Sustainable Communities Bill

I congratulate the hon. Member for Ruislip-Northwood (Mr. Hurd) on getting the Bill this far and offer him my warm support. I am beginning to understand the patience required by those who served on the Committee and the lengths to which people sometimes have to go to support the causes in which they believe. I am concerned by the tone of some of the Government amendments, including new clauses 4 and 2. I welcome amendment (a)—a cheeky little amendment that makes an important point—but amendment No. 39 is an example of the way in which some of the language of the Bill is beginning to change, threatening its sense and purpose. Reflecting earlier Government amendments to other parts of the Bill, it changes the word ““indicators”” to the word ““matters””, but that implies that the various matters listed in the schedule are simply issues for discussion and not, as they are really intended to be, indicators of the health of a local community. Let me illustrate that by reference to my own constituency. To outsiders, Cheltenham often seems like a very affluent place, and it is indeed doing well by many conventional economic indicators. However, a list of indicators such as that in the schedule would probably reveal a rather different picture. For instance, it might reveal the loss of local NHS services, including in-patient children’s services and some local mental health services, and the imminent downgrading of our local maternity ward. It might reveal that the opening of five large supermarkets, while obviously delivering benefits to constituents as consumers, has occurred at some cost, in the most recent case almost immediately resulting in the loss of a series of local shops, in turn resulting in a loss of choice for consumers. The second indicator would reveal whether that was at some cost to the local economy. The list of indicators might reveal the loss of local post offices, which have been reduced from 19 to 14 to 10 and will soon be reduced to nine or even fewer. It might highlight the risk to our green spaces, which seem to be continually threatened by over-development, or the threat to local railway services, which, it has been suggested, might move out of town and thereby make the town less, not more, sustainable. It might reveal the difficulty faced by local businesses such as Battledown brewery, which is struggling to get Cheltenham’s only local beers into the large local supermarkets. That is a cause that I am sure that many hon. Members would happily support.