Green Belt (England)

Debate between Anna Soubry and Nigel Mills

Tuesday 18th October 2011 Westminster Hall

[Anna Soubry]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I am sure the Minister has heard his comments, and he will no doubt respond in his speech. However, I wish to bring my remarks to an end.

[Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con)]

My hon. Friend and neighbour and I are separated by some green belt, which perhaps gives us both an incentive to protect it even more. Before she winds up her powerful remarks, however, may I direct her to another comment in the draft planning policy framework, which says the advantage of the green belt is that it assists urban regeneration by encouraging the recycling of derelict land? Does she agree that before anyone even thinks of taking the easy option of taking away some beautiful green fields, they should tackle some of the problem contaminated brownfield sites we all have in our constituencies, which are not used? Moving those sites back into use would be a far more effective way of proceeding.

[Anna Soubry]

As ever, my hon. Friend makes a brilliant point, and I am grateful to have him as my neighbour, with or without any green belt that may separate us. He makes an important point, which my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) may hear, about the value of sustainable development, which is not just about building more homes: it is much more than that. It is about bringing jobs and enhancing the environment. That may mean clearing up sites, as my hon. Friend the Member for Amber Valley (Nigel Mills) said, so that homes may be built, or business be generated or regenerated. There are many sites, such as the Stanton works, with which my hon. Friend and I are familiar, where hundreds if not thousands of people once worked. We need that imaginative approach, which lies at the heart of sustainable development as defined in the framework and identified in the Localism Act 2011.

I suspect that what is happening in my constituency is not unique, and that is something that concerns us all.

[Anna Soubry]

I completely agree with that helpful intervention. We need a revolution, in the best sense of the word, in the way we provide the new homes that so many people want, without damaging the environment: on the contrary, we can enhance it as we provide those homes. However, we must continue to protect the green belt, because of its special features.

[Nigel Mills]

I want to ask my hon. Friend a question that I know is of concern to her as well as me, about the impact of open-cast mining on the green belt. Last week, sadly, an application for open-cast mining in the area of Smalley in my constituency was approved by Derbyshire county council. Does my hon. Friend agree that homes are not the only problem that threatens the green belt? There are also the despoiling open-cast coal mines, which, instead of dealing with contaminated land that needs to be cleaned up, merely rip up green fields. We should have protection from those.

[Anna Soubry]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. Paragraph 145 of the draft national planning policy framework unfortunately includes mineral extraction—the very sort of open-cast mining that blights Amber Valley and sits hanging over my constituency, between Cossall and Trowell. The paragraph makes it clear that such works are not necessarily inappropriate in green belt land. I respectfully suggest to the Government that they are wholly inappropriate in green belt land. I know that open-cast mines can be restored, and I therefore understand why they are in the paragraph, but in the short term—and, it could be argued, in the much longer term—they are scourges of the countryside. They are horrible open scars. Open-cast mining and green belt are irreconcilable. I hope that the Government will consider that paragraph and do all that they can to protect the green belt from open-cast mining.

I hope that the Minister will make it clear that the Government take the view that, as my hon. Friend the Member for High Peak (Andrew Bingham) said, local authorities do not have to accept the regional spatial strategy figures, and that they have the freedom and power to determine their own housing need. Planning policy statement 3 makes it clear that in determining housing need local authorities should take into account evidence of sustainable land. I may be wrong, and I hope for some clarification, but I believe that when a local authority considers its housing need it must take into account the land available to it—especially sustainable land. That means that it must consider its green belt. It cannot be the case that homes can be built on the scale in question in Broxtowe on green belt. It is not appropriate or compatible. It is imperative that councils consider the land available to them, and that if it is green belt land it is effectively a no-go area.

Having spoken to colleagues and others, I believe that there is a great danger that what is happening in Broxtowe will be allowed to take place in other parts of England, and that we need a transitional period to make sure that we protect our green belt before the Localism Act 2011 and the policy framework come into full effect. Currently many authorities are rushing through their local plans, ignoring the 2011 Act, the framework and the certainty provided by the statements made by the Prime Minister and many others that our green belt will continue to have special protection. What Broxtowe is doing presents a danger of a presumption in favour of development on green belt, which means it will be completely vulnerable to over-keen developers and heavy-handed councils.

I am grateful to have had the opportunity to speak for so long. It is the overwhelming desire of the hon. Members present, and others throughout the House—because it is the overwhelming view of the majority of people in this country, the constituents we represent—that the green belt should be considered special. It needs to be protected and enhanced, so that it is here not just for our generation but for generations yet to come.

Train-building Industry

Debate between Anna Soubry and Nigel Mills

Tuesday 12th July 2011 Westminster Hall

[Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gale. I shall try to be relatively brief on this important topic. I am grateful that we have the chance to debate and question the Minister on the future of the UK train-building industry, especially with reference to the recent award of preferred-bidder status for the Thameslink contract to the Siemens consortium, rather than the Bombardier one. It is of great interest to people in the whole Derby area, not least in my constituency of Amber Valley, that we get to the bottom of how the contract came to be awarded to a German rather than a UK-based manufacturer.

[Anna Soubry (Broxtowe) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate in what has been a very difficult time for Derby and Derbyshire. Does he agree that the decision also has an impact on constituencies such as mine, which are as far from Derby as I think Amber Valley is? It has had a profound effect and caused a lot of anger among my constituents, as well as, no doubt, my hon. Friend’s.

[Nigel Mills]

I am grateful for that intervention. I suspect that part of my constituency is a bit nearer to Derby than my hon. Friend’s, but I accept that we are all in the same area and that we have people who commute to work at the Bombardier plant and work in the many support industries in the area and who are threatened by the decision.

It is worth starting by saying that the area has a proud history with the railway industry, ranging back to the beginning of the industry in the early 19th century—I believe that production began in Derby in about 1839. The Midland Railway Centre is in my constituency. It is a tremendous attraction and I urge everyone to come to visit it, but the last thing we want is for our whole railway industry to become a museum. We want a thriving and growing train-building industry. We have had a thriving and growing train-building industry. Passenger numbers have been up year on year for ages and we expect that growth to continue. There is no reason why we cannot have a viable industry in the UK if the Government support it.

I want to cover two areas in my speech. The way to help to preserve and enhance the train-building industry would have been to give Bombardier the Thameslink contract in the first place. I want to talk about whether there is any way that the Government can still reconsider that decision. We are only at the preferred-bidder status stage and have not signed on the dotted line for the whole contract, so I think there is still scope for that to happen. I also want to look at how we can go forward in a better way to procure such contracts more sensibly, so that there is a level playing field and our only UK train-building company has a fair chance of winning contracts. That may not be how we see the current process.

The award of preferred-bidder status on the Thameslink contracts to the Siemens consortium rather than the Bombardier one has led many of my constituents to think that the Government have taken leave of their senses. We have rightly spent the past year talking about the need to focus on the manufacturing sector to provide the skilled jobs we need and to rebalance the economy away from London and the south-east. My constituents have told me that they thought that that meant the midlands and the north, not Germany.

The industry is very skilled, with a huge number of skilled jobs of exactly the kind that we want to attract. The award of this huge £1.4 billion contract to Siemens rather than Bombardier means that we are talking the talk, but not walking the walk. Frankly, my constituents cannot understand why we do not spend taxpayers’ money in a way that produces the overall best benefit to the economy of the UK as a whole and the Derby area. We now risk losing not only the 1,000-plus jobs at Bombardier, but the jobs in the supply chain, which are much harder to quantify at this stage.

My first question for the Minister is this: can the Government reconsider the decision? If not, would she help us to understand exactly why not? We know from Government answers and statements that their view in simple terms is that all they could do was open the submitted bids, compare them to the tender specifications drawn up by the previous Government, work out which one was the most economically advantageous and award the contract. The Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills has commented that the specifications were very narrowly defined and there was almost no doubt who would win.

We understand now that weighting for overall socio-economic considerations was not included in the specifications. Had that been included, it may have allowed the Government to take into account the overall impact of the job losses, the loss of tax revenues, the benefits they will need to pay out and the overall knock-on effect on the economy. We would all much rather that those things were included in the specifications. Can the Minister confirm that that weighting was not included in the contract?

Having realised that, did the Government consider restarting the whole process and saying, “We got the specifications wrong, and if we are to spend £1.4 billion of taxpayer and passenger money, let’s get it right and spend the money properly”? Did they look at doing that? Could they have done it? If not, why not? There is a lot of concern that we are going ahead with so significant a contract, with such significant implications, when the Government do not even seem to think that the procurement process has been handled properly or included all the conditions that ought to have been included.

One reason why Bombardier has concerns is its record with Department for Transport procurement processes. It can win contracts worldwide. It can even win contracts to build trains in Germany. It can win contracts with everybody else in the UK. Out of the 14 bids it made for contracts from operating or rolling stock companies, it has won 11, but out of five bids where the DFT was running the process, it has won none. Is that just bad luck or does it suggest that there is something wrong with how the DFT procures the contracts? Do the Government think that huge DFT contracts are the right way to go about train procurement or should we look at letting the operating or rolling stock companies, which have great experience running such things, be in charge of the process? There is a suggestion that the very structure of the tender process made it hard for Bombardier to win. The phrase used was “bundled design, build, maintenance and finance” commercial structure—I find it difficult to get my head around that mouthful.

It was not a case of looking for someone to build trains and sell them, but a case of awarding a contract for someone to build, provide and maintain trains and keep them on the tracks for the best part of 30 years. It is a hugely complex financing exercise. I am not sure whether we were looking for a train-builder or a bank. One suspects that it is much easier for a huge multinational, diversified conglomerate with a brilliant credit rating to produce the cheapest bid, rather than the group that can build the best trains. I do not know about other hon. Members, but I am not sure that I can predict where I will be in 2045. I will be 70 years old, and I hope I will be getting a state pension by then, but I am not totally convinced of that. It is scary to think that these train carriages will be retired after me, but that is how long we are talking about.

The contract is to maintain the trains and keep them on the rails until 2045 or thereafter, which is a hugely difficult thing to do. How many of us can predict what the currency of many EU nations will be even in a year’s time? How many of us can predict how many major banks will still be solvent in a year’s time? And yet, we are asking the train-builders to come up with a finance package that in effect runs for that long period. How can they do that cost-effectively? The process started in 2008 and the state of the banks was even worse then than it is now.

Many hon. Members are concerned that the private finance initiative resulted in taxpayers paying people to borrow far more expensively than the Government could, and we ended up having to pay for that for 30-odd years. Is there not a risk that that is what we are doing with this? We are in effect locking people into a hugely expensive way of financing something, but if we did it better there might be a cheaper way.

I looked at some of the original tender documents from 2008, and there was an interesting presentation to interested parties in the “Commercial and Financial Overview”. On the financing side, it states:

“Consistent with HMT best practice, the Department will reserve the right to hold a funding competition”.

Have the Government considered that? If the financing costs made it hard for Bombardier to compete in the award of preferred-bidder status, did the Government think, “Actually, financing is a very risky thing for anybody to try and do for this long period. Should we take that out of the process and tender it separately?”? That might have been worth considering.

The same presentation outlines that the accreditation process structure had a weighting of 40% for business excellence and approach, and 60% for technical capability and experience. I do not know whether those weightings were used in the final process, but if they were, it would be interesting to understand how. We would all like to understand exactly how close these bids were. Where was Siemens stronger and where was Bombardier stronger? I fear that the answer to that probably involves hugely sensitive commercial data that the Minister cannot release today. We want people to understand why we are spending taxpayers’ and passengers’ money in this way, but it is hard to explain the process when we cannot access the full details.

One matter that has been raised—it would be helpful to have some clarification on this—is the lightweight bogie that will be used in the contract. For a contract that Siemens won in Germany, it had to use Bombardier’s bogie, and there is a joint contract in place for that. I understand—I cannot find any evidence for this on the internet—that Siemens has not managed to produce, test or bring into operation anywhere a lightweight bogie. The German train industry was not desperately keen to have its trains experimented on and tested, and therefore Siemens has used the Bombardier-made bogie to ensure that it gets the reliability from scratch. Frankly, such a situation seems a little perverse. The Germans give a contract to a German train company but they are not willing to have their trains experimented on, and we end up awarding a contract to a German train company for our trains to be experimented on rather than awarding it to the UK company that could have used its bogie, which it knows works.

Anecdotally, one of the attractions for Siemens was mentioned by the UK chief executive of Siemens rail industry operations, Steve Scrimshaw, in an interview with Rail Professional in March this year:

“A lot of the DfT’s scoring is around deliverability and our trains work straight out of the box.”

Interestingly, that same article goes on to talk about the problems that Siemens has had delivering trains into Scotland, where they have not worked straight from the box and their entry into service was delayed by ScotRail until it could resolve some of the technical issues. It is not the case that Siemens delivers and works perfectly every time, and that Bombardier does not. The fact that Bombardier can win contracts in the UK and around the world shows that it probably has a similar quality of delivery to Siemens.

In light of those issues, the key question for the Government is this: can they and will they reconsider this decision before the contract goes to final status? Some of the concerns about the procurement process that I have set out have led my hon. Friends the Members for Mid Derbyshire (Pauline Latham), for South Derbyshire (Heather Wheeler) and for Erewash (Jessica Lee)—she sadly cannot be here today—and I to ask the National Audit Office to review this procurement process and examine whether we are getting the most economically advantageous position for taxpayers and passengers.

There are doubts whether the DFT is very good at handling these processes based on its experiences with the intercity express programme contract and this one. Let us be honest: this project was originally called Thameslink 2000, but these carriages might hit the tracks in 2015. That is not a tremendous procurement record. Is it right for the DFT to be handling these contracts? My hon. Friends and I have fundamental concerns about whether the right requirements were in the tender specification and whether we can come to the right decision. Therefore, there seems to be a strong prima facie case to have another look at the matter and ensure that we are spending £1.4 billion of taxpayers’ money in the right way.

We can talk about the history of the process and this contract for as long as we like but, whatever happens on that, we need to get these things right in future. The fact that the past two major contracts have not gone to a UK manufacturer is bad enough but, if we are to sort this process out and keep the train-building industry in the UK, we need to start getting such things right and ensuring that there is a level playing field. Let us be clear that no one is suggesting that we want Bombardier in the UK to be a new British Leyland. Bombardier does not want that and absolutely no taxpayer would want that. We have a company that can build high-quality trains for the right price, and it should get the chance to do that. We want a process that creates a level playing field, and for a UK manufacturer to have a fair opportunity to win contracts to build UK trains in the same way that German manufacturers can build trains in Germany and French ones can build trains in France.

What kind of message are we giving to the people we want to invest and manufacture in the UK? It seems that if someone wants to win a contract to build trains for the German rail industry, they must build them in Germany, and that if someone wants to win a contract in France to build trains for the French rail industry, they must build them in France. However, if someone wants to win a contract to build trains for the UK rail industry, they can build them where they like. If an investor is short of money and considering which countries to invest in, what will their conclusion be? They cannot close the French or German plants because they know that they will not win contracts in those huge markets, but they could close the UK one.

Planning (Opencast Mining Separation Zones) Bill

Debate between Anna Soubry and Nigel Mills

Friday 11th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Anna Soubry (Broxtowe) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North West Leicestershire (Andrew Bridgen) on his Bill, and offer it my wholehearted support. I shall not rehearse all the arguments that have been presented so ably by so many Members, but it is clear to me that there is cross-party agreement not only on the buffer zone but on the horrors of open-cast mining, of which many Members who are present have experience. It is to be hoped that, if nothing else, an all-party group will emerge from this, so that together we can try to ensure that our communities who are working so hard to oppose open-cast mining benefit from all the support, advice and experience that can be brought to bear.

The Bill is relevant to my constituents, who currently face the third application from UK Coal to develop an open-cast mine near the villages of Cossall and Trowell. Mercifully, both my predecessors were successful in spearheading the campaign against other applications, and I hope to repeat their success. The application is to mine 1.275 million tonnes of coal and almost a quarter of a million tonnes of fire clay over an area of 130 hectares.

Broxtowe contains an abundance of houses, and we do not have much green belt land. The application relates to the heart of that precious land, and it fills many of us with horror, not just because of the dust and noise that many Members have mentioned but because there will be some eight lorry movements an hour. We can imagine the impact that that will have, not just on the residents of Cossall and Trowell but on all the other communities that will be affected. It is surely unacceptable in this modern age to extract minerals such as coal and other substances in that way. It inflicts real blight on our countryside, and it has a direct impact on the quality of people’s lives.

I do not want to go on much longer because so much has been said very ably and I would just repeat those arguments. I fully endorse all those comments. However, I make this plea. It is about localism. Other hon. Members have referred to that, but I hope that the Minister, whatever the Government’s attitude might be to this excellent Bill—I hope that they will adopt it—hears what is coming out loudly and clearly from Members and their areas. I do not know of any application that has not been opposed by every parish, borough and county affected—they have done that not just as a group, but individually. Almost without exception, democratically elected representatives in my area and areas represented by other hon. Members on both sides of the House have opposed these applications. Invariably, they go to appeal and unfortunately, as we all know, they are signed off by the Secretary of State. With great respect, that flies in the face of what we say we now all believe in, which is localism.

[Nigel Mills]

Does my hon. Friend agree that local councils and MPs oppose these applications not because of nimbyism but generally on strong, robust planning grounds that are entirely consistent with planning policy? That is why it is so incredibly frustrating that their decisions get overturned at appeal by the Secretary of State, who seems just to fly in the face of planning policy.

[Anna Soubry]

I could not agree more. I am grateful for that intervention and I fully support it. It is deeply ironic.

The other important matter to be considered is this. I know from the fight that has been put up in Cossall and in Trowell that local councils and local people find themselves in a battle with UK Coal, which has a number of resources, including the ability to instruct experts. Already our hard-pressed parish and town councils are looking at how they can raise funds. There is just the beginning of an equality of arms, but as my hon. Friend has said, invariably, the county council opposes these applications for sound planning reasons. It is not a question of nimbyism. Many of those county councillors are not affected; they do not represent those areas, but they accept the argument that they should oppose the application on planning grounds. Unfortunately, however, the Secretary of State, after the inquiry, if it goes to an inquiry, takes a different view.

These applications take many years. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for North West Leicestershire and others have campaigned for years. The process has in effect barely begun. Many years of campaigning lie ahead. We face that in my constituency. It means that for years people have that awful blight hanging over their head. They do not know whether their beautiful, precious, highly treasured countryside will be blighted and scarred for ever by open-cast mining.

I hope that the Government will support the Bill and that the Minister will take from the debate the strength of feeling among Members on both sides of the House on the issue. The buffer zone may not be a panacea but it would be a great help and assist our local authorities in making planning decisions on such applications.