Chris Curtis

I agree, and I hope that the nature restoration fund can be an opportunity to make those spaces more biodiverse. I am trying to support a wetlands art project in my constituency that would use such money to improve biodiversity. I hope that all the organisations that, like me, care about nature recovery will do the right thing and support these changes—they will be the best thing for nature in decades—rather than trying to defend an indefensible status quo. Finally, as somebody who owes much of my fantastic upbringing to a development corporation, I turn to the crucial issue of how we will fund development corporations when we start building the new towns. Although the changes introduced by the Bill are promising, at some point we will need to think about that financing. For every pound that was invested in Milton Keynes, many more were given back to the Treasury—somebody said the ratio was 14:1, but I have not found a source for that. Currently, any debt issues by development corporations to private capital must be added to the Government’s balance sheet. However, a simple change to Treasury accounting, to count those corporations in the same way as the banks that fell into public ownership after the financial crash, could unlock huge sums of international private capital to fund these vital homes and projects. That approach is consistent with those taken by many European counterparts, and we should actively explore it as a priority. I will support the Bill today, but I urge Ministers to be honest that this is not a moment for self-congratulation. We need to continue to go further and faster to build the homes and the infrastructure that this country so desperately needs.