Mr Doug Henderson (Newcastle upon Tyne North)

I rise to make my first contribution, and I thank you, Mr. Speaker, for giving me the opportunity to do so on an issue which is of such great importance to my constituency. I know that in my first contribution my constituents would want me to pay tribute to my predecessor, Mr. Bob Brown, and I do so with real affection and respect.

Bob Brown was first elected to this House in 1966 and represented Newcastle, West until 1983. Between 1983 and 1987 he represented the new Newcastle upon Tyne, North constituency that I now represent. He was a highly popular representative and was held in the highest regard, not only in the city of Newcastle but throughout the northern region. He has had a lifetime of service to the community as a city councillor and alderman and served the nation as Under-Secretary of State for Transport from 1968 to 1970, as Under-Secretary of State for Social Services in 1974 and as Under-Secretary of State for Defence between 1974 and 1979.

As an Army Minister and an ex-sapper, Bob Brown was in a real sense fully equipped to supervise the training of recruits. I have it on good account that this pleased the recruits and surprised the non-commissioned officers. I am also told that the very idea that a Labour army Minister had handled an Enfield ·303 had the Army chiefs of staff quaking in their flak jackets.

My constituency is in the north-west of the city and covers the older industrial communities of Newburn, Lemington and Westerhope and the post-war settlements of Denton, Chapel Park, Newbiggin Hall and Fawdon the villages north of the city, and the better-off areas which line the Great North road north of Gosforth.

The constituency was a proud workshop community. The people there extracted coal from the banks of the Tyne and served not only local industry but industry in the south. That workshop community manufactured engineering and glass products and exported them all over the world. It processed steel at Spencers to serve local industry and gave George Stephenson his first chance as a plugman in Throckley pit. The job might now be known as that carried out by a foreman. The community constructed the first railway line in Britain between Colodge and Kenton even before George Stephenson's time and in the post-war era it established new engineering and allied industries.

In his first speech in the House in 1966, Bob Brown spoke about the link between people's skills and economic well-being. He said: As surely as the prosperity of the nation was built on the skills of the industrial workers of the North following the Industrial Revolution, we are again in the position of being able greatly to enhance the national prospects with the contribution which we can offer in the years ahead." —[Official Report, 26 April 1966; Vol. 727, c. 587.] It must be obvious not only to Bob Brown but to all of his former constituents that such hopes have not materialised. In the 1980s people in my constituency and in the north as a whole have not been allowed to make that contribution. Between 1979 and 1986, 171,000 jobs have been lost in the north. Unemployment has doubled, one in five of the people in my constituency is out of work and in areas like the New Biggin Hall estate, with a population approaching 8,000, 44 per cent. of the men have no work.

Between 1979 and 1986, 140,000 jobs have been lost in manufacturing in the north. In my constituency 600 have been lost at Lemington Glass, 800 at Ever-Ready and 600 at Tress Engineering. After eight years of Conservative Government, my constituency now has a workless community in which young people have very little prospect of a real job and where everyone knows that there are people who are now in their late twenties who have never worked.

In that workless community 32-year-olds are told by the local employment office that they are too old ever to work again. It is no surprise that they feel alienated and outlawed by our society. Even in the more prosperous areas like Chapel Park and Gosforth people are terrified that their children will not get the opportunity to work in the locale. That despair is aggravated by growing poverty, deteriorating housing and a neglect of the areas blighted by urban dereliction.

People in my constituency and in the north of England are asking, "Can we take any comfort from the proposals in the Gracious Speech or from the idea that we should sell off schools, break up our water industry and dismantle local authority services?" Can they take any comfort from the prospect of paying higher rates through the poll tax? What comfort can people take from the inner-city proposals?

Previous Labour Governments recognised that the problems that afflict the inner city cannot be tackled without intervention by both central and local government. I freely concede to Conservative Members and to the Secretary of State for the Environment that the Government have now rightly acknowledged that that is the case. Such intervention is necessary, even if it runs counter to their economic theories, and they recognise that the free market can make no real impact on inner city problems.

The Government introduced a number of schemes designed to intervene and to assist the cities. They are the partnership scheme, the programme, areas in receipt of urban development grant, the task force and now the urban development corporations. Those schemes are fraudulent because they mask what is happening in our cities. They expose the hypocrisy of the Government's claim that they care and that they can do something.

The Government claim that their approach can create jobs and begin the process of regeneration in our inner cities, but an examination of what is happening in the cities and of what is happening in Tyneside shows how false this is. Newcastle district council lost £187 million in cumulative block grant between 1981–82 and 1986–87 at 1986 prices, yet it received only £112 million in partnership finance over the same period and calculated on the same basis. Because of the impact of rate capping, that has meant that £75 million for city services has been lost including the possibility of urban renewal.

In a report published this month, the Institution of Civil Engineers has estimated that a real job in the construction industry providing a real service to the community costs, in net terms, £12,870. That includes design costs, other overheads and profit. On that basis, the £75 million cut in real support has deprived the city of Newcastle of 1,000 jobs each year for the past five years. It has also meant the loss of the services and the potential redevelopment that could have been provided by those jobs. Parts of my constituency, such as Newburn and Lemington, are outside the designated partnership areas. They lose out doubly. Not only do they lose their share of the reduced block grant, but they do not qualify for any partnership money. We see the same picture in north and south Tyneside, which have lost £12 million and £5 million respectively in block grant over the same period.

What hope, then, can people have in Tyneside in the urban development corporations? Their projected funding, cumulatively over the next five years, is £52·4 million. That does not even compensate for the loss of block grant in Newcastle and north and south Tyneside. By 1989 or 1990, those areas will have fewer real resources to tackle the deep and severe problems that they face than they had in 1981–82, when the Government began their various partnership schemes.

The Secretary of State for the Environment wrote to me on 9 April confirming that Newcastle's application for derelict land grant to clear the Percy pit site in my constituency had been rejected. I wanted to ask the Secretary of State about that today, but as he is not here, I am prepared to ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who I know will be back later. In the light of the proposals in the Gracious Speech, will the Government let my constituents know whether they will now provide the funding to include Newburn in Lemington and the territory covered by the urban development corporation on Tyne and Wear? If not, are the Government prepared to provide additional funding to tackle the problem of the Percy pit site?

A telling view on the urban development corporations is expressed in Chartered Surveyors Weekly. It says that the idea that an urban development corporation should have undiluted power to flatten buildings and override unco-operative local authorities is clearly undemocratic, and that making plans in London to deal with the problems of Manchester, Leeds or wherever is misguided and ignores the clear lesson of the general election that people north of Birmingham see their problems differently from the Government. They should be given the resources to sort out those problems for themselves. That is solid advice from the real practitioners of urban renewal.

The people of the north are practical and down-to-earth people, who can distinguish false claim from reality. They know that, however special assistance is dressed up, if the net result is less available funding, less redevelopment will take place. The people of the north know that, if fewer resources are available, fewer jobs will be on offer to the 25,000 without work in the city of Newcastle. Like the Institution of Chartered Surveyors, they know that whatever misgivings they may have about their local authority, that council is more likely to understand local needs and respond to them. They know that, unless the manufacturing base of our city is rebuilt and we begin to attract and create new high-tech jobs, no amount of special assistance will tackle the real problems that our cities face. They know that everyone cannot work at the now famous Metro centre, because they know that some of us have actually got to make the things that we sell and consume. They know that it is sheer hypocrisy for the Government to claim that they can stimulate an enterprise culture when they give so little money to the northern development company set up by all parties in the north, and when they reject the establishment of a northern development agency.

The people of the north know that the Government have no record of support for them, and that only a sustained fight for jobs and for our cities by the whole northern community can hope to extract — however grudgingly — any assistance. The people of the north know in their hearts that they must permanently campaign and fight for real change in Government policy. I know that too, and I am with them 100 per cent., in the House and in the wider community.

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