Planning, the Green Belt and Rural Affairs
Kemi Badenoch Excerpts(4 months ago)
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Kemi Badenoch (North West Essex) (Con)
It is a delight to be back at the Dispatch Box, and I have been looking forward to speaking opposite the right hon. Lady for a very long time. She and I have never really met, and certainly never spoken to each other, despite being in this House together for seven years. We have some things in common, although not much. We were both born in 1980, although I am older and wiser than she is. People often think we are both much younger than we really are, because we have got such great skin and good hair, and we are both known as being quite feisty. I am really pleased to be able to congratulate her on her elevation to Secretary of State and Deputy Prime Minister. This is a phenomenal achievement.
She will be a great inspiration to young people, particularly young women, in many communities across the country. That is a wonderful thing. That is the sort of Britain we are: where people from all walks of life can grow up and reach the top. It is an extraordinary story, dare I say it, of Conservative success. Because unlike me, the right hon. Lady grew up under a Conservative Government, with a welfare state that provided a safety net, a strong economy and opportunity. I mostly grew up in Nigeria, under a socialist military Government, who used a lot of the rhetoric that I heard her promote when she was sitting on the Opposition Benches. She may not credit the Conservatives for what she has achieved, but we will take some of the credit anyway.
I would like to extend a very warm welcome to the right hon. Lady on her first outing as a Minister in the Chamber, because it will only be downhill from here. The thing is, I have been a Secretary of State, and after five years as a Minister one learns a thing or two about government that cannot be learned in Opposition. I have been there and done it, and I can tell the right hon. Lady that she has been stitched up. It is quite clear that the Bills and policies from the King’s Speech that she just referenced were written not by her, but by the Chancellor and her advisers. We all know that because we watched the Chancellor announce them in far more detail in her speech last week.
All the stuff that the Secretary of State worked on in Opposition, such as her new deal for workers, has been taken off her and given to the Business Secretary. I am sorry to tell the right hon. Lady that her colleagues—the Prime Minister, the Chancellor and their many advisers—have written a manifesto and made promises that are not deliverable, and they have hung them around her neck and said, “Ange, you go out there and you sell it.” I am sad to see many of her shadow team not sitting beside her as Ministers. They worked for free, grinding in opposition for years, only to watch the children of the chosen ones get the ministerial cars and salaries before their maiden speeches were written. Wow. Sue Gray was a lot nicer to me when she worked in my Department.
I think we know who is in charge, and it is not the right hon. Lady. She has been stitched up—her colleagues have made her the fall guy. The Government have promised 1.5 million houses by the end of this Parliament—over 800 houses per day—and we are already two weeks in. As she goes on, day after day, she will realise that a backlog is building, and there is no way out. I want her to know that I am here for her. I will be here to hold her hand and walk her through what is likely to be a very difficult time. I may even give her some tips because, having worked in that Department, I know what needs to be done. I know what we should have done but did not do, and I know that the Labour Government will make the same mistakes.
It is not that 1.5 million homes by the end of this Parliament is unachievable, but it will require the sort of systemic change that Labour Members are not ready for. I know that because of how they voted in the last Parliament and how they campaigned in their own constituencies. I will not read out the long list of all the Cabinet members who have been opposing planning in their backyard, including the Housing Minister. Many of them thought that they would get into government and concrete over lots of Tory constituencies. Three weeks ago, just 15% of the green belt was in Labour constituencies. Now it is 50%. They are not Tory constituencies now—they are Labour. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear!”] Yes, they are Labour. I say to Labour Members, “They are now your voters and your electorate, and you’re going to have to tell them that you’re going to do something that many of you promised locally that you would never do, not that long ago.”
However, mostly it will not be the problem of the Cabinet, who will look after themselves. It will be the Back Benchers—all those bright, shiny faces I see sitting behind the right hon. Lady, who are really excited to be here. They have not started getting those angry emails that we have been replying to for 14 years. Many of those voters, on whom their narrow, slim majorities now rely, will be writing to them.
In the spirit of sisterly support, I will let the right hon. Lady know what will happen over the next few weeks and months. Labour Members are looking so nervous right now. The right hon. Lady will have a consultation period, which will take this long. Then, she will have to respond to that consultation, which will take that long. Assuming that nothing goes wrong with either of those processes, we reach December or January. Six months will have passed—10% of the Parliament—and the Government will not have built any extra homes. At this point, she will be running 500 homes behind the target every single day and they would not have started building properly. [Interruption.] The Minister of State in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook), is chuntering from a sedentary position, “You wait and see.” We have seen. We have been there. We know; you don’t.
And as it becomes clear to their voters what is happening in their new Labour constituencies—for which, congratulations—in the green belt, those MPs are going to receive a lot more emails. I mean, a lot more. They are going to want a lot of public meetings, because they will know that the decisions she announced are now being taken out of local hands and made by central Government. And the only way that they can register their concern is by appealing to their local MPs, who will all be appealing to her.
Well, this is what being in power is. Government is about making difficult decisions. Opposition is easy—we have been watching Labour do it for 14 years, and it has spent all that time telling the people of this country that they will do better. So here is the record that they are going to have to beat: we built 1 million new homes in the course of the last Parliament, while safeguarding the green belt; and 2.5 million since 2010, despite covid. We delivered nearly 700,000 new affordable homes and over 172,000 of those were for social rent. We put in place the £11.5 billion affordable homes programme. Does the right hon. Lady even know yet if the Chancellor will give her up to £11.5 billion? She is going to need a lot more than that if she is going to beat our record.
And let us not forget what Labour did just last year. We had a majority in this House, but not in the other place, where they whipped Labour Lords to vote against an amendment on nutrient neutrality, using new Brexit powers to unlock 160,000 homes. Many new Members did not see that happening. They are going to find it shocking. We legislated for that and they blocked it—destructive opposition. Are they going to reverse that decision? I have a feeling they will not. And that is why I am worried about the right hon. Lady. Is she going to be able to face down her Back Benchers? Or will Labour carry on not doing the things that have to be done in order to build homes?
Let us look at Labour’s record. The right hon. Lady talked about what happened after the last world war. In the year to June 2009, when everybody here was alive and they were last in government, they only built 75,000 new homes—the lowest level of housebuilding since the 1920s. And what are they doing where they currently are in government? In London, Sadiq Khan has failed to hit his own targets, beginning just 21,000 new homes in 2022, despite us giving him pots and pots of money. We were forced to intervene on his housebuilding failures. Why has he not built on all those car parks that she was talking about in her speech? In Wales, the Labour Administration promised to deliver 20,000 new homes for social rent by 2026. They have barely delivered a quarter. The right hon. Lady may pretend that building homes is easy, but Labour know it is not easy because they failed in London and they failed in Wales, and they are already making new mistakes.
We all know that immigration increases housing demand. Just this week, we heard that they are going to be fast-tracking 90,000 illegal immigrants who already landed here. If they are permitted to stay, they will require permanent housing. We put the Rwanda scheme in place to limit illegal immigration. They have scrapped it. With no plans whatsoever to tackle the problem, has she got 90,000 homes ready for the people the Home Secretary is going to be fast-tracking through? If not, she is already 90,000 homes down on the target the Prime Minister has set for her.
So that is why I am feeling very generous towards the right hon. Lady, because she has been stitched up. She is going to need some friends, and I want her to know that we are all here for her. [Laughter.] Some people think opposition is about throwing mud across the Chamber or calling your opponents scum, but often it is about saying, “I told you so.” I want to reassure the right hon. Lady that I will be here to say, “I told you so” when these targets are missed.
We, of course, will be a constructive Opposition. We want to see homes built in the right places with the right infrastructure. We are here to help. I doubt the same can be said of the biggest local nimbys in the country, the Liberal Democrats. There are many more of them now—you wouldn’t know it, but there are—usually elected on promises not to build anything anywhere in their communities. In the last Parliament, I watched them oppose planning reforms on permitted development; reforms that would have allowed us to build on land that was already in use. It will be very interesting to see how they square their nimby tendencies with their manifesto promises—but then again, saying one thing and doing another has never bothered the Liberal Democrats. The right hon. Lady will not get any help from them, but we are here for her.
I have heard some of Labour’s plans. Introducing mandatory targets while introducing new regulatory costs will not work. Without taxpayer funding, Labour’s affordable housing targets are unviable. Where is that money going to come from? The mandate that Labour wants to enforce implies a consequence for missing the target. What will that consequence be for local councils? Is Labour going to scrap the neighbourhood plans that communities have put together to deliver more homes? What will those councils say when they are forced to do things that they promised they would not do just eight weeks ago?
We have heard from Labour Members that they will introduce mechanisms for overriding local decision making to identify the land for development. That is fine, but identifying land does not mean that homes or infrastructure will be built. I look forward to the Second Reading of the right hon. Lady’s Bill, when she will have to explain the plans that the Chancellor and her spads have written up for her, and she can tell us in great technical detail how they will be delivered—although I suspect that she will leave the tricky stuff to her junior Ministers. We Conservatives may not be as many as we used to be, but we still know all the stuff that we learned over 14 years as we delivered 2.5 million homes. We know where the difficulties are, and we know the technicalities; the right hon. Lady is just learning. We will be ready and waiting to show that she and her party have made promises that they cannot keep, and in many cases have no idea what they are doing.
The Labour Government have a tough act to follow—[Laughter.] They do! However, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and I am pleased to see that they have been copying and pasting many of the policies that we had in government. We introduced metro mayors with substantial powers; now they are announcing that they are going to do more. We put billions of levelling-up funding into communities, backing metro mayors such as Ben Houchen; let us see whether Labour will follow that for all its new mayors. In the last local government finance settlement we made £64.7 billion pounds available to local authorities, a 7.5% increase in cash terms. Let us see whether Labour tops that, rather than just moving money from one part of the country to another.
We would like to see the Labour Government get the Holocaust Memorial Bill—which we initiated—on to the statute book, as the Prime Minister promised, and we will support them in that. We must do right by our Jewish communities, and we provided record levels of funding to protect them from harm and extremism. We took decisive action to tackle growing sectarianism, so we were disappointed not to see any mention in the King’s Speech of how Labour would continue that. In the election we saw independent MPs win seats from Labour on the back of sectarianism and integration failures, a problem whose existence Labour continually denies even as we are watching riots in Leeds.
It is time to put away the childish displays and fake outrage that Labour has been showing. The right hon. Lady will need to get very serious very quickly, and where she has the right ambition, we will do what we can to support her in facing down those members sitting behind her who still do not get it.
Steve Reed
I am sorry, there is not enough time for me to give way. [Interruption.] Members should have spoken for less time.
Rural communities have been severely undermined by the previous Conservative Government. For a party that once claimed to be the party of the countryside, their track record is one of abject and absolute neglect. Voters in the countryside rejected their failure and embraced Labour’s positive vision. That is evident from the huge increase in Labour MPs representing rural constituencies, and the collapse in rural support for the Conservatives. Thanks to the Conservative party, transport links in many rural areas are now close to non-existent; there are more potholes in England’s roads than craters on the moon; schools cannot recruit enough teachers; GP surgeries are full; families cannot find an NHS dentist; thousands of rural businesses have collapsed; and rural crime goes unpunished. This is an abandonment of the countryside on a historic scale.
Yet instead of apologising for their failure, the Conservatives choose to deny the reasons why rural voters turned against them in their millions. They are at it again today. I take it from the comments the shadow Secretary of State was making just now that they are so out of touch that they do not understand that rural communities want more affordable homes, more dentists, more teachers, more GPs, better public transport, energy security, more digital connectivity, well-paid jobs, better access to the countryside all around them, and their rivers cleaned up, after the Tories left them swilling with raw, stinking toxic sewage. They are out of touch, out of ideas and now, thank goodness, out of office.
This week, Britain starts a new chapter. Rural communities will be central to our mission to rebuild Britain and fix the issues that make a real difference to people’s everyday lives, as we grow the economy, mend the NHS, fix our schools, tackle crime and address the cost of living crisis. Over a decade of national renewal, this Labour Government will serve the British public, wherever they live. The Prime Minister has been clear that this Government’s priority is to grow our economy. We will boost rural economies with our new deal for farmers; seek a veterinary agreement with the EU to get food exports moving again after the Tories locked them out; and stop farmers ever again being undercut by dodgy Tory trade deals that sell out Britain’s environmental and welfare standards, as they sell out Britain’s exporters and food producers. We will set up a new British infrastructure council to steer private investment, including for broadband roll-out, into rural areas neglected by the Tories, and reduce our exposure to volatile global fossil fuel prices, protecting farmers’ energy bills against future price shocks.
Steve Reed
I am very sorry, but there are only three minutes left and I need to cover the points that have been raised. [Interruption.] They had their time.
We will do that by switching on GB Energy as we make Britain a green energy superpower. We will speed up the building of flood defences to protect rural homes and farms, and rebuild our NHS with 40,000 more appointments every week, 8,500 more mental health professionals—[Interruption]—and a hub in every rural community to tackle loneliness and the mental health crisis. [Interruption.]