Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Debate between Greg Smith and Chris Curtis

2nd reading
Monday 24th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Greg Smith (Mid Buckinghamshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Barking (Nesil Caliskan) in what is a critical and important debate that will affect my constituency in Mid Buckinghamshire very deeply. Back Benchers on both sides of the House have made some sensible suggestions in this debate. I particularly support the points made on the protection of chalk streams, which is important to my constituency as well. But I have deep concerns about the tone of the Bill and some of the rhetoric underneath its defence. I would categorise it as a Bill that does things to communities, particularly rural communities, as opposed to with them.

The Minister can probably predict some of the things I am about to say, as we sat on the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill Committee in the last Parliament together over very many weeks and with many, many housing Ministers over that period. I will not apologise, however, for representing my constituents who, time after time, are fed up to the back teeth of losing our rural identity and our rural character due to the constant flow of housing and infrastructure projects that devastate our countryside and the rural identity of Buckinghamshire.

[Chris Curtis]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Greg Smith]

Before I give way to the hon. Gentleman, I just want to say that we in Buckinghamshire feel that we have probably already done our bit with a new town, as it is now a 250,000-population city called Milton Keynes. With that, I will give way to the hon. Member for Milton Keynes North (Chris Curtis).

[Chris Curtis]

I recently visited my 93-year-old grandmother, who was a constituent living in rural Buckinghamshire back in the 1960s. At that time, she expressed many of the concerns that he has just expressed about a city being built around her rural community, but if you ask her now, she will tell you about the fantastic opportunities that Milton Keynes gave to her children and grandchildren, to the point where one of them is now sitting on these Benches able to make speeches and interventions. Sometimes we need to have change and development, and sometimes we need to support it.

[Greg Smith]

I understand the point that the hon. Gentleman is making. Milton Keynes is very close to me. I visit Milton Keynes all the time. I have many friends in Milton Keynes. It is a great city. However, a line in the sand has to be drawn as to the amount of our countryside, our farmland and our food-producing land that we allow to be lost to development of whatever kind.

My hon. Friend the Member for South Leicestershire (Alberto Costa), in his speech earlier, reeled off a list of things that were already happening in his constituency, where they are already playing their part. In my own constituency, while we have had concerns about a lot of it, there has been an enormous list of things. The amount of house building in Buckinghamshire has been extraordinary. The village of Haddenham is unrecognisable from what it was because of the sheer volume of new house building that has gone on there. There are also incinerators, and we are about to get a new prison. Despite our objections, HS2 has ravaged the middle of the constituency. It is not as though Buckinghamshire has not done anything.