Budget Resolutions

Cherilyn Mackrory Excerpts

Monday 11th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting]

Who knows? I must confess I do not even know who the New Conservatives are, there are so many warring tribes and families involved every week. It is a level of reproduction that even the former Prime Minister Boris Johnson fails to match.

Turning to the list of the damned who made their way into the Chancellor’s Budget speech, the hon. Member for Dudley North (Marco Longhi) was identified as pushing the Government to give into the shadow Chancellor’s call to cancel their planned rise in fuel duty. Where Labour leads, the Tories follow. I wonder if he will defend his Government making pensioners in Dudley £1,000 a year worse off. The hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth (Cherilyn Mackrory) was singled out by the Chancellor. Does she think her constituents earning £15,000 a year will forgive her for voting to pinch an extra £580 from their pockets in tax rises?

[Cherilyn Mackrory (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)]

rose—

[Wes Streeting]

She does! She wants to defend the Chancellor and her fingerprints on the Budget.

[Cherilyn Mackrory]

The hon. Gentleman seems to be taking the wrong tone with my constituents. Being overly political with each other is not something we practice, and he would know that if he spoke to my Labour opponent in Truro and Falmouth. The Chancellor singled me out because we have worked very hard across Cornwall to remove advantages for short-term holiday lets; that is all.

[Wes Streeting]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for that intervention. I do not think that that alters the fact that there are 60,000 people on the NHS waiting lists in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. I am sorry if she takes issue with my tone, but the simple truth is this: however much the Conservative party tries to build the idea that politics cannot change anything—that there is no point in voting, that we are all the same and that there will not be any change with a change of Government after the next general election—politics does make a difference and voting can change things. I cite in evidence the fact that when Labour left office we had the shortest waiting times and the highest patient satisfaction in the history of the NHS. I cite in evidence that if we had economic growth under this Government at the rate we had growth under the previous Labour Government, there would be £40 billion extra to invest in our public services without having to raise taxes on anyone. That is Labour’s record. It is a record we are proud to defend. Conservative Members cannot defend their record—they have no record.

--- Later in debate ---

[Cherilyn Mackrory (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne). Despite what he said about Government Members having their shout-out from the Chancellor last week, I was very proud to have had mine; I will come to why in a moment. The Chancellor mentioned not only me but my constituency neighbour. To my knowledge, Labour cares so little for St Austell and Newquay that it has yet to select a candidate. The hon. Gentleman’s trope about marginal constituencies is somewhat off the mark.

I start by thanking the Chancellor for his Budget statement last week. Many policies in it will help fulfil the promises that I have made to my constituents in Truro and Falmouth. There were announcements that will make a real difference on the ground in delivering better homes, a lower cost of living, and high-skilled jobs for the future—everything that Cornish Members of Parliament have, time and again, sought to deliver for local people.

The abolition of the tax regime for furnished holiday lettings is what I got my shout-out for last week. As we emerged from covid, I held a surgery in St Agnes, one of my constituency villages. In a couple of hours, I had seen 15 people, every single one of whom was being evicted or had their rent hiked to an unaffordable level, and had to leave their property. That illustrated to me that the Cornish property market had become unworkable —not just because of covid, although covid amplified the effect—and that we absolutely needed to rebalance. It has taken three or four years of hard work by Conservative constituency MPs, working with Departments across Government, to start to reach the balance that we need.



It started with the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities introducing the register of holiday lets and the need for planning permission for a change of use from a family home to a holiday let, and last week it culminated with another tool in the box: the furnished holiday lettings tax regime. Neither of those would work alone, but together they start to change the direction of travel for landlords in Cornwall. We are not demonising those landlords; we are just trying to reset the balance and to re-engage them in thinking about letting for the long-term to families in Cornwall.

That is important, because all our constituents need somewhere to live, but that is becoming untenable. I have a village called Portloe that has 90 properties in it, and 80% of them are second homes or holiday lets. One child lives in that village. I hope the whole House agrees that it is unacceptable that in winter the lights are off and nobody is home, and that we have got to do something about it. Thanks to the Government, Cornish Conservative MPs and like-minded MPs from around the country, we are starting to see a difference.

I would like to whistle-stop through another few highlights from the Budget. In the Secretary of State’s opening remarks, she mentioned the creative arts, which are hugely important to Cornwall. There are 6,000 businesses in the creative arts in Cornwall, and we also have Falmouth University and the University of Exeter in Penryn in my constituency. In particular, Falmouth University is first in the UK and second in Europe for games development. All of those things are vital to the Cornish economy and to the UK economy, and I am pleased that the Government will invest heavily in tax reliefs to encourage that important industry.

Apprenticeships are also vital to all the emerging and re-emerging industries in Cornwall. The Cornwall Marine Network, for example, has created more than 5,000 apprenticeships and jobs, secured £42 million of investment and generated more than £500 million for the Cornish economy. It includes companies such as Pendennis shipbuilding and A&P. Incidentally, A&P is trying to be part of the supply chain for floating offshore wind for the Celtic sea and has put in for the floating offshore wind manufacturing investment scheme. It would be remiss of me not to take every opportunity when I speak in this place to remind Ministers that they need to invest in the Celtic sea for the whole of the south-west region and look carefully at A&P’s FLOWMIS submission. Critical minerals—lithium in particular, but also tin and other metals—are vital for the future of renewables in the United Kingdom.

All emerging industries rely heavily on apprenticeships and are getting their apprentices from Cornwall College and from Truro and Penwith College, among others. Apprenticeship schemes are vital for these emerging industries and give hope to Cornish children who for years have thought they could not possibly go on in life unless they left Cornwall and went to university. Now, they can use the UCAS system to look for apprenticeships at the same level as university courses. They can stay in Cornwall, do fantastic courses and go on to brilliant quality careers in Cornwall.

We have life sciences. Phytome, for example, is spearheading the evolution of plant-based medicine. Of course, we have also got our traditional industries of fishing and farming. In fishing, every one job at sea is reliant on 15 more on land—that is 8,000 jobs in Cornwall that rely on fishing. In farming, we have not just traditional farming—of course, we are protecting our farmers in that—but agritech. We have a fantastic company called Bennamann that specialises in methane capture: it cleans it, processes it and upgrades it to generate a better-than-net-zero gas to power the farming industry.

It would be remiss of me not to mention the Chancellor’s announcement of £35 million for maternity services across the country, for which I am utterly grateful. As the chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on baby loss, I think that is fantastic. Again, it is something that I have been calling for. I pay tribute to our maternity services at Treliske hospital in Truro, which I visited last week with Donna Ockenden to show off—if I could—how well our maternity team is doing. It is bucking the national trend, with a waiting list to come to be a midwife in Cornwall; there are no vacancies. That is testament to the hard work that has been done to make that team one of the best in the whole country.