Thank you for granting me an opportunity to discuss the Kent and Medway structure plan, Mr. Deputy Speaker. It is a wholly good thing for a county such as Kent—I include Medway—to take stock and to reflect on the needs and aspirations of its people. If we do not have the chance to dream, and to dream big, and to back those dreams with more detailed plans, we are the lesser for it.

I shall be interested to hear from my hon. Friend the Minister how the plan was initially conceived. I know of no public meetings, no bus that went up and down the county, and no polls that were taken, but a plan has come from somewhere. It seems that the plan was started back to front: to have an aspiration or some idea of where the county should be in 2021, the people of Kent should have been talked to.

Kent and Medway together are the largest local authority area in the country, with a turnover of billions of pounds. It has not been possible to find out the gross domestic product of the county, so may I suggest to the Minister that GDP figures be produced for each county, district and, where possible, Constituency? Such figures would help the people of Kent to understand better what we have and, as important, what we need, especially when we are discussing the future needs of the county through the structure plan.

We know a great deal about poverty indices and which wards in Kent suffer from neglect. Kent had a necklace of poverty around its coast for much of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, but thankfully, under the Labour Government's stewardship, there are signs of green shoots everywhere, not least in my constituency, where the Government are investing more than £300 million. That investment includes £44 million for the northern distributor road in Sittingbourne, £21 million for the Rushenden link road, which we hope will happen soon, and between £40 million and £60 million for the new secondary schools for the Isle of Sheppey. We have already had a £13 million new community hospital and our new £100 million bridge is being built as we speak. Sadly, all that may be at risk, as the Tories have announced the closure of the Thames gateway should they win the next election. In that event, my constituency and many others in Kent would be returned to boom-and-bust economic policies and poverty and deprivation would rear their ugly heads once more.

For Kent and Medway to be the best in Britain is no longer enough. The Kent and Medway structure plan needs to have at its core an understanding of the impact of globalisation, as India and China threaten Europe and America's economic hegemony over the coming two decades. The plan needs to demonstrate a better understanding of the impact that formula 1 high-speed broadband will have on our communities. I am not sure that the plan understands either of those profound changes.

In 2002, as the founder of the Oxford internet institute I was invited to lecture in north Sweden, in a region called Lulea. It is not possible to go much further north before reaching the Arctic circle, yet Sony Ericsson has its 3G research centre at Lulea university of technology. In 2004, I visited Helsinki to meet the owners of M-real, which owns UK Paper in my constituency, but I took time out, thanks to the UK ambassador to Finland, Matthew Kirk, to visit Nokia and to spend some time with the mayor of Helsinki. Like Singapore, Helsinki is a smart city—completely online and completely broadband, some of it wireless—and it is incredible to consider that the whole country is too. Finland has a population of 5 million and is incredibly mountainous, but it is online and broadband. That broadband was paid for by the regional development agency. It is not just any kind of broadband—not the 512 k on offer from BT, but 2G and 4G. It is more formula 1 than model T.

Interestingly, as a result of such provision, the north Baltic area, including Sweden, Finland, Latvia and Lithuania, has the fastest-growing GDP in the whole of Europe. Landlocked, cold and distant by 20th-century standards, it is smart and already connected by 21st-century standards. A history of the 20th century written in the mid-1970s would have failed to include venture capital, the personal computer, the mobile phone and wireless and broadband. The Kent and Medway structure plan must have those values underlying the activities; it does not.

If we were debating this issue in February 2021—when I will be 72—what could we say about Kent and Medway and the place that we bequeathed to our children and their children? Our duty would have been to provide enough added-value employment opportunities in a greener environment, with new housing that we could be proud of and an infrastructure to match. Only aspects of that are available today in Kent and Medway. We do not have enough added-value or smart employment opportunities, we have been slow on a green audit, few of our housing estates have any architectural value or merit, and our infrastructure, especially our road and rail investments, needs more attention.

The greatest centres of added value are to be found in California, mainly in the bay area. Those centres in San Francisco, San José, silicon valley and Oakland gave birth to the modern economy. They had at their core two great universities—the university of California at Berkeley and Stanford university, the private university founded by Leland Stanford. Those institutions have embraced globalisation and they have as the heart of their being the biosciences and technological industries that make for smarter communities. The Kent and Medway structure plan needs to have biosciences and technology as the added value for our children's sake.

The Kent and Medway structure plan has no vision or understanding of where we need to be as a county. The largest local authority in the country has no world-class university and no plans to create one, or to bring one in from outside, or to initiate a franchising arrangement with an Oxford or a Cambridge—or a Stanford or a Berkeley, for that matter. How can we have such low expectations?

The Kent and Medway structure plan needs to be re-thought. It lacks vision, and the county continues to fail to attract world-class businesses. It is shameful that the whole computer industry passed us by. Motorola chose Swindon, Slough and Basingstoke. Microsoft and Oracle opted for Reading. Apple and Cisco Systems homed in on Stockley park. Hewlett Packard—now HP—made a base in Bristol. Intel also settled at Swindon. Not one chose Kent, which is worrying, especially as both Microsoft and Intel continually feature in the top five companies in the world. One of the fallouts from that failure is that Kent has still not made inroads into establishing a venture capital base.

In the 1960s, the Robbins report on higher education highlighted the need for new universities. Out of that came the new university of Kent at Canterbury. Since its establishment, it has welcomed the Open university, Christ Church university college, Canterbury, and more recently the university of Greenwich, which used to be Woolwich polytechnic. I know that my hon. and learned Friend Mr. Marshall-Andrews has always wanted a university for Medway, and he has now realised part of his dream.

Kent and Greenwich universities have been working together to find common ground. The science of computing has spawned spectacular successes where a university has developed a spin-out science park. Surrey was the first to do so. Surprisingly, Cambridge and Oxford were relatively slow to come to the dancefloor, but their respective parks now make a substantial contribution to the UK's GDP. They have drawn their success from the example of the Ivy league universities in America, especially Stanford, which spawned Hewlett Packard, Yahoo and, more recently, Google.

Into this mix, in 1998 and 1999 the Labour Government introduced the regional development agencies. The South East England Development Agency—SEEDA—ignored the science park phenomenon, and chose instead to create small hubs or clusters. Perhaps it is too early to judge their success, but I believe that it was a mistake not to link them directly to our universities. Science parks have become the vogue, and in all cases they are attached to universities. Leeds university, Leicester university, Bristol university and Bath university announced science, technology or innovation parks in 2001. Liverpool university and Liverpool John Moores university followed suit last year—interestingly, funded by the local RDA—as did London and, more recently, Nottingham and Nottingham Trent, which all announced science parks.

The Chancellor of the exchequer is a science enthusiast and has increased science research funding substantially in the Budget. At the same time, he has ensured that our investment and share option tax breaks are better than those of California. The UK has the fourth-largest GDP in the world; California used to have the fifth, although it has slipped recently. That is why it is important that we follow the California model.

According to the league tables of the The Times guide to universities—notwithstanding the usual reservation about league tables—Kent is placed 44th in the UK and Greenwich 94th. Kent has disappointed in comparison with other 60s universities: Warwick is fifth, York is seventh, Bath is 11th, Loughborough is 24th and Essex is 27th. However, we have a newcomer in Kent: Imperial college at Wye. Imperial is ranked third overall, after Cambridge and Oxford, and first in technology and science, although it is only a university college of London university. Imperial is hampered by its location in Kensington and it cannot develop a science park except at Ashford. I was the only MP who attended the Kent and Medway discussions on science parks in September. Kent county council said that there was no intention to develop a science park at Ashford— you couldn't make it up. Kent needs a world-class university, and Imperial is the only game in town.

The two major science companies in Kent are Pfizers at Sandwich and Abbott's at Queenborough. We should be working with those two American companies to create an equivalent of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at Ashford and a collegiate university system for Kent based on the university of California model that would enable university colleges to be sited at Ramsgate and Margate, Dover and Folkestone, Maidstone, Sittingbourne, Tunbridge Wells and Tonbridge, and Dartford along with those already established at Canterbury, Medway and Greenwich. Imperial would, over a 20-year period, subsume both Kent and Greenwich.

Does the Kent and Medway structure plan have those two companies at the forefront of the bioscience and technology plans for our grandchildren? It does not. Instead the plan has identified four small science centres, none of which will be world class or an integral part of a university. One was called the Sittingbourne research centre until a name change last year. Now called the Kent science park, it is owned by the LaSalle pension fund on behalf of Mars and it wants to double its footprint. It wants to build an additional 10,000 homes on top of the 10,000 announced last week by the Government, and it wants a southern ring road to a new motorway junction of the M2. However, according to an anonymous phone call that I received last Friday, it will allegedly enrich two landowners to the tune of £80 million.

Can the Minister confirm that if that wretched scheme were to see the light of day the Government would introduce a substantial windfall tax on gains from farming land that is given planning permission for housing? In that way the cost of housing would be reduced, which would greatly help our younger families and our key workers who are frozen out of the property market in Kent. Above all else it is clear that the Kent and Medway structure plan has no real understanding of the place of biosciences and technology. If the plan is adopted our children and their children will be the poorer.

Let me add a few comments about the housing needs for Kent and the lack of detailed infrastructure modelling, although Kent county council's "Kent—What Price Growth?" is more than a stab in the right direction. I have raised the matter continually over the past eight years and even proposed a ten-minute Bill on the subject. Incidentally, I wonder when the Government will respond to Kent county council's request for £9.6 billion worth of infrastructure over the next 30 years.

Wherever I look in my constituency, the new build housing has not had any section 106 gains. At Warden Bay we were promised a primary school; it never happened. Guess what? We were promised another on the Meads estate at Bobbing; it never happened either. Now I learn that the large Thistle Hill estate being built on the Isle of Sheppey will not after all have a primary school. Three different developers have reached a section 106 agreement with Kent county council, but have walked away smiling. They have lined their shareholders' pockets, but they have not improved the quality of life of my constituents.

My constituency needs quality housing of every sort. We are desperate for housing estates in the great 19th century traditions of New Earswick and Port Sunlight, not the appallingly designed new rabbit hutch estates that currently adorn the north Kent coast. We need at least 3,000 houses for our young couples, our older people and our key workers. As Sittingbourne and Sheppey's economic base grows, we will need more housing to attract businesses.

The structure plan is weak on how we build, side by side, both the hardware of the infrastructure and the software, by which I mean our people. We will have a shortage of water in the next five years. Without wind power from the Thames, Kent will not have enough power. Where do we get more carpenters, builders and painters from? Where is the skills audit in the plan and where are the plans to build co-operation between our secondary schools and our further education colleges? I could say more, but I know that my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Medway wishes to add something and so I will stop there.