Mr Lindsay Hoyle (Chorley, Labour)

I congratulate both you, Madam Speaker, and the President of the Council. I also congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley, North (Mr. Cranston) and the hon. Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon (Dr. Harris) on their maiden speeches. I hope that I can follow in the same, successful vein.

I pay tribute to Den Dover, the former hon. Member for Chorley, who represented the constituency for the past 18 years. He worked hard in the general election campaign, and one must always remember that he was a dedicated Member of Parliament. Before him, George Rodgers—a Labour Member—served Chorley well. From 1945 to 1969, Clifford Kenyon—a renowned name in the Chamber—served Chorley as one of the greatest ever Members of Parliament. His knowledge of farming was unquestionably renowned.

I should also like to thank my father, Doug Hoyle. He was a Member from 1974 to 1979, representing the old Nelson and Colne constituency. He then went on to serve, from 1981 to 1987, as the hon. Member for Warrington, North, where my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale (Mr. Hall) represented the adjoining constituency. My father has since been elevated to the House of Lords. I wish him well, and I thank him for all the support that he has given me.

It is a privilege to represent Chorley, the town of my birth. Perhaps uniquely among hon. Members, I was born in my constituency, and I have always lived and worked in it. I am therefore very proud to have been elected to the House to represent my home town.

Chorley is an historical market town. It comprises more than 50,000 acres—from lowland, near Southport, to the west Pennine moors—and 23 parishes, and it has a population, which is rising, of 96,000. We had much manufacturing, from textiles to such famous companies as Leyland, Royal Ordnance and Horwich Locomotive Works. Although the latter was in Bolton, West, it still employed thousands of people from all over the area, including Chorley. Almost all those companies have now gone.

Royal Ordnance was most recently in the news as a dumping site for bovine spongiform encephalopathy infected animal offal, thereby serving as a double symbol of Tory failure. The borough unemployment rate now averages 4 per cent.—which is very low—but it is low only because more than 50 per cent. of the working population travels outside Chorley to work, as most of our manufacturing has been destroyed.

Other areas have severe unemployment, which is sometimes 12 per cent. or higher. Recent job losses have included those at NORWEB, GPT, Perrite and John Willman. Well-known companies across the country are still shedding jobs, and that is the danger. I am confident that the Government will deal with the danger.

A recent survey in Chorley showed that more than half the job offers in our jobcentre were for part-time employment. The average weekly wage for those jobs was £103, and one job was advertised at £1 per hour. Such a situation is disgusting and unacceptable in a modern society. We will be a modern society, and we will redress that imbalance. A minimum wage is crucial to achieving our goals.

How personal and national economic security can be obtained under current economic circumstances is inconceivable, and I await the Government's establishment of a commission to examine a minimum wage. Some private utilities earn in a few seconds as much as some people earn in a lifetime, yet they refuse to contribute—as detailed in the Government's finance plans—to the effort to put young people back in work. Our Government have a mandate to achieve that goal.

I was chairman of Chorley borough council's economic development and tourism committee, and I helped to bring investment to Chorley, by working with businesses and showing them the attractions and benefits of what we have to offer.

The Royal Ordnance site, which is now essentially derelict, once employed 30,000 people. Now it offers a few dozen jobs. By maximising the site's potential, we are finally returning investment to our area. We are delighted that the Computer Science Corporation has chosen a redundant building on the site as its base, thereby creating 400—mainly highly skilled—jobs. Over the next four years, Latham, Crossley and Davies, a major Chorley accounting firm, plans to expand, thereby creating 200 new jobs. An extension is also planned to Ackhurst business park, which should create another 130 new jobs.

Those developments were aided by the economic development unit, which plays an active, interventionist role in Chorley business. It does not tell business how to run itself—it works with business to create the economic conditions that business requires. Every week, we visited firms to talk and listen to them and to provide them with contacts with councillors and officers, with whom they could deal directly in the council. As the hon. Member for Chorley, I shall maintain those links and work hard for business and for the local authority. For many years, it has been a revelation in Chorley to have a public-private partnership—which is one basis of the Government's industrial strategy—instead of pitting one sector against another.

I also helped to found the Chorley partnership, to join businesses and community leaders in working together for the town's social and economic development.

Chorley has lacked support from central Government. To have a progressive Government who share our aims will give a major boost to my area. The creation of regional development agencies will be a massive improvement. Chorley's economic development unit dealt with 442 inquiries last year. Most people were seeking advice on sites, on property available in the locality and on potential sources of financial assistance. Little assistance has been available, however, because the previous Government did not believe in it. It is a crying shame that the previous Member of Parliament thought that assisted area status would do nothing for Chorley. I hope that we can redress the balance and put Chorley on a level playing field with neighbouring areas so that we can improve it for the benefit of the people who live there. My experience of Chorley's economic development unit has shown me that development support is exactly what business wants and needs. The creation of a regional development agency will meet that objective.

It is appropriate that Europe should be dealt with at the same time as the economy; they are inextricably linked—one cannot have one without the other. The previous Government did not believe in Europe, so we profited little from the support available while every other country in the European Union did. KONVER is available to areas such as Chorley, which has seen a rundown in its defence industry, yet because of the previous Government's lack of belief and interest, we received hardly any aid to which we were entitled.

What was more shocking was the fact that the rules that applied to parts of the midlands and the south-east were different from those applied to the north-west. There could be 50 per cent. funding in the south-east, but only 35 per cent. in the north-west. There is something tragically wrong about being able to divide the country so easily. If one was cynical, one would assume that it was a political decision.

KONVER money has always been important to us. In 1996, we put in for a £3 million grant from KONVER II—which was a continuation of the old peripheral areas programme—under the auspices of the Chorley business technology centre, to assist with an £8 million development scheme for part of a 1,000 acre site in Chorley which is contaminated, but which can be used for business. We received little support from the Government. The bid was scaled down to £1 million and then to £500,000, concentrating exclusively on managed workshop facilities at the Chorley business technology centre. It will do little to regenerate the massive Royal Ordnance site, but if we get the money, we shall at least have some start-up units for new businesses.

It is pointless to be a member of the EU when so much of what is available from membership is going begging because the previous Government's ideology was opposed to its positive aspects. By maximising our return from the EU in terms of grants such as KONVER, we can invest in sites, such as the Royal Ordnance site, which have massive potential. Those sites are existing industrial areas that can be developed without damaging the environment or contributing to urban sprawl. That must be of benefit to everyone.

I am delighted that we now have a Government who are committed to getting the most out of the EU by working with their partners and taking all to which we are entitled. I shall lobby Ministers hard to ensure that Chorley's case is heard and to support the early creation of regional development agencies, which will do so much to improve the economic success of regions such as the north-west.

I hope that the Royal Ordnance site will become a flagship for the whole of the north-west. It must be one of the biggest brown-field sites in the UK. It will benefit the whole of the north-west, it is well placed between two major motorways and it has a railway line running through its centre. We have a great opportunity to save green fields and to create new jobs for the north-west as a whole.

See this speech in context