Environmental Protection and Green Growth

Rory Stewart Excerpts

Wednesday 26th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mary Creagh]

My hon. Friend, as usual, makes an excellent point. She has spoken eloquently and at length about the flood insurance deserts that have resulted from the chilling effect of the cuts. One of the key recommendations of the Pitt review, which followed the 2007 floods and affected my constituency of Wakefield, was that flood defence spending should rise by more than inflation every year. With inflation at 5%, that would mean an increase of more than 5% this year.

[Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con)]

This is not a party political question. The Scots argue strongly that one of the best ways to deal with flooding is not to allow construction on flood plains. Will the shadow Minister acknowledge that one of the real errors of the past 15 years has been our construction policy, rather than the amount of money put into flood defences?

[Mary Creagh]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that question, but I did not hear him thank us for the flood defences that were put in place in Cumbria following the terrible floods there.

[Rory Stewart]

Thank you.

[Mary Creagh]

It was our pleasure. I know that Carlisle also suffered terribly. We cannot stop all development. The Thames Gateway development is happening on areas that are also potentially flood plains, but we must ensure that there is a joined-up strategy across Government and that the Department for Communities and Local Government, the Treasury and the Home Office look at the real costs of flooding. At the moment insurers pay out, but it is not in their interests to stop flood events, because ultimately it is the reinsurers who pay the costs. We need to drill down and get a true account from across Government of the costs of flood events.

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[Richard Benyon]

I shall certainly look at that situation in my hon. Friend’s constituency. It is vital that we take action to clean up rivers. We have put £92 million more into the budget to try to improve the quality of the water in our rivers. Anybody who is polluting should be penalised, and that is what the Environment Agency is for.

[Rory Stewart]

rose—

[Richard Benyon]

I will give way once more before making some progress.

[Rory Stewart]

In fact, we have not experienced capital cuts in Cumbria; rather, the Environment Agency is being considerably more flexible than it was six or nine months ago, responding to communities and clearing out gravel. The progress is good under the current Government; I would like to put that on the record.

[Richard Benyon]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point. The new partnership scheme will end the problem of communities failing, year after year, to get just above the line needed for their schemes to go ahead. There will now be clarity in the system, so that people can see exactly where they are on the scale and what needs to be geared up, by whatever means, for their scheme to get above the line.

May I express my admiration, in a perverse way, for the nerve of the hon. Member for Wakefield for mentioning the word “broadband” in the motion and in her speech? That is masterful chutzpah. I could ridicule her for it, but part of me secretly admires it from somebody in a party that did so little in government. This country was at the bottom of every conceivable league table, and the previous Government had a scheme that involved raising huge amounts of money from some kind of telephone tax that nobody thought would work. This Government have made the issue an absolute priority.

The hon. Lady is right to make broadband an issue in a green debate. Broadband allows people to work and learn from home, which reduces congestion. The Government also believe that this is a social inclusion issue, however. Broadband will assist people who are old, ill, mentally ill, out of work or on a low income, particularly those who live in remote communities, out of all proportion to any other factor in their lives. It is therefore absolutely right to include it in this debate, and I am very happy to talk about the investment that we are making, including the £530 million that is being spent through Broadband Delivery UK and the £20 million that has been geared up from DEFRA’s funds for the hard-to-reach in our most rural communities, as well as the £150 million recently announced by the Chancellor to assist the roll-out of mobile 4G access, which can provide coverage for broadband on mobile phone networks. That is also very good news.

The hon. Lady also made some interesting points about the five-point plan for growth and jobs, but it would simply add to the scale of debt. How can we deal with the debt problem by adding to it? Nothing should add to our debt. The shadow Chancellor’s five-point plan would not be a way of gearing up jobs and growth in the green economy or in any other. As in so many areas, Labour Members have absolutely no credibility when they talk about the economy.

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[Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con)]

I am a little troubled by the idea that the Opposition are presenting their policies to be quite so idyllic. My experience as a Cumbrian MP is that when one looks at a village such as Bampton in my constituency, what one sees is neglect. The past 10 years have seen, if I look to the left, that we suddenly have inedible grass on our hillside because the stocking levels have become too low. We have cows dying unnecessarily of bovine TB. We have an absence of affordable housing in our villages because of rigid planning regulations, and we have worse mobile coverage in Cumbria than in Kabul and extremely ineffective broadband coverage.

In every single respect, the problem—this goes to the heart of the motion—has not been a lack of cash. The problem with the policies pursued has been that they have been too centralised in London, too inflexible and too black and white, and they have failed correctly to engage with communities and businesses.

[Mary Creagh]

I saw an interesting article a couple of weeks ago in Farmers Guardian or Farmers Weekly, which I read assiduously, about bovine TB. Will the hon. Gentleman confirm that bovine TB in his area is not endemic in the badger population, and that it has come from the movement and transmission of cattle?

[Rory Stewart]

I shall take up that point, as it illustrates the four aspects that I identified. What we need and what the Government are providing is more courage, which goes to bovine TB, more work with communities, more ability to confront vested interests and more creativity.

On courage with respect to bovine TB, what is the fundamental problem with bovine TB in Cumbria? It is not badgers, as the hon. Lady says. It is that for 13 years the previous Government were not prepared to talk honestly to farmers about the fact that the TB getting into our herds is coming from cattle movement. The answer should come from a better attitude towards movement and linked holdings, and a better attitude towards post-movement testing. Scotland has shown the example. We should have had the courage in areas such as Cumbria, which are still safe and where TB is not endemic, to have effectively moved that border south.

That leads to the second element—working with communities. Again, the solution to the lack of affordable housing in our area, the solution to planning in our area, and the solution to renewable energy, particularly hydro-generation, lies in working much more flexibly with communities. We have just built 22 affordable homes in a rural area by allowing the community of Crosby Ravensworth to do its own planning. We are doing barn conversions up and down the east side of Cumbria by listening to communities who want houses for farmers’ children and have been unable to provide them because of rigid centralised planning regulations.

There has been a failure to confront vested interests—a failure to confront supermarkets over contracts, a failure to confront supermarkets over planning, and sometimes a failure to confront certain elements and lobbies within the farming interests, which connects to the issue of bovine TB. The solution is not only to engage with communities and not only to be more courageous, but to be more creative, which brings us to broadband and mobile telephone coverage.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

There is another problem—the direct and, I suggest, deliberate skewing of Government funding to urban areas in the name of deprivation, and away from rural areas. The average grant per head in rural areas is 50% less than in urban areas at the end of 10 years of Labour, average incomes are lower and the average council tax is 100% higher. People are poorer, they pay more and get less, and that needs to be put right.

[Rory Stewart]

I agree, but to continue to develop the point, it is not simply a matter of cash. The point is creativity. On broadband, the problem with the Cornish project implemented by the previous Government with enormous generosity was its inflexibility—£100 million spent on a region with half the surface area of Cumbria. Were we to try to pursue broadband on that basis, we would spend £42 billion in this country, instead of which, by using communities that are prepared to dig their own trenches and to waive wayleaves, and by pushing commercial providers to innovate in their technical delivery, whether it is cellular delivery, a point-to-point microwave link or a fibre optic cable, means that in Cumbria, with any luck, and touching wood, we should be able to achieve results at least as good as those in Cornwall for about a quarter of the price.

The same is true of mobile coverage. The Ofcom target of 95%, which was set under the previous Government, was not ambitious enough and the costs to rural communities were extreme. By pushing up the coverage obligation, providing £150 million—not a very large amount—for building more masts and, most importantly, confronting the producer interest, meaning the mobile phone companies, which used to be their stock in trade, and compelling them to provide the coverage that they are reluctant to provide outside urban areas, we should now be able to achieve coverage of 98% to 99%.

The economic benefit of all that to rural areas would be immense. There would be a GDP benefit to small businesses and health and education benefits for remote rural areas. All the health, prosperity and vigour that that would bring those communities would allow the delivery of exactly the environmental projects that the Opposition hold so dear. Prosperous and vibrant rural communities will allow farmers, who are often the people in whom we vest responsibility for the environmental projects, to deliver them.

In conclusion, the fundamental mistake in the Opposition’s motion is not their objectives or what they feel ought to be done, but the methods they propose. I am afraid that those methods are dependent on a large deployment of cash, which is what I call the Cornwall approach. Instead, I believe that this Government have brought, as I am proud to see in rural Cumbria, the right focus on communities, the right creativity and the right ability to confront and to show courage, which hopefully means that the next time I look out of my window in my constituency, when I return there tomorrow, I will see affordable housing being built, broadband going into the ground, mobile coverage emerging, healthier cows and a more prosperous farming community that can support all the environmental targets we hold dear.

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[Andrew George]

Absolutely, and I am really grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point. It takes me on to another point that I wish to make, in response to the hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin), who is no longer in his place. He was bemoaning the lack of progress on the draft Groceries Code Adjudicator Bill, which has cross-party support.

I have to declare an interest, as for the past five years I have chaired the grocery market action group. I have been urging and seeking cross-party support for that Bill. When I started out I was entirely on my own, but I am pleased to say that both the previous Labour Government, latterly, and the Conservatives just before the general election came on board and recognised the importance of ensuring that we get fair dealing in the grocery supply chain. Although that is not directly relevant to our debate on the environment today, it is directly relevant to other matters that Members have raised, including recycling. On that issue and others, we should form cross-party support.

In spite of the very limited time that we have, I cannot allow this moment to go by without responding to the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart), since he mentioned the great nation of Cornwall and the investment strategy for broadband. It has to be said that there are more than 500,000 people in Cornwall, and its population may not be as dispersed as that of Cumbria. He may well be right that we will be paying Rolls-Royce prices for something that we could be getting a little cheaper, but if the policy is advanced in one rural area, lessons can be learned that will benefit other areas later.

[Rory Stewart]

That is a very fair point, and it is absolutely right that Cornwall got a good deal at the time when it got it. However, the real lesson of that is that we need flexibility and pilots, with one county at a time learning the lessons so that we can drive down the costs and force suppliers to do more and more as they move from Cumbria to Northumbria and around the country. What I said was not intended as a criticism of Cornwall.

[Andrew George]

No, and I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for agreeing with me on the matter. Certainly it is not possible to have fibre-optic cable to a cabinet within yards of every home in dispersed rural areas, so we need to ensure that we have an investment profile that allows the use of satellite broadband in certain circumstances. We are learning lessons from the Cornish example, and we have had the benefit of European convergence funding to take the matter forward.

I wish to touch briefly on three more matters—waste, green growth and sustainable development. The Government have rightly put in place a waste review. It is an iterative process that is progressing—perhaps too slowly, but it is certainly progressing. It provides a framework for those who want to engage in the process, as I encourage Members of all parties to do, to make constructive proposals to enhance the Government’s intention to achieve a zero-waste economy. That means sending zero to landfill.