Oral Answers to Questions

Daniel Zeichner Excerpts

Monday 27th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Maclean]

I thank my hon. Friend for raising the concerns of his constituents, which are shared by many communities. We know how important it is that infrastructure is delivered alongside housing growth. That is why, through the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill, we will require local authorities to produce an infrastructure strategy as part of the infrastructure levy. I would be delighted to meet my hon. Friend to discuss it further.

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

Last week London Economics reported that the University of Cambridge contributes almost £30 billion per annum and supports 86,000 jobs across the whole country. When Cambridge does well, the whole country does well. The arc is the key to future UK prosperity, so will the Government play their part by giving local leaders the tools and access to investment so that they can use the wealth that we create to set the stage for Labour to achieve our mission to be the fastest-growing economy in the G7?

[Rachel Maclean]

As I said to my hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller), we are considering the report of the National Infrastructure Commission, but this Government are committed to levelling up and to devolution across the country. We saw in the Budget, delivered by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor, that we have devolved significant powers to Mayors across the country, such as Andy Street in the west midlands. That is the right thing to do to drive prosperity across the country.

Levelling-up Missions: East of England

Daniel Zeichner Excerpts

Tuesday 31st January 2023 Westminster Hall

[Peter Aldous (Waveney) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered progress on the Government’s levelling up missions in the East of England.

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Davies. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting this debate, which comes a year after a similar debate, when the opportunities and challenges facing the east of England were also considered through the prism of levelling up.

Last February the Government published their White Paper, “Levelling Up the United Kingdom”, in which they set out 12 levelling-up missions, with targets to be achieved by 2030. Last month, in December, the all-party parliamentary group for the east of England, which I co-chair with the hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner), published a report in conjunction with the East of England Local Government Association and various private sector partners that analysed confidence in the region in achieving those targets.

In summary, the report found that there was high confidence in achieving three of the levelling-up missions: employment and pay, research and development, and wellbeing. There was medium confidence in achieving four of the missions: improving digital connectivity, delivering pride in place, reducing crime and widening devolution. However, there is low confidence in five policy areas, many of which are the most important to the people of, and the prospects for, the east of England: improved educational attainment, more skills, better transport, longer, healthier living, and more affordable housing to buy and rent.

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

The hon. Member is doing an excellent job of making the case for the east of England. One of the five areas of concern he referenced was transport. Does he agree that it is essential to keep up the pressure for important rail improvements at Ely and Haughley junctions, to restore four trains per hour to London Stansted, to secure East West Rail and to ensure that affordable, reliable bus services become the norm rather than the exception across the region?

[Peter Aldous]

I thank the hon. Member for that intervention, and I greatly enjoy working with him on the APPG. He is correct to raise those issues. I will comment on the rail issues in passing a little later, but they are vital to the east of England and to the whole UK.

I will comment in a little more detail on the five issues where there is low confidence and on what needs to be done so that we can get on course to deliver the 2030 targets. I anticipate that colleagues will home in on areas and issues that are important to them and their constituents. I should add that each of the issues warrants a debate of its own, and I am conscious that I will only scratch the surface of each mission.

Earlier this month the Government published the results of round 2 of the levelling-up fund. In the two rounds that have taken place so far, there have been 12 awards in the east of England, with a total value of £252.5 million. In both rounds we secured the fourth lowest amount of funding in the UK. Although, on an allocation per head basis, the situation has improved significantly, from £14 per head in the first round to £26 per head in the second, the east of England remains the region with the third lowest funding over both rounds.

It would be wrong to judge levelling up solely on the basis of those grants, but there is a worry that there is a lack of understanding in Whitehall of the challenges faced by many people in the east of England and of the exciting opportunities available in the region. With the right policies and support, the Government can help unlock these opportunities, which will benefit not just our region but the whole United Kingdom.

Down here in London, there may be a view that East Anglia is a comfortably-off region where levelling up does not apply. That is wrong, as we have relatively low levels of pay and there are deep pockets of deprivation in coastal communities such as Lowestoft, which I represent, in rural areas and in our larger cities and towns, such as Norwich and Ipswich.

Oral Answers to Questions

Daniel Zeichner Excerpts

Monday 16th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

My right hon. Friend has, with his characteristic assiduity, already raised this question with me both formally and informally, and I appreciate the unfortunate consequences that some have to face, but we obviously need to balance protecting the rights of leaseholders with ensuring that, through the proper application of permitted development rights we can in a sensitive way increase accommodation and make sure that we have a process, particularly in urban areas, that allows us to provide more homes without encroaching on valuable green land. As ever, however, we need to keep under appropriate supervision the use of permitted development rights, and the case my right hon. Friend raises will be one that weighs on my thinking.

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

The Secretary of State will know that an associated problem for many leaseholders is the very high cost of insurance premiums; that affects many of my constituents in Cambridge. What is he doing to address that?

Future of Small Cities Following Covid-19

Daniel Zeichner Excerpts

Tuesday 26th April 2022 Westminster Hall

[Caroline Nokes (in the Chair)]

I will call Daniel Zeichner to move the motion, and I will then call the Minister to respond. There will not be an opportunity for the Member in charge to wind up, as is the convention for 30-minute debates.

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the future of small cities following the covid-19 outbreak.

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Nokes. Let me start by saying that the pandemic clearly is not over—this debate is very much looking ahead. I am grateful for the opportunity to raise a huge subject, about small cities in general. I have a particular interest in Cambridge, my own small city, and in the future of the community that I represent and in which I live.

There are many things that could be said on this topic. I am conscious that it is a short debate and there are other Members who want to make a contribution. I therefore offer a warning to any watchers or readers: be aware that this will be a very narrow account, dealing particularly with issues of work and innovation. There is much more to be said on a whole range of issues, such as housing, fairness, mental health, transport, environmental sustainability, and air and water quality, but for today only, I will just touch on many of those issues.

The stimulus for this debate is the report by Cambridge Ahead entitled, “A New Era for the Cambridge Economy”. I pay tribute to the many Cambridge thinkers who have started the ball rolling on this discussion as we think about the world beyond the pandemic. I will mention in particular Jane Paterson-Todd and her team, Metro Dynamics, who were the lead authors, and the chair, Dr David Cleevely—there were many others.

The report sits in a wider framework. I have long felt that our goal as leaders should be to make Cambridge the best small city in the world. For me, when we are seeking to understand what that might look like, the idea of one city fair for all must be at its heart—social justice is essential. I am delighted that that runs as a golden thread throughout the report.

That goal will inevitably be delivered through the work of local leaders. I will name just a few: Councillor Anna Smith, the city council leader; Councillor Katie Thornburrow on the local plan; and Dr Nik Johnson, the Mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough. I have named some of my Labour colleagues, but I well appreciate the work of many others within and beyond local government. Future success will only be achieved in partnership; I look to the Government, and the Department in particular, to work with us to find constructive ways forward.

Let me turn to some lessons from the pandemic. A leitmotif for many of us was, “You’re on mute!”—I think many of us will remember that for years to come—but the report picked up on many more things. When it was launched a few weeks ago, I could not help noticing that it was picked up in the national media, by the Daily Mail and The Times, and it was almost as if the only issue was whether people should go back to the workplace—that is an ongoing conversation in Government, as I understand it.

However, those reports missed the core point of the report; frankly, the paradigm has shifted and the world has changed. The question is how to adapt and turn that change to our advantage. Let us be clear that for many workers in Cambridge and elsewhere, there is no choice. The street cleaners, the cabbies, the bus drivers, the hospitality workers, the cleaners, the health workers, the lab workers, the manufacturing workers and many people in schools and universities did not have a choice—all those people had to be in their workplace all the way through the pandemic and will continue to be there.

The knowledge economy is different. In some ways, historically, Cambridge has evolved in a unique way to foster networking. Those who are familiar with the college system will know that it has its pluses and minuses, but one of the great bonuses is the sense of people being together and meeting in human-sized communities. When one looks at the way the science parks, innovation centres and networking organisations, such as Cambridge Network, Cambridge Ahead and Cambridge Angels, have grown up, along with many of the consultancies that have emerged in Cambridge, one can see that it is key that those opportunities for people to meet and discuss continue as they have in the past.

David Cleevely talks passionately about what he calls the serendipity of the chance meetings that so often lead to breakthrough ideas. I have lost count of the number of people who have told me they were padlocking their bicycles in Cambridge and a chance conversation led to an investment opportunity, a discussion or a new idea. Those moments—in other places they are the water-cooler moments; in Cambridge, they are the bike-locking moments—are crucial.

The report argues that policy makers need to understand how these changes will work for city economies, so that we can respond positively and take advantage of them. Our places must not only be resilient to the shocks of the future but evolve, adapt and mature through the process, taking the opportunity to do things better than they were done before. To achieve that, we must be on the front foot and experiment to help us understand what new demands we need to make of our cities, and how resources could and should provide for all.

Cambridge Ahead is a business-led and academic membership organisation. It has been looking at the structural changes that have occurred in Cambridge during and after the pandemic, looking at internationally competitive companies, and bringing together world-leading thinkers to identify the impacts of the pandemic and the opportunities it might present. Clearly, the report was produced through the lens of Cambridge, but I believe much can be learned for other great small cities across the UK. Cambridge Ahead concluded that the UK is on a new path and that the changes we are seeing are substantially changing the city’s dynamics in a number of ways. I will touch on three points.

First, transport patterns have altered. It is pretty clear that private vehicles are still being used in preference to public transport. Public transport numbers have recovered, but not to pre-covid levels. The timing of people’s journeys has also shifted. That offers both a threat and an opportunity. There is a danger of gridlock, frankly, but if we can spread the peaks and understand that road spaces are a precious commodity, there is an opportunity to do something differently—to develop active travel in a city the size of Cambridge. There is a genuine opportunity to shift to things such as electric bikes—I am a passionate user of an electric bike myself; they are ideal for small cities such as Cambridge—and reliable, affordable mass transit into and out of the city to make sure that those outside the city are not disadvantaged.

This is a time of real opportunity, but to realise it, we have to resolve the vexed issue of financing such a transition. I make no apology for referring the Minister to my very first speech in this place, back in 2015. Perhaps slightly unusually in a first speech, I talked about tax increment financing and how close Cambridge had come to securing a truly innovative deal a few years earlier, until the dead hand of the Treasury descended, as it so often does. It is time for the Government to look at that again.

Secondly, the demand for space is changing. Perhaps counterintuitively, demand for office space in Cambridge continues to grow, even though not everyone is back. The report details why that is: people want to maintain a space, and with social distancing and so on, we do not necessarily have people back together in quite the same way. At the same time, people are also working from home. The report concludes that it looks as if we are going to settle back at somewhere between three and four days a week in the office for most people, meaning one and a half days working at home.

That means that people are working in places that were never originally designed as workplaces, which raises some real challenges, not least the need to develop far more neighbourhoods—or quarters, as one might call them—with services nearby. Academics are talking widely about the 15-minute city. We need to do that and find a way to create it. We also need green spaces for people to be able to enjoy those new workplaces. That is a very big planning issue and there are many ways to address it, but I gently suggest—this might be slightly controversial at home—that for Cambridge, where many of our green spaces are locked behind college walls, sharing that space more equitably with citizens of our city should be high on the list for those who have the opportunity to make these decisions.

[Anthony Browne (South Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

rose—

[Daniel Zeichner]

I will happily give way to my constituency neighbour.

[Anthony Browne]

The hon. Member is making an excellent speech. As he said, I am a neighbour of his; I am the MP for the bit of Cambridge that is not in his constituency. I pay tribute to Cambridge Ahead, which does excellent work—this is an excellent report.

The hon. Member makes a lot of interesting points about the changing nature of Cambridge. I just want to highlight a couple of other things. You mentioned quite a range of workers who could not work from home, but I do not think you included laboratory workers. A lot of those who work for life sciences companies, particularly in my constituency, have to go into laboratories to work, and they often stayed there throughout the pandemic. You mentioned the shortage of office space—

--- Later in debate ---

[Anthony Browne]

I am sorry, Ms Nokes. The hon. Member mentioned the shortage of office space, but there is also a shortage of wet lab space that is constraining a lot of companies. Perhaps he is going to come to this, but the changing nature of the high street is also very important, not only in Cambridge but in some of the villages in my constituency, particularly because people are doing more online shopping and there is a changing demand. The report is excellent, and I pay tribute to its authors.

[Daniel Zeichner]

I am grateful for those contributions—they are all important. I mentioned lab workers in passing at the beginning, but the hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. The Cambridge economy is perhaps slightly different from other parts of the country, but many of these lessons, particularly those relating to reinventing the high street, will be key. The report picks up on the fact that a number of companies are looking at setting up work spaces in other areas, not necessarily in the city centre, so it is likely that there will be a different pattern to the way in which people work in future.

The third and final point that I will pull out from the report—this is, inevitably, a brief summary of a long, complicated report—is that the biggest thing for innovation in Cambridge is, as I have already hinted, how networks work and may change. New working patterns affect the frequency and manner in which we interact with people. There are generally many benefits to homeworking. At the document’s launch there was a discussion about our need—I think we can all appreciate this—for places where we are not being constantly interrupted and where we can think and work through ideas. Homeworking provides an opportunity for such a productive space, and it can clearly boost people’s quality of life.

However—and this is key for innovation—we still need to create moments of value where people come together. The report describes that as making “serendipitous encounters” happen—in other places, that could be the water cooler moment—which has been key to Cambridge’s success. Many people over many years have asked why Cambridge has done so well. This is one of the key understandings that we have learned over the years. We have to ensure that, in the transition to different working patterns, we do not lose that. To be frank, that is important not only for Cambridge. Cambridge is a key, significant driver not just of the regional economy but of the wider UK economy, so it is very important to the Government.

That is a brief summary of a much longer argument, but lessons can be pulled out for other small cities, too. Cambridge has a proud tradition of innovation and we could be an ideal test bed for new approaches. Our economy continues to grow and there are opportunities to observe, measure, experiment and learn. That will require selecting projects to monitor proactively, publish data and test ideas, so that other cities can benefit and share in the experience, with an emphasis on generating societal benefit for every community.

We are asking Government to work with Cambridge and perhaps other like-minded cities to take the work forward to the next step. I hope the Government will follow up on this discussion and agree to meet us to discuss the creation of what might be called a multi-disciplinary test bed: a framework for implementing experiments and studies, covering health, education, climate, retail, town and city centre offers, transport, housing, business models and the evolution of office and industrial space. Cities across the UK have different characteristics and face different challenges, and they will want to experiment in different ways. Of course, an experimental approach is not without risks. Some experiments will fail, but the vital thing is to have the mechanisms to monitor and learn.

In conclusion, our cities have changed substantially and will continue to do so. There will be no return to the way things were, so let us take action together to take advantage of these changes and give our cities the resilience they need to face the future.

[Caroline Nokes (in the Chair)]

I call the Minister to respond to the debate.

--- Later in debate ---

[Richard Graham]

My understanding was that my office had put me down to speak in the debate.

[Daniel Zeichner]

The hon. Gentleman certainly sought my permission.

[Caroline Nokes (in the Chair)]

Thank you for making that clear. I will allow the Member to speak, but only for two minutes.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stuart Andrew]

That is exactly the sort of innovation that we want to see in towns and cities all over the country, where people locally know what is best for their communities and of the existing opportunities, such as an empty building or area in need of redevelopment. Such local decision making will be key to ensuring that we maximise the potential for local communities. I thank my hon. Friend for raising that.

I also emphasise, as I have many times in the past, the moral imperative to level up the country. Levelling up is not about an arbitrary divide that starts just to the north of the Watford gap, and nor is it about a London versus everyone else divide; it is about breathing new life into, and offering a more prosperous future to, neglected areas across the country that have for years felt forgotten by Westminster. I assure every Member present that those places in the east—Cambridge, Peterborough, Luton, Bury St Edmunds—and those further afield, such as Gloucester, are just as central to our levelling-up ambitions as Sunderland, Darlington and Grimsby.

The hon. Member for Cambridge has said that while slogans come and go, we need a proper regional policy. I could not agree more. For our strategy to work, it has to be more than a slogan; it has to be something that people can really see and feel where they live. One of the central pillars, therefore, is regeneration, and I am delighted with the progress that we are making on that front. The towns fund of more than £3.6 billion is helping to create jobs and to build more resilient local communities and economies. Our investment of £2.4 billion through the town deals for 101 towns across England is giving them the tools they need to boost their local economy.

Hon. Members will have seen at first hand how that funding is supporting regeneration in the east of England. The region has received more than £287 million through our towns fund for several projects to support growth, regenerate public spaces, as the hon. Member for Cambridge mentioned, and improve transport. A fantastic example is the city of Peterborough, which will benefit from a range of new cultural facilities in the city centre, including a lakeside activity centre and the creation of new pedestrian links to improve access to the riverside and its green spaces, alongside the brand-new university opening its doors for the first time later this year. That is levelling up in action, and is just one of hundreds of examples.

We are soon to open the next round of our £4.8 billion levelling-up fund, and I encourage all smaller cities to get their bids in and to secure investment that will help to deliver on local priorities for the people they serve.

[Daniel Zeichner]

I am encouraged by much of what the Minister is saying. Cambridge is in a slightly different position, with slightly different issues. Will he undertake to meet Cambridge Ahead to look at how we can take things forward in future?

[Stuart Andrew]

I was literally about to come on to the hon. Member’s point. For me and the Department, regeneration has a fundamental role to play in the levelling-up agenda. By bringing together the vast experience that exists in our private sector businesses, local authorities, developers and local communities, we can create vibrant cities and restore people’s pride in the places where they live.

The hon. Member mentioned the Cambridge Ahead report, and I loved his comment that his ambition is for Cambridge to be the best small city in the world. The Government are clear that, as I have said, levelling up means levelling up all over the country—and that, of course, includes Cambridge. He will understand that certain points he raised on education and transport are not in my Department’s remit. None the less, the values he raised from the report sound like they could be of value to our Department’s levelling-up mission. I particularly welcome the report’s recommendations for a more resilient city with well-designed, inclusive spaces. That will be a key element of some of the work we will be doing in the forthcoming months. I will ensure that this report is reviewed and taken into consideration by my Department as we consider the next steps from the levelling-up White Paper. More importantly, I am more than happy to ensure that officials meet people in Cambridge to discuss the report further.

I want to touch on another central theme of our levelling-up plans, and that is devolution. As part of our diagnosis of the challenges that areas are facing, we recognise that low-paid, low-productivity work is largely concentrated in areas that are disconnected from much bigger cities. We believe that one of the principal solutions should be levelling up by devolving down, with a proper revolution in how we approach local democracy—one that replicates some of the extraordinary successes that have come from the introduction of metro Mayors in places such as Teesside and the west midlands. We believe that that is a winning formula for giving back control to areas over their own destiny.

That kind of devolution is what will propel us beyond what Michael Heseltine termed “the traditional Whitehall solution” of

“throwing money at individual identified problems”.

Our approach will embody the Heseltine approach to devolution, where the focus is not based on north, south, east and west, but on devolving power to cities and devolving to towns. For the east of England, that process has already begun, with Norfolk and Suffolk among the first wave of areas being invited to discuss county deals.

I will finish by thanking the hon. Member for championing the cause of small cities and bringing the debate to us today. I hope I have laid out our vision for how we offer these places a positive vision for the post-covid era, with policies and initiatives that meet the urgent needs of the moment. Individually these policies would do little to transform the fortunes of any given place, but taken together our levelling-up plans, with new hospitals, new county deals, new 4G infrastructure investment and new powers for local leaders have the potential to lift up every single city and strengthen its social fabric.

Local government and local institutions worked with national Government throughout the pandemic to support people through one of the most challenging periods in the history of this country. We did that in the spirit of collaboration and with a desire to protect people from a deadly virus. I am certain that if we work together and apply the same spirit and zeal that we showed in that moment to levelling up our country, we can deliver on the things that matter to people. I know that all hon. Members present share the motivations behind that agenda, even if we may sometimes disagree on the precise means of getting there, and I look forward to working hand in hand with hon. Members present and on all sides of the political divide to make that a reality.

Question put and agreed to.

Levelling Up: East of England

Daniel Zeichner Excerpts

Tuesday 18th January 2022 Westminster Hall

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous) on securing the debate. His introduction has been very thorough, and I will not go over the same points. He and I work closely on the East of England all-party parliamentary group, which I thank for its work. I also thank those who have supported us and other all-party parliamentary groups, such as the APPG for the innovation corridor. We have been trying to keep the idea of the east alive.

Some of us have been involved in regional policy for many years, and I sadly recount that I attended my 35th annual regional Labour party conference at the end of last year. I am not sure whether that is cause for celebration or concern, but we have been thinking about this issue for a long time and have discussed it in Westminster Hall before. I looked back at the previous debate on the east of England, which was in April 2016 —during the referendum period, as I recall. The discussion at that time was about establishing a three-county system with an elected Mayor. It was introduced with enthusiasm by the then Minister but it died a death a few weeks later, as the Government fell. I gently suggest that slogans come and go and things come and go, but the regional issues stay with us for a very long time.

It is sometimes said that there is no such thing as the east, although the hon. Member for Waveney bravely defined it in the correct way. It is a question of regional identity. We know it is an odd construct sometimes, but I also think that what bring the east together most of all are our television regions—I do not say that just because Andrew Sinclair is sitting in the Public Gallery. It is the excellent work that is done by journalists such as Emma Hutchinson at ITV Anglia, Andrew at “Look East” and Deborah McGurran, and particularly by people such as Stewart White. I say that again in the context of the current debate: those people bring the region together in a way that very few others have managed to do.

[Matt Hancock (West Suffolk) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman add his congratulations to Mark Murphy of BBC Radio Suffolk, who was awarded an MBE for services to broadcasting in the new year’s honours list?

[Daniel Zeichner]

I am happy to do so.

On the question of the funding issues, the difficulties and the relative lack of understanding of the challenges that face our region, I agree with the statistics that the hon. Member for Waveney presented. I would also point out that if we take the London effect out of the east, we very quickly see that our region is, by UK and European standards, not nearly as prosperous as some of the initial statistics suggest. I read the House of Commons Library briefing, and one would think it is all fine. Actually, it is not all fine; it is a much more complicated picture than that, but it is not necessarily an easy question to solve. I would also look back historically and reflect that at the end of the last Labour Government we had a Minister for the East of England—I make no secret of my ambition to be the next Barbara Follett.

I have four questions to put to the Minister. As he is not a regional Minister, he may well not be in a good position to answer them, but these are important issues. East West Rail and the Cambridge-Milton Keynes-Oxford arc are absolutely crucial. Without talking too much about my constituency of Cambridge, AstraZeneca’s Discovery Centre—a life sciences cluster that generates over £7 billion turnover and employs over 20,000 people—opened in November and is absolutely key. Can the Minister confirm that the project is on track, and that there is no question of any further delays?

Secondly, Ely junction, as the hon. Member for Waveney mentioned, is absolutely critical to unlocking the freight issues. My third point is that the West Anglia main line is absolutely key to improving links to our regional airport and gateway to the world, which is Stansted.

My final point is on bus funding. There is a critical point coming in the next few weeks, when the covid funding runs out. Bus operators are having to make decisions this week as to which routes will be cut. In my city of Cambridge, that is already happening. What is going on?

In conclusion, slogans may come and go but we need a proper regional policy. Scotland and Wales have the freedoms, but England is getting a rough deal.

Building Safety

Daniel Zeichner Excerpts

Monday 10th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

My right hon. Friend makes a very important point. We of course respect the devolution settlement, but he is absolutely right that money generated for building safety should be devoted, as far as possible, to building safety. I will work with him and others to ensure that the focus is maintained in the way he outlines.

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

It was a good weekend for Cambridge United, but sadly the misery continues for so many people in and around Cambridge who find themselves trapped in buildings that were not built to the expected standards. As we have heard, it is not just about cladding; it is also about fire breaks and so on. For so many of those people, lack of an EWS1 form means that they cannot move—they are absolutely trapped. What in the Secretary of State’s statement can give them confidence that they will be freed from that trap?

[Michael Gove]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman and all supporters of Cambridge United, and I extend my sympathies to Newcastle and Arsenal fans, given the unfortunate events of the weekend. On his very important point, I hope that the withdrawal of the consolidated advice note and its replacement with the BSI-approved PAS 9980 will play a part in helping his constituents and others to be in a position once again to operate fully in the property market. Lenders to whom I have spoken have given our proposals a fair wind so far, but obviously engagement needs to continue.

Second Homes and Holiday Lets: Rural Communities

Daniel Zeichner Excerpts

Thursday 6th January 2022 Westminster Hall

[Tim Farron]

The hon. Lady makes a great point and I am grateful for her intervention. It is not just a rural issue, although it may predominantly be rural. York is clearly a good example of somewhere that suffers in a different way. I will come to the issue of holiday lets and some of the answers in a moment. It will rob communities of their very life if we do not intervene. I am not someone who is anti-market—I am anti-broken market, and this is a broken market. This is our opportunity to do something about it.

Excessive second home ownership is a colossal problem in our communities. The purpose of this debate is to shake the Government out of their demonstrable and inexcusable inaction and to take the action required to save our communities.

The crisis has become a catastrophe, and it is not just about second homes. Holiday lets are an important part of our tourism economy. In the Lake district, we argue and believe that we are the most visited part of Britain outside London. Our tourism economy is worth more than £3 billion a year and employs 60,000 people—comfortably Cumbria’s biggest employer. It is a vibrant industry and, by its very nature, a joyful one; I am proud to be a voice for Cumbria tourism in this place. Those 60,000 people working in hospitality and tourism need to live somewhere. Some 80% of the entire working-age population of the Lake district already works in hospitality and tourism. We need to increase the number of working-age people who can afford to live and raise a family in our communities, yet the absolute opposite is happening at a rate of knots.

During the pandemic, in South Lakeland alone—just one district that makes up part of the Lake district—there was a 32% rise in one year in the number of holiday lets. I assure the Minister that those were not new builds; they were not magicked out of thin air. Those new holiday lets emerged in 2021 following the lifting of the covid eviction ban. That is not to blame the ban; it was a good idea, and it had to come to an end at some point. My point is that that rise was over a tiny period of time: less than 12 months, in reality. The fact is that this time last year those new holiday lets were someone’s home.

In Sedbergh, Kirkby Lonsdale, Kendal, Windermere, Staveley, Ambleside, Coniston, Grasmere, Grange and throughout Cumbria, I have met people who have been evicted from their homes under a section 21 eviction order—which, incidentally, this Government promised to ban in their last manifesto.

Among the hundreds evicted, I think of the couple with two small children in Ambleside, who struggled to pay £800 a month for their flat above a shop in town; they were evicted last spring only to find the home they had lived in for years on Airbnb for £1,200 a week. I think of the mum near Grange, whose teenage son had lived in their rented home his whole life; they were evicted only to see their property on Airbnb a few days later for over £1,000 a week. I think of the tradesman from Sedbergh, who had served the community for 15 years; a few days after he was evicted, his former home was also on Airbnb for £1,000 a week. There are hundreds more individuals and families in the same situation right across rural Cumbria.

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. Back in 2018, I did some work with Gordon Marsden, the then MP for Blackpool South, looking at Airbnb and the issues of the sharing economy for the all-party parliamentary group for hospitality and tourism. We came up with a recommendation for a statutory registrations scheme for all accommodation providers. Is that something the hon. Gentleman has considered?

[Tim Farron]

I have, and I will come to some suggestions in a moment, including on how we might tackle the issue—to put it neutrally—of Airbnb. The hon. Gentleman raises an important point, and the need for such a scheme is huge. Undoubtedly, the ease with which people can turn a home into a holiday let is part of the problem. The consequences are phenomenal. The people I am speaking about are real human beings; I could pick dozens and dozens more to talk about. What it means for them is that they have to leave the area. This is no less than a Lakeland clearance: whole communities ejected from the places where they were raised, where they had chosen to raise their families, or where they had set down roots to live, work and contribute to our economy.

Will the Minister accept that this is both morally abhorrent and economically stupid? We have businesses in Cumbria that, having survived covid so far, are now reducing their opening hours or closing all together because they cannot find staff anymore. We have people isolated and vulnerable because they cannot find care staff. There are friends of mine in that situation, in part because the local workforce has been effectively cleared out and expelled. In each case I mentioned earlier—in Sedbergh, Ambleside and Grange—the people could not find anywhere else to live in those communities or in the wider community. They have had to uproot and move away all together. How is the economy of Britain’s second biggest tourism destination expected to deliver for Britain’s wider economy without anybody to staff it?

What about the children who have to move away, and are forced to move school, and leave behind friends and support networks? What about those left behind in our dwindling communities, whose schools are now threatened with closure? I have spoken to MPs, not just those who are here and for whose presence I am massively grateful, but from rural communities right across this House. Most of those, particularly in England and Wales, are from the Conservative party. There is a kind of private agreement that this is a catastrophe. They see it in their own constituencies: the collapse of affordable, available housing for local communities is killing towns and villages in Cornwall, Northumberland, Shropshire, Devon, Somerset, North Yorkshire, the highlands of Scotland and rural Wales, as well as in my home of Cumbria.

Our rural communities want two things from the Minister today: first, a sign that he understands that this catastrophe is happening; and secondly, a commitment not to wait for the planning Bill, but to act radically and to act right now.

Building Safety Bill

Daniel Zeichner Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 21st July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab) [V]]

The Bill is both welcome in that we have waited for it for so long and totally unwelcome in that we all know it will not solve so many of the problems. On behalf of so many of my constituents who have been locked in an absolute nightmare, I am incandescent with rage about the Government’s utter hopelessness, and I am not the only one.

MPs across the House will have had the same conversations and same site visits. A couple of years ago, for me it was Berkeley Homes and its hugely expensive properties in the centre of Cambridge. They were lovely looking properties but catastrophically poorly constructed—so much so that they literally had to be taken apart. As that was done, it revealed the slapdash built on the cavalier. There were joists hanging in the air not connected to anything, pipes not connected, and waste water expected to run uphill. When exasperated purchasers looked to those who had made a fortune out of them to offer some help, they were met with a wall of denial and obfuscation—the only reliably sound wall. What about the National House Building Council and other organisations supposedly there to provide redress? They were partners in crime. Unbelievable, one might have thought. Where was the local building control? That had been outsourced, too. Rip-off Tory Britain, complete with massive bungs from those developers.

We used to think that other countries had corrupt systems. I am afraid that is what we have here—a corrupt, broken system. The question is: do the measures in the Bill give any hope for the future? The new homes ombudsman has been awaited for almost as long as I have been in this place—goodness knows how many times it has been promised—and if it is finally going to happen, that is good, but there is nothing here to address past failures.

I named one developer in Cambridge, but frankly I could name most of them. Barratt, Countryside, Bovis—it is a lost list of shame. Twice in the past few weeks I have been in Trumpington with distraught residents looking at sloppy work and areas left unfinished. The skate park got the developer its planning permission, but now the kids have to scramble over fences and fight through weedy undergrowth and past dead trees—they were never watered—to get to it. No one ever takes responsibility because everything is subcontracted. How convenient. The only problem is that the unfortunate residents cannot subcontract living there. Maybe we should arrange a house swap with some of those who have made such rich pickings.

There is so much more to be said, but let me make one observation raised by the Local Government Association on the provision for duty holders to choose their building control regulator. As the LGA says:

“By requiring regulators to remain in competition with ‘approved inspectors’ for the majority of buildings, the Bill leaves in place one of the root causes of the current crisis.”

Absolutely it does that. It beggars belief that that should be allowed to continue. The LGA goes on:

“Compliance with regulation cannot be a commodity and local authority building control should not be left to tackle non-compliance in buildings over 18m while simultaneously having to compete with private businesses for work in out of scope buildings, often owned by the same developers.”

Let us think about compliance with regulations as a commodity—it really is absurd. I want independence. It really is not complicated. The fact that the Conservative party cannot grasp that simple fact goes to the heart of why it is totally unfit to be in charge.

Planning

Daniel Zeichner Excerpts

Thursday 15th July 2021 Westminster Hall

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure, Mrs Cummins, to serve with you in the chair. I congratulate the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) on securing this debate. I agree with his opening comments on the broken housing system and the stranglehold of the volume house buildings.

It is also a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby). It was east Devon where Labour secured a memorable by-election win last week. I congratulate councillor Jake Bonetta and the Labour team. It is, perhaps, wins such as these that are sending a shudder through the Government at the moment. Perhaps this is why the Prime Minister today ignored the unveiling of the hugely important national food strategy, in favour of trying to reassure Conservative MPs in the south that planning changes are not the political dynamite they fear. However, he has a job on, because if the mantra is “build, build, build”, and one characterises those who care about our countryside as newt counters, then one can hardly be surprised when they turn away to people who take a more considered view. It is not only in Devon: many newspaper columns have been written about the battle going on in Horsham, where the legendary Knepp estate fears that Horsham District Council will approve thousands of homes, while the council says that central Government have put it in this position.

We all agree that there is a problem with the current system, but many of us are deeply suspicious of the suggestions put forward in the planning White Paper last year, not least when one sees the level of donations made by developers to the Conservative party. According to The Times, the developer behind the plan at Knepp, Thakeham, has donated more than £600,000 to the Conservatives since 2017. “Build, build, build”—it is not hard to see why. Be in no doubt that I want people housed, I want affordable homes, I want council homes and I want homes of high environmental quality, none of which has been achieved by this Government.

There is much more to be said about planning and housing than can be said in three minutes, but I will highlight one glaring contradiction in Government policy that remains unresolved. I have challenged Ministers on this repeatedly and will try again today. In the Government’s much-delayed but initially worthy Environment Act 2020, there are good proposals to secure biodiversity net gain. They may not be as ambitious as some of us would like, and we have raised some practical concerns, but the principle is right and we support it. However, no one on the Government side has been able to explain how to get biodiversity net gain in a zonal planning system. When challenged, they evade the question. I do not blame them, because there is no obvious answer.

That is not me saying that; it is the planning experts. I refer to an excellent piece in The Planner last summer by Huw Morris, who asked how individual schemes will be environmentally assessed to provide the mitigation. They will not, will they, Minister? That is one reason why Conservative MPs are right to be worried. People in England want homes, and homes for their children, but they want our precious land protected too. I just say: beware the Prime Minister’s bulldozer—it is out of control and it is coming for some green space near you.

Planning Decisions: Local Involvement

Daniel Zeichner Excerpts

Monday 21st June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Christopher Pincher]

I hope that my hon. Friend’s council does listen, and I also hope, for that matter, that the Greater Manchester Mayor listens. We have given them £75 million of public funds to invest in brownfield remediation. Let him use it effectively for his constituents in Greater Manchester.

Individual planning applications can take up to five years to determine, in addition to plans potentially taking up to seven years. The system is not fast enough and it is not consistent, nor is it clear or engaging enough. We are committed to improving the system, because our reforms will protect our valuable and beautiful green spaces, with vital protections for the green belt.

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

The Government’s Environment Bill rightly protects environmental net gain. How can that possibly work within a zonal planning system?

[Christopher Pincher]

We are determined to bake in biodiversity net gain of 10%. We are determined to look at recovery networks and also to ensure that we introduce a future homes standard. We will make sure that, baked into these plans and beyond, the environment comes first and foremost. I shall say a few more words about that in a moment.