Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Debate between Kevin Hollinrake and Louie French

Report stage
Tuesday 10th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

May I thank the Minister for all his hard work? He is an incredibly decent and polite man. He may be misguided at times, but we cannot agree on everything. I thank him and his team for all their work, and I thank my shadow ministerial team who did a fantastic job of subjecting the Bill to line-by-line scrutiny, the other Front-Bench teams, the Committee and the Clerks. I also thank hon. and right hon. Members from across the House for their contributions.

We are told that this Bill is about accelerating house building, unleashing growth and meeting a national target of 1.5 million homes in England alone in this Parliament. On the face of it, those aims are worthy, but what price are we prepared to pay for the Deputy Prime Minister’s ambition? Make no mistake: what is being proposed could fundamentally and irrevocably alter the character of our towns, our villages, and the green and pleasant land that makes Britain what it is.

This is not an attack on new homes—I am unashamedly pro-business and pro-development. Unlike the Secretary of State, the Minister and half the Cabinet, I have never objected to a housing development in my constituency. Let me be clear: we need homes. We need homes for first-time buyers, for young families, for key workers and for the next generation, but we need the right homes in the right places, shaped by the right principles. Instead, we are being offered a top-down model driven by arbitrary targets and central diktat. The result is soulless settlements, identikit developments and rows of uninspiring concrete boxes that bear no relation to the history, the heritage or the hopes of the communities they are built in.

Crucially, in the Government’s “centralising zeal”—as the excellent shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Hamble Valley (Paul Holmes), calls it—local voices are being sidelined. Local councillors, and those who live in, love and understand their communities best, are being cut out of the process, with their role reduced and their judgment overlooked. The individual has been subordinated to being a cog in the machine. The Bill in its current form is not just flawed, but dangerous. It risks eroding trust in the planning system and widening the gulf between the Government and the governed.

The Bill must be considered in conjunction with the changes to the national planning policy framework. The Government’s approach of shifting housing targets from urban areas to rural areas is cynical and economically illiterate. While I welcome the restoration of mandatory targets in principle, raising targets by up to 400% in rural areas while simultaneously reducing them by over 11% in London, 30% in Birmingham and Newcastle, and over 50% in Coventry is unfair and wrong-headed. Their grey belt policy—presented as a few disused garage forecourts and wasteland in green belts—is a con. What they have actually done is remove important protections that prevent villages from merging into nearby villages and towns.

Of course, there is also the matter of the environment. Anyone who cares about our natural world knows that once a habitat is destroyed, a woodland torn up or a biodiverse landscape bulldozed, no cheque can bring it back. There is zero confidence on this side of the House that Natural England can successfully mitigate the significant environmental harms that will ensue through the environmental delivery plans. That is why we propose that they be delivered locally through local or strategic plans.

The truth is that we cannot concrete our way to community, we cannot meet our housing needs by overriding the very people we are building for, and we cannot call it progress if the Bill leaves our countryside degraded and our communities disempowered.

[Mr Louie French (Old Bexley and Sidcup) (Con)]

Residents in Bexley village in my constituency—it is one of London’s outer villages—are particularly concerned about the erosion of their green areas around the village. Does my hon. Friend share my concern and surprise that, when the outer London green belt issue was discussed in the London Assembly last week, Reform backed Mayor Khan in building over the green belt? Reform backed Khan against the interests of Bexley residents.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention, and the failures of the London Mayor to build more houses are well documented. What is perhaps not a surprise is that Reform would take the further step of supporting the London Mayor in the pursuit of Labour votes.

We have grave concerns about the enhanced compulsory purchase order powers for councils, mayors and even Natural England, without hope value or market value. This undermines one of the most important principles of our economy: property rights. Not only is this unfair, but it will face legal challenge after legal challenge in the courts.

During the passage of the Bill, we attempted to work with the Government to make sensible changes to make it fit for purpose, but to no avail. Let us not be seduced by false choices. We do not have to choose between development and democracy, between homes and heritage, or between ambition and accountability. We can build and we must build, but we must do so in a way that listens, respects and safeguards.

I urge the Government, yes, to be ambitious, but also to think again. They should rethink the Bill, and restore the local voice and reinstate environmental protections. Let us chart a path to progress that honours our need for homes, our obligation to communities and to the environment, and our duty to future generations. In its current form, we cannot support this Bill.

Workers (Predictable Terms and Conditions) Bill

Debate between Kevin Hollinrake and Louie French

3rd reading
Friday 24th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Kevin Hollinrake]

I start by thanking my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool South (Scott Benton) for all his work. He has been a delight to work with all the way through and I have been delighted to support his Bill through its various stages. I reiterate the Government’s support for the Bill.

It has been encouraging to observe the support for the Bill from across the House. I was pleased to hear that reflected once again in this debate, including by the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Bradford East (Imran Hussain), who represents part of the fine city of Bradford, in my county of Yorkshire.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool South pointed out, zero-hours contracts are an important part of the UK’s flexible labour market, for both employers and individuals who may need to balance work around other commitments. We believe they play an important role, and 64% of people surveyed said they do not want more hours and that they are happy with the basis of their current contracts. As my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Dr Mullan) pointed out, Labour is determined to take that option away from people, which once again illustrates that the Government believe in freedom of choice while the Opposition believe in state diktat.

Around 3% of workers in the UK workforce are on zero-hours contracts and such contracts may offer many of those individuals the kind of flexibility they want, but, of course, we are determined to tackle unfair working practices used by a small minority of employers. I endorse the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Laura Farris), who speaks in this House with such authority on employment matters, given her background. Many of those employers take advantage of what she describes, quite rightly, as “a grey zone”. Workers may be left waiting on standby for work that never materialises, unsure whether they will receive the hours they need to pay their bills.

We have already made significant progress in bringing forward measures that support individuals on zero-hours contracts and in low-paid work. In 2015, we banned exclusivity clauses in zero-hours contracts; in December 2022, we extended the ban to workers who have a guaranteed weekly income equivalent to or below the lower earnings limit of £123 per week; and on 1 April, we will increase the national living wage by 9.7%, to £10.42 per hour.

[Mr French]

In reference to the comments made by the shadow Minister, does the Minister agree with me that the Labour party’s words on sticking up for workers are rather hollow, particularly when they support the Labour Mayor of London’s ultra low emission zone expansion and tax rise, which will impact over 850,000 drivers in London and have been described as “anti-worker” by Unite the union?

[Kevin Hollinrake]

My hon. Friend is a fine champion on that issue; I would describe the measure as anti-worker and also anti-business, particularly at a time when we are all seeing cost of living challenges. It is simply the wrong measure to take and I applaud him for his constant campaigning on it.

The Bill in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool South represents a further step towards addressing one-sided flexibility, as he says. In 2018, the Government consulted on the right to request predictable working and in 2019 we committed to introducing a right to request a more predictable contract in our manifesto. That militates against the hon. Member for Bradford East’s argument that we have suddenly discovered this concern. We have always committed ourselves to legislating in this area.

The new right to request a more predictable working pattern will apply to all eligible workers, not only those on zero-hours contracts, meaning that a wide range of workers who have unpredictable working conditions will benefit, including temporary workers, agency workers and workers with non-guaranteed hours. Crucially, that is a right to request more predictable hours, not a right to insist on them, because we also need to look after the interests of businesses in this conversation.

My hon. Friend’s Bill includes a list of eight specific grounds on which any employer may decline a request, similar to those established for the existing right to request flexible working—for example, if the costs of providing a worker with a more predictable pattern would be too burdensome, or if accepting a request would have a detrimental impact on the ability to meet customer demand.

The Bill forms part of a wider package of six private Member’s Bills on employment rights that the Government are supporting. I pay tribute to the businesses and business representative groups that have supported them, despite the obvious impact on businesses—if hon. Members have read the impact assessment, they will know the additional impact on business is £16.9 million, at a difficult time for them, so we should pay tribute to businesses that are willing to take on these extra duties.

The hon. Member for Bradford East talked about a ban on zero-hours contracts. I gently ask whether he is doing that in the full and certain knowledge of the costs on business, because I have not seen a figure from Labour to say what would be the cost to business of doing that. That is a reasonable concern that businesses may have about the extra costs of doing business under a potential Labour Government.

Taken as a package, these Bills will deliver on our 2019 manifesto commitments to enhance workers’ rights and support people to stay in work. They will help new parents, unpaid carers and hospitality workers.

Before I close, I want to thank the officials who have worked on this Bill: Sasha Ward, Bex Lowe, Lizzy Blakeman, Mel Thomas, Sarah Boulton-Jones, Louis Ariss, Laura Robinson, Richard Kelly, Adrienn SzNagy, Rose Jefferies and Dan Spillman and, from my private office, Cora Sweet. I commend the Bill to the House.