Housing Costs: Government Support

Debate between Jayne Kirkham and Andrew George

Wednesday 21st October 2026 Westminster Hall

[Andrew George]

The hon. Lady makes a very good point. I will come to the extremely difficult decisions that any Government need to make about how this policy adds up with the available resource. Certainly, if one wants to avoid driving private landlords out of the market altogether, one has to form an understanding of how the market works. I entirely agree with the principle of what the hon. Lady is saying, and I will come to how we can how we can pay for these things. That is a very difficult question, which Opposition politicians generally avoid, instead asking for more money, while not necessarily explaining where they will get it from.

My primary message is that current Government policy is not working. It is driving the poorest into debt, food banks, homelessness and, in many cases, sadly, destitution. I have a number of questions for the Minister, which I sent to him in advance. If the Government know that a person’s private rental is bound to be at least x, why in my area of Kernow West, when the Valuation Office Agency assesses these factors, is the benefit level set at x minus 30% to 40%? That leaves people in the kind of poverty I described in the two cases I mentioned earlier. Have the Government reviewed the adequacy of the present methodology for LHA calculations, and are Ministers confident that the present arrangements do not risk tipping families and individuals in areas of high-priced private rental accommodation into rent arrears and potential destitution?

I understand that the Valuation Office Agency collects the rental data from landlords to determine the LHA, but how accurate and up to date is that data? Is the VOA using historical cases, where people have been living in accommodation for a very long time, and where the data would not reflect the price of that accommodation were it to come back on to the market? The Government need to answer many questions about this issue. I know the Minister is sympathetic.

One example was raised with me by Citizens Advice Cornwall. A family in Penzance consisting of either a couple or a single parent with two children of different sexes, one of whom is 10, meaning the children need separate bedrooms, would technically require a three-bedroomed house. Local housing allowance states that they can have a maximum of £812.76 per month. According to Rightmove last night, the lowest price for a privately rented three-bedroomed house in the Penzance area, a few miles away in Marazion, is £1,800, making a gap of £987.24 per month for that family. I could go through a large number of cases, but I do not have time now.

[Jayne Kirkham (Truro and Falmouth) (Lab/Co-op)]

I want to make an important but related point. Emergency and temporary accommodation in Cornwall is also extremely expensive because of the seasonal nature of things, and particularly because of the holiday let industry. That adds to the burden on councils and tenants.

[Andrew George]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady from the next neighbouring constituency for raising that issue.

I was going to make the point that although there were over 1,700 Airbnbs available in my constituency last night—and that is just Airbnbs, not all holiday lets—there were zero private rental properties available within the LHA rates when we checked on how the market is operating. I will come on to how we will pay for any kind of increase, but the reason why I compare those properties with holiday lets is that for the last 10, 12 or 13 years, we have been paying out multibillions to second home owners through small business rate relief and other tax loopholes that are available to people with second properties. Local people do not get any small business rate relief. The people with second properties who do not let them to local people, and flip from paying council tax to business rates, are able to apply for small business rate relief and pay nothing at all. In Cornwall alone, that has cost over half a billion pounds in the last decade.

If the Government want to invest in desperately needed homes for local people, they may well incentivise private landlords by providing tax concessions to those who provide decent homes with security and an agreed, negotiated rent cap to bring it within the scope of what is affordable. That would be a far better way of spending the Government’s resources.

I urge the Minister to look carefully at the issues I have raised. I urge him to look at ending the freeze of local housing allowance rates, to restore and maintain the link between local housing allowance and the 30th percentile of the local market, to commit to an annual LHA uprating, to introduce measures to mitigate the impact of the benefit cap, and to continue wider housing reforms, such as, as the Government want to, delivering more social housing. I hope he will consider those matters, but now I want to give time for others to speak.

Rail Connections to London: Rural Towns

Debate between Jayne Kirkham and Andrew George

Monday 23rd March 2026 Commons Chamber

[Andrew George]

I am enormously grateful to the hon. Member for making that point about vulnerability. At a number of points where the line is singled out—not just at Dawlish—a fire can have catastrophic consequences for the thousands of people seeking to travel on that day. One of my members of staff attempted to travel from Bristol down to the Lizard yesterday afternoon, and instead of that journey taking three hours it took over 11 hours. So often we hear those stories, especially about travelling to the far west of Cornwall—the further west we go, the more affected we are by those vulnerabilities.

My message to the Minister is that if we are to invest in the future of rail, what we really want is reliability, comfort, low pricing and space for people’s luggage. I know that the business community in Plymouth has previously lobbied to say, “If only we could take half an hour off the journey, it would change the economic perception of the city,” but taking half an hour off a five-hour journey means nothing to people in the far west of Cornwall. We also want reliability on the services so that the toilets do not constantly break down and people do not have to sit in the vestibule.

[Jayne Kirkham]

Of course, superfast satellite wi-fi has been tested on our part of the line. Although we have slow trains, we have the opportunity for fast wi-fi to be rolled out, so that while people will be sat on their trains for five and a half hours, they can at least work or watch a film.

[Andrew George]

Indeed, I was going to come to that point. Busy Members of Parliament, or other people engaged in busy lives, sat on that train do not want those five hours to be dead time in the working day. Reliable wi-fi services can allow people to continue their working days with online meetings and communication as they travel. However, at present, on the vast majority of services the wi-fi is often interrupted and is very unreliable. In contrast to the many billions of pounds required to achieve the HS2 standards set by successive Governments for north-south connectivity, in many parts of the country it would cost significantly less—many millions of pounds—to achieve the kind of comfort, resilience, reliability, superfast wi-fi and competitive pricing that I have described to the Minister this evening.

Extreme Climate and Weather Events: National Resilience

Debate between Jayne Kirkham and Andrew George

Tuesday 10th March 2026 Commons Chamber

[Jayne Kirkham]

The hon. Member feels my pain. Yes, of course we need a strategic plan for our rail in the south-west. That is fundamental, and I will come on to it later.

[Andrew George (St Ives) (LD)]

The hon. Member mentioned Storm Goretti. She and I attended the online meeting on storm recovery with Ministers two days after the event. What troubled me in that meeting was the culture that exists among service providers, and indeed Government Departments, of always seeking to reassure Ministers that everything is under control and presenting a very different picture from the one that I was seeing on the ground in west Cornwall, where my constituency was the worst hit. Does she agree that, following Storm Goretti, we need to ensure that we genuinely learn lessons about what actually happened on the ground and how we can recover best and put the right resources in place to help communities in future?

[Jayne Kirkham]

I understand the hon. Member’s point, and I know that his constituency was the worst affected, with people losing their water as well as their power. I agree that we must learn the lessons from Goretti.

Utility teams worked around the clock with local authorities, engineers and emergency responders to restore essential services. National Grid brought in 1,350 staff from all across the country, and tree surgeons were deployed, but we saw failures in the systems designed to keep people safe. The storm was a wake-up call. It exposed vulnerabilities in our infrastructure and emergency planning that could affect anywhere in the UK as extreme weather becomes more frequent.

Holiday and Second Homes Regulation: Cornwall and Isles of Scilly

Debate between Jayne Kirkham and Andrew George

Wednesday 23rd October 2024 Westminster Hall

[Andrew George]

That is absolutely the case. As a visitor to the Isles of Scilly, my hon. Friend knows that that is a significant problem, because people cannot commute to the Isles of Scilly to work. It is difficult to commute to work for businesses providing those kinds of jobs in many of the coastal areas around Cornwall, and many people find themselves living in very informal settings, including caravans, because nothing else is available to them.

I will rapidly run through some of the regulations concerned: council tax; small business rate relief; the furnished holiday lettings scheme; holiday business registration, which the last Government proposed, and the planning use class changes. First, on council tax, going back to the pre-history where this all originated, when the Conservatives originally introduced the council tax system—what they called the community charge—they introduced a 50% council tax discount for second homes, because they said second home owners were not using all the services and therefore should not have to pay for them. That was the justification back in the 1990s.

[Jayne Kirkham (Truro and Falmouth) (Lab/Co-op)]

The hon. Member mentioned some of the solutions. Would it not be a good idea to consider giving a suite of powers to a local authority so they could pick and choose which of those would suit that local authority and those particular circumstances?

Renewable Energy: Cornwall

Debate between Jayne Kirkham and Andrew George

Tuesday 22nd October 2024 Westminster Hall

[Jayne Kirkham]

The hon. Gentleman is quite correct. My point is that Cornwall has some catching up to do with other parts of the country, but I am aware that other parts of the UK are in the same situation.

The Secretaries of State for the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero and for the Department for Business and Trade visited my constituency and that of my neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Camborne and Redruth (Perran Moon), earlier this year, and met businesses with solutions in the marine, geo, tidal and wind spheres. The breadth of the innovation in Cornwall is huge. However, the sector needs investment along with the ambition and determination, and a long-term strategy from Government to make that vision a reality.

Under the previous Government, there was a de facto ban on onshore wind. Of planning applications for onshore wind turbines over 150 kW in Cornwall since January 2015, only one was successful in planning and has since become operational. I am very pleased that one of the first things this Government did was to end that ban on onshore wind. Community energy projects did not receive much support from the previous Government either. The rural community energy fund was only open from 2019 to 2022, and there were no new funding sources for urban community energy projects after that, except from local government.

[Andrew George (St Ives) (LD)]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for giving way and for the case she is making today. I fully endorse everything she has said. She mentioned the previous Government’s effective ban on onshore wind: does she agree that the Conservative Government also scrapped sustainable homes regulations and other regulations, setting us back many years? We have a lot of time to make up. In Cornwall especially, there is significant enthusiasm to accelerate the pace so that we can become the green peninsula and be recognised for that throughout the UK.

[Jayne Kirkham]

I thank the hon. Member. That is true particularly around standards on homes, where our local solutions for ground source heating could have been made more of in the past and have obviously now been delayed for that reason.

The feed-in tariffs introduced by the previous Labour Government were reduced several times by the last Government and then finally ended in 2019. Despite that, the community energy sector is resilient and has continued to grow. In my constituency, Ladock won the low carbon communities challenge, and Low Carbon Ladock was given £500,000 under one of the last Governments, which it invested in solar panels on homes, biomass boilers, and ground-source and air-source heat systems. It has been able to put the profits into things for the community, such as safer school crossings, playing fields and more renewables.

The current state of play in Cornwall is that there are 104 wind turbines, 88 solar projects and two operational geothermal sites. Twenty-two projects have been granted planning permission in 2023-24 to date, including one geothermal, one onshore wind, eight battery and 12 solar photovoltaic projects. A further 22 projects have submitted planning applications in 2023-24, three of which are geothermal, four onshore wind, six battery and nine solar.

Housing: Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly

Debate between Jayne Kirkham and Andrew George

Monday 9th September 2024 Commons Chamber

[Jayne Kirkham]

I thank the hon. Member for his intervention. I will shortly move on to some of the ways in which we can deal with the proliferation of second homes and holiday lets, and address the imbalance.

I want to reinforce the point that the hon. Member for St Ives made about the tax loophole. I think £18 million is now lost in council tax because so many housing providers have taken advantage of the loophole whereby they can claim business grants and the zero rate of exemption, rather than pay council tax, if their houses are let out for 10 weeks of the year. As the hon. Member said, so much money was lost in business grants during covid. I think £170 million in business grants went to properties that were registered as holiday lets.

I want to mention my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard), who cannot speak in this debate. He has worked hard with us in Cornwall on the issue of protecting first homes, rather than second homes, and he has supported us, as I know that the same issue applies up in Devon. We have spoken with the Minister about potentially having a toolkit of measures that could be used to deal with issues relating to second homes and holiday lets. I know that our Government will introduce one of those measures: the licensing of holiday lets, hopefully with fees and safety checks on those lets, which is not done at the moment—some properties are not checked for fire safety, or for safety in any way. That is a massive loophole that needs to be dealt with.

The hon. Member for St Ives talked about planning requirements. The previous Government had a review on introducing a use class for holiday lets—but then did not do very much about it—so that is one possible measure. The default could be second home owners having to apply for a change of use if they flip their homes to holiday lets.

[Andrew George]

On the C5 category, and further to the excellent point that my hon. Friend the Member for North Cornwall (Ben Maguire) made, the last Government tinkered with this, announcing and reannouncing on many occasions a proposal to introduce a use class for holiday lets, but does the hon. Lady not agree that that would be far better if it applied to all non-permanent occupancy, whether second homes or holiday lets? Otherwise, there will continually be flipping from one to the other to avoid regulation.

[Jayne Kirkham]

I thank the hon. Member for that point. I wanted to talk about council tax in particular, because, strangely, one of the few things that the entire council agreed on—we have a Conservative council in Cornwall at the moment—was doubling the council tax on empty second homes. In fact, we wrote to the Secretary of State at the time to ask whether we could triple the council tax on second homes, as they do in Labour Wales—that was a very unusual thing to do. Of course, as has been discussed, this is about looking at closing the loophole so that the owners of the property cannot flip between business rates and council tax. That would mean an £18 million a year gain in council taxes.

I agree with the hon. Member that we should encourage co-operative and community housing in Cornwall. That is very popular, and if it was supported more, there would be a great deal more of it. In fact, our cabinet housing member in Cornwall has said that if every village built 10 homes, that would deal with the housing crisis completely. Discouraging hope value, particularly in certain parts of Cornwall, would be very helpful. I know that forcing developers to deliver their affordables rather than relying on the viability defence is part of the Government’s plans, because so often developers get to a point and say that they cannot afford to build the affordable houses that they promised. Another real problem is that the cost of building has shot up because the contractors in Cornwall have dropped in number and have become a great deal more expensive.