House of Commons
Adam Thompson (Erewash) (Lab)
I beg to move, That the House sit in private.
Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 163) and negatived.
Homes and Planning Bill
(1 day, 6 hours ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Andrew George (St Ives) (LD)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
Meur ras, Madam Deputy Speaker. I declare an interest—a non-pecuniary interest—as a member of the Cornwall Rural Housing Association for many years and a volunteer board member of the Cornwall Community Land Trust. Both charities are, as I will refer to later, deeply engaged in the delivery of affordable homes.
The purpose of this Bill is to create tools that can be used—or not, as local communities and local authorities choose—to assist communities that are determined to address the desperate housing needs in their area. I think that all Members present today are here on behalf of their constituents who are concerned about the impact of the current circumstances in which many people are living. Certainly in my part of the world—west Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly—the housing needs of local families are extreme. Many people are living on the streets and thousands of families are on the Homechoice housing register.
I acknowledge, but regret, that the Government intend to block the Bill today—the Minister might use gentler language, but that is effectively what it amounts to. As a humble Back Bencher, I do not have the army of civil servants across a leviathan of Government Departments to assist me in drafting the legislation, so I appreciate that my version may not be quite as perfect as Government draftspeople would like. I acknowledge that there may be some technical deficiencies, but the purpose, intention and benefits of the Bill are clear and sound, and technicalities could be very easily ironed out in the remaining stages of the Bill.
I have already explained to the Minister that if the Government remain uncomfortable with the first part of the Bill, the community-led homes and the community rights element, I would be content to find another way, with the co-operation of the Minister and the Government, and have that part removed if necessary in Committee so that we can at least proceed with the second part, the planning use class element, which, after all, simply implements policy that was implemented by the Labour party in Wales. It is not unusual, even for Governments, to declare on Second Reading, as I have just done, an intention to amend in Committee. The Government did so with the Representation of the People Bill on 2 March this year—in column 625 of Hansard.
I am not new to this procedure. As long-standing Members will remember, in 2014 I was very fortunate to come first in the ballot for private Members’ Bills. On 5 September that year I brought forward an echo of today’s Bill, the Affordable Homes Bill. It succeeded on Second Reading and 540-plus Members of Parliament were here to enjoy the occasion. It was keenly contested to get it through Second Reading. Although it was ultimately unsuccessful in its remaining stages—through, I have to say, unacceptable mechanisms used by the Conservatives, during the coalition years—one of its primary purposes was to abolish the bedroom tax on social housing. All Labour MPs at that time were happy to support me in delivering that aim, but since the Labour party came into power I have not seen it do that. It is having a detrimental impact on how housing charities go forward with their development policies. We are building far too many smaller homes and not giving ourselves the flexibility to accommodate larger families. That is a result of the pressures caused by the bedroom tax, quite apart from its immediate impact on people who live in social housing.
The Bill does not impose from the centre but offers a menu of policy options for local authorities and communities to adopt if they deem that helpful in their area. It has broad, cross-party support, including from the local Labour party in my area. Indeed, those who read yesterday’s Hansard will see that I presented a petition, the signatures to which were gathered by the local Labour party in St Ives. The petition was handed to me by a local Labour activist, Cornelius Olivier, who was a candidate against me in a general election. Nevertheless, we work together, and he strongly supports the Bill because he can see the impact of the pressures not only on west Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, but on many other places across the country. It may not be the same everywhere, but pressures certainly exist in our area, which is why we need a change in legislation to assist such areas.
Steve Darling (Torbay) (LD)
Only this week I was contacted by a single mother who is set to become homeless very soon. The letting agent demanded evidence of an income of £39,000—Torbay has the third-lowest average income in the country, at £27,000. I would welcome my good friend’s thoughts on how the Bill will provide levers to supply more affordable homes for families such as that of this lady in need.
Andrew George
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point. The problem experienced by his constituent is replicated throughout the country. It certainly is in my area, and I am sure the situation is the same in a tourism area such as Torbay. We looked on the internet—in the days when one could look on the internet—and found that 2,700 holiday lets and Airbnbs were available in the constituency, but there was not a single home for private rent within the local housing allowance. Some 65 private rents were available, but at rents significantly above the local housing allowance. That shows the degree of imbalance in areas such as ours, where there is an incentive for those who own more than one property to make their properties available for the holiday trade, rather than as affordable housing for local people.
The Bill’s purpose is to empower local communities to deliver affordable homes. I will come to the relevant clauses in a moment.
Brian Mathew (Melksham and Devizes) (LD)
For the past two years I have been trying to get suitable accommodation for Chantelle Black, a lady who lives in Devizes and has seven children. She is forced to live in a two-bed flat. Suitable accommodation to house her simply is not available. Such problems need to be addressed.
Andrew George
I agree. I hope that my hon. Friend is able to assist Chantelle to pursue all the potential routes by which her housing need can be met. I often hold a casework surgery in my constituency on a Friday morning—I seem to be holding one now in the Chamber. Perhaps I should invite others to bring forward their cases, although I do not wish to make light of the seriousness of the issue.
As I said, the Labour party in my constituency supports the Bill. Indeed, my constituent Cornelius Olivier, whom I mentioned earlier, has travelled all the way to London, and we delivered his petition, with nearly 2,000 signatures, to Downing Street, and indeed to Parliament, last night.
I also note that the Conservatives support the proposals in the Bill. Only a few years ago, in February 2024, the now Lord Gove announced that the Conservatives intended to bring in a change of the use-class order to require those wishing to convert a permanently occupied home to a holiday let to apply for planning permission.
Markus Campbell-Savours (Penrith and Solway) (Lab)
I am just trying to imagine a situation where two identical properties are next door to each other and one is currently being used as a second home. In those circumstances, under this Bill, would that property automatically have rights to be a second home with planning permission? What impact would that have on the value of the two homes in comparison with each other?
Andrew George
Markets find their own equilibrium. If the hon. Member is indicating his objection, his question should presumably be directed to his colleagues in Wales, who have already implemented this policy. There would certainly be a presumption that properties currently used as second or holiday lets, which would then need to be registered, would form part of that register. But the purpose here is to assist in communities where there is a risk of a proliferation of the properties that are desperately needed for permanent occupancy ebbing away from the local community and going into non-permanent use.
Markus Campbell-Savours
I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way again. I wonder whether he recognises that some people are advocating instead for a licensing-based scheme, which moves away from a planning system that is arguably insufficiently funded and does not give planning authorities the means to carry out enforcement at later dates. A licensing scheme, in contrast, would give them income; importantly, it would also not be permanent, and would give the people issuing the licences the ability to remove them if they have been given to inappropriate landlords.
Andrew George
I think the hon. Member misunderstands what this is about, and he also misunderstands what the Government’s proposal with regard to a licensing system would do and achieve. A licensing system is really just a bit of superficial dressing on the side, quite frankly, as far as actually getting to the nub of the issue. First off, a licensing system would apply only to holiday lets, not second homes, and would not give the local community any power to put a cap on the numbers within a particular area in order to manage the stock.
Steff Aquarone (North Norfolk) (LD)
My hon. Friend will know, as I do, that this is about not just the housing crisis, but communities. In Blakeney, in my constituency, four out of 10 houses are either second homes or holiday lets; this can have a devastating impact on community cohesion, particularly out of season. Does he agree that that is partly why his Bill is so important?
Andrew George
Yes, absolutely. The registration scheme is welcome—it will be a helpful side issue as far as actually addressing and getting to the nub of the problem.
Andrew George
If the hon. Gentleman wishes to intervene again, could he explain whether he supports what the Labour party has done in Wales?
Markus Campbell-Savours
I thank the hon. Member for giving way. I am ambiguous about what Labour has done in Wales on planning. I was genuinely asking what the impact has been on the prices of properties. What is important to me, though, is that we have not yet proposed a licensing scheme in this country. The hon. Member made the point about giving communities the power to put a cap on numbers, and such a scheme could be used with a cap. Does he agree that if a licensing scheme came with the power for communities to cap numbers, it could be a more powerful tool than planning, which gives planning permission in perpetuity?
Andrew George
As my hon. Friend shouts correctly, it is obvious that the hon. Member has not read the Bill. When a property changes hands, any permission would need to be renewed, so it is not in perpetuity at all. He has completely misunderstood that.
The hon. Member says that there is a cap. Well, that is a step forward, but it was very interesting that the Conservatives brought forward a proposal to introduce a planning use class, as well as a registration scheme. A registration scheme would be useful. I know that he has been encouraged by the Whips to come and make a brave defence of the Government’s opposition to this Bill, and I give him some credit for that, but frankly, a registration scheme does not cut the mustard. It is a useful and interesting sideshow, but it has no relevance and will not address this issue. I would have thought that there are a lot of second homes and holiday lets in the hon. Member’s area, so he should understand that this is a serious issue. Having a licensing scheme is not the answer.
Noah Law (St Austell and Newquay) (Lab)
Is the hon. Member supportive of taking further steps towards licensing and the potential introduction of caps, as suggested by my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and Solway (Markus Campbell-Savours)? I am sure that he is, but can he confirm that he would be happy with that direction of travel?
Andrew George
In case I have not made it clear, a licensing scheme is welcome. That will play a small role, but only in relation to holiday lets in a particular area. It will not have the impact that I think this Bill would have.
Vikki Slade (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (LD)
A community in the countryside—not coastal—recently contacted me about an agricultural building that was given permission under class Q to become a residential property. The neighbours talk about how often it is being advertised on Airbnb and the problems caused by people coming in and out. Cleaners are coming in and out, causing disruption. Does my hon. Friend agree that if we had a system like the one in London, where a property can be rented for a limited number of nights for it to remain a residential property, that would allow local authorities to work with the planning scheme? People could be told, “If you want to rent out your property for 100 days”—or whatever figure it is—“a year, you now need to register a change of use class.” Neighbours are becoming frustrated by properties changing from agricultural to residential to holiday, and that is not what was intended.
Andrew George
My hon. Friend makes a very good point. As a result of tax changes, we have seen properties moving from holiday lets to second homes, and from second homes to holiday lets. It is relatively easy to move from the council tax register to the business rates register.
Of course, the vast majority of holiday lets in places such as Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly are owned by people who do not live there. They run the business through agents, and the vast majority of those who apply for small business rate relief end up paying nothing at all. They must have been joyous, and were no doubt popping champagne corks in whichever part of the country they live in—not Cornwall—when the Government announced in the Budget that they would increase the valuation that will be used for small business rate relief, from £12,000 to £18,000. That allows people who are wealthy enough to own a second property to use it for their own leisure purposes, to let it out for holiday purposes or to do both. That is the point, and a lot of holiday letting agents make this quite clear to those people with second homes, “You don’t like paying double council tax on your second home? Well, you can enjoy it and, in the weeks when you’re not using it, you can let it out.” I could give quotes. Certainly, if we look at all the agents’ sites, the advice is clearly there: they say that second homeowners can switch from council tax to business rates, apply for small business rate relief and pay nothing.
Andrew George
I will finish this point—no doubt, my hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay (Noah Law) will want to assist me in making it. In Cornwall alone, since the small business rate relief change came in in 2012, well over half a billion pounds of taxpayers’ money has subsidised those people who take advantage of small business rate relief for holiday lets. Admittedly, a large amount of that was covid aid—whether they should have been entitled to that is a moral question one might want to ask—but the fact is that that amount of our taxpayers’ money is being used subsidise people who, in many cases, are wealthy enough to have a second home. They enjoy that second home, using it for themselves, but do not live in the area and let it out to the holiday trade, yet we have not got enough money to invest for the many thousands of families in places like Cornwall who have desperate housing need.
I am trying to persuade the Minister to change his mind, and surely regulations that were better defined through planning law and registrations would help us to manage this better, close the tax reliefs and invest money better in social housing for the people who need and deserve it.
Noah Law
I am grateful to the hon. Member for giving way again. Notwithstanding some of the issues that it can create, I hope he welcomes the dozens of high street businesses in his constituency and mine being lifted out of the business rate system entirely through some of those valuation changes; I hope he will confirm that he supports that. Does he agree that we need a co-ordinated approach to tackling the real, stark example he gave of second homeowners flipping between their two properties to avoid taxes? We need an approach that addresses that across the planning regime, taxation and licensing. It is essential that we get that co-ordination and the right level of property taxation for such properties.
Andrew George
I welcome that intervention, and I entirely agree with my hon. Friend about small business rate relief on retail, hospitality and leisure, especially for those in the hospitality sector, who in many cases—certainly in my constituency, as in his—are on their knees as far as future viability is concerned. At the end of the day, if one wanted to disaggregate the holiday letting fraternity from that definition, the Bill could be one means of doing that. If we had a planning register, we could see them all with their C6 categorisation, which would help us to say, “This category is exempt from the small business rate relief system.” Then we would not be wasting money in that area; we could instead invest it where it is desperately needed.
Fleur Anderson (Putney) (Lab)
I welcome the hon. Gentleman’s Bill on housing, which is such an important issue to constituents across the country, as he said. In London, dark flats—flats not used by anyone—are a big issue for us; at the same time, more than 8,000 people are registered on the social housing waiting list and 4,000 families are in temporary accommodation. Many mums criss-cross London, taking their children to get on buses to school and back. Does he agree that the issue is not just having more homes, but where those homes are, so that they are connected to jobs and support networks and make life affordable for people in many other ways?
Andrew George
I entirely agree. Although I have highlighted rural and coastal areas such as my own, I am well aware that London and many inner urban areas also have an issue with the proliferation of second homes.
In fact, that brings me to what I was hoping to talk about some moments ago: the clauses of the Bill itself. The first four—the community-led homes element of the Bill—are simply a logical extension of community rights relating to assets of community value. The powers would simply extend those rights to the identification of land or buildings either in or adjoining a community. That would enable a local community organisation to advance a project to deliver affordable homes for local communities.
I declared an interest as having been a professional in this sector in the past, and I am still a volunteer in it; I therefore have some experience of being involved with local communities that wish to address their local housing needs. This is the opposite of the nimby: the yimby. This is, “Yes, please, in our backyard; we would like affordable homes,” not more unaffordable homes, which is what the planning system seems to deliver for many local communities in areas like mine.
How can we deliver more affordable homes? The way to do it, if all potential development sites are taken, is to undertake a call for land. In many of the cases in which I was doing that, through community land trusts or parish and town councils, there would be no response: the price available for affordable housing on rural exception sites was significantly more than the agricultural value currently available to the landowner, but less than might be available to that landowner—easily by a factor of 10 or 100—if the land were to get planning permission for unaffordable, open-market housing. Landowners therefore would not come forward with sites to deliver affordable housing. The purpose of the first four clauses is to give communities the powers—as a community right—to identify that land. That would strengthen the ability of communities—through parish and town councils, community land trusts and other community-led organisations—to meet unmet local housing need, including through the delivery of in-perpetuity social and affordable housing.
The Bill contains a number of safeguards. The local authority must be consulted, and land made available would have to be at a scale commensurate with the moderate growth of the community. Provisions would prevent the expropriation of private gardens and similar land, there would be a vacancy and utilisation test, and powers would be exercised only as a last resort, after a call for land and all other measures had been pursued.
The planning background to the Bill is that in places such as Cornwall we have for decades followed the policies of successive Governments in meeting very high house building targets. Indeed, Cornwall has been one of the fastest growing places for housing in the United Kingdom—almost trebling its housing stock in the past 60 years—and yet the housing problems of local people have got significantly worse. One of the lessons that one learns from this is that pursuing a policy of a means to an end rather than an end in itself—that is, the building of homes, rather than meeting the need—has been an abject failure. This Bill would put need first, rather than simply building homes.
Cornwall has had its house building targets significantly increased—almost doubled—as a result of the Government’s changes to housebuilding targets. That has resulted in the counter-productive outcome that sites previously identified for affordable homes—rural exception sites on the edge of towns and villages—have, as a result of planning appeals, had those permissions changed to now deliver unaffordable homes. In other words, all the affordability has been stripped out of the development, and planning inspectors have been obliged to permit those homes to be delivered purely as open market homes.
The reason that the planning inspectors have said this is the case—[Interruption.] The Minister is chuntering at me; I am very happy to take an intervention from him if he wishes. Planning inspectors have said that because local authorities have had the rug pulled from underneath them, they are no longer able to demonstrate that they have a five-year supply of land. It takes two or three years for a local authority to go through the process to identify sites. Cornwall had identified a five-year land supply at a prior stage, but when the Government announced the new figures, it immediately no longer had that.
The Minister for Housing and Planning (Matthew Pennycook)
To clarify for the hon. Gentleman, where an adopted up-to-date local plan was in place at the point we introduced the new national planning policy framework, its housing need requirement remained as per that adopted plan. Transitional arrangements were put in place. Yes, as the system progresses, local authorities will have to plan on the basis of the new standard method, but it is not the case to say that when we changed the NPPF in December 2024, immediately across the country those new targets kicked in everywhere.
Andrew George
In that case, the Minister has not explained that to his planning inspectors. If he looks at the appeal reference APP/D0840/W/25/3367358 for land east of Meneth, Bonallack Lane, Gweek in my constituency, he will see that Inspector Harrington was very clear on 23 February 2025 that a location that previously had permission for an all-affordable rural exception site was converted to an open market site, purely as a result of the lack of a five-year land supply. I think the Minister needs to look at this again. We need additional tools to address the housing need of local people because the current tools are simply not working; indeed, they have been undermined by the Government’s own policy.
The problem with the house building target approach is that it is built on a delusion that private developers will collude with Government in driving down the price of their finished product. We have found over a decade—certainly in Cornwall—that developers will only deliver their homes at times when the market is buoyant, and they will not collude with Government in order to achieve those outcomes.
I know the Government have a series of concerns with the Bill and, in the interests of time, I will quickly rattle through them. They say there is a risk it is not compatible with property rights under the European convention on human rights. I do not think that applies as far as the powers of my Bill are concerned. In any case, there would be other measures that we could introduce that would resolve these issues and provide additional safeguards.
Dr Scott Arthur (Edinburgh South West) (Lab)
The way the Bill has been presented is interesting. The hon. Gentleman says he does not think that the ECHR guidelines apply—surely we need more reassurance than just his thoughts. We are talking about a housing crisis here. I have been listening carefully to all the points being made, and I can see the benefits, but they all seem quite incremental. Can he outline the scale of the difference that he thinks the Bill will make, bearing in mind that we face a housing crisis?
Andrew George
Well, that was a very interesting intervention. This is a private Member’s Bill and I am a Back Bencher. I do not have a magic wand—neither do the Government, evidently—with which I can change things overnight. This is not going to change the tectonic plates of policy; it is a private Member’s Bill dealing with one element of how communities can respond to their own desperate housing needs. It is a tool that would be available to them. The hon. Member needs to wake up to the reality of the scope of private Members’ Bills.
Dr Arthur
I absolutely accept the hon. Gentleman’s point, but he is presenting the Bill in the context of a massive housing emergency. It would be good to get some clarity on how many additional homes would become available in Cornwall, say, if the Bill were passed—not a precise number, just an estimate so that we can get a feel for the impact that it would have.
Andrew George
If one person were housed, would the hon. Member think that a waste of time? Of course I would want to see the approach scaled up, because it is a principle that could be adopted in every single community. We are talking about a potential impact on a high scale.
I disagree with the hon. Member’s point about the ECHR. In any case, that could be ironed out in Committee. As I say, if I need to find alternative routes to achieve the Bill’s aims, I will. If necessary, I will take the relevant provisions out of the Bill rather than allowing progress to be stalled on a good idea that we should pursue—in my view, obviously.
I know that the Government will say that there are already powers in the planning framework and routes to identifying and assembling land for development, but those are not as properly and fully available to community-led projects as they are to larger developers. The community-led homes sector has not found that the Government’s measures have assisted it in achieving the outcomes that it needs.
On holiday homes, clauses 5 and 6 would provide communities with powers of control, to be adopted in areas that wish to pursue this approach. I emphasise that this is driven not by the politics of envy, but by the politics of social justice, as I hope I have already made clear. I spoke recently to someone on the Isles of Scilly who is in his early 50s. His parents separated when he was eight, and since then he has moved more than 60 times on the islands, from garages to winter lets to temporary accommodation. He holds down an important job on the island, as does his partner, who works in the public sector. Those are not unusual circumstances. [Interruption.] I know that some hon. Members think that is funny, but it is a serious issue in our area.
Amanda Martin (Portsmouth North) (Lab)
I do not find any of this funny, actually. There are 3,000 people in my city who are on a council waiting list, and we have a council that built less than 40 homes and has not even brought back the homes that we had. I do not find it funny that all we hear is tumbleweed when we ask our Liberal Democrat council to do anything to house people. We need to ensure that people use the rules that they have, so we can get proper housing and so people are not moved 10 times.
Andrew George
There are 25,000 people on the housing waiting list in Cornwall, and the surveys that I and others have carried out professionally indicate that that is the tip of the iceberg. There are many people who do not put their name on the waiting list because they know that it is a complete waste of time, as they stand very little chance.
Ben Maguire (North Cornwall) (LD)
My hon. Friend is making a fantastic speech about the issue, which he is passionate about and has spent his life campaigning on. The Government Members saying that Cornwall needs to build more were clearly not listening when he said that Cornwall has an exemplary record of building houses. In the Chapelfields development in my constituency, 10 affordable homes were put aside for local residents. The developer has now effectively bullied the registered provider out of providing those homes for local residents—and guess what? They are back on the open market. Does my hon. Friend agree that these massive housebuilding targets are meaningless unless they are focused on local residents who need the housing?
Andrew George
I strongly agree. Planning consultants will often say privately that when an affordable element is required within the planning permission, developers will often go to their local authority with two viability assessments—one that they show the local authority with violins and a sob story, and another in their back pocket that has substantial profits for themselves. As a result, the portion of affordable homes delivered on many of the open market-led sites often diminishes to none at all. It is a system where, I am afraid, cynicism has succeeded, and I wish the Government well in trying to bear down on the problem.
My speech has taken a long time because of the number of interventions I have taken. We have had an interesting debate, but I will bring my remarks to a close by reminding the Minister that this policy not only has the support of the local Labour party, but it was also supported by the Conservatives in the past, although I do not know where they are on that at the moment. It has been implemented by the Labour party in Wales. Indeed, I will quote the Minister, who said on 20 January last year, in answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron), that
“the previous Government consulted on making short-term lets a different use class, but did not consult on second homes becoming a use class. As part of our wider consideration about the additional powers we might give local authorities, I am more than happy to have a conversation”—[Official Report, 20 January 2025; Vol. 760, c. 713.]
on that issue. This was obviously in his mind at the time, and I do not know why it is not now, because it would certainly assist local communities.
I believe that the Bill represents a range of modest measures—necessarily modest because it is a private Member’s Bill—that would be available to communities to address serious housing problems. The second part of the Bill would particularly apply in those areas where there is high pressure for holiday and second homes, and I urge hon. Members and the Minister to think again and to back the Bill.
Samantha Dixon (Chester North and Neston) (Lab)
Protecting our affordable housing stock is vital as we continue to pass through the cost of living crisis, and consider the scale of the housing crisis that confronts us. I hear this repeatedly on the doorsteps of Chester North and Neston, and I know that many Members hear the same. From larger urban centres to smaller villages and rural areas, my constituency contains the whole spectrum of housing provision. Residents have continuously voiced concerns about access to affordable housing across the constituency as a whole.
In small rural towns, like Neston, younger people and those on lower incomes are being pushed out by the lack of affordability, leaving historic settlements less diverse and worse off. Neston has the potential to be a wonderful home for our younger people. It has great links with Chester, Liverpool and the Wirral, access to beautiful green spaces that are well suited to family outings and sports, and good schools and restaurants—in short, the basic building blocks needed for a fulfilling, well-rounded life. To hear stories of families who can no longer afford to live there, pushed out by a lack of affordable homes, is disheartening, and strengthens my commitment to improving the situation—a commitment that I know is shared by this Labour Government.
With that in mind, I recognise the ambitions set out in the Bill introduced by the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George). The delegation of greater power to local communities who know their areas, with a depth and cultural understanding that cannot be replicated by a top-down, heavy-handed approach, is admirable. I believe that the Government understand that and, since entering office, they have begun to give the issue the attention and focus it deserves. For that reason, when I read the Bill I found that many of its proposals began to feel somewhat similar.
To take one example, let us consider the Bill’s clauses that would require any housing associations seeking to dispose of homes to give preference to local community bodies. If that sounds familiar, it is because the Social Housing Bill, which has been extensively debated and will soon return to the Chamber, contains requirements for housing associations to notify registered providers in their local area when selling homes out of the regulated sector. This replication of work already undertaken or in progress continues throughout the Bill before us, touching on business rates, right to buy and measuring housing need, to mention but a few examples.
I have seen the passionate and dedicated campaigning of the hon. Member for St Ives in this area, and I truly believe in his commitment to delivering for his constituents. It is clear to me that he shares my own commitment to improving access to affordable housing. However, I remain concerned that by passing the Bill into law risks duplicating work already undertaken by the Government and muddying the waters. Building more social and affordable housing is central to continuing the robust economic growth that we have seen in this country over the past two years. I believe that passing the Bill before us may create the potential for confusion and unnecessary red tape, which threatens the overall effectiveness of this Government’s house building programme.
Caroline Voaden
I thank the hon. Member for giving way—I have to be careful not to stand on the dog that is lying at my feet. She says that passing the Bill would be confusing because the Government are attempting to build more social and affordable homes. I do not think any Members on the Liberal Democrat Benches are against building more social and affordable homes, but the problem is that so many of those homes that exist and that are built in areas like that of my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives (Andrew George) and mine in South Devon become second homes and holiday lets. The Bill is trying to prevent those much-needed residential dwellings leaking out of the housing system. It does not matter how many homes are built, because if there is no cap on the number of second homes and holiday lets, local people still cannot get a home.
Samantha Dixon
I acknowledge the hon. Member’s points and I am sure that the Minister will respond to them in due course.
The hon. Member for St Ives is right to highlight the rapid growth in short-term lets in our communities. Chester has a strong heritage and leisure industry that attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists every year, and the growth of our visitor economy has risen in step with the number of short-term lets. In Chester, and many other communities across the country, the proliferation of short-term lets has the potential to erode the supply of housing in the private rented sector. In turn, that may drive up rents for hard-pressed families. It is right that this issue is given the attention we are giving it today. Short-term lets certainly have their place in a vibrant tourism economy across the UK. Indeed, I am proud that Sykes Holiday Cottages, a company that takes its responsibilities in this area seriously, is headquartered in my constituency.
None the less, the growth in this sector must not come at the expense of our local communities. In the light of that, I was pleased to hear the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport reconfirm the Government’s commitment to the regulation of short-term lets, providing local leaders the power to balance local need for affordable housing while still benefiting from tourism in their areas. The short-term lets register will take decisive steps in an area that the Bill seeks to regulate. I am sure we will hear from the Minister for Housing and Planning about this in due course. I know that he has spent a substantial amount of time with the hon. Member for St Ives discussing this particular issue.
Ben Maguire
Let me just pick up the point about the registration scheme. Cornish MPs have met the Minister for Tourism and Sport, and, as we understand it, the scheme will start out as a voluntary one, so holiday lets can voluntarily register themselves. There is currently a data issue, as local authorities cannot even access data on a specific level to see the scale of the problem in some of our constituencies.
Samantha Dixon
I acknowledge the hon. Member’s point. As I said, I am sure that my hon. Friend the Minister of State is listening and will respond to those points in due course.
Markus Campbell-Savours
My hon. Friend made the point that the registration scheme moves us forward some way, but for an area such as mine in the Lake district, it achieves very little other than the ability to count short-term lets. If I want to count them, I will look at the small business rates relief system, which already counts about 90% of them. Does she recognise that until we have a system that allows us to cap them, as a licensing scheme would, a registration scheme will do very little?
Samantha Dixon
Again, I acknowledge the hon. Member’s point. I am sure that the Minister of State is keen to respond later in the debate to those particular issues.
Let me be clear. The hon. Member for St Ives and other Members supporting this Bill are not wrong to demand a stronger and more affordable housing market that provides local authorities with greater power over their community planning, but, in putting this Bill forward, the excellent cause that it champions risks being lost in an already very busy and active policy landscape and leading to an unnecessary doubling of work. Our focus and the Government’s focus is on working hard to ensure that Government policy in this area is robust and delivered at pace to bring about real progress for residents in our constituencies and across the whole country.
John Lamont (Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk) (Con)
I congratulate the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George) on doing so well in the private Member’s Bill ballot and on bringing forward this Bill. He first brought his Affordable Homes Bill to this House back in 2014. While we have many differences on what the remedies to this challenge might be, his persistence on this issue deserves respect.
As the House knows, the planning provisions in this Bill would not apply in Scotland, where housing and planning are devolved to the Scottish Government, but the problems that it tries to tackle do not stop at the border. Families in the Scottish Borders face the same struggle as those in west Cornwall. Young people cannot find a home in the town that they grew up in, and key workers cannot live where they work. Communities need new homes, but they find the system stacked against them. I will use this debate to set out what that looks like in the Scottish Borders and the lessons that it holds for both Governments.
Let me start with the scale of the problem. In 2024, the Scottish Parliament declared a national housing emergency. More than two years on, the figures continue to head in the wrong direction. In the year to March 2026, some 17,268 new homes were completed in Scotland, almost 2,000 fewer than in the year before. Completions of affordable homes fell to their lowest level in a decade. In the year to June, social sector completions were at their lowest level since 2007. The SNP Scottish Government have promised 110,000 affordable homes by 2032. By the end of June this year, 36,518 had been delivered—barely a third of that target. Shelter Scotland, the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations and the Chartered Institute of Housing say that Scotland needs almost 15,700 social and affordable homes every single year, but less than half of that number are being delivered.
Behind those numbers are real families. At the end of September last year, some 10,480 children in Scotland were left living in temporary accommodation. That is more than 10,000 children without a safe, reliable and stable place to call home. It does not have to be that way. When the SNP Government cut the affordable housing budget in 2024, housing associations and councils explicitly warned them of the serious consequences of that decision. They were right, but their warning went ignored at the time, and while funding has since been restored, we cannot get back the years wasted or the projects stalled or abandoned.
Dr Arthur
I want to add a little bit of detail for the people who still think that the SNP-Green Government, as they were, were somehow virtuous. The cut that the hon. Member refers to was 26% of the affordable housing budget. It was absolutely incredible. The 2007 date is very important, because that was the year in which the SNP Government first came to power, and housing starts and completions are lower today than they were back then. Is that not an absolute disgrace?
John Lamont
I agree. What the SNP Scottish Government have done to housing in Scotland is an absolute scandal, and it is affecting the hon. Member’s constituency, just as it affects my own.
I want to dwell a bit on how the national picture has been felt in my constituency. Scottish Borders council has declared a local housing emergency, which is not a phrase any council uses lightly. I pay tribute to my local housing associations in the borders— Eildon, Berwickshire Housing Association, Scottish Borders Housing Association and Waverley. Since the council transferred its housing stock, they have been the only providers of social rented homes in the borders, and they build homes of real quality. However, looking at last year’s figures, it is just not enough.
The Scottish Government allocated £16.2 million to the borders for affordable housing, yet only £10.8 million of that was actually spent. Just 94 affordable homes were delivered against a target of 141. When the money allocated to fix the housing crisis cannot be spent, something in the system is broken. Maybe it is the availability of land, maybe it is the cost of building in rural areas, or maybe it is the inability of planning and infrastructure to keep up; most likely, it is all of them. Those are the questions that I am going to keep pursuing, in order to get answers.
That brings me to rural housing. Too many national housing programmes are designed with cities and big towns in mind. In a village in Berwickshire or in the Teviot valley, a development is six or 10 homes, not 600. There are fewer contractors, connecting to water and electricity costs more, and the cost of building each home is higher. Too often, the numbers simply do not stack up. Rural communities need support for small sites and small local builders. They need backing for community-led housing, and they need flexibility for homes tied to local jobs—farm workers, care staff and people working in tourism and hospitality, whose employers cannot recruit because there is nowhere for staff to live. Without those homes, young people leave, the school rolls fall, the bus service is cut, and the shops close. Housing is not just about bricks and mortar; it is about the future of rural communities.
The Bill puts a particular focus on second homes. I understand why—in parts of Cornwall, the concentration of second homes is extraordinary—but I want to offer a slightly different perspective from the Scottish Borders. I am not opposed to second homes. In many of our smaller and more isolated communities, second home owners are a lifeline. They shop in the village store, eat in the local pub, hire local tradespeople, and support businesses that would otherwise struggle through the quieter months. Many have deep family roots in the borders, and many go on to make them their permanent home. Second homes already make a contribution in the Scottish Borders: Scottish Borders council charges a council tax premium on them, and uses that money to help fund affordable housing and bring empty homes back into use.
As such, I suggest that the answer is a balance. Where second homes become so concentrated that a community is hollowed out, councils should have the tools to act, but in the borders, the main problem is not too many second homes—it is too few new homes. Blaming second home owners is easy; building the homes we need is harder, and that is the task in front of us.
Andrew George
I do not think anyone is blaming the individuals. Indeed, I acknowledge that second home owners bring a great deal to their local communities, and many are strong champions and supporters of local initiatives in the way that the hon. Member describes. The purpose of this Bill is simply to give affected communities the power to, if they choose—only if they choose—cap numbers where they think second home ownership might get out of hand.
John Lamont
The hon. Member makes an important point, but I think this is about balance. We do not want to stigmatise many of the people coming into rural communities, who are keeping the village shop open and the local tradesmen going during the harder months. I believe there is a balance to be reached. Many councils, and certainly those in Scotland, already have the powers to allow that balance to be reached, such as the second home council tax premium. I think we need to be careful about the language we use regarding second home owners.
That leads me to the planning system. Builders in Scotland say that a shrinking supply of land and poor viability are behind the fall in house building. Planning departments are under-resourced, and decision making takes too long. In the Borders, there is a particular pressure that I want the House to understand: the sheer volume of large electricity infrastructure projects. Wind farms, battery storage, data centres and grid upgrades that have resulted in massive pylons coming across the border—these have all made the Borders the epicentre for the expansion of the energy network.
Most large wind farms are decided by Scottish Ministers through the energy consents unit, not by the council, but the council must still assess each application, respond as a consultee, work through the environmental information and answer to local residents. These applications are often vast and complex. In the past year alone, the council’s planning committee has had to consider proposals such as Scawd Law and Glenburnie. When the council objects, Ministers can and do override it, as they did at Ditcher Law, where the council has now been forced to take legal action to review the Government’s decision.
All of this falls on a planning service that has had little extra support from the Scottish Government. Every hour that a planning officer spends on a 200-metre turbine is an hour not spent on an application for six family homes in a Borders village. If the Scottish Government want councils to deliver their energy ambitions, they must properly supply and resource the planning departments to do the work, and they must also give local communities a proper say.
My final point relates to infrastructure. In my experience, communities are not against new homes; what they are against are new homes without the GP appointments, school places, roads, water and drainage that go with them. Put the infrastructure in first and we win the consent for the homes. In the Borders, that means transport, properly staffed rural schools and nurseries, bus services to all parts of the Borders, well-resourced GP practices and roads without potholes.
The hon. Member for St Ives is absolutely right to raise these issues. Whether it is in Cornwall or the Scottish Borders, the message is the same: people need homes they can afford in the communities they love. That means building more homes. It means a planning system with the resources to do its job, it means recognising that rural areas are different, and it means putting infrastructure in first. The Scottish Government must do better by their rural communities. I will keep pressing them, as I hope the UK Government will, to act on behalf of the families across the Scottish Borders who simply want a place to call home.
Steve Yemm (Mansfield) (Lab)
I want to start by recognising the excellent intentions behind the Bill and the importance of ensuring that local people have access to decent and affordable homes. I am sure the whole House shares these ambitions with the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George), and they are ones that this Government are also committed to delivering.
However, having considered the Bill and the Government’s assessment of its proposals, I find it difficult to support. I believe the fundamental problem is that much of what the hon. Member for St Ives seeks to achieve is either covered by existing powers or being addressed through legislation that is already before Parliament, or it can be delivered through the Government’s existing housing programmes, without the need for further primary legislation.
Ben Maguire
Can the hon. Member please point me to specific Government legislation, either currently before the House or upcoming, that addresses the things that have been described by the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George), such as the issue with second homes and holiday lets, which has really added fuel to the fire of the housing crisis?
Steve Yemm
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention; I will give him a number of examples. The Government are already strengthening the ability of local authorities to work with communities through neighbourhood planning and existing planning powers. We already have the Social Housing Bill going through Parliament, which will address issues to do with the disposal of social housing assets. There are also changes to the types of intermediate housing that can receive Government funding. I question what further value this Bill would deliver.
I appreciate that second homes and holiday lets are significant issues in some parts of the country, particularly coastal and rural areas, and for communities in the south-west of England. But they are in no way a defining feature of the housing market in my constituency of Mansfield, and nor do they reflect the challenges facing my constituents, which are really very different.
Andrew George
The hon. Gentleman actually helps to make my point. The examples he gave are totally irrelevant to my Bill, by the way. This is, after all, a Bill that proposes a set of tools that are available to communities that wish to take them. If communities in Mansfield do not wish to take those, they will not be imposed on them.
Steve Yemm
The issue that constituents regularly raise with me is not second homes but the growing concentration of houses in multiple occupation. I have spoken previously in the House about the impact that excessive concentrations of HMOs have on neighbourhoods in areas such as mine. I therefore want to put on record my strong welcome of the work being undertaken by Mansfield district council to assess the case for an article for direction in that respect.
It follows concerns raised by local residents and representations that I have made over the past year. I am pleased that the council in Mansfield, other local authorities and the Government are taking those concerns seriously and moving to give local communities such as mine a greater say over what happens in their neighbourhood.
Perhaps a more important issue in my constituency is the shortage of social housing. Identifying land and extending community rights can play a role, but those measures are not a substitute for a clear, deliverable approach to increasing the supply of council and housing association homes that people desperately need.
David Burton-Sampson (Southend West and Leigh) (Lab)
In Southend we hear similar concerns to what my hon. Friend is describing. I am proud of Southend-on-Sea city council, which has put £100 million towards new social housing and acquiring housing for social housing. Does my hon. Friend agree that often the issue here and across the whole country is political will? For example, the local planning situation in Southend is being frustrated by the Conservatives, Reform and the Greens. Without a good local plan, local areas cannot have the right type of housing that they need.
Steve Yemm
I agree completely with my hon. Friend, who raises an important point.
We all know that a private Member’s Bill is a very valuable opportunity. Members right across the House have very limited opportunity to bring forward legislation. I think this opportunity has been used to revisit measures where work is already under way rather than concentrating on some of the genuine gaps in our housing system. I would suggest that a closer examination of the Government’s existing programme and the practical housing problems facing constituencies such as mine would produce a more useful Bill. For those reasons, I support the Government’s position and oppose the Bill.
Ben Maguire (North Cornwall) (LD)
It is a great privilege to rise to speak in full and fulsome support of my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives (Andrew George), to whom I would like to pay a brief tribute. He has spent many years campaigning on this issue with such passion and dedication. Even when he took a brief sabbatical from this place, he carried on that passion and dedication, and was determined to pursue the measures he has laid before the House today. So I pay tribute to him and thank him.
Seeing my hon. Friend’s dedication to people in Cornwall has been an inspiration for me as a young person coming into politics in Cornwall. Like him, I grew up in Cornwall and felt that I had no option but to move away when I turned 18, because it seemed that there were simply no opportunities for a career or further education, but also no kind of hope of affording my own home and raising a family in Cornwall. It is therefore an immense privilege that I have managed to return to North Cornwall as its Member of Parliament.
The measures my hon. Friend proposes today are, unfortunately, not new. We have been talking about these issues in this Chamber for decades. In fact, one of my predecessors, the former hon. Member for North Cornwall, John Pardoe, who some hon. Members may remember, in 1966 described our area as “neglected” and
“exporting a mass of young people.”—[Official Report, 25 April 1966; Vol. 727, c. 623.]
He said: “The tragedy facing so many of the people I represent is the knowledge that the stock of housing on which they must rely—namely, the housing provided by the local authorities—is rapidly declining.”
Paul Tyler, his successor, in 1974 said:
“The housing shortage is now a major social evil once again.” —[Official Report, 12 March 1974; Vol. 870, c. 144.]
My most recent Liberal Democrat predecessor, Dan Rogerson, in 2005 quite simply said:
“North Cornwall has more second homes than council houses”. —[Official Report, 18 May 2005; Vol. 434, c. 214.]
Yet here we are again. It almost feels like groundhog day, debating once again the abject failure of successive Governments to build enough affordable and social homes for local people in Cornwall that they can actually afford to rent and live in. We just continually see inaction from Government after Government.
Noah Law
I certainly appreciate that progress has been slow over the decades, but does the hon. Gentleman recognise that, given the changes to allow a second home council tax premium and the Labour Government’s position on stamp duty for second homes, there is some light at the end of the tunnel on this long journey to ensuring that second home owners pay their fair share? Will he call on the Liberal Democrat council locally to make an economic impact study of what those changes have done to the housing market locally?
Ben Maguire
Apologies, I did not quite catch the hon. Gentleman’s last point, but on the stamp duty point I was proud to walk with him through the Lobby in support of that. Unfortunately, that was a very incremental change, which I know from anecdotal experience has not deterred a single person from turning a residential property into a second home. I think it was something like a 2% increase. I suspect that many house buyers paying for a £1.5 million or £2 million home will not balk at the thought of an extra 1% or 2% stamp duty. Of course, I welcome the measure and I agree with him that these are the kinds of steps that need to be taken.
Ben Maguire
Perhaps in the hon. Gentleman’s next intervention he could explain why he will not be supporting the specific provisions in the Bill, which he knows as well as I do would benefit his constituents extremely in areas such as St Austell and Newquay, who for decades have struggled to get on the housing ladder or rent a home, because they are all being put up for holiday lets and second homes.
Ben Maguire
I would be pleased if the hon. Gentleman brought that data to the House. I must admit that I am struggling with some of the opposition to the Bill from Labour Members. We have heard that it is not radical enough, and that we need to build more homes. The hon. Gentleman said he wanted data; well, I have a stat: between 1961 and 2011, Cornwall’s population almost tripled, and during the 2000s, Cornwall built 770 homes for every 1,000 new residents, which was double the national average of 377 at the time.
We are not short of homes or houses in Cornwall. We have record—[Interruption.] I hear the hon. Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Patrick Spencer) chuntering from a sedentary position; I am happy to give way. We are not short of residential properties, which are being built every year, but, as I highlighted in my intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives, many of those homes, once built, are rapidly turned into second homes and holiday lets, and the local authority has no control.
I warmly welcome the measures in the Bill. I thought there was consensus in the House on giving local areas the choice and the powers to make decisions for certain parts of the country—for example, towns and villages in my North Cornwall constituency such as St Minver Lowlands, which has 71% non-first homes, or St Merryn, which has 60% non-first homes. Other Members have highlighted the impact on community life, school staffing, nurseries and other local facilities. I warmly welcome my hon. Friend’s attempt to take forward this legislation to give local people, local authorities and local areas decision-making powers where there are far too many second homes compared with affordable first homes for local people. We should give those areas the right to choose and the power to balance the market.
As my hon. Friend said, we are not against second home owners, and we are certainly not against holiday let owners—they are an important part of the accommodation mix for the tourism industry in Cornwall—but may I humbly suggest that if the proportion gets to over 70% it is possibly too much? Despite the massive house building numbers I mentioned, Cornwall’s housing register list has over 25,000 families who cannot find a safe and warm place to live. I suggest that in those specific areas we give local people, local authorities and local councils the chance to decide how many and where any holiday lets and second homes might be appropriate.
My hon. Friend, along with some Government Members, touched on the council tax loophole, whereby if holiday homes can be easily flipped to holiday lets, they qualify for business rates and, often, small business rate relief, so they do not pay double council tax and they pay no business rates at all. In fact, they do not pay any tax, full stop. I would welcome the Minister’s thoughts on that loophole which, as I understand it, can be backdated several years.
On infrastructure, Cornwall is, as has been mentioned, very good at meeting our house building targets, and we have built thousands of homes. Unfortunately, as I have explained, they do not always end up in the hands of local residents, as they should. But in Cornwall, as well as a housing crisis we now have an infrastructure crisis. In my town of Bodmin—the largest in my constituency—the surgery is operating at 160% of capacity, yet we cannot get a new surgery building past the local integrated care board. We have part but not full funding, and yet by 2030 Bodmin will see 3,500 more homes built. Unless new homes come with infrastructure, we are storing up enormous issues for our local residents.
I would really welcome the Housing Minister explaining the very ambitious house building targets. As I say, if those houses are for local residents who really need them, I am fully supportive, but I have highlighted the issues around those arbitrary targets.
Matthew Pennycook
As has been mentioned—I say to the hon. Gentleman again—one of the most effective ways in which communities can shape development in their area is to have up-to-date local plans in place. Cornwall’s local plan was adopted in 2016 and, again, the infrastructure funding statement alongside that, which is so important, is out of date. Cornwall is now taking steps to get an up-to-date plan in place, but it is very late in the day.
Ben Maguire
I thank the Minister for that intervention. He knows as well as I do that it takes years to put together neighbourhood plans, and lots of those were disregarded when the new legislation came forward. I hope that he will say something on that. As we move forward with our Cornish devolution deal, perhaps something can come with that.
I want briefly to take the rare opportunity to praise the Conservative Government—I am not often found doing so in the House, and I will have to caveat this carefully. Just before the general election—I leave it to hon. Members to consider the cynicism of this and how likely they felt it was that they would be returned to enact the measures—they proposed much of what my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives does in his Bill in requiring planning permission when a residential property is turned into a holiday let. I must admit that I am extremely frustrated and disappointed to see the Labour Government not taking that on.
Sean Woodcock (Banbury) (Lab)
It is lovely to see the coalition making a comeback in the Chamber. My reason for opposing the Bill is that, during the coalition in particular, local authority planning capacity was totally gutted. Councillors have no capacity to do this. Local authorities such as Lib Dem-led Cherwell in my constituency are in special measures because of their failures to deal with planning, so the idea of giving them more stuff to decide on is ludicrous when we have a housing crisis. Does the hon. Member not see that logic?
Ben Maguire
The hon. Member makes a good point. Of course, his Government have centralised planning policy, so my councillors in North Cornwall have virtually no say about planning applications, be they on infrastructure or affordable homes. When I was reaching out cross-party, what a contrast those cheap political points are. By the way, I work well with my Cornish Labour colleagues for the good of Cornwall and would happily work with Conservative Members and hon. Members across the House to make positive changes for my constituents.
I really emphasise that these measures are already being taken in other parts of the United Kingdom: we saw the Labour Government in Wales introduce much of what my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives seeks. Finally, I re-emphasise my commitment to people in my constituency such as Sarah and Frank, who live in Rock and have been sofa-surfing for nine months because they cannot afford to rent anywhere. As was said earlier, when we look on Rightmove for rental accommodation, we see little available, because—guess what?—it is much more profitable to put properties on Airbnb or let them as holiday accommodation. We need to bear those people in mind when we vote—although, given the Government’s opposition to the Bill, we may not get a chance to vote for it today.
I hope that today is not the end of the conversation. I mentioned my predecessor from the ’60s, who talked about how acute this issue is in Cornwall, and we have heard similar from hon. Members who represent other parts of the country. I hope that the Minister is listening and that he will finally take action on an issue that has gone on for decades. We have heard various proposals along the way, but we have never seen the action that we need to regulate the housing sector and ensure that our local residents can afford a safe and warm home.
Michelle Scrogham (Barrow and Furness) (Lab)
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for the opportunity to speak in this debate.
The concerns that this Bill seeks to address are genuine. Across the country, too many families are struggling to access secure and affordable housing. Young people are finding home ownership increasingly out of reach. Social housing waiting lists remain far too long and, in many communities, the growth of second homes and short-term lets has placed further pressure on already limited housing stock. Private rentals are becoming increasingly unaffordable. Far too often, we hear stories of the horrible conditions in which private tenants are forced to live. These are important challenges, and it is right that we dedicate time to solving them. However, I am not convinced that this Bill provides the remedy.
The Bill focuses on identifying opportunities for affordable housing through the “assets of community value” process. That requires parish and town councils, community land trusts and local charities to identify vacant or unused buildings, or land suitable for affordable housing. At present, such assets can include pubs, village shops, community centres and libraries, among others. The hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George) wants to expand the framework to include land that is vacant or substantially unused. The Liberal Democrats were part of the coalition Government, who introduced the legislation. If they believe that the framework needs strengthening to support affordable housing, why did not they do that when they were in government?
The difficulty is that identifying land is not the same as building homes. Like other Members of this House, I am aware of many derelict and unused sites in my patch that would be perfect for redevelopment, but the challenge has never been knowing that these sites exist. The challenge has been securing the investment, planning capacity, infrastructure and long-term delivery required to turn those sites into homes that people can actually live in.
Noah Law
My hon. Friend makes a really important point. We can make changes to planning rules and regulations, but ultimately what matters for delivery is investment and making sites investable. Does she welcome the £40 billion or so that this Labour Government are putting into social and affordable homes, and the £65 million that we are putting aside for local community organisations to work on those kinds of projects on their high streets?
Michelle Scrogham
I absolutely agree that this Government’s interventions and funding will make those changes. This Bill, though, creates additional expectations, without addressing the problem of delivery.
The Liberal Democrats were not powerless observers during the worsening of our housing crisis; they spent five years in government. They sat at the Cabinet table, and they voted for coalition Budgets. They supported policies that saw local government funding slashed and planning departments across the country stretched ever more thinly. If they believed that local communities needed stronger powers to bring forward affordable housing sites, why did they not legislate for that when they were in office? The truth is that too often the Liberal Democrats seek to campaign against the consequences of decisions that they helped to make in government.
This Labour Government are pursuing a comprehensive strategy to tackle the housing crisis. We have committed to delivering 1.5 million social homes over this Parliament. At the 2025 spending review, the Government confirmed £39 billion in funding over the next 10 years, as has been mentioned. This provides the certainty needed for providers to plan ambitious housing development projects over the next 10 years.
Ben Maguire
I still fail to understand what measures the hon. Member’s Government are taking to tackle second homes and holiday lets, which, as so many hon. Members have explained, are adding fuel to the fire of the housing crisis. I welcome the social housing measures, but what is specifically being done in that area?
Michelle Scrogham
I welcome the hon. Member’s intervention. This Government have brought in the powers to increase taxes to tackle that issue. In my area, Liberal Democrat-run Westmorland and Furness council has benefited from that tax by several hundred million pounds. What worries me, though, is that the council has not actually tackled the heart of the problem. Nearly 8,000 households in my constituency are waiting for affordable houses, and there are 3,500 long-term empty homes. If the Liberal Democrats really wanted to get serious about fixing the situation, we have given them the tools to do so, yet Liberal Democrat-run Westmorland and Furness council has failed to do that. My area has the fifth highest number of long-term empty homes in England. We have given councils the tools, so I would suggest that the Liberal Democrats talk to their colleagues and perhaps press for some changes.
We are taking action to ensure that local authorities have the regulatory and financial powers to deliver on these commitments. We are reforming the national planning policy framework, restoring mandatory housing targets for local authorities and addressing concerns that the planning permission application process is too lengthy, complex and time consuming. The Government are devolving powers over spending on house building to regional mayors and combined authorities, so that they have greater power to address regional house shortages. We are enabling councils to retain 100% of the receipts from right-to-buy sales and allowing them to channel the money directly back into house building—something I am incredibly passionate about.
By reducing barriers, we are getting Britain building again. Although I respect the intentions behind the Bill, I do not believe that it provides the scale of reform necessary to meet the building challenge faced by this country, and nor can I ignore the irony of taking lectures from a party that had five years in government to address many of these issues and failed to do so. For those reasons, I cannot support the Bill. Instead, I back this Government’s programme to deliver the social and affordable homes that Britain needs.
Sarah Gibson (Chippenham) (LD)
It is important to remember that the last time this country consistently built the number of houses that we, across the House, agree we need was the 1960s, when councils were building houses. If the new Labour Government, who have had two and a half years to get this right, are still going to blame the Liberal Democrats’ small part in a coalition, in a fairly powerless time, some 10 years ago, then they really need to look forward and concentrate on what they can deliver.
Matthew Pennycook
Does the hon. Lady recognise that, last year, this Labour Government delivered the highest number of council homes since records began in 1991-92?
Sarah Gibson
I do recognise that, but we are still nowhere near the levels we were at when councils were actually building. That is important, because for too long—even under this Labour Government—we have assumed that the answer to the housing crisis is more planning permissions, in the hope that the market will deliver, when we know that it will not.
That is why I welcome the Bill tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives (Andrew George). It recognises something that we have forgotten in housing policy: land, planning and delivery cannot be separated from one another. As the hon. Member for Barrow and Furness (Michelle Scrogham) mentioned, we can have planning applications, but delivery is a different issue. As an architect, I have spent most of my adult life trying to deliver buildings and actually get things built on the ground. One of the problems that I repeatedly see is land passing from one developer to another while the planning application process takes so long. With each of those transactions, the price increase on the land and the hope value built into the assumption that planning permission will ultimately be granted mean that, by the time planning permission is secured, the price paid for the land and the expectations on that future development have created so much pressure that almost everything else gets squeezed.
Emily Darlington (Milton Keynes Central) (Lab)
The hon. Member is making a good case for development corporations. Does she agree that spatial development strategies—there was an announcement on them yesterday, I think—are a good step forward in doing the strategic planning that she is asking for, and that I think we all agree is needed?
Sarah Gibson
Absolutely. I recognise that this Government are working towards that, which is why I feel very strongly that the Bill is adding to the work that the Government are doing, not detracting from it.
Over the years, we have seen the squeezing of affordable housing. It is what gets removed every time there is an economic crisis or an economic case for its removal—the social housing, the infrastructure and the quality of the housing itself. I particularly welcome the compulsory purchase provisions in the Bill, as they deal with the issues of affordability for housing associations and local government being able to actually provide this housing. Authorities need to be able to secure the land at a value that makes these homes deliverable, rather than allowing the inflated expectations of future development value to consume the viability of the scheme before a single home is built.
We also need to look again at who actually builds the homes. I speak regularly to the social housing providers in my area, and one problem in relying on developers to construct the affordable element of a large scheme, and then asking the housing association to acquire it, is that those homes have not necessarily been built with what the provider needs. The homes may be the wrong type of house or built to the wrong specification, and increasingly they may leave the provider with the additional costs of bringing them up to the standards the provider will shortly be required to meet.
By 2030, social landlords will need to meet new minimum energy-efficiency standards, and providers are therefore being asked to retrofit thousands of their existing homes while simultaneously finding the money to build new homes designed and built by somebody else.
Amanda Martin
Is the hon. Lady saying that people who live in social housing should not have those elements in their houses, whether they are retrofit or new build? Yes, those things are expensive, but we should absolutely ensure that everybody has a warm home to live in.
Sarah Gibson
As an advocate of the warm homes plan and as an architect trying to ensure this, I absolutely agree that everybody deserves a warm, safe and comfortable home. What the hon. Lady suggests is completely the reverse of what I am saying. I am saying that if the developer provides social housing that lacks those things, it is therefore the social housing provider that has to retrofit the housing to ensure that it is delivering on the promise of the 2030 agreement. It is a real problem that local developers are still putting in gas boilers and the social housing provider is having to retrofit the homes with alternative forms of heating. I agree with the hon. Lady that we need to ensure that our social housing is fit for the future, but getting the developer to build it on behalf of the social housing provider is probably not the best way of doing it.
If we can give social housing providers the capital to commission the homes that their communities actually need, we would also be able to diversify who delivers housing. We need the councils, housing associations, community land trusts, small builders and private developers all to play their part, rather than depending so heavily on a small number of large developers and a single model of delivery.
That is why I also welcome the provisions in the Bill that strengthen the role of community land trusts, parish and town councils and neighbourhood planning. People are much more likely to support development when it is community led: the homes are genuinely affordable; local families can access them; and, as the hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (John Lamont) mentioned earlier, when much-needed infrastructure comes with the homes, the development can enhance the existing towns and villages, rather than just being a bolt-on to the side, adding to the pressures of existing services.
Good placemaking is not a barrier to growth; it is one of the foundations of sustainable growth. This Bill begins to reconnect land planning and community delivery. I really hope that even if the Government cannot support the Bill in its current state, they will continue to work with my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives. I congratulate him on bringing this Bill before the House.
Emily Darlington (Milton Keynes Central) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George) on his laudable Bill, but it is just a sticking plaster on the housing crisis we are experiencing and many of the measures are unnecessary—[Interruption.] I hope I have not offended the hon. Member. I thought I was being quite nice! The measures are unnecessary for councils dedicated to building communities and not just housing. In fact, too many councils led by the Opposition parties are, quite frankly, nimbys and blocking councils.
Milton Keynes is 60 next year, which is exciting for me and the MPs there. It is an example of what can be done when a council is committed to growth through building communities. In fact, everyone who has chosen to live in Milton Keynes is a pioneer—part of building the city that we are still creating. In every new estate, we build the school and GP surgery before the houses, rather than retrofitting them afterwards, and that is paid for by developers. We also build the infrastructure first. We are extending the grid roads, our famous roundabouts and our redways, which means that bicycles and pedestrians do not have to interact with the roads. Those provisions are set out in our council planning. Our community infrastructure—which ensures that communities have places to play, pray and gather—and our mixed housing, including social, affordable, private rent and private ownership, are set out in our “Strategy for 2050” plan. Having a five-year land supply, an up-to-date plan and a strategy that takes us out to 2050 allows us to put in place the things we need.
We are also building culture. Over 100 languages are spoken in Milton Keynes, and each and every one of those communities is celebrated. We respect the fact that diversity increases our innovation and our ability to build this new city. It is of no surprise to any of us—though it might be to others in the country—that we have been shortlisted for the city of culture.
Amanda Martin
I congratulate Milton Keynes on being shortlisted. Unfortunately, my city of Portsmouth was not—we were on the long list. [Hon. Members: “Shame!”] Yes, shame. I thank my hon. Friend for talking about the wider plans. My dad helped to build Milton Keynes—he was a gas fitter—and when Galley Hill estate was built, my parents moved there and were able to live in council housing because Milton Keynes had that forward thinking, so I echo her words.
Emily Darlington
I am sorry that Portsmouth was not shortlisted. I do not know what the bid was, but I am sure it was a fantastic one and that there will be opportunities in the future for Portsmouth to be city of culture. I want to recognise people like my hon. Friend’s father, who were part of building this new kind of city, and we continue in that spirit. When we built 183 new council homes, we ensured within the contract that local builders, plumbers, electricians and tradies were a part of the process—continuing the strategy of building homes with the people and talent we have in Milton Keynes.
Oliver Ryan (Burnley) (Lab/Co-op)
My hon. Friend paints a utopian picture of Milton Keynes. She is such a strong advocate for the city and for municipal planning across the board. On the anniversary of the creation of Milton Keynes—she looks well for 60, by the way—perhaps she could remind the House under which Government Milton Keynes was designated a new town, and also which Government it was that installed the priorities and principles of new towns into what is now the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government?
Emily Darlington
I will not take the bait on how old I am, because one never asks a lady how old she is, but I am not 60. But my hon. Friend is absolutely right that Milton Keynes is the epitome of a Labour Government’s dream, not just in the fact that it is a city built on opportunity, bringing people together and building communities as well as housing, but in that it also houses another amazing Labour Government initiative—the Open University—which shows that every single person has an opportunity to succeed.
Caroline Voaden
It is great to hear about Milton Keynes building infrastructure and having dedicated cycle lanes. That is so much easier in a new town, where that can be done through urban planning, and we are absolutely in favour of that.
The hon. Lady talks about how important it is for local areas to build. South Hams, which I represent, has built its required number of houses year after year after year under Liberal Democrat leadership, but, because of inward migration, we have more than 4,000 second homes there—the fourth-highest concentration in the entire country. The Devon Housing Commission says that inward migration from outside Devon is a massive problem. That is why my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives (Andrew George) has put forward a Bill that would help us to curb the second homes issue. It may not be a problem in Milton Keynes, but it is a particular issue that we are dealing with in certain parts of the country. That is why building and building and building is not the solution when we have massive inward migration from people wanting to retire to a beautiful part of the country.
Emily Darlington
I was just coming on to explain how second homes are an issue in Milton Keynes.
Milton Keynes is not immune to the second homes issue, but, in fact, our issue is a little bit different—everything in Milton Keynes is a little bit different. Our new homes are marketed in the middle east because of our prized location in being able to access London, Oxford, Cambridge and Birmingham, as well as fast trains to Manchester and Liverpool. Those homes are occupied only in the summer and remain empty for the rest of the year. Despite doubling the council tax for those homes, that remains an issue. I want to continue to have a conversation with the Minister about what more we can do to tackle that issue so that those new homes go to families.
There are other, even more pressing issues in Milton Keynes that the Government could help with, which would help to fix the housing crisis. The Minister will not be surprised by my raising some of these issues, but I would appreciate it if he could address some of them in his response.
First and foremost, rough sleeping in Milton Keynes used to be the highest that it had ever been. As the deputy leader of the council, I was able to bring it down to some of the lowest levels, and I am really pleased that the approach we have taken in Milton Keynes is now the national approach. We have done No Second Night Out in Milton Keynes for more than three years, and it has led to a significant decrease in the number of people sleeping rough, but, unfortunately, issues still need to be resolved to make our dream of ending rough sleeping. Some of those issues have been taken up by the Prime Minister, who has committed further funding beyond this Christmas and will allow some proper infrastructure around supported housing to be built right across the country.
We have to talk about how the local housing allowance does not respond to local rents. That is important in a city such as Milton Keynes, where private rents are about the same as those in many areas of London. We also need to talk about local councils building council housing again. The Government have rightly done quite a bit to support registered providers, but that does not deal with housing revenue account debt or the fact that many local councils have not been able to access the £39 billion in Homes England funding. How are we ensuring that council homes are being built by councils? We need to look at the impact of right to buy and the wall put up by the Thatcher Government between a council’s general fund and the HRA budgets, which makes no sense when temporary accommodation comes out of the general fund and council homes come out of the HRA.
The other big issues that we need to solve in the housing crisis include service charges for leaseholders. I really welcome the Minister’s efforts to deal with this issue, because it is not only pricing people out of purchasing, but trapping people in homes, as they can no longer sell them because of high service charges, and they are therefore building up debt. There are also the service charges for freeholders. That is an issue, because when we build new houses and estates, we see fleecehold being used more and more to continue to game cash from residents, instead of handing over roads and parks to the local council. The Minister will be aware of how much that impacts Milton Keynes, and how important it is for my residents, and I hope he will talk about some of his work and thinking on this.
Although the hon. Member for St Ives—he is now back in his place; he just did a tour—is identifying some real issues, we cannot look at these things in isolation, and this is really a sticking plaster for a housing crisis for which we need an overarching plan. We need councils to use the powers they currently have, and to stay up to date with their five-year land supplies and local plans, so that planning inspectors are not coming in and forcing them on councils. The power stays local when the local behaves properly, and that is what we need to get across to councils that have still not put such measures in place. Those councils—Milton Keynes is surrounded by many of them—that refuse to build, or build only on the borders of Milton Keynes, are not taking this issue seriously.
Emily Darlington
And Reform. Councils from all the Opposition parties are frankly not looking at this issue strategically and building the continued infrastructure. Not everyone likes roundabouts, but I do not like traffic so I will take a roundabout any day.
Alison Bennett (Mid Sussex) (LD)
I primarily want to talk about the first four clauses of the Bill and community-led housing. Second homes exist in Mid Sussex—of course they do—but the scale of the challenge is nowhere near that faced by colleagues in parts of the country that are more frequented by tourists, such as Cornwall in the south-west, Cumbria and so on.
When I think about my constituency, I think about the district as a whole. There are about 2,000 households on the social housing register, and about 100 homes where families are living in temporary accommodation. I am well aware that those are quite small numbers compared with other parts of the country, but when we go out knocking on doors in Mid Sussex and have a conversation about the need for housing and the housing crisis, people in my community often do not realise that even 100 families are in temporary accommodation in our area.
First as a councillor, and now as a Member of the House, I think about what that means for people’s day-to-day lives. I think about the mum and her daughter who spent the first five years of that child’s life sharing a one-bedroom flat in a rural village. I think about the family of six I tried and failed to help, and who were facing eviction about 18 months ago. They were unable to find anywhere suitable for rent either privately or socially, and critically, there was nowhere near the school that the children attended. Too many people are inadequately or insecurely housed in my constituency, as is the case across the country.
Mid Sussex has a mixture of towns, large villages and small hamlets. It is by no means the most rural or largest constituency, but if someone who has an established network of family and friends around them in one area, in that village, is moved to accommodation at the other end of the district, that is devastating. It strains family ties, breaks friendships and support networks, and makes it next to impossible for people to stay in work, or for children to remain in the school where they are settled and happy. For those families who do not have access to a car, or perhaps two cars in a rural area with no buses, it is absolutely awful when somebody cannot find a decent home. For those reasons, we should be doing everything we can to enable people to stay in the place they call home. Community matters, villages matter, being near our family and friends matters, and the Bill goes with the grain of what communities are already trying to do.
In our area, we are lucky to have a network of town and parish councils, and their councillors—particularly the parish councillors—are unpaid volunteers, but they go above and beyond for their communities in a variety of ways. Over the years, I have seen how they have tried, with mixed success, to secure assets of community value for their communities.
When I first moved to Mid Sussex in 2012, it was the time of the neighbourhood plan. I saw my parish council, and subsequently other parish councils, do everything it could in good faith to meet the requirements for neighbourhood planning, only to be told a few years later that the need for local plans trumped that neighbourhood plan, which it believed provided the housing that its community needed, and which the community felt able to support. Those parish councillors were acting on a voluntary basis, and they were acting in good faith.
In the last week or so, we have had the latest examination of the Mid Sussex district plan and, again, these volunteers have worked tirelessly to represent the interests of their communities. Mid Sussex council is currently led by the Liberal Democrats, although we do not have a majority, and it was previously run by the Conservatives. It has actually done what has been asked of it by successive Governments and delivered housing at scale, generally over 1,000 homes a year, 30% of which have been for affordable and social housing. As a council, we have not shied away from building the homes required of us, which is evidenced by the fact that Mid Sussex has the highest rate of population growth across the whole of Sussex.
If last week’s examination were to go ahead, it looks like another 24,000 homes will be allocated, despite them being predicated on having an adequate water supply. Ardingly reservoir, on which the constituency relies for its water, currently contains less than 20% of its capacity. When I talk to residents, they are in disbelief that another 24,000 homes could be provided for, when there has been a hosepipe ban in place for 10 of the last 16 months, and when there is a severe drought, a knackered and leaking pipe network and a reservoir that seems to empty quicker than water down a plughole.
Alison Bennett
Last time I had a PMQ, the question was about water companies being statutory consultees on planning applications. I think there is a bigger challenge in that water companies are not properly engaging in the planning system, and I would be really appreciative if the Minister looked into that issue. In my estimation, the housing sector works on five-year timescales, with a five-year housing land supply being in place. However, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the water industry work on 20-year timescales. Those two are in gross mismatch, which means that there is constant pressure for more housing, but the water infrastructure is in no way keeping up with it.
Against all that backdrop, the Bill introduced by my hon. Friend the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George) would put in place provisions to allow a real path forward for communities that want to provide the homes that their own residents need. That means that housing local people, affordably and in the place they already call home, would be made possible by the Bill’s proposals.
I do not see this as an either/or with the current planning framework and the reforms that this Government are bringing forward; it is in addition to them. It is something that those volunteers on parish and town councils want, as they want to do what is right for their communities, so I fully support my hon. Friend’s proposals. The purpose of the Bill is clear and simple: it strengthens the ability of communities to meet unmet local housing need through parish and town councils, community land trusts and other community-led organisations.
In my time in this House, when Government Members start talking about the coalition, I have observed that it is because they are on the wrong side of the argument, and it is the only argument they have left. These are good proposals that would benefit the country, and I ask the Government to think again.
Adam Thompson (Erewash) (Lab)
I thank the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George) for introducing this important debate. The issue matters a great deal to my constituents, as well as to my father and step-mother, who are constituents of his, and their cats, Trevor and Midnight. I know he is a great campaigner for their interests, especially those of Trevor the feral cat.
My constituency sits within Erewash borough—the boundaries of the constituency and the borough are not quite coterminous—which has a social housing waiting list some 5,000 people long. Of those 5,000 people, more than 2,000 are children. Too many families are growing up in temporary accommodation and there is a generation of young people for whom the dream of home ownership is distant, at best. The Prime Minister is right to talk about how our politics has treated housing purely as a commodity to be bought and sold, and we have heard lots of commentary on that point during the debate.
The failure to recognise that housing is an essential part of life and important in our way of living has been a major contributor to the housing crisis that we face today, and we need to change tack to address that issue. That is why I am strongly in favour of this Government’s direction on housing and planning generally. I believe that direction already addresses many of the areas in the hon. Gentleman’s Bill.
My principal concern is that much of what the Bill seeks to achieve, as we have heard from a number of my hon. Friends, is already being delivered through existing policies, can be achieved without primary legislation or would sit uncomfortably alongside frameworks already in place. Work is already underway through licensing arrangements and neighbourhood planning mechanisms to provide councils with the tools they need to influence the use of properties and shape development in our communities. Work is also underway to strengthen protections against second home owners abusing rates relief.
Indeed, many powers already exist at the local level to crack down on empty second homes. I will highlight a couple of examples from my patch as to where we have done some good work in this area. Recently, Labour-run Erewash borough council took the decision to introduce a double rate of council tax, which some colleagues have already mentioned, on long-term empty properties. That policy has already proven successful. Homes that were being kept on the market for unreasonably high prices, waiting for the market to catch up to those expectations, are being sold at a more reasonable price in order to avoid the double council tax. Landlords who were previously happy to sit on empty properties that they could use as collateral are now being forced into action, which is fantastic. As a result, those homes are being sold to families who will actually live in them. At the end of the day, that is exactly what this Labour Government are about.
Furthermore, the money raised from taxing empty homes is being used to do other great work locally in the council area. Labour-run Erewash borough council has frozen council tax this year because of the money it has successfully raised. It has also introduced free parking on Saturdays and great new measures to help tackle the cost of living generally that back our town centres as local economic hubs. These are simple powers and they are available to district councils across the country right now. They are both effective and capable of delivering many of the aims set out in this Bill.
Sean Woodcock
My hon. Friend is making a really important speech about empty homes. We all have homes in our constituencies that have been empty in the long term that we want brought back into use, but is the reality not that there are generally far too few empty homes across the country? Just 1% of houses are empty, so what the Government need to do, which I support, is build more homes in the first place so that we can house people properly.
Adam Thompson
I thank my hon. Friend for that excellent point. This Government’s drive towards building more homes is incredibly important.
Turning to the parts of the Bill that pertain to the creation of local plans, such plans already allow communities and councils to determine where development should take place, what infrastructure should accompany that development and the mix of the home types that we need to meet local demand. They are built on assessments of local housing need and they are subject to consultation with residents, businesses and community organisations.
I know this because in Erewash my colleagues on the council are currently going through the process of starting a new council local plan. In fact, this week Erewash borough council is publishing its first draft for a consultation to get the views of local residents on what they want to see in their community—indeed, in my community. For the first time, the council will be launching a brownfield land request, asking residents to identify brownfield sites that they believe could be suitable for development. This Government have a “brownfield first” policy. I think the council is doing great stuff in implementing that at a local level by allowing residents to put forward appropriate sites. It takes the conversation away from big landowners and developers and gives everyone the opportunity to chip in.
I want to put something on the record. My hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes Central (Emily Darlington) recently talked about fleecehold. I want to talk about a local area in my constituency where this is occurring. Around the time I moved to Erewash, a little over a decade ago, there was a new estate being built just on the outside of Ilkeston called Elka’s Rise. It was a lovely few hundred houses in a great location. Indeed, at one point I even looked at buying a house there myself.
Since the completion of that estate, I have discovered by knocking on doors in the area and talking to residents that there are many issues—many colleagues will have had similar experiences. Residents have told me of a fee—I consider it to be almost a privatised council tax in many ways—that they are being forced to pay annually for the upkeep of space on the estate, whether it is the roads themselves, which have not yet been adopted by the council, despite being in good condition, or, in this case, the creation of a local play park that was never opened. The play park was built on flood land. Residents never got to use the space because it was completely unsuitable and unsafe. Fencing was put around the outside that was not safe. I went to look at the park and the grass was at chest height at one point. It was just dreadful. Yet the residents are being forced to pay for this on an ongoing basis.
I was pleased in recent months to hear about the work that the Government are doing to tackle this fleecehold approach, and I look forward to hearing from the Minister over the coming weeks and months about what more he will be doing to implement changes to address these issues. I was very grateful that my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes Central raised that issue, because I was keen to get that on the record.
I do want to say that local councillors Mark Alfrey and Kate Fennelly are doing fantastic work with the residents. They are doing everything they can to get as much of that land adopted by local councils so that we can take power away from those developers, who are really fleecing the residents.
In the interests of local need, with which this Bill concerns itself, the draft plan has set ambitious goals. Erewash borough council seeks to ensure that of the 6,800 homes that it is expected to deliver under its plan, 1,500 will be available for social rent. More than 20% of those new homes will be provided for social rent—I think that is great. This measure will help us move towards bringing down the unacceptable length of our social housing waiting list and ending the practice of families growing up in temporary accommodation.
I would also like to bring to the attention of the House the decision to create at least one new job for every home built. That will help to tackle youth unemployment and provide real opportunities for young people. It shows, again, the implementation of this Labour Government’s national policies at a local level by a Labour council, which I am incredibly proud of.
Amanda Martin
I thank my hon. Friend for raising the issue of jobs for our young people. I have worked closely with the construction industry, and I believe that our Government are doing many things to help support that industry, from introducing vocational subjects at age 14 to the Chancellor announcing paternity leave for self-employed men. It means that we can say to our young people, “This is a job and a career for life.” Does my hon. Friend agree?
Adam Thompson
I thank my hon. Friend for that fantastic intervention. I know that she is a powerful campaigner for tradespeople and their rights. Indeed, the Chancellor’s recent announcement about paternity leave for self-employed tradespeople is huge. Many of my closest friends who I grew up with are tradespeople. Lots have got young kids with more on the way, and I know that they are over the moon about this, because it means that they will have the opportunity to spend time with their children, which they would not otherwise have had. I thank her again for that wonderful intervention.
There is also a plan in Erewash to regenerate our town centres into mixed-use spaces, breathing new life into our high streets, as has been done to great success in places such as Bristol and parts of Manchester. Again, I think that shows the local implementation of progressive Labour national policy. I am very proud of the work that my colleagues on Erewash borough council are doing to begin building a local plan that is progressive and meets local need right across the board. I am looking forward to seeing how that plan evolves following the current consultation and building a real grassroots swell of support for what the council is doing. Taking people along with us is the most important way to deliver good policy.
That work—identifying that local need, allocating a fifth of those new homes for social rent, regenerating town centres and creating space for employment—demonstrates the powers that local councils already possess, such as the powers they are using to deal with empty second properties. They meet many of the goals set out in the Bill, and they do so using existing legislation.
Sam Carling (North West Cambridgeshire) (Lab)
It is great to hear about the good work that my hon. Friend’s council is doing through its local plan. I have two local planning authorities in my constituency, Labour-run Peterborough and Lib Dem-run Huntingdonshire. In Labour-run Peterborough, the new affordable housing requirements in the emerging local plan specify that 30% of homes must be affordable housing, of which 30% needs to be for social rent. Will my hon. Friend join me in calling on Huntingdonshire, under the Liberal Democrats, to do something similar? Right now, its affordable housing requirements do not set aside anything for social rent.
Adam Thompson
I do not know my hon. Friend’s locale particularly well, but it is important that he has put that on the record, and I am glad that he has done so.
I want to be clear that I am not advocating for the status quo, because change is needed, and the good news is that change is coming. This Government have committed to the largest increase in social and affordable housing in a generation. They have launched a 10-year, £39 billion homes programme, providing councils and housing associations with the funding they need to bring forward new developments, which I think is wonderful. At least 60% of the homes delivered through the homes programme will be for social rent, ensuring that support is targeted at those families who are currently trapped on waiting lists and in temporary accommodation—I know that colleagues across the House will commend the Minister for his work on that. Similarly, the Social Housing Bill will help protect existing social housing stock, reforming the right to buy and ensuring that more social homes remain available for future generations. That Bill will increase the qualifying period for the right to buy, reduce discounts and exempt newly built social homes from the scheme for 35 years.
Finally, I return to my constituents, many of whom are stuck on social housing waiting lists. Some are raising their children in temporary accommodation, while many others—especially young people—remain priced out of home ownership despite working hard and doing the right thing. This Government are working to bring back the hope of home ownership, and I believe their programme of planning reform and social and affordable house building offers the clearest route to delivering the change that our constituents deserve.
Caroline Voaden (South Devon) (LD)
I am very pleased to be in the Chamber to speak in support of this Bill, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives (Andrew George) on bringing it forward. He has deep expertise in this area, having spent many years dealing with the tragedy that is homelessness in Cornwall.
My constituency of South Devon, just up the road from Cornwall, is one of the most beautiful parts of the country—possibly more beautiful than Cornwall, I would argue, but we will not get into that. It has a stunning coastline, rolling farmland and villages that look like they belong on a postcard, but a postcard is exactly what some of those villages are in danger of becoming, because behind the beautiful views lies a housing crisis that is literally hollowing out our communities. In 1997, the average home in Devon cost about £60,000; today, it costs around £300,000, and wages have nowhere near kept up. In the South Hams, the gap between house prices and local earnings has widened by 159% since 1997. A home now costs more than 13 times what a local person can earn in a year, yet affordable homes make up just 9% of Devon’s housing stock, half the national average.
Devon also faces pressures that many other parts of the country do not: second homes, holiday lets and serious levels of inward migration, particularly of people who have sold up elsewhere and retired to the coast. I make that last point with no resentment—who could blame anyone for wanting to retire to Devon? However, the effect is that local people end up bidding against buyers who have decades of equity behind them. Devon already has an average age of 50, and it is local young people and key workers who are left with nowhere to go. It is becoming impossible to recruit for lower-paid jobs, including seriously needed community jobs such as teachers, nurses and healthcare workers, because there is literally nowhere that they can afford to live. None of this is driven by the politics of envy; it is about basic social justice, and whether the people who keep our communities running can afford to live in them.
The Bill that we are debating does two things, both of which are absolutely vital to South Devon. First, it extends the community right to buy, so that parish and town councils, community land trusts and other community-led organisations can designate redundant buildings and land on the edge of a community. They would have first refusal for an option period of up to five years to use that land for genuinely affordable homes, held in perpetuity for local people.
The Bill builds on the provisions already set out in the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act 2026 and gives communities the tools to overcome ransom strips and access problems and to use compulsory purchase powers where necessary.
The answer to the housing crisis—I have said this many times in the House and will keep doing so—is small sites on the edge of every village and rural exception sites. Every village needs a few new homes to survive: not 50, 100 or 200-plus identikit houses plonked on a field by the side of a town 30, 40 or 50 miles away, but 10, 12 or 20 houses in the right place for the people who need them.
I recently met Paula, who has lived in a local village for 20-plus years. She is the kind of person every village needs. She walks the dogs. When someone comes out of hospital, she brings food to their home. She looks after homes that are second homes. She does a bit of cleaning. She does all those things for people in the village—everybody could do with a pair of helping hands at some point. Paula’s landlord is trying to evict her. There is nowhere else she can live that is in or near the village, so not only will she lose her home, but she will lose her livelihood and her income. She will be forced to move 10 or 20 miles away to find a social or affordable home elsewhere in Devon, which will be like finding hen’s teeth. She will lose her entire network—her social network and her livelihood—because there are no social or affordable homes in her village.
We need homes that let young people who grew up in communities stay there if they want. We do not want all young people to have to leave Devon because there is nowhere for them to live. We need homes that let older residents downsize and free up family houses. We need homes that keep the schools open and the bus running, but it is not happening.
I recently met a local housing developer. He told me that with a small site it takes just as much preparation, red tape and admin to get spades into the ground as with a large site. The cost of getting there is the same, but for a fraction of the return, so for many developers it is simply not worth building a few homes on the edge of a village. That is why it does not happen: instead, developers choose to build huge sites on the edge of towns, miles away from where homes are needed.
This is where I take issue with the policy of “Let’s build loads of homes” or “Let’s build a million and a half homes”. They are being built at scale in the wrong place. For someone who lives in a large rural community, it does not work. Not everybody can go to Plymouth or Exeter and buy a house in a huge development like Sherford. People want to stay in their local community. That is where community-led delivery comes in, which is why this element of the Bill is needed.
In Salcombe, a community land trust was ready to deliver homes that would have met virtually the entire social housing need of the people in that community on the list; I think there were 18 households on the list. After years and years of effort and commitment from some incredibly committed local volunteers, the community land trust has been stopped in its tracks because the landlord decided at the eleventh hour that he did not want to sell the field. This Bill could have changed that. It could have led to homes for local families who have no other possibility of staying in their local community.
Then there is Clay Park in Dartington, with 39 energy-efficient homes, all for social rent for people with local connections. It is exactly what rural areas need, but it took 16 years to get from the first community meeting to the building work, which started last year. That is the reality of trying to build differently. Community groups give up. They get worn down by the red tape. In the time it takes to put a spade in the ground, children become adults. The people who need the homes have to move away or buy elsewhere because they cannot wait any longer. Villages cave in and let a developer put 50 homes on a field. As my hon. Friend the Member for North Cornwall (Ben Maguire) says, affordable homes end up as market-value homes because the permissions are changed. People cannot get more imaginative proposals through the hoops.
That has to change. We have to make it easier to build differently. This Bill would do exactly that, so I cannot understand why Labour Members are so adamant about opposing it. No, it will not fix the housing problem in the UK, and no, it is not radical enough—we all know that we need radical solutions—but it would address part of the problem. In communities like ours, that is vital.
Secondly, the Bill would give communities the power to limit the number of second homes and holiday lets in their area if they want to. A new C5 use class would require planning permission for the conversion of a permanently occupied home into a second home or holiday let. Local plans and neighbourhood plans could set limits on the proportion of such homes, and the power would be available only to those places that chose to use it. It would not necessarily need to be used in places without a second home issue. It would be used in places where there is a tipping point at which the loss of more permanent residents threatens the very viability of a community. Any C5 permission would revert to C3 when the property changed hands, to avoid perverse incentives. It would not last into perpetuity.
Markus Campbell-Savours
I note that there is a mechanism in the Bill by which, at the point of disposal, the C5 use comes to an end, but C6 does not. Why is C6 excluded?
Caroline Voaden
I believe the hon. Gentleman is correct.
Let us look at what the Bill would mean for South Devon. Well over half the homes in Hope Cove are second homes. A constituent I spoke to grew up there and moved away as a young adult. She came back to raise her own family, but ended up leaving again because there were literally no children left in the village for her kids to play with. She was broken-hearted that her children would not have the same experience as she had growing up by the sea. Not far away, the primary school in Kingswear has closed. There are not enough families left to make it viable.
We have over 4,000 second homes in South Hams, which is more than the number of social homes in the whole district and makes for one of the highest concentrations in England. We have 1,600 people on a housing waiting list. Imagine if some of those second homes could go back into the residential market. All across South Devon, homes that once housed local families, nurses, teachers and fishing families have been converted into tourist accommodation, and the private rented sector has shrunk as a result.
Caroline Voaden
I will make some progress.
When a social rented home becomes available, the competition is extraordinary. There were 119 bids for one home in Marlborough, 113 for one in Salcombe, and 190 bids for one house in Brixham.
The measures in the Bill are not fringe ideas. The Devon Housing Commission recommended both more social and affordable homes through rural exception sites and tighter controls on second homes and holiday lets. The Devon and Torbay combined county authority has built those recommendations into its local housing plan, and they are the considered view of the people who know Devon best.
I urge the Government to take the Bill seriously. I am deeply disappointed that they have chosen not to back it today. Perhaps it is the politics of it being a private Member’s Bill from someone on the Opposition Benches, or maybe it is because they really do not understand what is going on in large, dispersed rural communities. Whatever the reason, it is really poor that the Government cannot get behind a Bill introduced by someone with the years of experience that my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives has in dealing with the tragedy of homelessness in Cornwall. If anyone is really interested in understanding what it looks like down there, I cannot recommend highly enough reading “Homesick” by Catrina Davis, a heart-wrenching book about what the housing crisis in Cornwall really means.
I want to see the Government back a stronger community right to buy, so that a community land trust like the one in Salcombe has a realistic chance of finding the space it needs to transform people’s lives. Everybody needs a home, and this Bill is one way to make that happen. I hope the Government will give communities in places such as Hope Cove, Salcombe and Kingswear the power to protect homes for permanent residents, and I hope they will look hard at the economics of small sites, so that building 10 homes in a village is not 10 times less attractive than building 100 far away.
Without homes for local people, my local schools will keep closing, the shops and pubs will shut their doors, and the buses will stop running—if we had them; we do not have enough buses, but that is another matter. It is already happening across South Devon. My hon. Friend has introduced a Bill that would give communities the power to stop this. I implore the Government to listen and to give our towns and villages the chance they need to stay alive.
Andrew Lewin (Welwyn Hatfield) (Lab)
A number of colleagues have spoken of their great respect for the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George). I have personal thanks to give to him, because many years ago—before Brexit, before coalition Governments and long before I had any grey hair—my first work experience in Parliament was in his office. He is a man who is committed to doing his best to tackle the housing crisis, and I have huge admiration for him.
I want to talk about the macro challenge of the housing crisis, which is the real issue that faces us today, but I will start by addressing the point made by the hon. Member about his ambition of having affordable housing secured in perpetuity. I want to reflect on the reforms that this Labour Government have made to right to buy, because they are so important. We are making changes that mean that any new social home built will have a 35-year exemption whereby right to buy cannot be exercised, and the discounts available to people who are seeking right to buy have been significantly reduced. That, by the way, reverses a decision made in 2012 under the coalition Government when those discounts were significantly increased.
As I said, I seek to talk to the big picture. I want us to build homes at scale and to have the greatest possible emphasis on building social and affordable housing. I am sorry that this may upset the hon. Member for Mid Sussex (Alison Bennett), but I will start with how we got into this problem and talk a little about the collapse in social housing under the coalition Government. This is not party political point scoring; these are facts.
In 2010-11—the last year of the last Labour Government—the number of social homes completed was 39,000. That is a combination of council homes and housing association homes—homes for social rent. In 2015-16—the last year of the coalition Government—the number completed was 6,500. That collapse in social housing occurred when the hon. Member’s party were in government. I understand that many Liberal Democrat Members played no part in that Government, but we must recognise that the leader of their party, the right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Ed Davey), sat at the Cabinet table at that time.
It was not just under the coalition Government; it continued through the Conservative-majority Governments that followed. By the time we get to 2021, the net loss of social homes in this country from 2012 was 280,000. As a society, we were not just failing to build social housing but losing it year on year. That is why we have a national crisis and that is why this subject is rightly debated so frequently and intensely in the House of Commons.
Amanda Martin
The picture my hon. Friend paints nationally is very stark. In my city, at the peak we had 27,000 council houses, and we have had a loss of 11,000. We now have fewer than 16,000 in operation. Had we rebuilt those homes during that time, the 3,000 people on the waiting list would have somewhere to live.
Andrew Lewin
I could not agree more. I know that councils up and down the country have been battling, but it is the national choices made that have put us in this position.
Andrew George
I agree with everything the hon. Member just said. I was on the Government Benches during the coalition years, and I opposed those measures; indeed, many of my Liberal Democrat colleagues did their best to try to face them down. But may I get some clarity? From what I understand, the hon. Member and other Labour Members are saying that my Bill—this sensible piece of legislation—should be opposed and blocked by the Government as punishment for the coalition years. So it is purely petty party political point scoring. Should we not be doing better?
Andrew Lewin
I am grateful for the hon. Member’s intervention. That is not my position at all. My position is that we need—[Interruption.] Let me answer. We need a national answer to the housing crisis, and I was setting the scene of why we are in the place we are today. I am about to reflect on what we need to do differently and what the Government have already done in their first two years in office.
First, and most importantly, we have had a sustained and significant increase in Government funding for social housing via the affordable homes programme. A 10-year settlement of £39 billion was initially announced—a 60% increase on what went before—topped up by £1.5 billion announced just a couple of weeks ago in the Budget specifically for council housing. [Interruption.] No, I recognise that some Liberal Democrat Members are in agreement, but it is also the case that this is about big macroeconomic choices. This was a choice by the Government to spend more money on housing.
Kevin Bonavia (Stevenage) (Lab)
Eighty years ago this week, the Labour Government of Clement Attlee and the Minister’s predecessor, Lewis Silkin, announced Stevenage as the first new town. That was a big macroeconomic choice. Tens of thousands of homes were built, but now we have a housing a crisis in my town. Our council is so pleased that we have a Government who are providing more funding to build council homes again. Does my hon. Friend and constituency neighbour agree?
Andrew Lewin
I could not agree more. My hon. Friend is my constituency neighbour, and it is fantastic to work together on this issue.
On the economic choices—this is the central point—the current investment was only possible because of Labour Budgets in 2024 and 2025, and the one given at the Dispatch Box just a couple of weeks ago. The Liberal Democrats did not support those Budgets, and we have to focus on this issue. Economic choices underline every facet of this debate.
I want to make a quick reference to the importance of Homes England. There has been a good debate today about land ownership, access to land and how it is not affordable. Homes England, empowered by the Government, is purchasing strategic sites so that we can build more social and affordable homes across the country. I am very fortunate that in Welwyn Garden City, one of the two fantastic towns that I represent, we have a success story from the latest round of AHP funding. The front page of this week’s Welwyn Hatfield Times says that 128 new homes will be delivered, including 90 for social rent and 38 for shared ownership. That is a step in the right direction, and has been made possible because of national Government investment and Homes England.
I have an ambition to reshape the housing market. Today I have listened closely to colleagues who represent communities across the country, and I know that the market is broken in many parts of England. In my view, one of the reasons for this is that the private rented sector has doubled in size since the year 2000, which I do not think was a policy ambition of any political party. That has come about because we have failed to build the social housing that we need, and because we have not been able to get enough people on to the housing ladder so that they can have security of home ownership. The private rented sector has swollen, and I believe that our ambition should be to shrink it through the growth of social housing and of homes to buy.
This Government are taking on both those challenges. Importantly, they are acting to protect private renters through the Renters’ Rights Act 2025, which includes a ban on no-fault evictions, greater security of tenure and an end to bidding wars between people who are desperate to have a roof over their heads—a landmark achievement. As I have said, we are also investing in social housing and looking to support people who aspire to get on the housing ladder.
We have a mortgage guarantee scheme that has been under way for just over a year, and it gives people the opportunity to put down a deposit of less than 10% of the value of their home, with the Government providing support to the lender. We also have an exciting new scheme that was confirmed in the Budget, Your First Home, whereby the Government will step in so that, through an equity loan scheme, people can get on the housing ladder with a deposit of as little as 2.5%. That has the potential to be transformative for lots of people who are currently in the private rented sector and want a way out. By the way, if they are able to access a deposit, they will spend less money on a mortgage than they currently do on their rent. That is why this package is so important.
Fixing the housing crisis is about big political and economic choices. I know the hon. Member for St Ives is absolutely sincere in wanting a better mix of housing for his community, but I believe that we need an ambitious national agenda to address this problem. Previous Governments have not lived up to the promise of acting on the housing crisis. There is still a lot of work to do, but I am very confident that with this Housing Minister, who has been sat around the Cabinet table since July, we are on track to make a real difference to people’s lives across the country.
Iqbal Mohamed (Dewsbury and Batley) (Ind)
Our country is in the midst of a full-blown housing crisis, and hon. Members from across the House have agreed that we face a critical situation. The waiting lists for social housing are the longest they have been in generations. Families are paying up to half their monthly income in rent, which has skyrocketed. Wages have not kept up with food, energy or housing inflation. It is increasingly impossible for first-time buyers to buy their own homes. In Dewsbury and Batley, house prices have increased by 58% on average over the past decade.
It is the Government’s duty to take all necessary meaningful policy actions to address the crisis. Over the weekend, the protests over the housing crisis in Spain showed where not addressing social and national crises can lead. Many Spaniards find themselves priced out of the market by rising costs and rents, and increased demand linked to tourism and immigration has led to rents shooting upwards. One banner at the protest read, “We want neighbours, not tourists.”
This Government are acting. I welcome the £40 billion and the extra £1.5 billion announced in the recent Budget for social housing. However, delivering that housing will obviously take time, and the crisis that faces us is happening today—here and now. Even before the announcement of the extra funding, one of the bottlenecks to house building over the past 15 to 20 years has been local planning departments, which have lacked the funding and resources to recruit the right number of planning officers and specialists to allow councils to process applications, inspect builds and allow houses to be built in the shortest possible time.
In Dewsbury and Batley, the average salary including part-time workers is £14,000 a year; for full-time workers, it is £34,000 a year. The average house price in Dewsbury is around £200,000, which is six to 14 times the average salary of residents. In Batley, the average house price is £274,000, which equates to between eight and 19 times the average salary of people in Batley. Nationally, rents have climbed from an average of £975 to more than £1,400 a month. Regional averages outside London have set new records, with average rents doubling in areas in the north.
I thank the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George) for introducing this important Bill. As is the case across the United Kingdom, the housing crisis in my constituency is not an abstract policy debate. It is a defining issue. Although the housing pressures in West Yorkshire differ from those in coastal communities such as St Ives, where second homes are a growing problem, the fundamental issue is the same: working families are being priced out of their communities, young people are struggling to get on the housing ladder and local authorities cannot provide affordable homes.
We in this place must recognise that we are extremely privileged. We are in the top 5%. Our current salary is three times the average full-time salary of people working in Dewsbury. A house in Devon costing £300,000 is about three times our annual salary, and we can afford the deposit and the mortgage. Millions of people across our country are not in the privileged position that we are in, and we cannot forget that those are the people we represent. It is our absolute duty to make the lives of normal British people across our country easy, affordable and bearable. Wanting a roof over one’s head and over the heads of one’s family should not be a luxury or an unattainable ambition in the sixth richest country in the world. I thank the Government for the steps that they are taking, but I also support this Bill, which would introduce some additional steps that would contribute to addressing the absolute crisis that faces us.
I welcome specific measures in the Bill. Clauses 1 and 2 would put power back into the hands of local communities by allowing land suitable for affordable housing to be designated as an asset of community value. Other Members have mentioned that some of those properties might be pubs or other businesses. My understanding is that the Bill refers to derelict, empty or abandoned properties, or properties that have just been purchased for their appreciation—as an investment—not properties in active use in communities and providing services. Empowering local planning authorities in that this would bring unused and empty sites back to life, with new, affordable housing meeting the needs of people across this country, including in Dewsbury and Batley.
I strongly welcome the powers in clause 3, which would enable local authorities to acquire land using compulsory purchase orders at the request of a community representative, such as a parish council or charity. Sites often sit vacant for years at a time while waiting lists for housing grow longer and longer. Dewsbury and Batley sits in the authority of Kirklees, which has a waiting list for social housing that now exceeds 20,000. In the last meeting that I had with its executive and leader, I learned that Kirklees council has managed to move people who need social housing from emergency bed and breakfast accommodation into more sustainable and affordable accommodation, and I pay tribute to them. However, hundreds of families are still being housed in hotels and non-permanent social settings. The Bill would give local authorities the power they need to step in, take action and improve opportunities for housing for their constituents. That is long overdue.
Although the issue of second homes and holiday lets does not affect Dewsbury and Batley, I understand the concerns laid out by the hon. Member for St Ives and other Members across the House. That issue is impacting many towns and communities across the country. I stand in solidarity with the people in those communities who are not able to afford rent or get on to the housing ladder, because people are buying up properties at inflated prices as investments to earn money through second and third incomes. Priority should be given to people who just need a home to live in, not to earn a profit from.
The Oxford academic John Muellbauer has spent four decades researching the UK’s housing system, and he calls it
“one of the most dysfunctional in the world”.
Indeed, the housing problems that we face are deeply entrenched and complex.
I agree with the hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Andrew Lewin) about the decisions made by the coalition Government after the previous Labour Government ended. The responsibility and accountability for the drastic and terrible state we are in today should not just lay on the shoulders of the Liberal Democrats. It was the Tory Government who introduced an ill-thought-out and mismanaged right to buy scheme, where discounts were huge but the proceeds of the sale of council-owned properties to people on low incomes, which I support and applaud, were not given back to the councils to reinvest in replacement stock—one of the most idiotic policy decisions that I can remember in my time on this planet. They should be held accountable, and they should apologise to our nation for that idiotic policy.
Although the housing problems we face are deeply entrenched and complex, the Bill offers practical, targeted tools that will work in concert and add to the measures that this Government are already taking to address some of those problems. By empowering local communities to increase genuinely affordable housing stock and targeting the disruptive effect of second homes, the Bill offers an opportunity to deliver real change for communities such as Dewsbury and Batley, and across this country.
The Minister for Housing and Planning (Matthew Pennycook)
I am grateful for the opportunity to respond on behalf of the Government.
I congratulate the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George) on securing fourth place in the ballot, and I thank him for bringing his Homes and Planning Bill before the House. He is a passionate advocate for more social and affordable housing in his constituency. He brings a wealth of frontline housing experience from his time away from the House and he has campaigned tirelessly—I recognise this—over many years for greater control over the number of second homes and short-term lets in the wonderful towns and villages he has the privilege to represent.
Amanda Martin
Does the minister agree that if the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George) is so passionate about this issue, he should have a conversation with his Liberal Democrat colleagues who run my city council and clearly do not share the same ambition as him?
Matthew Pennycook
I have always found that Liberal Democrats operate like a sort of franchise system around the country, where responsibility for individual decisions is not taken at the national level. I encourage Liberal Democrat Members to talk to their colleagues in those parts of the country where they are not acting along the lines that they have been advocating for today.
Matthew Pennycook
I am just going to make a bit of progress. I am happy to give way later.
As the hon. Member for St Ives knows from our recent discussions, despite agreeing with the Bill’s overarching intention, namely to support the housing needs of local people, the Government unfortunately cannot support it for the reasons I will set out in as much detail as I can in the time available to me. However, I want to reiterate from the outset that the Government recognise the acute need for social and affordable homes in rural and coastal communities. We understand and appreciate fully that many local authorities want more tools to bear down on excessive concentrations of second homes and short-term lets within them.
As the hon. Gentleman set out in opening the debate, the Bill contains essentially two measures: one relating to land for affordable housing, and the other concerning planning controls in relation to second homes and short-term lets. I do not intend to exhaustively detail the Government’s position on each individual clause in the Bill. Instead, I will set out our position in respect of each of these measures, starting with land for affordable housing.
Clauses 1 to 4 extend provisions around assets of community value and the community right to buy, so that they can apply to land for affordable housing. Clause 1 is the core operative clause in the group and we understand the intention behind it. We all want suitable land to provide affordable housing to meet identified local need. However, extending the assets of community value regime to allow vacant, substantially unused or materially underused land to be nominated because of its potential for affordable housing is not, in our view, a proportionate means of achieving that objective.
The new community right to buy, enacted through our English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act 2026, was carefully designed to balance the legitimate rights of property owners with the ability of communities to protect buildings and land that are important to them. Bringing potentially much larger quantities of land within the assets of community value framework could, in our view, increase interference with property rights in an unjustifiable way.
Andrew George
On the franchise point, the Labour party seems to franchise different approaches with both the local Labour party member who delivered the petition in favour of the Bill, and the Welsh Assembly. The Minister heard what I have to say on the issue: these proposals could be improved and streamlined in Committee. If he wishes, we could find another route for that and deliver the second half of the Bill in Committee.
Matthew Pennycook
I have a huge amount of respect for the hon. Gentleman, but when a Bill is this flawed—I will come in detail to how it is flawed in several other respects—it is too much to ask the Government essentially to redesign it in Committee, with all the capacity that would require. I will come to what the Government are doing on these issues in due course.
The community right to buy already provides for a 12-month moratorium and a right of first refusal. Extending those effects across a wider class of land might also increase compensation claims against local authorities, including claims arising from delay to a sale or diminution in value following listing. Although the Bill now includes additional evidential requirements and chief planning officer scrutiny, those safeguards do not resolve our fundamental concern about the implications arising from expanding the purpose and reach of the regime.
The national planning policy framework already provides strong support for community-led development, including community-led exception sites, and the August 2026 revisions strengthened and clarified that support. Members are saying that such things are not working, but that measure was introduced only a few months ago. Our considered view is that those changes need time to embed before further primary legislation is considered.
Clauses 2 and 3 concern the identification of land in neighbourhood development plans, and the acquisition of land required to enable affordable housing respectively. Again, we understand the intention behind the clauses, but they seek to add further statutory processes and powers where relevant ones already exist—several hon. Friends made that point in their speeches. Clause 4 seeks to provide a safeguard in respect of the new provisions in clauses 1 to 3, in the form of a limit of one hectare of land for every 1,000 people in an adjacent settlement over each five-year period, thereby aggregating land listed as an asset of community value identified in a neighbourhood plan or authorised for compulsory acquisition. I understand fully why the hon. Member has included that clause in the Bill, and I commend his efforts to try to tweak it to reassure the Government about the effects of clauses 1 to 3, but I am afraid it does not resolve our fundamental concerns about those provisions.
Matthew Pennycook
I will give way, although I can already feel Madam Deputy Speaker’s glare.
Andrew George
Unless I am wrong, I will not be given the opportunity to wind up this debate, but on that point, the Minister needs to accept that there are thousands of communities around the country where, irrespective of the Government’s tools—those are all welcome in their own right—if there is a call for land for affordable homes, because of the frailties of the way humans operate, they will not get any offers of land. There have been dozens of cases where there is simply no land available for affordable homes because people want an open market.
Matthew Pennycook
I am more than happy to have a conversation with the hon. Member about public land and what more can be done in that area. As I said, we strengthened rural exception site policy in the NPPF. I am interested—I have made this offer to him previously, and I make it to other hon. Members—to know why rural exception sites in particular parts of the country are not coming forward at the scale required. On the safeguard, in our view a national hectare-to-population formula risks imposing an arbitrary constraint that may bear little relationship to local need or the characteristics of a particular site. The requirement for population figures, land management, aggregation, record keeping and avoidance also demonstrates the administrative complexity of the model.
Matthew Pennycook
I will make a bit of progress. The established planning system is the appropriate framework for assessing housing need, land supply, site suitability and the scale of development in the light of local circumstances. The Government therefore do not believe that the additional statutory ceiling is justified.
I will now turn to clauses 5 and 6 individually, starting with clause 5. I recognise the concern that has given rise to this provision. Excessive concentrations of short-term lets and second homes can impact the availability and affordability of homes for local residents to buy and to rent, as well as local services, and we agree that local authorities need effective tools to manage those impacts.
However, we believe the clause is problematic for the following reasons. First—I say this gently to the hon. Member for St Ives—the proposal appears to misunderstand the effect of the use classes order. The order is permissive: it provides that a change of use within the same use class is not development, and therefore does not require planning permission. However, it does not provide that a change between different use classes will necessarily require planning permission. The introduction of new use classes C5 and C6 would not therefore automatically mean that a change to or from those uses is a material change of use requiring planning permission, and whether a particular change of use is material would still need to be considered on the facts of the case.
It would also provide for a C5 second home use to cease automatically when a property is sold or otherwise subject to a relevant . A future owner wishing to use it as a second home would need planning permission for that use. Again, this requirement would be subject to specific carve-outs, such as a transfer between spouses or civil partners.
The important point here is that planning use classes run with the land or building and are not based on ownership. Automatic reversion on sale would cut across that established principle and create complexity for property owners, conveyancers and local planning authorities. Furthermore, the proposed exemptions would be at odds with the current functioning of the order and wider legislative scheme.
Andrew George
Has the Minister raised this matter with the Senedd? Has the Minister considered what is known as the St Ives clause in neighbourhood development plans, where permissions can be granted for accommodation only where it is specified that they cannot be used for non-permanent occupancy? This already exists in planning law. I am afraid that whoever is advising the Minister is not advising him correctly, because this can be done. It has been done in Wales, and it is being done here as well.
Matthew Pennycook
What can I say to the hon. Gentleman? He has expertise in this area, but I think it is slightly rich of him to say that the expertise available to Government, including legal expertise, is wrong on this point. The Welsh Government do have a particular approach, as I have heard mentioned several times today; that does not need to contend with the 90-night short-term let limit in London, which creates additional legislative complexity in England. We are engaging with the Welsh Government, who are due to publish their final impact evaluation on a series of measures, including on planning use classes. As I have said many times in this House, we continue to give serious consideration to what further powers local authorities need in order to bear down on excessive concentrations of second homes and short-term lets.
As I was saying, the clause does not propose that C6 short-term uses would revert to C3 at the point of sale, nor does it propose an alternative method to facilitate the return of existing short-term lets for use as primary dwelling houses. There is therefore an asymmetry in the proposed clause. This could most negatively impact the place most in need of properties reverting from a short-term use to a sole or main residence use.
It is also not clear how the proposed new C3 dwellinghouses definition would interact with existing C3(b) and (c) use classes, which include up to six residents living together as a single household where care may or may not be provided to residents.
Matthew Pennycook
I am not going to give way. I can feel your glare, Madam Deputy Speaker. I feel it in every debate, but I can feel it more intensely now. I can see that you wish me to make progress.
Markus Campbell-Savours
Will the Minister consider whether that really was a glare? [Laughter.]
Markus Campbell-Savours
The Minister is spelling out quite clearly how the use of planning to control the number of short-term holiday lets is complicated and difficult. I view using the planning system on these sorts of issues as a bit like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Will the Minister confirm whether, as the Government consider ways of controlling the number of holiday lets, they will consider a licensing system, and whether a cap could be applied to such a system?
Matthew Pennycook
I thank my hon. Friend for that question. Look at what is being done across the rest of the world under different regimes: some use licensing alone, some use planning alone, and some use both planning and licensing. We are reviewing what further powers local authorities might need and considering all options. As I have said, I am more than happy to continue to engage with hon. Members across the House on this point.
We share the ambition of improving access to housing for local people, but changes to the use class system must be judged by whether they would achieve that objective in practice. We are not persuaded that the approach proposed in clause 5 would work.
Recognising the underlying pressures, the Government have taken action, including abolishing the furnished holiday lettings tax regime, legislating for a national registration scheme for short-term lets, and preventing landlords from evicting tenants simply to convert a home into a holiday let. Any further planning changes will require careful consideration alongside those measures.
I will turn briefly to clause 6. It is right that communities should be able to respond to the effects of second homes and short-term lets through the plan-making system. However, the clause largely restates powers that are already available to local planning authorities and qualifying bodies. Neighbourhood plans can already include policies relating to second homes and short-term holiday lets, and local plans can also introduce principal residence or principal occupancy policies. Indeed, clause 6(4) explicitly recognises those existing powers.
The clause therefore largely sets out an approach that the existing planning system already enables. For that reason, we do not believe that the case for further statutory provision has been made, and nor are we persuaded that prescribing matters that plan-making bodies must take into account when preparing such policies via a separate statutory provision would improve the operation of existing plan-making powers.
I thank the hon. Member for St Ives once again for bringing forward the Bill, and I thank all hon. Members who have contributed to the debate. There have been some great speeches from my hon. Friend the Members for Erewash (Adam Thompson), for Welwyn Hatfield (Andrew Lewin) and for Milton Keynes Central (Emily Darlington). A number of issues have been raised that are well beyond the scope of this particular Bill, including the housing revenue account, rough sleeping, and fleecehold leasehold. I am more than happy to sit down with hon. Members from across the House to discuss those matters.
Matthew Pennycook
No, I will conclude.
The Government commend the motivation behind the Bill. We want to see more social and affordable homes come forward in rural and coastal communities, we want to empower communities to shape their local areas, and we recognise the important contribution that community-led housing can make to meeting local housing needs.
We simply disagree that the measures in the Bill, which is problematic in a number of respects, are the right way to achieve those objectives. Taken together, its measures would add considerable prescription and complexity to the planning and land system. In a number of cases they would duplicate functions that can already be exercised through the existing planning framework, while in others they risk constraining the flexibility that local authorities and communities need to respond to very different local circumstances.
For the reasons I have set out, the Government are unable to support the Bill, but I very much look forward to having an ongoing constructive dialogue with the hon. Member for St Ives and other right hon. and hon. Members on the matters raised in the debate, with a view to realising our shared aim of supporting the housing needs of local people.
Michelle Scrogham
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I would just like to correct the record. In my speech earlier, I referred to hundreds of millions of pounds, rather than tens of millions.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
I thank the hon. Lady for giving notice of her point of order, and for her promptness in correcting the record at the earliest opportunity.
Cancer (Reporting and Strategy) Bill
(1 day, 6 hours ago)
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Clive Jones (Wokingham) (LD)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
At its heart, the Bill is about a simple principle: if the Government make commitments on cancer, Parliament and the public should be able to assess whether those commitments are being delivered. Cancer affects almost every family in this country. Nearly one in two people will receive a cancer diagnosis during their lifetime, and the number of cases continues to rise. More than 403,000 people are now diagnosed with cancer each year in the UK—that is around 1,100 diagnoses every day, or one person every 80 seconds.
For those people and the families who support them, cancer policy is not an abstract debate; it is about whether diagnoses are made early enough, whether treatment starts quickly enough, whether people survive, and whether they can live well after cancer.
Emily Darlington (Milton Keynes Central) (Lab)
I thank the hon. Member for bringing this important debate to the House. I want to emphasise his point that early diagnosis is so important when it comes to cancer. My mother-in-law got an early diagnosis and had 12 years of living, and living well, with cancer, yet my father-in-law got a late diagnosis and only had 12 weeks. Does the hon. Member agree that this absolutely states the importance of early diagnosis to deal with cancer and have a life while living with cancer?
Clive Jones
The hon. Lady is absolutely right; early diagnosis is so important.
I know that from my own experience. I went to see a doctor and he said, “Men cannot get breast cancer, so off you go. Come back if anything changes.” Seven or eight months later I went back and I saw a different GP. He sent me for a test straightaway. The test happened very quickly—I was very lucky—but unfortunately in those six or seven months the cancer had spread from my breast to my lymph glands. I ended up having to have two operations and radiotherapy and chemotherapy. If I had gotten an earlier diagnosis, I might not have had to go through all that. That is true for an awful lot of people. I was lucky that the second GP sent me for a test. If I had waited another six months, I would not be taking part in this debate.
Accountability really matters. The national cancer plan contains important ambitions and commitments. The Government have committed to monitoring delivery through national oversight structures, including the National Cancer Board, and tackling progress against the plan’s objectives and performance measures. However, there is currently no clear commitment to publish a dedicated annual report to Parliament, no formal assessment of progress against every commitment within the plan, and no requirement to explain what action will be taken when progress falls behind schedule.
My Bill addresses those gaps. It would require annual reporting to Parliament on progress in preventing, diagnosing and treating cancer. It would require the Government to publish and maintain the strategy for improving cancer outcomes—nothing more, nothing radical; simply transparency, scrutiny and accountability.
The Bill is supported by 64 cancer charities, with millions of supporters. Those 64 cancer charities have written to the Secretary of State urging her to support the Bill. Their message is clear:
“The Bill is practical, proportionate and uncontroversial. It creates no new rights or entitlements but instead provides a clear means for reporting progress and maintaining focus on delivery.”
The charities go on to say that it
“represents an invaluable opportunity to underpin the ambitions of the national cancer plan and demonstrate a long-term commitment to improving outcomes for cancer patients.”
When organisations representing patients, clinicians, researchers and families all speak with one voice, the House should listen. The need for greater accountability is informed by experience. We have learned that, without transparency and scrutiny, commitments made today can disappear tomorrow. Cancer patients deserve better than that.
Many Members will remember the work undertaken in 2022 on the Conservatives’ proposed 10-year cancer plan, when their Secretary of State declared war on cancer. Thousands of people contributed to that process, including patients, charities, NHS staff and researchers. Then, less than a year later, following yet another change of Secretary of State, the plan was abandoned. Time, momentum and years of engagement were lost and hope was wasted. Many people affected by cancer were left wondering what had happened to the promises that had been made to them. We cannot allow that to happen again.
People affected by cancer need confidence that commitments made today will survive the political changes of tomorrow. Perhaps this is a good point to remind the House that we have had seven Prime Ministers and nine Health Secretaries since 2015. This Bill would help provide that confidence.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
Order. Ms Wrighting, it is not “you”, which means me; it is “the hon. Member”.
Rosie Wrighting
Apologies, Madam Deputy Speaker. Does the hon. Member share my delight to see the former Minister who wrote the national cancer plan appointed as the national cancer plan adviser? That shows how seriously this Government take progress in this area.
Clive Jones
The hon. Member for West Lancashire (Ashley Dalton) did a fantastic job in producing the national cancer plan, and I am pleased that she has been appointed to the National Cancer Board, but I still think the Government should support this Bill.
I know that some people have questioned whether legislation is necessary, but I respectfully disagree. Action 21 of the national cancer plan already commits the Government to report on delivery. The Government already intend to monitor progress and track performance. This Bill does not create new bureaucracy, require extensive new structures or create significant additional work for civil servants. The Government already intend to collect the information; the Bill simply requires that the Secretary of State reports that information to Parliament, so that Members of this House can scrutinise progress on behalf of the people we represent.
If the Government are confident in their plans and the delivery of those plans, why would they object to the transparency of reporting on that progress? Cancer affects every constituency in this country. It affects families in Wokingham just as it affects families across England. Those affected by cancer often feel that they do not have a voice. This Bill would give Parliament the opportunity to speak for them.
I raised the Bill with the Prime Minister at Prime Minister’s questions on 21 October. In response, he told me that he would ask the National Cancer Board to consider the accountability and reporting measures contained within the legislation. I welcomed that response, but we have heard nothing from the National Cancer Board. The Prime Minister has also said:
“I’ve always been somebody who puts my shoulder behind the fight against cancer”.
A few weeks ago, he sat down on “Gogglebox” to support cancer patients. Today was an opportunity for him to stand up for cancer patients and support my Bill. This legislation provides an opportunity to demonstrate that commitment in practice.
There is another important reason why accountability matters: the national cancer plan is the first cancer plan to contain a dedicated chapter on children and young people’s cancer. That is a really important step forward, but progress must be measured if those commitments are to endure. The plan recognises that its wider ambitions will only be achieved if meaningful progress is made for children and young people with cancer, yet teenagers and young adults are too often hidden within broader datasets, despite facing distinct challenges around diagnosis, treatment, long-term side effects and psychological support.
Emily Darlington
Is the hon. Gentleman aware that the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee is launching an inquiry on the fact that many younger people are now being diagnosed with cancer? Does he welcome that inquiry? It will help us to understand more clearly why so many younger people are now experiencing cancer.
Clive Jones
Yes, I absolutely welcome the Committee looking at that.
Without transparent reporting and meaningful age-specific data, it becomes difficult to understand whether outcomes for younger patients are improving and where inequalities persist, and whether policy interventions are working. Annual reporting can help ensure that children and young people are not overlooked in future strategies, and that progress continues to be monitored for that important patient group. Data should be broken down by age, including for teenagers and young adults.
Stronger accountability is particularly important because current progress is not where it needs to be. Recent analysis by Cancer Research UK paints a concerning picture. The charity estimates that nearly 1.1 million people will need cancer treatment following an urgent referral between March 2026 and March 2029, yet current trends suggest that the Government’s commitment that 85% of patients will begin treatment within 62 days by March 2029, may not be achieved on time. Indeed, Cancer Research UK estimates that almost 47,000 additional patients would need to start treatment within 62 days in order to meet the target.
Those figures should concern all of us. Waiting for cancer treatment is not simply a matter of statistics—it is weeks of uncertainty, weeks of fear and weeks of wondering whether the cancer is progressing, while patients and families wait for answers. All of that can be extremely stressful for patients and families, as I know from my own experience when I was diagnosed with breast cancer 18 years ago.
Cancer Research UK’s analysis suggests that the Government still have an opportunity to get performance back on track, but only if there is the same focus and sufficient resource directed towards cancer services. The next spending review will be an important opportunity to demonstrate that commitment. The reality is that accountability drives delivery. What gets measured gets managed, what gets reported gets discussed and what gets discussed is more likely to improve.
There is also a broader challenge. More people than ever are surviving cancer or living with cancer, which is something for us all to celebrate. The Government’s ambition is that, by 2035, three quarters of people diagnosed with cancer will be cancer free or living well with cancer five years after their diagnosis. That is a fantastic ambition, but achieving it will require sustained progress across the entire cancer pathway, from prevention and diagnosis through to treatment, recovery and long-term support.
Pam Cox (Colchester) (Lab)
I welcome the hon. Gentleman’s highlighting of the need to reduce waits for treatment and note his personal comments about his treatment. I also welcome his focus on the reporting of cancer treatment data. Does he agree that the national cancer plan will greatly assist us in improving our understanding of reporting, and that we should work together across the House to ensure that we get the resources needed to implement the plan in full?
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
Order. Mr Jones, you are speaking through the Chair. If Back Benchers make eye contact with the Chair, they will know that they are speaking through the Chair. When you say “you” and “your”, you are speaking to me—but, obviously, you are responding to another Member in the Chamber. It is best to remember that. The floor is yours, Mr Jones.
Clive Jones
Thank you very much, Madam Deputy Speaker.
The national cancer plan does contain a plan for regular reporting, but the Bill would make reporting happen every year. It would make this Government and future Governments report yearly. That is very important. Annual reporting is absolutely essential if we are to understand whether ambition is being realised. It will help us to identify where performance is improving, where it is falling behind and where action is needed.
Wendy Chamberlain (North East Fife) (LD)
My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech, which is bringing out some of the emotional impacts of cancer, but does he agree that there is also an economic argument to be made? If people are diagnosed and get treatment more quickly, they are more likely to be able to return to the workplace more quickly. We sometimes debate issues such as welfare in this Chamber, but surely getting things right in the NHS as quickly as possible has a wider economic benefit, too. All hon. Members should welcome that.
Clive Jones
My hon. Friend is absolutely right that earlier intervention helps people to get back into the workforce faster. It helps families get back into the workforce faster as well, because people want to take time off to help loved ones going through cancer treatment.
The Bill does not ask the Government to adopt a new cancer strategy. It does not seek to score party political points, or impose unrealistic obligations on Ministers or officials. It simply asks that Parliament and the people we represent are given a clear account of progress against the commitments that the Government have already made. The Bill is uncontroversial, and the Government have not given any reasons why it should not be supported. The charities support the Bill, patients support the Bill, and I hope that Members across the House will support the Bill.
Mr Will Forster (Woking) (LD)
I thank my hon. Friend for introducing the Bill. He is right to highlight that it is supported by national charities across the board, including Walk the Walk, which is from Woking. It wants the national cancer strategy and the Government to lower the age for breast screening from 50 to 40. Does he agree that that would save lives? I hope that the Government and the Minister will agree to implement that as soon as possible.
Clive Jones
I thank my hon. Friend for mentioning Walk the Walk, which is a most fantastic charity. I did a walk with it this year, and there is another walk on 15 May next year—perhaps Members might want to join me on it. Before covid, that charity always had quite a number of MPs join in the walk; since covid, it has had hardly any. My hon. Friend’s point about reducing the age for screening is absolutely valid.
In my view, rejecting this Bill would be a mistake—a mistake for the Prime Minister and for the Secretary of State. It would mean that the Prime Minister’s warm words are, sadly, just words. Cancer patients deserve more than promises; they deserve transparency, accountability, and confidence that commitments made today will be honoured tomorrow. I commend the Bill to the House.
Several hon. Members rose—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
Time is very tight, and I cannot set time limits. If colleagues speak for around five minutes, I will be able to squeeze in a few more Members.
Dr Scott Arthur (Edinburgh South West) (Lab)
To start with a slight aside, it is fantastic to see my hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Alison McGovern) on the Government Front Bench. Some of her comments this week on social media regarding the stories about violence against women and girls have been really moving for me, and they have been amazing leadership from her, so I thank her.
Returning to the Bill, we should be in no doubt that the Government’s national cancer plan for England sets a genuinely ambitious vision—a vision to transform the lives of millions of patients and families affected by cancer. The Bill before us aims to turn that vision into reality, or at least help to do so. It has cancer patients at its heart, and would create a new era of transparency and accountability, ensuring that good intentions are matched with meaningful action and measurable progress. I thank the hon. Member for Wokingham (Clive Jones) for presenting it.
The Bill strongly supports the ambitions already set out in the national cancer plan. In particular, it reinforces action 14, which recognises that greater transparency drives improvement, and action 21, which commits the National Cancer Board to report annually on progress and carry out a comprehensive review every three years. I accept that as the hon. Member for Wokingham has already outlined, we do not need to put the plan on a statutory footing. I hope Labour remains in power for the remaining 10 years—or almost 10 years—of the cancer plan, but I worry that some other Government might not take that plan quite so seriously, which is why it is important that we consider a statutory requirement for reporting.
However, this is not just about plans, targets or reporting mechanisms. As we have heard, the Bill is backed by 64 cancer charities. As Members of Parliament, many of us have attended those charities’ receptions, posed for photographs and heard about their remarkable work. Today, they are asking something more of us: to take a small but important step by supporting the Bill. I have to declare an interest, because I am wearing my Cancer Research UK tie; it was a gift to me, and I am very grateful for it. I also have to reflect that this week, I went to a Blood Cancer UK event, which was focused on raising money for trials that it is running. At that event, I met a young woman who is living with myeloma, and another young woman whose father died of myeloma last year. They are both fantastic people, and they want us to support the Bill.
This year alone, around 400,000 people in the UK will hear the words, “You have cancer.” Behind every one of those diagnoses is a person—a mother, a father, a husband, a wife, a son, a daughter or a friend. Those 64 charities speak for those people; indeed, they speak for all of us, because statistically, one in two of us will receive a cancer diagnosis during our lifetime. Cancer touches every constituency, every community and almost every family in this country, and those charities do more than just speak for patients; together, they fund more cancer research than the Government. That is something we should always remember. They have put their expertise, their resources and their credibility behind this Bill, because they know it will help make a difference.
At its heart, the Bill is a modest proposal. It does not ask for billions in new spending—at least, I hope not, Madam Deputy Speaker—and it does not create a vast new bureaucracy. It simply asks that we measure progress, report it honestly, and hold ourselves accountable for the outcomes that matter to patients. If we are serious about getting cancer back on track, about delivering on the ambitions of the national cancer plan—which I do not doubt that we are—and about improving outcomes for the millions of people affected by cancer, we should support the Bill. I understand some of the reservations people have, and I hope they can be explored further in the debate.
If not, I hope the Bill will, at the very least, make it to Committee, because there is something in this. We should take seriously the fact that so many charities support the Bill.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
The hon. Gentleman took four minutes and 50 seconds; colleagues will appreciate that.
Vikki Slade (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (LD)
I will do my best to stick to that time, Madam Deputy Speaker.
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Clive Jones) for introducing this Bill on behalf of all those in our communities who are living with cancer, like my dad Ray Walls, who has stage 4 metastasized prostate cancer but is refusing to let his prognosis reduce his approach to life, grabbing each day, and tiring us all out with his energy, sporting prowess and positivity. He is truly standing up to cancer.
The Bill is also for those of us who are likely to be given the news that we have cancer. This impacts every family, and an annual report will ensure that it remains at the front of the minds of Ministers and civil servants, hold them to account to improve outcomes, and give hope to those who see improvements on the horizon but worry they will be denied access to treatments that buy them more time.
I want to talk to the issue of survival rates, as mentioned in clause 1(2), and the work of the national cancer audits. Although I of course strongly welcome the strategy, and the expanded national cancer audits, there appears to be a gap in the stated aims in relation to emerging treatments that are available elsewhere in the world but are not being fast-tracked here. My constituents Nigel, Lara and Sandra are just three of the many who have been denied access to emerging treatments, despite in some cases having been given them on a limited basis in ongoing trials. I am talking about situations in which young parents or much-loved mothers are willing to accept the risks to their own health or capacity to manage their symptoms to give them more time with their families, and to help to make progress on a widely used cure for second or third-degree cancers, or those that are so rare that there are no active UK trials.
Nigel has stage 4 pancreatic cancer, and has explained to me that when the second-line chemotherapy stops working, he will have no UK options left. He explained to me that this summer the Food and Drug Administration in America approved for use a drug called daraxonrasib, but the projected timeline for UK approval is 2028. He said:
“I will be dead by then.”
He explained that his children are now looking at how they can raise funds to send their dad to America, and asked me why the UK cannot create a rapid pathway, with waivers signed by people willing to take the risk. After all, their alternative is certain death.
Lara has an eye cancer that has led to tumours in her liver. Although the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence recognises that there is a significant unmet need for patients, given that this is a typical presentation for her condition, patients can only access chemosat under special arrangements. Lara knows that our attempts to help her will probably come too late, but if we ensure that a plan must be published for progress across a range of rare cancers, research and survival rates, we can at least offer hope to those who come after her.
Sandra and her family face the same issue. Her cancer has spread to her kidneys. The treatment enfortumab, which has been available in the US for years, was finally approved for NHS use this summer. Imagine the family’s joy, having spent thousands of pounds a week to keep her on the treatment for many, many months. But her daughter told me:
“I am totally aghast that something finally available, which is potentially my mum’s last remaining option, is only available for first-line treatment despite having been successful on her third-line cancer.”
The family are now considering selling the family home to fund treatment. This is just ridiculous. I urge the Minister to look at bringing in measures so that we can reassure our residents and families that progress is being monitored, and so they can see, year on year, the goal getting closer.
May I send Nigel, Lara and Sandra my best wishes? I know that colleagues throughout the Chamber will have similar stories, and that the experience of my constituents is not unique. That is why it is so important to accept the need for a report every year that sets out metrics against the plan and details the investment in research. The Government have made a great start with the strategy, but without a mechanism to report on it annually, there is a risk of drift, and of a future Government deprioritising it or changing direction. I urge the Government to support the Bill.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
If only we had a pharmacist in the Chamber who could help with pronunciations.
Lee Pitcher (Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme) (Lab)
Head and heart—that is what it is all about. My head says I should not be saying what I am going to say in a second, but my heart tells me that I absolutely can. If I could swear in the Chamber today, I know what I would tell cancer to do. If I could signpost to cancer from the Chamber with my hands, I know what message I would like to send. However, I will say it in a way that works for this place.
Sometimes a guest will arrive uninvited. They will outstay their welcome and will not take the hint to leave. I say to that particular visitor, who turns up nowadays in almost one in two people’s lives: your departure is long overdue—we will find a way to kick you out, and I will make sure that the bloody locks are changed as well. In Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme, we would say, “Cancer, you can do one.” Any legislation that will facilitate or enable an improvement in waiting times, late diagnosis and survival rates, and that will address the gaps between our least and most deprived communities, has to be taken seriously, and I thank the hon. Member for Wokingham (Clive Jones) for championing the Bill.
When this private Member’s Bill, which includes screening, research and preventive measures to improve survival rates, was listed for today, that was a call for me to be here on a Friday, when I would normally be at home in my constituency. Today is especially important to me, because although this Bill focuses on governance, statistics and annual reporting, I want to speak about Peter Robinson—a person, not a number.
Peter, my best friend of 20 years, who I said goodbye to for the final time the week before last following his lengthy battle with bladder cancer, was a fiercely independent hero of mine with a thirst for life and a love of his family, especially his son Noah—and a weird love for S Club 7. If he was here now, he would talk to you, just as we did nearly every day over the last number of months. He would talk about regular surveillance and follow-ups, about the importance of symptoms and side-effect management, and about specialist nursing support for that particular cancer. He would talk about stoma care, lifestyle guidance around diet, help at home and work adjustments.
I note that today’s Bill contains measures on accountability, but I have also looked at the Government’s work on cancer. I have reviewed the national cancer plan, which includes a structured governance reporting and clinical data framework to monitor the various measures that we are trying to introduce. Moreover, it also covers all the things that I discussed with Peter on a regular basis: treatment and clinical care, skills and training, and personalised bespoke cancer plans. I will push to make sure that the national cancer plan is implemented in full. I will take on board all the things around accountability that are mentioned in the plan as we go forward, but the national cancer plan goes further than just governance. I need to make sure that what we do works for everybody, so that every single person who hears that horrible, horrible message—it happens once every 85 seconds in England—will go on to make many more cherished memories.
I say to Peter, my best Wakefield Trinity and Marvel-loving mate: I miss you, but every day I will fight in your memory to ensure that this Government do all that they must for everyone out there who has lost a Peter. I know that you will be with me all the way. Together, mate, we will reach for the stars.
Madam Deputy Speaker
Mr Pitcher, you have done a great service to your friend Peter.
Adam Thompson (Erewash) (Lab)
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme (Lee Pitcher), who made an incredibly powerful speech. I also thank the hon. Member for Wokingham (Clive Jones) for bringing forward this Bill, and recognise the very genuine concern for cancer patients and their families that sits behind his doing so. There are few issues that could unite our House more totally than the battle against cancer. Every one of us knows someone whose life has been impacted by this terrible disease, and we have just heard about my dear friend’s loss of his friend, Peter.
For many families, a diagnosis, the uncertainty of waiting for results and the anxiety of waiting for treatment are among the most difficult moments that they will ever face. I think we can all agree that when someone receives that diagnosis, they deserve the best care that our NHS is able to provide. That person deserves to be able to get the diagnosis as early as they possibly can. Following their diagnosis, they deserve timely treatment and to know that everything possible is being done to give them the best chance of recovery. We can all wholeheartedly support those objectives.
I recognise the importance of the issues raised by the hon. Member for Wokingham, particularly around transparency, accountability and tackling inequalities in health outcomes, but we must ask ourselves an important question: do we need this legislation to achieve those objectives? I am not sure that we necessarily do. The Government have already published their national cancer plan for England, a 10-year strategy setting out a clear direction for improving cancer outcomes, increasing earlier diagnosis and tackling the inequalities that exist in cancer care. It is a significant commitment, with the ambition of reducing the number of lives lost to cancer over the next decade.
Sarah Smith (Hyndburn) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is making a really important and powerful speech. Does he agree that the national cancer plan also takes the important step of acknowledging the specific actions needed around child cancer? I certainly know that a local charity of mine, Milly’s Smiles, has welcomed the steps in the national cancer plan, and the specific elements recognising the tailored and different approaches needed to support our children and young people and their families who face the awful news of a cancer diagnosis.
Adam Thompson
I certainly agree with my hon. Friend—she makes a profoundly important point.
The national cancer plan is a significant commitment, with the ambition of reducing the number of lives lost to cancer over the next decade. Importantly, the Department of Health and Social Care has already committed to publishing an annual report on progress against the plan, including key metrics and targets. The Government are not simply setting out ambitions; they are committing to measure progress, report on that progress and remain transparent about the improvements being delivered.
This Bill would introduce additional statutory requirements for annual reporting and a 10-year cancer strategy. We already have that 10-year strategy, we already have commitments to report on progress and we already have a framework through which Parliament can scrutinise the Government’s performance. I do not believe that passing additional legislation that overlaps with these existing commitments is necessarily the best way to deliver better outcomes for our constituents. That distinction matters, because legislation, however well intentioned, is not an end in itself. The real end is whether that legislation would improve the lives of people who are suffering from cancer and who rely on our NHS.
We need to be honest about what patients really want. They want to know that they will be seen quickly. They want to know that when cancer is diagnosed, treatment will follow promptly, without endless waits or unnecessary delays. They want to know that the NHS will be there for them when they need it the most. That is what matters to patients and their families. We should be concentrating on implementing the national cancer plan, strengthening the NHS’s ability to deliver cancer care, and ensuring that the improvements we have committed to actually reach patients. That means supporting earlier diagnosis, improving access to screening, investing in research, and ensuring that patients receive the treatment that they need as quickly as possible.
Ultimately, we will not be judged on how many strategies we publish or how many reporting requirements we introduce. We will be judged on whether people receive their diagnosis earlier, whether they receive treatment faster, whether inequalities are reduced and whether more people survive cancer. That is the Government’s responsibility, and that is why I believe we should focus on delivering the commitment we have already made, rather than introducing additional legislation to achieve what we have already started to work towards. For those reasons, while I recognise, respect and support the intentions of the hon. Member for Wokingham, I cannot support the Bill itself.
Mary Kelly Foy (City of Durham) (Lab)
Everyone in the House agrees that cancer touches every family. I share the concerns that motivated the hon. Member for Wokingham (Clive Jones) to introduce his Bill—we all want earlier diagnosis, faster treatment and better survival rates—but while I understand its intentions, I am not convinced that creating further statutory reporting requirements is the answer.
Earlier this year, the Government published their national cancer plan, which is a comprehensive 10-year strategy to transform cancer outcomes. The ambition is that, by 2035, three in four people diagnosed with cancer will be cancer-free or living well beyond five years after diagnosis, helping to save an estimated 320,000 lives.
Clive Jones
While that might be this Government’s intention, what about the next one or the one that might come after that? What if they do not want to take cancer seriously?
Mary Kelly Foy
I thank the hon. Member for that intervention. The cancer plan should go forward with whoever comes next. I am sure that if the hon. Gentleman is still in this place, he we will be able again to promote a private Member’s Bill to have that plan changed.
As the Member of Parliament for the City of Durham and someone who has personally experienced breast cancer, I cannot speak about cancer services without mentioning the deeply distressing breast surgery scandal at County Durham and Darlington NHS foundation trust. Independent reviews exposed serious failures in clinical oversight, governance and decision making. Women underwent unnecessary procedures, including mastectomies, while many others experienced avoidable harm. I have met a number of those women affected and worked closely with them. Their stories are heartbreaking, but their bravery is breathtaking.
I pay particular tribute to the campaigners in the Pink Justice Network, whose motto is, “Alone we survive but together we thrive!” Their courage and determination has ensured that failures cannot be swept under the carpet. I want to formally recognise Amelia, Jackie, Nadeen and Rachel, who are some of the most tenacious women I have ever met. Their experiences remind us that cancer care is not simply about waiting times and treatment targets; it is about safety, dignity, accountability and, above all, listening to patients. The lessons from County Durham must never be forgotten. The women affected deserve answers, accountability and certainty that no other patient will experience what they have endured.
We must also recognise the excellent support networks in Durham that have helped fill some of the gaps in diagnosis. In particular, I thank the Durham district prostate cancer group. Les and his team have organised prostate-specific antigen testing events, helping to identify men at risk of prostate cancer and ensuring that they are referred for further tests and support. They have literally saved lives, and I pay tribute to their work.
Ultimately, the true test of any cancer strategy is not how many reports it produces but whether more people survive cancer, receive treatment sooner and have confidence in the care they receive. For those reasons, while I wholeheartedly support the objectives of improving cancer outcomes and transparency, I do not believe that the Bill is necessary, given the substantial cancer plan and our existing reporting commitments. I will therefore oppose the Bill, but I will continue to work with the hon. Member and the all-party parliamentary group on cancer as well as local patients, Ministers and campaigners to secure safer services, earlier diagnosis, faster treatment and better outcomes for people in Durham and across the country.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
I call the shadow Secretary of State.
Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)
I thank and commend the hon. Member for Wokingham (Clive Jones) for bringing the Bill to the Floor of the House and for his powerful personal testimony. We have already heard, and I think we will hear more, personal testimonies from colleagues across the House. It was a particular privilege to be here for the speech of the hon. Member for Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme (Lee Pitcher).
About a month ago, the hon. Member for Wokingham and I were both at a breast cancer campaign event at which one of the themes was inequalities in breast cancer care, particularly among under-represented communities, secondary breast cancer patients and men. It was good to hear from him on that occasion. He draws on his experience to contribute effectively to raising awareness about breast cancer in men and—as he is doing today—all cancers and the issues around them.
There were a number of important initiatives under the last Government, including the use of community diagnostic centres; the introduction of the lung health screening programme, which subsequently expanded to become the national lung cancer screening programme; the major clinical trial, initiated with Prostate Cancer UK, on testing screening approaches for detecting prostate cancer; and the launch in February 2024 of the children and young people’s cancer taskforce. As the hon. Member for Erewash (Adam Thompson) says, few things can unite this House as strongly as the fight against cancer. When the national cancer plan was published in February 2026, the Opposition welcomed its aims to improve survival and outcomes.
Amanda Martin (Portsmouth North) (Lab)
The shadow Minister and I share a university hospital. Although the targets are woefully out, does he agree that it is not because of the staff? Will he join me in thanking ward matrons Gavin Foley and Rachael Hunter, who do a fantastic job supporting our cancer patients?
Damian Hinds
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for the opportunity to express thanks and appreciation, as she has done. She is right that we happen to share a hospital, and it provides fantastic care for so many of my constituents.
When the national cancer plan was published, the then shadow Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Daventry (Stuart Andrew), raised questions about how its ambitions would be realised. He called for a
“fully funded long-term workforce plan”
alongside
“clear, funded milestones showing how and when patients will see improvements”.—[Official Report, 5 February 2026; Vol. 780, c. 455.]
The focus needs to be on that plan.
Yesterday, we saw the most recent performance statistics from the national health service. It was a difficult set of statistics overall, and cancer standards, by all three measures—the faster diagnosis standard, the 31-day treatment standard and the 62-day treatment standard—had deteriorated month on month. Cancer Research UK’s analysis shows a discrepancy in diagnosis time between those who are ultimately found to be clear of cancer and those who have cancer; it rightly calls for particular analysis of that point. Its analysis also shows that breast cancer referrals had the biggest drop in performance among those who went on to be diagnosed with cancer.
The hon. Member for Wokingham is absolutely right that Ministers need to focus on the entire pathway, from risk factors such as smoking and obesity to waiting times, children and young people’s cancer screening, investment in research and key metrics around earlier diagnosis. The key thing, as I know he agrees, is to get all those things done and to make real progress.
Time is short, Madam Deputy Speaker, and we need to hear from the Minister about how she can reassure the hon. Gentleman and the House on those points. I hope that she will also update us on the long-awaited health workforce plan, which underpins so many aspects of the NHS. I commend the hon. Gentleman for all he has done and is doing, and for bringing the matter before the House today.
The Minister for Social Care and Mental Health (Alison McGovern)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Wokingham (Clive Jones) on introducing the Bill. I was 12 when my dad was first diagnosed with cancer; I was 29, and standing for election to this House for the first time, when he had his most recent major cancer treatment; and, as the House knows, my mum died of cancer in July after a painful period of serious illness, at the age of 73, so I like to think that when it comes to experience of this disease, I am no ignoramus.
We have heard from colleagues just how important this issue is to all of us in the House. I know that colleagues across the House will welcome the progress that we have made, just as they have welcomed the Government’s cancer plan. Around 290,000 more people over the last 12 months have had cancer diagnosed or ruled out within 28 days. The number of patients who have received treatment within 62 days of referral is up to 70% over the last 12 months, from 66%. But I am under no illusion about the work still to do and the urgency that patients rightly expect from this Government.
Olivia Bailey (Reading West and Mid Berkshire) (Lab)
I associate myself with the Minister’s thanks to my near neighbour, the hon. Member for Wokingham (Clive Jones), who has done important work campaigning on cancer—I thank him for it. I also think a key part of our fight against cancer is those who fundraise for cancer research. Will my hon. Friend congratulate my constituent Stephen, who is in the Gallery today, on raising £1,600 walking 26 miles in the London Shine Night Walk for cancer research?
Alison McGovern
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. Of course, fundraising is really important, and I offer my thanks to Stephen. I hope he has enjoyed the debate so far. He has done a great thing.
I have paid close attention to what the hon. Member for Wokingham said today. Colleagues on all sides are listening with sympathetic ears. All of us want our constituents to have earlier cancer diagnosis and better treatment, and to improve patient experience, ensuring that the progress we are making in the NHS is, as he points out it should be, transparent and accountable. While I share his ambition, I am sorry to say that the Government are unable to support his Bill, because we do not think that its provisions are necessary. Ultimately, the hon. Gentleman’s Bill rests on two principles: that there should be a clear national strategy for improving cancer outcomes; and that the Government should be transparent about the progress we are making.
Clive Jones
Will the Minister arrange for me and the charities who support the Bill to see the Minister who will be responsible for the national cancer plan, so we can work together to ensure there is proper parliamentary scrutiny?
Alison McGovern
I feel sure that the Minister responsible for this area of policy will arrange such meetings. I will make available to him a copy of this debate so he can read for himself how important it is. I would say in a supportive way to the hon. Gentleman that we now have a cancer strategy that will improve outcomes over the next 10 years. I hope colleagues will also recognise that we have been unflinchingly honest about the scale of the challenge we face. We will always do so. We cannot sugarcoat the current situation, even while we all want to offer our constituents some hope.
We have a 10-year national cancer plan to make England a world leader in cancer outcomes. It is very important that it succeeds. It is a plan that sets out more than 100 actions to improve cancer survival, increase earlier diagnosis, recover performance against waiting time standards, and improve the quality of life for people living with and beyond cancer. We published the plan in February this year and, starting on its first anniversary, we will publish an annual report that will measure our progress against each of these targets every year. It will be freely available online and accessible to all. At the end of three years, we will also publish a complete and honest account of what we have got right and where we need to go further.
When it comes to improving the plan, no options are off the table. I want to express my sincere thanks to our friend, my hon. Friend the Member for West Lancashire (Ashley Dalton). I am delighted that she has agreed to rejoin us as an adviser on the national cancer plan’s implementation. She knows how important it is that we get this right and she has already done some pretty inspirational work on the first draft of the plan. But I know she would be the first say that wherever the plan is falling short we should and we will improve it. It is not a question of creating new legislation or statutory requirements when we have a cancer plan; our priority should be to crack on with the job.
While we get on with that job, I welcome scrutiny from the hon. Member for Wokingham and from all other Members in this place as they rightly hold the Government to account. Accountability is already being built into the way we deliver the plan. For example, in September we followed through on a commitment to establish a new National Cancer Board, bringing together leaders from across the cancer community, to set strategic direction, give independent challenge and make sure we are keeping up momentum towards our goals.
A few weeks ago, the hon. Member for Wokingham asked the Prime Minister to look at this proposal, and his suggestion was shared with the National Cancer Board. I can update the House that the board has now provided its views to Ministers, and those views have helped shape the Government’s position today.
As I have said, the board deliberately brings together people with different roles and different perspectives. We would not expect every member to agree on this issue. Some members have noted support for the Bill and its ambitions to put cancer strategy and reporting on a statutory footing, while others have concerns and worry that creating a parallel statutory framework could duplicate the national cancer plan, cause confusion for patients and the public and create additional reporting requirements without necessarily improving delivery.
Board members, however, share a clear expectation that reporting on the national cancer plan must provide a transparent account of progress, including where delivery is off track and, importantly, what action is being taken to get it back on track.
Amanda Martin
I thank the Minister for taking the intervention. On that note, will she look at the issues with recruiting cancer specialists, particularly in coastal towns and cities such as Portsmouth?
Alison McGovern
As the hon. Lady says, recruitment is very important—I am sure that the Minister with responsibility for the plan will look at that issue.
Our commitment to publishing an annual report on progress against the national cancer plan is intended to deliver these insights into where the plan is off track, and to spur action to address any problems. The hon. Member for Wokingham has recognised that commitment, but I understand that he is worried that a future Government might choose to stop these annual reports. Even if today’s Bill is passed, a future Government, if they were intent on ceasing annual reports, could undo what the hon. Gentleman’s Bill seeks to do with a simple vote, just as commitments made in legislation on child poverty were undone.
However, we have listened carefully to the wider point that the hon. Gentleman is making about accountability. Following the views of the National Cancer Board, we are strengthening our approach further. We have taken on board suggestions from Macmillan and Cancer52 that the annual national cancer plan progress report should not simply be published, but laid before Parliament and accompanied by an oral statement from the Secretary of State. We will make that further commitment, which I hope reassures the hon. Gentleman that we share his determination to ensure that Parliament can scrutinise our progress and hold us to account.
The national cancer plan was written by a collective of people who care about this issue, and it takes action across the whole pathway. We are supporting the NHS to transform diagnostic services with £1.65 billion-worth of spending, including through new surgical hubs and state-of-the-art diagnostic scanners. Just last week, we announced that a world-leading new cancer blood test trial is being launched across at least 200 GP practices in England. We have invested £70 million into new cutting-edge radiotherapy machines, and exciting progress has been made on research with the cancer vaccines launchpad, which has now been expanded to support eight clinical trials. If I may test your patience, Madam Deputy Speaker, I also congratulate the world-leading research that is done at the Clatterbridge cancer centre in Liverpool, which is very close to my heart.
We are also delivering commitments to improve quality and consistency of care. The Royal College of Physicians and Macmillan Cancer Support have recently published what is called a clinical consensus statement on acute and supportive oncology, establishing a common framework for service development. We are developing a new generation of cancer manuals and treatment. I could go on, but I just want to mention that, for children and young people with cancer, the Government are committing up £10 million a year to a new fund to help with the cost of travelling to and from principal treatment centres, for reasons that will be obvious to Members.
We are giving rarer cancers the dedicated attention and leadership that they deserve. We have appointed Dr Robert Metcalf as the national clinical lead for rare cancers, giving patients a powerful voice and clinical leadership. This work also includes renewing our focus on brain cancer. Last month, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister and the Health Secretary met Archie Goodburn to discuss new action that we are taking on brain cancer. We will appoint a new national brain tumour clinical lead in the coming months.
This subject is of great importance to us all, and I therefore thank the hon. Member for Wokingham for bringing his Bill forward, and for the very constructive way in which he and his colleagues have approached the matter. I hope he can see that he has impacted the decisions that the Government have made. It is not the Government’s view that we need further legislation, but it is our view that we must work collectively to do much better with independent checks to improve treatment outcomes and to help people live better with cancer.
Coastal Communities (Health) Bill
(1 day, 6 hours ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Steff Aquarone (North Norfolk) (LD)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
It is my privilege to introduce this Bill today. I thank the Clerks from the Public Bill Office for their support in bringing it to life, and colleagues from along our coastline for their expressions of support for it.
Along our coast, people live sicker and die younger. Five years ago, the chief medical officer laid out the evidence, and today this House has an opportunity to act on it. Fresh from steering the nation through the pandemic, Professor Sir Chris Whitty sought to tackle another major challenge: he published a seminal report outlining the health inequalities faced by coastal communities across our country, which include mine in North Norfolk. The findings are stark and shocking, but clear: across a range of measurable factors, those living in coastal communities were worse off—higher rates of coronary heart disease, lung conditions, obesity, substance abuse and addiction, and mental ill health. Their life expectancies were lower, and the percentage of those lives lived in good health was lower, too.
We are an island nation. For an island nation to have poorer health outcomes in coastal areas is an unacceptable failing. The evidence exists, and the recommendations exist. What is missing is a system that turns them into action and makes someone answerable when that action falls short. The things that Professor Whitty outlined are not news to many of us in coastal communities. We understand the challenges we face, and we live with them daily. What they exposed is how much coastal communities have in common in facing down these challenges, and how much more we have in common with our coastal neighbours than we do with many of our inland neighbours.
Our coastal communities could be a powerful force, and they need to be if the Government are to deliver their ambitions for growth, green energy, strengthened industry, and national defence and security. If our communities are sicker, those aims will all be harder to achieve. For too long, the issues of health and wellbeing in our coastal communities have not been part of the wider conversation about tackling health inequality. I introduced this Bill because I am determined to ensure that my community in North Norfolk, and communities anywhere on our nation’s coast, is being properly represented.
Let us look at the inarguable facts. Professor Whitty’s findings continue to stack up with more recent research. An article published just weeks ago in the Journal of Public Health found that coastal communities in the south-east have life expectancy four years lower than their inland neighbours. In the east of England, it is three years lower. I have spoken before about how these inequalities can even be seen within counties; there are notable differences in life expectancy at either end of the Acle Straight in Norfolk, between Broadland and Great Yarmouth, despite their being only a few miles apart. Research from University College London, published in the British Medical Journal over the summer, also shocked me. It spoke of
“people who grew up and stayed in coastal areas becoming more likely to develop morbidity from midlife compared with those staying in inland areas and…the people who move to coastal areas are sicker compared with those who move away from coastal areas.”
I want the House to reflect on that for a moment. We have evidence that suggests that for people in coastal communities, the best way to stay healthy could be to leave—and for those who are not there currently, not to move there. This is an existential threat to coastal communities as we know them.
Action is not a choice any more; it is a necessity. This matters to the Minister with responsibility for health inequalities, the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North and Cottingham (Dame Diana Johnson), who is not in her place today. She is a respected champion and hard worker for the fine city of Hull. In her area, people will live only 53 years of their life in good health. The average age of MPs elected to this place in 2024 was 48, so were the average MP to become an average resident of Hull, they would have only five years of good health left. I am sure many of us still have a great many things we wish to do in our lives that are reliant on our good health. How would we react to being told that we had five years before our health started to become noticeably and impactfully poorer? That is not acceptable for the people who live anywhere in the country, and I implore the Minister to support the Bill and make a change for all our coastal constituents.
The Bill makes two straightforward demands: a duty to act and a strategy that brings Government together to deliver. As I said during the Health Bill debate, the Government’s current aim to have a duty to tackle health inequality is commendable, but as drafted it is flawed. There are no safeguards to ensure that coastal communities see the benefits of any of this work. Being at the end of the line, often disparately populated and with difficult challenges to tackle, makes it possible that the Government will overlook such communities in favour of tackling health inequality in larger, inland metropolitan areas.
Sean Woodcock (Banbury) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Member on introducing an important debate on health inequalities to the House. My constituency is inland but largely rural, and shares similar issues with health inequalities to those that he raises, because of transport and access to services. Does he think that by confining the discussion to coastal communities he is stifling a much more important debate about health inequalities across the country more generally?
Steff Aquarone
In fact, I would say to the hon. Member that in order to tackle inequality truly we need to work from the outside in. In doing so, we would surely bring into line all the rural inland communities of which he speaks, which I do not doubt share many of the same issues that I am discussing today. If we start with the places the system finds hardest to reach, then we can design services that work there and work inwards. Otherwise, a national average can improve while the communities with the greatest barriers are left exactly where they were.
Amanda Martin (Portsmouth North) (Lab)
Does the hon. Member agree that the men’s health strategy is working from within, and that having diagnostic, GP and mental health services available at farming auctions is a great move forward by this Government?
Steff Aquarone
That is a wonderful example of how designing from the outside in can work. We have seen that with buses and with broadband, and it is plain that we suffer the same with all forms of health services. The former Health Secretary, the right hon. Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting), said:
“If Australia can effectively serve communities living in the remote outback, we can meet the needs of people living in rural and coastal England.”
Caroline Voaden (South Devon) (LD)
In my constituency it can take a very long time to get to the nearest hospital because of small, narrow lanes, and it can be almost impossible in the summer when there is heavy holiday traffic. The integrated care board has talked about merging emergency cardiac care between three hospitals, which would make the journey so long that people would literally die en route to the hospital. We have been campaigning hard for the ICB not to do that. Does my hon. Friend agree that while merging some services may be the way forward to enable ICBs to cover their costs, choosing a service like emergency cardiac care, where the time taken to get to the hospital, and therefore the distance travelled, is absolutely crucial to survival, is the wrong area to start when looking at service provision?
Steff Aquarone
That surely defies all sense. I understand, as my hon. Friend alluded to, that for reasons of professional development and training it may not be possible to deliver all services in all areas, but acute and emergency care is surely beyond reproach. I am yet to hear any understanding or potential safeguards for that risk from the Government, either here or in the other place. There was no acknowledgment of it when I brought forward and spoke to an amendment on the Health Bill, or when Lord Patel did so in the other place. Coastal communities deserve an explanation of why the Government are not ensuring that health services are delivered for them.
Pam Cox (Colchester) (Lab)
The east of England has one of the longest coastlines of any region, so we too are familiar with the challenges faced by coastal communities. The University of Essex has an exemplary centre for coastal communities, led by Dr Emily Murray, an epidemiologist and public health expert. Will the hon. Gentleman join me in commending the work of that centre and in encouraging Ministers to meet representatives from the centre to hear their recommendations?
Steff Aquarone
I surely would, on condition that the hon. Lady allows me to join them, because I would really like to hear more about that work. I am sure it would have a great impact on my part of the east of England, which is quite a big part of the United Kingdom.
When I have tried to question the Government on the specifics of their work, I have not received anything substantive. In July, I asked how many meetings the Minister for health disparities had attended in relation to coastal health inequalities this year, and I was told:
“Ministers in the Department meet regularly on a range of topics, including tackling health inequalities, to which coastal inequalities are closely linked.”
I asked which meetings had taken place; I received a general assurance. I asked what specific work was being done, and I was referred back to that general assurance. Ministers must be able to tell Parliament what they are doing, who is responsible and what has changed. It is becoming a worrying theme that coastal health inequality is being kicked out to sea, so I hope the Minister can provide some straight answers on what the Government have done and will do to make a difference.
People in coastal communities want the reassurance that this House, which has more than 100 MPs who represent coastal communities, is placing a legal duty on Ministers responsible for tackling the issues that matter to them. This lack of action or record of delivery is growing more and more worrying.
The other part of my Bill relates to a cross-governmental coastal health strategy. It is rare for politicians to admit when an idea is not theirs, but I will admit that this is not my idea. In fact, it is not even very new. It was a core recommendation of the Chris Whitty report in 2021.
I am sure that the Government will be keen to point out their existing health plans and strategies. While those do important work in places, they will not do enough to recognise the specific challenges of delivering coastal healthcare. Coastal communities suffer from the challenge of the half-compass effect when seeking access to healthcare. It might sound obvious, but when residents in Mundesley or Cley seek to access healthcare, half the compass directions they could travel in would take them straight into the North sea. To my knowledge we are not yet building GP surgeries or dentists there. Yet we still risk planning services as though patients can travel in every direction.
This morning I received a letter from a constituent in Holt, who had been referred by his GP for an MRI scan but was told there was only availability at the Norfolk and Norwich hospital, some 25 miles away. It is a six-hour round trip on public transport. He cannot afford a taxi and there is no hospital transport available, so he has declined the test. He asked me, rightly, how many other constituents find themselves in this situation because of inadequate access to healthcare on the coast.
Geography has to shape provision. If we take a one-size-fits-all approach to healthcare delivery, it will only be half as effective for coastal communities. A strategy that pulls together all parts of government that have an impact on and interest in tackling coastal health inequality is important to bring together the action necessary to face up to this challenge.
This speaks to the core of my vision for a country that works for people, to rewire Westminster around the lives that people lead. A patient misses an appointment because there is no bus. Their health deteriorates because their home is damp. They cannot get the help that they need because the local service cannot recruit. Westminster files those problems under different Departments, but that person experiences one life. We should organise government around that life. We should give people responsibility for the outcome, the resources to deliver it and the funding and authority to work meaningfully across Departments, not just within annual budgets.
Tackling coastal health inequality is a great opportunity to show that this can work. This Bill does not list exhaustively all the things that the strategy should do, but it does touch on many of the key issues that Professor Whitty identified and that I and my constituents see and live with every day.
The strategy would look at the recruitment and retention challenges of coastal communities, which come from being at the end of the line and lead to an extreme workload for those who do healthcare work in our areas. The chief medical officer’s report outlined how there are 14.6% fewer postgraduate medical trainees, 15% fewer consultants and 7.4% fewer nurses per patient in coastal communities. I have seen this at first hand in my area when it comes to securing enough trained pharmacists to keep community pharmacies open and operating in our coastal towns. Many will remember the scandal of the failure of Jhoots. It was noticeable how many coastal towns were impacted by that collapse. The localised factors of transport, environment, employment and more would also be addressed in this strategy.
When seeking to address health inequalities, the Government need to truly understand how being coastal affects Cromer and Sheringham differently from Whitby or Grimsby. There are different characteristics of the coast—fishing, ports, tourism, rurality—and all need their solutions to be well tailored.
To that end, I strongly encourage them to take a look at the excellent work of the Coastal Navigators’ Network, which has been taking on this great challenge and building a nationwide network of local government and health professionals to find solutions to challenges faced by coastal communities through the lens of opportunity. They understand how that investment, and the time and energy that is spent getting to the root causes of much of coastal inequality and deprivation, can pay excellent dividends in both wellbeing and economic terms.
The test of the strategy will be what changes—how staff are recruited and retrained, how patients reach appointments, and how investment prevents ill health. Each commitment needs an owner, a timetable, and a measure of success. We cannot have this becoming another nice document that becomes confirmed to a fate similar to that of the “display department” in Douglas Adams’s “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy,” meaning that we might find the coastal health strategy
“in the bottom of a locked cabinet, stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’.”
Publishing a strategy is not the same as delivering it, and Ministers should return to the House and tell us what has improved, what has failed, and what they will change.
When Chris Whitty was on our television screens every night, giving us evidence and making recommendations backed by data and in the public interest, the Government listened to him and trusted him. We listened to him and trusted him. There has been no change in his methods when assessing the challenges of coastal communities. His reasoning and recommendations are just as well thought out as during the pandemic. Coastal health inequality is another challenge of our times, and the data show that we are losing the battle. We cannot allow this approach of sidelining coastal issues, or assuming that they could be picked up by another non-specific piece of work as an afterthought. The coast is where the country begins for millions of people. It must not be where the Government’s ambition ends. Give this Bill its Second Reading, and make improving healthcare a responsibility that Ministers must answer for.
Several hon. Members rose—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
Colleagues know what time this debate has to end, so they should be mindful of time keeping.
Sadik Al-Hassan (North Somerset) (Lab)
In my constituency, our coastal towns of Clevedon and Portishead are places of real character, with Clevedon’s grade I listed pier, Portishead’s maritime and dock heritage, and communities with a fierce sense of pride and belonging. As many Members of the House know, before I was elected I worked as a community pharmacist for nearly 20 years across the south-west. Behind the pharmacy counter I saw the health inequalities between coastal and inland communities first hand. The Chief Medical Officer’s report exemplifies that disparity.
Five years ago, Chris Whitty warned that if health problems in coastal communities were not tackled vigorously and systematically, we would face
“a long tail of preventable ill health.”
It is a problem that will only get worse as populations age. That warning matters in North Somerset. Today, 11% of our population is over 75, but by 2043 that will rise to 14%. The 2021 census showed that people in coastal areas are more likely to report bad or very bad health. In Clevedon, 6.7% of people said that their day-to-day activities were limited a lot by their health, and the figure was 5.2% in Portishead.
As the hon. Member for North Norfolk (Steff Aquarone) mentioned, coastal communities are harder to recruit in when it comes to health. My first-hand experience of trying to recruit pharmacists and health care professionals, such as pharmacy technicians and dispensers, across coastal communities in the south-west has shown me that it is problematic in those areas to get the healthcare professionals we need. That is also true of GP surgeries. The south-west has the highest community pharmacy vacancy rate at 14%, and workforce planning needs to reflect the ageing population in coastal communities, which will fuel the demand for healthcare.
I hate to agree with the hon. Member one more time, but I believe the Government need to have a Minister specifically responsible for coastal communities, to push a cross-Government and cross-Department strategy to try to bring those inequalities in coastal communities closer to those of their inland neighbours.
Transport and access to health hubs in coastal communities are more difficult, and that can be problematic not just for attending a GP appointment or getting to a pharmacy, but for getting to work for those working in a healthcare establishment. Pharmacy tends to map towards deprivation and health inequalities in this country, with higher numbers of pharmacies located where inequalities are greatest, and that links to coastal communities and rural areas. When pharmacy is impacted by funding cuts and closures, that tends to hit those communities worse, such as with the closure of the Jhoots pharmacies in Portishead. We lost two of the three pharmacies in that area, meaning that one pharmacy was left to serve a population of around 25,000. Thankfully, with the help of Magna Pharmacy, we have managed to reopen those two pharmacies, but closures make coastal communities particularly vulnerable due to the health inequalities.
Pam Cox
I have put on the record my support for particular initiatives around coastal communities. Clause 4 of the Health Bill gives the Secretary of State a duty to have regard to reduce inequalities in access to health services for people in England. Does my hon. Friend agree that Ministers should be mindful of the needs of coastal communities when looking at that clause?
Sadik Al-Hassan
I agree with my hon. Friend’s wise intervention. As I have said, I would go further and put in place a Minister with a responsibility for coastal communities, so great are the health inequalities. They require such a focus.
The 2021 report by Chris Whitty made several recommendations, and I urge the Government to take them forward. We need a cross-Government strategy for coastal health. We must ensure there are sufficient healthcare staff in coastal areas as recruitment levels are often lower than the national average, which, as I say, I have personal experience of.
Finally, we must undertake better research. Coastal communities have been chronically understudied in public health research, and that gap leads to worse inequalities. An ageing population adds to pressures on local services, from getting appointments at GP surgeries to access to Pharmacy First at community pharmacies.
I welcome the hon. Member for North Norfolk raising this issue. Someone’s postcode should never dictate their health outcomes, and I will continue to champion the health of North Somerset’s coastal communities today and for the years ahead.
Ian Roome (North Devon) (LD)
I greatly appreciate my hon. Friend the Member for North Norfolk (Steff Aquarone) for bringing forward this Bill on behalf of coastal communities around the country. Hundreds of families in North Devon have now spent three months without an operational maternity unit, and more than 200 births have been redirected over two hours inland to Exeter. It is not acceptable that an expectant mother in coastal towns such as Ilfracombe, Combe Martin or Lynton should have to travel so far to reach a hospital. It clearly amounts to a massive inequality in NHS healthcare.
Many of my constituents feel that if this crisis had struck in Exeter, Bristol or London, things would be very different. We would not have just warm words of sympathy from the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State; we would already have a solution. Many women have told me that the anxiety and worry that the travelling time has caused them is not acceptable and that it has caused many families to feel that the worst could happen while travelling, especially because our areas have a heavy volume of tourists and the roads are narrow.
Ben Maguire (North Cornwall) (LD)
My hon. Friend is making a fantastic speech. I pay tribute to him for all his hard work campaigning on North Devon district hospital; it is a national disgrace that we have not seen its maternity unit reopen. Does he agree that in areas like both our constituencies, poor rural transport is locking our constituents out of accessing healthcare? In North Cornwall, not a single town has a direct bus to a major hospital, which I find incredible in 2026.
Ian Roome
I thank my hon. Friend for making that point, and I totally agree. People in some areas of my constituency and my hon. Friend’s constituency use the hospital situated in my constituency, and it causes those families lots of worry. I appreciate all the work he is doing to help me on this campaign to get the maternity unit reopened.
Many of these coastal towns have only very basic healthcare provision locally, and that is reflected in people’s quality of life and life chances. Coastal healthcare is a crisis that overlaps with poor housing, few economic opportunities, limited transport, as we have just heard, and other disadvantages. In one part of Ilfracombe, life expectancy is a full 10 years lower than in other parts of Devon. This Bill rightly says that the Secretary of State should be made to come to this Chamber and account for those disparities.
Coastal towns have so much to offer, but across the country there is a pattern of too many coastal towns ending up in the category of “have nots”. A national strategy should exist to counter that and to deliver good healthcare for every coastal community. First-time parents in my constituency have been left all at sea. The Government must take this Bill seriously.
Amanda Martin (Portsmouth North) (Lab)
I thank the hon. Member for North Norfolk (Steff Aquarone) for introducing this Bill and, importantly, for shining a light on issues that deserve far greater attention.
Our coastal communities are special places, but we know that many face challenges that can have a profound impact on people’s health, wellbeing and, indeed, life expectancy. Deprivation, low wages, poor housing, poor air quality, education opportunities and isolation all play a part. I want to concentrate on one area where these inequalities are particularly concerning, which is mental health. Research shows that young people in England’s coastal towns are three times more likely to experience a mental health condition. Behind that statistic are young people, families desperate for support and people whose conditions worsen because help simply is not available when they need it.
These challenges are very real in my constituency of Portsmouth—a coastal city. Too many people in our city are struggling with their mental health. An estimated 15.4% of adults have been diagnosed with depression—above the regional and national average. Behind the figures are people trying to cope, families worried about loved ones and individuals who are not able to get the help they need. Getting this help is also not easy, because Portsmouth has 2,133 patients for every GP, compared with 1,634 nationally. This puts enormous pressure on primary care and makes it hard for people to access support early, when it can make the greatest difference.
The picture for children’s mental health is equally concerning. The Hampshire and the Isle of Wight integrated care board spends just £966 per child with an active referral to mental health services—the 10th lowest spend in England. By comparison, north-west London spends £2,410. Even more troubling is that 40% of referrals are closed before a second contact—the third highest rate in the country. These are not figures; they represent children and young people who need someone to listen, families looking for reassurance and people who deserve consistent support, rather than being left to navigate the system alone.
I therefore welcome the Government’s commitment to opening 159 new NHS mental health facilities across England, bringing support closer to home and intervening early, because it can make a real difference. When community support is unavailable, people too often experience a mental health crisis and end up in A&E. Our emergency staff do extraordinary work, but A&E cannot replace the specialist ongoing care that people need. We must give people access to the right support in the right place at the right time. That is why I am disappointed that Portsmouth has not been selected for one of these new facilities. Given the level of need in my city, I believe that Portsmouth should have been considered, and I welcome the opportunity to work with the Minister to see how we can make that happen.
Behind all these figures are real people and real families. Too many young people, in particular, have lost their life to suicide in Portsmouth. I want to pay tribute to Tegan Hide and everyone involved in the Glade’s law campaign. I thank them for meeting me and sharing their friend’s story. Their determination to honour Glade’s legacy and improve mental health support in our city deserves recognition. Glade Clarke was a 23-year-old woman who sadly died of suicide on 26 August 2026.
If we are serious about tackling health inequalities, we must recognise that coastal communities have distinct needs and ensure that they are not left behind. People in my city of Portsmouth deserve the right to access the same timely, high-quality mental healthcare as everyone else in the country, and I hope that this Government will continue to work with local communities like mine to make that a reality.
Steve Darling (Torbay) (LD)
Torbay is often known as the English riviera, and in my view, it is the premier resort in the United Kingdom. We have incredible beaches, incredible countryside and an outstanding hospitality offer. However, behind the beach huts and the palm trees, we have high levels of deprivation—in fact, Torbay has the highest level of deprivation of any constituency that has a Liberal Democrat MP.
I pay tribute to Lincoln Sargeant, who is our director of public health. He was also in that role at the time of the Chris Whitty report, and he wrote a chapter on Torbay. I was leader of the council at the time that it was written, so I am only too aware of the issues, and had conversations with him about the deaths and about the diseases of despair that plague our communities across Torbay, whether they relate to drugs, alcohol or depression. Only this morning, I was speaking to a lady in Torbay who attempted suicide because of the challenges in her world, and was trying to support her.
I would also like to mention Kate Lissett, the chief medical officer at Torbay hospital. She has shared with me how many patients who come into Torbay hospital say that they see living into their 60s as a good age in Torbay, which is shocking. The challenges we face include high levels of morbidity due to respiratory issues and—going to the other end of the spectrum—obesity and high levels of teeth extraction among young children. All these things in Torbay paint a very depressing picture.
What is the fabric that gives rise to these challenges? It is that we have only 8% social rented housing, compared with a national average of 17%; when Thatcher came into power, the figure for the nation was 35%. As a young Liberal, many years ago, I campaigned on street homelessness, and the sad thing is that the levels of street-attached are worse than ever. In Torbay, we also have the third lowest household incomes in the country in terms of wages. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North Norfolk (Steff Aquarone) on bringing forward the Bill. If we do not measure health inequalities in coastal communities and develop strategies, we are not going to tackle them.
Adam Thompson (Erewash) (Lab)
I thank the hon. Member for North Norfolk (Steff Aquarone) for bringing this discussion to the Chamber. He might be asking why, as an inland MP, I am speaking on this Bill—I intend to cover that in the coming minutes. Before I begin, though, I will say that it was lovely to hear from the hon. Member for North Devon (Ian Roome). He reminded me of a holiday I had in his constituency many years ago, which I had more or less forgotten, so it was lovely to be reminded of the weekend I spent in Ilfracombe.
I strongly respect the goals of the Bill, but I cannot directly support it. I do not believe that the problems the Bill diagnoses and seeks to recognise are limited to coastal communities, which is why I have chosen to speak today. The issues covered in the Bill and as part of this discussion are ones that affect communities up and down the country, whether they are next to the sea or—like mine—many miles from it. It is not living on the coast that inflicts particular problems on a place; it is people and economy. However, because of the fundamental imbalances that have plagued our country for decades, it is difficult for me to read that a specific strategy is needed to tackle child poverty in coastal communities. My community is nowhere near the sea, but there are children in poverty in Erewash who desperately need help all the same. Half of all the children in Ilkeston live in low-income households—that is nearly double the national figure. Opportunity needs to be created for young people right across the country.
Amanda Martin
I thank my hon. Friend for mentioning young people. This Government have changed the rules for parents on universal credit; previously, if their child went to college, they would still get universal credit payments. This Government have extended that to young people taking up apprenticeships. Does my hon. Friend agree that is a really helpful way to encourage growth and provide opportunities in deprived areas?
Adam Thompson
I completely agree. The work that the Government are doing to support young people— especially those not in education, employment or training—is really important. We are doing a huge amount of good in that space.
Support should be offered—that is absolutely correct—but on the basis of need, not just geographical location. Why should concerns about poor educational attainment in coastal communities be recognised in law but not the real concern of parents in Erewash about poor school standards where they live? The thing is, basically everywhere in this country has some claim or another to having been left behind. Erewash is, given certain elections and a party politics-focused perspective, an extremely important place. Since my constituency was established in 1983, it has had a Government MP, completely without fail. I am proud to be the most recent in a very long line of Erewash Government MPs.
Maria Eagle (Liverpool Garston) (Lab)
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. May I ask you to clarify that we are discussing the Coastal Communities (Health) Bill at Second Reading rather than the Debt Relief (Developing Countries) Bill, so that it is clear to everybody that we have not suddenly switched to the fifth Bill of the day instead of the third?
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
The right hon. Member is very Eagle-eyed. [Laughter.] She is indeed correct; we will rectify the error on the screens. We are indeed in the correct debate and hearing the correct speech.
Adam Thompson
I thank my right hon. Friend for making that point of order.
I was just talking about being the last in a long line of Government MPs. In 2024, the then Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Richmond and Northallerton (Rishi Sunak), launched the Conservatives’ 2024 election campaign in Ilkeston, where he took some planted questions from local Conservative councillors dressed in hi-vis jackets—that definitely made them look like ordinary members of the public—and the current Prime Minister kicked off his August listening tour in Ilkeston as well. As per the accounts of one Peter Thorne—one of my fantastic former local members, sadly now passed—even Clement Attlee once stood on a soapbox in Long Eaton market place. Indeed, many Labour party and Conservative party leaders have done so over the intervening years.
Has Erewash’s status as a perennial key marginal done it any great service? Sure. Long Eaton was in the first round of levelling-up funding under the previous Government, but Ilkeston got rejected in the second round. The particular formulation of my constituency and its demographics mean that it has never been described as part of the “red wall”, but parts of it—especially Ilkeston—can really be considered as such.
Ironmaking at Stanton—one of the smaller parts of my constituency—started at the dawn of the industrial revolution, and it carried on for more than 200 years, but sadly it did not survive beyond 20 years after it was privatised. A deep point of pain for my constituents is what happened in Stanton after it was privatised.
I have spoken plenty of times in this place about the struggles that our town centres face. The high street banks are abandoning Ilkeston and Long Eaton, without any regard for the one in five people in my community— often elderly and disabled folks—who still do not use online banking and probably never will. Historic industries have left our towns. That is all as true in the midlands as it is on the coasts of Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, Essex, Kent, Dorset and Cornwall—wherever. It is just as true inland as on the coast.
I accept that Erewash is almost as far from the sea as it is possible to be in England—I understand that the furthest point away is about 7 miles away from my house, so that is pretty close—but it is not like we do not also have the flooding issues that face our coastal communities. My constituency is bounded to the east by the River Erewash and to the south by the Trent, which is fed by the Derwent. That means that the entirety of my constituency—particularly Long Eaton—is always at flood risk, as I am reminded every year when I struggle to get house insurance. Even before I was a Member of Parliament, when Storm Babet came in 2023, I spoke to people across the constituency in Ilkeston, Long Eaton and especially Sandiacre, where many residents found their homes under water, facing exactly the same issues as their counterparts in coastal constituencies.
A few months ago, I was joined by my hon. Friend the Minister of State for Water and Flooding at the new Witches Oak addition to the Severn Trent site at Church Wilne, which is being specifically developed to deal with particularly dirty water sourced from the River Trent. The River Erewash itself, formerly flanked on both sides by heavy industry, as it flowed through Mansfield, Ashfield, Amber Valley, Ilkeston and Long Eaton, was once said to be the most polluted river in Britain.
I was particularly bemused by attitudes to regional development and the distribution of economic growth during the Makerfield by-election. Right-wing journalists, perhaps for the first time ever, were looking at ward-level economic data to try to say that the incredible growth they have had in Greater Manchester was all just bundled up in shiny towers in the city centre, but that is not what the evidence showed. That suggests that columnists at The Spectator and The Daily Telegraph were perhaps not engaging with that very real and serious debate in good faith. While the pinnacle of growth in Greater Manchester may not yet have reached to the very edges of the metropolitan area, it has spread outwards into Salford, Trafford and Stockport.
What does that tell us about economic growth in the country, in coastal communities and in my community? It is quite simple, really. Some have observed that maps of economic growth across the country just show us where trams go, where local train stations serve or where bus routes go. That should not be a surprise to us in the east midlands or in our coastal regions; Nottingham has a great tram network, and the city has a more productive economy than the country as a whole. I know that they have done incredible work in Stockport on densification, meaning that there are more people in the same space living together, shopping and socialising, and therefore doing a greater amount of economic activity.
I will return to my central thesis. We have grievous economic inequalities around the country, be it in coastal communities or in towns. As we all know, regional distribution is exceptionally poor. I met an education YouTuber—a woman called UnJaded Jade—at Labour party conference this year, and she drew my attention to some of the statistics. They are the things that we know in abstract and by instinct, but it is shocking when they are laid out in front of us. More than half of all graduates from the top universities are still from London and the greater south-east. Young people in the midlands are the least likely to go to university to study a creative subject.
When I see communities in England that are really moving, getting along and growing, they are down here in London and in Manchester, where there is a clear, significant space for creative industries, which need graduates in creative subjects to fuel them. The truth is that that is a world away from our economy in the midlands, where there is very little opportunity for jobs in the creative industries and young people are thoroughly discouraged from pursuing one, despite their growing and innovative part in the British economy overall.
Amanda Martin
I thank my hon. Friend for considering our children, our young people and their opportunities. Does he agree that the report by the Children’s Commissioner made for some very stark reading? My own city of Portsmouth was the 12th-worst place in the country to be a child, yet Hampshire was in the top 20 best places. When we talk about red wall seats and areas of deprivation, it is really important that the south-east is not just seen as one block; there are elements of high deprivation in the south-east. We were the worst place in the country for opportunities for 16-year-olds.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
Order. Before the hon. Member for Erewash (Adam Thompson) returns to his speech, let me remind him that we are debating the Coastal Communities (Health) Bill, which is about health inequalities.
Adam Thompson
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I will continue to make points about the health system in coastal communities. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth North (Amanda Martin) for her intervention.
The fact is that coastal communities have suffered for the same reason that the post-industrial midlands and north have: the economy has changed, and the health provision has changed with it. A good part of that change is the swirling nature of markets, consumer interests and all that, but undeniably political choices were made. The route to recovery for those places, whether we live next to the sea or far away from it, is economic growth. That is as true in the health space as it is everywhere else. For that, we need investment. I have no doubt that a great many of our coastal communities suffer from infrequent, expensive and unreliable deregulated services, particularly in the health sector, that have been cut time and time again.
There is a lot more that I could talk about, and I know that the various crises are really biting in many coastal communities, but I want to end my speech by saying that I cannot support the Bill as written, because I agree with the Prime Minister. What we need is growth in every postcode, in the health sector and across all of society. Our problems are not created by geography, even if they are reinforced by it. Ultimately, the problem is that our economy and our health service have been imbalanced for too long.
Regardless of whether someone is on the North sea, looks out across the channel or, like me, lives in the very heart of the midlands, where they live has been left behind because of political and ideological choices made by successive Governments. I am proud to be part of a Government who recognise that fact and are finally striving to correct our nation’s course—not pitting us against one another, but pulling us all together.
The Minister for Social Care and Mental Health (Alison McGovern)
I begin by thanking the hon. Member for North Norfolk (Steff Aquarone) for bringing forward this Bill and for giving the House the opportunity to debate, on all sides of the question, the health and wellbeing of our coastal communities. I trust that the hon. Member will be reassured that, as a Minister and a constituency MP for Birkenhead who lives right next to the edge of the country, on the banks of the River Mersey and proximate to the Irish sea, I understand this issue very well.
The Government share the concern that lies behind this Bill. We recognise that there are significant and persistent health inequalities in some of our coastal communities, and it is absolutely right that the Government address them. However, having listened to the debate, I am struck by some of the comments that my hon. Friends made about the various health inequalities that persist across our country. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Erewash (Adam Thompson) that the underlying economic circumstances are the determinants of health. There should be nothing inevitable about somebody experiencing poorer health, or spending fewer years of their life in good health, simply because of where they live, yet in far too many communities, including coastal communities, poorer health outcomes sit alongside deep-rooted social and economic disadvantage.
These challenges are not new. They were set out powerfully in the chief medical officer’s 2021 report on health in coastal communities, and the importance of place to our health has been reinforced by the chief medical officer’s latest annual report on health in rural areas and small towns. We in this House all thank the chief medical officer for his considerable work on this subject. That report is particularly relevant to today’s debate, because rural, small town and coastal communities frequently overlap, and many of the challenges that it identifies will be familiar to Members of this place. It highlights the challenges of accessing and providing services across greater distances, limited public transport, ageing populations, workforce recruitment and retention, housing pressures and hidden deprivation.
Importantly, the report also emphasises that health and social care services need to be designed around the needs and circumstances of local populations. That matters, because when we talk about health inequalities, we cannot simply talk about differences in people’s experience of the NHS, as I said yesterday in a speech on the work that we are doing on social care.
Steff Aquarone
Given that we have limited time for a full ministerial response and that the Minister obviously has an interest in this subject, as do I, will she agree to meet me or set up a meeting with the relevant Minister to discuss coastal health inequalities further?
Alison McGovern
As you know, Madam Deputy Speaker, I never refuse a meeting with any Member of this House. I have my surgeries on Wednesdays, if the hon. Member would like to pop in and talk about mental health or social care. If he wants to talk about general health inequalities, I refer him to the Minister for Public Health and Patient Safety.
Of course, high-quality healthcare matters enormously to all of us. Our health is shaped long before we arrive at a GP surgery or a hospital waiting room. It is shaped by the homes in which we grow up and live, by our education and the opportunities available to us, and, as Labour Members know only too well, by whether we have secure and rewarding work. Our health is also shaped by our income, by the transport available to us, by our environment, and by whether the communities in which we live give people the opportunity to lead healthy and fulfilling lives.
Place and geography matter for health, but tackling inequalities between places requires action within healthcare and far beyond it. That is an analysis with which this Government agree, and I have not heard dissenting opinion in the House this afternoon.
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Defence Research and Development Spending
(1 day, 6 hours ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Chris Coghlan (Dorking and Horley) (LD)
Thank you for calling me to speak, Madam Deputy Speaker. I also thank the Minister for his time today—he has a very distinguished record of military service.
My grandfather, Austin Coghlan, was told that he was too old to serve in the war, so he lied about his age and joined the Navy. On one convoy, he sailed into Havana, met a girl in naval intelligence and, after seven days, married her. He moved fast with Grandma, because he knew he was a lucky man.
But he also did not expect to survive. That he did was in many ways due to the codebreakers of Bletchley Park, who diverted convoys away from U-boats. In the process, the codebreakers invented the world’s first computer, Colossus, which went on to power the economic development of the post-war world. The spillover effect from publicly developed military technology to private sector civilian use is one of the most powerful forces for economic growth. We can use it now.
I commend the Government’s decision in the Budget to borrow, jointly with our allies, and invest £5 billion in dual-use military technology. It is a great start. We now need the confidence to scale it, knowing that even with extra borrowing, the debt-to-GDP ratio will fall as a result of higher growth. The London Business School’s Paolo Surico has shown that innovations that are funded by the Government, but taken forward by the private sector, develop productivity and economic growth that is eight times larger than for innovations funded by the private sector alone. Just look at how innovations in military train technology have led to disruptions in civilian industries, from 3D land mapping and crop monitoring to rapid cost-effective manufacturing. UK Government support for nuclear submarine technology has led Rolls-Royce to develop small modular nuclear reactors for civilian use.
I would like to know whether the Government are open to scaling their £5 billion initial investment. With annual £2 billion increments over 10 years, academic research suggests that, along with improvements in AI, we could choose to double our annual growth, to fulfil our NATO defence spending commitments and, together with our allies, to secure liberal democracy.
British politicians in the 1930s were labelled guilty men because they failed to prioritise defence over the deficit. My grandfather’s generation paid the price. As a reservist, an infantry officer and an MP, I want to ensure that our generation does not.
The Minister for Veterans and People (Mr Calvin Bailey)
I thank the hon. and gallant Member for Dorking and Horley (Chris Coghlan) for securing this debate and for his continued interest in the role that research and development can play in strengthening our national security and economy. He spoke passionately about his grandparents, about the impact of technology during the war and about the innovations that brought about the victories that ensured our democratic freedoms in the nation we both grew up in. It was a powerful testament to his commitment to democracy. I will share with the hon. Member how highly the Department spoke of him and his work in the run-up to this Bill debate. As a member of the Treasury Committee and a steadfast advocate for innovation-led growth, he has made a valuable contribution to this discussion.
This debate comes at a particularly important moment. The world is becoming more contested, more technologically competitive and more uncertain. Emerging technologies, from artificial technologies and quantum computing to advanced cyber capabilities and autonomous systems, are transforming the character of warfare and the nature of economic competition. In this environment defence research and development is not a luxury; it is a necessity. It is how we maintain operational advantage and keep our armed forces ready to face the challenges of the future. More than military capability, it is a catalyst for economic growth, industrial resilience and technological leadership.
Innovation must sit at the heart of our national security strategy and our growth agenda. In the 2025 strategic defence review, we set ourselves the goal of the UK becoming a technologically enabled defence power innovating in priority areas, including AI, cyber, space and quantum at a wartime pace. Building on that, the defence industrial strategy recognised that investing in our innovation ecosystem is not simply a security imperative, but a significant opportunity to create jobs, as the hon. Member made very clear. It is central to growing businesses and strengthening our regional economies. Most recently, the defence investment plan provided a clear direction of travel for defence spending. It sent a signal to industry, investors and research institutions about the technologies and capabilities that we intend to prioritise. The plan marks a shift towards readiness and resilience at scale. It combines high-cost and low-cost equipment and integrated networks that make the most of crewed and uncrewed platforms.
That commitment must be backed by investment. In answer to the question about whether we are scaling productivity, the Ministry of Defence’s research and development budget will exceed £2 billion in 2026-27 and will rise in each subsequent year. Defence R&D expenditure reached approximately £3.1 billion in 2024-25, representing a significant real-terms increase on the previous year.
Chris Coghlan
I would be grateful if the Minister could comment, as far as he is able, on the extent to which we are integrating R&D with Ukraine.
Mr Bailey
Perhaps I will come on to that point shortly.
Small innovative firms are the bedrock of UK innovation. They are also the bedrock of our commitment and delivery in Ukraine. Ensuring that they have every opportunity to access defence opportunities is a priority for this Government. That is why, as part of the root-and-branch modernisation of the Ministry of Defence, we are establishing UK Defence Innovation, a new team with a ringfenced annual budget of at least £400 million and planned investment of £1.6 billion by 2030. UKDI is helping up-and-coming enterprises to develop new technologies and move them more rapidly into service, maximising the military and economic impact of that investment.
UKDI is part of our new National Armaments Innovation organisation, which unites our development accelerator with the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, under the leadership and co-ordination of a three-star director general. DSTL continues to play a vital role in defence research, working with industry and academic partners to look beyond the immediate horizon at threats and opportunities from emerging areas, such as quantum, engineering, biology and future computing. Alongside that, we are bolstering the links between Government, industry and academia. The Defence Universities Alliance is bringing together universities and defence to accelerate research, develop skills and increase the commercialisation of new technologies.
At the heart of this agenda are people. We have committed £182 million to defence skills initiatives, supporting education, training and workforce development throughout the country. This investment will help improve science, technology, engineering and mathematics participation, increase capacity in the education system, and ensure that people have the skills they need to succeed in the defence sector. We are investing in defence technical excellence colleges and supporting hundreds of doctoral researchers working on technologies that are vital to the country’s future prosperity and security. We are securing the highly specialised workforce needed to develop and support future nuclear submarine and deterrent programmes, with £290 million committed to developing nuclear skills that support recruitment and training across the defence nuclear enterprise.
I am surprised not to hear an intervention from my hon. Friend the Member for Barrow and Furness (Michelle Scrogham).
The sector supports around 440,000 jobs and more than 24,000 apprenticeships across the UK. We are creating even more highly skilled, highly valued defence innovation employment opportunities, which will benefit communities for decades to come. Those are not confined to London or the south-east; they can be found in cities, towns and communities across every region and nation of the United Kingdom. We have launched defence growth deals, backed by £250 million, in Plymouth, Yorkshire, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. These partnerships are designed to attract further investment, strengthen local industrial capability, support innovation and create long-term economic growth. By aligning defence investment with regional strengths, we are helping to ensure that the benefits of defence spending are shared across the whole country.
Strengthening British exports is key. From day one, we have been clear that this Government view defence through an international lens. The UK has been one of the world’s leading defence exporters over the past decade, with defence exports worth £14.5 billion in 2023, and defence R&D has played an important role in securing that position. Continued investment in research and innovation, and our role in transformational programmes such as AUKUS and the global combat air programme, ensures that British companies remain internationally competitive.
Chris Coghlan
On the international point, does the Minister agree that borrowing jointly with allies is a great way of not only reducing our credit risk in borrowing for investment in defence R&D, but building our relationships and the middle power alliance?
Mr Bailey
I could not agree more with the hon. Gentleman. I was grateful to see the commitment that the Chancellor made to the multilateral defence mechanism and the efforts that we are making with partners, particularly Finland and other peer nations, to scale money and bring in private capital. I look forward to hearing your comments and views on the defence finance strategy.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
Order. Minister, no “you” and “yours”, because you are speaking through the Chair. Please try to rephrase that.
Mr Bailey
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker—of course, I was referring to your views on the defence finance strategy, which I will take back to the Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry. That strategy will arrive in December, and will be a staple part of making sure that we can deliver the defence investment plan and the strategic defence review.
Of course, we recognise that defence R&D is not a silver bullet for the economic challenges facing the UK. It must form part of the broader strategy, encompassing greater oversight and fiscal responsibility. New funding for infrastructure and a fresh perspective on private wealth funds and venture capital is essential, as the hon. Member for Dorking and Horley made clear. However, innovation investment can provide a golden opportunity to advance two fundamental national objectives—I think these are the points that the hon. Member was making—by strengthening both our security and our growing economy.
I will leave hon. Members with an example to illustrate that point. The UK’s DragonFire laser weapon programme did not emerge overnight. It is a product of more than two decades of investment in advanced weapon science and technology led by our scientists at DSTL and delivered in partnership with MBDA, QinetiQ and Leonardo. That long-term commitment and partnership has produced a world-leading directed-energy weapon—one capable of downing drones at a cost of £10 per shot, compared with the hundreds of thousands and, in some cases, millions of pounds that conventional air defence systems cost.
The programme is backed by a £316 million contract to accelerate delivery of the capability to the Royal Navy and is sustaining about 560 skilled jobs and 30 apprenticeships across the UK, from Scotland to the south-west. DragonFire demonstrates the hon. Member’s point. It demonstrates why defence R&D matters. A sustained investment in science creates the knowledge, skills and industrial capacity that allows the UK to develop transformational military capabilities. It grows new sectors, supports high-value employment and strengthens our sovereign technological base.
DragonFire is a powerful example of how investment in defence research and development can deliver military advantage and economic growth for decades. It supports British scientists, engineers and innovators. It creates highly skilled jobs, drives productivity and strengthens regional economies. It attracts private investment and helps secure the UK’s place as a leading technological nation in an increasingly competitive world, and it ensures that our armed forces have the capabilities they need to meet the threats of today and tomorrow.
The Government recognise the critical importance of making the UK a technologically enabled defence power and ensuring that the economic benefits of innovation are felt in every postcode. Once again, I thank the hon. Member for securing this debate and commend the House’s continued interest in this important subject.
Question put and agreed to.