I beg to move, That the House do sit in private.

Question put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 163 (Motion to sit in private):—

To state the obvious, I am delighted that the Bill has reached this stage, because if it completes Third Reading, it will have time to clear all its stages in the House of Lords and will, I hope, be enacted. The fact that it has reached Third Reading is due to support not only from its sponsors, but from hon. Members on both sides of the House. Indeed, the hon. Member for Teignbridge (Richard Younger-Ross) drew my attention to the Emergency Workers (Scotland) Act 2005, on which I based my original Bill. My Bill has all-party sponsors; moreover, at every stage we have had all-party support, including from Opposition spokesmen, and I am grateful for that.

I should like to cite two individuals in particular. I suffer from the great disadvantage in the House of Commons of not being a lawyer, so it was invaluable to receive the assistance of my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore), who is not always associated with a benevolent approach towards private Members’ Bills, and my hon. Friend the Member for Islington, South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry), both of whom gave legal advice and support when I was in negotiations. As those who followed the progress of the Bill from the start will know, the provisions in the Scottish Bill were much wider, and there were negotiations with the Home Office and others to try to ensure that a similarly wide-ranging Bill was introduced in the House.

My right hon. Friend mentions our hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore); hon. Members might think it unusual that he is not in his place on a Friday, especially as he is a sponsor of the Bill, as my right hon. Friend says. I think that my hon. Friend would want it to be known that he is attending a funeral, which keeps him from his business in the House.

My hon. Friend the Member for Hendon explained that to me personally, too.

After negotiations with the Home Office, the Bill became not only shorter but clearer. My only regret, if I may make a personal comment, is that the great scourge of private Members’ Bills, as I described him in Committee, Eric Forth, is not here today. I do not think that my Bill was a unique case, but Eric actually suggested that he supported its intentions. I pointed out to him in a slightly mischievous way that his only objection was exactly the one espoused by the Home Office. I felt that that combined opposition was too much for me to take on, and so we are considering a truncated Bill. The Bill has been welcomed by the emergency services. Strangely enough, it has been welcomed in Northern Ireland, too, which has asked for the Bill to apply there, because it has no such provisions on ambulance workers.

The Bill addresses the offence of impeding emergency workers. It is based on two straightforward, simple principles. First, people who risk their lives to save others should not be obstructed, and should be free to undertake their rescue work without obstruction and attack by yobs and idiots. Secondly, people who need to be rescued in an emergency because they are in danger should not face additional danger because of the mindless activity of a minority of idiots. Rescue work is essentially a team operation, and it is important that the team operate together. If part of the team is dislocated, the team does not work as effectively, so victims could be at greater danger. Sadly, that has become more important now, because of the threat of terrorist attacks.

On Second Reading, I mentioned the unbelievable conduct of some people, and I will reiterate a few examples. Greater Manchester fire and rescue service helped to lead a campaign on the subject, with the prompting and help of the Manchester Evening News. The fire and rescue service reports as many as 200 incidents a year of impeding and assault. Barry Dixon, who gave me considerable briefings on the Bill, told me of incidents from across the country of pipes being cut to stop the water supply. That is the least of the imaginative devices that some thugs use. Stoning is not unknown, and scaffold poles have even been driven through the windscreens of fire tenders. Fires have been lit deliberately as an ambush to lure the fire services to places where the thugs are waiting for them. Once inside, firemen find such refined tactics as razorblades fixed underneath banisters, so that as they try to haul their equipment upstairs their hands are severely injured.

There was an instance of live electric wiring being fixed to the inside of a door, so that the firemen trying to reach the source of the fire were in danger of electrocution. In the most grotesque case, in a multi-floor building, a hole in the floor was covered with a mat, like a bear trap, so that firemen coming in were in danger of plummeting to the floor below. That is the sort of dangerous nonsense that our rescue services have to endure.

The Bill’s provisions are wide-ranging. Clause 1 covers firefighters, rescue services, ambulance workers, including air ambulance workers, and voluntary organisations. I stress the latter, because some people were afraid that voluntary organisations were omitted. As Opposition Front Benchers proposed in Committee, clause 2 covers individuals who come to the help of the emergency services. The Bill covers the coastguard, lifeboat crews, and people transporting blood, organs and medical and rescue equipment to the site of an emergency. That is a list of provisions in the Bill, but the trouble with lists is that they are not always accurate and do not always fully reflect need. For that reason, we have built in a safeguard clause, which means that the list is not conclusive. That safeguard clause—clause 5—allows Ministers by order to add or remove categories of workers that they think need to be added. That builds in flexibility, so that we can act if the idiots find new targets.

Can my right hon. Friend elaborate on other groups of workers who, although not usually considered emergency service providers, none the less fall into that category in some situations? Examples include approved social workers when they are sectioning people, and child protection officers when they have to remove children from danger. Can my right hon. Friend clarify the scope of the provision?

As I said, the Bill was truncated in negotiations. We have built in the option under the order-making powers so that any organisation or group of workers who feel they should be covered by the Bill may make representations to the Home Office, and it would be a relatively simple matter for the Home Office to add any group to the list. We have kept options open. I do not pretend that the list is comprehensive.

On similar lines, one important service that has not been covered, unless I have missed something, is the air rescue service, which is extremely important in Snowdonia, as my right hon. Friend knows, where climbers and others get lost on the mountains.

I should have thought that that service was covered, especially as it operates within the country, rather than at sea. Perhaps the Minister will clarify that with the help of his memory box, which Ministers have and the rest of us are denied.

Most of us know that excellent services are provided by volunteers. Mountain rescue crews are often volunteers. I was recently at an open day event in my constituency where St. John Ambulance volunteers were in attendance. They often help at such events, as well as at football matches and on many other occasions. Will non-professionals carrying out such health-providing services be covered? We know that St. John Ambulance in particular provides a vast amount of those services.

At this stage, it is not possible to amend the Bill, but I am sure the Minister is listening to representations and would be glad to receive back-up representations from the organisations and groups involved.

The penalty was in dispute on Second Reading. In my original Bill, which was based on the Scottish Act, the maximum penalty was a fine of £5,000. At that stage the Home Office was minded to reduce that to £1,000, which I was not exactly happy about. Fortunately, as a result of discussions and negotiations within and outside Government, the £5,000 penalty has been restored, which was welcomed by the fire service.

The other aspect addressed in Committee was defences. The Scottish Act, on which I originally based my Bill, listed defences. It was pointed out, correctly, as I said in connection with my safeguard clause, that lists are not comprehensive. The Home Office offered the suggestion, which I accepted, that instead we should resort to the concept of reasonableness. That is a fairly standard process in law. A person would be guilty of impeding if he impeded without reasonable excuse. For example, a reasonable excuse would be that he did not realise that someone was an emergency worker. This change from the specific list to what I call the catch-all phrase was unanimously endorsed in Committee.

The Bill is relatively simple and straightforward. I hope there are now few areas where there is grave disagreement. The Bill that has evolved is better and clearer than the one that I originally proposed to the House, and I commend it to the House.

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams) on the progress that he has made in steering his Bill to Third Reading. I agree with most of the sentiments that he expressed. The Bill will unquestionably make life easier and allow prosecutions for hindrance of services.

In reply to two of the points that were raised, the air ambulance service is specifically covered under the Bill where it is operating at the request of the national health service. Where it is not operating in such circumstances, the position is unclear. Perhaps the Minister needs to address that. According to my reading of the Bill, mountain rescue services are not mentioned and therefore would not be covered by the Bill. Again, that is an omission that the Minister may wish to reflect on, in view of the powers that he is granted.

In his usual self-effacing way, the right hon. Member for Swansea, West said the Bill is far better than it was when he started. In some ways, it is. All Bills improve through the Committee stage. Sadly, as we discussed in Committee, some important elements and opportunities have been missed by the Government and the Home Office, particularly the opportunity to put an assault on an emergency worker on the same level of seriousness as an assault on the police. That would have been in the original Bill and is in the legislation in Scotland. A Liberal Democrat amendment to the Scottish Bill which specifically included social workers engaged in child work or sectioning was accepted by the Labour party in Scotland. That was all removed from this Bill by the Government because they thought it was not compatible with English legislation. It was an argument that I understood but did not necessarily agree with.

We wish the Bill further progress and look forward to its being enacted and becoming law. I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman once again on pushing it forward.

I add my congratulations to my right hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams). He was kind enough to ask me to be a sponsor of the Bill, but with his experience of the procedures of the House, it was not the most onerous task to support his Bill as he is so capable of steering it through all its stages. It is no surprise that it has reached Third Reading this morning.

When my right hon. Friend moved Third Reading, he mentioned Eric Forth, my former constituency neighbour in Bromley, and the fact that he was fortunate enough to have Eric Forth’s support for the intent of his Bill. I pay tribute to Eric Forth as a formidable opponent and a regular at our sittings on a Friday morning. My two Bills on environmental measures, which I fought for several years to get through the House, always fell on what became known as Eric Forth’s killing fields for private Members’ Bills. I had to sit silently as he eloquently talked them into oblivion. I am pleased to say that elements of one of my Bills have been resurrected in the legislation on home information packs, but sadly not with my name on them. None the less, Eric Forth was a formidable person who will be missed at our Friday morning debates.

It is surprising that we need to address the issue that is covered by the Bill. We have had emergency workers for many years and the problem is not new, but the Bill will be welcomed by those workers.

I understand that accident and emergency workers have been excluded from the Bill. It is arguable that in their daily work they frequently need immediately to respond to the needs of people who have been brought in for care and attention, and obstructing accident and emergency workers can have catastrophic consequences for people who need their attention. I accept that accident and emergency workers work in buildings and that they are often supported by security guards, but they face a great deal of aggression for no apparent reason. I have witnessed such behaviour when I have accompanied people to accident and emergency. The obstruction of such workers should be dealt with more severely, and the situation would be simplified if the Bill applied to them, too.

The Government’s respect agenda, although not directly addressed by the Bill, is part of what the Bill seeks to achieve because it is better to prevent emergency workers from being obstructed or attacked while carrying out their duties in the first place. I commend the work of the Metropolitan police, the fire service and others to explain to young people the dangers posed by things that they do sometimes for a lark and the consequences for other people if they impede emergency workers. That approach includes explaining to young people the importance of the work done by emergency workers and the dangers to which emergency workers expose themselves in addition to the problem of their possibly being attacked. That helps young people to address antisocial behaviour in the wider community and gets them to understand the consequences of their actions for not only emergency workers, but people who need emergency services.

Does my hon. Friend accept that although the Bill is welcome and positive in many respects, other aspects of Government legislation are making a huge difference to, for example, the number of assaults experienced by NHS staff? The number of assaults against nurses has drastically reduced in recent years because of other aspects of Government business.

I am grateful for that intervention, but I will not pursue it, because I can see that Mr. Deputy Speaker thinks that that would stray too far from the Bill. Nevertheless, we need to address the antisocial behaviour that has made this Bill necessary. The Government are addressing that point through the respect agenda, which has my full support. I commend the work that has been done, but I believe that we need to invest more money to minimise the number of times that the Bill is used to protect emergency workers.

I agree with my hon. Friend that education is important in preventing the obstruction of emergency workers. Does he agree that it is still important for Parliament to pass this law, which sends a message to young people that the matter is so serious that there is a specific offence of obstructing emergency workers?

Yes; the Bill is necessary. As I have said, it is surprising that the gap in the law still exists and that we still need to simplify the law regarding firefighters. Although existing measures can be used against those who obstruct firefighters, the Bill simplifies the procedure and, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West has said, covers other emergency workers, such as ambulance workers—I am surprised that they have not included before—and coastguards.

The Bill is necessary, and the emergency workers and public sector workers whom it covers will welcome it. As has been said in this House on numerous occasions, emergency workers risk their well-being when they attend emergencies and protect the public. They do an enormous amount of good work in our local communities, and they deserve the cover of the Bill if they are impeded in doing so. Once again, I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West on successfully piloting the Bill through the House.

I spoke in the debate in March, and I am delighted by the Bill’s progress. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams) on his work on this important Bill.

I support the Bill, because unfortunately Greater Manchester has one of the worst records for assaults and attacks on firefighters. My right hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West has already referred to the fact that about 200 assaults a year are recorded on our fire services, which is a record that we want to lose. Although hon. Members would be concerned by an assault on any emergency worker, we know that the greatest number of assaults are directed at the police, firefighters and prison officers.

I want to praise the role played by the Manchester Evening News and its reporter, Neal Keeling, in highlighting the scale of the problem faced by firefighters in Greater Manchester. That newspaper has run an effective campaign to highlight the issue as the Bill has progressed through Parliament, although it is sad to say that there is still a need for such reporting in my area.

Today, we have had good news about the success of the recent knife amnesty run by the Home Office, because it is necessary in the fight against crime to reduce the number of knives on the streets. In a recent disturbing case, a teenager from my constituency was convicted of using a knife against a firefighter, who was trying to tackle a blaze, which shows the context in which our emergency workers are trying to do their jobs. The incident began with a scenario mentioned by my right hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West, in which a group of youths were shouting abuse at a fire crew and taking items from the fire engine. As an officer went to help his colleagues deal with the yobs, he was confronted by a youth on a bike. The court was told that the youth said, “Shall I hold him down while you cut him up?” The youth then said to the firefighter, “You’ve got an axe, but I’ve got one of these”, at which point he brandished a bladed weapon. We can all imagine how shocked the firefighter was to be confronted by a youth who was brandishing a bladed weapon. He told the police who assisted with the incident that he joined the service to protect the public, not to be threatened by them.

That incident occurred very recently and the prosecution was only a couple of weeks ago.

I wonder whether my hon. Friend is aware, as a parliamentary neighbour of mine, of the excellent work that the emergency services—all of them—undertake in Bolton through a programme called “Crucial Crew”? Emergency set-ups are staged in a large building. All the emergency services are in attendance. Primary school children go through each of the scenarios. The aim is to try to impress upon them how important it is to observe decency when emergency workers are attending various incidents. Perhaps in that way we can inhibit some young people from becoming hooligans in future and thereby cure the problem that the Bill is intended to target.

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. I think that he is absolutely right. I was a councillor for a number of years and was aware of such initiatives, which do a great deal of good.

I am here to support the Bill because the incident to which I have referred was much more serious than verbally abusing fire crews or throwing things at them. I find it shameful that one of my constituents did what I have described to a firefighter. I feel badly about that for the fire crew. There is a case for saying that we must start with people when they are at a very young age. The young man I mentioned was convicted and, rightly, received a 12-month sentence for an appalling incident. He was 17 and a half years old. It is serious when someone gets to that age and, unbelievably, thinks that it is acceptable or a jape to brandish a weapon at a firefighter who was doing his job and trying to protect the local community.

The chief fire officer for Greater Manchester and Councillor Fred Walker, who is the chair of the Greater Manchester fire authority, are concerned. They have told me that they want Members to hear about the incident to which I have referred so that we can understand the threat that fire crews face daily. It must be shocking and difficult for someone to return to work the next day, or even the same week, when they have been the victim of such a severe incident. We need the Bill because of that threat.

The hon. Lady rightly draws attention to a horrific incident. I have every sympathy with the firefighters in her constituency. She must be aware that the Government have deleted the specific provisions that the right hon. Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams) wants to cover assault and to ensure that it is an aggravated offence.

Indeed. We are trying in this debate to highlight various issues. A plethora of things can be done and are being done to deal with these issues. As I said, the young person who committed the offence that I have described is already in prison. He received a sentence of 12 months, and rightly so.

Further to what my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton, South-East (Dr. Iddon) said, incidents can involve youths as young as eight or nine years of age. Perhaps that is where our attention should be focused. We must start to explain to young people the seriousness of the job that emergency workers undertake. We must get them to understand how vital that work is and that it should not be impeded in any way. Barry Dixon, the chief fire officer, feels that it is important that magistrates use the powers that they already have to deal with such wrongdoing so that young people do not carry on with abuse and assaults on fire crews.

As I said on Second Reading, community penalties might be appropriate for the incidents that we are discussing. My hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) talked about the respect agenda and the great work that is being done by the police and fire officers to engage with young people. That is an important example of what can be done.

The Prince’s Trust and the fire service run joint schemes in my area. The young firefighters scheme is probably similar to the “Crucial Crew” programme that my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton, South-East mentioned. I know that firefighters attend a great variety of community events to talk about fire hazards and to show off their equipment, which helps to develop relationships with young people in the community. More than anything, given all the work that my right hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West has been doing, we need to have the Bill on the statute book so as to add to the respect agenda, the good community work that is being done and the penalties that are available. We need to keep on highlighting the message to magistrates that they should be as firm as they can be, and use all the powers at their disposal, to stop young people developing the tendency to abuse and then later, possibly, to assault firefighters.

The situation is still as serious as it ever was. The Bill is as necessary as it ever was. I further congratulate the people whom I have mentioned, who alongside my right hon. Friend have been highlighting the matters that we are discussing. I have already referred to the Manchester Evening News and the report by Neal Keeling. Barry Dixon has undertaken a great deal of work and should be commended for so doing, as has Councillor Fred Walker. I know that that team of people will be delighted to see the Bill enacted. Again, I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West on introducing it.

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams) on his Bill, which is both timely and much needed. Its purpose is to deal with a genuine and urgent problem.

During previous deliberations, we heard statistics relating to offences against emergency workers, including actual assaults. The situation is improving in some sectors, such as the NHS, since the introduction of programmes such as conflict resolution training and the determination of the NHS to protect its staff by prosecuting offenders. There were about 37,000 assaults in 2003 and the numbers went down to about 11,000 in 2004-05. Those figures relate to acute hospitals. New orders, such as acceptable behaviour orders, are assisting generally, but there is still a job to be done to prevent incidents. That is where the Bill will do its job. We must get in earlier, as it were. The news that the Government are supporting the new offence of obstructing an emergency worker in responding to an emergency will help to plug the gap and further diminish the number of incidents involving emergency workers. It will give them the same respect and protection in law as that which is accorded to our police force.

I was speaking to my local ambulance personnel recently. They were keen that I and my hon. Friends should support the Bill. That is why I am here instead of opening fêtes and fairs, the number of which seems to be growing exponentially in my constituency. It is important that I make sure that the Bill goes forward so as to assist ambulance personnel and others in their work. I am proud to be in the Chamber to support the Bill.

The obstruction of emergency workers responding to emergencies is a heinous crime that at best is irritating and troublesome and at worst potentially life threatening. The consequent danger and damage to the person awaiting emergency assistance can be devastating. I am pleased that the Bill defines emergency workers as firefighters and those transporting blood, organs and medical equipment, as well as coastguards and lifeboat crews. It is especially welcome that it covers all ambulance workers, including those working in air ambulances, volunteers and those working under contract to the health service.

I am especially concerned about the safety of those in our ambulance service and paramedics, whom I consider the unsung infantry of the NHS. I am therefore particularly pleased that the protection contained in the Bill is extended to them in clause 1(2)(c). They work in extremely stressful and sometimes dangerous circumstances. They are on the scene of an accident from the start and they use their skills to save lives. We should also have pride in them and they deserve not only our gratitude and respect, but our protection. They should be protected from harm and from obstruction in going about their duties, and they should have support in law.

My hon. Friend is being characteristically modest in that she is not revealing what a number of us know: she has spent a great deal of time working with emergency crews out on their shifts. Having spent hours overnight with them in her own time at weekends and during summer breaks, she knows about these matters at first hand. I commend her for doing that, and I hope to take it up.

I thank my hon. Friend for those comments. I had hoped to get on to that point, although I was not going to be quite as obvious. Part of what I intended to do as an MP was to get out and about, particularly with public service workers. I am a former teacher, but teaching was probably not as dangerous—at least it did not feel as dangerous—as some of the situations I have been in since I started going out on duty with police crews and the ambulance service. I believe that doing that should be part of my role as an MP.

I recently worked a night shift with an ambulance crew from Stourbridge station, which is an experience that I recommend to all parliamentary colleagues. Experiencing situations is very different from reading about them, or even from hearing first-hand stories. That experience has served to deepen my respect for the ambulance service and its personnel. I hope that it might also have deepened their respect for Members of Parliament, but we shall have to wait and see about that. [Interruption.] I hope that it might at least have deepened that crew’s respect for their own MP.

That night shift began at 9 pm and finished at 6 am. I do not think that anybody expected me to work the whole shift, so I think I got brownie points for doing so. Apart from one rest break at about 3 am, the crew work solidly for the duration, going from call to call and either tending to patients on site or, in some cases, taking them to hospital. At all times during that shift, they were constantly on guard, constantly concentrating and working together with almost unseen communication between them. The whole process was very uplifting.

We attended a variety of cases, including a cut head at the local swimming baths, a road traffic accident, alcohol-related incidents, a suspected heart attack, a young woman with severe abdominal pains, a distressed and disturbed patient in need of assistance, and the rescue—I do call it a rescue—and treatment of two young men who were the victims of a group attack. That attack underlined to me how helpful a Bill such as this could be.

We were returning to hospital with a patient from one of the other incidents that I have mentioned, when the paramedic who was driving noticed a man by the roadside whom he believed to be receiving cardiopulmonary resuscitation—CPR. He called in the incident immediately, which is the right procedure, but he also took an immediate decision to divert our ambulance to it to assist. Upon parking it became clear that the incident was quite different from how it had first appeared. The young man on the floor was in fact being attacked, and his friend, whom my colleague—if I can use that description—from the crew had initially thought was giving CPR, was actually protecting him from further blows.

Both paramedics attempted to calm the situation and to assist both young men under attack. They managed to negotiate successfully, through a highly charged situation, and the young men were then attended to, and the badly injured patient on the floor was carried into the ambulance. However, while that was happening, two bystanders who had not previously been involved in the incident, attempted to prevent it by barring the way to the injured party and then hitting out at one of the paramedics as the injured man was lifted into the ambulance. Local police arrived within two minutes of the call to them having been made, and the situation calmed. But in those two minutes, when lives could have been lost and immediate assessments and quick judgment were needed, the professionalism and dedication of my two colleagues shone through. Of course, that was a one-off experience for me, but men and women such as my two Stourbridge paramedics face such situations day in, day out, night in, night out. That incident brought home to me that inadequate protection is sometimes afforded to such excellent professionals.

I also welcome the provision in clause 3 that allows a person to be convicted for impeding an emergency worker “by action directed” at a vehicle used by an emergency worker, because of another unfortunate aspect of the incident I have described, which occurred as we began to drive back to the hospital with our injured patient and prior to the police establishing order in the fracas. At one point, two young men mounted the steps at the side of the driver’s door and attempted to prevent our ambulance from moving away. The situation was unbelievably tense, but once again the calm and professional manner of my colleagues, and the way in which they handled the situation, enabled all of us to leave safely and to get the patient to hospital quickly.

The enacting of this legislation will underline our great respect for services such as the ambulance service, and it will also send a message to those who have less respect for them than us and to those who would try to frustrate their staff in their work. The decision to support the increase in the penalty for such behaviour to up to £5,000 will also serve to indicate to the wider public how seriously we regard such offences.

Members have mentioned other methods of getting this message out. I wish briefly to mention the work of the west midlands ambulance service, which runs an education programme throughout the midlands. It goes into schools and community groups to raise awareness of its work and to help to draw young people in particular closer to the service to encourage respect for its workers and appreciation of the role they play. When he speaks, will the Minister underline possible future plans to publicise and widen that educational role, which is very important?

Finally, I congratulate again my right hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West on his success so far with this Bill, and I hope that colleagues from all parties will continue to support it in its latter stages.

I join my hon. Friends in congratulating the Father of the House on this Bill. If it is enacted, it will be a worthy addition to the statute book, as is recognised by the cross-party support that it has. The Bill has undoubtedly been improved as a result of the lively and constructive debates on it in this House, and it will play an important role in addressing the serious problem of the obstruction of our emergency services. The Bill addresses an increasingly important issue. I hope that Members will forgive me if I repeat some arguments that have already been made, but the need for the Bill is worth reinforcing again.

The British crime survey shows that fire and rescue service firefighters and officers, along with police officers and prison service officers and others defined in the Bill as being in the protective services, are the people who are most at risk of experiencing violence and obstruction at work. Some 14 per cent. of workers in the occupational category report that they have experienced an incident of actual or threatened violence while working. The figure for the work force as a whole is 1.7 per cent., so there is a huge and outrageous difference. The former Office of the Deputy Prime Minister collected figures for England and Wales from 2004 at the request of the Chief Fire Officers Association. The stats show that there were almost 400 serious incidents in a nine-month period alone.

It is not only the number of incidents that is increasing, but their ferocity and seriousness. I am sure that most hon. Members in the Chamber know of at least a single incident that has occurred in their constituency or nearby that illustrates how serious the problem is becoming.

The Fire Brigades Union has published research showing that the instances of obstruction on UK fire crews runs at approximately 40 a week, and we understand that the problem may well be getting worse. I understand that the research is the first of its kind in the UK. The problem is also seriously underreported, so it is suggested that there could be as many as 120 incidents in one week. We believe that there is serious underreporting because only 18 of the 50 English and Welsh fire and rescue services responded to requests for information when the figures were being compiled. Only a third of the brigades thus added their numbers to the statistics that we have available.

My hon. Friend raises a valuable point that was discussed substantially on Second Reading. I mentioned that the Greater Manchester fire authority has an apparently appalling record in respect of attacks on its firefighters and I am sure that I speak for Salford Members when I say that we want to lose that record. I have read the material about the situation and my hon. Friend is right that underreporting is a problem. Does she agree that we should send out the message that the job of recording attacks that is carried out by the Greater Manchester fire authority and police should be done by other fire authorities?

I thank my hon. Friend for her timely intervention and agree with her. I understand that the arrangements for reporting have been tightened and improved so that the data that we have will reflect better the situation as a whole. However, the Bill will enable firefighters and fire officers to appreciate the importance of collecting such data because they will realise that it might be possible to do something about the problem.

My hon. Friend told us earlier about an attack that occurred in her constituency. It seems clear to me that the young man who was involved in the incident was not committing a first offence because it would not have been the first time that he had seen emergency workers as a legitimate target to allow him to have some fun. My guess is that his behaviour had been escalating up to the age of 17. If the Bill had been in place, perhaps his behaviour could have been addressed when he was 10 or 14 years old. The Bill would have imposed penalties, and perhaps the dreadful incident in my hon. Friend’s constituency could have been avoided. We need to nip things in the bud as early as possible and say that certain behaviour by members of our community is totally unacceptable. If we can do that early enough, we can hopefully prevent such incidents.

The FBU states that fire crews in some parts of the country are served a diet of bricks, bottles and missiles as they fight fires. In some cases, firefighters have been lured to an incident, ambushed and attacked, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams) pointed out. Scaffolds have been thrown through the windows of emergency vehicles and crews have been attacked with concrete blocks. Bricks and bottles have been thrown, and crews and vehicles have been spat at.

The serious problem that my hon. Friend describes is a long way away from young people acting out of order. Does she agree that instead of hugging a hoodie, we should perhaps hug a firefighter?

My hon. Friend gives me the opportunity to say that I have taken a leaf out of the book of the experiences of my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge (Lynda Waltho) over the past year. I have been out for an eight-hour shift with my local police force. I am in the midst of arranging a similar night out—if one can call it that—with my firefighters and ambulance crew. I look forward to seeing their experiences at first hand, although I am not sure that I will go as far as hugging them, unless, of course, they wish that to happen.

My hon. Friends the Members for West Ham (Lyn Brown) and for Stourbridge (Lynda Waltho) sound like prime candidates for the police parliamentary scheme, which I have undertaken myself. I spent 30 days with the Greater Manchester police, so, like other hon. Members, I have seen it all. I strongly recommend the scheme to both my hon. Friends.

I am looking forward to taking part in the scheme. In fact, I have the papers on my desk as I speak. My only concern is that I might be expected to become fitter than I am. Once I have received clarification on that point, I will sign and submit the papers.

As I said, we unfortunately all know of incidents in our constituencies or neighbouring areas. I remember an incident that took place in a neighbouring constituency on a Guy Fawkes night when youths fired rockets at two firefighters as they responded to a call. Their injuries were so bad that they were both hospitalised.

At this juncture, it is useful to recall the words of the FBU’s general secretary, Matt Wrack. He said in March this year that the union welcomed the Bill and the cross-party support for it because the

“number and ferocity of the attacks has been getting worse and there have been several attacks this week.”

The Bill is thus central to firefighters’ concerns about their working conditions.

I wanted to speak about the Bill because I received representations from my constituents to ensure that I supported it. I thus read the FBU website and paramedics’ websites to find out what they said about the Bill and people’s experiences. It is clear that assault and abuse causes great concern because they take up many pages of those worthy websites.

As Matt Wrack said:

“If we can’t do our job because of violent assaults then it is our communities which are being put at risk. We are the targets, but it is our communities which are deprived of an emergency response which are the victims.”

He believes that the Bill must be part of a package of measures and that central to that package should be a wide range of educational measures to try to stop such attacks. The union is keen for statistics to be collected on such incidents. In some brigades, fire crews are being encouraged to record every single incident. However, as the union points out, the crews will be encouraged even more if they understand how the figures can be used.

The union also wants co-ordination and evaluation. I understand that various initiatives are being introduced throughout the country, including community-based projects with offenders and possible offenders. I know that we would all agree that there is a need for such initiatives to be properly monitored and evaluated nationally so that brigades can learn more quickly what works and what does not. Frankly, what works in one area will not necessarily work in another.

We need to understand the nature of the problems in our own communities and find remedies suited to our particular needs.

The Fire Brigades Union has also accurately pointed out that the end result of the continuation of these incidents could well be the effective withdrawal or diminution of services from certain areas. Unless the problem is dealt with, we run the risk of depriving parts of the UK of access to the first-class emergency services that we have all come to expect and appreciate. After all, if we have to wait for the police to accompany an ambulance worker or a firefighter into a certain part of the country, it means waiting for two emergency services rather than one, which will slow down our ability to respond to incidents. That would be a real shame, and would mean that there would be a postcode impact on 999 services.

Does the hon. Lady agree that we have reached a truly appalling state of affairs when these attacks threaten services that are so badly needed? Does she have any ideas about how to stop them, or what provokes them? Is it something specific—men in uniform, for example—that provokes them?

Personally, I think it has something to do with the high adrenaline and excitement associated with a blue flashing light, and the attendant drama. It may be cultural thing, with emergency services arriving at a scene, leading to a rush of adrenaline, from which some young people, unfortunately, get a thrill.

My father was a postman, but he did not often have the experiences that I understand certain people in the postal services have today. To take up the previous intervention, I think that there is something significant about uniforms as symbols of authority. A minority of people have made it impossible for the post to be delivered in certain localities. A minority of young boys see it as an opportunity to challenge symbols of authority. Clearly, although the Bill is important we also need other measures to deal with the problem of the socialisation of young men. We need to get them to accept that there are boundaries of acceptable behaviour, and that they should respect some symbols of authority.

My hon. Friend is right to say that we cannot view one Bill as a panacea for all ills. We need to look at the provision of youth services and what happens in our schools, to build a picture of the sorts of remedies that can begin to impact on this growing social ill. In my own West Ham constituency, the council has used the Olympic games and other sporting events as an effective way of galvanising interest in sport. It has spent about £1 million each year for the last three years on sporting services for young people, and as a result, 40 per cent. fewer young people appeared in the magistrates court for the first time. I hope that the House will congratulate the London borough of Newham on that particular achievement, and thank it for continuing to invest in such services.

I am grateful to my long-standing hon. Friend for giving way again. I believe that her council should also be congratulated on its fantastic campaign to regenerate the borough and on its victory in bringing the 2012 Olympics to Stratford in the borough of Newham, which I hope will be yet another measure of—

Order. We are now straying a little wide of the mark.

It is a shame that I will not be able to respond to my hon. Friend by saying how grateful I am for his congratulations. Let us get back to the Bill.

Let us remember that the obstruction of emergency workers is not just a worrying and unwarranted assault on our hard-working and widely respected emergency workers. At worst, obstruction in an emergency can threaten people’s lives. Obstruction of emergency workers is becoming more of a problem, and the Bill can help to deal with it.

I am reminded of a case in Hertford, which I read about just a few weeks ago. An angry motorist tried to move an ambulance that was blocking a road and assaulted a female medic who was treating a seriously ill patient. The incident happened on a Saturday afternoon, and it caused fury in the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire ambulance and paramedic service.

The high dependency unit was called about 4 o’clock in the afternoon to help a patient with severe breathing difficulties. The patient was at home, so there was no option but to park in the road. The crew were assisting the patient into the back of the ambulance when the car pulled up. The driver could not get past, so he got out of his car, climbed into the ambulance and let the handbrake off so that it rolled back. A woman technician came out of the back of the ambulance and found a man in the ambulance attempting to move it. Being confronted, the man walked off. She asked him what he thought he was doing, which I think is a fairly reasonable and measured response to such an incident. They exchanged words, and he slapped her round the head. Because of the delay, the patient’s condition deteriorated to such an extent that they had to call the paramedics through. I understand that the police are investigating the incident but have yet to make any arrest.

Does not that example support the view of Opposition Members that we should have kept the original wording of “aggravated assault”?

I suffer from the malady of not being a “learned” Member and find myself wishing that I had done a law degree, which would have been much more useful to me than literature—[Hon. Members: “No!”] Well, we do need people who understand books as well. I understand that the reference to assault was taken out of the Bill because there is already sufficient remedy in English law to tackle that problem.

I understand that the panel that advises on sentencing is consulting on sentencing for assaults and other violent offences, including the sort that we are talking about—the use of weapons, and when victims are serving the public, for example. I ask the Minister to pass on the concern of the House about this policy area because, on behalf of their communities, Members would like to see guidelines appropriate to the seriousness of the offences that we are dealing with.

I thank my hon. Friend. The Bill puts in statute a respect for emergency services and emergency service workers that may not hitherto have been established. I believe that it will incrementally change opinion, and the perception of those workers. It is a great pity that we need to do that, but when cases are brought to court and people are accused and tried for obstructing emergency crews, it may help to bring about a certain attitude on the part of the public, who may not have a natural respect for the authority and work of emergency services staff—

Will my hon. Friend give way?

Let me finish the sentence before I forget.

On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I apologise to the hon. Lady for interrupting. Now that Israel has killed scores of civilians in its disproportionate, dangerous and destructive response to events in the middle east and is behaving more like a rogue state, and given that it is a serial offender against United Nations resolutions, have you received any notice that a Minister intends to come to the House to make a statement on Britain’s response to the terrible unfolding tragedy and the dangerous situation in the middle east?

I understand the hon. Gentleman’s point. Clearly, the matter is very serious, but I have received no indication that the Government plan to make a statement—at least, not today.

I believe that I was about to give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney, South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier).

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way, and for her eloquent speech. Does she agree that it is possible under current sentencing provision for the judge to take into account the fact that the victim is a public servant? A mechanism already exists in law, although we all agree that further work needs to be done on sentencing guidance.

That is my understanding of the position. As I said earlier, we need to create and enforce respect for people who work in difficult circumstances to serve the public. It is a pity that the measure is necessary, but it will be an added bonus on our statute book.

In April, a 999 crew were attacked just after 10 o’clock at night in Westburn road, Aberdeen. The ambulance was responding to an emergency call with sirens and blue lights activated when an object was thrown at its windscreen. It shattered the glass and badly shook up the paramedic who was driving. That was such an irresponsible act. It could have significantly injured the people in the ambulance and prevented the paramedics from getting to the scene to which they had been called. The paramedic was clearly dedicated, and continued to the emergency that had necessitated the 999 call and dealt with it. I am informed that paramedics have also been attacked in Grampian, but that was believed to be the first occasion on which an ambulance was attacked. In response to what the hon. Member for Teignbridge (Richard Younger-Ross) said, I am trying to emphasise that there is an escalation.

The hon. Lady may not know it, but I had the great privilege of being brought up in Aberdeen, not far from Westburn road. In Scotland, legislation provides that assaults against emergency workers constitute an aggravated offence. She has drawn attention to an incident in Aberdeen that clearly requires exemplary action to be taken against the assailants. However, the same provisions do not apply south of the border. The hon. Member for Teignbridge (Richard Younger-Ross) made that point, but the hon. Lady persists in defending legislation that is, according to her own words, inadequate for the task.

Again, I am not a learned Member, but I understand that there is a difference between Scots law and English law. The provisions in Scots law were necessary to deal with a specific matter, but their incorporation into English law would create confusion. I am sure that the Minister will deal with that point later.

The hon. Lady is generous in giving way. I am not a learned Member either—my background is in architecture—but is not the problem the fact that people who hit a policeman know that that is a serious offence, but that the general public do not view hitting an ambulance worker or member of a fire crew in the same way? Surely we should try to get young people to appreciate that hurting an emergency worker is the same as hurting a police officer, and would have the same repercussions.

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention, but I can only give the same answer: I understand that incorporating provisions from Scots law into English law would create confusion rather than assist. I agree with his sentiments—people must know that when they attack our paramedics, firefighters and others who attempt to assist the public, the full force of the law will bear down on them and the crime will be perceived as serious.

Amendments in Committee were thoughtful and measured. Broadening the scope of the offence to include assaulting and impeding was sensible. I am pleased that the Government have announced that several measures will be introduced to complement the new law. Such attacks can be viewed as part of a bigger picture, and it is important to include them in the Government’s general antisocial behaviour agenda. It must be made clear to people involved in such incidents that their behaviour is unacceptable. We must underline the fact that they are threatening lives, attacking brave, hard-working and committed public servants and depriving their communities of vital public services.

From the magnitude and frequency of the incidents, it would appear that some sort of national education campaign, co-ordinated with the emergency services, is required to change people’s attitudes to such behaviour.

My hon. Friend has been most generous in giving way. Like other hon. Members, she has highlighted the seriousness of the situation and the need for this important Bill. However, does she agree that the examples that we have heard tend to under-represent the seriousness of the position? My hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge (Lynda Waltho) spoke about how busy ambulance workers are, going from one emergency call to another, and there must be assaults that are not reported. We therefore underestimate the true scale of the situation and we need the Bill, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams) is steering so carefully through Parliament.

My hon. Friend is right. There is gross under-reporting of incidents. I stress to Opposition Members who have intervened that the abuse and minor incidents go unreported, perhaps because there is no redress in law to deal with young people or other individuals who commit such acts. If there were such redress—which there soon will be, thanks to the diligence of my right hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West—there would be a point in reporting the abuse, aggravation and obstruction. The reported figures will thus increase, but that will not mean that the number of incidents has increased. It will simply mean that people now have redress and a means of dealing with obstruction and petty violence—the small incidents that do not go to court and cannot currently be tackled.

The hon. Lady has been generous in giving way and I am most grateful to her. She mentioned the need for a national education campaign. Does she agree that parents, perhaps especially fathers, play a crucial role? We must nip in the bud the sort of attitudes that we have been considering, and that must be done in people’s homes, because children first learn behaviour from their parents.

I agree. There is nothing to add to the hon. Gentleman’s eloquent intervention.

I sincerely hope that the incidents are happening through ignorance of their consequences rather than being malicious attacks on community services. The Bill will also help to underline the overwhelming public support for our emergency workers, and to reflect just how unacceptable attacks on hard-working law-abiding people are.

The Bill has avoided creating a range of different offences of assault applying to different groups of public servants. While I agree that any assault on public sector staff is abhorrent and to be condemned, tougher sentences for such assaults can be achieved through the Sentencing Guidelines Council. That would be preferable to risking muddying the waters with regard to the protection already offered by the law on assault, which is both universal and equal. The fact that the victim of an assault was serving the public is already taken into account by the courts when sentencing, and is regarded as a serious aggravating factor.

I am pleased that the Bill has seen fit to cover the full range of emergency workers who can conceivably be expected to respond to emergency situations, as my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley (Barbara Keeley) said. To restrict the legislation to emergency services that display a flashing blue light would be too prohibitive, and would, as has been stated at earlier stages, remove the protection provided by the Bill from a number of vital parts of our emergency services. I also accept the need for the provision allowing the Secretary of State to modify the legislation to allow further categories of emergency worker to be included under its protection.

The Bill has benefited from constructive debates, and constructive amendments in Committee, and will prove to be effective. It is a clear and comprehensive Bill, and fills an important gap in our legislation. I therefore commend it to the House.

It gives me great pleasure to follow a number of eloquent hon. Members in the debate. As a new Member of the House, I am learning from the Father of the House, my right hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams), whose brevity, eloquence and commitment to his Bill provide a model that I hope to pursue in my parliamentary career—which might not be as long as his, but which will, I hope, be at least as distinguished.

The hon. Member for Teignbridge (Richard Younger-Ross) raised the issue of air and mountain rescue services being included in the provisions. I am glad that the Bill offers the Secretary of State the opportunity to add categories of people to the list of emergency workers, or to delete them. I am sure that the Minister was listening to what was said about that. I want to comment later on emergency services other than those that have taken up the main part of our debate.

I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford), who is no longer in his place—

Yes, he is.

My apologies. He has moved places, just to confuse me.

My hon. Friend talked about the Government’s respect agenda. Throughout the debate, there has been an undercurrent of comments about the lack of respect that such attacks demonstrate. They illustrate a lack of respect from young people and adults towards the vital services that emergency workers provide to us all. The Government’s respect agenda and the provisions of the Bill meet up in a very helpful way in that regard.

My hon. Friends the Members for Worsley (Barbara Keeley) and for Stourbridge (Lynda Waltho) highlighted horrific examples of the problems that some emergency workers face. I want to place on record the fact that I have now been inspired to go out with emergency workers in Hackney. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge said, there is nothing like doing it if we want to learn at first hand the difficulties that emergency workers face. My hon. Friend’s indignation highlighted the points that she raised, and I congratulate her on one of the most eloquent speeches that I have heard her make in the House.

My hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore) is not in the Chamber today, but my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown) paid homage to his skills as an orator in the House on these sitting Fridays. I commend her particularly for her eloquence and statistical knowledge, and for the research that she has done on this important issue. I will not go into the issue of the Olympics in Newham, but she will realise that I mention it in passing because they will be taking place in Hackney as well.

We are here to discuss the Emergency Workers (Obstruction) Bill. It is an important Bill, because our emergency workers are the backbone of a decent and caring society. The citizens of a well-run country with a responsive and effective Government expect proper and appropriate action to be taken in an emergency or crisis. They should receive such action, and we should do all that we can to prevent anything from hindering it. That is what the Bill is all about. It underlines and reinforces the totally legitimate expectation of British citizens that emergency workers will be able to carry out their duties and serve the public without fear of obstruction.

We have focused on the police, fire and ambulance services today. I am glad, however, that the Bill also covers voluntary organisations and other agencies that work on behalf of the state. These include organisations such as St. John Ambulance, and the mountain rescue teams that provide such great service in remote parts of our islands to rescue people in difficulty. No one has yet mentioned the lifeboat crews, who voluntarily do a great deal in their free time to rescue people in difficulty at sea. Speaking as a former merchant seawoman, I feel strongly about safety at sea, and it is vital that the work of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution should be recognised in our debate today.

The offence of assaulting a police officer already exists, as hon. Members have mentioned. It carries a maximum penalty of six months in prison, as does common assault. The criminal law includes a range of powers and penalties to protect individuals from violent behaviour. Perhaps the lawyers in the House will criticise me for saying this, but I am not too concerned about the difference. My concern is the outcome. If someone is prevented from doing their job—be they a police officer, a firefighter, an ambulance worker or any of the other emergency workers that we have mentioned—the sentence must be proportionate to the crime. Sentencing guidelines allow the courts to take into account that the person involved is a public sector worker. The Bill will reinforce and underline that, by creating a separate offence.

The hon. Lady mentioned St. John Ambulance. A St. John Ambulance crew attended a carnival in Chudleigh in my constituency recently, to provide first aid services. Is she aware that, if someone tried to prevent those crew members from doing that job, it would not be an offence under the provisions of the Bill? The legislation would kick in only for an ambulance capable of carrying out blue-light duties responding to a blue-light incident.

I am indeed aware of that distinction. I am sure that the Minister will go into this in more detail in his response. It is important to implement law that it is possible to deliver, and by drawing the provisions narrowly, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West has done, it is possible to be clear about exactly when the law will kick in. Difficulties could result if the Bill had a very wide remit. However, it could represent the first step towards further changes. We often see law being introduced incrementally. As one part proves successful, other elements are added to it. The Bill contains a degree of discretion, in that the Secretary of State may add further categories of worker. It does not allow for other situations to be added, but who is to say that that could not be changed in the future?

The hon. Lady refers to making clear what the provisions cover. I am not an hon. and learned Member, and perhaps I am being a bit slow, but I would have thought that it was very clear to say that if someone obstructs a St. John Ambulance crew who are in uniform at an event, they are committing an offence. To say that it is an offence to obstruct emergency workers at certain times when they are responding to certain incidents is actually unclear.

We are becoming involved in definitions now. It is a question of whether St. John Ambulance, for instance, is attending on behalf of the public service, which will often not be the case. I may not be best qualified to comment on such questions, but the Minister may be able to clarify the position. The hon. Member for Teignbridge may not be hon. and learned, but he is certainly au fait with parts of the law with which I, as a new Member, am less familiar.

As I have said, the sentencing guidelines allow sentences for attacks on public servants to be weighted. I hope that the Sentencing Advisory Panel’s recent consultation on sentencing for violent crimes against the person will produce some sensible proposals. Perhaps the Minister could give us a tantalising glimpse of anything that may have emerged from that consultation, which was wide-ranging and to which a number of interesting contributions were made. That might reassure Members, including me, that some of the points we have raised could be dealt with in that way rather than by the Bill.

My hon. Friend the Member for Eltham spoke of young people larking around, and impeding emergency workers. As he and others have pointed out, education is an important way of tackling that kind of obstruction. I also agree with what was said by my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford, South (Mike Gapes).

I want to say something about the work of the London fire service. I am particularly impressed by what Graham Howgate, the Hackney borough commander, has done in collaboration with the Shoreditch service. They have been working with fire cadets. Young people are chosen for the scheme because they are likely to become criminals if they are not channelled in the right direction at a particular time. They may commit a crime if they are not given support, and this excellent scheme provides them with that support. It gives them a sense of purpose, and educates them about the work of the fire service. The results have been good so far, and I wonder why the scheme has not been adopted more widely. Although such matters are not in the Minister’s remit, I hope he will take up that question with Ministers in other Departments.

Since the creation of a borough command unit in Hackney, some interesting collaborative work has been done, thanks largely to Valerie Shawcross, chair of the London fire authority. Although largely unsung, her achievement has been significant.

One of the first things that Commander Howgate and his team observed was that a number of fires are started in abandoned cars. They would often have to deal with such fires, and clear up the mess. Such fires were frequently started by young people in particular spots in Hackney, but happily the problem has now been solved. Cars are removed much more quickly, because the fire service mapped the incidence of the attacks. It was realised that if the cars were removed, there would be less arson, less antisocial behaviour and fewer opportunities for young people to impede emergency workers in connection with their crimes.

Although the Bill is welcome, the low-level obstruction that Members have mentioned is also important. The Hackney firefighters repeatedly find that equipment is stolen from their fire engines when they are out on a job. They themselves may not be impeded, but bolt cutters—which are particularly popular—and other emergency equipment are often stolen as trophies. Lack of respect for public services is a crucial part of what the Bill attempts to tackle. It deals with the worst elements, but we and, in particular, the Government, have a responsibility to consider a number of possible solutions.

I was disturbed by the example given by my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham, which involved an adult. We should bear it in mind that young people do not always cause these problems, although we tend to focus on them. The hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) is smiling, because of course he wants to hug the hoodies, but not all young people are bad, whether they wear hoodies or not.

The Bill sends out an important signal about the seriousness of impeding emergency workers. Members may have heard of a project called “Prison? Me? No way!”. It is run by an educational trust set up by prison officers, which visits secondary school across the country to demonstrate the reality of prison to young people. There is a mock-up of a cell on the back of a lorry, and young people are locked into it. Prison officers drill the young people in teams, and explain to them clearly what the prison regime means. In combination with such educational initiatives, the Bill should help young people to realise gradually that if they commit the offences that we have heard about today, they could end up in prison. Organisations such as the one that I have described are there to remind them that that is a very undesirable consequence of such action.

The Bill obviously focuses on the criminal act of impeding emergency workers, but the services themselves have acted both to protect their staff and, crucially, to encourage them to report incidents. As we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Worsley, Greater Manchester is ahead of the game because of the particular problems that it has experienced. Various initiatives have been launched, including the placing of video cameras in the cabs of appliances so that offenders can be identified. I know that one of the Opposition parties has persistently resisted the installation of CCTV. I do not know whether the hon. Member for Teignbridge wants to tell us now whether he supports the move to put video cameras in cabs. It appears that he does not wish to take me up on that, but it may be a subject for another debate.

As we heard earlier, in Northern Ireland support is already given to firefighters along the lines suggested in the Bill, but the Bill will apply to ambulance workers and coastguards there. It is important to recognise that it will not apply only to England.

Although the Bill mainly concerns ambulance workers, we should bear in mind the implications for other public service workers, notably in the national health service. Early indications suggest that 71 per cent. of staff trained in the NHS to deal with potentially aggressive and violent incidents believe that they have the necessary skills to do so, compared with only 29 per cent. before the training. We must not sit back and assume that the Bill alone will solve the problem. I am sure none of my hon. Friends is doing that. We may try to initiate further debates in the House to discuss other ways of protecting emergency workers. The law is an important tool, but it is not the only one.

The NHS, supported by the British Medical Association, Unison and the Royal College of Nursing, has produced posters reminding would-be offenders of the tough penalties that they could incur. I hope that public information campaigns will stress the reality that the Bill is law, and that people may, in the most serious cases, be sent to prison.

Several of us have mentioned young people and antisocial behaviour. What is needed is proper youth work, and I am glad that the Government have provided more money for the purpose. In my borough of Hackney, nearly £1 million extra will be spent on youth work this year. We pay attention to the respect agenda, and aim to tackle antisocial behaviour at all levels, nipping it in the bud. As my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham said, it must come to be seen as absolutely unacceptable.

The decent folk whom I meet on doorsteps nearly every week want to lead peaceful lives. They do not want their emergency workers to be impeded. Low-level activity escalates quickly if it is not challenged, and we must challenge it. Sport, including competitive sport, is an important way of channelling young people’s energies in the right direction, as is education. I will cite one example from a visit to Mossbourne city academy on the edge of my constituency. I talked to children and staff at the school, and asked one child what he liked about the school. He said that he liked the discipline. I was surprised that a 12-year-old said that, as one does not tend to think of that as a top desire of a child of that age.

Young Conservative.

I would not want to comment on how the hon. Gentleman brings up his children.

I was puzzled by what the child said, so I asked him what he meant. He said that the discipline meant that he could get on and do his work, concentrate and not be messed around. He was not a top achiever but a child who wanted to learn and have a disciplined framework in school. Children stay late and come at weekends to work at that school, because they find it a quiet and calm environment. In that regard, the Government’s agenda of extended education also helps to generate respect. Children want a framework of stability, and the Bill will help to achieve that.

I want to end on one incident from my experience as a teenager. I was sailing with my older brother, who had offered to take me out off the Isle of Wight. I was not an experienced sailor, but I thought that it would be exciting, which it was until we capsized in the middle of the Solent. I was cold, shivering and scared. I give credit to my older brother, who did everything that he needed to do and whom I trusted, but I was young and scared. Who came to our rescue? It was the coastguard. Had they not been there, I do not know whether I would be here today. There were there, however, and they were not impeded. Nobody tried to stop them getting to me, and they rescued me. For that, I am ever grateful.

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West on introducing this important Bill and adding a further protection to our emergency workers in the course of their duties in protecting the public of this country.

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney, South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier). I add my voice to all those who have praised my right hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams) and congratulate him on successfully steering his Bill through all its stages. The signs are encouraging that it will also pass today’s stage.

I supported the Bill on Second Reading, and I am pleased to do so again today. On that earlier occasion, my right hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West explained his reason for adjusting the focus of his Bill. He made a good decision. In its new form, the Bill is positioned between those cases that involve no offence having been committed and those more serious cases involving assaults on emergency workers, which can attract serious sentences of imprisonment, as we heard earlier. An offence of obstructing an emergency worker in the execution of his or her duty is a valuable addition, as, for a long time, there has been such an offence to protect police officers from being obstructed in the execution of their duties.

Some people might therefore think that the Bill is quite narrow, but I hope to show that its application is broad. People might be pleasantly surprised at what a valuable tool the Bill will be to emergency services in adopting policies of zero tolerance to such behaviour, and to the prosecuting authorities—the police and the Crown Prosecution Service—in enforcing the law. The Bill extends the same protection from obstruction enjoyed by the police to the other blue light services, but applies more widely than to the blue light services alone. I am pleased that my right hon. Friend has secured a provision in the Bill for the protection to be extended later to other emergency workers. I congratulate him on ensuring that the Bill protects emergency workers from obstruction at every stage of their response to an emergency, which is important.

Some Members have asked about the Bill’s application to mountain rescue workers, and I think that I agree with the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) that they do not attract protection under the Bill as drafted. Like him, I examined the provision about air ambulance services, which are provided at the request of a national health service body. That would not extend to mountain rescue services, such as those launched from RAF Stafford in my constituency, which rescue people lost on mountains in Wales. Clause 1(2)(f)(ii) extends protection to

“any other person or organisation operating a vessel for the purpose of providing a rescue service”.

I am pretty sure that that the definition of “vessel” would restrict the protection to ships on the sea, and would not include vessels that carry people through the air. If I am wrong, of course, the provision would be wide enough to protect those engaged in mountain rescue services. If not, although, as my right hon. Friend said in his speech, it is too late now to amend the Bill further, I urge the Minister to consider making use of the power in clause 5 to extend the protection to other groups, to make sure that the crew of aircraft who are engaged in saving and rescuing people are also protected.

I am pleased that protection is extended to fire and rescue service workers. In Staffordshire, horrendous news reports appear from time to time about obstruction and assaults on fire and rescue workers. Happily, such occurrences are few and far between. I hasten to add that the Bill is not intended to deal with hoax calls, which are a much more prevalent nuisance to fire and rescue service workers. In relation to fire and rescue service work, a specific offence already exists for hoax calls, which prevent people from doing their job and saving lives when necessary.

Fire and rescue service workers are usually enormously popular, which is why those who obstruct and assault them are such a small minority. At the time of the last national pay strike, however, there was a little ill feeling in some areas of Staffordshire towards fire and rescue service workers. Unchecked, that could have become the kind of behaviour about which we have heard today. Even before that strike began, however, Staffordshire fire and rescue service had embarked on a community fire safety strategy, which, once the strike was out of the way, applied fully. That involved a widespread campaign to issue householders with smoke alarms and, as other Members have described, of fire and rescue service officers meeting young people and families in schools and more informal settings such as school and garden fetes, to explain their work. That has ensured that fire crews get much earlier notice of a fire, so that they can respond to it more quickly, and that there is less chance of people wanting to obstruct them, as they understand the importance of the job.

The happy ending to the story in Staffordshire is that, as a result of that community fire safety strategy, the number of deaths in fires has dropped dramatically. That fall has been long-lasting, which is a tribute to the workers who have committed themselves to go into communities, meet people and persuade them to protect their property and lives with smoke alarms and to understand the importance of fire workers and not getting in their way.

Having mentioned the national pay strike, I hope that it will be a long time before we see green goddesses back on our streets. The Bill, however, has the foresight to extend to members of the armed forces who carry out the duties of firefighters the same protection from obstruction as fire and rescue service workers. That is important, albeit that none of us wishes to see the provision apply, as we would prefer the Army, Navy and Royal Air Force to continue their normal duties and not have to protect us from fire as well.

I am pleased that the Bill protects crew members of the third of the emergency services—the ambulance service. Hon. Members might know that Staffordshire has the best-performing ambulance service in the country. That is no mere puff or boast; anyone who studies the statistics will see that, year after year, Staffordshire ambulance service massively outperforms any other in the country in its response times and the number of lives saved as a result. There is a secret to our success. Our ambulance service has tried desperately for many years to explain it to other services and to persuade them to adopt the same standards, but sadly too few have followed so far, although I know that it has been on the Government’s agenda since their policy statement last year to persuade other services to go the same way.

As a footnote I should add, if you will permit me, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that during the recent large ambulance service mergers we successfully argued that Staffordshire ambulance service should stay out of a west midlands service precisely because our standards are so much higher than others. There was concern that the standards of a very good ambulance service might in the course of a merger fall, by however small a degree, and that that would harm the public of Staffordshire.

I mention that because, although we have the best-performing service in the country and all residents of Staffordshire know that, we still face the problem of a minority of people obstructing, assaulting and threatening ambulance service crews as they go about their duties. There was a horrendous report last year of an ambulance crew member being badly assaulted and seriously injured.

It might be a coincidence, but Staffordshire ambulance service recently issued—on 6 July—its own press release saying that it has

“a robust policy of zero tolerance toward any alleged verbal or violent behaviour”

aimed at its crews. The release says:

“This Ambulance Trust appeal to the Community to help change the apparent attitudes developing in society that seems to say it’s ok to behave in such a way.”

I would add that, if such societal attitudes develop and embed in behaviour, just as the violence and abuse referred to in the release would worsen, so would obstruction of ambulance crews, which would be highly undesirable.

As I mentioned in an intervention, the Bill is important in the education process for which many hon. Members have called as part of the response to the problem. It is important that we send the message that we think that this is such an important issue that we are creating a specific offence of obstructing emergency workers. We do not wish to send mixed messages—that the matter is important but we are not doing anything to face up to it.

My right hon. Friend gave an assurance that the Bill extends more widely than to employees of ambulance services. There has been some debate about whether that means voluntary workers such as St. John Ambulance, but I want to mention another group of people who are extremely significant in Staffordshire and other rural ambulance services: community first-responders. There is a strong association of community first-responders around the country. They are remarkable people who voluntarily undergo training by paid ambulance service workers and stand ready in their isolated localities and communities to receive calls to attend the scenes of serious incidents. Very often, because they are in isolated locations, they are first on the scene, before the ambulance crew arrives in response to the 999 call. I stress that they are volunteers who attend in their own time and who have the skills to deal with however horrific a situation they find when they reach their destination, where they help of their free will keeping people safe and alive until the professional crew arrives.

I also welcome the fact that the Bill extends to the air ambulance service. I tried to think in what ways people in helicopters might be obstructed in carrying out their duties and saving lives. The most obvious situation is somebody obstructing the landing of a helicopter that is picking up someone who is seriously injured in order to take them to hospital. Therefore, there is a point to that provision.

I shall not take up time dealing with the other groups of people who attract the Bill’s protection, but I should like to mention the case of staff who are transporting organs from one hospital to another in order to save a live in a transplant operation or delivering much needed blood that is required for a serious operation. They are clearly carrying out highly time-sensitive work, and obstructing them in the course of their duties could have serious consequences. It is right that they attract the protection of the Bill.

My hon. Friend the Member for Hackney, South and Shoreditch mentioned protection for those who are willing to put out to sea to save lives. There is no coast in my constituency; we are a long way from the coast in every direction, but as my hon. Friend pointed out, people travel to the seaside and might get into danger. Conceivably, that could be any resident of my constituency. It is therefore pleasing to know that the protection of the law extends to people doing such important work.

I said that clause 1(3) is sensibly wide, covering all the emergency operation: the journey to the scene of the incident, the preparatory work at the scene and the time spent giving help at the scene. The entire process is covered by the Bill and protects those doing such work.

Subsection (4) contains a comprehensive definition of emergency circumstances. I am particularly pleased that it extends to cases involving mental illness, which are so easily overlooked. It is interesting to note the protection offered concerning serious harm to the environment. I think instantly of the great expanse of beauty in my constituency in Cannock Chase, where there are numerous sites of special scientific interest and an area of outstanding natural beauty, which during the summer months are at serious risk of an outbreak of fire. Somebody obstructing the fire services on their way to tackling a fire in an open space such as Cannock Chase could be endangering hundreds of square miles of sensitive landscape, and I see the point in the provision.

The same point applies to buildings and premises. If the response is delayed, the extent of damage can be great. Perhaps most obviously, life and death situations are also covered, in subsection (4)(b).

I said that the Bill is surprisingly broad, and clause 2 is certainly a good example of that. Whereas the primary protection is for an emergency worker who is usually an employee of a fire or ambulance service, clause 2 extends to a person assisting such a worker. As I think I heard my right hon. Friend say, such a person could be a good Samaritan among the public who steps forward to help emergency workers at the scene. If that person, anxious and willing to assist, is obstructed on their way to give that assistance, it would be an offence. That is the impressive extent of the coverage that the Bill offers.

Action that amounts to obstruction is also widely defined in clause 3(1). It can consist of action other than physical obstruction, and when trying to think of examples of that, I recalled the incident last summer when someone killed a number of people at a garden barbecue and the police, fire service and ambulance service all stayed away for several hours because they believed that there was a person at the scene who was armed and would be a danger to the emergency workers who attended. I realised that a way in which workers could be obstructed by other than physical means was by someone maliciously and falsely claiming that there was something at the scene that would make it dangerous for them to attend—an armed person or explosive device, for example—thus keeping them away from the scene.

The Bill is impressive. It is widely drawn to cover the objectives. Critics of the Bill who complain that it does not deal with aggravated assault have the wrong target, because it is filling a space, albeit not that one, and by so doing it will provide valuable assistance to our emergency workers who, after all, face enough danger in their jobs. They act out of public spiritedness, first and foremost, because they want to serve the public, to save lives and to prevent suffering and damage. Their jobs are hard enough without a very small minority of irresponsible people getting in their way and preventing them from doing their job, thus putting other people in more serious danger and putting property at greater risk of damage than would otherwise have been the case. The Bill is welcome and I sincerely congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West on his success in bringing it to this point.

Like other hon. Members, I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams) for introducing the Bill because I, too, have done night shifts and day shifts with police, ambulance and fire services and with accident and emergency services at the hospital in my constituency. I greatly admire people who spend their time in public service and now that I have worked those shifts with the emergency services my admiration for what they do knows no bounds. They go out and work in a difficult environment trying to resolve some substantial problems, and they do so in a way that is kind and friendly and helps people who are in severe distress. Like other hon. Members, I think that it is outrageous that, when doing that, they face the threat of attack and aggression.

I have received a communication from Cheshire fire service—an admirable fire service—telling me that there were 25 reported incidents in 2005. On 21 occasions, stones, bricks, bottles, iron bars or golf balls were thrown at crew attending incidents. On several of those occasions, the vehicle but not the crew was hit, and on four occasions the appliance was forced to withdraw to ensure the safety of crew and prevent the situation from worsening. Some of the incidents were severe: for example, a firefighter attending a rubbish fire was attacked by two youths who smashed his visor on his helmet, cutting his eye. Other incidents have involved water bombs being thrown that forced the appliance to swerve when it was trying to get to a fire to tackle it. A fire service mechanic was travelling in his marked vehicle when two youths pulled out what appeared to be a firearm and aimed it at the vehicle. A crew member on an appliance that was attending a rubbish fire was hit by a 2-ft iron bar. So far in 2006, stones, bricks, bottles and other debris have been thrown at crews attending incidents on eight occasions, causing crew to consider whether they could get through to deal with the fire. Firefighters attending a fire in June were threatened with knives by a gang of youths and the crew was forced to withdraw from the scene.

All those incidents are taken extremely seriously by Cheshire fire and rescue service, which is working to increase the safety of its personnel. The service has installed closed-circuit television cameras on appliances in a number of the areas it covers, and it intends to introduce them across its whole area as soon as it can. In addition, appliances have high-visibility stickers stating that they are equipped with CCTV recording equipment. The service is determined not only to deter such incidents, but to make it clear to people that offenders who can be identified will be prosecuted.

Not only does our fire service deal with emergency fires, but it tries to prevent them. We have an extremely effective initiative whereby a home safety assessment is completed every 15 minutes, every day, seven days a week. I particularly admire our fire service personnel for the way in which they constantly seek ways to introduce safety into our local community. As well as going out, risking their own lives and safety in dangerous incidents, they are looking for ways to make our community a better place to live by helping people to make their homes safe and dealing with slip and trip hazards for older people.

The fire service is also involving local young people in such work. At a surgery in a community building that had had problems with fires being lit, I saw fire crews talking to quite young children and explaining to them what a fire does, how dangerous it can be, and their role in helping to make their local community safer. The children were getting very involved—actually, they had a great time. Adults were treating them with respect and the children were learning directly from important role models what respect means in a local community. I was pleased because the community in question has a number of disadvantages and having adults of that type—admirable role models—coming in is not just about dealing with current problems, but about giving young people an opportunity to see what they can do in future.

The experience that my hon. Friend describes is seen in my constituency, too. The community in the old mining village of Chopwell was being destroyed by drugs and lack of investment. The retained service there has a young firefighters club where young people go to work with the fire brigade. They learn how to respect their homes and each other. The service also holds open days and public days, so it is a real community initiative.

I thank my hon. Friend for highlighting that work. In my community, too, groups of young people are brought along to fire service stations where they can use the equipment, learn about what is happening, and get a sound idea of the future prospects, not only for their community, but for themselves through going into public service. The fire service is an integral and key part of our community, which is why the Bill is so important. The Bill shows that we, too, believe that our emergency services are key, integral, valued and respected parts of our community that we not only respect, but are prepared to defend.

We are talking about one of the things that particularly disconcerts me about the position for fire service personnel, ambulance personnel and people in accident and emergency services at hospitals. I hope that we will be able to look at that to see whether the ability to modify might need to take into account the needs of accident and emergency workers, particularly people who work shifts on a Friday or Saturday night and have to deal with the alcohol-fuelled antisocial behaviour that can kick off in hospitals sometimes.

It is particularly important that we protect people who work in stressful jobs and who should be able to know that they can call on other people when they need help. I am concerned that paramedics who have suffered assaults and attacks on their vehicles when they are working in an extremely stressful environment feel that they cannot continue to work in the front line. It is shocking that they believe that they are not sufficiently protected to be able to continue to do their valuable job, because we all want them to.

I want to draw attention to Merseyside and Cheshire ambulance services, because the work that is being carried out locally to tackle assaults on crews is drawing together in the most effective way management and trade unions to get across the message not just that we will not tolerate attacks on ambulance crews, but that if someone prevents an emergency service from getting out and doing its job, it could be that person or a member of their family who faces the effect. It is admirable that the management and Unison are working together to get that message across in a poster and public relations campaign. The figures indicate that ambulance crews reported 86 separate incidents involving an assault on them during 2005 in Merseyside and Cheshire. That is completely unacceptable. The Bill sends a clear message that we will not tolerate that sort of thing and I would like to add not just my support and that of the ambulance and fire services in my local area, but that of all my constituents, who want to see our emergency services given the protection and support that they need and deserve.

I congratulate the Father of the House on his success in allowing the Bill to proceed so smoothly and quickly through the House. I repeat the words that were offered on Second Reading and in Committee by my hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert): the Conservatives wish the Bill to proceed as quickly and smoothly as possible to the statute book. I offer my apologies to the House on behalf of my hon. Friend. He cannot be with us today because he is in his constituency seeking to protect the jobs of emergency workers in the NHS and other health workers who are threatened by incipient cuts to the health service in Sussex, and indeed Surrey.

We wish the Bill to proceed because we recognise that it performs three valuable functions and in that respect we are more than happy to give it our full support. First, it plugs a legislative gap. We are aware that, at the moment, legislative protection is afforded to the police as they go about their duties. Everyone knows that if they assault a police officer, it is an aggravated offence for which they will face a tougher sentence. As a result of the Bill being passed, a signal will be sent that to obstruct an emergency worker, whether it is an NHS worker, a fireman or someone who is working for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution or the coastguard, will also mean facing a particularly severe punishment. In that respect, we wholeheartedly support the legislation.

As well as plugging a gap, the Bill sends a message. We do not always support legislation that sends a message, because sometimes we believe that legislation should not be used so lightly, simply to communicate censoriousness on the part of the House. However, by sending a message, the Bill can have a welcome deterrent effect. We have heard from a number of hon. Members this morning about the increase in the number of incidents of attacks on, in particular, ambulance workers. There is a clear need for legislative action to ensure that those tempted to go down that path understand that the House and the Government wish to prevent them from behaving in that way.

The third reason why we want the Bill passed is because we believe that those who obstruct the work of emergency workers are guilty of a double crime: not only are they interfering criminally with the work of public servants, they are endangering the lives of others. As well as interfering in the effective provision of a public service, they are maximising the risk to others, whom those public servants are attempting to assist. In that respect, because those who commit such crimes are guilty of a double assault, we welcome the Bill.

As my hon. Friend said earlier, we wish to enter one note of regret. The original legislation that the right hon. Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams) introduced was based on the Bill that was introduced in the Scottish Parliament. For the sake of ease of legislative drafting, he attempted to introduce a Bill that was, in many respects, almost identical to the Scottish legislation. As someone who was born in Edinburgh and raised in Aberdeen, I am well aware that Scottish and English law are distinct from one another, and it may not be the case that Bills introduced in Scotland can have identical application in England. However, in order to introduce his Bill, the right hon. Gentleman had to negotiate with the Home Office, as he did in a spirit of good faith, and it insisted on dropping the aspect of the Bill that dealt specifically with assault. That is a matter of regret because, as has been spelled out by almost all hon. Members who have spoken, the incidence of direct physical assaults on emergency workers has increased in recent years, and legislation to deal with that would be welcome.

Indeed, the Government recognised that in their manifesto, which says:

“we will introduce tougher sentences for carrying replica guns, for those involved in serious knife crimes and for those convicted of assaulting workers serving the public.”

They have accepted legislative changes to deal with those carrying replica guns and with serious knife crimes, but when it comes to protecting workers who serve the public, they do not want legislation and say instead that the Sentencing Guidelines Council will do our work for us. We all remember that in recent weeks some of the decisions taken in court by judges acting in accordance with the Sentencing Guidelines Council have earned the criticism of Home Office Ministers. How can it be that judges who are operating according to the Sentencing Guidelines Council were excoriated by the Home Secretary two weeks ago but are now, according to what Home Office Ministers have said, to be the agents of the protection that we all feel that is required?

The onus is on the Minister to explain precisely how the Sentencing Guidelines Council will give effect to the feeling of the House to ensure that emergency workers get the protection they deserve. He must also explain why legislative action is not specifically required in this case. What is it about emergency workers that means that they do not deserve the same legislative protection that he has extended to other categories of potential victims in the range of legislation that he is introducing?

I look forward to hearing from the Minister as he provides enlightenment on this and many other topics. It remains only for me to say that we congratulate the Father of the House on introducing this much needed legislation. Our only regret is that his original intent was blunted by the Home Office.

I congratulate the Father of the House on securing the Bill and on facilitating its smooth passage.

As a member of the 1997 intake and a London MP, let me start in the same place as my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) did. At that time, we sat for perhaps half the Fridays available instead of 13. That was an interesting way to get more and more practice in this place. None of us can ever get enough of that. We had all-day Adjournment debates as well as debates on private Members’ Bills. I remember with great fondness duelling constantly, but mostly failing in the attempt, with my right hon. Friend—I hope that he would not have minded me calling him that—the former Member for Bromley and Chislehurst. As this is the first time that I have participated on a Friday since his sad demise, I want to put on record how much I learned from him. He was much maligned, misunderstood and excoriated—not least by Labour Members who did not know any better—but he will be sadly missed, not least by the 1997 intake of Friday boys, some of whom have been mentioned in dispatches today and some not.

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams) on securing cross-party support for the Bill. I also congratulate him on selecting, from among the plethora of choice of legal advice in this House, my hon. Friends the Members for Hendon (Mr. Dismore) and for Islington, South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) rather than certain other learned colleagues. I can furnish him with a list of those on both sides of the House from whom he should never seek legal advice.

It is important—this has underscored many of today’s speeches—to say what precisely the Bill is supposed to do. It is not an attempt to reinvent assault legislation. It is not an attempt to establish a legislative framework for other things such as education awareness, antisocial behaviour, respect and all the other relevant considerations that hon. Members have mentioned. The Bill does not seek to achieve all that. Nor does it seek to afford aggravated status to the offence of obstructing emergency workers—a point to which I shall return.

As the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove) suggests, the Bill seeks to fill a serious gap. Many of the concerns that he and my hon. Friends expressed would be more relevant if we wanted the Bill to be an overall comprehensive measure like the Scottish Act, but the Bill does not profess to be such a measure. There is no need for that, not least because, as the hon. Member for Surrey Heath well knows, the Scottish Act sought to fill considerably more gaps in the Scottish legislative framework, and those gaps simply are not there in English legislation.

I had to check my notes on this point, but I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Swansea, West, for saying that a Bill that the Home Office had anything to do with was short and clear. That has not entirely been my experience, either as a Back Bencher or as a Minister, particularly in the Home Office, so I am grateful for those comments. The Bill is short and clear—rightly so, because these are extraordinarily serious matters, and filling the gap is hugely important.

I must confess that although hon. Friends and colleagues have tried to explain such behaviour, I do not entirely understand why people think it a clever, smart or positive use of spare time to throw rocks at ambulances, or why they regard people in uniform who seek to help the public, and who invariably save lives, as invading their turf, or think that they are just “uniforms”, like the police. Some colleagues were even more generous, saying that the blue lights sparked off adrenaline, everyone became terribly excited, and testosterone levels went through the roof, but none of those are excuses for impeding, obstructing or doing something worse to prevent our emergency workers from going about their business. That simply is not right in any way, shape or form. Whether it is just a kick-out at authority, or whatever the excuse is, those concerned must desist, and we must introduce legislation that addresses the issues—and the Bill is a necessary part of that.

I know—all the more because, happily, there is a cross-party approach to the Bill—that the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) would tell us that the perpetrators simply need a bit more love and affection. He would say that they are much misunderstood, and if only we understood them more, everything would be so different, and that we should hug them or whatever—but I do not agree with that approach, either. However, to take one step back, I agree with the opening sentence of the contribution by my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown)—her point was repeated by the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous)—that we have to go a long way back along the chain and consider issues such as parenting, family breakdown and other factors that are the antecedents of antisocial behaviour, to try to address such matters. That is part of the Government’s comprehensive approach.

Many of my hon. Friends mentioned the respect agenda and what we are trying to do to tackle antisocial behaviour. That very much fits in with trying to take preventive measures, but we have heard some horrendous stories this morning about the ways in which people seek to impede and obstruct emergency workers. Some of the points that colleagues have made are entirely fair and were dealt with in Committee. Some have been answered, but some perhaps will need to be revisited. It was right and proper to try to define an emergency worker as narrowly as possible, but also to include the escape clause so that we can consider adding to the categories, if experience dictates that the list is not adequate. I understand what was said by many colleagues about social workers and people who, in the course of their routine day-to-day work, may not necessarily be construed as emergency workers, but who are often put in positions in which they solve or help to solve an emergency. Those people deserve to be covered by the Bill so that they are not obstructed while carrying out their work. Those matters can and should be considered.

As I said, the Bill was not intended to reinvent assault legislation in the context of public workers. We are doing that in many other ways. It has been pointed out that unlike Scotland, we have the Sentencing Guidelines Council. It already almost imposes a tariff for impeding people in the execution of public service, and we are considering in detail, with the council, other ways in which sentences can reflect the spirit and sentiment of the Bill. It is appropriate that many colleagues have put the wider issues of assault of public sector workers generally, and emergency workers specifically, in the context of the Bill, but the Bill does not try to do everything. Its narrow focus is appropriate.

It probably was inappropriate that the original Bill almost exactly reflected the Scottish provision, given that we do not start from the same legislative base. I shall say very carefully—and I shall not, as I was invited to, tease the House about what the Sentencing Guidelines Council may or may not say—that that is a matter that the Government should keep under review. Having set up the Sentencing Guidelines Council, we should let it do its work. If that achieves what we want with respect to the legislative base, that is more appropriately done in that way, although I reserve our right to return to the matter.

The Minister used the words “may” and “if” with reference to the Sentencing Guidelines Council. Will he give a commitment that if there is not an increase in sentences over time, the Home Office will review the matter and consider whether assaults on emergency workers should be deemed to be aggravated?

That sounded terribly like one of those elephant traps that Liberal Democrats are always trying to get Ministers to fall into by giving cast-iron assurances. None the less, unusually, that is a fair paraphrase of what I said, and I will take it back to the Home Office. I think that means yes, in a convoluted way.

The Minister used the conditional “may” or “might”, yet the manifesto on which he fought the last general election—and, I concede, won it—says:

“we will introduce tougher sentences . . . for those convicted of assaulting workers serving the public.”

We have already had retreats by the Home Office this week on ID cards and on police mergers. Is this the third retreat this week?

I thank the hon. Gentleman, whom I respect very much, for conceding the last election. That is terribly generous. He is being tedious. We already have people looking at how we can carry out that manifesto commitment. It is not a matter of whether we will do that—we will; it is a matter of how. We have established the Sentencing Guidelines Council, so it is appropriate in the first instance that it does the job with which it is charged. Then, as I tried to say to the hon. Member for Teignbridge (Richard Younger-Ross)—in a convoluted way, I fully accept—we will examine the matter further if the Sentencing Guidelines Council route is not the appropriate one.

With the Sentencing Guidelines Council, there is already an implied tariff in place for those who obstruct public service workers. We need to build on that. We are considering, as the hon. Member for Teignbridge rightly suggests, other aspects such as sentencing for firearms and knife offences, and the wider context of assaults on public sector workers, rather than the narrow confines of obstruction of emergency workers. That commitment remains absolute.

When the hon. Member for Surrey Heath speaks of retreats of this sort or that sort, both of which are fiction, he is introducing an unnecessary and poisonous veneer of partisanship into our deliberations, which he should be ashamed of. I agree with his starting point. We need to fill the gap and add a deterrent or exhortatory value to the law. I agree with his point about the double impact of interference in the discharge of emergency workers’ duty and the potential damage done by that obstruction—for example, when the pipes used by firemen are cut.

I absolutely commend what the Father of the House has done with regard to the Bill. To hon. Members who have criticised the extent of the Bill, I say that it elegantly fills a gap that needs filling. Hon. Members on both sides of the House have discussed the wider issues, and we will examine those points and report back to the House. The House is about to give the Bill a fair wind, and I hope that it receives a fair wind in the other place too, in which case the Father of the House will be able to add it to his many other significant contributions in his long and enduring time in this place.

With the leave of the House, I shall reply to the debate. It has gone on longer than I anticipated, and there is another important debate to come. I therefore hope that hon. Members will excuse me if I do not go through all the excellent speeches that have been made. All the speeches have been positive, and there has been unanimity on both sides of the House in our support not for the Bill, but for the work done by emergency workers, which should be satisfying for those workers.

I want to make two points about the debate. First, it has emerged that hon. Members are deeply afraid that with increasing attacks on emergency workers, as well as interference in their work, we may end up with no-go areas in parts of some towns. Secondly, hon. Members are deeply conscious that sanctions alone are not enough, and that education, training and understanding must form part of the programme.

It would be invidious to pick out one speech, but I shall pick out one comment, which I commend to the House as the quote of the day: my hon. Friend the Member for Blaydon (Mr. Anderson) intervened to suggest, “Hug a firefighter”. I am not sure whether that would create a sense of neglect among the other services—but I do worry that our poor firemen will be afraid to go out in daylight.

I thank everyone for their support.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read the Third time, and passed.

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

It is a great privilege to open this Second Reading debate on behalf of my right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (Mr. Maude), in whose name the Bill stands. Sadly, he cannot be in the House today, because of commitments to fight for the interests of his constituents in Sussex, but that should not take away from the importance of the issue or lead anybody to conclude that the Bill is not widely supported by hon. Members, and, in particular, by those in the south-east and other parts of country that face excessive housing development.

The purpose of the Bill could not be clearer. The south-east faces unprecedented and unwanted pressure for new houses. The infrastructure is already creaking, and there is grave concern about the implications if many new houses are built before the infrastructure is improved to accommodate them. That is one of a number of issues that concern hon. Members. In particular, I draw attention to the Bill that my hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark) will introduce to change the designation of gardens from brownfield sites, which is currently causing extreme problems in many parts of the country and particularly in the south-east.

The Bill requires a full audit of existing or planned infrastructure in areas in which significant housing development is planned. It has been introduced because there is growing concern that the Government plan for massive house building in the south-east will lead to a substantial deficit in the region’s infrastructure. Local authorities in the south-east earmarked by Government for significant amounts of new house building estimate their individual infrastructure deficits to be about £1 billion each. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Sussex (Mr. Soames) will be familiar with that figure, as it was calculated by his district council. The cost of providing adequate infrastructure for the Government’s house building targets for the south-east has been more formally estimated at £45 billion at least.

In March 2006, the South East England regional assembly submitted the south-east plan to Government, recommending an additional 28,900 new dwellings a year as sustainable housing growth for the south-east. For many of us, that figure was already much higher than we believed the region could sustain. However, as the consultation period on the south-east plan closed, the Government published a report examining the impact of building up to 60 per cent. more houses than was suggested in the already controversial SEERA plans. Typically of the Government, the report was published on the Government office for the south-east website without adequate attention being drawn to its presence there.

There is therefore a real concern that the Government are determined to impose even higher levels of house building in the south-east than SEERA had itself suggested, which, as I have said, many of us felt was already too high, especially given that recent legislative changes mean that the Secretary of State now has a veto over all stages of the planning process, from regional strategy to local plans, even after examination in public. That brings even greater focus to our concerns in these matters.

Government spending on our infrastructure is already woefully inadequate. The community infrastructure fund is a mere £295 million for London and the wider south-east. Compare that figure with the figure I gave earlier of a £45 billion infrastructure deficit across the south-east in general. If that is not bad enough, there is also the worry that the current system of section 106 agreements will soon be replaced by the Government’s new system of planning gain supplement. This new system will siphon off the majority of development gains into a central fund for strategic infrastructure. That is new Labour-speak for the Treasury, and yet another example of funds being taken away from the south-east to be distributed to other parts of the country.

Last year, the south-east county councils commissioned ICM to carry out the largest-ever survey of public opinion on the south-east plan. The headline result is stark indeed. The survey revealed that 60 per cent. of people in the south-east are not confident that the supply of infrastructure in the region will keep pace with new house building. The percentages of people saying which types of infrastructure should be given priority come as no surprise: 48 per cent. said that NHS hospitals should be given priority; 48 per cent. also said that priority should be given to public transport; 31 per cent. said that it should be given to major road projects.

The Bill would force a serious rethink about where the infrastructure is weakest and it would require a full audit of existing or planned infrastructure in areas where significant housing development is being proposed.

Is the hon. Gentleman genuinely suggesting that the Government in perhaps the Lee valley or the Thames Gateway are not doing what is necessary by laying down the foundations of good community projects and infrastructure, including housing, parks and libraries, to create the new communities that are desperately needed in my area of London?

Of course there will be some parts of the country that the hon. Lady may be more familiar with than I am where the Government are investing in that infrastructure. I am saying that, more generally across the south-east, that infrastructure is already lacking and that unless steps are taken now to address the problem, with hundreds of thousands of houses being proposed, the situation will become catastrophically worse.

The hon. Gentleman is being extremely generous in giving way.

I am trying to understand the nub of the Bill; I am struggling somewhat with that. As I see it, there are not many new proposals in the Bill that are not already part of what has come through via the ODPM Select Committee, which sets out things that the Government are doing. Is the nub of the issue the number of homes that are being built? Does the hon. Gentleman wish to say to people who are on my public sector housing list, and who have been for about 18 to 20 years, that they can sit and wait because we are not prepared to build any more houses?

If the hon. Lady is having trouble understanding the Bill, I have two proposals. First, she could read it—to do so might be helpful to her. Secondly, she might listen to the debate before she starts intervening, because I shall now come on to exactly the matter that she raised.

We realise that the Bill would not prevent what we consider to be the Deputy Prime Minister’s disastrous legacy of housing development in the south-east, but it would make it much more difficult for the Government to impose those new houses without proper provision being made for the infrastructure necessary to support them. It would lay bare for public scrutiny the deficiencies in Government thinking and planning.

It might be helpful if I gave an example from Braintree, which until recently was one of the fastest growing towns in Britain. Two of our community hospitals have been closed down, and the land has been sold off but a new community hospital has still yet to be built. That has caused enormous frustration in a town that is growing very fast. In addition, we have had electricity blow-outs in many of our new housing areas because the proper infrastructure was not put in place for there to be sufficient electricity supplies to the new houses.

My hon. Friend, with his usual intuition, has predicted my next point. Any south-east Member could tell a similar story because all of us face the same sort of problem: enormous pressure for house building without the necessary infrastructure in place. Indeed, many aspects of that infrastructure are getting worse.

I wish to make a point in response to what the hon. Member for Braintree (Mr. Newmark) said about community hospitals. I hope that the hon. Member for Wealden (Charles Hendry) agrees that we are moving away from having smaller unit hospitals because the advice of health professionals these days is that we want hospitals that can cover all the needs that people have and that have all the diagnostic equipment that people need. A plethora of new community hospitals is not the answer to the situation we face.

Crowborough and Uckfield in my constituency have two incredibly popular and well supported community hospitals, and the hon. Lady would be very brave if she were to come and say that they should be closed down. If that is truly a statement of the Government’s intentions, it is very worrying indeed, and it would cause profound concern.

rose—

I want to move on to some specific points on the health service, but if the hon. Lady wishes to intervene later, I will of course give way again.

The Bill would require an audit in specific areas. In terms of health care, to accommodate additional housing growth it has been calculated that almost 1,300 additional acute beds and more than 600 general beds will be required over the next 20 years in the south-east alone. To pick up on the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Braintree (Mr. Newmark), in Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and Essex there will be a requirement for an additional 500 acute beds and almost 300 general beds over the next 15 years. In total, that equates to six medium-sized new hospitals being required in the greater south-east over the next 15 to 20 years. But far from increasing investment in health care, the current structure is under intolerable stress. The massive debt accumulated due to the chronic underfunding in Surrey and Sussex strategic health authority is leading to service reconfigurations across Surrey and Sussex, and those moves go against the public feeling that more, not fewer, services are required.

My hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Sussex has been a fantastic champion for saving the health facilities at the Princess Royal hospital, Haywards Heath and the Queen Victoria hospital, East Grinstead. Without his perseverance, determination and commitment, the situation would undoubtedly be even worse than it is. Further south, my hon. Friend the Member for Eastbourne (Mr. Waterson) is leading the campaign to preserve the maternity, paediatric and specialist baby services at Eastbourne district general hospital. There are even worse proposals for downgrading the accident and emergency facilities, with at least part of them being moved to Hastings, which is causing profound concern among local communities, Members of Parliament and the ambulance service.

The hon. Gentleman talks about chronic underfunding. Although I do not wish in any way to question the difficulties that the health service in his local area seems to face, will he at least admit that there has been a massive increase in NHS funding over the past seven or eight years, including in his area, compared with the level of funding under the Conservative Government?

No one can deny that there has been a very significant increase in the funding of the health service, but that is not resulting in better quality health care on the ground. What we have also found is that there is pressure each and every year on—

Order. The hon. Member is straying a little wide of the Bill into a debate on health care.

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and I will endeavour to ensure that I am not tempted by further interventions away from the Bill’s Second Reading.

Secondly, there is the issue of water resources. The south-east is one of the driest regions in Britain and has high rates of per capita consumption of water compared with other English regions. Inevitably, demand for water resources will increase as a result of population growth, a decreasing average household size and growing use of water-intensive appliances. The current water restrictions in the south-east resulting from exceptionally dry weather have brought a requirement for new house building into sharper focus. I find it inconceivable, with about 10 million people in London and the south-east facing a hosepipe ban and the continuing possibility of standpipes this summer, that the Government have not reduced their house-building plans for the area. Those houses will all be built before a single new reservoir can be built.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

I have already been generous in giving way, so perhaps the hon. Lady will make her own speech in due course.

The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee report on water management recently considered water infrastructure in relation to the Government’s house-building targets. Many of its findings are particularly damaging. It says that

“the ODPM failed sufficiently to consult the water industry directly—or to give due consideration to the water management implications—when formulating the Sustainable Communities Plan and selecting the growth areas.”

The report also said:

“It is worrying that the housing growth plans have not in many cases been factored into the water companies’ long-term plans due to the way in which Government have initiated the planning.”

Thirdly, the Lords report recommends the provisions in the Bill, urging that

“the Government consider making water companies statutory consultees on applications for developments comprising a number of properties that exceeds a given threshold. It would also be desirable to make the Environment Agency a statutory consultee on water supply issues in these circumstances.”

The irony is that the Government will allow water companies to raise prices to meet the enormous cost of providing new water infrastructure—a double blow for residents in the south-east, where people are effectively being asked to fund the infrastructure for houses that they do not even want. Even the Government’s preferred think-tank believes that current policy has been conceptually flawed. The Institute for Public Policy Research commission on sustainable development in the south-east noted in its final report:

“Only with significant water efficiency savings in existing and new homes, and the timely provision of new water resources, will there potentially be enough water to meet rising demand for new housing and domestic consumption.”

Flooding is the third issue. It is now nearly six years since devastating floods affected 10,000 people at the cost of £10 billion. According to the Environment Agency, 5 million people in 2 million properties are already at risk of flooding. More than 40 per cent. of people are unaware of the threat and 30 per cent. do not have adequate insurance cover. One of the worst towns affected in the flooding of October 2000 was Uckfield in my constituency. Nearly six years on, no money has been spent on new flood defences. We have had pledges, a reception at Downing street, ministerial visits, consultants employed and even the drawing up of a model that showed miraculously that if water is poured into it, it comes out somewhere else—but not a single pound on flood defences to prevent a recurrence has been spent. Yet Uckfield is expected to accommodate hundreds more houses over the next few years, with more concrete and more drains putting more water in the self-same rivers.

Despite planning guidance directing development away from areas at risk of flooding, inappropriate development is still occurring. Data from the Environment Agency for 2004 show that 34,000 new homes are envisaged within the indicative flood plains in local plans and that in the south-east growth areas, 30 per cent. of development sites planned for 2016 to 2031 will be in flood-risk areas. That is yet another aspect that has not been assessed and addressed.

Fourthly, there is transport. The total transport infrastructure in the south-east is estimated to be £21.3 billion. Increases in traffic congestion and pollution are cited by residents in the south-east as their two top local priorities, but there is no sign of significant improvement. There has been a legacy of underspending on transport in Britain and further public spending will be tighter in the coming years. By 2010, road traffic is expected to increase by 23 to 29 per cent. in England and by more than 25 per cent. in the south-east compared with 2000.

There is specific evidence to show that congestion in the south-east acts as a brake on new development. For example, a total of 13 junction improvements on the M1, the M11, the M20, the M3, the M27 and A3(M) are necessary for proposed developments. However, those improvements are subject to highways authority holding objections. The A2 outside Dover is now the only stretch of single carriageway main route between Carlisle and Italy. East Sussex has no motorway and there are only 12 miles of dual carriageway in the county. Vital improvements in dualling the A27 along the south coast have been abandoned or put on hold.

On top of that, there is the problem of maintenance backlogs. The average county council has an estimated £200 million to £300 million worth of maintenance work to do to bring highways up to a satisfactory standard by 2026, but poor financial settlements mean that the necessary work cannot be done.

My hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Sussex has continually highlighted the traffic problems around East Grinstead. I was born in East Grinstead and a bypass was being discussed even then. Indeed, it has been talked about since the 1920s. Although the town’s population has doubled in my lifetime, the A22 through the town remains a disaster. I support my hon. Friends the Members for Mid-Sussex and for East Surrey (Mr. Ainsworth) in saying that the town cannot take more houses without improvements in the road, and that any solution must also be a solution for the surrounding communities, such as Forest Row in my constituency and the villages in East Surrey.

Let us consider rail. Concerns about overcrowding, especially on commuter trains in the south-east, constitute the most common complaint that the Office of Rail Regulation receives. Although some improvements have been made, 4 per cent. of rail passengers into London in 2004-05 were still without a seat. That figure will increase further with additional house building. Along with the hon. Member for Lewes (Norman Baker), I have been working with the county council to examine the case for reopening the Uckfield-Lewes rail link, which would not only provide an improved local service but open up a strategic new link to the south coast. Despite thousands of new houses being imposed on us, the Government will not put one penny piece into that key infrastructure project.

The message could not be clearer. The Government expect the south-east to bear all the pain of the new houses but none of the gain of improved infrastructure. If we could prevent the unwanted new houses being built, we would love to do that because they will destroy areas of remarkable beauty for ever. However, the Bill is not about that. If the Government are determined to impose such huge numbers of new houses, against the wishes of local people, the least they can do is establish the investment that is needed in the infrastructure to accommodate them, and the Bill provides for that.

The measure requires local planning authorities to consult a range of authorities: the health authority to ensure that GP and hospital services can meet the additional demand; the relevant water companies and providers of sewerage and waste services to ensure that they can meet the additional demand; the education authority to ensure that local schools have adequate capacity; and the highways authority and Network Rail to ensure that there is capacity on the road and rail networks.

The Bill is eminently sensible and commands great support in areas that face the greatest housing pressure. It is an urgent measure and I hope that it will be given time to proceed today. I urge hon. Members to support it.

My situation is similar to that of the hon. Member for Wealden (Charles Hendry) in that there is a lot of new build in my local authority area. However, my constituency is urban and we have a lot of new build because we are surrounded by the green belt, which acts as a straitjacket on all the open spaces in the London borough of Redbridge, to such an extent that, in recent years, there has been a significant increase in the population in my borough, especially in my constituency. The Conservative council in Redbridge has given planning permission for 33-storey and 21-storey tower blocks, and many additional housing units are being built.

My electorate, which was 78,000 at the election, will increase to about 82,000 in the next three or four years and will probably reach 90,000 10 years from now. I therefore face considerable pressure. Problems involving changes of circumstances and a lack of facilities apply equally in urban areas, with one exception—the beautiful Valentines park, where Essex used to play their cricket.

We had a problem with finding additional school places, but a long campaign was run over many years by a local residents association against the development of a former sports field for a new primary school. The council has just compulsorily purchased that sports field to build the new school. In fact, we are having two new primary schools built. However, we will also need a new secondary school in the near future, and I have absolutely no idea where the land for that will be found. Our existing schools are all full, and I regularly see constituents in my surgery who are being told that they must take their children to schools in the north of the borough, four or five miles away, where there are places, because there is none in the south of the borough.

We all face such problems due to rapid population change. I would like to point out to the hon. Member for Wealden that it is predicted that the population in England will increase from 50.1 million in 2004 to 55.8 million in 2026. That is an increase of 11 per cent., or 5.7 million people. London’s population is now increasing after years of decline, and it will continue to increase because of London’s success as a global city and the great success of the economic policies of this Government.

We face a real problem, however. There is insufficient land in London to provide housing for all the people who are already in desperate housing need, including those in the London borough of Redbridge and other boroughs who are in temporary bed and breakfast accommodation. I have constituents who have been placed in my borough by Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Newham councils because they cannot find housing for them in their own boroughs. For several years, my council was placing people in guest houses in Southend-on-Sea out of season in order to deal with the emergency housing needs of so many homeless people.

We need new housing. We need the new housing in the Thames Gateway, but we also need it in other areas. The hon. Gentleman’s speech was a little like the curate’s egg: parts of it were good, and parts were very bad. The bad parts illustrated to me that the Bill is not all that it seems, and that it represents a very sophisticated form of nimbyism. It is saying, “We want to carry out an audit, and when we find that the facilities are not there, we will stop the houses being built in our area.”

People in urban centres such as my constituency do not live in a green and pleasant land. We have the dark, satanic mills—except that they are no longer mills but rows and rows of houses, because manufacturing industry has gone and the landscape has been transformed. Nevertheless, we do not have the same green and pleasant areas that the hon. Gentleman’s constituency has, yet the building will go on in our areas rather than elsewhere in the region. I suspect that many of the people who live in his constituency get on the train and come into London to work, earn their nice salaries from working in our capital city and go back to their homes and enjoy their environment.

Many of my constituents suffer as a result of the lack of space and the congestion caused by the growth of the city, but we have to recognise that nimbyism is a threat to the vast majority of people living in urban areas. Someone must speak up for people who cannot speak for themselves, and do not have sophisticated pressure groups and campaigns to preserve this or stop that. Although the hon. Gentleman made a number of valid points, he also made a number of sophisticated nimbyist points.

As the hon. Gentleman will know, the Government have conducted various surveys to forecast the number of homes that will be needed for our growing population. An inevitable consequence of changes in lifestyle and the ageing population is the fact that we have more and more single households. Between now and 2026, the number of households will grow by 209,000 a year, and 72 per cent. of them will be single-person households. But we are not delivering 209,000 homes a year; in 2004-05, the most recent year for which we have statistics, we delivered only two thirds of that number—168,000. There is a gap.

People are having to live in overcrowded accommodation, with friends or relatives or in temporary accommodation because they cannot obtain the housing that they need. The private rented market has not provided enough homes to meet the social needs of people in all categories. We therefore need social housing, and a mechanism to ensure that it is provided throughout the country, not just in certain areas. That necessitates a proactive approach from central Government, consulting and, I hope, in co-operation with, local authorities. In London we have a Mayor with planning powers, and what he does is very important, but we need a national strategy. The brunt should not be borne by those of us who live in urban areas, or in new areas such as the Thames Gateway.

We can do some valuable things. Yesterday I spoke at a public meeting organised by Friends of the Earth in the neighbouring constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Margaret Hodge). She and I were both on the platform. A representative of Barking council talked about the borough’s interesting plans to deal with the huge increase in its population as part of the Thames Gateway development. There will be about 140,000 new homes, or housing units, in the Thames Gateway. Many of the homes in Barking will be built at a higher level than the town centre. The hon. Gentleman talked about flood plains. Although these homes are being built on a flood plain, they will be in less danger of flooding than the existing ones.

The new housing will enable us to do something about climate change. We can introduce solar panels, and district heating schemes. We can use the surplus water from power stations: when the water has cooled them, it can be used for district heating schemes. Enormous gains can be made from modern, technological housing development. We do not all benefit from living in areas containing 17th-century and 18th-century cottages; any that existed in Ilford have long gone. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Ilford was just a little hamlet, an adjunct to Barking, where the abbey was. The only buildings of any great age in my constituency are the hospital chapel, a fantastic building that dates back to the 11th and 12th centuries, and Valentine’s mansion, which dates back to the end of the 17th century. My constituency, like many others, only had a few thousand people 120 years ago, and then the railway came. As a result, my borough has a quarter of a million people. Further growth and urbanisation of London followed as the suburbs linked together, and we ended up with a global city.

Change is inevitable, and we need to manage that change. Last December, in response to the Barker review of housing supply, the Government published several documents, including a consultation document on the planning gain supplement, which contained several interesting proposals, including modifications to section 106. That also raised the issue of whether it is right that people derive private benefit from huge increases in the value of their land and in their ability to make money, effectively at the public expense, while a mechanism is not provided for the public to benefit in return. The community, not just the private interest that is fortunate enough to own land in an area of development, needs to benefit.

The Government’s response in December 2005 set out a commitment to provide more homes for future generations and an ambitious package of measures to help people into home ownership and to increase social housing, which is vital. When I was young, I lived in a council house—

My hon. Friend is still young.

I thank my hon. Friend. Everything is relative. She is younger than me, but we will not go into that.

When I was younger than I am now, many years ago, the area where I was growing up, Hainault, in the Ilford, North constituency, had a large body of social housing. There was a huge estate. Since the 1970s, almost all the houses have been sold. Compensatory social housing has not been built in the London borough of Redbridge. Since the Labour council of a few years in the 1990s, a policy of housing association developments has been in place, but the total number of social housing units is only a few thousand.

Every week at my advice surgery, people complain about shortages of housing. They say that they bid for a property under the choice scheme, with a glossy booklet produced by the east London councils. After checking, we find that there were 250 bids, and that the constituent is, say, number 37 or 64 on the list. The constituent says, “What is the point of bidding?” We contact the council, and the council officers issue a standard letter—I know what it will say before I read it—that there is a scheme, people can bid and the constituent is entitled to do so. That is it, unless, there is some overriding medical need.

I have quite a lot of large families in my constituency, and I was told that, apart from new build, only about four or five local authority or housing association properties with four bedrooms become available in the borough every year. There might be 40 families with overriding medical needs, yet they will not get one of those properties. We need new housing to meet those social needs and we cannot allow selfish nimbyism in certain areas to prevent the majority of people from accessing the housing that they require. Not everybody has the ability or resources to purchase a property. We therefore need mixed tenure—joint ownership, shared equity and so on. Above all, we need to build properties for people to live in, and we need them in areas where we have the land, access and communication.

We also need sometimes to create new communities. The hon. Member for Wealden referred in error in his interesting speech to Essex and motorways. My constituency has the Redbridge roundabout, which is the second most polluted area for particulates in the air, according to the Evening Standard survey two years ago—

Order. I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman could relate his comments to the Bill, which is quite wide-ranging.

I will relate my comments exactly. The M11 in Essex comes down to the Redbridge roundabout, and along its route communities have been growing. Throughout Essex and Cambridgeshire, one can see hamlets and new housing all along the motorway. The M11 has provided a means for new build and new communities. I agree with the hon. Gentleman that improved road communication in his constituency and elsewhere would be good, but would he campaign against a motorway going through the beautiful countryside, the virtues of which he was extolling? Perhaps he would. I would welcome an intervention if he wishes to intervene. Obviously not; I will carry on.

The Government have an ambition to raise the level of house building in England to 200,000 a year by 2016. That is a big ambition, but in the 1960s we built far more than that a year. Many of the properties that we built at that time—we must learn the lessons—have had to be knocked down because they were tower blocks and not very good, but we desperately need the housing and transport infrastructure, particularly if London is to maintain its position as a global city. In that context, Crossrail is vital, and I look forward to the Bill going to the other place very soon.

Is the hon. Gentleman aware that he is endorsing the Bill? The Bill calls for such infrastructure. We are grateful for his support.

The hon. Gentleman was listening and he heard what I said. I said that his Bill is an interesting, sophisticated form of nimbyism. His speech was a curate’s egg. I am endorsing some of what he said, but I also have concerns. Those who are against new housing and who are nimbyish will hide behind aspects of the Bill, because they see it as a way of delaying, prevaricating and stopping the housing development that is so vital.

We need to ensure that new homes are built in areas where they are needed. The hon. Gentleman is right that we need to look at the infrastructure and at water supply. I agree that there is a serious problem of water shortages in London and the south-east, but the main cause is the water companies and their massive leaks, which waste far more water than could be lost through an hon. Member with a leaky tap.

Does my hon. Friend agree that Thames Water’s record is truly disgraceful? Would it not be abhorrent to our constituents if that private sector company’s record stopped them getting the homes built that they desperately need?

I agree. There is a hosepipe ban in parts of my borough but not in others, because two water companies—Essex and Suffolk Water and Thames Water—operate in the London borough of Redbridge. We need to take a serious approach to the water companies, because it is a disgrace that water charges increase while those companies continue to waste our water through leaks—

Order. However serious that complaint is, it is not relevant to the Bill.

I appreciate your words, Madam Deputy Speaker.

The Government’s housing and planning policies are set out in planning policy guidance note 3, which was published in 2000, and in the draft planning policy statement that is to replace PPG3 later this year. An essential part of PPG3 is a move away from the old-fashioned predict and provide approach, which seems to underlie the Bill, to a planning, monitoring and management approach. Local authorities and central Government must use much more forward planning and, in that respect, I have some sympathy with some of the comments of the hon. Member for Wealden. Forward planning is needed in relation to both housing and capacity, both existing and planned and thought must be given to the provision of schools, doctors’ surgeries, hospitals and other infrastructure.

We also need to take account of the potential for unexpected developments. For example, the number of people in work affects the amount of traffic on the roads. In the days of Conservative Government, when we had 3 million unemployed, far fewer people were travelling to and from work, so there was less traffic and less congestion. Under the Labour Government, people are more prosperous. There are 28 million people in work, more people own cars and drive them to the supermarket to shop or on holiday. The downside to higher levels of economic activity, as I pointed out to Friends of the Earth last night, is that, sometimes, that affects our ability to meet our targets on carbon emissions and other targets. However, I do not want to live in a world where we all go back to living in caves—or the Conservative version, where we have 3 million unemployed. I would rather have a Labour Government and high employment and prosperity, but recognise that we have to manage the consequences.

That is why we need planning. That is why sometimes we have to say to local communities that it is all very well their saying no to this and no to that, but there is a greater good and a greater need. The residents of two streets might not want a school to be built opposite them because they think it will generate traffic, but we have to take account of the families living in the 30 surrounding streets who have children who will attend that school and benefit from its existence. That, of course, is when we have to take on board the wider community interest. The same arguments apply nationally, as well. For that reason, I welcome the fact that the Government are going to revise their planning policy guidance and I look forward to the outcome later this year.

We need to create mixed communities. I hope that we have moved away from the ghettoisation of poor people and people in social housing. Many of the new housing developments in my borough mix different housing together. Under the rules laid down by the Mayor of London and agreed with central Government, a proportion of social housing has to be provided in all new housing developments above a certain size, but clearly there are ways in which developers get round that. They find smaller units and try to get under the threshold. We must make sure that people of all kinds can get housing in the areas where they need to live.

One by-product of that is the impact on our economy. In the debate on the previous Bill, we talked about public service workers and protecting emergency workers. They need protection and they need to be prevented from being obstructed in their work, but they also need somewhere to live. In London, we increasingly find that people who work in our health services, and our police, teachers and firefighters—people who work in the whole range of public services—cannot afford to live in the boroughs where they work. They have to commute from a long way out because of the lack of social housing or affordable housing in the big cities. That is not a healthy development, because, apart from anything else, it means that people do not necessarily relate to the communities in which they work, because they do not live there. We need to get a balance. I am not saying that we should tell people where to live—far from it. There should be freedom of choice, but people should have that choice. They should have the ability to purchase a property or to pay the rent in the areas where they wish to work.

In my borough, there are young teachers who spend their first three or four years after qualifying working in our primary schools. Then they look for promotion and immediately move out of the London borough of Redbridge and the excellent schools in Ilford to some other part of the country, because they can afford the housing there and they cannot afford it in their current area. We lose their experience, which is not good for continuity or the needs of young people.

Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the biggest difficulties that both of our communities face is high private rents? They would more than cover the mortgage of an individual. People who are being forced to live in private rented accommodation in our communities because of the lack of availability of public sector housing often find themselves in a poverty trap and cannot work, despite wanting to, because they cannot afford to work and pay the private rents.

My hon. Friend is right. That is the biggest problem. When someone is paying £230 or £260 a week in private rent for a three-bedroom property, which seems to be about the going rate in my borough, they have to have a large income to afford it. The problem is that people get trapped. People who want to work cannot get off the benefits cycle. As soon as they get a job, their housing benefit is reduced and they are in a situation in which working has become almost useless to them in terms of bettering their life.

Order. Again, may I remind the hon. Gentleman of the content of the Bill? Perhaps he will address his remarks accordingly.

The planning system has an important role to play in ensuring that the housing market is flexible and responsive to these needs and that we can provide homes for all the people in all our communities, including those who are trapped and paying extortionate private rents. Some people become trapped in other ways. A couple might move into a social housing property when they had no children, or one child, and then expand their family so that they end up with three or four children but are then unable to find a property in their area within their price range, become subject to the whims of the housing association, and cannot find a property to transfer to near to where the children are at school. That is a dilemma that I hear about regularly.

Does my hon. Friend agree that London has the highest rates of overcrowding in the country? There has been a 20 per cent. increase in overcrowding since 1991. The only way in which we can deal with that and with private rents in a market-driven way is to address the supply of public sector and private sector housing to drive down rents and increase the affordability of tenancies.

I agree. I therefore welcome the various initiatives recently introduced by the Government. They are not sufficient, but at least they are a step in the right direction. I also welcome the issuing of the code for sustainable homes, on which there was a consultation that ended in March. That code is to be strengthened to improve the environmental sustainability of homes so that when people move to a new home it is not of poor quality but subject to high standards. The Government are going to revise the code to ensure that energy efficiency ratings are made mandatory for new and existing homes. That will help poorer people because it will reduce their fuel bills. There will also be minimum standards of water efficiency and measures to ensure that builders and people in the building trade must have the highest standards and not engage in jerry-building and competing on the basis of low quality.

Many things can be done to ensure that we meet the needs of our communities. We must consider energy and micro-technology. Wind turbines, which are popular, should be put not only on the houses of people with lots of money in the countryside but on those of people in cities where that is sensible and sustainable.

Order. The hon. Gentleman’s comments have been wide-ranging. Will he please now look directly at the contents of the Bill?

The audit that the Bill proposes is unnecessary. We already have many forms of planning guidance, consultations and other measures that have been put forward by the Government over many years. The essence of the Bill is a sophisticated delaying tactic—

The hon. Gentleman knows all about that.

Yes, I know a lot about delaying tactics and am grateful for the recognition. Cunctator is my nickname.

I believe that the promoter of the Bill has the best of intentions, but it is misguided and will not help to deal with the problems of my constituents. It is unnecessary because there are already many different forms of planning that take account of these needs. We do not want a static picture that relates only to the current situation. Foresight is needed, as we must consider the future. We need, too, to build in flexibility to accommodate the unexpected, including changes in world energy prices and the economic cycle. We need sophisticated measures to take into account a range of issues and, although the Bill is well intentioned, it is not necessarily the best way forward.

Finally—hon. Members will be pleased to hear that word—may I refer to measures that are already under consideration, including water management. The Department for Communities and Local Government is working with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to look at water resources and the needs of new communities. That work should be strengthened so that the water companies deliver their commitments over a 25-year period or longer. We must make sure that new homes are built in areas that are environmentally sustainable. It is not just a question of water but of other resources in the region.

Does my right hon. Friend agree that sustainable communities should provide a community-based infrastructure which, however, was not provided in the docklands in the early 1990s? Homes were provided, but not schools, hospitals or any community facilities at all by the London Docklands development corporation. The Government have recognised the folly of such activity—

Order. The hon. Lady’s comments are rather wide of the Bill.

I shall avoid delving into the history of the docklands, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I agree with my hon. Friend.

There is already statutory consultation on regional spatial strategies and local development frameworks by the Environment Agency and water companies, and planning authorities will have more statutory powers to require water companies to consult on the management of water resources in future. Such powers are overdue but, hopefully, they will be introduced next year.

Other measures are in hand to look at the question of household growth, and that should be taken into account when water companies consult Ofwat about pricing and so on. It is essential to take a coherent, planned approach to many of those things, and it is not sufficient to look at them purely in the local context. We need, too, to emphasise the need to save water—a subject I have already touched on—and we need to make sure that statutory bodies, including Government agencies and Departments, consumer organisations and the Consumer Council for Water take part in the consultation to ensure that the correct decisions are made.

The new code for sustainable homes must ensure that builders and home owners are given guidance on ways in which they can improve existing properties. It is all very well dealing with new build, but people who build conversions and extensions, or otherwise change their properties, could install solar panels or mechanisms to use waste water to irrigate their garden. Such measures are small steps, but they make a huge difference. I should add, in passing, that if everybody was told to take their televisions off standby and disconnect their mobile phone chargers from the socket, they would save a lot of electricity.

I hope that, over the coming years, we will see a significant increase in the amount of housing and home building. It is urgently needed. I hope that some of it will continue to be in my constituency, but I also hope that we will not be put in a straitjacket and that all new developments will not take place in already overcrowded areas that suffer from traffic pollution, congestion and a shortage of public open space, parks and leisure facilities. I hope that we will be able to say that the country as a whole is benefiting as well as making a contribution to the building of sustainable communities and decent homes for all.

It may not be generally known in the House of Commons that at the Conservative party parliamentary away-day, I won one of the chamaeleon awards for the biggest contribution to environmental affairs for my extensive role in nature conservation work. I say that because listening to the hon. Member for Ilford, South (Mike Gapes) is, for me, something like a near-death experience, and when I was wondering why, I remembered that gapes is a fatal disease in grouse.

I realise that the hon. Gentleman’s role today is to act as a logjam, but I have seldom heard more nonsense talked, even on a Friday, about a serious Bill, of which my right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (Mr. Maude) is the promoter and I am pleased to be a sponsor. The Bill was admirably and expertly introduced by my good Friend and parliamentary neighbour the Member for Wealden (Charles Hendry) who, together with me and many other local Members of Parliament, is involved in a campaign that could not be further from the vices attributed to us by the hon. Member for Ilford, South. Indeed, it will be the answer that the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Meg Munn) uses, if and when she has a moment to speak.

A number of us—my right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham, and my hon. Friends the Members for Chichester (Mr. Tyrie) and for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) and the chief executives and leaders of the district councils—went to see the Minister for Housing and Planning to talk about the problems associated with infrastructure and housing targets. We explained that we were not against more housing and understood the need for further and more affordable housing in the south of England, but she accused us of being nimbys, not wanting the housing and so on.

May I lay to rest the suggestion that the Bill is a plot to stop the building of more housing? It is a plot to prevent the Government from imposing housing targets on areas of the south-east which are already creaking and do not have the infrastructure to cope with the housing that we already have, that which we are going to get and that which will be imposed on us in the future. Let us dispel the impression created by the 50 minutes of drivel from the hon. Member for Ilford, South and return to a first-class Bill that is trying to do something very important—that is, to secure the quality of life for people of all backgrounds and all walks of life.

The picture portrayed by the hon. Gentleman of some downtrodden urban minority struggling in the inner cities, as opposed to people who spend their entire lives in traffic jams, is pathetic. I agree that the problem is a national problem. It cannot simply be looked at locally. The Bill is a serious attempt to devise a national procedure for an audit of the infrastructure, so that what his Government have always promised can, unusually, be made true, and infrastructure will keep pace with housing development.

I first raised this question years ago. In 2000 I went to see the right hon. Member for Streatham (Keith Hill), who was then a Minister at the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and is now the Prime Minister’s admirable Parliamentary Private Secretary, to discuss the real problems caused by the creaking infrastructure in my constituency and other constituencies such as Wealden, East Surrey and Horsham—the places that we know best, which are struggling to cope with further housing. At that time, I participated in serious discussions about the infrastructure deficit.

My hon. Friends the Members for Arundel and South Downs, for Chichester and for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) all wanted to be here today, but they are attending meetings to try to save some of the most important assets in the health service in the south of England, St. Richard’s hospital in Chichester and Worthing hospital, which are in danger of being downgraded. That illustrates the vital importance of health infrastructure, which my hon. Friend the Member for Wealden has mentioned.

My hon. Friend the Member for Wealden was generous in his comments about the campaign that we have fought in Mid-Sussex to preserve vital services at the Princess Royal hospital in Haywards Heath and the Queen Victoria hospital in East Grinstead, which is particularly well known to him. Incidentally, the Government have not even consulted the health service on major housing targets. No one has bothered to consult the NHS on plans for the future. If anyone had, the strategic health authority in my area would not be starting another consultation, which will lead to further recommendations to cut services.

I want to relate the Bill to one particular problem in my constituency. We must provide about 14,100 homes in Mid-Sussex between 2006 and 2026. The plan is to build some 2,500 of those homes on a greenfield site in the beautiful town of East Grinstead in addition to a further 2,000 homes in the town, making a total of up to 4,600 houses in one small market town, which is out of all sense of scale and proportion. The plan has been subject to a planning consultation, which has just ended, in which it attracted almost universal objection from local residents, who are extremely anxious. I anticipate that the result of the consultation will be a strong no to what the council has had foisted on it and is having to propose.

As I have said, the plan would result in about 4,500 new houses in East Grinstead alone, which would result in a new population of more than 11,000—3,000 extra schoolchildren, 1,600 extra school places, 1,500 pensioners, a requirement for 5,000 jobs, 2,000 extra commuters and 6,000 extra cars on the road. To put the matter in context, that development does not include a single penny of Government funding for infrastructure to maintain my constituents’ quality of life under such a huge weight of development.

The Minister may have heard of the Gatwick diamond, which is an economic zone. There is a proposal to build 41,200 houses between 2006 and 2026 in the Gatwick diamond, which is more than 2,000 houses a year. That level of activity is almost twice that of Ashford and similar to that of Milton Keynes. Both Ashford and Milton Keynes receive enormous public support and help for building infrastructure to keep pace with the development of homes. No help at all is available in Mid-Sussex from the Government. At present, the infrastructure charge per house is likely to be about £46,000. How will that help affordable housing? How will people be able to afford house prices that will sustain such an infrastructure spend?

Another consideration is water. A distinguished environmentalist who sits on the Labour Benches said to me yesterday, “There are 14 million people in the south of England at present living under a hosepipe ban. A massive increase in housing development is proposed. Where do the Government expect the water to come from?” How can this be called sustainable development?

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

No, I will not.

Does the Minister have any idea of what sustainable development is? When I asked a parliamentary question three years ago—I was seeking a definition of sustainable development—the answer was, “I will reply to the hon. Gentleman shortly.” There was not even an answer. Since then, what sustainable development means has changed according to the whim of the Minister at the time.

There is a water shortage. There is great anxiety about the quality of water, about the treatment of sewage, about the quality of life and about roads, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wealden rightly said. The exit turn of the A23 to East Grinstead is already running at full capacity. Just up the road at Horley, in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey (Mr. Ainsworth), there is a development of 2,000 houses. The occupiers of those houses will use the A23. There are 4,000 houses to be built at East Grinstead. The exit turn of the A20 is already running practically at capacity. I assumed that it was a national asset and that the Highways Agency would want to pay for it. Not a bit of it. It is to be paid for by the developers. How are developers to pay for the exit turn of the A23 and improvements to the A264 and the A22, build a relief road, build schools, create green places and build all the other things that make a civilised, viable contribution? How is all that to be provided just by the developers, without any contribution from the Government?

I say to the Minister, “You cannot go on willing on the south-east a scale of development which is intolerable environmentally.” By any definition of sustainability, environmental security and of all the other things the Government witter on about, what they are willing on the south-east of England is utterly unfeasible. There needs to be an audit of the infrastructure.

Does my hon. Friend agree that not only his constituents, my constituents and the constituents of other Conservative Members but many constituents of Labour Members, including Labour voters, will be distressed and disgusted by what is going on in the House today to try to thwart a piece of legislation that is both environmentally important and important for all our local communities?

My hon. Friend makes an essential point. The Government’s intentions are clear. The speech by the hon. Member for Ilford, South (Mike Gapes) was a disgrace and will be noted by constituents throughout the land who have a vital interest in their quality of life, that of their children and that of their grandchildren. Terrible harm will be done to the environment of the south-east because of what the Government are willing on us.

I have in my hand a letter from the then Chief Secretary to the Treasury dated 10 February 2000. It was written after I had raised questions with him and had asked for an audit of the infrastructure in mid-Sussex and wider Sussex. He said:

“Again, I can offer an assurance that this will be one of our principal concerns once a decision is taken on numbers of new houses to be built is resolved. There is no question of planning for new homes while excluding planning for the range of services required to build thriving communities.”

That has been shown to be a bare-faced terminological inexactitude. It has not happened, and it is not happening. The Government are not doing what they promised to do. They have not backed with plans and Government money the additional infrastructure required to sustain the level of housing that the Minister and her hon. Friends are demanding.

Other Members want to speak, so I do not wish to go on—as I could do—except to make two further points. This is a terribly serious matter. The environment cannot be played with like a toy, at the political whim of whoever happens to be in power. It needs to be at the heart of development in the south-east of England. At present, the Government are denying that, and they are destroying much of what has been built up over the years.

Decades of unsustainable development has put our region’s environment under significant pressure, and that makes the Bill even more important. Development is not always bad. Indeed, it is often good; it can be good for the environment, as long as it is in the right place, well designed and well supported by properly funded infrastructure. Without planning for water supply and sewerage, waste disposal, flood risk management, proper roads and railways that function, communities simply cannot function. The quality of life of my constituents in East Grinstead, Haywards Heath, Burgess Hill and the surrounding areas, which are the engine room of the economy of this country, inevitably will decline.

The current infrastructure in south-east England is struggling to cope with existing demand. The most careful planning is needed to accommodate the proposed number of new houses. The Minister nods her head, but that is not happening; there is no plan whatever to support the infrastructure in and around my constituency with Government money. There is no plan. All the money has gone to places such as Ashford—to what are called the growth areas. If these developments go ahead as planned, there will be very serious consequences for the environment of this country.

The decisions that need to be made are very difficult. They involve a whole series of issues, which are all connected to one another, and constitute the most formidable challenge for Government policy and for the lives of our constituents throughout the country. They include climate change, pollution, biodiversity, the countryside and water. They also involve all the other things that go to make a civilised life: how we deal with waste; how we enable our people to travel to work; how we enable our children to be educated, and where they play; the quality of public space and our whole urban landscape; working and living patterns; and the fact that the natural landscape of this country is about to be concreted over. Other issues include traffic jams, juggernauts in rural areas, the balance between road and rail, carbon emissions, demographic change and the supply and affordability of housing.

It is just not possible to separate those issues. They have to be addressed in the round. That is why the Bill is so important: it would make the planners conduct an audit of infrastructure in every regard, in order to understand whether there is the local infrastructure to support the kind of development that the Government are willing, and the housing that we do indeed need in our constituencies to accommodate people—to enable people to continue living in such areas and to enable people new to those areas to buy homes.

It is not possible to docket such issues in one Government Department or under one heading. It is a disgrace that they are being dealt with in the current disjointed and dysfunctional way. The Minister must report back to her Secretary of State that they need to get a grip of that, and understand that such development cannot be just handed down by diktat without any thought or concern for the quality of the lives of those on the receiving end of the Deputy Prime Minister’s odious plans. The problems are not just environmental, social, or economic, but all three at one and the same time. The way in which we think about and handle those problems will have the most profound effects on our financial prosperity, our society, our environment, and above all, on the quality of life of not only all our people living now, but those to come in the future.

The Bill is concerned with the tension between two groups in our local communities that has been reflected in the past two speeches that we have heard. The first group are those who need homes, but find that they cannot get them because of a substantial housing shortfall, especially in urban areas. The second group are those who are living in areas in which they do not want further and more intensive development. It is difficult to balance those two groups’ concerns, and that is something of which I have experience.

When I served as an elected member on the Trafford local authority in the north-west, I represented a town-centre ward for nine years. That part of Trafford is a desirable area with good schools, so it was a target for housing development. Most of the substantial planning applications resulted in a large volume of objections from local residents, and a key part of my work as an elected member was dealing with them. However, at the same time, we had a shortage of homes in the area. The situation was difficult for couples, families and young people who wanted to get their first independent accommodation and move out of their parents’ home.

We know that the number of households has increased by 30 per cent. over the past 30 years. We clearly have an ageing population because people are living longer. However, we must balance other key factors when we consider the mix of housing that we need. There are now more lone-parent households. Most elected representatives, especially those in local government, will find that they are continually dealing with couples who have split up, both of whom want accommodation in which their children can live for part of the time, which also increases the numbers of houses that we need.

It is predicted that the population will have grown by 11 per cent., or 5.7 million people, by 2026. The number of households is increasing by 209,000 a year, of which 72 per cent. will be single-person households, which is a key point. However, there is a gap, because we are building only 168,000 extra homes a year. We must acknowledge that there is thus a shortfall in housing. The Government’s ambition in response to the Barker review is to increase the supply of new homes to 200,000 a year by 2016. Of course, it is also recognised that new homes must be in sustainable communities.

Planning guidance has been changing since I served in local government. The main guidance for planning policy on housing was set out in planning policy guidance note 3, which was published in 2000. PPG3 became a well-known acronym in local government. However, I understand that it will be replaced later this year by planning policy statement 3. The main difference seems to be a move away from the simple predict-and-provide approach to housing towards one of planning, monitoring and managing. We need such an approach on planning, so the choice is to be applauded.

The local housing market has not responded to local need, and it is no exaggeration to say that the shortage of housing causes absolute misery in communities. We want residents to be able to get their first step on the housing ladder. People often want to take that first step in the area in which they grew up, where their family and friends are. However, my experience shows that areas often become overheated. In the town centre that I represented, small, new apartments that were built were put on the market for about £200,000, which was way above what a young person or couple in that area could afford.

The planning system has a role to play in improving the responsiveness and flexibility of the housing market because everything that I saw suggested that if the housing market was left to its own devices, it would not meet all needs. So we need affordable units of starter accommodation for couples and young people and in other areas we need affordable family homes. We also need much more accommodation for older people. The area I represented had the largest concentration of older people anywhere in the borough. Some of it—sheltered housing, for example—was very good, but nowhere near enough of that type of housing was available to support the many people growing older and frailer.

The Bill may prevent the development of sufficient accommodation for older people’s needs, which is one of my main concerns about it. We are considering what we need in sustainable communities, but I feel that the needs of older people merit much more consideration.

A constituent told me about one of his friends who had grown older and whose wife had died. His standards declined and he even failed to wash or keep up at all with how he looked. He simply could not keep up the maintenance of his home, which was burgled, so he became fearful and his health went into even further decline. My constituent, speaking on behalf of his friend, asked whether there was a service to help with the very difficult move from his lifelong home. The man was living in the place he had shared with his wife and he needed to move somewhere warm and secure that would be more suitable for him as he got older. I faced the difficulty that local government did not really have such a service at that time, when the housing market just produced what the housing market produced and there was nobody around to help that person with the move.

At that time, the sort of help that the man required did not exist, but I believe that it is more available now because we have sheltered housing with wardens and even a move to extra care in housing, so that people can remain in their own homes and receive the sort of care that was previously available only in nursing homes. That is the mix of housing needed in most areas. Having suitable and sufficient accommodation for older people and a change in the type of accommodation as people grow older is increasingly becoming a problem. It has started to be recognised, but we need to pay much more attention to it.

I have spoken about the mix of houses needed in most areas. Without the appropriate mix of accommodation to meet the needs of older people, their health can rapidly decline, so we really need the right mix. We also need a mix of measures to make new houses sustainable, to make them energy efficient and efficient in the use of water in the kitchen and bathroom, which the last two speakers mentioned. Improved fittings and appliances can help. The bigger issue is that water companies must address the level of leaks, but that matter is probably outside the scope of today’s debate.

I understand that there is to be a strengthened code for sustainable homes, which will ensure that new homes are efficient in energy and water. That is important not just for the environment, because as the code suggests, householders need better information about the running costs of their homes. There is now a virtuous circle: using less water and energy is the aim, but it entails saving money on utility bills, which most people want. I believe that the strengthened code will incorporate that.

In growth areas such as health and education, I understand that the Government are ensuring that the main public expenditure programmes are flexible and responsive to growing communities. In my constituency, education presents the opposite problem to securing adequate supply because we have falling rolls. Schools across my constituency, particularly primary schools, are having to contemplate school mergers because not enough children are being born in our communities. Having a better housing mix, particularly more family homes in some areas, would help to ensure the continuing viability of our schools. It is not only a question of there being too few homes, because in some areas it is the type of home that is unsuitable.

I want to return to health planning, which the Bill touches on and we discussed in today’s earlier debate. For me, health planning, as I mentioned in an intervention earlier today, is not about saving small hospitals. The key point about hospitals in respect of what communities need as more houses are built is that they should provide safe and effective services. A difficult tension is developing. There is a tendency for hon. Members of all parties to argue for “save the local hospital” campaigns when we should campaign for safe and effective services for our constituents. We need hospitals with appropriate neo-natal and paediatric services. Those are often highly specialised units and it is not possible for them to be available in every hospital. We need suitable diagnostics, and every hospital should have an MRI scanner and the other sorts of scanner that are needed for care and treatment.

All the discussions that I have held with NHS professionals suggest that we need hospitals of a sufficient size to provide the right number of staff with expertise, especially consultants. When I was in local government, we had a long-running battle to try to hang on to our district general hospital but, as we discussed the matter with NHS professionals, we began to realise that there was a problem with the number of consultants that a hospital of that size could sustain. We discussed whether it was safe, whether there would be a proper career path and whether we would get the right and best people for our hospital. Those matters are important, too.

Not just anybody can diagnose cancer. It requires expertise, and operations and treatment should be conducted by those who are experienced and can manage to perform the required number of operations every year. Health planning must therefore be linked to more effective community and primary care services. That is beginning to develop in a—dare I say it?—healthy way in my area.

In the Leigh area, there is an admirable walk-in centre, which also serves my constituency. A new primary care centre is about to be built in Walkden in the centre of my constituency. The new local improvement finance trust—LIFT—centre will include GP services, a clinic that offers physiotherapy, rehabilitation, audiology and a children’s clinic. It is vital to my community for all those service to come together so that, for example, an older person who has had a stroke will not have to travel to Hope hospital some distance away, or to Bolton or Wigan, but can get the rehabilitation treatment and physiotherapy locally. That also means that family members could accompany the person more easily.

Transport, which the Bill describes as condition 6, has been mentioned in the debate. The measure would provide for

“sufficient capacity on the existing road network… to sustain any increase in… traffic that is likely to be generated by the proposed development”.

That is peculiar. Most people in local government have been working with the assumption that we should encourage people to use public transport. In my area of the north-west, that means the Metrolink tram. A guided busway from Leigh to Manchester will soon be added to that. The tram has led to people switching from private to public transport and lessening road use. As with the tube in London, people find that the tram is a good mode of public transport.

Transport is another weak aspect of the Bill because we should not simply cater for an increasing amount of traffic. The assumption in planning is to encourage the use of public transport. To go by the staff who work in my constituency office, we cannot assume that younger people will drive to work. We should encourage them to use public transport. The Bill does not cover that and is therefore deficient.

I understand the competing issues that affect planning and I have several years’ experience of dealing with residents who are concerned about new housing developments. Such concerns are still expressed to me as a Member of Parliament, and that happens to many other hon. Members, too. However, people in all age groups are affected by the problem of not finding a home suitable for their needs. In my constituency, that means young people, including couples, families and older people. If the hon. Member for Mid-Sussex (Mr. Soames) does not believe the amount of homelessness that exists—some of his comments implied that he did not—I suggest that he attend the surgery of one my hon. Friends with a London constituency.

Does my hon. Friend agree that it might be a good idea for the hon. Member for Mid-Sussex (Mr. Soames) to visit one of my constituency surgeries, given that two of the wards in my constituency have the highest amount of overcrowding in the country?

Yes, I do. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will be interested in that invitation, but he does not seem to be responding to it at the moment.

A recent case in my constituency involved a mother with a 14-year-old daughter who had always lived in an upstairs flat and had never had a garden to play in. There are also an awful lot of old or frail people who cannot find a home suitable for their needs. It will be very difficult to deal with such people, or with people being treated for cancer or other conditions, who are living in unsuitable accommodation, if we do not proceed in a different way to provide the necessary growth in housing.

There is a case for housing growth, and we have to listen to it; otherwise, we shall condemn children and families to live in overcrowded homes, as my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford, South (Mike Gapes) mentioned. We need to reflect on this issue and to take it seriously, although some hon. Members do not appear to do so. There are people bringing up a family over many years—perhaps decades—in a two-bedroom flat. As the children get older, it becomes more difficult for siblings of different genders to share a bedroom, so the living space has to be used as bedrooms. If all the accommodation space is used as bedroom space, there is no living room in which the children can do their homework and study. Educational underachievement then becomes a factor of overcrowding, as well as poor quality of life.

Does my hon. Friend agree that overcrowded households can also have an impact on the health of the children and families involved? We often see an almost constant succession of illnesses in such households, owing to the fact that there is inadequate space and ventilation for a growing family.

I very much agree with my hon. Friend. This affects not only children, although we think primarily of children when we are discussing overcrowding and housing need. After all, why should a child grow up in an overcrowded home? Anyone who uses Westminster tube station will have seen, going down the escalator, the large poster showing this Chamber overcrowded with babies and children. Every time I see it, I think it is a powerful image. Those of us who are adequately accommodated should think through what it is like for people trying to bring up a family in an overcrowded situation. We cannot have that.

I am talking not only about the start of life, although these problems are bad enough at that time. If we read through to the end of life—

Order. I should like to remind the hon. Lady that the Bill is about an infrastructure audit. I would be greatly comforted if her remarks could come back to that subject.

I was just about to refer the effect of overcrowding at the end of someone’s life, in that people cannot be discharged from hospital to die at home, even if that is their wish, if their home is overcrowded. Those who propose measures such as those in the Bill that would reduce or restrain housing development should take overcrowding into account. It is the biggest driving factor in these issues, and we cannot have that.

We must provide the homes that our communities need, in terms of the mix of housing that I have mentioned, and of the energy and water efficiency measures. I welcome the fact that the Government have changed their planning approach, through planning policy statement 3, from the plan, monitor and manage approach to a plan-led approach that will allocate land for housing and then assess the capacity of existing and planned social and transport infrastructures.

The Bill applies to the construction of more than 150 houses or flats by the same developer on a single site, or on contiguous sites, within a period of five years. I do not think that that aspect of the Bill really helps.

As I said earlier, I have had experience of a housing hot spot. Developers there were keen to build expensive apartments in quite small numbers. They would buy a plot containing one or two large properties, of which there were many in the town-centre ward that I represented, then build 10 or 15 expensive luxury apartments. They would repeat the process on many sites. Housing change of that kind caused a number of problems in itself. When we speak of audits, or of planning that will affect only areas containing at least 150 houses, we ignore the fact that a community can be significantly affected by small numbers of units.

As was pointed out by my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford, South, those who build small developments consisting of 10 or 15 luxury apartments can avoid the requirement to provide affordable homes. We found again and again that it was the small developments that did not provide such homes. Some of the larger developments of flats or houses—the few that we had—were more likely to provide them. I think that local authorities could do more to ensure that some mid-scale housing developments supplied affordable housing, to the benefit of the community.

I believe that the plan-led approach of PPS3 can ensure that local authorities provide homes, and that sustainable communities and homes are developed.

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Horsham (Mr. Maude) on the Bill, and the hon. Member for Wealden (Charles Hendry), who presented it so ably on his behalf.

I understand the reasoning behind the Bill because of my background in architecture. I spent most of my life as a junior in an office talking to other architects, who would sit and puzzle over how we would design, for instance, a housing estate. The planners would debate with us what could be on the estate, and about the height and design of the houses, while failing utterly to provide the infrastructure that the estate required. I found it puzzling that there was so little joined-up thinking about how we developed our towns. It must be said, though, that having seen what planners did in the 1960s as a result of joined-up thinking, we have knocked a good deal of it down. Perhaps the lack of any real planning constituted a reaction to some of the appalling planning decisions of the late 1950s, the 1960s and the 1970s.

I understand the problems that we are discussing. When I first set eyes on Teignbridge in about 1990, the electorate was 74,000. It is now the fourth largest in the country, at 88,000. We envisage more development to deal with an increase of 10,000 in the population, and even more at a later stage. We are suffering from the consequences of the lack of joined-up thinking. There are pressures from time to time on the health service—on doctors’ practices and on hospitals—to say nothing of roads and water.

We have heard a great deal about housing need today. During a period in which 3,000 council homes were sold off, the building of only 1,300 social homes has been allowed. During that time, I have seen the number of families on the housing register rise from 1,000 to 4,000. The basic figures in themselves represent an appalling indictment of the total failure of the Labour Government’s housing policy. The Government’s inability to provide the homes that are needed has increased the misery of those living in overcrowded accommodation, and the pressure on that accommodation must be relieved. That, along with social changes such as more single families and the fact that few of us are living with our parents, is one of the reasons we need new homes. Parents on both sides of the family died last year, but I must confess that when I was a young man the last thing that I wanted to do was live with the in-laws or the outlaws—I wanted to set up a home with my wife. Again, that creates extra pressures.

The other problem is our growing elderly population. We need to bring in immigrant workers to maintain the tax base and to ensure that elderly people can afford to retire in dignity. All those factors are creating extra pressures. That does not mean, however, that we should not give careful consideration to housing development and where it is placed. Increasing audit is an idea that has much to commend it, although I would not want the Bill as it stands to be passed. It has some merit in some parts, so I shall not oppose it at this stage. I have grave reservations, however, about some of the detail and some elements of the Bill.

One of those reservations relates to how this Bill will link up with local development and the work that local government ought to do—and that some parts of it are doing—to audit the provision of services and the needs in an area at the same time. It might not be this Bill per se that is needed, but a responsibility on local authorities to have a more wholesale approach. Perhaps we ought to plan the infrastructure that is needed rather than having the current piecemeal, ad hoc approach.

The hon. Gentleman will find that the guidance on the production of regional spatial strategies provides for exactly that.

There is some element of that, and I have looked at some regional spatial strategies. In relation to district councils and more local problems, I have not seen that approach. I will be interested to see how the provision works its way through, and whether it ultimately delivers anything.

There are some other difficulties relating to predictions and auditing. The hon. Member for Wealden referred to auditing in relation to hospitals, and gave some figures on growth of hospital need. That is a difficult calculation, because it depends on what basis is used. Were we to take a crude figure of 400 bed spaces in the local hospital, we could say that a doubling of the population would necessitate 800 bed spaces in 10 years’ time. That does not quite follow, however, because we must take account of the changes in hospital care. With micro-surgery, keyhole surgery and other techniques, more people are being kept in hospital for shorter periods. Therefore, even were the population to double over a period, the number of bed spaces needed might be only 600, not 800—an increase, but not a doubling.

I therefore have some reservations about the crudity with which the Bill operates at some levels, which might cause some difficulty. That does not mean, however, that it is not worthy of debating in Committee. One good reason it is worthy of such debate is that it would show the paucity of some of the Government’s action in the past.

The hon. Member for Worsley (Barbara Keeley) mentioned the definition of “significant”. I hope that I have pronounced her constituency name correctly, as Members are always mispronouncing my constituency’s name—it was mispronounced earlier. The Bill refers to 150 houses as “significant”. My background is in architecture, and one does not have to be bright to work out that if “significant” is 150 houses, a developer looking to build 300 houses would build 298. He would build 149 now, which he would get through without the additional burden. A couple of years later, as he had land-banked the land—given the size of the development, one does not build 300 houses in one go anyway—he would put in another application for a further 149 houses. He would therefore get round that definition a second time. That difficulty and failure would need to be addressed, but that does not mean that it is not an important thing that should be tackled.

My constituency is beautiful—from Widecombe in the Moor, across lots of Dartmoor, to rural coastal towns. The building of 150 houses in Widecombe in the Moor would be devastating. Developers would never get consent from the national park authority anyway, but the principle of the argument is that far fewer houses would be significant in such areas in their impact on doctors’ surgeries, on roads—the roads are narrow and Devon banks are very high—and on other parts of the infrastructure. A far more flexible approach would be required.

I come to the next stage of the problem in how we deal with the planning process. Part of the difficulty is that many of the services have been privatised. By their nature, such services will respond only once there is a market. Therefore, water companies will by and large look at resolving the problem after demand has been created. In some cases they do not even do that, which is why Thames Water is getting itself into hot water, as it were. We have to find a way—special planning begins the process—to get the infrastructure in place before construction or at the same time.

That cuts across—without digressing too far—much Government thinking in other areas. Very often, funds from the closure of a care home, for instance, will be used for another facility, but the care home is closed before the funds are made available and the other facility is not provided for two years. Exactly the same applies in planning. We cannot leave a gap of two years between the creation of the need and the construction of the road, the extra water supply, hospital or school.

The hon. Member for Wealden criticised the Government’s proposal to change section 106 agreements. Let us be clear: section 106 agreements are a form of bribery. A developer comes along and says, “Right, I want to build 150 houses. What do you want—a new school, a new link road?” That is how it works. Small parishes might really want a new school and somebody might come along and say, “I know that you really don’t want 150 houses; you only want about 50. But you allow us to build 150 and we’ll build you a new school.” That is the reality in this country and that is why getting rid of 106 agreements is an exceedingly good idea.

I have reservations, too. The idea that the funding will go into a pot and move out of the local authority is deeply worrying. I would like to be assured that there is some way of getting that money back into the community to pay for infrastructure. I am somewhere between the two: I am not convinced of the Government’s proposal, but I know that the way in which 106 agreements work at the moment is deeply flawed.

On the point about 106 agreements, does the hon. Gentleman agree that many local authorities do not use their powers effectively and that sometimes they agree to housing developments without taking account of implications for school places five, seven or 10 years down the line?

The hon. Gentleman makes a valid point; local authorities often do not take such things into account. A developer in my constituency said following the process, “Cor! They were a soft touch. We would have put in twice as much money if they had asked us.” The system relies on the skilled negotiations of the planning department in extracting as much money as possible. Planners are good at spatial design; we do not train them to be negotiators and to extract money from developers. That is not part of what they are taught at college.

Comments have been made on the intentions behind the Bill. In neither the opening remarks of the hon. Member for Wealden nor the speech made by the hon. Member for Mid-Sussex (Mr. Soames) did I find one hint of nimbyism. Perhaps some local authorities would use the Bill for nimbyism, but existing legislation is used for that purpose. However, to accuse the hon. Gentlemen of that is to do a disservice to them and to the Bill. For my part, I think that the Bill has some merit. Sadly, I doubt that it will get much further, but it has given rise to an interesting debate and raises serious issues that the Government need to tackle.

As an MP from the north-east of England, I wish that we had some of the problems that have been identified in the south-east—too much work, too many people wanting to live in the area, too much investment. If we had some of those problems, I might share some of the views that have been expressed today.

I live in a village that was the epitome of a sustainable community. It was a mining community that was first developed in the early 1820s, when a local colliery was sunk. They started building houses in 1832: the houses were part and parcel of the job of the miners and remained so for the next 150 years, becoming part of the village scene. Not only were there houses that working people lived in, but the miners’ union developed houses for retired miners who had been thrown out on the streets when they finished working so that they could remain in the community. The people developed parks, sanatoriums, welfare systems, football fields, cricket clubs and brass bands. It was the epitome of a sustainable economy—sorry, a sustainable community; it was anything but a sustainable economy.

Unfortunately, everything changed when the Thatcher Government, in their wisdom, decided that it was a good idea to do away with this country’s indigenous coal industry. As a direct consequence, they destroyed thousands of homes and hundreds of communities throughout the country—homes that were valuable to the people who lived in them but that, unfortunately, had no real value on the property market. They were in areas where there was no work and people had no interest in moving there; they continued to be lived in by people who could not afford to move out because the houses had no market value. Eventually people did move out, or elderly people moved into homes or, sadly, died in their home, and the local authorities brought in people that they could not house elsewhere. That led to a spiral of despair: drugs, burglary, petty crime and violence sucked the life out of the communities.

Now, houses are being pulled down and we need new ones. We need new houses in a way that we have not needed them before. We do not need restrictions or any form of nimbyism to prevent the development that we need. We want high-quality, environmentally sound houses that our young people can afford to buy and live in. We do not want obstacles such as the ones that we faced when we were younger put in the way of positive, quality developments for the people of the future.

We in the north-east do not have some of the other problems that have been identified today. We have a plentiful water supply, mainly because we developed resources such as the Kielder reservoir. It was created to help the steel industry and the coal industry in the north-east, but in the 1980s, the Tory Government decided that they did not want to use British coal to keep the steel industry going; they bought Polish coal instead. As a result, we have a reservoir with underground links to three main rivers, but the water is not needed except for public consumption. We do not have the problem that affects the south-east, so why should we in the north-east be subjected to the limitations that the Bill would impose?

We do need infrastructure development. We need investment in new roads, we need our railways infrastructure to be built up and we need more and better housing. We are seeing quality development in houses and businesses across the north-east, but we want more. Obstacles are being thrown up in certain areas, with people saying that they do not want building in their area because they think that they have enough. That is nimbyism and it is not helpful. What my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford, South (Mike Gapes) said was nimbyism, clearly is. It may be a sophisticated term and I am not the man to ask about sophistication, but it is clear that, if the Bill goes through as it stands, we will have a situation in which a private company can say, “We aren’t satisfied that we can deliver in the way that you are asking us to.” To me, that is a built-in veto.

If private companies such as Thames Water cannot produce enough water for the people of the area to use, why should we allow them to dictate the system and stop development? I have just moved into this area. I have bought a flat in Wandsworth common. I am told that I need to go carefully with my water. I am paying for it, so why should I go carefully with it? Twenty years ago, those people were allowed to take control of our public water supply—helped by investment from the Government. We were told that part of the deal—the reason we were giving control to the private companies—was that those people would develop the infrastructure, look after us and make sure that we had water, without any problems. That is not the case.

What is Thames Water doing to improve my water supply? Is it fixing the leaks? Is it employing mechanics and engineers to dig the roads up and put the leaks right? It has put adverts in the newspapers and on billboards to say, “This is how much more water we will provide for the next 10 years.” There are adverts featuring Battersea power station and other buildings in London. Those adverts say, “This is how much water we will save.” Instead of talking about it, Thames Water should get on with it. It has had 20 years to get on with it and unfortunately it has not succeeded.

It is clear that one of the drives behind water privatisation was that promise, and that promise is not being delivered. Why, then, should we allow those people to say to us, “We aren’t satisfied that we can deliver. Therefore we will block what has been suggested.” Those involved in running the sewage system can do the same, as can the Environment Agency and the people who get rid of our waste. In the area where I live, there are massive issues about waste disposal. There are already big planning arguments involving companies such as Sita which have long-standing contracts in our area to fill up old quarries and mine shafts. They are having massive planning arguments under present legislation. Why should we give them another veto so that they can say, “We are not satisfied, therefore this cannot go forward.”? That is not right or proper. That may not be the intention of the Bill, but I am convinced that it is how some people will use it.

The difference between what happens now and what is proposed is that, at present, any developer has to consult certain bodies. It has to say to people who provide waste systems, sewerage, water and power, “Can you deliver for us?” and they can say yea or nay. What they cannot do, and what the Bill will mean they can do, is say, “We aren’t satisfied we can do it, therefore you can’t move forward.” That is what we will end up with. Lectures from the Conservatives, who sold off social housing and then refused to build more houses to replace it, do not in any way enamour me of taking lessons from them on providing sustainable communities and decent-quality affordable housing for our young people. That is what this is about.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

No, I will not, because the hon. Gentleman would not give way to me.

One of the questions that the hon. Gentleman raised was, how can we save water? Well, we could say to some of the millionaires in the south-east, “Why don’t you turn your swimming pool into a sandpit?” That could go a long way towards saving some of the water that we need. The clear intention in the Bill is nimbyism. The intention is to stop things moving forward and to block the development of quality housing in a particular area. That will have a massive impact on the rest of the country and that should not be allowed.

We have had an excellent debate. I hope that the Bill can now move quickly to Committee. I commend it to the House.

I certainly agree with the hon. Gentleman that it has been an interesting debate, but we have had a lot of bluster about proposals that would add absolutely nothing to the processes that we already have in place.

My hon. Friend the Member for Ilford, South (Mike Gapes) rightly said that the Bill amounts to sophisticated nimbyism. The current planning processes and the regional spatial strategies, linked with the local development framework, do everything that the Bill sets out to do. The hon. Member for Mid-Sussex (Mr. Soames) is completely wrong to say that there are no provisions for consultation with relevant organisations and with local and strategic health authorities.

It being half-past Two o’clock, the debate stood adjourned.

Debate to be resumed on Friday 20 October.

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On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Earlier this week, as you may recall, I won the sympathy of Mr. Speaker when I complained about the tardy approach of the Home Office to making available documents due for debate in the House of Commons. I draw your attention to the fact that, in business questions yesterday, we were told that on Thursday 25 July the main business would be a motion to approve the Terrorism Act (Proscribed Organisations) (Amendment) Order 2006.

I came to the House this morning to obtain the order and any related documents, so that I could study them with other people this weekend, because the issue is important. That document is not available in either the Vote Office or the Journal Office; indeed, they have not seen the order at all, as it has not been tabled. That might not be breaking the rules of the House—I understand that, in theory, it can be done right up to the eleventh hour—but it is the convention of the House to allow two weekends between the publication of major legislation to make it available to hon. Members and its being debated. The order is not a Bill, but nevertheless it is an important piece of legislation. It is not unreasonable for the House of Commons to expect from the Home Office at least one weekend in which to study the order. I am desperately anxious, as this is not a one-off incident. Twice in one week, the Home Office has shown a blatant disregard for individual hon. Members—even if it is not fit for purpose, they wish to be fit for purpose—who wish to provide scrutiny and accountability, and who wish to study and prepare for legislation.

My final word—this is a serious point—is that although the Whips expect me to support the order, lemming-like, next week, I have not had an opportunity to study it or take cognisance of its contents. I personally think that that is outrageous, and I hope that you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and perhaps Mr. Speaker, will intimate a similar view—in your way, of course, which is not quite the same as mine—to the Home Office. We cannot go on like this, because it makes what we do in the House a charade.

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving notice of his point of order. I have asked for inquiries to be made, and I have been informed that the order will be laid on Monday, although I regret that that means that the hon. Gentleman will not have the opportunity of reading it this weekend. It will be in the Vote Office on Monday, and his comments are, of course, on the record.

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. May I ask your advice as the guardian of the rights of Back Benchers against the overweening power of the Executive? There have been two examples today of the Executive exerting their power to crush the right of Back Benchers to raise the vital issues of the environment and social justice as they bear on housing and planning development. First, in the course of debate on the Infrastructure Audit (Housing Development) Bill, which was introduced by my right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (Mr. Maude), one speech lasted more than 25 minutes and another more than 45 minutes. Those speeches were made by hon. Members whose constituencies were not directly affected by the provisions of the Bill. The Bill had extensive support and backing, and I exercised forbearance in my own speech to try to ensure that the Bill would reach Committee. Unfortunately, the Minister—

Order. The hon. Gentleman has made his point. There was nothing in the course of the debate that was disorderly. I must therefore ask him to resume his seat, rather than continue the debate on Second Reading.

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Is it reasonable, when Ministers have intimated their personal support for my Bill, that the Whip on the Government Front Bench objected to a Bill that his colleagues have supported?

Among the many duties that the occupant of the Chair has, one of them is not to judge what is or is not reasonable.

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for allowing me the opportunity to raise an urgent and pressing matter on behalf of my constituents.

Peterborough has an excellent record of harmonious community relations, having evolved from a relatively small cathedral city of about 48,000 citizens after the second world war with an economy based on engineering, the railways and agriculture, to a diverse cosmopolitan city of about 160,000 people, according to the 2001 census. Although manufacturing has declined, service industries such as insurance and finance, retailing, transportation, warehousing and distribution have expanded significantly since 1991. Recently, the city has been an urban hub for agriculture and food processing.

The decency and tolerance of local people are marked by their willingness to welcome newcomers over the years: refugees from poverty and oppression, such as the Italian community to work on the Fletton brickworks after the war, Irish immigrants to work on the railways, and Pakistanis and especially Kashmiris in the 1960s and early 1970s. The latter are now third generation Peterborians and they contribute hugely to the business and civic life of the city of Peterborough.

Although the Pakistani community could be said by some to be socially insular, we have rarely seen the social antagonism, resentment and communal violence witnessed in other cities and towns in England, such as Oldham, Burnley and Bradford, between the white working class and Asian youth. Indeed, the Pakistani community is well led and moderate in its political outlook. It is proud of its historical heritage, well educated and politically engaged and values its hard won place as an integral part of the host community.

For instance, Pakistani residents make up 60 per cent. of the population of the Central ward. Across the whole of the unitary authority area, the non-white population is over 10 per cent. It is appropriate to add that the city also contains three wards in the bottom 250 most deprived wards in England—Central, Dogsthorpe and East wards—and has a male life expectancy four years lower than that of Cambridge, as well as higher rates for infant mortality, teenage pregnancy, heart disease and strokes than the eastern region and England and Wales as a whole.

A series of events began in the 1997 Parliament that has jeopardised Peterborough’s enviable record as an exemplar of middle England accepting and embracing change for the common good. In 2000, Peterborough was designated a dispersal centre by the Home Office and the National Asylum Support Service. It was decreed without any proper consultation with the people of Peterborough or their elected representatives that the city should receive 80 per cent. of all the asylum seekers and their families dispersed to the eastern region. Despite efforts by officers of the city council, elected Members and others, including my predecessor in the House, the actual number of asylum seekers in Peterborough was never quantified and was the subject of Government obfuscation, with the frequent citing of commercially sensitive contracts with private sector housing contractors such as Clearsprings as a pretext to hide the true picture.

In December 2004, the official figure for the number of asylum seekers in Peterborough was 255, which was still more than the figures for Luton, Norwich and Ipswich. However, sources within Peterborough city council estimated that the figure was much higher—perhaps as high as 4,000. For no discernible reason other than self-interest, the unaccountable and unelected members of the East of England regional assembly colluded with that official deceit, much to their discredit. Other agencies such as the police and local health bodies preferred to take the path of least resistance rather than speaking out, either because of political correctness or because of collective cowardice. Predictably and contemptibly, any attempt to debate the policy in a rational and reasoned way was met with the cry of “Racism” to close down the debate.

The issues of immigration and asylum, as well as crime, quickly reached the top of the political agenda in the Peterborough constituency, which played a major part in costing the Labour party the parliamentary seat at last year’s general election. Many people were affronted by the high-handed decision by central Government and the lack of consultation. That said, there was a consensus across the political spectrum that community cohesion was at risk if the city council and local taxpayers were not financially assisted to deal with assimilation and integration and the burden they were placing on council tax payers. The then Home Office Minister, who is now Secretary of State for Defence, correctly surmising the gravity of the situation, made this pledge in the Peterborough Evening Telegraph on 15 December 2004:

“The fact of the matter is that any charge asylum seekers place on local authorities, we in Central Government will meet.”

After prolonged lobbying by the city council and other key stakeholders, such as the greater Peterborough primary care partnership and Cambridgeshire constabulary, the Government agreed in November 2004 to fund through the Treasury’s invest to save budget the establishment of the new link project, which was set up under the auspices of the city council’s asylum and migration service in Lincoln road in the Millfield area of Peterborough. It involved the amalgamation of nine key projects undertaken by seven voluntary and statutory agencies and was designed to help the integration of not only asylum seekers, but refugees and economic migrants. The scheme was awarded £2.2 million over three years to develop key projects in areas such access to information and training, volunteering, citizenship, English language courses, mediation, translation services, setting up community groups and research on new arrivals and cohesion.

At the outset, I was a sceptic about new link, but I am a pragmatist. My view is that it was necessary to support the work of new link to safeguard the long-term harmony and stability of my constituency and to prevent the resentment and alienation felt justifiably by many of my constituents against Government policy, which, incidentally, resulted in a candidate standing at the general election as “National Front—Britons not Refugees” receiving 931 votes at last year’s election.

I was also impressed by the leadership of the project’s manager, Leonie McCarthy, and her team at new link and by the experiences of some of their clients. Leonie has worked hard to make the most of a difficult situation and has steered clear of political controversy, preferring practical action to political posturing.

Some weeks ago, I was privileged to visit new link and launch the website of the newly established Peterborough African community association, which is a confederation of people from 18 African countries. I met its chairman, Dan Cissikho, an asylum seeker who was originally from Senegal, who is working hard to integrate new African residents in the city as a community leader and using his practical skills, which he obtained while running an IT business in his homeland, in order to help others.

The local police have also praised the work of new link. In particular, they have pointed out that its ongoing work helps to release scarce police resources, which are decreasing, to concentrate on other major crime problems in the city. In the jargon, new link is defined as “part of the complex Social Cohesion jigsaw” in Peterborough. Its work was recently recognised in the UK housing awards 2005, where it won an award for excellence in promoting community cohesion.

Do I applaud the Government funding? The answer is yes. Do I think that our work on community cohesion is finished? No, I do not. As we all know, every silver lining has a cloud. I intend to tell the House why I think that two policy decisions taken by this Government, discrete but interrelated, have the potential to destroy all the good work that new link has achieved since November 2004, and potentially to plunge Peterborough into a state of social dislocation and even civil strife, and to create a breeding ground for the emergence of the plausible racist bigots in the shape of the British National party.

Despite significant evidence that the work undertaken by new link is both valuable and cost-effective—that was its raison d’être—and vital to maintaining community cohesion, the Government intend to end all invest to save funding for the project from March 2007. The Government envisaged across-the-board savings of £5 million on its £2.2 million investment. There is the important work in areas such as community development, training, learning, information and assistance. If that work is to continue, most of the burden will thereafter fall on the hard-pressed city council tax payers. A sum of certainly £1 million will be necessary to keep the work going.

Despite tabling half a dozen parliamentary written questions to Ministers over the past 12 months, I have yet to receive even the basic rationale for this short-sighted decision, which effectively will terminate one of the most successful projects of its sort in the UK. The Government seem to have closed their mind to any debate on this issue. The Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Nationality advised me on 19 June that there were no plans to discuss invest to save projects with local authorities or other key stakeholders. He added that there were

“no current plans to visit any Invest to Save Budget (ISB) projects or to make a statement.”—[Official Report, 19 June 2006; Vol. 447, c. 1677W.]

I assume that the Government are proceeding on the basis of an essentially false premise, which is that the sticking plaster of 2004 is no longer needed and that the problem of potential community conflict has gone away. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are enormous potential problems brewing in Peterborough.

In the summer of 2004, tensions between Portuguese youths and the Pakistani community boiled over into small-scale violence in the Gladstone street area. A further conflagration was avoided only by the quick deployment of the Cambridgeshire police. Recently, there have been problems between the significant Kurdish population in Peterborough, many of whom are asylum seekers or failed asylum seekers, and other ethnic groups.

That brings me to the substance of the debate. The second Government policy that puts the diverse community in my constituency at risk of major social disorder is a result of inadequate funding for delivering basic local government services. There was the decision alone by the UK, unlike any of the major economies in the EU, not to impose any restriction on migration to the UK after 1 May 2004 of members of the EU accession countries—namely, Cyprus, Poland, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Malta, Lithuania, Slovakia and Slovenia.

The Prime Minister predicted that only 13,000 such workers would travel to the UK and that the bulk of them would return after a short stay. That was a massive underestimate. Even the Government now admit that more than 400,000 eastern European workers have come to the UK since May 2004. That is 15 times the official prediction.

Those figures are based on information provided by the workers’ registration scheme, a scheme that the respected Centre for Research on Nationalism, Ethnicity and Multiculturalism at the university of Surrey found likely to account for 36 per cent. fewer than the true number of migrants, giving a more indicative figure of 600,000 eastern Europeans having migrated to the UK in the past two years.

There is substantial evidence, too, that large numbers of migrants bypass the need to register with the workers registration scheme, due to its cost and bureaucracy. The problem with such an unprecedented and arguably unsustainably high level of immigration is that it affects relatively few areas, which are usually urban and outside London. As it stands, the workers registration scheme is largely irrelevant in terms of immigration and border control.

Currently, no checks are made on the health of migrants, their language skills and other skills, or whether they have criminal records. Indeed, the UK decided not to participate in a European Union scheme, begun in May, to share criminal records data across a number of EU countries. In addition, how can we ensure that we recruit highly skilled workers who will make a vital contribution to the UK economy? The answer to that is: we cannot.

It would take another Adjournment debate to analyse fully the folly of this Government’s immigration and asylum policy. However, I want to focus on the impact on Slough—as well as on Peterborough, of course. I mention Slough because it is experiencing precisely the same problems as we are in Peterborough, but its situation is better documented, in no small measure as a result of the brave and principled stance of the borough’s chief executive, Cheryl Coppell. That information gets to the heart of the ways in which unrestricted immigration can have a huge impact on a small geographical area, and on its social mix and economy—especially on the funding available for its local services, heavily dependent as they are on central Government support.

Reasonably, Slough is challenging official statistics showing that it had a net loss of 3,000 people in the 12 months before 2003-04. Indeed, 9,000 new national insurance numbers have been issued there in the last year. It maintains, as do I, that the methodology for measuring population is outdated and inaccurate. Anecdotally—of necessity—Slough borough council officials maintain that there are 10,000 new Polish residents in the borough, taking advantage of the economic activities in the Thames valley and the supply of cheaper housing in the town.

Peterborough is in a very similar position, especially as it is a regional hub for agriculture, horticulture and food processing and packaging. According to some estimates at the East of England regional assembly, the number of post-May 2004 migrants from eastern Europe is 16,000—that is in a city of 160,000 people. Yet official statistics state that the number of migrants in Peterborough had fallen by 150 in the 12 months to mid-2004. That would be a moot point, were our funding not so inextricably tied to population statistics, and in particular to the Office for National Statistics population estimates and projections.

How can the Government contradict that anecdotal figure? They cannot, as they simply have no idea of the extent of migration to, and within, the UK. The independent Statistics Commission has recently written to Ministers—including the Minister for Policing, Security and Community Safety and the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs—to express its concern at the inaccuracy of population statistics. However, the Department for Communities and Local Government has refused to act on the matter.

A letter from Karen Dunnell, the national statistician, which was placed in the House of Commons Library in May 2006, stated:

“There is now a broad recognition that available estimates of migrant numbers are inadequate for managing economy, policies and services”.

Glen Watson, director of social reporting and analysis at the ONS, has conceded that at present data on migrant statistics is “limited”. Although the ONS has set up a task force on migration statistics, it is unlikely to report for a number of months, and it certainly will not be ready to report in time for the local government financial settlement for 2007-08, to be fixed later this year. Regrettably, without help from central Government, local authorities such as Slough and Peterborough are forced to commission their own research to support their contention that they require extra help as a result of a Government policy over which they have no control, and which costs them scarce and irrecoverable public funds.

What are the problems in practical terms? The Home Office community cohesion panel, which was set up in the wake of disturbances in northern cities in 2001, reported in July 2004. In its document entitled “The End of Parallel Lives”, it stated, inter alia, that

“inward migration does create tensions and these do not necessarily revolve around race. It is easier for affluent communities to be tolerant towards newcomers as they do not perceive them to be a threat...by contrast, many disadvantaged communities are in competition for scarce resources and public services, such as housing and social services. These fears cannot be disregarded.”

Furthermore, it stated:

“there are…concerns about the speed at which newcomers can be accommodated. Housing, education, health and other services all take time to expand…The identity of the host community will be challenged and they need sufficient time to come to terms with and accommodate incoming groups, regardless of their ethnic origin”.

Those words could have been written about the Millfield and New England areas of Peterborough, which were hitherto settled and peaceful, if not affluent, but are now at the centre of mass migration. Those areas are not alone in their progressive degradation. They are becoming run down and ghettoised. They are scruffy and more threatening, especially to older people. They have a massively increased number of houses in multiple occupation, with many properties housing eight, 10 or even more eastern European workers. Such people are on the minimum wage and prey to unscrupulous landlords and gangmasters. They are picking vegetables on the fens from 5 am so that they can send money back to their families in eastern Europe. Is that what we want for them, or for the economy of a great city—or indeed the UK? The streets are littered. Rubbish is dumped in back alleys, neighbour disputes are rife and established shops are closing.

The demand on public services grows each week. There are children at schools such as Dogsthorpe junior school and Beeches primary school who speak no English, but cannot be turned away. There are demands on housing in a city in which there are 6,000 people on the housing waiting list. There are demands on the police to keep disparate communities from conducting turf wars, which prevents them from tackling more routine crime. The police also face the growth of crimes such as drug dealing, casual violence, sex crimes and people trafficking. Resentment, anger and hostility is rising all the time in the host communities—white-British, Afro-Caribbean and Pakistani alike.

I know that the Minister wants to speak, but I will cite some quotes from just a few people on one street in the Millfield area. One person talks about

“Gangs outside our houses … talking and shouting to each other until very late every night”.

Another person says:

“We all realise we have to live together as peacefully as possible but the disrespect and upheaval these Czech and Slovak families are causing is putting a number of local residents to breaking point.”

A further person says:

“When I first moved into the area it was relatively peaceful…but in the last 6 months it has become unbearable to live here.”

Another person says:

“I have a disabled child and the noise and disturbance is causing myself and my family real problems.”

I would like to say that Peterborough city council has acted with the determination and alacrity of Slough borough council, but that is not the case. Unfortunately, the city council neglected to take part in the December 2005 consultation on the sub-regional population projections for England. It is only now preparing to commission its own research, but it is keen to collaborate with authorities in similar situations. With the exception of Councillors Charles Swift and Keith Sharp, who represent the city’s North ward, few local councillors have spoken out. Despite having strong leadership at elected member and officer level, a combination of ignorance and inertia has led the city council to make the belated and palpably underestimated guess that only 700 more international migrants now reside in Peterborough than were projected last year, but, of course, it does not really know.

I will conclude now to allow the Minister to make her comments, although there is more to say. We need the new link project to continue its work. It is needed now more than ever before, so to disband it or dissipate its work would be an act of community vandalism. I hope that Ministers will realise the consequences of their decision on EU migrants prior to May 2004, and the impact that that is having on a small number of localities in respect of the funding of local services and the social dislocation that it is causing. They should do something about the problem. Ministers can help to stave off the pernicious attractions and opportunism of the racist right, with its easy solutions and vicious bigotry, or they can sit back and risk another Oldham or Burnley. I hope and trust that the Government, in the interests of my constituents and the whole community, will make the right choice.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Peterborough (Mr. Jackson) on the securing the debate. However, I must say that the purpose of an Adjournment debate is to get a response from a member of the Government on a specific issue—and unfortunately I will not be able to respond to him as fully as I had hoped, because he has left me very little time.

A cohesive community is one in which there is a common vision and sense of belonging for everyone, and in which the diversity of people’s different backgrounds and circumstances is appreciated and positively valued. In such a community those from different backgrounds have similar life opportunities, and strong and positive relationships develop between people from different backgrounds in the work place, in schools and within neighbourhoods.

The Government’s strategy to increase race equality and community cohesion, “Improving Opportunity, Strengthening Society”, is designed to help ensure that people are not discriminated against because of their race or religion and that all can make a contribution to our society. It includes specific goals to reduce perceptions of discrimination in a wide range of public services, reduce employment inequalities and monitor the progress of minority ethnic communities across major public services from education to housing.

Community cohesion can be linked to race issues, but not exclusively. Barriers to community cohesion are formed through different cultures, lifestyles and beliefs. The Government know that community cohesion should be at the heart of regeneration policies locally. They believe that strong and positive relationships between people from different backgrounds are built within neighbourhoods and communities through bottom-up approaches, which devolve power from central to local government, and from local government to its citizens and communities. The Government’s “Together We Can” action plan is another way in which we hope that the relationship between citizens and public bodies can be transformed.

Moving on specifically to issues in Peterborough and Cambridgeshire, if we look at Government policy in the round, the amount of funding targeted at community cohesion and regeneration is considerable. The neighbourhood renewal fund, for example, was worth more than £1.875 billion between 2001 and 2006, with a further £525 million to 2008. Other funding has been made available, but the hon. Gentleman has not left me sufficient time to go into all that.

Peterborough is one of 100 areas in receipt of the neighbourhood element funding allocated to areas that include the 3 per cent. most disadvantaged communities nationally, to which the hon. Gentleman referred. The funding is worth £1.6 million to the Greater Dogsthorpe area of Peterborough over the next four years.

The Government’s community cohesion pathfinder programme was designed to place the pursuit of mutual understanding and the creation of common ground between communities at the heart of community development. It involved 14 local partnerships, including Peterborough, and between April 2003 and September 2004, each local area was awarded £285,000 to pioneer approaches to cohesion. An £18 million connecting communities plus grants programme forms part of our strategy and it provides funding for activities that encourage race equality and community cohesion. That funding follows on from two rounds of the Home Office’s race equality grant scheme, which ran between 2000 and 2006 and included funding of £104,000 to Peterborough race equality council to develop a “Positive Images” project. Furthermore, £7.5 million in funding was awarded this financial year to 578 faith-based groups. The hon. Gentleman really must concede that the Government have given considerable resources to organisations in and around Peterborough to promote work that will benefit community cohesion.

Let me deal specifically with the invest to save budgets and the new link project. There have been eight rounds of invest to save budgets, which is a joint Treasury/Cabinet Office initiative with the aim of creating sustainable improvements in the capacity to deliver public services in a more joined-up manner. Details of round 9 of the invest to save budget will be announced shortly, but it is expected to focus on the voluntary and community sector’s role in building fairer communities and the delivery of public services.

Peterborough’s invest to save bid under round 8, which is worth £1.5 million of the total project cost of £2.2 million, includes the development of a new link, new arrivals partnership. New link provides an integrated network of service providers, statutory agencies and support workers to ensure the successful integration of new arrivals in the city. It is already perceived as a success. The innovative work undertaken here has won awards nationally. We are currently supporting the project management team in establishing its strategy for long-term sustainability of the services provided in the public, voluntary and community sectors.

The purpose of invest to save is in its title. It is not meant to be an ongoing funding stream. Too often, public sector organisations cannot adjust their services to meet changing demand, such as that that the hon. Gentleman outlined in Peterborough, because all their resources are tied up in meeting ongoing demand. The schemes are put together to enable organisations to invest funds in changing their services with a clear plan to save on budgets in the future.

The Government’s commitment to assist Peterborough to tackle community cohesion also includes financial support to establish a post of community cohesion manager, based with the Greater Peterborough partnership, and the first permanent post holder in that role took up post in May.

We will work with the Government office for the east of England to identify additional cohesion projects in the regions, including in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, for support from the Department for Communities and Local Government this financial year.

I had a great deal more to say. The East of England Development Agency recognises that, despite contributing more than £360 million to the economy of the east of England, migrant workers continue to face barriers that prevent them from making full use of their skills—

The motion having been made after half-past Two o’clock, and the debate having continued for half an hour, Madam Deputy Speaker adjourned the House without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.

Adjourned at ten minutes past Three o’clock.