Building Safety

Ben Everitt Excerpts

Monday 10th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

I can totally understand the hon. Gentleman’s frustration. As my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) pointed out, and as the hon. Gentleman’s question lays bare, there is a complex set of inter-related problems. We are making money available to ensure that we can get rid of waking watch in all save a very few circumstances. I recognise that there are people who have faced costs so far, but it depends on individual circumstances as to whether or not—depending on the ultimate owner of the building—they can receive compensation. I do not want to make any guarantees about that in a blanket way today.

On EWS1 forms, we can dramatically reduce their use as a result of the engagement that we have with lenders and with RICS. Again, it will still be the case that, in the meantime—even as we get a more proportionate approach—there will be some 11-to-18 metre buildings where work of that kind will be required, but we absolutely want to reduce it.

[Ben Everitt (Milton Keynes North) (Con)]

I welcome the commitment of the Secretary of State to hold to account those responsible for this. It is morally wrong that leaseholders should foot the bill. I know that this announcement and this progress will be welcomed by residents of Vizion apartments in Milton Keynes as well as by thousands and thousands of others across the country. Can he confirm that this means that the Government are accepting the principle of polluter pays in this instance? How confident is he that the cowboys will cough up without additional taxation?

[Michael Gove]

We do accept that principle, and we will do everything that we can to round up the wrong ‘uns. I do recognise, none the less, that we are dealing with some individuals who have behaved unscrupulously in the past and who will do everything to evade their responsibilities, which is why we need tax as a backstop.

Affordable and Safe Housing for All

Ben Everitt Excerpts

Tuesday 18th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Ben Everitt (Milton Keynes North) (Con)]

We must fix our broken housing market not just because it is the right thing to do—we need to build more houses in the right places, at the right price, to the right quality standards, at the right speed, and to the right environmental standards—but because we must keep our promises to future generations and keep our promise to level up. We cannot achieve levelling up without fixing the housing market.

The White Paper and the measures announced in Her Majesty’s Gracious Speech will not in and of themselves fix that entire problem, but I am very heartened. Reading the introduction to the White Paper or speaking to one of our wonderful Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government Front Benchers, one gets the impression that we are on the right track but we will not solve the problem all at once. It is that kind of realism, dosed with the enthusiasm that this Government have for levelling up and for fixing tricky problems, that gives me the confidence that we are heading in the right direction.

The housing market is incredibly broken. We have suffered decades of tinkering. Well-meaning policy interventions from Governments of every type over decades and decades have nicked away at what used to be a market but now operates as some kind of amorphous blob with an incentive coming in one way and an unintended consequence coming out the other.

There are lots of things to like in this Queen’s Speech. I am keen to address the speed at which we can get through the planning process. Seven years to put a local plan together! How can communities stay the same for seven years, when what we want them to do is grow, progress and become better? If we plan on the basis of what we were looking at seven years ago, we will never build the right houses in the right place at the right time.

The digital agenda is close to my heart. We need to make planning smarter, more digital, more accessible. We need to break the stranglehold of big business. Anybody who has ever been through a planning situation knows that the system seems to be set up so that nobody wins—apart from perhaps the developers with the deepest pockets and the longest time to wait. We need to make sure that we break up that monopoly of big players in planning and housing development.

Freeports are part of the infrastructure revolution that we have planned, and a key part of delivering on our promises to level up to stimulate the economy. It is the ambition and the appetite, with that realism, that will take us through, but we need a lot more shooting for the moon. To what we already have, I would add an ambition to reform how we tax property. The stamp duty land tax holiday was a fantastic and very welcome measure to support the market through the pandemic, but we now need to take the opportunity to look in the whole not just at stamp duty, but at business rates and locally raised revenue. Add that to our freeport ideas, and put freeports on steroids—stimulus and tax breaks for inward investment like the special economic zones in some of the highest- growth areas of the world—and we will be cooking.

We need to build the right houses in the right places at the right time, at the right speed and to the right environmental standards, to keep our promises.

Rough Sleeping

Ben Everitt Excerpts

Thursday 25th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

Luton Borough Council’s area has seen a 65% reduction in rough sleeping, according to the numbers that were published today, so I hope that the hon. Lady will welcome the considerable steps forward by her local council and community. She is right to raise the need to build more social and affordable housing. That is why we have the £11.5 billion affordable homes programme, which I hope that the council and housing associations in her vicinity will participate in. I do not accept that Luton cannot build more homes. There are plenty of imaginative ways in which a community such as Luton could be building more, through urban regeneration, through building upwards and through gentle density.

[Ben Everitt (Milton Keynes North) (Con)]

Over the past 20 months we have had a reduction of 49% in the number of rough sleepers in Milton Keynes. That is incredibly welcome and it is down to the hard work of the Everyone In programme, and the millions of pounds of Government funding allocated to the local authority and local charities, but most important—I am sure that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State will agree—it is down to the team effort of charities such as The Bus Shelter MK, the Winter Night Shelter Milton Keynes, the YMCA, the Salvation Army and the national charities such as Shelter and Crisis.

[Robert Jenrick]

My hon. Friend is right. This is a collective effort across the whole country and in every community. I join him in praising everyone in Milton Keynes for their hard work. To have achieved almost a 50% reduction in rough sleeping over the year is a huge achievement.

Coronavirus: Supporting Businesses and Individuals

Ben Everitt Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Ben Everitt (Milton Keynes North) (Con)]

When the Labour party talks about business, we could be forgiven for thinking that every company is some kind of evil, global mega-corporation and that every employer is a cross between Gordon Gekko and that bloke with the top hat from the Monopoly board. Perhaps every employee is some sort of downtrodden Dickensian character bound into servitude by wicked capitalists. The reality, however, is very different. Our small and medium-sized enterprises are the backbone of our economy—99.9% of the 6 million businesses in the UK, and they account for three fifths of all the employment and more than half the turnover in the UK private sector. Total employment is 16.8 million, while total turnover is estimated at £2.3 trillion.

We on the Conservative Benches get that business means jobs, that jobs mean security, livelihoods, the certainty of a wage and being able to provide for our family. That is why our £280 billion financial support package is one of the most generous and effective in the world. That is why our furlough scheme has protected almost 10 million jobs, and that is why our business support schemes have delivered almost 1.6 million loans worth more than £70 billion.

I know that this support is welcomed by the 8,700 businesses in Milton Keynes North and I know how frustrating it is when businesses find it hard to access this support that the Government have allocated for them. That is why it is so important that councils release the additional restrictions grant to support local businesses in these tough times. I am ambitious for Milton Keynes; indeed, I am ambitious for Britain. Towns and cities across our four nations should be grasping the opportunities presented by the free trade deals that this Government are securing. Projects such as global MK, proposed by Conservative councillors in Milton Keynes, can drive inward investment into exciting new industries and help our local economic recovery to support those jobs. Global MK will be a two-year inward investment programme aimed at bringing international businesses to Milton Keynes, as the UK begins our post-Brexit journey. With trade deals being struck around the world, Milton Keynes is uniquely positioned to attract inward investment in areas such as logistics, FinTech, finance, artificial intelligence, electric vehicles, digital services and sport.

This Conservative Government are throwing the kitchen sink at supporting our businesses during the pandemic, but we should not stop at keeping the show on the road; we need to take the show on a world tour. Global MK can be the centre of global Britain.

Local Government Finance (England)

Ben Everitt Excerpts

Wednesday 10th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Ben Everitt (Milton Keynes North) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak in a local government finance debate, because it is an area close to my heart. I want to begin by echoing words that have been spoken on both sides of the Chamber: councils have absolutely played a blinder during the pandemic. We have asked a lot of our local authorities at every level, and they have consistently delivered in the most challenging circumstances. Those circumstances are challenging not just because of the pandemic, but because of the financial situation councils have faced over the past few years.

The structure of the settlement between local and central Government needs to be reformed. There is something fundamental about the revenue support grant and financial settlement that needs to be reformed. Put bluntly, it is broken. We cannot keep bailing it out year after year. The fair funding review, which was set to come in about 18 months ago, and then again this year, was a very good way of going about that reform, and I commend the Department for the work it has done to identify and address the issues. It is unfortunate that emergency measures had to be put in place during the pandemic and that we did not get to the stage we needed to in implementing the review.

The problem is that it is about much more than simply tweaking the formula. We need to look at the whole relationship between where revenue is raised and where it is spent, and that involves looking much wider than simply at council tax, formula grant and the new homes bonus, which has been such a lifeline to councils over the last few years. We need to look at how we reform business rates. Some in this Chamber have argued for 100% retention of business rates, and there is definitely an argument for that, although it might make some London authorities richer than some small European countries. Some might see that as no bad thing, but we need to make sure that there is an equitable distribution of business rate revenue that supports our wider goals.

It is those wider goals that I want to spend a couple of moments talking about. The first is levelling up and the second—not to sound like a broken record from the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee—is of course social care. Let us take levelling up first. We cannot level up until we reform the way we distribute financial support for house building. At the moment, we are supporting houses in areas where the markets need it; what we need to do is recognise that housing is part of the solution to levelling up. We have to make a choice: are people going to live in an area, or are we going to put the jobs there? It is about pump-priming, and we need to make a call on investing in housing in the former red wall areas and other areas that need levelling up. I am passionate about that, and I know that the Minister and the Secretary of State are aware of that.

We also need to recognise that we do not level up without providing sustainable enterprise—jobs for the people who live in those houses. We need to make sure that we are not just looking at this from a departmental point of view, but working across Government to realise this country’s ambition to be truly one nation and a global Britain in a newly connected world.

Looking specifically at the problems we face in the formula grant and the amount allocated to local government to spend on services, the elephant in the room is of course social care. Reforming the social care element of funding—how the revenue is raised and how it is distributed —is urgent now. It is the one big thing we need to fix. There are many solutions, and I believe there is cross-party support for many of them. We are in the middle of dealing with a pandemic—in fact, no, we are hopefully near the end of dealing with a pandemic—and now is the time to reach across the aisle, to look at how we fund social care in a sustainable way and to take these things forward in a non-partisan manner.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

There will now be a time limit and I hope that Dame Diana Johnson has been told that it is six minutes—[Interruption.] No? Well, you know now, Dame Diana. I am sure you will be incredibly flexible with your speech. The wind-ups will begin no later than 7 o’clock.

Unpaid Work Experience (Prohibition) (No. 2) Bill

Ben Everitt Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 11th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Alex Cunningham]

Maybe my Bill should limit the length to 20 days with one employer—it all amounts to the same thing—but the hon. Member is right: a young person could gain experience over a period of time. If he supports my Bill, perhaps we can amend it to take on exactly that point.

The only way that we will crack down on this practice is by limiting the amount of time that someone can do unpaid work experience for one organisation.

Of course, there are already rules around the definition of a worker, but the Sutton Trust carried out some excellent research that found those rules are not as clear to organisations and those carrying out their work experience placements as we would hope. For example, it found that half of young graduates are unaware that unpaid internships are illegal—yes, they are already illegal—in most circumstances. This is a significant problem as the current system relies on young people to self-report any unpaid internships that they suspect are illegally not paying the minimum wage. That puts those young people in an incredibly difficult position.

[Ben Everitt (Milton Keynes North) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Alex Cunningham]

No, we are running out of time.

Information received through a parliamentary question in June shows that since 2007, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs investigations have led to just 15 successful prosecutions of employers for national minimum wage-related offences, but there have been no prosecutions relating to internship cases despite more than 150 complaints received by HMRC from workers undertaking unpaid internships. And that is before we consider the large number of people who do not know they are illegal and are working for months on end under the illusion of it being work experience.

The Bill clarifies and tightens current legislation and ensures that those on unpaid work experience placements are not being exploited. One of the best ways to do that is to limit the length of time of a placement in law. A six-month unpaid internship will cost a single person living in London a minimum of £6,300, and in Manchester £5,300, just to fund their own placement. Not only are they not being paid, but their living expenses can put them into serious debt before they even get their first proper job. That is not a system that we should be advocating. One we could advocate is Mr Speaker’s own intern scheme, which ensures that the young person taken on is paid the London minimum wage, or the local minimum wage. We should encourage organisations to replicate Mr Speaker’s scheme. I would like to make it clear that the Bill does not apply to placements where a university course requires it. These are often unique circumstances in which the student is funded through other means, so it is not affected by my Bill.

Moving towards a conclusion, we in this place must first look to ourselves and recognise that Parliament needs to take a lead. It is a significant statistic that 31% of Westminster staffers have worked for an MP without being paid. How are we supposed to set the example when many MPs in this House think that having people work for us for months on end with no pay is even the slightest bit satisfactory? Out there, thousands of employers are offering such placements under the guise of work experience and most of them do not even know they are breaking the law.

The Sutton Trust found that up to 50% of employers thought most unpaid internships were perfectly legal. Many others were not so sure. We need to take the ambiguity out of this. We must make sure that the rules are not open to misinterpretation. We need to be firm and make it clear that long-term unpaid internships are not permitted. We need to ensure that those who can afford to work for free are not given a step on the ladder ahead of their less affluent peers. We need to make sure that young people are not being exploited by organisations that should be paying them a wage. We need to make sure that social mobility is a reality in this country. Passing the Bill will help in all those areas. It is simple, it is straightforward, and it provides the clarity needed by both young people and employers.

I would like to end by reminding the Government about their prior commitments. The response of the Government to the Taylor review of modern working practices was that they would introduce new guidance and increase targeted enforcement activity to help to stamp out illegal and exploitative unpaid internships, but they have not. When he served as Mayor of London, the Prime Minister said that he wanted to tackle unpaid internships. The Prime Minister also said on 25 July last year that he backed this exact Bill in the name of the right hon. Member for Elmet and Rothwell. Now, however, it seems that instead of backing it, he has backed out.

Government Members have a choice today: back the Bill and work to thrash out the minor details, if necessary, in Committee. Take a stand today and acknowledge that we have not done enough to eradicate exploitative working practices and that the Bill makes the move to right the wrongs. All colleagues here should be aware and think of the teenager in their constituency who works hard but, because of a low socioeconomic background, cannot work for free. Help that teenager get on the ladder for a change. Many young people from poorer backgrounds face challenges that many of us in this House could not even imagine. Let us take down one more barrier in their way. Let us take one step further to improving access to the workplace. Let us end exploitative, unpaid work experience or internships once and for all. I commend the Bill to the House.

Housing, Communities and Local Government: Departmental Spending

Ben Everitt Excerpts

Thursday 9th July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Ben Everitt (Milton Keynes North) (Con)]

I should start by drawing the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

We must reform local government finance. The formula grant system is unbalanced, outdated and unfair. It is a shame that we have delayed the review into local government finance, although that is for perfectly obvious reasons. But as well as reforming it, we must increase the quantum of funding, and I think this needs a grown-up conversation on localisation of revenue raising.

The current settlement is not ungenerous. Indeed, the increase in core spending power of 4.4%, which is £49.2 billion for local authorities, was the biggest in a decade. Milton Keynes received an increase of 6.6% in core spending power. This, of course, was all in February, before the world changed and before funding changed. Since then, £4.3 billion in support for councils has been issued by the Department for their additional pressures, for lost income and for the extra costs. The entire package for councils, businesses and communities comes to £27 billion. In my own local authority of Milton Keynes, we have received £137.6 million, which includes over £77 million for business rates relief.

Councils are our frontline. They deserve certainty and they deserve fairness. So it is very promising that the aforementioned review into local government finance is called the fairer funding review. This review should not, though, be an exercise in reslicing the cake. We need to level up local government finance—a phrase that I think may stick—but we also need to address the elephant in the room, which is social care. The rising costs of delivering social care are well known and recognised, but these costs are magnified by the unfairness of the current formula grant system.

We need to level up local government finance. We need to have a grown-up conversation about localised revenue raising. We need to increase the quantum. We need to remove the unfairness. We need to bake in a cross-party solution to social care. We need to deliver the fairer funding review.

Local Government Responsibilities: Public Services

Ben Everitt Excerpts

Wednesday 18th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Luke Hall]

I am glad the hon. Lady welcomes some of the immediate progress being made. She makes an important and serious point, which I will consider in depth. I am happy to discuss it with her in the days ahead.

We must also acknowledge that the crisis will not only put enormous pressure on our social care system and our most vulnerable people, but hit our local economies. We must play our part to protect those around us as well as to actively protect the local economies that underpin our communities. I will therefore set out measures the Government are taking to reflect that local priority.

Local venues, including pubs and theatres, are the pillars of local communities, and we understand the importance of giving them our wholehearted support in the weeks and months ahead. That is why we are giving all retail, hospitality and leisure businesses in England a 100% business rates holiday for the next 12 months and increasing grants to small businesses eligible for small business rate relief from £3,000 to £10,000; we are also increasing the planned rates discount for pubs to £5,000 as part of mitigating the social and economic effects of the virus.

[Ben Everitt (Milton Keynes North) (Con)]

We have two theatres in Milton Keynes. Understandably, they are incredibly worried about their future. What specific measures are being taken to support theatres at this time? Perhaps I could intervene with a further point to do with breweries in a minute.

[Luke Hall]

May I suggest that my hon. Friend and I meet after the debate, so I can outline in detail some of the measures relevant to his local establishments? I would be happy to do that.

It is important that as part of mitigating some of the effects of the virus, we are working with the 38 local resilience forums in England, which have plans and frameworks for pandemic influenza already in place. We will supplement our support for LRFs with a new taskforce to compare preparations, to identify gaps and to highlight where additional assistance might be required for local authorities.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ben Everitt (Milton Keynes North) (Con)]

These are unprecedented times. One thing that comes through quite clearly for me is community spirit. It was illustrated by my hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye (Sally-Ann Hart), and will be the thread that runs through my remarks, and probably through everybody else’s remarks as well.

I must draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests as I am a councillor. I say that these are unprecedented times, but in local government we have had unprecedented times for quite some time. I remember back in the late noughties, we had the Barnet Council graph of doom. I do not know whether any fellow local government finance aficionados remember this, but it is the point at which the cost of adult social care rises and the amount of central Government grant goes down—it is the point on the graph at which those two things intercept. We are well past that now, so local government is used to reacting to changing financial circumstances and filling that gap with either locally raised revenue through taxation or locally raised revenue through commercial ventures.

The hon. Member for Luton South (Rachel Hopkins) mentioned the powers used by local government in Luton relating to commercial activities around the airport —[Interruption.] They have an airport, what can I say? The point here, of course, is that there are many ways of skinning a cat, and local government has had to face adverse circumstances in the past, and I am sure that our friends in local government will rise to this challenge as it stands today.

[Jerome Mayhew (Broadland) (Con)]

Is it not the case that this is the kind of situation where it is not just about local government? This is one of those rare occasions—the first time in my lifetime—where it is not sufficient for the community to dial 999 and leave it to local government or the emergency services. We, the people, will be on the frontline, directed and co-ordinated by district councils, or county councils, as in my constituency of Broadland. It is our opportunity to stand up and be counted to protect those who have to be shielded—the most vulnerable in our society including the elderly and those with underlying medical conditions—and that is both a wonderful opportunity for us to demonstrate our cohesiveness as a society and also our fundamental duty to look after those less fortunate than ourselves.

[Ben Everitt]

I could not agree more with my hon. Friend. The job of local government is on the frontline. Any job of a public servant such as ourselves, or councillors or council officers, is to look after the most vulnerable in society. If we do not do that, we are not a society.

Speaking of the most vulnerable, in Milton Keynes, we have a persistent problem of homelessness, which possibly provides one of the best examples of partnerships between local government and the voluntary sector. I have been very fortunate to visit many charities in Milton Keynes since being elected to represent Milton Keynes North. We have a winter night shelter, the YMCA, the Salvation Army and, of course, the Bus Shelter, which is run by volunteers, with a full-time on-site manager. It takes street homeless people off the streets. They get a bed for the night in Robbie Williams’ old tour bus, which seats, I think, 18, but it normally holds eight clients. It was wonderful to meet the clients, to see how they access the service and how the service helps them get their lives back on track and into work. Milton Keynes has received over £2 million of central Government funding for homelessness and rough sleeping since Christmas, which is incredibly welcome, because this is a critical time to support those who are on the street. That is a good example of how the voluntary sector, charity sector and local government can come together to solve a problem.

[David Simmonds]

Does my hon. Friend agree that that is a clear illustration of why we need to have the maximum possible flexibility for local authorities in deploying these resources at a local level? Those examples of creativity and innovation are replicated by local authorities across the country, but local circumstances vary enormously. Does he agree that we must encourage the Minister to take the view that the more flexibility and less bureaucracy there is for local authorities in using that money effectively at a local level, the more value we will extract from it in delivering for our residents?

[Ben Everitt]

Again, I could not agree more with my hon. Friend. I am sure that the Minister for Local Government, who is sitting on the Treasury Bench listening avidly to the pleas of councillors for more flexibility in the way that local government spend their finances, will heed that call.

Knife crime is a new problem for Milton Keynes, and it is incredibly worrying, but it is another example of where the public sector can work in partnership with communities and the voluntary sector. The police are on the frontline of knife crime, and I am pleased that they have extra money, officers, kit and powers, all of which are focused in Milton Keynes on solving the issue of knife crime. The extra money is incredibly welcome, and I will come back to that. There will be an extra 187 officers for Thames Valley, of which 36 will be in Milton Keynes. In terms of the extra kit, it really helps when the police know that they have a Taser to use.

There are also extra powers for the police. Parents say—again, this relates to the intersection between the public sector and the community—that, when the police use section 60 powers, it gives them confidence to know that an area is being policed. It also has a deterrent effect for young people who might think about going out with a knife.

It is through the extra money that there is an intersection with the public sector. Diversionary activities through boxing clubs, interventions in schools or projects such as the knife angel are incredibly good for bringing communities together. There is a demand management issue. There is also a data challenge, to enable the public sector, voluntary sector and charity sector to work together on a data-led response to a situation.

Housing and Planning

Ben Everitt Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd March 2020 Westminster Hall

[Ben Everitt (Milton Keynes North) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Harborough (Neil O'Brien) for initiating this important debate. We have heard from hon. Members of all political colours, representing areas rich in diversity, about the multiple problems with our housing market and planning. We have also heard many proposed solutions. That in itself is a real warning sign.

We should accept that the housing market is like an ecosystem or biosphere of interconnected dependencies and feedback mechanisms. When we put an intervention in one side, it goes into a black box that policy makers must deal with, and something unexpected pops out the other side. This is fiendishly complicated, but we must get it right. The price of failure is obvious: more unaffordable houses and continuing not to meet our supply targets. The prizes for getting it right are multiple and go across many policy areas—from solving homelessness, to local economic productivity and our sense of place. Building houses in the right place can contribute to food sustainability for our country.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (James Daly) made the point well that we are building the wrong kinds of houses in the wrong places. It is as simple as that. If we focused on building more two-bedroom houses and bungalows, we would free up capacity for people who are, frankly, over-occupying larger houses, and that would help the whole system. That, however, relies on liquidity in the market, where stamp duty is a real issue, because it acts as a break on social mobility as well as on liquidity.

I was struck by the comments by the hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq). We are blessed with a modern problem: people are living longer, happier, wealthier and more independent lives. That is wonderful. In so doing, however, they are staying in their homes for longer. We must sort out supply and liquidity, and we need homes that are more sustainable, affordable, appropriate to their area and proportionate to the areas they surround.

Homelessness

Ben Everitt Excerpts

Wednesday 29th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Ben Everitt (Milton Keynes North) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the maiden speeches from Opposition Members. The hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mick Whitley) was incredibly generous to his predecessor, who was clearly very well thought of by Members on both sides of the House, and the hon. Member for Erith and Thamesmead (Abena Oppong-Asare) was passionate and sincere—I am sure I join everybody else in this place in hoping that her careers adviser saw her speech.

There are 48 rough sleepers in Milton Keynes—that is, of course, 48 too many—but the really shocking statistic is that there are 2,244 people in temporary accommodation. This is a complex issue. Each of those statistics has an individual behind it who will have complex needs, such as domestic violence, adverse childhood experiences, substance misuse—be that alcohol or narcotics—poor school attainment and attendance, family breakdown, debt and mental health issues that are either underlying and exacerbated by homelessness or caused by homelessness and other issues.

The extra money does help. Earlier this month, Milton Keynes received £1.7 million more to tackle homelessness and only this week it received £870,000 to target rough sleeping. Obviously, however, there is a correlation between the number of people who are homeless and the number of homes that are available, so I welcome the Government’s record and the Secretary of State’s commitments to delivering more affordable homes.

Planning is a complex and devolved issue. At this point, I should declare my interest as a district councillor on Aylesbury Vale District Council, which deals with planning activities, but Milton Keynes is the area that I have been elected to represent in Parliament and Milton Keynes Council has been Labour-run since 2014. It recently released a plan to double the size of Milton Keynes—I say plan but it is more of a land grab, complete with a map with “Dad’s Army” style arrows going north, south, east and west into other boroughs. While it plans to double the size of Milton Keynes, a shocking 24,000 existing planning applications have currently not been built out.

We need to build not only more houses, but the right kind of houses in the right places, so that our homeless people can have somewhere that they can practically expect to live. I welcome the Government’s commitment to building more affordable houses and I look forward to voting for the next housing Bill.