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Home-to-School Transport
(1 week ago)
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Westminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
Each debate is chaired by an MP from the Panel of Chairs, rather than the Speaker or Deputy Speaker. A Government Minister will give the final speech, and no votes may be called on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Tom Gordon (Harrogate and Knaresborough) (LD)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered home-to-school transport.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Twigg, and I am grateful for having secured this important debate. At its core, home-to-school transport is a simple promise: where a child cannot reasonably walk to school, transport will not be a barrier to their education. However, that promise is under serious strain.
Across the country, and acutely in North Yorkshire, families are finding that promise being broken by policy changes that are short-sighted, poorly designed and, in many cases, deeply unfair. The national picture is stark; the Public Accounts Committee published its report on home-to-school transport in March, and its conclusions make for uncomfortable reading.
Rachel Gilmour (Tiverton and Minehead) (LD)
I serve on the Public Accounts Committee, and I was the spokesperson for that report when it went to the media. The report dealt specifically with the education of those with special educational needs and disabilities, and it became very clear that there is a complete drop-off at age 16, meaning that many young adults aged 16 to 19 cannot get to school. The other point I would like to make is that, in rural constituencies like my own, the local special school is not a mile down the road, so it can mean a two-hour round journey.
Tom Gordon
I thank my hon. Friend for her diligent work as a member of the PAC, and for making that point about SEND, which I will come on to during my speech.
Local authorities in England spent £2.6 billion on home-to-school transport in 2024-25, which was a real-terms increase of 70% since 2015-16. SEND transport alone more than doubled in cost over that same period, and it now accounts for £2 billion of that total. These are enormous sums, but remarkably, the PAC found that the Department for Education does not know whether this spending is achieving value for money. It does not have the data needed to oversee the system effectively, and it cannot adequately measure the relationship between transport and school attendance.
The consequences of that failure are visible in other figures: some 1 million young people in the UK are not in education, employment or training, and one in five children of compulsory school age misses at least a day of school per fortnight, which rises to one in three at sixth-form age. The Department’s own assessment looks only at transport disruptions on the day they occur, not the wider issue of whether the system is keeping children in school. This is a serious blind spot, and one that the Government need to address.
This is not just a North Yorkshire problem; the County Councils Network has warned that three quarters of councils are expected to tighten mainstream transport eligibility in the coming years. What is happening in my constituency today, and across North Yorkshire, is a preview of what families across rural England will face if this direction of travel is not reversed. Nowhere is the picture more stark than in some of the stories that my constituents have told me, which is why I secured this debate today.
At the heart of the problem is a growing disconnect between two systems that are supposed to work together but increasingly do not. We have a school admissions system built around catchment areas and feeder school relationships, and a home-to-school transport framework that has been interpreted ever more narrowly as being for the “nearest school only”.
For many years, county councils bridged that gap pragmatically by offering transport to the nearest or catchment school. That reflects the realities of rural England, where many children live well beyond walking distance, where public transport is sparse or often non-existent, and where the geography means that the nearest school on the map is often not the most practical school to reach—sometimes there is a dale in the way, sometimes a river crossing, and sometimes a simple county boundary that bears no relation to how communities actually function.
As budgets tighten and authorities retreat towards the statutory minimum provision, councils are removing catchment transport and reverting to nearest school only. In rural areas like North Yorkshire, the consequences are severe and they are being felt right now. Within days of being elected, the issue of home-to-school transport was landing in my email inbox, and it has not stopped since. North Yorkshire council changed its transport policy to base eligibility on nearest school only, rather than the nearest or catchment school. The council says this is to address rising costs, which are now expected to exceed £52 million—one of the three largest areas of the council’s expenditure—with unsubstantiated claims of savings of up to £3 million over the next seven years.
I understand budgetary pressures, and I understand that local authorities are being squeezed from every direction, but understanding a pressure does not simply mean accepting the response to it uncritically, when the policy is clearly not working. The system that North Yorkshire council uses to calculate the nearest school is not publicly available, so families receive decisions with no ability to interrogate the methodology behind them. That opacity alone is a problem, but when we look at what the methodology is actually producing, it becomes something worse than opaque; it becomes absurd.
The council measures distance using the shortest available walked route to school, which sounds reasonable until we look at what counts as a “walked route”. That includes riverside paths, farm tracks, roads with no pavements or street lights, cliffside grass tracks and hiking paths over the dales. Campaigners have discovered that the council’s mapping tool has even been thought to include a private farm track and a ford crossing of a river as an available walking route to school. In reality, the ford is passable only by tractor and the track is on private land. One family appealed successfully against the use of the route, but it remains on the council’s mapping system, ready to be used again.
The School Transport Action Group has documented routes that children have been expected to follow, including climbing over metal barriers on the A64 and using paths that cross an active military firing range. I am interested to hear the Minister’s view of whether any of those constitute a “nearest available walked route”, in North Yorkshire council’s words. STAG, which was formed to fight the changes, has done determined and important work in documenting the human and financial cost of the policy. I pay particular tribute to Jo Foster, whose campaigning on the issue has been tireless and has helped bring the national attention that it warrants. STAG puts the situation plainly:
“North Yorkshire Council has lost the plot on home to school transport”,
and I am inclined to agree. More than 1,000 families have been affected, with more than 200 appeals and 20 ombudsman cases in the past year alone. A senior councillor who voted for this very policy has publicly admitted that it contains errors, and some families have been left as losers. This is not a rounding error; it is a clear policy failure.
STAG has completed a survey of families going through the process right now, the class of 2026. The group has 60 responses so far, and the findings are telling: nearly 59% applied to a school because it was their catchment school, more than a third already had siblings there, and 84% live in towns and villages that have a school bus going to their chosen catchment school, yet 73% will not be eligible for free transport. Nearly two thirds of those families have no back-up plan at all.
Some have told STAG what their options look like in practice. One parent said:
“My back-up plan is to leave my job so I can drive my child to school.”
Another said:
“We would have to consider driving, but we both travel with work and it wouldn’t allow us to do our current jobs.”
A single parent wrote:
“I would not be able to work. I am a single parent household.”
One parent captured the particular absurdity of sibling cases:
“I shall have to take extra overtime at work in order to pay for my second child to sit on a bus that my eldest child is already on.”
Those families who plan to buy a paid-for bus pass face a further cruelty. Those passes will not be confirmed until August. They will be subject to availability and can be withdrawn with one week’s notice. The council has made it clear that its intention is to phase out catchment routes entirely, as soon as possible. Families are therefore being asked to plan their working lives around a service that may not exist by the time that their child starts secondary school.
Those are not edge cases; they are predictable, documented consequences of a policy that has stripped the transport system away from the admissions system it is supposed to support. The costs have not disappeared; they have simply been transferred from the council to the rural families who can least afford them. Council officers have described the changes as ensuring “fairness and consistency”, but I will put some individual stories on the record and let Members judge that for themselves.
Leanne lives in a village outside Harrogate. Her daughter has been waiting three and a half years for a diagnosis, but is on the SEN register and has a PDA—pathological demand avoidance—profile with emotional-based school avoidance. There is no public bus through her village and no safe walking route. Leanne’s other child has Down’s syndrome and an education, health and care plan, and cannot travel to school safely alone. Both children need to be at school at the same time; Leanne and her husband both work full time. Under the new policy, they have been denied free transport to the nearest suitable school and are now paying £94 a month for a bus permit. She told me:
“The system is broken and does not take into account personal circumstances or rural villages’ needs.”
I agree with her entirely.
David lives in Upper Wharfedale. Every morning he drives in convoy with his neighbours, following the school bus past his house, because his neighbours qualified under the old policy, but he did not. For him, the bus goes to the nearest primary school, the only school that anyone in the local area has attended for 60 years, along the only safe route available. North Yorkshire council, however, is now saying that his children’s nearest school is Hawes, in Wensleydale. To get there, they would have to cross Fleet Moss, one of the highest and most remote routes in the country, which is treacherous in winter and frequently impassable. David and his family moved to the dales five years ago to run a farm diversification scheme, but they would never have come had this policy been in place then. He has told me that it will be
“the death of these communities, and that’s not hyperbole.”
I believe him.
Sophie, a friend I went to high school and college with, lives in one of the villages straddling multiple local authority boundaries, with a Doncaster postcode, North Yorkshire council oversight, an East Yorkshire postal address and a West Yorkshire phone number. Her children’s primary school cohort has been scattered across four secondary schools, in different local authorities and in four different directions. She made the point with her characteristic directness: it cannot possibly be more cost-effective to fund transport to four separate schools in four different directions than it would be to fund one bus to one school. The policy is not just unfair to families, but undermining the purpose that it is meant to be achieving.
There is also a wider consequence that is often not discussed. One in four small primary schools in North Yorkshire stands to lose pupils because of this policy. Small secondary schools in Settle, Whitby and Boroughbridge face an existential threat. When we hollow out the transport routes that sustain these schools, we do not just inconvenience rural families, but undermine the schools themselves and the rural communities they serve.
I also want to raise the issue facing SEND families specifically, and the additional injustice of a cliff edge at 16. I want to tell this Chamber about Noah, whose mother Catherine has shared his story with me. Noah deferred starting primary school by a year because he was unable to walk. After winning an appeal to attend St John’s, North Yorkshire council offset that deferred year and placed him in year 8. The consequence— I want colleagues to sit with this for a moment—is that Noah will now receive one fewer year of education than his peers, and four years of free transport rather than five because his transport entitlement ends at 16. He has already had more taken from him than other children, through no fault of his own, and the system’s response is to take even more.
Noah cannot walk independently and requires one-to-one support. His taxi to school has become the highlight of his day because it is the one moment where he does not feel dependent on his mum—when he can feel something like freedom. His family have one income, claim universal credit and have little to no savings; they cannot find the money needed to pay the monthly costs for school transport. When Noah turns 18, the assumption is that his mum will simply be able to drive him because she has a Motability vehicle, which will strip away his independence that took so long to build. This is not a bureaucratic edge case; the system does this to families like Noah’s without apology.
That is not an isolated experience. The Public Accounts Committee found that 40% of families with young people with SEND said that they needed to give up work because of transport provision ending when their child turned 16. Colleges report students failing to start courses because transport had not been agreed. I believe that there was an issue across the border in Leeds, where the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman has already found the council at fault for its approach to post-16 SEND transport, identifying both individual injustice and systemic failure. However, families continue to report inconsistent decisions, inadequate assessments and personal travel allowances that do not cover the actual costs.
The charity Contact put it clear in evidence to PAC: the policy is simply not working post 16. The change in entitlement can feel like a cliff edge. For families who have spent years building routines and supporting a young person with complex needs, that cliff edge can be devastating for the young person and for every member of their family around them. We cannot have a system that claims to support inclusion and participation while simultaneously pulling the transport that makes participation possible.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I wanted to come along and support the hon. Gentleman in bringing this debate forward. He is a very assiduous MP in this House, whether it be on the Back Benches in the Chamber or leading debates in Westminster Hall, and I want to congratulate him on that. I also add my support to what he is hoping to achieve because, although this is not a responsibility for the Minister—this issue is devolved in Northern Ireland—we have similar problems when it comes to SEND issues, disabled children and road safety. In his quest to have a better system, I wish him well. I hope that, back home in Northern Ireland where it is devolved—the Minister here has no responsibility for it—we will see changes as well.
Tom Gordon
I thank the hon. Member for his contribution. As ever, he puts his point eloquently and passionately. I agree that, no matter where a SEND child is living in this United Kingdom, they deserve a lot better than they are getting at the moment.
I want to press the Minister on a number of specific points. The single most impactful achievable change that this Government could make is also the simplest. The statutory guidance on home-to-school transport should be updated so that the minimum provision becomes the nearest or catchment school, rather than solely the nearest suitable school. That one change would restore the alignment between admissions and transport that rural families depend on. It would give councils a clear framework and remove the incentive to reinterpret eligibility ever more narrowly. It would protect the community-school relationships that anchor rural life, and it would not even require primary legislation. I urge the Minister to give that serious consideration.
Secondly, I urge the Minister to impress on her colleagues at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government the need to reinstate the rural services delivery grant. The rural premium matters enormously for local authorities such as North Yorkshire, where distances are not a policy choice, but a geographical fact. Cutting that grant has had real consequences for the decisions that local authorities have to make, and those consequences are being borne by families in villages across the dales, across my constituency of Harrogate and Knaresborough, and in North Yorkshire more widely.
Rishi Sunak (Richmond and Northallerton) (Con)
On that point, my first ministerial job was as Local Government Minister, and I think that the hon. Member makes an excellent point about the importance of the rural services delivery grant to councils such as North Yorkshire, which incur extra costs in delivering services in rural areas. Does he agree that that is an important aspect of local government finance that needs to be considered when MHCLG is looking at allocations, and that it is particularly important to our rural county of North Yorkshire?
Tom Gordon
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for that point. It is one of the things on which we absolutely agree. I would like to see all parties and especially the governing party put that problem right. As I said, cutting the grant has had real consequences for the decisions that councils make.
Thirdly, we need to see expansion of the statutory minimum more broadly. The current system, which involves a 2-mile walking distance for primary, 3 miles for secondary and a duty that ends at age 16, was designed for a different era and different pattern of schooling. Where school systems have been reorganised, specialist provision has been concentrated and rural bus networks have been allowed to decline, the statutory floor is no longer fit for purpose.
Fourthly, will the Minister confirm that the Government will make data collection on home-to-school transport mandatory, as the PAC recommended? We cannot improve what we do not measure. Voluntary, inconsistent data collection across more than 100 local authorities is not a sufficient basis on which to run a £2.6 billion spending commitment. The Department needs a proper baseline if it is ever to hold local authorities to account and drive genuine improvement.
Home-to-school transport is not a niche issue. It sits at the intersection of SEND, rural sustainability, school attendance, the cost of living and the long-term viability of rural communities. In rural England, school buses are not a luxury, but essential infrastructure. Families across rural communities such as those in North Yorkshire are not asking for special treatment. They are asking for a system that works, keeps their children safe, keeps them in school and does not price them out of the education to which they are legally entitled. There should not be a rural tax on education. That is not too much to ask, and I hope the Minister agrees.
Derek Twigg (in the Chair)
I remind Members to bob if they wish to be called to speak in the debate.
Kevin McKenna (Sittingbourne and Sheppey) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Twigg. Massive congratulations to the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Tom Gordon) on securing the debate. This issue matters to so many people around the country.
My constituency is a coastal community, but also very rural in parts. Many of the issues raised by the hon. Member apply directly to Sittingbourne and Sheppey. A notable issue is the recent school allocations in the east of the island of Sheppey that sent people what on paper was a few miles, as the crow flies, but given that it is an island, there is an enormous body of water in the way, and as the Harty ferry from Harty island went many decades ago, it was never going to happen—unless the kids were really good at swimming. They are being sent on a more-than-two-hour journey by public transport, often on snarled-up roads, and we have terrible bus services, like so many rural areas.
However, I want to focus on the issues for children with special educational needs and disabilities and particularly those aged 16 and older. Kent county council has recently changed the criteria that allow people to opt for school transport to their education and has now made it all but impossible for people with special educational needs to secure transport. In fact, more than 50 families have written to me about this in just the last couple of months, since it was announced that the policy was being changed.
Some of the stories that I hear are heartbreaking. Anthony is one young lad. He is 17 years old and non-verbal. He is attending sixth form at the moment. Although he is mobile on his feet, he needs a lot of help with his day-to-day care: his toileting—the ability to toilet—but also his interaction with people if they are on public transport. In fact, he would always need to be chaperoned, which is not something that can now be afforded in this system. That puts him at risk and puts the public at risk as well. He is distraught—visibly so—and his mother is distraught at the fact that now he may be unable to access schools and complete his education. He is just one example of many. They have been through the appeals process, trying to get that overturned, and it is really opaque. When I have written to people at the county council to try to find out what the process is and what the criteria are for challenging these decisions—for Anthony and many other children in this situation—I am told that it is a case of exceptional circumstances only, but then they struggle to define what exceptional circumstances are. As we burrow through this, we find that in the end there is an absolute veto in terms of their local policies, which frankly, to my mind, just means that they can make it up as they see fit. There is no real guidance as to what is and is not possible.
Anthony is not the only one. One of my near neighbours in Sittingbourne is Mason. I went to see him. He is a young lad of 16 with cerebral palsy. He has a fantastic wheelchair. It is a big chunky piece of kit that he requires to get around on. He is having a great time in sixth form at the moment, but from September that is not going to happen, because although nominally some funding has been allocated to him, it is not enough to hire transport. More to the point, when his parents have gone round looking for available transport in the area and have phoned up all nine of the local cab companies in Sittingbourne, not one of them has an adapted vehicle. To the point made about how transport impacts parents and other members of the family, Mason’s father drives their adapted vehicle to work and so is unable to use it to take him to school. Mason’s mother does not drive and has to take their daughter to a different school and get to work herself. One of those two parents is now under pressure to give up work in order to protect Mason’s education, which is going to be vital. This is a lad who could absolutely thrive as an adult if he can get through the key stages.
We know a lot of people with SEND need to go through the later stages in education all the way up to 25 to give them the life skills and ability to interact with other people, and a degree of independence that means people like Mason and other children who are affected can get into work and employment, which we know is one of the Government’s key aims. In a constituency like mine, with particularly high levels of young people not earning or learning, the impact is felt ever further. There are other stories where people have gone through the appeals process. It is a very intrusive process pushed down on people where members of the extended family—uncles and aunts, near friends and quite distant members of the family—are all asked to give a reason why they cannot take the children to school. In one case, members of a family who live in Cornwall were asked to account for why they could not take the child to school, when, of course, my constituency is in Kent. Unless there is a rapid way of travelling, I do not think that is very likely. It is not very plausible and it just speaks to how the whole process is not coherent—and I am being very polite.
The hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage), who is not here, as he often isn’t, came to Kent soon after the election to give his opinion and to tell the Reform administration what he thought should happen. He was very clear. He said it was an enormous waste to spend money on getting kids to school. In fact, he said:
“There are things called parents who for as long as modern times remember have had the aggravation of getting their kids to school.”
That is a very characteristic turn of phrase from him. This is the modern world, not the 1950s or the 1850s. Transport is very complicated and we have a very different relationship with people with disabilities. I think particularly of families in which both parents are working. It really feeds into everything that is happening in Kent under its Reform administration. The leader of the Reform council said that breakfast clubs are a disaster because parents should be feeding their children. The trouble is, when I spoke to the county council to try to get clarity about what the criteria are, it pushed it back on the national Government and said that there is no tight guidance.
In line with the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough, who secured the debate, I ask the Minister what we can do nationally to ensure that local authorities deliver what we want as a national policy: getting people into education, work or training, and making sure that everyone has access to a full and vibrant life. Is there a way of updating the statutory guidance for local authorities to include funding for transport for young people who need post-16 SEND transport? We need to get that in black and white so that local authorities have to consider it and cannot flim-flam away in the way that Kent county council has. That is my main ask.
Derek Twigg (in the Chair)
I advise Members that if they refer to Members who are not here, they should have let them know beforehand.
Sir Julian Smith (Skipton and Ripon) (Con)
As I have said to those on the Front Bench, I am unable to stay until the end of the debate, for which I apologise to you, Mr Twigg, and to colleagues. I commend the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Tom Gordon) for securing the debate.
I am delighted that we have such an influential member of the Labour party here on the Front Bench—the Minister for School Standards, the hon. Member for Queen’s Park and Maida Vale (Georgia Gould)—because we cannot have this debate without mentioning the context of what this Labour Government are doing to rural areas. We have had the family farm tax, intolerable rate increases on pubs and hospitality businesses, and the Employment Rights Act 2025 hammering the ability of businesses, particularly those in rural areas, to take on young people. We have had the business inheritance tax issue, which causes huge problems for the continued success of many family businesses in rural areas, including in North Yorkshire. We are seeing policies of micro- managing moorland from Whitehall, rather than allowing long-term landowners to care for it as they have for generations. In North Yorkshire, we have a particular issue with the Labour mayor, who is looking to impose an overnight tourism tax, which will cause businesses more problems. He is also taking a greater portion than the Government wanted to give him for roads in York rather than across North Yorkshire.
The context is that Labour is hitting rural areas incredibly hard. I know the Minister is a fair person—she is on a very short journey to greater and more senior things in this Government. Though I disagree with them, the Government need to be a success. I urge her: please start thinking about rural areas across policies. We heard about the work that my right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond and Northallerton (Rishi Sunak)—the former Prime Minister, Chancellor and Minister for Local Government—did to protect rural areas with the rural services grant. That has been taken away, as has the fairer funding formula. North Yorkshire council is running a £42.5 million recurring deficit. That is the context out of which many of the things raised in this debate are coming.
North Yorkshire council has been forced to move to a policy of nearest local school, rather than the much more generous policy that it had before. We are one of the most rural parts—if not, the most rural part—of England, but in order to be fair to other taxpayers and the services it looks after, this was the only position it could take. On a lightly political point, the Lib-Dem-led Westmorland and Furness council is having to look at this, as is Oxfordshire county council—everybody is facing these challenges.
I will not talk about SEND travel today, but a big issue in my inbox—as in that of the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough—is from parents who accept that things have to change, but who have seen anomalies impacting their kids and their ability to get their kids to school. For example, in Skipton and Ripon, there are selective and comprehensive schools either on the same road or very near one another. If kids are at the wrong end of town, they can be selected for one of those schools, particularly the selective schools, but are then unable to get free school transport because of the designated nearest school policy. In Settle and Upper Wharfedale, and other schools in the heart of the dales, feeder schools are needed to keep their numbers up. They have historical links with primary schools in Bentham, Ingleton and other parts of my constituency, but those kids are now being sent outwith North Yorkshire, into Lancashire and other counties.
Rishi Sunak
My right hon. Friend, who is my dear friend and constituency neighbour, is making an excellent speech. He talks about families in the dales. I am sure that he agrees that families in the upper dales and Swaledale have been acutely impacted by this policy. He knows the geography well; families are also now being directed to schools in Kirkby Stephen or Barnard Castle, and getting there requires passage on minor, single- track roads through high moorland—roads that are often unpassable and unsafe in the winter months.
The situation has obviously caused concern for the families involved. They are being very well represented by Councillor Yvonne Peacock. I join her in urging the council—it has to make difficult decisions, and my right hon. Friend was right to point out the climate in which it is operating—as it looks to refine and review this policy using the discretionary powers that Government guidance allows it, to think about the particular geography of Swaledale, the impact of weather on these roads and whether it is right for these children to be going to those schools. Often, they are having their education disrupted or travelling on unsafe routes.
Sir Julian Smith
I completely agree with my right hon. Friend. We have talked about Settle college, which is threatened by kids going outwith the constituency and is worried about its numbers, but in the upper dales, too—we heard about the Thomases and others in Oughtershaw—children have to go over the top into Richmondshire or to Settle college, which is much further away than Upper Wharfedale school. The impact is that historical links between communities and villages, and between primaries and secondaries, are being broken, and these schools are vulnerable to tiny changes in rolls from year to year. I urge the Minister to reflect on the fact that many of us have fought to keep some of these schools open, and this policy really is having a negative effect. There are issues with the siblings policy, whereby the school attended by a sibling is no longer taken into account. I hope that this and other examples will be considered as North Yorkshire completes its review and considers its post-implementation procedures.
We heard the proposal from the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough to look again at the definition of a local school and at the rural services grant. I think we need an emergency brake to ensure that Settle, Upper Wharfedale and other vulnerable schools are protected, and that one policy—in North Yorkshire or other counties—does not undermine schools. Parents also want to understand the opportunities for voluntary contributions. That interacts with commercial bus services; what are the options there? Above all, there is a need to look at the appeals process. Is the Department for Transport allowed to look at cases? In the case of Oughtershaw, it is just impossible to get over to the recommended school in winter; the Department had not really done an assessment of that.
Tom Gordon
It came to my attention that a freedom of information request to North Yorkshire council uncovered emails that suggested that the Conservative leader of the council was suggesting that there should not be more than one Liberal Democrat sitting on any of the council’s appeal panels. Does the right hon. Member agree that we need full transparency to understand what has been going on there and how the council might have been looking to fix who sits on those appeal panels?
Sir Julian Smith
Well, I thank the hon. Member for that point. [Laughter.] All I would say is that, knowing the personalities involved and their integrity, I think North Yorkshire council has been grappling with a difficult challenge. It accepts that there will have to be changes. It is key that we move forward, and a way to do that is to ask whether there can be a more empathetic approach to appeals and whether North Yorkshire can look at some of the points that the hon. Member and others have made about the fact that we are such a sparse area and need some changes. Ultimately, though, this falls on the Government. Although a small increase in home-to-school funding was earmarked in the previous local government funding settlement, it did not reach the need and the amount of money that North Yorkshire spends. We really need the Government to look at the specific needs of rural education, and to look again at how to assess sparsity and rural factors, in this and every other policy they have a part in.
Several hon. Members rose—
Derek Twigg (in the Chair)
Time is moving on, so before I call the next speaker, I kindly suggest that Members keep their speeches to about six minutes so that we can get everybody in with a similar amount of time.
Jen Craft (Thurrock) (Lab)
It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Mr Twigg. I congratulate the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Tom Gordon) on securing this debate. I will focus my remarks on home-to-school transport for SEND children and young people, as I know others will talk about other aspects of the home-to-school transport system.
The home-to-school transport system for SEND children and young people is a good lens through which to view how parts of the SEND system in general do not really communicate with one another. There is currently a statutory duty to provide home-to-school transport for children with additional needs who need to travel to a place of learning that is not within walking distance or is not their local place of education. However, the way that is applied often leads to rather negative outcomes for these children.
There are obviously financial constraints on local authorities, which are obliged to provide home-to-school transport, and that often leads them to going with the lowest possible bid from a company that can provide it. A number of home-to-school transport companies market themselves as “specialists”. In reality, however, their staff have minimal specialist training, which often consists only of how to correctly load and unload a wheelchair, and the vehicles are often highly unsuitable for transporting children with special educational needs—sometimes it might just be a taxi. Obligations are placed on parents, who can be deeply worried about putting their child in a car with an unfamiliar person, particularly if that child is non-verbal or has communication difficulties. Safeguarding concerns often come to the fore.
There also does not appear to be a great deal of monitoring or holding of companies to account for the service that they provide. Parents in my constituency tell me that their home-to-school transport turns up late or fails to turn up at all, and that getting replacement drivers or assistance for their children is a regular occurrence. One parent said that if they were taking their child to school and regularly dropped them off half an hour late, the school would have something to say about it. Indeed, schools quite often like to send messages out to parents—as they should—to remind them of the importance of punctuality and being at school on time. Lateness has a huge knock-on effect for children and young people. Disabled children are often at a disadvantage to their peers to begin with, and if a child needs a routine in their day and to begin their day in a certain way, constantly turning up late to class and having to be signed in at the office can put a real dampener on their day.
The costs of home-to-school transport have been increasing for some time, and I believe it is projected that they will continue to increase. The Minister will probably speak about how the SEND reforms will go some way to address that. The County Councils Network, among others, has called for the Government to consider means-testing home-to-school transport for disabled children. It highlighted cases where councils were sending transport to pick children up to travel sometimes for upwards of an hour and a half each day and claimed that that was unsustainable. To be clear, we do not means- test education for anyone in this country, and I do not believe that parents who happen to have a disabled child should be treated any differently here.
There is a hidden cost of having a disabled child that an income-based means test would not take into account, as has been pointed out by Contact, the charity for disabled children and their families. Often, a child has to travel a long distance to go to a school that meets their needs because the system has catastrophically failed to meet their needs any closer to home. That failure usually lands squarely at the door of the local authority, which attempts to dodge having to pay for it by means-testing and putting the onus back on parents. It is reprehensible that a system that has failed to provide an education, failed to intervene early enough to stop issues escalating, and failed to find somewhere suitable to educate someone close to their home tries to make parents pay for the privilege of sending their child to a special educational needs establishment a long distance away. I would welcome the Minister’s assurance that there are no plans to introduce means testing of parents of special educational needs and disabled children for home-to-school transport.
I will touch briefly on another aspect of the system that probably could do with changing. The statutory duty to provide home-to-school transport for children with SEND currently covers those between five and 16 and those between 19 and 25. That leaves ages nought to five not covered—in some cases, children begin school at age four, which leaves a year-long gap during which the parent has to take them to school until the duty kicks in when the child turns five—and a gap between 16 and 19, where it seems that legislation has not kept pace. We acknowledge that some people require additional education until age 25, but we do not have the statutory cover for them to receive transport to get to a place of education.
I will leave it there, as I think I have gone over my six minutes.
Josh Babarinde (Eastbourne) (LD)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Tom Gordon) on securing the debate. Members will be pleased to know that my speech will be under six minutes, so we will have brought that time back.
I want to speak about home-to-school transport for children with special educational needs and disabilities and in particular about Lewis—that is not his real name, but he is a real Eastbourne boy with special educational needs. What happened to Lewis should never happen to any child. Lewis was physically restrained, relentlessly and brutally, by his passenger assistant on his home-to-school transport. His mum only found out when he came home that evening visibly distressed and bruised. She had not been told. That is because, shockingly, there is no statutory requirement to report incidents of physical restraint on home-to-school transport. We only know the specifics of what happened from looking at it, because it was captured on CCTV in the vehicle, and it was only captured because Eastbourne borough council—coincidentally, when I was a councillor—pushed for mandatory CCTV in cabs that facilitate home-to-school transport.
I raised Lewis’s case at Education questions last April and secured a meeting with the Minister’s predecessor, the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell), who acknowledged that there is a clear gap in regulation. When I raised the issue again at Prime Minister’s questions in November the Prime Minister looked into the eyes of Lewis’s mum, who was in the Public Gallery, and said that the principle of safety and tailored support for every child would be “central” to his SEND reforms. I am asking, and Lewis and his mum are asking, why the issue was not addressed in those reforms. Why was that gap in regulation not filled?
The Challenging Behaviour Foundation, which does lots of amazing work and research in this area, has set out exactly what is needed. It has rightly said that we need national training standards for all staff on home-to-school transport—something that does not exist now but could have helped Lewis. We also need a statutory duty to record and report to parents any use of restraint on home-to-school transport. That duty exists in school settings, but the situation is patchy for home-to-school transport. The Challenging Behaviour Foundation has rightly said that stronger safeguarding guidance, linked to “Working Together to Safeguard Children”, is required.
Those are not complex or costly asks. They are nowhere near as complex or costly on a human level as the trauma that Lewis has experienced and the anguish that his family have been through.
Jen Craft
The hon. Member is making an excellent point. I hope he will forgive me for adding another ask to his list. In assistance and drivers for home-to-school transport for disabled children—particularly those who have autism or neurodiversity—consistency is key. Does he agree that best practice guidance, setting out things such as consistency and the three points that he has made, would be very welcome?
Josh Babarinde
I completely agree. My little brother is autistic so, as a family, we see up close how important consistency is and how disrupting the consistency of a particular service can be hugely disruptive to the flow of his life. The same goes for many others with special educational needs and disabilities, so I would absolutely add that ask. I hope that the Minister can address it in her winding-up speech.
Those four points are the minimum that Lewis and every SEND child travelling to school deserves. I hope that the Minister will meet me and Lewis’s mum to discuss this issue further—things fell through the cracks with the change of Minister at the last reshuffle—so that we can finally get closer to delivering on the promise that the Prime Minister made.
Alex Brewer (North East Hampshire) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Twigg. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Tom Gordon) on securing this important debate.
Connection and mobility are key to a social, happy and healthy society—and, as we are hearing, an educated one. The ability to build networks, reach community and simply get where we need to go matters, and it matters most in the early years of a child’s development. It councils’ responsibility to ensure that money allocated is properly spent, but it is Government’s responsibility to ensure that councils have adequate funding, including for home-to-school transport. That funding is provided through recurrent general funding allocations, and the Government must make absolutely certain that their funding formula matches local needs. When it does not, families and communities pay the price.
I have a local example of exactly that. When Ancells Farm, a housing development in my North East Hampshire constituency, was built with the promise of a local primary school, families moved there in good faith. That school was never built. However, as part of a new arrangement, Hampshire county council promised a free bus to take children to their catchment school. That promise, too, has now been broken. What exists today is a bus service restricted solely to eligible students, with no spare seat capacity whatsoever. The decision to reduce the bus size, removing additional seats that parents were not only willing but actively prepared to pay for, has had real and serious consequences. It is the subject of a stage 3 complaint with Hampshire county council and has been referred to the ombudsman, but while complaints work their way through the bureaucratic channels, families are struggling today.
Let me be specific about what that looks like. I am all in favour of children walking to school whenever practical and possible. Parents are doing the school run twice a day, every day. Even by car, that is still time taken away from work. For those in paid-hourly or shift-based employment, it means hours lost, and hours lost mean money lost. For those in salaried roles, it means arriving late, leaving early or relying on the good will of employers, which cannot be taken for granted indefinitely. Some parents have had to reduce their working hours; others have had to turn down responsibilities or opportunities at work. Those ripple effects reach into every corner of family life. Less income means less financial resilience. It means fewer after-school clubs, fewer activities and fewer of the enriching experiences that support a child’s development and wellbeing. The broken promise of a bus is not just an inconvenience.
For the parents who do not drive, the situation is simply unworkable. The walk to the catchment primary school is 2.4 miles according to Google Maps—other maps are available—which is 54 minutes on foot. For a five-year-old, it would take considerably longer, as I am sure we can all imagine. For a parent doing the round trip twice—there and back in the morning, and again at the end of the day—that is close to four hours of walking every single school day. Those are four hours that cannot be spent working, caring for other children, managing a home or doing any of the other things that family life demands.
The route crosses the railway station entrance with no pedestrian crossing, and runs along the town’s busiest roads at rush hour. Parents have raised serious concerns about its safety. They have paid out of their own pockets for an independent safety assessment, which has identified real hazards, while Hampshire county council has refused to conduct a safety assessment of its own. One school is 10 minutes closer, which is not nothing for a young child, but it is not in catchment, and there is no public bus as an alternative because rural bus services, even in semi-rural commuter towns, have been cut.
Let me turn briefly to the law, because it is instructive. The Government’s own guidance on free school transport sets out clearly how children qualify. Rightly, they qualify if they cannot walk to school because of special educational needs, disability or mobility problems. They qualify when there is no safe walking route, but if the council refuses to undertake a sufficient assessment, who decides what is and is not safe? They qualify if the school is more than 2 miles away and they are under eight, or if the school is more than 3 miles away and they are eight or older. That often leaves families in the ridiculous situation of having to walk an eight-year-old to school while their seven-year-old is on the bus.
It is arguable that, for families on Ancells Farm, every single one of those criteria is met for every child in one way or another, yet parents have been fighting for years to keep the bus service going. We must consider what more the Government can do to ensure that local authorities are adequately funded and meeting their statutory duties towards the children in their care. I urge the Minister to consider what families are facing in Ancells and elsewhere across the country.
Mr Will Forster (Woking) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship in this important debate, Mr Twigg. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Tom Gordon) for securing this debate and for the way he introduced it and shared his constituents’ stories. Our constituencies are very different, but the stories I heard were very familiar. The thread running through them is that children who are reliant on home-to-school transport are often failed.
For another 10 months, my Woking constituents will be served by Surrey county council, and that is a real challenge for them. I have called many times for the children’s services at that council to be investigated and put into special measures, and home-to-school transport is another area in which I think the council lets people down. Surrey has third biggest local authority spend—at the last count, it spent more than £65 million in one year—on home-to-school transport, and it regularly overspends. The vast majority of that money is spent on home-to-school transport for children with special educational needs. Last year, The Daily Telegraph said that
“Workers in Surrey have been left unable to book a taxi first thing in the morning because firms are too busy ferrying pupils to…schools”.
On top of that, I speak to many parents and carers in Woking who are struggling and fighting to get the home- to-school transport that their children need. No one is happy with the system; it is not working for anyone, be they parents, carers, taxpayers or the wider community. It is broken, particularly in Surrey, where the county council has not invested enough in SEND school places. That means that the school places available for SEND children in Woking are often far away, making home-to-school transport absolutely essential. If we had capital investment—an invest-to-save approach—to build more SEND school places, the bill for home-to-school transport could be reduced and the quality of life for my young constituents would improve. Surrey county council is not doing that, and I think that is disgusting.
A young male constituent of mine, who is in a wheelchair because of cerebral palsy and suffers from epilepsy, was given an education place 25 miles away from his home. He had to leave my constituency and go through the next constituency, through the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire (Alex Brewer), and then into another. The county council did not think that that journey merited home-to-school transport; it said that the child was on their own. That decision was absolutely appalling, but thankfully it was reversed.
My county council has also tried to suggest that children should travel on inappropriate routes so that it can avoid providing home-to-school transport. One young girl was told to walk down a narrow country lane, with no streetlights and no pavement, to ensure that she would not qualify for home-to-school transport. Yet again, we got the right decision via tribunal, following complaints from my office, but parents should not have to fight time and again to get what they are entitled to.
I therefore echo the calls from my hon. Friend the Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough, especially for a joined-up approach to school places and home-to-school transport. He talked a lot about the challenges for home-to-school transport in rural areas. I agree that the rural services delivery grant was important, and it is sad that it has gone. Surrey is the fifth most congested place in the country, so there are other challenges in my Woking constituency. Having a home-to-school transport system in a congested county is a real challenge.
Another issue that I have raised before is safeguarding. I have led Westminster Hall debates about safeguarding, following the appalling abuse, torture and murder of my 10-year-old constituent, Sara Sharif. That case has huge implications for local authorities and children’s services—I will not repeat those now—but it also has a significant impact on home-to-school transport. Sara’s father and murderer was a licensed taxi driver. He was employed by the county council to support vulnerable children with home-to-school transport. Even though, from day one in her life, the council knew that Sara was at risk from her father, it did not give that information to the taxi licensing team or the home-to-school transport team.
I echo the words of my hon. Friend the Member for Eastbourne (Josh Babarinde). I was there when he raised this issue at Education questions and at Prime Minister’s questions. There are clearly safeguarding issues, and I urge the Minister to meet me so that we can improve the situation. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 made notable improvements on data sharing, but I do not believe it goes far enough to have stopped what happened in Surrey.
I hope this debate forces the Government to review home-to-school transport and reassure constituents that services will not be taken away from them. I believe that we can deliver better value for money and the better service that young people deserve.
Derek Twigg (in the Chair)
The Front Benchers will have roughly 10 minutes each.
Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)
It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Tom Gordon) on securing this incredibly important debate and on setting out this deeply concerning issue eloquently and passionately. It does not affect his constituency alone; as we have heard from right hon. and hon. Members on both sides of the Chamber, it is an issue right across the country, from Yorkshire right the way down to Kent and Sussex, and everywhere in between.
It feels a bit basic and obvious to say this, but it bears repeating: every child deserves to be able to get to school. There is a legal requirement to educate our children, and their ability to get there is a fairly basic right. They also deserve to get to school safely, efficiently and on time, yet the shocking stories that we have heard from around the country show just how hard that is for far too many children. The fact that the changes in Yorkshire mean that parents are being charged almost £900 for bus passes is, frankly, ridiculous.
Sadly, those stories are symptoms of wider failures by a number of Administrations to consider the needs of rural communities and SEND families. As a London MP and a born-and-bred London girl, both of whose children walk fewer than 10 minutes to get to their primary and secondary schools, I hesitate to talk about rural communities, but I hear from colleagues in my party and others about the real challenges of getting to school in rural communities. I have seen that when I have been on visits to Shropshire and talked to families and schoolteachers.
Under the last Conservative Government, bus services withered. Between 2015 and 2023, the number of local passenger journeys fell by a quarter—1 billion trips—and many routes were scrapped altogether. We have heard today about the Public Accounts Committee’s recent report on SEND home-to-school transport, which highlighted the ongoing decline of bus services, particularly in rural areas. It notes:
“Better local transport options…would reduce home to school transport costs”.
I will address the soaring costs that local authorities face when it comes to home-to-school transport, but I will first take a moment to focus on the fact that it is the most vulnerable in society who are impacted by poor transport provision. I find it somewhat surprising that the Department for Education seems to have little interest in what transport looks like for those who use it. As we have heard, it does not collect clear data about who receives home-to-school transport or whether it is reaching those in need.
As we have heard from Members from both sides of the House, children are being made to feel that their education does not matter because of where they live. They miss after-school clubs and activities and are made to walk on unsafe roads, often in the dark before school starts. As we have heard very clearly from some case studies today, parents are forced to sacrifice their time and income to drive their children to school, all because a computer said no—because of the rules that have been put in place by their local authorities. Grandparents or other extended family members are forced to go out of their way and step up when no one else is able to—although, as the hon. Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey (Kevin McKenna) pointed out, Cornwall to Kent seems rather extreme and pushing it somewhat.
There is, however, a larger underlying issue here. We have seen the costs of home-to-school transport soar alongside the need for SEND provision. While the Government have made the welcome move of committing to write off local authorities’ historic SEND deficits, that, sadly, does not extend to transport costs. My Liberal Democrat colleagues and I have been urging the Government to exempt SEND transport operators from the Government’s national insurance contribution increases to curb further cost increases.
I hope the Minister will address that issue in her response today and will set out what the DFE is doing to address it now. Pushing it into the reforms that we have seen announced, which we know are going to take years to implement, will be too slow to address this particular issue.
The cancellation of a number of planned special schools around the country does not help this situation. I strongly urge the Minister to revisit and reverse the cancellation of planned special schools. As I think my hon. Friend the Member for Woking (Mr Forster) said, if the specialist provision was closer to home, we would not need to spend quite so much on home-to-school transport.
Tom Gordon
I have been campaigning since before I was elected to get the special school for autism in Bilton Woodfield reopened. The situation has now been dragging on for years. Does my hon. Friend agree that we need to see North Yorkshire council, the trust that has now been appointed and the DFE work together to get that open on time for this September?
Munira Wilson
I 100% agree that they need to crack on as soon as possible.
The challenge we had with the Government announcements before Christmas was that some local authorities were given the option to crack on with the special school or be given money instead. From talking to councillors on the ground who went for the money, I know that it is not going to be anywhere close to what they need to cover the provision that they were looking for, but they felt kind of forced to take that option.
I am really worried about what these announcements will mean for the continued ferrying of children with special educational needs and disabilities very far away from home. Parents of children with SEND battle against the system enough as it is. It seems really unfair that they are now being made to choose between the right school for their child, but not being able to get them there without further sacrificing time and income, and getting their child to a school, but not one that can actually provide the right support.
A number of hon. Members have today highlighted the cliff edge in transport provision for students over 16 both with and without SEND. Local authorities do not have a duty to provide a universal transport system after the age of 16. For young people with SEND, their access to education is at the discretion of their local authority. Given what we have heard about financial pressures, it is sadly no surprise that young people with SEND are around 80% more likely to not be in education, employment or training than the average student.
The Public Accounts Committee has said:
“the Department appears unconcerned about the clarity of offering for this age group or the impact that losing transport at 16 may have.”
My hon. Friend the Member for South Devon (Caroline Voaden), who cannot be here today, told me that the cost of a Stagecoach South West termrider increased in September 2025 from £238 per term to £444 per term. Sixth-form students who are not entitled to free transport are being forced to pay more than £1,300 per academic year to access education. I want to be clear with the Minister that the increase was due to the rise in national insurance contributions, which meant that, over and above all the other inflationary cost pressures faced by the company, like many others, it needed to generate an additional £3,500 per year per vehicle to make ends meet.
In the light of the Milburn report published last week and the shocking numbers of young people not in education, employment or training, it is deeply disappointing that the Government’s policy on national insurance has exacerbated the problem. Like me, the Minister is a London MP. We are very fortunate that our 16 to 18-year-olds have free transport to be able to get to college and education, so this is not an issue for our constituents, but it is shocking to read those numbers for residents in other parts of the country.
I understand that local authorities are under immense financial pressure. As was rightly said by the former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Richmond and Northallerton (Rishi Sunak), who is no longer in his place, home-to-school transport is a problem for all political colours, right across the country. Sadly, the policy on national insurance has made the problem worse. I hope that the Minister will consider the exemption I called for, and I echo the request made by my hon. Friend the Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough for the Government to review and update national guidance on home-to-school transport. I also pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Eastbourne (Josh Babarinde) for the passion with which he has campaigned for his constituent in the terrible case of Lewis. I urge the Government to look at safeguarding standards for home-to-school transport.
Jack Rankin (Windsor) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. I thank the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Tom Gordon) for securing this important debate, and hon. Members across the House for their thoughtful contributions. When introducing the debate, the hon. Gentleman rightly advocated for his constituents, talking primarily about North Yorkshire. Although he left in some political barbs about his Conservative-controlled local council, he, like the hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson), had the decency to recognise that the problem is not local, but is faced by all counties and councils.
My right hon. Friends the Members for Skipton and Ripon (Sir Julian Smith) and for Richmond and Northallerton (Rishi Sunak) highlighted the scale of the challenge in North Yorkshire, which is now the highest spending local authority in the country, at £52.5 million a year. When talking about North Yorkshire specifically, we must consider the context of the council having one of the worst outcomes in the country from the Government’s so-called “fair” funding review, as well as losing the rural services delivery grant. I am afraid to say that this Government have whacked rural areas quite broadly. Honestly, it is felt on the Opposition Benches that that takes a partisan flavour.
The hon. Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey (Kevin McKenna) made a fluid and passionate speech. I am not familiar with the geography of his part of Kent, but it is clearly not sensible for councils not to take into account where bodies of water are—obviously, that is utterly ridiculous. The hon. Member for Thurrock (Jen Craft) said that the failure of local authorities to build spaces locally is upstream of this issue, and that building places locally where children and parents want them would help remedy the problem.
The speech from the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Josh Babarinde) was one of the more moving contributions to the debate. He articulated the story of Lewis, which is disgraceful. I hope that in the Minister’s response, she will assure the hon. Gentleman that he will get the changes that he is campaigning for. The hon. Members for North East Hampshire (Alex Brewer) and for Woking (Mr Forster) talked about the necessity of safe walking routes to school. Often, councils mark their own homework in determining that, so I would be interested to hear how the Minister might be able to hold councils to account on upholding their statutory obligation.
In this country, legislation is intended to ensure that no child is prevented from accessing education due to lack of transportation, which all hon. Members here support. However, the reality is that growing demand and spiralling costs are causing councils to question the sustainability of their current policies. An estimated 520,000 pupils use local authority-funded home-to-school transport, which cost councils a staggering £2.3 billion in 2023-24—a 70% real-terms increase on the cost in 2015-16. Of that money, £1.2 billion was spent on transporting under-16s with special educational needs to school—a figure that has gone up by 106% in real terms since 2015.
Home-to-school transport is about more than just getting children to school. The Public Accounts Committee found through its evidence gathering that for many children and young people, home-to-school transport is also about gaining a sense of independence, building their confidence and preparing for life beyond school; I know from speaking to my constituents that it is also relied on by parents so that they can go to work. However, the figures show that the rising cost of home-to-school transport is placing significant financial burdens on councils, which, they warn, is making delivery of their statutory obligations increasingly unsustainable.
If meeting statutory obligations is becoming an increasing challenge, the non-statutory things that make our communities what they are all get squeezed. We also know that local authorities are consistently spending more on home-to-school transport than they have budgeted. In my time in the cabinet of the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead in the mid-2010s, the home-to-school transport budget was one that continually popped out with significant pressures. I know that it is many magnitudes different today.
We have to look at how we can make home-to-school transport more sustainable for the future. We have had many discussions in this House about the pressure on the SEND system more broadly. While many questions remain, it is right that the Government are talking about reform. Children deserve the right support, and parents want a system that works for them and not against them. As Members have highlighted, the huge increase in the number of children with EHCPs, which went up by 166% between January 2015 and January 2025, has had a knock-on impact on demand for home-to-school transport.
The National Audit Office estimates that around a third of pupils with EHCPs attend special schools. As those schools tend to serve broader geographical areas, it is more likely that their pupils will live beyond a statutory walking distance and therefore qualify for transport. A survey conducted by the Local Government Association suggests that the average cost per child of providing SEND transport is now nearly £9,000 per year. That is almost triple the average cost of providing mainstream transport, which is just over £3,000 per child.
Effective SEND reform is essential if councils are going to be able to sustain school transport services for those who rightly require them. For SEND children, the Education Secretary has said that the Government will
“respond to the challenges that local authorities are facing with home-to-school transport…by improving provision closer to home.”—[Official Report, 23 February 2026; Vol. 781, c. 75.]
That is welcome in principle. However, we know that implementing that scale of reform will take a substantial amount of time. The bulk of the reforms will not be introduced until 2029 at the earliest. Local authorities and children who rely on their services need help now, not in three or four more years.
In some instances, I am afraid to say that we are actually going backwards. In my own constituency, the much-needed Chiltern Way Academy Trust, a 100-place specialist school that was promised for west Windsor, was withdrawn from the Government’s free school programme. Instead, £5.4 million of additional high needs capital funding was offered and accepted by the Liberal Democrat-controlled royal borough. In my view, that is a deeply disappointing short-termist decision. I am sure that is a story replicated across many constituencies across the country.
What are the Government are doing now to help local authorities cut the ballooning cost of home-to-school transport in the immediate term? What specific assessment has the Minister’s Department conducted of the longer-term impact of SEND reforms on the cost of home-to-school transport? The Public Accounts Committee has warned that plans to write off 90% of the historic deficit from overspend on SEND
“fail to take into account burgeoning home to school transport costs.”
I implore the Minister to urgently clarify what those funding arrangements will actually mean for home-to-school transport cost pressures.
It is also worth highlighting that school places nearer to home could go a long way towards supporting young people to build their independence as they move into adulthood. While independent travel is not possible for everyone, it is right that the Government make every effort to support those who could use public transport to start building experiences while they are in school. The Association of Directors of Environment, Economy, Planning and Transport found that travel experience from daily to-and-from school transport could help children to become independent and use public transport. In some cases, helping children gain the tools that they will need is what true support might look like.
Rather than launching attacks on individual councils for decisions to align their policies with DFE guidance and address rising, unsustainable financial pressures, we need to look at how we can support all councils to manage those pressures and make home-to-school transport sustainable for the future. That is not just an issue facing a handful of councils. The spiralling cost of home-to-school transport is a nationwide issue, and without urgent action from the Government, those pressures will only continue to grow.
Derek Twigg (in the Chair)
I ask the Minister to leave a few minutes at the end for the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Tom Gordon) to wind up.
The Minister for School Standards (Georgia Gould)
It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Mr Twigg. I thank all Members for an incredibly constructive and thoughtful discussion. It was particularly powerful that so many Members brought the lived experience of their constituents and some of the challenges that they face with home-to-school transport to the Chamber. I welcome the visibility given to those stories.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Tom Gordon) on securing this important debate. His passion for and commitment to this subject came across in his speech, as did the fact that he has been an avid campaigner who has widely engaged with families. We have heard today why this is such an important issue.
We also heard why the support that is available through home-to-school transport matters to families. It is the mechanism through which many disadvantaged families, many children in rural communities and many young people with SEND are able to access education. We heard how the existing statutory rights are incredibly important.
In addition, we heard about the particular challenges faced by rural communities, where the distances are greater and home-to-school transport costs are higher. That is why the Government made changes as part of a fair funding review, which included a distinct home-to-school transport relative needs formula, based on pupil numbers and home-to-school distances. The focus on distance deliberately supports those authorities with the longest distances and recognises the needs of rural communities.
We heard about the statutory guidance and about the discretionary opportunities available to local authorities. Local authorities have a discretionary power to arrange free travel for children who do not meet the eligibility criteria, in recognition of specific local factors. We have heard about some of the challenges that areas face, and local authorities are best placed to make those decisions.
We heard from the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough about the importance of data, and about the data that the Department holds, in holding local authorities to account. We have added a new absence code to reflect issues with local authority-arranged transport. Since September 2025, local authorities have been able to evaluate absences that are the result of home-to-school transport. Just 0.011% of the total number of school sessions that are missed is due to such transport; for special schools, the percentage is higher. That is really important data. Of course, any missed school session is one too many. Data helps with accountability, but I understand that the hon. Gentleman was referencing wider data and I would be very happy to have a follow-up conversation about that.
We also heard from many other Members about the interaction between SEND and disabilities, and about the increase that we have seen in the need for home-to-school transport for children and young people with SEND. As I have engaged with children around the country, that is something that I have heard time and again. Sometimes, children have to spend up to two hours on transport to access education. For some children who sometimes have issues regulating and who can find change disruptive, as well as for their families, that can be an incredibly distressing experience, despite the best efforts of the providers.
This also disconnects children from their communities. I always remember speaking to an 18-year-old who travelled a long distance to school every day. He said that when he returned to his community, he did not have friends or networks within it, so he felt very isolated going into adulthood. It is therefore incredibly important that children have access to SEND provision locally and closer to home, and Members today have agreed with that. Improving home-to-school transport is core to the SEND reforms.
The hon. Member for Windsor (Jack Rankin), who spoke for the Opposition, rightly challenged me on how we can move as quickly as possible to deliver such improvement. As he knows, we are investing £3.7 billion into 60,000 new places. That investment has gone in last year and this year, so it is going into communities urgently to help them to address those challenges.
We are supporting a large number of free schools to go forward. As we have heard, some local authorities have chosen to use their share of that investment to move faster in providing new places, at a cost of around £50,000 per place. The development of new places is critical, but it is also critical to make schools more inclusive for students—everything from improving school buildings and teaching—to develop the expertise around schools, so that local schools are accessible for children with SEND and every area has the right specialist provision available.
This investment will transform children’s outcomes; it not only reduces travel time but, as we have heard, saves money, which is also important. And the money that is saved can go back into improving outcomes for children in some of the really critical issues that have been raised during this debate.
We also heard a number of Members talk about support for young people post 16. There was a particularly powerful speech from my hon. Friend the Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey (Kevin McKenna) on the topic.
At the moment, local authorities have a statutory duty to make sure no young person is prevented from attending education post 16 because of a lack of transport. Local authorities must publish annual transport statements on this, and it is expected that local authorities will make reasonable decisions. Many local authorities do subsidise transport for young people post 16, but I have very much heard the passionate responses in the Chamber today. The issue also came up in the SEND consultation that we recently completed. We will look carefully at those responses.
As the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Windsor, said, the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Josh Babarinde) made a powerful speech about an incredibly distressing story from his constituency. I will of course meet him and Lewis’s family to discuss it and look at what we can do to make changes in the future. I thank him for raising that—I am sorry that they got caught in that transition.
The hon. Member for Woking (Mr Forster) also raised issues about safeguarding and an appalling tragedy that happened in his constituency. He will know that some of the measures in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 were very much a response to the lessons learned from that horrendous case, but again I am very happy to meet him to discuss this further.
More widely on the national criteria and the statutory guidance, we heard a powerful speech from my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Jen Craft), who is a brilliant campaigner on these issues. I want to reassure her that there is no intention to look at means testing. We absolutely reject some of the calls we have heard from, for example, the Reform leader of Warwickshire county council to try to reduce those statutory distances. We are not in the business of reducing disabled children’s rights to transport.
In conclusion, this has been a thoughtful and important debate. A number of issues have been raised that we must continue to look at. I hope we can follow up on conversations in relation to not only special educational needs and disabilities but the wider system and our shared ambition, which have been highlighted in this debate, to ensure that people have access to opportunity and education.
Tom Gordon
This has been an involved and thoughtful discussion. I appreciate the cross-party support for this issue across the Chamber; it is one of the few areas where the right hon. Members for Skipton and Ripon (Sir Julian Smith) and for Richmond and Northallerton (Rishi Sunak) and I see relatively eye to eye. I appreciate them both turning up today to make this case to the Conservative-run North Yorkshire council.
It was, as always, fantastic to hear from the hon. Member for Thurrock (Jen Craft) on the work she does around disabled children and SEND. She is one of the best voices I have heard in this place on those subjects. Hearing from my hon. Friend the Member for Eastbourne (Josh Babarinde) regarding the horrendous situation he outlined and Lewis being physically restrained is heart- breaking. I hope he gets a solution and the accountability that is needed.
I appreciate the Minister’s response. I would love it if she could be open to the further conversation she mentioned and make sure we can rule out things such as the nearest available walking routes to schools including river and motorway crossings and so on. There might be something in the statutory guidance that we could tease out to put some prohibitions on those things being part of those calculations.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered home-to-school transport.
High Street Businesses: Government Support
(1 week ago)
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Olly Glover (Didcot and Wantage) (LD)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered Government support for high street businesses.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Lewell. For decades, centuries and even millennia, towns and their high streets have been the focus of commercial and community activity—not just for the towns themselves, but for surrounding villages and rural communities. Whether it is for market day, celebrating great events such as VE Day, essential services such as banking and laundrettes, or spending time eating and drinking with friends and family, high streets and urban centres have long offered so much. However, across the country, our high streets and their businesses are struggling as never before. Too many, sadly, are falling into disrepair, with empty shops, cracked pavements, antisocial behaviour and crime, and streets strewn with waste.
Such issues are seen across the country. The 2025 Simply Business “SME Insights Report” on small and medium-sized enterprises found that more than half, or 63%, of small businesses believed that the high street as we know it will be obsolete in the next 10 years. This debate is an important opportunity to set out why central Government support is essential for high street businesses to thrive.
My constituency has three towns. I will say a little about the challenges and opportunities that they each face, before covering three key themes on the support that they and other high streets and businesses need. Didcot is the largest town in my constituency. It has seen huge housing growth in recent years, a trend that continues with the ongoing development of Valley Park. The town centre does not have a single focus, such as a traditional market square. Instead, it has two key areas: an older high street called the Broadway and a new retail park called the Orchard Centre.
Both the Broadway and the Orchard Centre face the challenges of antisocial behaviour and shoplifting; far more co-ordination between police, local authorities and businesses is needed. Didcot Broadway contains a range of shops, cafés, takeaways and restaurants. I thank Little India for the fantastic paneer jalfrezi that I got for a takeaway on Monday evening. Broadway also has the wonderful Mulberry pub at its western end. The Broadway forms the centre of the town, but businesses face many challenges, including the presence of the popular Orchard Centre retail park close by.
Amer Siddique, owner of Snack@Teas, formed a group of local business owners and is a passionate advocate for investment in the Broadway and town centre. I shall explore a number of those business owners’ concerns in my speech. Didcot’s last bank closed this year, despite the town’s population having grown to more than 32,000. It remains to be seen how well a proposed banking hub will fill that void. Parking in the town is a big concern as well, as a result of the rising population, although I am pleased that the Orchard Centre listened to vociferous local concerns and changed its mind on introducing car-parking charges.
In the east of my constituency, Wallingford is the smallest of the three towns, but more than makes up for that with its history, which goes back to Anglo-Saxon times. Its town centre high streets have a range of small businesses, full of character, such as the independent Wallingford Bookshop and Le Clos, a wine bar also offering amazing food, including tarte flambée with a range of toppings—baked flatbreads originating in the Alsace region of France. A key challenge for an ancient town is how to accommodate car traffic and parking to maintain visitor levels, given the large towns and cities fairly nearby. There is also frustration in Wallingford that NHS criteria seemingly prevent more than one pharmacy being able to serve the town.
Finally, Wantage is the second largest town in my constituency and the birthplace of King Alfred. In Wantage, the great Market Place is lined with independent shops, cafés and restaurants, with a retail park in the town centre, too. Wantage’s Argos store has been shut for two years, and New Look has now closed its doors as well, so vacant premises are a concern and many existing businesses highlight the crippling impact of significantly increased business rates—including the Vaults bar and pizza restaurant, the Kings Arms pub and the Bear Hotel, the last of which reports a doubling of its business rate charges. Consultation and debate are ongoing about how to further improve Wantage Market Place, which is dominated by car parking and bus stops. Special events that see Market Place closed to traffic, including the annual Dickensian evening, are popular and see the place filled with visitors.
The three towns, and their high street businesses, have three themes at the heart of their challenges and concerns, the first of which is the growing burden of business taxation and costs. Local businesses are feeling hammered by rising costs and barriers to their growth and hiring people; they feel there is an unfair playing field, given that online businesses are not taxed in the same ways and to the same degree. They feel that business rates are a flawed tax that is not directly related to either income or profit. Businesses in my constituency feel that recent Government changes to business rates have done little to ease the difficult situations they face, and certainly fall well short of the radicalism that was at least implied in Labour’s 2024 manifesto.
David Chadwick (Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe) (LD)
I salute the speech that my hon. Friend is giving; I am seeing the same situation play out in my constituency. Brecon has one of the most beautiful high streets in Wales, with its gorgeous Georgian buildings, but local businesses are telling me exactly the same thing. They are taking an absolute hammering from this Government’s decision to push through business rate revaluations. Does my hon. Friend agree that that is a real concern? Does he believe that the VAT cut to hospitality that the Liberal Democrats are calling for would at least help to restore some activity, life and profit to our hospitality businesses?
Olly Glover
I agree that such a VAT cut would help, because it is not just business rates that small businesses on high streets are facing. On top of business rate increases and the burden of value-added tax, they are also paying for increased labour and payroll costs, including the higher national living wage and increased employer national insurance contributions. Some of those measures are understandable, and they will of course be welcomed by some, but the story I hear from my high street businesses is that the cumulative impact of all these things in a small space of time is creating challenges. Many businesses are also still servicing debts from the covid-19 pandemic, such as repaying bounce back loans, which further restricts their finances to ride out the current challenges or invest in the future.
Electricity, wage costs, business rates and general taxation are adding up to a perfect storm when combined with ongoing cost of living pressures for consumers, which affect demand. Constrained finances in high street businesses have a knock-on effect on their capacity, meaning that owners are particularly reluctant to hire entry-level or younger workers. That is exacerbated by the recent compression of the wage floor with changes to national insurance contributions and the national living wage.
While recognising the benefits of such changes for workers, businesses raised concerns in Alan Milburn’s interim report, “Young people and work”, saying that these pressures make them consider reducing staffing altogether, or hiring fewer, more experienced workers. This affects the flexibility of the businesses to staff correctly against fluctuating footfall, and reduces opportunities for entry-level workers. Labour is effectively one of the few remaining adjustable cost bases within owners’ control, and it is suffering accordingly.
High street retailers continue to adjust to the changing nature of consumer behaviour, such as online competition and destination shopping. There is a lack of consistent support available to high street businesses at a local level to support retailers through these challenges, and I will come on to say a little bit more about that.
The second key theme is transport and access, which is a key challenge as a result of population growth and central Government housing targets. A growing amount of car traffic, competing for a constrained amount of car parking in town centres, creates real challenges, particularly in older towns such as Wallingford. That is why the reality is that more must be done to help those who can, and would like to, walk and cycle by providing them with safer and better options for doing so. For example, cycle parking can reassure them that their bicycle will be safe.
At this point, I should say that when we get into a debate about transport, it is often presented as an either/or between cars and public transport, walking and cycling. However, those things are not mutually exclusive. The Netherlands does not just have a globally leading cycling infrastructure and culture; it has the most comprehensive motorway in Europe, as well as a fully electrified mainline railway network. Public transport, walking and cycling are complementary to cars—we need both. Even small increases in the use rates of public transport, walking and cycling can help to ease congestion and free up parking spaces for those who need them.
Investment in roads, pavements and general town centre infrastructure is also a concern. Poorly maintained pavements can be a barrier for older residents and those with mobility issues, increasing the risk of falls and discouraging visits to the town centre. Improving accessibility would help to attract more visitors and support local businesses.
The third theme is local government funding pressures. Of course, many small businesses in my constituency, entirely understandably, look to local councils to help them with their high street and business challenges. I want to explain why local councils are too affected by central Government policy and face reduced budgets amidst growing costs.
With their origins in European Union funding streams, South Oxfordshire and Vale of White Horse district councils have, until now, benefited from allocations from two funds: the UK shared prosperity fund and the rural England prosperity fund. Between them, those funding streams have supported more than 130 local projects across the councils so far. Projects were hugely varied, but they included grants to support businesses and community groups with a transition to more efficient and affordable energy use—pubs and cafés, for example. They also included providing capital investment into equipment that supports productivity gains, funding a huge range of business and skills support programmes, often targeting those most at need; developing a visitor economy support programme to support our market towns; and making several small-scale improvements to the public realm across the two districts.
Unfortunately, this Labour Government have decided to scrap those funds, and their replacements, Pride in Place and the local growth fund, are principally targeted at city regions and areas of high deprivation. The impact of the abolition of the two funds is not trivial. In 2025-26, the allocations from the two funds across the Vale of White Horse and South Oxfordshire districts were £1 million; in 2024-25, the total was £2.4 million. At the same time, changes to local government funding formulae mean that Oxfordshire county council will lose £24 million in funding over the next three years.
Those changes affect all three councils’ abilities to invest in high streets and support local businesses. They also make it harder for them to explore new ideas, such the ones requested by the town councils of the three towns I mentioned: grants to town and parish councils to invest in civic pride, such as floral planting, hanging baskets, more street cleaning and more ways to promote local shopping; or funding to employ town centre managers to link the town council with retail centres and independent traders.
I want to set out my key asks of central Government. Once again, the Government need to go much further in reforming business rates—a form of taxation that bears little resemblance to a business’s earnings. Does the Minister recognise that evidence submitted to Alan Milburn’s interim report into young people not in education, employment or training identified labour costs as a key concern? The Government, to their credit, have announced serious intentions in relation to energy prices, but what should be done in the meantime, particularly with no sign—very sadly—of war in the middle east abating?
Once again, will the Minister heed Liberal Democrat calls for a 5% cut to VAT for hospitality? Does he agree that taxation arrangements need modernisation, given the rising threat to physical businesses posed by online retail? Given rising demand and the same amount of space for car parking, do the Government agree that greater investment in public transport and walking and cycling infrastructure is needed to make it easier for people who need to drive to have the road space and car parking to do so?
What fresh, new ideas do the Government have to help our high streets? I have a few examples to consider. National “buy local” schemes would incentivise and reward people for spending their money locally. A “high streets back home” scheme would give people a clear route to invest in their own community, whether by restoring heritage building, supporting local enterprise or helping to secure community assets. The Government could give councils the power to designate independent shop zones, protecting and championing small locally owned businesses against the tide of chains and empty units.
Does the Minister accept that, for councils not benefiting from Pride in Place funding, including in Oxfordshire, the end of the UK shared prosperity and rural England prosperity funds constitute a cut to local government funding? That undermines their ability to invest in staff and initiatives to help small businesses improve town centres, and to award grants to businesses and community organisations to help them reduce their energy bills or upgrade their equipment. Our high streets and local businesses are critical to the successes of our towns and surrounding communities, and I call on the Government to give them the support that they deserve.
Phil Brickell (Bolton West) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Lewell. I congratulate the hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover) on securing this debate.
I want to focus on an important lever that the Government should pull to regenerate our high streets: tackling the illicit financial activity that is hollowing out towns and undercutting legitimate local businesses. That matters because these streets are the soul of our communities; they are where local traders serve their regulars, and where the greengrocer, butcher and corner café have always been part of who we are as a country.
Despite all the pressures that our high streets face, brilliant independent businesses—whether new ventures like Hive in Westhoughton in my patch, or long-standing local favourites like Serendipity in Horwich, run by Chris and Kath Parbery—are still choosing to invest in our communities. But millions of us no longer recognise the high streets where we grew up. The bakery, now a barber shop, is somehow always empty. The greengrocer is now a vape shop. The pub on the corner is boarded up for the third time in five years. The Woolworths is long gone, replaced first by a pound shop and then by something called an “American candy store”. Now, just like all the empty barber shops, vape shops and mini-marts, the high street is silent.
The number of vape shops in England has grown by nearly 1,200% in a little over a decade. The number of barber shops per 10,000 people in the UK has more than doubled in the same period. Meanwhile, the National Crime Agency assesses that at least £12 billion of criminal cash is generated in this country every single year, and our high streets have regrettably become a primary route for washing those proceeds. Behind some—not all—of the cheap shop fronts sits drug money, trafficking money and money stripped from the most vulnerable in society. The proceeds of human misery are being cleaned through card machines on high streets in every town represented here today.
The all-party parliamentary group on anti-corruption and responsible tax, which I chair, has spent the past year speaking to individuals on the frontline with responsibility for tackling the explosion of cash-intensive businesses. Representatives from the banking sector told me that they hold significant data on suspicious cash flows but lack the legal architecture to share it usefully. Legitimate hard-working barbers being driven out by criminal operators told me that their trade is being tarnished in plain sight. Officials in local government told me that they watch shops close one week and reopen the next under a new name and a new nominee director, with the unpaid business rates simply written off.
The NCA’s Operation Machinize has shown what is possible. In my constituency, Horwich Mini Market on Lee Lane was closed for three months last year after the seizure of almost 20,000 illegal cigarettes, hundreds of illegal vapes and 7 kg of illegal tobacco. The nearby Texaco service station on Chorley New Road was prosecuted in December 2024—the first prosecution of its kind in the north-west of England—with more than 7,000 illegal vapes seized across four visits. But let us be honest: Operation Machinize has visited more than 2,500 premises across two waves, and its initial wave produced only 10 permanent closures—that is 10 out of 2,500 businesses. Organised crime will absorb that figure as an operating cost and shrug it off by the end of the week.
After years of austerity and inaction under successive Governments, I know that this Government understand the severity of the situation facing our country. Measures announced include a new £30 million high street organised crime unit, which I was proud to lobby the Chancellor for before last year’s Budget, and 75 new officers in the worst-affected regions, including the north-west of England. Trading Standards will receive £6 million, after a decade of cuts that halved its capacity.
Other measures include a new cross-Government taskforce, 350 new His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs investigators, a new abusive phoenixism taskforce and a consultation on extending closure orders. All that shows real progress, and the APPG that I chair has campaigned hard for many of those measures, so it would be remiss of me not to thank the Minister and his colleagues across Government for their work over the last two years.
But money alone will not finish the job. The criminals hollowing out all our communities have to know that they are no longer welcome, and that must mean three things. First, we should adopt a British equivalent to the Dutch Bibob regime. The officials in the port city of Rotterdam I met earlier this year told me how they have spent 14 years dismantling the organised criminal infrastructure that we are struggling against in the UK. Dutch officials in one Rotterdam suburb told me how their integrity screening regime reduced the number of firms from 111 to 65 without recourse to a single criminal prosecution, removing suspicious businesses en masse. We should learn from our Dutch counterparts and give our local authorities similar powers to refuse permits to applicants linked to criminal intelligence and to look through nominee directors for the real money behind them.
Secondly, we should move to mandatory licensing for barbers, vape shops and the other high-risk sectors that have become criminal franchises in plain sight on our high streets. If someone needs a licence to sell a pint of beer, someone should need one to open a barber shop or a vape store.
Thirdly, we should extend closure powers so that persistent offenders are shut down for good. Members of the Chartered Trading Standards Institute overwhelmingly back the idea: 98% support extending closure orders and 97% support permanent closure for repeat offenders. And let us remove, in a single line of legislation, the absurd £1,000 cash seizure threshold that lets criminals wave goodbye to trading standards officers with fistfuls of notes in their hands. Let officers seize every pound of ill-gotten gains from the till.
Our high streets are where this country lives. They bind our communities together and they are where the next generation of British entrepreneurs will cut their teeth. Businesses like Hive, Serendipity and Blackedge Brewery are proof that there is still enormous pride, creativity and resilience in our towns. They are worth fighting for, so let us do so.
Emma Lewell (in the Chair)
There will now be a five-minute time limit on Back-Bench contributions.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
It is a real pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Lewell. I congratulate the hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover) on securing the debate, setting the scene and giving us all a chance to participate.
In Northern Ireland, the future of our high streets is of great concern. We have seen some of the steepest falls in footfall on our high streets compared with the rest of the United Kingdom. Six or seven years ago we would not see an empty shop front in Newtownards; now there are 10 or 11. Owners have retired from family firms and been unable to get someone to take over. I saw in the paper the other day that businesses are closing and people cannot sell their businesses. Perhaps, Minister, there is something to be done to encourage people who want to have a business on the high street but are unable to.
There used to be 11 butchers in Newtownards town, but now there are two. That is because of changing habits: all the big stores now have a butcher’s counter—they have a cabinet—and purchasing is done differently. The Minister and the Government are not responsible for certain things, but something can be done for those who want to open a shop.
All four UK nations record year-on-year declines in footfall, which is a reminder of the economic pressures on our high street shops, some of which are forced into administration. Our high streets have been hit hard by the cost of living crisis, both directly as a result of their costs going up, and because footfall has decreased due to the effects of the crisis on potential customers. Smaller independent retailers made up 84% of all closures in 2024; that shows the effects of decreased footfall and increasing costs.
As an increasing number of shoppers use contactless payments, businesses are suffering, with increased amounts of their revenues going to payment providers. Shops processing £10,000 a week in card payments are paying around £13,000 a year in fees, and there has been a big increase in credit card payments. The Government have no say in that, but could contact be made with credit card companies to ensure that they drive down their charges? That might help a bit. To put that figure into perspective, it could cover several months of rent or the salary of a part-time staff member. These costs are one of the reasons why high street businesses are not employing new staff—they have to cut back somewhere.
Crime and antisocial behaviour leave high street firms facing extra expenses for security measures, insurance, replacing stolen or damaged stock, getting CCTV and establishing contact systems with local police. Larger retailers are not unaffected, with retailers such as Claire’s Accessories, Poundland and River Island announcing closures. Even charity shops such as Cancer Research UK are on the list.
Large banks are also affected, the impact of which cannot be overlooked, as their branches act as an anchor, driving foot traffic to surrounding high street shops. Eleven banks have closed in my constituency. We have been able to get banking hubs to fill in the gaps, and there are post offices in nearly every Spar shop down the Ards peninsula, so there are ways of addressing this. Fewer people are visiting town centres, leading to high street decline. The combination of higher running costs and less disposable income has led to more and more vacant premises.
A considerable factor in this decline is the rise of online shopping, which again relates to the people’s habits. It poses a particular concern to smaller enterprises, which are unsupported when it comes to e-commerce and accessing the necessary technology. Consumers should be encouraged to consider the fact that online shopping cannot replace the experience of face-to-face contact with retailers and the opportunity to see, touch and assess products themselves.
We are very fortunate in Newtownards, the main shopping town in my Strangford constituency, to still have many family shops—I think of Knotts, Wardens and many clothes shops that are family firms as well. Consumers’ ability to make more informed choices will contribute to the creation of a more loyal and consistent customer base for our high street shops. Retail parks and larger shopping centres have fewer economic pressures because they have the car parks. Sometimes the car parks in towns charge fees, which by their very nature create issues.
In conclusion, I endorse all the recommendations made by the hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage. There are some really good ideas that would help each and every one of us, including our constituents. The Government’s aim should be to create a more resilient high street that can survive as well as thrive long term. We look to the Minister so that the high street can be supported for our customers and shopkeepers.
Melanie Onn (Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship this afternoon, Ms Lewell. I congratulate the hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover) on securing the debate.
For some time now, there have been unrelenting efforts from colleagues across the House, many of whom are here today, to keep the future of our high streets firmly on the desks of Ministers. That reflects how important our town centres are not only to local economies but to the social fabric and cohesion of communities right across the country. High streets are where people come together. They are places of commerce, but also places of connection, identity and pride. When they thrive, communities thrive. When they decline, the effects are felt far beyond empty shop fronts and reduced footfall.
One issue that has become impossible to ignore is the growing criminality taking root on some of our high streets. Alongside my hon. Friend the Member for Leigh and Atherton (Jo Platt), I have been leading a campaign to shut down dodgy shops, which has now secured the backing of more than 50 Members from across the House. We were really pleased to meet the Chancellor recently to discuss the steps to tackle the organised criminal enterprises operating behind many premises. I am pleased that significant action has been taken across Government Departments to address the issues, some of which I will outline today.
Progressive announcements in the Budget included increased resources for trading standards officers— I feel I am repeating things that my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton West (Phil Brickell) mentioned, but it is worth reinforcing. Budget announcements also included the creation of a dedicated cross-Government taskforce to develop an intelligence-led understanding of organised crime on our high streets; the deployment of 350 newly recruited criminal investigators in HMRC’s fraud investigation service; and the recruitment of 50 additional Insolvency Service staff through a new abusive phoenixism taskforce. These are important and welcome interventions, and they would not have happened if not for my hon. Friend and the APPG he so ably leads.
Under the Tobacco and Vapes Act 2026, the Government are introducing a licensing scheme for retailers selling tobacco and vape products, helping to strengthen enforcement and improve accountability across the sector. Most recently the Home Office announced a £30 million enforcement blitz to target organised crime gangs that exploit UK high streets, sending a clear signal that the Government understand both the scale of the challenge and the need for co-ordinated action.
All that will come as very welcome news to residents in communities such as mine in Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes, because local people are absolutely fed up with seeing their high streets abused. They are frustrated when they see businesses apparently operating outside the law, while honest traders who pay their taxes, employ local people and contribute to their communities in many different ways are expected to compete on an uneven playing field.
However, if we are to achieve the tangible change that communities want to see, the Government must go further and faster. Speed matters because, while we discuss these issues in Westminster and in rooms like this, more of these businesses continue to appear on our high streets. They pop up every single day. Every month that passes without visible enforcement undermines confidence in the rule of law and leaves legitimate businesses feeling completely abandoned.
If this is a Government priority, as I believe it is, we must consider how to encourage more local authorities to move the issue higher up their agendas. Many councils face severe pressures on resources and capacity, but tackling high street criminality cannot be viewed as an optional extra. It must be recognised as central to economic regeneration and community safety. We must continue to reinforce the message that these enterprises are not simply untidy retail operations or minor breaches of regulations: organised criminality, tax evasion, exploitation and fraud lie behind many of them. Frankly, their presence drags down shopping areas, deters investment and damages public confidence.
The prize for getting this issue right is enormous. Economically thriving high streets support local jobs, encourage investment and help small businesses to succeed. Socially, they provide communities with places that they can be proud of, and morally, they help to restore faith that the rules apply equally to everyone. In too many towns across the country people feel left behind, ignored and increasingly sceptical that the law is being enforced fairly. Pulling high streets away from criminal exploitation offers an opportunity not only to revitalise local economies but to rebuild trust. That is why I welcome the progress the Government have already made, but urge Ministers to maintain the pace, strengthen enforcement and ensure that communities finally see the change they have been waiting for.
Mr Paul Kohler (Wimbledon) (LD)
It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Ms Lewell.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover) on securing this debate. I declare an interest as the owner of CellarDoor, a bar and cabaret venue in Covent Garden, and as the chair of the all-party parliamentary group for the night time economy.
Small businesses, hospitality and the night-time economy are the backbone of our high streets. In London alone, they support nearly 1.5 million jobs and generate close to £50 billion a year. Yet the independent, locally-owned shops that once defined our high streets have been squeezed out and far too little has been done to nurture those that remain. That said, I welcome new investment in my constituency. Primark is coming to the Wimbledon Quarter—Primark’s first new London store in nearly a decade—and Aldi, Marks & Spencer and Barclays have all recently invested in Wimbledon town centre, but they are international chains with deep pockets and preferred borrowing arrangements. Their confidence must not mask the fact that there are fewer and fewer independent businesses in Wimbledon. Such businesses are worn down by costs that they can no longer absorb.
Like the coalition in 2010, this Government received a hospital pass from their predecessors, but that is no excuse for making matters worse. The rise in employer’s national insurance contributions—Labour’s tax on jobs—fell hardest on high street businesses, whose staff cannot be automated or offshored. That measure, along with record increases in the minimum wage and an expansion in the legal burden of workers’ rights, both of which have a disproportionate effect on small businesses, seemed almost designed to destroy growth and hold back our high streets.
Online shopping is a major contributing factor. By failing to enact sensible reform of the business rates system, successive Governments have failed to address the unfair advantage enjoyed by online retailers. Increasingly, high streets are filled with things that one cannot get online, but even here, Government policies are failing responsible employers. Take the hair and beauty sector as an example. The first Headmasters salon opened in Wimbledon village more than 40 years ago. Across the sector, the number of apprenticeships dropped from 16,000 to 6,000 between 2016 and 2023 because of a VAT regime that incentivised salons to use self-employed staff rather than to grow and develop their own talent.
However, my constituency is doing better than many parts of the country. Footfall in Wimbledon town centre is rising, and Wimbledon village was recently named the UK’s top neighbourhood high street. However, the same is not true of Morden town centre, most of which has been part of the Wimbledon constituency since the 1980s.
Morden town centre was once a go-to destination. I am a south Londoner, even though my parents were both cockneys, because my mother came to Morden from Hackney one day in the 1940s to attend a Sunday Pictorial film stars garden party—as a fan, not as a celebrity, I hasten to add—in nearby Morden Hall park. She was enraptured by the thriving art deco high street that she encountered and decided on that day that she wanted to live in south London.
Sadly, Morden town centre has been in decline for many decades, despite Merton’s Labour council promising, for at least the last 30 years, to rejuvenate it. The council’s latest plans have now been put on hold till the end of the decade. Sadly, nothing is happening. I thank the Minister’s colleague—the former Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Nottingham North and Kimberley (Alex Norris)—for meeting me to help to move things forward, although sadly Merton council declined to attend that meeting.
Nationally, the Liberal Democrats are offering concrete solutions. We would cut VAT for hospitality from 20% to 15%, which a study from the Night Time Industry Association shows would pay for itself by increasing sales and VAT revenue. We would reform business rates to reward occupancy and community value, while agreeing a youth mobility scheme with the EU to resume the flow of young, eager Europeans keen to work in hospitality in their gap years. We would also reform the apprenticeship levy so that our hair salons and other small businesses are incentivised to develop talent. Our high streets need urgent help. Too many shops have put the “closed” sign up for the last time. I look forward to hearing how the Minister is proposing to reverse that trend.
Chris Hinchliff (North East Hertfordshire) (Lab)
It is an honour to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Lewell.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover) on securing this important debate. The question of support for our high street businesses cuts to the very core of what economic policy in this country sets out to achieve. For decades, a flawed orthodoxy has promoted the concentration of economic activity in a few urban centres, with the expectation that the rest of us will commute from the towns and villages we live in to the city centres for work. It is a vision for the economy that reduces the hopes and talents of citizens in every part of the country to units of social capital that should be deployed in the most “efficient” manner, and one that measures success in GDP figures rather than in thriving communities.
The reality is that an economic theory based on principles of agglomeration and spill-over effects has next to no relevance for improving the daily lives of our constituents. Whether measures of productivity would be zero-point-something per cent higher over the next 10 years if we focused on high-growth centres is totally beside the point when it comes to what makes for true prosperity. That can come only from ensuring that every high street is a success.
High street businesses give life to the heart of a community. Independent traders, entrepreneurs and innovators give a place its identity. Pubs, bars, coffee shops, community hubs, restaurants and the rest provide the social space for a town to come together and connect, rather than us remaining atomised in our private lives. These are the businesses that so often offer those first, defining jobs for young adults, and where staff build genuine connections with local customers, keeping an eye out for the elderly and vulnerable if they need a bit of assistance. In short, the success of our high street businesses is essential for a healthy, happy society. We are very fortunate in North East Hertfordshire to have many fantastic high street businesses, including G’s Deli, Vutie Beets and the Uniform Monkeys in Letchworth, the Cheese Plate in Buntingford, Bow Books in Royston and Café Luna in Baldock, to name just a few.
There is no denying that our high street businesses are under enormous pressure, and we must take immediate, decisive action to help them. I ask the Minister to look at the following priorities as a matter of urgency. First, energy bills are crippling our high street businesses. They need support just as much as domestic users but have none of the protections, and that must change. Secondly, the business rates system is manifestly unfair and a huge burden. Frankly, the Byzantine complexity of the whole edifice is mind-boggling. We cannot keep debating discounts, transitional support and multipliers. In the manifesto that this Government was elected on, Labour—my party—promised to abolish business rates and replace them with a fairer, more transparent system. We must deliver on that promise now.
I urge the Minister to ensure that, as we deliver reform, we not only remove the loopholes that allow huge corporations to practically choose how much tax they pay while independent businesses play by the rules, but shift the burden of taxation away from high streets, which give so much to our communities, and balance that with a fairer share being paid by online sales giants.
Finally, we have to recognise that, to create the environment for thriving high street businesses, we need to reverse the huge damage done to our local councils by the years of austerity under previous Administrations. Only with properly funded councils will local democracy have the power to take back control of empty shops and give commercial opportunities to a wider range of retailers and local entrepreneurs, rather than the endless parade of vape and betting shops that too often seem to be the preference of absentee private landlords.
What is more, properly funded councils are essential for tackling the scourge of overflowing bins, littered streets and crumbling roads, which do such a disservice to our high streets when it comes to attracting people. We need councils that are able to make more than a merely financial decision about the cost of parking around our high streets, and that can take a more creative approach to the differing needs of small market towns such as Buntingford and large towns such as Bishop’s Stortford down the road.
To conclude, supporting our high streets is essential for spreading genuine prosperity across every part of our country. I hope to hear from the Minister today about more decisive action to achieve just that.
Mr Gagan Mohindra (South West Hertfordshire) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Lewell. I congratulate the hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover) on securing today’s debate. As we have heard, we are all increasingly concerned about the state of our high streets.
As the House will know, I am a former furniture retailer. That was many years ago, and I think I would struggle in today’s environment. My plea to the Minister and to the Government is to change tack and support wealth creation. The high street is really suffering. Hospitality venues, independent retailers, SMEs, post offices, pharmacies and other local businesses are all facing rising costs and challenging trading conditions.
The diversity that thriving high streets depend on is being destroyed by cost increases caused by this Labour Government. We have seen an increase in taxes for employing new people and in business rates, which makes it even harder for businesses to invest, grow and create jobs. My party has come up with an alternative plan. I am sure that the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Andrew Griffith), will articulate what we think are the solutions to this huge problem, but here are the highlights.
The back our high streets Bill would introduce a permanent 100% business rates relief for the retail, leisure and hospitality sector in England. The get Britain working Bill would scrap job-killing elements of the Employment Rights Act 2025, and the reducing bureaucracy Bill would repeal and cease a number of environmental, social and governance reporting requirements. We also have the save British industry and cheap energy Bills. Others have spoken about energy costs, which have put significant pressure on businesses. The middle east is part of the problem, but some of the Government’s policy decisions are only going to exacerbate those issues.
A local wine merchant in Kings Langley, who provides white labelling for multiple retailers, is really struggling. They said that extended producer responsibility cost them an additional £240,000 in its first year of being introduced, and new bureaucratic regulation cost £15,000 to manage and adhere to, with an overcomplicated application. It feels like death by a thousand cuts for these businesses. It is affecting decisions to invest in those businesses, which in normal times would be increasingly successful.
Hubs, a franchise owner in my constituency, said that his national insurance contributions alone increased by £138,000 from April to September, and he expects the figure to be £275,000 in the full first-year cycle. Mark, the Rickmansworth Waitrose branch manager, said there has been a 45% increase in wages in the last five years, and NICs are costing Waitrose millions. If a huge high street giant like Waitrose is suffering to this level, how can a small independent retailer of whatever type survive?
My plea to the Minister, for whom I have the utmost respect, is to think twice about the burdens we are putting on businesses. Local councils can help, for example by not introducing parking charges for short stays. That would encourage footfall. We saw the upside of strong communities and high streets during the pandemic, where it was typically the retailers who knew their customers inside out who could identify where particular elements of our communities were suffering and proactively reach out to them. My worry is that if we continue with the drive towards online shopping— I am as guilty as anyone else—we will lose the face of our high streets, and the soft power relationship between retailers and the clients and consumers they serve.
Mr Will Forster (Woking) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Lewell. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover) for securing this debate and introducing it in the way he did.
Earlier this week, the second largest settlement in my constituency, West Byfleet, lost its last bank. That is a stark, sad reminder that high streets are really struggling in Woking and across the country. They are under pressure because of business rates, energy bills, increases to national insurance contributions, the Ukraine war causing inflation costs and, quite frankly, customers not having so much money because of the cost of living crisis, so they cannot shop and visit as much.
Heartbreakingly, my constituency also recently lost its last local brewery, Thurstons, whose demise is another example of the decreasing number of pubs—we lost more than 300 across the country last year. My constituent John, who used to run Thurstons but still runs a local pub, the Crown, said that this was
“death by a thousand cuts”.
It was not one thing that caused the brewery to close; it was the cumulative impact of many problems.
One of my other Woking constituents, Jo Moulton, owns and runs a salon in Knaphill. Hairdressing is another sector that is really struggling. Several hairdressers have closed in my constituency recently. Jo’s salon, Sorella Hair Salon, is facing a 340% increase in its business rates over five years. That is unacceptable. No business can cope with that, and that is why so many are closing.
Pubs, the hospitality sector and hairdressers are so important: they make our high streets thrive, and they are key employers of local young people. Given that we have increased the bill for businesses of employing people, we cannot be surprised that they are not employing young people any more or providing those vital training opportunities, but it is a real concern.
Despite what feels like the Chancellor’s best efforts, there are actually thriving high street businesses in Woking—fortunately, my constituency is doing better than most. Ihlara restaurant in Woking town centre and the Drumming Snipe pub in Mayford have recently been nominated for awards. Many businesses have adapted to the changing world after the pandemic: with people working from home more, every village and high street in my constituency now has a café. A Cup of Peace in Kingfield is amazing. The owners regularly pick my brains on foreign policy, because they are from Iran and are really concerned about what is happening there.
Businesses can adapt, but they need the Government to give them a break. That is why I urge the Minister to look at the Lib Dem proposals to cut VAT, including a 5% cut for pubs, the hospitality sector and, I hope, hairdressers.
Property taxes—business rates, council tax and stamp duty—are some of the most controversial and despised taxes in the country. We should look at property tax reform and genuinely reform business rates. I am pleased that the Government have given support to some businesses, but the fact that they are tinkering around the edges shows that the whole system is broken.
I urge the Minister to look at the effectiveness of the high street rental auctions scheme. At the last count, Woking town centre had 112 properties that have been empty for a year or more. Very few of them are being brought back into use, and I know that the same is true elsewhere. I do not think the rental auctions scheme is working as well as the Government had hoped, and I urge them to review it and work with local authorities to ensure they are empowered and have the resources to bring those properties back into use. If the Government do at least some of that, we can grow our economy, provide employment and training for young people, and ensure that our high streets thrive.
Daniel Francis (Bexleyheath and Crayford) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Lewell. I thank the hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover) for securing this debate. Many in my constituency will welcome the comments by my hon. Friends the Members for Bolton West (Phil Brickell) and for Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes (Melanie Onn), given the kind of shops that we have in Bexleyheath and Crayford and the changes we have seen in recent years.
I declare an interest: I am a member of the USDAW parliamentary group. I spent 11 years working in retail. I started as a Saturday boy—an old-fashioned term, I know—in my Marks & Spencer in Bexleyheath, and I worked my way up to a management role, so I understand the importance of high street businesses to our communities.
In my constituency, we have two town centres in the two towns, with a mix of large retailers and independent stores, a smaller high street in Northumberland Heath and a number of smaller shopping parades. I appreciate that, in the 32 years since I first worked in retail, our town centres have changed, and that has been heavily driven by changes in our shopping habits.
In my constituency, with a retail park in Crayford and a 1980s shopping centre in Bexleyheath, we have lost some of our high street shops from the shopping centre, which has a higher footfall, because of the pattern of businesses, particularly my former employer, that want to be in those retail parks. I know from the hon. Member for Wimbledon (Mr Kohler) that my former employer has recently invested in its store in his constituency—in fact, in a number of stores in London—but with a very defined model, which is very different from when I first worked for it 32 years ago. It is about food retail rather than clothing, and it is about retail parks. That is the reality of where some of our high street businesses have gone; we cannot replicate the high street of the 20th century.
There are some issues unique to my constituency. I thank my local business improvement district and Broadway shopping centre in Bexleyheath for the work they do to diversify opportunity and to try to bring leisure opportunities into the town centre. I hope there is some good news coming, with a new retailer in the near future. I receive requests, notably from the Kings Arms, Globetrotters soft play, Masala Inn, Zingara, Stuzzichini and Buddha restaurant in Bexleyheath, and the Duke’s Head, and the Duchess of Kent in Northumberland Heath, about the pressures on the hospitality industry. I thank you, Ms Lewell, for the work you do leading on those issues.
I support the Government’s Great British summer savings, which I hope will increase footfall for a number of those businesses. I note that Government changes have meant that two thirds of the pubs in my constituency have seen their business rates go down this year, but there is more we need to do and, while any measure would need to be costed, I am receptive to looking at the rate of VAT in the hospitality industry.
On cash, there are no longer any banks in Crayford and Northumberland Heath. We rely on post offices in those two places for cash services. We need to look further at the criteria for banking hubs and make sure there are more of them.
I welcome the Government’s announcements on the high streets strategy. I engaged with the previous Minister and I look forward to engaging with the new Minister to look at more investment in my patch. On Pride in Place, we are seeing £20 million coming into Slade Green; the retailers in Forest Road and Slade Green will look forward to that investment.
On transport, I continue to press Transport for London for a direct bus route between Crayford and Northumberland Heath to support the shopping parades, and to press my Conservative council to introduce a fairer short-stay parking arrangement for traders in Northumberland Heath.
I welcome measures in the Crime and Policing Act 2026. I have been at the forefront—I have wrestled shoplifters to the floor, many times—and I welcome the measures that the Government have brought forward, but there is still much more that we need to do to support people, and I will continue to press for that.
My policing teams have done some great work in Crayford around illegal working, particularly with delivery drivers in my retail park, with arrests and deportations as a result. I thank my policing team in Crayford for that. They have also worked on shoplifting there. In Bexleyheath, they have done similar work; I went out on a raid with them last summer and looked at the work they do. They have also done some great work on illegal shops, which hon. Members have commented on, but they still need an increase in police numbers.
I have welcomed the changes that have been brought forward. Police in Bexleyheath now have higher police numbers at the end of the day and at school kicking-out time, and on a Friday and Saturday night. That is as a result of changes that were controversial, but which I have supported.
There is more that the Government could do to support our high streets and businesses. I will continue to press them on that, but, as I have said, I support them on a number of the things that have already been done.
Rachel Gilmour (Tiverton and Minehead) (LD)
It is a pleasure to see you in the chair this afternoon. Ms Lewell. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover) for giving us the opportunity to speak in this debate on the importance of high street businesses.
It was once said by American President Calvin Coolidge that the chief business of the nation is business, but high street businesses in Tiverton and Minehead tell me of how they feel more squeezed than ever before. I must confess that my deepest frustration as an MP is seeing people and enterprises held back stubbornly and unnecessarily by basic challenges, and by Governments who have spoken the language of growth while too often acting against it. The cost of energy has been crippling for high street businesses. I commend the Government on having the antenna to keep out of Washington’s war, but that has not left us insulated from its effects; as alluded to by many, energy prices have soared.
The hikes in national insurance contributions, business rates being at the level they are, and the rise in the minimum wage make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to hire local young people looking for work, who often rely on summer jobs over the school holidays. We see that borne out in the number of young people who are not in education, employment or training, and in the mental health epidemic making victims of so many of our young people.
The high street is as much a place of commerce as it is of human connection, and when that hollows out, so does something vital in the lives of local people. I therefore simply ask this: what happens when the goose is no longer laying the golden eggs, when the tax revenue is no longer there, and when the properties sit empty? This is not sustainable.
I would like to say just a brief word on Europe: the most powerful growth lever available to this Government requires no new spending, no new legislation and no great political imagination; it is to ease the red tape choking trade with Europe. My constituents, including my farmers, tell me—in language rather more colourful than parliamentary convention permits—about the bureaucratic absurdities they have to navigate just to trade with our nearest neighbours.
In Tiverton and Minehead, threadbare transport is a choke on high street trade. For a significant portion of my constituents who do not have access to a car—and I have one of the poorest constituencies in the country, even though it is beautiful—public transport provision is so painfully limited that employment opportunities just a few miles away might as well be on another planet. That is a structural drag on our local rural economy.
It is also true that a local economy is only ever as strong as the talent feeding it. The skills gap that employers in my constituency raise with me begins here; backing business has to mean investing in the pipeline that feeds it. Without that, we get a brain drain away from rural areas. While that is far from a new phenomenon, it is a cumulative one, and my local rural economy bears the cost: businesses lose potential employees and communities lose the purchasing power and energy of young professionals, who might, with the right provision, have chosen to stay and build their lives in their community—the most beautiful constituency in the United Kingdom.
Charlie Maynard (Witney) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Lewell. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover) for the interest, passion, desire and ideas that he brought to the debate—I think we all really appreciate that—and I thank my other hon. Friends for all their good ideas. I will give a particular shout-out to the hon. Member for Bolton West (Phil Brickell) for his ideas about enforcement and dealing with illicit businesses on the high street—I think all our constituencies would benefit from those.
It is clear that we have a serious problem. Local pubs, family-owned shops and restaurants matter—they make our communities tick—but up and down the country they are closing at an alarming rate. I want to quantify just what that means: according to figures from the British Beer and Pub Association, 161 pubs—nearly two per day—closed in the first three months of this year across England, Scotland and Wales, taking with them 2,400 jobs, and in 2024 the UK lost 37 shops per day, with almost 13,500 closing. Preliminary figures for 2025 indicate that last year was likely even worse and could surpass 2022, the previous record year for closures. Alarm bells are ringing.
A successful high street is not just about shops; it is about community and connection. As almost everybody in the room has said, it is about bringing community together and giving people opportunity and fun. It is on us as politicians to do our best to make that happen and ensure that it survives. The Lib Dems have been calling consistently for a package of support that recognises the scale of the problem: cutting VAT for hospitality and attractions from 20% to 15%; reforming business rates to reward occupancy; and strengthening the town centre-first principle in planning policy to tackle vacancy rates. That requires applications for main town centre uses to be located in town centres rather than edge-of-centre locations, which should be used only if suitable sites are not available in the town centre. I will give a special shout-out to Witney as an example of a place where decades of support from planning officers and councillors has kept the high street lively, as opposed to everything being dragged out of town. Well done to everybody for doing that over decades.
Let me turn to the problems. I will start with the big stuff: at the top is the failure to get our economy moving. As my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Minehead (Rachel Gilmour) just mentioned, being back inside the European single market and customs union would not cost anything—it makes really good sense. Dealing with tax reform makes really good sense. Those measures would cut the cost of doing business by reducing the cost of food, addressing the chronic vacancy rate in hospitality, easing labour shortages and reducing the cost of energy. This is all doable.
At the top of the charge sheet are national insurance contributions. As an ex-entrepreneur, I feel the horror of this daft tax on headcount. Before getting out of bed in the morning—before generating any revenue, let alone profit—businesses are being whacked, and they do not want to hire people. That is really bad news. Liberal Democrats have consistently opposed the change and think it should be reversed in full. We are also calling for a consultation on a new NICs band from £5,000 to £9,100, with a lower rate to better support part-time workers, on whom the hospitality industry relies heavily.
Then there is VAT—that is the 5% cut—and business rates. The numbers on business rates are terrifying. Statistics from the Valuation Office Agency show rateable values rising by an average of 30% in 2026 for pubs and restaurants in England, and by an average of 70% for pubs with accommodation—imagine if that was your business!—outstripping the still substantial average increase of 19.4% across England for all properties. Those increases are completely unsustainable, and I do not think the Government are doing nearly enough to address them.
In my constituency we have fabulous high streets. We have the medieval wonders of Witney and Burford, which rightly attract visitors from around the world. We have much-loved and much-defended free parking, which matters a lot to people, and we are working hard to better our local transport, whether that is buses, walking or biking. As my hon. Friend the Member for Didcot and Wantage said, we need all those things, not to pit one against the other. Often-overlooked Carterton and Faringdon have tons of wonderful independent shops and need so much more support than we are currently giving them.
I want to focus on a few examples. Lisa and Kirsty have been running Sassi, a clothing shop on Witney high street, for over 15 years. Their business rates bill has gone up by £1,200 this year. Clive, who runs The Flooring Centre in Witney, has seen his business rates increase by 15% this year. This is not being addressed as a problem. Given the dire economic circumstances, such big increases in rates are a disaster.
Let me turn to solutions and return to the need for a 5% VAT cut, a reversal of the increase in employer NICs, and the proper and fair reform of the business rates system that businesses have long been promised. As an interim support measure, we have called for the Government to keep in place the existing 75% relief for retail, hospitality and leisure until the new system is in place.
Our high streets and town centres are places that we all rely on and depend on, hang out in and have fun in, and they are going in the wrong direction. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s thoughts on what we can do about it.
Andrew Griffith (Arundel and South Downs) (Con)
What a pleasure it is to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Lewell, and to make common cause with so many hon. Members. Our passion for our high streets—something we share, as proud representatives of our constituents—has come through in all the contributions to the debate. I thank the hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover) for sharing that with us. I speak on behalf of my own wonderful high streets in Midhurst, Storrington, Arundel, Steyning, Petworth, Pulborough and Henfield —we are so lucky to have them, Ms Lewell. I hope that you will come and visit them, and the Minister always has an invitation to see the wonderful enterprises in my constituency.
Here I fear that the consensus may break down a little, but I hope that the hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage and his colleagues will join me in condemning the decision of my local Lib Dem district councils to increase parking charges and bleed the life out of our high streets—an unwarranted headwind, transferring economic life into the coffers of the town halls. I invite the hon. Member to join me in seeking to reverse that unwarranted decision.
The Minister is a good man, and many of these measures were not of his making, but I fear that what we are seeing is the Government’s fundamental—albeit perhaps unintentional—misunderstanding of business: what it is to combine so many different factors of production, to take risks and to try to give back, through economic activity, to our communities. We heard many examples of that today. We heard about the difficulty for employers of making ends meet with the unwarranted increase in national insurance—not just the rate but, in particular, the threshold. Anyone who really understood the granularity of business, and the number and mix of part-time employees who were previously outwith the national insurance net, would never have made the decision to reduce the threshold from £9,100 to £5,000, encompassing at a stroke hundreds and thousands more employees. What do businesses do when faced with the anaemic top-line growth in the economy and the pressure on consumer household spending? They have to sit down on a Sunday afternoon and work through the shifts, trying to pare back hours and work out which employees they may let go.
We heard from my hon. Friend the Member for South West Hertfordshire (Mr Mohindra) the challenges of making the business rates calculation add up. I accept that this challenging problem did not start at the last election—I am very ecumenical in that sense; it has been creeping up on us for a long time—but the first and best advice that I got was that when you are in a bit of a hole, you should stop digging. Rather than the permanently lower business rates that we were promised and that businesses relied on—many placed their votes accordingly —we have got permanently higher business rates. That started with a swingeing increase. The Government, under pressure from other parties represented in this House, listened—eventually—and have mitigated that increase through some welcome measures in the short term, but they have done nothing to provide the long-term relief that for many would mean they had a viable future as a business.
I know that the Minister will have been given some brilliant lines to read out this afternoon, but I ask him, in all seriousness, to hear the will of the House on the perennial challenge of business rates, perhaps work on a cross-party basis and see what we can do over time to lance this very difficult boil. This is part of an overall picture of spending first and taxing second—certainly, that is the view of the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, from his description of meetings with so many of his colleagues.
The challenge is that we are just not seeing any top-line growth, any confidence in the economy, anything to make people think that it is a good idea to go and start an enterprise, to hire people, to take some risk in our high streets. We all want that for our communities. We want our high streets full of lively, independent, diverse shops catering to the needs of local people, not merely those catering to the lowest common denominator —vape shops—or, meritorious though they are, charity shops in perhaps too great an abundance.
There is a real desire to work on the future of the high street, because we all care so much about it. We need the employment opportunities for our young people. We have heard about the challenges for the hospitality sector. VAT is of course one potential relief, but what people are telling me is, “Just do something. Stop piling more and more taxes and levies”—packaging taxes, bed taxes—“on us. Let’s have a little bit of a moratorium.” My party’s fully costed plan would go much further by taking 250,000 small businesses out of business rates entirely. I know that the Minister will disagree, but I am afraid that we would go back to the very settled status of employment law that was good enough for Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. It persisted for many years and gave many of our young people the opportunity to get their first foot on the ladder, particularly with starter jobs. Indeed, some hon. Members have spoken today about their own first experiences working in hospitality and retail.
I will leave it there, but I am very keen to hear from the Minister what new hope he can inject into our souls and hearts—we want to take it back to our high streets to give people good cheer, so that they are no longer just surviving, but thriving. I leave the final word to the Prime Minister’s Chief Secretary, a man infamous for his self-confidence and, I am told, more than a little ambition. Upon discovering that the nation’s growth plans are in the hands of the right hon. Member for Leeds West and Pudsey (Rachel Reeves), he said:
“It doesn’t fill you with confidence.”
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business and Trade (Blair McDougall)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Lewell. I congratulate the hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover) on securing this important and passionate debate, and I thank him for his own thoughtful and passionate contribution.
It was interesting to hear so many hon. Members name different local businesses in their areas without necessarily explaining what those businesses did—I am intrigued what Serendipity in Horwich or the Uniform Monkeys do. I would be remiss if I did not abuse my position by naming some of my favourites in my own constituency, including Bica in Netherlee; Wheataly in Clarkstown, which does the best Italian food in Glasgow; The Pad in Neilston; and Valentini’s ice cream in Giffnock.
What is encouraging about this debate is that it has placed the role of high streets in its proper context. Yes, they are full of businesses, which are about a bottom line, but as was said by the hon. Members for Woking (Mr Forster) and for Tiverton and Minehead (Rachel Gilmour) and my hon. Friend the Member for North East Hertfordshire (Chris Hinchliff), this is about more than just soulless economics; it is about how we feel about where we live. It is essential that we understand that.
We must also place high streets in the wider economic context. They are not only the engines of very local economies but a barometer for how the wider economy feels. We have to recognise that the reason why so many of our town and city centres sometimes feel so down at heel is that before we lost the shops on those high streets, we lost the industry at the edges of towns.
It is important to put this debate in the context of the Government’s wider efforts to reindustrialise the country, to create good work and a sense of economic pride and purpose in places. I disagree with the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Andrew Griffith): yes, to tackle the insecure work and low incomes that left people without the money to spend in the neighbourhoods where our high streets are—
Tom Gordon (Harrogate and Knaresborough) (LD)
Whenever we talk about high streets, we think primarily about town centres, but there are smaller communities and sub-neighbourhoods, such as Bilton and Starbeck in my Harrogate and Knaresborough constituency—and even Kings Road, just a little further outside the town centre—that often miss out on support from the likes of the local chamber of commerce or business improvement district. Does the Minister think there should be additional measures for those that struggle because they are a little further from the town centre?
Blair McDougall
One of the hallmarks of our efforts through Pride in Place and other measures is recognition that there is not really a one-size-fits-all solution. In my constituency, we do not have one central high street; we probably have about a dozen separate ones, which sounds similar to the hon. Gentleman’s constituency.
It is clear from what everyone has said during the debate that high streets are facing real pressures, from changing consumer habits to crime and increasing costs. There is not a single quick fix—there is no one-size-fits-all solution. It will take determined effort and real strategy from the Government. A key part of that is our small business strategy, which was launched just short of a year ago and aims to cut red tape, cut costs and make things just a little easier in challenging times. We will build on the strategy later this year as we bring forward a cross-Government high streets strategy that aims to support the businesses that we have been talking about today and equip local authorities with the tools that they need to drive long-term regeneration. We are working really closely on that with businesses, representative organisations and, indeed, Members from across the House.
We have already started taking significant action through, for example, our high streets innovation partnerships—a £301 million package that aims to help local areas to reinvent and reimagine high streets, to make them more attractive places to live and put more services into them. My hon. Friend the Member for Bolton West (Phil Brickell) mentioned a Woolworths that had been replaced by businesses of lower value over the years. There is a challenge for all of us within our areas, working with local authorities and health authorities, to make sure that we locate more services in our areas and drive more footfall to them.
I will give an example of that type of action. I also oversee the Post Office, and as well as the Government making the decision to keep the Post Office network open at its current level, there are really exciting plans under way from the Post Office to create a new community hub model for post offices in towns across the UK. That will offer a place for commercial services and public services to be delivered, and enhance the role that post offices have as an anchor in the high streets.
I will turn quickly to some of the issues raised by hon. Members and outline the areas that the Government are focusing on within each of them. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) raised the issue of payment providers. That issue was raised with me by Kadir’s, a chip shop in Barrhead in my constituency. The payment services regulator recently carried out two market reviews in this area to look at those cost increases and is currently looking at what action to take as a result.
Many hon. Members rightly raised the impact of business rates on high street businesses. They say that all of heaven rejoices more over one sinner who repents, so I welcome the acknowledgment by the shadow Minister that we inherited a system that was, frankly, a mess. It was chaotic; it kept changing. It did not give people any sense of stability. For high streets, we have to ensure that our business rates system is fair, stable and responsive to the changing economic situation that hon. Members have described. That is why, in the face of the cost of the first revaluation since the pandemic, we have put in the £4.3 billion support package.
The hon. Member for Wimbledon (Mr Kohler) asked when we will take on the big online giants—the warehouses—and start to shift some of the burden on to them and away from high street businesses. That is exactly what we did with those lower multipliers. That was paid for by putting the burden on to the big warehouses. We are working in that area. Rather than tinkering, we are doing that big structural change.
Let me turn to jobs, and particularly youth unemployment and the link to high streets. My hon. Friend the Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Daniel Francis) said that he was a Saturday boy. I was a Saturday boy as well in Beveridge’s fishmongers in Giffnock. It taught me everything about how to talk to people. It gave me confidence. Every time someone came into the shop, I had to re-find my confidence—remake myself. I do not think that I would be where I am now had I not had that experience.
Some Members raised national insurance contributions in that context. Businesses still have those reliefs for under-21s and for apprentices under 25. It is worth about £2.5 billion. In terms of national insurance, there is relief there for employing young people, but I absolutely take the point. Obviously, the Milburn review is working on the much bigger issue of the number of young people not getting that opportunity.
Daniel Francis
I spoke to Alan Milburn about this yesterday. Does the Minister accept that, although there is a clear job for Government in this matter, there is also a clear job for retailers? The kind of schemes the retailer I worked for had in the ’90s for young and disabled people have gone by the wayside for many large retailers. We need to bring them round the table and get them to bring back some of those schemes.
Blair McDougall
My hon. Friend will know from talking to Alan Milburn that he is very much of the view that this is not something the Government can do alone; it will need to be done in partnership with industry and, as my hon. Friend says, with retailers in particular.
Nothing in recent years has made people angrier than either experiencing retail crime or seeing videos and images of it on social media, in which shop workers are treated appallingly. Despite that, there are encouraging signs that our efforts to tackle retail crime are beginning to bite. Shop theft has started to fall, following really sharp increases under the previous Government. At the heart of that effort was the revitalisation of neighbourhood policing with 13,000 additional personnel being delivered, 3,100 of whom are already in place.
My hon. Friends the Members for Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes (Melanie Onn) and for Bolton West spoke, rightly, with some anger at how organised crime—as they correctly named it—has impacted the way that our high streets feel. We are seeing legitimate, independent and valued businesses having to compete with businesses that are not real, and that is simply unfair.
My hon. Friend the Member for Bolton West was right to talk about his campaign and efforts, along with other Members, to deliver the high streets organised crime unit to bring about the system-wide response that he described—bringing together HMRC and local authorities, and working with Companies House, the Insolvency Service and the organisations that I oversee. As part of that, my officials have joined the Home Office in engaging with the Dutch Government to learn the lessons from their approach with the Bibob Act, highlighted by my hon. Friend, with a view to exploring whether a similar approach could be taken here.
The Home Office will shortly launch a consultation on strengthening closure orders, with stronger powers for local authorities being considered as part of our work on the high street strategy. Importantly, this is all backed by funding for the organisations that we rely on to do this. This is about fairness, but it is also about the way people feel about where they live. It is one of those issues on which our constituents have been ahead of us; they have noticed that there is something wrong on the high street, and we need to deal with it.
Finally on the point about that sense of where we live, many hon. Members referred to Pride in Place, and the nearly £6 billion invested to support hundreds of places around the country. This is not a one-size-fits-all approach and it is not directed from Whitehall; it is communities shaping for themselves how they want their high streets and local areas to be reimagined.
Alongside that, hon. Members mentioned the perennial problem of empty properties. They are one of the most visible challenges facing our high streets. High street rental auctions are now beginning to bite, not just in terms of the number that have gone through the whole process; the very ability of local authorities to have that conversation is letting them engage with landlords, changing the nature of that relationship and changing things on the high streets. This week, we announced £10 million of funding to support the expansion of high street rental auctions to help councils to identify opportunities, deepen engagement with landlords and get properties ready for use. That is a practical and important step forward.
Finally, hon. Members raised the issue of banking hubs and the loss of banking facilities in local areas. In Barrhead, a large industrial town in my constituency, we recently lost our last bank, so I get the frustration, particularly with the process of deciding whether an area gets a banking hub or not. As hon. Members will know, the Government commissioned an independent review into access to banking services. Alongside that, we are supporting the roll-out of 350 banking hubs, 235 of which are already open. That is alongside the work that we are doing to make sure that the Post Office network is sustained, invested in and able to provide the banking services that people rely on.
I thank again the hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage for securing the debate. As I have said in this room before, we sometimes talk about high streets as being an important part of the community, but for me, as many hon. Members from all parties have made clear today, they are not just a part of the community but where community happens. They are where people get services, meet their friends and have fun, and where those who are otherwise socially isolated find companionship and community. That is why we have to do far more to support them, to ensure that all the places that we represent thrive and have a sense of pride.
Olly Glover
I thank all hon. Members who have attended the debate. I hope I will not get in too much trouble for suggesting that this is a bit of a graveyard slot, so in that context I welcome that hon. Members from four parties and from many geographical parts of the UK have given their time to attend. I will briefly bring out some of the wide range of important themes that other hon. Members raised during our discussion.
On the important issue of illicit businesses on the high street, the hon. Member for Bolton West (Phil Brickell) cited good practice in the Netherlands—as did I, for different reasons—on tackling illicit and suspicious businesses. It really is a remarkable country in terms of how much good practice there is to be found there. The issue of an EU youth mobility scheme remains important for helping with labour shortages and boosting opportunities. The hon. Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Daniel Francis) definitely deserves a mention, given his experience of wrestling shoplifters personally. It is important that we have people in this House who can bring such real-world experience to bear here. My constituency neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Charlie Maynard), mentioned the critical issue of pub closures, the huge issues that pubs face and the very valuable role that they play in the rural economy.
I thank the Minister for his remarks. From what he said, I could hear that he very much recognises the importance of high street businesses. I shall read with interest the small business and high streets strategies, although I hope I am not being too cynical in noting that history is paved with the paper of Government strategies that have not always translated into action. He mentioned the Post Office community model; he will be receiving a parliamentary petition about East Hagbourne post office in his ministerial inbox. My concern is that, while the community model may be suitable in some locations, the Post Office as an organisation may be a bit too keen to foist it on areas for which it is less suitable.
The Minister’s comments did not address the impact of the scrapping of the UK shared prosperity fund and the rural England prosperity fund, perhaps as it is an issue more for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. Perhaps he will be so good as to take that point to his colleagues.
I thank everybody for attending and giving their time. Let us hope that all of us across this House can work together to ensure that we continue to have thriving high streets, with thriving businesses on them.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered Government support for high street businesses.