House of Commons
Message to attend His Majesty
Speaker’s Statement
Mr Speaker
The House has directed the Speaker to make a statement at the beginning of each Session about the duties and responsibilities of hon. Members. I begin by reminding Members of their duty to observe the code of conduct and behaviour code agreed by the House, and to behave with civility and fairness in all their dealings. Unacceptable behaviour that does not meet the standard of these codes will be dealt with seriously and independently, and with effective sanctions.
The House asserts its privilege of freedom of speech. That privilege is enjoyed by Members of Parliament only in their work in proceedings of this House; as private individuals, we are equal under the law with those whom we represent. This privilege is there to ensure that our constituents can be represented without fear or favour. It is an obligation upon all of us to exercise that privilege responsibly. The Speaker does not have the power to police the accuracy of Members’ contributions—unfortunately. [Laughter.] It is incumbent on all Members to be accurate in what they say in this House, and to correct any mistakes as soon as possible.
All Members, including Ministers, should take their responsibilities in this House seriously. I remind Ministers that the Government’s own ministerial code makes it clear that important policy announcements should be made in the first instance in this House when it is sitting—some people seem to have short memories. Both Front and Back Benchers must also adhere to the courtesies of this House. That includes informing other Members in advance of visits to their constituencies, except those for purely private purposes.
I remind all Members that it is important that they are able to raise matters with me and seek guidance from the Clerks freely. For that reason, any such conversations and correspondence should be treated as confidential. I want all Members and everyone in the parliamentary community to be able to go about their work safely online, here in Westminster, and in their constituencies. We have a duty to be vigilant and to assist those whose job it is to keep us safe.
Finally, I want to say something about how we treat each other and the language we use in the Chamber. What we say in this House, and how we say things, matters. It has an impact on colleagues, on those who follow our proceedings and on wider political discourse across the country. Members should be heard courteously, whatever their views, but in this place we are all honourable Members. While I expect robust political debate, I will not accept undignified language or improper criticism of individual Members. Our constituents expect us to focus on the very serious issues that they care about, rather than make cheap attacks on each other.
If a Member falls short of the standards expected of us all, there are ways of dealing with that, but not by accusations made as sideswipes during questions or debates. If we fail to treat each other with respect in debate, it diminishes our work and risks raising the temperature of discussions outside this place—particularly on social media—which too often descend into abuse against Members and others. I expect Members from all sides to treat each other with respect.
Before moving to the first business of the new Session, I would like to express my very best wishes to all hon. Members, and to thank all those who work for the House and for Members for their continuing support. They are the unsung heroes. I thank them all for working with Members and for working in this House.
Outlawries Bill
A Bill for the more effectual preventing Clandestine Outlawries was read the First time, and ordered to be read a Second time.
King’s Speech
Mr Speaker
I have to acquaint the House that this House has this day attended His Majesty in the House of Peers, and that His Majesty was pleased to make a Most Gracious Speech from the Throne to both Houses of Parliament, of which I have, for greater accuracy, obtained a copy.
I shall direct that the terms of the Gracious Speech be printed in the Votes and Proceedings. Copies are available in the Vote Office.
The Gracious Speech was as follows:
My Lords and Members of the House of Commons
An increasingly dangerous and volatile world threatens the United Kingdom, with the conflict in the Middle East only the most recent example. Every element of the nation’s energy, defence and economic security will be tested.
My Government will respond to this world with strength and aim to create a country that is fair for all. My Ministers will take decisions that protect the energy, defence and economic security of the United Kingdom for the long-term. They will defend the British values of decency, tolerance and respect for difference under our common flag, and they will harness the potential of the pride felt across this country for its communities. My Government will take urgent action to tackle antisemitism and ensure all communities feel safe.
My Government believes that the United Kingdom’s economic security depends on raising living standards in every part of the United Kingdom. My Ministers will support measures that maintain stability and control the cost of living. They will use public investment to shape markets and attract further private investment. They will deploy the power of an active State in partnership with business and enable reforms that support higher growth and a fair deal for working people.
My Government believes that improved trading relations are vital for the United Kingdom’s economic security, for significantly raising economic growth, and for lowering prices for working people. My Ministers will introduce legislation to take advantage of new trading opportunities, including a Bill to strengthen ties with the European Union. My Government will also support the economic security of British businesses. Legislation will be introduced to tackle late payments and to reduce the burden of unnecessary regulation through innovation.
The United Kingdom’s economic security depends upon world class infrastructure. Legislation will be introduced to unlock the benefits of airport expansion; enable roads to be built at pace including the Lower Thames Crossing; and deliver a fair deal for the north of England through Northern Powerhouse Rail. My Ministers will continue to take all action necessary to safeguard the domestic production of steel.
My Government will also improve the United Kingdom’s security by continuing to invest in the renewal of public services. My Ministers will push forward with significant reforms to the police, the National Health Service, and to the criminal justice system to help them deliver services the British people expect. Legislation will be introduced to increase confidence in the security of the immigration and asylum systems. My Government will improve critical infrastructure with legislation to clean-up the water industry and establish Great British Railways.
My Government believes that the United Kingdom should be a country fair for all and a place where every child is included in the nation’s highest aspirations. My Ministers believe that every child deserves the chance to succeed to the best of his or her ability and not be held back due to poverty, special educational needs, or a lack of respect for vocational education. My Ministers will continue to invest in apprenticeships and measures that tackle youth unemployment. They will respond to the Milburn Review and the Timms Review and continue to reform the welfare system to support both young and disabled people to flourish in work as the basis for long-term economic security. A Bill will be brought forward to raise standards in schools and introduce generational reforms of the special educational needs system. My Ministers will also proceed with the introduction of Digital ID that will modernise how citizens interact with public services.
Alongside strong public services and a strong economy, the highest standards of trust in public office are essential for the social contract and the United Kingdom’s collective security. My Government will introduce the Hillsborough Law to bring forward a duty of candour for public servants. My Ministers will also introduce legislation to enable peerages to be removed. My Government will bring forward proposals that strengthen the delivery, accountability, innovation and productivity of the Civil Service. These proposals will also seek to safeguard its impartiality and core values, to enhance trust and confidence in the institutions of government.
My Government will bring forward a Bill to speed up remediation for people living in homes with unsafe cladding and a draft Bill to ban abusive conversion practices.
In this volatile world, my Government will continue to pursue foreign policy based on a calm assessment of the national interest. It will continue its unflinching support for the brave people of Ukraine, who fight on the frontline of freedom. My Ministers will seek to improve relations with European partners as a vital step in strengthening European security. It will continue to promote long term peace in the Middle East and the Two-State solution in Israel and Palestine.
My Government will also uphold the United Kingdom’s unbreakable commitment to NATO and our NATO allies, including through a sustained increase in defence spending.
My Government will seek to reinforce the long-term energy, defence and economic security of the United Kingdom as an essential component of strength on the world stage. This will include housing, which can be a source of insecurity for many people. My Ministers will bring forward legislation to increase long-term investment in social housing and to reform the leasehold system, including the capping of ground rents.
My Government will introduce legislation to tackle the growing threat from foreign state entities and their proxies. They will respond to the horrific attack in Southport with measures to protect the British people from extreme violence, and honour the victims, the injured and their families. My Ministers will also introduce legislation to improve the country’s defences against cyber-security threats.
My Government will support our gallant Armed Forces and their families who make considerable personal sacrifices for the collective security and freedom of everyone in the United Kingdom. My Ministers will recognise this service with an Armed Forces Bill that improves the service justice system and establishes the Armed Forces covenant in statute.
My Ministers believe that energy independence must be a long-term goal of national security and that the nation’s energy security requires long-term investment and reform, as demonstrated by recent events in the Middle East. Increased production of clean British energy will help to ensure that enemies of the United Kingdom cannot attack the economic security of the British people. My Ministers will therefore introduce an Energy Independence Bill to scale-up homegrown renewable energy and protect living standards for the long-term.
My Ministers will also take forward recommendations of the Nuclear Regulatory Review and encourage a new era of British nuclear energy generation.
My Government will remain a leading advocate for tackling climate change and achieving a world free from poverty. The United Kingdom will also take action to reduce humanitarian need and conflict around the world.
My Ministers will champion the rights of women and girls to live in a world free from violence. This will include promoting women’s full economic and political participation within their societies, with agency over the decisions that impact their lives.
Next year, the United Kingdom will take on the G20 Presidency and host the G20 Summit to drive global growth and reinforce global stability, which is essential for the prosperity of working people across the country.
My Government is committed to the strength and integrity of the Union of the United Kingdom and will continue to work closely with the devolved governments to deliver for citizens across the whole of the nation.
Members of the House of Commons
Estimates for the public services will be laid before you.
My Lords and Members of the House of Commons
Other measures will be laid before you.
I pray that the blessing of Almighty God may rest upon your counsels.
Debate on the Address
(2 days, 12 hours ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Speaker
Before I call the mover and the seconder, I want to announce the proposed pattern of debate during the remaining days on the Loyal Address: today—debate on the Address; tomorrow—getting Britain working again; Monday 18 May—backing business to create economic growth; Tuesday 19 May—energy security; Wednesday 20 May—defence readiness.
I now have the privilege of calling Naz Shah to move the address, and I will then call Chris Vince to second it.
Naz Shah (Bradford West) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That an humble Address be presented to His Majesty, as follows:
Most Gracious Sovereign,
We, Your Majesty’s most dutiful and loyal subjects, the Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, in Parliament assembled, beg leave to offer our humble thanks to Your Majesty for the Gracious Speech which Your Majesty has addressed to both Houses of Parliament.
It would be remiss of me not to say a few words about the outstanding state visit by His Majesty to the United States. We saw eloquent oratory, remarkable wit and genuine statesmanship from His Majesty. Presenting President Trump with the original brass bell—inscribed with his name before he was even born—from the second world war submarine HMS Trump and suggesting, if he needs us, to “give us a ring” was a masterstroke in diplomacy. His Majesty returned—very humbly, of course—having secured the lifting of trade barriers on Scotch whisky. Given the performance, I was rather worried His Majesty might come back with the 13 colonies as well.
It is a huge honour for me and my constituents in Bradford West for me to move the Loyal Address. This is the second time that my constituency has been honoured in this way. In 1959, the then Member for Bradford, West, Arthur Tiley, seconded the Loyal Address. When the Chief Whip called me about today, my first reaction, like many across this House when the Chief calls, was, “Uh-oh, what have I done?” However, that “Uh-oh” soon turned into, “Oh my days—no way!” with the biggest smile ever.
I clearly remember listening to the speeches by my hon. Friends the Members for Bootle (Peter Dowd) and for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green (Florence Eshalomi) the last time this occasion happened, and thinking, “Now, that is an honour.” Had I known God was listening, I would have asked to win the EuroMillions. In fact, had I known that not always voting with the Government also works, I might have done more of it. [Laughter.]
I am indeed humbled and honoured, primarily for being trusted by the people of Bradford West in placing their faith in me and sending me to this place, but also by being given this opportunity to be the first ever Muslim to propose the Loyal Address in this Chamber—[Hon. Members: “Hear, hear”]—and, of course, seeing the meltdown of the far right online at a “Muslim takeover” and even an “act of domination”. In the light of this, I must assure them this is not a takeover. I must state it is, per convention, a joke—[Laughter.] But if seeing black and brown people on TV makes you feel sick, my speech is going to make you vomit. [Laughter.]
On a more serious note, over the last few months I have had the opportunity to tell my own story: the story of my life and the challenges I faced growing up. I often pinch myself while in this Chamber, questioning how a girl who lived the life that I lived could be given such an honour to represent her city in the mother of all Parliaments. It is because, despite the challenges we may face as a nation and the differences in approach that we present across the House, I know without a doubt that, as someone who comes from the ethnic, religious and socioeconomic background that I came from, and whose entire live crashed before her, I would never have been given such an honour in any other country than this one—my own country, our country. For me, there is no nation greater than ours. We are the greatest nation on earth, and I am a true patriot. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”]
Raised in abject poverty, living in a single room because we could not afford to heat the whole house and suffering tuberculosis as a result, I understand at first hand what this means. Therefore, I welcome the Government’s continued commitment to prioritise addressing the cost of living crisis. In doing so, we cannot ignore the instability across the world around us: the plight of the Palestinians, the war in Ukraine, the instability in the strait of Hormuz, and the growing global threats for which we must also be ready.
Living in a globalised world means that there is an ever-growing connection between the local, the national and the international. What happens out there reaches every home and doorstep across every constituency. The defence of our country is rightly also among these top agenda items. As a proud graduate of the armed forces parliamentary scheme—I recommend that all Members take part in and support it—I have nothing but admiration and thanks for those who have served and continue to serve to protect our tomorrow.
I also have the honour to serve as the Prime Minister’s trade envoy for Indonesia and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, a region of more than 660 million people, and a hugely important geopolitical and trade corridor. I welcome the continued commitment to strengthening our place across the world. Without international trade and growth in our economy, we cannot deliver the jobs, investment and support we need across our country. I will continue to play my part in securing trade and investment for the UK, and championing British business abroad with colleagues from across the House.
Closer to home, I had the honour to serve in Committee for the assisted dying Bill—something that went beyond party lines—where I had the opportunity to work with colleagues from across the House, including the hon. Member for East Wiltshire (Danny Kruger). While I did not eventually support the Bill, I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Spen Valley (Kim Leadbeater) for her work, commitment and passion.
Talking about going beyond party lines, I noted with interest, as I am sure the whole nation did too, the rather peculiar fascination of the previous Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, the noble Lord Gove, with our Home Secretary. He actually confessed to browsing the internet for her images. Thankfully, knowing our Home Secretary as I do, I am confident that this is not the kind of cross-party mischief that she would reciprocate. [Laughter.]
But I do have a guilty pleasure of my own—and no, it is not a Tory. [Laughter.] Unfortunately for my calorie count, it is custard and cake. I blame Godfrey and Sharon in the Tea Room for their unwavering encouragement to indulge “sparingly”. [Laughter.]
I am proud to be the first woman elected to Parliament for the constituency of Bradford West, a constituency with a history of extraordinary women who broke every barrier that patriarchy put in front of them. The Brontë sisters changed English literature forever but had to use men’s names to publish their writing. The suffragettes of Bradford went to Holloway prison for the right to vote. The women of Manningham Mills walked out into the cold, changing our political landscape forever. Margaret McMillan pioneered free school meals—trialled in 1904 in the school I later attended, Green Lane primary—leading to the Education (Provision of Meals) Act 1906, which cemented free school meals in our history.
Barbara Castle, shaped by Bradford’s streets and schools, went on to write equal pay into law, and I am proud to serve alongside equally formidable women, such as my hon. Friends the Members for Bradford South (Judith Cummins) and for Shipley (Anna Dixon). There is something in the air in Bradford as a whole that produces women who will not be told. I promise this House that I have zero intention of breaking with that.
Today our country beams with pride because of the many great changes made by successive Labour Governments, but none of those changes would have been possible without the women who led the Manningham Mills strike. That strike led to the founding of the Independent Labour party, conceived and formed in Bradford West. It was in Bradford that a man named Keir first took the chair of the Labour movement, and despite 130 years, two world wars, and roughly 47 leadership elections, the party remains in the hands of a Keir. Prime Minister, nobody can say that you do not know how to fight on.
I could not make this speech without recognising David Hockney—a boy from a Bradford terrace who pushed his paintings around the city in a pram. David went on to become the world’s most famous living artist. He once said that if you look closely, Bradford is a city with magic. I do not know whether he was looking into the future and describing Bradford magician Dynamo, Zayn Malik’s magical music, or the leg-spinning, world cup-winning magic of our very own Adil Rashid, but Bradford is without question a place of wonders.
Bradford is also a place of culture. The Bradford literature festival is often referred to as the jewel in the crown; it is now one of the largest literature festivals in the UK, and the largest of its kind throughout Europe, pairing excellence with access for those who would otherwise be excluded from culture. In 2025, Bradford was proud to be named UK City of Culture, home to a rich, diverse population, built on the back of the historic title of the wool capital of the world.
In the 1850s, German-Jewish merchants came to Bradford and built the magnificent warehouses of what we now call Little Germany, helping to make Bradford a global trading city and the proud home of the oldest synagogue in the north. It is a synagogue that the Muslim community recently stepped in to save when the roof was about to cave in, illustrating the relationship between the Muslim and Jewish communities in Bradford. A century after the German-Jewish merchants, men from Azad Jammu and Kashmir, India, and Pakistan arrived in the 1950s and 60s, and worked tireless nightshifts to keep the mills running, ensuring Britain’s economy continued to flourish after the second world war. Each generation of newcomers did not just come to Bradford—they built Bradford.
Chicken tikka masala might be the UK’s national dish, but I must inform the House that they have not had a curry until they have had a Bradford curry. Whether it is the legendary family naans on trees invented by the late king of curries Shabbir Hussain, the founder of Akbar’s, or the subcontinent flavours of Aaghra, Mumtaz, Jinnah, MyLahore, or any one of hundreds of restaurants across the city, Bradford does curry like nowhere else. The curries are that good they even defy the Mounjaro jab. A note to the Health Secretary: he may have to develop a stronger solution.
I recommend Bradford’s curry to all Members of the House. Now that Bradford has a few Reform councillors, perhaps the hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage), who I see is not in his place, could pay them a visit and treat them to a good curry, followed by a pint brewed in Bradford. In fact, given the size of the gift he received that we are all now aware of, he could probably take half of Bradford out and still be left with plenty of change.
Bradford is the youngest city in the United Kingdom. It has been named the most entrepreneurial, too; Morrisons grew from a market stall in our city to a household name. Bradford has no poverty of aspiration, talent or ambition, but decades of poverty of infrastructure have left us behind.
Bradford is, however, turning a corner, with £270 million in public sector investment building private sector confidence, with a combined pipeline now reaching £2.3 billion. I am grateful for our Government’s support, which includes: a new hospital in Airedale; a £2 billion integrated settlement for West Yorkshire, giving our Labour Mayor, Tracy Brabin, the power and flexibility to invest in local jobs, new homes and improving skills; a Bradford city station; and £2.1 billion investment in transport for the city region, enabling West Yorkshire to deliver mass transit, better buses and repair our roads and potholes. All that is pumping confidence into a city ready for investors to benefit from its untapped potential. Northern Powerhouse Rail is not a “nice to have”, but the difference between Bradford’s young people building their futures at home and building them somewhere else.
I give thanks to all the House staff across the estate who ensure that Parliament can play the role it does. They are hugely deserving of our appreciation for everything they do. Outside of this place, I also thank the security services and our police forces, who keep us safe with the ever-increasing risks and threats to our democracy. Given the magnitude of this moment, I also emphasise the huge weight and burden of responsibility on our shoulders. When we speak in this Chamber, it carries meaning and impact; it impacts the boy who takes off his kippah and the girl who removes her hijab, fearing for their safety because their race and religion have become a political football. An attack on anyone, or anyone’s place of worship—a synagogue, a mosque, a church, a temple, a gurdwara or any kind of religious institution—is an attack on our British way of life. We must strengthen our communities against the rising tide of nationalism and populism. In an ever more dangerous world, and an ever more toxic online world, society needs unity, calmness and leadership more than ever to make our country the best it can be. The burden of responsibility falls on all our shoulders, and it has never been greater.
It is also convention to part with words of wisdom for those who are slightly newer to this place. With that in mind, I simply say this: nurture the pragmatism of being an elected representative of the people who have put their trust in you and sent you here, but never forget the passion of an activist. Keep that fire burning—it is that passion that will sustain you and carry you through, because sometimes it gets difficult here.
A King’s Speech is meant to be a fresh start—Parliament’s version of clearing the kitchen table, making room for the work ahead, gathering the family round and reminding ourselves what the country has sent us here to do. As hon. Members may know, I believe in a full table. In my home, hospitality matters. You make space, listen and serve people properly. But good hospitality and politics itself is about more than who speaks first or loudest. It is about noticing the quiet ones, those who may be less organised or not as powerful but who are none the less equally, if not more, important—the voiceless whose voices we need to become.
For someone like me, who spent her formative years fighting a campaign to release her mother from prison and who did not have a formal education beyond the age of 12, spelling, grammar and parliamentary language do not come naturally. Forced into a marriage at 15, forced to live a life with hearing aids, lugging around a black bin liner of belongings as a homeless teenager, left all alone as a guardian to a younger brother and sister without a shoulder of support or stability in life, attempting suicide as I could not see a way out from my despair, yet here I stand—[Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] Here I stand with the world’s eyes watching the state opening of Parliament on this momentous occasion, having been given the privilege of this moment. If this was not my story, I would believe it to be fiction. But the truth is that there can be light at the end of the tunnel. As I believe, and as my life personifies, after hardship comes ease.
When I stood in this Chamber for the first time, I pinched myself—and I still do—that someone like me can end up here representing the city they love in the mother of all Parliaments. Bradford and my country gave me everything. I intend to spend every day in this House returning the favour. It is the honour of my life to move the Loyal Address on behalf of the people of Bradford West. I commend the motion to the House.
Mr Speaker
I won’t mention the Bolton-Bradford game on Thursday.
I call Chris Vince to second the address.
Chris Vince (Harlow) (Lab/Co-op)
It is an absolute honour to second this Humble Address. First, I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford West (Naz Shah) for her incredibly powerful speech and echo her words about the importance of communities coming together to tackle the divisive politics that we have seen so often. I thank her for those comments.
May I also echo her comments about the House staff and the incredible job that they do to support all of us? Following my recent London marathon run, two of the Doorkeepers suggested that the only reason Sabastian Sawe did it in less than two hours was to get away from me talking about Harlow. As a big fan of curries, I look forward to having the opportunity to sample one in Bradford in the future, although I cannot speak for all my fellow Essex MPs.
Speaking to this motion is a unique opportunity. I have checked the records, and I am the first MP for Harlow to have had the opportunity to do so—mind you, Harlow has only been a constituency since the 1970s, and I am not counting Winston Churchill, who represented what is now Harlow when it still came under Epping. It may be the first time that a Harlow MP has delivered this speech, but I believe that this opportunity has come at the right time. When I reflect on the hurdles ahead, a lot can be learned by looking at Harlow’s past and Harlow’s future.
My seconding the Humble Address came about when I received a phone call from the Chief Whip on the train home. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford West—and most Members across the House, I am sure—my first thought was, “What have I done wrong?” I thought that perhaps, as some Members across the House did, he had misheard me when I said “horned” during a speech; I did not much fancy explaining to him on a train full of my constituents that I had said “horned” and not another word that sounds like “horned”. Thankfully, that was not the case.
The Chief Whip told me there were certain traditions around the King’s Speech—that the seconder’s speech should be humorous and was an opportunity to mention the Member’s constituency as often as possible. This did sound like a good gig to me, to be fair. I cannot necessarily promise humour—although I will give it a good go—but I can certainly promise that I will mention Harlow as often as possible. Those listening at home may wish to count the number of times I do so. I believe the current count is seven. [Interruption.] Is it eight? What did I do for a living?
Harlow is never a dull place to represent. Members across the House will know that Harlow once again bucked the national trend when it came to last week’s local election results. We are getting quite good at that, even if it might not have been in quite the way I would have liked. However, it shows the ambition of the people of Harlow to see their town improve and grow—something that can only happen with this Government’s continued investment. Hint, hint!
The Chief Whip also told me that it was tradition to have an established MP propose the Loyal Address and for a “bright young thing” to second it. I have to say that I am not particularly bright and I am not particularly young—[Hon. Members: “Ah!”] But I am definitely a thing, so I can claim one third of that description.
I think the Chief Whip asked me to give this speech because he was aware that, on the last day of term, I failed to achieve my 400th contribution to Hansard. I thank everybody for being here so that I can now do so. In this parliamentary term I look forward to making 400 further contributions, with multiple references to Harlow, my mother’s sterling career at HMRC, and the fact that I may have previously been a maths teacher. [Hon. Members: “More!”] There is more; don’t worry.
I think we all recognise, as His Majesty does, that this King’s Speech comes at an increasingly dangerous and volatile time that, like hon. Friends and other hon. Members, I have spent a great deal of time thinking about. During this turmoil, I have taken the time to reflect on what it means to be British—those British values. What is our country about? What is the real Britain? We mention Britishness more and more, but it can mean any number of things to any number of people.
When I think about what it means to be British, I think about my recent experience running the London marathon. To be clear, I am not referring to when the right hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Holden), with his Union flag shorts on, overtook me on mile 17, just as I hit the metaphorical wall. I have looked it up and he is two years younger than me, so I have an excuse.
During my marathon run—or perhaps in my case I should say my marathon limp—along the streets of London, I saw neither hate nor division. I saw unity. I saw people coming together to cheer on perfect strangers in their shared endeavour. I saw Gordon Ramsay randomly heckle me to carry on. I even got support from a Man United supporter. I saw everyone—man or woman, black or white, gay or straight—all lining the 26.2-mile course. And by the way, that 0.2 miles at the end is only made possible by those supporters. That is the Britain I know. That is the Britain that I love.
That sense of supporting one another, and of coming together as a community in hardship and celebration, is alive and well in Harlow. In fact, it was baked into the very foundation of Harlow when it was first conceived as part of the new town revolution under the first majority Labour Government in 1945.
Harlow remains a strong community today. When I think of Britishness, I think of Rainbow Services, which supports projects across Harlow by getting young people to build infrastructure for their community; I think of Streets2Homes, the homelessness charity I worked at that supports the most vulnerable in our society; and I think about the Michael Roberts charitable foundation, which runs the local food bank.
As I mentioned, Harlow is a post-war new town designed by Sir Frederick Gibberd to be a place of neighbourhoods and communities. It was built as a solution to the problem of overcrowding in London. Harlow sought to alleviate that pressure, while keeping communities tightly knit together. We can still see remnants of that today, with people from Walthamstow moving to The Stow in Harlow, which gives people a fresh start in life with all the comforts of their community. To this day, Harlow is one community built by lots of smaller and close communities—communities like Potter Street, Bush Fair, Church Langley and Little Parndon.
As Harlow grew into its new town, so too did its pioneering spirit. Just two weeks ago, I was lucky enough to recognise one of those pioneers by unveiling a blue plaque in memory of Harlow-raised scientist Dr George Hockham, one of the key brains behind the invention of the fibre-optic cable. Fibre-optic cable, created in Harlow, revolutionised modern communication not just in Britain, but across the world. For me, George Hockham and many others like him from Harlow can be an inspiration for Harlow’s next generation—a generation who deserve a Government on their side. I also think of inspirations like Professor Hannah Fry and Paralympian Anne Strike. These inspirations are a reminder of what it means to be British, to achieve so much and to have such a proud community behind you.
Harlow has a history to be proud of and a future to be excited about. As a former teacher—I do not know whether I have mentioned that fact—I am filled with pride when I visit schools across Harlow and see the incredible young people learning there. That is why I am proud that education is at the heart of this Government’s offer in the King's Speech, building on the work done in the previous parliamentary Session.
Looking to this Session, the Government will tackle the broken special educational needs and disabilities system, giving every young person with SEND the support they need and supporting parents, not leaving them to battle a broken system. This issue cuts across this House. I am sure every hon. Member can recall a constituent coming to them broken, with nowhere to turn, at their wits’ end with a SEND system that benefits no one; I certainly can.
I also welcome the Government’s commitment to review the national curriculum to make it broader, recognising the importance of citizenship and financial education and the dangers of online harm. What our younger generation learn is so important. If I could achieve one thing, when I look back on my time serving Harlow, I want it to be achieving for the young people in Harlow the aspiration that they deserve. Every young person now sitting in a classroom in Harlow—primary or secondary—should have the opportunity to aspire to achieve whatever they want to do. That is what I want for Harlow.
Some might say the fact that I am standing in this Chamber, giving this speech, means that anyone can achieve anything if they are resilient enough. Let me tell you, Mr Speaker, I can roll with the punches, and believe me, my journey to these Green Benches did not happen without me getting knocked down along the way. I say now, directly to the young people of Harlow: Do not give up on your dreams. Do not let someone tell you that you can’t do it. If you really want something and you are willing to work hard for it, you can achieve it. I am proof of that, and I know that in this Government, you have a Prime Minister dedicated to giving that opportunity to others—because he is even more proof of it than I am.
I would be remiss of me not to take this opportunity to mention a personal focus of mine in this place: supporting young carers and young adult carers. I call on the Government once again to ensure that support for those particularly incredible young people is a golden thread running through everything that they do.
Of course, Harlow is about more than just its young people, and my community has not been immune to the pressures of the cost of living crisis. I welcome the work already done—the freezing of rail fares and prescription charges, the lifting of the two-child benefit cap and the raising of the minimum wage—but most of all I am pleased that this Government, in this King’s Speech, recognise that there is more to do to support families in Harlow.
When we talk about cost of living pressures, it is easy to get lost in the numbers— as a mathematician at heart, that is even easier for me. But to bring the issue home, when I think of the reality facing hard-working and proud families in Harlow, I think of my friend Jamie, who works six days a week to pay the bills, put food on the table for his two-year-old son and provide for his family. At the end of the month, he has very little, if anything. He cannot enjoy himself. He cannot treat his family. This parliamentary Session must be defined by being the one where we see living standards improve for everyone in our society, not just for the privileged few. That is what will be in my mind’s eye when I cast my votes in this place.
I am sure my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham West, Chadderton and Royton (Jim McMahon) is waiting anxiously for me to point out that I stand here in this place as not just a Labour MP, but a Labour and Co-operative MP. I am proud of the Co-operative party and the work it has been doing alongside the Government to empower local communities, like mine in Harlow, through community ownership. I hope this next Session will bring even more co-operative opportunities for people in Harlow.
Of course, like those of many hon. Members in this place, my constituency name does not encompass the full nature of my area. The Harlow constituency does not end at the town boundary; I also represent incredible villages with incredible histories. I represent Roydon, a village that first appeared in the Domesday Book. Bordering Roydon are Lower Nazeing and Dobbs Weir, which are home to the Lea Valley growers—some of the biggest vegetable producers in the country. I also represent Sheering, one of whose most notable residents is Rod Stewart. For the first time, Harlow also includes Hatfield Heath and Hatfield Broad Oak—I know that the Leader of the Opposition will vaguely remember those places—which are incredible communities with a strong sense of what it means to look after your neighbour; I have got a “Neighbours” reference in there for the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport! Ironically, one of my predecessors, Bill Rammell, moved out of Harlow to one of the villages, but Harlow was not keen on this so it expanded its boundaries to include him back in the constituency, and we welcome him.
Part of the fun of representing such a diverse community, with its healthy share of rural and urban, is the mix I get to experience as its MP. I can visit local businesses in the morning, talk to a group of students in the afternoon, and then round up the day with a community event. I have attended my fair share of community events, although I am not convinced it was a great idea to run the Matching village 10K a week after the London marathon. I did not see the right hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay there—just saying! Perhaps he had already finished. [Laughter.] On the point about running, when I took part in the London marathon, I received the card from my parliamentary team wishing me luck, with one member of my team commenting: “You’ve run in enough elections, so a marathon should be easy.”
That brings me to my conclusion and to the line that I want to end with, which is from one of my own former teachers. Did I mention I was a teacher? Mr Feeley used to teach me science, although I am not really sure that we learned a lot of science in his lessons. However, I think this line perfectly sums up this Government. We should always remember: “it’s a marathon and not a sprint.” I would respectfully remind Members of that.
Mrs Kemi Badenoch (North West Essex) (Con)
This King’s Speech is taking place against the most extraordinary backdrop. We knew that the carriages were booked, that the horses were ready and that the King was coming, but would we have a Prime Minister? It is such an honour to be the Leader of the Opposition who gets to respond today. May I start by congratulating the proposer and seconder of the Loyal Address on their excellent speeches? I also congratulate the Whips on finding two Back Benchers prepared to support the Prime Minister at this time.
The hon. Member for Bradford West (Naz Shah) gave a moving and funny speech. I especially appreciated her comments about black and brown faces on TV—or, as my children say, “Oh look, it’s mummy again.” She only touched lightly on the fact that she is someone who has faced one of the most challenging childhoods imaginable, yet through the strength of her character, has made it to this place. She is made of tough stuff, and that is something we need more of in this House. Anyone who can boast of chewing up and spitting out George Galloway in an election is clearly formidable.
I also congratulate the hon. Member for Harlow (Chris Vince) on successfully delivering a humorous and warm-hearted speech. As he noted, he is my constituency neighbour. He ran the London marathon last month, raising money for the St Clare hospice, which cares for his constituents and mine, so I would like to take this opportunity to thank him for doing that. I have become a big fan of his after listening to his speech, especially as he was so generous in his comments about the Harlow Conservatives’ successful election campaign and my councillors’ outstanding work on regenerating the town centre. If things on his side of the House are getting a bit much, he would be very welcome to cross the Floor and help the Conservatives carry on that work. I think we can say that the proposer and seconder of the Loyal Address have upheld the best traditions of the House.
I would of course like to pay tribute to His Majesty the King. His Majesty has served through a period of great personal difficulty, and throughout it he has exemplified the virtues of grace, dignity, humour, modesty and resolve in the face of adversity—virtues that were on full display during his hugely successful state visit to the United States. I am sure the whole House will have admired his skilful speech to Congress. It was a speech full of the wisdom and courage needed for our times. Of course, we would never have got to hear it if we had listened to some people in this House who called for the King’s visit to be cancelled—thank goodness no one listens to the leader of the Liberal Democrats.
As for the Prime Minister, when he was young, he called for the end of the monarchy, so I am glad that the right hon. and learned Gentleman has seen the error of his ways, because previous King Charleses took a much dimmer view of that kind of thing. I am only sorry that this new-found appreciation of the monarchy and our country’s traditions has come too late, because this is the first parliamentary Session ever without the hereditary peers. Their departure will be keenly felt and our Parliament will be poorer for it, especially when we consider some of the people Labour has been replacing them with—people who have already had the Whip removed before they have even taken their seats.
Mr Speaker, I know that the convention is for this to be a light-hearted debate, but as I have already said, this is a highly unusual moment. The Prime Minister is in office but not in power. Everyone is trying to pretend it is all right—it is not all right. In the past 48 hours, nearly 100 Labour MPs have called for the Prime Minister to resign. Four Ministers have quit. It is clear that his authority has gone and that he will not be able to deliver what little there is in this King’s Speech. This is a Government less than two years in office who have already run out of ideas and run out of road.
So how did we get here? There is a great line in the musical “Hamilton”: “Winning is easy, governing is harder”. Everything that has gone wrong in Labour’s first two years comes back to one problem: it came into office with no plan. It did not understand the difference between winning an election and governing a country. It was very easy to make promises in opposition—promises to freeze council tax, promises to take £300 off energy bills, promises to the WASPI women. Hundreds of Labour MPs took photos with them to post on their Facebook pages, websites and election leaflets, but at no point did they bother to think how they would deliver any of it.
Labour did not spend its time in opposition thinking deeply about the country’s problems. It assumed that governing in the 2020s would be like governing in the 1990s, but it is not. Britain is facing new structural problems. We have an ageing—[Interruption.] Labour Members all shout at me; I know they cannot wait to get back to their plotting, but it is quite important that we hear what is being said. We have an ageing population, a falling birth rate and a welfare bill that is spiralling out of control. We have an information revolution in the shape of AI that threatens to unravel the world of work as we know it, and the cost of energy is driving industry out of the country.
Labour was taken by surprise that we are living in a more competitive and increasingly hostile world. Its manifesto was just a set of misleading promises. It promised no new taxes on working people—fail. It promised to crack down on illegal immigration—fail. It promised to tread more lightly on people’s lives—epic fail. It made promises without knowing how anything works.
Let us look at housing. Just after Labour took office, when I was shadow Housing Secretary, I stood at this Dispatch Box and warned the former Deputy Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner), that she had been stitched up and that the 1.5 million new homes Labour promised had been hung like a millstone around her neck. I knew the Government would not be able to meet that target, because they did not understand why more houses were not being built. Sure enough, they are already more than a third down on their target, and well behind what we delivered. Of course, in the end it was not 1.5 million homes that did for the former Deputy Prime Minister; it took just one flat in Brighton to bring her down.
It is so obvious—[Interruption.] I know Labour Members don’t want to hear it. Look at them—they are so arrogant that they want to lead our country, but they cannot even lead a coup. It is so obvious that they cannot handle being in government. They hate the responsibility, and they hate having to take tough decisions. They prefer scratching the itches that they had in opposition: giving inflation-busting pay rises to the unions, with 28% for the doctors who, after nearly two years, are still striking, and handing out more benefits to the only people who will still vote for them, because Labour Members do not understand that poverty is created not by a lack of benefits but by a failing economy.
We spent the last Session listening to Labour MPs telling us how great everything was going, and no doubt we will hear lots of grandstanding speeches this week, telling us what a fantastic job they did. How absurd, given the number of them demanding that the Prime Minister stands down. We counted, Mr Speaker, and there were 24 U-turns in that first parliamentary Session: winter fuel, family farms, grooming gangs, welfare reform, social media for under-16s, day one workers’ rights—the list goes on and on. Every single one of those U-turns had at its core a single issue: the Prime Minister’s total lack of judgment. This is a man who, faced with a crisis of vision, charisma and electoral success, sent for Gordon Brown.
Leadership is about having a vision for this country, and the courage to take difficult decisions, persuading your party that those difficult decisions will pay off in time, and taking responsibility for your mistakes. The Prime Minister has failed on every count. We have had pillars, promises, four-point plans, five-point plans, missions, with none of it achieving anything—reset after reset after reset. Even if the Prime Minister lasts long enough in office for this Loyal Address to be delivered, the Bills announced today do not remotely come close to what the country needs—[Interruption.] Labour Members are chuntering, Mr Speaker, but not a single one of them dares to intervene on me.
I welcome the Government’s ongoing support for Ukraine and their commitment to NATO. In this increasingly dangerous world, it is more important than ever that we stand with our allies in the fight against tyranny. I also commend the Government for their commitment to speed up the delivery of infrastructure such as new nuclear. Too many Governments have been frustrated in their attempts to deliver nuclear projects quickly, and we will support efforts to make the process simpler, faster and cheaper.
I also want to be generous to the Home Secretary, because I see that she is trying to do something about illegal immigration. The elephant in the room is that she almost certainly will not be Home Secretary for much longer, and sadly, no one else in the Labour party looks remotely interested in bringing down illegal immigration. The rest of the offerings in the King’s Speech make it clear that Labour Members have learned no lessons from their mistakes in government so far. All we have is a load of reannounced policies: hounding our brave veterans through the courts; legislating for digital ID—a policy they told us they had dropped; and banning trail hunting, which is just more class war that makes no one’s life better. Scrapping NHS England is something the Prime Minister announced 14 months ago—but I suppose the Health Secretary has been a bit distracted lately, hasn’t he? [Interruption.] He’s chuntering now. Why don’t you just do your job? There is no point in him giving me dirty looks; we all know what he has been up to.
Even worse is what is not in the Gracious Speech. There is no defence readiness Bill, because apparently it is not ready. Where are the plans for welfare reform? There are none, because Labour MPs have blocked them. Where is the plan to make savings? There isn’t one, because Labour Members do not know how to make savings; they only know how to spend money—other people’s money. Where is the plan to support businesses? There isn’t one, because they do not understand that it is business that creates growth, not Government. They have no answers on what really matters: the problems that must be solved to get Britain working again.
I do feel very sorry for Labour Back Benchers. [Interruption.] It’s true—I do feel sorry for Labour Back Benchers. They arrived here not that long ago with such high hopes. Some of them, in fact, were so talented that they were made Ministers before ever speaking a word in Parliament. So talented! Although one of them has just resigned; I must not forget that. We have watched their growing horror, day after day and week after week, as this hope descended into total chaos; the dread as they are sent out yet again to defend the indefensible; the injustice of feeling like pariahs in their own constituencies—banned from pubs and banned from hairdressers, which is presumably why all the women on the Government Front Bench have the same hairstyle. We have seen the realisation that their legacy is just going to be—[Interruption.] They can complain as much as they like. I was not expecting this to be comfortable for them. They are the ones who are trying to unseat their Prime Minister; they should face that. We have seen the realisation that their legacy is just going to be breakfast clubs and Peter Mandelson.
Labour MPs have been treated as disposable by their leadership: sacked for backing the two-child benefit cap, sacked for opposing welfare changes, sacked for supporting farmers. The Prime Minister then U-turned on all of them. It must be tough when you take a principled stand and have the Whip removed, only for the Government to confirm six months later that they agreed with you all along. It is no wonder that nearly 100 Labour MPs have now called for the Prime Minister to go. I know that there are another 100 who claim to be supporting him, although some of them did not even know that their name was on that list. When you can only get a quarter of your MPs to publicly back you, the game is up, so the starting gun for the Labour leadership contest has been fired.
Let’s have a look at the runners and riders. We have the former Deputy Prime Minister—she is not here—who has giving up vaping but still has not paid her taxes. We have the Health Secretary, who accidentally sent his takeover plans to No. 10—almost as incompetent as leaving them on the photocopier. And we have the Mayor of Manchester, a self-proclaimed winner who has twice failed to win the Labour leadership, including against the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn). As one Labour MP said about all the candidates in this race, and I quote:
“We have to face up to the fact that every single one of them is”—
I apologise, Mr Speaker—
“f****** useless.”
I do feel sorry for the poor Labour MPs who will now be subjected to months of peacocking by leadership candidates while the country is not being governed. I have some advice for whichever of them eventually takes over. Getting to No. 10 is not an award for being in a game show. This is not “Strictly Come Dancing” and, despite appearances, it is not “The Traitors” either. If you are a Housing Secretary who cannot work out her housing taxes, if you are a Health Secretary who can only cut waiting lists by deleting names from them, if you are Gordon Brown’s former Chief Secretary to the Treasury and you think the bond markets are a hoax, I can assure you that being Prime Minister is going to be a lot tougher. Too many have failed because they thought that winning an election or a leadership contest was the success, but it is not. The work does not end when you get the job; that is when it starts.
It is absolutely preposterous that the Government are here laying out a programme as their Ministers are resigning and a large proportion of the Labour party is saying that the Prime Minister needs to go. The whole thing is totally illogical. Either Labour MPs agree with this agenda—in which case, why are they trying to get rid of the Prime Minister? Or they do not agree with this agenda—in which case, what on earth are we all doing here?
It is time to be brutally honest. The country is angry with the entire political class—all of us here. They are not happy with how we have been doing politics. It is time to get serious.
Emily Thornberry (Islington South and Finsbury) (Lab)
The right hon. Lady seeks to lecture us on why everyone is so fed up with the political class, but she is using this opportunity not to lay out what the Conservatives would do, but to insult everyone on the Labour Benches. Surely that is not the way to proceed.
Mrs Badenoch
Oh, I am not done yet; there is plenty more to come.
The right hon. Lady says that she is getting a lecture, and she is. We are all getting a lecture, because we are legislators of the United Kingdom. We were sent here to fix difficult things, not to focus on our personal hobby horses, ranging from the petty to the puerile.
Labour Members do not need to be scared of the hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage)—I am not. He is not the cause of Britain’s problems—[Hon. Members: “You are!”] Labour Members are still delusional. I am sorry to puncture the bubble, but I am not here to pretend that what is happening is not happening. They can all pretend and live in la-la land, but I am going to speak the truth to them. The hon. Member for Clacton is not the cause of Britain’s problems; he is a symptom of the failure of the political class to focus on what matters. If you fix the problems that people care about, he goes away.
Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
The right hon. Lady says that the hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage) is a symptom of the problem, but does she agree that she and he have something in common? She very loosely agreed that we should race with America into war in Iran, then just a week later she thought, “Maybe that’s not such a good idea.” Does that not prove why she and he are totally unsuitable for speaking from the Government side of the House?
Mrs Badenoch
That was a nice try, but it is not going to work.
You cannot solve the problems of the country unless you have a plan to fix the civil service, the regulators, the legislative straitjacket and the powers transferred from Parliament to the courts. Unless you fix the structures of Government, everyone will continue to fail. Britain is not ungovernable and it is not broken.
The right hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) asked what the plan was. We have published an alternative King’s Speech, and the reason is that we need to take tough decisions to get the country out of the mess we are in by cutting wasteful spending, funding defence, securing our borders and reducing the cost of energy. If you want to bring down bills for families and bring industry back to this country, you need a plan to scrap the net zero legislation that is strangling industry and making energy costs higher. That is why we are proposing a cheap energy Bill to do just that.
If you want businesses to employ people, you need to stop crushing them with thousands of pages of employment laws and stop handing power to the unions. You need to stop hammering businesses with tax rises. That is why we are proposing a get Britain working Bill, which would scrap laws that are no longer fit for purpose and are killing jobs.
If you want to get a grip on illegal immigration and remove foreign criminals from the country, you must have a plan to leave the European convention on human rights and repeal the Human Rights Act. Efforts to get control of our borders have been frustrated because power has been taken out of the hands of Ministers. We need to bring that power back, so that we do not have murderers staying in our country because the courts stop us from deporting them. Our alternative King’s Speech shows how it can be done, letting the Government, not the courts, decide who comes and goes. Prime Ministers are going to keep running into problems until they deal with activist lawyers and international agreements that tie the Government’s hands against the interests of the British public. [Interruption.] Labour Members are chuntering that this is “boring.” Does someone want to stand up and tell us who they are supporting: the plotters or the PM? I know that is what they really want to get to. They are not interested in hearing what the plan for the country should be, because they are too focused on Labour party problems.
Next, we must reduce welfare spending, which is eating every penny that we generate in income tax and more. We must spend much more on defence. Even former Labour Defence Secretaries are pleading with the Government to do so. That is why we are proposing a sovereign defence fund that will overhaul Britain’s defence industrial base. That is what the alternative could be. The alternative King’s Speech makes difficult choices, because that is what leadership is. We have laid out these plans now because we are more than happy for Labour to take them; they might be our political opponents, but we are all citizens of this country. We recognise the enormous challenges facing Britain. We want to see those problems solved, and so do our constituents.
Time and again, I have offered the Prime Minister support to pass difficult legislation. Time and again, he has turned it down. It might be too late for him now, but it is not too late for his successor. It is time to get serious—it is time to deliver. That is what the British public expect, and it is what the Conservative party will do.
The Prime Minister (Keir Starmer)
Mr Speaker, may I say what a pleasure it is to welcome the Gracious Speech of His Majesty, and the radical agenda of this Labour Government that will tear down the status quo that has failed working people and build a stronger, fairer Britain?
In the light of the abhorrent attacks in Golders Green two weeks ago, let me start by briefly addressing that directly. It was the latest in a series of appalling antisemitic attacks; a normalisation of hatred that leads terrorists with warped Islamist ideologies to attack people they have never even met, simply because they are Jewish; a hatred that leads some to march calling for the murder of British Jews, and not to think that there might be something wrong about that.
I have fought that hatred in my own political party, and I have sat with others as they describe what it means for them—the fear, the sense that maybe they should not wear something or do something that might reveal their Jewish identity, just in case. It is time for the silent majority in this country to speak up, to stand with British Jews and to defeat this hatred once and for all, just as we will take on any form of hatred, from left or right, that seeks to divide us. In the words of the Gracious Speech, we will
“defend the British values of decency, tolerance and respect for difference under our common flag”.
That is also why, when far-right agitators try to come here this Saturday to spread their poison of hatred, this Labour Government will block them, this time and every time.
The Humble Address was brilliantly proposed by my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford West (Naz Shah). Members across the House will have read her remarkable new book, and her list of endorsements is truly impressive, reaching well over 100 Members—at last, a list that we can all get behind. [Laughter.] It is not the first time that she has shown her ability to bring people together. She united her city and many in this House when she sent George Galloway packing.
The House will know that my hon. Friend is passionate about the measures that this Government are taking to lift half a million children out of poverty, as we all are on this side of the House—it is the pride of these Benches—but the House might not know about her remarkable effort to get Marcus Rashford to champion free school meals and speak to pupils in her constituency. Most of us would have attempted this via the complex world of agents and managers, but my hon. Friend had a different idea. She spoke, as you do, to the sister of Cristiano Ronaldo. I can imagine that the Ronaldo household is used to fielding some pretty big offers—multimillion-pound transfers, billions in brand sponsorships, Piers Morgan calling for the eighth time that day—but I cannot imagine the confusion in the Ronaldo family when they heard my hon. Friend say not, “Is Cristiano Ronaldo available?”, but, “Can you give me the number of Marcus Rashford? I want to invite him to a primary school in Allerton to have some porridge in our free breakfast club.”
On a much more serious note, I know that the whole House will join me in paying tribute to my hon. Friend’s extraordinary courage, together with her mother, brother and sister. Their story is utterly harrowing, and their strength to survive and deep-rooted determination to fight for change are an inspiration for all of us, and the very best of who we are. My hon. Friend brings a lived experience to our politics—an empathy, a compassion, a humanity, and an understanding of how easy it is to slip from a stable and secure life into one gripped by terrible deprivation.
As my hon. Friend writes in her book:
“Behind every word we utter must lie the foundation of real human experience”.
In that spirit, I am sure she will welcome the measures in this King’s Speech, which will deliver change grounded in that lived experience and the work of the tireless campaigners who have fought for justice, whether that is remediation for those living in homes with unsafe cladding, banning abusive conversion practices, our mission to halve violence against women and girls, or the Hillsborough law, which will bring justice for all. As she says so powerfully,
“equality, fairness and justice must belong to all of us.”
That is the driving purpose of our party, and her speech was in the finest traditions of this House.
The Humble Address was also brilliantly seconded by my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Chris Vince). We are all proud to represent our constituencies, but few of us so relentlessly name our constituency as those who represent Harlow. Members from previous Parliaments will remember my hon. Friend’s predecessor, Robert Halfon, who seemed to get Harlow into pretty well all of his contributions. Well, my hon. Friend will not be outdone. He has inherited the great Harlow shoehorn, and he is already recognised across this House as a one-man tourist board. I have to thank the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Ben Obese-Jecty), who is caught in Hansard referring to my hon. Friend as the “Trade envoy to Harlow”—a rare example of a good idea from the Opposition.
No matter the debate, my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow will find the local connection, whether it is championing the role of Harlow college in dealing with climate change, praising the invention of fibre-optic cables in Harlow, or telling us how Harlow doubled for Paris during an episode of “The Crown”. I remember clearly my hon. Friend saying to me that wherever he goes in the world, he is always thinking about Harlow, and he is quite right.
I congratulate my hon. Friend on his amazing fundraising at this year’s London marathon, as has been mentioned.
I understand his disappointment at being overtaken by the right hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Holden). All I can say is that there is no shame in losing to someone whose training was so extensive that it involved running all the way from North West Durham to Billericay.
It is perhaps no surprise that, as a secondary school maths teacher for 15 years, my hon. Friend has an eye for detail, boundless energy and an ability to handle those on these Benches who are occasionally unruly, but he also has a real passion for young people, a deep and personal understanding of the invaluable role that young carers play, and total conviction in the power of education to change our country, so I know he will welcome the education Bill in the Gracious Speech. When the next series of “Educating Essex” is made, he will rightly be the star, and I thank him for yet another fantastic speech today.
Let me also thank the Leader of the Opposition for the usual warm and generous nature of her contribution. In difficult days, her input is always a ray of sunshine. I particularly like getting tips from her on how to win friends. This is from the party that had previously called us “orcs and goons”; I am a Gooner, so, as usual, she is less than half right. However, we do have one thing in common: both our parties had tough results in the local elections last week. The difference is that she has not noticed. There is another difference: we are in government, and they are no longer even the Opposition.
This King’s Speech is a strike against the status quo, which has failed working people. It is a King’s Speech for the young people whose gifts lie in their hands, and who work hard, want their talents to be recognised, and just want an opportunity in their community. It is a King’s Speech for the children who, under the Conservative party, had to go to school without breakfast, hungry, cold and tired, when they should be focused on their learning. It is a King’s Speech for the backbone of this country; for working people who worry about the cost of living and want their town centre to thrive, their public services to work, and their Government to be on their side—and we are, because at the heart of this programme is a plan to make Britain stronger and fairer.
Right now, across the country, people turn on their television and see bombs falling; they go to the petrol station and see prices rising; and they are worried sick about the consequences. We cannot stand here in the House and pretend that this is new. Britain has been buffeted by crises for decades now—the 2008 financial crash, the austerity that followed it, Brexit, covid, and the war that still rages in Ukraine—and the response? Their response is always the same: a desperate attempt to get back to a status quo that failed working people, decimated their public services, and made them pay the price. Our response this time must and will be different—a complete break. We will not simply slump back to the old ways. This King’s Speech gives us the strength we need—the economic security, energy security and national security to control our future in a chaotic world. It is an agenda of radical reform across our major public services. This is an urgent, activist Labour Government who tilt power back to workers, renters and the less fortunate, and give a voice to the working class and to all those whom the status quo has repeatedly ignored and dismissed. We are in favour of a Britain where everyone, whatever their background, can go as far as their talent and effort take them, and where people have a pride in where they live and hope in what lies ahead. That is the change of a Labour Government, and this King’s Speech delivers it.
We will deliver on economic security, and let me be clear: as the conflict in Iran unfolds, we are in a better position because of the action that my right hon. Friend the Chancellor took last year—getting inflation down, borrowing down and mortgage costs down. That is why we have been able to cap energy bills, raise the living wage, strengthen workers’ rights and end the shameful two-child benefit limit, lifting half a million children out of poverty.
Faced with challenges, we do not retreat from our Labour values; we use them as our compass—strength through fairness. We will keep supporting those who need it most, including by creating a new national programme to redistribute surplus food, so that no one in this country needs to go hungry because of the conflict overseas. We also need to strengthen our sovereign capabilities, because the days when this country turned its back on our critical industries are over. We have seen that with British Steel, and we will see it with new legislation to clean up our waterways. A failure in the water industry has been going on for decades. It is a disgrace, and this Labour Government will tackle it.
We will take that moral urgency to every part of our nation, with Bills to increase the pace of change in our NHS, in law enforcement, in controlling our borders and more. While immigration is down, we need to do more. While violent crime is down, it needs to be lower. While NHS waiting lists are down, we must go further, rewiring the state so that the working people of this country feel that it serves their interests. We will also build in this country sovereign power in the industries of the future, which will give us greater control in a world being reshaped by artificial intelligence. We will tear down the barriers to growth on planning, on faster infrastructure development and on business regulation, helping our great businesses, large and small.
We will, as a defining act of this Government, rebuild our relationship with Europe, putting Britain back at the heart of a stronger Europe. That is good for growth, and it will reduce the cost of living and strengthen our security. There is no good reason to oppose it, so for our economic security, and for our Labour values, this Government will act.
Jim Allister (North Antrim) (TUV)
Prime Minister, in my part of the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland, we have been subjected for some years to the humiliation of being governed by laws that we do not make and cannot change. Yet you, Prime Minister, now seem to want to impose that same denial of democracy on the whole United Kingdom by making us a subservient rule-taker from a foreign Parliament. How is that in the interests of democracy?
Mr Speaker
Order. The hon. and learned Gentleman has been here long enough to not blame me for the problem. He should not say “you”.
The Prime Minister
I thank the hon. and learned Gentleman for his intervention. I am very well aware of the tensions in Northern Ireland, and the issues that have to be dealt with in our relations with the EU, but we have to face the fact that promises were made about Brexit that were not true, and which have not borne fruit. It is in our economic interests, our national interests and our defence interests to be closer to Europe. Of course we will navigate carefully, taking on board the issues in Northern Ireland, as he would expect, but it is in our interest to be closer to the EU. That is what we are doing, and we will go further.
This moment demands even greater radicalism on energy security. The British people should not have to pay more in their bills, and their living standards should not be hit, because of a war that they did not vote for and that Britain is not involved in, which is happening thousands of miles away. That is a fundamental argument of this Government, and the Conservatives have no answer to it. For decades they ducked the long-term decisions to make our country, our energy and our economy stronger, so we are going to take control. We are going to declare Britain’s energy independence. That does not mean, and it will not mean, that we turn off the taps in the North sea—oil and gas will be part of the mix for decades—but we have to move so much faster on clean energy, with a whole-society effort and everyone playing their part as we take control of our energy security.
Dave Doogan (Angus and Perthshire Glens) (SNP)
I am very grateful to the Prime Minister for giving way. He talks about energy security; he should know that Scotland has an energy surplus—we generate more electricity than we use—and that, in conditions of surplus, prices go down. However, in Scotland, because we are stuck in the GB energy market, we pay for the scarcity of energy in England—not just to the point of equality, but to our detriment, so that there are higher prices for energy in Scotland. Can he explain why that dysfunction exists, and what is in this King’s Speech to fix it?
The Prime Minister
What is in this King’s Speech to fix that is moving faster to our energy independence. That is the way that we get off the international markets. That is the way that we take control and reduce bills for people across the country.
We will, of course, also strengthen our country’s defence security. That starts with the fundamentals, and a recognition that it is not in the interests of this country to rush into a war without any thought of the consequences. That is my position, and that has always been my position, regardless of the pressure—a test of judgment that some in this House have failed. It continues with our commitment to NATO, the most successful defensive alliance in history, and a proud achievement of this party that others would throw away.
Today, faced with even greater threats, we need to strengthen NATO, we need to invest in our defence capabilities, and we need to strengthen the European element of NATO, because this nation is stronger when it stands with others, not just in word, but in deed. We are prepared to lead from the front; to bring nations together in this moment of danger; to support Ukraine, including through the coalition of the willing; and to act with our allies to reassure shipping in the strait of Hormuz. We are not content merely to manage the fallout from the Iran crisis; instead, we are building an international effort to solve it and end the economic harm.
Of course, standing up for the defence and security of the United Kingdom depends on one thing above all else: ending 14 years of Tory defence austerity with the biggest sustained investment since the cold war. We will go further with the measures outlined in the King’s Speech and our upcoming defence investment plan. We will develop the capabilities that our nation needs. We will also deepen our partnerships to fire up our industries and make sure that British skill, British pride and British resolve are converted into British jobs in a stronger, fairer Britain.
Lincoln Jopp (Spelthorne) (Con)
The Prime Minister has used a lot of words about the defence investment plan. I think it was due in the autumn of last year, so when is he going to sign it?
The Prime Minister
I will take no lectures from the Conservatives. They hollowed out defence spend. Defence spend was 2.5% when they came into power, and 2.3% when they left power. The investment plan is being finalised and will be published soon. However, strength is the foundation, and that is the way we maintain our control, even in the storms of this world.
David Davis (Goole and Pocklington) (Con)
The Prime Minister quite rightly prioritises the defence of the country. We have depended for decades on the courage, honour and loyalty of our soldiers. However, some of our best units are now losing soldiers, because this Government are undermining them and allowing them, under the Northern Ireland Troubles Bill, to be prosecuted and persecuted for alleged crimes—that were not carried out—from decades ago.
The Prime Minister
The right hon. Member knows very well that the provisions for Northern Ireland are intended to strike the right balance between what needs to be done and protecting our veterans. We are, of course, proud of all those who have served and do serve our country, but the legislation put forward by the last Government was struck down, leaving no protection whatsoever.
Mr Mark Francois (Rayleigh and Wickford) (Con)
On that point, will the Prime Minister give way?
The Prime Minister
I will make some progress. The way we change our country—[Interruption.]
Mr Francois
The Prime Minister will know that in the recent Supreme Court Dillon judgment the Court ruled that the Conservatives’ Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2023 overwhelmingly was not incompatible with the Human Rights Act—he knows that. He referenced the awful events in Golders Green, rightfully, and he defended the police officers against attacks and the leader of the Green party, rightfully, and said that they had to take split-second decisions. If Northern Ireland veterans had to take split-second decisions to uphold the rule of law in Northern Ireland, what is the difference?
The Prime Minister
I have been in control rooms in Northern Ireland, watching decisions being taken on the use of fatal force. I am well aware of the nature of the decisions that have to be taken, the circumstances in which they are taken and how difficult those decisions are. That is not the same as the issues in the Bill, and the right hon. Gentleman knows it.
Strength is the foundation: it is the way we maintain our control even in the storms of this world, and the way we change our country rather than just manage the crisis. More than anything, change means a Britain where every child can go as far as their talent or effort allows. It is a beautiful idea, one that I know is shared across the House, but as representatives we need to see the country as a whole to make sure we see every child, including the children growing up in poverty, the children who have special educational needs, the young people who cannot get a job, and the people who are ignored and excluded from our highest aspirations because they do not want to go to university. This is a King’s Speech to change that once and for all.
My late brother had difficulties learning, and he had to fight every day just to be seen. There are millions of people like him: people who are ignored by a system and a status quo that has no expectations for them. This King’s Speech will make sure that no child is left behind, because everyone has something to contribute to the success of this nation. Every child must succeed if we are to build a stronger, fairer Britain. That is how we tear down the status quo preserved by the Conservative party—a status quo that failed working people, a status quo that left Britain’s economy exposed, a status quo that made our country weak.
There are some in this country—some even in this House—who would feed the frustration with that status quo into a politics of grievance and division. This King’s Speech sets a different course, a more hopeful course, and a course that sees the conflict in Iran, a war on two fronts, not as something to wring our hands about, but as an opportunity we must take to shape our country’s future, to end the status quo that has failed working people, and to build a stronger, fairer Britain. That is what this King’s Speech delivers and I commend it to the House.
Ed Davey (Kingston and Surbiton) (LD)
I start by giving my sincere thanks, on behalf of all Liberal Democrats, to His Majesty King Charles for his Gracious Speech. We still believe President Trump should not have been rewarded for insulting British soldiers and the Royal Navy, but His Majesty was superb on that state visit.
I join others in paying tribute to the hon. Members for Bradford West (Naz Shah) and for Harlow (Chris Vince) for their accomplished speeches proposing and seconding the Loyal Address. Like me, the hon. Member for Bradford West worked in a factory. For her, it was crisps; for me, it was pork pies. If we throw in the hon. Member for Isle of Wight West (Richard Quigley), who worked in the soft drinks industry, together we are a meal deal. May I say that the hon. Lady is the real McCoy? She has already had an extraordinary life and career, talking from first-hand experience about how violence against women and homelessness touches millions of people. We are in her debt for that, and for her bravery and courage.
I also congratulate the hon. Member for Harlow on his speech. I hear he recently ran the London marathon—the House might be shocked to know that I have more experience with crisps than with long-distance running. It is a great pleasure to work with him on young carers and young adult carers, something that we are both passionate about, and I thank him for his leadership as chair of the all-party parliamentary group. As has been mentioned, the hon. Gentleman was a maths teacher for many years, and no doubt had to deal with bad behaviour in the classroom, so he may want to advise the Prime Minister on whether the Health Secretary should be put in detention.
There is a lot to cover in responding to this Humble Address, but I will start by directly addressing the atrocious acts of antisemitism that British Jews are experiencing at the moment, and the insecurity and fear that the community now feel. Week after week, British Jews are being attacked, intimidated and persecuted—Heaton Park synagogue, Kenton United synagogue, Finchley Reform synagogue, Jewish Futures in Hendon, Hatzola ambulances, and now the Golders Green stabbings. When I visited Western Marble Arch synagogue last week, members of the Jewish community questioned whether Britain is a safe place for them, or whether they must move abroad to be safe. No one should have to ask themselves that question in our country today—no one.
The independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, Jonathan Hall, is right to call these appalling levels of antisemitism a “national security emergency”. He is also right to say that existing laws must be properly enforced. That is why I welcome the Government’s initiative to bring forward a policing Bill, and I urge them to ensure that police and prosecutors receive the right training and support to pursue antisemitic crimes much more effectively.
That is why the Liberal Democrats have long called for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to be proscribed as a terrorist organisation in order to tackle the threat that these Iranian terrorists pose to British Jews. The legislation to proscribe the IRGC—finally confirmed today, I believe—must be a top and urgent priority.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I welcome what the Prime Minister is doing in relation to the IRGC, but he will be aware that some 30,000 individuals who protested on the streets of Iran are in jail. Some of them are on death row, about to be executed for standing up for liberty and freedom. Does the right hon. Gentleman feel that the Government, and the Prime Minister in particular, should be taking action to try to get those people free? Now is the time to act.
Ed Davey
The hon. Gentleman is right to mention those in Iran who have been persecuted by the appalling Iranian regime. I am sure that the Foreign Secretary will have heard that and will make as many representations as possible, but I accept that it is not an easy matter, given the regime in Tehran.
This is the 23rd Loyal Address that I have listened to in this House, and it is the most surreal by far. Everyone in this House and across the country knows that the Prime Minister may soon not be in power—not in place for his own programme and not able to deliver these promises. The votes on this King’s Speech ought to be interesting—a test of confidence in this Government and Prime Minister. The Liberal Democrats will be voting against it, but how many Members on the Government Benches will? By my reckoning, if every Labour MP who has called for the Prime Minister to go voted that way, the Government’s huge majority would be at risk. Let us see if they have the courage of their convictions.
The Liberal Democrats will be voting against it not just because the Prime Minister is now one of the weakest in post-war history, but because this King’s Speech does not offer the change our country needs. It does not offer the change needed to fix the insecurity that people and businesses are increasingly fearful of. It does not offer change to do with rising prices. People know that inflation in food, energy and fuel is set to rocket, but people do not think the Prime Minister has their backs on the economy. The financial and economic insecurity stalking our country is hitting growth, investment and jobs. We were promised change and a Government with growth as their mission, yet rather than change, we have had continuity from the failures that came before.
Faced with that calamity, what has the Prime Minister offered on growth? We have been offered an EU reset Bill that fails to reset. With a Prime Minister who knows a thing or two about failed resets, perhaps we should not be surprised. The Prime Minister’s refusal to remove his red lines on a new EU-UK customs union, to go further than his red lines on the single market and to deliver a new deep trading relationship with our European partners with a proper youth mobility scheme all mean that he is consigning our country to higher prices and lower growth and failing to address the economic insecurity plaguing our economy. Instead, we have been given taxes on jobs and the family farm tax.
Johanna Baxter (Paisley and Renfrewshire South) (Lab)
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Ed Davey
Not at the moment.
To be fair to the Government, some of our current economic problems stem from President Trump and his reckless war in Iran. Let us be absolutely clear: Trump’s war is stoking the cost of living crisis to new and alarming levels—fuel prices are up at the pump, food prices are set to go up even more, and people’s holidays are threatened. The Prime Minister’s biggest success was not taking us into Trump’s damaging war with Iran when the Conservatives and Reform were urging him to do so, yet because of the Government’s failure to build new and deeper economic alliances with Europe and the Commonwealth, as we have been urging them to do, this country is set to be hit far harder by the inflation caused by the situation in the strait of Hormuz.
Dr Scott Arthur (Edinburgh South West) (Lab)
We all recognise the impact that Trump’s war is going to have on our economy. The right hon. Gentleman offers membership of the single market and the customs union as a solution to that, but prices in Edinburgh South West are going up right now. How long, in his estimation, would it take to access the single market and become a member of the customs union?
Ed Davey
The hon. Gentleman has obviously not noticed that we are the only party who have put forward a costed package to reduce the cost of petrol and diesel at the pumps—something that could be done immediately. I think he should pay more attention.
Trumpflation is predicted to be worse here because of the failures of this Government, and indeed the last. Cosying up to this White House was never going to work, and it has not. I suspect that history will show that the Prime Minister’s approach to President Trump was one of his worst mistakes.
The sad truth is that President Trump is one of the reasons why so many people in our country feel insecure, anxious and fearful about the future. From trade tariffs to the weakening of NATO, President Trump has broken all the certainties British people and businesses used to rely on, yet this Government have been far too slow to realise that and to respond to this new reality. The Conservatives and Reform may not have woken up, but there is no excuse for the Government. It has therefore been left to us. The country can know that my party will champion the new and changing international alliances that are so vital for the British economy and the defence of the United Kingdom.
Let me try to find an area of agreement. I do welcome the Government’s decision to bring forward an energy independence Bill, although we will scrutinise it line by line and advance our more ambitious ideas. I have long felt that energy independence should be a long-term goal for our country and our allies; even before Trump’s war in Iran, people and businesses were being hit because of our dependence on others for fuel. Energy bills for households are still around a third higher than before Putin’s war in Ukraine. When fossil fuel dictators like Vladimir Putin can hit the pockets of every family and pensioner in our country and tyrannical regimes like Tehran’s can hold our country and the world to ransom, surely it is time to wake up.
Oil and gas prices have a long history of spiking and hurting our economy. Even when North sea oil and gas production was at its height—now almost 30 years ago—the UK could still be hit because we have always been price takers. While I have always been pragmatic about our North sea oil industry for our economy—not least in Scotland—it is simply fantasy and fabrication for some in this House to pretend that there is a solution in the North sea to high energy prices.
The best way to cut energy bills is to invest in home-grown renewable power. We will therefore push the Government to go further in the energy independence Bill, just as we did on solar power early in this Parliament with the sunshine Bill of my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Max Wilkinson)—now reflected in law.
The Prime Minister, or whoever replaces him, must take up our plan to protect people from Trumpflation on fuel bills and cut fuel duty, rail fares and bus prices to protect British families and businesses right now.
The Liberal Democrat agenda of greater security for families and businesses begins with greater economic, financial and energy security, but it is also built on greater security for our country. The Government must do far more to bolster our nation’s defences. With Vladimir Putin waging war in Europe and the need to redouble our efforts to support our brave Ukrainian allies to beat Russia, with a wildly unpredictable President sitting in the White House, leading a dangerous and idiotic war in the middle east and undermining NATO at every turn, and with a world order challenged by the rise of China, the case for an urgent and significant rise in defence spending is clearly a strong one.
It is even stronger when one looks at the state of our defence readiness. The Conservatives failed on the No. 1 task of any Government: to defend our country and back our armed forces. They left our Army at its lowest size since the Napoleonic war, and they left our Navy at its lowest size since the English civil war. Yet this Labour Government have moved at a snail’s pace, failing month after month to publish their own defence investment plan. In contrast, we have called for the immediate launch of defence bonds to raise £20 billion over two years, building on successful models used by Poland, and for a commitment to spending 3% of GDP on defence by 2030 at the latest. We have argued for a new European rearmament bank so that our defence industries will lead the next generation of defence technologies.
If the history of the last century taught us anything, and if the experience of President Trump has taught us anything, it is essential and urgent that we work with our European and Commonwealth allies to secure and defend our country, our values and our way of life.
Central to our British way of life is the NHS, to which I now turn. It is important I do so, because I am likely to be the only Opposition party leader to stand up for healthcare in this debate, as the Conservatives are so embarrassed by their record and Reform’s leader has spent decades saying that he wants to get rid of the NHS entirely. The Government would have us believe that they have turned the NHS around after the mess left by the last Government, but when he is not plotting his next leadership bid against the Prime Minister, the Secretary of State would have Labour Back Benchers believe that he is fixing the NHS. If only.
Now we are told that the Health Secretary is planning to resign tomorrow. This resignation is taking so long that it would give NHS waiting lists a run for their money. Anyone who visits their local hospital knows that the NHS remains in a critical state. Thousands of people are still being treated in hospital corridors every day. We are now even seeing job adverts for people to provide care in corridors.
Sam Rushworth (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)
It would be interesting to be reminded of how the right hon. Member voted on Andrew Lansley’s reforms of the NHS, many of which are still creating problems in our NHS today.
Ed Davey
The hon. Gentleman ought to know that although there was a long time when the Conservatives were messing up our NHS, Labour has had two years and has absolutely failed.
Let us turn to Labour’s promises to turn around primary care with more GPs, NHS dentists and community pharmacists. Some areas of the country have been going backwards since this Government came to power. When it comes to people feeling more secure in their lives and their futures, quality healthcare is central. I will not list off our policies for fixing the NHS, except one: care—social care and family care. Not for the first time, I must declare an interest.
I focus on care because it is the central, radical and transformational change that has to happen if we are to fix our NHS. Two years ago in the debate on the last Loyal Address I raised care with the Prime Minister as the big challenge that the Government had to tackle to rescue the NHS. I welcomed promises back then for cross-party working, but what has happened? Almost nothing. True, the excellent Baroness Casey has been dispatched around the country, on a timetable written in the Treasury, but her report will land just before the election so, once again, nothing will happen for care in this Parliament. That is a betrayal of the elderly and disabled who need better care, of their families and of the NHS. We will not let up in the fight to fix social care and to back people caring for their loved ones at home. We will put forward the changes that our country needs for people to feel less insecure when they face old age and illness.
Another aspect of our national life where insecurity has got worse and worse is farming and food. British farmers are world renowned. They are the key to ensuring that everyone has high-quality and affordable food on their plates. Yet they have been let down and forgotten time and again. They were let down by the Conservatives, who undermined our food security with bad trade deals and botched funding. The Conservative Government left England as the only country in Europe where farmers are not supported to produce food.
But somehow the Labour Government have managed to make things worse for farmers, not least with their terrible mess over the family farm tax. That is why we called for the inclusion of a good food Bill in the King’s Speech, to prioritise food security and back British farmers to produce British food. With Trump’s idiotic war in Iran hitting farmers with everything from higher fertiliser costs to higher prices for red diesel, the need for our good food Bill could not be more urgent. If that is coupled with our plans for a much closer trading relationship with Europe, there is a pathway to greater food security and lower food prices, and the Government must seize it.
There are many ways in which our party believes the Government should tackle the insecurity that people across the country feel right now: from quicker, tougher action on the damage being done by social media to our young people and people’s mental health, to backing the case for more community police officers to keep our communities safer, and having a fair asylum and immigration policy that is genuinely effective against irregular immigration but welcomes people who play by the rules and contribute to our great country; and from tackling the continuing scandals in our water industry to building the affordable and social housing that so many families and young people desperately need, and ensuring that children and families are at the heart of reforms to special educational needs.
My right hon. and hon. Friends will set out our approach on all those issues over the course of the debate, but I will end by addressing the threat to our country from another source: populist politicians and extremist parties that sow division, play the blame game and make wild promises, and that are a threat to our very democracy. They are exploiting our broken political system, which both the Conservatives and Labour have failed to fix.
The first-past-the-post electoral system of “winner takes all” was supposed to bring stability. It was supposed to provide majority Governments who could take the tough long-term decisions necessary to deliver for our country on the economy, the NHS and defence. We see how badly it has failed. We have majority Governments, yes, but with six Prime Ministers in a decade—soon, probably seven—we hardly have stability, when so many people now ask, “Is Britain governable?”
The concentration of power undermines so much and leads to the scandals that undermine the standing of our democracy even more: a twice-sacked Member of the House of Lords is handed our most prestigious ambassador post, despite the Prime Minister knowing his links to a convicted paedophile and sex trafficker; a Conservative Prime Minister consistently broke the rules that he himself set for the rest of us during one of our nation’s most severe crises; and a leader of a political party thinks a £5 million gift from a Thailand-based crypto billionaire does not reek of corruption
The threat is clear. Under our electoral system, a Reform party that takes its orders from its American boss at Mar-a-Lago could win a majority on less than a third of the popular vote. We must fix our broken political system before it is too late, but the King’s Speech is not up to that historic, vital task. We need a new Magna Carta to enshrine the rights of citizens and protect us from the populist extremists now threatening our country.
Anna Dixon (Shipley) (Lab)
The results in the Bradford district were some of the least representative, with Reform taking a majority of seats despite getting only 23% of the popular vote there. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that, while Reform made gains in seats, it is not what the majority of people in this country support?
Ed Davey
I certainly hear the figures from Bradford; the hon. Lady makes the same case that our party makes for electoral reform of both local and national government. In the constituencies of my hon. Friends the Members for Twickenham (Munira Wilson) and for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney), the Liberal Democrats now have every single councillor, but we do not have every single vote, and we would welcome electoral reform in those councils where we are over-represented. I hope the hon. Lady’s Government listen to the voices of Members on these Benches.
It is clear the country wants change—and, given the battering that the two old parties received at the recent elections, it is clear they are not offering it. Worryingly, many people are looking to the extremes on the left and the right, thinking that if we burn the system down, things will improve. Yet I do not believe the British people want Trump’s divisive, unfair America here, even though that is Reform’s offer of change. I also do not believe the British people want a reheated Corbynista agenda put forward by a Green party that no longer offers serious action to protect our nature and our climate.
It falls to the Liberal Democrats, then—the only non-populist, non-extremist party left standing—to offer the real change that people crave. Our change is about building things up, not burning them down. Our change is about bringing people, communities and our country together, not dividing and blaming people. From Europe to social care, from energy to defence, from political reform to our environment, I am proud to lead a party that is preparing for government so that our country can be changed for the better.
Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)
I should say at the outset how much I welcome the opening remarks of my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister about antisemitism. Kenton United Synagogue and Golders Green sit very close to my constituency. The attacks were shocking and appalling; I welcome the Government’s determination to crack down on online hatred and antisemitism, and I take this opportunity to commend the courage and skill of the police officers who responded.
One of the many important points that my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford West (Naz Shah) made in her excellent and humorous speech was the need for those of all faiths—and indeed those of no faith—to stand together against hatred. That point will resonate particularly in a constituency such as mine. My hon. Friend gave a brilliant speech. She is an inspiration, and I suspect I am not the only Member to feel that it is an honour to be in the same party as her.
My hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Chris Vince), who is without doubt a rising star in our ranks, made me jealous with his marathon-running skills. If hon. Members will forgive me, I will not dwell on his love letter to Harlow, but I will dwell a little bit on our shared commitment to co-operation. Together with other members of the Co-operative parliamentary party, I hope we will see progress on delivering solutions to the need for capital so that more co-operatives can expand in our country over the time covered by this King’s Speech.
The biggest challenge facing our country remains how to put more money in people's pockets and drive up living standards at a time of ever-increasing global tensions. It is worth remembering what the Leader of the Opposition is clearly trying to forget: after 14 years of austerity, and after the Conservatives and their friends in Reform led us out of the world’s biggest market, doing huge economic damage, our public services are still in need of sustained investment. In that regard, I share my constituents’ impatience for change.
I welcome the determination in the Gracious Speech to continue to reform the leasehold system, for example to make service charges more transparent, fairer and easier to challenge. I welcome the plans to abolish NHS England, to fund more investment in expanding GP services and to bring down waiting lists and waiting times in hospitals such as Northwick Park, which serves my constituents. I welcome, too, the overdue crackdown on late payments by big firms to small businesses.
There are two long-term changes that I believe are key to delivering sustained higher living standards, particularly for my constituents. The first will be to secure far better access to Europe’s single market; the second will be to secure far better access to finance for small businesses and the financially vulnerable. On Europe, I particularly welcome the European partnership Bill in this Gracious Speech as the next step towards a closer relationship with Europe. With the US increasingly unreliable as an ally and with the economic damage from Brexit ever clearer, Britain needs to prioritise negotiating a dramatically better trade, defence and security deal with the EU. The imminent deal lowering barriers to trade in food will reduce red tape and lower business costs. The decision to rejoin Erasmus and the coming deal on youth mobility are positive, too.
A referendum in my lifetime on whether to rejoin the EU feels inevitable, and if it happens, I will be very tempted to campaign to rejoin. We are, though, a long way from such a moment. The priority, with the next UK-EU summit coming up, should be to reach agreement for a full renegotiation of the trade and co-operation agreement and to secure greater access to the single market, which would be far more beneficial than mere customs union membership. The recently concluded EU-Swiss trade deal offers a helpful pointer, with much more integration into the single market for more sectors of Switzerland’s similarly service-based economy. Further security and defence co-operation, increased business mobility, mutual recognition agreements to remove duplicate product testing and certification to make it easier for businesses to sell British goods in European markets would make a significant difference for businesses here, for our economy and ultimately for living standards.
Dave Doogan
I am listening intently to the hon. Gentleman’s anticipation of a brighter future, with a closer relationship with the EU. He even goes so far as to say that he looks forward to another referendum on whether to rejoin the European Union. Does he agree that when we are sold an outcome in a false prospectus on a referendum, it is probably no big deal to have a rerun of that referendum so that we can make an informed decision about our constitutional future?
Gareth Thomas
The one thing I would agree with the hon. Gentleman on is that we need a closer relationship. It is this Government who have sought to rebuild relations with Europe, and they are doing so increasingly effectively. On the need to open up opportunities for more co-operation with Europe, I recognise that we will have to pay to access the single market more easily, but given the damage to our economy, the higher costs and the extra bureaucracy that the poorly negotiated Brexit deal brought in its wake, we should be willing to negotiate that hard bargain.
The second long-term issue that we should focus on as necessary to deliver sustained higher living standards is banking. Millions of people and thousands of small businesses are locked out of affordable credit and forced into high-cost or illegal lending. Money is being taken from the pockets of the poorest, and economic growth is being stifled. This is an entrenched but fixable market failure, which I hope the coming enhancing financial services Bill may begin to address.
Research published in January by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, funded by the Treasury and the Department for Business and Trade, made the striking conclusion that if Britain had a network of mutual banks that had stronger direct relationships with their small business owners, growth would be higher by between 1% and more than 2% over its first five years, rising to between 1.7% and 3.5% over the long term. It noted, too, that investment would be almost 2% to 3.5% higher in the first five years, rising to between 2% and almost 4.5% higher in the long run. The research—it is academic research—looks at the impact of mutual banks in France, state-run German regional banks and community development finance institutions in the US, and considers how much more lending would happen if the UK had a somewhat less centralised banking model than we have now.
Many suggestions for how to deliver growth are currently doing the rounds, but the scale of the impact of more investment in mutual or community banks, as this serious research suggests, raises the obvious question of what more we could achieve in this area during this Parliament by expanding the reach and scale of mutual banks, building more direct and personal relationships with more small and medium-sized businesses, offering more affordable credit options for personal customers, and creating a greater willingness to back hard-headed community ownership initiatives that help to restore pride in the places where we live.
Fair banking legislation—similar to that in the US—would help. Proactive efforts to help credit unions expand through employers, particularly those in the public sector, offering payroll deduction options would help too. The biggest banks should actively help support the expansion of community banks; one or two do, but they need sustained private capital investment. Barclays, Santander and HSBC invest in community development finance institutions or community banks in the US, but they do not here in the UK. That should change.
Let me turn to the international situation. I welcome the Government’s continuing support for Ukraine, the decision to stay out of the illegal conflict with Iran and the strong support for NATO. The situation in Gaza remains profoundly disturbing. Every child under five in Gaza is considered undernourished by UNICEF and other aid agencies. Almost every school has been destroyed or severely damaged, and 96% of households lack adequate access to water. Over 1 million children are facing a catastrophic humanitarian crisis, which I suggest demands fresh and sustained UK engagement. I strongly supported the Government’s decision last year to recognise the state of Palestine to protect the viability of a two-state solution and create a path towards a lasting peace for the Israeli and Palestinian people. Distant as that prospect may seem, in my view it remains the only path to a sustainable peace for the Palestinians and Israelis alike. The UN documented more than 1,800 settler attacks last year in the west bank—the highest on record and clearly part of a sustained campaign to reduce the possibility of a viable Palestinian state. Action to clamp down on goods coming into the UK from illegal settlements and to further sanction violent settlers is needed.
Lastly, 80 years since the founding meeting took place just across from where this House meets, a renewed commitment to the United Nations has never been more necessary. For all its failings—and there have been many—it remains our best route for addressing conflicts, for tackling global health threats, for promoting the rights of all, for delivering humanitarian aid and for championing the interests of the world’s most vulnerable. With our coming G20 and G7 presidencies, we are in a unique position to support the current UN Secretary-General as he seeks to rethink and reaffirm the UN’s role for the world we are in now. I hope that we will support him in those efforts.
Sir Andrew Mitchell (Sutton Coldfield) (Con)
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for giving me a chance to contribute to this King’s Speech debate at such an early point. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Harrow West (Gareth Thomas), and I want to express strong support for what he said about the determination of the Government and of the whole of Parliament to crack down on antisemitism. I hope that he will have carried everyone in this House in the words he used.
It is also a great pleasure to congratulate the hon. Members for Bradford West (Naz Shah) and for Harlow (Chris Vince) on their brilliant speeches, which entertained and amused the House. The hon. Member for Harrow West said that it was an honour to be in the same party as both of them, but I think all of us can say that it is an honour to be in the same Parliament as both of them, and they certainly did very well. I have to admit that it is now 34 years since, in 1992, I had the privilege of seconding the Queen’s Speech from the Government Benches. On that occasion, I referred to myself as an
“oily young man on the make”—[Official Report, 6 May 1992; Vol. 207, c. 56.]
Those were the days!
There are three points I wish to contribute briefly to the debate, all of which came off the doorsteps in the royal town of Sutton Coldfield during the recent elections, when I was listening carefully to my constituents—elections, incidentally, which were extremely successful for the Conservatives in the royal town of Sutton Coldfield, where we hold now all 10 seats on Birmingham city council, having got rid of the last vestiges of the Labour party in the royal town.
That clean sweep in the royal town of Sutton Coldfield was not echoed across the city of Birmingham, where six significant parties are now represented on the council, making governance even more difficult than it was before. I urge those on the Treasury Bench, in particular the Secretaries of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and for Housing, Communities and Local Government, to be on red alert about what happens now in the city of Birmingham. They are, I think, going to need to give the commissioners far greater powers. Vulnerable people, old and young, depend on Birmingham city council turning a page and becoming a more effective giver of good local governance. The words of the Conservative leader of the Conservative group on Birmingham city council, Robert Alden, are important. He said that the group would try to
“work with people across the political spectrum”
to deliver these priorities.
Birmingham has languished under a profoundly inadequate Labour administration, which even the Labour party nationally did not think was doing a proper job. It will now require a herculean effort of restraint and good will to deliver the governance that the people of Birmingham are entitled to receive. That will involve devolving more power locally. Governance is always best when it is closest to the people it seeks to serve, and certainly the royal town of Sutton Coldfield’s town council, under its outstanding leader Simon Ward, is ready for more devolution, which we think will make life better for local people.
My second point is about defence, because although the words are in the King’s Speech, an awful lot more needs to be done. Ukraine and President Trump have ushered in a new era on defence—and, incidentally, thank goodness the last Conservative Government were so fast to realise, arm and train the Ukrainians ahead of and during the early days of the illegal invasion by Russia. The Prime Minister complains—he may or may not have some justice in doing so—that the armed forces have been hollowed out over many years by both parties. However, it is on his watch that these acute problems have come to pass. George Robertson, who was respected on both sides of the House over many years, has made clear that we must now rearm and increase our spending on defence, and I very much hope that the Government will provide far more urgency than they are providing at the moment to that cause.
President Trump was not the first person to complain about Europe failing to pull its weight financially in NATO, but he is the first American President to take action. Britain needs to step up. We need to lead European NATO with France and Germany, but also with Poland and in co-operation with Ukraine, whose technology has redefined modern warfare. Australia and Canada are significantly increasing their spending, and I very much hope that the Government will now entertain far greater urgency in addressing these matters.
I am pleased that Gordon Brown is now at the heart of this Labour Government. I hope he will explain the importance of soft power being the other side of the defence coin. Many hon. Ladies and Gentlemen on the Labour Benches are experts on defence, and they know that the Government made a terrible mistake in cutting further the amount that we spend on development. Development is a very important arrow in the defence quiver, and I very much hope that Gordon Brown will be able to explain to the Government why this is so important, and why they have made such a mistake.
My third and final point is about welfare, which is now consuming every penny that we raise in income tax. We simply cannot go on like that. The Government always appear to be caught in the headlights whenever welfare is discussed. The last time they sought to tackle the issue, they were unable to carry their Back Benchers and they failed to do so. I submit that they failed because they tackled it in the wrong way.
There are three rules of welfare reform, as I learned many years ago as a junior welfare Minister between 1995 and 1997 in John Major’s Government. That may have been 30 years ago, but the rules of welfare reform have not changed. It was the most complex of the various ministerial jobs that it was my privilege to undertake, and this is what I learned.
First, we cannot take benefit money off poor people. It is not right to do so anyway, and as constituency Members of Parliament we know that it cannot be done. None of us came into politics to make poor people poorer. Taking money off the poorest people is not something that anyone who is planning to reform welfare should entertain.
Secondly, the only way to save on welfare is to freeze benefits, although not disability benefits—something that I believe no Conservative Government have ever done. Freezing benefits can make a significant difference to the size of the budget.
Seamus Logan (Aberdeenshire North and Moray East) (SNP)
Does the right hon. Member agree that rather than attacking the most vulnerable in our society to pay for the nation’s defence, it would be better to tax the banks and the large multinationals on their extravagant profits?
Sir Andrew Mitchell
I am worried that the hon. Gentleman, who is my friend, was not listening to what I said. I said that the first rule of benefit reform is not to take cash off very poor people, and I explained that it cannot be done. That is what Labour found when it outlined its policies for welfare reform and then had to back off.
The third rule is to narrow the gateways into a benefit. We have seen—particularly with the personal independence payment, but in other ways as well—that narrowing the gateways is an important aspect of any reform. I very much hope that the Government will return to the issue with a well-thought-through plan and will manage to carry people with them.
Finally, the hon. Member for Harlow said in seconding the motion that this is a King’s Speech for young people. I hope that it is; I fear that it is not. We need to recognise that we are presiding over a period of growing intergenerational inequality, and this House must address it. I hope that the hon. Member’s point will inform the decisions that the Government make now.
Chris Webb (Blackpool South) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friends the Members for Bradford West (Naz Shah) and for Harlow (Chris Vince) on two terrific speeches. I have to say that I am quite surprised to see my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow here without his London marathon medal around his neck, but I gently say, “Come back when you’ve done two of them, and then you can start talking”—[Interruption.] I’m not doing another one!
The lives of my constituents in Blackpool South may feel far removed from this place, but the legislation announced in the King’s Speech will impact them. For 14 years, Blackpool was the poster child for Government failure. My constituents have lived through the consequences of decisions made in this place. They have felt sharply the pressures of insecure work, poor housing, rising living costs and overstretched public services, and they have felt forgotten. But if Blackpool became an example of how badly politics can fail people, it can also be an example of what happens when this place gets it right. If the Government can turn around the fortunes of a town with the worst health outcomes, lowest wages and highest levels of deprivation in the country, there is nowhere that cannot succeed. When Blackpool succeeds, Britain succeeds.
When we talk about the cost of living crisis, we are not just talking about the price of a pint of milk or a loaf of bread. In Blackpool, we are experiencing food insecurity alongside debt, poor housing and an acute mental health crisis. Families already struggling to pay the rent are pushed further behind by insecure work and rising bills. These are not isolated problems, and there is no quick fix.
Legislation passed in this House matters so much in constituencies like mine. Strengthening employment rights, increasing the minimum wage, expanding free childcare provision and providing security to renters are all examples of the real difference being made right now to working families in Blackpool, but, with parents still skipping meals so that their children can eat, there is still much work to be done. I hope the legislation announced today will ease the pressure on working people, who have carried the burden of economic instability for far too long.
Energy security is part of the challenge too. The devastating conflict in Iran is having a growing impact across the world. For families in Blackpool who are already struggling to make ends meet, another spike in their bills is devastating. My constituents deserve the security of knowing that their energy supply is reliable and affordable, and the energy independence Bill will hopefully give them that.
I welcome the commitments to improve patient care and support early intervention through the NHS modernisation Bill, because health inequality remains one of the biggest injustices facing my constituents. People in Blackpool spend about a third of their lives in poor health, and the healthy life expectancy for men in my home town is 50 years old. My son was born in Blackpool, as was I, and this simple fact means that he and all the other children born in our town are expected to live 10 years less than a child born in Hampshire. That is 10 years stolen before they have even had the chance to live them. There is nothing inevitable about those figures; they are the result of political choices and years of inequality. NHS reform must be meaningful to improve outcomes and give people the chance to live longer and healthier lives.
Having visited schools across my constituency, met with the parents of SEND children and read hundreds of the responses to my constituency SEND survey, it is clear to me that the current system is not working for families in my constituency and beyond. Parents speak about fighting for support that should already be there. Schools are under enormous pressure, and children are waiting far too long for the help that they need. The funding secured earlier this year and the two new SEND schools in Blackpool are welcome, because they will mean that more children are getting support closer to home and that fewer families face months of uncertainty and delay. However, areas with the highest levels of need must receive support that reflects the reality in their area, because children growing up in Blackpool deserve the same opportunities as children growing up anywhere else in this country.
As the chair of the all-party parliamentary group for hospitality and tourism and the MP for a town built on tourism, I have followed discussions about the visitor levy closely. Tourism supports thousands of jobs in Blackpool and gives young people opportunities to join the jobs ladder, as was the case for me; I sold crisps and KitKats at the age of 14. The tourist pound reaches far beyond hotels and guest houses and supports pubs, cafés, restaurants, theatres, attractions and transport links across our area. Before the introduction of the overnight visitor levy Bill, the concerns of the sector must be taken seriously, because additional costs and burdens will hit them the hardest. If we are serious about supporting British tourism, I repeat my call for the Chancellor to reduce VAT for hospitality and tourism in line with other European countries.
Just under two years ago, when we were in opposition, I stood from the Opposition Benches to ask my first question as the MP for Blackpool South; I called for taxi licensing reform. Taxis are an essential part of Blackpool’s transport network, but the licensing scheme has failed both passengers and our local economy. We need reform so that local drivers are protected, passengers are safe and Blackpool gets the benefit of the revenue that is created in our town, instead of it leaving down the motorway at the end of each day. After a long campaign, I am delighted that the Government will take action that I have long campaigned for to modernise taxi and private hire laws. This Bill can finally address the issue of out-of-area working, protecting public safety and supporting local taxi revenue.
This place has the power to change the direction of my seaside town’s story and, in doing so, to change the story that Britain tells about itself. Let that be the challenge for this Labour Government. If we want the trust of the country, we must prove that we can rebuild places that were unfortunately written off too often by the previous Government. We must prove that prosperity does not belong only to the wealthiest postcodes and that working people, coastal towns and forgotten communities matter just as much as anywhere else in the United Kingdom. It will stand as proof that a different future is possible—one that is fairer, more hopeful and more equal—because, as I have said before, when Blackpool succeeds, Britain succeeds.
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (North Cotswolds) (Con)
Madam Deputy Speaker, I am grateful to catch your eye in this important King’s Speech debate. I follow other colleagues in congratulating the hon. Members for Bradford West (Naz Shah) and for Harlow (Chris Vince) on their amusing and well-informed speeches.
One of the few things that this Government have got right in the King’s Speech is the expedited Bill to nationalise Scunthorpe steelworks in order to safeguard domestic steel production. The plant is costing the taxpayer £1 million a day, and therefore modernisation and future private and public investment under a Government-owned company need to be implemented.
However, our economy is in a very fragile state. It grew by only 1.3% in real terms in 2025, and the Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts that it will grow by only 1.4% in 2026—the lowest level of any G7 country. The United Kingdom is carrying one of the highest levels of borrowing in the western world. National debt is a staggering £2.9 trillion, which is equivalent to 93.8% of our entire GDP or £102,000 per household. Even more concerning is the fact that we are expected to spend—wait for it—£111 billion on debt interest alone to service that debt. If that were a Government Department, it would be the third largest.
We are heavily reliant on international markets, and our national balance sheet is highly leveraged. That leaves our economy dangerously exposed to external shocks, such as the war in Iran and the Ukraine conflict. As a result, our borrowing premium on that debt is one of the highest in the OECD; today, we are paying more in debt interest than Greece. A 1% rise in interest rates adds £1.3 billion in costs in the first year, and £12 billion by the end of the forecast period, as new, expensive debt replaces older, cheaper debt. Indeed, yesterday, 30-year gilts hit a 28-year high at 5.81%. That gives a clue as to what the international markets think of our economic standing.
On that note, I observe that one of the Labour leadership candidates does not have a clue how the bond market funding our enormous debt actually works. With inflation expected to rise again—some forecasters expect it to reach 6.7% next year—we face the very real risk of sliding into recession or a bond strike. If those very serious consequences were to occur, this country would be forced to take much more fundamental measures to cut our expenditure. A competent Government should already be doing so, to avoid any chance of this happening and to protect our reputation in the international markets.
I note that the Government have included a Bill to reform the welfare system. The fact that 1 million people could work but do not is causing unacceptable tax increases on the rest of the hard-working population’s earnings. On top of that, higher interest rates are leading to higher food prices, higher mortgage payments and higher business costs. No one in this country—especially poorer working people—will be protected.
Some of the issues we see today are avoidable. The current political instability is a major factor. It is not my job as an Opposition MP to tell Labour how to sort out its leadership problems, but whatever it does, it is important to convince the international community and the people of this country that there is a stable, well-thought-out economic policy and to give the markets confidence, in order to reduce the current borrowing premium. It is not the job of the Government to subsidise every business, but it is the duty of the Government to create conditions in which growth, prosperity, enterprise and investment can thrive.
The Government have included a Bill to target youth unemployment, which is welcome, but the fact that it has risen by 16% or by 100,000 compared with a year ago makes it very hard for youngsters now leaving university or further education to start their careers. Meanwhile, businesses—particularly in hospitality and retail—are being taxed into oblivion and are not hiring as many people. In my North Cotswolds constituency, we employ 3,700 people in hospitality, and the sector provides £220 million to the local economy. However, higher employer national insurance contributions, rising minimum wages, hugely increasing business rates and energy price increases, exacerbated by the Employment Rights Act 2025, are all making it harder to make profits and are stalling growth. Taxes are already at a post-war high and there are threats to hike them further. None of this environment is encouraging businesses to hire and take on more people and so reduce the high unemployment figures.
Sorcha Eastwood (Lagan Valley) (Alliance)
I agree entirely with the hon. Member. To me, we have one of the most business-hostile environments. You made comments about young people not getting work. Do you agree that that is made worse by the national insurance hikes that have seen almost a generation being unable to get employment? Do you agree with me in that contention?
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
Order. Let us start the Session as we mean to go on, with no “you” or “your”, because the hon. Member is not talking about me.
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown
I do not think I could design a tax increase that was a bigger tax on jobs than the hike in national insurance. I totally agree with the hon. Lady, and I think it is tragic in particular for our young people trying to get into the world of work today.
As Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, my focus is on value for money for the taxpayer and ensuring that no expenditure goes to waste. Figures published by the National Audit Office in its “Audit insights” report in January 2026 point to a deeply worrying picture. The Government now spend around £1.1 trillion of taxpayers’ money across 17 Departments. A Department’s accounts are qualified—sorry, this is getting a little technical, but I hope the House will bear with me a little in this section of my speech—when it does not spend its budget as Parliament intends. The Department for Work and Pensions has had its accounts qualified for 36 years because its fraud and error rate is 3.3%, costing the taxpayer a staggering £9 billion. Overall—this is even more staggering—the Government have written off close to £7 billion this year across Departments, including the Ministry of Defence writing off £1.5 billion purely on cancelled projects. I repeat: £7 billion has been written off this year from cancelled and wasted projects. That is staggering.
The PAC has consistently recommended that each Department improves its digital and AI efficiencies. We believe that should be implemented from the top down, and that a chief digital and information officer should be appointed at a senior level in every Department and on arm’s length bodies. That would lead to efficiencies and savings. After all, every efficiency and every saving that can be made is more money to spend somewhere else. The public sector is constantly behind the private sector digitally, and we need to do much better to ensure that our public services actually deliver for taxpayers, using the latest and best technology to do so. AI is a tsunami that the Government are nowhere near prepared to deal with. I do not mean this as a criticism of the civil service—it is just how it is—but only 5% of the civil service have specific IT qualifications. Some experts say that needs to rise to 10%, which would be a massive transformation.
The Government announced a Bill to reform the welfare system. This year alone, the Department for Work and Pensions budget is expected to reach a projected £333 billion, or around 23.7% of UK spending. That almost outweighs the income tax payments of £330 billion that we receive from hard-working people. Imagine that: the total amount of income tax from hard-working people almost does not pay for the bill for the Department of Work and Pensions. The pension and benefit budgets are ballooning, and that expenditure is only due to increase as we mercifully live longer and healthier lives. Somebody else mentioned that we are at risk of intergenerational unfairness. There is a risk that our children will be unable to pay off this increasing debt, yet this Government have failed to take back control of this skyrocketing budget. Instead, their Back Benchers refuse to support such changes, which would cost just £5 billion.
Another issue that the PAC will be examining closely is the cost of Government compensation schemes, which over their lifetime are expected to exceed £102 billion, or just under what we pay in debt interest in any one year. The Government, of course, have a moral obligation to compensate citizens when the state makes serious mistakes, but we must do so in a fair, proportionate and non-litigious way.
Finally, and most importantly, I want to turn to defence. The first absolute duty of any Government is to ensure that our nation is properly defended. The King’s Speech made a commitment to NATO and to a sustained increase in defence spending, yet the defence investment plan, promised from that Dispatch Box in June 2025 and in every month since then—alongside the strategic defence review—has still not been published. Until we have that plan, we cannot see how the Government propose to procure all the military equipment that is needed.
Jim Shannon
I commend the hon. Gentleman for the speech that he is making. Does he agree that one of the things we need to do on defence here in the United Kingdom is adopt the drone technology that Ukraine now has? Russia is under threat: it is worried about the attacks that are reaching far into its interior. Does he agree that we may need a partnership with Ukraine to promote our drone technology in a way that can make us as effective as the Ukrainians?
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown
If the hon. Gentleman is just a little patient, he will find that, two or three paragraphs down, I will address precisely that point.
Currently, the defence budget for 2025-26 is £62.2 billion, which is a measly 18% of the welfare budget of £333 billion. The Government have pledged to increase it by 2.6%, or £9 billion, by 2027 and by 3% in the next Parliament, which means a further increase of £14 billion. But none of that new money has yet arrived.
Iqbal Mohamed (Dewsbury and Batley) (Ind)
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the best form of defence is peace, and that the overseas development aid budget—as was mentioned earlier by the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Sir Andrew Mitchell)—is a key component of achieving peace around the world through soft power and diplomacy? A great deal of that aid is crucial for people’s survival in many parts of the world.
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown
I welcome the hon. Gentleman’s intervention. As someone who worked under my right hon. Friend for Sutton Coldfield (Sir Andrew Mitchell) as a junior Opposition defence spokesman, I understand the value of overseas aid, and I particularly understand the elements of it that he describes as soft power. The other day the PAC conducted an inquiry about the BBC World Service, and I do wish that the Government would fund that service properly. It is an extremely well-respected element of Britain’s ability to project our values around the world, and it is very sad when the Chinese and the Russians come in as soon as we make cuts in it.
At a time when the world is increasingly uncertain and bellicose, our MOD budget is in crisis, and as a result a significant number of procurement projects have been put on hold. These delays will have significant cost implications, so when, or if, the extra money does arrive, it will buy less and less equipment. I went to Ukraine earlier this year, and it is clear to me that we need more and more rockets, drones, interceptors, unmanned vehicles and investment in space. However, some of the proposed equipment is designed for yesterday’s wars, and it remains to be seen whether the MOD will be agile enough to make those substitutions in future procurement.
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown
It may be pretty obvious to some, but it is not so obvious to others.
To govern is to make difficult choices. In short, the Government are spending more than the country can afford, funded by ever-increasing amounts of debt. If we are serious about protecting our nation in an increasingly uncertain world, we must also be serious about the strength of our economy. That means bringing our unaffordable welfare bill under control, creating a stronger environment for growth, eliminating billions of pounds in waste—some of which I have identified in my speech, although if time had allowed I could have identified billions more—and reforming how government works through the rapid roll-out of digital reform. The civil service must be reoriented around productivity and efficiency. Only with a stronger, leaner and more resilient economy can we fund our defences, secure our future and meet the challenges ahead.
Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)
I congratulate His Majesty on delivering the Gracious Speech, and I concur with the hon. Member for North Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) that investing 0.7% of GDP in international development aid will bring greater stability and increase our ability to secure greater diplomacy, as well as development. I think that should be our focus. I also thank him for the work he does on the Public Accounts Committee.
The intersection of crises bearing down on our planet, our nation and our communities demands a bold response in this parliamentary Session. I recognise the current bind, but as we move into the next chapter of Labour’s story, there is one consideration that I want the Government to take through this legislative programme: how we bring our communities, our country and our fractious planet together. Such vision and policy must be the thread that gathers and inspires us.
Against the backdrop of fast-paced change, this planet is breaking. The grotesque inequalities, climate degradation and conflict are driving people apart. At home we have had 14 years of austerity, whereby the harder someone works, the tougher it gets. That is why I have called for a new economic orthodoxy, as neoliberalism preys on the working class and exploits all who want to get on as much as those who cannot. As people are fleeced, the energy giants and water bosses profit, despite putting carbon in our air and sewage in our rivers, such as the Ouse in York—the second worst in the country. The clean water Bill must pull this service back into public hands and public accountability.
Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)
I welcome the hon. Lady’s call to take water back into public ownership. Does she agree that in setting the share price at which we buy it back, we should take account of the cost of pollution, of the money that is being paid to distant shareholders with no investment or interest in this country, and of the inconvenience caused to so many of our residents by constant leaks and the waste of water? Shareholders should pay the price of it, not our constituents.
Rachael Maskell
I do agree. It is daylight robbery, and people should not be profiting from our natural resources. We should not see the levels of pollution that exist in our rivers, which should be pure and clean. I have a sewer running through the middle of my city, and it is not acceptable. It is right to legislate, but also to ensure that we are not adding carbon to our natural environment. On airport and road expansion, we should ensure that we bring down levels of carbon, and I fear that might not be the case with airport expansion.
The draft commonhold and leasehold Bill is welcome, as is freezing ground rents, but as developers extract all they can and people pay extortionate rents and management costs, we need to see good-quality housing as a right and to rethink the model. As I have witnessed in my constituency, co-operative housing is a powerful antidote that is worth investing in, alongside a new generation of council-built housing for the common good.
The system is rigged against ordinary people, as it was 126 years ago, when trade unions came together to form the Labour party. It is our duty in this Parliament to once again set the ambition to drive transformation for our communities, address the grotesque inequalities that drive people apart, and rewire the system to bring us together. That is our purpose. As the unions fought for common terms and better pay, Labour reimagined a society in which everyone can get on, a welfare state for those in need, and an NHS in which Bevan positioned the duke and the dustman as equals. Not understanding a collective, cohesive society puts all this at risk, as Opposition parties seek to exploit opportunity and people, sell off our common assets and sow division. That is why Labour has an immense obligation to be bold and ambitious, not for those who take all they can, but for those who serve, work and play their part—and to take away the stigma and barriers for those who cannot. I implore the Government to maintain the rights of those with indefinite leave to remain, as new communities work alongside established communities. When it comes to restraining traumatised children, on which the Government are consulting, I simply warn them: don’t! I will not support that. All children must be treated with dignity—nothing less.
Iqbal Mohamed (Dewsbury and Batley) (Ind)
On indefinite leave to remain, on the journey down from my constituency today, I spoke to the private hire driver. He is on a visa that requires renewal every two and a half years. He will have to do that renewal four times before he is eligible for indefinite leave to remain. He is not really complaining about that, but about the council not allowing him to continue working when his visa is up for renewal and he sends away his documents to be processed. Would the hon. Member agree that that should be looked at, and that there should not be any unintended consequences of that process?
Rachael Maskell
The hon. Member has put that well and truly on the record. We need to reform the system. It is really prejudiced against so many people who are working hard in our society. We should not increase the time taken to get indefinite leave to remain, because our word should be our bond, and we should honour the agreements we make.
That brings me to Labour Members’ ambitions for reforming the special educational needs and disabilities system. We need an inclusive approach, so that every child finds their place and reaches their level. More inclusion means rewiring the culture to be therapeutic and trauma-informed, with new pedagogies; mapping out learning styles for children; and ending harsh discipline and the single channel of exam-based assessments. Instead, we must include children and bring out their best. I urge the Treasury to invest the funding needed to help raise this generation and future generations, by supporting parents and babies with the right foundations during the first 1,001 critical days, and by providing the wraparound support that teachers, health professionals and support staff need, so that our SEND system is fixed once and for all. The benefit of that investment will show in the years to come.
As we support our young people into work, we must recognise that state neglect under the last Government caused so much harm. We must be compassionate and work with, not against, our young people, as they struggle to navigate their way and transition into independence and work. Society and our communities should be brought together.
Our centralised system is failing; decisions are made far from the realities of the regions and nations. That is building a sense of remote dystopia, and of not being in touch with the daily challenges that are being experienced as the cost of living weighs heavy, while others live profligate lives. Today, we need a radical devolution of power, finance and opportunity to help people see themselves as having agency and purpose. We should recognise the diversity of all our communities, and our common bond. It will not be found in the idealisms of some, or the toxic divisions of the right, which, believe me, will set community against community, while its crypto-backed leaders sow chaos and division, ripping up our NHS and our welfare state—our incredible inheritance that has glued our society together through generations.
In the King’s Speech, we have so much to celebrate, and I will sew in the voices of my community in York as we progress. I want to ensure that the Railways Bill protects the wellbeing of all who work in the sector. Having championed the Removal of Titles Bill in the last two parliamentary Sessions, I hope that we can move fast on cleaning up our politics. I welcome the move to tackle antisemitism, as antisemitic graffiti has been found in my community this week. It brings such shame, and we must move fast on that. Improved relations with the EU will help to build the bridges we need.
York is a visitor and tourism hotspot, so I will work carefully with the Government on the overnight visitor levy. I trust that businesses will not pay a penalty, and that our city will get the reward. The draft taxi licensing Bill will really help to bring licensing back under control.
I trust that we will do more on the climate crisis. As the national emergency briefing highlighted, we do not have the luxury of time. The UK is in the bottom 10% of countries in the biodiversity intactness index, and one in six species is at risk of extinction. While our planet burns and our icecaps melt, we need to invest fast. Finance should be invested to hasten decarbonisation, and projects such as BioYorkshire should be funded to ensure that we hasten agricultural resilience, preventing the low yields and crop failure that are escalating the cost of food. That is why I am really glad that we are moving to independence in our energy market, too. We need a second employment rights Bill to capture the single status of worker, extend collective bargaining, and improve the wellbeing of workers.
My final point is this: if we are to bring a diversity of voices to Parliament and ensure that they are heard, this place must change. Governments have been destabilised in recent years due to too much power being held by the Executive, and too little power being invested in Parliament. If that does not change, the discourse of distrust between Parliament and the people will continue. Our voices, representing the diversity of the country, must be heard, and must impact the programme of government. I want all Bills to go through in-depth consultations with MPs, who would input the experiences of their communities. Just running artificial intelligence across consultation responses is not good enough. I want full pre-legislative scrutiny, so that we can ensure that Bills are robust, unifying, and do everything possible to improve the lives of those we represent. Without that, I fear that we will let down the people we were sent here to represent. It is time to include all; the mission is too great to be for just a few. This parliamentary Session must be like no other, connecting communities, unifying society and transforming our future.
Christine Jardine (Edinburgh West) (LD)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell).
As I listened to His Majesty the King today, there was one part in his speech that reminded me of the Queen’s Speech in 2017, when I was first elected. The then Government promised that their priority would be
“to secure the best possible deal as the country leaves the European Union.”—[Official Report, 21 June 2017; Vol. 626, c. 34.]
That went well. Let us compare our economy then and now. Inflation and unemployment are now both higher. In 2017, we had the fifth-largest economy in the world. We have slipped to sixth since we left the EU. Outside this place, in 2017, people were concerned for the welfare of the refugees risking their lives on boats crossing the Mediterranean. If they landed in a safe European Union country, that was where they had to seek refuge. Not now. Now that we have left the European Union, that rule no longer applies to us. That is something that the Brexiteers omitted—perhaps forgot—to mention then in their campaign, and now in their immigration rants. That is why one part of the speech I welcome is the promise of closer links with the European Union. I am delighted to hear that we will, in the words of the King’s Speech, “strengthen ties”, but what exactly will that mean?
At the weekend, I spent time with some non-political friends. It would be a welcome break, I thought, from the constant election messaging of the past few weeks, but they dragged me back here by asking quite clearly and categorically: “When are we doing something to get back into the European Union?” Leaving has been a disaster for them, for their businesses and for the country. “Closer” probably will not be enough for them. They want to know exactly what we will do, and how we will get back to the centre of Europe, to lead and work with our neighbours and build the trading links that are essential to economic recovery.
What about the customs union and the single market—does being closer include being in them? While I agree that being closer to Europe will help our economic growth, it will not be enough on its own. It will not be enough to improve the lives of the constituents who come to me every week. It will not be enough to cut their energy bills before next winter, to provide housing that they can afford, or to help their children get on the housing ladder.
I welcome the moves on antisemitism, which has rocketed in the past few years. We have seen it go up by 175% in a decade, and it has been all too visible in the recent attacks on our streets. However, while the Government are promising to tackle antisemitism, I hope that they will not forget Islamophobia, which is also rampant, or the misogyny that we see everywhere, influenced by the dangerous views that young men hear expressed on the internet, and that affect how they look at women and girls.
Among the 35 Bills are measures to support women and give them greater “agency over the decisions” that affect their lives. I do not disagree with that, but again, as with the measures on the European Union, it is not exactly clear what that will mean. More action on domestic abuse and helping women entrepreneurs sounds good, but I hope there will be bold action, rather than clever language and warm words.
Over the past two months, on the doorstep of almost every home I visited, the theme of the conversation was exactly the same: change. It was change that people wanted—the change that people voted for two years ago, but did not feel yet. I am not sure that they will see that desire for change reflected in the Government’s plans today. They are all too bitty, unclear and not absolutely transparent.
We know energy security is vital to national security, and that national security is increasingly under threat and needs investment. It is only too clear that Ukraine’s pain is being suffered on behalf of us all, and that without its resistance, the rest of Europe would be even more vulnerable. Again, there is nothing in the King’s Speech on defence that most people would take issue with; what is there sounds good. However, I believe that people will take issue with what is missing from the speech.
Where is the bold new direction for this country? Where is the thing that will give people hope that their Government understand what it is like to lie awake at night, worrying about how to pay the bills, or understand the fear that the job that a person has just lost, because their employer struggled with national insurance increases, will be their last? Where is the hope that the Government understand that same employer’s growing realisation that they may not be able to hold on to the company that they spent their life building? I actually think that many in this Government do understand that, because like me, they come from a background where that was an all-too-clear reality, but the country wants to see action and change—and soon.
David Burton-Sampson (Southend West and Leigh) (Lab)
It is a great pleasure to speak in this debate on the King’s Speech, which set out the Labour Government’s programme for this Session, and I warmly welcome its measures.
I thank my hon. Friends the Members for Bradford West (Naz Shah), and for Harlow (Chris Vince), for their opening speeches. My hon. Friend the Member for Bradford West showed how she had overcome adversity, and tackled head-on some of the challenges that people who look like me and her face in today’s society. There is, of course, no greater champion for their community than my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow—my Essex friend. He lives, breathes and is Harlow, and I thank him for all the work that he does in his community.
This Labour Government have already achieved so much, handing back power to local leaders, supporting local regeneration and growth plans and taking the pivotal step of a new deal for working people. They have also put in place the biggest change to renters’ rights for 40 years, which was particularly welcomed in my constituency of Southend West and Leigh, directly giving greater housing security to our 8,938 renters.
We have seen other significant improvements already: a new Best Start family hub at the Blenheim family centre; three free breakfast clubs in my primary schools; a new, extended nursery provision at Chalkwell Hall infant school; more than £2.5 million of investment into South Essex college to upgrade its campus; and a new youth hub—one of 80 being rolled out across the UK. In addition, the removal of the two-child benefit cap is helping 1,800 families in my constituency and, most importantly, lifting children out of poverty. Add to that the fact that we have brought back into public ownership both our train lines, which will soon be part of Great British Railways, and opened the first community diagnostic centre in our city, which is having a huge impact, providing testing early and late, seven days a week, and getting people diagnosed much quicker.
I have also been thrilled to see more than £2 million of new Government funding to start to transform the futures of children with special educational needs in Southend. This is the start of a breakthrough moment—one that families in my constituency have waited a long time for. I have heard from these families during my “See Every Need” meetings, which bring together parents, school leaders, health representatives and charities to get the changes right. Reports from those meetings have been sent to the Secretary of State for Education and the Minister for School Standards, and I am delighted that local voices from my constituency have been reflected in Government policy.
There remains much scepticism among parents of SEND children as to whether these reforms will actually happen and make a difference to their children’s lives as they have quite simply been let down so many times in the past. However, I am confident that seeing the reforms start to come forward in legislation during this Session through the education for all Bill will help to give parents more certainty that this Government are focused on fixing this situation once and for all.
I welcome the announcement in the King’s Speech of the enhancing financial services Bill, which promises a major shake-up of financial services regulation. As the current chair of the APPGs on fair banking and on open finance and payments, I have a passion for financial services reforms, and I am pleased to see this legislation coming forward. It is important, though, that Government continue to listen to the voices of industry, ensuring that these reforms are appropriate and genuinely designed to fix the challenges the industry faces, and I thank my hon. and learned Friend the Economic Secretary to the Treasury for her work in listening to industry to date.
Moving on, conversion therapy and similar practices are appalling. Sadly, I am aware of people who have been subject to some of these despicable acts. I believe interventions intended to change or suppress a person’s sexuality or gender identity are wrong, so I am delighted to see a full trans-inclusive ban on conversion practices coming forward. The LGBTQ+ community has waited far too long for this ban; after promises made and broken by previous Governments, this Labour Government are finally bringing it forward through the draft conversion practices Bill. It cannot be delivered a moment too soon for our community.
I am grateful for the Government’s water reform legislation, which is set to go even further with the clean water Bill, and I applaud their approach to ban bonuses for water company bosses when companies pollute or fail customers. Since being elected, I have been holding regular water summits, focusing on storm overflows, sewage discharges and bathing water quality as well as many other related matters on which we have called our water company, Anglian Water, to account. I am delighted that the local community has now taken ownership of these summits, proving that they are just as invested in this agenda as our Government are.
My constituency has a diverse and growing Jewish community. I have met with many from the community recently, and they have told me of their fears following the recent rise in antisemitic attacks. I know that they will be particularly assured by His Majesty the King’s specific mention of this in his speech and the Government’s desire to do all they can to stamp out this scourge.
I conclude by touching on the enormously challenging international situation we face. I support the priority that this Government have placed on standing firm with Ukraine, and I stand firmly with Ukraine too after Putin’s appalling illegal invasion. I am also pleased with this Government’s stance on the middle east conflict. I am pleased to see our commitment to a sustained increase in defence spending. The challenges that we face demand that we work together with our allies through international co-operation.
I am glad to see in this Humble Address support for strengthening and rebuilding the ties of trust, trade and friendship with our European friends that were so badly damaged by a poorly implemented Brexit. We will fix them through our European partnerships Bill. The promise of a return of the Erasmus scheme and better opportunities for our young people to live, work and study in Europe is also welcome. A good relationship with our closest neighbour is vital in this uncertain world. It is pleasing, therefore, to see the desire to bring forward primary legislation in this area.
I am excited to see the legislation announced in this King’s Speech unfold, so that we can make even more of a difference to the lives of people in Southend West and Leigh and across the rest of the country. In an uncertain world, I am confident that this Government are now moving at pace to make the country fit for the challenges we face while prioritising hope and renewal for our country.
Dave Doogan (Angus and Perthshire Glens) (SNP)
If I was not cheered by the landslide victory of the SNP in Scotland last week, I certainly am after this King’s Speech. It is just as well that the people of Scotland have John Swinney as First Minister and the SNP as the Scottish Government to stand as the buttress of fairness and justice between them and the remote and unaccountable UK Government in Westminster. They are not just remote and unaccountable but dysfunctional to an alarming degree, and that dysfunction is what has precipitated this most vapid of King’s Speeches.
If somebody who was unaware of the UK malaise, and the multiple economic crises affecting it, saw the Government’s solution in the form of this King’s Speech, they would be unable to identify the problem. That speaks to an obscurity of purpose. Government should have a clarity of purpose—see also the SNP Scottish Government in Edinburgh—but this Government have not got a clue. They are so busy bickering with one another, arguing with each faction about who gets the next shot at being the Prime Minister, that they cannot focus on the problems ailing the people up and down these islands—and the problems are profound. People are unable to pay their energy bills, and they do not know whether they will have a job this month, next month or the month after that. There is a crushing concern about everything, not just this or that. People are now terrified about their washing machine breaking down or their car getting a puncture, because they are so hard up.
Under this Labour Government, the margin of economic resilience in people’s homes has been eroded to a translucent wafer. There is nothing between the wolf and the bank account, after less than two years of a Labour Government. I do not understand why that could be. I am a political bore and I understand these things—or I thought I did. They have a majority that would choke a horse. They have been preparing for government for 14 years, yet they come in and it is like they just landed. They even said as much: “Well, we didn’t know the state of the books.” If they never knew the state of the books, they were the only people who did not, yet they had the temerity to come in, take power and make it even worse.
Labour Members kid themselves about the reason Labour was elected, but really they know it. They tell themselves, “It was our manifesto. We have a mandate.” There was no mandate for this guddle. Nothing that has happened over the last 22 months was backed up by a mandate. Labour was elected, and ushered in with a colossal majority, for one reason alone: Labour was not the Tories, and it is a two-party system in this place—or rather, it was. That is why Labour Members are here.
Alison Taylor (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (Lab)
Will the hon. Gentleman explain to the House what the Government in Scotland have done over the last 20 years to generate the economic growth that he talks about?
Dave Doogan
What the hon. Lady, as a Scottish Unionist—I am sure a proud Scottish Unionist, for reasons best known to herself—needs to understand is that the UK is not contingent on Scotland, but Scotland is contingent on the UK. The decisions made here affect Scotland, but the decisions made in Scotland do not affect down here. Against that backdrop, Scotland is regularly in the upper quartile for GDP per capita in the United Kingdom. This myth that we are subsidised by the rest of the UK is risible. We economically outperform more than three quarters of the UK in any given quarter, roughly. We are the top destination for foreign direct investment. Foreign companies are not confused: they know where they get a return on their investment in the United Kingdom, and it is in Scotland. Our unemployment is lower and our employment is higher. I could go on, but I do not want to get in trouble, Madam Deputy Speaker.
Seamus Logan
My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech—his first as our party’s new group leader. He mentioned the vapid King’s Speech—this is no criticism of the King, of course—which contained the renewed promise of a Hillsborough law that the Government have had two years to introduce. Why on earth is it taking the Government so long to deliver on their manifesto promises?
Dave Doogan
My hon. Friend is right to highlight that issue, which is so important to many people across the UK but especially in the north of England, and in Liverpool in particular. But it is not just that. It is the way Labour rushed during the campaign to stand shoulder to shoulder with WASPI women before abandoning them when they got into office. It is about the family farm tax, which the Labour party expressly said before the election that it would not introduce but then got in and did exactly that. That was a gross betrayal of our agricultural industry and our rural communities.
The change to employer national insurance was self-evidently anti-industry, self-evidently inflationary and self-evidently a tax on jobs. It was going to have one potential outcome. The £25 billion that the Government said that it would bring in was complete fantasy; by the time they had compensated for the public sector, it was down to single figures of billions, and even that did not take into account the drag on the economy and the lower fiscal receipts as a result of that disastrous, self-defeating policy.
Noah Law (St Austell and Newquay) (Lab)
What would be the hon. Gentleman’s answer to filling that massive fiscal black hole that we were left with?
Dave Doogan
What the hon. Gentleman needs to understand is that countries grow their way out of these issues. Growth comes from economic investment in equipment and people, raising productivity and lowering economic inactivity and all those things that have risen under Labour, because Labour does not understand economics—never has, never will.
Before I move on, I want to focus on the real impact on real people. Unemployment is now at its highest level in five years. Unemployment across the UK is at 5.2%; thankfully, through the economic efforts of our SNP Scottish Government, it is at 4.1% in Scotland, although that is still far too high for our communities. Youth unemployment in the UK is at 15%. That is a catastrophe. The way young people enter the world of work dictates their relationship with employment for the rest of their lives, and that is catastrophically damaging for young people up and down these islands.
Youth unemployment is particularly acute in hospitality. Hospitality is a gateway industry for employment, but the Government are taxing it out of existence. People with a pub, a hotel or a restaurant now feel like unpaid tax collectors for this Labour Government.
Christine Jardine
While I agree with the hon. Member about young people’s routes into work, how does that sit with the way his SNP Government in Scotland have destroyed apprenticeships up there? As for the hospitality industry in Scotland, it pays business rates in Scotland—I hear complaints about them all the time. Is that perhaps why the SNP lost seats in the election that he is so busy congratulating himself on?
Dave Doogan
We still got more than four times as many seats as the Lib Dems in Scotland, Madam Deputy Speaker, so I will not be taking any lectures there. However, I look forward to working closely with the Liberal Democrats in the Scottish Government—
Dave Doogan
I am not sure the hon. Lady has that in her gift, but to her point about youth unemployment, as I said to the hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North (Alison Taylor), the Scottish Government are subject to the same economic malaise as anywhere else in the United Kingdom. It is to the betterment of the fortunes of their constituents and mine that they are under an SNP Government—on that point, I can assure the hon. Member for Edinburgh West (Christine Jardine) that she is welcome.
Do not just take my word for it, Madam Deputy Speaker: the markets give their verdict on what is happening in the United Kingdom, and the markets are incredibly concerned. That is why 10-year gilt interest rates touched 5.13%, a rate not seen in the UK since the financial crash of 2008—a very dangerous report card.
Dave Doogan
No. I am going to make progress and close my speech.
Defence is the first duty of government, but under this Labour Government, if we had a significant investment for every blunderbuss piece of hyperbole and rhetoric on defence, we would be in a far better position than we are. The Prime Minister said in his speech earlier that we are negotiating a de-escalation of the war in Iran. He did not tell us which of the three protagonists was listening to the pontifications of the UK Prime Minister—because not one of the three participants in that conflict could care less what the Prime Minister thinks about the war in Iran.
The defence investment plan—the road map for what defence will look like in the United Kingdom for the next decade—is now a year late. I do not know what the Government think they can get away with, but if their signal, apex piece of defence legislation is more than a year late, that tells this Parliament and everyone up and down these islands that they do not have a clue about defence any more than they have a clue about anything else.
Dr Arthur
I am genuinely grateful to be here for the hon. Gentleman’s first speech as SNP leader here in Westminster. It is just a shame that only one other of his fellow SNP MPs is here—no doubt they are all on important business. I know that he does champion the defence sector, unlike some of his colleagues in Scotland, but he sits on the Scottish Affairs Committee and he knows the sector’s concerns about skills development and education in Scotland. Does he share those concerns, and what is he doing to influence his colleagues in the Scottish Government to ensure that the sector is more fully supported?
Dave Doogan
The defence sector is a significant part of the Scottish economy, and I just wish that the hon. Gentleman and his Unionist colleagues in the Labour party, and in other lesser parties, would acknowledge the fact that this is a mutual endeavour and that the UK benefits greatly from the skills and expertise that exist in Scotland, as well as from the apprenticeships, training and investment. Let us not forget that everybody who works in the defence sector in Scotland went through a Scottish school, a Scottish apprenticeship, a Scottish college or a Scottish university. There is this idea that everything was fantastic previously and is terrible now. The former is not true, and the latter is not true either. It is a work in progress, and we are investing heavily in Scottish education. That is why such a high percentage of people leaving school in Scotland are going on to a positive destination.
The Prime Minister said that he was going to take steps to bring the United Kingdom into the very heart of Europe. Well, he is not going to do that without rejoining the EU, so this is yet more hyperbole and fantasy. My final word on this is that a Government in this level of disarray—with this level of division and infighting, who have caused so much damage in such a short period of time to people’s livelihoods and to the economy—needed to make an emergency response today, but this King’s Speech was anything but. I look forward to them getting their house in order, but I won’t be holding my breath.
Bell Ribeiro-Addy (Clapham and Brixton Hill) (Lab)
In 2024, the public voted for change, for an end to Tory chaos and for a Government who would transform their lives. That summer, our Government set out a King’s Speech to deliver that. In the past two years, in spite of everything, we have begun to make truly transformational changes, including ending no-fault evictions and finally scrapping the two-child benefit cap. Those are things that have changed lives, but today’s offering pales in comparison, perhaps because we have heard so much of it before, but definitely because it lacks the urgency and the radical transformation that we need. I do not believe that this is the “further and faster” that we have been hearing so much about. It seems that we have put the handbrake on offering change, and that we are wasting political capital on divisive measures that were not even in our manifesto, such as ID cards and curtailing the rights of asylum seekers.
I want to be clear that I am not in any way objecting to the King’s Speech. I am pleased to see measures like the Bills on conversion practices, on votes at 16, on tackling antisemitism and on reforming leaseholds, as well as the Hillsborough law and many other key measures, but why are we not doing more? What is there to shout about? Last week, the electorate sent our party a clear message that they were dissatisfied with the Government, and I do not believe that this is a King’s Speech to inspire them back to us. I do not believe that my constituents will hear this and think, “My life will be better when Labour introduces digital ID, replaces the water regulator and instigates another top-down reform of the NHS.”
At a time of great turmoil and difficulty, with global uncertainty hitting households in their pockets, people need policies that will ease the financial pressure they are under today. Building on the successes of the last legislative Session—and there were successes—I would have liked to see an extension of renters’ rights and the introduction of rent controls, especially in major cities where private rents are beyond extortionate. We acknowledge that those living in social housing need their rents capped and regulated, yet we disregard the thousands of low-income households and young people left at the mercy of the private rental markets.
I had also hoped to see a second employment rights Bill announced today. While the first one deserves significant praise, it does not go far enough. We need a Bill that will restore sectoral collective bargaining, give basic rights to the self-employed and gig economy workers, and commit to greater insourcing. The nationalisation of British Steel is welcome, but this should have been accompanied by the nationalisation of rail, mail, water, energy and other essential services. These are not mere industries; they are lifelines. They should never have been handed over to shareholders, and it is long past time we took them back.
I would have liked to see greater acknowledgement of the biggest existential crisis we face as a species, nationally, by reducing the planning burdens on solar farms and on offshore wind. If the Government really want to help people with their energy bills, we need to be switching to renewables much faster. Internationally, I would have liked to see steps to introduce debt cancellations for those climate-vulnerable nations who are fighting the crisis with their hands tied behind their backs. If we want to reduce the numbers of people seeking asylum, we need to work with allies to tackle the biggest causes of displacement.
As the only Labour MP to vote against the Brexit implementation agreement, I was very pleased to see measures on the strengthening of our relationship with the EU. We can now all stop pretending that Brexit was in any way a good idea. Watching the disastrous impact that it has had, I feel vindicated, but I would also advise the Government that, with all the Henry III clauses in that legislation, we could do so much more and faster, and we could do it in a way that would quickly benefit our nation.
I understand that some things take time, but other things are not hard. I would have liked to see steps to address the continued private sale of human remains. At the start of this year, I presented a simple Bill that ought to have ended the vile practice of human remains, many of which have unknown provenance, being bought and sold by private individuals. It would have been relatively straightforward to end this practice, but the Government have no plans to close this loophole and implement such legislation. As I said, I understand that these things take time, but there are some simple things that we could just get done. It feels like the Government may be inclined to capitulate to the right and row back on some of their climate goals, but I remind them that we lost more votes to the left of us than we did to the right of us; if we carry on doing the bare minimum on climate issues, this could only get worse.
I would also have welcomed steps to strengthen the citizenship rights of children who were born here or have grown up here, and to address the extortionate fees that block them from becoming citizens. I have raised this subject again and again in this House—just about every single year—and I was guaranteed that there would be some changes. I do not like being misled, inadvertently or otherwise, on such issues. Whatever our differences on migration, people right across this House agree that these children are not migrants, yet we continue to treat them like that and to price them out of their rights.
I acknowledge the fact that there are measures in this King’s Speech to tackle the cost of living crisis but, frankly, successive Governments have been skirting around this issue for years, making minor tweaks that slightly ease the pressure but do not go far enough. It is time to be bold and to consider the merits of a universal basic income. This is not a radical idea; it is a logical one. Poverty is a political choice. Even at these difficult times, we remain one of the richest countries in the world, so why do we have such a huge cost of living crisis? Why are people skipping meals, rationing heating and working themselves into the ground doing multiple jobs just to stay afloat? This does not happen by accident. It happens because those in power decided it was acceptable. For the avoidance of doubt, we are the ones in power. The question is not really affordability; it is whether we have the courage and the will to take on such a transformative policy. At the moment, it feels like we are offering piecemeal change and minor tweaks. They may be necessary, but I do not believe they will excite anyone or make the tangible change that we need.
I know that we cannot sell people the world, and systematic changes need to be made to facilitate reforms, but we cannot solely offer that and then tell people that their lives have been changed, especially not after the very clear message that the electorate delivered to us last week. People may call me unrealistic, but I would say that I am ambitious for what we can achieve in government right now in this parliamentary Session. Labour Governments have always accompanied radical transformational change in our society. This is the change that the electorate want—they made that very clear—and it is the change that we promised them, but I do not believe that this legislative agenda goes far enough to achieve it for them. The public are demanding more, and I believe that we can do more to give them that.
David Davis (Goole and Pocklington) (Con)
During the privileges debate, I told the House that I had hoped, a couple of years ago, that the Prime Minister would make a success of his new job. Unfortunately, this House is now debating against the backdrop of a Labour psychodrama, but that psychodrama would not have happened except for the fact that the Government have failed, and failed very clearly. In his now infamous speech, the Prime Minister said that he was going to undertake a reset. I don’t know about the Labour party, but the country certainly needs a reset. What he said, in describing his reset, was that he needed to “explain” things better. That is not a reset; that is a re-spin of what they are doing. We need a proper reset. The hon. Member for Hornsey and Friern Barnet (Catherine West) was exactly right when she said that Labour must be
“judged on actions and not just our words”.
As a number of people have said, including the new leader of the SNP group, the hon. Member for Angus and Perthshire Glens (Dave Doogan), Labour came into office promising that its No. 1 mission was economic growth. It was right to do so, because without growth we do not have the money to do anything else, yet the consequences of its own policies in the last couple of years have been that growth has been suppressed. The IMF has literally just reduced the UK’s growth forecast by half a percentage point. That is the largest reduction in the G7.
It is not just the Opposition who are concerned about growth. I recommend that the House reads the Labour Growth Group report called, “An Honest Day”, which is aimed directly at this problem. While I do not agree with everything in it, there are a lot of good ideas that the Government should have already taken on.
When Labour took over, inflation was bang on 2%—that is something it cannot claim was disguised in any way—and now it is 3.3%. Again, Labour and the Prime Minister will try to blame somebody else, and no doubt at the moment the blame is on the strait of Hormuz. That explains energy costs in the future; it does not explain the increases in food costs in the past, or indeed a number of other costs.
David Davis
No, not for the moment.
Neither does it explain the increase in borrowing costs, which are higher than any other G7 country’s and virtually double Japan’s. That is nobody’s fault but the Chancellor’s, and the horrific consequences for our public finances have been laid out already by the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for North Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown).
The real brake is Labour’s own policies: high taxes, massively burdensome regulation, high business rates and high energy costs. What on earth do we expect from our businesses when we saddle the country with the most expensive energy in the developed world, or indeed with the national insurance increases that the hon. Member for Angus and Perthshire Glens mentioned?
David Davis
It is interesting, because the hon. Member’s Government and his Secretary of State have claimed, “All these green policies are reducing the cost of our energy. Not using oil and gas is reducing the cost of energy.” What is the consequence? The highest energy costs in the world. I will be interested to hear if he can explain that when he makes his speech.
The other issue is that growth, or the loss of growth, has a material impact on the public finances. To give the House a measure of that, a 1% change in the growth rate is £10 billion to £11 billion in the first year and then more money in the consequential years, so when we lose that growth, we lose that amount of money. But even if we imagine that we could get that growth back, it still would not be enough. It would not be enough to pay the bills that we need to pay.
So what can we do? I am afraid that, because of the size of the debt, we have no choice but to cut welfare costs. I am a great believer in our welfare system, but it should be a safety net, not a lifestyle choice. People who can work should work, and the public have little sympathy for those who choose benefits over a job. It is true today, and it has been true since I was a child on a council estate, that the British working class, who Labour used to think of as its own voters, hate it when they see one of their neighbours choosing to sit at home spending the taxes that they have earned. Low growth handicaps our ability to solve our citizens’ problems.
Iqbal Mohamed
I agree, and I think most people agree, that people capable of working should be helped into work, but while the right hon. Member’s party was in government for 14 years, did it do an analysis of or have statistics on how many people on benefits across our country were actually fit to work, and what did his party do to get those people into work?
David Davis
I think the answer to the question is, “No, it didn’t,” but the hon. Member should be aware that it was only two months ago that a Labour Member described me as the MP who is never knowingly on message, which is a label I espouse—I do not mind that. No Government have got this right. We need a welfare system that looks after the disabled and people who have no choice about what they are suffering, but not one that makes it an even choice to be on the dole or in a job.
Jeremy Corbyn
Is the right hon. Member aware that the discussion held some months ago, when the former Secretary of State for Work and Pensions proposed big cuts in personal independence payments, caused unbelievable levels of stress and despair to often isolated people in receipt of PIP who have a carer who comes in to help them, and that the Government are still undertaking a review, the intention of which is to lower the personal independence payments bill? Does he agree that we should end that kind of debate and instead look at the needs of people with disabilities, particularly those who struggle to survive under the current system and especially those in receipt of PIP?
David Davis
I will be careful how I answer the right hon. Member because I have an interest to declare here: I have a disabled grandchild, and her mother is one of the people who suffers the stress he talked about. As I say, we need a humane system that deals with people properly. Our current system for supporting disabled people and people looking after disabled people is incredibly bureaucratic, unpleasant and nasty to deal with. That is not the area of welfare that we need to deal with; it is principally the area of employment that we need to deal with. We want to get people back to work, because there is no better way out of poverty than employment, rather than, as it were, being on the dole.
To come back to the thrust of my argument, what is it that we are talking about paying for? I will pick three issues—I could pick any number, but the top three issues that matter to my constituents are healthcare, education and defence. Our health service needs radical reform. I know we have a Bill in this King’s Speech, but it does not look to me like it will have a sufficiently radical impact. For some reason, we do not actually speak enough about the fundamental aims of our health service. Healthcare must be free at the point of delivery—that is an absolute—but it also must do its job of saving lives, and we turn our face away from that too often. Too many Britons are dying early and avoidably under a system that swallows money without delivering the outcomes. Every year, 125,000 deaths are listed officially as avoidable, and the situation has worsened in recent years. It went from 129 deaths per 100,000 people to 156 in the course of a decade. That is a huge increase and, as a result, we have an avoidable death rate that is higher than all our comparator nations. I am not just talking about rich nations like Japan; we are even worse off than countries like Portugal that are much poorer than we are. It is an extraordinary problem that we have to face.
Anna Dixon
I agree that patient safety is not enough of a priority in the NHS. There are too many incidents of patient harm; we see that reflected in the large clinical negligence bill. Does the right hon. Member agree that it is essential that patient safety remains one of the top priorities for not only integrated care boards, but all providers?
David Davis
That is absolutely right. My concern is that the reason we have so many excess deaths is not poor doctors or poor nurses, but poor management. We have really, really poor national health service management. To put it starkly, poor management effectively kills 15,000 people a year. If we improved that number, we could get within range of our comparator nations.
That is a huge number of people, and we could do quite a lot about it if we set our mind to it. Experiments within the health service now demonstrate that. Just over the river at St Thomas’, a high intensity theatre programme triples the number of people who can be put through an operating theatre or under the hands of one surgeon in a day. That means we can do something like 17 hernia repairs rather than five, or 12 hip replacements instead of four—those are the numbers they measured. A lot of lives are saved rather than lost, because people are put through the system and are not effectively left waiting until they die, as has happened to a number of my constituents. We need to reflect that efficiency in the management of the health service. It requires a complete change in how we select, train and organise the senior management of the national health service. For the moment, they are not up to the job and we need to put that right, but I do not see anything in the King’s Speech that will do that.
My second point is about education. A number of speakers have already said that there is an intergenerational problem in our society today, and education is where that crystalises. We are failing both very young children and young adults. Evidence shows that one in four children are not sufficiently literate or mathematically capable by the age of 11 to get any benefit from the next stage of education. To put it another way, the state has failed a quarter of our children by the time they get to 11. For poor children—those on free school meals and so on—we can double that number; in fact, we can more than double it.
When I grew up, I was lucky to be at the peak of social mobility in this country. This was one of the world’s leading meritocracies, but that is no longer the case. That is a shame on our nation and we must put it right, starting at the bottom. We must do something about it, and we can. Uniquely, using AI and software, we can do quite a lot to help children at the bottom of the scale, but we do not currently do that, and the Department for Education is not up to it. It is not under this Government and it was not under the preceding one—I spoke about this at the time, and we need to put it right.
It is not just the very young who we are letting down; a whole generation in higher education is being failed. The transition to student loans and tuition fees by the Blair Government has been an unmitigated disaster, shackling a whole generation to mortgages without houses and futures without jobs. I opposed it when it came in, I opposed my party’s decision to uphold it when we came into government, and I oppose it today. It takes away much of the point of university, because at least one in five courses do not give youngsters opportunities that will pay for their education. That means that we have to write off their loans, and in the next 50 years, the Government—the state—will pay £430 billion in unpaid loans in cash terms. From what I have seen of the calculations, I am pretty sure that that is an underestimate.
In my view, we should revise the whole policy radically, and perhaps look again at grants for certain courses—I think the Liberals have talked about this—with a 2% graduate tax to offset it, or something like that. That is better than what we have now, which leaves a loan hanging over people for their entire adult life—a loan they may never pay back. We could have grants for science, technology, engineering, mathematics, medicine, architecture and design—courses that will contribute to the economic growth of this country—and take the rest from there. We need radical reform, but we will not see it in this year’s education Bill.
Finally, I want to talk briefly about defence. There has been much criticism of the Government, rightly, for taking too long over enlarging the expenditure we put into defence, and the simple truth is that we will face challenges that will materialise much faster than we expect. The hon. Member for Dewsbury and Batley (Iqbal Mohamed) spoke in an earlier question about peace being better than war, and since Roman times we have known that being well armed is the best way to prevent war. Nobody wants warfare. At the moment, our military is depleted beyond value and would struggle in a major war, and obviously we must address that. In addition, we must ensure that our strategy and management are right. Frankly, the management of the Ministry of Defence is a disgrace—to be honest, I cannot pick a better word.
I always think that it is symbolic of the extraordinary priorities of the MOD that we have 134 admirals to oversee 63 ships, many of which are not able to set sail at any point in time—Nelson must be spinning in his grave. That is symbolic, but similarly the UK currently maintains an Army of just over 70,000 people, and the Ministry of Defence employs roughly 60,000 civil servants—a ratio that defies logic. Of those civil servants, just under a quarter are employed in procurement, operating a system that is among the worst in the world. If hon. Members need to, they should look at the Dragon, the Type 45 ships, or the Ajax. If the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee were sitting here now, he could get up and given me a dozen cases of disgraceful scandals in procurement in our Ministry of Defence, and we need to put that right.
If we are to maintain effective armed forces, we must also maintain the morale and spirit of our soldiers. The simple truth is that the first step towards that is to treat those soldiers decently, and we are not doing that. The Northern Ireland Troubles Bill, which has been carried over into this Session, is exposing soldiers who fought in Northern Ireland to being dragged through the courts, sometimes three times over the course of five years, as with Soldier B in the Coagh case. They are in their 60s, 70s and 80s. Honourable people who fought bravely for their country and did nothing wrong are being punished in their old age. That is a disgrace.
The excuse that the Government used when they started the Bill was that the previous legislation was illegal—that is what a lower court found. Last week, however, the Supreme Court overturned that judgment in the Dillon case. There is now no legal basis for the Government’s policy, yet still we are pressing on. I asked the Prime Minister, and he said that they are still pressing on with it, effectively psychologically torturing people who served this country. That is morally wrong, but moreover it is causing people to leave the SAS in numbers—this is now in the public domain and I can say it. Our best and most active regiment is being depleted and destroyed. The regiment of which the rest of the world is envious is being undermined by the Government’s strategy, and they should walk away from that policy and drop it. We should bin that Bill.
I do not want to take any more of the House’s time. I have picked three subjects, but there are many other important issues that the Government need to address. I say again that I hope the Prime Minister succeeds in resetting the Government and giving them new dynamism. At the moment, however, the only attractive part of the King’s Speech for me was the last line, which always says the same thing:
“Other measures will be laid before you.”
Kevin Bonavia (Stevenage) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friends the Members for Bradford West (Naz Shah) and for Harlow (Chris Vince). The hon. Member for Bradford West gave us a personal tale of strength through adversity, which should remind us why, as she said, this is the greatest country to live in. She spoke as a true patriot, and about a patriotism that is there for all of us if we choose to use it. We often have rivalries in the Chamber: my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow is a proud advocate for his new town of Harlow, and I am a proud advocate for the first new town in the UK, Stevenage. He has done so much for Harlow, including running for a good cause in Harlow. This Saturday I will join a resident of Stevenage, Luke Weynberg, who is running an ultramarathon, which is even further than a marathon, around Fairlands Valley Park in Stevenage. When I say I will join him, I mean for the park run bit.
Like my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow, each of us in this Chamber, for all our political differences, is proud of the constituents we serve. When we come together in this place for big moments, as we have done today, we should think about the country as a whole, not about what divides it.
I congratulate His Majesty the King. As has been said in this Chamber, he has recently given speeches of great depth, humour and wit, and I thank him for it. His speech to us today, as is normal for speeches in these buildings, was very serious. It was a serious speech for serious times. I recall his opening words:
“An increasingly dangerous and volatile world threatens the United Kingdom… Every element of the nation’s energy, defence and economic security will be tested.”
How true that is. It demands more than warm words in response: it demands strength, and it demands a Government who act. The world has changed—it is harder, less stable and less predictable—so we cannot treat security as something distant or optional. This Government are committed to investing in our nation’s security and, indeed, in the security of each of us in our own life.
It was a Labour Government, from 1945 onwards, who recognised the threats that our country faced following a devastating war and with an uncertain future. Among their many responses, they built new towns, such as Stevenage, to deal with the housing crisis—a crisis we face again today. Our new towns provided jobs, security and hope for the future. Some of those jobs, both in those days and to this day, have been in the critical defence sector that this country and the rest of the civilised world need.
Security is what we need today, but it cannot just be a slogan; it must be a plan that runs through everything we do. I am pleased that this Government are bringing forward the Cyber Security and Resilience (Network and Information Systems) Bill, because the systems that we rely on every day are now targets. Data centres, communications networks, the digital backbone of our economy—if any one of those things fails, everything else will follow. That is why we are also acting where security starts in the real economy.
When British Steel was pushed to the brink last year, this Government stepped in and saved it. We protected jobs and we protected capability. We acted because the industrial base is not optional in a more dangerous world. We cannot defend a country that cannot build. As the Prime Minister said earlier today, we need sovereign capability for that. Steel, engineering and precision manufacturing all feed directly into the defence supply chain. In Stevenage, that chain ends with highly skilled workers building and upgrading some of the most advanced systems in the world. At MBDA, workers are retrofitting Storm Shadow missiles—systems that are in use right now, protecting Ukraine’s civilians as they sleep. That is what industrial policy and national security look like when they are joined up: British steel, British engineering and British workers delivering real deterrence.
Security means ensuring that we are ready. The Armed Forces Bill will give us new powers to mobilise reservists and former personnel when the country needs them, because deterrence works only if it is credible. Credibility does not come from words alone; it comes from capability. It comes from the knowledge that this country can act, scale up and sustain itself in a crisis. We can see that credibility not only in what we deploy, but in what we build at home. In Stevenage, alongside the missile defence systems, we can see the next generation of secure military communications being developed at Airbus, connecting our forces and our allies securely in real time.
Security must also start at home, in the domestic field. A national security Bill will criminalise the glorification or normalisation of serious violence, because when violence is excused or made acceptable, that creates the conditions for more of it. We saw the consequences of that in Southport, and we cannot allow it to take root in our society.
The same applies across all our streets, where policing must keep pace with modern threats. In Stevenage, we have seen what proactive policing looks like. Under Project Vigilant, trained officers are out in our town centre identifying predatory behaviour before it escalates, intervening early to prevent harm and to protect women and girls. We are acting on organised crime, too. A recent operation targeting county lines gangs operating in Stevenage led to 19 arrests, with weapons seized and more than £27,000 taken off our streets. That is the reality of the threat. If people do not feel safe where they live, national security means nothing. The police reform Bill will build on that approach, giving our officers the tools they need to do their job, strengthening forces and creating a national capability to go after the most serious criminals.
Security also means being honest about the threats that we face from hostile actors. The tackling state threats Bill will give us the power to act directly against state-linked organisations that operate against our interests. It will mean that this Government can and will proscribe the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as the terrorist organisation that it is. When organisations use violence, intimidation and terror, whether or not they are backed by a state, there can be no grey areas. Proscription is not optional; it is essential.
The threats that we face today are not always conventional. They are covert, they are persistent and they are designed to exploit any weakness. That includes our digital infrastructure, which is why the Cyber Security and Resilience (Network and Information Systems) Bill is so vital.
Security is not only about stopping threats; it is also about building strength. In Stevenage we can see that strength in our life sciences sector. At the Stevenage Bioscience Catalyst, the UK-based CAR T-cell therapy company Autolus is developing advanced programmed T-cell therapies and is at the forefront of a revolution in cancer treatment. That is British innovation at its best: highly skilled jobs, world-leading science and life-changing outcomes for patients.
A country that leads in science, in manufacturing and in innovation is a country that is more secure, more resilient and better prepared for the shocks that we know are coming. Those shocks are real. War has returned to Europe. Ukraine has shown us that peace cannot be taken for granted. The middle east has shown how quickly instability spreads, from conflict abroad to pressure on energy markets and prices at home. Some of the most serious threats are the ones that people never see: cables beneath our seas, networks under constant pressure and hostile states probing for weaknesses every single day.
We have already seen that in action. Just weeks ago, Russian submarines were detected operating over critical undersea infrastructure in waters around the United Kingdom and our allies. Let us be clear about what that means. These are the lifelines of our country. The vast majority of our data flows through those cables. Our energy supplies depend on them; our economy depends on them. This was a deliberate act by the Russian state to test our defences, and we must call it out for what it is: it is unacceptable, it is hostile and it will not be tolerated. Our armed forces tracked those submarines, exposed their operation and forced them to withdraw. The message to the tyrant Putin was clear: “We know what you are doing, and any attempt to damage our infrastructure will have serious consequences.”
In the modern world, there is no warning sound and there is no clear beginning. The attack comes quietly, and if we are not ready, we will feel the consequences before we even see the cause. Let us be clear that security is not in one policy or Department; it is and must be a national mission. It runs through defence, policing, industry, science and the strength of our communities. It is about whether people feel safe on our streets, secure in their jobs and confident in their future. That is the first duty of Government. When we take it seriously, act and build the strength that we need, places like Stevenage show exactly what that looks like in practice. We will not just endure in a more dangerous world; we will lead Britain through it safely and securely.
Richard Tice (Boston and Skegness) (Reform)
Eighty-six years ago today, on 13 May 1940, Britain’s greatest and most popular Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, rose to give his first speech as Prime Minister. At a time of war, he said that he could offer nothing but blood, sweat and tears. Eighty-six years later, we have heard from Britain’s most unpopular and possibly worst Prime Minister ever. After just 22 months, all we have had is failure, incompetence and negligence.
We have a programme of government in this King’s Speech that, in a sense, represents everything that the Prime Minister we currently suffer under represents—process and regulation. The thing is that that just drives up costs. I can see nothing in this programme of government that will actually reduce bills and the cost of living and drive up growth, prosperity and the quantity of jobs.
Iqbal Mohamed
The hon. Gentleman talks about regulation. I have failed to identify a successfully self-regulating industry anywhere in the world. When we remove regulations, we harm consumers, animals, nature and the planet. Will he enlighten or educate me on what the alternative is?
Richard Tice
What we want is smart and safe regulation; we do not want daftness, dither and delay, and this Prime Minister represents all those three things.
In a desire to be constructive, I have scoured the King’s Speech and found some good news. The greatest news in this programme of government is that there is one Bill in which this Government have copied and learned from Reform. They have listened to what I said almost exactly a year ago: that we must nationalise British Steel, invest in it, and grow it, so that it becomes the heart of our sovereign steel-making capability. Although this is somewhat delayed, after a year, this Prime Minister has thankfully listened to me and Reform.
There is another important area: the critical issue of special educational needs and the Government’s plans for a Bill to follow the White Paper. That is incredibly important to so many children and parents across all our constituencies. The White Paper was produced by the Secretary of State some weeks ago, and I have said in this House that there will hopefully be much that can reassure parents. As we look at the details of the Bill, I hope that we will find that some of the measures being brought forward will give better, faster outcomes for children, and reduce the conflict between parents and councils. I urge the Government to try to accelerate some of those measures for the benefit of so many children. That is absolutely vital.
However, I regret to say that there is some very bad news in this King’s Speech. We all talk about the energy bills crisis, but the plans for an energy independence Bill will make things dramatically worse. Completely unbelievably, and ignoring all the evidence from the growth of the ’80s and ’90s in the last century, when we grew by 2.5% to 4% most years, because we used the great energy treasure of oil and gas in the North sea, this Government think it is a good idea to ban all new exploration of oil and gas fields. That is not a good idea; it is a terrible idea. That is unbelievable. We must be the only nation in the world with the joy, the pleasure and the treasure of oil and gas that says, “No, it’s a good idea to leave it down there.” That is unbelievably incompetent and negligent, and it is the reason why we have such high energy bills. That is an absolute tragedy, because that could drive up growth and prosperity, so we must absolutely ensure that that does not happen.
Here is my deepest concern of all about this programme of government. In a sense, we in Reform are joyous; we completely smashed it last Thursday in the local elections. After May 2025, and the success of our brilliant 10 councils on which we have a majority, voters have said, “We want more Reform.” They have given us full control of 10 more councils, and there are another nine councils in which we are the largest party.
Kevin Bonavia
The hon. Gentleman says that voters want more of Reform. We have had lots of Reform councillors elected in the past year, and we have had a Reform councillor in my patch of Stevenage. When the voters had the first opportunity to give their view on his performance, he was turfed out, and we got a Labour councillor back in. Is what the hon. Gentleman says really true?
Richard Tice
The hon. Gentleman clearly has not looked at the data, because it shows that we have secured some 1,450 new councillors. I think the Labour party has lost well over 1,000 councillors, to the benefit of our great country.
Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Liz Saville Roberts
The hon. Gentleman talks about the successes of Reform in England; does he recognise that it is possibly because of Reform’s bombast and predilection for foreign money that Plaid Cymru is now in government in Wales, and Reform is not?
Richard Tice
I congratulate Plaid Cymru on its success, but I note the success of Reform as the second-largest party in Wales. We are proud to be the largest Unionist party across Scotland and Wales.
Emily Darlington (Milton Keynes Central) (Lab)
I believe that in Milton Keynes, Reform was forecast to win 26 seats, but after the hon. Member’s visit, that went number went down to nine. Does that not prove that the more people get to see of him and his party, the less they want them?
Richard Tice
That is interesting, because I spent most of the election campaign in the west midlands, where we absolutely smashed it. We secured full control of councils such as Newcastle-under-Lyme and Walsall, and we are now the largest party in Birmingham, which is truly remarkable. We are also the largest party in Bradford, which is fantastic news. That success is because voters have looked at this Government and the failures of this Prime Minister, and they have said, “We want to vote Reform, and we want this Prime Minister out.” I suspect that what we have seen—
Richard Tice
Bear with me, because I am in full flow. I believe that we have seen the last important speech from this Prime Minister. Let us see what the next few days bring.
Anna Dixon
The hon. Gentleman mentions Bradford district, and notes that Reform got the largest number of seats there. Does he recognise that the vast majority of people across the Bradford district—three quarters of them—voted for parties other than Reform UK? Does he also recognise that while Reform got seats, it is not popular?
Richard Tice
If we have just won and become the largest party in Bradford, by definition we must be popular. Obviously, I would like to please everybody, but sometimes that is not possible; that is the joy of democracy. The reality is that the voters have spoken.
Richard Tice
I have given way to the hon. Gentleman already. Although people may have enjoyed my dialogue, others wish to speak.
The key thing about the utter failure of this programme of government is this: having listened last week to the voters in the midlands and the north—in Labour heartlands—who voted 10 years ago for less EU and less European interference, what is this Government’s brilliant response? They have stuck two fingers up to the former Labour voters in the midlands and the northern heartlands, and said, “We’re going to ignore you. We’re going to try and go back to the failing European Union.” That surely highlights the arrogance and stubbornness of this dreadful Government.
Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)
Will the hon. Member give way?
Sir John Hayes
I am immensely grateful to my constituency neighbour for giving way. I agree with a lot of what he has said about the failure of successive Governments who represent what the Leader of the Opposition described earlier as the “political class”, and what I would describe as the liberal orthodoxy. Over successive Governments, a liberal-left orthodoxy has prevailed in this country—one that has been at odds with the sentiments, wishes, hopes and fears of the vast majority of ordinary people. It is not just for the hon. Gentleman’s party, but for my party, certainly, and—I say this respectfully—for all political parties to recognise the gulf between the establishment’s view of the world and the people’s.
Richard Tice
Well, that is the joy of competition, and given what happened in last week’s elections, we seem to be winning the competition.
I conclude by saying that surely this Government should have listened to voters last week and said, “Actually, we’ve got it wrong on energy. We need more oil and gas to bring the bills down, just as they are bringing them down in the United States. We need to be more sovereign and independent, and more distant from the failing economic model of Brussels.” Instead, they have done the opposite. However, I bring hope to this country: the good news is that once there is a new, unelected Labour Prime Minister, that will accelerate a general election, in which the country will vote Reform.
Mr Jonathan Brash (Hartlepool) (Lab)
I am acutely aware that this debate on the King’s Speech is in the shadow of a political moment that is moving at extraordinary speed, a moment on which I have already made my views clear. While I respect the sincerely held opinions of many of my hon. Friends, there are truths that are now too obvious to ignore. Last Thursday’s local election results, in which many hard-working, dedicated and talented Labour councillors in Hartlepool and elsewhere lost their seats, were not a routine protest vote; they were a roar of unbridled anger.
In towns like Hartlepool, that anger did not begin 22 months ago with the election of this Labour Government; it has been building for more than 20 years. People have repeatedly voted for change. When it came to Brexit, they voted for the change promised by members of Reform, and they were failed. They voted again for change under the Tories, with levelling up, and were let down once more. Now, that accumulated anger lands on our doorstep, alongside an understandable fear among many of my constituents that politics will once again let them down. The message last week was unmistakeable. People want a Government who act with urgency, courage and purpose against the crushing pressures of everyday life, and if they do not get it, they will once again roll the dice, even if it means taking a risk on a charlatan, because desperation drives risk, and people are desperate for hope.
However difficult it may be for many Labour Members to admit, it is now clear to me that this Prime Minister can no longer provide that hope. I do not say that with pleasure, but leadership is not only about knowing when to fight on; it is about knowing when your authority has ebbed, when trust has frayed, and when it is time to leave the stage. Some people will say that this is about personality. It is not; it is about policy, and whether we are prepared to meet the moment with the scale of change it demands. This Government have done so much in their first 22 months, and there is much to applaud in this King’s Speech, but caution will not save us now. Incrementalism will not save us now. We must be bolder.
We need a programme of radical renewal that improves the lives of working people in Hartlepool and across Britain. That means abolishing the hated council tax and replacing it with a progressive system that no longer punishes poor communities simply for being poor. It means radical welfare reform that is both compassionate and demanding—support for those who need help, but a clear demand that everyone who can work must work. It means bringing failed monopolies back into public ownership where markets have plainly failed, from water companies to the Royal Mail. It means cutting taxes on jobs and investment in deprived regions, so that opportunity finally reaches communities that have been left behind for decades. It means banning estate management companies altogether, and requiring every council to adopt every street. It means finding the £2 billion that the British Dental Association has said is needed to rescue NHS dentistry. It means lower energy bills for those communities hosting the new nuclear, wind and solar that powers Britain, and while I absolutely support the Home Secretary and stand behind her reforms, if it is necessary, it means declaring a state of emergency at our borders and turning boats back. It means banning southern councils from discharging their homelessness duty by shifting the burden to communities like mine, simply because our housing is cheaper. It means taking defence spending out of the fiscal rules and spending what this dangerous world requires now. It means giving councils the power to simply seize empty shops, abandoned homes and derelict sites where absentee owners refuse to act. It means finally standing up for justice for our WASPI women—the Women Against State Pension Inequality Campaign—and it means delivering a national care service, not eventually, not someday, but now.
I do not want this country to fall prey to Trump-style populism, but the truth is that only we on the Labour Benches can prevent that. We have the parliamentary majority, we have the mandate, and we still have time, but if we do not use those things to deliver visible, meaningful change—if we do not give people hope that they can feel in their wages, their streets and their communities—then others will inevitably fill that vacuum. If that happens, the responsibility will lie with us.
Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
Diolch yn fawr iawn, Dirprwy Lefarydd. I listened with interest to the speech made by the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr Brash), and heartily agreed with very much of what he said. Of course, we know that something momentous happened in Wales last week, although there was no mention of Wales from either of the Front Benchers. It is as though Wales, and possibly many other places in the UK, do not matter that much to this place, but of course I am a Member for Plaid Cymru, so it is my job to talk about Wales.
Across the campaign that ended last week, people responded strongly to our message of hope and fairness, and of putting their nation of Wales and their communities first. Plaid Cymru has won at least two representatives in every one of the Senedd’s constituencies. That is unheard of; it is momentous. We came first in 11 out of the 16 constituencies in Wales—all across Wales. The message that we only reached out to certain people has gone. Our party is now active and representing everywhere in Wales. I am proud to say that 60% of our group in the Senedd are women.
This historic result represents a decisive break from the past. It gives a Plaid Cymru-led Welsh Government a clear mandate to act on urgent priorities, including reducing child poverty, cutting NHS waiting times and unlocking our economy’s latent potential. Our Cabinet was announced at 4 o’clock this afternoon. We will now need to work to deliver the progressive and stable government that Wales craves. In doing so, our priority is to form a Government who reflect the seriousness and ambition that Wales—our nation—expects and deserves. The groundbreaking result was a rejection of the stale status quo of the Labour Welsh Government and the divisive politics of Reform. It also demonstrated the Welsh public’s expectation that the UK Government end their neglect of Welsh communities. People are crying out for change, not for more of the same.
My party’s manifesto and the plan for the first 100 days of government set out the areas where we will be pressing Westminster to deliver fairness for Wales, and we look to the King’s Speech for inspiration. We need to see steps taken to devolve the Crown Estate, justice and rail, and to deliver fair funding that reflects Wales’s needs. We need parity with Scotland. In a United Kingdom that puts equality first, there is no reason for devolution to be so unbalanced between the different nations of the United Kingdom. These powers are not constitutional fripperies; they are the means to realise better lives and better communities. They are the building bricks to lift people out of poverty and desperation.
Wales needs control over our natural resources so that our communities directly benefit from their wealth, ending the scandal of high energy prices in an energy-rich country like ours. Wales needs full control over our justice system, in line with Scotland—why is that such an extraordinary thing to ask for?—so that we no longer hold the infamous status of having the highest imprisonment rate in western Europe. Instead, we would be able effectively to promote rehabilitation, and thriving communities would follow.
We need to see the end of the great Welsh train robbery that is HS2 and other English rail projects. Doing so will deliver billions in funding to our crumbling, inadequate transport network so that people can travel quickly and affordably across our nation. Wales needs to see the scrapping of the Barnett formula, and its replacement with something that reflects the reality of our population’s needs. Despite the mountains of evidence and popular support, the UK Government have stubbornly refused to engage with these issues. That has been the reality of the partnership at both ends of the M4. That, in part, is why we have had these results in Wales.
After last week’s election result, it is no longer possible to ignore Wales’s voices and people’s demands for fair treatment. In his speech on Monday, the Prime Minister did not even acknowledge Wales once, and the King’s Speech today has again failed to provide the answers that we know the people of Wales need and want. There was no acknowledgement of the structural inequality that means that the powers begrudged to Wales since the birth of devolution have so far only allowed us to manage poverty, but never ever to build our way out of poverty. In the over-centralised, chaotic Government of Westminster, that is something that we need now to address.
None of the chaos we are seeing now serves the people of Wales—or many people in many communities across the United Kingdom—and that is now in particular focus. We can now see how that chaos ill serves the people of Wales. Whoever the Prime Minister is going forward, he or she must respect the mandate that the new Welsh Government have to deliver new powers and fair funding for Wales. My party will therefore be tabling an amendment to the King’s Speech calling for a new Wales Bill, so that Wales can gain the tools we need and the means to thrive. I hope that the Prime Minister will finally have seen the error of his ways from after he warned his Government—I think in March—against over-deference to the devolved Governments. Over-deference? Where is the respect to our communities and to democracy?
Those are the changes we need to see. Sadly, I do not see them in the King’s Speech as it stands, but there is potential. I urge the Government to think seriously about the need for a new Wales Bill.
Alison Taylor (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (Lab)
I congratulate my hon. Friends the Members for Bradford West (Naz Shah) and for Harlow (Chris Vince) on their excellent speeches in proposing the Loyal Address and seconding it. It is an absolute pleasure to support the Government’s programme for this Session of Parliament. They have set out a challenging programme to build the security and growth that our country so badly needs. After many years of stagnation, this Government, under the guidance of the Prime Minister, the Chancellor and the Cabinet, are laying the foundations for sustained growth and the economic prosperity that my constituents in Paisley and Renfrewshire North so badly need. That long-term thinking has been missing from politics for a long time.
My constituents need to see the life chances of their children correspond with their talent and effort. Too many young people have started to think that a life in another country would be a better alternative. We need to appreciate our young people’s efforts more when they join the workforce. In my career and my experience, I am yet to work with a young person from whom I have not learned enormously in so many ways, making me a better leader, a better manager, a better person and a better business owner.
This Government’s transformative actions around employment law—abolishing zero-hours contracts, increasing the minimum wage and legislating for more job security—are all things that this House should celebrate. We will lose our young people if they do not feel rewarded and appreciated. They will literally vote with their feet and move away. We need to do better at explaining that an apprenticeship is every bit as worthwhile as a degree. In Canada and Australia, centre-left Governments are working well for their people, and that in part explains why many young people want to leave the UK and travel there. We are losing to other countries skilled young people who have been nurtured, educated and cared for from birth here.
One industry where we need to create and nurture more apprenticeships is my former industry: the property sector. It is a key economic driver and delivery body for the homes and businesses of the future. No other sector has the ability to transition our economy to a greener, less energy-hungry society while providing hope and new environments that will inspire and attract our young people to stay.
It is true that places like Paisley are changing. It is a new world, with historic buildings being brought back to life, new cafés opening, public and civic buildings being restored, and a programme of cultural events too. But even for a great town like Paisley, it is not enough. Change is not quick enough or slick enough. The truth is that we need real investment in our towns in Scotland, and that requires UK Government money. The local authorities are doing their best, but they are undercapitalised and under pressure. They are under-resourced, particularly when it comes to staff such as town planners, environmentalists and building surveyors. We need more initiatives like the city deals, Pride in Place and the UK town of culture, and we need them to be supercharged. To do that, hon. Friends, we need courage, hard work, political and economic stability, and gritty determination from each and every one of us.
Iqbal Mohamed
The hon. Member is making an extremely eloquent speech. Does she agree that people are sick and tired of living in towns that just look dirty? They are not cleaned or maintained, and sports clubs do not even get the grass on their fields cut. The basic requirement for having pride in our towns and cities is for a council to be funded so that it can do the basics of keeping the streets clean and cutting the grass so that people can play sport.
Alison Taylor
I could not agree more. The Scottish Government have cut the budgets of local authorities in Scotland for the past 20 years. I like to go out and do litter picks, and we have some good litter-picking initiatives in Renfrewshire. I encourage everyone in the community to do that, because it at least makes people feel like they are making a difference.
We build on strong foundations—strong Labour foundations—unlike the local cowboy who builds on quicksand. The Government’s programme will take time, but it will have positive effects for communities up and down the country, providing greater immediate support to help young people find the education and training opportunities that they need to fulfil their potential. The programme will also continue the promise of long-term economic growth based on strategic investment in housing and infrastructure.
There is still a great deal to be done. Great British businesses, large and small, should be able to thrive under this Government, and helping them to overcome the obstacles and barriers that they face should always be part of our strategy for growth. Do not think for a minute, Madam Deputy Speaker, that that simply means agreeing with whatever business asks for. It means a realistic engagement with businesses, and an awareness of the pressures that they face. From my own experience of running a small business, I understand the choices that people make in starting and building their businesses. I know something of the struggles that they face to get money that is owed to them and to meet myriad costs, not least those of paying staff and suppliers.
I welcome the changes proposed in respect of late payment and procurement to assist small business owners. I empathise with entrepreneurs who are working hard to build something and to employ people, and who are willing to take the risk to build a business. In my constituency, as in many others, small businesses are an important part of the local community, but building a successful business is predicated on much of the social fabric and infrastructure that we in the UK take for granted. We need transport infrastructure, and public transport for workers and customers. We need economic growth, and customers with the disposable income that enables them to buy our goods and services.
Those things do not just happen by accident. The Gracious Speech makes clear this Government’s commitment to building a thriving economy, because people need that to do business, and so does society at large. The choice is not between “good for business” and “good for workers”; it is between “good for society” and long-term decline. On this side of the House, we want to build a future for everyone.
Dr Ben Spencer (Runnymede and Weybridge) (Con)
I pay tribute to the opening speeches from the hon. Members for Bradford West (Naz Shah) and for Harlow (Chris Vince). However, context is key. The backdrop to the Gracious Speech is a Labour party engaged in open warfare—we heard something of that in earlier speeches—and a huge amount of uncertainty over what will happen in relation to the leadership of the Labour party and the current Prime Minister, and that uncertainty is playing out in the financial markets. The message that I want to convey to Labour Members is this: “Whatever you are going to do, please just do it quickly, because we need to move on.” The country needs leadership, and there are a great many important things that we need to be getting on with.
As Labour Members are mulling over their options, I want to give the House some feedback from my constituency on a couple of issues affecting its residents. The message from the constituency is that small and medium enterprise is the backbone of our economy, but it is now under intolerable pressure. Let me give a couple of examples. I received a letter from One Cobham—a business improvement district covering Cobham, in my constituency—which was co-signed by 50 other BID members, that raised the issue of business rates in particular, but also rises in rent, wages and utility costs. Two companies have already gone bust recently, and this is putting intolerable pressure on the high street and individual businesses.
Iqbal Mohamed
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that there needs to be a different model of business rates for small businesses that is linked to profitability and that has a maximum cap, rather than their having to pay the flat rate regardless of what they are making or not making?
Dr Spencer
In a different world, we would have a very different King’s Speech. We would have the alternative Conservative King’s Speech from the Leader of the Opposition—soon, hopefully, to be the Prime Minister—which would scrap business rates for those with rateable values of up to, I think, £110,000. I ask Members please to look at the details.
In recent weeks, I have visited another company, in Egham in the north of my constituency. It is a very specialist logistics company, which transports medical devices to be used in pathology investigations. In fact, it has probably supplied the pathology department at St Tommy’s across the river. The company has been operating for 40 years, but when I met its representatives, they told me that it faced going to the wall because of the increases in business rates and tax burdens. I hope to God that the company will be OK—that the Government will change course and that it continues to be successful—but if it does go to the wall, all the jobs and livelihoods of the people who work for it will go with it.
That is a story that affects businesses and organisations across my constituency. In Chertsey, Addlestone, Weybridge, Woodham, Row Town, New Haw, Oxshott and Stoke D’Abernon—in all the different parts of my constituency —businesses are struggling, and free enterprise is under pressure. It is dying, and it is dying because of the tax and regulatory burdens that are being imposed on businesses by this Government. For all the great words in the King’s Speech, the fundamental problem is the Government’s tax and spend approach and the intolerable pressure that is being placed on free enterprise and business.
This is my final message to Labour Members: “As you agonise over the direction of the Labour party leadership over the next few days, please just remember that you cannot tax a company that has gone bust.”
Ruth Jones (Newport West and Islwyn) (Lab)
It is a pleasure—well, it is always interesting to follow the hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Dr Spencer), and I thank him for his speech, although I am not sure that I learned anything from it. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford West (Naz Shah) for her poignant and clear proposal of the Humble Address, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Chris Vince) for his witty seconding of it. I wish him well in his future marathons.
I welcome the firm focus in the King’s Speech on the day-to-day security of British families. It puts the cost of living front and centre of the Government’s priorities. This Labour Government have already increased the minimum wage, boosted pensions, and ensured that wages are rising faster than prices for the first time in over a decade, and the removal of the two-child cap will benefit more than 2,000 families in my constituency. Now we are moving further and faster to deliver the change that our country needs, bearing down on the costs facing ordinary families.
There is no clearer expression of the cost of living squeeze than people’s energy bills, which doubled under the last Government. The latest energy crisis highlights the danger of Britain’s continued reliance on volatile fossil fuel markets, which would only be exacerbated under the Conservatives and Reform. Genuine energy independence cannot be achieved through continued exposure to volatile global fossil fuel markets. The fastest way to improve energy security, while meeting the UK’s climate and nature obligations and bringing down bills, is through the expansion of renewable energy and the roll-out of energy efficiency and electrification measures. I urge my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero to go further and faster, looking not just at solar and wind—onshore and offshore—but at tidal, including wave energy and lagoons.
The need for change is pressing. A third of all households across Wales live in fuel poverty, amounting to approximately 9,000 households in Newport and 12,000 in Caerphilly county borough, and that can only be tackled by bringing down bills for good. I am disappointed to see that the Welsh Government in the Senedd have tied themselves in knots over decarbonising Wales’s energy supplies, because Plaid Cymru’s policy of undergrounding cables at all costs will mean cancelled projects and higher household bills. They need to rethink that as a matter of urgency. The Bill proposed in the King’s Speech shows that Labour is clear that the UK’s future is in clean, cheap power. The energy independence Bill is a decisive step towards energy security, warmer homes and reforming our broken energy market.
Liz Saville Roberts
Does the hon. Lady recognise that the communities in which energy infrastructure is placed, be it large or small, must start seeing real advantages from that energy? In parts of Wales, we pay the highest standing charges in the United Kingdom, yet we have historically exported energy and still do so. That has to change in order to make a difference to people’s lives, and in order that people welcome having the infrastructure that we need in Wales and possibly in the rest of the United Kingdom too.
Ruth Jones
I do not disagree with the right hon. Lady, because we absolutely need to make sure that our prices are fair. That means looking across Wales as a whole, but also benefiting from the renewables that we know Wales has in abundance. The energy independence Bill is a decisive step, as I said.
Another major scourge of bill payers that is firmly in the sights of this Government is our failing water companies, including Welsh Water, and I welcome the urgent steps being taken by the Government to reform our broken water system through a new water Bill. In March, Ofwat published its finding that Welsh Water breached its legal obligations in operating its waste water treatment works and network. Ofwat found that Welsh Water failed to operate, maintain and upgrade its waste water assets adequately to ensure that they could cope with the flows of sewage and waste water. We know that Welsh Water discharged raw sewage into rivers, lakes and seas for over 968,000 hours in 2024. Water pollution in Wales has reached emergency levels, so I welcome the water Bill. I look forward to seeing water bosses being held to account, and to the clean-up of our rivers and waterways.
I welcome further action by this Government to back British Steel. Whereas the Tories left our steel sector unsupported, Labour is taking action. That includes nationalising British Steel and protecting domestic production from international dumping and uncompetitive subsidies. UK Steel has said that the Government’s steel strategy is the most significant intervention to support UK steel competitiveness in over a decade. The Government’s new target for at least half of steel used in Britain to be made here is a major boost for Welsh steel, with Welsh manufacturing expected to account for half of future steelmaking. We must not forget about Port Talbot and Llanwern in south Wales, and I pay tribute to my constituency neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Newport East (Jessica Morden), for the sterling work that she has done to promote and protect our steel at Llanwern.
The Conservatives’ botched Brexit deal has been disproportionately damaging to the Welsh economy, because Wales remains a significant manufacturing economy, with 60% of our exports going to the European Union—that is 10% higher than the UK average. Although negotiations on the EU trade Bill are ongoing, I urge the Government to commit to securing a carve-out on animal welfare, like that secured by Switzerland in a similar deal. The UK is proudly a nation of animal lovers and a world leader in animal welfare standards, and we were the first country in the world to ban fur farming. A future trade deal, involving dynamic alignment in key sectors, must not risk watering down UK commitments to ban the sale of foie gras or end the import of fur.
I gently say to those on the Government Front Bench that there is a lack of legislation on animal welfare in this King’s Speech. I said that we are a nation of animal lovers, and the Government could have some easy wins. We are committed to the animal welfare strategy, and we could use it to ban the use of snare traps, bring forward a close season for hares, and bring into effect the Animals (Low-Welfare Activities Abroad) Act 2023. These are small pieces of legislation, but they could make a huge difference to wild, domestic and farmed animals, both here and abroad.
I will move on to small businesses. The Federation of Small Businesses has estimated that 50% to 54% of SMEs regularly experience late payments, which cost the average SME £22,000 a year. On average, businesses spend 86 hours a year chasing invoices. This is a massive problem for businesses in my constituency of Newport West and Islwyn, and I am pleased that we are taking action to stop it happening.
Looking ahead to Great British Railways, this Labour Government’s new railways Bill will transform the railway network in Wales as we deliver our £14 billion plan to improve Wales’s railways. Front and centre of that is the £90 million investment in five new stations between the Severn tunnel and Cardiff, including new stations at Newport West in my constituency and Cardiff Parkway next door. These new stations will support over 12,000 new jobs across Monmouthshire, Newport and Cardiff. South Wales is also set to benefit from an additional £40 million investment to upgrade two sets of rail tracks, which will improve service reliability and capacity for additional services. Labour’s railways Bill will also give the Welsh Government a new statutory role, to ensure that Wales-wide strategies feed into cross-border plans by Great British Railways. This will be a key pillar of the constructive and professional relationship between the two Governments as they work together for the benefit of people in Wales.
I turn now to the Timms review. I would welcome the Government’s continued ambition to support more young and disabled people into work by reforming the welfare system, but the changes must be based on compassion and provide effective support mechanisms for people to move into work, building on the already introduced right to try. I agree with His Majesty that we must have a system that is fair and fit for the future.
Finally, I turn to the conflict between Israel and Palestine. I welcome this Government’s continued commitment to supporting a two-state solution. We urgently need to work with partners to ensure a viable Palestinian state, alongside a secure Israel. In supporting peace efforts in the middle east, I press Ministers to call on Israel to end its continued bombing in Lebanon, which has seen over a million civilians displaced from their homes.
Mr Adnan Hussain (Blackburn) (Ind)
Does the hon. Member agree that it is now time for the Government to support the International Court of Justice’s case and call it what it is—a genocide—and to cut all diplomatic ties and end all arms licences, because Israel is a rogue state?
Ruth Jones
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his contribution. If we cut ties, we cannot communicate. The only way to a lasting peace is through communication, so we must keep communication channels open. That is the only way to a lasting peace.
I listened carefully to the King’s Speech this morning, and I am pleased to hear of the proposed 35 Bills and the actions planned. I look forward to them being delivered swiftly for working people across the UK, so that they can feel the benefits of a Labour Government working for them and with them.
Jerome Mayhew (Broadland and Fakenham) (Con)
Madam Deputy Speaker, you do not need me to tell you that this is a deeply unhappy Government. It is a deeply unhappy party sitting on the Government Benches, and Labour Members do not appear to understand that their core problem is a lack of economic growth. If the Labour Government were presiding over fast economic growth, the taxes would come rolling in, their ability to spend on their pet welfare projects would be unlimited, and they would be riding high in the polls. They used to know that. When they came into office, they said that their No. 1 mission was to deliver economic growth, yet what we have seen in the two years since is the most appalling example of a fundamental misunderstanding of how an economy works.
Instead of bringing in policies to increase economic growth, we have entered into the depressing doom loop of increased taxes to fund increased welfare, leading directly to reduced economic activity, which leads to increased welfare needs and therefore an increased need for tax rises. We need a leader and a Government who have a plan, not just words, to support economic growth—something that reverses the welfare taxation doom loop. And what do we have in the King’s Speech? Where is the welfare reform bill?
It is an appalling statistic that we now spend more on welfare than we recover in income tax. Four million adults receive PIP—the figure has gone up by half a million since the last general election. The Centre for Social Justice came out with a really terrifying argument the other day: according to its analysis, 25% of all full-time workers would be better off receiving benefits than they are in employment—a quarter of the working population. Yet, in this King’s Speech, there is nothing to fix the relationship between welfare and the productive economy.
Jerome Mayhew
I will just deliver this point and then give way.
We have the extraordinarily named “regulating for growth Bill”, which I think is oxymoronic—or perhaps just moronic—because it seems to me that the Government’s answer to anaemic growth is more regulation. We will also have “more Europe”, according to the Prime Minister.
Jerome Mayhew
I said I would give way to the hon. Member for Dewsbury and Batley (Iqbal Mohamed).
Iqbal Mohamed
Would the hon. Member enlighten me and help me understand why the Tories, during 14 years in power, did not address the welfare ticking time bomb? What would he do to address the wage disparity whereby people on benefits can be better off than if they are in work?
Jerome Mayhew
The hon. Gentleman will acknowledge that the previous Government absolutely did take action to reduce the welfare state, although the global crisis caused by covid knocked that back a bit. The shadow Chancellor, in his previous role as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, was bringing in wide-scale reform, which would have been effective, but it was cut short by the general election. So this was a long-term project for the Conservative Government, but it has gone into reverse as a result of the Labour Administration.
If there is one message that the election results last week should have transmitted loud and clear to all of us, it is that the country is frustrated. People feel that we are bogged down in bureaucracy, with Ministers announcing plans and then nothing happens, but it costs a fortune and takes forever, with costs spiralling. So where was the “reducing bureaucracy Bill” that would unlock the power of the state to actually get things moving? We heard the Leader of the Opposition, in her powerful response to the Gracious Address, setting out the plans of a Conservative Administration, yet without such a bureaucracy-busting Bill, this Government are doomed to failure, even on their own terms.
For that matter, without cheaper energy, manufacturing in the United Kingdom is also doomed to failure. Commercial energy in the UK is now the highest in the world, which is a sobering fact, and domestic energy is the second highest in the developed world. So Labour Members cannot be surprised when we have a decline in manufacturing if its energy, which is its primary input, is the highest in the world. It is higher not because it costs us more to produce energy in this country than elsewhere, but because of deliberate taxation and levy decisions taken by the Government. The Government have taxes and levies on electricity to subsidise expensive renewables. Where is the cheap energy Bill? They have done the opposite. The Labour Government have doubled down on their renewable levies, tying this country into the world’s most expensive energy for decades to come.
Let us look at the wider economy. The high street has been hammered by Labour, whether from the business rates revaluation, the removal of the hospitality and leisure exemption, or employer national insurance contributions. Pubs and shops right across the country—not just in my constituency, but in every one of the Labour Members’ constituencies—have been closing in record numbers. So where is our “bring back the high street Bill”? It is not there. In fact, there is no coherent plan for a stronger economy and a stronger country. Instead, the King’s Speech is just a hotchpotch—bureaucratic fiddling while the Prime Minister burns.
The Government have had two years—two years already—yet the Opposition are doing more serious thinking about solving the problems of this country than the Government, with all their resources, which is shaming. [Laughter.] Labour Members should not be laughing; they should be ashamed of themselves and of their Government, given that the Opposition have a more complete King’s Speech, with more complete answers to the problems of this country, than their Government seem able to bring forward. It is extraordinary that we have this weak legislative programme from a weak Government. The country deserves so much better.
Fleur Anderson (Putney) (Lab)
It is a privilege to speak in this debate on the Loyal Address in reply to the King’s Speech. I thank my hon. Friends the Members for Bradford West (Naz Shah) and for Harlow (Chris Vince) for their proposing speeches and congratulate them.
It is an honour to be the MP for Putney, Southfields, Roehampton and Wandsworth Town, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the people who have stopped me—on the street, at events or when I go to schools—to thank me for the work I do for our community. That is not often the image of MPs, which is usually about being constantly harassed and abused, but, honestly, the people of Putney are wonderful and I am so grateful for their support for my work. We do not always agree on everything, but they are very supportive of my work as an MP, and I thank them for that.
In a short time, His Majesty’s Government have delivered real change that matters to people in Putney, Southfields, Roehampton and Wandsworth Town, who tell me what the Government are doing to make a difference to their lives. We have raised the minimum wage and strengthened workers’ rights, including day one sick pay, protecting renters’ rights and stopping the unfair section 21 evictions. In the last few months leading up to section 21 evictions being stopped, it has been horrific to see that, while the good landlords remain good, the rogue landlords have taken the opportunity to evict people. That just shows why we needed to make that change, and how good it is to rebalance the equation in favour of renters. We have also brought the railways back into public ownership, starting with our own South Western Railway, and I am so proud that we have lifted 450,000 children out of poverty by abolishing the two-child benefit cap.
I welcome the ambitious package of legislation announced today. The 37 Bills include those on health, education and security. There is a clean water Bill to tackle pollution and hold water companies to account. There is a Bill to speed up remediation for those living with unsafe cladding, which is still affecting so many people on developments in Putney. There is long-term investment in social housing, and support for victims of domestic abuse to stay in their own home. There is reform of the leasehold system by accelerating the transition to commonhold, including stronger transparency measures alongside tighter regulation of managing agents. This issue plagues so many people in Putney, who have been looking forward to the commonhold and leasehold transformation coming down the line. It will make such a difference to people who do not get enough information on their bills, do not know what they are being asked to pay for and see their bills go up time and again. We are giving them the security of tenure that they have not had up to now. There is also the scaling up of clean energy through the energy independence Bill.
The Northern Ireland legacy Bill will build a fairer Northern Ireland, with justice for the families who have waited for too long.
Jim Shannon
I commend the hon. Lady for her very positive speech. Unfortunately, however, we do not see in the legacy Bill the emphasis that we wish on victims. Does she agree that, if we are going to have a legacy Bill, it must address the issues of victims? It must also address the issue of the Republic of Ireland, which has more say in the process than we have here.
Fleur Anderson
I absolutely respect the work that the hon. Member does in his constituency and across Northern Ireland to bring about reconciliation, but I would say that the Bill does put victims at its heart. The victims have been spoken to constantly to create the Bill and rework it, since the Tories’ Bill did not work, and to put the justice they want at its heart. Across the Chamber, we should make sure that the Bill does deliver what he advocates, because it should deliver justice and the answers for which families have been waiting for so long.
I must say that I am disappointed there was no mention of the renovation of Hammersmith bridge in the King’s Speech. I live in hope that one day the King will sit on the Throne and talk about the renovation of Hammersmith bridge. We are one step further, because there is a timetable for applying to the structures fund, and I am very hopeful that funding will be announced soon—this year—for that renovation, so that the bridge can reopen for the six bus routes and all the vehicles now prevented from going across it, which impacts us so much in Putney.
However, I was most keen to see the focus on closer alignment with the European Union, and I will focus my speech on that, as well as on protecting children online and international security. Brexit has imposed a deep and enduring cost on our economy and living standards. It is the elephant in the room when we talk about the economy, and the context for the very difficult financial position we are in as a country. Because of Brexit, GDP per person is 6% to 8% lower, business investment is about 18% lower, and employment and productivity are down 3% to 4%. The hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage) will talk about everything he did, except the consequences of the single policy that he has delivered. He sold the country false promises, and we are seeing the consequences today, but he is not the only one that bears the cost.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)
Order. The hon. Lady might like to consider withdrawing the comment “false promises”, because I think she is suggesting falsehoods from the hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage).
Fleur Anderson
I certainly will withdraw that. Thank you very much, Madam Deputy Speaker.
The cost is being borne by families who cannot magic away the detrimental economic consequences of Brexit with a £5 million gift. The damage that the hon. Member for Clacton has inflicted has compounded, year after year. The Brexit effect has built up and up through uncertainty, higher trade barriers, and businesses being forced to divert time and resources away from growth, innovation and job creation.
As a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, I recommend that all Members read our report on the EU reset. The most important lesson the Committee drew is that a reset cannot simply be a collection of lots of initiatives; it must be guided by a clear strategic vision. We need a whole-of-government strategy that defines what we want the relationship with the EU to look like in five, 10 and 15 years’ time, and aligns our economic, security and diplomatic priorities accordingly. I therefore welcome the announcement of the European partnership Bill in the Gracious Address. I welcome the priority that is being given to a better working relationship with the EU. This will benefit the whole country through better security, increased economic growth and more investment for businesses. This is how we tackle the cost of living crisis.
On economic co-operation, we must reduce the real-world frictions holding back British businesses. A veterinary sanitary and phytosanitary agreement will cut border checks and bring down costs. Mutual recognition of professional qualifications will unlock services and trade, and where alignment supports jobs and growth, we should pursue it.
On security and defence, in a more dangerous world, the UK’s security and that of Europe are indivisible. We should seek to return to frameworks such as Security Action for Europe, which increased military readiness and defence scale-up. We should strengthen co-operation on defence capability, industrial resilience and strategic planning. The choice is not between sovereignty and co-operation; it is between influence and absence.
On people-to-people links, the return to Erasmus+ must be built upon with a youth mobility scheme. We should reverse the cutback in school visits, and ensure better access for touring musicians, creatives and researchers. This parliamentary Session will include action on social media and its impact on under-16s. Across Putney, parents raise with me again and again the harmful impact of social media. I recently had consultations in schools in my constituency—in Hotham primary school, Putney high school and Ashcroft technology academy—in which I talked to young people about the impact. I talked about the addictive design, harmful content and sheer amount of time young people are spending online—wasted time that they feel disappointed about.
I am really pleased that the Government are already taking action; there are consultations, pilots and proposals for restrictions right now. I agree that we must now go further, and with greater clarity. Other countries are already acting on this issue. The debate here has progressed very fast in the last year, and action now, it is agreed by everyone, is essential. The time has come to set a clear principle that childhood should not be shaped by predatory algorithms designed to maximise engagement at any cost. I support raising the age of social media use to 16, alongside robust and enforceable age verification. This is not about being anti-technology; it is about being pro-childhood. The campaign on this issue in Australia is called 36 Months. It said it so well: raising the age for social media use by 36 months, from the age of 12 to 16, gives young people 36 months to get to know themselves before the world gets to know them.
Internationally, I welcome our stance on Ukraine and Iran, and urge the Government to go further in opposing the illegal settlements on the west bank, which undermine peace in the region, and to take more action to boycott illegal settlement goods. In Sudan, 25 million people need assistance, yet the funding gap means that food, medicine and water, sanitation and hygiene services are being rationed.
Next week’s development conference at the beginning of this new parliamentary term is a test of whether the changes are more than rhetoric and will be backed up by action. If we reverse the cuts, put money behind frontline health and water systems, and back local leadership, instead of bypassing it with top-down contracts, we can effect real change. There is a false dichotomy between spending on aid and development, and on defence and security. Spending on aid is frontline defence and security spending, just delivered differently. Funding global health, WASH and conflict prevention cuts off the instability that terrorists and armed groups thrive on. Aid preserves a political space for diplomacy and stops conflict, the need to evacuate citizens, and the need to deploy troops.
This is a King’s Speech for talent. Britain’s got talent and Putney’s got talent. This King’s Speech shows that this Government back the talent of Putney’s young people. My constituents in Putney voted for Labour at the general election for action—action to change their lives for the better; action from a Government in touch with the issues that really matter to them; and action that takes a long-term view of the changes that are needed. This King’s Speech is a programme that delivers on that, and I look forward to working with the Government on continuing to achieve the ambitious programme for change that we promised.
Hannah Spencer (Gorton and Denton) (Green)
I am grateful to be taking part in this debate on the Loyal Address, and honoured to be doing so on behalf of the Green party. This is only the second time I have made a speech here, so I hope you will all bear with me if I get any protocols wrong.
In my maiden speech, I gave a shout out to those in the many professions and communities that have not been well represented here in Parliament in the past. I made a promise to help give them a voice. Today, it feels especially important to keep that promise, because there is, sadly, not enough in the King’s Speech that will make their lives significantly better. That is why we Greens have tabled a reasoned amendment—for all the people working hard to raise a family or just get through each day, because everyone deserves a safety net and a chance to get ahead, and for everyone who wants things to be different.
One in three households in Gorton and Denton live in fuel poverty. The UK has some of the leakiest homes in Europe. I know that, because I have worked on thousands of them in my previous job as a plumber. If we want to cut energy bills for good, we really need a properly funded and properly regulated national home insulation scheme, and to go even bigger on renewable energy. That is where investment should be going, not into nuclear power.
The King’s Speech includes some steps in the right direction, but it is nothing like the transformative, progressive programme that this moment demands. It does not rise to the climate and nature crisis that is happening now. It is a crisis that cannot be separated from the inequality and cost of living crises that are happening too, because it is always the poorest people who suffer the most, here in our country and around the world. While certain people will claim climate action is pushing up bills, we know that is not true. We know that some of the people who are saying that are being bankrolled by the very companies causing climate destruction and ripping off our constituents. The representation of the people Bill must go further on cleaning up politics, because a greener, more affordable and more secure future is possible if we stand up to those vested interests, and if we are prepared to admit that obscene wealth is damaging our country.
People out there are so angry at the gap between the super-rich and all the rest of us getting even bigger, and they want something equally big to be done about it. They do not want any child to go hungry, and they know that a free hot school meal for every child up to the age 16 is possible if extreme wealth is taxed fairly. They want public transport to be more affordable, and they know that we could start by giving free bus passes to all the under-22s—again, paid for by our tax system being made fairer. They want everyone to have a roof over their head, to get a doctor or dentist appointment without struggle, and for the NHS to be run for the public good, not to line shareholders’ pockets. They know that change is possible only if this Government—a Labour Government—taxed extreme wealth fairly.
Our Green amendment includes new powers to control rents. Greens welcome the changes in the renters’ reform Act, and the plans for more social housing, but far too many people are still struggling to pay their rent and make ends meet. Alongside taking action to bring down energy and water bills, it is time to get a grip on the cost of renting.
I was elected to give voice to a politics that truly represents everyone. This is the first King’s Speech I have been in Parliament to hear, and honestly, what I am hearing is not going to give everyone the meaningful change that we and they all know is possible. The Greens will not hesitate to use our individual and collective voices over the coming months to welcome progress when it is made, but also, crucially, to demand the change that people were promised—the change that people deserve to have.
Emily Darlington (Milton Keynes Central) (Lab)
First, I pay tribute to the King for coming to the other place and making a speech. He addressed us not with the wit and humour with which he addressed the Americans, but with the seriousness that was needed today. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford West (Naz Shah) for her impassioned speech and perseverance. She is admired and respected by anybody who has suffered any kind of hardship and abuse, and she shows how far one can go. She boasted that Bradford was the youngest city, but I would like to point out that Milton Keynes is the newest city.
We had a speech from my hon. Friend the Member for—where was he from again? Oh yes, my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Chris Vince); I should remember that, as he mentioned it 35 times—I counted. He made claims about his new town, and my hon. Friend the Member for Stevenage (Kevin Bonavia) claimed that he represented the first new town, but I remind everyone that Milton Keynes is the most successful new town.
I will not go through every Bill, but I will pick out some that will make a difference to people in my constituency. The European partnership Bill is so important. As we all know, and as the public in Milton Keynes know, especially if they are running a small or medium-sized business, the Brexit campaign was not clear on how leaving would impact people—that is me using parliamentary language.
The biggest thing that we could do to support small and medium-sized businesses in the UK is ensure that they had full access to all European customers, and to the whole trading area, and work with their European counterparts and trade partners to build growth here. We have already heard from Members about some of the impacts of Brexit. If the Conservative party is serious about growing the economy and supporting small businesses, as it says it is, I am sure that we can count on the Opposition’s full support in getting closer to Europe to make that happen.
On the clean water Bill, Milton Keynes has both a river and a canal; some Members may remember that the previous MP decided to demonstrate how clean the river was—or was not—by taking his shirt off in a photoshoot. The water is not clean—
Emily Darlington
It is a bit weird, but he was from the hon. Member’s party!
Emily Darlington
The clean water Bill is about taking on vested interests. It is about not just cleaning up the waterways but taking on those water companies that have absolutely taken us for mugs. I would remind any Member who still puts a picture of Margaret Thatcher up on their office wall that the reason we are in this position with water companies is because of her legacy.
We want to end leasehold for good. That is hugely important in a city such as Milton Keynes, where many people own their property. We are that new town—that promise that someone can move in and own a flat or property—but we must go further and ensure an end to leasehold, because those who buy freehold houses should not continue to pay a service charge, many years into the future. This is a huge problem in Glebe Farm, where six different developers are charging six different service charges to freeholders. That must end.
We also need the social housing renewal Bill. Social housing was part of my cabinet portfolio when I was the Labour deputy leader of Milton Keynes city council. We were able to build new council homes to high, green standards, with air source heat pumps and solar panels, further bringing down energy bills for our council tenants. We also had a social housing decarbonisation fund that supported over 2,000 tenants in bringing down their bills through insulation and new windows.
Iqbal Mohamed
In the late ’70s and in the ’80s, 80% or more of the housing benefit that was paid to low-income families and people on benefits went to local authorities, which used that money to provide services. Today, over 80% of housing benefit is going to private landlords, not to councils. Does the hon. Member agree that this money needs to be provided by Government to councils for them to maintain their properties and public services?
Emily Darlington
The hon. Member makes a good point, and I agree with him. In Milton Keynes, we did not privatise our social housing stock; we had 12,000 in the housing revenue account. The reality is that the reforms done under the Conservatives during the 1980s destroyed council housing stock across the country. The wall that has been put between the housing revenue account and the council’s account means that authorities cannot invest in building new housing to reduce their use of temporary accommodation. Things like that need to go.
We also need to ensure that victims of domestic abuse are not the ones evicted from their homes with their children. It is the perpetrators who need to leave. For the first time we are bringing forward legislation that will make sure that that happens. Stability for children and victims needs to be at the absolute forefront of our minds. Rather than move them around the country to protect them, we need to intervene to get the perpetrator away and to protect them from the perpetrator.
We are banning conversion practices. It should have been done before, but it is finally going to be done under this Government. The removal of peerages Bill is so important, too. People will also know my views on the digital access to services Bill, which will be vital in order to modernise our public services.
I want to talk about security, which is the theme that runs through the King’s Speech. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Putney (Fleur Anderson) that when we talk about security, we need to talk about domestic, defence and development, because they all go hand in hand. We need to see the tackling state threats Bill in the light of the horrible events that we have seen against our Jewish communities in recent weeks, and in the context of our democracy. That is why we need to do more to protect democracy through the Representation of the People Bill, which is coming back in this Session.
The most personal form of power that any of us hold is the power to freely choose who we vote for. That power is fundamental to democracy, but today it is under threat from foreign states that want to cause us chaos, tech bros who do not share our values, and opportunists looking to make money from division. They are not taking away our right to vote, but they are distorting the national conversation and undermining genuine voices. Deepfakes stop us being able to trust what is real. Bot armies spread disinformation. Algorithms that prioritise engagement over truth amplify all of that, and foreign actors exploit it.
This is a make-or-break moment for the security of this country’s democracy. We cannot shy away from what is at stake. Democracy does not require agreement, but it does require us all to live in a shared reality. Every Member of this House has seen misinformation, disinformation, bot activity or deep fakes in action—in fact, many of us have been victims of it. If we do not act, we are putting our democracy in the hands of tech bros in other countries who do not share our values—in fact, some have even called for riots on our streets—and who cannot be trusted with Britain’s future.
The Representation of the People Act 1983 was not designed for a world of deepfakes of politicians, micro-targeting, political advertising, and algorithms with agendas. I am thrilled that this Government are reforming it, and I will be re-tabling my seven amendments to the Bill on Report. I want to see clear laws that recognise and define digital manipulation as a serious offence against our democracy. I want increased powers for the Electoral Commission to demand back-end, real-time access to social media platforms when manipulation is suspected. I want mandatory labelling of AI-generated content and a political advertisement repository so that voters can separate what is real and what is not, and see where political content comes from, who is funding it and what they are saying in different parts of the country to different voters.
I want to see a critical incident protocol, independent of Government, which can be triggered in response to a significant risk to the integrity or security of our elections. I know this is controversial, but elections do not just happen for six weeks every five years now, so our election laws should also apply all year round. The six-week campaign is a thing of the past—we cannot keep regulating for a world that does not exist. Anything that people see relating to our democracy, whether it is a year out from an election or two weeks out from an election, should meet our electoral standards. This is not about limiting debate or controlling outcomes; it is about safeguarding the conditions in which each and every person makes their choice. It is the only way our democracy survives.
I am pleased that we are pursuing a serious agenda—an agenda that is about our security and the security of the everyday lives of our constituents. In Milton Keynes, the 35 Bills in this King’s Speech, on top of the 50 that we passed in the last Session, are making a real difference to everyone.
Martin Vickers (Brigg and Immingham) (Con)
It is a pleasure to take part in this King’s Speech debate. I join with others in congratulating the hon. Members for Bradford West (Naz Shah) and for Harlow (Chris Vince) on the way they spoke earlier.
I want to focus in particular on the proposals to nationalise British Steel. My constituency takes in a part of the Scunthorpe steelworks site. Many hundreds of my constituents work in the industry, with many more working in the supply chain. It is worth noting that the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government estimates that closure of the steelworks could equate to a loss in economic output in northern Lincolnshire of £802 million over the next five years.
As a Conservative, it is not natural for me to speak in favour of nationalisation; it is somewhat uncomfortable in many respects. However, the present situation—Jingye still owns the site, but Ministers and appointed officials manage it—is clearly not sustainable, and it is difficult to see any other alternative in the short term.
The hon. Member for Milton Keynes Central (Emily Darlington) spoke about the privatisations of the Thatcher years, and it is certainly the case that some of them need refining; certainly they need better regulating. It is worth noting, however, that for 13 years, between 1997 and 2010, the Labour party was in power and could have done something about those privatised companies. I think the big fault with the privatisation process was not the actual process initially, but what followed, with many companies now in foreign ownership and poorly regulated.
I want to comment on the EU reset that was proposed in the speech. I am an ardent Brexiteer. I am old enough to have voted to leave the EU—or the common market as it was then—in 1975, so my credentials in that respect are pretty good. I have no objection in principle to resetting our arrangements with Europe; clearly, we need to trade with Europe and we need good working relationships there. However, I would just warn Government Members that EU procurement rules and over-regulation will not be helpful to much of our industry.
If we are to remain a manufacturing nation—I share the view held by Members across the House that that should be the case—we need a domestic steel industry. As I have said in the House on previous occasions when we have discussed the steel industry, if we are going to maintain a domestic steel sector, which we must, there will be a cost to the taxpayer. Whether that is through subsidy or through nationalisation, the cost will certainly be there.
Scunthorpe thrives on the steelworks; as I have mentioned, 3,000 to 4,000 people work there, and many more work in the supply chain. Although I was born in Cleethorpes, I moved to Grimsby at the age of five, when my parents were allocated a council house, which they thought, quite rightly, was magnificent. In Grimsby, I lived through the decline of the deep-sea fishing industry, which means I am very aware of how such a decline can affect a town and its people. I subsequently went to work as the constituency agent for the current Father of the House in Gainsborough, which was in a similar situation at that time; the two big engineering companies had closed, and the inevitable downturn resulted. I do not want that to be repeated in Scunthorpe and the surrounding area.
I am grateful to the Under-Secretary of State for Business and Trade, the hon. Member for Stockton North (Chris McDonald), for contacting me on Monday and going through the proposals. I hope that when Ministers wind up these debates, they will give an assurance not only that the Government are committed to the steel industry, but that they will ensure that the blast furnaces now in Scunthorpe remain operational until electric arc furnaces are up and running.
I will move on to one or two other items. We heard from the hon. Member for Newport West and Islwyn (Ruth Jones) that the Great British Railways Bill will transform the railway network. I suggest that transformation will cost money and that taking the private sector out of the railway industry will mean the taxpayer has to find yet more money, which may well result from Government borrowing.
The other hit that my local economy has taken recently has been the closure of the Prax Lindsey oil refinery at Killingholme, near Immingham. That, again, has led to the local economy taking a really serious hit in recent months. We have heard oil mentioned today. I urge the Government to look again at the licences for the North sea.
I would also like to talk about local government, as I see no mention in the King’s Speech of how we are going to improve local government services. I was a councillor for 26 years; I worked for 14 of those years on Grimsby borough council, which was in the two-tier system, followed by another 12 years at the North East Lincolnshire unitary authority. I support the changes to unitary authorities as a gradual process, but I suggest to the Government that local government reform as it is proceeding at the moment is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic—it is not dealing with the serious business of the services that local government provides. The hon. Member for Dewsbury and Batley (Iqbal Mohamed) spoke earlier about basic council services—cutting grass, maintaining parks and libraries, and the like. I see no way in which this is likely to change. If we are to create a vision and make people want to be part of their local communities to a much greater extent, local authorities can play a major part in doing that, but they need resources.
I remember the days when even the lamp posts in Grimsby had the coat of arms on them. Now we have street furniture all over the place, but it is just basic grey steel. The place begins to look a mess. If we are going to tidy up our towns and improve the public realm, it is vital that local authorities have resources, but I do not see the Government looking seriously at ways to improve that.
Anna Dixon (Shipley) (Lab)
I would like to begin my congratulating my constituency neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford West (Naz Shah), on her humorous and passionate opening speech. It is a true privilege to sit alongside her and, together with Madam Deputy Speaker, to represent our shared home of Bradford. I would also like to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Chris Vince), though he is not currently in his seat, for demonstrating his commitment to meeting his personal goals—and no, I am not talking about getting a PB in the marathon, but about hitting 400 contributions in Parliament.
Just 10 days ago, I stood in the other place for the Prorogation of Parliament and proudly heard an account given of the many things that this Labour Government achieved in their first parliamentary Session. Renters are no longer worried, thanks to secure tenure under the Renters’ Rights Act 2025. Children have been lifted out of poverty and families have been supported through the Universal Credit (Removal of Two Child Limit) Act 2026, which removed the cruel two-child benefit cap. We now have stronger safeguards through the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026. Workers are no longer on exploitative zero-hours contracts thanks to the Employment Rights Act 2025.
I returned to my constituency buoyed up, ready to take the positive message to the doors alongside hard-working Labour councillors defending their seats and a new group of enthusiastic candidates, some standing for the first time. All of them were prepared to stand up for their communities and be a strong voice in City Hall. They all wanted to be part of a Labour-led council that after a decade of overseeing drastic budget cuts handed down by a Tory Government could finally turn a corner.
Our Labour Government in Westminster who believe in local government are devolving more power to local authorities and communities through the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act 2026, and we have a new fair funding formula that links deprivation to funding, giving places such as Bradford the first significant budget increase for over a decade. There have been commitments to invest in Northern Powerhouse Rail to better connect our city, and I am pleased to see legislation on that in the King’s Speech. I could go on.
There was hope, and there was possibility, but all that was dashed as the results came in. I was devastated to see so many brilliant Labour councillors lose their seats, to see Reform take the most seats on Bradford council, and to see people winning seats who frankly should not even have been allowed to stand as candidates due to racist comments that I will not repeat in this place.
Reform UK was spreading despair. It argued that Britain is broken and cannot be fixed, and it undermined the very foundations of our democracy. Let me be clear: the majority of people in Bradford rejected Reform’s divisive politics, despite it winning the most seats. I fear that Reform is bringing its divisive politics to our beautiful, multifaith and diverse city, which my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford West described so beautifully.
As we begin this second parliamentary Session, we need a bold agenda that delivers tangible and visible improvements in the lives of people in every community across the country. I therefore welcome today’s King’s Speech, but I urge the Government and Ministers, as they bring forward these Bills, to ensure that they go as far and as fast as they can to deliver the change we promised to the people of this country.
I would like to focus on three of the Bills that address opportunities that we particularly need to grasp. I welcome the commonhold and leasehold reform Bill, which will abolish the outdated and, frankly, feudal system by which leaseholders can be held to ransom by unscrupulous freeholders. I have constituents in Bingley and Wrose who have faced massive increases in service charges, failures to carry out maintenance to accepted standards and unexpected bills for large upgrades. I have estates in Gilstead and Cottingley where homeowners have been left on unadopted estates paying out extortionate fees for ground maintenance.
I look forward to hearing more about how the Government propose to strengthen the regulation of managing agents to ensure that this new system works fairly and has the confidence of leaseholders and commonholders alike. I hope that Ministers will ensure that there continue to be ways in which older people looking to right-size can benefit from living in specialist retirement communities when switching from leasehold to commonhold.
While that legislation, together with the Renters’ Rights Act, will provide security for renters and homeowners, for those with no home, those in temporary accommodation and those waiting for a social home, the Government must take more radical steps to accelerate the building of a new generation of social homes so that everyone can have a secure, safe home. I look forward to hearing more about the social housing renewal Bill.
I welcome the Government’s intention to bring forward legislation that will strengthen accountability for the NHS, abolish NHS England and ensure that we continue to allocate funding to the frontline to bring down waiting lists and improve patient care. However, I urge the Government not to wait until the next parliamentary Session to lay the foundations for a national care service. We urgently need national commissioning standards to ensure greater consistency for older and disabled people and a workforce strategy that addresses the need for better training and career progression for care workers. Baroness Casey has made an initial set of recommendations, but I hope the Government will act with urgency and take this opportunity to put in place legislative provisions that will enable us to move further and faster towards our ambition of a national care service as we also rebuild our national health service.
Finally, I welcome the clean water Bill, which will take forward the major reform of the water sector that is needed. However, I am concerned that if we simply take forward the proposals for a new regulator without fundamentally addressing the financial failings of the water companies, we will only perpetuate a broken model. I have urged Ministers to use existing powers to immediately take Thames Water under special administration and use this as an opportunity to explore alternative public ownership models. I also hope to see the Government create a legislative path for bringing other water companies into public ownership in future.
Tom Hayes (Bournemouth East) (Lab)
Bournemouth is a footballing town, and we are so excited for the Cherries, who are in pole position to qualify for European football for the first time in our history. That being so, does my hon. Friend also welcome the measure in the King’s Speech to curb ticket touts, especially ahead of Euro 2028?
Anna Dixon
I do join my hon. Friend in welcoming that measure. I recently saw Bradford City play at Valley Parade. The team has an important championship play-off match, and I hope that there will not be ticket touts selling extortionate tickets for that much sought-after match.
There is still time to make the fundamental and radical changes that we desperately need. We need to show the public that we are not going to let privatised water companies profit from polluting our rivers and seas. Above all, our most urgent priority must be to renew our democracy. I welcomed the speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes Central (Emily Darlington) about how we clearly need to protect our democracy against threats. From my point of view, the local election results show clearly that two-party politics is dead. The vote has fragmented, and people have stopped tactical voting. Therefore, I urge the Government as part of the Representation of the People Bill to set up a democracy taskforce that will look at electoral reform for both local and Westminster elections.
In conclusion, I sat today in the Royal Gallery amid much pomp and ceremony and plenty of bling. I can honestly say that it seemed a world away from the realities of my Shipley constituents: the single mom who is working two jobs and struggling to make ends meet at the end of the month; the pensioner who, despite a modest private pension, is having to cut back; and the young person living with their parents, unable to get employment, training or a place of their own. The Labour Government have begun the work of rebuilding Britain after the failures of the past. We must now push on and be bolder and more ambitious in delivering for people across every community of this country and delivering a fairer society for all.
Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)
This debate is taking place in an almost surreal atmosphere. We have a psychodrama going on about whether the Prime Minister will be challenged for the leadership of the Labour party, whether he will still be Prime Minister by the time we come to vote on the motion, and whether the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care is going to challenge and take over. The Government have been in office for less than two years and seem not to be reflecting on the results of last Thursday’s elections. It is obvious that the Government lost a huge amount of support because of their perceived failure to deliver on the promises made in the 2024 manifesto, and their vote split asunder to independents and Greens or to Reform.
At the same time, there is a horrific growth in our society of far-right racism and intolerance—a horror show in our society—with the growth of Islamophobia, of antisemitism and of all forms of racism. There was an attack on a prayer room in Blackburn on Monday evening; precious little was said about it on any of the media. Shame on them for not reporting it. They rightly report on antisemitic attacks on synagogues; the same should apply to any community that is under attack if we are to succeed in bringing our communities together and to show that we need to stand up against racism in absolutely any form in which it rears its ugly head.
This weekend, there will be an appearance in London by Tommy Robinson, attended by a lot of people, some of whom presumably adhere to his worldview, and others who will be there out of a mixture of frustration and lots of other things. It is a very dangerous situation and a very dangerous time. Every Member of this House will have been out on the streets last week for the local elections, and they will have picked up the language and understood what is going on. We have to be absolutely united against racism and racist violence in absolutely any form. I, for one, will be on the anti-racist and Palestine march on Saturday to show my support for the anti-racist campaigns in our society.
Behind all this lies an horrific level of inequality and the unrequited ambition of ordinary citizens in our society. We have become a society of food banks and billionaires, with a tax system that encourages the growth of billionaires and restricts the opportunity of so many of the poorest in our society. Unless we address the issues of social injustice and inequality that are so prevalent in our society, the situation is going to get worse. It is a feeding ground for the cheap, nonsense, headline-grabbing stuff that the Reform party comes out with all over the country. People from Reform lack a solution to any problem other than blaming the nearest minority they can find and pretending that the great threat to this country is asylum seekers and refugees, when actually they are desperate human beings trying to survive in a very complicated world. By their very actions, people from Reform drive humanity out of the discussion and the political debate. It is up to us to put it back there.
Reform plays on many issues, the first of which is housing, which is in absolute crisis. Local authorities are unable to get the funds necessary to build the council housing they all want to build, because of a failed funding model that does not allow them to develop 100% of sites. For example, in London the mayor has said that major sites will now have only a 20% social housing requirement. In other words, 80% of the development will not be available for people on the housing waiting list, or the needs register, as it is usually referred to. That drives many people who cannot get council housing and cannot afford to buy into the private rented sector.
I supported the Renters’ Rights Bill that was passed in the previous Session. I could see nothing wrong with it and much good in it, particularly the ending of section 21 evictions. It is a pity that the Government did not end section 21 evictions in July 2024, which they could have done—that would have saved a lot of tenancies at the time—but I am pleased that happened. Nevertheless, that legislation did not deal with the fundamental issue, which is the level of rent in our communities. It would cost at least £2,000 a month to rent a one-bedroom flat in my constituency. Roughly speaking, that is £500 a week. It is three, four or five times the level of rent for a council tenancy.
If a person has access to DWP benefits, some of their rent is paid through housing benefit, but if the rent is above the local housing allowance—and it nearly always is—families on universal credit have to subsidise their rent out of their benefit because they simply cannot afford it, and they have to stay somewhere. If they become homeless, they get moved far away, and we have children making horrendous journeys because they do not want to lose contact with their beloved primary school. That is the normal story all over inner-city areas in Britain today. We can do something much better about that.
I am sad that the King’s Speech does not address the issues in the clear way that it should. People are crying out for some degree of security, and housing security is fundamental. Is it right that when we all walk into Parliament every day we could count so many homeless people on the streets of London? Who could count the number of people begging to try to get a bit of money to get into a night shelter? They then spend the rest of the day trying to get together another £17 to spend another night in a shelter. What a terrible existence those people have—and that is pretty normal across every major city. We all travel a lot, and we know that every major station is surrounded by people begging for money. What is wrong with us that we cannot recognise that something can and should be done about that? I wish that was the case.
There is much else in respect of insecurity in society that has to be addressed. A large number of people are in insecure employment, despite welcome changes in employment legislation, and because wages are so low and prices and rent are so high, so many people are doing two jobs. How does a parent doing two jobs spend time with their children? How do they help them with their homework? How do they take them to a club? How do they do any of the things that we all love to do with our families? That parent simply cannot, because they are tied down to two jobs, and in some cases even more.
We have to recognise that we are bringing up a whole generation of children in this society who spend less time with each other and less time with their parents or carers, because of the economic stress and the cost of living. Can the Government not intervene and say, “We’re prepared to control food prices if they start going up at a ridiculous rate”? The Labour Government of the 1970s controlled food prices in order to control inflation, and I remember it being quite a successful policy. It was very controversial when it was mooted by Roy Hattersley, of all people—he was not on my wing of the Labour party by any manner of means—but he felt the need to do it.
Tom Hayes
The right hon. Gentleman is talking about bringing younger people together. My constituent Caroline is watching this debate from Meon Road in Littledown and Iford in my constituency, where, as it happens, last Thursday a Labour councillor won for the first time ever: Councillor Patrick Connolly. Caroline wants to bring younger people together and she welcomes the Government signing the UK back up to Erasmus+. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that it is a good thing for British young people to mix with their European counterparts and welcome this move closer to Europe?
Jeremy Corbyn
I absolutely welcome the Erasmus scheme—indeed, I wanted to retain the scheme during the endless debates on the withdrawal agreement, because I can absolutely see the value of it. I also see the value of overseas students coming to this country; we should be encouraging them, but they are put off by the very high student fees. Something has to be done about that.
Many colleagues have brought up issues with the services within our society. The water industry has come up many times. I am a London MP and therefore fall within the purview of Thames Water, whose record is appalling and atrocious at every conceivable level. The water industry as a whole has had more than £70 billion taken out of it in profits and dividends since privatisation. We have had statements by every Secretary of State that I can remember for the past 35 years, saying that they will look at the regulation model to make sure there is proper control of what the water companies do. Yet every year the sewage pouring into our rivers and streams gets worse. The chalk streams are destroyed; the fish on our coastline are polluted and killed. It just gets worse and worse.
It is surely pretty obvious that the private ownership model, where the motive is profit, not service, has absolutely failed. We should take the whole water industry back into public ownership. It was public ownership that cleaned it up, it was public ownership that constructed the reservoirs and all the infrastructure, and it is public ownership that will deliver clean water in the future. However, it also needs to be democratic. We should not just have the appointment of a national water company or regional water companies, where the Secretary of State decides who the directors are. We should include the workforce, the local trade unions, the local business community, the local authority—we should make it a matter of community pride to be part of the water industry and the water company.
Anna Dixon
Does the right hon. Gentleman recognise the need to strengthen the regional water authorities, and to have a greater focus there on the consumer voice? Would he also agree that the special administration regime for Thames Water might offer an opportunity to explore alternative public ownership, such as mutuals, where we could have workers sitting on a board alongside consumers?
Jeremy Corbyn
Yes, the water authority obviously needs to be strengthened and we need to explore all the options. The hon. Lady has probably got the gist of where I am going on this issue: wanting a more democratic form of ownership. Involving local government in that would be the obvious thing to do. After all, the London County Council had a big say post the Metropolitan Water Board and so on. We need to think about how we improve local involvement, because local people are the best guardians of the water service, making sure that we do not pollute our rivers and streams and that we do provide good-quality, safe water for everybody.
There are other areas of public ownership. I welcome the development of Great British Railways and the public ownership of the rail companies, particularly the train operating companies and the infrastructure. However, there is no public ownership of freight, and the retention of the principle of open access to our service is, to me, a sort of Trojan horse to bring the private sector back on to the railway network. Surely we need to look at that—and when the Government look at it, I would be grateful if they would also look at the ludicrous railway fares in Britain compared with any other railway anywhere in Europe, which are far cheaper and far more efficient to run.
I have a couple of other things I want to say before I sit down. Last year the world spent $2.4 trillion on warfare and weapons. This year it will be more than $3 trillion. Pretty well every country in the world is spending more and more on defence. I have heard the Prime Minister say that he wants Britain to go up immediately to 3%, and ultimately to 5%. The same kind of language is used across Europe, and in other countries as well, including Russia, China and so on. Everyone is massively increasing defence expenditure, and that defence expenditure ends up in the wars and in massive profits for the arms companies around the world.
It is a bit sad that the King’s Speech said nothing about funding the United Nations properly, or about peace initiatives to try to promote a ceasefire, difficult as that would be—I understand all that, but it has to happen—in the ghastly war between Russia and Ukraine, or the crazy war in Iran that President Trump has got us involved with. Despite the British Government telling us that they are not part of this war, in reality the bombing takes place from RAF Fairford and other bases in Britain. Surely we need an agenda for peace, not an agenda for war.
Israel’s bombardment of the Palestinian people in Gaza is an act of genocide against the Palestinian people. It is abominable and appalling, and we as a country have maintained the arms supplies to Israel throughout that conflict. We have allowed the use of RAF Akrotiri. We have had the overflying of Gaza, so the RAF know exactly what happened in Gaza, because they took all the pictures of it. Would it not have been good if the Government instead had said they would join with the Hague group of nations in the UN, who are determined to adhere to the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court decisions?
We need to look to the real issues facing this world—climate change, environmental destruction, global inequality and poverty, or the 70 million people worldwide who are refugees—rather than just the language of more and more money on arms and more and more preparedness for war. Can we not have an agenda for peace? If we cannot talk about peace when a war is going on, what is the point of ever talking about peace? I would hope that something could happen with that.
This was supposed to be, the Prime Minister said, a speech for hope for young people. Well, fine—I want hope for young people. I admire the young people of my community and others for what they do, for the efforts they put into so much, and for the joy and music and everything that they bring. But those who have been to university all tell me they are saddled with massive university debts. They cannot get anywhere to live; they are sharing flats into their 40s or beyond because they cannot afford to pay off a student debt and buy anywhere, and they cannot get council housing because they are not eligible. Others are working in the gig economy, being ripped off by delivery companies that do not pay them properly. Many of them are in school but not achieving everything they could, because we are over-competitive in the way we run our schools, and we are not inclusive enough.
Let us give some hope to young people; let us listen to young people, including young people with special needs and disabilities. They want to be part of our society too, not to be told that we are spending too much money on personal independence payments or on benefits. They want that support. Give hope to people. We cannot achieve everything that we want to achieve—at least, I guess most of us do—if we persist with the economic inequality within our society and the social injustices that follow from it.
This King’s Speech is such a missed opportunity. It could have been so good. It could have put so much hope in so many people’s minds. The lesson of last Thursday is that if we do not give people hope, they can go off in all kinds of directions. We can end up in a very nasty and a very dark place if we take away any opportunity for hope within our society.
Noah Law (St Austell and Newquay) (Lab)
I welcome the King’s Speech, as we continue to implement our manifesto. I note that we have already delivered more of those manifesto promises than Reform has actual policies.
I welcome the steps to make Britain a land of opportunity, built for all. That opportunity starts at home, with a good home. That is why I support the measures that we are taking to protect social housing stock and incentivise the building of more social homes via the social housing renewable Bill. At the heart of this opportunity must be a hard day’s work, and it must always be our Labour mission to repair the broken link between work and our livelihoods. I welcome the steps that we are taking to deliver a fair deal for working people, but I want targeted fiscal support behind it, to ensure that we have a tax system for growth, and a tax system that ends the carers’ tax trap and the other tax cliff edges that punish working people. We have to work on lowering the cost of employment for young people, and let them get that first crucial step on the ladder. We must let low earners take home more of what they earn, on top of the pay boost that 2.7 million workers have already had via the minimum wage increase delivered by this Labour Government.
I welcome the steps to strengthen and reform the state, and I urge the Government to go even further, faster, to get dynamism back into the apparatus of our British state and to harness its potential as an investor and co-ordinator, as we have done by empowering our public finance institutions. Those same institutions are investing millions of pounds in the Cornish economy and bringing together crucial projects that might not have come to fruition under a pure, narrow-minded, private investor mindset. Sometimes it takes the state to co-ordinate things, and to step up and say, “We are going to deliver in this industry.” This toolkit, and this ambition for the role of the state and its potential for dynamism and for rebuilding our public wealth, is needed to deliver on the ambitions for economic, energy and national security that we have outlined today.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. You caught me off guard there. I am used to being the last to speak. You are very kind to invite me to participate.
Can I first of all give special thanks to the hon. Member for Bradford West (Naz Shah) for her speech? I get on well with her, and she gave me her book as a gift; I read it from beginning to end. I was very moved by her contribution. For me, she epitomises strength of character and courage, despite all the hard things that life threw agin her. She was able to overcome them, and she is a lady of exceptional talent. I want to put that on record. The hon. Member for Milton Keynes Central (Emily Darlington) said that the hon. Member for Harlow (Chris Vince) mentioned Harlow 35 times in his speech. I thought it was more! I never was very good at mathematics. The hon. Gentleman is a great asset to this House, and his speech seconding the motion was worthy of this place. We thank both him and the hon. Member for Bradford West for their contributions.
My comments about the King’s Speech will be in two parts. We have all heard about the curate’s egg: it was good in parts. I want to speak first about the good things that I see in the King’s Speech, and then I want to refer to some specifics about Northern Ireland. I very much welcome the Government’s commitment to addressing the issue of antisemitism. The Prime Minister and the Labour Government have grasped the importance of the escalation in antisemitism in this United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It is really important that it is grasped, and I hope that the forthcoming Bill and the directive that comes from the top, from the Prime Minister, will address the issue. For that to happen, we need resources, so I hope that on Wednesday night, when we finish these debates, a financial commitment will be made.
I also welcome the Government’s commitment to the defence funding target. In an intervention on the hon. Member for North Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown), I referred to the importance of changing technology in defence. For instance, in the last few weeks, there has been lots of talk in the papers about Ukraine grasping new drone technology in a way that no other country in the world has done. It is time that we had a partnership with Ukraine, so that we can be involved in drone technology and the changes in how warfare is conducted.
I thank the Labour Government very much for lifting all those children out of poverty. That moves me greatly, because I see lots of young children in poverty in my constituency. Sixty-thousand children in Northern Ireland were lifted out of poverty by what this Government have done. I thank them for what they have done on those three issues.
I always try to be decent in my contributions—they are never meant to be adversarial—but I have to record some of the points that concern me. The King’s Speech laid bare the true priorities of this Administration. Let me speak from a Unionist point of view. The Government speak of a stronger and fairer United Kingdom, but what this Government say, through His Majesty King Charles, tells a different story for Northern Ireland. Unionists judge a Government not by their rhetoric, but by their respect for the constitutional integrity of our nation and their commitment to fundamental justice. On both counts, this legislative agenda unfortunately falls profoundly short. Indeed, I listened intently to discover exactly where Northern Ireland was in the plan put forward in the King’s Speech, and I struggled to find its role in it, and that is worrying to the extreme.
Nowhere is that failure more evident than in the Government’s decision to carry over the highly contentious Northern Ireland Troubles Bill. Although we know that it is being carried over from the last Session, there was not much mention of it today—but Opposition Members certainly referred to it. Let us be completely clear about what is happening. This legislation is being pushed forward, despite having zero support from the people who matter most: our victims, our survivors, and our courageous veterans—those with the clean hands and the aching hearts. Instead of listening to the families who carried the heaviest burdens during the dark years of terror, the Government have chosen to bend the knee to intense pressure from the Dublin Government. It really vexes me, as a Unionist and a Democratic Unionist party MP, to recognise that the Republic of Ireland Government have more say in this process than I have—someone who lost family members to the IRA campaign, and who represents, in Strangford, many of those who served and who also lost loved ones.
The Democratic Unionist party will always stand firmly against any process that aims to rewrite the past, shield terrorists or treat our brave security forces as anything less than the defenders of democracy. It is a disgrace that Westminster is ignoring domestic consensus to satisfy a foreign jurisdiction, because that is what the Republic of Ireland is, and that there was no reference to reform, or even a nod to the massive work that must be done.
We also heard about the Government’s grand design for an EU reset. I put on the record that I am a Brexiteer, and I voted to leave—and we did not get all we wanted in Northern Ireland, unlike the rest of the United Kingdom. You will forgive me, Madam Deputy Speaker, for refusing to offer commentary on the inner workings of any party. I said the other day that I will make no mention of what is happening in Labour, because that is its decision, and I will leave that with Labour; but the effect of what is happening on my nation, on Northern Ireland, must be recognised. There appears to be a desperate scramble for a closer relationship with Brussels, yet one of the main casualties of our relationship with the EU has been Northern Ireland. In the Brexit process, we received callous treatment, yet not one single word has been uttered about renegotiation. I have an ask for the Labour Government and the Ministers in their place—I am very respectful of the two Ministers here, and I always will be. Northern Ireland’s position, at this moment, is not the same as the United Kingdom’s. If we are to have a renegotiation, and closer ties with the EU, I ask that we be put at the forefront of the Prime Minister’s and the Labour Government’s intentions.
The Prime Minister intends to align Great Britain more closely with European laws. If the rest of the United Kingdom is set to follow EU regulations, the Government must answer a fundamental question: where is the road map for moving entirely beyond the Windsor framework, and how has any discussion of legislation on the European question taken place without even a nod towards those of us in Northern Ireland who have been used and abused by the EU, in order to negate the democratic will of the people of this United Kingdom? If the Prime Minister and the Labour Government have set their eyes and their focus on closer ties, please ensure that we in Northern Ireland are on the same page. I seek a renegotiation for ourselves, and a place for us at the table. Others may say that, too, in the other days of debate on the King’s Speech.
Perhaps this is one of those times when silence has spoken more clearly than words ever could, and perhaps the Government need to be reminded that we, the people of Ulster, will not be silent. We demand that our Government recognise the disgraceful impact of the framework and prioritise its dismantling. If Great Britain aligns with those rules, there is no longer even a flawed logistical excuse for maintaining an artificial barrier in the Irish sea. The continued enforcement of the Winsor framework remains a direct unconstitutional assault on Northern Ireland’s economic and political place in the United Kingdom.
If the Government genuinely desire a fairer path that unlocks hope, they must immediately stop treating Northern Ireland as a bargaining chip. We are not a bargaining chip; we are part of this great United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It gives me great pride and pleasure to say that, because I mean it from the bottom of my heart. I am proud to have a British passport and to be a member of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. We in Northern Ireland, Unionists that we are, deserve to have the same declaration and recognition. We demand a clear road map to eliminate internal trade friction, scrap the Irish sea border, and fully restore our place in the United Kingdom internal market. The Democratic Unionist party will continue to challenge this legislative programme at every turn, fighting for real justice for our veterans and the complete restoration of our constitutional rights.
The Leader of the Liberal Democrats mentioned the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the commitment that the Government have made. I welcome that commitment. Thirty thousand—perhaps as many as 40,000—people were arrested for peacefully protesting on the streets. They were put in jail, and many of them have been executed just for standing up for freedom, verbally—not having taken any physical action. The week before last, when we were about to enter Prorogation, six Iranian ladies who protested on the streets were facing execution. It is for those who want freedom that I make these comments. Perhaps we need not hesitation, but a timescale for the direct and immediate proscription of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. For years we have listened to grand promises from the Dispatch Box, yet instead of using counter-terrorism legislation to immediately ban that hostile state entity, the Government have nested the issue within a broader and delayed legislative framework. Such tactical evasion exposes a worrying vulnerability; we are creating new bureaucratic hoops, rather than enacting an outright immediate ban.
As I said at the beginning of my remarks, the King’s Speech is a curate’s egg. I have spoken about the good things in it, and I also wanted to highlight some of the things that I and my party have concerns about. It is always a pleasure to see the Under-Secretary of State for Scotland, the hon. Member for Midlothian (Kirsty McNeill), in her place. I wish her well in her job. I pray for every Minister; I pray that they will be full of wisdom when it comes to doing the right thing, and knowing when to say it. I wish you well, Minister.
Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)
It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), just as it was a great pleasure to visit his beautiful constituency last week. Even though I do not agree with everything he said, he is a true gentleman. I will keep my comments relatively brief, but I echo his tributes, and those of other Members, to my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford West (Naz Shah), and particularly my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Chris Vince), for their excellent speeches. My hon. Friend the Member for Harlow and I campaigned for many years in the east of England, which is not the easiest place to win for Labour, and I do not think that either of us would have imagined that he would be here, delivering that brilliant speech. I am so pleased for him—it is a joy.
I welcome the Gracious Speech. I know how much work, thought, effort and planning go into it; I also know how many things that others wanted to see in it did not make the cut. Although I was pleased to hear the Prime Minister’s remarks about a national system of food redistribution, which I would welcome, I hope that in future we will see measures to modernise the regulation of the food system to secure the outcomes that we would all like around health, environment and food security.
There are a whole range of Bills that I particularly welcome: the clean water Bill, the energy independence Bill, the social housing renewal Bill and the draft taxi licensing Bill. Over the years, I have spent many hours in this Chamber talking about the taxi and private hire trade. I genuinely hope for progress on modernising the legislation, which has become woefully out of date as the world has moved on.
Iqbal Mohamed
Every time I come to Parliament, I take a taxi from my home to the station. I speak to many private hire drivers, as I am sure many Members across the House do. In the past two years, since the settlement with Uber to class drivers as employees and get some benefits, the commission rates have ballooned. Before, they were fixed at nearly 25%; now, they are dynamic. Drivers sometimes get less than half the fare that customers pay. Does the hon. Member agree that the Government should do more to prevent any exploitation of workers and protect them from modern slavery conditions?
Daniel Zeichner
This is a complicated set of issues. There has been a genuine change in the structure of the industry because of the legal cases to which the hon. Member refers. Over the years, out-of-area working has particularly troubled me; I hope we can address that and make it safe. The hon. Member is absolutely right that the squeeze on drivers has been harsh, so I hope we can address that too.
I am delighted that more than a quarter of a century after I led a debate at the Labour conference on lowering the voting age, it looks as if it is finally going to happen. It is ironic that it has taken 25 years to lower the voting age to 16, but I am really pleased. While I am on constitutional reform, I suspect that there is still some unfinished business relating to the second Chamber. I would love to see that addressed.
Most of all, like one or two others, I welcome the proposals to bring us closer to the European Union. One of my happiest days as a Minister last year was the day of the agreement that we had started to develop. I remember the celebrations that evening in the Downing Street garden, where pieces of cake with Union Jacks and EU flags on them were being passed around. Our phones had been confiscated, unfortunately; I would have loved to send a picture back to my constituents in Cambridge. I understand that not everyone would have been celebrating, but I can tell the House that my constituents would certainly have been delighted. I was very pleased to hear the Prime Minister’s comments on that in his speech on Monday.
There is a paradox here, is there not? I think most people in this country can now see that there was a problem with the Brexit process and that what was promised at the time has not been delivered, and yet the very people who led the campaign have been surging in the polls. They are the people responsible for the damage, and frankly I think we have been a bit too cautious about pointing it out. The argument goes that we should not be telling the electors that they are wrong. That is absolutely right, but it is not the electors who were wrong; it is the people who, frankly, misled them. They were shamelessly misled, and frankly I think they are being misled again. We should repeat the message endlessly: “Be warned—do not listen to these people.”
In his speech on Monday, the Prime Minister explicitly chose Europe. He also chose young people, and in doing so he chose the future. I was genuinely thrilled to hear it because, as far as I can see, my generation and the generation above it have run off with all the money. The only way in which that will change is through explicit political choices.
There is a feeling that politicians cannot say anything about the pensioner generation for fear of upsetting them, because they vote. Well, I think it has gone too far, quite frankly. It is time to recognise the very real intergenerational unfairness that has emerged. I hope not only that we will see schemes to help young people working and travelling in Europe, but that every policy will be examined and the question asked will be, “What impact will this have on the younger generation?”
Let me make one final point. In my speech during the Budget debate a few months ago, I railed against what I called the “fragmentation and privatisation”—the decay—of the public realm. In retrospect, I think that was a rather Cambridge way of putting it, because frankly I needed to be a bit more blunt. The question is: why are so many areas around the places where people live in such a state? That point has been made by a number of hon. Members. It is no wonder that people are fed up. Whether it is graffiti, fly-tipping or potholes, we need to tackle those issues with an urgency that for too long has been missing. Yes, local government has been hollowed out and under-resourced, but just saying that will not reassure angry voters; we need to actually fix those problems and show that we are fixing them. When we had the pandemic, it was a national emergency, and I think we need to take a similar approach to address problems of this scale.
I wish the Prime Minister well as he tries to make the national machine work. Frankly, the Labour party needs him to succeed, but, even more, the country needs him to succeed.
Iqbal Mohamed (Dewsbury and Batley) (Ind)
I would like to start by associating myself with the remarks made by Mr Speaker about how we should conduct ourselves in this place: with kindness, compassion and respect, even when we disagree. I will quote Jalaluddin Rumi, a Muslim Sufi philosopher, who said:
“Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates. Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind?”
I believe that if we all followed that principle here, in the other place and in our country, we would be more united and compassionate to each other.
I join Members across the House in paying tribute to the absolutely amazing speeches by the hon. Members for Bradford West (Naz Shah) and for Harlow (Chris Vince). They spoke generously about their constituencies, and I intend to do the same, although as an independent Member I will do so without the burden of a Whip. Having said that, I am not sure that colleagues on the Government Benches feel particularly burdened by the Whip at the moment either.
I mention the lack of a Whip behind me, but that is the furthest thing from a complaint. The people of Dewsbury and Batley provided me an explicit instruction in 2024, when they returned the first independent MP to Yorkshire in more than a century, and they doubled down on that message last Thursday. Across five wards out of six on Kirklees council that I represent, 11 out of 15 elected councillors are independents. In this election, the people showed that voting for an independent is not a protest vote, but a real alternative to failed party politics. The two-party system is well and truly finished, and I will not mourn its demise if it means that we get more legislators who pick constituents over their party Whip or their rich corporate donors.
Mr Adnan Hussain
I am the Member for Blackburn, and I too am one of the first independent Members of Parliament for my area. I am proud to represent my constituents. People up and down this country are speaking against the two-party system, because they are fed up of being spoken for and spoken at. It is time to listen to the people and to hear them. I often say this, but my policy is the people of Blackburn, my Whip is the people of Blackburn and my boss is the people of Blackburn. Does the hon. Member agree?
Iqbal Mohamed
I believe that every single Member in this House has a primary duty to their constituents—those who voted for them and those who did not. Every single resident in their constituency has a right to their Member representing them without fear or favour. I look forward to welcoming many more independent and independent-minded colleagues to this place in future.
As for the Gracious Speech, it contains measures that I welcome. The Hillsborough law is long overdue—a statutory duty of candour and accountability will finally begin to address a culture of institutional defensiveness that has failed families for too long. There are also meaningful steps on economic security. The small business protections Bill will tackle late payments—a crisis that is costing the UK economy £11 billion annually and closing 38 businesses every day. That is a practical reform that will make a real difference. The Government are also right to prioritise cyber-resilience. Some 43% of UK businesses experienced a cyber-attack last year, with the UK facing major attacks every week on average. This is a real and growing threat, and action is both welcome and necessary.
The Government are likewise correct to identify access to SEND provision as a key issue. Parents should not need to go through the lengthy, challenging and dispiriting process of obtaining an education, health and care plan before their children can receive the support they need. However, the Government’s proposals need to be matched with a more comprehensive plan to address the teacher recruitment and retention crisis, in order to ensure that classrooms receive the targeted interventions they need. There are clearly measures in the Gracious Speech that move us in the right direction—admittedly, they may be too little, too late in some instances, but they are welcomed none the less.
I cannot, though, ignore the measures included in this speech that I vehemently oppose. Words do not put a roof over people’s heads or food on their tables. Words do not heat homes or make work pay, and they do not end the cost of living crisis that is affecting the majority of people in our country. The Government’s actions do not address the acute nature of that crisis for many people in our constituencies.
The actions that the Government have taken need to be challenged. The continued curtailment of protest rights undermines the fundamental democratic principle of the right to dissent. If the Government continue down this path, they will stand on the wrong side of history, and the UK will be listed with other authoritarian regimes. The immigration and asylum Bill, while framed as “fair but firm”, runs the risk of introducing a system that is anything but—a system in which rights are conditional and subject to contribution, narrowly defined by income. Retrospectively doubling the standard qualifying period for indefinite leave to remain from five years to 10 would leave an indelible stain on this Government’s legacy. The expansion of digital ID, presented as a convenience, instead represents a wildly unpopular Orwellian shift in the relationship between citizen and state. It creates what Big Brother Watch rightly calls an “intrusive” system from “cradle to grave” that would be
“ripe for mass surveillance and more government control over people’s lives.”
These proposals risk trading away hard-won freedoms in the nebulous name of efficiency. That is a trade that this House must scrutinise and stop.
Our principles must not stop at our borders. We cannot claim—as this Government so often do—to defend the rule of law and human rights while failing to uphold those principles abroad. The UK must end weapons exports to Israel and to any other state suspected of, or shown to be, violating international humanitarian law, or accused of genocide before international courts. Our commitment to justice must be consistent, otherwise it loses all credibility.
Perhaps the greatest weakness of this King’s Speech is not what it contains, but what it leaves out. It contains no meaningful framework for AI safety, despite overwhelming evidence of the risks posed by this new technology, which is developing at an alarming rate.
An Institute for Public Policy Research report has stated that up to 8 million jobs could be lost due to AI disruption in the next three to five years. AI-exposed firms are already cutting entry-level roles and reshaping the labour market. Even more worryingly, many AI experts, including Geoffrey Hinton and more than 300 others, consider the risk of existential catastrophe as a consequence of loss-of-control scenarios to be plausible at best and likely at worst without adequate regulations and global collaboration.
Our blueprint should be the Montreal protocol. That framework helped to pause and reverse the damage to the ozone layer from the use of chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs. The world had decades to stop and reverse the harms from CFCs, but with AI, the disastrous consequences could be realised during this Parliament. The potential risk from unregulated AI could cause irreversible harm to humanity and our planet. It demands immediate and meaningful Government action to prevent these harms before it is too late.
The public is rightfully clear that it wants sustained, forceful action. A 2025 survey by the Ada Lovelace Institute and the Alan Turing Institute found that 72% of the UK public reported that laws and regulations would increase their confidence in AI. However, in today’s Gracious Speech, there was no plan for governance, safety or accountability. Similarly, it offers no plan to hold social media companies to account. There is no meaningful framework for transparency, no clear standards for algorithmic responsibility, and no serious enforcement mechanism for those who flagrantly breach the rules. There is no ability to take action to ban addictive platforms or to compel safety by design.
This King’s Speech is a programme of progress in parts, problems in principle and profound omissions. It contains measures that I welcome, proposals that I must oppose, and omissions that I and others cannot ignore. It falls short of the radical action that this country needs and has been crying out for. It lacks urgency on material issues that affect people’s daily lives. It avoids hard decisions to tackle vested interests. It fails to hold power and wealth to account. It also fails to clean up politics by banning dodgy donations and revolving doors.
In conclusion, the people of Dewsbury and Batley did not send me here to be loyal to a party; they sent me here to be loyal to them and to stay true to them. In this Session, I will vote against inhumane, unjust and unfair policies wherever they appear; defend our public services and the funding they need to thrive; and give voice to my constituents of every faith or none and of every colour and creed who refuse to look away from injustice abroad. I will fight for Dewsbury sports centre, Batley baths, GP surgeries, local dentists and the buses, schools, charities and communities that hold our towns together.
Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Dewsbury and Batley (Iqbal Mohamed). I agree with the point he made about representing all our constituents, whether they vote for us or not.
I thank His Majesty for the Gracious Speech earlier, and I place on record my massive appreciation for the speech given by my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford West (Naz Shah). I think Members from all parts of the House would agree that it was a truly inspirational and uplifting speech. Likewise, I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Chris Vince) for his typically amusing but informative speech. May I say just how well he represents the good people of Harlow?
In the last parliamentary Session the Government passed 50 pieces of legislation, including the Employment Rights Act 2025 and the Renters’ Rights Act 2025. We banned no-fault evictions, and brought four rail companies into public ownership. While we were doing all that and introducing much more legislation, we increased the minimum wage above inflation, reduced the number of children in poverty by 450,000, and brought NHS waiting lists down by 500,000. So much has been done, but people would not realise that from reading the papers or listening to the media. Let me just add that we also launched 676 family hubs across England, which are hugely welcome following the loss of the children’s and family centres that we had before.
I welcome the King’s Speech. It recognises the dangerous world in which we live, and the necessity of building security and resilience throughout our lives. I welcome the emphasis on security—economic, national, energy and defence—as well as the reform and renewal of public services: the NHS, the police, justice, immigration systems and, indeed, water. It also proposes long-term investment in housing and to strengthen infrastructure. It mentions 37 Bills that will improve the country in the long term. I was encouraged by the Prime Minister’s announcement about British Steel in Scunthorpe and by the legislation to be introduced for its nationalisation, which shows real ambition on the Government’s part; I hope it is an indication of where we will go in the future.
The Prime Minister referred widely to the status quo today, so perhaps I can start with how I think we got here. Let us first think back to nearly 20 years ago, and the 2008 global financial crash. That was followed by austerity, which I believe was the wrong political decision, and subsequently by the EU referendum; and then, of course, we had the pandemic. All those elements have contributed to a stasis in the UK economy. Let us now think back to what we had in the run-up to 2010, when the economy was beginning to emerge from the global financial crash, before the move to austerity frustrated the nascent growth in our economy. Austerity meant that investment was cut while interest rates were at record lows. Any investor worth his or her salt would have been investing in this country, in infrastructure, when we had interest rates at 0.5%. If I had had the money I would have been investing it, and that is certainly what the Government of the time should have been doing. When we look at the infrastructure today, after 14 years of austerity, we can see the cracks, and they are not just in the roads or the schools and hospitals.
Let me now say something about what happened to the economy following Brexit. UK in a Changing Europe has said:
“By 2025, we estimate that UK GDP per capita was 6-8% lower than it would have been without Brexit. Investment was 12-18% lower, employment 3-4% lower, and productivity 3-4% lower.”
Between 2009-10 and 2024, incomes grew by just 0.5% a year on average, or 7% over the whole 14-year period. Income growth over the 14 years prior to 2009-10 was more than five times as strong, at 38%. We can see the huge loss in real earnings that was suffered by citizens—by our workforce—as a result of austerity and then Brexit. According to the Office for National Statistics, average UK real household income has remained broadly unchanged between 2007 and 2022.
This has left the UK woefully unprepared to deal with the crisis that we face in a more dangerous world. War is raging in Europe and the middle east. The Iran war is forecast to cause a decline in employment of 0.4%, with construction and manufacturing the worst hit. J.P. Morgan has predicted that the price of Brent crude will average $96 per barrel throughout 2026, so there is no respite on the horizon when it comes to oil prices and, of course, the contribution that they make to all our costs, to the cost of living and to the economy.
Despite all that, we saw growth return when the Labour party returned to government in 2024 and through to the beginning of this year, and there was optimism. Consumer confidence was returning and business investment was improving, but then we got hit by the Iran war. Given the constraints of what is going on globally, the Government’s push to build closer relationships with Europe is so important. As I understand it, the legislation that is being proposed will see the introduction of a dynamic alignment mechanism to reduce trade friction and the burdens on business.
As I said, because of Brexit, UK GDP is now 6% to 8% lower than it would have been by last year, and employment and productivity are both around 4% lower. What is essential is that the partnership Bill will aim to reduce costs for businesses, and to increase trade and co-operation, and it will ultimately be better for consumers. Given that the EU accounts for 42% of UK exports, with automotive accounting for £29 billion of exports, the EU is a massive market for my constituency of Warwick and Leamington, which has a very large automotive presence. We have to think about the Bill in the wider sense of partnership through broader legislation, international law and maritime law, but as others have said, we also need to recognise how important some of the proposals are, particularly on the Erasmus programme and the benefits that it will bring to young people.
The energy independence Bill will be important to our resilience. We need to move our economy away from fossil fuel dependency, and setting more ambition on energy infrastructure and generation will improve our resilience. That is important for my constituency, and not just because National Grid is headquartered there and we have a major Siemens Energy operation, although they will clearly be beneficiaries of the ambitions that the Government are setting out on increasing grid capacity and the adoption of clean energy technologies. It is vital that we reduce our dependency and avoid external shocks, as we have seen most recently with the Iran war and over the last four years or so as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That is really important not just for wider society but for businesses, because we have traditionally had such high energy costs.
The Government are looking to introduce a small business protection Bill, which will have a particular emphasis on late payments. I commend the Federation of Small Businesses for the work that it has done for many years on this front. Late payments cost the UK economy £11 billion per year and cause 14,000 businesses to close annually. The introduction of the Bill is fantastic news, and I really welcome it.
I am also impressed by what I am hearing about the SEND reform Bill. I held a roundtable on 5 September last year, where I listened to practitioners and families talking about their lived experiences and what we needed to do. I am encouraged by the proposals, including on the delivery of integrated SEND partnerships and tiered support models. The critical thing is that we should reduce waiting times and improve the quality of service that families currently experience.
I want to talk about the impact of cyber-attacks and cyber-security on businesses, which we have heard about. In the last year, we have seen significant impacts. The attacks on Jaguar Land Rover cost around £2 billion. They hit not just Jaguar Land Rover, but the UK economy. A year ago, Marks & Spencer and the Co-op were hit too. As we have heard, the number of attacks that we are suffering is huge. We are the third most cyber-attacked nation in the world, and the most cyber-attacked in Europe, and it is really important that the Government get to grips with it. The Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy, on which I sit, has identified this as a really important area for the Government to address.
In a similar vein, on defence and security, I welcome the Government’s comments in the King’s Speech. It is vital that we get the defence investment plan. I hope that, through bonds or an investment bank, we can get this plan going and get it the funding it desperately needs. We need to improve our security and increase our spend, but we also need to develop our sovereign capacity, with the fantastic businesses and partnerships that this country offers, with others, in some of the new spheres of defence.
On the Representation of the People Bill, I think the legislation that has been put forward is really encouraging. I have tabled some amendments to it, and I hope that we can create a very comprehensive piece of legislation, because democracy—not just here in the UK, but of course across the world—is under threat. It is really vital that we tighten up the Bill and put in protections to ensure that our democracy, which is a fragile thing, is defended.
I welcome the water reforms that the Government have been talking about. In my constituency, the River Avon and the River Leam are badly polluted as a result of the discharges made by Severn Trent Water. Through some of the proposals being made, including for the new integrated water regulator, I hope we will see such changes and a tightening up of the regulations.
I want to talk about the Leasehold and Commonhold Reform Bill. I understand that the expected provisions will cap ground rents at £250, reform the commonhold system and bring an end to forfeiture. This is so important because, on so many of the new estates built in recent years, so many residents are angry about what they have been mis-sold, as they see it, in buying those new properties.
More widely, on digital ID, I disagree with the hon. Member for Dewsbury and Batley (Iqbal Mohamed). We should seize this huge opportunity, as so many other nations have done, because of the advantages that digital ID is bringing. Ultimately, it has to be a good thing. The Northern Powerhouse Rail Bill is so important for rebalancing our country. Yes, the tourist tax is a good thing, but I hope the Government will also look at introducing a VAT break for tourists in this country, because at the moment we are losing tourists to other countries where they do get VAT breaks, and that is impacting on our tourism sector. I welcome the ban on conversion therapy practices and the private hire legislation being considered.
As the Prime Minister said earlier, UK economy and society have not been adequately prepared and are not resilient enough. We cannot continue with the status quo. We have to reform our systems and structures. We need to address reform in the NHS, and in our energy systems and water utility infrastructure. We must also hold the cost of living as the fundamentally central issue of the time, because that is what is really hurting so many of our residents, but also our businesses.
Last week’s elections really showed that there is impatience across the country—people believe that the system is not working for them—and we need to show greater urgency in the work being done. Once more, we are in yet another global economic and political crisis, after so many of them, as I illustrated earlier in my speech. We have two wars, but we have the social and security challenges more widely, so we have to seize the moment. We have to demand boldness of the Government and a more radical approach if we are indeed to build a better society, and I stress that we must do so as a matter of urgency.
Dr Roz Savage (South Cotswolds) (LD)
It is a great honour to speak in this debate. I add my voice to the many voices of appreciation from across the House for the two magnificent speeches from the hon. Members for Bradford West (Naz Shah) and for Harlow (Chris Vince), which were inspiring, moving and entertaining.
There is much to reflect on in the King’s Speech. There are 37 Bills, many of which have been amply covered by colleagues across the House. Of course, the King’s Speech is not truly the King’s Speech; it is the Government’s speech that His Majesty the King has the great joy, I am sure, of reading out in the other place. I would like to pick up on a matter that was not actually in the speech. Far be it from me to presume to guess what His Majesty might have wished to add to it, but having had the privilege of visiting his beautiful gardens at Highgrove House in my constituency on numerous occasions—sadly, not as a guest of their Majesties, but as a paying punter on a guided tour—I would like to think that His Majesty might have chosen to mention nature, which was not mentioned at all in the speech. Nature is a subject dear to my heart, as it is to those of my constituents, including the many farmers who farm in South Cotswolds.
We have talked about many different aspects of security today, but I would like to connect nature to security. The fourth sentence of the King’s Speech was:
“My Ministers will take decisions that protect the energy, defence and economic security of the United Kingdom for the long-term.”
In my view, those decisions absolutely have to factor-in nature. Natural security is an essential part of our national security. At the beginning of this year, the Government published a national security assessment on biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse. It was not written by campaigners or charities, and certainly not by the Green party; it was written by the intelligence community using the same analytical frameworks that it applies to terrorism and state threats. Its conclusion was absolutely unambiguous: global ecosystem degradation threatens UK national security and future prosperity. Crop failures, intensified natural disasters, infectious disease outbreaks, geopolitical competition for food and water—these are the inevitable consequences that the assessment identifies will happen if we continue on our current trajectory.
Jim Shannon
I thank the hon. Lady for her contribution. Does she not agree that it is only fair that we should record David Attenborough’s 100th birthday? He epitomises the very person we would like to see and the world he wishes to preserve. Does she, along with me and others in this House, wish him well on his 100th birthday?
Dr Savage
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. We must be telepathic, because my very next paragraph is as follows.
Five days ago, Sir David Attenborough celebrated his 100th birthday, and I am sure that colleagues would like to join me in wishing Sir David the warmest congratulations on his long, wonderful and highly influential life. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] He has spent much of his century on this planet showing us what the natural world looks like, but in the course of that long lifetime the UK has become one of the most nature-depleted countries on earth. I am sure the House has heard these facts before, but I remind Members that we have lost 38 million birds in the past 50 years; wildlife abundance has fallen by a third since 1970; we have lost 93% of our wild flower meadows; and only 15% of our rivers are in good ecological health. I am sure that those statistics cause Sir David great distress and anxiety, yet we continue to treat nature as though it were expendable.
I would like to pick up on some aspects of nature that are particularly worthy of our attention. Rivers are the lifeblood of our natural world, yet too many of them are in an appalling state. I commend the clean water Bill mentioned in the King’s Speech, which is a good start, but it does not address the underlying problem. Water is a vital public good that should not be owned and operated primarily in the interests of shareholders, many of whom are based overseas, extracting returns from an essential service while communities downstream live with the polluted consequences.
It is promising to see reforms coming down the pipeline, so to speak, that would see Ofwat replaced—something the Liberal Democrats have been calling for since 2022. However, my constituents need to see that legislation enforced more rigorously. South Cotswolds is the ninth most polluted constituency in the country, so my constituents want real transparency on what is being discharged and when—not just for how many hours, but in what volumes. They deserve bathing water designation for the sites that they have swum in for generations, and a Government who are willing to ask the deeper question: is the ownership model fit for purpose? The Government have to get upstream of the problem and ask whether profit-making monopolies, focused on short-term gains, can ever serve the long-term greater good of customers and nature.
On energy security, instability in the middle east, gas price volatility and the direct hit on household bills demonstrate why home-grown renewables are the right choice for the climate while also paying a security and peace dividend. However, I would like to see the public brought with us on the transition, not pushed away. In my constituency, a huge solar farm has been proposed that would industrialise thousands of acres of farmland.
I absolutely support renewable energy—I have spent decades campaigning for climate action—but the transition works best when communities have ownership and agency. I would like the Government to address the barriers facing community groups that want to supply local customers directly. Liberal Democrats believe that communities should be able to generate clean energy, sell it to local households and keep the benefits locally.
Food security is national security. To quote again from the Joint Intelligence Committee report:
“Without significant increases in the UK food system and supply chain resilience, it is unlikely the UK would be able to maintain food security if ecosystem collapse drives geopolitical competition for food.”
Let that sink in for a minute. We are talking about the very real prospect of food and water shortages, not just in other countries but right here, if we carry on with the current trajectory.
What is to be done? Farmers are facing a tough time at the moment. Energy costs have risen sharply, fertiliser prices remain volatile, and rural crime is a growing burden. The abrupt cap and closure of the sustainable farming incentive was a decision that pulled the rug out from under farmers who had been planning to enter the scheme, with small-scale family farms being the hardest hit. That matters far beyond the farm gate.
Around 70% of the UK’s land is under the stewardship of farmers. If we want cleaner rivers, healthier soils and more pollinators, then farmers need reliable and well-funded support for environmental stewardship into the future. Disrupting that support harms not just farms but the rest of us. I would like to hear about a good food Bill. Food is essential and we need to secure its future.
The national security assessment is explicit that ecosystem collapse is potentially irreversible; once those habitats are destroyed, they cannot be recreated with an offset calculation on a spreadsheet. Degraded ancient meadows and woodlands, fragmented hedgerows and lost wetlands and peatlands cannot simply be replaced elsewhere. We will pay the cost of their losses for generations.
Ms Julie Minns (Carlisle) (Lab)
I agree with much of what the hon. Lady is saying, but I would like to highlight a little glimmer of hope. Last week I visited RSPB Geltsdale in my constituency, which has successfully rewiggled and restored an ancient landscape—it is wonderful to see it blooming. Does she agree that while it is difficult, it is not impossible to reverse many of the changes to our rural landscapes?
Dr Savage
Absolutely. Nature is very resilient; when we leave her alone, or give her a bit of a helping hand by rewiggling rivers, for example, or through rewilding projects, she does come back. We just need to stop pummelling nature from every direction with chemicals, and in the many other ways that we assault the world of nature.
There is a word that the Government’s national security assessment uses repeatedly: cascade. Ecosystem degradation creates cascading risks. Water insecurity leads to food insecurity, which leads to geopolitical instability, which leads to conflict and, yes, even immigration—the risks compound. However, the same logic can be applied in reverse. Investment in nature creates cascading benefits. Healthier rivers mean healthier soils, and healthier soils support pollinators; pollinators, in turn, support food production. Thriving ecosystems buffer communities against flooding and drought. This is not just idealism; it is the conclusion of the Government’s own intelligence analysts.
My asks of this Government are simple: restore proper funding for sustainable farming, bring in a good food Bill, and deliver a right to local supply for community energy. On the international stage, I ask them to implement the long-promised measures under the Environment Act 2021 to remove deforestation-linked products, such as unsustainable palm oil, from our UK supply chains. Britain signed international commitments to halt forest loss by 2030, and those promises now need action; 2030 is just around the corner.
My constituents are not asking for miracles, but they are asking for urgent and radical action to protect nature. They are asking for rivers that are safe to swim in, farmland that can feed us, landscapes that function and communities that are resilient in the face of a more uncertain world, all of which is eminently doable with political will. The cost of inaction will far outweigh the cost of action; nature is the foundation on which our present and future security, prosperity and wellbeing ultimately rest. It would be a fitting gift, on the occasion of Sir David’s 100th birthday, to hear that the Government had found the political will to do what is necessary for our national security, and for the security of future generations.
Ordered, That the debate be now adjourned.—(Deirdre Costigan.)
Debate to be resumed tomorrow.
New Developments: Unadopted Roads and Public Amenities
(2 days, 12 hours ago)
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Alistair Strathern (Hitchin) (Lab)
I know that pulses have been racing all day in Westminster, but the moment is finally here: we come to tonight’s Adjournment debate on unadopted housing estates. The House may not be quite as packed as the other House was for the speech His Majesty gave earlier, but I think we have some of the best of the bunch of hon. Members from right across the Chamber here, including my constituency neighbour, the hon. Member for North Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller). Protocol prevents him from intervening today, but I know that he has been dealing with a lot of these issues in his constituency, too.
I am very proud to be standing here as a member of a party that is committed to taking on so many of the big structural housing challenges facing communities right across the UK. We are committed to tackling the undersupply of homes, breaking down the barriers to better protection for renters, and doing more to liberate leaseholders from the feudal system that they are trapped in. It is really important that we meet the mark on unadopted estates—the topic of this debate—even if the issue does not always catch the same headlines as those other issues. The problem has been growing and growing. It arises when housing developers and local authorities fail to ensure that adequate measures are taken to adopt the roads and public amenities on new-build estates, which are being built across the country and have been over recent decades. It used to be typical that 5% to 10% of housing stock would be subject to this issue, having perhaps been marketed as a premium product, but recent research from the Home Builders Federation shows that over the last three years, 90% of estates were not adopted. What had been a marginal part of the system has, as a result of local authority cuts and developers sometimes looking to profiteer off the back of their new homeowners, become a much more endemic problem.
That is an issue for so many reasons. First and foremost, it means that those new homeowners—90% of new homeowners on estates built over the least three years—are essentially paying a new-home stealth tax. They are on the hook to estate management companies. They often pay hundreds of pounds in maintenance fees for services that other residents would receive by paying their council tax alone.
Noah Law (St Austell and Newquay) (Lab)
I am sure that residents in Gwallon Keas in my constituency are incredibly grateful to my hon. Friend for securing this debate, as am I. Does he agree that this is not just taxation by stealth, but an unsung privatisation by stealth of our public realm in recent decades? Does he, as I do, welcome the Minister’s recent commitment to working to reverse this terrible trend?
Alistair Strathern
Absolutely; this is a stealth tax, but the issue is far wider than that, as I will explain. I look forward to the Government’s work to address it in a root-and-branch manner.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I commend the hon. Member on bringing this debate forward. What he is explaining happens round my way regularly. It is a scandal when hard-working people put all their life savings into a new-build home and then find that the estate’s roads are not even completed. The Department for Infrastructure back home is unwilling to take over the work, so the only way forward is through maintenance fees, and they rise every year. Does the hon. Member agree that the Government and the Minister, who is always very responsive to our requests, should bring forward clear guidance, for all the regions of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, that maintenance fees must be kept to the bare minimum?
Alistair Strathern
Absolutely. The situation that the hon. Member highlights is far too common across every part of the United Kingdom. It is really important that the Government drive forward an ambitious solution that tackles all the issues that he has set out.
Homeowners on average pay £350 in maintenance fees. That is a significant sum of money, on top of their council tax bill, and fees often run to much more than that. I have had correspondence from residents who have been paying close to £1,000 in fees. That is exacerbated by the fact that the relationship with the management companies is often structured in a way that inflates the costs that have to be paid. We have heard examples of constituents having to pay up to £200 simply to have a lightbulb fixed on a street lamp, and some estates have been subdivided to the point where the biggest part of their bill each year is simply for having the accounts audited of a management company to which they do not want to be on the hook. They are being hit in the wallet, week in, week out, by fees that simply cannot be justified by the quality of the service that they are receiving. That is making them poorer not just in their wallet, but in their pride of place. This lack of accountability is not just inflating costs but leading to very poor service.
Ms Julie Minns (Carlisle) (Lab)
My hon. Friend touches on a key point that a group of residents of Moorside Drive in my constituency have recently spoken to me about. For well over a year, they have been trying to get the developer Gleeson to take responsibility for completing the resurfacing of a road on their new housing estate, and for maintaining the green spaces. Does he agree that we have to get this right, and bring developers like Gleeson to heel, so that they make investments and do the works to improve the quality of life of residents on these estates?
Alistair Strathern
My hon. Friend is spot on in highlighting that Gleeson and many other developers right across the country are not fulfilling their crucial obligations, and new homeowners are being failed as a result. We owe them a duty of action over the coming years. Alongside the big challenges on quality of service, I have seen estates where the public realm has fallen into complete disrepair, roads are riddled with potholes, and playgrounds are unsafe and very poorly maintained.
Helena Dollimore (Hastings and Rye) (Lab/Co-op)
My hon. Friend raises the issue of the facilities on new housing estates, and playgrounds in particular. One of the new estates in my constituency, the Ashdown House development, has been developed by Chartway homes and funded by Legal & General. A playground was promised as part of the development, as was a community centre, but they have not been delivered, to the shock of residents. Eight-year-old Gia came to my playground drop-in session to tell me about this, and to show me in her notebook—with a cat on the front—the many residents’ signatures she had collected to urge the developer to live up to its commitments. Does my hon. Friend agree that not only must the developers live up to their commitments, but the planning enforcement teams at Hastings borough council need to enforce the provision of services that developers have agreed to provide?
Alistair Strathern
My hon. Friend is spot on. We should not tolerate the shirking of any responsibility by developers, but sadly that happens all too often on developments throughout the country, including in her constituency, and if developers fall short, we need councils to step up, meet their obligations and drag developers into delivering the valued community assets that new communities are desperately crying out for.
As well as there being poor service levels, important moments in homeowners’ lives can be put at jeopardy. A number of my constituents’ house sales have nearly fallen through—in one case the sale fell through completely —because of management companies’ failure to provide management packs in a timely fashion. That dragged out the process and made the already quite stressful buying of a new home even more difficult for far too many homeowners. We have to act. This is exactly the type of example of rip-off Britain—of unaccountable agencies and poor regulatory failures—that the Government have made it their mission to correct. I look forward to working with the Government to ensure that we deliver.
David Reed (Exmouth and Exeter East) (Con)
I thank the hon. Gentleman for bringing this important topic to the Chamber. We have had a great deal of development in my constituency, and we are seeing these issues play out in places like Cranbrook, Pinhoe and Lympstone. In Cranbrook, no grit bins were provided during the cold weather at the end of last year because the roads were unadopted. Local councillors were sloping their shoulders and the developers would not do anything. Local people were falling over and injuring themselves. In more extreme cases—this has been alluded to already, but I will not name the developments—people have not been able to sell their houses because the utility companies, councils and local people cannot agree on where things need to go. What more can be done to make the various groups accountable? What in today’s King’s Speech does the hon. Gentleman think will drive legislative changes to improve the situation?
Alistair Strathern
The hon. Gentleman brings me seamlessly to my next point, which is what we can do about the matter. I introduced a ten-minute rule Bill in the previous Session, and I am glad to see that the Government are now consulting on two really important parts of it. The first relates to bringing forward recommendations from the Competition and Markets Authority’s 2024 report in respect of how we can stop estates becoming unadopted at source. It will not be easy to do—it is a thorny process—but it is imperative that as we build the homes that the country needs, we do not allow the problem to grow further, because it will always be harder to unpick retrospectively.
Secondly, we need to make sure that as we bring forward important protections to protect leaseholders from rip-off management companies, we extend the same protections to those on freeholder estates. That will not guarantee magic service overnight, but it will mean that freeholders have much more recourse when things go wrong. Those two ideas are the subject of consultation, and I look forward to working with the Minister to ensure that they are implemented as quickly and robustly as possible.
There is more that we can do. In introducing my private Member’s Bill, I alluded to the imperative to think about how we could introduce a stronger right for freeholders to manage their estates. I know that many of them do not want to be the ultimate managers of their estate—they want their estate to be adopted, and we need to work towards mechanisms to deliver that—but, in the meantime, such a power would give them far greater agency in trying to drag the marketplace to a point of better performance. It would put them in the driving seat, so that they can far more easily kick out managing agents who are not performing, and ensure they have far greater control over what happens on their estate.
As has been alluded to, we owe it to homeowners on legacy estates to start the thorny work of thinking about how we can best equip councils and developers, where needed, to fix the problems that remain on their estates so that they can progress towards adoption. It will not be easy. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, because, frustratingly, the legal agreements are so different from estate to estate. However, we owe it to those on estates that have been left abandoned for far too long by developers—and, at times, by local authorities—to work with them, to do that thorny legwork, and to think about what solutions could be possible.
Alongside those issues of fleecehold estates more generally, I want to spend one minute talking about a road in my constituency that will be known to pretty much anyone who lives near it, because it exemplifies some of the problems of unadopted and ownerless assets. It is Old Bridge Way in Shefford, the town I live in. Old Bridge Way is a private road built through the middle of the town. It is the only route people can take to our main supermarket in the area, Morrisons. As the town has grown over time, with planning consent as planned out by Central Bedfordshire council, that road, far from being a slight, small private road for an industrial estate, has become a major thoroughfare through the town—the main access point, as I say, to the supermarket, and used by buses and residents alike.
However, Old Bridge Way has never been adopted. As a result, despite collecting thousands and thousands of pounds in property fees from the adjoining properties, that landowner was not doing their duty to maintain it. Worse than that, the landowner got bored of doing their duty and decided to shirk it, instead transferring it to a separate company—with some similarly named directors, we might note—liquidating that company and evading that responsibility altogether, chucking it back to the Crown Estate to do what it could with it. That is the very definition of the lack of accountability that so many of my constituents are deeply fed up with—and without any mechanism for recourse, the problem will only get worse.
I was delighted to be able to pull together nearly 100 residents for a protest, closing down Old Bridge Way last year, to highlight to Central Bedfordshire council that we need the council, as the highways authority, to step up and play its role in providing a solution. I hope to be able to work both with the Minister and with Ministers in the Department for Transport on the long-term solutions we can put in place to tackle such issues. I am aware that, as awful as that road is, my constituency is not the only one across the country to have been blighted by such a terrible evasion of responsibility.
Leigh Ingham (Stafford) (Lab)
I thank my genuinely honourable Friend the Member for Hitchin (Alistair Strathern), for securing this debate. He has been a tireless campaigner for leaseholders as long as I have known him.
Having a safe, well-maintained neighbourhood and a home to call your own should be in reach for everyone, which is why I have backed this Government’s mission to build more homes, albeit the right homes in the right places and with the right infrastructure. It is the job of government to give families, couples and individuals their homes, and it is one that I am proud to support. My first home was on a new build estate, like many of the ones we are talking about, and it meant the world to me to get my foot on the property ladder. I was proud and I felt as though I had really achieved a dream. But living on an unadopted new build estate, as I did, the reality was very different from what I had pictured.
The nature of unadopted estates means that residents are paying for a service that many people get through their council tax, meaning that simple maintenance is often just not done. It can result in unsafe paths, roads and parks. I have one constituent at Sancerre Grange in Eccleshall who uses a wheelchair. The footpaths on the estate were so badly maintained and uneven that she fell and was unable to move for 20 minutes until a passer-by found her. She now has to pay for taxis to get to and from appointments that she should be able to reach independently. That is a basic failure of accessibility, and it should not be happening in 2026. On The Crossings, residents have been waiting nearly 20 years for their roads to be adopted, which tells us everything about how slowly this system is working. We must take action now to fix the historical problems and give those families the safe neighbourhoods that they deserve.
I am proud to support this Government’s draft Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill, which is a huge step forward for homeowners and shows real progress in fixing an outdated system. I support my hon. Friend’s ten-minute rule Bill—the things it would deliver sound excellent—but I also ask the Ministers what more the Government can do to protect those in fleecehold situations and to make sure that their roads, paths and parks are safe and fit for purpose.
The Minister for Housing and Planning (Matthew Pennycook)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin (Alistair Strathern) on securing this important debate. He is an incredibly hard-working and effective advocate for the interests of his constituency, and he has long championed action to address unadopted amenities on privately managed housing estates. I warmly commend him for his ongoing efforts to secure a fair deal for homeowners living on freehold estates in his constituency and across the rest of England. I also thank my hon. Friends the Members for Carlisle (Ms Minns) and for Hastings and Rye (Helena Dollimore), and the hon. Member for Exmouth and Exeter East (David Reed), for their interventions in the debate, and my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Leigh Ingham) for sharing the experiences, which are clearly unacceptable, of residents on developments in her constituency.
Whether it be roads, street lighting, or sewers and drains, homeowners rightly expect that public amenities on new housing estates should be built to an acceptable standard that enables them, in due course, to be adopted by the local authority or other relevant body. Yet, for far too many homeowners, the experience of living on a newly developed housing estate has been tainted by the hidden and enduring consequences of unadopted infrastructure.
Unadopted roads and private estate amenities are not, in and of themselves, new, as my hon. Friend mentioned. What has changed is their prevalence and the impact of private estate management arrangements on homeowners. Roads, sewers, drains, green spaces and other amenities that historically would have been maintained by the local authority or utility companies are instead now routinely left to be managed by private estate management companies, often with little transparency or accountability. In many cases, the quality of the amenities on such freehold estates is inferior to those adopted by the relevant public authority, and falls far short of what people have a right to expect. Residential freeholders across the country frequently report open spaces not fit for purpose, roads left unsurfaced and drainage systems that are often little more than open ditches. These issues blight people’s lives and, with few of the rights to redress found in other markets and no ability to control the management of the estates on which they live, residents feel that they are being treated as second-class homeowners.
The Competition and Markets Authority, which has been mentioned, published a house building market study in 2024 that identified significant consumer detriment arising from the private management of unadopted public amenities on housing estates, and concluded that without Government intervention, this consumer detriment was likely to increase. This Government believe that homeowners living on freehold estates deserve a fair deal. That is why we pledged in our manifesto to act to bring the injustice of fleecehold private housing estates and unfair maintenance costs to an end. Our objective is clear: we are determined to reduce the prevalence of private estate management arrangements, which are the root cause of the problems experienced by many residential freeholders, and we also want to provide those who currently live on privately managed estates with greater rights and protections, so that the fees they pay are fair, transparent and robustly justified.
As my hon. Friend is fully aware, the Government are taking action to deliver on their manifesto commitments in this area. He rightly referenced the two comprehensive consultations that we launched on 18 December last year, both of which closed on 12 March. I do not intend to summarise the contents of those two quite lengthy consultations—I know that hon. Members have been engaging with them—but in simple terms, they sought views on how best to implement the new consumer protections for homeowners on freehold estates contained in the last Government’s Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024, and on the ways in which we might reduce the prevalence of privately managed estates over the coming years. We are currently analysing the many responses received, with a view to setting out next steps in due course.
I am clear that our approach must be balanced. Homeowners must be protected. They should know before they buy whether the public amenities they will rely on will be adopted, and what that means for service standards and costs. Local authorities operating under significant pressures must have confidence that adoption is safe and sustainable and provides value for money. In turn, highways authorities and drainage bodies must know that any infrastructure and amenities offered for adoption meet proper standards and are durable.
David Reed
Like many other Members, I am exhausted by dealing with the Liberal Democrats on East Devon district council and Devon county council. They seem completely unaccountable, so can I ask the Ministers directly what can be done to make local government more accountable for the adoptions of roads?
Matthew Pennycook
I would refer the hon. Gentleman in the first instance to that CMA house building report, which says very clearly that a twin-track approach is needed. We need common adoptable standards. Only at the point that we have common standards can we force local authorities to adopt. I understand, as I know many hon. Members do, the dilemma that local authorities can face when they have substandard amenities and are asked to adopt them and incur all the costs of bringing them up to the necessary standard, as well as the cost of their ongoing maintenance.
Jim Shannon
The Minister probably know what my question is going to be before I have even asked it: will he share his ideas and his conclusions on the way forward with the relevant Minister back home? If the Minister has a way of doing it better, we need to know it as well.
Matthew Pennycook
I will happily direct my counterpart in Northern Ireland to the Government’s response when we publish it in due course, having analysed those two consultations.
Where private arrangements exist, they must be transparent and properly regulated. If residents are expected to pay for services, they must be able to see and scrutinise what they are paying for and to access effective routes to redress. We must, of course, ensure that any reforms taken forward work in practise across different types of development and support effective long-term stewardship. But we also have to avoid unintended consequences—for example, implementing measures that would reduce overall housing delivery or that simply shift costs in ways that do not ultimately benefit homeowners.
Alongside the consultations I have referenced, we are bringing forward measures to help those on existing unadopted housing estates, including the removal of draconian enforcement practices that can cause real anxiety for homeowners. Through the Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill, which was published in draft in January and is obviously mentioned in substantive terms in the King’s Speech today, we intend to repeal sections 121 and 122 of the Law of Property Act 1925— a 100-year-old law—in order to bring arrears collection into the modern era.
The Bill also strengthens safeguards around enforcement, including requiring notice before enforcement action can commence. We are acting to ensure that enforcement mechanisms are fair and proportionate, and that people are not faced with undue threats or escalating penalties in relation to their home. In addition, we are sponsoring a Law Commission project to consider longer-term legal frameworks so that residents could be given greater control over the management of their estates. I really do think—alongside the consumer protections that are the short-term answer to some of those unfair charges being levelled, and looking at how, in the long term, we end the prevalence of these arrangements—that control is the vital third leg of that stool, giving residents in such situations control. I know that is what the private Member’s Bill of my hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin seeks to address.
We are also considering what further steps we can take to strengthen the regulation of property agents because the quality and conduct of the managing agent can make a profound difference to residents’ experience, particularly in respect of communication, responsiveness and the handling of disputes.
This issue also engages the responsibilities of other Departments, including the Department for Transport and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Residents do not experience these matters in departmental silos. A road that is not adopted affects safety and accessibility; poorly managed drainage affects flood risk and local environmental quality; and under-maintained public spaces affect community wellbeing and pride in place.
Concerning roads specifically, alongside our consultation, the Department for Transport has commissioned independent research by Ipsos UK into the barriers to road adoption. This will help to ensure that we have a clearer evidence base about what is preventing adoption in practice, whether it be issues of technical standards, inspection and certification processes, funding and commuted sums, long-term liability, or the interaction between planning consents and highways agreements.
That work will help inform my Department’s thinking about next steps, including how we can support local highways authorities and ensure that the system encourages timely adoption where that is the appropriate outcome. In parallel, a Future Homes Hub project is under way that is helping my Department to engage with industry, local government and others on quality, standards and delivery. Ensuring that new estates come with well-designed, durable and maintainable infrastructure is an integral part of building the high-quality places that communities expect.
Before I conclude, I want to briefly mention transparency. It is important to recognise that this debate is not one only about one type of amenity; it is about the whole public realm on new estates—as has been mentioned, the play areas, open spaces, water features, attenuation ponds, sustainable drainage, street lighting, verges, footpaths and the smaller pieces of infrastructure that, taken together, determine whether a development feels like a coherent community. When those amenities are not properly completed, or when their long-term upkeep is not clearly and fairly arranged, residents can feel that the place they were promised has not been delivered. That is why transparency at the point of sale matters so much.
People are making the biggest financial commitment of their lives in most cases. They should be able to understand in plain terms what is intended to be adopted, what will remain private, what services will be provided, how charges will be set, what protections exist if standards slip and what happens if the original developer is no longer on the scene. Certainty and predictability are not luxuries—they are essential.
We know some that private management arrangements can work well, particularly where there is a clear resident-focused governance model and robust oversight, but where such arrangements are used, it is vital that residents are not left exposed to opaque fees, poor service or enforcement measures that feel disproportionate. That is precisely why our reform programme spans both the prevention of poor outcomes, by reducing the creation of problematic unadopted estates, and the strengthening of protections and accountability where those arrangements remain.
In conclusion, the Government recognise the strength of feeling on this issue, and the very real impact that current practice is having on homeowners. We are acting through the two consultations that concluded in March, the draft Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill, the implementation of the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024, our sponsorship of the Law Commission’s project, which I just mentioned, and our ongoing efforts to strengthen the regulation of property agents. I look forward to continuing to engage with my hon. Friend and other hon. Members from across the House as this work progresses, so that we can deliver a system that is clearer for consumers, fairer in practice, and better at ensuring that the places we build come with the adopted, well maintained amenities that residents rightly expect.
Question put and agreed to.