Oral Answers to Questions

Matt Warman Excerpts

Monday 21st November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

The autumn statement was at a time of challenging news for the global economy. It was absolutely the right response and, again, not only did we secure a significant, record increase in funding for local government at the previous spending review, but we, as my hon. Friend the Member for North East Derbyshire (Lee Rowley) pointed out, secured billions additionally for adult social care and for children’s services. Once more, local government is securing the funding it needs under a Conservative Government who are putting stability and growth first.

[Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)]

6. What steps he is taking to support mixed-use developments.

[The Minister of State, Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (Lucy Frazer)]

We cannot have houses without services and infrastructure. The national planning policy framework recognises the need for mixed-use developments, including local facilities and transport networks. In addition, the national design guide and national model design recognise the importance of mixed-use development in creating sustainable, active and vibrant places.

[Matt Warman]

The Skegness Gateway project is a 1,000-home development, but it is also home—thanks to the levelling-up fund—to a new college for Skegness and, if all goes well, it could be a significant boon to local NHS services. Will the Minister join me in welcoming the huge contribution of the Sanderson family, some of whom are in the Gallery? Will she also join me in welcoming the prospect of Departments working together, breaking down the silos to deliver the maximum possible potential for such projects all in one hit and at the first opportunity?

[Lucy Frazer]

I echo my hon. Friend’s praise of the Sanderson family and their commitment to the local area, and I welcome them to the House of Commons today. I am delighted that Government funds are helping Skegness thrive. I know that officials in the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and other Departments continue to work closely with local partners to ensure that, as the Skegness town deal programme enters its important next phase, the vision for the new local college that he mentions and the wider gateway can be realised.

Budget Resolutions

Matt Warman Excerpts

Monday 1st November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)]

This is the first time that I have spoken from the Back Benches in a while and the first time that I have spoken at all in this place since the reshuffle, so I have a new perspective on the Dispatch Box: it is rhetorically the easiest place to speak from in this place, but intellectually and emotionally, it is so much the hardest. I hope that it is not too glib to recognise the responsibility that Ministers bear and to say thank you, and I hope that my gratitude makes up for now pestering them so frequently and shamelessly in the voting Lobby.

The second hardest place to speak from is the Government Back Benches, because we do not have the luxury of standing up and making empty speeches and claiming that everything would be better if a different party were in power. I hope that the three things that I have to say about the Budget are heard in the constructive spirit in which they are meant.

First, it is right, as the Chancellor said, that the Conservative plan is working: unemployment is down, employment is up, growth is up, wages are up, and we are tackling the tax on work that is the taper rate and addressing the cost of living by scrapping fuel duty rises. Those are all great things, but perhaps most importantly, the Chancellor has levelled with people. I believe, in both hope and expectation, that he and the Prime Minister are low-tax Conservatives. In an age when political rhetoric has too often been a way to veil talking about the hardest choices we have to make, the Chancellor has more than justified today’s tax rates while spelling out the path to lower ones in the future.

We say glibly sometimes that to govern is to choose, but these are life-and-death decisions, and I praise the Chancellor’s honesty in saying why taxes are where they are now and laying out a path for where he wants them to fall. If I could choose three values for my kind of Conservatism, they would be: honesty with voters on the impact of policies, a social desire to live and let live; and, of course, the low taxes that come with as small a state as possible. So I support that fiscal approach.

Secondly, I want to talk about levelling up. I would like to see even more money going into research and development, but I thoroughly welcome the huge investment that is already there, particularly in infrastructure. The most consequential impact from levelling up will come from digital infrastructure—from broadband, 4G and 5G. We have just hit the figure of half the country having access to gigabit-capable connections, up from just 9% when the Prime Minister took over.

[Andrew Bowie]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend’s work at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, and to everything that he did to improve the digital infrastructure across the United Kingdom. When does he expect more than half this country to have gigabit fast broadband?

[Matt Warman]

I had a little to do with it, but the truth is that it was the private sector that delivered that growth, and it is the private sector that will get us to about two thirds by the end of this year. Much of that growth is in Scotland; I know that my hon. Friend will take a particular interest in it.

Digital infrastructure, more than any one road or any one railway line, has a huge impact. I will never forget a teacher in Northern Ireland telling me that she had to teach at the pace of the slowest broadband in her class. If we cannot have equality of access to everything from YouTube to the rest of the internet, teachers cannot teach equally; that is what levelling up means.

My third point is about the speed of Government and public services. Ordinarily, tax changes take a while to come in, but the taper rate change in particular is coming much faster. In part, that reflects its urgency, but it also speaks to some broader issues. Whatever we think about its tax bill, Amazon is the pace of life at which many of our constituents now live: deliveries come the following day and supermarket slots are booked for an hour.

Government has to be deliberative—of course it does—but in the pandemic we showed that we can act with real agility. Our democratic pace is sometimes out of step with the pace that our constituents want, so I welcome the huge investment in further digitising the NHS so that digitally booking an appointment might feel a little more like booking for groceries. That does not mean that the availability of appointments has to be identical, but the ease of booking them and the way in which the Government interact with the citizen have to improve.

It has been easy to make those constructive criticisms, because I do not have to implement them, but Ministers do; Back-Bench MPs of the governing party are on the hook for delivering them, too. This has been a Budget that gets things done: it will fund better roads in my constituency, whether that is through the levelling-up fund or through the towns fund, and it will tackle the climate emergency as we find the path back to 0.7% and invest in some of the countries most affected by climate change. I look forward to the promise of lower taxes stimulating growth and helping around the world

What we say in this place matters. Budget debates, perhaps even more than Opposition day debates, often degenerate into Members on one side saying that everything is terrible and Members on the other saying that everything is perfect. Voters understand the immensely difficult choices that the Government face; I think perhaps we could sometimes level up the standard of debate in this place by acknowledging that.

Stronger Towns Fund

Matt Warman Excerpts

Monday 4th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[James Brokenshire]

I do not want the hon. Lady to doff her cap in any way, shape or form. This fund is part of a package of measures that we will be bringing forward. That is why I have highlighted the UK shared prosperity fund. She talks about European money. That fund is part of the replacement for those funds post-2020. I recognise the passion and ambition and the sense of identity of people across Yorkshire, which is why I had that meeting at the end of last week with Yorkshire leaders. I cannot take the Yorkshire deal forward in the way that she and some of her colleagues may wish, but I certainly have that ambition for Yorkshire, which is something we discussed positively last week.

[Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)]

Boston and Skegness are proud and ambitious towns that, frankly, have been frustrated because we have not been spending money like this for many years on our great towns. I welcome enormously what the Secretary of State is doing today. He is extoling the virtues of a plethora of different funds. It should be for towns to come up with their own ambitions and perhaps for the Department to help them in saying how best they can be put together and allocated from different pots of money.

[James Brokenshire]

That is why we want to see the development of what I might categorise as town deals, whereby we can bring different funding streams together to support that positive sense of how towns can fulfil their potential. This firmly forms part of that, but, as I have indicated, there are other sources of funding, and bringing those strands together will add that further leverage. I look forward to working with my hon. Friend as we seek to establish more of those town deals.

Residents of Leisure Park Homes

Matt Warman Excerpts

Wednesday 27th February 2019 Westminster Hall

[James Heappey (Wells) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Austin. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Helen Whately) on securing this debate. The issue has arisen on a number of occasions in my constituency, and I have carried out casework on behalf of people on both sides of the equation. Before I get into that, may I use this opportunity to pay tribute to the emergency services in Somerset, who responded so well to the ceiling that collapsed at Pontins in Brean the other night? A number of people were injured. I hear that the emergency services responded with their usual professionalism and expertise, and ensured that injury and inconvenience were absolutely minimised.

Brean is a wonderful place to go for a holiday. Tens of thousands of people do so every week, all season long, and there are many more caravans and mobile homes in the wider Burnham-on-Sea area. I understand that it is second only to Skegness in the European rankings for concentrations of caravans. We are very proud of that.

[Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)]

I feel that I should mention that my hon. Friend is completely correct: Skegness is the proud owner of the highest concentration in Europe. While I envy my hon. Friend the Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Helen Whately) for securing this debate, it is important to set it in context. The overall benefit to the economy of the industry is enormous, and the rogues are small in number, even if their effects are genuinely profound.

Non-Domestic Rating (Nursery Grounds) Bill

Matt Warman Excerpts

3rd reading: House of Commons & Committee: 1st sitting: House of Commons & Legislative Grand Committee: House of Commons
Tuesday 10th July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)]

It is extraordinary that this House has spent so long talking about doing such a simple thing as undoing the errant court judgment, and I suspect we may even continue talking about it for a few minutes yet. However, that is only fitting, because, as has been said by a number of my hon. Friends, including the Minister, and by the Opposition, we are all here concerned about this issue as we understand the profound impact that a single court judgment could have had, not only on businesses up and down the country, but on the food chain and even on the communities and local economies that those businesses support.

I have talked in the previous debate on this matter about the individual constituency business that came to me to discuss the impact this court judgment would have had, not only on its business and bottom line, but, crucially, on the income to the local internal drainage board. This would have meant that in my constituency, which is the most at risk of flooding in the country, according to the Association of British Insurers, not only would businesses and livelihoods have been affected, as others have said, but, even worse, that huge swathes of the area would have been at greater risk of flooding. That would have posed a real threat to the broader economy, the food chain and huge numbers of people who live in areas at or sometimes below sea level and who rely on those internal drainage boards being able to function.

The Bill is therefore a hugely important tweak to the legislation that was inadvertently altered by the court judgment, and it is a fitting tribute to the change that the previous Minister and this Minister are initiating and seeing through respectively that we have devoted a reasonable amount of parliamentary time to it. However, it is worth pointing out that we would hope in future, in legislation generally, not just in this area, to avoid a single court judgment having the kind of ramifications that this one has had here. We would all like not to put our constituents through the genuine trauma of knowing that the business they work for might face real financial difficulties simply because of a single court judgment. Somewhat unusually, these people in my area may also face the risk of their homes and businesses being flooded, which is an additional factor.

Although it is good that the Government are fixing this and the Opposition parties have co-operated so readily in fixing it, we should also bear in mind that it would have been better not to have found ourselves in this situation in the first place. So my plea to the Minister is to see what he can do, working across the Government—I do not pretend that all the problems are in his Department, by any means—to avoid legislation where we have not thought through all the potential consequences of the precise wording. We spend a lot of time in Bill Committees and in Committee of the whole House going through pieces of legislation line by line, paying close and deep attention to every moment in those Committees, but sometimes such things lay themselves open to unintended consequences, so we would all welcome anything that can be done to try to avoid them.

Clearly, the Government have acted as quickly as they can, given the unfortunate situation with the previous Bill, to bring this piece of legislation back individually, notwithstanding the election interrupting the previous passage of the Local Government Finance Bill. Obviously, that Bill was going to do a number of things far wider than this one and it is clearly the right thing to have adjusted how the legislation has been formatted so that we can do this quickly. It is likely we would have ended up seeing businesses paying large sums and going through significant difficulty only then to be given that money back. Of course it is a good thing that this legislation has been moved on faster than it otherwise might, but I hope that we would all like to avoid this sort of situation in the first place.

I will close simply by saying that I hope the Minister will do all he can to avoid this sort of situation arising again, should he have the opportunity. I re-emphasise how good it is that we have been able to bring this matter to a relatively speedy conclusion and how heartening it is to see so many colleagues discussing a matter that otherwise would have passed with relatively little attention. This is a good example of the Government giving real attention to an important matter and acting quickly to correct a court judgment that was never intended by any previous Government. I welcome the actions that the Minister has taken and, as I said previously, that his predecessor has taken. Perhaps weirdly, I welcome, above all, the co-operation of the Opposition in getting on with this ever so quickly. I hope that the constituents who raised this issue with me see that this is an example of action being taken and are genuinely reassured.

[Mr Simon Clarke]

It was particularly moving to be in here as we heard the sound of the RAF fly-past a few moments ago to mark 100 years of the RAF. It was 100 years ago this month that my great, great uncle John Headlam was killed while serving in the RAF, so it is nice to be able to pay tribute to his service and sacrifice.

We are a nation of gardeners, and it is important to us all that our nursery sector thrives. It is a particular pleasure to see my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond (Yorks) (Rishi Sunak) on the Front Bench as the Minister today, because my constituency abuts his and it is home to some of the nurseries that I know very well—Cherry Hill and Strikes in Stokesley, which was subject to a recent devastating fire. I know that I speak on behalf of lots of people in my constituency when I say that I hope Strikes is back up and running in its normal place as quickly as possible.

The nursery industry is extremely significant for growing produce for our home market and for ensuring the sustainability of our rural economy. At a time when there is fierce competition from the supermarket and similar sectors, there is no doubt traditional nurseries need all the support they can get that Agricultural land has been exempt from business rates for almost 100 years.

Non-Domestic Rating (Nursery Grounds) Bill

Matt Warman Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Tuesday 5th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)]

We are always being told that debates in Parliament should be about real people, not statistics, and in that spirit, for me, this debate is about cabbages and flooding, not business rates per se.

This matter first came to my attention when the Black Sluice drainage board came to me deeply concerned about the prospect of losing £23,000 as a result of the levy. Worrying though that was, it turned out that a business in my constituency—it is incredibly rural, and in many areas business rates payments are very little, which is why I have some concerns about business rates retention, although we will gloss over that—was, although set to see its drainage levy fall by £23,000, faced with a business rates rise of well into six figures. So my drainage board—one of several in my constituency—was in a state of some confusion over the prospect of not having enough money to keep people’s feet dry, and my local businesses were in a state of perturbation at the prospect of going bankrupt.

This anomaly was a real issue for my constituents, as it was for those of my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Gillian Keegan). When I went to see R. Fountain & Son, the business in my constituency, I was delighted to discover not just its confidence in expanding its business, this potential problem aside, but how much it led not just Lincolnshire—a pretty difficult place to lead when it comes to growing brassicas—but the country in terms of its technology. In collaboration with the National Farmers Union, whose work on this I pay particular tribute to, it alerted me to the anomaly arising from the Tunnel Tech case and the ramifications of that case for it and others running glasshouses across my constituency.

[Sir Greg Knight]

I believe that my hon. Friend’s constituency contains two villages called Bicker and Wrangle, which I have always thought would make an excellent name for a law firm.

It was suggested earlier that there should be a compensation fund for those who had had to pay rates in the past, and also for local authorities that had suffered loss. What is my hon. Friend’s view on that, and who does he think should pay for such a fund?

[Matt Warman]

My constituency also contains a village called Old Leake, which is in the same ward as Wrangle. “Wrangle and Old Leake” surely has some comic potential as well. I agree with my right hon. Friend that businesses that have paid out—I should say that I do not believe that Fountain is in that position—should be entitled to the refund that the Minister suggested, and the Government should consider establishing such a fund if compensation is due.

Having been exempted from rates since 1929, the businesses to which I have referred were faced with a number of factors that they had previously never even had to consider incorporating in their business models. I understand that glasshouses, which are obviously of huge concern to a constituency such as mine, have been exempted since the 1990s. An issue on which businesses throughout this section of the economy have been entirely predicated was upended by the courts almost overnight.

I agree with the hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton (Jim McMahon) that the Government deserve some credit for seeking to clarify what might have been an important issue had the system been allowed to persist. There was real concern—not just among businesses in my constituency—when it became obvious that the Valuation Office Agency was going down this path. I began by saying that the issue was about brassicas and flooding, but in fact it is about the jobs that would have been at stake. If the Government had not intervened to clarify the position, people would undoubtedly would have found themselves out of work.

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Nuneaton (Mr Jones), who at the relevant time had ministerial responsibility for these matters. Having visited those at R. Fountain & Son and reassured them that I was confident that such an extreme situation could only be the result of a mistake rather than Government policy, I had the extraordinary and delightful experience of mentioning that to my hon. Friend in a Lobby—he may not even remember it—and being told that the Government were already looking into the matter. It was a pleasure to be able to go back to businesses in my constituency and say that the Government would not be daft enough to increase their business rates so suddenly and massively.

To be honest, however, it was an even greater pleasure to go back to the drainage board. While I obviously care greatly about businesses throughout my constituency, the work of drainage boards in Lincolnshire is particularly and enormously valuable. They do huge service to the broader economy, and provide a great deal of reassurance through their work with the Environment Agency across the broader flooding landscape. Given that, according to the Association of British Insurers, my constituency is at greater risk of flooding than any other, I am particularly alive to that.

As I have said, my constituency is largely agricultural, and we are grateful for the business rates retention pilot. The Department is obviously aware of what must be done to ensure that business rates retention works for the areas to which it is applied, and that we do not end up losing out overall and accidentally giving more money back to the Treasury. I know that it does not intend that to happen in any circumstances.

I hope that Members will bear in mind that the Bill represents a useful endeavour to fix a problem that would have had a real impact not only on the local economy and jobs in my constituency, but on the availability of cabbages throughout the country, about which I know the House cares deeply. I also hope that, while accepting my praise for his swift action, the Minister will bear in mind that it highlights what business rates retention may well look like as we proceed with what I consider to be a worthwhile and popular policy.

[Rebecca Pow]

Does my hon. Friend agree that it is heartening that although people often think that we in Parliament are powerless and are not listened to, when my hon. Friend went to the Minister about his cabbages, the Minister listened and we have done something that will help? That is a positive message. It might be a small thing to many people, but this is a positive message that, with cross-party work, we can make something happen.

[Matt Warman]

I agree with my hon. Friend, and this shows the power of my hon. Friend the Member for Nuneaton, and now the power of the two current Front Benchers. I agree with the Opposition spokesman that it is of course a good thing to work cross party on such an issue, which relates to not an intentional decision taken by the Government, but a decision by the courts that risked upending a long-standing principle.

I pay tribute to the work of my hon. Friend the Member for Nuneaton and those who have continued his work. I hope that the one wrinkle in the potential of the excellent notion of business rate retention will be considered in the context of these sorts of decisions. Such decisions could of course come up again, because people do go to courts, and courts do produce judgments that perhaps surprise all of us. In this case, the decision certainly surprised my drainage board and farmers such as Fountains. I praise the Government and hope we can get on with this as soon as possible.

Windrush

Matt Warman Excerpts

Monday 30th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

My most urgent priority now, as I enter this Department, is to continue to build on the work set out by my predecessor to help the Windrush generation as quickly as I can, and in every way that I can.

[Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)]

I welcome my right hon. Friend’s ground-breaking appointment. Does he agree that while a humane immigration policy demands that we take action on the Windrush generation, it is not inhumane to act on the legitimate concerns of ordinary working people about illegal immigration in this country?

[Sajid Javid]

I very much agree with my hon. Friend, who has reminded the House of an important distinction. This is about acting correctly and fairly in respect of those who are here for all the right reasons and are helping to make our country strong, while at the same time cracking down on illegal immigration.

Space Industry Bill [Lords]

Matt Warman Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 15th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)]

I shall speak briefly in support of the Bill.

In my constituency, we talk about space far more than people might think. That is not because there is a lot of it in the open fenland and marsh country, but because, as one might expect, we talk about foreign aid an awful lot, and the question that always arises is why we give money to certain countries. They have space programmes. That is, in a sense, the definition of a country that is a thriving great nation: an economy that is looking to the future and does not need the help of others to thrive and travel to infinity and beyond—to the final frontier. I think the very existence of the Bill demonstrates that Britain today is a nation that looks forward to the future with confidence. This is not just empty rhetoric; it is something that the Government are doing in real detail.

Before the general election, I was privileged to serve on the Science and Technology Committee. We had a quick look at what was then a draft Bill; there was a limited amount of time for the full parliamentary process because of the impending election. We made a number of recommendations, most of which were prefaced by a declaration of our support for the Bill, for two reasons.

First, there is the huge economic potential that a thriving space industry brings to the country as a whole. We talk about artificial intelligence as an issue that will bring broad and widespread benefits throughout the growing new economy in this country, but we do not talk about space in the same way. It is a cliché to say that Teflon, which is now ubiquitous in every kitchen, was invented because of the American space programme. We should think of the forthcoming space industry in the United Kingdom in the same way. The Bill represents the beginning of a huge new economic element that will have huge tangential benefits, whether they are CubeSats or the satellites that will power a host of other industries. The point that the Committee sought to make at almost every opportunity was that the Bill was not simply about bringing the benefits of a spaceport to Newquay or Prestwick—or possibly to both areas, and to many more. Indeed, there is space in Lincolnshire, although it is very good agricultural land, so it would be a difficult decision to make.

There is not just the question of where we should put the individual assets that will be crucial to the development of an industry, but the vital question of how we should be trying to foster the benefits of an economy that is wrapped up in new technologies so that they can be extended beyond the technology that gets CubeSats up into space, and the research that will ensure that we do not end up with a space industry that pushes debris out into the ether, treating space as previous generations have treated parts of China, where we offloaded our own waste pretending that we could ignore the consequences for the planet. We must be mindful of what is going on, not only on this planet but beyond it, and I think that the Bill does that to some extent. We must begin to think of ourselves not only as global citizens, but as intergalactic citizens. We must consider the consequences of what we do as a human race, not only beyond our country’s shores but beyond our atmosphere. That is what real global responsibility looks like.

The Committee’s recommendations constitute an attempt to be genuinely mindful of the regulations that we need for an industry whose full scale does not yet exist. One of our aims was to come up with principles that would not be overtaken by events. For instance, we discussed drafting a memorandum of understanding between the two agencies that we expect to regulate the two principal types of spaceflight. I was pleased that the Government accepted a number of our recommendations, but the point of that particular recommendation was not that we thought it sensible to come up with hard and fast rules that should never be broken—as the Bill proposed at that point—but that we were asking the Government to be cognisant of the fact that the rules that we needed could not be made immediately. I think that the Bill tries to strike a balance between setting those valuable principles and identifying the baselines that will not allow us to imagine that it is sensible to clutter up the outer atmosphere with bits of kit that will be of little value in years to come.

What I must praise about the Government’s approach to the Bill is that they sought to involve the industry, and sought to involve Select Committees. They also sought to make sure that we did not simply have a single principle that was so broad that it was almost meaningless —that we would also have principles embodied in legislation that were broad enough to allow industries to grow and flourish and did not constrain them too much.

I, like other Members across this House, support this Bill, but I do so specifically because it does not embody every single regulation in statute; it looks optimistically to the future and acknowledges that not only is this the industry that will in the first instance take affluent tourists a long way from home, or people very quickly from one part of the country or the world to another, but that it will foster an entire new industry that can be plugged into our existing economy and will bring many benefits that go way beyond the invention simply of technologies such as Teflon—although I hope this Bill has all the material benefits of Teflon and we do not allow ourselves to get stuck on the details and instead stick, in a non-stick Teflon kind of way, to the beautiful principles that will allow us to see more of space in the future. I am glad to support the Bill this evening.