Economic Growth

Elliot Colburn Excerpts

Tuesday 14th November 2023 Commons Chamber

[Elliot Colburn (Carshalton and Wallington) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak in the first King’s Speech debate in nearly 70 years. I looked back at my comments during the last Humble Address debate, where the Government promised to make hundreds of millions of pounds-worth of upgrades to my local hospital and construct a new specialist emergency care hospital. I am grateful that the first set of funds has now been released for that.

The King’s Speech contains a lot to be welcomed, including the Media Bill, the draft rail reform Bill, the Renters (Reform) Bill, the Sentencing Bill and the Victims and Prisoners Bill. Turning however to the theme of today’s debate, securing high, sustained economic growth in every part of the country, I commend the Government for focusing on economic growth. Only with economic growth can we pay for those public services that our constituents rely on, and I want to touch on a few of those today.

I will start with rail. Although Carshalton and Wallington is in a London borough, it is one of the worst-connected parts of Greater London and would hugely benefit from a more efficient rail network to enable people to travel not just in and out of central London, but across London as well—a fact consistently lost on the Mayor of London, as we consistently come last out of all 32 London boroughs for investment from this Mayor. I invite the Government to look again at the redistribution of funding from HS2, to see whether any of that funding can be allocated to the Croydon area remodelling scheme to unlock the Brighton mainline and deliver improvements on that important link.

Moving on, I want to talk about being safe online. Many of my constituents raise with me issues including scams on social media platforms such as Meta. I look forward to seeing how the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill will be able to bring back consumer confidence online and provide a robust legal framework so that people can trust the services provided to them.

I want to touch on other elements of the King’s Speech. I welcome the Government’s ambition to make people’s safety and security paramount for the next parliamentary Session. That is particularly salient in Carshalton and Wallington, where the Mayor of London continues to fail to grasp the problem of violent crime in the capital. He promised a violence reduction unit, but we are yet to see any details of that unit’s operations or what effect it has had. We have recently seen a number of attacks locally, including an horrendous knife attack on the Roundshaw estate.

Many of my constituents are waiting with bated breath to see how the Criminal Justice Bill will tackle the scourge that is knife crime and violent crime. Tougher sentencing is an important step forward, but I remind those on the Treasury Front Bench of my interest in restorative justice and the part that that could play in breaking the cycle of reoffending. I look forward to the conclusion of the Victims and Prisoners Bill, and I hope that a right to access restorative justice services will be included in it so that we can help people to break the cycle of reoffending. Of course, punishment must be part of that as well, and creating a criminal offence for the possession of a bladed article with intent to cause harm will help to take more knives off our streets and stop the next generation taking up knives in the first place.

Lastly, let me touch briefly on the Renters (Reform) Bill, which will affect many of my constituents and many Londoners. I hear from many renters that there is no way of holding their landlords to account and that housing quality is not kept up to standard. The privately rented property portal will, I hope, be able to provide some security for tenants. Landlords will also benefit from the Bill, as they will be able to evict antisocial tenants more easily and disputes will be quicker and easier to resolve. I hope that, as the Bill makes progress through the House, we bring more harmony between landlords and tenants, and make the UK a much safer place in which to live and rent, cracking down on wrongdoers while supporting innovators.

Overall, I very much welcome the measures in the King’s Speech. I absolutely welcome the Government’s focus on and commitment to economic growth because—to repeat what I said at the beginning of my remarks—without economic growth, through backing wealth creators and entrepreneurs, we will not see the improvement in public services that we desperately want.