| I should like to take the opportunity of the debate to consider a much longer-term vision for Swindon, the town that I have the honour of representing. Swindon’s existence and prosperity is a tribute
to the power of vision. In its first incarnation as a great manufacturing town, it owed everything to the great engineer and entrepreneur, Isambard Kingdom Brunel. When the railways, on which
Swindon’s prosperity was based, began to decline, the vision and foresight of a post-war Labour town council prompted it to buy a lot of land and to make the town very attractive to businesses. At a
time when it was not a fashionable occupation for Labour councils, it wooed businesses to come to Swindon, and that has been the basis of our prosperity for many decades.
We have been open to the world economy, however, and we now face very particular challenges, from which there is no hiding
place. Chinese exports to Europe have increase 100 per cent. in three years, for example, and up to 5 million European and American jobs will be outsourced in the next 15 years. Moreover, many
people now realise that we face competition not only from low-wage and low-skill economies. Every year, universities in China and India turn out 4 million graduates.
Nowhere can escape change. Each of Swindon’s major employers has experienced radical restructuring, including W.H. Smith, Asda
and Zurich, and Motorola is now consulting on further redundancies. Even the most successful companies in our town are having to face these challenges. Swindon is a prosperous town at the moment,
but that prosperity cannot be taken for granted. We must remain attractive to the employers who are going to bring in the high-skill, high-value-added jobs on which our future prosperity depends.
That means not only that we need the right skills base but that the town must have an attractive environment.
The employees on whom those employers will depend are highly mobile, not only within the United Kingdom but throughout
Europe and across the globe. Their skills are highly in demand and they can move anywhere, so we have to make the town attractive to them. If we do that, we will have a better chance of attracting
the employers on whom the town’s prosperity depends. I made this case strongly to the Government a few years ago, and I was able to persuade them to bring in an urban regeneration company, now known
as the New Swindon Company. It is regenerating the town centre with that vision very much in mind, and about £1 billion worth of redevelopment will take place in due course. The University of Bath is
planning to locate a major campus in Swindon, which will also be crucial to providing the basis for the high skills on which the town’s
prosperity depends.
We have to get the vision right, and we have to do so now, while these decisions are being taken. This not a party political
issue. I represent the Labour party in North Swindon, but the town council is now Conservative dominated. However, all these decisions will have an impact long after everyone who is now active in
local politics has departed the scene. We have to get it right. That is our duty as local politicians. But these crucial decisions are being made, primarily by the town council, without sufficient
ambition for the town. We have to compete with other towns not only in the United Kingdom but in Europe and across the world. We have to be more attractive than towns elsewhere, but the town
council does not seem able to grasp that vision. I want to explore this point in relation to cultural regeneration and to more general environmental concerns.
The town council has a vision for the town centre, working with the New Swindon Company, that will undoubtedly result in a
significant improvement on what he have now. Any hon. Members familiar with Swindon town centre will know that that would not be hard to achieve. However, when the town council talks about building
a desperately needed new library why does it not talk about building one of the best libraries in Britain or Europe? If we consider the example of Tower Hamlets, we can see what an imaginative
borough council can do. There is a wonderful new library there called the Idea Store. It is visionary and exciting, bringing in local people in a way that no one would have imagined 10 or 15 years
ago. But Swindon does not think in that visionary, imaginative way. Swindon borough council has to learn from elsewhere, and to think about how it can compete with Tower Hamlets and everywhere else
in Europe. We are also talking about building a new concert hall in the town, but we are not talking about a concert hall that would be capable of attracting world-class performers. We should
be.
The Swindon local area agreement has just been signed off, and it represents an important step forward for the borough council.
It is an improving council with a great deal of support from central Government, and the local area agreement brings together many local agencies in a worthwhile way. I have been urging the borough
council for a long time to have a visionary theme to underpin its work, but what did it come up with? It came up with, “Swindon—the UK’s best business location”. Any town is likely to want to be
that, but we must look a little more deeply to avoid a bland and meaningless phrase.
There is nothing in the local area agreement to suggest why Swindon is going to be the best business location. I very
much hope that it will be, but we have to work at that, not just assert it and assume that it will be true. We have to produce the infrastructure and resources that will make it the best business
location. The targets in the local area agreement are, of course, good and will improve the position on the ground in a range of different ways, but they are not very ambitious. They are, for the
most part, pretty much in line with targets that the Government have set centrally. All that the local area agreement is doing is mimicking those targets. It is good, but not good enough.
For three or more years, I have been begging the council to develop a green vision for the town and to make it the centrepiece
of the local area agreement, but I am afraid that I have been ignored. Everyone accepts that, in climate change, we face one of the greatest problems in the history of our species and that if we do
not tackle it now, the consequences for our world will be incalculable. We all have to make a contribution: it is not just a matter for international agreements and national Governments; we have to
act personally and in our local areas. We have opportunities to do that and other towns are doing it.
A Conservative council in Woking is doing fantastically good work in energy conservation. Why cannot the Conservative council in
Swindon mimic what a Conservative council in Woking is doing? I am not sure that Swindon council is even aware of it. There is absolutely no evidence that it is on its agenda at all. Reykjavik, to
take an example from Europe, is already piloting running its buses on hydrogen. When we are having a major regeneration and re-sculpting of the town centre, why cannot we find something as
imaginative and visionary as that in Swindon? When Isambard Kingdom Brunel built the town, he had a wonderful far-reaching vision, which now seems to have been ignored.
I shall conclude with an example of how difficult it is to persuade Swindon borough council to be more ambitious for the town.
Nearly two years ago, I held a meeting in the House of Commons, to which I invited the then leader of Swindon borough council, its officers and various other local dignitaries, as well as a
distinguished galaxy of representatives from some of our leading cultural institutions. We had an interesting lunch, in which these distinguished representatives of some of our leading, world-class
institutions came up with their ideas about how to transform Swindon with a cultural vision based on lots of exciting and stimulating concepts. No one would expect the town council to take ideas
away from the lunch and implement them, but with so much expertise and incalculably valuable advice being freely offered, one would expect it to explore some of those ideas.
After the meeting, I wrote a note summarising some of the ideas that were proposed and sent it to the borough council. I asked
how it would like to proceed and how I could help it, but to this day I have received no reply and, needless to say, none of the ideas has been pursued. A truly ambitious council would have taken
those ideas and run with them. All the decisions facing the town now—what to do with the town centre, the new university, the redevelopment of a big site owned by the Science museum in Wroughton in
the south of Swindon—desperately require a bold and ambitious vision if the town is to compete successfully with other towns in the UK and across the world.
Time is running out, as the important decisions are being taken as we speak, and the town stands to benefit from them, but it
will not necessarily be good enough. We are not ambitious or competitive enough in Swindon. I am desperately worried that, unless the borough council wakes up now and realises that it is competing
throughout the world with similar towns that are ambitious and competitive in their approach to the great challenges of the future, our prosperity may soon become a distant memory.
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