PLEASE ATTRIBUTE ANY QUOTES USED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS  

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Good morning then to Mr Pickles.  

ERIC PICKLES: Morning  

DM: Mr Pickles just want to ask you first of all about this latest twist, it seems, in the issue of lobbying and Westminster for sale, so called, involving your, your colleague Tim Yeo. I mean you’re not going to comment, he’s going to come in himself. I know you’re not comment on the specific allegations but it seems its, it’s yet another attempted sting by journalists on Parliamentarians. Is the atmosphere getting very toxic between the two sides?  

EP: I can’t say I’ve really noticed it getting particularly toxic but I would just say, Tim’s going to be on the programme in a little while and you’ll get an opportunity to cross examine him. I notice that he’s referred the case to the Commissioner and I notice that he’s vigorously denying it.  

DM: I mean I didn’t want to obviously ask you about the specific allegations but it’s just that idea some people are saying, is it do with the Leveson Recommendations, are journalists out to get some MPs and Parliamentarians and from all parties in this sense that, you know can you ever relax when you go into a meeting now? You must be thinking oh maybe I’m being secretly filmed or taped?  

EP: Well that’s the welcome to my world. I think if you really, if you become paranoid about the press they’re just doing their job. That’s all they’re doing and if you’re obeying the rules, you’ve got nothing much to fear.  

DM: Okay so again that’s the fix and before you talk to them. Well you’re on the record here Mr Pickles. Let’s about these development zones and I mentioned there the hundred million pounds that’s going. It’s not new money is it?  

EP: Yeah I don’t want to be sniffy but its a hundred and four million pounds and if you include the money that’s going in from Transport its a hundred and twenty eight million pounds well no money is entirely new. It was part of the process of gradually rolling out the schemes but they will help the schemes along enormously, they’ll decontaminate land, they’ll help put roundabouts. They’ll just make it that bit more easier to create jobs. And we’ve found that these things, these schemes are motoring pretty good going, they’ve been going just slightly over a year and already they’re starting to generate jobs.  

DM: But are they? Are they new jobs? Because this is the question isn’t it, that’s always asked. When you give tax breaks like this in one specific area well doesn’t the business not so very far down the road think, well you know if I’m going to get this kind of tax breaks, I’m going to get looked after by the government, I’m just going to uproot and place myself there?  

EP: Yeah, yeah I know and this is, that was something that we were very keen to avoid right from the beginning so we weren’t really looking in terms of, you know, helping out, moving one retail park to another park. No, these are, these have been pretty…  

DM: Well how do you police that though, what do you say?  

EP: Well a lot of them, I don’t want to get techie, but a lot of them have been based on I think, on a local development order which is a simplified planning system. But that, most of them have been about a specific type of enterprise. For example, there was down in Nottinghamshire, as you might imagine it’s concentrated on pharmaceuticals. There’s the one up in Manchester, concentrates very much on the airport. So all of them are that little bit, that little bit different. And you know they’ve been quite enterprising, they’ve started to attract investment from all around the world. You will have seen the investment came in from India, Leyland into Lancashire. It’s been really quite impressive.  

DM: But I wanted to ask you about you know the philosophical point…  

EP: That’s the shipping department.  

DM: …you know but about that international investment because these are by and large smaller businesses but you’re, as a government, saying with them is we will give you tax breaks. Yeah you don’t have to pay your full whack of tax but if you get bigger then we’ll have the Prime Minister standing up in the House of Commons before the Despatch box and saying you’re not paying enough money and we want to get it off you.  

EP: I think comparing a number of very large international companies, global companies with what we try to do here is stretching it a bit.  

DM: But many of them were originally enticed here. I’ve interviewed them over the years, were enticed here by deals that the British government, you must know this, is going round, you’ve been part of that, goes around talking to multi-national companies and saying well come here and set up because we will give you a tax deal.  

EP: Well indeed I was myself engaged with that this week in India making those of kind discussions. I don’t think anybody is complaining about tax breaks, tax deals. What I think we are suggesting, with a respect to a lot of the large new industries is, we just want you to pay a fair whack, we just don’t want you to use some fancy off-shore process that you’re not paying and that’s something of course the Chancellor is very keen on.  

DM: Talk to me about planning. We touched on it there but when it comes to the hundreds of thousands, some say in the millions, of new homes that we need, fundamentally what underlies all this is where do they go and how do you ensure that they have the consent of the people whose areas they are in? Do you think you’ve got it about right?  

EP: Well I think we’ve made an important step towards that. I think part of the problem there’s been for the past thirty years or so, there has been no Town and Country Planning in this country. They have just been development control and what we’ve been attempting to do over the last two years is to get local authorities to actually plan and seventy two percent of them have now published a plan. We’re hoping we’ll get as close to a hundred percent as we can. And you can have the conflict not on the application on where things go and particularly…  

DM: This issue of the people that already live there that you know there are very few people who are going to look at the green field that they’re currently looking at and say you know I want to see five hundred houses built on it. How do you accommodate their views?  

EP: Well one of the big changes that we’ve made is to introduce neighbourhood planning and that takes a very small part of the town or it might take a village and local people decide. Now we’ve had I think five or six of those have already gone through. There’s a lot in the pipeline and the interesting thing whether it was up in the Eden Valley or down in Exeter, they were absolutely prepared to have new housing, new builders because they want their children to live close by, they want their parents to have specialist housing. If they decide on what’s going to go, if they decide on density, if they decide what it looks, there’s a much greater willingness to accept it.  

DM: Yeah and the same goes for windmills doesn’t it? It you’re going to bribe communities to have them there?  

EP: Well I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say if you’re going to have a windmill that you yourself should get some benefit. But I’ve changed the planning guidance because I was, I became very worried that the need for additional energy this country was completely outweighing all other considerations. So what we’ve tried to do is to rebalance so that inspectors will look at landscape, will look at the effect, will look at the cumulative effect of having a number of windmills there. So it’s all about just being reasonable and balanced.  

DM: Well reasonable and balanced I mean have you been reasonable balanced in that we know you’ve accepted the latest swathe of cuts to hit your department and yet we’re also hearing that local authorities, from the Public Accounts Committee saying this, that dozens of public authorities look like they may go to the wall. Well maybe they can’t go to the wall but maybe they’ll go bankrupt.  

EP: I thought it was a very old fashioned kind of report and doesn’t seem to take into consideration the changes that we’ve made to local government finance. Previous to this administration, I decided everything. I decided the level of Council Tax, I decided the level of domestic business rates at a certain level of their income. Now they can increase the amount of money they receive from business rates by bringing new business and on Council Tax. I no longer have any restrictions on the level that the Council Tax should be. The local population is, so there are no chances of them going bankrupt, they can always increase their Council Tax providing…  

DM: By going to a referendum.  

EP: …providing they can persuade the people that it’s justifiable. And I know a number are already announcing it. We’ve got some elections next May in which every single part of the United Kingdom is coming out so those who are wanting to run a referendum, they should do it then. It would be at virtually no cost. Nothing wrong in trusting the people.  

DM: Certainly not. I want to ask you about communities and in the wake of the Woolwich attacks. I know it’s something you’re monitoring and care about very deeply.  

EP: I certainly am.  

DM: Have you actually noticed a substantial increase, a substantial worsening of community relations in some areas? We hear about the odd attacks here, the odd demonstrations but do you think that it really hasn’t gone that deep?  

EP: It’s a very good question and we don’t really have the information to be able to analyse it precisely. My gut response in terms of, there have been a number of isolated incidents. I’ve talked to many of the victims of those and the one thing that is common throughout all those attacked is how the community by which I mean all of us have responded about it. I was talking about that dreadful business in North London with the attack on the Somali Centre and the leadership there was saying it was just fantastic the way in which their neighbours have kind of joined together to help them and to work together. The ones that occurred in North Kent and in Essex, their response was to do an open day of their mosque to thank people for the help that they’ve given. But you should understand that there are some nasty, vile people, extremists within that would classify themselves as Muslim and extremists that would regard themselves as being white supremacists who want to see our country torn apart.  

DM: We are just running out of time but on those, on that very issue of those nasty people that we have to keep an eye and this keys into the whole GC HQ…  

DM: Oh yeah. Yeah.  

EP: … and the prison programme from the United States. We understand the need of the security services to monitor those kind of people and…  

DM: Yeah.  

EP: …keep us safe, but the key question is, is that we have to be asked about it, we have to be told don’t we because we’re a democracy?  

DM: Yes and of course we do have a monitoring system set out, independent, looking at what the security forces are doing. And I remember seeing their last report suggests the highest degree of probity and scrutiny was being engendered but we just saw a clip from William that says, these, you know we need to be vigilant. I think we need to understand how really lucky this country was. We got through the Royal Wedding, we got through the Jubilee, we got through the Olympics without a major incident. We only need to be reminded what happened in Paris and in Woolwich and in Boston that the terrorist needs to be lucky just once and we need to be lucky every time.  

DM: Okay we are just nearly out of time. I’m just hearing by the way Mr Pickles that Tim Yeo, we started our interview, has decided not to appear in these studios. Do you think he should stand down?  

EP: Well he’s missing out a treat because I’m sure that you would have been very charming to him.  

DM: Okay well. Thanks very much indeed Mr Pickles. Eric Pickles there and you’re watching Murnaghan…  

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