May I caution Members that, although the first debate is on deaths in the construction industry, they must not refer to any case that is still before the courts or unresolved and that is therefore sub judice?

I am extremely grateful but somewhat sad that the issue of deaths in the construction industry has been chosen for debate today. By the time we have finished this debate, there is every possibility that a construction worker will have either lost their life or been severely injured through no fault of their own. Having spent many of my working days in the industry, I am well aware of the dangers and risks associated with it.

There are, on average, 80 deaths a year on building sites, and significantly more serious accidents. Although there are official figures for recorded accidents on Britain's building sites, there are serious concerns that many accidents go unrecorded, for reasons ranging from employer intimidation to workers operating in the twilight world of illegal working.

Organisations such as the independent trades unions are already expressing genuine concerns about the fact that the problem could be further exacerbated by much-needed qualified migrant construct ion workers moving into the industry. Such workers may currently have little or no training in health and safety, and many of them cannot read or understand the English language.

I congratulate my hon. Friend on raising this serious issue, and I look forward to hearing the debate. On twilight organisations and unscrupulous employers, does he share my concern that many take up work in the construction industry with bogus rogue employers who do not have the proper health and safety procedures and insurance? The firm could have a fatality or serious injury, and there would be no recompense for the workers concerned or their families.

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Unfortunately, some people still operate illegally in the construction industry. Workers are engaged by such people and they have no recourse to compensation should they suffer injuries during their employment with those conmen. I congratulate my hon. Friend on raising that issue. She has vast experience of working in the health service, and has seen at first hand some of the horrific injuries that have come through the hospitals.

I spoke about migrant workers coming into the construction industry, but I qualify that statement by saying clearly that migrant workers and indigenous workers are entitled to the same health and safety standards as anyone else. It is true that the construction industry, in particular, is suffering from severe skills shortages across the length and breadth of Britain. It is important that we bring in migrant workers, but we should do so on the understanding that they work under the same conditions as everyone else in Britain.

There is no doubt whatever in my mind that the increase in fatalities in the construction industry is consistent with the decline in trade union representation on our building sites. Unfortunately—and my hon. Friend the Member for East Lothian (Anne Picking) alluded to this—some unscrupulous employers are still happy to play fast and loose with people's lives. I will return to that point later.

Trade unions invest large amounts of their limited resources in training safety reps to recognise and report potentially dangerous practices. Perhaps that is why the cowboy operators, as we call them, seek to undermine the trade unions at times and obstruct their activities. I am sure that many colleagues here will have constituents working in the construction industry, which is often undervalued. None the less, it makes an enormous contribution to our everyday lives and the country's economy.

I congratulate my hon. Friend on introducing the debate. Putting the cowboy companies to one side, does he agree that even the best companies have problems with health and safety? That is not always on the side of the management. When the management express an opinion on the rules governing health and safety, it is sometimes perceived to be interfering. Does he agree that we need education not only for the management, but for the workers so that they become their own safety officers?

My hon. Friend makes a valid and honest point. I am not suggesting for a minute that all employers in the construction industry are rogue or cowboy operators. There are a fair number of legitimate, good and honest employers in the construction industry and they are calling for a level playing field for health and safety. I agree that the workers have a responsibility on their own shoulders to make sure that they are working in a healthy and safe environment. If they identify a reason why they are not experiencing such conditions, they have a responsibility to say so. Facilities are already in place for whistleblowing and so on.

I have referred to trade unions, but those who work in a dangerous environment deserve our attention and our support. Thankfully, similar fatalities do not happen in other sectors of our society but, if we had the same number of deaths in our police forces, our fire services or, dare I say it, in our armed forces, we and the press and media would demand action and call for heads to roll. Why then do we not make similar demands on employers who knowingly put their employees at risk?

A 20 per cent. rise in the number of deaths on building sites must be taken seriously by us all. If not, the trend will continue. Last year, 86 construction workers were killed with employers being punished—if that is the right word—by having to pay ridiculous fines ranging from £300 to £600. What is the point of our clamping down on culpable employers and pushing for more prosecutions only to be undermined in the courts? We need to find ways in which to join up the authorities that are charged with prevention and punishment or there will continue to be an increase in the number of fatal accidents in the construction industry.

Are the fines set the maximum allowed or are they what the courts are imposing?

The maximum fine can be more than £600, but those who impose the fine might not have a clear understanding of how dangerous the industry is. Therein might lie the problem. If they had a flavour of what some workers are going through in the construction industry, they might want to consider seriously how to deal with rogue employers.

In February 2001, the Government called a construction summit entitled "Turning concern into action" because of their awareness and growing concern about the industry's poor health and safety record. The conference acknowledged the concern about the industry's performance, agreed that it had to improve and committed the industry to a step change in performance. That was demonstrated by challenging targets and action plans.

The Minister then responsible for health and safety summed up the main day of the conference by concluding that

"we need a culture change—one where the industry sees itself as high quality, high performing and highly trained. The status quo is not acceptable—we must strive for the highest standards.

The Government, as a major client, has a vital role to play. The Office of Government Commerce guidance is a welcome step in setting those standards and lending more weight to health and safety performance."

The Minister continued:

"An industry which values and respects its workforce and takes responsibility for encouraging the health and safety and well being of its employees it likely to be a successful industry. We owe our workforce the right to be able to do a good day's work safely, go home to their families and not be one more casualty in an industry where there has been far too many in the past."

That step change in performance has not been achieved; those challenging targets have not been met; and the action plans are not delivering. This Government have done many good things in their period in office. However, despite giving a commitment that is now seven years outstanding, they have so far refused to set a date for a Bill that will make corporate killing an offence. With such blatant injustice, we must ask what the Government are afraid of.

I will conclude, as I am conscious that several other colleagues want to speak. The Health and Safety Executive is trying hard to address this issue along with good employers and the trade unions, but they require the proper tools to do the job effectively. That is why we, as legislators, must take seriously our responsibilities and introduce effective and robust legislation that will concentrate the minds of employers on the fact that life is precious and should be treated as such. As the law stands, the paltry fines imposed on guilty employers are an insult to those who have died and to workers and their families.

First, I offer my congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for West Renfrewshire (Jim Sheridan). I also draw Members' attention to my interests, as I chair the group of MPs who are concerned with the Union of Construction, Allied Trades and Technicians, which is the largest trade union operating in the construction industry.

I shall make three points, and I want to draw the Minister's attention to what I perceive to be required in the construction industry: partnerships, which should work in conjunction with enforcement. There is a need to bring together on the major sites trade unions and their solicitor, employers and their solicitors, and the British insurance industry. If we can do that, there is the possibility of ensuring that the major contractor has a health and safety policy approved by the Health and Safety Executive, which becomes embedded in the contracts of all the other subcontractors. The one thing that is difficult to come to terms with in construction is the fragmentation caused by subcontracting. If the major contractor agreed to a health and safety and training policy, which was included in the contracts of all the subcontractors, there would be a chance of getting on top of some difficulties that we face.

One difficulty that my that my hon. Friend referred to is the safety culture. Because of fragmentation, there is little meaningful safety culture in construction.

Does my hon. Friend agree that one priority should be to beef up the Health and Safety Executive, in particular to have spot checks and field operatives checking on building sites without notification?

My hon. Friend makes a good point and I will refer to it later.

First, we could set up a partnership approach and encourage subcontractors to take it up, and we could encourage the British insurance industry to make discounts available in employment insurance premiums in return for accepting the health and safety policy of the major contractor and agreeing to training. That is not to say that there should not be enforcement. I believe that there is a need to increase the penalties and I hope that my right hon. Friend the Minister will consider whether she needs to introduce legislation that would embrace corporate manslaughter. That would be an important inducement to ensure that employers comply with their legislative requirements.

There could be a partnership approach along with enforcement and checks by the HSE, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Anniesland (John Robertson) referred. It is important that the HSE is properly financed so that it can ensure that it has the adequate number of field inspectors to carry out regular inspections and to turn up unannounced on building sites.

There also needs to be workers' safety representatives who are well trained and who could take on the role of roving safety representatives. I know that there have been a number of pilots in the construction industry; perhaps the Minister will refer to those. I understand that there have been successful pilots using roving safety representatives. She could consider rolling those out across the industry, because there is a need to come to terms with the poor record on deaths and injuries in construction and we must make a concerted effort to reduce the number of deaths, which my hon. Friend the Member for West Renfrewshire identified as 86 in the past year. Using partnerships, enforcement and roving safety representatives could be a way of getting on top of the situation in the construction industry and also of helping to rebuild a safety culture in it.

My second point relates to false self-employment. It is rife in the industry, which is the only one in which people who are self-employed have their tax deducted at source. I recall that UCATT, which is the major union in the industry, had a report prepared on false self-employment two or three years ago. It showed that the practice was rife across the industry. It was suggested that the Exchequer was missing out to the tune of £1.5 billion a year because of false self-employment.

Following that report, there was a series of meetings with the Treasury and it is considering—or it was—revising the process of how people register as self-employed. I understand that during the past year there was a pilot on that aspect. I also understand that it may be rolled out across the industry if it proves to be successful. If that is the case, we may be able to get on top of false self-employment, which helps to fragment the industry and undermines the safety culture.

Does my hon. Friend agree that this is not just a question of the Treasury losing money as a result of false self-employment? The Treasury encourages false self-employment by providing financial incentives not only to those who become self-employed but to the potential employer, who has a disincentive to take people on directly. Clearly, the Treasury drive for flexible labour markets costs lives.

I agree entirely. We need to be able to check false self-employment so that we can come to an arrangement on how people are employed. People employed on a pay-as-you-earn scheme tend to be more given to following the regulations set by their employers, but a self-employed person will tend to ignore the procedures set down by the contractors he is working for.

It is also important to recognise that in construction there are genuinely self-employed people, and there will always be a need for them, but the position is that false self-employment is undermining the union's attempt to embed a safety culture that would help to tackle the problem of accidents and injuries. It is important that we come to terms with false self-employment so that we can control it and stop it fragmenting attempts by the unions and employers to embed a safety culture.

My third point is about asbestos, to which many construction workers are exposed. I note from the recently published summer edition of the British Asbestos Newsletter that construction was the industrial sector with the highest incidence of diagnosed mesothelioma cancer between 2001 and 2002. During that period, there were almost 1,900 new diagnoses of that particularly virulent cancer. A person diagnosed with it has a short life expectancy—possibly 18 months.

The TUC reckons that, in addition to the recorded mesothelioma cancers, twice as many different cancers are caused by exposure to asbestos, so, overall, there are probably 4,000 cancer diagnoses across the country each year as a result of exposure to asbestos. On 16 May, The Sunday Times magazine published a thorough article by the investigative journalist Peter Martin, which drew attention to the growing problem of asbestos. He suggested that over the next 46 years there are likely to be more than 180,000 deaths in the UK resulting from exposure to asbestos.

I am aware that the new control of asbestos at work regulations were introduced earlier this year, and they are a step forward, but they do not apply to residential premises, even though many construction workers who come into contact with asbestos do so in residential premises. I can tell the Minister that during the health and safety debate at this year's UCATT conference, it was made clear that the union will call for an extension of the asbestos at work regulations. It wants that extension to embrace the residential sector, in which many of its members work.

Asbestos is a real problem, and I hope that I can persuade the Minister to support the call for a health and care strategy for people suffering from asbestos-related diseases. Australia has already implemented a health and care strategy. It has made a great deal of resources available to deal with the victims of exposure to asbestos, and I think that this country needs to do the same. I am aware that the NHS has a number of pilot schemes running, but we need to move pretty speedily when there are 4,000 diagnoses each year of cancers caused by exposure to asbestos. That is in addition to the men and women who will be diagnosed as suffering from asbestosis.

I hope that the Minister will take on board those three points and consider how we can move forward to building a meaningful safety culture in construction, because that is how we will get on top of the high rate of deaths and injuries each year.

rose—

Order. I remind hon. Members that the purpose of the debate is to enable the Minister to answer the hon. Gentleman who initiated it. However, if all contributions are short, all those who want to will be able to speak.

I will try to be brief. Like others, I welcome the debate and congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for West Renfrewshire (Jim Sheridan) on securing it. There is no doubt that the construction industry is of national importance to the British economy. Nevertheless, the statistics for the industry hide the personal tragedy for the people who are killed and injured and the effect that that has on their families. That applies all over the UK. The debate has given, and will give, recognition to the very good work and practice of employers, individual trade unions, the Health and Safety Executive and, in particular, the TUC and the STUC. Both those organisations have had a keen interest in the construction industry.

You will have noticed, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that a number of Scottish MPs are attending the debate, and with good reason, because the statistics for Scotland are horrendous. Indeed, they are worse than those for the rest of the United Kingdom. I will give an example. In manufacturing in 2002–03, four people were killed in Scotland and 41 in the UK. In the main industries, therefore, Scotland's rate of injuries and deaths is about a tenth of the UK's, but that is not the case in construction. In construction in 2002–03, there were 11 fatalities in Scotland; there were 56 in the UK. The rate of deaths is running at almost 10 per cent. higher in the Scottish construction industry than in the rest of the UK. Clearly, there is something wrong in the building industry in Scotland and much more work needs to be done in that regard.

I recognise that things are happening. There has been a blitz of inspections of building sites, including across whole cities, to try to get on top of the problem. I, for one, would welcome that practice being relaunched by the HSE, because it is an effective way of working. Following one such visit, the HSE's head of operations for construction, Pam Waldron, said:

"The clear message is that the industry must tackle those things which are killing and injuring people, and making them ill at work. Sadly the blitz indicates that there is a common pattern across construction sites in Great Britain of relaxed attitudes to health, safety and welfare.

As in the London blitz last month, we found standards on many of the sites to be well below what we expect. I personally witnessed many examples of poor site management and lack of control of subcontractors allowing unsafe working practices. I also saw individual workers putting themselves at risk by ignoring site rules and taking shortcuts. But there were also examples of well run sites, where health and safety risks were properly controlled. We need to see much more of this."

The figures make interesting reading. Prohibition notices were served on 226 of the 440 sites that were visited. That is another clear indication of the type of problem facing the industry. The figures across the UK are horrific.

There is good reason to be optimistic in some ways. Last year 2,000 young people were brought into the industry to go through a modern apprenticeship based at a college and the workplace or the site itself. We need to ensure that we step up the work of the HSE and the trainers in this area. People can receive good and fundamental health and safety training that, I hope, will never leave them. We need to keep the issue to the fore; it always will be if my hon. Friend the Member for West Renfrewshire is in the House.

I offer my congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for West Renfrewshire (Jim Sheridan) on securing this debate and on his Gangmasters (Licensing) Act 2004, which he successfully piloted through the House. A comparison can be made, because the same cavalier and uncaring attitude of some employers is found in the construction industry.

Many hon. Members have spoken about the numbers of people who have been injured. It is worth repeating that workers in the construction make up 6 per cent. of the work force, but account for a third of all fatal accidents and 16 per cent. of reported accidents. Construction workers are nearly five times more likely to be killed than workers in any other industry. There were 71 deaths in the construction industry in 2002–03 out of a total in an industries of 226. Alan Ritchie, UCATT's regional secretary for Scotland, said in June:

"The problem is that the best way to murder somebody in Scotland is to employ them in the construction industry."

The provision for the cost of accidents and near misses on a typical building site can amount to 8.5 per cent. of the contract price. The construction industry has a total annual output of £84 billion, so £7 million is built into contract prices to account for accidents and injuries. That is a horrific figure. The targets set at a health and safety summit in 2001 between industry and Government of reducing deaths and major injuries by 40 per cent. by 2005 and 66 per cent. by 2010 are unlikely to be met. I ask the Minister to look seriously at that. If we are setting targets at that level, we should see how best we can ensure that they are met. They have to be realistic.

In a report published in May, the National Audit Office looked at the HSE and the role the Government can play in improving safety in the construction industry. It was critical of the culture of the industry and explored a number of avenues for further Government action. It believes that the high level of death and injury is caused by the culture of some in the industry. I echo the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Strathkelvin and Bearsden (Mr. Lyons). There are some good employers in the construction industry, but we have to deal with the bad ones. We also have to deal with the employees who put their own safety at risk and ensure that they have the sense and are trained to prevent the accidents that occur on construction sites.

The deskilling of workers is a major problem. The point has been made about the need for apprenticeships in the construction industry. I am heartened that the industry has taken that on board and is looking for ways to re-skill the work force because many people on construction sites do not have the necessary skills or the proper attitude towards health and safety.

Another problem is the fragmented nature and the large size of the industry. The HSE has done much through education and enforcement action to encourage employees to become involved with health and safety. Employers have talked about cowboy practices among employees that need to be removed by training.

The sanctions that apply against companies that break the law are part of the culture problem. Custodial sentences have been given to those guilty of animal mistreatment, and we have even talked about a naked rambler who was wandering from London to the top of Scotland and was put in jail. People are also threatened with jail for non-payment of council taxes. Yet, no one in the construction industry responsible for accidents has been given a jail sentence. The draft animal welfare Bill will set in place a maximum fine of £28,000 for people found guilty of animal mistreatment. We must get our priorities right; I support those measures for animal welfare, but we should also consider people in the construction industry.

Over the past 30 years, there have been 3,500 deaths in the construction industry yet no employer has faced prison. Large fines have been issued—£250,000 to £500,000 in recent cases—but there is no clear link between the seriousness of the offence and the ability to pay. If someone has the ability to pay, they should do so. A number of labourers have been fined £500 for unsafe actions, while companies are fined only £5,000 for hiring out defective equipment that has caused death. That dramatically highlights the attitude of some courts in this country, and we must overcome it.

There has been a progressive deskilling in the construction industry. A UCATT survey found that only 10 per cent. of workers had appropriate formal qualifications. The same survey found that 25 per cent. of workers had problems with basic reading, writing and numeracy. It is incredible that we are employing people in the construction industry with those problems. The increasing casualisation of the industry, both through the rise of self-employment—real and bogus—and through the rise of subcontracting has undermined industry-wide initiatives such as national vocational qualifications and minimum safety standards.

The fragmentation of the industry has direct consequences. There are 2 million employees across 168,000 companies. That causes problems for the HSE, but it has tried to tackle them seriously. Its blitzes have been effective. It has targeted particular problems in particular areas of the country. A September 2003 blitz found that one third of sites were well below standard. As part of a May 2002 blitz in Scotland and north-east England, as my hon. Friend the Member for Strathkelvin and Bearsden will know, the HSE visited 444 sites and found that more than half required health and safety action. What is more worrying is that the HSE gave advance notice that it would blitz those companies, yet it still came up with those horrific figures.

I am a member of Amicus, which has members in the construction industry and has been active in seeking to reduce deaths and injuries. The national construction sector conference was held in June. Unfortunately, Nigel Griffiths, the Minister for Small Business and Enterprise, was unable to attend. Particular concern was expressed about the continuing deskilling in the industry and the decline in apprenticeships. Amicus is very concerned about the dangers posed by the implementation of the EU posted worker directive. It believes that the importing of cheap posted labour undermines the safety, skills and job security of the whole UK construction work force. It also believes that if the directive is implemented properly, it will enforce minimum standards. However, it would appear that, at present, workers employed on contracts in other EU countries and not subject to the appropriate skills and safety standards will be allowed to be imported into the UK to work; the tendency is in some instances to undercut other companies on the basis of cheap labour.

Will the Minister take into account the fact that there are just over 100 health and safety inspectors in the inspectorate? That amounts to one per 20,000 construction workers. There is a need to strengthen the construction division, and I am sure that the HSE would welcome additional inspectors. That is one way to help to deal with the problem.

It is important, Mr. Deputy Chairman, to examine the issues of skills, the importation of foreign workers—we welcome them but must ensure that they are of the appropriate standard—and the strengthening of the health and safety inspectorate.

rose—

Order. Before I call the next speaker, I must point out that this debate is about enforcing the rules. I therefore remind the hon. Member for Hamilton, South (Mr. Tynan) that if he refers to another hon. Member, even a Minister, he should do so by referring to his constituency, which in this case was Edinburgh, South, or by his post—not by name. Also, I am certainly not a Deputy Chairman, whatever else I am.

I take the point, Mr. Deputy Speaker.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for West Renfrewshire (Jim Sheridan) for securing the debate. It is appropriate to have the debate now, because the Work and Pensions Committee is also investigating health and safety matters in industry. I believe that it is the first review of its kind by the Work and Pensions Committee and that the report will be a worthwhile document. That is not just because I am a member of the Select Committee, but because we have had discussions that seem to me quite important.

The subject before us today is one of the most important for the industry. Everyone wants our building industry to prosper, but we want people who work in it and their families to know that they will return home safe in the evening after a day's work. Our job as politicians is to create a fair playing field. I remind colleagues and Ministers that we set the rules by which the industry works. If we tell the construction industry that we want it to work using the highest levels of safety, it will agree with us, because the legitimate companies argue that they will comply with the dictates of the companies that procure the contracts.

The Government, local councils and health authorities are among the biggest contractors. The Construction Confederation, representing the building trade—it represents more than 5,000 companies and 75 per cent. of the industry—wants as much as we do to eliminate the cowboys. We should accept only those with a record of the highest standards to tender for contracts. If the public sector cannot determine who the contractors are, who can?

I worked in the mining industry for more than 20 years. I was on the safety committee of the colliery for more than 10 of those years. At its peak, there were 2,000 employees. More than 30 years ago in the pits, men still had to buy safety equipment, boots, gloves and tools. Hon. Members can imagine my horror when I found out from the Scottish regional secretary of UCATT, Alan Ritchie, that some workers still have to do that in the 21st century.

I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for West Renfrewshire about migrant workers. Building sites are by their nature dangerous, but we employ thousands of migrant workers, while providing little or no training in the English language. In one of the exercises that we conducted in the mining industry all those years ago we found that 10 per cent. of the work force were dyslexic or suffered some form of dyslexia. If that is the case for British people, let us imagine the problems entailed in bringing in migrant workers.

It is 40 year since the Health and Safety at Work, etc. Act 1974 was passed. I was still at school. A car was something that most people dreamed about. A telephone was something that a neighbour might have, if we were lucky. A colour TV was pie in the sky in those days. Television programmes came on for an hour in the afternoon. Scottish Members will remember that it was the Larry Marshall show at 1 o'clock in the afternoon. Then it started again at 5 o'clock and finished at 10 o'clock. In those days, "going all the way" meant you were going to the bus terminal. That was the difference way back then. The United Kingdom's safety record of more than 1,000 workers facing injury and death every year should not be tolerated in this day and age, and it is unbelievable to think that, in the 21st century, we are still working to 40-year-old legislation. The people we represent deserve better and there is no reason why we should deny them the working standards of which we should be proud.

The Minister should consider the following example: I went with the Work and Pensions Committee to what will be the world headquarters of the Royal Bank of Scotland, which is being built just outside Edinburgh. It will be a massive building, and more than 1,000 people are employed on site. The contract is being completed under time, under budget and with the best safety record in the UK. There are more than 30 contractors on site and each one must undergo training. There is a system of points and incentives to ensure that they work to the highest standards.

We, as legislators, have a responsibility, and our approach should be radical. The building industry already has an arrangement with CITB-ConstructionSkills. If it were to pay a small levy, it could be transferred and, with Government support, it would surely be possible to have health and safety representatives who could work with employers and unions towards establishing the right working environment. What is needed is a healthy work force, with training strengthened to encourage the development of transferable skills and with reward for achievement. Employers should see the unions as an asset, not a threat, and treat relationships with trust. Management should have a high-calibre work force, invest time and resources in people at all levels, have a strong communications strategy that allows the sharing of knowledge—that does not happen in the industry at present—have safe and productive working conditions and a well planned and logistical strategy. All those things can be achieved. That is the type of administration that is demanded on the Royal Bank of Scotland site, which will employ 3,000 people when it is finished. The people in Britain do not want workers to be injured or killed because of shortcuts and good companies do not want that either, so why do we allow it?

rose—

If the hon. Gentleman is brief, I will call him.

Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I draw the Minister's attention to the recent report by the National Audit Office and the hearings that were subsequently held by the Public Accounts Committee. My hon. Friends have referred to matters that I hoped to cover, but which I shall drop because time is short.

The one issue that has not been adequately discussed is the responsibility of designers for work and safety. The National Audit Office report indicates that research undertaken by the HSE and the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions suggested that mistakes made during construction in the design phase led to 60 per cent. of fatal accidents. That is corroborated by groups such as the Major Contractors Group, the Strategic Forum for Construction, the Federation of Master Builders and others. However, the response from the professionals involved in design was shocking. The NAO report states:

"The Royal Institute of British Architects … questioned whether there were sufficient incentives for designers to 'design out' hazards, as this would lead to an increase in costs to the designer which could not necessarily"

be recovered. That is a clear example of designers placing their profits and financial well-being above the lives of workers in the construction industry.

In a survey of designers undertaken by the HSE, one third displayed virtually no knowledge of their responsibilities under the relevant legislation, many lacked knowledge of their duties and some did not even accept that they had any responsibilities, believing that all responsibilities for health and safety fell upon the contractors on site. In those circumstances, when designers who are adequately paid and in many cases overpaid, fail completely to take into account the implications of the designs on the safety of their work force, something should be done. Given that 60 per cent. of fatal accidents art traced back to design faults, I hope that the Government will undertake work in this area as a matter of considerable urgency.

I join other hon. Members in congratulating the hon. Member for West Renfrewshire (Jim Sheridan) on introducing this important subject. Everyone who works in the construction industry owes him a debt of gratitude for putting it on the agenda today.

Deaths in the construction industry sadly affect all parts of the country. Perhaps the most notorious case in my part of the world in the west of England concerns the deaths of four construction workers on the Avonmouth bridge. They were doing repairs to the bridge on the M5 near Bristol when they fell 100 ft from a gantry to their deaths. The case has been through the courts, and the judge who passed sentence at Bristol Crown court in 2001 commented that there had been a

"blatant disregard for basic health and safety legislation over a long and sustained period of time."

That is the culture that we have been talking about today.

Interestingly, the fines in this case were £250,000 for each company involved. No figure is enough to compensate for a life, but that seems to be the kind of figure that we should be talking about. A Health and Safety Executive representative said:

"The fine imposed is there as a reminder of the financial costs of accidents at work. The human cost is incalculable."

It is striking from what we have heard from several Members that such large fines are the exception and that all too often fines are pitiful.

When we debated a private Member's Bill introduced by the hon. Member for Edmonton (Mr. Love) on 14 May this year, the hon. Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore), a member of the Select Committee on Work and Pensions, discussed the level of fines. He said that the Committee, which had investigated the issue, had been told that the average fine following a prosecution after a death at work was about £9,000—that is in the more serious cases. He compared that with the penalty for one day's delay in delivering a contract of £20,000. As several hon. Members have noted, that indicates the relative priorities that we seem to attach to the value of construction workers' lives.

We have heard some important contributions. We heard predominantly from hon. Members from Scotland, and it was interesting that the hon. Member for Strathkelvin and Bearsden (Mr. Lyons) suggested that there was a Scottish dimension to the problem. Five of the six hon. Members who have spoken so far represent Scottish constituencies, and they might want to take that point up with the HSE, because it does not accept the view. Its research, a summary of which I have here, made the findings that one might expect: the major causes of fatalities are falls and the majority of fatal accidents happen on smaller sites. However, it said that there is no specific association with time of day, age of worker or nation or region. If there is a particular Scottish dimension that the HSE is not picking up, it is important that hon. Members relay the information to it. There is clearly a difference of opinion.

The hon. Member for Barnsley, West and Penistone (Mr. Clapham) made an important point about the role of main and subcontractors and ensuring that the highest standards of health and safety are part of what main contractors try to obtain. I was interested in the idea that we could use a discount on insurance as a lever. Will the Minister say whether she has had any discussions with the insurance industry on whether they could be engaged in giving subcontractors an incentive to take health and safety seriously?

The hon. Member for Hamilton, South (Mr. Tynan) made a powerful case when he showed how we take some trivial offences very seriously and lock people up for minor offences while we do not have serious penalties for people whose negligence results in the deaths of workers in the construction industry. There are serious questions about how we should respond. Corporate manslaughter and the time for legislation on it have been raised. Will the Minister tell us where the Government have reached in that process?

The hon. Member for Hendon, whom I quoted earlier, cited the fact that a director who gets their company accounts wrong can be disqualified, but if their negligence leads to someone being killed, they can just carry on. That does not seem right, and I hope that the Government will take action on it.

The hon. Member for Midlothian (David Hamilton) mentioned the work of the Select Committee on Work and Pensions, and it is welcome that it is taking health and safety seriously as a topic of investigation. I shadow a Minister in the Department for Work and Pensions, and health and safety is in danger of becoming a Cinderella subject in that Department; it came to the Department when employment matters were transferred to it. I would be interested to hear the Minister's honest reflections on how much of her time health and safety matters take up. I am aware that she is responsible for a range of other issues, such as welfare to work, so how important is health and safety in comparison, and how much of her time is required for it? Does she feel that enough governmental time is devoted to health and safety issues?

Some of the statements of Ministers and hon. Members highlight the fragmentation of responsibility. As I understand it, there is a Minister with responsibility for the construction industry in a different Department. One would hope that that Minister is concerned about health and safety in construction, yet he is in a different Department from the Minister with responsibility for health and safety. Is such fragmentation a problem, and, if so, what can be done about it? How closely can the Minister work with her opposite number at the Department of Trade and Industry?

The hon. Member for Glasgow, Pollok (Mr. Davidson) referred to the National Audit Office report on construction industry deaths, which came out a couple of months ago. It made an important contribution. He mentioned, in particular, the contribution of designers. That subject did not immediately occur to me, but the more I think about this issue, the more it becomes clear that it is important that the people who design buildings and decide on the way in which they are constructed should think about safety issues. That is obvious, but many of them did not appear to be aware even of their legal obligations. The Health and Safety Executive could do more on that.

Finally, I want to touch on some of the recommendations that the NAO made in its report. The hon. Member for Hamilton, South mentioned that, in 2001, the industry set itself a target of achieving a 40 per cent. reduction in deaths by the middle of this decade, and a 60 per cent. reduction by the end of it. I was not there, so I do not know how those figures were decided on, but I can almost sense that people said, "We have got to come up with a target," and yet the nitty-gritty of how it will be delivered was not addressed.

The hon. Gentleman rightly suggested that those targets would not be met. We all want a target of 100 per cent., because we do not want any deaths in the construction industry, but targets that cannot be met are almost meaningless. The NAO calls upon the HSE to ensure that the industry sets itself more specific and low-level targets for particular types of construction and activities—deaths from falls from heights, for example. The industry should do that.

We have heard about the blitzes that the HSE conducts. The NAO thinks that it could do more to publicise them, so that everybody knows that they could be next. As the hon. Member for Midlothian mentioned, even when sites are told that somebody is coming, there are still gross breaches of regulations. That is appalling. The NAO wants the HSE to return to the sites where it has done its blitzes more often so that they are not one-hit wonders, and to see whether anything has been done and to get tough if it has not. I support that.

The HSE should do other things, too. It should liaise not only at high levels with major Government Departments, but with all the people in the public sector who tender for and let out construction contracts, and with non-departmental public bodies much further down the supply chain.

In construction contracts, the NAO suggests that delivering health and safety should be part of what we mean by getting value for money for the taxpayer. It is interesting that that should be recommended in a report by a bunch of auditors. I think we all support that.

There is no shortage of aspirations, fine words and targets, but we do not seem to be making progress at the speed that everybody who works in this industry has a right to expect. That is why it is particularly valuable that the hon. Member for West Renfrewshire has brought this subject to the House's attention.

First, I declare my interests, which are listed in the Register of Members' Interests. I also want to point out that, in fact, I shadow the relevant Department of Trade and Industry Minister, and that I am here in place of my colleague who shadows the Department for Work and Pensions Minister. As the shadow construction Minister, I have been following the issue carefully.

I congratulate the hon. Member for West Renfrewshire (Jim Sheridan) on securing the debate and on the excellent way in which he put his case forward. I was fortunate enough to be in the Chamber for the Second Reading of his Gangmasters (Licensing) Bill, which I am pleased has now passed through the House. The hon. Gentleman's tenacity in pushing that Bill forward showed how effective he is as a parliamentarian. No doubt, he will return to the issue under discussion time and time again.

I represent the area in west Norfolk in which CITB-ConstructionSkills has its headquarters and the National Construction college. Both work closely with the college of West Anglia in King's Lynn and, between them, they provide a number of important vocational training courses. I have been to the CITB at Bircham Newton many times. It offers training across the whole construction sector, places an overwhelming emphasis on safety, and makes constant efforts to drive up standards.

The hon. Members for Strathkelvin and Bearsden (Mr. Lyons) and for Hamilton, South (Mr. Tynan) mentioned the modern apprenticeship scheme. That scheme is now locked closely into a number of the training courses in construction skills provided by CITB-ConstructionSkills.

It is worth reiterating the importance of the statutory levy, which was mentioned by the hon. Member for Midlothian (David Hamilton). Without that levy, the CITB would not be able to provide the training. Since I have been following the activities of the CITB, there has been increasing emphasis on trying to reduce the number of injuries and tragic deaths in the construction industry. If the levy system were voluntary, there would be nothing like the level of training in the UK that is currently provided. As the hon. Member for West Renfrewshire and many other hon. Members pointed out, the situation with regard to deaths in the industry is worse than it should but it would be worse still if we did not have the statutory levy. I do not believe that there is any debate between the parties about the levy, but I take every opportunity to put on record my support for it. I urge Ministers to put their support for it on the record.

One of the points that was made—I think by the hon. Member for Barnsley, West and Penistone (Mr. Clapham)—concerned the fragmentation of the industry: the proliferation of sites and subcontractors, and the problems that that causes for the major contractor.

When the tragic accident at Potters Bar occurred, I focused on it carefully, because the train was on its way to my constituency. I nearly took that train, but missed it and took the next one—which was, of course, much later. The contract in that situation was fragmented: there were a number of different subcontractors. The hon. Member for Barnsley, West and Penistone made the important point that a safety protocol should be embedded not just in the main contract but in the subcontracts. Had that been the case with Jarvis at Potters Bar, there would not have been the lax safety standards that led to the tragedy of the derailment.

There is obviously a challenge posed by language and cultural barriers. I am pleased that CITB-ConstructionSkills has introduced a comprehensive health and safety test, which now has a pass rate of 85 per cent. Half a million people have now passed that test. The test is an important part of the construction skills certification scheme, which is the skills passport for the industry.

I hope—I should like the Minister to comment on the matter—that major contractors will soon start to stipulate that subcontractors should have a carded work force on all sites where they are working for the main contractor or are part of a contract chain. The health and safety test imposes pretty rigorous standards, and I understand that, in that context, CITB-ConstructionSkills now receives 20,000 applications a week for the skills passport. If we can move forward to a fully carded work force, that would make a huge difference.

The language barrier that is often found on sites was raised by a number of hon. Members. CITB-ConstructionSkills and the National Construction college are now providing extensive safety training in different languages. For example, Laing O' Rourke Learning has set up an organisation called Learning World to train a number of its different contractors at Heathrow terminal 5 in different languages. That is very positive and I hope that more companies will set up similar initiatives and schemes.

A number of hon. Members, including the hon. Members for Northavon (Mr. Webb) and for West Renfrewshire focused on the fines that are levied on negligent construction companies. which are partly the cause of deaths on construction sites. However, I am not clear—perhaps the Minister can elaborate—whether fines are levied for exceeding the limits set by the legislation or for causing an accident by adopting a cavalier and lax attitude. I join the hon. Member for Northavon in asking the Minister to tell us more about the Government's current thinking on introducing a new offence of corporate manslaughter. Can she also comment on the excellent idea put forward by the hon. Member for Barnsley, West and Penistone of trying to persuade the insurance industry to offer discounts on their employer and public liability premiums to companies that are able to embed safety protocols not just in the main contract but in the subcontracts?

I read the other day—perhaps the Minister and her officials also spotted it—that the National Federation of Roofing Contractors has entered into an exclusive agreement with a particular insurance company, so that any of its members who sign up to a fairly comprehensive safety protocol receive a substantial discount on their insurance premiums. I should like to see other trade associations and federations do the same, and perhaps the Minister can do something to encourage that.

The point about self-employment is important, because there has been a substantial debate in the Department of Trade and Industry, the Department for Work and Pensions and the Treasury about false self-employment. I urge the Minister to consider that a lot of small construction companies, many of which I meet as I go round the country, tell me about the stiff regulatory barriers that they face when taking on employees. There is currently a hefty disincentive to employ people, which is why there is every advantage, for employer and employee, to ensure that they are self-employed subcontractors. That is a real issue, so perhaps the Minister can say what the Government's current thinking is.

I notice that the hon. Member for West Renfrewshire alluded to the construction summit that took place in 2001. I remember the great fanfare that greeted that summit: a lot of discussions took place, which generated hope and optimism. Targets were set and a lot of good came out of it. However, we must hear from the Minister an update on how the Government consider the initiatives that came out of the summit. It supported a lot of good initiatives, but as hon. Members have pointed out, the number of deaths in the industry has unfortunately remained rigid at about 80–86 last year. If one adds to that the deaths from asbestos-related injuries and illnesses, the figure obviously goes up. I hope that today's debate will act as a watershed, because it is the first time since I have been a Member, both this time and the previous time, that we have had a debate on the issue. It is a vital issue, and let us hope that not just words but action will come out of this debate and, as a consequence, lives will be saved.

May I add my congratulations to all those that have been expressed this morning to my hon. Friend the Member for West Renfrewshire (Jim Sheridan) on securing this debate and on bringing the challenge to me, newly in position as the health and safety Minister? This is the first opportunity that I have had to consider the issue, and I have been sobered by the details that have come out not only in the contributions but in my preparations for the debate.

I also thank my hon. Friend for his work in bringing forward the Gangmasters (Licensing) Act 2004, which received Royal Assent on 8 July; other hon. Members have also congratulated him on that. The Bill was strongly supported by Ministers in its passage through Parliament. and I am pleased that it is now on the statute book.

I apologise in advance if I miss any points that have been raised; I will seek to address all of them. This has been a robust but courteous debate. The issues are extremely serious and, at the outset, I would like to offer my condolences to the families of the three agricultural workers who died on Monday in Norfolk in the course of their work. When I was preparing for this debate, I looked at the figures for this year. I had prepared to say that the number of fatal construction accidents this year stood at 11, but, sadly, a worker yesterday suffered a fatal injury at a construction site in Purfleet, Essex, so the total is now 12. I want to put on record my condolences to the families of those killed.

As we have already heard, there can be no doubt about the poor record of the construction industry. I would like to pick up on a number of points made. My hon. Friends the Members for Hamilton, South (Mr. Tynan) and for Glasgow, Pollok (Mr. Davidson) and the hon. Member for Northavon (Mr. Webb) drew my attention to the National Audit Office report. I am grateful to them for that, and I will look at the report as a result of this debate.

My hon. Friend the Member for Midlothian (David Hamilton) invited me to consider the Royal Bank of Scotland construction site. I will look into that. If I get the opportunity to visit bonny Scotland, I will perhaps see whether I can fit in a visit to that site.

The hon. Member for North-West Norfolk (Mr. Bellingham) is welcome at our debate. Many of us came at the issue with a Health and Safety Executive focus, but the hon. Gentleman, in a useful, interesting and challenging contribution, asked me to speak about the compulsory levy that contributes to the training of construction workers. I am happy to say that we support that levy. It is without question a practical way to ensure that the industry invests in training. Health and safety law requires that workers and managers be trained and competent to carry out their functions. It is important to bear that in mind when considering the issues.

My hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley, West and Penistone (Mr. Clapham) raised a number of issues. I am grateful to him for the role that he plays on this subject, wearing a number of hats. Not least, he is chair of the all-party occupational health and safety group and its asbestos sub-group. He invited me to consider the question of partnership. I will talk about that in greater detail later. I will think carefully about his idea which the hon. Member for North-West Norfolk commended—about major contractors and the role that they play. I will touch on that point in a moment.

My hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley, West and Penistone and the hon. Member for Northavon invited me to think about how the insurance industry works with contractors and construction businesses. During the review of the employers' compulsory liability insurance difficulties experienced over the last year, we worked closely with the Association of British Insurers and the Health and Safety Executive. We are looking into ways in which the risk can be assessed properly. Employers—not just in the construction industry but in all walks of life—who demonstrate that they take health and safety seriously, who manage properly the incidents that occur to their work force and who can show that the number of incidents is as low as possible should get some relief from the insurance premiums that they face. We are working to secure that. That will benefit everybody.

Every Member who has spoken has commented on the level of penalties and fines applied. I want to make it absolutely clear that the general level of health and safety fines does not reflect the gravity of the relevant offences. That is why we were pleased as a Government to support the private Member's Bill that was introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton (Mr. Love). That received a partial Second Reading in May; it is due to receive a further Second Reading this Friday if it is fortunate enough to be reached, although it is fairly low on the Order Paper. That Bill would certainly be a major step forward. The problem is partly that the fines are not high enough but, as the hon. Member for Uxbridge (Mr. Randall) said, it is also because the courts do not apply the available fines. The Bill will send an important message to those considering these issues in a legal setting.

I want to make two further points about Crown immunity and corporate manslaughter. If the Bill of my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton does not make progress, the Government need to consider the consequences of that and find another way of bringing about those changes. I reassure hon. Members that we are actively looking for a way of making progress on all these issues. It has been a long time, and I acknowledge the justice of what my hon. Friends have said. Home Office colleagues are taking forward the questions of corporate manslaughter and Crown immunity. We are working on a draft Bill, and the aim is to have that published towards the end of this year—perhaps the back end of autumn. That is our objective. In spite of the number of green seats between us, I hope to be able to demonstrate to hon. Friends that, in fact, we stand shoulder to shoulder on many of the issues that they have rightly raised.

One or two things should be said about what is happening in the construction world. It is of no comfort, but it is a factor that we should bear in mind, that the UK construction accident rate is the second lowest of any European Union state and significantly lower than the larger member states. Good though that may at first appear, we acknowledge that nearly 850 workers and members of the public have died as a result of accidents in the construction industry in the past 10 years. Many more have died as a result of exposure to asbestos, as my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley, West and Penistone rightly pointed out. In fact, to describe the increase in the numbers of those suffering from asbestos-related illnesses as an epidemic to be faced over the coming years would not be too strong. Thousands more have been seriously injured as a result of accidents or have had their lives blighted through damage to their health and well-being. As has been said, we must remember the wider impact on families and friends. They, too, suffer when injuries and deaths occur.

At its best, however, our construction industry is world class. We all benefit from the improved built environment that the industry provides: new houses, schools, hospitals, a better transport system and other essential infrastructure. However, we should not and cannot accept that those gains should be at the cost of damage and suffering to construction workers and their families. The industry must improve its performance in controlling and managing the safety and health risks that it creates.

Many hon. Members drew attention to the summit in February 2001 at which my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister set down some major challenges to the industry. We should remember that, at that time, there were a shocking 113 deaths of workers and members of the public in a single year. Commitments were given at the summit by all those who have a stake in the industry, including clients, designers—about whom I will talk more in a moment—suppliers, contractors and trade unions. That meant accepting responsibility for the industry's health and safety performance and giving it a priority in terms of business risk management to achieve dramatic improvements, and we heard about the target of a 10 per cent. year-on-year reduction in deaths and major injuries.

Since then, the number of deaths has reduced to 76 and 71 in the two most recent years. I did not recognise the figure of 80, but I will check the figures that we have been discussing. However, the record is less clear when major injuries are also taken into account. I acknowledge that the industry is well short of its target to reduce the rate of fatal and major injuries by 40 per cent. by 2004–05. It is not clear that there has been any marked improvement in reducing ill health. Major challenges face all the industry's stakeholders.

Those commissioning the work—the clients, who have been referred to as contractors—must do more to meet the challenges set by Ministers in the strategic forum for construction, which is convened by my right hon. Friend the Member for Cunninghame, North (Mr. Wilson). The purchasers—the clients—must provide leadership to the teams that they create, make clear their commitment to respect the people who will work for them and reject those who do not measure up. My hon. Friends are right to point out that, as major purchasers of the industry's services, central and local government need to ensure that they follow the practice of best value and not lowest cost, so that whole-life health and safety issues are addressed to reduce injuries, whether caused during initial construction, or, equally importantly, during subsequent maintenance.

My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Pollok questioned the role of designers. He is right to draw attention to that; designers have yet to engage fully in reducing the likelihood of injuries by improving the quality of their designs so that potential hazards are eliminated at the earliest possible opportunity—in the design office itself. Designers can, for example, specify lower-weight building blocks to reduce the risks involved in manual handling. Through the design process, they can also reduce the need to work at height. A recent HSE survey suggested that there is increasing commitment by designers. However, as my hon. Friend rightly said, that has come from a very low base.

Equally, suppliers could do more to improve the products on the market. For example, heavy components that have to be manually handled create problems, and advances in reducing the weight of pre-packaged materials need to be rolled out more widely. There should be joint development work with others in the supply chain, so that off-site prefabrication, which we see more of these days, reduces on-site risks. Such things hold out further opportunities for manufacturers to make a contribution to the health and safety agenda. Contractors also have to commit more positively to the provision of decent working conditions, put that at the top of their agenda and improve the ways in which they engage with those who work for them.

As the Minister responsible for health and safety, I am pleased to give my support to the Health and Safety Commission's document "A strategy for workplace health and safety in Great Britain to 2010 and beyond". The hon. Member for Northavon asked me how much time I devote as a Minister to health and safety. I commit half my working time to it because health and safety matters are so pressing and urgent in the Department. The role that I play in liaising with the Health and Safety Executive and the Health and Safety Commission is demanding, and rightly so.

Hon. Members may not be aware that long before becoming a Member of Parliament—more than 25 years ago—I trained as a Workers Educational Association health and safety TUC instructor. I well recall working with shop stewards in training courses in Liverpool. I have an anecdote about a self-employed construction worker who worked, I think, at the Shell oil refinery at Ellesmere Port. He described how he had been instructed to travel from one side of the site to the other. He and his comrade, who was also self-employed. loaded up the back of the flat-bed truck that he owned. They put their acetylene torches, the accompanying paraphernalia and the brazier that they were to use at the next point on the site on to the truck and they trundled off across the vast chemical plant. They did not see a soul on the site and when they arrived at the other end, they climbed out of the cab of their flat-bed truck and found that the brazier had reignited. They had thought that it was out, but it had reignited when they started and, by the time they reached the other end of the site, it was ablaze. Presumably, they had trundled the blazing truck right the way through the centre of one of the most dangerous sites in the UK. That indicated to them that, self-employed or not, they needed to get some training and to understand what they were doing in terms of safety.

That is a good point at which to remind everybody that all workers, irrespective of their status—whether they be migrant workers or self employed—are covered by UK health and safety legislation. I hope that that reassures those who had concerns about migrant workers. The question of language problems needs to be addressed by employers when they take on subcontractors who may have such difficulties.

The strategy that the HSC and HSE have developed signals a new approach, which recognises that they have to work with others to develop closer partnerships in creating a sensible health and safety culture. I am also pleased that the construction industry has been identified as a priority for action by the HSE. The creation of a separate HSE division that is tasked to challenge the industry makes clear the HSC's commitment to the construction industry's problems as part of the new strategy. There are more inspectors and support resources tasked to construction than ever before. That was a point about which reassurance was sought and I hope that that has helped.

The HSC is taking forward the development of two codes of regulations that are particularly relevant to the construction industry: the work at heights code, and the design and management of construction work. I know that some stakeholders have concerns and also that the HSE is in close consultation with them so that the outcome will be regulations that add value by reducing injuries and do not simply increase bureaucracy. We must acknowledge that the HSE alone cannot put right the health and safety performance of the industry. Those who commission, provide and maintain the built environment create the risks and they must take responsibility for working in partnership to manage them.

Partnership working was amply demonstrated when Andrew Smith—I beg your pardon, Mr. Deputy Speaker—my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions—

The right hon. Member for Oxford, East.

Oxford, East. I have no excuse. As a former Whip, I should know all that. It should be on the tip of my tongue.

Partnership working was amply demonstrated when my right hon. Friend announced on 30 June the success of two bids made jointly by construction trades unions and employers for a share of the £3 million workers' safety adviser challenge fund. Workers are the ones who are exposed to the risks and in many workplaces they have not been fully heard. Evidence shows that when workers have a voice and influence, workplaces become safer and health risks are better controlled. I congratulate the social partners that made the successful bids—UCATT, the National Federation of Builders, the Transport and General Workers Union and the Federation of Master Builders—so that sustainable workers' safety advisers can be established in the south-west and the midlands. Partnership has equally been successfully demonstrated from the summit until now.

Since the summit and since the targets were set, I would acknowledge that the construction industry has not been on course to meet them. All of us who have an interest in making the industry safer must join forces to ensure that we work harder to achieve those targets.

May I thank all the hon. Members who have taken part in this debate for their co-operation? It has been a good, if not a model, Westminster Hall debate.

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak about the Way to Go campaign, which was launched by more than 30 non-governmental organisations with environmental and social objectives to set the pace in developing a progressive transport policy that places greater emphasis on public transport, cycling and walking.

I speak as one who has been a motorist for more than 30 years and who, until recently, according to the chart in my doctor's surgery, was categorised—unbelievably, I have to say—as obese. However, I have started a diet and taken up regular cycling again. I am no longer in the red column, but have moved into the pink, which is for those of us who are merely overweight.

I have been relearning the simple message that "lifestyle" and "healthy" should go hand in hand. However, in today's society they often do not. What is promoted as a good lifestyle these days will usually allude to cars, fast food and one's desire for convenience. Around the time that I was born, traffic was measured at about 33 billion vehicle miles. Now the number has risen to more than 300 billion vehicle miles and shows no sign of abating, which is not surprising as the cost of motoring continues to plummet and the costs of other forms of transport continue to rise.

The costs of obesity continue to increase, too. The Health Committee estimated the expense to the national health service of dealing with obesity at £3.7 billion a year. When we consider the proposals of the Way to Go campaign, which amount to the capital and revenue sum of £1.75 billion each year to 2010, we should consider how much we could save elsewhere. That is a central feature of the Way to Go campaign and why it was initiated not only by environmental or transport groups, but by such organisations as Help the Aged, Age Concern and the women's institute. They know that we need a transport strategy that is about social justice, as well as greening the environment. The organisations know that, if the campaign bears fruit, it will deal with social exclusion and give more people real mobility, as opposed to congestion, pollution and health problems—especially for those who live in inner cities and have to cope with the fumes spewed out by commuters' cars. We would have better rural services, too, which is why the Campaign to Protect Rural England also supports the Way to Go campaign.

The Government need to build on their successes. I welcomed the Secretary of State for Transport's announcement last week about car sharing on motorways and the recent publication of the walking and cycling action plan. I am pleased that the Department for Transport has a new public service agreement target to deal with climate change. I am delighted that, yesterday, the Government introduced a transport renewable fuel obligation to the Energy Bill. I welcome the fact that they have an open mind about new ideas and new ways in which to develop partnerships to deliver better transport.

I also acknowledge that the taxpayer does not have a bottomless pocket to pay for schemes and that the Government rightly want to obtain the maximum benefit from whatever schemes are proposed. I know very well how such strictures are applied because, at the local level, the Leeds supertram—a proposal that I support—has over the past 15 years or so seen its projected capital costs increase from £330 million to about £800 million. What a shame that the Leeds supertram has had so many false starts, but it is not alone. I recognise that the costs in general of light rail systems have mushroomed and that we have to be sure that they can deliver value for money. I believe that, in this instance, the case for that can still be made.

Can the same be said for all the road schemes still on the books? In an answer to a recent parliamentary question, I was told that the targeted programme of improvements had risen from £7,761 million to £8,781 million—an increase of more than £1 billion or, in itself, more than enough to fund the entire Way to Go capital proposals for the next six years. The amount is enough, in other words, to fund a cycle-friendly road network, cycle training for all, networks of bus lanes, the promotion of bus services, safe routes to schools, 20 mph speed limits in residential areas, the restoration of streets and pavements to good condition, quality standards for buses and trains, and grants for rail freight projects.

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate and on his sterling advocacy on behalf of the Way to Go campaign. I hear what he says about investment. Does he agree that the vast majority of passenger transport journeys are made by bus, and that since the ill-advised deregulation of bus services in 1986, patronage has plummeted, mainly because of unreliability, escalating fares and the constant chopping and changing of timetables?

Does my hon. Friend also agree with the 106 hon. Members who signed early-day motion 518 that the successful bus franchising in London should be extended to other places, such as the West Yorkshire passenger transport area. to secure quality bus contracts that strike a better and fairer balance between passengers and profit?

I am grateful for my hon. Friend's intervention, and I agree with what he says; I think I am a signatory of the early-day motion. The Government should listen carefully to those proposals, as in the last 20 years, bus passengers have been ill served by the dogmatic, ideological Thatcherite deregulation in 1986. The Way to Go proposals, which may one day include those ideas too, are excellent. They have been costed and are waiting to go.

Last week, I read about the proposals from Central Railway to develop a new freight service between the north-west and the south-east, which would have a major impact in reducing both congestion and the need for extra lanes on the M62—one of Europe's busiest motorways, which goes through my constituency. Those proposals would boost the economy of the north-west, and I hope the Government consider them seriously.

As we review the transport strategy, we should try to apply a much greater vision and escape from the predict-and-provide shackles of the past. Roads will take the largest slice of funding for the foreseeable future and the car and road transport lobbies will say that they make a massive contribution to the Exchequer. That is true—I do not dispute it—but what often does not enter the equation is the huge environmental cost of road transport.

I acknowledge that there have been improvements such as reducing pollution from individual cars and that fuel consumption overall has moderately eased off in the last three or four years, although the long-term trend is up. Road traffic has increased by 79 per cent. since 1980, and fuel consumption rose by 53 per cent. in the same period. Since 1990, CO₂ emissions have risen by 11 per cent., and transport on the ground and in the air threatens to wreck the Government's greenhouse gas emissions targets. My question is, what would happen if the costs of global warming were to be internalised in our assessment of the real cost of motoring? Given that road transport contributes 25 per cent. of our carbon emissions, compared to just 1 per cent. for rail, it is easy to see where the burden of improvement lies.

Adjustments have been made to vehicle excise duty to reflect the fact that smaller engines pollute less, but it would make sense to carry that logic through and to make larger engines pay more than the standard rate of VED. As any study will show, most four-wheel drives sold on the market today never see an off-road track, and for that the countryside must be grateful. These behemoths clog up our urban roads, but their fuel efficiencies are disgracefully low. Their owners may argue that they are therefore paying more in fuel duty, but that is to miss the point entirely. They were described by the Mayor of London as complete idiots, which may explain why 4x4 owners can so easily miss the point. Apart from the greater pollution they cause, they also hasten the demise of a finite resource. If they cannot be trusted to be the guardians of their children's future, the Government should take that small step and do it for them. Would that be such a terrible thing?

A modest adjustment in VED would pay for much of the Way to Go campaign's manifesto and it would save lives, too. Four-wheel drives have been shown to have a far higher risk of causing death to cyclists and pedestrians than ordinary vehicles, because of their greater height and bulk.

That proposal is an example of integrated transport, and we could use the money to train cyclists, as most journeys made are less than 5 miles. I believe that the Government's target was to quadruple cycling, but we are well short of that: at just 2 per cent. of journeys made, we are abysmally short of the Dutch 28 per cent. or the Danish 18 per cent. The smart Alecs who scoff at our attempts to boost cycling will retort that Holland and Denmark are flat countries more suited to cycling and that, besides, they have all those dedicated cycle lanes. However, is Switzerland, where 15 per cent. of journeys are made by bicycle, a flat country?

We know that measures to increase cycling have precisely that effect. London has bucked the national trend, and cycling has increased considerably. That is because cyclists are considered important and deserving of road space in their own right. The congestion charge has helped by making the roads safer for cyclists and by forcing motorists to reconsider how they get to work. The Government's action plan for cycling is a welcome document, but it is described in the introduction as a beginning, not an end. I hope that that is true, as we have seen some false starts in the recent past.

There are other measures I would like to be introduced, which go beyond the Way to Go proposals and perhaps show that that campaign is too modest in its objectives. I note, for example, that the Environmental Transport Association—I am a member of it, so I have declared my interest—is promoting carbon emissions offsetting. Under that scheme, motorists can seek to neutralise their carbon emissions by funding renewable energy schemes such as paying for the distribution of free low-energy light bulbs or the planting of forests. What help for such schemes are the Government willing to offer? These initiatives are new and we should see whether there are new ways to support them—with tax breaks, for example.

I must also plug my ten-minute Bill, the Domestic Tradable Quotas (Carbon Emissions) Bill, launched last week. It shows how carbon trading at the individual level could help us all to reduce carbon emissions, and it might even raise a bit of money for the Government, which could be used to promote the schemes in the Way to Go manifesto.

We cannot afford to be timid in addressing the issues. We have panics about obesity, congestion and global warming, but we then comfort ourselves with the thought that, as change happens at such a slow pace, it does not really matter if we do not do something about those things today, if our next pair of trousers happens to be 2 in wider at the waist or if there is a slight change in the weather that means that somewhere else in the world a hurricane is stronger than usual. That is normally off our register.

Our psychology is the same in both regards, and collectively we persist in putting off the day when we take drastic action to tackle the problems. Like smokers, we always want one last fag. The question is, when are we going to curb our addiction to yet more roads and cars and recognise that what we need is not the transport equivalent of a nicotine patch, but a bit of exercise on the old step-change machine?

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Morley and Rothwell (Mr. Challen) on securing the debate. These are important matters.

I am grateful for the contribution that the Way to Go campaign has made to the review of the 10-year plan for transport. It has raised many points about how a future transport system could better service the needs of the population, and it highlights some key issues that the Department for Transport has regularly to consider as we aim to balance transport efficiency, safety and accessibility with achieving our environmental objectives.

As I hope to show, we are addressing many of, if not all, the issues in the Way to Go campaign, although I would be the first to agree that we need to go further in some areas. However, we start from the premise that we need a transport strategy that can meet the challenges of a growing economy, as well as a rapidly increasing demand for travel, and balance that with the environmental considerations to which my hon. Friend referred.

In passing, and no more than that, I say that the undercurrent of opinion that characterises our transport policy as "predict and provide" across all modes is simply wrong. I will not go into substantive detail on the air transport White Paper, but it has been characterised as predict and provide, and it is not.

Much debate prompted by the Way to Go campaign starts from the premise that this Government are as voracious as previous Governments when it comes to road building. Well, my hon. Friend will know that we imposed a moratorium on road building soon after we came to government to take stock of where we were with the road network and to see how, rather than simply building roads willy-nilly, we could optimise existing networks. That is what we have done across the piece, including the air transport White Paper.

My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Transport has said time and again of the road network that we will not, and cannot, build our way out of congestion. That is central to all we do, but it does not obviate the need for a roads programme. There clearly is such a need, but this Government, unlike the previous Government, start from the premise of optimising the existing road network before creating more scars across the land.

Last year, in my previous incarnation as a Minister responsible for housing and regeneration, I took great delight in visiting any number of city centres where scars across our communities were being torn down. I am referring to the once-fashionable inner-city ring roads that simply went straight through communities. The people who had those roads built could not care less about their impact on communities and on air quality and the environment. I do not accept, therefore, the underlying premise that our approach is all about predict and provide, that over the past seven years this Government have done exactly the same as any previous Government, that we are in hock to the road lobby and that our approach is all roads, roads, roads as that is the only answer.

The Way to Go campaign has published a list of measures that it wants the Government to incorporate in the review of the 10-year plan for transport. I will dwell on some of those to see where we are with them, as a prelude to publication of the review. First, on the provision of cycle networks and training, the Government have been proactive in their efforts to maximise cycling as an alternative to the motor car. I congratulate the many local authorities up and down the country that have taken the provision of cycle lanes and networks seriously.

As my hon. Friend suggests, it is no accident that London is ahead of the game in that regard. That is because London boroughs and local political leaderships in London take cycling and the provision of cycle lanes far more seriously than their colleagues elsewhere. I would venture to say that that includes West Yorkshire, which is not the brightest light bulb in the box when it comes to such provision.

I am talking about not simply cycle networks and the like, but going beyond that and getting our infrastructure right in relation to the balance between public transport and the motor car. To many local authorities up and down the country, bus priority measures mean a bus stop, rather than a bus lane or similar devices. I endorse what the Way to Go campaign says about getting the balance in many of our towns and cities much more favourably disposed towards all road users. I also agree with that in the context of cycling.

As my hon. Friend said, in June, after working closely with experts and organisations in each area, we published an action plan on our strategy to encourage cycling and walking. Improvements can best be driven through at local level, and the best councils are developing improved cycle routes as an integral part of their local transport plans. We certainly encourage that. Local authority spending on cycle infrastructure was about £45 million in 2003–04—up a third on two years earlier—but, as my hon. Friend said of the document that we published, it is a beginning. We have not secured everything we need in that regard. We have been working with more than 20 road safety and cycling organisations on a new national standard for child cycle training. Many other schemes reflect our commitment to those important issues.

I can reconfirm that buses remain at the centre of our strategy for local transport networks. The vast majority of public transport trips are made by bus. Overwhelmingly, buses connect our communities to key areas of employment, leisure, retail and other activities. In the context of transport as a weapon in the battle against social exclusion, buses are, will be and should be at the core of our strategy. We employ a host of measures to help to improve bus efficiency, including priority at traffic signals and access to vehicle-restricted areas. The Department has published local transport note 1/97, "Keeping Buses Moving: A Guide to Traffic Management". More recently, we published a guidance pack on behalf of the Bus Partnership Forum called "Bus Priority: The Way Ahead".

I repeat, however, that it is incumbent on local authorities to take these matters forward. I make no apology for getting local transport plan resources down to the local level over the past four or five years, so that in the first instance local authorities can determine what is necessary in terms of local transport for their own areas. When I appear before local government organisations or forums, I take every opportunity to repeat that it is in their hands not to describe bus priority measures as an add-on or a frill that they might get around to if they want. If we are serious about tackling urban congestion, the bald logic that 80 people on a bus is 80 people not in 50,60 or 70 cars must commend itself. However, there is no point having 50,60,70 or 80 people on a bus if all it is doing is sitting in the same traffic that everybody else is sitting in.

Local authorities can and should do more, and elected representatives in the House could do more with their local authorities to ensure not only that the buses work, but that measures are taken. We must get a better balance between the various users of road space. Many of the Way to Go policy proposals are about reconfiguring our public space, especially our road space, so we can achieve that. I endorse that, and local transport is central to achieving it.

We support the uptake of real-time information for bus users, which allows passengers to make better-informed decisions. In 2002, £20 million was allocated to local authorities to implement real-time information schemes. People will use the buses and rely on public transport if they are reliable, efficient and safe and there is the necessary information for them to be able to rely on it.

Developing safe and efficient routes to school is also an important part of our transport plans. We have put into action a wide range of initiatives to improve travelling to school for children and parents, tackle rising car use on the school run and encourage healthy and safe routes to school. That should also be seen in the context of the anti-obesity campaign. Those initiatives include a travelling to school action plan and a good practice guide. We want every school in England to have a school travel plan by the end of the decade; all of them will focus on developing safe routes to school.

I turn to other issues highlighted by the Way to Go campaign. We believe that decisions on local speed limits are best made at local level. Local authorities already have the freedom to introduce 20 mph speed zones through their local transport plans. We recommend that 20 mph zones be installed near schools, where appropriate. Our child pedestrian casualty record has improved in recent years and we have a number of initiatives under way to reduce casualties further. My hon. Friend knows that our record in terms of the statistics on killed or seriously injured children and adults is far superior to that of most of our colleagues in Europe, but we can and should go much further.

The Way to Go campaign says that funding for local transport is a priority. We have doubled our capital funding for local transport, and we are delivering a sustained investment policy to ensure that we do not return to the days of stop-start investment in transport. We have not shifted the resources focus to the local dimension through the local transport plans simply to starve them of resources. Whatever the mode of public transport, throughout the past 20 or 30 years there has been stop-start investment, which has been detrimental to the entire public transport network. We must ensure not only that there is investment, but that it is sustained.

In December 2003, we announced an investment package of almost £2 billion in local transport—roughly three times the investment in the mid-1990s. We have also given local authorities extra power to solve local transport issues themselves. New guidance on the next round of local transport plans is due soon. In addition, almost £200 million has been made available in the three years between 2001 and 2004 to improve rural transport provision. I accept what has been said about the need for transport in rural areas. We have a rural bus subsidy grant, which has funded more than 2,100 new and enhanced bus services in rural areas in 2003–04.

I agree with the underpinning points of the Way to Go campaign, especially with respect to sharing very limited space when there is urban congestion. We are taking forward policies on streets in a manual for streets to help to provide guidance on the design and layout of roads.

The development of a tool to help local authorities to manage streets effectively has been proposed as part of the integrated local transport bid. That would help authorities to bring together the many different parties responsible for our modern streetscape. We cannot encourage people to walk far more in urban areas to alleviate aspects of urban congestion if the very act of walking is unsafe and unhealthy and takes people through what is almost a war zone or obstacle course.

It is necessary to reconfigure and to bring balance back into the equation in terms of design and what can be found on our streets and at road junctions. Professional engineers especially need to think about why people may walk through a certain area and whether some road space should be configured for pedestrians as well as for motorists.

Among other Way to Go priorities is the improvement of quality standards for bus and rail travel, which we are keen to continue. Journeys involving those will be improved by the new Transport Direct programme—a comprehensive national information service covering all modes of transport.

We are determined to improve standards by making buses and trains more accessible. With 1,400 new rail vehicles entering service over the past two and a half years, and another 1,000 to come over the next 18 months, we will see a big improvement in rail services and accessibility in many areas.

On rail travel, a senior executive of a train operating company told me recently that he was told by a Minister—I know that this is all anecdotal, but I hope that my hon. Friend will take it on trust that it is true—that the way to handle the capacity problems that some rail services have is to put up prices. How will that message go down with commuters, particularly those who travel through my constituency on two lines where extra carriages are sorely needed? If they thought that they would have to pay more to use those services, that would give them a grievance.

I accept the point behind my hon. Friend's intervention—price is an important dimension of all aspects of public transport—and that we cannot allow rail services, which are a crucial part of the network, to price themselves out. More often than not, if people are priced off the railways, they do not jump on a bicycle or walk to where they are going; they get in their cars. However, I should make the point in passing that pricing is in the first instance a matter for the train operating companies.

We will bring in new initiatives to make taxis and buses more accessible. Such initiatives are already bearing fruit in some ways and we are making transport safer by cracking down on crime.

As to discount railcards, the Secretary of State has, in response to the fares review, asked the Strategic Rail Authority to work with the industry to develop a national discount railcard. I know that that is another concern of the Way to Go campaign.

In response to the ninth point on the Way to Go list, we are already encouraging motorists to buy smaller, cleaner cars. Vehicle excise duty and the range of taxation and fiscal measures are a matter for the Chancellor of the Exchequer, not for me, and if my hon. Friend wants to pursue that aspect through an Adjournment debate, I am happy for him to do so, as I will not be answering.

Broadly speaking, although I accept that we may need to go further, and we probably will not make sufficient progress on some Way to Go issues, much of what we are already doing through our transport policies, as I have tried to show in the short time available, goes with the grain of the Way to Go campaign.

Buses are central to our transport strategy. Public transport is central to all that we try to do. Across all modes of transport—roads, rail and buses—we try to make optimum use of existing capacity before even considering any additional capacity. In that way, as we progress over the coming years. the Way to Go campaign and what we are trying to do nationally are at least aligned in terms of direction of travel, if not in every detail.

11.30 am

Sitting suspended until Two o'clock.

I was delighted to secure the debate this afternoon. In fact, I could not believe my luck. The hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr. Hayes) and the Minister may have a sense of déjà vu, because we debated the same subject on 9 December 2003. The hon. Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew) also took part in that debate. One of the reasons that we are here today is that it is a massive issue and affects most of this country. We in the House cannot explore enough the need to find solutions to this most pressing and urgent of problems.

I said that I felt extremely lucky to secure the debate this afternoon, but that was before I realised that the minor matter of the Butler report would be discussed in the main Chamber at the same time, which may have diverted a large number of hon. Members who would otherwise be interested in taking part in this debate. There are important issues to debate and I am delighted that the Minister is here. I told his office about the issues that I intend to cover. They are similar in some ways but different in many others, and develop our debate of eight months ago.

The situation is now so urgent that we need a constraint on the building of new private market homes in the countryside. That may sound perverse, but it is needed to deal with the lack of affordable housing, particularly in the countryside. There is a crying need for the development of an intermediate market between social rented housing and the first rung on the ladder of the private owner-occupying sector. That gulf has been consistently large in many parts of the country, particularly in rural areas, although it oscillates over time. Sadly, it has affected my part of the world for the last generation. We must recognise the need to build a bridge by developing an intermediate market between social rented housing and the first rung of the housing ladder.

I argue strongly that the Government should explore new constraints on the still growing demand for second homes in many areas with severe housing problems. I am not opposed to people who own holiday homes. There are many of them in my area, and despite what others in the Chamber may believe, I am on very good terms with them. Owning second homes and using unused or underused properties for recreational purposes is fine in areas with an excess of housing, but we need seriously to consider ways of constraining the use of such houses purely for recreation and investment in areas with massive local housing demand. Those are the areas about which I am most concerned.

I want to talk about the development of the intermediate market. I also want to engage constructively in the debate, and I hope that that spirit came across the previous time we debated the issue. It is perhaps important to tell the Minister that I shall not be encouraging the many thousands of people in housing need to get involved in a gladiatorial argument about statistics, past records and what the Government have or have not done. I say that because the answers are staring us, as legislators, and the Government, as the controller of the resources, in the face.

In my contribution, I want to look at the intermediate market, changes to the planning exceptions policy under planning policy guidance note 3, and section 106 obligations under the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. I also want to look at measures to control second home ownership and ask about the Housing Corporation's targets for rural areas and market towns. I then want to ask about the predicted outcome of the investment in social housing that was announced in Monday's spending review and that the Deputy Prime Minister elaborated on further on the Floor of the House yesterday.

I have covered the background to the issue in previous debates, so I shall not go into great detail about the situation in my constituency, which covers Kerrier, Penwith and the Isles of Scilly. As has been well documented, however, it is experiencing severe need because it is at the bottom of the earnings league table but has extremely high house prices. As Members of Parliament, we tend to wear our hearts on our sleeves, drawing attention to the severe problems in our constituencies in an almost macho comparison of scars. Although we may all say that the problem is far worse in our areas than in those of other hon. Members, that will not help to solve the problem. None the less, I assure the Minister that he will find severe housing problems if he looks at areas such as mine. Indeed, the numbers on the local authority waiting list have increased by more than 50 per cent. in the past five years alone.

The problem is illustrated not only by the statistics, but by the human tragedies and the human suffering that those statistics quite properly highlight. It is clear from my constituency work over the past three or four years that the lack of affordable housing is the most significant issue for the majority of people, and I am sure that other hon. Members will have found the same in their casework surgeries, correspondence and public meetings.

Many young couples come to me in severe circumstances. They may be living in winter lets, overcrowded accommodation or one-bedroom flats with two or three children. The local authority is doing its best, and social housing providers and housing associations are trying to manage their resources as best they can, but the fact that many hundreds of families are in such situations brings home to us all just how severe the problem is.

Some people perceive those who live in bedsits, bed-and-breakfast accommodation, overcrowded housing or, as happens in constituencies such as mine, in winter lets such as holiday chalets, as incompetent, dysfunctional, or as belonging to the undeserving poor. I assure hon. Members, however, that those living in such circumstances in my constituency come from hard-working families and were born and brought up there. They do not have criminal records and show no signs of being dysfunctional. They are doing their best, but the facts of life that they face are against them. Despite every effort to improve their situation, they find that it is getting worse, if anything.

Does my hon. Friend have the same problem in his constituency as I have in mine—a growing gap between wages and average house prices, and a new group of people who need affordable housing because they cannot afford to borrow, and whose wages in the same occupations 20 or 30 years ago would have meant that they could afford to buy? The affordability gap has increased homelessness among working people.

That is true. I am grateful to my hon. Friend for mentioning that. I notice from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation findings on affordability differences for working households wanting to buy homes that Torbay comes 20th on the list of authorities with the highest house price to income ratios. Many areas in my part of the world are high on the list, too.

In the families that I am talking about, the main or second income earner—it is not unusual for there to be two—may be a nurse, a member of the fire service or, as in one recent case, a teacher. One would normally expect those professions to provide for their members a settled existence in the community and a sound foundation from which to go to work with some security.

I shall speak later, so I do not want to take up too much of the hon. Gentleman's time. Does not the intervention by the hon. Member for Torbay (Mr. Sanders) highlight the fact that affordability is about people, not buildings? Houses become more or less affordable according to market change, so it is necessary to focus on helping people to afford the available housing stock—not merely to assume that it is possible to build "affordable houses", because they may quickly become unaffordable.

I am grateful for that intervention. I entirely agree. As I said earlier, we cannot simply build ourselves out of the present housing crisis. However, I did not sufficiently explain one point. The affordability gap has been significant for the past 25 years in areas such as my constituency, which has consistently been at the bottom of the earnings league table, but where house prices have always been buoyed by people equity stripping from the south-east, buying second homes and so on. It is just that a gap sometimes becomes a gulf, which is what it is at the moment.

Of course, there are oscillations in the market. Even when there is negative equity, the affordability gap remains for many families. It is not something that goes in cycles and will vanish in a few years when the market rights itself. My prediction is that in areas such as mine the market will never come right. There will always be a significant affordability gap. Therefore, we need to find constructive, creative ways to resolve the problem.

The Countryside Agency's report entitled, "The state of the countryside 2004", published at the end of June, identified a 30 per cent. increase in homelessness in remote rural areas in the past two years. I am sure that the Government have taken that on board.

I apologise for not being able to stay for the debate, much as I want to participate, as I have a Committee meeting.

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that there is a great deal of market failure in many respects? In my constituency, for example, there are communities where more than 50 per cent. of the homes are second homes. Anyone on an average wage locally will be pushed out of the market. There is nothing whatever that those people can do. On his point about homelessness, is not a large amount of rural homelessness masked by out-migration?

I entirely agree. In certain circumstances, even where there are jobs locally for a local young person or family, housing pressures become so great that those people are forced to leave—they do so because of lack of housing, not lack of jobs. In the far west of Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, which are particularly remote, it is difficult to make that decision, whereas in areas that are closer to urban centres, that decision can be made relatively easily because the family or person can still keep in touch with the local community from which they come. However, I accept the hon. Gentleman's point.

I want to mention the development of the intermediate market. I use that expression, as do some others, and I hope that it will gain common currency and that the Government recognise that there is a policy area that is presently largely filled with a vacuum. I am talking about the gap between rented—mainly social rented—housing and the first rung on the housing ladder in the private sector. Primarily, when people think of filling that gap, they think of shared equity developments, which is fine as an approach. I agree that, primarily, an intermediate market means shared equity properties or long-term leasehold properties.

A problem emerges when people are encouraged to create demand in that market, but there is a lack of available properties for them. Another problem, if people are able to get a shared equity property, is what to do after they have purchased that property if they want to move on. Often, people find themselves locked into a shared equity situation. They are unable to make the further step on to the first rung of the housing ladder because there has been no significant increase in their income, and they have not had the benefit of money from a legacy, or won the lottery. Where do those people go? There are so few options for them.

The development of sufficient property in the shared equity sector—the intermediate market—is required, so that it will have a life of its own. That will need a positive policy initiative from the Government. I appreciate the need to avoid, in any shared equity development, the situation in which an occupier can staircase ownership up to 100 per cent., so that the property cannot be used for local need. It is also important that such schemes ultimately have a housing association or other similar manager to provide long-term management. Investment and a concerted effort on the part of the Government are needed.

On 10 May, I had a debate with the Economic Secretary to the Treasury in the main Chamber on self-invested personal pensions. The hon. Member for Ceredigion (Mr. Thomas), who knows a great deal about the issue, and I had a meeting with the Financial Secretary to the Treasury last week to discuss the potential negative impacts of the misuse of self-invested personal pensions, which we fear may allow those who use the scheme to purchase second homes. There is potential for a virtuous circle to be achieved here. There may be a problem with the many people who have spare income to invest in private pension arrangements, and who use a self-invested personal pension, because from 2006 they will be eligible to invest their pension in residential property. If that were clearly restricted to portfolios of shared equity accommodation with housing associations or the public or private rented sector, the pension investor would get the benefit of investing in the relatively stable and growing value of the property market over time, there would be a beneficial social outcome and the available housing stock would increase for people who need affordable housing.

I urge the Minister to talk to his Treasury colleagues about ensuring that self-invested personal pensions are not misused to buy second holiday homes, but are used for good and virtuous purposes. That will take a concerted effort and a little joined-up government, with which I am sure the Minister would want to associate himself.

Another area that is currently being developed, which was mentioned to me by the co-operative movement, is the possibility of establishing mutual home ownership. I am told that mutual home ownership is a model based on two core structural elements: a community land trust to hold the land outside the market, and a shared equity housing co-operative to reduce the management costs and to ensure accountability. It is argued that the main advantages of that model are that, unlike shared ownership, any public subsidy is locked in and preserved for future generations.

The proposed structure gives residents access to lower mortgage rates as an individual owner-occupier, because it is part of a wider investment plan. The monthly payments are flexible and based on an affordable percentage of a key worker's income. There are a number of advantages to the scheme. I say to the Minister that the mutual home ownership approach is worth looking at along with other approaches such as the shared equity system.

I want to consider the planning exceptions policy. Before I was elected in 1997, I was involved in the charitable sector, working with parish councils and local authorities, to establish local housing need working parties to identify land and housing associations, and to work with the local authority to stitch together developments of 10—possibly more, possibly fewer—houses using the exceptions policy, after PPG3 was introduced in the early 1990s. At that stage, there was a lot of enthusiasm about recognising the distinction regarding market housing on the edge of villages and, I argue, towns as well, and recognising the problems of sticking strictly to planning policies and not demonstrating flexibility, which rolls over into hope values on land. Landowners were prepared to countenance the idea of making land available at significantly lower than market rates in order to meet a need that is held in perpetuity. I urge the Minister to look carefully at the way in which the policy is being rolled out.

The Minister for Housing and Planning made a written statement on 17 June this year regarding that policy, but he did not make it clear whether the Government will ensure that exception sites will be allocated, or allow them to be identified through a development process. I urge the Minister to consider the issue carefully because as soon as one starts allocating exception sites one, first, increases their value and, secondly, restricts other options.

When I was involved in the working parties, there were occasions when the landowner said, "I want to hold out for more money." Because the working party held the mechanism to deliver housing to meet local need, we were able to say, "If you're not prepared to negotiate on the price, we'll look at another site". That usually brought the landowner back to the negotiating table.

It is important that we ensure that the exceptions approach is expanded still further. As I have said, we cannot resolve the crisis simply by building so many thousands of houses that it brings market prices down. That is unrealistic. In fact the private sector has enough land in planning permission to build 250,000 houses tomorrow. The problem is the phasing and development.

Last week, a local newspaper the Helston Packet had as its front-page headline—it is a big issue—"Priced-out". Its report states that estate agents were confirming the findings of an official report by the National Housing Federation that said that homes in the south-west were unaffordable. One branch manager, Stephan Kent of Miller Countrywide estate agents, is quoted as saying:

"The only way, really, you could solve the situation is having councils saying houses can only be sold to local people.

There really is no other solution unless the market comes down."

That recognises that something needs to be done. Something dramatic needs to happen to ensure that exception sites can be brought forward.

That involves much more robust planning policies. In my view, those need to be more draconian to stop general unfettered planning permissions in the countryside and to provide a fertile ground on which exceptions developments can go forward. For example, in Penwith district, only one exception site has been brought forward in the past five years and that was on council land. We need the support of Government to create the fertile ground on which such development can take place.

I do not want to go on much longer but I emphasise to the Minister the issue of second home ownership, which I have raised before. I understand that the Welsh Assembly has considered the issue of altering the Town and Country Planning (Use Classes) Order 1987, so that planning permission would be required to change a property from a permanent residency to a recreational, holiday or non-permanent residency. It consulted a large number of academics, who said that that would be unworkable because it is difficult to define what is a second home and what it is not.

I urge the Minister to consider the issue more carefully. It was possible to define what a second home was when it was in the interests of second home owners to receive a 50 per cent. discount in council tax. As it was possible in those circumstances, I urge the Minister to consider the issue closely to see whether there are ways in which such constraints could be brought forward. In the past, the Housing Corporation set targets to meet needs in more remote and smaller rural communities.

There is concern about the matter. In its annual report to Government last week, the Countryside Agency warned that the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister's plans to scrap national targets for the provision of low-cost housing for local people in settlements of fewer than 3,000 people—and to hand responsibility to the regional housing boards—will result in fewer social housing units being developed in rural areas.

When it comes to meeting future targets, the impact of the spending review and the annual 4.1 per cent. increase in investment in social housing, I am concerned that, in respect of registered social landlord and council developments of social housing since 1996, the number of completions has almost halved—from 38,000 in 1995–96 to 19,000 in 2002–03. The investment available from the Government is one thing, but completions appear to be quite another.

I know that I have taken up quite a bit of time but, as not many hon. Members are present, I have perhaps taken more liberties than I should. I apologise to you, Mr. Olner, and to other hon. Members for doing so. I wanted to set out the importance of the issue clearly, as well as establishing a constructive cross-party consensus to try to find new ways to bridge the affordability gap.

I am delighted to reprise a debate that we seem to have every six months, but I hope that we can move it forward today, as there have been some important developments since we last had the opportunity for debate, either in this forum or in others. I know that some of us are regular offenders when it comes to taking part in such debates, but either we are a bit slow in getting our message across, or we feel that it is such an important message that we must keep reiterating it. I hope the latter is the case.

I welcome what the hon. Member for St. Ives (Andrew George) has said. I disagree with no detail of his explanation of the rural context. I make no apology for speaking largely about rural Britain, because the urban dimension is regularly raised in other quarters.

Three developments since we last had a similar debate are worthy of note. The first happened yesterday. It would be churlish not to recognise that the OPDM has done well out of the comprehensive spending review—assuming that the review will turn into real money at some point. It was a good announcement, and housing was obviously the major beneficiary: £1.3 billion by 2008 is a significant investment. However, we all know that we have to go further and lock in private sector funds.

The second development is the changes in the planning system. Like so many developments trailed by any Government, the impact of the changes is more immediate in theory than it is in reality. I hope that the changes will be implemented sensitively in rural areas—no one wants untrammelled development. I retain my membership of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, but sometimes argue with the organisation about the way in which some of its messages are—at best—misconstrued. The CPRE must avoid being perceived as a taking a no-development-in-any-circumstances approach. The focus should be on having the right development, carried out in the right way, with appropriate housing numbers.

The third development, which is not to be underestimated, is the Miles report, which considered some of the macro-underpinning of the housing market. Although we are considering only part of that market, it is an important part. If people are starved out of the market, it is not effective—there is market failure. The inbuilt pressure of excess demand inevitably increases prices, which prevents more people from entering the housing market.

The hon. Gentleman did not blind us with a lot of statistics, as has happened in previous debates, and I do not intend to examine the figures for what has happened over the past few years, either. Anyone who has a rural or semi-rural constituency will know one clear piece of anecdotal evidence: development has not taken place in recent years, especially in villages; and many developments in market towns have not been able to bridge the affordability gap. We have a specific problem with our ability to deliver social housing. My right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister talked yesterday about gap funding, and on a very different level we may need to consider that in a rural dimension. I take it that the Department will be working on it, and no doubt my hon. Friend the Minister will say a few words on the subject when he responds.

I shall concentrate on three rural housing issues, coming in directly where the hon. Gentleman left off with exceptions policy, although I will be even more blunt than him. Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde asked some of us whether it was suitable or appropriate to try to change exceptions policy. The overwhelming message from rural Labour MPs was to leave it alone. The figure should not be raised beyond 3,000, because, if it were, the emphasis would immediately be put more on market towns than on small communities. There was even an argument for reducing the threshold, but we did not get into that. I hope that the Government are not wobbling and getting the idea that the figure is irrelevant or that a different approach is possible. The only other approach is to use section 106 agreements, and anyone who has had dealings with local authorities—love them though we do—will know that they are often seriously underpowered in that respect. Developers are too often able to twist and turn and exploit the lack of expertise, so that what is supposed to be delivered ends up not being delivered. That is no way to give any community confidence in that way of proceeding.

I do not disagree with the hon. Gentleman, but were he and his fellow Labour MPs confusing the Housing Corporation targets, which over the years have included developments of social housing for communities with fewer than 3,000 people, with exceptions policies, which are about developments on the edges of settlements that could involve a range of communities of various sizes? Is he talking about the allocation of public funds or the imposition of planning policy?

They work together. That is the whole point. My old friend Moira Constable from the Rural Housing Trust has told me on more occasions than I care to remember that, in reality, there are three sides to the problem. There is the problem of land, but people are adamant that they can find altruistic landowners to provide land. Planning permission is more of a problem, but that is why exceptions policy is so important. An interested parish council or organisation working off a parish council—usually the main drivers—will almost certainly find a way of using the policy. Because the development almost certainly falls outside the village envelope, they usually find a way to persuade people that the development falls within the exceptions policy criteria, and it is moved forward. The third problem is money. One can have the land and the permission, but one needs the money from the Housing Corporation. The biggest single problem with that is the fact that the sites involved are small, perhaps consisting of only three or four houses; they go into the pot against larger developments and sometimes lose out because they cannot offer economies of scale.

Let us leave things as they are, but improve the process. Let us give parish councils and local communities the wherewithal to feel confident. The biggest problem is the time involved. In the case of one village in my constituency, Nympsfield, it took a decade of attrition to get from wanting a small number of affordable houses, some of which would be social housing, to completion. It took so long despite helpful support from Gloucestershire rural community council, which takes an active interest in the area. The process takes a long time and we need to cut that down.

There is another problem that needs to be solved. I am usually a great believer in regional strategy and identity, but regional housing boards must recognise that, as well as establishing the strategic overview, they must work at a much lower level—dare I say, the first level—of communities: villages. Regional housing boards must include rural housing people who really understand what needs to be done in terms of the process of attrition, the cleverness that always has to be brought into any system, and the sheer guts that are needed to stand up to the developers, who often come back with something that is not necessarily what the community wants.

I hope that the Minister will consider the matter. I am sure that he will net give us an instant reply, because I know that the discussions are ongoing, but there is a clear understanding among rural MPs in general, and Labour ones in particular, that we do not want the policy monkeyed with. It is working. It could work better, but the alternatives are far worse.

The next issue is what I call the structure of rural housing—who is there and who is not. We know who is coming into the rural housing market: increasingly, it is people with money. When I met Shelter recently, it described the drift that is taking place, largely from the south-east to the south-west—I make no apology for concentrating on the south-west. That drift puts enormous pressure on house prices, particularly for the sort of house that a first-time buyer wants to move into, but that someone else might regard as an ideal second house—they might ultimately want to move to the south-west, but initially they regard the property as an investment and something that they can use at weekends. In the meantime, they might rent it out, which keeps the unit of accommodation accessible to someone of lesser means for a time, but at some point it will be lost. We must understand the structural implications.

Labour does not sell off housing association properties—there is a marked difference between the main Opposition and us in that respect. Going along the route that they propose would be the death of any form of social housing in rural economies. However, I feel strongly that we have made a huge mistake in terms of the number of council properties that have been lost. I know that I disagree with Ministers on that—I shall not reiterate the arguments about keeping the fourth option open—but social housing in rural areas is even more important than in large urban council estates, because even now there are still some units of accommodation left and it is important to keep them in a price bracket that makes them available to families who are never going to be able to buy at the current rate. That is important whether one calls it social engineering or social justice.

We can look at the issue in different ways—I will come on to my proposal in a minute—but we must not confuse affordable housing with social housing. Some people concentrate wholly on social housing, and we must fight that corner, whether we are talking about housing for agricultural labourers or housing that is tied to a particular job, or housing in some parts of the south-east and the south-west for people who would not be able to do social care work, or even work in the public sector, if they did not have access to that type of housing.

That takes me on to my final point, which was well rehearsed by the hon. Member for St. Ives—I said "hear, hear" plenty of times. My solution to many of the problems, which is still in its infancy, involves community land trusts as a way to control the land. If we lose control of the land, a whole section of the population is shut out. Retaining ownership of the land while giving people an equity stake—that is where the mutual prospects come in—would be music to my ears and those of my hon. Friend the Minister, who is a fellow co-operator. That is not just a theory or a wonderful idea that might be tried in a couple of decades. In many parts of the world, community land trusts and mutual house ownership give people an equity stake that increases so that, ultimately, they can buy for themselves—they are not prevented from taking advantage of the opportunity to do so—but the important thing is that they cannot take the unit with them. I hope that the Government will give the idea serious consideration.

If my hon. Friend the Minister has been briefed properly, he will know that I have already got my greedy little fingers all over one of the sites that has moved from the Department of Health to the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and said that it would be a wonderful location for a pilot. Although I have a vested interest in my hon. Friend examining what can be done in the Strouds of this world as well as in the Londons, he does not have to say anything today and do not mind where it is done. This is a real opportunity that should be grasped now, given the fact that there is good will behind it and additional investment.

We had an excellent meeting in my constituency last Thursday with David Rodgers of CDS Co-operatives, who is well known to my hon. Friend the Minister. Mr. Rodgers was well received by 100 people, to whom he sold the idea that the proposal that I have outlined could begin to break the back of the affordable housing problem. A report commissioned by CDS from the New Economics Foundation goes into considerable detail about how it could work. We just need to take it up and get pilot projects under way to discover how it could be introduced across the country.

Community land trusts are not the only answer, but there are solutions to the problem, and we must consider them. What is happening now is not in any way acceptable, let alone sustainable. We talk about sustainable communities, but it will not help if urban centres become more sustainable while rural communities become even less sustainable—if they become commuting settlements or areas in which only those with means are able to live.

I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister has heard my plea. He will get nothing but support from me, because I believe that we must all pull together—I hope that the issue does not divide the parties. There were many Conservatives in the audience last week, and they were keen to hear about the proposal. We must begin to break the back of this problem. Many people think that politicians have let them down and that the issue has slid past us. It seems so difficult, and we ask, "What can we do?" Well, there are things that can be done, and I hope that with support from all quarters my hon. Friend will be there to make sure that they are done.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for St. Ives (Andrew George) on securing this debate and on dealing with issues that are pertinent to most constituencies in south-west England and beyond.

The intermediate housing market requires attention. It is clear that we have suffered from a two-dimensional housing market in which one either rents or buys. However, in an intermediate market, one can go from renting to part-purchase to purchase. That gap in the market is short. My hon. Friend mentioned the affordability gap—not a new phenomenon but one that has certainly become worse in the past 15 to 20 years. As I said in my intervention, a new group of people are looking for affordable accommodation—people whose incomes would in the past have enabled them to borrow and get on the first step of the property ladder.

My hon. Friend also mentioned the problem of second homes. People with equity who move in from outside not only inflate house prices with their bids, but are often in a position to move faster to secure a sale than people in the local area. My hon. Friend also mentioned self-invested personal pension schemes and the impact that they might have in future, which is certainly a concern.

On PPG 3 and local housing need strategies, if a local authority was tasked with developing a local housing needs strategy and left to conduct an authoritative study of what was needed in the area, it would probably come up with a very different picture than simply an outline showing the total number of units required, which is how things are done now. A local approach is more likely to produce appropriate housing. That point is important in bringing quality to the planning system and in developing communities.

My hon. Friend called for tougher planning rules to assist the provision of affordable housing. The hon. Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew) echoed that call and made a good point about section 106 agreements. There is expertise within local authorities to negotiate such agreements, but that expertise is not the same in every local authority. There is no doubt that some developers can get a better deal out of one local authority than another. Perhaps some work should be done to ensure that the skills and powers in local government are equal, so that no authority can be picked off.

The hon. Gentleman also mentioned migration from the south-east to the south-west, which is quite well documented. Surveys of people's expectations suggest that there will be no downturn in the number of people desiring to move to the south-west from the south-east. He also mentioned community land trusts—an idea whose time has come, particularly in small rural communities, but in urban areas and cities as well. He was right to say that no one has the answer to the problem of affordable housing, but there are solutions. I should like to talk about some solutions that the Liberal Democrats advocate, and add to those that have already been mentioned.

On the scale of the problem, about 175,000 houses were built in the United Kingdom in 2001—the lowest level since the second world war—and 12.5 per cent. fewer new houses were built in the last 10 years than in the preceding decade. Over the past 30 years, UK house prices have increased by 2.4 per cent. a year in real terms, compared with the EU average of 1.1 per cent.—the figures were 0 per cent. in Germany and 0.8 per cent. in France. The latest evidence suggests that the trend rate of house price growth in the UK has increased to 2.7 per cent. in the last 20 years.

Following the spending review and the Barker review, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister's housing budget will be £1.3 billion higher in 2007–08 than in 2004–05, which is equivalent to an annual average growth rate of 4.1 per cent. in real terms. That is marvellous news—I do not think that anyone has said, "We're against this"—but, according to the Government's figures, the increase will provide funding for only 10,000 new social housing units a year by 2007„08. The Barker review says that we in fact need between £1.2 billion and £1.6 billion for social housing alone, and 17,000 to 23,000 more houses each year.

My local authority conducted a housing needs survey and brought in outside consultants, who concluded that my authority alone needed 2,000 units of affordable accommodation. I often look at national statistics and try to work out what they mean for my area, so I did a quick calculation based on that figure. The population of my area is 0.2 per cent. of the UK population, so the 2,000 properties needed in my constituency is equivalent to close on 1 million properties across the UK, yet the Barker review says that only 23,000 are needed. Either the Barker review has massively underestimated the likely need for housing, or the situation in my constituency is worse than a crisis. Perhaps it is a bit of both. The Barker review states that

"additional investment building up to £1.2 to £1.6 billion per annum"

will be required to deliver additional social housing to meet projected future needs. The spending review is therefore a start, not an end, to meeting the need for more affordable housing.

The Liberal Democrat view is that we can do better, that empty homes should be brought back into use and creative planning should be used to build more affordable homes. Between 1991 and 2001, growth in housing demand outstripped supply by more than 400,000 households Based on current trends, a housing shortfall of 1.5 million within 20 years is predicted. In human terms, that means overcrowding at best, and more homelessness at worst. Britain now has the highest ever number of households in temporary accommodation, and Shelter reckons that 1 million households are already inadequately housed. House prices and rents are so high in some areas that employers in schools, hospitals and across the economy simply cannot afford to recruit staff locally. That will not get any easier when graduates come out of university with big debts: areas with high house prices will have difficulty in attracting graduates, because they will want to go where the highest salaries are so that they can pay back their debts with minimum outlay on housing costs. That will have a profound effect across the board in the far south-west, where the affordability gap between what the local economy can offer in salaries and how much it costs to house oneself is greatest. That will affect not only the private sector, but local government and other public services.

There is a rather obvious reason for the problem: for the past 30 years, we have been building fewer homes. Annual house building has plummeted to levels not seen since the 1920s. The Government have acted, but, sadly, they also cut the social housing grant, which meant that affordable housing schemes across the country had to be curtailed and projects that had been several years in the making had the rug pulled from under them. The Liberal Democrats want to know why the tens of thousands of empty properties across the country are not being reused. There have been some pilot schemes, but nationwide action is needed. There should be some consideration of homes that are left empty because their owners lack the cash to repair them, or because the absentee landlord cannot be bothered with them, or because their ageing owners have not been offered help and advice about renting them out. Empty homes present an opportunity, and we need to do more to bring them back into the market. If we want to boost the number of affordable homes quickly, it makes more sense to use existing homes than to build new ones, as it must be cheaper and faster to repair empty housing stock.

To do that, we need to trust and empower housing authorities more than we currently do, which means providing best-practice cash and legal powers to act. The Liberal Democrats believe that the first steps should be voluntary changes such as the use of grants and advice to try to persuade owners to let their property; brokering relations between owners and letting agents; proposing appropriate tenants; and delivering faster on housing benefits, which can often act as a disincentive to people to rent out. However, all that needs back-stop powers. There should be a power to act where owners leave homes empty for no good reason, which is why we have long advocated empty property management orders giving councils the power to take over the management of the property for a limited period, and compelling them to lease it. I am pleased that the Government are taking that up. The use of empty homes should have been part of the sustainable communities plan. That aimed to be environmentally friendly, and in many ways it is, but there is a glaring error in relation to empty homes.

We all know that it is difficult to find extra housing resources, so one of our proposals is for a right to invest, which has been referred to by other hon. Members. That would make the old notion of shared equity far more flexible, by allowing council and housing association tenants the right to build up stakes in their homes. We think of it as a development of right to buy in which the home does not leave the social housing sector. Under right to invest, tenants share in the rising value of the social landlord's property, so rocketing house prices do not prevent them from moving out of social homes if they want to do so. The concept is not new; it just involves tweaking the planning rules so that planning consents place limited restrictions on future sales of new affordable homes.

We are also keen for the Government to investigate the idea of land value taxation, which would bring land that is banked by landlords into use. The evidence of greater Government effort is there, but the report of the Select Committee on the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister on the Housing Corporation concluded that housing policy has become a quagmire of quangos. That needs to be addressed. We must make it simpler to invest in housing. Finally, the message from the ventures is that we need more affordable homes because the scale of the problem is so great. We want more local decision making, a review of the planning system and policies that match the problems that are experienced in our communities.

I refer hon. Members and others to my entry in the Register of Members' Interests.

I congratulate the hon. Member for St. Ives (Andrew George), who always speaks with charm and expertise about his locality, expertise that wavers a little when he moves outside it, but he is certainly well informed and passionate in his advocacy of local interests. It is entirely appropriate that the tone of the debate has been largely non-partisan. As several hon. Members have said, many of these issues extend well beyond the normal party divide or knockabout.

We have a major problem with housing affordability in the south-west and elsewhere; there are few areas in which it is not a problem. Although there are pockets where this does not apply, most places experience an affordability problem of some kind. In my part of the country—a rural constituency in a rural county—young people, first-time buyers and other local people who want to get on the housing ladder all experience difficulties because house prices have risen sharply.

There is a great deal of empirical evidence to support that assertion. The Halifax price index shows that the price index ratio increased from 3.19 in 1997 to 4.78 in 2003, and the Halifax annual first-time buyer review suggests that eight out of 10 towns in the UK were unaffordable for the majority of those buying their first home during 2003.

The hon. Gentleman referred to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation report, which found that the ratio of house price to household income for working households aged between 20 and 39 exceeded five to one in 33 local authority areas in England, and that in 19 local authority areas fewer than one in five such households could afford even the lowest quartile of house prices.

The results of the affordability problem have been manifold. One of the most notable and socially significant is that people are buying houses later in life; they are finding other ways to accommodate themselves. More young people, including young married couples with children, are unable to get on the housing ladder and are therefore obliged to live with their parents. It happens in my constituency, and I am sure that it happens also in the Minister's constituency and those of other hon. Members. Couples are having to live with parents, or other members of the family because they cannot get on the housing ladder.

However, this is not principally a problem of housing supply, although that is a problem in some parts of the country. We certainly need to build houses—we always have and we always will. Houses of the right kind, built in the right places, will add to the quality of the built environment, be in sympathy with the landscape and deliver high-quality residences for those who buy them, but, although supply is important, the question of affordability is principally about people. I justify that conclusion on three grounds.

We have already spent a little time debating the first; it is clear that as house prices change so does affordability. Affordability is about people's ability to afford what is available. With volatility of the sort that we have seen in the housing market over recent years, houses that were affordable one year become unaffordable the next—for the same group of people doing the same kind of job and with the same social status and the same income. That is exactly the point made by the hon. Member for St. Ives when he introduced the debate.

Secondly, the result of the massive growth in second home ownership and the buy-to-let market is that available houses have been bought not by first-time buyers, key workers or those who in the past would have been able to buy them, but by people who consider them principally either as an investment or as places to be used for recreational purposes. That does not suggest a supply problem. The houses are there, but they are not being bought by the people who once would have purchased them—people who are rooted in the local community. Often, for the reasons I mentioned, they are bought by people from outside the community.

Thirdly, there seems to be an imprecise relationship between house prices, and therefore affordability, and supply. Only 10 per cent. of housing transactions involve new housing stock, and only 1 per cent. of total housing stock is new. Due to the typical delays involved when supply is increased, a massive number of houses would need to be built to affect price through supply-side means. Most factors that affect house prices, and therefore affordability, are demand-side factors. They include the level of interest rates, the attractiveness or relative unattractiveness of alternative investment vehicles, the level of borrowing secured by housing equity and the disproportionate allure of home ownership in English culture.

To assume that one can counteract those factors by changing the volume of supply is at best naive and at worst a hopelessly misplaced adventure. None the less, the Government may embark on that adventure if they follow the recommendations of the Barker report. Despite the fact that Kate Barker is a distinguished and much respected economist, she seems to have disregarded the macro-economic arguments that I have listed. She seems to assume that one can significantly affect house price inflation and volatility by making a massive change in supply.

I hope that the Government will be much more imaginative than that. We have to consider a range of means by which people can be helped to afford available housing. Before that, however, I want to deal briefly with two or three points made by others.

The hon. Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew) spoke with great passion and knowledge about the exception site policy. It is an important means, in rural areas such as those represented by me and the hon. Member for St. Ives, of adding to the housing stock incrementally—with sensitivity to local wishes and in keeping with the local built environment and landscape—to provide housing for local people. But the exception site policy should not be used as a means to ride roughshod over the proper planning process. That policy is not about building 100 houses in a settlement irrespective of who will buy them, what they look and feel like, and their impact on local infrastructure. It is an incremental means to add to a settlement and to provide low-cost and social housing for local people. That has my full support, as I have said in the House previously.

The hon. Member for Stroud is right in that we need to look at ways that we can provide extra support. I hope the Minister deals with that. There are strong arguments for examining how we can build on the exception site policy, because there is hardly a village in Britain that could not accommodate a small number of extra houses to provide opportunities for local young people and first-time buyers, and this policy provides a good means of doing that.

The hon. Member for Torbay (Mr. Sanders) referred to social housing and was right to say that, notwithstanding the Deputy Prime Minister's announcement yesterday, social house building has virtually petered out. There were between 35,000 and 40,000 social housing completions in most years under the last Conservative Government, but that figure has fallen to fewer than 20,000 under Labour. Even with the extra 10,000 a year mentioned by the Deputy Prime Minister yesterday, we are 10,000 a year behind the record of the last Tory Government.

There are key issues involving social house building and whether we are getting, in the words of the Minister for Housing and Planning, sufficient bang for our bucks. Are the current means for providing social housing and the mechanisms for delivering a return on investment the most effective? We did not hear much about that from the Deputy Prime Minister yesterday. There may be an issue as to how effectively the Housing Corporation is delivering bang for bucks—those words are not mine, but those of the Minister for Housing and Planning—and there may be issues about how we can help housing associations to work more effectively with the private sector to deliver more social housing where it is needed.

rose—

I shall give way briefly, because I am anxious to give the Minister maximum time to reply.

I agree that the hon. Gentleman should give the Minister the maximum, so I shall be brief. I accept that the Labour Government seem to be putting more money in, but they seem to be getting less housing out. The crucial factor is the price of available land, which requires the Government to establish robust policies to distinguish between unfettered permission for market housing and social and affordable housing.

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point; it may also involve how land availability can be re-examined. I refer him, in particular, to the designation of brownfield land. I recently completed a study on that and found that the proportion of brownfield land designated for commercial and industrial development is greater than that designated for residential growth. In terms of take-up, the Government have had some success; they have met their target for brownfield land, although whether it was high enough may be debatable. That is a cheap and easy point, which I should not make because I am neither.

There is an argument that some redesignation of brownfield land in urban and rural areas would have a significant effect on the available land for development. While one would need to consider the cost of development in those cases—there are associated fiscal and regulation issues—it would provide an opportunity for the development of land that is lying idle. There is hardly a town in this country that does not have a derelict former industrial or commercial site that has remained so for a considerable period and that could be used more productively for residential development.

We are not saying that we do not want to build anything anywhere, but that we want to build the right houses in the right places—houses appropriate to local needs and in line with local wishes. We also want to make available housing that suits local demand, so we are indeed talking about social and affordable housing.

My final point is about changing our view of affordability. We need to change from a building-centred view to a people-centred view. We need an equity revolution—to give serious consideration to shared equity, as several hon. Members have said. We need a multiplicity of schemes that will allow people to get on to the housing ladder at different levels and to staircase up their acquisition of equity over time. Most people can afford more as they become more prosperous. Ironically, however, mortgages do not work like that. They are very hard to pay right at the beginning, but as one becomes older and richer—well, some do; I live in hope—the mortgage becomes easier to pay and so we need to consider ways to adjust that kind of arrangement. In essence, shared equity can provide a means to bring into the housing market people who are excluded from it.

In conclusion, I draw the Minister's attention to the study by Glen Bramley of Heriot-Watt university, who estimates that if shared ownership was widely available, it would help an additional 12 to 15 per cent. of householders in the south of England, including the south-west, to buy.

We have a problem that requires imagination and lateral thinking. It is not a party political problem, but the Government are the ones with the power to do something about it. If we fail, we fail aspirant home owners; we fail the future.

I congratulate the hon. Member for St. Ives (Andrew George) on securing the debate and on bringing this important issue to the attention of the Chamber again. If we do this every six months, we can call it a biannual review and develop policy in that way. We have had a high-quality debate, although there may have been few people in the Chamber, for reasons to which he alluded. The quality of hon. Members' contributions has been excellent. We will take away many of the comments in the spirit in which they were made, which is how we solve the problems that we face.

I make it clear, and I am sure that there is no doubt, that the Government are committed to increasing the overall supply of housing in areas with significant housing shortages. I shall return to the core point made by the hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr. Hayes) about being people-centred rather than building-centred. Whatever that argument may be, there is no doubt that we must increase the supply of housing in areas with significant housing shortages. The provision of sufficiently good-quality housing is an essential requirement if we are to have thriving and sustainable communities.

Tackling housing shortages, homelessness and the problems associated with housing in poor condition, which we have not touched on today, as well as low demand and abandonment, which are totally different problems that affect certain parts of the north, is a key part of our strategy to tackle social exclusion and to make real changes to the quality of life in our most deprived communities. Cramped housing and housing in poor condition have an impact on people's well-being, their general health and their children's educational attainment. There is a raft of problems, with which we are trying to deal. Problems with the supply of housing affect the economy as well as people, a point that was made earlier.

Several hon. Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew), mentioned the strategic spending review announcement yesterday. I shall place on record what was announced, so that we have a context. There will be an extra 10,000 social rented homes a year by 2007–08—an increase of 50 per cent. on previous figures—delivered as a result of a 22 per cent. increase in investment, coupled with significant efficiencies, to which the hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings referred We intend that real investment to turn around the growth in homelessness by 2008.

We are acting to increase the housing supply and to help to improve affordability in high-demand regions through the communities plan, which will deliver some 200,000 additional homes in the growth areas of London and the south-east. We are also responding to new proposals for sustainable growth where there is demand locally. Yesterday, we announced a new £200 million community infrastructure fund, responding in particular to the Barker report recommendations on providing transport infrastructure to support the development of new sustainable communities. Often, transport can be the key to unlocking sites and regeneration.

Although this has not been a focus of the debate, we are also improving the economic development of the north of England to deal with the issue of the growth gap between the regions. We are dealing with low housing demand by trebling the pathfinder programme to £450 million, with a new scheme to deal with low demand—the opposite of the affordability issue that we have been debating this afternoon. We are also reducing the number of non-decent social rented homes by 1.6 million between 1997 and 2008, giving sustained progress to our target of having 2.1 million decent homes by 2010.

In these debates, the time available to tackle the raft of issues and concerns raised is never enough. There is no quick and easy way of tackling the complexity of the problems and issues raised this afternoon. However, we are now putting in place all the building blocks—if I may use that phrase—to get this matter right. First and foremost is the question of resources. Although public funding is inevitably limited and difficult choices have to be made, it is clear from yesterday's announcement that we attach huge importance to the need to improve our work on housing. Some £4.5 billion has been allocated for mainstream housing investment in 2007–08, which is about three times the amount made available in 1997–98.

I do not want to get into point scoring here, and we have done pretty well in that regard so far, but I have to say that the previous Conservative Government halved funding for housing investment in the five years up to 1997–98. When the hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings was speaking about how he wanted to be person-centred, not building-centred, I wondered whether that meant that he could not say today whether his party would match the investment that we announced yesterday for housing. I am happy to take interventions from the hon. Gentleman or from the hon. Member for St. Ives on whether they would commit themselves at this stage to matching the investment in new house and home building over the period of the strategic spending review. It seems that no one is going to intervene, so I shall take that as a no.

I make that point because the hon. Member for St. Ives made an impassioned speech, but did not give the statistics. He talked about the personal impact on individuals, families and people growing up in rural areas of not being able to afford to buy a house. He was absolutely right to describe that in those personal terms, but the Government have to match personal experiences with effective spend. and put the resources in place. That is why I put down that small challenge as to whether we could rely on a Liberal Democrat Government—God forbid—to match our spending on housing, which the individuals whom he described so desperately need.

It would be quite improper for me, speaking from the Back Benches, to tie the hands of my Front-Bench colleagues by making commitments. We certainly strongly support the investment that the Government are proposing to put in. We are undertaking our own spending review, and we will be looking at the Government's commitments, but the Minister knows very well that the Liberal Democrats are very committed to increasing investment in social housing.

Rather than getting involved in such a silly spat, I want the Minister to answer the constructive issues that I raised about exception sites, section 106 agreements and the intermediate market.

I will certainly do that, but it is important in these debates that we have not only analysis and discussion but the action that goes with that, which requires commitment to deliver from those who take part in the debates.

I move on to deal in some detail with some points that have been raised, turning first to second homes. The hon. Gentleman described the impact of people buying second homes in his constituency, and how that takes away from the market affordable housing for the people who live in his area. He will know that we changed the council tax rules to allow local authorities significantly to reduce the 50 per cent. discount for second homes. That was done to provide additional funds to address the significant impact that second and holiday homes have on local housing markets.

Of course, it is up to local authorities to decide how to use any additional income. I am pleased that local authorities in Cornwall have taken the opportunity afforded by the Government to increase council tax on second homes. It is estimated that that will provide more than £4 million of additional funding for affordable homes in 2004–05. That is a significant amount, given that the Housing Corporation's investment programme in Cornwall will provide about £20 million over the next two years. So that is one successful line that has been taken.

The hon. Gentleman has raised concerns with my Treasury colleagues about the impact of self-invested personal pensions. I have been given assurances, as I think he has in his meetings with those ministerial colleagues, that the relevant policies will not give individuals an incentive to buy properties for personal use, because a tax charge based on the rent imputed on the capital value of the property will be levied on any non-commercial use that is made of it. Therefore, most homes that are bought by a pension fund will need to be sold before the pension can be drawn to provide a secured income in retirement.

It is true that those policies will increase the number of pension funds that can invest in property, but individual property investment is unlikely to be attractive in many cases. The restriction on borrowing to 50 per cent. of the value of the scheme's assets, together with the requirement to put all rental income into the pension fund, is likely to be unsuitable for most buy-to-let landlords, who will need to access income returns to fund mortgage repayments. I hope that that reassures the hon. Gentleman.

Unfortunately, I cannot give the hon. Gentleman a similar answer on changing the use classification of second homes. We debated the idea of a separate use class for second homes six months ago, and there were lots of arguments either way. For example, concerns were expressed about the fact that, even if the use class were changed, there would be nothing to prevent someone from claiming that their second home was another family member's main residence, even if it were being used primarily as a second or holiday home. We have had lots of debate about that in the House. Following research into the issue, and feedback on the consultation document that we issued in 2002 on options for changing the use classes order, we have decided not to change the C class, and we shall not be allocating a different use class to second homes. All the research has shown that such a measure would not have the impact that the hon. Gentleman and others would like.

Let me move on to some of the planning issues. PPG3 is all about having a sufficient number of better-designed homes to meet housing need. We want a better mix of housing to reflect everyone's needs, and there has been some development on the issue. We are updating PPG3 to secure more affordable housing and a better match between the housing plan and the needs of the community. Some of our proposals for updating PPG3 will make it clear that affordable housing—this reflects the point made by the hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings—should be defined in terms of the relationship between local income levels and house prices or rents for different types and sizes of housing, as well as in terms of housing for identified groups, such as key workers. That brings together the points about the affordability of property and people's ability to pay.

The issue of exceptions is still under consideration, but I can say that we are taking all the responses into account in working up our proposals, which we hope to publish in the autumn. We understand the point that is being made.

I realise that I am about to run out of time. I have answered all the questions that have been asked in the Chamber. Rural housing issues, such as affordability and the provision of more housing in the areas that need it most, are at the top of the Government's agenda, and we are responding positively through our strategies. I have also answered one or two of the more detailed points raised by the hon. Member for St. Ives. I hope that he knows that our review and our plans are putting money in place, changing planning procedures and introducing measures to deal with how people behave and how we provide more resources for building. They will address many of the concerns that hon. Members have raised in the debate.

I am as always grateful for the opportunity to raise a matter that affects my constituents. This is one that can be literally a matter of life and death, and it has an application that is wider than my constituency. I asked for the debate because of personal experience, the experience of friends and the number of cases coming to me as a constituency MP.

I have been conducting my own survey, and although there are not yet any finished figures—it is early days—we are getting a considerable number of responses. Of the approximately 60 responses that have been received in my constituency office so far, more than half report trouble of one sort or another with appointments.

I am concerned that the figures the Minister will no doubt cite to us later in the debate may tell a partial and possibly misleading story. I have initiated the debate in a spirit of helpfulness, in the hope that the Minister will act to ensure that he is not being misled. Of course, he could treat my contribution as he did yesterday, with dismissive, cheap point scoring, but the public know that there is a problem with some appointments in the NHS, and all his debating points will score nothing with the people who matter—patients who use the NHS.

I am in no way complaining about the vast majority of front-line staff. In many ways, they are the victims of the problems that I shall outline. Certainly, the nurses I meet tell me that they spend a disproportionate amount of their time chasing up appointments for patients.

Problems with appointment systems are of various types. My survey already shows quite a lot of information about cancelled and postponed out-patient appointments. About half the responses received point out such problems. The questions concern a two-year period: participants were asked whether they had had a hospital out-patient appointment in the past two years, whether the hospital had cancelled or postponed it, and how many times it had been changed.

If I take a random sample of responses, I find the following answers: four times, twice, twice, three times in the past six months, twice, one hospital twice and another hospital once, four times and three times. Clearly those replies are not entirely typical. On the whole, the people replying to the survey see themselves as having been messed about by the system. I am well aware of that. However, there is a significant number of such people. I am pleased and grateful that half the replies say that appointments have been fine, and that the respondents have been able to see the person concerned on time. However, that is not happening for a number of people.

I understand that hospitals may well collect their own data. I have been in communication before with local hospitals that have been able to explain matters to me; for example, of the five cancelled appointments that one patient told me about, she had cancelled two. When we asked her whether that was true, she said, "Yes, I had forgotten about those, sorry." I understand that patients are sometimes forgetful, but that does not alter the fact that people are telling us about this problem.

The hospitals collect their own data, which do not necessarily affect the waiting time statistics. A cancelled appointment for a check-up for a life threatening condition possibly does not show up in the Government's waiting time statistics. I can understand that a consultant may be ill, or, more often, perhaps, decide to go to a conference abroad. What seems to happen more often than not is that a block of appointments is shifted six months to the back of the queue.

Most of us coming back to work after illness or some other absence have to work a bit harder for a while to make up for lost time. I can imagine what my constituents' attitude would be to their MP saying, "Sorry, I was away for a week. I shall have to put seeing you back six months." They would not be prepared to put up with that, and I would not expect them to. What would happen if a schoolteacher said, "I missed the time when I could have written reports because I was at a conference, so they will not be ready for another six months"? That is simply not acceptable, but it happens too often in hospitals.

The Minister should investigate the issue of cancelled and postponed appointments. He should ask the Healthcare Commission to look behind the waiting time targets for out-patients' appointments to find out about cancelled appointments and how they are handled. I sincerely hope that the practice of sending appointments to patients when they are known to be on holiday, which I have come across once or twice, has stopped.

The Minister may tell us that out-patient waiting times are at a certain level, but the boxes that have been ticked do not necessarily reflect the actuality for patients. I ask him to look behind the figures. I have raised the matter with the chairman of the strategic health authority in my constituency and with others, as the problem is very worrying indeed.

I know of quite a few cancelled and postponed operations. As an MP, I have the opportunity to intervene, which I have done on several occasions. It worries me how often a patient gets what he needs simply because I have written a letter asking whether his operation can be carried out in a timely fashion after one or two cancellations. It worries me that patients who know enough to come to their MP and get themselves placed slightly further up the queue than they would otherwise be cannot do that for themselves with the same result. I want the Minister to discover what impact MPs' letters are having and why the patients themselves cannot have the same impact.

I salute the new patient advice and liaison service, which is doing a better and better job and making a difference in my constituency. However, there are problems. For example, I have a constituent, a young mother with a brain tumour, who needs an operation that will involve her being in hospital for at least a fortnight. She has two young children and her operation has been cancelled twice on the day of the operation. In such circumstances, when family arrangements have to be made, that makes things very difficult indeed. My intervention, and possibly that of the woman's husband, who wrote a letter of complaint, ensured that the third time she prepared for the operation it was actually done, but it is worrying that people have to make a fuss to get their operation.

Unco-ordinated and untimely appointments, possibly—I will only say "possibly"—because of working to the targets, are affecting large numbers of patients, including in my own case. The report by CancerBACUP in May 2004 indicated that cancer patients were often left not knowing how long they would have to wait for an appointment. The all-party parliamentary group on cancer has been conducting a Select Committee-style inquiry into the tension between national targets and local decision taking and the impact on cancer services. The group has heard evidence from health professionals and civil servants, who emphasised that shortages of specialist staff such as radiographers, radiologists and chemo nurses are hampering efforts to reduce waiting times for treatment.

Equally, there is good practice, where services have been redesigned. I ask the Minister to ensure that services are redesigned to meet the needs of patients more effectively, as that would bring great benefits. Such good practice should be spread throughout the country rather than being limited to small, isolated pockets, as it really makes a difference and patients benefit tremendously.

I should also like to make the point that CancerBACUP has made, which is that the difference between urgent and non-urgent cancer patients is causing a problem. I know that Ministers have not always agreed with that, but I would argue the case again. Routinely, around a third of the patients referred who are labelled as "non-urgent"—even the urgent cases have difficulty getting through sometimes—are subsequently found to have cancer. There is a serious problem with a system that leaves a third of patients waiting for the length of time that some end up waiting. When such patients are subsequently found to have cancer, it may well be too late for treatment that can make a difference. Again, the appointments systems do not seem to reflect what is necessary.

CancerBACUP has said that it receives phone calls every week from people who are worried about how long they will have to wait for treatment. Not knowing how long one will have to wait and believing that one's prognosis is getting worse in that time is, CancerBACUP says, a source of enormous anxiety to patients and their families. I am sure that the Minister is well aware of that issue, so will he address it? The problem affected me during my treatment—I talk about my treatment and the patient pathway in the round. Not knowing when things are coming is a source of enormous stress and cannot be good for the patient.

To sum up those points, there is a tension between targets and clinical need. It is possible—many are saying this, including consultants—that targets are distorting priorities. In many cases, there appears to be a lack of co-ordination, which means that resources are wasted and additional appointments are needed. There appears to be a lack of capacity. Where targets are attached to one part of the treatment, the patient is given no indication of the total wait. For example, a two-week wait at the beginning to see a consultant does not tell the patient when the diagnostic tests will be conducted. A 62-day wait for treatment to start on a fast-growing cancer is too long and patients cannot wait that long.

Waiting to get on the list is another problem. I received a letter, which came as part of a survey, from somebody who, happily, has now had her operations. She waited for a year and a half to be put on the waiting list, which was where she clearly needed to be for bilateral hip replacements. Once on the list, she was told that she would have a 12-month wait and was operated on 363 days later—so, slightly less than a year. The normal waiting system would have made her wait another year for the second hip, but she made a lot of noise and got it four and a half months later. Happily, she managed to climb a mountain in Glen Coe in May with speed and ease, and has sent her thanks to the people who sorted her out. Two and a half years is far too long to wait for that operation; it is simply not on.

A further issue is the interface problems between hospitals. I would ask the Minister to look at that too. CancerBACUP says that the distress and inconvenience that patients suffer can be extreme when there are such problems. Patients can be left for weeks watching a cancer grow, or imagining that it is growing internally, not knowing when their appointments will come. While they wait for diagnostic test appointments, they imagine that the cancer has spread to every area as yet unchecked. Again, the problems of getting information passed between hospitals are extremely serious.

What needs to be done? May I make a plea to the Minister to push to ensure that patients do not leave a previously arranged appointment without having their next step planned and co-ordinated? That means dates for appointments, and so on. It means that GPs, nurses and other authorised persons should be able to make bookings with patients by phone or computer link before the patient leaves. I know that the Government intend that computer link-up to be available by the autumn of 2005. I applaud that and I hope that they make fast progress, but that does not alter the fact that there will still be capacity problems.

I shall make one list point, as I am aware that I have overstayed my welcome. The point that I made to the Prime Minister on 5 May was that when appointment systems are not functioning properly, disadvantaged groups are especially disadvantaged. People like me who know who to contact and who to make a fuss with will end up rising to the top of the queue, if there is a queue. It is wrong that advantaged groups should be able to push themselves forward while disadvantaged groups fall to the bottom of the queue and, according to the National Audit Office, have worse outcomes. I do not ask that everybody get pushed further down the queue, but that there is better co-ordination of appointments and better design of services so that all patients get a better crack of the whip, not just those who are sufficiently articulate to be able to push their way to the front.

Once again, I commend the hon. Member for Cheadle (Mrs. Calton) on securing an Adjournment debate. On this occasion, I agree with a great deal of what she had to say. Very little is as frustrating for people as having appointments cancelled, not being able to get the appointment they need and seeing mistakes being made. Those are issues that we must tackle, and indeed we are tackling them.

The hon. Lady began by saying that she hopes I will not be dismissive of her as I was yesterday. One reason why I was dismissive was her inconsistency. Yesterday, she told us why we should scrap all the targets. Today, she gave us a good case for having targets for different types of people, why the targets that we have are not tight enough and why we need to build capacity so that we can improve waiting time targets

Will the Minister give way?

Let me make some points first. I need to answer the case that the hon. Lady made, and I have only 15 minutes in which to do it.

We are reducing the maximum waiting time for operations. We have reduced it from 18 to nine months already, and we intend to reduce it further. We have reduced the first out-patient appointment waiting time from 26 to 17 weeks. Setting targets was one of the tools that we used to do that. The hon. Lady said that those waiting times do not include the time a person waits for a consultant's referral or for diagnostics. That is true, which is why, in the NHS improvement plan, we set a target for 2008 of a complete patient journey time of 18 weeks from seeing a GP to receiving treatment.

The hon. Lady mentioned cancelled appointments. She seemed to imply—although perhaps I am overstating this—that cancelling appointments might assist people in meeting waiting time targets. I assure her that cancelling appointments in no way alters how the maximum waiting time is measured. Trusts and commissioners are unlikely to achieve the standards that we have set for out-patient waiting times if they allow consultations to be cancelled without good reason.

To be sure that the public can be confident of the accuracy of published NHS waiting times, we have asked the Audit Commission to examine how NHS trusts manage information on waiting lists and waiting times. A spot check programme began in 2002. We agree that when, occasionally, appointments have to be cancelled, it is essential that trusts keep closely in touch with patients to rearrange appointments. The new booking system, which I shall talk about later, will support the NHS in doing that.

We offer other guarantees to patients. Work is being undertaken by the Healthcare Commission to ensure that we do not allow clinical priorities to be distorted by waiting lists. We offer a guarantee, which was introduced in the national health service plan five years ago, for patients whose operations are cancelled at the last minute for non-clinical reasons. The example that the hon. Lady gave of an operation twice being cancelled on the day of the operation should not be happening, because the guarantee, which came into effect in April 2003, says that if operations are cancelled at the last minute, patients are given a new firm date quickly so that they have certainty about their readmission to hospital and capacity is not wasted. If they cannot be offered another appointment within 28 days of their operation being cancelled, the national health service will fund the patient's treatment at a time and hospital of the patient's choosing. We are putting in place guarantees to deal with exactly the sort of case the hon. Lady mentioned. They are terribly difficult to deal with.

The hon. Lady talked about people who know sufficient to go to their MP. Many people come to see me at my surgery because their operations have been cancelled. I do not know what it is like in her trust, but if I identify a mishandled case, my trust responds by raising its priority to deal with the error and ensure that the patient is seen within an appropriate time scale. If, on the other hand, someone has come to me to see whether they can jump the queue, the matter continues to be dealt with according to its clinical priority and writing an MP's letter has no impact. That is the way it ought to be.

The hon. Lady is right to identify the patient advice and liaison service, which is increasingly helpful in many constituencies, including my own and hers. It was introduced so that people would not have to go to their MP to have things sorted out and there would be somewhere in the hospital to have issues dealt with through the national health service. It is proving increasingly successful.

The reduction of waiting times and the improvement of patient access are very high on our agenda. We are working to bring down waiting times from referral to treatment to 18 weeks, but clinical assessment of clinical priority will always be the key determinant of how quickly someone is treated.

In developing our health care service, we are taking into account the patient's experience through patient surveys and other systems to provide better feedback. All surveys focus on issues that patients say are important, not issues decided centrally. The development of national standards, including the national service frameworks, is an important part of ensuring that clinical priority always comes first.

I remind the hon. Lady that the implementation of national service frameworks is mandatory on the national health service. The frameworks are targets. She and many of her hon. and right hon. Friends support much of the work being done under the national service frameworks, so they are, by implication, supporting a target. We must accept that.

The Minister pushes the case on targets somewhat. All of us would accept that a change of culture needed to take place in the health service and that some targets have assisted that change. He would accept, too, that there are misgivings about the effects that some of those targets are having two or three steps down the line and that some are producing unwanted effects. I ask him to be a little less dismissive of the concerns about targets, because there are legitimate concerns.

Order. This is becoming a speech.

Again, I agree with the hon. Lady. This is a point that we have made consistently: it was necessary to change the culture of the national health service, which is why we had to have many clear targets. Whenever one tries to change the culture of an organisation and how it works, firm leadership and firm management of the direction of travel are necessary.

We have made progress, so we have announced that we will reduce the number of targets and examine the way that targets are working to produce cleverer, better and more appropriate targets—targeted targets, if the hon. Lady will. I cannot give her an announcement today, because we will be publishing shortly the Department's public service agreements and the planning and priorities framework. However, when they are published, I am fairly confident that she will see the current 62 targets dramatically reduced. They will be much broader and different from the current targets, but they will still be targets; they will still be mandatory and there will still be clear, central leadership. That will allow a lot of local decision making and prioritisation, but there will still be a clear central vision of what the NHS needs to become, which is important.

I will deal now with specific points that the hon. Lady made about appointments. We have been talking mostly about secondary care, but I need to reflect for a moment on primary care. We have set a target of patients being able to see a GP within 48 hours and a primary care professional within 24 hours by December this year. Nationally, the vast majority of patients—about 98 per cent.—can now be offered a GP appointment within two working days. That compares with 75 per cent. two years ago, so there has been progress.

I am grateful to the GPs and nurses who have made that possible. Through the primary care collaborative approach, the national primary care development team, led by Sir John Oldham, has supported more than 5,000 practices, covering more than 32 million patients, in taking up the advanced access methodology to improve access for patients. Advanced access involves doing a lot of simple things differently. I think the hon. Lady said that service redesign could help a great deal in achieving targets. Patients benefit from advanced access, as do staff. It has reduced waiting times to see a GP by about 50 per cent., so it is an important step forward.

The target of seeing a GP within 48 hours or another primary care professional within 24 hours does not prevent people from making their own choice. They may want to see a GP at a later date because that is more convenient, and that choice should be available.

The hon. Lady mentioned our plan to use IT systems to streamline and co-ordinate improvements, which is a huge and important project. Over the next four years, the culture of waiting that has long been a feature of the NHS will be replaced by a personalised approach to care. The information systems that we put in place will enable patients to choose more convenient and higher-quality personalised care. An individual personal care record, for example, will enable health professionals to have easy and rapid access to patients' medical histories at any time. It will also allow patients to influence how they are treated in a way that they cannot do now.

The booking of hospital appointments is a cornerstone of our reforms; it is central to the provision of a new, modern service, as the hon. Lady said it needed to be. By the end of next year, an electronic booking system will make it easier for patients to arrange appointments that suit them. That will be a fundamental change in how hospital appointments are booked. As she said, at the moment people have to wait for a letter or postcard; they do not know when it will come. They have to leave the hospital and come back, hoping that sooner or later the postcard will follow them. All that will change.

Appointments used to be made clinic by clinic. Each clinic, and sometimes each consultant, had a different way of booking appointments, which was expensive, time-consuming and the cause of many mistakes. Now, 96 per cent. of day cases and more than two thirds of out-patient appointments and in-patient elective admissions are booked. That is a considerable achievement in a relatively short time.

By December next year, all NHS patients will be able to choose between a range of providers for hospital appointments and they will be able to book their appointment for a date and time that suits them. Gone will be the misery of wondering when they might make the front of the queue; they will know exactly when the appointment is and that it does not clash with another commitment.

We will go further, so that by 2008 there will be independently assessed health care providers providing treatment within a maximum agreed price range that people can choose from. People will be able to sit in their GP's surgery, or even on the sofa at home, and not only choose a consultant, but make a booking that suits them to receive treatment.

Underpinning those changes will be a booking management service to support patients in making, amending and cancelling appointments, because quite frequently it is patients who do that. We will bring to an end the traditional system of NHS waiting lists; that will genuinely put patients at the centre of their NHS treatment. That will create a fundamental shift in how we do things and completely revolutionise the national health service. Those changes—

Order. We must move on to the last debate of the afternoon.

I am extremely grateful to have been granted this debate on the Kent science part and its owners, LaSalle Investment Management, the pension fund for Mars UK Ltd.

I am a big fan of science and technology. I was a fellow of the Industry and Parliament Trust, working with Motorola. I spent 18 months looking into satellite technology, both here and in America, and I am due to visit Motorola in Chicago shortly. I was the only MP on the BT Vital Vision programme at Berkeley and Stanford, which looked into change management in systems, and I am one of the founders of the Oxford Internet Institute, with which I have helped to raise £15 million. So, I am a fan of science and technology; I want it, I like it and I think it is a great change.

I am worried about Kent science park on every single level, which is why I am raising the issue with the Minister. Almost a year ago, on 21 July 2003, Swale borough council's economic scrutiny panel minutes read:

"In relation to the feasibility of the Southern Relief Road, the Chief Executive explained that Sittingbourne Research Centre … had been identified as an Enterprise Hub And had great potential to benefit the local economy. As a result, a submission had been made to the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister … for funding for a feasibility study to be carried out on the implications of a proposed junction from the M2, which could serve the site and east and south Sittingbourne."

From the fact that the chief executive of Swale borough council commented at that early stage, it follows that the chief executive, the leader of the council—Andrew Bowles—and the Conservative executive must have been in confidential talks for a considerable time with the South East England Development Agency, the Government office for the south-east, possibly the Thames gateway and the owners of the research centre.

As an aside, I would say that the local government reforms that we introduced at the end of the 1990s have not worked; they have led to greater secrecy and much less democracy.

First, I would like to ask the Minister when he first became aware of the plans for a southern ring road. LaSalle Investment Management bought Kent science park, or Sittingbourne research centre—Shell research centre, as it used to be called. The last thing Kent science park is is a science park.

Earlier this year, the Deputy Prime Minister had a photograph taken and made a statement at a trade fair in France. What he said has been widely interpreted by my constituents and the local media as meaning that the Government are 100 per cent. behind the plans. I hope that the Minister puts the record straight.

Science parks in the United Kingdom are inevitably attached to a university. Consider the evidence. On 27 April 2001, it was announced that Leeds university was to build a 110-hectare science park. On 18 May 2001, it was announced that Leicester university was to build a science park next to the National Space Centre. On 28 June 2001, it was announced that Bristol and Bath universities were to join forces to create an innovation centre for technology start-up businesses. On 14 February 2003, it was announced that Liverpool university and Liverpool John Moores university were to provide a science park paid for by the local regional development agency. On 1 August 2002, it was announced that London was to launch a centre for bioscience, and on 3 January 2004 that Nottingham university and Nottingham Trent university were to open the largest biomedical science park and incubation centre in the United Kingdom. Before then, there was a much older science park tradition with science parks at Surrey—the first—Cambridge and Oxford.

The Kent science park is only 80 per cent. occupied. That 80 per cent. is sub-divided 50:50 between concerns that involve science and those that do not. It is now clear from LaSalle's objections to the draft Swale borough council local plan that it already knows that a second park on greenfield land would not necessarily be driven exclusively by science. In effect, it wants an open-ended business park that may or may not involve any world-class science companies. That is not surprising.

I asked the UK Science Park Association how many parks have been built since 2000 that are not attached to a university. It confirmed in an e-mail that there is only one—the Colworth science park at Sharnbrook in Bedfordshire—but that happens to be owned by Unilever. That is rather like the Shell research centre that used to be in Sittingbourne. We have in Sittingbourne no university and no further education college, and there are no plans for either. Therefore, I suspect that a science park that is not a science park, and that will not be connected to the needs of local people, will fail. Can the Minister confirm that, on the existing Kent science park, there is still substantial room to refit the buildings or build new ones and that, therefore, a second park is not necessarily required? Is he aware that in 1992, when the park was known as the Shell research centre, more than 1,200 people worked there, whereas today some 800 do?

Is access a problem? I confess that I have not received a single letter about that from either a constituent who lives on the route to the park or a single company on the park. A constituent has provided me with the following notes about objections to the Kent and Medway structure plan. The first is KMSP deposit consultation—policy NK3, dated 10 November 2003:

"Name: Mr. Brian Lloyd (on behalf of Swale borough council). Consultee comment: Amend (e) to read 'expansion of the Sittingbourne Research Centre as a mixed science cluster supported by the provision of a southern Sittingbourne Relief Road linking the A2 to a new junction on the M2 motorway'."

The second is KMSP deposit consultation—policy FP4, dated 10 November 2003:

"Name: Mr. Brian Lloyd. Consultee comment: Reference to Sittingbourne Research Centre to read 'Sittingbourne Research Centre, supported by the provision of a southern Sittingbourne Relief Road linking the A2 to a new junction on the M2 motorway'."

My problem, on which I hope the Minister can shed some light, is this: how could Swale borough council put a request in November 2003 to the Kent and Medway structure plan that it wanted a significant change to the planning when it was, at the same time, launching a draft local plan over which it would be both judge and jury? That does not strike me as fair or democratic. It seems that the authority owns all the rights and its citizens have none.

Why is Swale borough council so keen to have a southern ring road when we are still struggling over the northern distributor road, which opened only earlier this year? Indeed, if funding for crossing the creek at Milton is not found, and the additional exit at Bapchild on to the A2 remains incomplete, there is a danger—as another constituent put it to me at the weekend—of the northern distributor road becoming the biggest cul-de-sac in Kent. I hope the Minister will allay those fears.

I understand that research commissioned by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister on a traffic model shows that the northern distributor road will take 20 per cent. of through traffic away from Sittingbourne centre. That seems remarkably low. Why put upwards of £25 million into the northern distributor road if it is going to take away only 20 per cent. of through traffic? I am speculating, but I hope that the Minister says when the survey will be put in the public domain. I have to ask him whether the Thames gateway should have produced the model before agreeing the funding. Will he comment on that? Swale borough council has also introduced traffic calming at Bapchild and Tunstall, so I hope that has been factored into the modelling.

A new access road from the motorway would attract new companies to the Kent science park—either now or in future, if the extension is granted—and make it easier for employees to get to work. The cost of a single extension would be approximately £10 million. However, that would do nothing for my constituents, as none of the high-skill jobs would be filled by them. A new exit would have the unintended consequence of opening the south side of the motorway on to the spectacularly beautiful north weald of Kent. I think that various agencies would have serious objections to that idea. The Highways Agency is opposed to a new exit, as indicated in an e-mail dated 6 April 2004. Can the Minister confirm that it is for Kent county council to make the case for a new exit and for the ODPM to say yes or no?

The owners of the new Kent science park need to persuade my local borough council to allow them to build a second park with associated housing, which will help to pay for the extension. That will provide a new southern ring road. The council wants to exchange a science park that will not be a science park for some 5,000 to 6,500 brand new high-density houses on greenfield sites. Hon. Members might expect me to complain about that. However, I have been the local MP since 1997, and I have to say that the Labour Government have been incredibly generous to my community. We have had a £100 million bridge and a new hospital in Minster. Wards have been opened in a hospital built by a previous Conservative Administration, who could not afford to open them. We have had Sure Start in Sheerness, which is sensational; extensions to schools; computer suites; and the promise of a new Rushenden link road. We stopped an asylum centre at Coniston, and just recently the Allied Steel and Wire Sheerness occupational pensions campaign led to the Chancellor and the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions giving us £400 million for failed pensions. Dare I say it—we have never had such Government investment and it has been worth waiting 18 years for it.

I will stop there because, in a sense, what happened next causes more concern. The ODPM has asked the south-east to build more homes; everyone recognises that it is the engine that is driving growth for the whole United Kingdom. Of course, we must build the roads. However, according to the draft Swale borough council plan, 9,000 new homes are to be anticipated between 2006 and 2016. That figure is approximate depending on whether we are talking about 2.4 people per house or 2.8. Whichever statistic is used, there will be somewhere between 22,000 and 30,000 extra people, who will all need doctors, schools, policing, water, electricity and other essential infrastructure. At every level, that will strain the community that I represent. The good thing is that 90 per cent. of the build will be on brownfield sites.

The southern ring road affects five parishes: Bredgar, Tunstall, Rodmersham, Milstead and Bapchild. I went to a meeting last week and I have to say that people there have lost complete faith in the local democratic process. They are having to raise their own funds to pay for their own representation. I have told them that, later in the year under information legislation, I will request telephone logs, e-mails and correspondence between the Conservative executive, its officers, LaSalle and the landowners, where applicable.

LaSalle hopes that the executive at Swale borough council will fall for a new science park that is only a glorified business park. It wants a new southern ring road paid for by a section 106 order, which will increase the number of people involved by between 12,000 and 18,000, on top of the 22,000 to 30,000. In other words, over the next 10 years we would be asked to cater for perhaps 34,000 people, but possibly as many as 48,000. That is absurd and it flies in the face of what Sir Sandy Bruce-Lockhart, the leader of Kent county council, said in a letter to me:

"In my view, a development of anything like 6,000 homes would be totally unacceptable."

Kent science park will not create new jobs for my constituents and it will not attract a university or further education college. It will make us a vast dormitory town and make two landowners very rich.

In relation to Monday's three-year spending review announcement, I draw the Minister's attention to the publication on the science and innovation investment framework—sponsored by the Treasury, the Department of Trade and Industry and the Department for Education and Skills—of the document relating to 2004 to 2014. Among many excellent things, it draws attention to the fact i that the Government announced

"that it will build the Higher Education Innovation Fund as a permanent third stream of funding for universities in England to further build the capacity in the university sector for knowledge transfer."

It continues:

"The Government will develop this policy as part of its ten-year investment framework for science and innovation."

Nowhere in the document is there anything about individual science parks that are commercial entities and not attached to universities. If we could have a university, I would rethink the whole issue.

This is what I want for my community: Sure Start for Eastchurch, Rushenden, Milton and Murston; improvements in relation to primary schools; one system of secondary schools, especially on the Isle of Sheppey; a further education college; and a sixth-form college or academy. I would love a postgraduate university department. I would like to bed down the northern distributor road before we start on a southern distributor road, and I would like a bypass for Newington and work to start on the Rushenden link road. I would like more job opportunities on the island and greater sporting and cultural entities. None of those things will happen if the Kent science park is built.

If we, the Labour Government practise what we preach, let the Learning and Skills Council propose a plan to build a further education college for Sittingbourne. Let the Department for Education and Skills give university status to Imperial college and ask it to merge with Kent university at Canterbury. Let the new world-class university open a graduate science department on the Kent science site. Let us move the 40 per cent. of people on the existing site who have no science base to space on the Eurolink estate in Sittingbourne. That is a win-win-win situation. That is what we need now, not this seriously flawed plan from a pension fund representing Mars UK Ltd. that wants to rape our countryside for its own ends.

I begin by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey (Mr. Wyatt) on securing the debate. He is well known as a keen advocate of his constituency and for bringing constituency issues to the attention of the House.

Before I address the matter that my hon. Friend has so eloquently put before us, I remind the House of my Department's commitment to Swale. As part of the Thames gateway growth area, Swale submitted bids for funding from the sustainable communities plan. In July 2003, the Deputy Prime Minister announced that four projects would receive funding in the next three years. Those projects included: £10.4 million to the Sittingbourne northern relief road to support mixed-use development to the north of Sittingbourne; £3.6 million for improvements to Sittingbourne town centre; and £7 million for a mixed-use redevelopment scheme in Queenborough on the Isle of Sheppey. In addition, a number of education, environmental and community regeneration schemes approved for north Kent will directly benefit the residents of Swale.

Also included in the package was a £1.3 million grant for the Kent science park, formerly known as the Sittingbourne research centre. The science park houses 80 businesses, providing 1,000 jobs with a focus on life sciences. It has been designated by the South East England Development Agency as one of a network of enterprise hubs across the south-east. As an enterprise hub, the site provides units for small science-based businesses to start up. That has been successful and £1 million from my Department is going towards a project to renovate a building on the science park to provide space for those businesses to expand when they outgrow the innovation buildings.

Both Kent county council and Swale borough council support the expansion of the site as a science park. Policies encouraging the further development of the site as an innovation hub are included ill both the draft Kent and Medway structure plan and the draft Swale borough local plan. However, it is recognised that any major expansion of the site will raise a number of planning issues, not least that of providing better road access. For that reason, the Government have approved a grant of £300,000 for a feasibility study into the possible provision of a new junction on the M2, as well as other options. The study is nearing completion. Any major changes to the highway network would take several years to complete. As Swale borough council does not want to stifle the further development of science-based industries on the site, a policy has been included in the draft local plan allowing limited expansion if measures are taken to minimise the generation of extra traffic on existing roads.

My hon. Friend wrote to me earlier this year about his concerns regarding the future expansion of the Kent science park. He emphasised the need for a strong link between the science park and research-based universities and expressed his view that the feasibility study on access should be put back until the Sittingbourne northern relief road had been completed. In my reply, I stated that, due to the long run-in times for delivering new roads, to wait for the new northern relief road to be completed before carrying out the study might leave developing the site too late to support the regeneration of Sittingbourne as a whole. The feasibility study will, at this time, inform not only the future development of the science park, but take into account the other redevelopment works in Sittingbourne. To delay the study would therefore be counter-productive and leave a large part of the regeneration of Sittingbourne uncertain.

The reasons for the absence of a research-based university in the Kent science park are largely historical. The science park has been developed during the last 10 years on the site of the former Shell research facility and is one of the few privately owned science parks in the country. One of the purposes of the enterprise hub is to strengthen links with academic establishments. Many links have been developed between firms on the site and the universities of Greenwich, Kent at Canterbury and London. For example, one firm is developing a shared lab facility with the university of Kent, and an employees training unit to be launched later this month will involve the Kent new technology institute.

The Kent science park was identified as the location for one of a small number of flagship centres for technology and business development in work undertaken for the Thames gateway innovation subgroup. The consultants identified as a prerequisite for a viable flagship the need to secure a suitable anchor member. The businesses on the science park are a good nucleus on which to build. The site represents the largest single concentration of laboratories to let in the UK, with buildings suitable for biological and chemical sciences, pilot-scale production and clean and constant temperature activities. Existing tenants include major pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, of which Pfizer is one, as well as technology-based business in environmental technology, electronics diagnostics instrumentation and information technology. I understand my hon. Friend's concern about the present make-up of the park, but I understand that the trend is towards mixed business parks. Good office accommodation as well as on-site conference facilities will also be required.

My hon. Friend also raised the issue of housing on the site. Under Highways Agency rules, a new motorway junction cannot serve a single site but must link into the wider highway network. For that reason, the feasibility study will also examine a link between the M2 and the A2. Clearly, such a road could open up land to the south of Sittingbourne and raise the possibility of land being released in future to help to meet Swale's housing needs. Furthermore, the sustainable communities plan supports developments where mixed use would contribute to reducing commuter and business travel, thus easing congestion. That is of particular relevance on the A2 and M2, which are not only the main trunk roads between Sittingbourne and its neighbours, but major links between the ports of Dover and Folkestone and the rest of the UK. My hon. Friend asked when the Government first became aware of the southern link road plans. The answer is: when a bid for sustainable communities fund money was made in 2003 by the Thames gateway Kent partnership.

The site owner recently proposed a scheme for a major expansion of the site, including 72 hectares of employment land and 150 hectares of housing and community facilities, together with the provision of the M2-A2 link. That would entail the development of some 5,000 houses, which the site owner believes are necessary to fund the whole package. I emphasise that that figure has not emerged from the feasibility study and has not yet been subjected to any testing through the planning system. Such a major proposal raises wider issues relating to the long-term housing and employment needs of the area, and it will need to be fully debated at the public examination of the draft Kent and Medway structure plan in September. By then, the feasibility study on the road access will have been completed. It will indicate the practicability of a new junction and link road, and the cost that would be involved. The funding mechanism for the infrastructure will have to be considered carefully before any further proposals for the science park or new housing in that part of Sittingbourne can be properly evaluated.

I emphasise that the Government have made no decisions about the expansion of the science park, the proposed link road or the housing. The public examination will be the first stage of evaluating the proposal. It might lead to proposals being advanced in the Swale local plan, which will go to public inquiry next year. I emphasise that there will be full opportunities for public consultation before any decisions are made. The House will understand that I cannot pre-empt the results of the public examination or the local planning inquiry. The aim must be to encourage the development of the science park as a centre for innovation and high-quality employment in a sustainable way that brings the maximum benefit to the area as a whole.

Complex issues are involved and I am grateful to my hon. Friend for highlighting them in this debate. It goes without saying that I sympathise with his vision for improving education in his constituency. However, he and the House will understand that such matters fall outside my responsibilities as Minister for Housing and Planning.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly, at twenty-three minutes past Four o'clock.