Lord Fowler (CB)

My Lords, I declare an interest as having been a Member of Parliament for a Birmingham constituency—Sutton Coldfield—for 27 years, so I know a little about the area. I am not sure that I agree with the Minister or my noble friend Lord Snape—he used to be my pair, so I call him my noble friend just to keep in with old things. I am not sure they can simply ride away from this and say that the origins of this and the problem are all down to the last Conservative Government. That argument does not stand up. The real problem we need to tackle is not in going back. We have an instant problem now in Birmingham. As we all know, we have the problem of the streets and the rest. We need most urgently to find a solution to that, not to go into all the details over years and years. Two points come out of this debate. First, surely the Government have a prime responsibility to preserve public health. That has not happened over the last month. They have failed dismally in that duty, not to this House or the House of Commons but to the citizens of Birmingham. They have let them down, and we are still to find out the final result of that negligence. The Government are now saying, as they should, whether they agree with the action of the pickets in stopping trucks removing the mounds of rubbish that have scarred the city and attracted rats and other vermin —we have not imagined this; it is an actuality—and that kind of action and that kind of defeat cannot be justified to the public. The people stopping the lorries are causing immense damage to individuals. The people who matter most in this are the citizens of Birmingham, and they have been let down. That is the fact of the matter. The Minister should be turning her mind to how the Government will urgently help to get this straight. It is not a matter of having committees and long discussions. We now need urgency and urgent action. I hope the Minister can tell us of some of that.