Dr Roz Savage

It is a pleasure to serve under you in the Chair, Sir Desmond. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Harpenden and Berkhamsted (Victoria Collins) for her very insightful opening speech. If the number of homes in an area is doubled but the roads, buses, rail capacity, flood protection and sewerage are not doubled, something has to give. In Siddington, in my constituency, we are being asked to absorb up to 1,100 additional homes on top of the 2,500 already under way nearby, with no credible, guaranteed transport plan to support them. That is not infrastructure-led growth; it is infrastructure playing catch-up, and rural communities are the ones that will pay the price. In a previous career as a management consultant, I learned through critical path planning that certain things must happen in a specific order to work smoothly; that just does not seem to be happening at the moment. In a perfect world—I know we do not live in one—the land use framework would have come out first so we could see how to allocate our land. I understand that if we add together all the land area commitments in this country, we will need a couple more Waleses to accommodate them all. Clearly, something has gone a little awry. To pick up on a point already made by a couple of colleagues: will housing targets actually deliver the affordable houses we need, where we need them? I am not at all convinced. As an environmentalist, I am very concerned by measures in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill. Are we at risk of trashing our countryside and building houses that are not fit for their designated purpose? Of course, we do not yet have the sewerage infrastructure; as a constituency that lies largely in the Thames Water catchment, this is very much top of my mind.