Freddie van Mierlo

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Desmond. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Harpenden and Berkhamsted (Victoria Collins) for securing the debate. I have listened with great interest to many of the speeches given today, including from my near neighbours. It has been interesting to hear a run through of their constituencies and I will give a bit of a run through of some of the issues in my constituency as well. Many Members have spoken to the issues of bolt-on developments and so-called ribbon developments where we get additional speculative developments extending villages and towns beyond their infrastructure capacity. That is true for a village in my constituency called Chalgrove, which is at risk of becoming one of the longest villages in the country. If the developers get their way, it will eventually look a bit more like Chile when we look at it on the map. Developers are seeking to take advantage of the B480 without delivering any infrastructure alongside it. As a councillor, I have fought against developments that seek to do that. I also want to speak to badly planned development in particular. That is nowhere more true than in Chalgrove, which has an airfield that was sold by the Ministry of Defence back in, I think, 2001 to Homes England. Chalgrove is in the middle of nowhere and I do it no disservice by saying so—it is a lovely village in a rural setting. It has no mass transit system; there is no railway and there is a very limited bus service. It is a car-dependent community and there is no getting away from that; it is purely the geography of where it is. Yet Chalgrove has been assigned 3,500 new homes in the local plan that was forced through by the former Conservative Government and, indeed, by a Member who no longer sits on the Conservative Benches but sits with Reform UK. Residents are wholly opposed to that, as am I, because it requires massive road building to facilitate it. It requires bypasses at the villages of Chiselhampton, Stadhampton and Cuxham, even though Homes England is trying to row back from that. We will also get bottlenecks at Little Milton as residents try to move from that car-dependent, dormitory town to the M40 and onwards to London, Oxford or beyond for work. We need to move beyond car-dependent communities for the reasons that many, including my hon. Friends, have outlined. Elsewhere in my constituency, bypasses—so-called edge roads—are still required to facilitate developments, and I have been supportive of the Watlington relief road. That is an example of a community that has embraced development. It actively sought the development of new homes that it did not have to take on in the local plan. It put them into its neighbourhood plan so that it could get a relief road, because the historical nature of the town means it has a choke point that was previously used only by horse and cart, but is now used as the main through route to the M40. It has therefore been incredibly frustrating to see homes being built ahead of the relief road, to the point where we are now seeing intense difficulties navigating the town. Even where we have communities that embrace development, we are betraying them by not delivering the infrastructure alongside it. I want to see more investment in infrastructure for those communities that get new developments.