Uber: Supreme Court Ruling

Sarah Olney Excerpts

Wednesday 24th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Paul Scully]

My right hon. Friend knows that I am also Minister for London, so I take a keen interest in these important issues. The people who drive black cabs —that premium product—do amazing work throughout; they are icons of London. However, we must get the balance right between having a free market and making sure that the flexibility of the labour market is not impeded by any encroachment on workers’ rights and what is due to them.

[Sarah Olney (Richmond Park) (LD) [V]]

These contract conditions have been a feature of our economy for some time, which means that many thousands of workers have been illegally treated by companies such as Uber for years. Can the Minister tell me what the Government will be doing to ensure that those people are transferred to legal employment contracts and compensated for lost rights and benefits?

Oral Answers to Questions

Sarah Olney Excerpts

Monday 22nd February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Eddie Hughes]

We are indeed aiming for the very highest standards; I do not think anybody could accuse us of being anything other than very ambitious. While some of the sector is already leading the way by building highly efficient, low-carbon buildings, it is important that all parts of the industry are ready to build homes that are fit for a zero-carbon future. The timeline we have set out delivers on our net zero commitments while providing industry with the time it needs to develop the supply chains and skills that will be necessary. I am hoping that I will get to join my right hon. Friend the Minister for Housing on his visit to the ZEDfactory in due course.

[Sarah Olney (Richmond Park) (LD)]

If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.

[The Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Robert Jenrick)]

On Saturday, I was delighted to announce that the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government will be opening a new dual headquarters in the great city of Wolverhampton, taking Ministers, senior civil servants and decision makers to the west midlands. We are leading efforts to level up all parts of the country, so it is only right that MHCLG brings decision makers to the communities that we seek to serve. This is about more than just the hundreds of jobs that we will bring to the region, with 800 MHCLG staff outside London by 2030—it is about pride, prestige, proximity to power, ensuring that more local voices are reflected in the creation of Government policy and playing our part in raising the stature of smaller cities such as Wolverhampton, which have been undervalued by Governments hitherto.

Earlier today, I was pleased to meet representatives from Wolverhampton, who included—you will be pleased to know, Mr Speaker, as a supporter of Chorley FC— the mighty Wolverhampton Wanderers football club. All at the Ministry look forward to being an integral part of the great city of Wolverhampton and the wider west midlands.

[Sarah Olney [V]]

Can the Secretary of State tell me what projections have been made of the impact on homelessness of the ending of the protection for renters at the end of next month? What provision will be made to assist local authorities in supporting those who find themselves evicted?

[Robert Jenrick]

My right hon Friend the Lord Chancellor and I are working to consider what further steps are necessary. We will hear in a few moments’ time the Prime Minister’s statement, which will set out the road map for the reopening of our economy, but it is important that we keep in place measures that protect the most vulnerable in society, including those who are renting. That is exactly what we have done since the beginning of the pandemic, and I intend to keep doing so for as long as is necessary.

The hon. Lady will also be aware that we have spent more than £700 million protecting rough sleepers in her part of the country and across the whole of England. We have helped more than 34,000 of the most vulnerable people in society into safe and secure accommodation, and we intend to build on that over the course of the year as we move forward with our pledge to end rough sleeping.

Towns Fund

Sarah Olney Excerpts

Thursday 4th February 2021 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Olney (Richmond Park) (LD) [V]]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for giving me an opportunity to speak in this debate. It has been fantastic to hear the stories of how the towns fund has helped individual town centres, and I am pleased for those communities that have seen a boost from the fund. Members will know that the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee, of which I am a member, have expressed doubts about the transparency of the decision making relating to the fund’s distribution. I do not want to reiterate these concerns, as they have been expanded on by various Members in this debate, but I note that the approach of selecting certain town centres for funding while excluding others is bound to lead to inequalities. Town centres that could have benefited from funding will miss out. The hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq) made an excellent point about London suburbs, and obviously I, too represent one. There are lots of opportunities in London’s suburbs for levelling up, not least now that we are seeing less commuting, and lots of town centres will be looking for funds to revive, to help those who are working from home more often.

In the interim, our town centres have had to weather the unprecedented economic blow of the pandemic lockdown and a further decimation of the retail industry. Once the restrictions are lifted, there will be an urgent need to make a substantial economic offer to town centre businesses, not just to help revive them, but to provide jobs, and to deliver local goods and services, and, most importantly, public spaces, where local people can come together and meet each other. It is those informal meetings that we are all missing out on during lockdown. All our town centres will need assistance to bounce back from this crisis, so I call on the Government to take measures that will support all our communities, and abandon this winners and losers approach that we have seen with the allocation of funds from this towns fund.

The need to review our approach to business rates has been aired many times in this Chamber, and I hope we will hear more on it in due course, in order to level the playing field between physical and digital businesses. Similarly, I would like to see a change in the way in which commercial leases are granted and an abolition of upward-only rent reviews. I have heard that ask from many, many businesses in the past year. We should also reform local authority funding to give all councils more money to spend on investing in their own town centres. There are great opportunities for our retail and hospitality sectors, and our cultural organisations, once the lockdown restrictions are lifted, and they will bring new employment to every part of the UK. I urge the Government to put the investment necessary into those sectors to help them all recover from the current downturn.

Oral Answers to Questions

Sarah Olney Excerpts

Monday 11th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Christopher Pincher]

The Government have stepped in: they have spent £1.6 billion of public money on remediating the most difficult and challenging buildings that require help and support. We have made a further £30 million available for waking watch. The Building Safety Bill to which the hon. Gentleman refers—one of the most significant pieces of legislation in this Parliament —will be brought forward to make sure that building defects such as we have seen are things of the past. In the meantime, we will work at pace to find solutions that resolve the question of building defects such that we do not see hard-pressed leaseholders enduring difficult, unforeseen and unfair taxes. If those leaseholders wish to step forward and make comments themselves, who am I to say that they should not? We live in a free country; let them speak.

[Sarah Olney (Richmond Park) (LD)]

What plans he has for the allocation of the recently announced waking watch relief fund.

[The Minister for Housing (Christopher Pincher)]

We expect that the £30 million fund will be open this month, as I said earlier, with the aim to start providing funding for the installation of alarms as quickly as possible. We will work with local authorities and fire and rescue services on the delivery of the fund, and we expect to publish a prospectus with further information on the additional eligibility criteria and evidence requirements as soon as possible.

[Sarah Olney [V]]

Residents of Royal Quarter, Kingston in my constituency have contacted me to say that their building has been assessed as having dangerous cladding, but they cannot apply to the waking watch fund, as their building is less than 18 metres tall. Leaving leaseholders to pick up the tab for remediating cladding means that many buildings will not be made safe in the near future. Will the Government commit to funding the remediation of cladding on all buildings as soon as possible, to ensure that they can be made safe, and then claim the money back from those responsible?

[Christopher Pincher]

I am obliged to the hon. Lady for her question. In our response to this challenge, we have been guided by Dame Judith Hackitt, who advised that we should focus our attention specifically on buildings that are over 18 metres, and that is what we have done. We believe that the £30 million that we have made available will go a long way to helping with the waking watch challenges of many of those buildings. It still remains the responsibility of developers and owners to make safe the buildings that they own or are responsible for and to resolve the defects in them. That is the point I have made from this Dispatch Box before and which I make again today, and it is the point that the building safety Bill will help to remedy.

Planning for the Future

Sarah Olney Excerpts

Tuesday 15th December 2020 Westminster Hall

[Sarah Olney (Richmond Park) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the Planning for the Future White Paper.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Charles. There is a great deal to consider in the White Paper, which takes as its starting point the idea that the lack of progress in building the homes we need in this country is largely due to our system of planning controls and approval. I should declare an interest at the outset. I have been happily married to a town planner —a member of the Royal Town Planning Institute—for 18 years, which just goes to show that not all politicians are at loggerheads with town planners. I can see by the number of people who have applied to speak in the debate that the issues raised in the White Paper have generated a great deal of interest. As an MP for an urban constituency that none the less has more than half its square mileage covered by a national nature reserve I believe I have as much insight as anyone into the balances that need to be struck in our planning system between preserving our environment and building more homes.

The White Paper proposes a number of reforms to how planning permissions are granted. Among them are a proposal that development land should be divided up into different zones—growth, renewal and protected—each with different approval rules. That proposal will remove the ability of locally elected councillors to scrutinise individual applications on their merits. Engagement with local communities will instead be only in the development of the local plan. In the White Paper it is envisaged somehow that that approach will engage groups who have previously been excluded from planning decisions, although it does not give details of how that will be achieved.

There are many other contentious proposals in the White Paper and I am confident that each of the points will be fully debated during the sitting, but I want to make two specific points. The world faces a climate emergency—a fact that the Conservative Government have belatedly woken up to. Having spent a decade trying to cut the “green crap”, in the words of their former leader, the Conservatives have recently made encouraging moves towards recognising that the climate crisis is real, our environment is degrading, and it is high time our Government got on and did something about it.

Among the most urgent challenges facing us, not just as a nation but in partnership with other nations across the world, is that of cutting our carbon emissions. I welcome the Government’s commitment to achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050. That commitment was underlined by the Prime Minister’s announcement of his 10-point plan last month. There was also an announcement on renewables in yesterday’s energy White Paper. However, all those announcements are missing the details of the actual plan to get there. Where are the policies? Where are the interim targets? Where is the funding?

The areas that need to be tackled are well known. We need to decarbonise our transport, power generation, agriculture and industry; but above all we need to decarbonise our housing. We need a step change in how our homes are built, how we heat them and how we cook our food. There are two key approaches we need to take to combat carbon emissions. The first is to upgrade existing homes with better insulation and sources of heating and power. The second is to ensure that all new homes are built to net zero carbon standards. That standard was ready to go in 2015 when the Liberal Democrats left government but was rejected by the Conservatives in 2016. The Government are now returning to it, but promise only a 75% decrease in carbon emissions by 2025. A million homes have been built since 2015. In itself that is hardly suggestive of a planning system that impedes development. Those homes have been built without a zero carbon homes standard. All of them will need to be expensively upgraded in the future.

[Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)]

I am grateful to my near neighbour for giving way. She mentioned going back to existing buildings. Is she aware of the Architects’ Journal campaign to retrofit? That could be an idea. Does she share my concern that often design is sacrificed in all this? There was a report last year by the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, but it feels as if there is a possibility of ushering in the slums of the future. We need to emphasise more retrofitting stuff—and beauty, properly.

[Sarah Olney]

The hon. Lady makes some interesting points. The Liberal Democrats are absolutely committed to supporting policies for retrofitting—or upgrading, as I prefer to call it, as it is a slightly more future-focused look. I believe that the particular value of that policy is that it will benefit our lowest-income families the most. They are the ones who are living in the worst housing and who will benefit most from the reduction in heating bills that will result from, for example, better insulated homes. I am glad that she mentioned building design, because that is precisely the point I am making. If we can design our buildings from the start to achieve a net zero carbon output, those benefits would be there from day one and could be seen both in reduced carbon emissions and reduced heating bills.

The planning White Paper is a missed opportunity to do much more to embed this net zero carbon ambition into our planning policy and thus facilitate the step change that we need to see in our new housing developments. It is only through the constraints applied by the planning system that we can hope to see net zero carbon homes built by private sector housing companies that want to build cheaply and quickly.

The legislative framework already exists if the Government would only use it. The proposed planning reforms should bind together the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 and the Climate Change Act 2008 to confirm that local planning authorities have a clear and specific duty to address climate change in their planning decisions. Carbon reduction would then become a material consideration in the planning process, enabling local authorities to reject applications that would not seek to achieve net zero carbon in the resulting developments, and the law could enable local authorities to go further if they wished by allowing them to put carbon reduction targets in their local plan.

The failure of the White Paper to explore opportunities to achieve net zero carbon in our housing is indicative of the Government’s failure to provide a proper plan to achieve their overall target of net zero carbon by 2050. However, it is not just a climate emergency that we face; we are also confronted by an environmental emergency. The threat to our natural environment has never been greater and the Government must do much more to tackle it. There could not be a better opportunity than a planning White Paper to make proposals about how we balance our need for housing and economic development with our need to protect our green spaces and wildlife.

There is a very real environmental pressure in every part of the country and the Government urgently need to set policy on it and provide a clear lead. However, in proposing a zoned approach to development, they are heading in precisely the wrong direction. By allowing the automatic granting of planning permissions in growth and renewal zones, the planning process will no longer be able to mitigate against environmental damage in those locations or restrict development where environmental damage cannot be mitigated.

I would struggle to think of a single part of my constituency that could be designated as an unrestricted growth zone, where development would need to take no account at all of environmental impact. The proposal to introduce such zones rides roughshod over the many small decisions that can be made by those who know their local areas and can arrive at the best solution for the local population and the local environment.

[Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)]

Government-commissioned research from University College London has found that homes built through permitted development rather than by going through the planning process are also of worse quality. Does my hon. Friend agree that that is also a very regressive step rather than a progressive step?

[Sarah Olney]

I thank my hon. Friend for making that point, because it highlights the fact that the more we weaken the planning decisions made by local authorities at local level, the more we risk allowing unsuitable development, including architecturally displeasing development, environmentally damaging development and development that is not primarily designed to meet the needs of the local community. That is why bypassing local authorities is the wrong approach.

The planning White Paper proposes to bypass much local authority planning involvement in the mistaken belief that it is local nimbys who are blocking development. In my constituency, it is local people who have provided many of the ideas for local authority action that have improved our environment and guided planning policies. Local authorities, especially Liberal Democrat-controlled ones, are often willing to go much further than the national Government in reducing carbon and improving our environment. In Richmond and Kingston, for example, the councils have introduced new cycle lanes to encourage people to reduce the number of car journeys they make, and electric vehicle charging infrastructure to encourage the switch to cars with lower emissions. Liberal Democrat councils up and down the country are also planting trees, installing solar panels on the roofs of council buildings, switching council vehicles to electric, and insulating council-owned homes. In each case, they are responding to the needs of their own environment and that of their local population.

When the public inquiry into the handling of the coronavirus is completed, I believe that it will clearly demonstrate that some of the response could have been more effectively delivered by local authorities or neighbourhood groups. We have seen the weaknesses of a centralised test and trace system, for example, and even today the Government are setting central rules for school openings that might be better decided by local education authorities.

The same is true for planning. A group of concerned local residents, whether elected representatives or volunteers, are much better placed to decide how their street should be adapted to keep pace with the challenges of modern life than a few unknown Government workers in Whitehall. If all bodies making decisions about future developments can be tasked with the responsibility of achieving net-zero carbon and protecting our environment, then the ingenuity and enthusiasm of our local authorities, and the residents they serve, can take us a lot further towards the Government’s 2050 goal than any amount of top-down diktat. It is time for the Government to show they are serious about climate change and the environmental emergency, and that starts with some serious revision to this planning White Paper.

[Sir Charles Walker (in the Chair)]

We have had a few drop-outs, so I will allow five minutes per speaker.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sarah Olney]

Thank you, Ms Ghani. It has been a real pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I thank the Minister for his comments. He did not fulfil my every Christmas wish, but this has nevertheless been an entertaining and interesting debate, and I value everyone’s contributions. We have heard from representatives of the rural south-west, the urban north, and even the urban south-west, and the theme I am really getting is that planning decisions are incredibly difficult. There is a balance of competing interests; we all know that, and we are all plugged into what is going on in our constituencies.

I also heard that everybody agrees that those decisions are best made at a local level, to take a full account of all of those different factors, and I believe that is the biggest pushback against the planning White Paper in its current form. I repeat what I said at the beginning: it does not make enough progress towards the Government’s plans for net zero. The Minister just said it himself: he is only targeting a 75% reduction. Another point that has come across very strongly is that the White Paper does not give local councils enough powers to deliver the affordable homes that are so desperately needed in every region. However, I thank him very much for his response. Thank you, Ms Ghani, for your chairmanship, and I thank all Members for their contributions.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the Planning for the Future White Paper.

United Kingdom Internal Market Bill

Sarah Olney Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments & Ping Pong & Ping Pong: House of Commons
Monday 7th December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Bowie]

I am afraid I cannot, because we have not got very much time.

This Bill will amount to more money being spent in Scotland. That is a fact. As a result of the Bill, no powers are being taken away and the Barnett consequentials will not be affected. Jobs will be safeguarded as a result of the Bill. It does amuse me to hear Members of the Scottish National party defending and supporting amendments being put in the other place. I hope the Scottish National party one day will come in here and stand up for democracy and the democratically elected Chamber of this United Kingdom. When will the Scottish National party defend the democratic will of the British people?

I seriously urge SNP Members to reconsider their support for the Lords amendments and to stand up for the Bill because it is good for Scotland. But I know they will not. Frankly, the Scottish National party and the Scottish Government do not care that the Bill protects jobs and is good for business and for the country because it binds the United Kingdom closer together. That is why they do not like the Bill: it binds the United Kingdom closer together. That is the truth of it. They do not want the internal market to succeed. They do not want it protected. They do not want the United Kingdom to succeed, and they will sacrifice Scotland’s prosperity, Scottish jobs and anything else, as long as they achieve their aim of undermining the United Kingdom and achieving separation.

As if to make my point, on BBC Radio Scotland’s “Good Morning Scotland” today we heard from Mike Russell, the Minister for constitutional affairs in the Scottish Government. Like the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West—I congratulate her on her election, by the way—he is a member of the national executive committee of the Scottish National party. He said that the Scottish National party will not vote for a Brexit deal even if one is achieved. The SNP would vote against the deal. It has not even seen a deal, but it would rather say no, because it thinks that will further the cause for separation. SNP Members want the United Kingdom to fail, and that is why they are against the Bill this evening, and that is why they will vote against the Brexit deal if we get one in the coming days.

We want to level up the United Kingdom and, as my hon. Friend the Minister has set out, that is why we are disappointed that their lordships have in amendments 48 and 49 attempted to remove the power of the UK Government to intervene to provide financial assistance across the United Kingdom. It is a fact that formerly EU assistance powers now rest with the UK Government. It is right that through the UK prosperity fund, and with consultation with the devolved Administrations, we have the same powers now that the European Union had previously.

I have great respect for my hon. Friends and, indeed, some Members across the aisle for supporting the Lords amendments tonight. I disagree with them, but they have principled objections to the Bill, as do many of their lordships. Although I respect the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West personally, I am afraid I do not respect the position of the Scottish National party, which, as ever, is opportunist, divisive and seeks only to further the aim of breaking up our country, with everything that that means. I will back the Government today because this Bill binds our country closer together and is good for trade, good for jobs, good for people, good for Scotland and good for our entire United Kingdom.

[Sarah Olney (Richmond Park) (LD)]

This was a controversial piece of legislation on Second Reading, so it is no surprise to find that our noble Friends in the other place have made historically substantial amendments to it. It is probably a sign of the remarkable times we are living in that the Government should attempt not only to table legislation that effectively breaks the law, but to do so in such a way as to destabilise a critical bilateral negotiation, the outcome of which will have a major impact on the lives of every single UK citizen.

According to announcements made while we have been here in the Chamber, the Government have so far been unable to conclude our negotiations with the European Union over a future trading relationship. To proceed with this legislation when these critical discussions are at such a crucial stage ought to be unthinkable, were it not for the fact that the Government have routinely ridden roughshod over every convention, broken faith with every promise and undermined every pillar of our society when they threatened to stand in the way of Brexit.

I feel somewhat relieved therefore that their lordships have inserted some normality into proceedings by taking as their first principle that legislation and legislators should not break the law. The Liberal Democrats wholly endorse their amendment that removes the whole of part 5 from the Bill, and we oppose the Government’s motion to reject the amendment.

Since 2016, the Conservative Government have repeatedly ducked the difficult choices required following their decision to implement the referendum outcome in the most damaging way possible. Many of us thought that these choices would finally have to be confronted once Brexit stopped being a right-wing dream and became a reality, but it comes as no surprise that the Government will break the law and destroy our international reputation in order to delay unpleasant reality for a little while longer.

We do not know what unintentional consequences will be unleashed by reinserting this clause into our national legislation, but if we as a nation break treaties, act in bad faith and undermine our international relationships, we should expect there to be a price to pay. This is a recklessly foolish action at a time when we urgently need to build and strengthen our links with other countries, not just because we need new trade deals, but because we urgently need co-ordinated global action to defeat coronavirus and fight against climate change.

Arcadia and Debenhams: Business Support and Job Retention

Sarah Olney Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Paul Scully]

My right hon. Friend raises a really important point. We have wrapped our arms around the economy, but clearly it is very difficult to do things at pace to cover everybody. We will always make sure that we reflect on what happens, to help as many people as we can and try to fill the cracks as best we can.

[Sarah Olney (Richmond Park) (LD)]

I, too, express my sympathies to all those employees of Debenhams and the Arcadia Group who find themselves out of work so close to Christmas and in such an uncertain time. Will the Minister’s Department work with local authorities to support them to offer more flexible rates terms to new businesses that want to come in and set up in the large voids that a lot of town centres will be experiencing in their retail spaces? Those voids affect town centres and communities. What can the Department do to work with local authorities to lower the barriers to new entrants into the retail sector?

[Paul Scully]

There are plenty of things on which we can work together with the sector and, indeed, the whole gamut of British high street businesses, including by talking about getting the rent balance right between landlords and tenants, as well as rates, as the hon. Lady says. The Economic Secretary to the Treasury is joining me on tomorrow’s Retail Sector Council call that I mentioned, to talk about the fundamental business rates review. I hope we will be able to work with local authorities to get that flexibility.

Planning and House Building

Sarah Olney Excerpts

Thursday 8th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Olney (Richmond Park) (LD)]

Let me start by declaring an interest: my husband is a member of the Royal Town Planning Institute.

I particularly wish to speak about the parts of the White Paper that propose to phase development areas into three categories—“growth”, “renewal” and “protected”. That proposal gives rise to great concern in Richmond and Kingston. I cannot think of any part of my constituency that would fit neatly into any of those categories. My constituency contains some beautiful neighbourhoods of great architectural and historical interest, and all of its neighbourhoods have their own distinctive features. We would like to see some of those preserved and some regenerated, and there absolutely is space for growth, but it would be difficult, even in the most environmentally and historically sensitive sites, to say that no possible development could be permitted in an area. Equally, I cannot think of a site where unrestricted growth, with plans going unanalysed, would be at all desirable. Any kind of development can be agreed only by considering each site on its merits, which is why I am really opposed to the idea of adopting this phased approach to development.

I welcome the White Paper’s emphasis on local plans, which are good for local communities. I agree that local authorities should do more to get local communities engaged in that. In Richmond Park, we have already embraced the opportunities offered by local neighbourhood forums and their recognised role in developing neighbourhood plans. I wish to pay a particular tribute to the North Kingston Neighbourhood Forum, which I have been a member of in the past, and its incredible chair, Diane Watling, and to the very successful neighbourhood forum that was built up in Ham and Petersham. They have made a great contribution to local planning and thinking, and more of that sort of thing should definitely be encouraged.

We heard earlier from the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) about some of the issues with our current planning system that stem from private developers getting permissions that they then do not build. That provides part of the evidence of market failure in some aspects of our private sector housing development, and if we were able to encourage more public sector housing development, that could provide the competition we need to see prices driven down, and improvements in carbon standards and in building quality. That is much more the sort of change we need to see in our planning, rather than the ones proposed by this White Paper.

Above all, I wish to emphasise that taking decisions away from local communities makes it much harder to co-ordinate local services. In Richmond Park, we have a proposal for a development on the old Stag brewery site in Mortlake involving 1,275 homes. The massive issue we have with that is that it is no longer going to be decided by the local authority, because it has been called in by the Mayor, and the local authority no longer has oversight of what kind of development is taking place in its area. It cannot think about the impacts on schools, health services and transport, and the development will be difficult to integrate without that overview.

The proposal to allow building upwards without permission will be a massive problem in my constituency, where we have some beautiful views. Turner painted one of the views from the top of Richmond hill. We have so many views that we want protected and we need the powers in our local authority to prevent building upwards—I am very opposed to that aspect of the White Paper.

Oral Answers to Questions

Sarah Olney Excerpts

Monday 5th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Luke Hall]

The right hon. Gentleman will be fully aware that Knowsley has received £30 million in additional un-ring-fenced spending to deal with pressures resulting from the pandemic, on top of the £10 million increase in its core spending power this financial year. More widely, Knowsley received £51 million to support councils, businesses and the community. He will be interested to know that to prepare for local outbreaks we have provided a £300 million grant to all upper tier authorities to develop strong and effective local outbreak plans. In relation to ongoing engagement, I met the Mayor of Greater Manchester last week and I believe he is meeting the Secretary of State tomorrow. We are, of course, happy to continue those discussions.

[Sarah Olney (Richmond Park) (LD)]

For what reasons he plans to introduce the future homes standard in 2025.

[The Minister for Housing (Christopher Pincher)]

Our future homes standard reforms propose an ambitious uplift in the energy efficiency of new homes. The homes will have at least 75% lower emissions than current standards. That is real action toward a cleaner and greener built environment. Furthermore, ahead of 2025, we have consulted on a meaningful interim increase in the requirements of part L of the building regulations, which will act as a stepping stone to a full uplift.

[Sarah Olney]

If I cannot persuade the Minister to be more ambitious in his deadline, perhaps I could encourage him to use the time to be more ambitious in his target. Instead of a target of reducing carbon emissions by 75%, will the Government set a target of net zero carbon for new builds?

CCRC Decision on 44 Post Office Prosecutions

Sarah Olney Excerpts

Monday 5th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Paul Scully]

My hon. Friend makes an incredibly good point. It is important, first, that Sir Wyn Williams engages with the sub-postmasters, led by Alan Bates, as part of the group litigation, to explain how he intends to investigate and take evidence, and I hope that they would therefore engage. I have talked about the fact that the Post Office and Fujitsu are ready to comply fully with the investigation, but if there are important people with important evidence that is not coming out, for whatever reason, there are mechanisms available to the chairman, Sir Wyn Williams, to look at that further and to re-evaluate.

[Sarah Olney (Richmond Park) (LD)]

Two post offices in my constituency are threatened with closure because of the difficulty of recruiting new sub-postmasters or sub-postmistresses. What impact does the Minister think the appalling case of Horizon has had on recruitment? Is he anxious about the future of post offices, particularly rural ones but even those in urban constituencies such as mine? What is the Department doing to work with the Post Office on this issue?

[Paul Scully]

Yes, I am anxious, because it is important that we keep the network up at the target level we set of 11,500. The hon. Lady is right that some of the difficulty is due to the situation gone by; some of it is due to the ongoing complexity of the Horizon system and resource availability. I am glad that the chief executive, Nick Read, comes from a business where he is used to dealing with people as stakeholders, not just as employees, so engaging in a more positive future relationship with postmasters. She is right to talk about rural and urban areas. In London, although clearly we do not want to lose post offices, it is relatively easy compared with some rural areas to get to the next post office, but that is not an excuse to diminish the network in London.