(3 years, 8 months ago)
Commons ChamberUrgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
That is an important question, and it is exactly why we are doing fundamental business rates reform. The first stage of the consultation has ended, and we will respond in the new year, but we need to have a comprehensive approach to tackle this both online and offline.
The Risborough basket is an innovative scheme founded by Princes Risborough Town Council in my constituency, with a mission to keep the pound in the town, enabling local shoppers to buy from small independent retailers and have their purchases personally delivered. It is a real boost to those high street businesses, but in setting up the scheme, they have come across a number of regulatory burdens. Will my hon. Friend join me in congratulating everyone who set up the Risborough basket and commit to working with them, so that we can get rid of those regulatory burdens and ensure that such schemes can help high streets up and down the land?
The Risborough basket is one of those brutally simple schemes that are from the grassroots up. It is fantastic to hear about that innovation, and I would love to see what we can do to spread it across the country, never mind working with the council to get rid of some of the burdens in bureaucracy and regulation to help it prosper.
(3 years, 9 months ago)
Commons ChamberWe are committed to levelling up through further devolution, but our focus must be on tackling covid-19. I know that Buckinghamshire Council has worked tirelessly throughout this pandemic to support its community, helped by £32 million in additional covid funding. We intend to bring forward the devolution and local recovery White Paper in due course, detailing how the UK Government will partner with places across the country to build a sustainable economic recovery.
I thank my hon. Friend for that question. He is right to raise this hugely important issue, and I was pleased to meet him and other colleagues from Buckinghamshire just the week before last. We are extremely grateful to the council for submitting its proposal, and I know my officials are looking at it closely. As I have said, we will set out details about our approach to devolution in the White Paper. I absolutely agree that our officials should meet as soon as possible to discuss this proposal in greater depth.
I thank the Minister for his answers, and particularly for his praise of Buckinghamshire Council throughout the pandemic. I agree with him entirely that the focus must be on recovery from covid-19, and that is precisely at the nub of the devolution proposals that Buckinghamshire has put together. Therefore, will my hon. Friend agree to meet the Buckinghamshire MPs, Buckinghamshire Council and all of our partners to look at the detail of this proposal, which could put £10 billion extra into the UK economy, both to get the right deal for Buckinghamshire and to help shape the White Paper?
I thank my hon. Friend. It was a pleasure to meet him recently to discuss this and other matters in Buckinghamshire. I would be delighted to have that meeting. As I say, I think our officials should meet to discuss the proposal, and then let us get together with the council very soon to take it further.
(3 years, 9 months ago)
Commons ChamberUrgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Actually, I thank the hon. Gentleman for raising the issue in his constituency. It is true, and I am sure I speak for everyone across the House, that every one of us really feels sadness and regret when we see any individual sleeping rough in a tent, a box or whatever. It is just not satisfactory. That is why this Government have committed to ending rough sleeping, and why we have put in this unprecedented level of support to achieve that goal. My challenge is to keep working with those local authorities to deliver on that promise.
I welcome the funding that my hon. Friend has outlined for councils, including over £1.6 million for Buckinghamshire Council to provide accommodation for people at risk of rough sleeping. Can she confirm how many additional such homes the Government intend to fund by the end of this Parliament?
I thank my hon. Friend and I am glad that we were able to allocate funding to Buckinghamshire to deliver on those programmes. At the moment—this is our first tranche, obviously—we are delivering 3,300 homes by the end of March 2021 and that is within our commitment to deliver over 6,000. We will continue to work, as I keep repeating—I am sorry, Mr Speaker—with local authorities, because we have to be very clear that each individual area is very different. The drivers, challenges and needs in those areas are so different, as are the needs of the individuals. It is so important that, when we are announcing these things and making policy, we are making sure we are delivering policy that does actually achieve the ambitions we want to achieve.
(3 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberI am grateful for the contributions of all 39 right hon. and hon. Members who have spoken today, and I do not for a minute underestimate the insight and the wisdom that I have heard, not least that of my hon. Friend the Member for Hazel Grove (Mr Wragg) in his very kind but entirely unsolicited testimonial during his remarks.
I hope that we will not lose sight of where we have come from, because this Government have delivered more than one and a half million new homes since 2010. We have built more than 241,000 in England in the past year alone. This year, we will announce a £12.3 billion package of affordable homes, which will see more than 50% of them delivered at discounted rent. We will take no lectures from representatives of the Opposition: we built more council homes in one year than they built in the entire 13 years. In Wales, they managed to build just 12 council homes last year—not even enough homes for a Welsh rugby team.
We can be rightly proud of our success, particularly as it has been achieved despite a slow and outdated planning process. We are determined to deliver on our manifesto commitment and deliver 300,000 new homes each year by the mid-2020s in the areas that really need them to meet that most fundamental Conservative value to own our own home and to have a stake in the country and the future of it. We want more people, especially younger people, to realise that aspiration. We also want to enhance our environment, protecting our green belt, increasing biodiversity and safeguarding our precious green spaces.
In that spirit, will my right hon. Friend, as he looks at the consultation responses, make a commitment to giving a measure of consideration to those of us in constituencies such as mine and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Rob Butler), where we have had national infrastructure like HS2 forced through us, and take that into account when it comes to further development land that is required?
I am obliged to my hon. Friend. I shall certainly look very closely at the representations on the consultation that he makes.
The Prime Minister has made it absolutely clear that we have to be bold in our vision for the future of planning in our country. That is why we have put forward two sets of proposals for consultation to address our needs both in the short term and the longer term. The first, on changes to our current planning system and local housing need calculations, closed last week. The second, on our White Paper “Planning for the Future”, which sets out our long-term ambitions, closes on 29 October.
Our long-term proposals will create a reformed system that not only delivers the homes that we need but puts communities at the heart of a process that encourages more local community involvement, fairer contributions from developers, more beautiful homes and communities, and stronger environmental outcomes.
(4 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberI would be delighted to discuss with the hon. Gentleman that masterplan and to learn more of its details. It is extremely important to us that we not only build more homes, but tackle substandard homes in all parts of the country. That means making them greener and, in some cases, regenerating parts of towns and cities that desperately need it. That will be a focus both for our planning reforms and future investment.
I am extremely pleased that leisure centres will be able to open shortly, in a safe and socially distanced manner. The income guarantee scheme that we have already announced will reimburse local councils for 75p in the pound for lost income, including for the leisure centres that they own and operate themselves. I appreciate that many leisure centres are not owned and operated by local councils; I am working with my right hon. Friend the Culture Secretary to see what further package of support we might be able to bring forward to assist.
(4 years, 2 months ago)
Commons ChamberUrgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Thank you, Mr Speaker. I am very happy to answer the hon. Gentleman’s question, and certainly never question your judgment.
The hon. Gentleman asked first about the nature of the decision of the Secretary of State for a redetermination. The Secretary of State, with the support of the Mayor of Tower Hamlets and others in the local planning authority, believed the best course of action was for a swift redetermination of this particular issue. The way to achieve that, technically in law, is to accept the action that was brought by the local authority to the court. That is why the Secretary of State made the decision that he did.
The hon. Gentleman also asked whether the Secretary of State acted properly and with propriety in making clear to the Department all discussions that he has had with applicants; yes, he did. At all times he has disclosed any conversations that he has had with applicants.
The hon. Gentleman also requests me to describe my right hon. Friend’s relationship with the applicant. My right hon. Friend has no relationship with the applicant, so that question is irrelevant. Both the applicant and the local authority have asked my right hon. Friend to make a site visit. My right hon. Friend, in discussion with officials in our Department, weighed up the pros and cons of such a site visit and decided against.
As for the decision on 14 January, which is outlined publicly and which the hon. Gentleman and other hon. Members can see online, that decision is all very clear. There were no discussions about the CIL issue between my right hon. Friend and the applicant. My right hon. Friend has been very clear about his involvement with the applicant. I do not think anything further needs to be added.
The applicant has, I think, paid for tickets to a Conservative party event. That is apparently where the funds came from. Ministers have no knowledge of funds provided to political parties through donations or through payment for tickets. These are spendings made by donors which go to parties of all persuasions. They are declared in the proper and usual way. None of this is known to Ministers, and none of it is discussed by Ministers. It certainly was not discussed on this occasion.
When it comes to planning, nowhere offers greater opportunity for house building, of all tenure types, than here in the capital, yet a total lack of ambition by the Labour-run City Hall leaves a shortfall. What steps can my right hon. Friend outline to get the planning system working in London?
One reason why my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has called in the Mayor’s plan is that we believe it to be insufficient; it has a paucity of ambition for the sorts of houses and the number of houses we need in London. By his own admission, the Mayor is missing his own target. The reason why this particular application came before my right hon. Friend was the failure of the local authority to properly determine upon it. He came to the conclusion that it should go ahead because of the number of homes and of affordable homes that were going to be built—the sorts of homes the Mayor of London is not building.
(4 years, 5 months ago)
Commons ChamberThe fund will operate like the 18-metre ACM fund, in that it will be available only for the costs of the remediation works themselves, not for any service charge fees that might be incurred in the interim. We want to see this work done as quickly as possible, because I am very conscious of the fact that those waking watches are causing meaningful costs to people. There are cases where people are finding it extremely difficult to meet those costs.
I warmly welcome my right hon. Friend’s words on the presumption of brownfield development. Will he give me an assurance that councils such as Aylesbury Vale District Council in my constituency, which are high in the league table for new-build housing, at significant loss to our countryside, will not be pressured, so long as we bring forward all of the brownfield developments in Buckinghamshire?
We want to support and reward the many councils across the country that are making often difficult decisions to allocate land, aggressively build out brownfield sites, re-imagine town centres and, above all, meet the local housing need of their communities. We want to encourage those that are failing to meet the housing needs of their communities to take such a lead, because it is not fair that people are not able to live and bring up their family in their own communities. That causes housing pressure to be pushed out to other areas, perhaps such as the one my hon. Friend represents, forcing the building of even more homes and putting even more pressure on local services and the countryside in some parts of the country, particularly in the south-east.
(4 years, 6 months ago)
Commons ChamberI warmly welcome my right hon. Friend’s statement, and thank him in particular for the £576,000 that has been awarded following a joint bid from Aylesbury Vale and Wycombe District Councils, which cover my constituency along with Chiltern and South Bucks. Does he agree that we need to encourage more councils to work together to tackle homelessness, not least so that they can build the strongest possible partnerships with charities and specialist service providers, which do not necessarily organise according to council boundaries?
I agree entirely with my hon. Friend. There are some fantastic councils across the country, and today’s figures would not have been achieved without them. I pay tribute to them, and encourage them to continue to learn from each other and work with voluntary groups, with charities and, of course, with the Government. If there is anything further that we can do to assist my hon. Friend and his colleagues in Buckinghamshire, we will certainly do it.
(4 years, 7 months ago)
Commons ChamberMay I welcome the real-terms increase for local authorities over the next two years, which is the result of our balanced approach to the economy? Will my hon. Friend update the House on the steps his Department is taking to make councils more efficient?
May I welcome my hon. Friend to his place in the House? He is already looking to be a champion for his community. We are of course working with local authorities to make sure that they can become more efficient, especially in respect of digital transformation. My hon. Friend’s local authority and those throughout the country will have access in the coming year to the 4.4% real-terms rise in core spending power.