Energy and Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

Chris Heaton-Harris Excerpts

Thursday 27th May 2010 Commons Chamber

[Chris Heaton-Harris (Daventry) (Con)]

I am grateful to you, Mr Speaker, for allowing me to catch your eye in this important debate and enabling me to make my maiden speech. Let me begin by commending the maiden speeches of my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Angie Bray)—a wonderful lady who will grace this side of the House very well—and my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins), who is a friend of mine. I am so pleased to see him elected and sitting on these green Benches.

Alas, I must also thank someone who, annoyingly, raised the bar in maiden speech terms just before I spoke: my hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury (John Glen). He talked a great deal about tradition and horticulture in his speech. I knew he was going to do that because I know that, on accepting the honour of being elected for Salisbury, he then sang the “Ode to the Turnip”.

As you will know, Mr Speaker, I was a member of the European Parliament between 1999 and 2009, representing the east midlands region of the UK in Brussels and the very expensive and completely superfluous Strasbourg. Many hon. Members here have asked me what the notable differences are between being a Member of the European Parliament and being an MP. There are very many indeed. For example, there is no obvious need for simultaneous interpretation here and it does not take me the best part of a day to commute to my place of work. However, the biggest difference I have seen so far is the amount of constituency work that hon. Members do.

When I was elected to the European Parliament I was, like all new members of any Parliament, as keen as mustard to prove my worth to my constituents. However, I had to wait a very long time for my first constituent to actually contact me––over two months. When it came, it was quite unexpected, as the constituent in question had somehow got hold of my home telephone number and called me quite late on a Friday night. Never mind; this was my first real punter and I was going to help him no matter what. I asked him what his problem was and he said, “It’s about my drains.” This was not necessarily a European matter but I was keen to help. We spent ages going over what he perceived his problem to be and, at the end of our conversation, I told him that I had a plan. My plan was that, on Monday morning, I was going to phone his environmental health officer and get things moving. He said to me, “Oh no, I don’t want to take it that high.” It was then that I realised that perhaps the public do not hold politicians in very great esteem. I very much hope that this new Parliament can rectify that, given time. That story keeps coming back to me each morning when I receive the dozens of phone messages, the bags of mail and the hundred-odd e-mails from my constituents in Daventry.

The seat of Daventry itself has only been around in parliamentary terms for the last 92 years. I am only the sixth MP returned for it. Indeed, when the seat was created in 1918, it returned a man who occupied your chair for a very long time, Mr Speaker. Edward Fitzroy had quite a reputation as Speaker of the House. According to Harold Macmillan, his speakership was “severe but fair” and he had a particular method of dealing with bad, tedious and too-lengthy speeches. Mr Speaker Fitzroy would remark to himself in a voice audible to at least the two Front Benches, “Oh, what a speech!” or “When is this boring fellow going to sit down?” Whatever you might be thinking now, Mr Speaker, I am obliged to you for not saying it.

The hon. Member for Daventry for the past 23 years was the hon. Tim Boswell, a man well regarded and much respected on both sides of the Chamber and very much so in his constituency. If I had a pound for each time someone said during the election campaign that Tim Boswell was “such a nice man” or that I would have very big boots to fill, I could have afforded not to have had any dealings with IPSA at all in my first parliamentary term. It is with some trepidation that I come to this place as the successor of a man called a saint by some in the national media, as everyone is disappointed that he chose to retire at the last general election. I am sure that all hon. Members will join me in the hope that we will get to see him working in another place very near here in the not too distant future.

I first met Tim Boswell back in the 1980s. I was working in New Covent Garden market, in my family’s fruit and vegetable import and wholesale business. At about 5 o’clock one morning, a mild panic swept through the market. A number of men in suits were touring around. Obviously there was no need for people to worry because everyone there had, of course, paid all their taxes. Soon the mood relaxed when the junior Minister for Agriculture, who was in charge of wholesale markets, started to introduce himself. Yes, Tim Boswell took seriously every job he was given in government and opposition and did them better than anyone else had ever done. No one in New Covent Garden market could remember seeing a Minister beforehand and I know that no one has since.

It should be noted that the boundary Commission changed the constituency boundaries quite considerably, so the new Daventry takes in areas that were previously represented by my hon. Friends the Members for Wellingborough (Mr Bone), for Kettering (Mr Hollobone) and for Northampton South (Mr Binley). Those Members all have excellent reputations among their former constituents, and they are all distinctive characters in this place, too.

The new constituency of Daventry has a great deal going for it, with almost 100 distinct and beautiful villages and the town of Daventry itself. Daventry, or Danetre for those who are truly local or like their Shakespeare, has its origins as a settlement back in the 9th or 10th century. It has had a market since the 12th century, which still continues to this day. The town once—but no longer, alas—had a railway station on the former London and North Western Railway branch line from Weedon to Leamington Spa, but it was closed back in September 1958. The local weekly newspaper, the Daventry Express, is nicknamed “The Gusher” after the steam engine that used to service the town.

If people know anything about Daventry, they will know that from 1932 the BBC Empire Service, now the World Service, broadcast from it. The radio announcement of “Daventry calling” made the town famous across the globe. They might also know that early in the morning of Tuesday 26 February 1935, the radio station on Borough hill, Daventry, was used for the first ever practical demonstration of radar by its inventors, Robert Watson-Watt and Arnold Frederic Wilkins.

Many beautiful villages are tucked away in the beautiful rolling countryside. Earl’s Barton is the home of Barker shoes—yes, I am wearing a pair now—a stunning Saxon church and a beautiful market square housing the famous Jeyes chemist, who invented and manufactured Jeyes fluid. Brixworth, with another Saxon church, lies just a mile or so away from a factory that builds McLaren’s Formula 1 racing car engines. Naseby is a beautiful village sited beside the battlefield where a decisive parliamentary victory was won in 1645, and at Ashby St Leger the plan was hatched to blow up the House of Lords during the state opening of Parliament on 5 November 1605.

Yelvertoft, Crick, Preston Capes, Hanging Houghton, Maidwell, Draughton, Lilbourne, Watford, Winwick and West Haddon are all stunning villages in my constituency, but they are also linked by the fact that every one of them has, or has had, proposed planning applications for wind farms with turbines of up to 126.5 metres tall, which is almost the height of the London Eye. The total number of turbines suggested for this small swathe of my constituency is 53.

This debate is about energy, and I must mention the folly that is onshore wind energy. Not only does it dramatically change the nature of the landscape for ever—and as we have very little beautiful English countryside left, so we should try to treasure the bit we have—but it does little to help us in our battle to reduce carbon emissions. Leaving aside the damage these turbines do visually, I believe that science is not on the side of this sort of wind power. We still need to have the ability to produce 100% of our energy requirements by other means for those times when the wind is not blowing, and when the wind does stop, there is plenty of research suggesting that firing up gas and coal power stations quickly to take the slack created by the wind stopping burns those fuels so inefficiently that much of the good that has just been done is undone. I also hope Ministers will give better planning guidance to local councils that have to deal with these matters. That guidance should perhaps borrow an idea from our European friends: a 2 km exclusion zone, meaning that no turbine can be constructed within 2 km of any dwelling.

I am a great believer in renewable, sustainable and locally produced solutions to our energy problems of the future. Plenty of miscanthus grass is grown as a true biofuel across my constituency. I also believe we have to face up to the fact that nuclear energy must play a part in the medium and long term.

Across Daventry, there is also huge pressure on housing, and there is also great concern that the previous Government’s top-down housing targets driven by quangos will mean building on greenfield sites and wrecking the countryside we love. I hope and expect to see this coalition Government return local planning to local people and incentivise the reuse of brownfield sites.

I imagine that everyone in this Chamber will have driven through my constituency, because the M1 carves it almost in two. At junction 18 stands Daventry international rail freight terminal, where what many people refer to as “big sheds” employs thousands of my constituents in skilled and unskilled work. My constituency is a key national hub for many large businesses, and I will always try to make the case for them in this place because I have noticed that wealth creators are often ignored, dismissed and perhaps even viewed with disdain by some in this Chamber. My constituents are excited about the proposals in parts of the Gracious Speech, especially those relating to the roll-out of high-speed broadband, because villages such as Spratton and Sibbertoft struggle to receive any connection.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, for allowing me to catch your eye and participate in this debate. Daventry is very much a part of middle England, and I consider myself fortunate and privileged to represent it in the House of Commons.