Sustainable Farming Incentive

Chris Hinchliff Excerpts

Thursday 15th October 2026 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Morgan]

I absolutely recognise the difficult year that farmers have faced across the country, and indeed in the hon. Member’s own constituency. That is why I am keen to open SFI27 as early as possible, and I gave that assurance from the Dispatch Box earlier. It is worth noting that this year, through all the schemes, £2.3 billion is going into the farming budget, as is £11.8 billion over the lifetime of this Parliament, but I am certainly keen to hear any further thoughts as we design the scheme for next year.

[Chris Hinchliff (North East Hertfordshire) (Lab)]

The fundamental problem is that for years our country has not allocated enough of our national resources to growing food in a way that boosts biodiversity. We now have a nature crisis that is increasingly a threat to our national security. We need every farm that can to do more on nature-friendly farming. Can the Minister reassure me that his Department is talking to the Treasury about securing greater investment in the SFI going forward?

[Stephen Morgan]

My hon. Friend will know that we were responding to our settlement from the Treasury. There is always more we can do. That is why we published our farming road map earlier this year, which sets out the direction of travel that we want to take when it comes to building a more resilient, productive farming sector, working in partnership with the sector to deliver nature-friendly farming.

Water Sector: Public Ownership

Chris Hinchliff Excerpts

Monday 14th September 2026 Westminster Hall

[Chris Hinchliff (North East Hertfordshire) (Lab)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Mrs Barker. The case for public ownership of our water is unanswerable. We can all see the money being swindled out of the British public by the privatised system. We can all see the sewage pollution going on, even during a summer of drought. I beg the Minister, in her response, not to repeat the bogus figures that some use to argue that public ownership of one of our most essential national resources would be too expensive. Those claims have been so comprehensively debunked that using them now is just getting embarrassing.

The truth is that the cost of the societal impacts of failing to take back control of our water resources would be far higher than that of taking action now, because— ludicrously for a country as wet as ours—we are on course for a water deficit of more than 6 billion litres of water every single day in the next 30 years. The truth is that there is currently no credible plan to avert that. All the reservoirs that currently we have planned will reduce that deficit only by a meagre 13%. There is no realistic prospect of water companies hitting the efficiency targets they have signed up for, either—and that is before the speculative proliferation of data centres claims its thirsty share of our dwindling resources.

In all likelihood, we will face further and severe water shortfalls in the future. Fire services are already warning that water pressure in many areas is dangerously low for fighting the new wildfire season that we also face. Communities in my constituency have already seen the taps running dry. In the future, we will have to choose what we do and do not use water for. We cannot have a situation in which our democracy has to mediate the fundamental question of national security through the interests of private companies that have proven beyond all doubt that their overwhelming priority will always be profit. We cannot afford to leave our water in the hands of private vested interests. It must be brought back into public ownership.

State of Climate and Nature

Chris Hinchliff Excerpts

Monday 13th July 2026 Commons Chamber

[Mary Creagh]

I was discussing that very issue with Natural England this morning. Land covering about 32% of England is already likely to, or has the potential to, contribute to the 30 by 30 target, including through our landscape recovery projects, and local nature reserves and national nature reserves. We are creating 3,000 hectares a year of national nature reserves, which makes a very significant contribution to that. We have also set out the route to 30 by 30, talking about bronze, silver and gold land. I understand why the ENGOs want everything to be gold, but we must live in the real world and show what the pipeline towards gold looks like.

[Chris Hinchliff (North East Hertfordshire) (Lab)]

Our best hope in the fight to restore our environment is this country’s nature-loving public, but many across the House will be aware of the recent example of the Environment Agency threatening to take people to court for trying to clean up their dying river. What steps will the Minister take to ensure that the Environment Agency is empowering the public rather than threatening to prosecute them for protecting nature?

[Mary Creagh]

My hon. Friend is right: we have an army of citizen scientists and naturalists, and we are certainly looking forward to celebrating some of them tomorrow at RHS Garden Wisley for Bees’ Needs Week. We also have the pollinator count next week. However, anyone who wants to clean up their river needs a permit from the Environment Agency beforehand. as we have habitats and flood defences there. My hon. Friend is right that we should empower citizens to take action but they need to do so without there being unintended consequences.

Farming Road Map and Profitability Review

Chris Hinchliff Excerpts

Wednesday 24th June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Emma Reynolds]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for marking my homework, and I look forward to having it marked in even more detail when I appear before his Committee. There is a separate document in which we have published our response thematically to the 57 recommendations of Baroness Batters’ profitability review. We are already working closely with the sector to take forward those recommendations. In December, we accepted a number of her recommendations: first, the Farming and Food Partnership Board; secondly, the sector growth plans; and thirdly, the trade missions. I suspect that I will be able to answer the right hon. Gentleman’s questions in more detail when I come before the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee.

[Chris Hinchliff (North East Hertfordshire) (Lab)]

For many years we have expected farmers to steward our environment and at the same time deliver food at rock-bottom prices to make up for the failure of politics to secure an affordable cost of living across the rest of society. That has made agricultural profitability increasingly difficult. Now, with the crisis posed by climate change to our national food security, we must pull every available lever to reverse that trend. At the general election, the Labour manifesto committed to a target of half of all food purchased across the public sector being locally produced or certified to higher environmental standards. Will the Secretary of State provide an update on progress towards that target?

[Emma Reynolds]

Farmers face lots of different challenges, one of which is volatile global commodity prices, along with some of things my hon. Friend mentioned. On public procurement, we are working to establish an accurate baseline of what percentage of the public sector gives contracts to our farmers. We are also looking at what more we can do to enable farming co-operatives to access those public contracts.

Thames Water

Chris Hinchliff Excerpts

Tuesday 16th June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Emma Reynolds]

When I served as the Economic Secretary to the Treasury, I worked on our plan to double the number of mutuals across the economy. More broadly, not just with regard to Thames Water, I would be happy to see more mutual ownership of water companies, but the question is how we get there.

[Chris Hinchliff (North East Hertfordshire) (Lab)]

The Secretary of State has made the right decision in seeking to protect billpayers and opposing giving Thames Water a free pass to continue polluting our rivers. The thousands of hours of sewage spills into chalk streams and their tributaries across North East Hertfordshire that Thames Water has continued to oversee are unforgiveable, if not technically illegal. Thames Water is failing in practically every possible way. The level of incompetence is staggering, given that it has 16 million captive customers. My constituents are not interested in Thames Water being given any more chances—[Interruption.]

[Mr Speaker]

Order. What is the hon. Member for Caerphilly (Chris Evans) doing, on his feet while another Member is speaking? Come on, Chris, you should know better than anybody!

[Chris Hinchliff]

Will the Secretary of State put an end to this unholy mess and rid us of this frankly parasitic company once and for all?

[Emma Reynolds]

I thank my hon. Friend for mentioning chalk streams. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Hertford and Stortford (Josh Dean), I have chalk streams in my constituency, and they are close to my heart. My hon. Friend the Member for North East Hertfordshire (Chris Hinchliff) is right to say that Thames Water is the biggest water company in the country, with 16 million customers. The Government stand ready for all eventualities, including a special administration regime. The customers are at front and centre of my consideration of this issue.

Water Companies

Chris Hinchliff Excerpts

Monday 8th June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Chris Hinchliff (North East Hertfordshire) (Lab)]

We come to the Chamber almost weekly to highlight the failures of the water sector in our constituencies, but I want to highlight a wider point today. For years, economic policy in this country has been based on trying to achieve growth by unlocking private capital, often from abroad. In this essential sector, we are now seeing the end result: water bankruptcy, environmental devastation, non-existent infrastructure and the public left picking up the tab. What conversations is the Minister having with colleagues across Government, especially in the Treasury, about learning from this monumental failure?

[Emma Hardy]

I thank my hon. Friend for his passionate work on this issue. I know how much he cares about the damage that over-abstraction is doing to our environment and to nature. On the water delivery taskforce, we have Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government Ministers and Treasury representatives all looking at how we can make the fastest and most effective change to our water system. They look particularly at water infrastructure because, as has been highlighted already, one of the problems is that we have been unable to build the infrastructure we need, which is resulting in damage to the environment now.

South East Water: Disruption of Supply

Chris Hinchliff Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Emma Hardy]

I thank the hon. Lady for her work on the EFRA Committee. She is entirely right: it is unacceptable. I feel that I am a fair-minded person. I know that water companies cannot control the weather, and I know that they cannot build a reservoir overnight. However, they certainly can contact their Members of Parliament, contact their councils, get in touch with their local resilience forums and make sure that they communicate with their customers, as an absolute bare minimum, and that is exactly the conversation that I will be having with each and every one of them.

[Chris Hinchliff (North East Hertfordshire) (Lab)]

Alongside the failures in the south-east, during the recent heatwave there was a widespread disruption of water supply across swathes of my constituency, in Buntingford, Cottered, Ardeley and Throcking. In a country as wet as ours it should take a true organising genius to create disruptions in water supply, but we are on track for a water deficit of 6 billion litres in our country in the coming decades, and on top of that, AI data centres estimate that water consumption will reach up to half a trillion cubic metres every year. Does the Minister—whom I deeply respect—accept that if we are to prevent water supply disruptions from recurring year in year out, we cannot continue to have infinite increases in demand on our already vastly overstretched water resources?

[Emma Hardy]

My hon. Friend is right. It is astonishing that although, owing to climate change, we will experience wetter and wetter winters and drier and drier summers, we have no capacity to store water in the winter and use it in the summer. That seems to me to be absolute nonsense.

As for the issue of data centres, there is one possibility that I am keen to look into, and I touched on it in an earlier answer. Under the current legislation, water that is supplied by a water company must be of drinking-water standard. It strikes me as logical and sensible to say, “If water is being used for cooling purposes rather than for drinking purposes in people’s homes, could it not be of a different standard? Why does it need to be of drinking-water quality?” Where, for instance, we want to use water for data centres, for growth, why do we not—in a closed-loop system—use waste water? We have some legislation that has been drafted for the right purposes and sounds great—of course, a water company must produce water of drinking-water standard—but does it need to be of drinking-water standard if it is being used to cool machinery?

Oral Answers to Questions

Chris Hinchliff Excerpts

Thursday 19th March 2026 Commons Chamber

[Chris Hinchliff (North East Hertfordshire) (Lab)]

There are widespread concerns that we are way off our national biodiversity targets. Does the Minister agree that there must be no further backward steps on environmental protections, and that we must set clear red lines for nature?

[Mary Creagh]

I agree that the environmental improvement plan that we inherited was not fit for purpose. We will oversee the largest ever investment in nature. We have banned bee-killing pesticides, licensed the first wild beaver release in England for 400 years, and announced the first new national forest for 30 years.

Environmental Protection and Biodiversity

Chris Hinchliff Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd March 2026 Westminster Hall

[Chris Hinchliff (North East Hertfordshire) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered environmental protections and biodiversity trends.

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Sir Roger. Unfortunately for everyone involved, this will be one of my longer speeches, so I had better not take too many interventions. Let me also say at the outset that this speech is intended first and foremost to support and encourage the Minister in the task ahead of her. She has one of the most important jobs for the whole Government and for the future of the country.

On that upbeat note, I turn to the litany of despair that constitutes a brief review of biodiversity trends in this country. Not a single one of England’s rivers is in good overall health. The same is true of our sea floor. Just 7% of our woodland is in good condition. Half of England’s hedgerows, which now should be bursting into bud and sprays of blossom, have been ripped up and grubbed out. Eighty-five per cent of our heathland is gone, as are 95% of our chalk downland meadows—the European equivalent of tropical rainforests. Our traditional orchards have declined by 81%, and 85% of England’s salt marshes have also been lost.

It is little wonder that one in six species in these islands is at risk of extinction. The scale of the wealth that we have squandered in pursuit of vapid notions of progress is staggering. It is more than just depressing; it is an existential threat to our way of life. The Government’s recent national security report on biodiversity loss confirmed that the collapse of nature is putting at risk the ecosystem services on which our society depends.

[Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. He is making it clear that biodiversity and our natural environment are in complete crisis. Given that, would he agree that the slogan “Back the builders, not the blockers” is one of the worst slogans that the Labour party has ever come up with? People do care about local democracy, biodiversity and nature, so that slogan should be put in the bin, where it belongs—the recycling bin, of course.

[Sir Roger Gale (in the Chair)]

Order. In the time available for this debate, that almost constitutes a speech. I had intended to say this after the hon. Gentleman moved the motion, but I had better say it now: please understand that any person who intervenes in this debate will be expected to stay until the end. It is not a case of speak and go.

[Chris Hinchliff]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. As I was saying, the ecosystem services—including water, food, clean air and critical resources—are all at risk. Even our soils, the very substance of growth, have lost around half their organic carbon, threatening the sustainability of our agriculture and our ability to keep our citizens fed.

More than that, however, the collapse of England’s biodiversity is a threat to our culture, national identity and one of the essential components of happiness. As iconic species continue to disappear from these islands, I wonder how many of us in this room will see a swallow or mayfly to herald summer this year?

[Joe Morris (Hexham) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend hope, as I do, that the Minister will work with expert organisations such as Northumberland national park to determine how we can best protect ground-nesting birds such as the curlew, which is mainly resident in my constituency of Hexham?

[Chris Hinchliff]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend about the importance of protecting our curlews, and the curlew action plan is a hugely important step, which the Government should be looking at. I also wonder how long it will be before the screaming sky falls silent, as each year, fewer swifts return to grace the air above our towns and villages.

Even our English language is losing its power, as the colours of the countryside are allowed to run dry. How could Brontë have conjured Heathcliff to love Cathy without the wild of the Yorkshire moors? How could Tolkien have fathered an entire fantasy genre without a shire worth fighting for? What hope is there for a future Vaughan Williams with so few larks left to ascend? Worse still, what stories will we have left to enchant the next generation of children with when the Hundred Acre Wood has been declared a blocker, Ratty and Mole have been evicted from their river home by decades of effluent, and—this is probably only a matter of time—someone tries to redefine Watership Down as grey belt?

All in all, the scale of the nature crisis is difficult to overstate, and any move to lower standards risks turning that crisis into a catastrophe. Yet, despite all this, we still get senior politicians declaring war on what little remains of our wildlife, with repeated suggestions that even this dire baseline is somehow too high. We continue to hear the unevidenced claim that Britain is held back not by a broken economic model but by bats and newts, and that profiteering developers would build genuinely affordable homes for all if only the last remnants of the natural world were less burdensome.

Liz Truss may be gone, but the spirit and lazy rhetoric of deregulatory Trussonomics bulldozers inexorably onwards with a planning and infrastructure Bill that sought to allow developers to pay cash to trash nature, despite having no meaningful evidence to substantiate the claim that environmental protections slow down infrastructure. Then, after we managed to head off the worst of that, we have had the wholesale rejection of the Joint Nature Conservation Committee’s recommendations on species protections, as well as a nuclear regulatory review based on fundamentally flawed evidence that inflates the costs of environmental protections and downplays ecological risks. I would welcome the Minister taking this opportunity to distance the Government from that particular exercise in scapegoating nature for developer incompetence.

Each additional deregulation and attack on environmental protections is a blow to the very root of what it means to be English. It is a truly bleak vision for our country to suggest that the only way to secure investment, build infrastructure or deliver homes is to rip up our environmental protections. Such measures are not only bad policy but directly contradictory to the manifesto we were elected on and deeply unpopular. Only 14% of British people think politicians are aligned with their values on nature, and three quarters of young people actually want more of the UK countryside protected.

[Abtisam Mohamed (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. He may know that Sheffield is well known for being the outdoor city and is one of the few major cities in the UK that has a national park within its boundaries. I support him in his red lines for nature campaign. Does he agree that protecting nature is vital, not just to protect our green spaces, but to make sure that communities have access to the right types of space, so that they are happier and more fulfilled?

[Chris Hinchliff]

I thank my hon. Friend for her support for the red lines campaign. She is absolutely right about what makes life worth living. Investing in our country, strengthening standards and restoring our natural world will do far more to improve the lives of ordinary people than a short-sighted race to the bottom. That is the Labour tradition: action to correct market failure, not dogmatic deregulation.

There is a nature-loving majority in this country, including the millions of members of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, wildlife trusts, national trusts and so many more. Our Labour Government should be working alongside those groups, not squaring up to them. At the end of the day, there is a lot more of them than there are developer lobbyists. Let us stop this endless cycle of skirmishes. It does not have to be like this. Enough is enough.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Chris Hinchliff]

I am very sorry, but I had better make progress at this point.

Today, I am calling for clear red lines for nature: no further weakening of environmental protections, no funding cuts to environmental bodies and no more collapsing biodiversity but instead a fully funded nature recovery plan to meet our legally binding targets. There are no more branches left to prune without killing the tree. There can be no more backward steps. Hand wringing will not protect habitats. Lip service will not stop extinction. Let us have a little optimism and idealism instead.

We know from projects such as Knepp and trailblazers such as my constituents at Finches Farm in Benington that with decisive action our biodiversity can come booming back again. Across the country, we have a vast, untapped pool of potential crying out for employment and meaningful, healthy work. It is ready to contribute to leaving the world in a better state than we found it, and there is so much work to be done: restoring our meadows, orchards, coppices and temperate rainforests; relaying hedgerows; re-wetting the lost marshes; re-wriggling our rivers; bringing back the species that haunt our islands; saving the curlew and red squirrel; and monitoring, measuring and enforcing our essential environmental protections. There is enough skilled work to deliver a huge boost towards full employment across every region of the country. Like new Labour’s “New Deal for a Lost Generation”, we need a green job guarantee to deliver essential environmental restoration work now and brilliant careers for years to come.

Now is the time for the honesty to admit that, for generation after generation, we have spent down and frittered away the vast wealth that was the natural inheritance of these islands. The truth is that the reality of GDP growth has been little more than a heaping up of virtual wealth—a hoarding of digital zeros in the bank accounts of the wealthy, while the real world around all of us suffered. Any further weakening of environmental protections will only push us over the edge into total bankruptcy. We cannot retreat a single step further. We must defend these last red lines for nature for the sake of every generation to come. My plea to the Minister is simply this: defy the lobbyists, side with the public and the planet over profit, and give us our nature back.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

Woodland Creation

Chris Hinchliff Excerpts

Wednesday 11th February 2026 Westminster Hall

[Chris Hinchliff (North East Hertfordshire) (Lab)]

It is an honour to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Lewell.

The state of England’s woodland paints a clear picture of national decline. The elms are gone, the ash is dying and even the English oak is at risk from the existential threat of climate change. We have far less woodland cover than many of our European neighbours and what woodland we have is in poor condition: just 7% of it is in good health. Many of our oldest trees—living legends that have been part of our landscapes for generations and that can each be home to thousands of species—are still at risk. A lack of diversity in size and species, and a lack of open, sunlit glades for young trees to grow in, has left our ecosystems fragile and degraded. That does profound harm to the wildlife that our voters love. Iconic species such as hazel dormice and our beloved red squirrels are disappearing into the pages of the history books and the number of woodland birds has fallen by 37% over the past 50 years. It must be said that although the wealth generated from tearing down woodland for shipbuilding, agriculture and construction was tightly privatised by a small, wealthy few, the consequences of the nature crisis are and will be felt by all.

We are on track to miss nearly all our targets for nature recovery. We have already lost half our biodiversity and one in six species are teetering on the brink of extinction. Those are not abstract targets that we can shrug off but missed opportunities to save species whose haunting absence would impoverish the lives of every generation to come. Unchecked, such decline will have disastrous consequences. Nature is not only the essential foundation for our economy but a source of joy to millions of people, and an irreplaceable ingredient of our national identity and culture. The Joint Intelligence Committee has warned that nature decline creates “cascading risks” to our food security and national security. To be frank, wringing our hands about nature’s decline in these debates while signing up to an economic model that treats nature as something to exploit, or destroys if it is in the way, will no longer cut it. The depoliticised niceties and doublespeak have to go.

We need to have the honesty to call out leadership that treats nature as an obstacle to progress, rather than a measure of it. Every politician loves ancient woodland until it is home to one of the world’s rarest bat species and is threatened by the latest grandiose project dreamt up in Whitehall. At that point it immediately becomes a blocker and a convenient scapegoat for the insane cost overruns of our model of outsourced and subcontracted infrastructure delivery, which so often rips off the public purse. We would not destroy historic cathedrals or royal palaces in this way, but, only a few years ago, we proved once again that even one of the best-loved trees in the country—every bit a work of art in its own right—can be destroyed in the pursuit of higher GDP. If we fail to do better, the public will not forgive either this Government or our political class more widely.

There are two tasks ahead for reversing the national decline of our woodlands. First, we must take a bold approach to woodland creation—on which subject much has already been usefully said today. I pay tribute to the Woodland Trust for its leadership in driving the northern forest, which will reach across Hull into Liverpool and surge into our cities. That is how we grasp an opportunity not just to rescue ecosystems, but to enrich communities, foster happier, healthier lives and reconnect ordinary people with what is collectively our greatest national inheritance.

As the Labour Government rightly focuses on building an economy with secure, highly skilled and meaningful work for all, here is an enormous opportunity. Essential woodland management—coppicing, pollarding, thinning, restocking and the rest—will require a new generation of tree surgeons and forestry workers, potentially offering brilliant careers right across the country. However, even the Woodland Trust or my hon. Friend the Minister—talented though they are—cannot recreate ancient woodland, nor restore other irreplaceable habitats or species once they are lost to extinction. Therefore, as we pursue woodland creation, we must also defend the protections we already have. The Woodland Trust has long argued that loopholes in the national planning policy framework leave ancient woodland vulnerable to damage and deterioration from development.

We should be strengthening those protections alongside an ambitious programme of nature recovery. Instead, the nature sector has been left fighting endless battles with the Government simply to stop things getting worse. That is why I led more than 60 MPs and peers alongside major nature charities, including the Woodland Trust, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the Wildlife Trusts, in opposing proposals to weaken the habitat regulations recommended in the nuclear regulatory review. We must be clear: if someone cares about our woodlands and woodland creation, they cannot advocate for repealing our most important nature protections. Planting trees while weakening the habitats regulations is like planting flowers at one end of a field, while a bulldozer rips it up at the other. We need a joined-up approach that protects what we have and restores what we have lost. That is why I am calling for red lines for nature. I hope that colleagues will join me in supporting this campaign in the coming months.