General Practice: Large Housing Developments

Peter Dowd Excerpts

Tuesday 29th March 2022 Westminster Hall

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Peter Dowd (in the Chair)]

Order. We have seven more Back-Bench speakers. We will start the winding-up speeches no later than 10.38 am to give Mr Selous time for a two-minute response. There is no formal imposition of a time limit, but if colleagues could keep to about six minutes maximum, that would be best.

[Theresa Villiers (Chipping Barnet) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) for securing a debate on this important issue this morning.

The Mayor of London wants 2,364 new flats and houses to be built in the borough of Barnet every year for years to come. I did a rough calculation for some of the bigger developments recently built, approved or pending in the planning system in my constituency alone, and the figure is nearly 4,000 units, with another 691 rejected but liable to come back on appeal or possibly with a revised proposal. That could mean anything up to about 9,000 people trying to find a place on a GP’s list of patients. I pay tribute to all the GPs in my constituency. They are the bedrock of our NHS. We all depend on them, and they have done magnificently in so many ways during the pandemic.

It is clear that rising healthcare need is already placing great pressure on our national health service, including general practice, as we grow older as a society and as our frail elderly population gets larger. But at the same time, council planning committees are finding it harder and harder to turn down planning applications even where it is clear that the area does not have the GP capacity to service the population increase that the proposed new flats could involve. Elected councillors are increasingly advised by officers that they should not turn down an application even if it contravenes long-established planning principles on matters such as character, conservation, height, density or pressure on local services and infrastructure, because their decision could be overturned on appeal, on the grounds that housing targets are not being met. To compound the pressure, elected representatives are threatened with high costs being awarded against councils if they lose planning appeals. That is forcing councils to produce long lists of development sites to meet the requirement of a five-year land supply, many of which may be wholly inappropriate for new housing—certainly high-density new housing. Even where developers offer to build facilities for a new GP practice as part of their plan, that does not solve the problem, as I said to my hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire, because it is a shortage of doctors, not premises, that is causing the greatest pressure on primary care.

My hon. Friend clearly articulated a solution in his speech, but I would like the Minister to consider a threefold solution. First, housing targets should be advisory, not mandatory. They should not be taken into account in planning decisions or appeals. Secondly, whether or not a local authority has a five-year land supply should no longer determine planning applications. Thirdly, we need to accelerate efforts to train, recruit and retain more family doctors. The Government take the expansion of the NHS workforce very seriously, and it is a proud achievement that there are more doctors in hospitals than ever before in the long history of our national health service. The Government have ensured that there are more GPs in training than ever before, and five new medical schools have opened. That good progress is all welcome, but as the Health Secretary has admitted, plans to recruit 6,000 additional GPs by 2024 are not on track. We need to turn that situation around if we are to tackle the covid backlog and ensure that, where new homes are built, all residents—existing ones and new ones—continue to be able to access the GP appointments they need.

I hope the Minister will set out the care improvements delivered by the £250 million package announced last year to relieve immediate pressures on GP practice. I hope he will also give us the latest numbers on the recruitment of other professionals, such as nurses and pharmacists, to support GPs as part of multidisciplinary practices. Will he commit the Government to redoubling their efforts to plan effectively for the future workforce needs of our national health service?

[Peter Dowd (in the Chair)]

Thank you for your remarks and for keeping within the advisory time limit.

Oral Answers to Questions

Peter Dowd Excerpts

Monday 24th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Christopher Pincher]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his question, because it gives me the opportunity to make it clear that it is for local communities to determine how many homes they want and need in their vicinity. Local housing need numbers are not an end point; they are a starting point. It is for local authorities to determine what constraints they may face to determine the numbers of homes that they need in their area. They then agree those numbers with the Planning Inspectorate to set a sound plan, and that is then the number that the local authorities build toward. Local authorities that fail to set an up-to-date plan leave their constituents at risk of speculative development, so it is for local authorities to set the numbers and make their plans.

[Peter Dowd (Bootle) (Lab)]

7. What steps he is taking to ensure that levelling-up funding is allocated equitably and transparently.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and Minister for Intergovernmental Relations (Michael Gove)]

I am grateful to the hon. Member for Bootle (Peter Dowd) for the brief, tantalising preview of what is to come. The levelling-up fund is allocated according to objective criteria, including value for money, strategic fit, deliverability and the characteristics of place. I am therefore delighted that places such as Rotherham, Liverpool and Newcastle upon Tyne have already secured funding through our levelling-up funds, which include the towns fund, the levelling-up fund itself and the previous local growth fund.

[Peter Dowd]

A bit more tantalisation here: how can the Government’s levelling-up allocations possibly be equitable and transparent when the Government’s own index of multiple deprivation indicates that the constituencies of the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care—numbers 254 and 268 of the 310 on the index—received £27 million and £14.5 million respectively, while an area in the top 0.5% of the index, which includes my constituency, where my constituency office is based, received nothing? The question is: is that equitable, transparent and fair? Will the Secretary of State or a Minister meet me and my neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Sefton Central (Bill Esterson), to discuss our concerns?

[Michael Gove]

It is certainly equitable, transparent and fair, and should the hon. Member wish, there is an explanatory memorandum on gov.uk, which would take him, as it would any hon. Member, through the process by which funds have been allocated. I should say that the whole Liverpool city region received £37.5 million through the levelling-up fund, but I would be delighted to talk to him and the hon. Member for Sefton Central (Bill Esterson) to ensure that future bids can land carefully, safely and successfully.

Enterprise Zones: Waveney

Peter Dowd Excerpts

Wednesday 8th December 2021 Westminster Hall

[Peter Dowd (in the Chair)]

Before we begin, I remind Members that they are expected to wear a face covering when not speaking in the debate, in line with current Government guidance and that of the House of Commons Commission. I also remind Members that they are asked by the House to have a covid lateral flow test twice a week if coming on to the parliamentary estate, which can be taken at the testing centre in the House or at home. Please also give each other and members of staff space when seated, and when entering and leaving the Chamber.

I will call the hon. Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous) to move the motion and then the Minister to respond. There will not be an opportunity for the Member in charge to wind up, as is the convention for 30-minute debates.

Council Tax: Government’s Proposed Increase

Peter Dowd Excerpts

Monday 25th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Peter Dowd (Bootle) (Lab) [V]]

Listening to the Secretary of State, it seems that everything is fine in local government, and local authorities have all the money and resources they need. Well, the Local Government Association does not say that, the Institute for Fiscal Studies does not say that, council leaders do not say that and Tory MPs—the ones who have a spine, anyway—do not say it. The Secretary of State consulted local government given the dire circumstances, and local government gave a view about council tax; it is entitled to do that.

The year 2021 marks 40 years since I was elected as a Merseyside county councillor, and now we have the city regions. Those councils were abolished by Mrs Thatcher—mainly because they stood up to her—and the beginnings of the first stage of austerity began. It seems that nothing much changes in 40 years. I continue to see local government bear the brunt of cuts and policies of retrenchment in the light of the Government’s inability to see beyond the confines of Westminster and Whitehall. Not content with making a hash of virtually every policy decision and initiative in relation to covid—I use the words “policy” and “initiative” with a certain amount of caution—they continue to dump on local government.

When I was the leader of Sefton Council, I often referred to the overall balance experienced and witnessed among local councils across the country. As early as 2010, my council had in-year cuts to funding—for example, for neighbourhood renewal funds— and things simply got worse that after that stage. As time went by, my authority had cut after cut after cut. When I first came to the House in 2015, five years into austerity, I heard one Conservative Member express surprise at and bemoan the fact that his local police authority was supposed to find savings that year—it was as though he was some sort of Rip Van Winkle who had just woken up. The shadow Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon North (Steve Reed), is a former council leader, like me, so has witnessed the impact of continued retrenchment in local council finance. That is the responsibility of the Government, not local government.

Meanwhile, as the unprecedented crisis in local government goes into even deeper and darker places and councils struggle to provide the most basic of services, the Secretary of State should be concentrating on the wellbeing of the living, not on the wellbeing of inanimate objects and issues such as the removal of statues in various areas. It is a diversionary tactic; I am sure the Secretary of State could have come up with something a tad more imaginative than that.

Allowing and expecting councils to increase council tax by 5% will mean very different things for households in different parts of the country. Although the percentage increase is uniform throughout the country, the starting point in absolute terms is very different. It is important to take that into account. If we follow the Chancellor’s assumption that councils increase tax by the maximum allowed, for band D householders in the Sefton Council area, the tax will go up in April by £99 for 2021, compared with £54 in Westminster and £55 in Wandsworth. Is that fair? No, it is not.

I have a number of questions for the Secretary of State. With the UK having experienced the worst recession of any major economy, does he really think that now is the time to raise council tax? Does he recognise that most councils will simply have no choice but to raise council tax to preserve crucial services such as adult social care and children’s social care? What assessment has he made of the impact on the economic recovery of taking £90 out of the pockets of families? Frankly, is it not about time that, instead of bowing down to the Chancellor, the Secretary of State stood up for local government and said, “Enough is enough”?

North Staffordshire Potteries Towns: Levelling Up

Peter Dowd Excerpts

Tuesday 1st December 2020 Westminster Hall

[Peter Dowd (in the Chair)]

I remind hon. Members that there have been some changes to normal practice to support the new covid system and to ensure that social distancing can be respected. Members should sanitise their microphones before they use them, using the cleaning materials provided, which should be disposed of as they leave the room. Members are also asked to respect the one-way system; please exit by the door on the left.

Members should speak only from the horseshoe. Members can speak only if they are on the call lists. That applies even if debates are under-subscribed. Members cannot join the debate if they are not on the call list. I remind Members that they must arrive for the start of debates in Westminster Hall. Members are not expected to remain for the wind-ups.

--- Later in debate ---

[Aaron Bell]

As usual, my right hon. Friend is right. We need to find a proportionate measure. There are lots and lots of hard choices; the pandemic has meant choosing between one bad option and another throughout. I do not envy the Prime Minister and the Health Secretary the choices they have had to make, and I will be supporting the Government today. I will not get to give my speech in the main Chamber, because I am No. 105 on the call list and I think they have reached about No. 30, so I will make that point now.

I recognise that the Chancellor of the Exchequer also has hard choices to make. It is not as simple as saying that we should give everybody a turnover and make them whole, because that is taxpayers’ money, too, and we need to be realistic about how we use it. However, the support has to be proportionate to the damage that those places are suffering.

I will briefly talk about a couple of other areas in which we could level up. I want to hear more from the Minister, when he sums up, about what the new £4 billion levelling-up fund will do. I welcome that, and I would like it to be extended to local areas. I do not know what “local areas” means in the guidance. Does it go down as low as parish or town councils? I spoke to Audley Rotary Club last week. Audley is a mining village and it is not included in the Future High Streets fund because it is not part of the town centre, but the mining villages further out, such as Audley and Bignall End, need levelling up, too.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Jo Gideon) mentioned the potential 5G pilot, and I want to put a word in for that. All 12 Staffordshire MPs wrote to the Chancellor, the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government and the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport about that. Most of all, I echo the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South about public transport. Newcastle-under-Lyme is one of the largest towns in the country without a railway station of its own. We would like a lot more to be done about buses, as we said in this place at the start of this year in my first ever Westminster Hall debate.

In the longer term, we would love to put a metro proposition together, and we would like some help with that from either the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government or the Department for Transport. Too many local authorities that need levelling up do not have the experience necessary to put the bids together, because they have not had this funding for years. We need help so that we can put the best-quality bids together and get the levelling up that our communities deserve.

I want to briefly mention culture. Newcastle-under-Lyme is proud of its culture and history. We are the birthplace of Philip Astley, the founder of the modern circus, and hopefully our town deal will do some work around that. The New Vic, which my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central was kind enough to mention, had a fantastic restoration during covid, which turned out to be exceptionally well timed. I went along to the relaunch event, “Ghostlight”, which was socially distanced and very good, although I have so much sympathy for the theatre, which cannot put on its Christmas performance this year.

I had better wrap up, otherwise I will be talking my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North out of this debate altogether. Thank you very much, Mr Dowd, for letting me make these points about the importance of levelling up for north Staffordshire and all our communities.

[Peter Dowd (in the Chair)]

Before I call Jonathan Gullis, may I ask you to finish by 3.38 pm if possible, to give the Minister, the Opposition spokesperson and Mr Brereton an opportunity to respond briefly?

Budget Resolutions

Peter Dowd Excerpts

1st reading: House of Commons
Thursday 1st November 2018 Commons Chamber

[Peter Dowd (Bootle) (Lab)]

I am glad to see the Chief Secretary to the Treasury in her seat today, as she could not get one on Monday. I wish to comment on what a number of Members have said. The right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) asked, in a rather perplexed way, why the Government were spending all the headroom. The answer is: because they are up the creek. My hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) talked about the problems her local authority has because of the Government’s austerity plans. My hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) spoke similarly, as did many other Members.

The hon. Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke) said young people need to be better off; well, that is why young people are voting Labour. Rather bizarrely, the hon. Member for Aldershot (Leo Docherty) talked about sausages and Marxism; I hope his sausages are more sizzling than his speech was.

My hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis) made the case for devolution. My right hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton South East (Mr McFadden) talked about how women have been most affected by austerity. [Interruption.] Conservative Members may want to laugh at that sort of thing, but we take that very seriously. My hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) made a similar case. The theme was there throughout the debate: austerity has not ended and will not end under a Tory Government.

When I entered Parliament, I believed that a primary role of this House was to hold the Government to account. I looked at the parliamentary website to check out my assumption, and found that it says:

“Parliament works on our behalf to try to make sure that Government decisions are…open and transparent”—

that is a foreign land for this Government—

“by questioning ministers and requesting information”

and

“workable and efficient”—

not a concept routinely associated with this Government—

“by examining new proposals closely and suggesting improvements”.

However, the Government have systematically treated the House in the most contemptible way. All Members should be worried. First, the Government stitched up Committees with a Tory majority, even though they are a clapped-out minority Government who are not fit to govern. Secondly, they have obstructed substantive scrutiny of three Finance Bills in a row by not permitting any amendments to the law, which is unprecedented. Thirdly, behind closed doors they agreed a billion-pound deal with another minority party, without proper parliamentary scrutiny or the signatories to the deal being held to account by this place. Fourthly, without precedent they did not provide my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition with the traditional advance copy of the Budget statement. That is wrong. Fifthly, the Chancellor did not even have the courtesy to attend the House when my right hon. Friend the shadow Chancellor opened the debate on Tuesday afternoon. That is simply disrespectful, not to the individuals but to the protocols of the House.

The power grab by Ministers continues in the Budget resolutions—for example, in resolution 79, which is worryingly designed to give Ministers the ability to amend key tax legislation ahead of Brexit without parliamentary oversight. That is unprecedented and wrong and we will vote against it. We will continue to raise this egregious contempt for Parliament through any means we possibly can.

As for the Budget itself, the Prime Minister offered an end to austerity, but the promise has turned out to be as hollow as a Halloween pumpkin. The Chancellor claimed it would be a Budget for

“the strivers, the grafters and the carers”—[Official Report, 29 October 2018; Vol. 648, c. 653.]

but the spectre of austerity continues to haunt the country, and will do for many years to come.

[Leo Docherty]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Peter Dowd]

No, I will not.

There is nothing in the Budget for teachers, police officers and local government workers. There is not a penny for most frontline services, while local council funding is being cut by £1.3 billion next year alone. The Government have broken all their economic targets. They keep setting their own work, but they are marked an F grade every single time. Economic growth has been sluggish and is set to stay below 1.6% for the next five years. Productivity remains 15% lower than in other developed economies and the Government are doing nothing about it. Regional economic disparity is vast. Public sector investment is more than £18 billion lower than in 2010—[Interruption.] The hon. Member for Aldershot talked about Marxism and brutal regimes. This is a man who has been to Saudi Arabia many times. That is the sort of brutal regime that he should be worrying about. It is an absolute disgrace.

Public sector investment is more than £18 billion lower than it was in 2010. That is not talking down the economy; that is talking up the truth. If austerity is over, why then is the Chancellor pressing ahead with a further £7 billion of social security cuts? The Health Foundation says that the money for the NHS is not enough. There is, of course, no mention of the £12 billion of outstanding loans and deficits that the NHS has had to use to get by.

On social care, the £650 million announced is less than half what the King’s Fund estimates is needed. Our children’s services are in meltdown. The additional money announced for universal credit is only half what was cut in 2015, and the list goes on and on. There is, of course, no shortage of gimmicks in the Budget. The introduction of a digital services tax is, I am told, already sending the tech companies into a frenzy. My right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge) says that it is media management.

In the labour market, one in nine workers across the country is in insecure work. Many are relying on credit cards to survive. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford South (Judith Cummins) reminded us earlier this week, since 2008 only one in 40 net jobs created has been full time. There was no mention of that particular fly in the ointment by the Chancellor. Eight years of austerity have ripped through our society and our communities, driving in-work poverty and inequality, and further entrenching the economic crisis caused by greed and avarice. Therefore, in that context, we will not stand in the way of more income for low and middle earners; they deserve some respite from the Government. That is unlike the Liberal Democrats, who evidently will be voting against their own flagship tax policy set out in their manifesto.

The Opposition’s amendment to resolution 1 sets out our progressive taxation policy, which we laid out in our manifesto in 2017, of increasing taxes for the top 5% to help pay for improvements in public services, which we all need and which many people across the country need. This amendment highlights our tax reforms, which would shift the emphasis on to the wealthy few, while guaranteeing no further increases of tax on anyone earning less than £80,000. Labour will challenge the Government every step of the way to introduce a more progressive taxation system despite their rigging of Parliament. This is yet another broken-promise Budget that does nothing to end the slowest recovery since the great depression.

Austerity has damaged our economy, weakened our recovery and divided our society. It has made poor people poorer, made them angry, made them fearful, and made them distrustful of the politicians on the Government Benches who they feel do not stand up for them against powerful lobbies. Austerity has made the richest richer; that cannot be right and that cannot be just. It is not in the national interest. Government Members have made a point of claiming that they are not ideological, that they are pragmatists. Let them prove their pragmatism and their open-mindedness. If they are so confident of their policies, so sure of their convictions, then quite simply let them support our amendment. What do they have to fear?