High Street Regeneration and Unlawful Storefronts

Debate between Paul Holmes and John Hayes

Tuesday 30th June 2026 Westminster Hall

[Paul Holmes (Hamble Valley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Vaz. I welcome the new Minister to her place; I know that she has a background in these issues, and I look forward to working with her in the weeks, months or years ahead. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Bradley Thomas) for securing this debate. He is a great champion for his community. This issue is close to his heart, and given his previous career in local government he is very knowledgeable about it.

I welcome the opportunity to contribute to this debate. My hon. Friend mentioned a range of topics, which shows how much he is involved in his constituency and community, ranging from flaws in the banking hub criteria to the aesthetics of our high streets. I know that that comes from his time as leader of a local authority. I am also his Whip; after this morning, he can be guaranteed a good mention in dispatches later.

We have heard some entertaining and knowledgeable speeches from my colleagues. My hon. Friends the Members for Bromley and Biggin Hill (Peter Fortune), for South Shropshire (Stuart Anderson), for Chester South and Eddisbury (Aphra Brandreth) and for Keighley and Ilkley (Robbie Moore) and my right hon. Friends the Members for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton) and for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) have shown their in-depth knowledge of the challenges in their constituencies.

Traditionally, high streets have been seen as indicators of the health of our economy, with the British Retail Consortium calculating that retail generates nearly £500 billion in annual sales and nearly 3 million jobs. According to the Office for National Statistics, around 4.4 million people work in businesses located on British high streets, which represents roughly 14% of all employment in the UK.

The contribution of the sector to the UK economy is vital to any Government seeking economic growth, especially regionally driven growth, which I have reason to believe the incoming Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Makerfield (Andy Burnham), is enthusiastic about. This growth will be much better able to sustain communities and help them thrive. It will empower local people, business owners and decision makers to improve the areas they know and love better than any centrally planned project ever could.

As I have said in previous debates, however, the high street is more than a place where cash, services and goods change hands. It is at the heart of our communities—a place where people can come together to catch up over a coffee or a beer, have a natter in the nail bar or have a quiet read in the local bookshop. The value of our high streets cannot be quantified by simple sums of money, or by the business rates or council tax that they generate for the Treasury and local government. They are so much more than that.

As has been outlined this morning, however, there is a sad story of decline on our high streets. Many factors explain that, and colleagues from across the House have touched on many of those, including the rise of online shopping, cost of living pressures, economic stagnation, high taxes on businesses, planning issues, poor local transport links and stretched public services. There are many causes of the problem, and many people lose out from dying high streets.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy is the impact on young people. Retail has always been one of the UK’s great entry-level employers. It has given generations of young people their first job, taught customer services skills, teamwork and responsibility, and provided a pathway into management and business ownership. As Members will be aware following the publication of Alan Milburn’s report, youth unemployment stands at a staggering 16.2%—an increase of almost two percentage points on last year; at the same time, youth employment has fallen. More than 3 million 16 to 24-year-olds across the country are unemployed and economically inactive.

We should ask ourselves a simple question: how many of those young people have been pushed out of work, or denied work in the first place, by the continuing decline of our high streets? Increases to the minimum wage, the surging cost of employer national insurance contributions and council tax hikes are just a few of the burdens heaped on to businesses, which have been pushed to the wire. In 2024 alone, more than 13,000 high street stores closed, and over the last two years the retail sector has lost almost 250,000 jobs. Every shop that closes represents not just another empty unit but another lost opportunity for someone hoping to take their first step into employment. If we genuinely care about tackling economic inactivity, we cannot ignore what is happening in our town centres and high streets.

The picture is no better for Britain’s pubs. At this point, I had better declare an interest: I like being in pubs quite a lot. Changes to employer national insurance contributions have added around £7,200 a year to the wage bill of the average pub, which employs eight people. Layer on top of that business rate reforms, which were presented as a lifeline but for many businesses have proved to be anything but, and it becomes easy to understand why so many publicans are questioning whether they can continue. The consequences are stark: across Britain, two pubs close every day.

At the 2024 autumn Budget, the Chancellor promised to “permanently lower” business rates for retail, hospitality and leisure businesses, telling Parliament that this would help to level the playing field for our high streets. That ambition was welcome, but when the detail emerged many businesses concluded that the reforms would do the opposite. Rather than providing certainty, the changes have raised serious concerns that many larger retailers and hospitality businesses—the so-called anchor tenants that attract shoppers to our town centres—could face significantly higher costs. Those businesses generate footfall for everyone else. When a department store, a supermarket, a major retailer or a large hospitality venue closes, it is not just the business itself that suffers; small independent retailers, cafés and local shops lose passing trade.

[Sir John Hayes]

The Government need to know when to step back and when to step forward. They need to step back by reducing the costs that my hon. Friend has set out, and they need to step forward by restricting where businesses can be located. The Government should be obliging businesses to reinvest in the high street.

[Paul Holmes]

I agree entirely with my right hon. Friend. That is something that this Labour Government have never got to grips with.

Businesses already operating on tight margins face £40 billion of tax rises, including substantial increases in national insurance contributions, which will place further strain on them. I am delighted that colleagues on the Opposition Benches mentioned the Leader of the Opposition’s pledge to abolish business rates for most high street businesses.

Alongside the economic challenges facing our high streets, we must also confront an uncomfortable truth, which many Members have mentioned: our constituents are increasingly concerned that some high street premises are being used not as genuine businesses but as vehicles for tax evasion, money laundering and organised crime. Those concerns are frequently raised in relation to certain cash-intensive businesses, including some barber shops, nail salons, mini-marts and vape shops. The overwhelming majority of those businesses are of course honest, hard-working enterprises that serve their communities and deserve our support, but the ones that are not undermine legitimate traders, distort competition and damage public confidence in our town centres.

Diego Garcia Military Base and British Indian Ocean Territory Bill

Debate between Paul Holmes and John Hayes

2nd reading
Tuesday 9th September 2025 Commons Chamber

[Paul Holmes]

I will tell the hon. Gentleman what one of those red lines was: not paying £35 billion to another country. In case he wants to read his Labour party briefing again, I remind the hon. Gentleman that another red line for the last Foreign Secretary was that he clearly did not accept unilaterally that the sovereignty of the Chagos islands fell with Mauritius. That is a key difference between the last Government and this Government.

This is a bad deal for Britain: it will cost £35 billion, while the Government tax and spend and make people in this country poorer, and in an ever-changing international security situation, this country is unilaterally giving up a strategically important defence base, in an area of the world where we are seeing more geopolitical uncertainty. I cannot put into words how bad this Bill is, except to say that it is an act of self-sabotage that we have not seen in this House by a democratically elected Government for generations.

To reiterate, not only is this a bad deal, but it is backed by every nation that is malign to our national interest, including China, Russia and Iran. Last week, at an international summit, those countries were actively advocating some of the malign influences about which this Government and the last Government spoke about, and they are actively backing this deal. I challenge Labour Members to look Opposition Members or any of their constituents in the eye and say that a deal that is successful for this country should be backed by Iran, China and Russia.

Madam Deputy Speaker, I am trying to work within the confines of parliamentary etiquette, but I have to say that there is something deeply concerning about the way that this Government have chosen to negotiate the terms of the agreement. We have to look at the close links between the key people who negotiated this deal with the Mauritian Government and the links—private links—to the Prime Minister and Ministers in this Government. The Prime Minister of Mauritius has said in the Mauritian Parliament that officials were asked to leave the room while private negotiations were going ahead. I have never known a responsible Government who are trying to hand over sovereignty of a British overseas territory to ask officials, who are there to protect the integrity and the transparency of the of decisions that Ministers take, to leave the room so that a negotiation can go on. Why have the Government hidden the cost of the deal? Why have they refused to give this House a solid and sustainable way to scrutinise the decisions of the Government? They have avoided scrutiny at every turn.

[Sir John Hayes]

Perhaps I can invite my hon. Friend to be helpful to the Minister. He clearly holds him in some regard, and he is right that he has got himself into something of a mess. By far the best way for the Government to proceed from hereon would be to make much more available either to this House or, as the former Attorney General, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright) suggested, to the Intelligence and Security Committee. That would clarify the terms of this trade—why it happened and the assessments that were made that led up to it—in a way that the House would be able to either legitimise what the Minister claims or refute it. A lack of transparency is half the Minister’s problem.

[Paul Holmes]

I agree with my right hon. Friend. I found it quite concerning earlier that the Chairman of the Defence Committee, the hon. Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi), relied on the fact that American counterparts in an Administration that he does not scrutinise backed the deal, so there was no need for the Defence Committee to interrogate Ministers of the Government it is supposed to scrutinise. There have been two offers this afternoon, one by my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes), and the other by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam, in his expert speech. There is a scrutiny structure in this House called the Intelligence and Security Committee to which the Minister could refer this decision, and he can rest assured in the knowledge that there are expert Members across the whole House who could offer their expert opinion on the deal. The Government have chosen not to do that. That is an indictment of the transparency and the drive the Government have shown in getting the deal very quickly.