Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Danny Kruger Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 9th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Tom Hayes]

My hon. Friend and I have talked many times about the importance of inclusive play, and I commend her as a fantastic champion for children with special educational needs and disabilities to access those play opportunities. I agree with her entirely, and one thing that my new clause 82 would do is to introduce a requirement for planning authorities to assess play sufficiency, particularly inclusive play sufficiency. That is a critically important point.

In a nutshell, we need to have national policy frameworks and national planning actions that will ensure that the voices of children and their families are properly listened to, that they are consulted on their needs, and that planning authorities are required and supported to introduce the outdoor play equipment and areas that can so enhance their life chances. In so doing, we would be building on the work of that last Labour Government that I was just talking about. If you ever want to enjoy a beautiful photograph that sums up all of what the last Labour Government were doing, have a look at Ed Balls and Andy Burnham on a swing announcing the 2008 national play strategy. It is a fantastic sight. Genuinely, you can see in their faces the joy that comes from play and extending play opportunities. You can see that they are Ministers who are fantastically enjoying their jobs, and that is because they are delivering for children. That 2008 strategy was a critical development in the world of play, and the play sector responded so positively to it. It came with £235 million of investment to provide up to 3,500 new or refurbished playgrounds. I still get sent photographs by people who have seen those playgrounds with the Department for Children, Schools and Families logo on them, with its beautiful rainbow, and we should have more of that.

To conclude, this Bill is critical for children’s development. This is also a pro-growth new clause because we have in our play sector small family businesses who contribute to our economy to the tune of £250 million and are powering employment and economic opportunity in our communities. Our country feels like it needs a lick of paint at times. We need potholes filling, we need litter collecting and we need playgrounds repairing. In so doing, we can bring hope back to our communities, and in doing that we can help people to feel positive about the potential for politics to make change.

[Danny Kruger (East Wiltshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Tom Hayes). That was an important speech and I concur entirely with his priority there. It is really important that we invest in the social infrastructure of play for the benefit of children, although not necessarily for the benefit of Ed Balls and Andy Burnham—an appalling image was conjured by the hon. Gentleman there—but I concur with his general point.

I want to speak in support of my new clause 87, which would require the Government to designate more chalk streams as protected sites within six months of the Bill passing. We know that 85% of the world’s chalk streams are in this country. There are only 220 of them, so they are a rare and very special habitat. Most of those chalk streams are in southern England, and I am glad to say that most of the most important ones are in Wiltshire. Morgan’s Hill on the edge of my constituency is a hydrological dividing line where a drop of rain can end up in the River Kennet and then the Thames, flowing out to the North sea. Alternatively it can go down the Hampshire Avon into the English channel, or it can go out west along the Bristol Avon and end up in the Atlantic. This is a very significant place, with water from Wiltshire flowing through the whole of southern England.

Those chalk streams are 60 million years old and they have flowed clear and clean all that time until very recently in the modern era. They are over-abstracted; too much water is being taken out because of overdevelopment and bad house building. They are contaminated with agricultural run-off and, of course, sewage spills. I pay tribute and give my sincere congratulations to all the campaigners in my constituency. We will all have similar organisations locally, but Action for the River Kennet in particular is doing great work to support that river and anglers, schools and farmers in our area. I also pay tribute to the Southern Streams initiative that supports farmers across Wiltshire to restore the health of the soil and the water in our area.

The last Government introduced some important new measures to restore and preserve the health of our chalk streams. These included the water restoration fund, which ensured that the fines levied on water companies for sewage spills went to restore nature in the areas that had been harmed. We introduced a storm overflow discharge reduction plan, stewardship schemes that addressed the question of agricultural run-off and, in the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023, we ensured that chalk streams were considered as part of environmental assessments for new developments. We also introduced the chalk streams recovery plan, which was sadly halted by the Labour Government when they came into power last year. They kept some of our legacy, I am glad to say, but they have paused the sustainable farming incentive and I am afraid to say that we expect cuts to stewardship schemes in the spending review this week. Crucially, they scrapped the water restoration fund itself. Thames Water was fined over £100 million last month because of sewage spills in our area. That money should have gone to supporting natural restoration in the Thames Valley area, including in Wiltshire. It has been taken by the Treasury. We do not know where that money will go. The Government have also scrapped the chalk stream recovery plan.

My concern about the Bill, and why I tabled the amendment, is that it will put additional pressure on our chalk streams. Yes, we need new building—absolutely, that priority is right and what we need—and building in our backyard, but the backyard of Wiltshire is Swindon. We need to see more intense development in urban areas where the real demand for housing is. That will be a great blessing to Swindon and Wiltshire if we can make that happen.

The new clause in my name would protect more chalk streams as protected sites. I am glad to say that the Kennet and the Hampshire Avon are already SSSIs, but we need to see more streams designated in that way. It is not enough to protect only 11 of the 220 chalk streams in this country; the more designations, the better. That would create genuine momentum behind the preservation of chalk streams, so that when developments are being considered, we can be sure that these vital national natural assets are properly protected for the future.