Westminster Hall Debate, Regional Spatial Strategy (South West), 7th October 2008

(Intervention)
John Penrose (Weston-super-Mare) (Con): I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this important debate. I reassure him that the point he makes about his constituents not being nimbys is echoed on the other side of the Bristol in my area of north Somerset. I see my parliamentary neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Woodspring (Dr. Fox), in his seat; I am sure that he will make the same point. No one locally is arguing for no extra houses. The problem is that the houses being foisted on us are above what is sustainable, above what local people will sign up to, and far in advance of what local infrastructure, local transport and local community services will stand.
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(Intervention)
John Penrose: My hon. Friend is making an elegant statement of the problems that we in north Somerset face. As he is making points about transport infrastructure, I remind him—to return to the earlier point about the lack of cross-departmental co-operation—that the Highways Agency has said that it has no plans to expand the capacity of the M5, the major arterial route for people making the type of journey that he describes, and that it is at odds with the Minister’s Department over the RSS.
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John Penrose (Weston-super-Mare) (Con): I hope that the Minister is getting the message that from one end of the region to the other, concerted opposition is being voiced to the proposals in the regional spatial strategy, not just by MPs from up and down the region and from all parties, but by many people who have come here to sit in the Public Gallery. I pay tribute to those who have written to me from my constituency and others, such as Chris Skidmore who is here. Many others are mounting very vocal campaigns to prevent the development.

I do not want to spend time going over issues that have been covered, but the crucial thing for my part of north Somerset, the constituency of Weston-super-Mare, is the proposals’ lack of sustainability. We have mentioned the difficulties of the lack of liaison between the Minister’s Department and the Department for Transport. The Department for Transport says it will not expand junction 21 of the M5 in my constituency unless proper provision is made to improve the balance between employment and housing in the RSS for my area, but at the same time, as everybody here knows, the RSS has dramatically increased the amount of housing without any concomitant or matching increase in local employment. As a result of that lack of joined-up Government thinking, my constituency, which already has an enormous amount of net out-commuting every morning and evening—it also has the matching degrees of traffic congestion—will actually face increases in out-commuting. We need jobs before yet more houses, otherwise a crucial element of sustainability in the RSS will be lost.

Without wishing to take up any more time, on the grounds that everybody else wants to say something, I would still like to mention the problem with the growth rates. It has to be wrong—it cannot be sensible—for us to talk with straight faces about a growth rate of well over 3 per cent. per annum for the next 20 years when, even as we stand here, we face one of the worst financial crises, and probably one of the worst general economic crises, of the past 20 years. As we all know, yesterday the stock markets collapsed to a tremendous degree—I do not know what they are doing today—so we are in cloud cuckoo land if we think that standing here and blithely talking about such high growth rates is reasonable
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(Intervention)
John Penrose: I hear what the hon. Gentleman is saying. Perhaps the only thing that could be said for declining house prices is that they make some houses more affordable, if people could only get the mortgages in the first place, which of course they cannot. We all understand that the growth rates are unrealistic and that therefore the central premise of the RSS is wrong, and yet for some reason the Government seem to be grinding on remorselessly and seem unwilling to change their figures or their view. The RSS is unsustainable; it does not represent joined-up Government and is tremendously environmentally unfriendly from the point of view of increasing commuting as well as concreting over green belt land. Ultimately, it fails the crucial test in my constituency—it does not put jobs before yet more houses