VAT: Independent Schools

Debate between Nusrat Ghani and John Milne

Tuesday 8th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[John Milne (Horsham) (LD)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.

First, I would like to pay tribute to my predecessor, Sir Jeremy Quin, who represented Horsham for the last 10 years. He was a dedicated MP, and in my first couple of months I have heard praise from many constituents for his past help. An MP’s best work is often unsung and behind the scenes, and I intend to continue his campaigns on issues such as child trust funds.

I would have to go back very much further to find a fellow Liberal MP to celebrate—144 years, to be precise. Being a rock-solid safe seat in a first-past-the-post system is not great for democracy. So many people have come up to me since the election and said it is the first time their vote has ever counted. Horsham’s turnout was over 70%, and if we had proportional representation, we would see that level of engagement everywhere.

For most of my life, I worked as a creative director in advertising, before becoming a local councillor five years ago. I would especially like to thank my family, who are up in the Gallery today, for supporting me in this unexpected career change, because this is a huge journey for all of us, not just me.

Most of Horsham is open farmland, with patches of ancient woodland and villages that retain a strong sense of community. Horsham town itself is pretty enough to be charming, but not so temptingly chocolate-boxy that it gets overwhelmed by tourists. As the name suggests, Horsham was once a home for horse trading, and to this day it is a centre of excellence in the equestrian industry. Horsham is also where our great national poet Percy Bysshe Shelley grew up. With luck, we will see him around town again soon if fundraising for a statue in his honour is successful. We have high-achieving schools, both state and private, and we want to keep it that way. Many of them have approached me with concern over the VAT imposition.

Although Horsham has never been the site of a major battle, it is where the Dalek invasion of Earth started through the work of Ray Cusick, the BBC theatrical designer and long-term Horsham resident. But perhaps the jewel in the crown of the constituency is the Knepp estate, the UK’s leading rewilding enterprise, which now has international fame. This is no frozen museum of conservation; it is a living, breathing experiment in flora and fauna, where nature herself is the key architect.

Of course, Horsham is not immune to national challenges, from a creaking health service to cuts in public transport and crumbling roads, but today I want to focus on the positives. Horsham is a great place to do business. It is hard to believe it now, but Horsham was once a centre of England’s iron industry. Later we became a leading brewery town, and today that tradition is carried on by energetic start-ups like Hepworth, Weltons, Kissingate and Brolly Brewing, which rather enterprisingly came up with a Lib Dem-branded beer during my campaign. We are home to Creative Assembly, one of Europe’s largest video game designers; Schroders, a world-class investment company; and innovative tech businesses like Metricell, which might one day help us solve our pothole problem—that would surely be worth a Nobel prize.

Whereas many high streets have struggled, Horsham’s is bustling—a shopping destination for not just local residents, but visitors alike. I urge Members to join us at the Carfax bandstand on a Friday evening in the summer, where the district council has pumped new energy into the town with a series of free events themed on everything from ska, ABBA, Pride and Bollywood to German oompah music. After a quietish first 1,000 years, Horsham is learning how to party. Whereas other communities have been losing their local theatres, ours is getting a multimillion-pound investment to help the council reach its net zero targets. After the last revamp, under the Tories, the theatre reopened with that surefire box office attraction, “An Evening With Ann Widdecombe”. I wonder if she is still available.

As a constituency that is now half town, half rural, Horsham plays a lead role in striking a balance between competing needs. We have large areas of productive farmland, making a valuable contribution to food security, but the same land is under pressure to provide housing and renewable energy installations. All of these are positive things, but the same land cannot do them all at once.

If there is one thing I would like to focus on during my term, it is housing. I strongly support the new Government’s house building ambitions, but I am surprised and disappointed to see that they are using the same flawed system to fix local targets as before, except with a bigger stick. The standard method, as used since 2018, has been shown to be a hopelessly inaccurate way of assessing local need, nor will it ever make housing more affordable. In Horsham, the average price of a new house is higher than that of the existing stock, so the more we build, the higher our target goes—the exact reverse of what is supposed to happen. Horsham already has 13,500 unbuilt permissions. We will be forced to continue building houses that people cannot afford to satisfy a local need that does not exist, while heaping further stress on to already overloaded local services— and then we are surprised when people say they do not like it.

Just to make things more complicated, Horsham has its own unique challenge, known as water neutrality, which restricts water use for environmental reasons. We are caught between two Government directives that completely contradict each other. One rule says we have to build a fixed number of houses per year, but the other rule says we are not allowed to build any houses at all because we cannot use any more water without damaging the environment. We are being punished for failing to build the houses we are not allowed to build. This is a planning system devised by Kafka, not Beveridge.

For all the challenges, I would like people to see Horsham as a place of opportunity. For everything that is going wrong, something else is going right. It is a huge honour to represent the people of Horsham—one that I never expected to have. As someone who campaigned on a promise to serve as a constituency MP, I could not ask for a better constituency to work for.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

To make sure that we get in as many valuable contributions as possible, Back-Bench speeches will now be limited to three minutes. Please be mindful.