how the very limited fees that they currently propose—each time I read my newspaper, the level seems to have dropped—will put our university system on what was described in the Queen's Speech as "a sound financial footing" given their ambitions for expansion, given other pressures for public spending, and given that, as I think we all agree, universities are already underfunded. Ministers have to explain how equal, common, single tuition fees at the low level they propose will do the trick. Equally, it is for my Front Benchers to explain how their policy—even if we were to stop expansion in its tracks, as I think is being suggested—will deliver the type of devolution and differentiation that we seem to favour almost everywhere else.

One cannot argue that hospitals and schools—which are, after all, public bodies—should have more freedom, but not be in favour of more freedom for universities, which are private institutions. One cannot on the one hand promise to be in the business of trusting professionals—head teachers, doctors and police superintendents—but on the other say that one is not prepared to trust a university vice-chancellor. I do not believe that a political party can advocate localism and difference in provision and simultaneously suggest that all universities, from the university of Abertay in Dundee to the university of Oxford, should be exactly the same.

In other words, I believe that the level of tuition fees is not exactly the issue. Students are paying already, and they will probably have to pay some more. I agree with those who say that there is probably a better way of ensuring that that extra payment is secured to a graduate tax or whatever. The real issue is how we encourage a university system that fosters diversity and benefits from difference, in which students—properly funded and properly bursaried, if they have not the means—have a real choice of courses and can know the outcome if they stick to them.

I am sure that my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Opposition Front Bench will rise to the task of explaining all these matters to me in due course as our debates unfold. I have no doubt that they will do so far more successfully than Ministers have so far defended their own proposals.

I was surprised earlier to hear the forlorn Liberal Democrat spokesman, the hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr. Davey), say that there was no mention of the environment in the Queen's Speech. Surely an energy Bill would be at the heart of the environment. I see that the hon. Gentleman has now been replaced by the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (John Thurso). Perhaps he will be able to take my message back, or perhaps not.

I hope that we can learn a simple lesson, and that is that the environment does not seem to be a great vote-catcher. Nor does it generate great headlines in the newspapers, except when things go badly wrong. It is a subject that tends to put people off. It is so complex, and it is difficult to understand how one thing impacts on another. People would perhaps rather ignore such matters. It is also a negative sort of subject, because usually we are expected to pay more for solutions that are advanced. There are many other problems on which I shall touch.

The Government have shown considerable courage in setting demanding targets not only to meet our obligations under the Kyoto agreement but to go much further. The target of a 60 per cent. reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 seems long-term, but the steps along that path come sooner rather than later. It is a cumulative target and not something that will suddenly happen on 1 January 2050.

The Government accept that during the period up to 2020 the extra burden of changing to green energy might add 5 to 15 per cent. to household electricity costs, and 5 per cent. to gas costs. I would argue that energy prices have been artificially low in the past four or five years, and that that has been a restraint on developing new green electricity generation.

We know the damage that the new electricity trading arrangements have caused to the development of combined heat and power, for example, but until fairly recently, everybody paid a 10 per cent. surcharge on electricity bills to prop up the nuclear power industry through the non-fossil fuel obligation. Mrs. Thatcher's nuclear tax put billions of pounds into a failing and unaffordable industry when that money should have gone into research and development work on renewable alternatives, a resource which the country possesses in abundance.

If we had followed that route, it would not now be the Danes and the Germans rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of our providing them with new export markets; it would be the other way round. On my visit to those countries to see their renewable energy industries, I was struck that they were investing so heavily not merely to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels but to develop extremely high-value new technologies to support their industrial strategies. I am sure that their approach will pay off big time. Their technology is at the cutting edge, and it is currently to these countries that we look when we seek answers to tackling climate change.

A backward-looking approach to our energy needs came to an end with the publication of the energy White Paper.

It is one of the best things published by the Government, at least since I was elected, and I say so despite my membership of the Environmental Audit Committee, which was critical of parts of it. Those criticisms reflect our impatience to get beyond the starting gate and move well and truly down the road that other countries are progressing along. True, some of those countries have not been saddled with an outmoded technology as we have. It is also true that we will now be groaning under the enormous burden of nuclear decommissioning costs as well as ongoing commitments to dinosaurs such as British Energy. If only the £3 billion to £4 billion cost of decommissioning just one nuclear power installation could be spent on developing wind, tidal and wave technology, combined heat and power and solar technology instead—what a missed opportunity—but we are where we are, to coin a phrase, and we must make progress as swiftly as possible.

I call on the Government to develop new thinking on air transport, as well as on investment in research and development of alternatives to fossil-fuelled road transport. In the latter case, I have no doubt that car use will continue to rise, because people enjoy the freedom it confers, as well as the comfort and sense of security. However, most car use is for relatively short journeys to the shops or work—precisely the kind of journeys where rechargeable battery-powered vehicles, or perhaps hybrids to start with, could make all the difference in reducing pollution. We should be doing more as a nation to invest in research and development work on such vehicles.

As for air transport, the argument now is that everyone should have the so-called right or freedom to fly, which sounds attractive. We are told in the air industry's lobbying and propaganda that it is a class issue. All I can say is that that is patent nonsense, as the projected growth rates for air transport produced by the Department for Transport clearly show that gains elsewhere in carbon reduction will be greatly reduced, or even knocked out, by the impact of all that extra flying. While electricity consumers at home, including working families, will be asked to pay an extra 5 to 15 per cent. for their green electricity, all the gains from that sacrifice may be swallowed up if people are not asked to pay any more for their cheap holidays. That is not a sensible balance, nor is it joined-up government. Air fares and air travel need to be managed. Prices have fallen every year for umpteen years, when they should at least have gone up in line with inflation. The fantastic freebies that the airlines get should be abolished. Fuel duties and VAT should be charged, and we should pay no attention to the fallacious and misleading arguments that the airlines lobbying industry is putting around.

I suppose that that is one reason why there are no votes in the environment. Everyone wants the new human right to fly, but nobody wants to live under a flight path. Everyone wants safe and secure electricity, but no one wants to live next to a wind farm. A lot of the people who do not want to live next to a wind farm—I can think of some fairly well-known if not infamous names—are the very same people who would not dream of living next to a coal-fired power station with all its slag heaps, nor indeed next to a nuclear power plant with all its inherent dangers. Nimbyism is rife, which is why I support the Government's endeavours to loosen the planning laws and ensure that the country's strategic environmental needs are not derailed by nimbyism.

Once again, however, there is a need for joined-up government. A good part of Yorkshire—Yorkshire is full of good parts, and I cannot think of any bad ones-is tied up by Ministry of Defence exclusion zones in which no wind farms can be developed. The MOD seems to have a much more refusenik attitude than is taken in other European countries, and I am not aware that their defence has been impinged on in any way whatever. The MOD must move into the 21st century, or it may be spending all its time in future defending vulnerable gas pipelines through some of the most hostile, unstable terrorist-infested territory in the world. In connection with nimbyism, I welcome the Government's introduction of a Bill on community interest companies, which could be used to emulate the German model. In Germany, people's objections to wind farms have been reduced because they can participate in companies that own the wind farms and generate electricity and income for the local community. I hope that the Government will give that model serious consideration.

We have a choice. We can either continue to base our economy on the energy of the 19th and 20th centuries, which has brought us to the brink of a global calamity, or we can behave responsibly in the 21st century and wholeheartedly embrace clean, renewable energy. The decision must be made now. As Professor Lester Brown, one of the world's leading environmentalists, told a recent seminar in Portcullis House, the consequences of climate change are already showing themselves very clearly. He noted that grain and rice crops are beginning to fail, notably in China, where the reduction is equivalent to Canada's entire grain harvest. Global warming is contributing to the fact that grain reserves are at an all-time low, and countries that were once self-sufficient are coming to the world market for supplies. Food prices will inevitably be forced up, probably in the next two to three years. Land where crops were once grown is succumbing to desertification and irreplaceable aquifers are becoming exhausted. Those are consequences of carbon-dependent economies, so the Government's energy Bill will, I hope, receive all-party support. It should be welcomed not as an end in itself, but as a new beginning.

I thank the hon. Member for Morley and Rothwell (Mr. Challen), particularly for his comments on the aviation industry and the excellent report that the Environmental Audit Committee published on aviation. I have a constituency interest, as Heathrow is in my constituency. I was not going to argue about why we should not have any further expansion at Heathrow, but then I heard the comments of the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody). I am sorry that she is not in the Chamber at the moment, but I am also rather relieved, because it is always best not to upset certain Members. I may be an MP but I am not completely stupid. I rather took exception to her saying that people who oppose further expansion at Heathrow are part of an obsessive lobby group. In fact, they are ordinary people who are concerned about their health and that of their children, as well as the future of their communities. As there is no Transport Minister in the Chamber at the moment, suffice it to say that the Government can read my arguments against expansion at Heathrow in Hansard.

My remarks also apply to other parts of the south-east, and what the hon. Member for Morley and Rothwell and his Committee have said must he taken seriously. Despite the fact that it is not a vote winner, perhaps we have to face up to the reality that cheap flights are not a human right. I am sure that the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich is an assiduous reader of Hansard, so I had better say that I agree that there is very little legislation on transport, which matters a great deal to all our constituents and needs to be addressed.

I noticed that a Bill on school transport is to be introduced. Until I see its detail, however, I will keep my powder dry. I know that it is a draft measure, and may even come before the Transport Committee if we are lucky, but it may be worth widening its remit so that it covers more than school transport. Brunel university is in my constituency, and many problems are caused by students arriving by car. The university is doing its best to try to encourage them to use public transport, but its attempts are not entirely successful. It is all very well introducing legislation and saying that people must use public transport, but there is usually a way around it. It will be interesting to see what happens.

I suppose that it is a sign of getting older when the debate on the Queen's Speech seems to come around more quickly. This year, it was a bit later, as the Government had a bit of trouble in the other place with some of their legislation. Interestingly, as our job is to legislate, we feel that we always have to find Bills to introduce. It would be nice to hear a Gracious Speech in which Her Majesty said "There's not much else that I've got to do, as my Government have done it all." Patently, however, this Government have not done it all. I look forward to a Conservative Government sending us all away again once we arrive, saying "There's not much to do; come back in a couple of months and we'll tidy up a couple of things." I know that that would go down well, but colleagues will be pleased to know that I am not making a leadership bid.

The Queen's Speech contains some measures that we should be pleased about, including on domestic violence, which my hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks (Mr. Fallon) mentioned. Those of us who support improved legislation to protect the environment, however, will be especially disappointed with what is, or is not, in the Queen's Speech. The issue of most concern to me personally is the lack of any proposals to improve the conservation and management of the marine environment. Labour Members might say that there is not enough time and that they have had two terms and are still looking for another to try to sort out the things that they promised to sort out in 24 hours, but I can make a few suggestions about measures in the Queen's Speech that we could possibly do without.

I am not averse to the idea of House of Lords reform, but the suggestions that have been made over the years in which I have been in Parliament have not taken my fancy. Although people might assume that I take a certain view on hereditary, as I speak as an hereditary retailer myself, I cannot see what point there is in removing them if we are not going to go the whole way. Still, in a rare admission of getting something wrong, I must say that when I first voted against the three-line Whip, it was on House of Lords reform and in favour of an all-elected Chamber. The policy changed shortly afterwards, but—perhaps this is a little bit of the strange behaviour of those of us from Uxbridge—I have now changed my view and do not think that a wholly elected Chamber is the answer. It is not that that option is not intellectually the answer, but that I think that it does not work practically. That is one Bill that the Government could remove to make way for a Bill that I shall suggest in a moment.

The abolition of the office of Lord Chancellor falls into the same category. I dare say that there are people who know much more about the legal system than me and say that it is a jolly good idea, but it has not struck the average man and woman in the street in my constituency as the most important issue. My right hon. and learned Friend the Leader of the Opposition demolished the Government's argument in respect of the referendum Bill for the euro, and I shall not repeat what he said.

I shall be stepping into controversial territory in speaking about the next Bill that I want to mention, which I know did not feature in the Queen's Speech, and I see that the Minister for Rural Affairs and Local Environmental Quality is in his place to respond. I refer to the Hunting Bill. Before Labour Members get excited and think "There goes another Tory on this subject," I should say that it is a matter of record that I have voted against hunting, and in favour of a ban. I am, however, getting sick and tired of the whole thing, and the Minister may share my views, having been given what is known in rugby terms as a hospital pass in being landed with the Bill last time around, when he became tied up in his golden threads and so forth. The Government seem unwilling to do what members of their party and some Opposition Members want to do. If we waste any more time on the subject, it will upset a lot of people who have strong views. However, although most people in my constituency would say that they were against hunting on being asked whether they took a view on it, I do not think that they want a great deal of time to be wasted on legislation when there are so many other important subjects to be looked at.

Hon. Members who occasionally find themselves in the Chamber on a Friday may remember that I was lucky enough a couple of years ago to come top in the ballot for private Members' Bills. I introduced the Marine Wildlife Conservation Bill, as I was seeking to do my bit for our seas and for important wildlife sites that are currently unprotected. I am pleased to say that that Bill enjoyed good cross-party support, as well as firm backing from the former Minister for the Environment, the right hon. Member for Oldham, West and Royton (Mr. Meacher). I think that the principle was also supported by the now Minister for the Environment. He is a fellow birdwatcher, and I know that, like me, he recognises the value of the UK's marine environment and understands why we need to do more to protect it.

Hon. Members will probably know—they will almost certainly be saddened—that my Bill was defeated in another place, despite the strong support that it had in the Commons and in the other place. You, Mr. Deputy Speaker, may also think that that would give me a reason to want House of Lords reform, but I stick to what I said earlier the suggestions that have been made will not help the situation, as appointed Lords will not have to listen to constituents.

I was especially disappointed to see that the Government's new programme of legislation contained nothing on those issues. I hope that that is not because the Minister for the Environment was unable to persuade the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs that the marine environment is a priority; if he wants some help, I shall come round and see what I can do. However, I shall be positive. I know that the Minister will be pleased to hear me say that the Government have published their marine stewardship report. There is also an ongoing Government-sponsored review of marine nature conservation, which I think will issue its report soon.

The Government will say that that should be proof of their commitment to introduce legislation, but no amount of consultation and deliberation can disguise the fact that we seem to have been waiting for legislation for an awfully long time. Those of us who support better marine conservation and management are beginning to feel that we might be waiting for Godot. I hope that the Government can assure me that we will see some legislative proposals very soon. Perhaps Ministers will have some exciting news for the Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs when they appear as part of its current marine environment inquiry.

Ministers will he aware of the campaign being conducted by the Wildlife and Countryside Link, which includes organisations such as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the WWF-UK, the Wildlife Trusts, the Marine Conservation Society and the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society. They are all seeking comprehensive legislation to improve the protection and management of our marine environment. I support their campaign, as I am sure many hon. Members do, and their contention that the protection of our seas has fallen well behind what we are doing on land and urgently needs to catch up. The Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, and more recently the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000, have been introduced to sort out the way in which we protect our most precious wildlife sites on land, and we urgently need equivalent action on the marine environment.

Those measures serve only to highlight the chasm or abyss—I think that that is the appropriate marine term for a deep, dark hole—that has opened up between terrestrial and marine conservation. We need a saltwater equivalent of the Wildlife and Countryside Link's campaign. Specifically, we need better protection of marine wildlife and heritage sites, which my private Member's Bill, in a modest way, went some way towards securing. That includes improved species protection and stronger enforcement of marine legislation to ensure that we can deliver what we say we will deliver in the marine environment.

There should also be a marine spatial planning system. The Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill deals with land-based issues, but we should also think about the marine environment, because intelligent and informed decisions must be taken about which parts of our marine sphere we can and should develop and which areas we should protect, as well as about the better management of inshore fisheries. That might appear to be an expansive and ambitious package, but it is one that we should all support.

I recognise, of course, that legislation on the environment is more likely to be given Government time if it is seen as having wider benefits. In my opinion, comprehensive marine laws could be a winner in that respect, too. At present, the marine environment is governed—I use the term loosely—by a range of often conflicting and outdated legislation and regulation, with plenty of gaps between the constituent parts. That is bad news not only for marine wildlife but for commercial, industrial and leisure users of the marine environment. New, rationalised legislation to provide a more strategic approach to marine planning could deliver a range of benefits for those sectors. For example, developers of offshore wind farms face the same problems with locating wind farms at sea as they do with those on land.

I wholeheartedly agree with the hon. Gentleman's remarks about the marine environment. He may be interested to know that in my constituency a project is emerging for a wind farm on the breakwater of Portland harbour, with the prospect that local people will have no say in the granting of planning permission. The decision will be made by three or four separate Departments, because the project is neither offshore nor onshore—it is in a no man's land.

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. That problem is becoming increasingly significant, but has so far been neglected. If we do not address it, there will be long drawn-out planning disputes between developers and objectors. The Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill aims to avoid such wrangles, but they will occur if the protection is not put in place to start with.

A gentleman called Charles Wilson, the one-time president of General Motors, once said:

"No plan can prevent a stupid person from doing the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time—but a good plan should keep a concentration from forming."

I would not suggest for a moment that any of the users of the marine environment should be given the "stupid" tag, but if we can put a good plan—and a good planning system—in place, we might be able to achieve a more sensible approach to the way in which we develop and use the marine environment. In Australia, no-fishing zones that protect spawning grounds for fish have had a good knock-on effect for surrounding fisheries and increased their stocks, and there is good potential for similar measures here. Moreover, if we were able to identify, and therefore to protect, nationally important wildlife sites, that would have major benefits for tourism. There are already examples of whale watching and trips to see basking sharks, sea birds and so on bringing people and money into local economies.

I hope that hon. Members of all parties would agree with the need for more streamlined regulation. Echoing the comments of the hon. Member for South Dorset (Jim Knight), someone who wishes to develop an offshore wind farm could require licences under the Food and Environment Protection Act 1985 and the Coast Protection Act 1949, consents under the Electricity Acts and the Transport and Works Act 1992,and—if the proposed development was in an important wildlife area—a consent from English Nature or the Countryside Council for Wales. Although I am all in favour of getting decisions right and developing in a careful manner, it is difficult to believe that those labyrinthine consenting regimes could not be tidied up somewhat to the benefit of all involved. That requires introducing wide-ranging legislation that considers marine issues in the round, not merely tacking a little bit on to a planning Bill.

I do not expect the Minister to provide an answer today, although it would be very nice if he did so. I often hopefully enter the ballot to secure a debate in Westminster Hall: that would give him ample opportunity to explain the Government's current policy and thinking. They may surprise me by saying that they have a piece of legislation up their sleeve that they intend to introduce in an idle moment between some of their more controversial measures. I am certain that that would be welcomed by hon. Members of all parties and that no early-day motion on the matter would be anything other than supportive. After all, it is good to have a bit of harmony in the Chamber from time to time.

I leaped into the Chamber as soon as my hon. Friend's name came up on the Annunciator, because I felt sure that he would mention what I think of as the Randall Marine Protection Bill—an admirable Bill that I was sorry to see fall in the Lords. I share his desire for a little harmony with those on the Government Benches, and such a Bill would be an excellent way in which to achieve that objective, because there is strong all-party support for it—even from the Liberal Democrats. I hope that it will reappear, to acclaim, during this Parliament.

I thank my hon. Friend. I always knew that he was psychic—or perhaps I am becoming an obsessive lobby group; it is one or the other.

Another reason why such a Bill would be a good idea is that many people in the Department put in a lot of hard work to help me to get my Bill to the stage that it reached. It would be admirable, not only for the marine environment, but for all those people, if the Government were to pick it up—perhaps even to make it a little better, given that I was constrained by the nature of a private Member's Bill. I hope that at some stage a Minister of the Crown will say that the omission of such a Bill from the Gracious Speech was just a mistake—that they did not mean it and that it was not mentioned only because Her Majesty did not have time. I shall then be quite happy for a short while.

As I shall be talking about fire safety, I draw the House's attention to my entry in the Register of Members' Interests in relation to my directorship of the Fire Protection Association.

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Uxbridge (Mr. Randall), who, as a representative of land-locked Uxbridge, has been a great advocate for the marine environment. Speaking as a representative of the beautiful coast of South Dorset, I welcome and support his work.

I welcome the Gracious Speech, which deals with the challenges that the Government need to address in the 21st century: extending opportunity to all our people to enable them to realise their full potential, providing security to our population so that they feel safe as they go about their legal business, and modernising our public services. I welcome the introduction of measures to widen opportunity, including the children's trust Bill and the abolition of up-front fees for students in higher education, and to tackle the important issue of security, including the domestic violence and victims Bill, the asylum Bill and the civil contingencies Bill. When I was a member of the Select Committee on Defence, we considered civil contingencies as part of our work on our report, "Defence and Security in the UK". I am glad that the issue has finally emerged in the Queen's Speech.

Given the theme of today's debate—local government, environment and transport—I want to focus on modernising our public services and infrastructure. The key issues for my constituents are the lack of affordable housing, especially in rural areas; rising council tax; transport problems in both rural and urban areas; and the protection of our environment, including the marine environment and the coast that is the only natural environment in England and Wales with world heritage status, to which I have already alluded.

Before I consider the welcome measures, I shall comment on what is absent from the Queen's Speech. When I was preparing my speech, I did not realise that I would follow someone who focused almost exclusively on what was not included. I am confident that the hunting issue will be resolved in this Parliament-we have had that reassurance. However, I am disappointed that a measure from the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to simplify the care of wild animals was not included. I know that a draft Bill will be presented and I had therefore hoped that the Gracious Speech would include it.

Five separate measures currently govern keeping a wild or dangerous animal. They cover keeping such animals as pets, in a pet shop, in a zoo, in a circus or in a laboratory. The same species of endangered animal must be kept in different ways according to the five measures. It is important to resolve that issue, which is of great public concern. Animal welfare matters make up a popular part of our postbags and e-mail inboxes.

By contrast, I welcome the fire and rescue services Bill. The fire community has worked with the Fire Services Act 1947 for more than 50 years and it is high time that it was amended. The tasks that the fire and rescue services perform have changed considerably in the past 50 years, for example, in the amount of road traffic accidents with which they have to deal. In my constituency, firefighters train for cliff-top rescues and do much community fire safety work, too. Funding for much of the rescue activity has had to be found from discretionary budgets in the fire and rescue services because it is not statutory. A statutory duty to perform those functions is welcome; it will make the budgeting considerably easier. I pay tribute to all those in the fire service who perform a great service for the people of this country despite working in such an antiquated legal framework.

I welcome the changes in the fire and rescue services Bill that will build a more flexible service. I also welcome the use of integrated risk management plans, which will ensure that we do not allocate resources to empty office buildings at night but consider how to protect people more than property. But I have a word of warning about automated fire alarms. I am anxious about authorities such as Oxfordshire and Somerset making moves not to respond to automated fire alarms because of the number of false alarms that they generate. That takes too much of a risk with human life.

We need to find new protocols and new ways in which to work with automated fire alarms, similar to those that the security industry developed and used for burglar alarms some years ago. It was possible to develop maintenance protocols then. In many cases, false alarms are generated by badly maintained automated fire alarm systems going off.

The hon. Gentleman will have heard my right hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Curry) talking about the Government's targets for deliberate deaths and attacks on property being put back, while in New Zealand, such deaths have been halved in the past four years. How does he feel about the targets being put back when people's lives will be at risk?

We could hold a long debate about targets and their usefulness. Clearly, they have an important function in the public services. However, we are going through a period of great change in the fire services. Introducing new flexible ways of working, new forms of risk management and a new emphasis on fire safety mean that setting targets would be arbitrary because of the extent of the change. We will have to reset the targets in the context or new working practices, but we must introduce the practices first.

I am a strong advocate of fire sprinklers—I am a patron of the National F re Sprinkler Network. We should target prisons, hospitals and especially schools—I shall consider houses in multiple occupation later—so that we can reduce the risk of death. No one has ever died in this country in a building with a maintained fire sprinkler system. We could bear down on the issue that the hon. Member for Cotswold (Mr. Clifton-Brown) rightly raised if we extended the use of fire sprinklers.

The hon. Gentleman is talking about positive actions in respect of how we can reduce fire-related deaths. The precise measures that he describes have been adopted in New Zealand and fire-related deaths have halved there in four years, yet the Government have put back a target to five years hence. That is unsatisfactory and people's lives are at risk.

The work that has gone on in New Zealand, Vancouver and parts of the United States, especially Scottsdale in Arizona, bears close scrutiny because it has led to good progress in cutting fire-related deaths. Other savings are being made in insurance loss, damage to the environment through fire and in a complete reconfiguration of t he way in which firefighters work by turning them into advocates and inspectors of fire safety. We can agree about that, but on the hon. Gentleman's substantive point, I refer him to my answer to his previous intervention.

There is anxiety about automated fire alarms in the national health service. Nurses' toasters were confiscated during the fire dispute because they caused so many alarms to go off. We can make some good progress on that, especially on poor design of systems in NHS hospitals, with smoke detectors in stupid places. They should be replaced with heat detectors; that could make a considerable difference.

I welcome regionalisation and the joint procurement proposals for fire services because of the civil contingency issue to which I referred earlier. Many civil contingency arrangements are and should be organised regionally. It therefore makes sense for fire services to be able to respond in that way. The benefits and savings of joint procurement were apparent with Airwave, the emergency services radio system. I should like them to be rolled out further in the fife service.

Reorganising the fire service does not generate huge correspondence for me as a Member of Parliament—unlike traffic management. In Weymouth, we are waiting for the Department for Transport to reach a decision on the local transport plan for Dorset. That includes the important issue of finance approval for the Weymouth relief road. I recently conducted a survey among households affected by the Weymouth relief road proposal and the great congestion, especially along the Dorchester road. Some 90 per cent. of those who responded viewed congestion as their No. 1 political issue-higher than council tax rates, the future of the NHS and all the matters that we would normally expect to feature at the top of their lists. For 40 per cent., the reason was the health effects of living on such a busy road; another 40 per cent. were worried about the effects on the area's economic and business prospects.

In Weymouth, there is a united view that we need our relief road. I take the opportunity to encourage Transport Ministers to listen to local people in South Dorset rather than groups such as the Campaign to Protect Rural England, which is campaigning against the road and does not speak for local people on the issue. The environment is crucial to us in Weymouth; we have one of the most protected environments in the country. We depend on tourism and people who want to enjoy that environment. Local people are fully aware both of the need to protect it and to get visitors to and from the beach and the coast. I want the Department for Transport to hear that voice loud and clear.

I therefore welcome the traffic management Bill, which aims to tackle congestion with new powers for local authorities to deal with utilities. The Dorchester road has all the utilities running down the middle. It is almost the only way in and out of Weymouth and every time someone wants to carry out work on our sewers, as Wessex Water did last year, we undergo months of hideous disruption, with a journey up the road taking half an hour. That is intolerable for my constituents.

The Gracious Speech also covered finishing work on the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill. That excellent legislation looks to cut by a third the time taken for major infrastructure projects to go through the planning system. Again, that would be welcome for my constituents in Weymouth. The relief road project has already cost the council tax payers of Dorset £5 million over the past 30 years while we have been trying to achieve it.

That £5 million could have been far better spent elsewhere as we have been trying to line up simultaneously the three items that we need to get our road: the finance, the planning permission and the compulsory purchase orders. At any given time, we may have had one or even two of those, but never three simultaneously. For 30 years, we have thrown all that money down the drain. I have made my appeal for the finance and the local transport plan settlement, so I now urge the House to support the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill, which could allow the planning and the compulsory purchase order public inquiries to be heard simultaneously as part of a single process, thus speeding up the way those issues go through the system. Crucially, the Bill would also improve community involvement, which I hope would thereby ensure that the community voice that I talked about earlier is not drowned out by organised lobbies such as the CPRE and Transport 2000 from outside the area.

Just as important in tackling congestion is school transport, which is why I am pleased to see a school transport draft Bill in the Gracious Speech. I have a constituent who lives in the village of Langton Matravers in the rural area of my constituency and who came to see me because he lives just over the 2-mile limit for free school transport That means that his seven-year-old daughter has to walk down the unlit country road to the middle school in Swanage. He was on working families tax credit, but just failed on the income threshold to get free school transport, so he has to walk his daughter to and from school down that unlit country road, even on nights such as tonight, through the dark and in an unsafe environment for her.

In that context, I was appalled by the behaviour of the Conservatives on Purbeck district council and Dorset county council when they removed the subsidy for our bus service after 6 o'clock for all the people who live in my area of the Purbecks. I plead with the Tories on the Front Bench tonight to support the draft school transport Bill and to work with their colleagues in local government in Dorset to develop imaginative new schemes so that we can apply to pilot some of the opportunities created by the Bill, tackle the congestion created by the school run and improve access to facilities and services in rural areas such as mine.

I have gone to the local education authority with what I think is an imaginative idea in relation to the National Trust and its ownership of Studland beach, which is in the top 10 most visited attractions owned by the National Trust. Huge traffic movements are generated in the summer, but it would be perfectly possible for it to reuse a school bus fleet to cut the cost to the public purse. We need to achieve the transfer from private cars to public transport. In that, I agree with the CPRE and Transport 2000, which I was a little harsh on earlier.

On environmental protection, I must also welcome the energy Bill. We heard my hon. Friend the Member for Morley and Rothwell (Mr. Challen) give his strong support to the Bill. I represent the area that contains the only de-licensed nuclear site in this country-at Winfrith—and it achieved its de-licensed certification from the nuclear inspections authority a year or so ago. That shows the House that it is possible to de-license nuclear sites and liberate the land, giving it back to the natural environment. The energy Bill will facilitate that process, and I hope that it will also clear up some of the issues relating to wind power. In an intervention on the hon. Member for Uxbridge, I mentioned the problems in clarifying who will give planning permission, as well as when and how, in respect of a wind farm proposal for Portland bill.

I also want to comment on the housing Bill. The lack of affordable housing is the biggest single issue affecting the rural part of my constituency.

I thought that congestion was the top priority.

Order.

Congestion is certainly the biggest issue for my constituents in Weymouth, but, if hon. Members on the Conservative Front Bench were listening carefully, they would have heard me say that the biggest single issue facing my constituents in the rural part of my constituency is the lack of affordable housing.

A Joseph Rowntree Foundation report published in May last year showed that Purbeck had the biggest affordable housing problem outside London and the area was the fifth worst of any authority in the country in terms of the gap between average wages—those in Dorset are the same as those in County Durham—and average house prices, which are rising all the time. That is in part due to the effect of the right to buy council homes, which was introduced by the last Conservative Government. I dread to think what would be the effect on that rural part of my constituency of a right to buy for housing association tenants, which would drain the area of all the remaining affordable houses to rent, so I welcome the modernisation of the right to buy proposed in the housing Bill to protect the availability of affordable housing.

The other welcome part of that measure returns me to fire safety. Houses in multiple occupation can present a huge risk and if you were to talk to Members from the varying seaside constituencies represented in the House, Mr. Deputy Speaker, you would find that there is a much higher prevalence of fires and fatalities in HMOs in seaside towns, which have many such houses. I talked earlier about the potential of sprinklers, but we cannot tackle the problem of HMOs until we introduce a licensing and registration system for them. I welcome the measure that will make that possible.

I very much welcome the Gracious Speech. I was elected to alleviate the problems in my constituency of South Dorset. At present, they are first and foremost the lack of affordable housing, traffic congestion and access to public transport. I am confident that the Queen's Speech will considerably help to address those concerns.

It is a pleasure, as always, to follow the hon. Member for South Dorset (Jim Knight). If he will forgive me, I shall call him my hon. Friend, because that is what he is. I also represent a seaside constituency. Although he represents a beautiful area, it is not quite so beautiful as the one that represent. He spoke with sincerity and knowledge, and on this occasion I agree with much that he said, although I am quite surprised to say that.

The hon. Gentleman did not say, however, that the Government's programme fails to tackle the issue of consulting the people on their proposed constitutional changes. I am surprised at that, because his constituents in South Dorset are keen to be consulted on the matter as they fundamentally disagree with what the Government intend to do. The Government claim, entirely disingenuously, that the draft European Union constitution is simply a tidying-up exercise. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Let me examine just one aspect of the effects of this invasive EU proposal. The criminal justice system has developed in Britain over many centuries; for instance, our freedoms were introduced by Henry II and they provided the basis for common law. The barons, through the Magna Carta sealed at Runnymede, ensured that King John and all future monarchs developed and respected fundamental protections for citizens. Those protections are, to some extent, enjoyed today. The William and Mary Bill of Rights set out rights for citizens and the responsibilities of Parliament and the monarchy—in short, it defined the state and its relationship with citizens.

The reforming Parliaments between the two great fires that punctuate the history of this Palace led the world in the development of justice and freedom, human rights, good governance and sound civil society. We should be proud of our history and we should teach it, although we do not. Those Parliaments developed and improved our laws, the protection of our citizens and the relationship between citizens and the state as well as that between citizens themselves. That is defined nowhere more than in our system of criminal law, which the Government propose to cast aside without so much as a by your leave.

Indeed, although it may not be politically correct to say so, our ancient system of laws and rights formed the moral bedrock from which Britain sprang to rescue Europe from absolute tyranny in two world wars, when Germany marched and France collapsed. Are we now to stand by, say nothing and let the Prime Minister hand over control of these very laws and values to those European states?

Chapter IV, section IV of the draft EU constitution states:

"Judicial co-operation in criminal matters in the Union shall include the approximation of the laws and regulations of Member States…A European framework may establish minimum rules of evidence, individual rights in criminal procedures, the rights of victims and witnesses, and any other specific aspects of criminal procedure that the Council identifies."

That last, catch-all phrase is breathtaking in its potential invasiveness. It would allow the unelected and unaccountable Council to override our Parliament on any significant matter of criminal law, and without the consent of the people or of t his Parliament.

The draft states that the Council can at any time add to the list of areas that could be brought under its control without the means for Britain to resist that, whatever the British peoples views, needs or interests. Thus, even the definition of criminal offences and sanctions would be removed from our sovereign control. The draft's impact on criminal justice is just one small area of influence of the proposed EU constitution.

The Prime Minister would be stretching his now severely diminished credibility if he continued to stand by the claim that the proposal is just a "tidying-up exercise." The great British public have seen through the Prime Minister's moribund policy and will no longer accept his double-talk on Europe. The European framework law is ill-defined in the extreme; I suspect that that is no accident. However, it is clear that it would change our laws and would remove our sovereign control over such matters; these are not simply small changes at the margins or in any sense minimal changes. It would impose so-called minimum rules that we would have to accept and abide by, like them or not, suitable for Britain or not. These new laws would he entirely unavoidable and would force important and fundamental changes on our criminal law, possibly very much against the wishes and interests of the British people.

In effect, the proposal would remove our sovereignty, nothing less. Moreover, it does not take an expert to see that this is an instrument designed for that very purpose. It is designed to transfer our sovereignty on criminal justice and much else from our Parliament to expensive, corrupt, wasteful and out-of-control Brussels bureaucrats. It would do much more than allow the entirely undemocratic and unaccountable bureaucrats to remove our sovereignty.[interruption.] The Under-Secretary of State for Transport, the hon. Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Mr Jamieson) laughs. Has he consulted his constituents about this matter? I have certainly consulted mine.

The proposal would force a new European central legislative body to develop new European laws to be enacted upon us; by definition, undermining our sovereignty. Control of criminal law is one of the key defining fundamentals of any nation state. Without it, there can be no nation state and no sovereignty. It becomes clear that the reason for the clause in the proposed EU constitution—like many of the others in the so-called tidying-up draw—is to create a new state of Europe and to destroy our current sovereign state, Britain.

That legislative move is not necessarily advocated for the purposes of efficiency; nor has the British public sought the move; nor would it necessarily improve the way in which the EU countries work together in fighting crime, or in any other area. It is simply yet another federalising tool. The Prime Minister knows that, and seeks to prevent the British people from seeing it until it is too late. The same analysis applies to the draft EU constitution's impact on areas such as foreign policy, the economy, defence, the militarisation of Europe, challenging NATO and, now, control of the asylum procedures.

It is not simply a tidying-up exercise. It has fundamental consequences for our nation state and for the people of Britain. Even if it were a good thing, which it most certainly is not, the proposal would deepen the democratic deficit for our people. It should not be for those who govern to change unilaterally and fundamentally the way the people are governed. That is the purpose of the constitution. It is the fundamental right of the people themselves to decide democratically their own constitutional arrangements. For the Prime Minister to seek to take the decision without allowing a referendum to hear the voice of the people and in direct defiance of the firmly expressed views of the people on Europe is arrogance and folly of historic dimensions. He will be remembered for that.

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who I suppose I should call my hon. Friend. Did he feel the same about Margaret Thatcher when she signed up to the Single European Act, or about John Major when he agreed to the Maastricht treaty, both of which were fundamental in respect of giving away sovereignty to Europe? Did he vote for or against those proposals?

That is a valid point, which I am happy to answer. Conservative Governments of the past made mistakes and went too far on Europe. I regret that, but we must look forward and prepare for the future. I want to retain British sovereignty. The constituents of the hon. Gentleman want to retain British sovereignty. If he does not join them, I suspect, sadly, that he will not be my hon. Friend in this place after the next election.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way'?

I shall make progress, as the hon. Gentleman has not been in the Chamber for long.

If the Prime Minister will not withdraw from the proposals or hold a referendum, he will be seen for what he is; outrageously arrogant and breathtakingly ambitious for himself at Britain's expense. In short, this is the last straw for a failed Government.

I am petitioning my constituents and calling for the Government to listen to the people. I have been out in my constituency on five occasions so far, campaigning for a referendum on behalf of my constituents. I am seeking to force the Government to hold a referendum on the draft EU constitution. I have been swamped by people of all political persuasions and of none who want to help and support me, and I offer them my grateful thanks. By their actions, they show that they care about Britain as I do. I am honoured to represent the good people of Castle Point.

I wish to refer to the housing Bill. The sellers' pack policy will do little to address the real problems of buying and selling houses in England. The Government's policy amounts to a vast increase in state control over yet another area, with more interference in people's lives, more compulsion and more regulation. It is another new law to create, potentially, a new class of lawbreaker among decent people in this country.

The additional cost to consumers of the pack is estimated to be around £322 million per year. That is the additional cost, over and above the current costs for buying and selling houses each year. There is some controversy over this figure, and I ask the Government to clarify it. I am told that 1.5 million houses are sold each year and that the extra cost could be as high as £650 per house sale, which could bring the amount of additional money levied to well above £322 million. I ask the Government to confirm the figure, either tonight or in writing as soon as possible. People need to know the figure before the Bill makes progress in the House.

The proposal for a home condition report is a key problem and should be withdrawn. We will no doubt debate the details in due course, but, in any event, 72 per cent. of failed house sales are as a result of the decisions of purchasers, not sellers. However, the Government are seeking to punish and create sanctions for the sellers and to push costs on to them, thereby inhibiting the operation of the housing market. The Government have simply got this one wrong, and I agree with the Select Committee that the policy is half-baked.

While on housing, I want to ask the Minister a question that, again, he might answer in summing up or by writing to me. Currently, there are 12 contracts with the public sector and eight with the private sector to provide housing for asylum seekers in this country; in general, they expire in 2005. Can the Government explain their position on the renewal of those contracts? Will the balance between public and private sector be retained, or is there likely to be a swing towards local councils acting as service providers? It would be most helpful if the relevant Minister could give me a steer on this issue.

The fire services Bill is based on good intentions and I hope to be able to support it during its passage, but I shall watch very carefully to ensure that my much-needed fire stations in Hadleigh and on Canvey Island are not threatened in any way, because I simply do not trust this Government.

There are major problems in Britain today, and this Government have clearly lost their way. Nothing signals that fact better than this Gracious Speech. Violent crime is rising and is now at its highest ever level. People feel less safe, particularly on the streets. Recorded crime is up by 800,000 per year. Transport is also much worse. For example, there is increasing serious congestion in my constituency on the A13, and on the A130 at Saddler's Farm and Waterside Farm, and through the centre of Hadleigh. Yet the Government are forcing on my constituency thousands more houses, without giving any indication as to how the infrastructure can be developed and improved.

The Government have announced a rail travel target: to increase the number of passengers by 50 per cent. The London to Tilbury and Southend line, which serves my constituency, is already operating well over capacity, yet the Government refuse to hear my plea to increase its capacity by providing a rail terminus on Canvey Island—probably at Waterside Farm—linking up with Pitsea, so that we can achieve their target. Unless the Government are prepared to invest in rail, we will not see the improvements that our commuters deserve. They certainly do deserve such improvements: we have the longest commuting times in the whole of Europe, which is simply not acceptable.

Our hospitals are struggling. There are 1 million people on the waiting list, which is simply not acceptable. Change is happening too slowly, and bureaucracy is growing too quickly. The Government have lost their way in that regard, as well. Moreover, our pensions are in crisis, yet only the Conservatives are offering the right answers. Illegal immigration is also in crisis. The Government have no idea how many illegal immigrants are currently residing in this country, or how many are entering this country each month. That is simply not good enough.

Taxes, including council taxes, are growing too fast, yet still our borrowing increases. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development predicts that our borrowing level will reach 3.2 per cent. of gross domestic product, putting us in contravention of the EU borrowing rules, which set a limit of 3 per cent. Interest rates will therefore continue to creep up in the short term. This Government are certainly failing badly. In that context, the Government's programme is disappointing, although it will lead to exciting times in this Chamber in the coming months; I look forward to them.

It is true that the Gracious Speech contains a number of Bills that have some merit. In fact, some are very good, and I shall support them, but the Government have missed a golden opportunity to make real progress where it is needed. Instead, they are pursuing Bills that will do real damage to communities such as mine in Castle Point. I am thinking, for example, of further forced overdevelopment. The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister is seeking to force the building of thousands more houses in my constituency, with, as I have said, no suggestion as to how the infrastructure to support that overdevelopment will be provided. I am also thinking of the access to higher education Bill and top-up fees—or the student tax, as it will become known. I hope that this House will defeat that.

Has my hon. Friend taken account of the proposed changes in the planning Bill? As a result, instead of Essex county council's distributing the housing numbers, they will be decided by the East of England Development Agency, which is based in Cambridge. His constituency and his local planning authority will have no option but to adopt those housing numbers.

I am indeed well aware of that aspect of the Government's centralisation programme, which takes decisions away from local, democratically elected people. I greatly regret that development, as do my constituents, which is why they will seek to throw out this Government at the next election.

As I was saying, some of the Bills are totally unacceptable, including the half-baked Bill on further reform of the House of Lords, which seeks to make it a wholly appointed House. Curiously but typically, the Government did say that legislation on top-up fees and on House of Lords reform to create an appointed House would be excluded from their programme during this Parliament. That was stated clearly in Labour's manifesto, yet such Bills are being introduced, thereby illustrating how little concern the Government have for open and honest public service. If this programme is the best that the Government can do, I fear for their future.

Like other Members, I believe that there is much to welcome in the Queen's Speech, but I certainly want some reassurance on the school transport Bill, which is a cause of concern to many. In all my time as an MP, not a single constituent has raised with me—at my surgeries, via e-mail or in written correspondence—the issue of transport conditions for schoolchildren. No one has said, "Something is wrong—we need to make major changes." By and large, most people are happy, and they certainly do not want to pay for school transport.

The Department for Education and Skills needs to talk to the Department for Transport, and to establish a joined-up approach. A DES press release stated that the legislation is

"central to the Government's wider aim to encourage safe and sustainable travel to school".

In my view, it will achieve nothing of the kind. We transport more than 700,000 children to schools across the UK—in urban, suburban and rural settings—and the system works perfectly well in most locations. If we start charging, we will put children at risk—it is as simple as that.

The Education Act 1944 guaranteed free transport to children living three miles from school, and to children aged under eight living two miles from school. That legislation has stood the test of time and worked perfectly well. The Bill on school transport will allow education authorities to opt out of their duties under the 1944 Act. Pilot schemes will be established, and it is said that such schemes will

"charge those who can afford to pay".

That would be a major blunder, but trying to organise and manage a system that charges children would also be an administrative nightmare. Put simply, such a charge will have to be based on income of some sort. It cannot be based on each child; instead, there will have to be some complex means of management. The system cannot work, because pay and salary—which can include performance pay, productivity pay, overtime, sickness pay and injury pay—are never constant. Such a system will deflect schools from focusing on teaching pupils.

It has been said that pupils who receive free school meals may also be given free school transport, but they do not need to be given such transport because they already get it. There is no need to give them something that they already have. We need to be very careful about what we suggest in this legislation.

What do teachers think of the Bill? I offer two comments.

As Doug McAvoy, the general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said:

"Children have to get to school. They must not be dependent on their parents' income to do so."

David Hart, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers said that charges would act as "a disincentive" to children going to school. As he suggests, the obvious outcome would be increased truancy in some areas.

Any move to end free travel will be met with the fierce opposition of not just parents but of politicians, too. Charging per child would be a real problem for a family with three or four children—as opposed to one child—attending school, so we must have clarification on that matter. Two families with massive disparities in their earnings would have to pay the same amount for their children to be taken to school, which is unacceptable to most people.

Arguments about damage to the environment and increased congestion would also become relevant if we moved away from the 1944 Act and the system that we enjoy today. No one could disagree with the fact that there is a problem today because many parents drive their children to the school gate. We see and hear of it day and daily. However, the Bill will not make a single bit of difference. Parents who already drive their children to school will continue to do so—with or without charging. If anything, the change will increase, not decrease, the numbers of cars on already badly congested roads throughout the UK. We should be trying to decrease, not increase, the number of car journeys to school. Every analysis, survey and investigation points to that goal, which should be the objective of any Bill. We must try to reduce congestion and the number of school journeys by parents in urban, suburban and rural settings. We should try to sustain and increase the number of buses in use to take children to school. The statistics prove that it is a safe way of transporting children to school: it improves the environment, and reduces congestion.

Other countries—and pot just in Europe—show the way forward. In the US and Canada, yellow buses deliver more than 1 million pupils per day to schools safely. I should like to hear some reassurance that we will not introduce charging and that the 1944 Act will be the basis of any improvement in the transport of children to school. I believe that that is the only way to proceed and I look forward to hearing some reassurance on that.

I apologise to the House for not being present earlier to hear the speeches. I had an important constituency engagement that I had to attend, and I arrived here only a little earlier this afternoon.

I want to participate in today's debate. Much of the publicity about the Queen's Speech has focused on what might prove to be the most contentious issues either here or in the other place. As a result, many of the best measures in the Queen's Speech have not received the attention that they deserve, and I hope to comment on some of them in my speech.

I should like to deal first with the housing Bill, which several hon. Members have mentioned this afternoon. It proposes several measures to deal with some of the most important problems facing housing markets throughout the country. I pay tribute to the Government, because we currently have the lowest inflation for about 30 years, with interest rates at historically low levels. The 75 per cent. of people who live in owner-occupied housing have benefited from those low mortgage interest rates, and more people have been able to become owner-occupiers than would otherwise be expected.

I also pay tribute to the Government for the sustainable communities plan, which was outlined earlier this year and will provide £2 billion worth of investment during the four years of the plan. It will make significant resources available in four different areas—mainly in London and the south-east—and will significantly increase the supply of housing over the next five to 10 years.

I also want to pay tribute to the Government for establishing a decent standard of homes over 10 years. When the Government took office in 1997 they faced a bill of about £19 billion because of the state of disrepair in the social housing sector—mainly a consequence of the massive underinvestment of the previous Government. The present Government have risen to the challenge of providing decent homes by 2010, which I strongly welcome.

I pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman for his work on the all-party housing and planning group. However, he will know from that work that the decent homes standard is one thing, but the fact that we have more homeless people in this country than ever before is quite another. Is not that a shocking indictment of a Labour Government?

That would sit much easier with the hon. Gentleman's argument if he could point to any positive contribution to solving the housing crisis that the Conservatives made during their 18 years in government. The reality is that, when I look at homelessness—[Interruption.]

Order.

May I continue, Mr. Deputy Speaker?

I was trying to make it easier for the hon. Gentleman to continue when a certain disturbance was taking place.

Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. You seemed to be the only one who was trying to make it easier for me.

It is a bit rich of Conservative Members to complain about the difficulties in the housing market when they did so much to cause them. I have already outlined some of the measures that the Government are adopting to help to sort out the difficulties and I could mention others such as the activities of the homelessness directorate, which is dealing with problems in bed-and breakfast accommodation and the worst forms of temporary accommodation. However, I shall not go into detail because I want to speak about the housing Bill.

As a Labour Member, I am pleased that the Bill will implement two manifesto commitments of the last two elections. The issues that we highlighted in 1997 and 2001 still pertain and need to be dealt with. The main problems relate to the private rented sector. We have talked about the work done in the social housing sector and I have already mentioned the advantages that the Government have conferred on the owner-occupied sector, but we all recognise that some of the worst housing conditions exist in the private rented sector, and I believe that the Bill will help to address some of them.

All the evidence suggests that houses in multiple occupation are the most difficult part of the private rented sector to deal with, so I greatly welcome the statutory licensing scheme that the Bill will introduce. I make a plea to the Government to ensure that the definition of houses in multiple occupation is wide enough to include the very worst of the conditions in respect of safety standards, space and the general quality of accommodation available in the sector. The scheme can make a significant difference and I hope that the Government will ensure that it is comprehensive enough to impact on the worst housing in that sector of the housing market.

There is much evidence to suggest that a selective licensing scheme is necessary in some areas. Several rogue landlords have extorted the highest possible housing benefit rents for extremely low-quality accommodation. In London, private rents are high, but in areas such as Manchester and other northern cities the highest rents are being charged for poor-quality accommodation because landlords know that housing benefit will cover them. In such circumstances, we must act to protect the public purse and a selective licensing scheme would achieve that, especially in areas of low demand. However, the system should be sufficiently flexible that any local authority can deliver accommodation of a reasonable quality, at value for money, to local residents.

Like the Government, I support the principle of the right to buy. I have been an owner-occupier for some time. All the surveys tell us that a large number of people would like to be owner-occupiers, so there is no reason why we should not try to assist them. The Government are undertaking a series of initiatives that will help them.

In recent years, unfortunately, the right to buy has been subject to significant abuse throughout the country, but mainly in the London area. People are exercising the right to buy not so that they can remain in the accommodation but so that they can sell it on to someone who rents it back to the local authority at a greatly increased rent. We need to protect the right-to-buy principle against such abuse. It is meant to allow tenants to become owner-occupiers if they so choose, and we want to maintain it.

The Government have already highlighted the lack of affordable accommodation in some parts of the country. Interestingly, not long after the Conservatives introduced the right to buy, they said that they would suspend it in some rural communities to safeguard affordable housing in villages. The same argument should apply even more strongly in parts of the south-east and especially in the capital. In 2002, more than 11,000 affordable dwellings were sold in Greater London, yet we managed to build only half that number. The supply of affordable accommodation is reducing and demand is increasing exponentially, so it is not surprising that the hon. Member for Cotswold (Mr. Clifton-Brown) draws homelessness to our attention; addressing the right to buy is one way of dealing with that problem. I shall not go into the Opposition's response to the issue, except to point out to the hon. Gentleman that simple arithmetic should tell him that it will not work.

The significance of the provisions to ensure tenancy succession for same-sex couples, which are not a major part of the Bill, is that they express an important principle for all our public services. Rights for same-sex couples will he introduced by another Bill. It is appropriate that such rights should apply in housing, so I strongly welcome those provisions and hope that they will form part of the final Bill.

I welcome the Bill. It addresses some of the problems, although several remain, especially in relation to the private rented sector. We need to make improvements to the sector so that it finally loses the Rachmanist image of the past. The private sector can make a contribution to the provision of value-for-money, affordable accommodation—but only if it loses its present image. We could take several steps to assist in that process, so that the private rented sector becomes a more useful tool in the provision of good-quality, decent accommodation for all our people.

The Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill makes a major contribution, too. I hope that there is cross-party agreement that over the past 10 to 20 years our planning system has been characterised by massive delays. Who does not recall the delays in planning applications that go on for month after month after month; the bureaucracy that goes back and forth, with plans here, there and everywhere; and, sad to relate, the nimbyism that exists all over the country? People are happy if the plans apply to an area down the road or somewhere else, but they do not want them carried out in their back garden—in their community. As a result, we have been unable to address the serious problems that confront this country.

The planning problems are due in part to staff shortages. We are all aware that authorities are unable to recruit enough trained planning officers to operate the system effectively. I welcome the resources that the Government have made available to try to speed up the system in that regard, but we shall probably need to do more in the future.

Many local authorities are still trying to grapple with a development plan process that began 10 or 12 years ago, or even longer. Some local authorities are still struggling with the consultation procedures on urban development years after the plans were introduced. We do not have an outline framework on which to base local planning decisions. That cannot be the right way to address the significant issues that we face.

The planning system has been a contributory factor in the lack of supply both of adequate private housing and of affordable social housing. I hope that the review of housing supply commissioned by the Chancellor will be able to detail where things have gone badly wrong. The net result of the delays introduced by the planning system is that house price inflation is even higher than it should have been and that the level of homelessness, to which the Opposition refer is even greater than it would have been if we had been able to set up an effective planning system.

It was always a truism that the Englishman's home was his castle. We take a much greater interest in housing than our European colleagues. We worry about housing while the French worry about other things, yet the number of houses per head of population in the United Kingdom is lower than in France and Germany. In my view, the planning system has been a contributory factor. The Bill made partial progress in the last Session, but it will now go through It is necessary because it will introduce a faster, fairer and, I hope, more flexible planning system that will address some of the problems.

Among the critically important things that the measure will introduce are local development documents, which will enable us to move away from lengthy consultation periods over precise urban or other development plans. It is vital that the process is shorter and that it is regularly updated to keep up with the times. I know of local authorities that had only just completed the first consultation on such plans and had to begin a second consultation immediately because the process was already out of date. The proposals are surely a sensible way forward.

Community involvement is essential. We hear accusations from all quarters that communities will be swept out of the process, but they will be at its centre. They need to be involved in development plans and their voice must be heard in major planning applications, but we must also realise that other considerations are involved in ensuring that we take the right decisions.

The system of planning obligations and section 106 agreements has been in much need of reform for some time. The Government tried to introduce reforms in the past, but they did not meet with approval. I hope that the more flexible system proposed in the Bill will be accepted, because the existing system has major problems. Many local authorities lack the expertise necessary to draw up a proper agreement, as do some applicants, although that is not a problem for major developers, such as major retailers and others, which use the planning system regularly. The lack of expertise leads to delays and failure to agree. Projects are put on hold for a year or two years and land is not developed as a result of delay and bureaucratic failure. Reform of the process is critical if we ar: to provide a steady supply of land for development, and we need tried and tested mechanisms. The proposed changes, which will introduce some certainty into the system, will allow a calculation to be made instead of a negotiated process, and that will make the system more secure and faster. We will find out over time whether the changes make the system fairer.

The proposed traffic management Bill will give local authorities new powers to control traffic—

indicated assent.

I note my hon. Friend's agreement. The Bill will give local authorities better controls over street works and thus minimise disruption. We have certainly experienced difficulties in my north London constituency, and I am sure that every hon. Member will have experienced disruption, either as a driver or through complaints from constituents. For example, a busy street in my constituency, which is used morning and night as a commuter run, was dug up by one of the utilities. I do not doubt the purpose for which the street was dug up, but the utility discovered that it did not have the part necessary to resolve the problem. So did it close up the hole and come back later? No. It left the hole in the middle of the road, not just for a week or a month, but for six months. During that time the street could carry only one line of traffic, instead of two. Eventually, so many complaints were made that the local authority contacted the utility to find out what was happening. As a result of a full and frank discussion, the utility filled in the hole without completing the work. Two months later, it came back, dug up the road and did the necessary work over three weeks, which concluded the matter. It took advantage of the public, which cannot be allowed to continue. If the powers that the Government will give local authorities mean anything, we may win the next general election on that issue alone. The level of frustration felt by London drivers is so great that this measure will be shouted from the rooftops, certainly in my constituency.

I hope that the Bill will also recognise the need for the public to be given information about street works. The most common complaint from members of the public is that they do not know why a street has been dug up, and local authorities should play a role in informing the public, especially in cases of significant disruption. Utilities should justify delays to the public. The warning of public works is usually a little card on a lamppost. if one happens to be in that particular street at the right time, one might find out about the works. The Government need to think seriously about how to inform the public about public works. That might involve local newspapers or other avenues, but some information should be provided two or three weeks in advance if street works will cause significant disruption.

I know that the pensions Bill is outside the remit of today's discussion, but I have some important constituency points to make on the issue. A significant number of employees of a major company lived in my constituency, although the headquarters was not located there. Some years ago the company was subject to two failures of management that led to its liquidation and left its pensioners in some difficulty. The pension fund lent a subsidiary of the company a significant sum of money several months before it went into liquidation. The subsidiary also went into liquidation and the pension fund lost that sum. The pension fund also lent money to someone who swindled the company. The person was caught and received a prison sentence, but the pension fund lost a further significant amount. Those events occurred at around the same time as the Daily Mirror fiasco, and pensioners asked why no legal safeguard existed to ensure that their pensions were protected.

As a result of that experience, I commend two aspects of the pensions Bill to the House. The first is the pension protection fund, which is urgently needed and which would have addressed part of the problem faced by my constituents. The significant sums that were lost would have been replenished by the protection fund, which would have secured my constituents' pensions. I hope that the Bill will ensure that that happens in future.

Does my hon. Friend agree that in addition to that welcome measure we need transitional arrangements to ensure that those who are being robbed of the money that they have put into pension schemes—often over 35 or 40 years—have some entitlement to a proper pension?

I hear what my hon. Friend says, and I have listened carefully to Ministers on the subject. Retrospective legislation would suck the Government into every pension fiasco that has occurred in recent years, so we must be circumspect. My hon. Friend the Member for Burnley (Mr. Pike) and I have both made significant representations on that issue, including holding Adjournment debates, to no avail. I would like to see some support for my constituents, but I recognise the difficulties that the Government face.

The second problem that I hope that the pensions Bill will address is the ranking of those who should receive pensions. Currently, the fact that people who are still in employment have made significant, long-term contributions to their pension schemes is not recognised appropriately in the ranking that they are given in respect of the pension that they receive when the company and therefore the pension fund have closed. That must be changed. We need to recognise the significant contributions made by members of those schemes, and I hope that that will be done in the pensions Bill.

Lots of measures in the Queen's Speech—I have chosen four of them—will do excellent work in responding to the concerns and problems faced by my constituents and by those of other hon. Members, and I commend them to the House.

It is a great pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton (Mr. Love), but I must apologise to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and to the House for the fact that I have not been present throughout the debate. First, I have a heavy cold and was not sure that I would be able to speak. Secondly, so many hon. Members seemed to be waiting to speak when I was present earlier that I thought it would be difficult to take part, so I attended a Select Committee sitting only to return to find that the large queue had dissolved. I am not sure how that happened, but I mean no discourtesy to the House for not having been present for the full two speeches prior to speaking.

I want to raise an issue that relates to local government but goes rather wider—the kind of government that we are trying to establish in the current parliamentary Session—in the light of the criticism that the Queen's Speech is hotch-potch of disconnected ideas that have no common theme. That criticism has been echoed by those—for example, John Humphrys in Sunday newspapers yesterday—who say that it does not matter if there is no common theme because the only objective of government is to manage and it does not matter at all whether those involved have any overriding idea about what lies behind their management philosophy.

The Queen's Speech would have been stronger if there had been an explicit underlying philosophy, and the Government would be stronger if they had an explicit philosophy underlying what they do. If they had such a philosophy, we might not be subject to the criticism made by an ex-Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Mr. Milburn), who said that the Government are like a Jackson Pollock painting—there are many bright patches, but there is no overall theme.

There is and should be an overall theme, and that theme ought to arise by reflecting on and asking how we can address the deficiencies of the governmental process that we have inherited, and how we can try to make it better not just for our generation but for succeeding generations. The theme that I recommend to the Government is a general one of freedom for all, because in one piece of legislation after another we as a Government have sought to liberate people from the yoke that so many generations of people in this country have suffered, and we have tried to so in a way that combines the power that people working together have for liberation, for improving quality of life and for realising people's capacity for liberty.

I recommend that general theme, but I ask whether we are matching up to those obligations, because there are two very different versions of what a Government concerned with freedom might do. Some people regard freedom almost entirely as the materialist freedom to spend their money how they like. That materialist freedom is but a very small portion indeed of what a Government should be about. We as Members of Parliament have an obligation to look much wider than that in fashioning those social systems that can liberate, as well as ensuring that the Government do not encroach where they should not do so. We are the custodians of that responsibility.

Two hundred years ago, the population of the city of Bath was about 25,000 to 30,000. The number of people who represented Bath in the Chamber was one, but the number of people who voted for that person to be their representative here was 31. That person could ensure, by giving his electorate a decent dinner in Dining Room A, without filling it, that he had wined and dined all those who could secure his continued occupancy of one of these seats, and the job as a Member of Parliament was correspondingly hugely different from that which we have today.

The Chamber is sparsely attended, but each hon. Member represents, including children, 100,000 or more people. Sparsely attended it may be now, but we who are present represent more than 1 million citizens of our country. Whether we do that job well or whether we do it ill, the quality of representation available to people today is infinitely different from what it was 200 years ago. Our capacity to respond to our constituents, to understand their needs, to argue their cases and to allow their concerns to be incorporated into the governmental process and into the system of laws far surpasses that of any previous generation. We have a choice, and it is partly about whether we ourselves are as free as we ought to be in advocating their causes and expressing their concerns. I am not convinced that we have got it by any means right.

I am, among other things, a member of the Procedure Committee, which has recently published a report on how the House conducts some of its affairs. One of the things that we do in conducting our affairs is to leave a great deal of power in the hands of the Whips. The last time we considered the local government settlement, the Whips decided that there would be only three and a half hours' debate in the Chamber.

The result was that most of our constituents' and citizens' concerns that Members wished to portray to the House were suppressed. We had arrived already at the absurd situation of having only one person representing 100,000 people—a hard enough job if one wishes to do it properly—and then only a mere handful of them expressed their concerns before we arrived at a conclusion of our debates about what the settlement for local government was to be. Those settlements bear hard on our constituents.

In a huge variety of ways, the quality of people's lives is very strongly influenced by what we can or cannot do with local government. That means, however, that we must have systems whereby our powers of representation in this place are devolved down through the system in a satisfactory way, so that citizens are empowered to change the circumstances governing their lives. In my area, we have recognised some of those factors. Those in the town of Hemel Hempstead look with a certain amount of envy at those in the villages around who have parish councils, because parish councils are the most basic level of representation for citizens, give people a direct involvement in their environment and quality of life and play an important role in the structure of our communities. If we go into the town, however, we find no such structure available.

The town of Hemel Hempstead has tried to establish what are called neighbourhood councils, whereby a particular area of the town might have something like the same level of involvement in the fashioning of its circumstances of life as those in the parishes. Those neighbourhood councils however, do not function, because the borough council responsible for their funding decides that it cannot afford to be really responsive to their expressions of desire for change, and unlike the parish councils, they do not have the capacity to levy a small, modest precept to address some of the most serious concerns of their communities. Therefore, what is decided centrally means that people living in a neighbourhood do not have the freedom and the power to change their life circumstances for the better in ways that they believe that they could were they thus empowered.

To try to bring the hon. Gentleman back to the Queen's Speech, he has been articulating precisely what is Conservative party policy—to bring power down to the lowest possible level. Is he not therefore dissatisfied with his Government's policy of putting his people in Hertfordshire into the eastern region, not the London region, and of pulling powers away from his area to that eastern region, particularly in terms of planning and housing? How can he support that? Does he not think that for the regions where there is a referendum, there should at least be a detailed regional assemblies Bill in the Queen's Speech, which is notably absent?

While I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman's intervention, I certainly cannot agree with him. One of the things that has characterised this Government is that whatever else has happened, the quantum of resource that has been made available to local authorities has risen by 29 per cent. in the past six years, while it went down by 7 per cent. in the five years preceding 1997. People are now beginning to ask why they cannot do things, whereas under the Conservative Governments they were told that it was impossible, because the constant theme was cuts and bearing down on the unit of resource. People therefore never even had the ambition to try to change their circumstances. Because the Government have improved the resources, they have begun to give people the ambition to change their circumstances, to deal with derelict cars, filth and squalor and to do something about sub-standard housing. We have a Government who have begun to generate some resources to do that job. Having given people the vision that they might be free to transform their environment in such a way, however, there is a deficiency of will, commitment and resources to follow the job through adequately.

Clearly, resources are very important. In relation to some of my hon. Friend's comments, Chinese walls exist between local government, national Government, parish councils and even the European Union, and perhaps we should find ways of knocking down those walls. Perhaps some consideration should be given to setting up some joint committee structures in some cases, and perhaps we should look at other ways of filling the other place. In Germany, the Länder provide half—

Order. May I bring both hon. Members back to the Queen's Speech and to either its content or to what the hon. Gentleman might wish to see in it.

I am grateful to you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I intend to bring my remarks ultimately to what things should be put in the Queen's Speech that were not there, while commending some things in the Queen's Speech because they have some echo of or affiliation with the kind of themes that I have been developing.

If we had a view that we were about personal and community empowerment, there are some things that should be in the Queen's Speech that are not in it, and the one on which I am focusing at the moment is how we are governed. My hon. Friend the Member for Morley and Rothwell (Mr. Challen) is right that we have tiers of government into which local government fits and has a place, but because we are uncertain and unsteady about how we deal with the fact that, for instance, many local authorities are not of the same political persuasion as the Government, people do not know or have not thought about what form of empowerment that should take, so much that could be done is not being done.

I have a particular complaint in my constituency, because one of the current features of local government that would need changing is a system of grant that relies on floors and ceilings. My complaint is that in my local authority the ceiling has a trapdoor, and unfortunately, a floor that is deeply permeable. That is because my local authority is in an area in which there is a new town. New towns have nothing like the level of resources that people had in the past, as local authorities have inherited over time large landholdings and significant resources. In a new town—all my colleagues who represent new towns feel strongly about this—because of the lack of resources and because some of the housing stock was made over to the new town, the appearance of being asset-rich and out of debt was given, when in fact there was little in terms of resources to address the needs of the new town.

The way in which resources are allocated to new towns, especially those that are debt-free, involves a bizarre mechanism called negative subsidy. That means that additional resources are heaved out of the local authorities through the floor, which is not built to sustain such resource drain.

I would have liked the Queen's Speech to contain a proper treatment of negative subsidy. That is especially significant in my area, because it is four times the level of that of the next most afflicted local authority, which is Harlow council in Essex. The situation is one example of the way in which the Government begin to get a sense of what they should be doing for areas yet fail to deliver in the end.

The process of government still reflects the idea that the main job of Members of Parliament is not to represent 100,000 people or work with their local community to ensure that it is represented as effectively as possible. There is still a view that if Members of Parliament feel like it, they may come to the House and have hardly any contact with their constituencies, just like the historical Members for Bath or Hemel Hempstead who were elected by a handful of people and owed no commitment to them. If we are to have a system in which we are in touch with our local communities, we must do more than say that the most useful thing that Back Benchers can do when serving on a Committee to consider a Bill to is to sit in silence.

Order. I must bring the hon. Gentleman to order. Whatever the rights or wrongs of the present system for Members of Parliament, will he address his remarks to the content of the Queen's Speech?

It might well be that I shall shortly conclude my speech. because it seems to me that the role of local government is related to the way in which we organise things in the House. I shall be guided by you, Madam Deputy Speaker, because I was about to consider the consequences of that on reform of the House of Lords, which should have been addressed in the Queen's Speech. If you feel that comments on that front would be out of order, I shall be perfectly happy to bring my remarks to a conclusion fairly shortly.

Order. There is indeed a reference to reform of the House of Lords in the Queen's Speech.

In that case, Madam Deputy Speaker, you have saved the next bit of my speech—albeit an unwritten one. [Interruption.] I do not know whether the Minister for Rural Affairs and Local Environmental Quality disapproves of what I am saying. If he does, perhaps it illustrates my point that not all things said from the Labour Back Benches are necessarily welcomed on the Treasury Bench. We sometimes seem to have a system in Parliament that tries to ensure that as little noise as possible comes from the Back Benches, to such an extent that when people change policies, they take insufficient notice of what has been said from there.

Let us consider reform of the House of Lords. One reason why we need a second Chamber is that our current structures mean that we cannot do our job properly. It is extremely difficult to get on a Committee to consider a Bill, and the debate in such Committees is often hideously truncated, which means that legislation is insufficiently scrutinised. There is then a question whether it should continue to be insufficiently scrutinised, which will happen if this House is not properly reformed, or whether somebody else should do more detailed scrutiny on our behalf, which happens currently.

I have no truck with, or time for, the hereditary principle. However, the fact remains that as long as the systems in this House mean that our communities are inadequately represented, we need a second Chamber to examine the logic of Bills at greater length and in greater depth than we currently do. That is why we need to think about who we put in the second Chamber and why this Chamber needs somebody else to address our deficiencies. If we were to have a proper and honest debate about the inadequate way in which this House performs, we might have a clearer sense of the functions that it would be vital for a second Chamber to carry out and hence the membership that it should have.

I commend the idea of a second Chamber with a powerful role representing local government to the House. I say that because irrespective of the other commitments of hon. Members, it is difficult for us to pay proper attention to the many matters that affect local communities. If there were proper regional representation in the upper Chamber, it could be given a clear role and mandate so that it could take an overview of the interdependency of communities and the ways in which they interact. It would be difficult for us to do that in such a manner at present. I echo the suggestion that the upper Chamber should have a clear role on European scrutiny. This House currently puts responsibility for such matters on people who are extremely pressurised by a host of other responsibilities.

I want careful thought to be given to what we are about as a Government and the vision of the society that we want to see. We need to consider the historical incubi that we must discard and determine the ways of governing ourselves that would most commend themselves to those whom we represent. We could do that better in local government, and our procedures and those of another place could be improved. I am somewhat disappointed that those issues were not addressed in what was otherwise a Queen's Speech that dealt effectively with many important matters.

It is always a great pleasure and delight to follow the hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead (Mr. McWalter). He brings refreshing honesty and insight to the affairs of the Chamber whenever he speaks. Before I begin my peroration, I must apologise to the House. I explained to the Chair that I would not be present for the opening speeches. I was not able to hear the words of wisdom of the Front-Bench spokesmen, but I hope that that will not limit my contribution too much.

The Government offer some encouraging things in the Queen's Speech. There has not been a Queen's Speech in history that does not have some good things in it, and it would be churlish not to recognise that. Indeed, it is important to point out that the Government have done many good things since 1997. Every Government have their achievements and triumphs. It ill behoves Opposition Members not to acknowledge that fact, and if there were more acknowledgement of each of our qualities, perhaps politicians would be regarded rather better than they generally are.

The hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead said that he thought that the last Conservative Government were rather like a Jackson Pollock painting. I regard this Government as being mote like a Damien Hirst work of art: apparently unwholesome, probably sinister, certainly ugly and never offering value for money.

In fact I was quoting my right hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Mr. Milburn), who said that this Government, not the last Conservative Government, were like a Jackson Pollock painting.

On balance, I prefer Jackson Pollock to Damien Hirst, but perhaps both descriptions can be made of this Government, and people can choose which they prefer.

Of course, many major changes are planned in this Queen's Speech. The problem is that most of them are irrelevant to the priorities of the British people. I see that the coming year is to he the year of the regions. According to a Cabinet Office press release, even the civil contingencies Bill

"proposes to enhance existing regional resilience by delivering a new regional civil protection tier".

I see also that the proposed fire services Bill will, according to the White Paper, reconstitute the fire services on a regional basis.

The grand panjandrum of regionalisation, the Deputy Prime Minister, has an even greater project in mind than regional fire services, if there could be such a thing. He wants regional assemblies. Regionalisation is the apotheosis of double -speak: the proposal is billed as a decentralisation measure, but the regions will take powers not from central Government but local government. The hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead is right to say that power is best when it is closest to people, accountable to them and in touch with their needs, and represents their hopes and protects them from what they least wish to see. Regionalisation will be thoroughly unsuccessful in that pursuit because people feel no affinity with regions.

The hon. Gentleman was right in what he said about parish councils because people feel a close affinity with their local parish. They probably feel in touch with their local district, and they have a sense of pride in their county, but what of regions? People in Lincolnshire no more look to the east midlands, to Derby, Leicester and Nottingham, than they do to Aberdeen or Penzance. Regionalisation will fail because its legitimacy is bogus; there is no relationship between the people and these regions. For that reason, if for no other, I argue against regionalisation.

The truth of the matter is that powers on planning, land use, environment policy, public health and fire services are, if the Government have their way, more likely to be taken upwards than brought down to a local level. They will be removed from local councils to regional assemblies. The county tier of local government is to be abolished. That is centralisation, not decentralisation. It is an absurd idea and one clearly driven by bureaucratic tidiness, not the needs of local communities.

Regionalisation is a deeply boring subject, even in my hands, and I do not think that the Deputy Prime Minister, with all his powers and skills as an entertainer, will rouse the British people to the slightest expression of interest in this pet project. Conservative Members, however, will not be apathetic about regionalisation. As my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition said, we will fight the Government's proposals with all our might to preserve the powers and responsibilities of local councils—be they Labour or Conservative—and local councillors of whatever party, who for the most part do a splendid job in standing up for the people they represent.

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that although people in Hertfordshire have a strong Hertfordshire identity, they are massively affected by the proximity of London and need devices to ensure that the shockwaves in London that regularly make their lives more difficult are properly addressed? That alone suggests the need for a more powerful tier of government.

There are already structural links between different authorities. There are already formal and informal arrangements to deal effectively with such cross-cutting issues. The system works effectively for the most part, and if it ain't broke, why should we even try to fix it? This will certainly not be a fix. I do not deny the hon. Gentleman's point. There is a case for proper collaboration on grand issues and big problems, but that is not sufficient cause to get rid of these important bodies, which inspire affinity and are accountable to local people, as the hon. Gentleman argued forcefully and persuasively in his earlier remarks.

Being a London Member, I am not entirely sure of some things, but my hon. Friend is a great expert so he may be able to help me. The regional centre for Hemel Hempstead, like Watford, is Cambridge, and would not that cause even more difficulties than the London effect, it being so far away?

Indeed. I am delighted to accept my hon. Friend's advice about the details of the Hertfordshire plan. Certainly in the case of my own proposed region, it is likely that Lincolnshire would be isolated, both literally and culturally. Lincolnshire and its needs would be on the edge of an east midlands region, and because of finance and population, power would centre around Nottingham, Leicester and Derby. I suspect that many of the issues pertinent to my constituents and my county would not figure large in the considerations of the region.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

I will briefly take another intervention before I turn to housing, about which I shall speak at enormous length.

The hon. Gentleman spoke powerfully in favour of retaining county councils. Would he therefore welcome the return of the West Yorkshire metropolitan county council, perhaps based on a referendum? That would be democratic, would it not?

Not being a Yorkshireman, I never get involved in Yorkshire affairs because I know that people from that part of the world guard their independence jealously. Whatever I said would probably be wrong, so it is better to move swiftly on to housing.

The Queen's Speech proposes a major housing Bill, and I want to deal with four or five specific issues that are likely to loom large in our considerations. The first is the much vaunted sellers' packs. The problem with them, or at least the first problem, is that we are told that a flat rate will be applied. The cost will take no account of the value of the property being sold. Buyers of houses of all prices will face the same likely price increase, as sellers seek to recoup their outlay on the pack. Those who are buying the cheapest houses, which are also likely to be the least sound, and who therefore most require an assurance that the property is sound, will face the same price increase as all other house buyers.

Neither are the sellers' packs likely to deal with the problem of gazumping. In The Times on 15 November, Simon Tyler of Chase de Vere Mortgage Management said:

"If gazumping is such a problem, then it should be made illegal and a system similar to that in Scotland should be introduced, where sellers receive sealed bids based on a minimum price and, once agreed, the seller cannot pull out without the buyer's consent."

My right hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Curry), whom I see in his place, said:

"The introduction of seller's packs in the Housing Bill will do little to address the real problems of those buying and selling, namely, to stop gazumping, speed up price negotiation, obtain finance, eliminate buying chains and delays in the legal work. These packs could amount to a vast increase in state control over house buying and selling. They will make things worse, not better."

I wholeheartedly agree.

How will sellers' packs impact on housing shortages? The National Association of Estate Agents remains critical. Its chief executive, Peter Bolton King, is concerned about the delay that the pack will cause in placing houses on the market.

On 27 November, he said:

"I am disappointed that, despite widespread industry concerns, Labour remains committed to introducing red tape, bureaucracy and additional cost to the home buying process."

Potential sellers will be unable to place their house on the market until they have received a pack. That will restrict not only the seller, but the prospective buyer too, by limiting choice. It will escalate the problem of housing shortages by reducing the number of houses on the market at any one time.

What is the housing Bill likely to say about development? We know that the South East England Development Agency has been set up to compete to bring development to its area. That will increase demand for housing in the region that already has the highest housing demand in the country and where the infrastructure is already wider pressure and creaking. Meanwhile, there is a growing problem of empty housing in other parts of the country, especially the north of England. We have all seen and read about the problems, and those who represent places a long way from London know them well. The provisions of the housing Bill will not be helpful to development and the competition between regions is likely to put more emphasis on unhelpful changes in development, when we should be spreading the bubble of prosperity outwards from the south-east to the most deprived and depressed areas, which need a shot in the arm.

There is also concern in the industry that giving social housing grants directly to developers—an interesting idea that is certainly worthy of exploration—must be implemented through a focused approach, properly controlled and regulated and integrated into the bigger picture of housing and community development. There is concern that European legislation may challenge that policy if it involves giving state aid to the private sector. It will be interesting to hear what the Minister who winds up the debate has to say about that. The National Housing Federation remains sceptical, saying that the proposal to fund private developers to build social housing

"will not deliver the sustainable neighbourhoods that the Communities Plan is trying to achieve."

My argument is not that we should rule such a policy out, but that if it is done it must be done in a systematic, considered and focused way. It is not good enough simply to give money to private developers and hope that they will build decent houses in the right places to meet demand sensibly.

Representatives of the National Housing Federation are concerned that the Treasury is undertaking an efficiency review—we all know what that is a euphemism for—of the cost of social housing. It is rumoured that the Treasury wants to reduce that cost by approximately 15 per cent. The Housing Commission is advocating standardisation of housing design and a reduction in the number of developing associations. The effect of such a proposal would be to make all the occupants of social housing immediately identifiable within communities—they would be identified and stigmatised. That is especially unjust in the case of disabled people. If it is built to a single design throughout Britain, housing for disabled people will be immediately recognisable as such. That is not a positive way to integrate people of all kinds into communities.

There are also strong concerns about the availability of social housing for disabled people. Adapting houses to be accessible by disabled people presents a massive challenge. I fear that the housing Bill will not adequately address that problem. A one-size-fits-all approach is not fair, just or acceptable. It is thought that between 6.8 million and 8.5 million disabled people live in the UK—it is difficult to arrive at a precise figure because disability covers a wide range of conditions. We know that the number of disabled people has increased substantially in the past 20 years. Research suggests that between 35 and 45 per cent. of wheelchair users consider their current housing and support inadequate. More than 8,000 young adult wheelchair users live in care homes that were designed primarily for a different client group—usually elderly people. The housing Bill must make provision to deal with those problems. Coupled with the single standard housing design that I mentioned, ignoring wheelchair-accessible housing fails disabled people by excluding them from choosing where they want to live and forcing them to rely on a lucky dip to find a suitably accessible home.

What is the housing Bill likely to do in respect of homelessness? Housing associations argue that they do not have enough freedom to generate a social mix within any one area. The problem with giving priority solely to homeless people in the granting of housing is that they tend to end up all living in the same neighbourhood. Homeless people need to be integrated into communities; they should not be separated and stigmatised. There are real concerns about the vicious circle of undesirability that results from putting all of "one type of people" into one type of housing in one place. That is not the way forward for social housing. We need a much more lateral approach—one that is founded on the principle that we should provide decent-quality housing for all our citizens. That is the responsibility of a civilised nation.

I am concerned about decent housing standards. The industry, commentators on housing and, I believe, hon. Members of all parties believe that the target of bringing all social housing up to a decent standard by 2010 will not be reached, and that in any case a "decent standard" is not adequate. The worst housing will be the hardest to bring up to a "decent standard". What assurance can Ministers give us that the Government will give priority to tenants of such housing, rather than focusing on the houses that are the easiest to bring up to a decent standard? It would be easy to meet targets without meeting real needs. The Government have often fallen into that trap in the past; I hope that they will not do so again.

The Queen's Speech has given us a raft of measures that affect our constitutional arrangements. We are to have a Bill on referendums for regional assemblies that are entirely unnecessary, as few people in Britain really want them. We are to have a Bill on a referendum on the single currency, which is also entirely unnecessary, given that we now know that the Government have given up on the single currency, at least for the rest of this Parliament. Despite that, a Bill on a referendum on the European constitution—a subject of real concern to the British people—was singularly absent from the Queen's Speech. We are to have referendums on things that people do not care about, but heaven forbid that we should have a referendum on something that people really do care about.

The Prime Minister believes that we should wait for the outcome of the intergovernmental conference. In my view, there is no likely outcome that would not justify—indeed, demand—the ratification of the British people in a referendum. I deplore the fact that the Gracious Speech contained no provision for a referendum on the European constitution. As my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition said, we will be relentless in our campaign to have just such a referendum.

We have a tired Government, exhausted by the labour of their own spin, worn out by exaggerating their achievements, and worn down by the efforts of concealing their failures—yet they struggle on. They have no guiding principle. I was interested to hear the hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead allude to the fact that there was no real theme guiding either the Queen's Speech or the Government. No thread of ideology holds the Government together. Labour Ministers are united in office not by a shared sense of duty, but by a common sense of fear—fear of their own demise. It is a fear that I guess will shortly be realised.

There is an alternative, of course, to the current Government. It exists in the form of the revitalised Opposition under the leadership of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard). That alternative Government would listen to the demands of the British people, change only when change was necessary and in their interests, and have the courage to stand up for those proper values that underpin a civilised society. The hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead is right those are the values of freedom—freedom from want and from fear, as well as the freedom to do as one chooses. He is right to attack selfish materialism and individualism.

It is right to say that the principles of concern and compassion should underpin a compassionate Conservative Government. They always have and they always should. I am sure that the Minister, with his long and detailed studies of these matters, and with his usual generous spirit, will acknowledge that. I see, however, that he is not in his most generous mood tonight.

An alternative is available to the Government. They could listen and they could act, but I suspect that they will not, so the responsibility will fall once again to the Opposition, who, in the form of my hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May), will make the case with passion, commitment and with an honest concern for all of the British people.

It is a pleasure to speak from the Opposition Dispatch Box again. I have had the opportunity to do so only once during the past 16 months due to my previous party responsibilities. I note that my return to the Opposition Front Bench has been marked by a remarkable presence in the Chamber this evening.

Of men.

Well, no. The Under-Secretary of State, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, the hon. Member for Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), is present on the Treasury Bench. Also, I am pleased to see that the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody) is in her place.

The debate has ranged quite widely. The hon. Members for Sheffield, Attercliffe (Mr. Betts), for South Dorset (Jim Knight), for Edmonton (Mr. Love) and for Middlesbrough, South and Cleveland, East (Dr. Kumar) spoke within the remit of local government, the environment and transport, the topics on which we were focusing today. Others, such as my hon. Friend the Member for Castle Point (Bob Spink), my hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks (Mr. Fallon) and my hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge (Mr. Randall) ranged more widely to touch on matters such as tuition fees, House of Lords reform and the European constitution.

The subjects for the debate are characterised by a common theme. They are all areas where the Government promised much but have failed to deliver. That may be a constant refrain from Opposition Members but it is also a well-used theme among members of the general public, and that increases rather than reduces the validity of the point.

As for local government, the Government have promised certain councils more freedoms and have crowed about increased funding. However, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Curry) made clear in his excellent opening speech, the Queen's Speech will increase the burdens on local authorities. We support the need to increase councils' responsibilities and powers, but we believe in giving them freedom to do what is right for their local communities. We do not believe in imposing burdens and restrictions on them from Whitehall.

My hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks referred to education and argued that devolution of power, which gives back to professionals the ability to get on with their job and the freedom to do what they believe is right, benefits the production of the service that the professionals provide and benefits children in schools.

I have mentioned that the Government make much about local authority funding, yet in this year's settlement councils such as the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead—my council—have a grant increase that is only equal to their passported increases in schools' funding. The problem is exacerbated for residents of Maidenhead by the presence of a Liberal Democrat council.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon focused on local government. I shall concentrate on the environment and transport. Only one Bill in the Queen's Speech comes under the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs or the Department for Transport, and that is the traffic management Bill. I agree that there is a desperate need to do something about the endless holes in the roads, and about the seemingly endless times when people dig up the roads, which causes congestion. A number of right hon. and hon. Members have made much of that.

There have been many attempts in the past to control the digging up of roads, and there is no evidence that the Government's response will provide the answer. The Government talk of lane rental, but 10 days ago, in a written answer, they smuggled out a report on the pilot projects of lane rental that showed that those projects had not worked, yet those are the very ideas that the Government are proposing to introduce in their Bill.

I hope that the Government will take advice from various disability organisations about the way in which they could introduce measures to manage roadworks that would help disabled people. They will have received representations from, for example, the Royal National Institute of the Blind. Beyond those positive aspects, however, there are parts of the Bill that give real cause for concern. We are told that the Bill will allow the Highways Agency to move from being primarily a road builder and maintainer to become a network operator managing traffic flow on trunk roads and responding quickly to incidents. The aim is to relieve the police of the job of responding to incidents that occur on our roads so that they can be used for other duties. That aim is admirable in itself but we shall find that police officers will not be released to the extent that the Government suggest. If an incident takes place that leads, for example, to the death of an individual in a car accident, the police will have to be present. If criminal charges are to be brought, the police will need to be present, not some form of traffic police under the control of the Highways Agency.

Of equal concern is the way in which the Government are moving the Highways Agency from its prime focus on road building and road maintenance to that of network operator. We know that in the five years between 1998 and 2002 –03 only 79 km of road building were started under the Government. In the previous five years under the Conservative Government, 574 km of road began construction. The impact of that is real in economic terms. A third of small firms in the UK claim that road congestion has a serious impact upon their business, leading to lost man hours and increased cost. One in four of those firms believes that that is damaging its competitiveness.

There are those right hon. and hon. Members who say that road building is bad because it creates an environmental problem. However, in some areas the building of a new stretch of road can have a beneficial impact on the environment. I refer, for example, to Sonning, a village in my constituency. The ancient bridge has to carry 15,000 vehicles a day and pollution levels are above the recommended threshold of the World Health Organisation. Another bridge across the Thames would solve that problem. If the Highways Agency is not to be in the business of road building and maintenance, we shall see under the Government yet more congestion and safety problems because proper road maintenance is important to ensure safety.

The proposed traffic management Bill will not simply solve the problem of digging up endless holes in our roads. The measure will change significantly the role of the Highways Agency, and I believe that in so doing it will lead to further problems of congestion on our roads, particularly given the way that the Government. in their management of transport, are throwing more and more people on to the roads because of the problems that they have caused on the railways.

I have been listening closely to what the hon. Lady has been saying about the Highways Agency becoming a network operator, or whatever the phrase was. However, if it was responsible both for maintaining the flow of traffic and for the maintenance and construction of roads, would that not balance its risk as a network operator? Many people would like something similar on the railways—if the same people were managing maintenance and the flow of trains, we might get a rather more reliable service.

It is interesting that the hon. Gentleman supports that proposal. From his earlier remarks, it seems that his own constituency would benefit from extra road building. Perhaps he should hold discussions with his hon. Friends on the Front Bench about the way in which the Government have signally failed to improve the road network, at the cost of the environment, people and business in this country.

rose—

I should like to make a little more progress, if the hon. Gentleman will excuse me.

The problems that the Government have caused by forcing people on to the roads could, I am afraid, be exacerbated by the proposed school transport Bill. The hon. Member for Strathkelvin and Bearsden (Mr. Lyons) showed us the problems that will result from that Bill. The threat of the increased cost of school transport for many families and the means test that will be introduced—yet another means test from the Government—may force more parents on to the roads instead of getting their children to use school transport. The hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich asked my right hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon whether we supported an extension of school transport. We do indeed believe that there is an argument for extending school transport, and we should look at the regulations that apply to it. However, I do not believe that the answer is to force parents to pay, nor do I believe that the answer is to force a school-gate tax on parents, as the Government may be proposing by charging parents for dropping their children off at school.

We need innovation in school transport, as the hon. Member for South Dorset himself said. However, we must look at good examples around the country, such as Conservative-controlled Runnymede council, which has introduced yellow school buses to improve transport and congestion problems in the area, despite the fact that it is not a local education authority. The Minister may wish to reflect on the fact that the discretionary funding used for that scheme may well come under significant pressure as a result of the Government's local authority settlement this year.

The Government have made many promises on transport. When they came to power in 1997, they promised "immediate benefits" for the travelling public. The Deputy Prime Minister promised to make

"Britain's transport the rival of any…in Europe".

He also promised to

"increase choice and cut congestion."—[Official Report, 20 July 2000; Vol. 354, c. 552.]

However, the Government have cut choice and increased congestion. The Deputy Prime Minister said:

"I will have failed if in five years' time there are not…far fewer journeys by car".

Since then, however, traffic on all roads has increased by 7 per cent. The CBI has warned that

"if a constructive way forward is not found soon we will see an evaporation of confidence in the Government's ability to deliver".

On the railways, the percentage of trains arriving on time has fallen year on year under the Government, and rail delays have doubled. That goes for all train operators. The hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich spoke from her knowledge and experience of the transport scene. She and I do not always agree on transport matters, but I do agree that there is a desperate need for the Government to clarify the role and responsibilities of the Strategic Rail Authority. There are great hopes for the SRA and what it is doing for the railways, but it is effectively trying to recreate British Rail and remove from the system the benefits of competition. By cutting the number of services for rail passengers, it is yet again reducing the rail service in this country and forcing more people to use the roads. In the merging of franchises, such as the merging of Thames Trains and First Great Western, there is a genuine threat to local and branch line services as a direct result of the Government's policy and the actions of the SRA.

I should like to make some remarks about what is not in the Queen's Speech. My right hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon in his opening speech referred to the lack of a Bill on regional assemblies. People will have to vote before they know what they are voting on. That is hardly surprising given that when the White Paper was introduced, the right hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr. Mandelson) was asked how the Government would decide in which areas to hold referendums. He said that they would hear voices—hardly a good basis for Government decisions. Those voices, I fear, would come from No. 10 Downing street, inviting him in through the back door yet again. My hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr. Hayes) set out clearly the failings of the Government's proposals on regional assemblies.

Many people throughout the country will be severely disappointed that the Government have not included an animal welfare Bill in the Queen's Speech.

There is a real need to update our animal welfare legislation, and the Government have missed the opportunity.

There is nothing in the Queen's Speech that will improve the lot of rural communities, but perhaps the biggest area that is missing from that brief is the environment. Yet again, the Government have promised much, but have signally failed to deliver. One of the reasons why they fail to deliver is that, far from having the joined-up government that they have claimed to have had over six and a half years, we have dysfunctional government. When the Deputy Prime Minister wants to put more houses in the south-east, he has to reveal that the Government have not thought of the transport consequences, let alone the consequences for water supply and the general infrastructure needed to support those new houses. He made a number of references to sustainability and even claimed that the sellers' packs would contribute to sustainable communities. I think that that shows that he does not know the meaning of any of the words in that sentence.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon referred to the specific example of aviation policy and its impact on local communities. If this Government really believe in joined-up government and sustainable development, they must look across the board and ensure that Departments talk to each other and make proper assessments of the impact of their policies, just as putting environment and transport together should ensure that the two can be looked at properly and that their impact on each other can be properly considered.

The Government came to power promising much on the environment. They promised that they would achieve a 25 per cent. recycling target by 2005, but they will not reach it and will probably take another 10 years to do so. Even in local government, it is Labour councils that are failing to recycle. Eight of the top 10 recycling councils are Conservative and none of them is Labour controlled. On so many aspects of the environment, the Government simply do not have a grip and do not know what they are doing. They have failed to address the issues and have squandered their opportunities. That is clear when we consider how they have responded to European Union directives, the fridge mountain, the prospect of yet further mountains of discarded electrical goods resulting from an EU directive and the fact that we are one of the few countries in the developed world that does not recycle batteries. The Government also have no response to the end of vehicle life directive. They have simply failed to get a grip on many environmental issues.

My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) put his finger on the Government's problem when he said that they had simply lost purpose and direction. After six and a half years of a Government who promised so much and had so much going for them—two large majorities and a strong economy—they have simply let the country down. There have been 18 Department of Health Acts, but 1 million people are still on waiting lists; there have been 30 Home Office Acts, but violent crime is at the highest level ever; and there have been five transport Acts, but rail delay is doubled and congestion has increased. This Government are indeed tired. They have run out of ideas and failed to deliver. After six and a half years, this is simply a Government who have lost their way under a Prime Minister who has lost his grip.

I welcome the hon. Member for Maidstone to her new role—[HON. MEMBERS: "Maidenhead."] I beg your pardon, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I welcome the hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May) to her role, and welcome her recovery from compulsory laryngitis. I look forward to having detailed debates with her about environmental issues when she has been able to engage with them a little longer and understands what this Government have done to protect the environment from a local to an international level. I also thank all hon. Members who have spoken in tonight's debate. I will not be able to do justice to all the detailed issues that were raised, but I hope to respond to the main themes.

One of the clearest tributes to the attractiveness of the programme set out in the Queen's Speech, which is designed to improve the quality of life for people in this country, came from the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke), who was clearly so satisfied with the speech that he said very little about it, and nothing about the topics of the debate, but focused on reform of the House of Lords. It was not entirely helpful to the Government, but he made it clear where his mind was focused.

He was honest enough to say that he opposes the Government's approach to higher education funding and is happy to abandon the idea of increasing the number and proportion of our young people who are able to study for a degree—an opinion with which many Members on the Government Benches would disagree passionately. The hon. Member for Wantage (Mr. Jackson) and the right hon. Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Mr. Portillo) have also disagreed with that view.

I want to focus on today 's topics of local government, environment and transport. I found it significant that it was not until 5.46 pm that my hon. Friend the Member for Morley and Rothwell (Mr. Challen) made the first serious contribution on the environment—I shall return to that in a few minutes. In fact, the debate in general shows that there is real meat in our programme. My hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Attercliffe (Mr. Betts) addressed the challenge of legislation on houses in multiple occupation and the licensing of landlords, which is good news for those of us who have dealt with housing issues at a constituency level over many years.

I was surprised that the right hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Curry), who spoke for the official Opposition, sought to rubbish the idea of a package to protect house purchasers. I have to say that he is out of touch with the reality of buying and selling houses, and that my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister has got it right with his proposals for the sellers' pack. I was even more surprised to hear the right hon. Gentleman abandon his promise to discuss what is in the Queen's Speech to demand that regional assemblies in England be given the same powers as the Scottish Parliament. The hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr. Hayes) took a different view: he was critical of the regional dimension in government, appearing not to realise the extent to which regional government existed by 1997, when the Government were first elected. We have made regional government more effective coherent and accountable. This is a Government with a policy for regional government—a Government who are giving people the choice on making regional government accountable to their elected representatives. I would say to Conservative Members that it behoves none of us who were elected to talk down the importance of accountability to an electorate.

In relation to accountability, the Government have clearly said that regional assemblies will have a very small number of elected representatives—the figure of 30 to 35 is quoted. As I understand the Government's proposition, some of those members will be elected by proportional representation and some by constituency. There are 5 million people in Yorkshire and Humber. Can the Minister tell us how accountability will be enforced and improved by removing district councillors, who represent a few hundred—perhaps a few thousand—electors, in favour of regional assembly representing 250,000 people?

The right hon. Gentleman ignores the fact that the increased accountability at a regional level is for a level of government that is already there. The hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings made a series of detailed and constructive points on housing issues, particularly in relation to disabled people. I am sure that they will be returned to when the Bill is before the House.

The right hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon said little about the big issues of the environment or the needs of rural areas, which the Government are addressing. In describing the district council as the elected level that is closest to the people, he completely ignored parish and town councils, which increasingly provide real local leadership in rural communities. I am pleased to report that there has been a good response from around the country to the quality parish and town councils scheme that is being promoted jointly by DEFRA and the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. On Wednesday, I shall present certificates to the first clerks to complete the professional qualification that is a key element in quality status. However, it is not just about qualifications. I commend the National Association of Local Councils and the Society of Local Council Clerks, several of whose regional conferences I have attended in recent weeks. They were lively arid enthusiastic and have moved further in a year or so than I expected in four or five years.

The future of rural communities depends on a whole range of issues. Three weeks ago, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs outlined her vision for rural England based on sustainable development and the right balance of economic, social and environmental considerations. We are refreshing rural policy, reviewing the rural White Paper and focusing on delivery and the needs of local communities. That is complimented by the vision in the Queen's Speech that was spelled out by my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister, and which is focused on issues that matter to people. Often, policy is spelled out nationally, but delivered locally by local government and other regional organisations.

In that context, I was interested and encouraged to hear several hon. Members stress the need for not only legislation but public engagement. Engaging people and creating a new "localism" fits well with the powerful sustainable development theme that my hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead (Mr. McWalter) appears to have missed. Indeed, his response to an intervention by an Opposition Member brought him closer to the Government's view than he may care to admit.

In making a point about public engagement, the hon. Member for Sevenoaks (Mr. Fallon) underlined the need to get to grips with people's behaviour. He was wrong to suggest that the Government focus only on legislation. We need an underpinning of legislation to deal with antisocial behaviour and there is scope for simplifying, clarifying and strengthening the law. However, there is a continuum of action that involves the engagement of the public, public bodies, business and voluntary organisations—the community and the individuals who make it up—as well as a lead from the Government.

I have always believed in a continuum from low level antisocial behaviour, such as graffiti, litter, fly posting, fly-tipping, rudeness and incivility to theft and violence. The broken windows theory is that the feeling of, "No one cares around here" quickly leads to, "It doesn't matter how I behave." That continues to hold true. Let me give an example of how we can make a difference. I recently launched a voluntary code to engage businesses, local government and the public in dealing with fast-food litter. It is not wishful thinking, but based on what has worked. Places that measured fast-food litter reported a 12 per cent. deterioration, but a 20 per cent. improvement in areas that have piloted the partnership approach.

I hope that all hon. Members will commend Environmental Campaigns—ENCAMS—for its work and note the file that I have distributed to it recently. It shows what each of us can do in our constituencies. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Morley and Rothwell, who showed that environmental issues stretch from local environmental quality, through national policies to international challenges and our contribution to improving air quality and tackling global warming.

It is worth remembering that two important environmental Bills recently completed their passage. The Waste and Emissions Trading Act 2003 enables the United Kingdom to face two of the biggest environmental challenges—climate change and the need to move towards more sustainable waste management. The Water Act 2003 builds on existing legislation to further the sustainable use of water resources—a current issue—and strengthens the voices of water consumers, increases the opportunity for competition in the supply of water and promotes water conservation.

Several hon. Members raised specific issues, which I hope we can pick up. For example, the hon. Member for Sevenoaks referred to consumer credit. The Department of Trade and Industry has been reviewing the Consumer Credit Act 1974 and will set out its conclusions in a White Paper that is to be published shortly.

My hon. Friend the Member for Strathkelvin and Bearsden (Mr. Lyons) mentioned school transport. I am sure that he will pursue the way in which we deal with that subject with colleagues in the Scotland Office and the Scottish Parliament. He asked why we needed to tackle the issue. School transport costs £0.5 billion a year and has an impact on rural authorities. It therefore needs to be addressed. The excellent report on transport and social exclusion, which the social exclusion unit undertook and led, challenges us all to think more flexibly about transport in general, including education provision, health transport, community transport, the use of bus subsidy and so on. I support colleagues in the Department for Transport who are trying to open up the debate and those in the Department for Education and Skills who ask us all to engage with issues of cost and necessary service.

The hon. Member for Maidenhead concentrated on transport in the first part of her contribution and referred to congestion and its impact on business. She should welcome the opportunity that the traffic management Bill offers to debate the subject in detail. The Government recognise that traffic congestion costs our economy billions of pounds and believe that it is up to us to identify the causes and do what we can to manage them. We have therefore introduced the Bill. Lectures do not sit well when delivered by members of a party that wrecked the rail system and failed us on the environment locally and globally.

In contrast, my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody) raised a series of transport issues, drawing on her deep knowledge as Chair of the Transport Committee. That promises the House a lively year on transport.

Like several Members, particularly my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough, South and Cleveland, East (Dr. Kumar), I welcome the effort being made by my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister to update and modernise the planning system. That is never easy. I chaired Cardiff city council's planning and development committee for a time, so I have to confess that I have form. Planners and planning committees are always an easy target. They are attacked by people whose applications are turned down and by those who see things built that they did not want in their local area. Neither believes that there can be any merit in a decision that went against their particular view.

I know that my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister has no intention to throw out the baby with the bath water in enabling local authorities to come to the right decision on those issues, but I welcome the recognition of the need, for instance, to diversify the rural economy. Planning needs to keep pace with change, although that is not easy. I yield to no one in my enthusiasm to protect our national parks, but I do not want our protected landscapes to be turned into museums of the landscape. Our protected landscapes and our countryside generally need to be living communities, which means that planning considerations must look not only at the protection of the environment but at the social and economic needs of the communities that live in them.

In that context, I particularly welcome the contribution of my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Jim Knight). I visited the world heritage site in his constituency. It is a good example of landscape that is of enormous international importance, and which is therefore protected, and yet is a driver for the local economy. I agree with the balance that he struck in his contribution.

My hon. Friend also rightly emphasised the work of firefighters and the importance of the legislation set out in the Queen's Speech. He is also right to emphasise the importance of legislation on animal welfare and the complexity of much of our existing legislation. I have to say to the hon. Member for Maidenhead that I will not take lessons on animal welfare from a party that has neglected that issue so consistently over the years.

As my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset said, work is going on to prepare legislation. There is a lot of engagement with the animal welfare organisations, but legislation is not ready. In any event, we want to deal not only with current issues, although we are getting on with many of the current challenges. I cite the example of live exports of horses, which we are addressing. The Ragwort Control Act 2003 has, with our support, just completed its passage through both Houses and we are preparing for an animal welfare Bill, which, when it comes before the House, will be seminal. The Conservative party voted against the regulation of fur farming and all sorts of other things—it has little to teach us on those issues.

It is a pleasure to refer to a variety of issues that represent the mainstream of work for me and for the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Exeter (Mr. Bradshaw), who takes the lead on animal welfare generally. The hon. Member for Uxbridge (Mr. Randall) demanded action to bring an end to the interminable debates in the House on the issue of hunting. I simply confirm to him that, as the Prime Minister made clear last week, the issue will be dealt with in this Parliament. We have a manifesto commitment to enable Parliament to reach a conclusion on it and we will keep that commitment.

The hon. Gentleman went on to refer to the marine environment. I can assure him that the Government have not lost sight of the need to protect it, but I am pleased that he acknowledged the work that has been done on the wider protection of our natural heritage and the encouragement of biodiversity.

I echo the welcome given by my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton (Mr. Love) to the communities plan approach, which is about creating an effective and flexible system to deal with the long-term needs of urban or rural communities. I commend my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister for striking a clear balance between the social, environmental and economic needs of any local community. That is as true for my hon. Friend's London constituency as it is for constituencies in any other city or in rural communities.

I am pleased to say that there is an increasing sense of a team approach to the needs of rural communities. Not only are we the first Government to create a departmental leadership for rural communities, but it is the Labour party in government that has become the first political party to establish a national conference on rural policy—now part of Labour's mainstream programme.

I was present in the city of Newport for the launch of the "big conversation" at the end of last week, and it has already started in rural communities, including the rural policy seminar that we held in September and the seminar on rural housing held by the powerful group of Back-Bench Labour rural MPs. Conservative Members ought to remember that it is Labour MPs who now represent rural England; Conservatives no longer do so.

Today's debate ranged widely. The hon. Member for Castle Point (Bob Spink) left the content of the Queen's Speech so far behind that he entered the realms of anti-European fiction. He caused some amusement, but it is serious to hear a Member of this House speak in such extreme terms—anti-European in tone as well as in content—and ignore the strong leadership provided by this Government in making sure that this country's interests are protected and enhanced by our engagement in Europe. The hon. Gentleman did not mention his own constituents until he told us how he is encouraging them to be anti European: how sad!

In contrast, other Members on both sides took the opportunity of this wide-ranging debate to comment on a variety of issues that affect their constituents. Tonight has illustrated the value of such an opportunity. Colleagues from the Department for Transport and the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and I have listened with interest and care. There may be specific issues that I have not been able to respond to on which we will write to right hon. and hon. Members. We look forward to continued debate on the detail of this excellent programme as the individual Bills come forward for debate and consideration. I, too, commend the Queen's Speech to the House.

Debate adjourned.—[Paul Clark.]

I am pleased to have secured this timely debate today, World AIDS day.

It is clear that unprecedented attention is being given to HIV/AIDS at this moment, so there is a great opportunity for increased funding and commitment. However, I believe that this window of opportunity is likely to slam shut shortly. World AIDS day contemporarily switched the media spotlight on to a global crisis that is killing millions and has orphaned 14 million children, but attention will soon revert to Iraq, where the scale of expenditure dwarfs the not insubstantial sums allocated to the battle against AIDS.

A range of initiatives are currently under way or have been launched recently on HIV/AIDS: the recent 46664 fundraising concert in South Africa; the 3x5 initiative, which will put 3 million people on anti-retrovirals by 2005; the Global Fund to deal with AIDS, TB and malaria. There has been comprehensive coverage of the issue by the BBC and in other media outlets in the past couple of weeks and there have been in-depth articles in many newspapers including The Guardian. We have heard from abroad that, for instance, Canada is looking at patent law changes that might well be relevant to the UK. Today, we have seen the launch of the Government's own statement, "The UK's Call for Action on HIV/Aids". The sheer range of initiatives highlights a risk that many of them might overlap.

There is also a risk that the appropriate focus placed on the AIDS crisis in the developing countries will perhaps lead us to overlook, or possibly neglect or minimise, the crisis that is still here in the UK. It is worth reminding Members of some of the statistics that relate to the UK. The number of people with HIV in the UK increased by nearly 20 per cent. between 2001 and 2002, and approximately 50,000 people are infected.

One third remain undiagnosed, so they are carrying HIV without knowing it, and without those close to them knowing. It is estimated that by the end of this year, 60,000 people will be infected. Gay men made up the highest number of people diagnosed with HIV in 2002.

There is another interesting point that relates to the UK statistics and makes the link with what is happening in developing countries. The majority—approximately 90 per cent.—of heterosexuals diagnosed with HIV in the UK actually acquired the infection abroad; some 80 per cent. acquired it in sub-Saharan Africa. That shows a clear link between what is happening in the UK and what is happening in the countries most badly affected by HIV/AIDS.

The international statistics are much worse, and much more alarming. More people became infected with HIV this year than in any other year since the beginning of the pandemic, and more people have died of AIDS than in any previous year. As hon. Members will know, treatment is not widely available, although it is here in the UK. Globally, only 300,000 people are receiving treatment—a fraction of the number of sufferers. In South Africa, for instance, 5 million individuals, out of a population of 40 million, are infected. We should all welcome the recent concert and the South African Government's belated recognition that this is a major issue.

This year, we have seen the highest level of spending on HIV/AIDS: $4.7 billion. That is welcome, given that spending in the previous year was $3.2 billion, but again, it is a drop in the ocean compared with what is required. I could read out other alarming statistics for many countries in the developing world. We are very familiar with what is happening in Africa, but something worse is coming down the road in terms of what will happen in Asia. Problems are already arising in eastern Europe, but given Asia's much larger population, the potential exists there for problems on a scale that we have yet to witness, even in Africa.

What has been the Government's response? First, I welcome the call for action, and the fact that the Prime Minister has formally backed it. That is only right, and it establishes the importance of this issue. The Prime Minister said:

"I can promise that HIV/AIDS will be at the top of our international agenda as we work towards our Presidencies of the G8 and the European Union in 2005."

He continued:

"We will make HIV/AIDS a centrepiece"

in the call for action.

That is welcome, but a memo leaked to The Guardian a few weeks ago—it was referred to in an article of 22 October by that paper's economics editor—stated that Britain was

"planning to use its presidency of both the European Union and the G8 group of industrial nations in 2005 to kick-start the trade talks again".

I am willing to bet that, if my researcher had had time to do the necessary research this afternoon, she might also have found references to the UK presidency's being used to put the focus on reform of common agricultural policy, on raising environmental standards in the European Union, and so on. There may be a tendency to push more and more on to that agenda, and for the UK to say that it will focus on a range of issues. It is clearly impossible to make everything the centrepiece of the UK's presidency, and I hope that the Minister can say a little about how the respective priorities will be allocated to the very important issues that the UK will want to focus on during its presidency of the EU, and of the G8.

I state without reservation that it is clear that the Government recognise the risk of overlapping initiatives, and of duplication and double-counting; indeed, the call for action exists in part to address that issue.

The Three Ones initiative is one strategy and one commission, offering one way of measuring and reporting progress in different countries, which could help to streamline the funding process and ensure that the various initiatives do not overlap. However, it is worth examining the detail of some of the different programmes to illustrate some of my concerns.

The World Health Organisation's initiative is sometimes called the 3x5 initiative. The WHO will lead that effort and provide emergency response teams at the request of Governments. It will work with treatment implementers and establish an AIDS drugs and diagnostics facility to assist countries and implementers in their work. It will publish uniform standards and simplified tools to track the progress of ARV treatment programmes, and it will start the emergency expansion of training and capacity development for health professionals.

Let us examine what the Clinton foundation aims to do. The initial remit seems straightforward enough—and seems completely different and separate from the WHO programme—in seeking to reach agreement with drugs manufacturers on a major reduction in the price of AIDS medicine, which should obviously be welcomed. However, the agreement covers ARV drugs delivered to people in Africa and the Caribbean and will also contribute to working with Governments to set up countrywide integrated care, treatment and prevention programmes. One can see the potential there for some overlap. The Clinton initiative aimed to have 2 million people in receipt of medicines by 2008—a slightly different target.

The Minister might say that all those aspects are rolled into one programme and that although the different initiatives appear to talk about different components, if we add them all up together, they are all perfectly dovetailed. I would like to think that that is so, but it is not immediately evident from the work of the different organisations.

The Clinton initiative involves working in Africa—Mozambique, Rwanda and South Africa in particular—but the US emergency plan for HIV/AIDS relief will also operate in Mozambique, Rwanda and South Africa. Clearly, there is potential for overlap or for different programmes to operate in the same country. The American plan has a slightly different target, aiming to prevent 7 million new infections, to provide ARVs to 2 million additional people with HIV and to care for 10 million individuals, including orphans, with HIV/AIDS.

There is also the World Bank initiative on HIV, which looks into the scalability and cost-effectiveness of programmes and talks about working in different countries in Africa. I have not examined it in detail, but I suspect that it will overlap in respect of the countries that I just mentioned. The only programme so far that does not seem to overlap—it could be a reflection of the level of information that I have about it—is the Bill Gates Foundation programme, where the initiative seems to be focused on providing funds. However, the detail could reveal that it is also about setting up specific programmes, which could overlap with others.

I am sure that my simple question to the Minister will require a complex answer. How does the Department intend to work with all the different initiatives and what role will it and the Government have in attempting to ensure that they all dovetail properly, do not overlap, do not duplicate effort and do not double-count the number of people treated by the different programmes? As alluded to in the Government's call for action, some developing countries spend more time trying to negotiate with the different donor programmes and donors than in treating the epidemic itself—a key issue that the Government must deal with. The call for action partly addresses that, but we need to see more detail, which I hope will emerge from the Government's consultations.

There has clearly been a shift in the Government's emphasis.

That is mainly the result of the welcome reduction in the cost of drugs, but it may also be due to the fact that the death rate is accelerating. There has been a move away from the development of health systems and human capacity in developing countries to an approach that incorporates the actual delivery of HIV/AIDS treatment. Can the Minister tell us how those approaches will be incorporated both at the country level and in terms of the budget allocations? The Department appears to have announced a shift in emphasis, or possibly an equal focus, so does it anticipate having a continued role in HIV prevention?

Absolutely.

Well, as we have a fair amount of time for the debate, I am sure that the Minister will be able to set out the Government's role in some detail.

On Government funding, the Minister will know that Dr. Peter Piot announced on 25 November that HIV has received an unprecedented amount of political attention this year and that funding had reached its highest level—$4.7 billion, compared with $3.2 billion in the previous year. The Minister will also know that Kofi Annan said that the amount needed to deal with the pandemic is between $7 billion and $10 billion per annum. Should not more resources be allocated to tackle the pandemic, which risks reaching a massive scale in India and China? Should not that investment be made now? Is sufficient funding going to the global fund to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, and to other funds?

The Government say that they plan to double the amount going to UNAIDS. Can the Minister tell us exactly how much that will be and when that doubled core funding will be made available? It would be helpful if he could write to me setting out the Government's precise funding commitments to address HIV/AIDS in the developing countries for this year and the next five years. That would give us a dear picture so that we can see what those commitments deliver in future years.

Can the Minister comment on some joined-up government issues? The plan of action is welcome, but it is difficult to see how much co-operation there will be between departments on tackling HIV/AIDS. The Minister will know that there is a link between HIV/AIDS and food poverty—one can lead to the other. What discussions are taking place between Departments about issues such as the small arms trade? Conflict has a major impact on poverty and HIV/AIDS and on Governments' ability to put resources into tackling a major health crisis. If the UK continues to play its current role in supplying arms to developing countries, there must he greater controls to ensure that such arms do not end up in the hands of different militias—the ensuing conflict would exacerbate the health problems.

What else is needed? I hope that the Minister can comment briefly on whether the UK Government have considered the Canadian Government's initiative: to look into legislation that would allow Canadian manufacturers of generic drugs to export cheap copies of patented AIDS drugs to poorer countries. I understand that the Canadian measure would comply with the World Trade Organisation agreement on trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights. It is the first proposed by any G8 Government to meet the drugs needs of developing countries.

I know that there is a slight difference between our manufacturing industries, in that Canada has a strong generic drugs industry, but there is no reason that the UK could not initiate similar developments.

Have the Government received any representations from generic drugs manufacturers asking them to consider what Canada is doing, or from other drugs manufacturers asking them not to consider any such changes?

The announcement by the Department for International Development today, which was backed by the Prime Minister, is a rousing call to action. It reminds us that we ignore at our peril the warnings from the international community about the ravages of AIDS, and it also reminds us that we must not let the Government forget their pledge to make AIDS the centrepiece of the G8 and European Union presidencies in 2005. If we forget, we will have on our consciences the preventable deaths of millions of our fellow world citizens, and humanity would never forgive us.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) on securing this debate. He has done the House a favour by allowing us to discuss this issue on world AIDS day. In the past few days, we have had a series of key reports and announcements of further action by Governments and donor agencies across the world. I, too, wish to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the excellent concert initiated by the former President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela. Those announcements represent a significant moment in the mobilisation of resources across the world to fight the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

In the United Kingdom, we are beginning to step up our effort significantly, but much more still needs to be done. That point was emphasised by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for International Development when he attended the launch last week of the 2003 United Nations report on the state of the AIDS epidemic. The scale of the epidemic is, as the hon. Gentleman suggested, truly horrific. Some 20 million have already died from HIV/AIDS. This year, some 5 million have become newly infected, and some 3 million will die. On average, 14,000 new infections have occurred every day this year, almost 2,000 of which are in children under 15.

Some 14 million children have already lost one or both parents, a figure that is expected to rise to some 25 million by 2010. In the worst affected communities, children are often left to rely on elderly grandparents as their only support. Income in such households is likely to be lower than average. Households fostering orphans in rural Zimbabwe were found to earn on average more than 30 per cent. less than non-AIDS-affected households. Orphans are at much greater risk of HIV infection. They are less likely to attend school and more likely to suffer poor health. They are much more vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse. Evidence from Mozambique shows that non-orphans are three times more likely than orphans to be in school.

People who are politically and socially marginalised, including women, migrant workers, sex workers and injecting drug users, are less likely to have access to health services and the public health information that they need to prevent infection. They are, therefore, much more vulnerable. In sub-Saharan Africa, women are 1.2 times more likely to be infected with HIV/AIDS than men. More than one in five pregnant women are HIV infected in most countries in southern Africa. Women, most of them elderly widows, shoulder most of the burden of caring. In Zimbabwe, more than 70 per cent. of carers are women over 70. Women are less likely to be cared for or to have access to services. Unfortunately, women with HIV or whose husbands have died as a result of HIV infection may lose inheritance and land rights, because of the discrimination that still exists.

The hon. Gentleman is right to say that countries in conflict are particularly affected by the epidemic. Young women and poor children are more likely to enter into sexual bartering and are acutely vulnerable to sexual violence. About 11 per cent. of Nigerian peacekeepers and 60 to 70 per cent. of the South African army are HIV positive. Demobilisation can also lead to an increase in HIV prevalence, as soldiers return to their home communities, taking HIV/AIDS with them.

Unless urgent action is taken, the epidemic will continue to turn the clock back decades in the battle against global poverty. It is worth touching on the sheer scale of the impact of HIV/AIDS on the very public services that we would expect to help in the battle against the disease. Education and health services—two of the key public services that one would expect to help in that battle—have been hardest hit. In Zambia, for example, teacher absenteeism because of HIV infection is expected to cut the number of teaching hours by about 20 million between 1999 and 2010. In Botswana, estimates suggest that up to a third of health workers may have been infected in 1999 and that up to 40 per cent. could be infected by 2005.

HIV/AIDS is not only weakening the capacity of public services, but placing new demands on them because of the number of people infected. There is a need for better education and better health services. HIV is already generating a tuberculosis epidemic, again increasing the pressure on already overstretched health services. There are indications that, in the worst affected countries, the ability of the state to ensure law and order has been compromised, as the bodies charged with maintaining stability are affected by HIV/AIDS and mortality.

Kofi Annan has again recently highlighted the need for leadership on the issue. Some countries have had considerable success in combating the epidemic, and one of the key reasons for that success is determined political leadership. For example, Brazil has managed to control its infection rate to a little over 0.5 per cent.—half that projected. Uganda has cut the prevalence of HIV/AIDS from a peak of 15 per cent. in 1991 to just 5 per cent.—still too high—in 2001. Early action in Senegal has kept the infection rate at 2 per cent. Strong political commitment and leadership has been at the heart of the response in those countries. President Museveni played a key role in leading the Ugandan effort to get early and decisive action from the different agencies of the Ugandan state.

Other aspects of the political commitment that is needed include engaging a broad range of stakeholders in mounting a response. Civil society, local community leaders, religious groups and people living with HIV/ AIDS all need to be brought on board, and the private and public sectors need to be lined up too. International donors are also clearly important in supporting those national efforts.

Leadership is essential in reinforcing strategies to combat this dreadful disease and in helping to deliver not only the access to treatment that is needed, but effective prevention work, which the hon. Gentleman rightly said must be at the heart of the international response. Leadership is also needed to minimise the economic and social impacts of HIV/AIDS on the rest of a country's people. Leadership is particularly important if we are to challenge the stigma and discrimination that presents countries from making effective responses to HIV/AIDS. Where that stigma is pervasive, people will not come forward for testing or treatment. A major factor, for example, in pregnant women not finding out if they have HIV/AIDS is that they fear the reaction of their husbands, families and communities. We will certainly not be able to achieve the target of 3 million people on treatment by 2005, unless we continue to challenge the stigma and discrimination that those with HIV/AIDS face.

The hon. Gentleman asked what the United Kingdom is doing. So far, according to UNAIDS, we are the second largest bilateral donor on HIV/AIDS. In the past six years, our funding has increased from £38 million in 1997–98 to more than £270 million in 2002–03. Our contribution accounts for some 28 per cent. of all projected bilateral spending on HIV/AIDS—second behind the 35 per cent. from the United States. We are active in nearly 40 countries, and our bilateral funding supports the national HIV/AIDS strategies of developing country partners, involving all relevant parts of government.

In addition, we have provided £1.5 billion in support to strengthen health systems more generally in developing countries. Internationally, we have worked successfully to push the crisis up the agenda of all international bodies, including the United Nations, the G8 and the European Union. We have provided strong support for research, including more than £70 million for microbicides research, and some £40 million for the international AIDS vaccine initiative. We are also working in all 40 countries with non-governmental, private and multilateral partners to improve prevention, treatment and care programmes.

The hon. Gentleman rightly identified the need to look beyond sub-Saharan Africa, and to recognise the rising scale of infections in Asia, Europe and central Asia. To give an example of what we are doing, the UK has committed £123 million to India's national AIDS control programme and is supporting hundreds of Government-led programmes that are having a major impact in halting the rise in infection. A programme in Calcutta, for example, has seen condom use among sex workers rise from 1 per cent. to 90 per cent. In conjunction with the BBC World Service Trust, a popular television series has been developed there with strong HIV awareness and reproductive health education measures at its heart, reaching audiences of some 150 million people.

The UK also works extensively through multilateral organisations including UNAIDS. As the hon. Gentleman said, we have increased funding to UNAIDS from £3 million to £6 million, which will kick in from 2004. We were a prime mover in setting up the global fund to fight AIDS, TB and malaria and we have already committed some $280 million over seven years to ensure that it has long-term, stable funding. By working through the World Trade Organisation, to which the hon. Gentleman alluded, the UK secured an agreement to enable those countries without manufacturing capacity to access cheaper medicines.

I am sure that the House will be pleased to know that the Prime Minister, as the hen. Gentleman mentioned, has accepted Kofi Annan's challenge and has already shown considerable leadership on this issue. On 20 November, with President Bush during his visit to this country, talks were held with African Health Ministers and other opinion leaders and NGOs on HIV/AIDS in Downing street. Next week, we will raise HIV/AIDS with other world leaders at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Nigeria. I can also confirm that the Prime Minister has accepted an invitation from the International AIDS Trust to become one of its co-chairs, alongside former Presidents Clinton and Mandela. The IAT has already played an important role in bringing together political leaders, parliamentarians, private sector leaders, women's leaders and business leaders to focus on HIV/AIDS.

Can the Minister spell out what raising HIV/AIDS at the Commonwealth conference means? Are the Government going there with a fundraising target in mind? What are the Government going to raise specifically, and what are they hoping to get out of that meeting?

The intention of raising HIV/AIDS at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting is to continue to encourage political leadership from the other leaders there, to encourage the process of donor co-ordination—to which I will refer in specific terms shortly—and to continue to ensure that there is debate and dialogue as to what individual leaders believe is missing or lacking in their countries.

As the hon. Gentleman mentioned, the World Health Organisation today launched its 3x5 strategy. We in the UK have welcomed the initiative to get some 3 million people on treatment by 2005. We recognise that the international community needs to take advantage of the opportunities offered by recent reductions in drug prices to make those treatments accessible to the poor. We certainly cannot stand by and witness the sheer inequality of four Africans dying of AIDS every minute while in richer countries anti-retroviral drugs make it possible for people not only to survive but to go back to work and lead productive lives.

As the hon. Gentleman suggested, only 300,000 people are currently on treatment in developing countries and only 1 per cent. of Africans with HIV/ AIDS who require treatment receive it. The WHO's target is an ambitious scaling up of current levels. We must ensure that the implementation of the scheme is equitable and that poor communities, and especially women, may access treatment.

As the hon. Gentleman said, we announced in a written statement earlier today the publication of a call for action on HIV/AIDS. The challenge of HIV/AIDS is especially acute in Africa, where AIDS is the biggest killer. However, as he said, we must not allow the spotlight to move away from the need for an effective response in parts of Asia and eastern Europe, where the pace of the increase of the disease is even higher than in sub-Saharan Africa.

Arresting the epidemic is an achievable goal, as is illustrated by the examples of Brazil, Uganda and Senegal. We know what needs to be done. Stronger political direction is needed and better funding and donor co-ordination is important. The taskforce for five African countries that was set up during President Bush's visit was designed to try to improve donor co-ordination and to share the analysis of problems in countries with Governments. It was also designed to ensure that bureaucracy and the need to fill in forms to access resources does not prevent proper work by country Governments.

Alongside better donor co-ordination, better funding and stronger political direction, we need better HIV/ AIDS programmes in countries and, crucially, continuing momentum. I am delighted that there is gathering international momentum that has led to a proliferation of activity and greater funding. However, money and energies are not being used as well as they could be, which is why there is a focus on donor co-ordination. The hon. Gentleman rightly challenged us in the UK to play our part in eliminating some of those difficulties.

The essentials of a strategy can be crystallised by the need for one HIV/AIDS strategy, one HIV/AIDS commission and one way of measuring and reporting progress. We want individual countries and the international community to sign up to that because it will help to ensure that there is not double counting, which the hon. Gentleman was rightly worried about, and that effective donor co-ordination is in place. Such co-ordination is important if we are to meet our targets.

We are calling on the international community today to get on track to meet the millennium development goal of slowing the progress of HIV/AIDS by 2015. We want it to meet the UN target of cutting infections among young people by a quarter and, crucially, the WHO's target of getting 3 million people worldwide on treatment by 2005. We want to ensure that women and poor people are reached. We will require all our efforts throughout the international community to be intensified over the coming months and years. We must do more for people who already have AIDS, which will require us to address increasing access to treatment. I accept that prevention must remain a fundamental part of our strategy. We have focused on prevention up to now, so we will need to rebalance our programmes. The UK is committed to getting £1 billion into Africa by 2005–06 and to ensuring that HIV/AIDS is a priority for the additional £320 million that that will generate for Africa.

The Minister mentioned a figure of £1 billion for Africa. May I bring him back to the subject of conflict? One could examine the revenue that the UK derives from arms sales in Africa, which I suspect dwarfs the £1 billion in aid that will be contributed. What discussions will his Department hold with other UK Government Departments about conflict and trying to ensure that the wealth of many African states will not be eaten up by funding an arms race when their money could be spent on resolving the health crisis?

The hon. Gentleman may already have had the chance to digest the call for action, and he will recognise that it is the beginning of a process of consultation not only across Government but with NGOs. As part of that, we will obviously be discussing with other Departments all the issues that have an impact on HIV/AIDS, and I am sure that conflict will be part of those discussions.

We know that drug prices are falling. We know that international political interest and commitment are growing and that new money has been committed. We stand ready in the UK to help to achieve the World Health Organisation's ambitious goal to get 3 million people on treatment. The call for action that we published today is the first step in an intensification of effort by the UK Government to tackle the epidemic. We have made it clear that we will make HIV/AIDS, together with Africa, a centrepiece of our presidencies of the G8 and the European Union in 2005. As I indicated, next year we will publish a new Government strategy on HIV/AIDS.

I hope that there will be other opportunities to discuss our response to HIV/AIDS, and again I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing the debate and allowing us to have this discussion.