Oral Answers to Questions

Philip Hollobone Excerpts

Monday 17th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Wheeler]

Again, I am absolutely delighted that the hon. Gentleman has asked that question, because we have actually put aside £9 billion for our affordable homes programme to deliver a quarter of a million affordable homes by 2022, including 12,500 for social rent. Let me repeat: we have given councils the ability to borrow against their housing revenue cap. We have taken the cap off. Please will councils get on with it? [Interruption.] As the hon. Gentleman is chuntering from the Front Bench, may I tell him that wonderful councils such as the ever present Conservative South Derbyshire District Council are doing exactly that?

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

13. What progress his Department is making with the Department of Health and Social Care on establishing an integrated health and social care organisation in Northamptonshire.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Rishi Sunak)]

Following the meeting I had with my hon. Friend, we were pleased to facilitate meetings for the chief executives of the various councils and health bodies with officials from the Department of Health and Social Care and my Department. Those conversations have been very constructive, and I am pleased to tell my hon. Friend that the Social Care Minister and I would both be delighted to meet him and other MPs once the proposals have been fleshed out in detail.

[Mr Hollobone]

I declare my interest as a member of Kettering Borough Council. There are still far too many patients in Kettering General Hospital and Northampton General Hospital who are classified as delayed transfers of care. They are mainly elderly patients whose medical treatment has been completed, but who face delays being put into the social care system. Does my hon. Friend agree that the reorganisation of local government in Northamptonshire presents a wonderful opportunity to create a social care and health pilot to combine these two services?

[Rishi Sunak]

My hon. Friend is spot on. Delayed transfers of care undermine patients’ dignity while putting pressure on beds and costing the taxpayer money. Although we have seen fantastic progress nationally with delayed transfers of care halving since the peak, Northamptonshire is obviously not in that place. My hon. Friend is absolutely right to highlight the opportunity that greater integrated care could bring, and we are delighted to work with him and others to make that a reality.

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[James Brokenshire]

I recognise the important point the hon. Gentleman the Chair of the Select Committee has highlighted on building safety. It is why I took the exceptional step of making £200 million available for remediation. It required a ministerial direction to be able to do so, because of its significance. Clearly, we have the ongoing testing of non-ACM materials. I will be advised by my team—the expert panel—in relation to the next steps, and I am clearly keeping the situation under careful review.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

There is no point building thousands of new houses in greenfield areas unless we have the requisite infrastructure to go with them. A recent report shows that North Northamptonshire faces an infrastructure deficit of over £300 million in delivering the houses requested by central Government. What can the Department do to ensure that the infrastructure comes to North Northamptonshire?

[Kit Malthouse]

My hon. Friend is quite right: one of the problems with housing development in the past in this country is that we have tended to build the houses first and cope with the infrastructure last. We have attempted to reverse that equation, and we now have £5.5 billion dedicated to housing infrastructure, which is specifically designed to release land to build the houses the next generation needs. I would be more than happy to meet him to discuss the possibility of a North Northamptonshire bid to the housing infrastructure fund either now or in the future.

House Building Targets

Philip Hollobone Excerpts

Tuesday 11th June 2019 Westminster Hall

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Mr Philip Hollobone (in the Chair)]

Order. The debate can last until 5.30 pm. I am obliged to call the Front Benchers no later than 5.7 pm. The guideline limits are five minutes for the SNP, five minutes for Her Majesty’s Opposition and 10 minutes for the Minister, and then Anne Marie Morris gets two or three minutes at the end to sum up the debate. Four Back Benchers are seeking to contribute, so I am afraid that there will have to be a time limit of four and a half minutes, to make sure that everybody gets in.

--- Later in debate ---

[Emma Hardy]

I completely agree, and I look forward to going to see those properties on Friday.

We have a problem with landlords not implementing their permissions in full, and with one landowner in particular. The problem is not just that sites are not being developed, but that landlords are failing to manage their responsibilities for them. There are patches of land across the city—I will talk about the details in a moment—that are being left to go to ruin, and landlords are not taking full responsibly for health and safety.

The Lord Line building is a site of personal significance to the people of Hull, as it is one of the last buildings relating to Hull’s fishing heritage. It is the site of the dock where the fishing boats used to come in and out of when we were the capital city of the UK for the fishing trade, but it has been left to go to ruin. Youths go in there for reasons that I do not want to elaborate on here. We can see from the discarded needles, the bricks thrown from the top of the building, and the fire engines that attend the site regularly that it is not being properly safeguarded or protected. There will end up being a tragedy there, because people keep going to that building and it is not being looked after.

The owner of that land also owned the former Rank Hovis Clarence Mill on St Peter Street. They pledged to clear the building and promised a Radisson Blu hotel in its place. The demolition and clearing work still had not started by 2015, and in 2017 the permission expired and was not renewed. They bought the Heaven & Hell nightclub in March 2011. They said that they were going to put a £15 million development called Manor Cube on the site, and stated that the building work on the hotel would be completed by July 2013, but by that time no work had been completed.

The Lord Line building has been left to go to rack and ruin, causing great upset in the fishing community in Hull. The company—Manor Properties—seems to have a habit of promising pie-in-the-sky, wonderful, big dreams to the people of Hull, while letting the areas go to ruin.

There are a few points where I feel the Minister can tighten up the existing legislation to prevent this from happening again. We could have enhanced compulsory purchase orders where a site is allocated and consent is not implemented in full. Those powers could enable the local authority to acquire the site at 50% of its market value, provided that it commences development within 12 months of acquisition and at least 50% of the development is completed within three years. I know that the council would develop that land, but it does not have the power to purchase it. If a section 15 notice has to be served due to a lack of maintenance and dereliction on a site, allowing it to be acquired at 40% of its market value could also help the development.

The Minister should also focus public sector funding on unlocking those sites by providing additional grants and loans. The rules are set up to prevent the council from being able to compulsorily purchase the sites, but when people come into my city on the A63, they see this abandoned building on the way in. That is not the advertisement that I want for my city. People walking around the centre see patches of land that have been left or underdeveloped. The Minister could change that by just tightening up a few bits of legislation.

Removing VAT for any conversion works undertaken to properties’ heritage action zones would also help us. The Minister should change the rules about what constitutes a material start, to prevent landowners from undertaking minor works.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (in the Chair)]

Order.

[Emma Hardy]

I will write to the Minister with more information.

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

When I first came to the House in 2008, I began work on a paper called “Open Source Planning”, which set out an important distinction and led to the abolition of the top-down targets that had existed under the Labour Government. It took a little while to get rid of them, but we have not replaced them. The Chancellor’s target of 300,000 houses is an aspirational or soft target, because it cannot be achieved on its own without consequential changes to the planning system. We have already made a large number of changes, and there are more on the way.

The main target that we should be aiming for is one based on housing need. Under previous Administrations, it was left to individual councils to come up with the figure for housing need and methodology to calculate it. That was incredibly expensive for councils and led to an enormous number of court cases, as developers challenged them. I was very pleased when the Government asked me to sit on the Local Plans Expert Group and come up with a new methodology. We were the first to introduce a methodology based on Office for National Statistics figures. Although there are some problems with it, which I am sure the Minister is aware of, it is a very useful starting point.

Unfortunately, many other deals—for example, growth deals—have subsequently come into play and overridden those figures. The councils concerned have come up with other figures to replace the need figure that is based on, for example, strategic housing market assessment surveys that are quite old. We and councils must have an overriding desire to go back and take those figures out to the public to discuss what is being done and ensure that there is public buy-in.

My hon. Friend the Member for Newton Abbot (Anne Marie Morris) mentioned the NPPF. I am very pleased to have been involved in the original version of it. All we tried to do with it was to boil it down from thousands of pages to 50 to make it accessible to everyone.

The best targets are those in neighbourhood plans. They have been developed by the community, and the figures from the district council that they have been built on are merely the minimum figures. The community can add to them whenever it wishes. Neighbourhood plans are very good at protecting the open and green spaces that the community wishes to include. There is a great need to protect the people who spend a couple of years producing a neighbourhood plan, which is why I introduced a private Member’s Bill to take away the right of appeal if a developer has definitely gone against a neighbourhood plan.

I do not think the system is broken. We have gone out of our way to try to fix it. I would point to the fact that the viability calculations that developers have to produce are public. They are available and have to be discussed, and local councils should have access to them. I agree with what my hon. Friend said about carbon impact, but I believe—

[Mr Philip Hollobone (in the Chair)]

Order.

Oral Answers to Questions

Philip Hollobone Excerpts

Monday 8th April 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

I declare an interest as a member of Kettering Borough Council. Despite cuts to central Government funding, Kettering council has now frozen its share of council tax all the way through to April 2020—it has been frozen since 2010—while enhancing the delivery of local public services. Does that not show that we do not need to increase council tax to improve the delivery of local public services?

[James Brokenshire]

I commend Kettering Borough Council for the work it is doing, and indeed Conservative councils up and down this country. It is worth highlighting that, on average, Labour councils in England impose bigger council tax increases than Conservative councils, reminding us that you always end up paying more under Labour.

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[James Brokenshire]

I firmly recognise the stress, strain and anguish that so many people continue to live with as a consequence of ACM cladding on the outside of a number of these blocks. A growing list of companies, such as Barratt, Mace and Legal & General, are doing the right thing and taking responsibility. In addition, warranty providers have accepted claims on a number of buildings. I urge all owners and developers to follow the lead of those companies and step up to make sure this work is done. This is a priority for me; I know the work needs to be advanced more quickly, and I am considering all other options if it is not.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

T5.   Mr Speaker, I declare my interest as a member of Kettering Borough Council. When will the Secretary of State lay the structural changes order for new unitary councils in Northamptonshire?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Rishi Sunak)]

I thank my hon. Friend for his engagement with the process of reorganising local government in Northamptonshire. I am pleased to tell him that the Department’s consultation on this matter has now closed. The Secretary of State is considering the responses and he intends to announce his decision to the House as soon as is practical.

Oral Answers to Questions

Philip Hollobone Excerpts

Monday 4th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[James Brokenshire]

The hon. Gentleman, the Chair of the Communities and Local Government Committee, is obviously aware that there is an ongoing consultation on the formula. He highlights a point in relation to the primary formula and the way in which deprivation plays into that. We will look closely at the evidence that is presented to us and I encourage him to take part in that consultation.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

I declare my interest as a member of Kettering Borough Council. At its budget last week, the council confirmed that it will achieve a 10-year council tax freeze, and despite cuts in Government spending it has maintained all frontline services and support for the voluntary sector. Is that not an example that other councils should follow?

[James Brokenshire]

I warmly commend Kettering Borough Council for the work that my hon. Friend outlined, and indeed councils for the way in which they have risen to the challenges. I commend all the work of the members and officers in Kettering for being able to deliver good-quality services in an efficient way.

Economic Growth: South-west

Philip Hollobone Excerpts

Tuesday 5th February 2019 Westminster Hall

[Sir Gary Streeter]

I thank the Minister for his speech. It is good to know that the Government are listening, that they are supportive and that they are committed to regional growth, especially in the south-west.

I thank all colleagues for taking part in this debate; we have heard some very powerful speeches today. Collectively, we are a good team for our region—we are all committed to working across the parties and to doing the best for our constituents. We already represent a wonderful region. If we can just get our infrastructure right, my firm hope and belief is that our best is yet to come.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered economic growth in the South West.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (in the Chair)]

Order. Would those who are inexplicably not staying to hear about the Red Arrows please be kind enough to leave quickly and quietly?

Oral Answers to Questions

Philip Hollobone Excerpts

Monday 28th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[James Brokenshire]

I can assure my hon. Friend that we are working with the Ministry of Defence on support that can be provided to veterans who need our help and backing because they have ended up, for whatever reason, on the street. He is right to say that we need better data, and that is what we seek to achieve.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

Of the 600 homeless people who died last year, 85% were men, one third died of drug overdoses and 10% died from alcohol poisoning. Will the Secretary of State ensure that those groups and factors are specifically prioritised in order to tackle this issue?

[James Brokenshire]

I am pleased to say that our rough sleeping strategy is intended to give that prioritisation, through work not only by my Department but across Whitehall. My hon. Friend is right about that need, and that is what we are determined to provide through the strategy.

Freehold Estate Fees

Philip Hollobone Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd January 2019 Westminster Hall

[Mr Philip Hollobone (in the Chair)]

Order. The debate lasts one hour and the finish time is 6.41 pm. I am obliged to call the Front-Bench spokesman for the Opposition no later than 6.19 pm, but until then it is Back-Bench time. Four Members are seeking to contribute, but I will need to impose a time limit on speeches of five minutes. The first speaker will be Preet Kaur Gill.

Deaths of Homeless People

Philip Hollobone Excerpts

Thursday 20th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[James Brokenshire]

The right hon. Gentleman makes an important point, and I commend St Mungo’s for its excellent work, for what it does out in our communities and for the difference it is making. I had a conversation with the chief executive of St Mungo’s this morning on some of the work it is doing now and, equally, on how, through our rough-sleeping advisory panel, we continue to work with those across the sector.

The right hon. Gentleman talks about giving help in hostels, and that point was also made to me last night. Within our rough-sleeping strategy we have a navigators programme, which is aimed precisely at guiding people through what is sometimes a complex system to ensure they get the support they need.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Melanie Onn) on securing this urgent question, and I thank you, Mr Speaker, for granting it.

Of the 600 homeless people who died on our streets last year, 85% were men, one third died of drug poisoning and the highest mortality rates were in London and the north-west of England. Will the Secretary of State ensure that, whatever Government help is provided, it is provided to where it will be most effective?

[James Brokenshire]

I can assure my hon. Friend that our rough-sleeping initiative is targeted at the 83 areas with the highest pressure and the highest demand. Obviously we will continue to reflect on that as evidence emerges. If the patterns change, clearly we will redirect resources, but he makes an important point about London and the north-west, where a lot of resource is being provided. Indeed, Manchester is one of the areas where we have our Housing First programme, which is aimed at providing help more quickly.

Local Government Funding Settlement

Philip Hollobone Excerpts

Thursday 13th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[James Brokenshire]

I hear what the right hon. Gentleman says. I will certainly look into his letter of 25 November and get back to him in relation to the points that he makes. But I would also highlight how we have been supporting the west midlands area in relation to issues such as rough sleeping, which he highlights, with our Housing First programme to ensure that we are getting the help that is needed to the most vulnerable people, getting them off the streets and getting them the support that they require.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

I declare my interest as a member of Kettering Borough Council. I thank the Secretary of State for listening to the campaign by local authorities in Northamptonshire and local hon. Members that Northamptonshire be granted a business rates retention pilot. Can he explain in simple terms, for the benefit of my constituents, how this will help local government finance as local councils reorganise in Northamptonshire?

[James Brokenshire]

I understand that Northamptonshire has estimated that the potential benefit is in the order of £18 million in relation to the business rates retention arrangements, with the growth in business rates. That is the change that we want to see across the system. I recognise the continuing issues and challenges within Northamptonshire. I can certainly commit to my hon. Friend to continue to work with colleagues on this.

Appointment of Sir Roger Scruton

Philip Hollobone Excerpts

Monday 12th November 2018 Commons Chamber

[James Brokenshire]

The short answer is probably very few, which is the point my hon. Friend is making. We need people who are prepared to come forward to advise Government and provide support. It is important that we continue to attract skilled, talented people to do that, and the Government will continue to champion freedom of expression and speech.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

I congratulate the Government on attracting a world-leading expert in architectural aesthetics to this position, and I thank Sir Roger for accepting unpaid public service. Will the Secretary of State join me in deploring the Opposition’s tactics which seem to be based on soundbite misquotations generated on social media?

[James Brokenshire]

As I said in my initial response, this has been misjudged. Professor Sir Roger Scruton is one of the most qualified people in this field to do this job, and that is why I am so grateful that he has said yes. I look forward to working with him.