Pension Schemes Bill

Debate between Crispin Blunt and Mark Field

Tuesday 2nd September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Crispin Blunt]

I will take advantage of your invitation, Mr Deputy Speaker. I am not suggesting anything other than that the guidance is incredibly important—frankly, it needs to be closer to advice than guidance in its scale if it is to ensure that people are properly equipped to make such very difficult and complex choices—but I am concerned by the suggestion that the levy will be directed at firms that will benefit, whereas we want a competitive market which highly entrepreneurial firms that can put together new products will enter to win business from people who have left their money sitting or have not moved it, and who take annuities from existing providers and the rest. There is a dichotomy there.

[Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend give way? [Laughter.]

Infrastructure (Financial Assistance) Bill

Debate between Crispin Blunt and Mark Field

Monday 15th October 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Blunt]

I am extremely grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his customary self-criticism and generosity.

The Minister must give us the necessary clarity. I note that the right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr Raynsford) has tabled an amendment on housing schemes that would add the words “of national significance”—or words to that effect. It is at that point that alarm bells start ringing for me, as the Member for Reigate, a constituency wholly within the metropolitan green belt. We have had a significant increase in housing, particularly through infill but also through new housing schemes that were agreed and supported by the local authority, and there has been development in parts of Redhill, but that has actually led to a shortage of infrastructure to support the people in that housing.

We desperately need two new primary schools locally, and then there is the small matter of the M23 never being finished. In these circumstances, when we are looking for capital schemes, it might be rather nice if the M23, several decades later, was finally finished properly where it joins the A23. In addition to the schemes that the Government will come forward with, which I anticipate will be announced in the expenditure statement, I hope that we can begin to look at some of the schemes that have been around for a long time and that these funding mechanisms will help to enable expenditure on them to take place.

I am seeking the same level of reassurance that my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham seeks. I have the same implicit trust that he has in the ability of the Economic Secretary and the team of Treasury Ministers to manage these things satisfactorily, but Parliament is owed proper accountability on this.

I am concerned that we will find housing schemes, particularly those of national significance, being imposed in the way they were under previous regional development strategies, with housing numbers simply being cascaded down from Whitehall to the regions, to the counties and then to local authorities, such as mine, in a way that leaves the borough councillors, as owners of the planning policy, completely unable to do anything other than mitigate the consequences. They have never been in the position that we, as a localist Government, want them to be in, in which they can judge between the economic and social need for housing locally and the environmental consequences of such development. Those are the balances that local authorities are there to draw.

The Bill will suddenly enable a substantially greater amount of new expenditure to take place, but where is the link with the rhetoric about planning policy? I just want to raise that concern, as I did on Second Reading. I do not want the financial provisions set out in the Bill to be combined with planning policy debates that take place elsewhere, and then suddenly find that in constituencies such as mine the powers of local representatives are being overridden in some rush to develop housing, which by no stretch of the imagination is infrastructure in the proper sense of the word.

[Mark Field]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the experience of the past 15 years is that there has been very little cascading down, despite all the intentions to build new housing? Is he perhaps becoming over-concerned that the inclusion of housing as one of the infrastructure heads might mean that only a number of housing schemes—relatively small ones; not necessarily national housing schemes—become the shovel-ready schemes that the Treasury is looking to encourage given that some of the other heads might mean that considerably more time is required before anything is built?

[Mr Blunt]

That is fine, but the borough councillors of Reigate of Banstead, as the planning authority, have a mandate from their local electors and they are perfectly capable of making decisions about the requirements for housing in the area and to weigh up the competing factors. That is the mandate they enjoy from local people and, as far as I am concerned, there is no need for the view that the gentleman in Whitehall knows best. If there is going to be a wider economic case for building, it needs to be made with great clarity. If that needs to be done with infrastructure of major national significance, there are bound to be occasions when local interests will have to be overridden in the wider national interest. As far as housing is concerned, the arguments are certainly significantly weaker in that regard than they are for actual national infrastructure, the benefits of which we will enjoy for decades to come. If we have too much jerry-built housing, we will then have to live with the environmental consequences for generations.