Windrush

Nick Boles Excerpts

Monday 30th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

What I commit to is making sure that, at all times, our immigration policy is fair and humane. If the hon. Lady wants to write to me about what she thinks needs to be done, I will look at it.

[Nick Boles (Grantham and Stamford) (Con)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend on his new job, though I wish that the circumstances of his elevation had been different. We need a new immigration policy for after Brexit. May I urge him—I believe that I speak for everyone on the Conservative Benches—to put his own stamp on that policy? We want to see the policy of the Home Secretary, one of the four great offices of state, and if that means retiring some legacy policies then so be it.

[Sajid Javid]

Having worked with me in a previous Department, my hon. Friend will know that in every Department in which I have worked, I have almost certainly put my own stamp on it.

Anti-Semitism

Nick Boles Excerpts

Tuesday 17th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Ruth Smeeth (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)]

I am devastated that we are discussing this issue in this place. We should never have had to reach a point at which we are discussing one of the oldest hatreds and how it is back in our political discourse as a norm. However, I am proud to be supported by so many of my friends and colleagues on both sides of the House. Specifically, I stand here in awe of the bravery and strength of my hon. Friends the Members for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger) and for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs Ellman). It is their dedication and commitment that inspire and ensure that we stand united against the politics of hate and scapegoating.

Today I find myself in the bizarre position of feeling obliged to state for the record that my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests is in fact accurate and that I have not failed to report any additional employment. Specifically, Madam Deputy Speaker, I feel I must inform you that I am not a CIA spy. I am not a Mossad agent, nor am I an MI5 operative. I can assure people who are occasionally foolish enough to google me—although I would urge Members not to; it can be unpleasant reading—that I work not for the people of Tel Aviv, but for the people of Tunstall. Those are just some of the regular anti-Semitic tropes that have become normal in my world. Let me also make clear—just in case I need to say it—that I am not, and nor have I ever been, a lizard, trans-dimensional or otherwise.

What I am, Madam Deputy Speaker, is a proud trade unionist, a Labour party activist for over 30 years, and a lifelong anti-racist. I also happen to be a British Jew. In three decades of political activism, there has never come a time when those four parts of my identity have produced any form of conflict—until now.

I used to run HOPE not hate, with the wonderful Nick Lowles. I was the Jewish community’s anti-British National party campaign co-ordinator. I first stood at a demo against the National Front when I was 12. I have spent my life campaigning against the politics of hate and extremism. I have witnessed anti-Semitism and racism from the far right—after all, that is what those people do—and, honestly, I had become desensitised to it.

[Nick Boles (Grantham and Stamford) (Con)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Ruth Smeeth]

I will.

[Nick Boles]

I just wanted the hon. Lady to speak for a minute longer.

[Ruth Smeeth]

I thank the hon. Gentleman.

Over the past two years, however, I have experienced something genuinely painful: attacks on my identity from within my own Labour family. I have been the target of a campaign of abuse, attempted bullying and intimidation from people who would dare to tell me that people like me have no place in the party of which I have been a member for over 20 years, and which I am proud to represent on these Benches. My mum was a senior trade union official; my grandad was a blacklisted steelworker who became a miner. I was born into our movement as surely as I was born into my faith. It is a movement that I have worked for, campaigned for and fought for during my entire adult life, so it was truly heart-breaking to find myself in Parliament Square just over three weeks ago, standing shoulder to shoulder with the Jewish community against the poison of anti-Semitism that is engulfing parts of my own party and wider political discourse.

If the House will indulge me, I would like to read out a small sample of what I have received on social media, but before doing so, I have to thank the dedicated team at the CST who have protected me, shielded me from as much of this abuse as possible, and worked with the police on the occasions when abuse became threats. As others have said, they should not be necessary, but personally I would be lost without them. They have also worked their way through the thousands of pieces of anti-Semitic abuse I have received to provide the following greatest hits, although I must warn the House that my fan-base has shown scant regard for appropriate parliamentary language, so I apologise in advance:

“Hang yourself you vile treacherous Zionist Tory filth. You are a cancer of humanity.”

“Ruth Smeeth is a Zionist—she has no shame—and trades on the murder of Jews by Hitler—whom the Zionists betrayed.”

“Ruth Smeeth must surely be travelling 1st class to Tel Aviv with all that slush. After all, she’s complicit in trying to bring Corbyn down.”

“First job for Jeremy Corbyn tomorrow—expel the Zionist BICOM smear hag bitch Ruth Smeeth from the Party.”

“This Ruth Smeeth bitch is Britainophobic, we need to cleanse our nation of these types.”

“#JC4PM Deselect Ruth Smeeth ASAP. Poke the pig—get all Zionist child killer scum out of Labour.”

“You are a spy! You are evil, satanic! Leave! #Labour #Corbyn.”

“Ruth you are a Zionist plant, I’m ashamed you are in Labour. Better suited to the murderous Knesset! #I Support Ken.”

“Your fellow traitor Tony Blair abolished hanging for treason. Your kind need to leave before we bring it back #Smeeth Is Filth.”

Housing, Planning and the Green Belt

Nick Boles Excerpts

Tuesday 6th February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Nick Boles (Grantham and Stamford) (Con)]

This is the first time I rise to contribute to a debate since my recovery from cancer and my return to active duty. I hope that you will therefore forgive me, Madam Deputy Speaker, if I divert for a moment to thank right hon. and hon. Members of the House, from all parts and all parties, for their kindness in the time I was ill. You know all too well, Madam Deputy Speaker, that Whips can sometimes come in for a bit of a bad rap, but I would just like to put on record the unstinting support that our Whips Office gave me while I was ill. In particular, I wish to single out my right hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Julian Smith), who, as Deputy Chief Whip, was constantly inquiring after my health and making sure I had everything I needed, and my current Whip, my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood (Mark Spencer), whom I hope will always be my Whip and my friend.

I need to warn the Whips Office that, like many people who recover from a serious illness, I have returned a slightly different man, with a slightly different perspective. I have returned with a determination no longer to draw a veil over awkward truths and no longer to avoid thinking clearly and speaking openly about the mistakes we have made. The truth is that, for 20 years, Governments of all parties and politicians of all stripes have failed to build enough new homes to meet the housing needs of our fellow citizens. We have done that even though almost every single one of us in this House knows that happy feeling of living in a home that we own. In all our constituencies, for huge numbers of the people we represent, the dream of home ownership has turned into a tantalising mirage—a nightmare which they can never hope to get out of. We have failed through a combination of cowardice, complacency, laziness and incomprehension.

The roots of this problem lie in a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of our housing market and house building industry. We talk of them as if it were a free market and all the problems that emanate from it are a result of free market operation, but that is not the case. This is a market in which the Government have made the most extraordinary intervention. Back in the 1930s, the house building market used to generate, in a country with a much smaller population, well over 300,000 homes every year. That was a free market, but the problem was that it led to unstoppable urban sprawl, as cities reached out into the countryside in a never-ending way.

As a result, as a Parliament and as a people we decided to introduce the Town and Country Planning Act 1932 to constrain that sprawl and introduce some order into the development process. That was an extraordinary intervention. We went from a situation in which someone could buy a plot of land, put up a few homes and sell them, to a situation in which the right to develop land was nationalised. The landowner has no innate right to build anything on their land. They have to apply to the Government for permission. That is an intervention that I support. I believe that the British people were entirely within their rights—as my hon. Friend the Member for Tewkesbury (Mr Robertson) is entirely within his rights—to want to defend the precious English countryside, but we need to acknowledge the effect of that intervention and be willing to embrace the measures to ensure that we nevertheless build enough homes for our people.

In France, they have a planning system, yet every single year they build 300,000 or 400,000 homes and they have very much less in the way of house-price inflation than we do. In Germany, they have a planning system, and every single year, routinely, they build 300,000 or 400,000 units, and they too have managed to avoid the UK’s curse: house-price inflation.

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

It is fantastic to see my hon. Friend back in his place, making his customary important points. Does he accept that in Cherwell we too have a planning system, and we are still able to build three houses a day on average, because of positive local leadership? We just have to work harder to make sure that we have the infrastructure to back that up.

[Nick Boles]

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention. The new Minister for Housing, my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Dominic Raab), will discover, as I did when I was Planning Minister in the same Department, that Cherwell is one of the most progressive authorities on house building and sets an example that many other authorities could do well to study.

When we have made an intervention of the kind we have by nationalising the right to build and introducing a planning system, we need to follow through with the kinds of interventions that the French and the Germans allow themselves, to ensure that land prices do not become the constant fuel of ever-rising house prices, that major house builders are not in the business of eking out their supply as slowly as possible to keep prices as high as possible and that every year we build enough truly affordable housing units—housing that people on average and below-average incomes can afford to rent or buy. That is something that is achieved in Germany and France, and it is something that we comprehensively fail to do.

There will be some on these Benches of the more pure free market cast of mind who would rather that we scrap our planning controls and revert to a system of the 1930s. If we were to do that, it is true that the number of units that we would build every year would go up, that house prices would fall and that more people would be able to own their own homes. It is also true that we would have cities merging with one another and that we would lose huge swathes of precious English countryside, and I simply do not believe that the British people would wear it. The alternative therefore is for this party in government, which believes in the free market and in free enterprise, nevertheless to grasp that further state intervention is necessary if we are to have a house building industry that delivers enough homes for our citizens.

I know that there will be other hon. Members who would like to say more about some of these ideas, but the key interventions that we need to make are these. We need to give ourselves the power to acquire land at a price that is fair to the community as well as to the landowner. Why should landowners benefit from the fluke that gives them planning permission to build on their land when none of their neighbours receives it? Why should the taxpayer bear the cost of the infrastructure—the roads, the sewerage and the schools—that makes land developable in the first place? We need to revert to the situation that led to Milton Keynes and the other new towns, where we were able to acquire the land at a reasonable price, a small multiple of its agricultural land value, and then use the uplift in that land value to fund the infrastructure that the community needs.

We also need to intervene with major house builders to ensure that they build out the sites with planning permission on the schedule that they agreed with the planning authority. My suggestion for how we enforce this is to ask them to offer any sites that they had refused to build out to any other house builder to build on. This is such an important subject, Madam Deputy Speaker, that I hope to return to it in future, but I thank you for your time.

Oral Answers to Questions

Nick Boles Excerpts

Monday 22nd January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Wheeler]

This is a very complex matter. The interesting thing that I find now that I am getting to grips with it as a Minister is the different layers of problems that people have in their chaotic lives. It is very important that different councils have moved on with building new council housing, including my own Conservative South Derbyshire District Council—I declare an interest as my husband was the leader. Different levels are really attacking the issue and it is going to be a pleasure to get my teeth into it.

[Nick Boles (Grantham and Stamford) (Con)]

The Secretary of State attended the launch of the new all-party parliamentary group on new towns, chaired by my hon. Friend the Member for Telford (Lucy Allan). My right hon. Friend will know that the new towns and Milton Keynes were created because they were able to acquire land at a reasonable valuation close to its current use. That is no longer possible, because of the Land Compensation Act 1973. Among his many admirable ambitions for housebuilding in this country, will he agree to look at the Act and the possibility of reforming the valuation of land that is acquired?

[Sajid Javid]

My hon. Friend speaks with great experience. He made a number of important planning reforms when he was a Minister. I will commit to looking at the issue he raises and point him to some of the work we have already done, including an amendment in the Neighbourhood Planning Act 2017 which allows the Secretary of State to designate planning zones.