Oral Answers to Questions
Polly Billington Excerpts(1 week ago)
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Daniel Zeichner
Once again, I direct right the hon. Gentleman back to the figures from the Treasury, which show that the numbers affected are under 500. That is the answer to his question.
Ms Polly Billington (East Thanet) (Lab)
The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Steve Reed)
The independent commission on the water sector was launched on 23 October and will be chaired by Sir Jon Cunliffe. It is the biggest review of the industry since privatisation and will report next summer. It will focus on boosting investability, speeding up the delivery of water infrastructure and cleaning up our waterways.
Ms Billington
Southern Water is responsible for blighting beaches with raw sewage along Ramsgate, Margate and Broadstairs, yet it plans on increasing household bills by 73% over the next five years, and the chief executive officers of Southern Water have received £4 million over the last five years in bonuses and salaries. Will the new independent commission do something about this egregious situation?
Steve Reed
I congratulate my hon. Friend on campaigning for her local water consumers. She is right to point to the wide failings across the system. We have charged Sir Jon Cunliffe with leading a commission that will look at how we can completely reset the sector—regulation, governance and how the sector operates—so that the levels of pollution and failure under the previous Government can never be repeated.
Agricultural Land: Protection
Polly Billington Excerpts(3 weeks, 3 days ago)
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Laura Kyrke-Smith
I agree that supporting smallholder farmers is absolutely essential.
There is too much to say in the time we have available tonight, but I will pull out three particularly important ways to help set up our farmers for success. First and foremost, we have to ensure the long-term financial sustainability of British farming. The environment land management schemes have been unclear, difficult to navigate and poorly tailored to different contexts—in the case of Ledburn farm, to the heavy clay land. As a result, the uptake has been low, but farmers remain in need of that support and we have to find a way to make it easier to access. Equally, farmers are forging ahead and finding ways to diversify their income, but there is much more we can do to support that—for example, by making it much easier to change the use of existing farm buildings, or to develop lower-grade agricultural land, if it creates renewable energy sources or affordable housing for farm workers.
Secondly, we have to promote and support farmers to roll out sustainable farming practices that address challenges such as soil erosion and low land productivity—for example, by supporting the farmer clusters that have become increasingly prevalent across Buckinghamshire, which bring together farmers to help explore best practice and to share ideas for enhancing natural habitats on their land.
Thirdly, we need to invest in the next generation of British farmers. This means ensuring that we give the profession the status that it deserves in the first place, and that we start educating children about it at a very young age. That means creating pathways into the farming sector—for example, through investing in specialist technical education and expanding agriculture apprenticeships. It means making it not just attractive but affordable to live in rural communities and to pursue a career in farming, particularly in places such as Buckinghamshire, where there is far too little affordable rural housing and services. As a result, the pull to towns is too strong. In short, we can put all the necessary protections in place for quality agricultural land, and I am confident that we will, but without a thriving farming sector to safeguard that land, they will have little impact.
My constituency has suffered from the absence of a coherent strategy for our land—where and how we protect it, where and how we use it, and where and how we develop it. Recent Governments have left nature depleted, farmers deeply uncertain at best and out of business at worst, and communities frustrated by haphazard house building without access to green spaces, infrastructure or services. Under this Government, the future has to look different, and we have to start with clear principles. Alongside the NPPF, the new land use framework will surely help to ensure that we get the right balance between food production, nature and economic growth.
We need more predictability. Of course external shocks will happen, but the role of the Government is to be a steadying force. It is great that we have got to work quickly on the first steps—whether planning reform or setting up Great British Energy—and I think we can look forward to a steady, focused roll-out.
Finally, we need a good deal of pragmatism and an acceptance that getting the right balance between development and environmental protection is not easy, and there will be compromises, but it is necessary. We have to find a way both to build the homes and infrastructure of the future, and to protect and regenerate our agricultural and nature-rich lands, because ultimately one cannot exist without the other.
Madam Deputy Speaker
Order. It is highly unusual for other Members to contribute to an Adjournment debate, because it is a conversation between the lead Member and the Minister. I believe that you have sought permission, but it is still highly unusual, so I assume that the contribution will be short before the Minister responds.
Ms Polly Billington (East Thanet) (Lab)
Thank you very much for your permission to speak in this debate, Madam Deputy Speaker. I want to support the representations from my hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Laura Kyrke-Smith), because some of the things that she raises are also relevant to my constituency and those across the country.
As my hon. Friend said, the case for more genuinely affordable homes is clear. That is accepted in my community as much as in hers, if not more so, as so many people struggle in the private sector and house prices spiral due to the pressure of unregulated short-term holiday lets, driven by many people’s huge and understandable desire to enjoy the delights of Margate, Broadstairs and Ramsgate.
We need new homes. I have spoken to far too many people in their 30s and beyond who live in their childhood bedrooms, sometimes with a partner. They are desperate to be able to start their lives in a home of their own, but they are priced out of their own community. We also desperately need the infrastructure to support the families who will live in those homes, and we need to protect and enhance not only the nature that we love but the nature that is essential to our own economy, wellbeing and future.
I came here to change the rules, Madam Deputy Speaker, although of course I observe the ones that you enforce in this House. It is clear that the current rules do not serve our need for homes or our need to protect and enhance nature. They do not enable the right infrastructure to be built, nor do they effectively help us identify and protect our vital farmland. Those who protect the status quo in this argument are condemning our country to failure. Those who think that any of these four elements—homes, farming, nature or infrastructure, including energy—should drop off the list of our priorities do not understand the importance of shaping our communities to benefit our residents, now and for the long term.
Nature is not just a “nice to have”. It is fundamental to us in achieving our economic, health and climate goals. In Thanet, people come to see and enjoy our natural world. Damaging nature, where it is a vital part of the economy, is short-sighted and dangerous. We also have some of the most productive farmland in the whole of the UK, yet the existing planning rules do not protect it from speculation and development. Access to nature is proven to enhance health and wellbeing, and the successes of previous Labour Governments in creating access to nature for everyone are some of our proudest achievements. Furthermore, responsible custodianship of our natural environment, especially precious ecosystems, is vital to capturing, sequestering and reducing carbon emissions. The sixth carbon budget predicts that, by 2050, we will need to remove 39 megatonnes of CO2 a year via nature-based solutions, which is more than double what we do today. That includes wetlands, woodlands and peatlands, which are both beautiful and useful.
This Labour Government were elected on a mandate to transform us into a clean energy superpower by 2030 and to restore and protect 30% of nature by 2030. We cannot achieve those goals under the current rules. That is why I look forward to us publishing a land use framework that will help us to decide what we use land for, and help us to shape our communities and our country to meet our ambition to be somewhere with affordable homes to rent or own and run, affordable sustainable food, affordable secure home-grown clean energy, decent public services, and our beloved countryside providing us with the peace and climate security we all need.
Independent Water Commission
Polly Billington Excerpts(4 weeks, 1 day ago)
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Ms Polly Billington (East Thanet) (Lab)
I welcome the commission announced by my right hon. Friend. Last week, six beaches in my constituency were affected by raw sewage dumping, with two of them—Joss Bay and Stone Bay—experiencing a bad effect on their bathing water quality, but the verdict was that they were still within Environment Agency permitted limits. Will my right hon. Friend confirm that the commission will investigate regulatory standards, so that when raw sewage is dumped, there is actually a fine and a punishment for the water companies? I must also make a declaration as a customer of Southern Water and a sea water swimmer.
Steve Reed
I thank my hon. Friend for her question. She is, of course, a well-known environmental campaigner who stands up for her constituents and for the many businesses, including tourism businesses, that are adversely affected by the appalling state of our waters. It is clear that regulation and governance have been inadequate for a long time. This is a reset moment, where we can finally strengthen those things and deliver the clean water that her constituents, mine and those of all Members across the House expect to see.
Oral Answers to Questions
Polly Billington Excerpts(2 months, 1 week ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mary Creagh)
I welcome the hon. Gentleman to his new seat and congratulate him on winning the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals’ Massingham advocacy award. The Department remains vigilant to potential global disease threats and has robust measures in place to prevent and detect disease incursion. We will be looking at funding as part of the spending review, but I pay tribute to those officials and veterinary officers who are working so hard to tackle the outbreaks that the hon. Gentleman mentioned.
Ms Polly Billington (East Thanet) (Lab)
Mary Creagh
I welcome my hon. Friend to her place. We need to educate the public and ourselves that there is no such place as “away” and that when we bring our children and our picnics to the beach, we should consume the food and leave only footprints in the sand. I am convening a circular economy taskforce, and we will look at seasonal needs as part of that.
The Solicitor General
The main lesson that we can take from this is how well the system can work when all of its constituent parts—the police, the leadership at the top of Government, and the CPS—all pull in the same direction. That approach will inform this Government’s commitment to mission-led government, which will bring all the key elements of the criminal justice system together and ensure that decisions are taken with the whole system in mind. That will particularly apply to the mission on halving violence against women and girls.
Ms Polly Billington (East Thanet) (Lab)
The Solicitor General (Sarah Sackman)
This Government have made tackling antisocial behaviour, which blights our streets and threatens many of our communities, a top priority. The new crime and policing Bill announced in the King’s Speech will include strong measures to tackle antisocial behaviour, to support neighbourhood policing and to give the police stronger powers to crack down on antisocial behaviour and keep our streets safe.
Ms Billington
What we have noticed, particularly in town centres such as Ramsgate and Margate, is that antisocial behaviour, drug dealing and street crime, particularly knife crime, continue because of people’s anxiety about giving evidence against the criminals. What will my hon. and learned Friend and the Government do to give people confidence that the criminal justice system and prosecutions will flow once they have given their evidence?
The Solicitor General
Just this week the Prime Minister met police, victims, families and media companies specifically to discuss knife crime, which plagues my hon. Friend’s community and many others across the country. The Prime Minister has promised to double down on these crimes, and to halve them in the next decade. I am part of a cross-departmental team that will work to deliver this. The Government are committed to taking back our streets by increasing the amount of neighbourhood policing, recruiting more prosecutors to deal swiftly with these crimes and bringing forward laws to ban zombie knives and machetes.