House Building: London

Wendy Morton Excerpts

Wednesday 5th November 2025 Westminster Hall

[Mr Louie French (Old Bexley and Sidcup) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered Government support for housebuilding in London.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. I thank all hon. Members who enabled me to secure this important debate. It could not be more timely, as house building in London has collapsed. In the first nine months of 2025, construction began on only 3,248 homes. Molior London predicts that just 9,100 homes will be built across 2027 and 2028—that is under 5% of the Government’s target for London. London is supposed to deliver more than a quarter of the Government’s 1.5 million homes target, but given the construction slowdown, that target appears to be dead in the water. That is the inevitable consequence of the Mayor of London’s disastrous London plan and the Labour Government’s anti-growth policies.

Three things have gone wrong. First, Sadiq Khan’s London plan has comprehensively failed to get London building. With more than 500 pages and 123 planning policies, the London plan makes it more complex and expensive to build in London. A 2024 review found that it takes seven weeks longer to determine major planning applications in London than in the next four largest cities. Sadiq Khan’s planning requirements also add to the cost of building in London. For example, the London plan goes beyond the national energy requirements, imposes carbon targets, and has policies on overheating and energy statements. Whatever the merits of those policies, they all add to the cost of building homes. In places, Sadiq Khan’s planning policies actively restrict house building. For example, the London plan effectively bans house building on large swathes of industrial land, often within walking distance of public transport.

[Wendy Morton (Aldridge-Brownhills) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is painting a really bleak picture for London. Does he agree that to build the homes that we need in this country, we should focus not only on increased density in our city centres, but crucially on brownfield sites? We are not seeing from the Government a determined brownfield-first approach to housing that would protect the green belts surrounding our towns and cities.

[Mr French]

I agree that we should have a brownfield-first approach, seeking to protect our green belt and countryside wherever possible. I understand my right hon. Friend’s concern and her representations on behalf of her constituents.

The Home Builders Federation warns that the London plan’s net zero requirements are imposing carbon offset payments of £3,000 a home. Even when building on brownfield land is allowed, it is fraught with problems. The mayor requires 50% of homes to be affordable, which, given the remediation costs on those sites, makes development unviable. Altogether, the London plan review in 2024 found that Sadiq Khan’s policies frustrated, rather than facilitated, development on brownfield land. That is why it is so disappointing that the Government stopped the mandated partial review of the London plan a year ago, saving their mayor’s blushes.

Secondly, Sadiq Khan’s affordable homes target has made many housing projects unviable in London. By demanding that 35% of homes built privately are affordable, he has made house building unviable in London.

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[Mr French]

I absolutely agree, and I appreciate the hon. Gentleman making one of his well-respected interventions in this important debate. We have to make sure that across the country, we are building the homes that people want to live in and that people can afford, including people in older age.

Demanding that 35% of homes built privately are affordable has made house building in London unviable. The higher 50% target for industrial land also applies to public land, which, again, has effectively blocked development in the capital. This policy may seem like a good way to get London building more social housing, but it has hugely backfired. The policy is effectively a tax on house building. It makes some development unviable and deters investment. It ultimately means fewer homes and higher costs. If a developer cannot afford the target, they face six burdensome checks on the project’s viability before, during and after construction.

[Wendy Morton]

The key thing is that until the Government recognise that they need to put some support into brownfield regeneration, our green belt and our green spaces will always be under threat.

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[Peter Fortune (Bromley and Biggin Hill) (Con)]

Of course I will, Mr Mundell. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Mr French) for securing this debate. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) for his excellent speech, much of which I agreed with, especially about using the TfL space.

The TfL chairman is Sadiq Khan and, as Mayor of London, he is responsible not only for TfL but for house building in London. If we look at some of his promises in 2016, he said his first priority would be tackling the housing crisis. His first manifesto promised a step change in new housing supply, and that 50% of new homes would be affordable. Here we are nearly a decade later, and he certainly has not delivered that step change. House building has in fact ground to a halt—it is down 73% in London over the past year. The Government have had to step in to water down City Hall’s anti-growth affordability targets, because there is no way of avoiding it: despite Sadiq Khan’s boasts, he has comprehensively failed to build. After nine years at the helm, Sadiq Khan has nothing to show for it. Four fifths of homes built last year, as previously mentioned, were approved under Boris Johnson’s mayoralty. The average home in London cost £483,000 in 2016. Today, it is about £560,000. The average rent cost £1,292 per month in 2016. Today, it is £2,252.

As has been discussed, it is not a question of money: Sadiq Khan has been given nearly £9 billion to deliver on housing in London. It is not a question of powers; he has strategic planning powers in London. Instead, it has been about bad policy. His London plan is onerous and expensive to adhere to, and his affordability targets have acted as a tax on house building. The Government know this. Instead of addressing the problem, they are dancing around the issue. They scrapped a mandated review of the London plan after independent experts found it to “frustrate rather than facilitate” building on the brownfield sites that my hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup discussed.

The Government have cut the community infrastructure levy but kept the more expensive mayoral levy. Instead of taking powers away from the failing mayor they are rewarding him, giving him power to call in developments of 50 homes on green-belt sites. Instead of removing the obstacles to building on brownfield sites they are weakening green-belt protections.

[Wendy Morton]

My hon. Friend speaks passionately about this, but does he not agree that this absolutely shows the problem with centralising not just targets but powers in the hands of one person—the mayor or a combined authority? We need much more involvement of local communities, and we need councils to have a greater say on planning matters.

[Peter Fortune]

I agree with my right hon. Friend. It is worth re-emphasising that the mayor has had responsibility for delivering housing in London for nine years and has fundamentally failed to deliver on his promises.

On weakening green-belt protections, which matters so much to those of us representing outer London boroughs, it is a bizarre decision to effectively block building on vacant former industrial sites in inner London near tube stations, as was mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup, and instead force thousands of homes on to poorly served farmers’ fields in Bromley. If the Government want to meet their housing targets, they need to realise that Sadiq Khan is not a builder—he is a blocker, and the record proves it.

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[Dame Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Mr French) on securing this debate on such a vital issue. I echo many of the points made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry). Her neighbouring constituency now includes a ward that used to be in my constituency—a ward where house prices are reaching £2.5 million to £3 million in some cases. That is one end of the scale.

At the other end of the scale we have a homelessness situation that is intolerable, with thousands of people on the waiting list. Exactly as my right hon. Friend said, every week I visit people in their homes, which is something that MPs do. We see people where they live, with the problems they have: triple bunk beds with little space for the third child to get into bed; five people in a room; and toddlers with no space to run around. I could give a different example every week, but a real one. This is what we need to resolve, so I welcome the Government’s plan to build more homes.

There are a lot of challenges. The right hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton) mentioned the “brownfield first” approach as a priority. There are plenty of brownfield sites in my constituency. I say “plenty” but, like the constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for Islington South and Finsbury, my constituency is very small in relative terms but expensive to build on.

House prices in Hackney are 18.5 times average income, so all the young professionals who might want to get on the housing ladder are stuck in shared accommodation, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Islington South and Finsbury said, and families are stuck in social housing, crowded and unable to go anywhere else because they cannot afford private rent, which gives no security anyway. Homeless families are increasingly in hostels for years. Only six years or so ago it would have been about six months before people had a chance of getting some sort of property, and now people are being moved out of the borough, wrecking their lives and opportunities.

We have 3,400 homeless households in temporary accommodation, which is a big issue for us all and costs the taxpayer a lot of money. It does damage to the families and the children’s opportunities. It breaks our communities, and all taxpayers have to fund that, so we need to resolve it. We have a total of 8,500 households on the council’s housing register, and the notional wait for a three-bedroom property is over a decade—it is a nonsense wait, because by that time the children have grown up. Around 44% of Hackney residents live in social housing. We have more private renters than homeowners and that level of social housing residents. Even though house prices are going up for some, the housing situation is worsening for many others.

Hackney council has been great at delivering properly affordable social housing. Affordable homes, which include both social rented and intermediate, make up 57% of council housing-led delivery. In crude terms, if Hackney council wants to build a home because of the land value, which I will touch on, it has to build one for private sale to pay for the one that is for intermediate or social rent. When I say to people, “We are working hard to get you a house,” they look at the houses I am pointing to on the neighbouring bit of land and say, “Will I get one of those?”, and I cannot, hand on heart, say that they will within any reasonable period of time. The devastation this is having is surely feeding into our special educational needs and health crises. It is just not long-term sustainable.

Since 2022, the current council period since the last council elections and between now and next April, 956 council homes for social rent have been in design, planning or acquisition or under construction. It is cheaper to buy back a leasehold property on a council estate than it is to build new, because it costs £450,000 in Hackney to build a new social rented home. It is no wonder we are having challenges delivering and no wonder that the Government and the Mayor of London are trying to work out a way to get more homes built. If they are all for private rent, we are going to exacerbate the problem, so we need to work that out. Construction costs are now around £5,000 per square metre compared with £1,000 to £1,500 a decade ago. That is being led by a number of issues globally, including Brexit, but this is the reality we are dealing with. When I looked at this in my previous role on the Public Accounts Committee, the Government’s own figures showed—I am sure the Minister is aware—that bricks and mortar subsidies offered the best value for money for the taxpayer to try to resolve the problem.

We need things not just on brownfield but on grey belt. I do think that the green belt has some grey belt —we need to be realistic about this. Bits of old car park that no one is using could be turned into homes. We need to be creative when looking at this.

[Wendy Morton]

The hon. Member makes a really important point about grey belt. I completely understand her example of a car park, but grey belt needs much clearer definition, because we are seeing cases of development that inspectors are now saying is grey belt when it is actually greenfield, and that is really damaging to our communities.

[Dame Meg Hillier]

That is a fair challenge, and I am sure that the Minister will pick that up. It is important that we all know where the goal posts are.

I would like to ask the Minister about the release of public land. This is something that I have looked at over the years. Whether it is the Ministry of Defence, Transport for London or the Department of Health and Social Care, the Treasury has, over many Governments, insisted that that money goes back to the Department. On one level, that is completely logical, but looking at hospitals or schools, if that land could be used for housing, it would help teachers, nurses or doctors to live locally.

Supporting High Streets

Wendy Morton Excerpts

Tuesday 4th November 2025 Commons Chamber

[Wendy Morton (Aldridge-Brownhills) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that we have a Government who simply do not understand business? They seem to think that they can just squeeze and squeeze small businesses because they make unlimited profits. If they do that, there will be no businesses left on our high streets.

[Andrew Griffith]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. One only has to look at the wording of the motion we are debating and that of the Government amendment. We Conservatives talk about lifting burdens, removing business rates, cutting red tape, and taking more action to address crime on our high streets. The Labour party talks about compulsory purchase, more grants and more subsidies—it is not interested in lifting the burden on business.

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[Miatta Fahnbulleh]

I thank my hon. Friend for mentioning that what we are doing is not peripheral—I was so incensed by that that I forgot to mention it. It is fundamental that we respond to the challenges in our high streets.

The key point that I want people to take away is that we are acting, whether it is through the pride in place strategy and programme or through the action that we are taking on business rates. The hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs mentioned business rates. From April 2026, eligible retail, hospitality and leisure properties with rateable values below £500,000 will benefit from permanently lower business rate multipliers. That will, critically, level the playing field between online retailers and high streets.

[Wendy Morton]

The hon. Lady talks a lot about footfall on high streets, and I think we all agree that more footfall benefits businesses. With that in mind, what consideration has she given to regenerating our towns and city centres by building on brownfield sites and setting proper housing targets in our city centres, rather than on the peripheries of cities?

[Miatta Fahnbulleh]

The right hon. Lady is absolutely right, and we are densifying. I return, however, to the 14 years for which the Conservatives failed on housing. Do they remember removing housing targets completely? Their carping on at us for making progress on our commitment to deliver 1.5 million homes is for the birds. We are clear that we need thriving high streets, and that requires mixed use and a range of things in our strategy.

Houses in Multiple Occupation: Planning Consent

Wendy Morton Excerpts

Tuesday 4th November 2025 Westminster Hall

[Wendy Morton (Aldridge-Brownhills) (Con)]

We are seeing more and more HMOs across Walsall borough and in my constituency, and it is leaving my local residents feeling that they have very little say on what is happening in their streets. Walsall council has worked on this. I welcome its new article 4 direction, which came into effect in October 2025 and is a much-needed step in restoring local accountability. However, the issue does concern me. The conversion of family homes into HMOs reduces the availability of affordable family homes and risks changing the nature of settled communities. There is also a growing fear and concern about the use of HMOs to accommodate illegal migrants or newly arrived asylum seekers, so once again I seek reassurance from the Government that, as those people are decanted from hotels, we will not see an automatic rise in the number of HMOs. The Government need to get a grip on this issue; a starting point would be a national assessment of the impact that HMO concentrations are having on community cohesion.

Underpinning all this is the fact that our communities need to feel that they are being listened to. I urge the Government to take note and take action.

English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Wendy Morton Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 2nd September 2025 Commons Chamber

[The Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Angela Rayner)]

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

This Government were elected on a manifesto to deliver change—real change for working people; change that people can see and feel around them. That means more money in their pockets, decent jobs, new homes, good transport links, thriving high streets and opportunities for young people. But after 14 years of a Tory Government unwilling to take the tough choices to make life better for working people, it is no wonder that people have lost hope that real change is possible. And we have a plan to change that—a plan to give people with skin in the game real control over their lives and the power to have a real stake in their place and share in our country’s success.

Our landmark English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill will deliver this and more. It will help us to build a modern state based on a fairer, stronger partnership between Government and local people, with the aim of renewing people’s faith that the state can work for them. That faith has been sorely tested in recent years. After more than a decade of broken promises from those on the Conservative Benches, people associate Whitehall with failure and decline. The communities that once built Britain have seen good jobs disappearing, secure homes crumbling and once-strong communities divided. Things that our parents and grandparents once relied on—that I relied on as a young mum—have fallen by the wayside. It is my mission to rebuild those foundations of a good life for all communities in all parts of our country.

I worked on the frontline of local government and I saw how it changes people’s lives. I know that I will not achieve our goals unless we fundamentally change the way that our country is run. That means handing power back to where it belongs—to local people with skin in the game—so that they can make decisions on what really matters to their communities. This Bill will drive the biggest transfer of power in a generation out of Whitehall to our regions and communities and end the begging bowl, micro-managing culture. It will make devolution the default setting by: giving mayors new powers over planning, housing and regeneration to get Britain building as part of our plan for change; rebuilding local government, so that it can once again deliver good local services that people can rely on; and empowering local communities to have a bigger say in shaping their local area.

[Wendy Morton (Aldridge-Brownhills) (Con)]

In the right hon. Lady’s attempts to drive forward this carthorse of devolution, will she tell us where the accountability and scrutiny will come from and where the voice of local people will really be heard?

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[Wendy Morton (Aldridge-Brownhills) (Con)]

Democracy matters; accountability matters. I am afraid that this Bill strips away both. At the heart of this Government’s attempted reforms lies a democratic deficit where planning committees lose their powers; councillors may scrutinise but cannot decide; and local councils are diminished, while in their place a mayor is handed sweeping powers over planning, housing, infrastructure and even development orders. This is not devolution downwards to communities; it is centralisation.

Let us be absolutely clear. In the west midlands, the Labour Mayor has shown time and again that his focus is on Birmingham, not communities such as mine in Aldridge-Brownhills. This Bill will entrench that imbalance. It gives a licence to concrete over the green belt and drive a coach and horses through local democracy, leaving the elected Member of Parliament with no formal way of holding the mayor to account or even to question his decisions.

The Government say that this Bill empowers local communities, but they have cut the very funding that made neighbourhood planning possible. The neighbourhood planning programme, supported by the National Association of Local Councils, helped more than 2,000 communities to write neighbourhood plans, yet Ministers have scrapped it—at a time when they seek to railroad development across communities. The NALC is right that this move by the Government weakens the very tier of democracy that should be strengthened. It is not empowerment; it is a contradiction. My constituents know exactly what that means. Aldridge-Brownhills is all too often treated as the dumping ground for housing numbers decided elsewhere.

[Bradley Thomas (Bromsgrove) (Con)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that the Government’s devolution proposal is an urban-based model that cannot be applied to rural areas without fundamentally distorting the character of that area?

[Wendy Morton]

My hon. Friend hits the nail on the head. His communities, not dissimilar to mine, are on the edge of a large urban area—the west midlands; Birmingham—and yet we are not deeply rural. We are at real risk of being subsumed into the suburbs of Walsall or Birmingham with no say in the matter.

My constituents know what this all means, with communities feeling “done to”, not “worked with”. We have seen what happens when contradictory housing targets are imposed from above. Take the Black Country plan, which was meant to be a model of strategic planning, but it collapsed. It fell apart because residents across the Black Country lost confidence, and rightly so—it was plain wrong.

The Bill repeats the same mistakes, introducing powers to push development through, riding roughshod over local objections and concreting over our communities’ green spaces. Look at the imbalance: Birmingham’s housing targets are falling while Walsall’s are rising by 27%. My constituency is told to take the strain as our second city offloads its numbers. It is not devolution, but displacement, and it will only deepen distrust. Take Stonnall Road, Longwood Road, Longwood Lane and Bosty Lane; the list of speculative planning applications across my constituency goes on and on—and all this before the Planning and Infrastructure Bill and even this piece of legislation have been enacted.

If this Government were serious about empowerment, they would have put a brownfield-first duty into their reforms, but they chose not to. The west midlands has hundreds of hectares of derelict land that could be brought back into use, and there is funding for this already: the brownfield housing fund, the national competitive fund and the brownfield, infrastructure and land fund. However, there is no requirement for the mayor to use those funds first before launching into our precious green belt and green wedges.

Without a statutory brownfield-first duty, we know that developers will always go for the easy option first. Take the Birch Lane proposal in Aldridge—hundreds of homes on green-belt land now rebranded as grey belt. It is precisely the kind of inappropriate development this Bill will make it harder to resist, with local consultees weakened and mayoral powers strengthened. This Government are not building communities; they are dividing them.

What about infrastructure? My constituents were promised Aldridge train station—as many Members know, I talk a lot about that. Funding was secured and the business case made, yet the Labour mayor diverted the money elsewhere. If he cannot deliver on those commitments, why should this House be handing him more?

There are serious questions to answer about what exactly is grey belt. Regulations suggest that it can be used to redefine a green-belt site with building on three sides. That should alarm all of us in this place. We in Aldridge-Brownhills are now at serious risk of being subsumed within a Greater Birmingham and a Greater Walsall. Do not get me wrong, we do need houses, but let us give it some thought. Let us put them in the right place and let us not lose our identity or our communities because of Government diktat—because that is exactly what it is.

This Government are making a complete mockery of what we call green belt and green wedges, which were there to protect communities from urban sprawl. And all this at a time when Birmingham city council cannot even empty its bins. The mayor has washed his hands of it and the Deputy Prime Minister does not seem interested. This Bill is not devolution or empowerment. Quite simply, it is a developer’s dream and a neighbourhood nightmare, and I shall be voting against it tonight.

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[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

It has been a wide-ranging debate. I particularly thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton) and my hon. Friends the Members for Bromley and Biggin Hill (Peter Fortune), for Isle of Wight East (Joe Robertson), for Reigate (Rebecca Paul), for Romford (Andrew Rosindell), for Bromsgrove (Bradley Thomas), for Broxbourne (Lewis Cocking), for Keighley and Ilkley (Robbie Moore) and for West Suffolk (Nick Timothy) for their contributions. The range of issues that they and other Members covered starkly highlighted the wholesale inadequacy of the Bill in relation to the scale of the challenges that our country and our communities face.

There are big issues facing local government, which deals with some of the most difficult tasks faced by any of our public services. We know that the cost of social care is rapidly growing and will consume a greater share of the available resources. Since this Government took office, there has been a collapse in the delivery of new housing. It is down 17% in the country as a whole and there has been a 66% drop by large social landlords under Mayor Khan here in London. As we have seen in the news today, the Government’s chums in the unions have voted to extend their strikes until March 2026. The people of our second city are left with their waste uncollected and populations of rats.

[Wendy Morton]

As an MP for a constituency neighbouring Birmingham, I see all too often the impact of the strikes. Does my hon. Friend agree that this issue is absolutely shocking? The one thing that residents expect from their local council is a regular collection of their household waste, and often garden waste and recycling as well. Birmingham city council is failing the residents.

[David Simmonds]

I thank my right hon. Friend for highlighting that issue; she has been a champion for the voices of those affected by it. While I understand that Ministers have come to the Dispatch Box time and again and said that they must wash their hands of it, the unions said in their statement today that there was “no point” negotiating with the council, because it lacked the authority to resolve the issue. The Government need to roll up their sleeves and get involved.

While our second city struggles with these challenges, here we have a piece of legislation about tinkering with structures. Not only that, but, as we learned just a week ago, it is an entirely uncosted plan. The Department has not undertaken any assessment of the cost-benefit of the measures contained in this legislation. That comes against the backdrop of the decisions of this Government which, as we know, are making the financial situation of our country more perilous by the day. In the first few months of this financial year alone, the Government borrowed £60 billion more than they raised in taxes. Borrowing costs have hit a 27-year high—a level seen only in the early days of the last Labour Government in 1998.

This Bill opens the door to a host of tax-raising powers. As we go through the pages and pages of new powers for Ministers and the Secretary of State to direct local authorities in one way or another and to instruct communities to accept this or that, we see the prospect of local authorities, which are already left a net £1.5 billion worse off by the Government’s rise in national insurance contributions, facing the maxing out of parking charges, huge increases in borrowing and big rises in business rates and council tax.

The £60 billion black hole that this Government have created just in this financial year will need to be bridged somehow. The Chancellor will be back to tell us how in a few weeks’ or months’ time, but I think we can see a clue already that local communities and local authorities will be the route by which those costs are raised. When we read what this Bill has to say about neighbourhood governance, the threat is very clear even at parish council level. Those parishes—the smallest unit of local government, but one with precepting powers—will be one of the local kitties that the Government expect to raid to finance the consequences of their economic mismanagement.

When we think of Sir Humphrey’s famous advice that it was always best to

“dispose of the difficult bit in the title”

of the Bill, because it did a lot less harm there than in the text, we can see that when this Bill talks about devolution, it devolves to the local level the responsibility for those tax rises and service cuts. Can the Minister tell the House how many libraries will close to pay for this Bill? How many road projects will be set aside? How many more communities, such as those referred to by the Labour leader of Shrewsbury, will lose their regular recycling and bin collections to pay for it? How high will council tax go?

What is the limit that Ministers will set on the tax rises that the Bill will drive? What is the maximum parking charge or fine that Ministers think it is reasonable for councils to have? What level of costs will local businesses have to face? When we debated the Bill on business rates that sits behind many of the financial elements of this Bill, Ministers said that they wanted to tax Amazon, but they ended up taxing our local high street stores and our pubs. On average, local pubs alone have to pay £6,500 extra a year, and that was before the £60 billion that this Government have borrowed in the last few months.

I am going to finish with a direct plea to the Minister, for whom I have a great deal of respect. He led his party in local government—he was its champion—and for many years, he was a local councillor too, earning a huge degree of respect in this House and in that wider family as a result of the work he did. At the Government’s favoured population level for new unitary authorities, this Bill abolishes 90% of all the councillors in England’s shires at the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen. That is 90% of the voices of those local communities—people such as Chris Whitbread, who stood up for his community against this Government over the Bell Hotel in Epping. These people have been the voices of their communities on migrant hotels, on protecting their green belt and on air quality. They are the people who stood up for their local communities on issues such as the grooming gangs, which we heard so much about earlier from the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Birmingham Yardley (Jess Phillips).

This Bill could have been transformational—a chance to step up that voice of local communities. I am sorry that the Minister lost his battle to let those communities keep their voices, but he still has time to change course, to support our reasoned amendment, start again, and build a cross-party consensus on the future of local government. Let this not be the funeral oration for local democracy in England.

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[Jim McMahon]

They absolutely had a choice. It was an invitation that 21 counties have responded to, demonstrating without a doubt that the appetite and interest for reorganisation was there within communities, and they responded in that way.

This process will deliver strong, sustainable unitaries, capable of leading their communities, shaping neighbourhoods and convening local public services to deliver better outcomes for local residents. This process is separate from the Bill. In fact, the devolution priority programme areas of local government reorganisation will be submitting their final proposals to Government on 26 September. All other areas will submit their final proposals on 28 November. Before this Bill even gets out of Committee, local government reorganisation will have final proposals for the 21 counties in the two-tier area. The idea that the Bill is bringing an end to the two-tier system is for the birds. By the time it reaches Royal Assent, the work will have been done and the consultations will be taking place and well under way. The Opposition know that, of course, because they used exactly the same process of reorganisation so many times when they were in government to reduce the number of councillors, reduce the number of councils and end the two-tier system in counties across the country.

To the Opposition’s credit, ending the two-tier system is a proven model, because once local government reorganisation has taken place in an area—by the way, I have not heard anybody calling realistically for a return to the old system—savings can be made. There is a world of difference between those and the savings that Government will take, as central Government is making no savings from local councils. That change gives the freedom to move money up and down that two-tier system to where the real pressures are being faced: adult social care and SEND in particular. If we do not take action after 14 years of inaction, the system will fall over, and we will not allow it to fall over on our watch, however bad the inheritance might have been. The Opposition know all that, because they laid the groundwork and were the architects of the current system.

This Bill also gives ambitious planning powers for mayors to unlock housing and infrastructure, working alongside parliamentarians and local councillors, with powers to intervene in major strategic planning applications and to grant mayoral development orders.

[Wendy Morton]

Will the Minister give way?

[Jim McMahon]

I am afraid that with the time we have, I need to canter through.

The Bill also allows mayoral development corporations to be established and for a mayoral community infrastructure levy to be charged, so that we can unlock much-needed housing and infrastructure to get Britain building once again.

Thirdly, the Opposition claim that this Bill introduces a new precept and will raise bills for working people. I remind them that the mayoral precept has been in law since 2017. In fact, it was a Conservative Government who brought it into law, giving all mayors the power to introduce a precept, so we will not take lectures from them on those powers. I will say this, because I believe in devolution: pound for pound, local people—through their local councils, their local mayors and their combined authorities—see the benefit of that investment in a real way in their neighbourhoods, their communities and their towns. For large parts of Government spending, for different reasons, they do not get that in a tangible way. The accountability that then comes alongside it is important.

Finally, the reasoned amendment tabled by the Conservatives claims that this Bill fails to empower local people. As the House has heard, that is far from the case. This is a generational change, moving power away from Whitehall, with the tools needed at a local level to get things going through community right to buy, neighbourhood governance and all the things that were being asked for. We urge all colleagues to vote against the reasoned amendment in a few moments.

This Bill sees the system of devolution move away from an ad hoc, inconsistent and deal-by-deal model, replacing it with a model that is clear about what places can access, when they can access it, and under what conditions. Our new system confers functions on classes of strategic authority to allow us to deliver our commitment for devolution by default and to streamline those functions, so that all parts of England can be clear about what powers they can access.

Members have raised the supplementary vote a number of times. The Government have no plans to change the electoral system for the UK Parliament or for local council elections in England. The Government believe that while the first-past-the-post system has its place, the SV system is the right thing to do for those executive positions where an individual holds that executive power, and the mandate from local people is important. That has been raised a number of times, and I hope that puts that to bed.

On local authorities, this Government have been clear that we will fix the foundations of local government and create a system that is fit, legal and decent. Changes to governance arrangements are one way that we are simplifying local government. Alongside our intention to strengthen the role of frontline ward councillors, this will provide the tools that will make it possible to act on the local issues that people believe are important.

By abolishing the committee system, we will simplify local authority governance arrangements and ensure that all councils operate an executive form of governance. I have heard the representations from Sheffield Members and others, and meetings will take place to discuss that further, but abolishing the committee system will provide clarity and accountability for local people, and importantly will strengthen that direct line of democratic accountability. We have accepted the continuation of the 13 legacy directly elected council mayors, while introducing measures to prevent the creation of any new ones.

The subject of neighbourhood governance has also been raised. The Bill sets out a clear ambition for all local authorities to hardwire community engagement and neighbourhood working into their governance. I do, of course, hear the calls on behalf of town and parish councils, and I share Members’ commitment to that local level, but if all we have are town and parish councils operating at a local level and no neighbourhood governance in the principal councils, we will miss the opportunity to hardwire localism in everything that councils do. We believe that we must have that hardwiring so that local people feel genuinely empowered. That is the only difference, however: this is completely compatible with town and parish councils working in partnership. When that is effective, they work in unison for the benefit of the local community, which is what we want to see from now on.

A significant amount of attention has rightly been paid to the subject of assets of community value. As we have all seen, community spaces such as pubs, cultural venues and places of worship are the life of our communities. They bring people together, foster a sense of community pride and support local economies. However, 14 years of the previous Government saw a total dismantling of that social infrastructure. People will be far too familiar with the sight of high streets being boarded up one by one, and with community centres being sold off, libraries being lost and parks being forgotten. Places that once defined a locality have been stripped away by 14 lost years. Too many of those critical assets are being lost, which is leading to soulless high streets and less vibrant local communities.

That is not because of a lack of will in local communities. It is because they do not have the tools and the powers to protect those assets and take them on. With the Bill we are starting the work to build back strong communities, which is due in no small part to the significant campaigning of the co-operative movement and the MPs here in the House who have made the case clearly that, in the end, ownership matters. We will give communities the tools and the real power to take on the assets that they love, because that is the right thing to do.

On all these issues the previous Government could have done far more, but what did we hear over the course of today’s debate? We heard Opposition Members say, “You are going too far—it is a power grab”, and in the same breath, “You are not going far enough, and you could have done more.” The truth is that this is a generational shift in power which will see a break-up of the stranglehold that Westminster and Whitehall have retained for far too long against communities across the country. This will be done with local communities, not to them, and indeed that is what has happened so far. Whether we are talking about our approach to fair funding and repairing the foundations, our approach to local government reorganisation or even our approach to devolution, this has all been done in genuine partnership with local leaders who are working together.

What I find so astonishing—and there is a night-and-day difference here—is the almost soulless response from Opposition Front Benchers who decry all these measures, omitting to say that their own local councillors are leading the charge at a local level. The leadership that has been shown, even by Conservative council leaders, puts those Opposition Front Benchers to shame. I do not know how many visits they make around the country, but I cannot imagine that their local representatives value the interpretation that has been presented from the Conservative Front Bench, whether it is about elections, devolution or reorganisation. We are not asking Conservatives Members to be as good as the Government, but we are asking them to be at least as good as their own councillors, and to stand with them instead of standing against them. I urge all Members to support this landmark Bill.

Question put, That the amendment be made.

Black Country Day

Wendy Morton Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd July 2025 Westminster Hall

[Antonia Bance]

Having recently run a competition for the best orange chips in Tipton and Wednesbury, I have great experience of sampling the double-battered delicacy—oh yes, we are talking about chips that then return to the batter and are deep-fried a second time. It was very hard to choose a winner for the contest; perhaps the Black Country Chippy or The Island House chippy, but I have not sampled them all yet. I will keep going until I have sampled every orange chip in the constituency.

The Black Country was built by working people. We remember the women chainmakers of Cradley Heath and their struggle for decent working conditions and pay. We are proud to commemorate their struggle every year at the chainmakers’ festival, which I was proud to speak at this year. We remember the workers of Tube Town—members of a union that was one of the forerunners of my union, Unite—who, in 1913, went on strike from their work metal forming and creating metal tubes, for decent wages. They were out for weeks on end. Somehow, they kept body and soul together. Somehow, those families prevailed and they won.

We remember those who, through no fault of their own, were caught up in the unsafe conditions of the industrial world in the Black Country of the early 20th century. I think particularly of the Tipton catastrophe, when 19 teenage girls working in an unlicensed munitions factory at Dudley Port, dismantling redundant world war one cartridges, were killed in an explosion. They were teenage girls in unsafe, unlicensed conditions. What happened to them changed the law and brought about some of our modern health and safety culture.

Although the Black Country is a proud and vibrant place, we do not always get our fair shakes. We do not always get what we are due. We are a proud place, we work hard and we want to do our best, but the legacy of deindustrialisation and 14 long years of austerity has meant that the people of the Black Country are less likely to be in work and more likely to be sick. Our children are more likely to live without enough money to live on. Forces bigger than any individual family or person hold us back.

I stand here today talking about Black Country Day and about our area to make the case for the two big changes that we need for the future of the Black Country. The first is a modern industrial strategy. I was proud to hear my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Business and Trade set out our modern industrial strategy a few weeks ago in the House. That industrial strategy named our West Midlands combined authority as one of the key locations for all eight of the industrial strategy priority sectors.

We were the only place in the country where all eight of those sectors were named as a priority, and our own Black Country was named as the priority for the clean energy industries. We are beginning to see that come true. In the last couple of months we have seen a £45 million investment from Eku Energy in a battery storage facility in my constituency at Ocker Hill on the site of a former power station. It is a lovely thought that modern, clean energy facilities can take over the space previously occupied by carbon-intensive polluting industries.

[Wendy Morton (Aldridge-Brownhills) (Con)]

The hon. Lady makes an important point about the history, landscape and geography of the Black Country and the fact that our roots are in industry. She makes a very good point about how we can reuse our brownfield sites—for example, for the battery and energy storage system. Does she agree with me that we should focus 100% on reusing brownfield industrial sites before we start damaging our precious greenbelt with things such as battery energy storage systems?

[Antonia Bance]

As a proud Black Country MP, it is good to see the right hon. Member in her place today. I thank her for the intervention, but I am afraid I cannot agree. Much of my constituency is brownfield land. It is right that we look to use brownfield land first of all, both for industrial uses and for housing, but the key problem is that brownfield land is expensive to remediate and that our need for industrial sites and housing is urgent.

I support the Government’s policy of a limited review of the greenbelt and using some of the greybelt to ensure that we can use low value land for housing. Some colleagues around the room might not agree, but when there are 21,000 people on the housing waiting list, as there are in Sandwell, and when we regularly encounter families living in temporary accommodation infested with rats and insects, who show us with shame—they should have no shame; the shame is not theirs—the arms of their children covered in bites, then perhaps we can have a conversation about which pieces of land should be used for what and about the best use of scarce public investment in land suitable for building.

The other investment that I want to talk about relates to a wonderful, timely announcement being made today by colleagues at the Department for Transport. They have announced the third round of the advanced fuels fund; I am delighted to say that Sumo Engineering in my constituency will get £4.5 million for its CLEARSKIES initiative, a demonstration project that will help to produce sustainable aviation fuel. I was so pleased to hear about that. Given that we will also have the battery storage facility in Ocker Hill, the Black Country could really become the hotbed and home of clean energy industries, which offer so much potential for the types of jobs that we need.

I should also say that I was glad that my right hon. Friend the Business Secretary announced action on energy prices in the industrial strategy. We so urgently need to bring down the costs of industrial energy to ensure we carry on with advanced manufacturing and the types of clean energy infrastructure development that we know is the future for our ends.

--- Later in debate ---

[Wendy Morton (Aldridge-Brownhills) (Con)]

I thank the hon. Member for Tipton and Wednesbury (Antonia Bance) for securing this debate and giving us, as Black Country Members of Parliament, and you, Ms Vaz, the opportunity to highlight some of the lot that is the Black Country at its best. I do not think that 90 minutes is long enough to talk with the passion that we all would like to convey, or name-check all the wonderful organisations and individuals who make up the Black Country’s history, present and no doubt future, but I know that we will all give it our best shot. Held every year on 14 July for over a decade now, Black Country Day is a time to honour and celebrate the incredible spirit of our region, from our tight-knit communities to our thriving businesses and tourism and remarkable industrial heritage. Today gives us the opportunity to share a little bit of it with all the people who have decided to tune into Westminster Hall on Parliament TV.

My constituency of Aldridge-Brownhills was not historically part of the Black Country. Its incorporation came in April 1974 as part of the major reorganisation of local government in England. Its name originally comes from the urban district council, that class of local authorities that was abolished by the 1974 reforms. Having previously come under Staffordshire, we were absorbed into Walsall borough council and hence joined the Black Country. Although we have a Staffordshire past, the Black Country is very much our present and our future, though I acknowledge that many in parts of my constituency still look, and rightly so, to Staffordshire and enjoy the historical and familial connections, which I for one will never forget.

The Black Country is renowned for its contribution to the industrial revolution. From the late 18th century onwards, the region developed into a major centre for coalmining, iron smelting and steel production. During the 19th century, the Black Country became noted for its iron and steel industries. Wrought iron production, chain making and the manufacture of locks and nails were central to the region’s economy. Those industries became essential to Britain’s railway, maritime and construction sectors.

As you know well, Ms Vaz, as a Walsall MP yourself, in parts of Walsall our major contribution as a borough was the leather industry. The origins of Walsall’s leather industry lay in the middle ages, and it continued to grow in the 17th and 18th centuries. I will use this opportunity to speak about the lorinery trade, which is what it is known as.

Many of the town’s leather goods trade pioneers were bridle cutters; by settling in Walsall, they could call on the skills of local loriners for their bits and buckles. In the early 19th century, leatherworking became an important local trade, providing employment and manufacturing opportunities right across the borough, including in my constituency. After 1840, the development of the town’s leatherworking industry gained pace. The coming of the South Staffordshire railway to Walsall in 1847 gave a boost to the trade, and by 1851 there were 75 firms making bridles, saddles and harnesses.

Horses were an essential part of Victorian life. There were around 3.3 million horses in late-Victorian Britain, which provided a huge market for Walsall’s manufacturers. In the last decades of the 19th century, the Walsall leather trade entered a golden age of prosperity: exports boomed and Walsall firms sent their products all over the British empire—sadly, foreign wars were a particularly lucrative source of trade. At the turn of the 20th century, Walsall was home to nearly a third of Britain ’s saddlers and harness makers, and it remains best known today for making saddlery and harness, yet from 1900 those trades began a long decline as, one by one, the traditional roles of the horse were challenged and replaced by the engine. The great age of the horse had ended.

Walsall firms had to adapt to this changing world, or they would have disappeared. Some had been making light leather goods, such as travelling bags and hatboxes, since the 1870s, but from 1900 onwards they concentrated more on that type of work. Since the 1960s, the light leather goods trade has met with tough competition from overseas producers, and Walsall’s surviving leather goods firms have concentrated on the luxury end of the market.

Goods for some of the world’s most famous brand names are made in our borough. Indeed, one of Walsall’s most famous clients was Her Majesty the late Queen Elizabeth. The late Queen was rarely seen without her Launer handbag. I must share this little story, although most people have probably seen the sketch: in the famous platinum jubilee sketch with Paddington Bear, the Queen pulled a marmalade sandwich out of one of her bags, which was proudly made in Walsall—the bag, not the sandwich. I believe the Launer handbag is still a favourite of many royals.

Walsall is not known only for its handbags. Canals and waterways were critical to the Black Country’s industrial success, and they remain integral to our local communities today. We have regularly hosted the Inland Waterways festival of water in Pelsall in my constituency, and we have the Canalside festival each August in Brownhills. Our canals, rooted in our industrial heritage, play a key role today, providing wildlife corridors and opportunities for walking, cycling, and simply enjoying being outdoors.

Our canals are a good example of how the region has adapted to changes over the years. Canals were critical to the Black Country’s industrial heritage, enabling the transportation of raw materials like coal and iron to local furnaces and workshops. The Wyrley and Essington canal, which dates back to an Act of Parliament—the Birmingham Canal Navigation Act 1792—runs through a large part of my constituency. Originally built to transport coal from the mines near Wyrley and New Invention, it was later extended to Wolverhampton and Walsall, terminating at Ogley junction near Brownhills. The Wyrley and Essington canal is affectionately known locally as the “curly Wyrley”, which derives from the fact it is a contour canal, twisting and turning to avoid gradients, and thus the need for locks.

On the subject of transport, it would be remiss of me not to draw a link between the role canals played in our past and the role transport will play in our future. Transport connectivity is essential to our communities, unlocking opportunities and access to jobs and education. That is why it is vital that the Government honour the commitment of the previous Mayor of the West Midlands, Andy Street, to deliver the train station in Aldridge, which I am always talking about, and will continue to do so. As we look to the future, improving transport links and, most important, delivering that train station, will unleash opportunities, enabling us to rediscover the vim and vigour of our industrial spirit, with access to good jobs, better connectivity and opportunity for the next generation as well as our own.

I will conclude by wishing everyone a happy Black Country Day, even though it was actually last week, but that is the way Westminster Hall debates work. I am so pleased that the hon. Member for Tipton and Wednesbury was able to secure this day for the debate. It has been an absolute pleasure to participate and to have this really important opportunity as a Member of Parliament to celebrate the heritage of the area that I am deeply honoured to represent.

--- Later in debate ---

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

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Vaz. It is so apt that you are in the Chair for this debate. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Tipton and Wednesbury (Antonia Bance) on securing it. Her contribution was a love letter to her community and it gave us all great pleasure. It shaped this debate—a debate about what has been, but also about what might be. There is an awful lot to be excited about in what may be in the future, so I am pleased to have an opportunity to highlight the profound cultural, historic and economic significance of the Black Country. This is a community that was the beating heart of the industrial revolution, renowned for coal mining, for chains made in Cradley Heath, for glass produced in Wordsley, for the iron and steel foundries of Tipton and Wednesbury, and for the leather made in the community of the right hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton)—as she herself said. What pride it must give her constituents to see that global, indelible and historic link to the late Queen. What a wonderful calling card that is for them.

[Wendy Morton]

Both.

[Alex Norris]

Both for them and for other Walsall constituencies. I definitely would not want to be seen to favour one end of Walsall over the other—certainly not with you in the Chair, Ms Vaz.

I think also of the pride it must give my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton West (Warinder Juss) and his constituents to see that Chubb branding everywhere they go in the world—what that says about their community and the contribution it has made.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Tipton and Wednesbury said in opening the debate, we could think of those industries in terms of their factories, their furnaces, their foundries and their tanneries, but actually it is people—the people of the Black Country—that were all those things: that showed all that creativity, that powered the nation, and that laid the groundwork for modern manufacturing and engineering. We also cannot decouple from our proud history as a movement, their struggle for recognition that the work they did was the magic there, and that they ought to have a share in its benefits, be treated properly, go to work—and come home again. I know that is of great importance to my hon. Friend the Member for Tipton and Wednesbury, as it was in her previous work. We see that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Halesowen (Alex Ballinger) says, in that iconic chainmakers’ festival and what that says specifically about the strike in 1910, and in general the struggle of the labour movement throughout that period to get a fair shake.

That speaks also to the cultural impact of the Black Country, which is a treasure trove of unique food— I am not sure I am going to pull on that thread any further than colleagues have—and unique traditions. In sports, we have heard about Jeff Astle. It is impossible not to mention him, and the work of the Jeff Astle Foundation. I will, of course, say that Jeff Astle was a son of Nottinghamshire, not so far up the road from my own community. I think of my trip to the Hawthorns in 2001 to see Manchester City lose 4-nil to West Bromwich Albion—we have had success since, but not with me present.

In politics, I am really glad that the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Max Wilkinson) mentioned Adrian Bailey. As a fellow Labour and Co-operative MP, he showed great kindness to me as a young parliamentarian. We have been well represented today by excellent Black Country politicians, and of course dialects—I cannot wait to see what the Official Report does with elements of the contribution by my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge (Cat Eccles), which, I have to say, I could not follow.

However, colleagues who are sat to the side of and behind me, who are in their first Parliament, have to some degree failed in the very important task of telling those of us who are not from the Black Country, and who perhaps do not have their familiarity with their region, where the best pint is. That is custom and practice although, as with many other customs and practices in this place, I am sure they will learn over the years.

The Black Country is also the birthplace of music legends like Led Zeppelin and home to the award-winning Black Country Museum, which keeps the area’s industrial and cultural heritage alive. But as in my community—and in Newtownards, as the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) said—the deindustrialisation of the ’70s and ’80s led to the loss of tens of thousands of jobs, and an economic legacy from which the area has still not fully recovered. Unemployment remains stubbornly high, as my hon. Friend the Member for Halesowen said, productivity is below the national average, and healthy life expectancy is significantly lower than in more affluent parts of the country. The challenge for the region and for the Government is clear, and that is why we are so determined to partner with the region to change that by driving growth and unlocking investment.

The former strengths that we have talked about can be the heart of future prosperity. As my hon. Friend the Member for Tipton and Wednesbury said in opening, and as my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge also said, the future is bright. I could not agree more. The hon. Member for Strangford talked about the importance of skilled work. I totally agree, because the share of manufacturing jobs in the Black Country is already significantly higher than the UK average, and the area has modern strengths, as a hub for advanced engineering, with global supply chains, a growing tech sector, and defence, as we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Halesowen.

This debate is well timed, coming eight days after the anniversary that the right hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills mentioned. Indeed, it is perfectly timed for the exciting announcement that my hon. Friend the Member for Tipton and Wednesbury mentioned about sumo and the clear skies programme—another example of how the Black Country is going to shape the global economy in the future, through the brilliant innovation of its people.

The link to this from central Government starts with the industrial strategy. That is the defining and guiding document for this nation’s economic future. We were very excited to publish it last month, and we are very excited about our ambitious plans for eight high-growth sectors, present across the Black Country, as my hon. Friend the Member for Nuneaton (Jodie Gosling) mentioned. It is right to say that the Black Country will be at the heart of that industrial strategy.

The west midlands more broadly will be getting a range of targeted support, including £150 million through the creative places growth fund to support creative businesses, £30 million for research investment through the local innovation partnership fund, and a pilot partnership to drive the development of a strong and resilient electric vehicle supply chain. What a great connection the region has through that industry. My hon. Friend the Member for Tipton and Wednesbury also mentioned the advanced manufacturing sector plan. That is an important part of the effort focused on innovation, upskilling the workforce and attracting investment to create strong supply chains and high-quality jobs.

As I often say in these debates, the industrial strategy talks about our nation’s place in the world. It talks about the industries in which we shall lead and the jobs that we shall create. It is big numbers; it is big-picture—it is the whole nation. But everything happens somewhere; everything is local somewhere. Even the biggest global success story, whether Chubb or anything else, is local to somewhere. That is the exciting bit that we do in our Department, and that I do as Minister for local growth. My commitment today is for a real cross-Government effort and a connection, through ourselves, to local growth.

That is an approach that I pitched in November to the Wolverhampton youth forum. I have to say, if those young people are the future of the region, and if the creativity with which those young people were tackling local problems or the scrutiny to which they subjected my ideas is anything to go by, I believe that the Black Country has a very good future indeed. Our approach, as I said to them, is about investment, devolution, reform and partnership with regional local leaders.

I recognise much of what my hon. Friend the Member for Tipton and Wednesbury said, from my own community and region, about the lack of support traditionally from central Government. What we offer in lieu of that now is not charity. It is not, “You are x pounds below the national average, so here are those pounds back to you.” It is about starting a new partnership and a theory of change that says, “We believe that the ideas, innovation and creativity exist in the Black Country and its leaders already; they exist in the west midlands and its leaders already.” It is the job of the Government to back that with power and resources to make sure that they are able to drive that forwards. As part of the spending review, we announced a number of things that I think will make good on that.

Before I discuss the spending review, I want to address local government finances; because for all the exciting things that we are doing, there is nothing more important than repairing local government finances. I cannot accept the shadow Minister’s characterisation of how we came to be in this situation. I think when he meets the people who have created it, he will be really furious. I give him a clue: they are not far away from him when he sits with his party colleagues.

We have a chance to make this right. We made significant commitments in the autumn Budget and the spending review, and there is now the fair funding review. I encourage hon. Members to take part in that. We are building on that, as we did at the spending review, with a new local growth fund and mayoral recyclable growth fund for specific mayoral regions in the north and the midlands, which identifies areas with productivity gaps and gives them the resources to close them; a £240 million growth mission fund to support directly job creation and economic regeneration of local communities; and our really exciting commitment to local growth plans, which will guide economic vision and foster productivity across mayoral strategic authorities. Yesterday, perfectly timed for this debate, the Mayor of the West Midlands became very the first to publish their growth plan as a strategic authority and set out their 10-year vision. Our commitment is to work with them to make that a reality.

Everything that happens, happens somewhere locally. I want the people of the Black Country to feel devolution not just in powers that go to a regional mayor across the west midlands, but in their towns and villages. When they say that they want to take back control of their future, we should give them the chance to do that. I am really proud to be leading efforts in our Department on the plan for neighbourhoods. We are in our first wave of that, with £1.5 billion of funding to 75 communities across the UK to help tackle deprivation and turbocharge growth. For the Black Country, that includes Dudley, Bilston, Darlaston, Smethwick—and Bedworth, although that is slightly outside the boundaries. Importantly, local people will be in the driving seat for how that funding is spent, with independently-chaired neighbourhood boards made up of residents, businesses and local leaders helping to decide what projects get funding. That will drive three goals: thriving places, stronger communities and taking back control over a 10-year period.

There is more to come, as was set out at the spending review. I note the timely submission that my hon. Friend the Member for Tipton and Wednesbury made on behalf of her community. I can say only this: the criteria will be objective and fully transparent, because I know I will suddenly have a lot of friends and a lot of enemies on that day. Other lists may exist, but I would take them for indicative, rather than definitive, purposes, and ours will be coming shortly.

Before I finish, I want to address two important issues that came up in the debate. The first is housing. As my hon. Friend the Member for Tipton and Wednesbury said, there are 21,000 people on the waiting list. Those people, and all communities in the Black Country, must have housing. That is why we have pulled together our comprehensive investment strategy to help us deliver the target of 1.5 million homes in this Parliament. I am pleased that the Mayor himself has committed to the biggest social housing programme the west midlands has seen. As part of the investment, the combined authority is building the Friar Park urban village, which is one of the largest brownfield developments going. Those are really good signs of what is going on.

The shadow Minister mentioned transport, and I completely agreed with his point. As it is the end of the parliamentary year, I thank the shadow Minister for his characteristically excellent contributions. He is such a good shadow Minister that, as it seems it is reshuffle day on the Opposition Benches, I hope he will be shadowing a different Department from mine. I know that he will take that in the spirit in which it is intended, because it is not his company that I do not wish for. I echo his point about transport, which is why we were proud that in June, the Chancellor announced £2.4 billion being made available to the West Midlands combined authority for transport across the region, including in and around the Black Country. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge said, it is great to see spades already in the ground on the £295 million West Midlands Metro extension to Brierley Hill, meaning faster and more reliable transport connections between Birmingham and the Black Country.

To conclude, I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Tipton and Wednesbury for securing the debate, and all hon. Members for their excellent contributions. Black Country day is about pride in our past and in the real things that make us who we are as a nation, but it is also about confidence in our future. From what we have heard today and see in the Black Country, I think we have an awful lot to be confident about. I look forward to working in that partnership with colleagues from across the House and their constituents.

Neighbourhood Plans: Planning Decisions

Wendy Morton Excerpts

Wednesday 9th July 2025 Westminster Hall

[Wendy Morton (Aldridge-Brownhills) (Con)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point because that is not just happening in his local community. Does he agree that we see the same thing right across the country? The same is happening in Birmingham, where the housing target is going down, yet in places such as Aldridge-Brownhills it is going up by some 27%, with no infrastructure and no brownfield remediation funding to support it.

[Dr Evans]

My right hon. Friend is spot on. That is why I wanted this debate, and many colleagues are here to raise that exact point.

--- Later in debate ---

[Brian Mathew (Melksham and Devizes) (LD)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Ms McVey. I thank the hon. Member for Hinckley and Bosworth (Dr Evans) for securing this valuable debate.

Let me take you, Ms McVey, and the Minister to my constituency of Melksham and Devizes, in the beautiful county of Wiltshire, where many villages have worked to develop neighbourhood plans over the years. The plans have allowed for good consultation with communities over what developments they want to see and where. For the most part, they have worked—when not disrupted by the lack of housing supply from the previous Conservative Administration.

The village of Holt is a perfect example of what can be done when local people have the tools to shape their future. A parish councillor in Holt recently reminded me of the success of Holt’s first neighbourhood plan, which was created in 2016. That plan shaped the development of a derelict tannery site into an award-winning mixed-use development that combines homes and commercial space while preserving the village’s distinctive character and history.

Nearly a decade on, Holt is now updating its plan to address residents’ current concerns, such as traffic, road safety and local infrastructure. As the councillor put it to me:

“The neighbourhood plan process is a part of local democracy.”

She is right. It empowers communities, gives residents a unified voice and ensures that developments do not just reflect the needs and priorities of developers.

The withdrawal of funding for neighbourhood plans means that we are heading towards a two-tier planning system. In one tier, more affluent areas, where the parish councils can afford to fund expensive plans, will continue to have a say in their futures. In the other tier, the less affluent areas that lack such resources will be left vulnerable to speculative development, with little say and even less resource.

[Wendy Morton]

On that point, some of us do not have parish councils, but the local voice in neighbourhood planning is still important. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that this insistence on top-down targets is driving out any space for local communities and the local voice? That is deeply damaging if we want to create sustainable communities.

[Brian Mathew]

I agree entirely with the right hon. Member. I urge the Government to reconsider their decision. Local democracy should not be a luxury available only to those who can afford to pay for it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Wendy Morton (Aldridge-Brownhills) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship today, Ms McVey. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Hinckley and Bosworth (Dr Evans) for securing this debate. It is really timely, not least because the Planning and Infrastructure Bill continues to make progress down the other end of this place. I hope that it continues to receive the scrutiny that such a huge piece of legislation requires.

Neighbourhood plans were designed to give local people a meaningful say in shaping development in their communities; as democratically elected Members of Parliament, we must never forget that. They are a crucial tool for ensuring local input and accountability. There has to be a place for local voices when it comes to planning. Even where there are no parish councils, as in my constituency, local residents expect a voice; they expect to be heard. Just the other week, I was out on site at Barr Lakes common with a group of residents regarding a specific planning application.

I fear that the Government’s Planning and Infrastructure Bill risks undermining progress by centralising decision-making power and reducing the influence of local councillors and neighbourhood forums in planning decisions. That is why the funding for the NALC is so vital. If the Bill is allowed to pass, the resulting democratic deficit will risk elected councillors having only a limited role in scrutinising developments and—this is really worrying—denying them a meaningful voice in deciding applications, including those guided by neighbourhood plans. If neighbourhood plans are to remain relevant, the Bill must ensure that they have real weight and that local representatives retain genuine decision-making power.

We all know that neighbourhood plans are crucial in helping communities to protect valued local green belt. Many people in this place will know that I bang on a lot about the green belt and I am happy to continue to do so, because it is vital to the integrity of the communities I represent. We are not anti-housing, but I want to see housing that is not only in the right place but has the right infrastructure, and housing that meets the needs of local communities. It is local residents who understand the environmental and social importance of making sure that spaces are developed appropriately. Often, they understand that so much better than central planners here in Westminster and in Government.

The Bill risks expediting development and sidelining the protections provided by neighbourhood plans. The threat of piecemeal “grey belt” erosion will just grow further if we do not firmly embed green-belt protections in planning reforms. We are seeing that in my constituency, particularly down at Chapel Lane. It is incumbent on the Government to ensure that neighbourhood plans can effectively safeguard the environment, which I think we care about on both sides of the House; to prioritise brownfield development as a first step, which I thought we all broadly agreed on as well; and to respect the clear wishes of local residents—and that is the bit where I feel there is an increasing divide in this place.

That is evident as I look around the Chamber: it is Members from Opposition parties who have come to speak in the debate and raise local issues. Apart from the Minister—and his Parliamentary Private Secretary, but of course he is not allowed to speak—there is nobody on the Government side of the Chamber. The Minister is a good man, so I do not want to refer to him as Billy No Mates, but he is a little bit lonely sitting there on his own early on a Wednesday morning.

[Sir Ashley Fox]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that probably half of Labour Members are pleased with the enormous reductions in housing totals in their urban constituencies and those who represent rural constituencies are just too embarrassed to show their faces?

[Wendy Morton]

My hon. Friend makes a really important point. The west midlands is heavily dominated by Labour MPs, but none of them are here today. Their housing targets have come tumbling down. My constituency is not technically a rural constituency; actually, I have challenged the Government to define whether my seat is rural or not, and there seems to be some ambiguity. Those of us on the periphery of the conurbations, where the green belt provides huge protection from urban sprawl, are really concerned about the Government’s approach.

The Government’s approach to housing targets is deeply flawed, as we have seen. Targets are imposed from the top down, with insufficient regard for local circumstances or infrastructure capacity. We need to see planning reforms that give neighbourhood plans real power, to help to balance that important housing supply with local realities. I have spoken a lot about the need to continue championing brownfield sites, and when it comes to neighbourhood plans, that must be seen as a credible alternative, but we need sufficient brownfield remediation funding to make that happen. Otherwise, it is almost unfair on developers, because if they are facing a choice of brownfield or greenfield development, often it is so much cheaper and quicker to develop that housing by going down the greenfield route, as we all know.

There must be adequate funding, and in the west midlands, under the leadership of the previous mayor, Andy Street, we absolutely demonstrated what can be done. He worked with Walsall council on the development of the Caparo and Harvestime sites, showing that these sort of town centre and urban edge sites can be delivered. That has to be a win-win. If we are serious about regeneration, let us develop the brownfield sites; then we will get footfall back into our town centres and communities working together again, and there is often some infrastructure in place. It just seems to be common sense, but we seem to be failing in that regard now.

One of the biggest concerns of local people is about infrastructure: “Where am I going to send my children to school?”, “Where’s the nearest school?”, “Where’s the nearest hospital?”, “Where’s the healthcare?”, “Where are the jobs?”, “Where’s the transport?”—do not worry, I am not going to talk about Aldridge train station today; I will save that for another day. This is about having joined-up thinking. We had an opportunity with the Planning and Infrastructure Bill to really make a difference, but I think that opportunity is gone. We need to build communities and houses, but we need to do more than that. We need to build sustainable neighbourhoods. We need to take communities with us, not leave them behind. Otherwise, I fear that we are not creating communities; in the worst-case scenario, we are creating the sink estates of the future. They have no heart and no soul, and they are not really homes; they are just houses plonked in an open space.

To me, all politics is local. It centres on the people we represent. Some of us will have friends or colleagues who serve on parish councils, district councils or county councils. We choose to serve here, but we must never, ever lose sight of the importance of that local voice.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Norris]

The hon. Gentleman runs a paragraph or two ahead in my speech; I promise I will address that point shortly. I was talking about local plans, but I will turn to neighbourhood plans shortly.

To help us achieve our ambition of universal coverage of up-to-date local plans, which I think is a shared ambition, not least because of comments made by hon. Members today, we intend to introduce a new system for plan making later this year. In February, we responded to the plan-making consultation, which confirmed our vision for that new system. We will provide further details soon, in line with our commitment to provide a reasonable familiarisation period.

On neighbourhood plans, evidence shows that they work best where they build on the foundation of the local plan to meet the priorities and preferences of the community. In a planning system that is all too often antagonistic, neighbourhood planning can bring the community together in support of development, often resulting, as the hon. Member for Hinckley and Bosworth said, in more housing for the area and additional benefits to the local community. If we are to hit our target of building 1.5 million homes within this Parliament, the community support that neighbourhood planning attracts will be a very important component. I can give assurance of that.

[Wendy Morton]

On meeting targets, would the Government undertake to ensure sufficient funding for the brownfield remediation process, to unlock sites across the country? All of us in the House acknowledge the importance of unlocking those sites, because the regeneration opportunities would be massive, but it needs funding from central Government.

[Alex Norris]

I appreciate that point and share that view. I stare at a site, and probably, I will retire still staring at it—I should not make that commitment to my constituents, as they would encourage me to—in my old council ward, Johnsons dye works, that has been brownfield and vacant for three decades. The site is of complex ownership. We need those sites developed because they are a blight on the community. I completely accept that point. I think we made clear in the spending review our significant commitment as central Government to making funding available to get sites going. I hope that gives the right hon. Lady a degree of comfort about the Government’s direction.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Norris]

On the point about the nation’s finances, it is the hon. Gentleman’s job to point the finger at the Government, but he and his party will continue to struggle until and unless they accept their role in that. At the end of the day, that inability to grasp the legacy of their 14 years in government will not help their fortunes in the future—but that is a matter for him, not me.

Difficult decisions have to be made. We have to weigh up where to put taxpayers’ money. Our analysis is that after more than a decade of taxpayer support, neighbourhood planning should be possible without further Government funding. Since 2013, more than £71 million of support has gone into this area. That speaks to the points made by the right hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills, the hon. Member for Hinckley and Bosworth and the hon. Member for Mid Buckinghamshire (Greg Smith). There has been a significant period of work in this area. There is a network of planners and groups with skills and expertise in preparing neighbourhood plans, who can help others to do so. I hope that addresses the point made by the hon. Member for Melksham and Devizes (Brian Mathew) about access.

[Wendy Morton]

The Minister makes an important point about the level of expertise needed by local parishes and town councils to prepare their evidence base and documentation. However, if there is no funding from central Government, the only way I can see for a parish council or town council to find the funding is by raising the precept, which would be tantamount to Labour increasing the taxes of local people. Does the Minister agree, or is there an alternative?

[Alex Norris]

The right hon. Lady will know, despite not having any parish councils, that the precept is a matter for local authorities. That is a decision that they will have to make. We recognise the concern on resourcing, and it will depend on the area. However, even though national structured support is ending, there is now expertise and know-how within the market for local groups to tap into, which should help to develop their ability. Hopefully, some of that combined support can help to lower costs.

Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government

Wendy Morton Excerpts

Tuesday 24th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Wendy Morton (Aldridge-Brownhills) (Con)]

I rise to the three-minute challenge. We hear that this is the biggest investment in social and affordable housing in a generation. I am sure we all remember the day when we got the keys to our first home and how that felt. We are told there will be £39 billion over 10 years, but the real test is whether it reaches the councils and communities that need it the most. As ever, we need detail and clarity, and once again it is lacking from this Government and these estimates—I fear that is because of their pursuit of their ideologically driven utopia.

Will the Government commit to publishing the regional allocation of local authority housing and affordable homes programme funds, which is critical to understanding the impact on our own communities? We must ensure that funding flows to not just city regions, but towns such as Walsall and the Walsall borough, where my constituency sits. Local authorities must have fair access to the affordable homes programme and to infrastructure support.

I have previously expressed my concerns in a debate on the Planning and Infrastructure Bill about the lack of democratic accountability that this Government will create in their approach to planning. A further point, which has been expressed by the National Association of Local Councils, is that the Minister’s Department is not proceeding with commissioning new neighbourhood planning support services from 2025. I feel that that is just another kick in the teeth for local parish and town councils.

I know that the Minister is a good man and brings loads of experience to this place from his time in local government, but I do not believe that his Government are interested in local communities, preferring to drive a coach and horses over our precious green spaces. I look at how Birmingham’s housing targets are being slashed, yet ours across the Walsall borough are being hiked up. Maybe it is because Birmingham is incompetent and cannot empty its bins, but I will leave that for another day.

These are arbitrary, Whitehall-driven and centralised targets. I have long campaigned for development to happen on brownfield first, but that needs real funding for remediation, infrastructure and up-front costs. Under Andy Street’s leadership and a Conservative Government, we showed in the west midlands that we can remediate brownfield sites—look at the Caparo and Harvestime sites—and deliver for local people, but we need funding, which is lacking in this estimate. A failure to remediate is a failure to regenerate our towns, cities, communities and local economies. I have done it in less than three minutes, Madam Deputy Speaker.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

Star pupil of the day.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Wendy Morton Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 10th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Paul Holmes (Hamble Valley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Northampton South (Mike Reader). He was very generous in congratulating many Members on their amendments and very constructive when he outlined his position on this piece of legislation.

I know that Members across the Chamber will be devastated to hear that this will be my last contribution on the Bill before the shadow Secretary of State makes his Third Reading speech. [Hon. Members: “Ah!”] I know! I wish to thank the Minister for his hard work, all the Members who contributed to our discussions, and the Clerks and the staff who gave us such amazing support throughout what I thought was a long, challenging and often frustrating Bill Committee. As a Committee, we all lived through the emotional journey of whether Charlton—a team that the Minister passionately supports—would be promoted. As I said to him during the Committee, he is welcome down to the Den for Charlton’s next match against Millwall. I will even let him sit on our side of the stadium.

As I have said, I wish to thank all members of the Bill Committee for their contributions. I also congratulate those, such as the hon. Member for Northampton South, who have tabled amendments to the Bill—we have had a weird, wonderful and varied number of new clauses and amendments. As the hon. Member said, finding them to be in scope of the legislation was quite challenging at times, but I trusted the Clerks to make the right decision and therefore most of them stood.

I look forward to briefly outlining the position of the Opposition on some of the new clauses and amendments before the House this afternoon. Only a small part of the Bill will be discussed this afternoon. The majority of mainstream clauses that we are opposed to were in the frustrating and rather emotive session last night. I look forward to challenging the Minister, who might, I think, look slightly less grumpy than he did last night, and to pleading with him to accept some of our amendments. Then again, Madam Deputy Speaker, I may be dreaming in that regard.

It is clear that the Minister and the Government have a driving mission in this legislation. The Opposition recognise that, but he knows that we have many disagreements on how to achieve the ambitions he has outlined. We have been very clear throughout the passage of the Bill—through the Bill Committee, Second Reading, Report and, later this afternoon, Third Reading— that we have many core, fundamental and principled disagreements with some of the measures the Minister has proposed. Although we agree that we need to build more houses, that we need to see an infrastructure-first approach and that we need to unlock some development, we have a fundamental disagreement with the centralising zeal of both the Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister to get us to where they want us to go. We also believe that the Minister could have looked more favourably on some of the new clauses and amendments that were tabled not just by my party, but by other parties in the House and by some of his own Back Benchers, who have proposed well-intentioned and well-meaning measures.

[Wendy Morton (Aldridge-Brownhills) (Con)]

Like others, I sat in the Chamber yesterday listening to the Government voting down so many amendments. We had an opportunity to do something really good with this Bill, and we have missed it. Does the shadow Minister agree that, if we are not careful, we will end up with a piece of legislation that will drive a coach and horses through our communities and our green belt and that does nothing for nature, for farmers, for communities and for the very people who want those things?

[Paul Holmes]

My right hon. Friend, not uncharacterist-ically, has made an excellent point and I entirely agree with her. As I said yesterday, the Minister has had a unique opportunity with this Bill—a detailed and potentially groundbreaking Bill—to fundamentally change the planning processes in this country for the better. He told us many times on the Bill Committee that he was reflecting on some of the genuine points and key concerns that Members from across the House brought to him. However, those reflections amounted to nothing. He consistently said that he would reflect on the genuine principles that we brought forward, but we have seen no changes in the legislation. We have seen no acceptance of our thoughts and no efforts to change this legislation to reflect the genuine concerns that so many of us brought to this place.

The Liberal Democrats tabled many amendments and new clauses. As the Minister knows, I very rarely praise the Liberal Democrats on the Floor of the House or in my constituency of Hamble Valley, and I am not likely to do so going forward. However, what I would say is that the hon. Member for Taunton and Wellington (Gideon Amos) and his colleague, the hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover), tabled some really good and principled amendments that would have this improved this legislation, particularly on chalk streams and on some of our other concerns.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Lamont (Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk) (Con)]

I will speak to the amendments relating to compulsory purchase powers, and to my new clause 128. I note that much of the Bill and most of the clauses will not affect Scotland, but, unusually for a planning Bill, there are components that do affect it.

Before I talk about the detail of my concerns about compulsory purchase powers, I want to set out a little of the context, and say why the issue is exercising so many of my constituents. I am privileged to represent the Scottish Borders—the place I call home. It is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful parts of the United Kingdom, but it is under attack. The net-zero-at-all-costs agenda of this UK Labour Government, backed by the SNP in Edinburgh, is causing huge concern to my constituents. Massive pylons, solar farms, wind farms and battery storage units are ruining the Scottish Borders as we know them, and compulsory purchase powers are a key part of delivering many of those projects.

[Wendy Morton]

When it comes to infrastructure, such as battery energy storage systems, it is not just the Scottish Borders that are affected, but areas like mine, Aldridge-Brownhills in the west midlands. I support what my hon. Friend says about this feeling like encroachment, and about increasing compulsory purchase powers. Where will it end?

[John Lamont]

I share my right hon. Friend’s concerns. Ultimately, this is about choices. The choice that this Government and the Scottish Government are making is whether we protect our natural environment, and the rural communities that have sustained food production for many years, or turn them into an industrial wasteland. The compulsory purchase powers in the Bill that affect my constituency in Scotland will affect many similar communities in England.

My constituents in the Scottish Borders have had their fair share of new developments. In the Scottish Borders, the countryside is where we live. It is not some distant, remote area that is occasionally visited by tourists from Edinburgh or London; it is the place we call home. Compulsory purchase powers must be exercised with appropriate checks and balances in order to protect our communities, whether in Scotland or in other parts of the UK.

I now turn specifically to the amendment that stands in my name, new clause 128, which deals with compulsory purchase and the community benefit related to it. We all know that when compulsory purchase takes place, it is difficult and often devastating for those who are directly affected. Too often, though, we fail to recognise the impact on the wider community, especially when it comes to new energy infrastructure. We have to improve the relationship between those affected and those acquiring the land. Compulsory purchase can be a complex and intimidating process.

--- Later in debate ---

[Wendy Morton]

I share my hon. Friend’s frustrations with Natural England. Does he agree that it is a bit strange that we have a Government who say they want to reduce the number of quangos, but who have reduced it by one and introduced 27? In this Bill, they are giving more powers to an unelected quango, which risks doing further untold damage to our green fields, our open spaces and our farmland.

[Robbie Moore]

That is exactly why I am so frustrated by the intent of the Government’s Bill. It gives Natural England more compulsory purchase powers, more funds through environmental delivery plans, and an ability to scrutinise and, indeed, to dictate to landowners how their land or farm may be utilised. That is wrong, especially when, as I say, a farmer farming in my constituency of Keighley could be subject to a CPO as a result of a development elsewhere in the country.

The Government and I absolutely disagree on the right to use CPO, and I really struggle with the expansion of section 14A orders, which will allow an acquiring authority to discount the hope value of a seized property. Property rights matter, because they are the foundation of our society. If the state chooses to use its powers to confiscate the property of a law-abiding person, stipulates how that land must be used, and then tells the landowner how much they are entitled to receive, that is wrong—in my view, it is an absolute theft of private property. So-called hope value is not a capitalist trick, a racket or unfair; it is simply the true market value of the property. That is why I fundamentally disagree with the purpose of the Bill, which entails the Government’s stipulating that hope value must be disregarded over and above the agricultural value that is to be paid. It should not be the law that decides the value of something; it should be down to negotiation and the market.

That brings me to fairness. Although I admire the Government’s aspiration to increase development, the Bill is fundamentally flawed on the issue of fairness, because it takes away the property rights of landowners—the very landowners who will have been encouraged by their local authorities to put forward their land to be zoned as part of a local plan, and encouraged through a service level agreement process to have their land zoned for housing, employment or whatever it may be. As a result of this piece of legislation, the local authority, or indeed Natural England, will have the ability to compulsorily acquire the land not at market value, but at agricultural value.

--- Later in debate ---

[Robbie Moore]

Here we have the Liberal Democrats setting out their position, and it is a good that they are doing so because I fundamentally believe that if a farmer owns land and the state seizes control of it through compulsory purchase powers, it is absolutely right that that farmer should be rewarded with the market value, not the agricultural value. I know the Liberal Democrats have set out their position that they fully support just agricultural value being paid, not what the land is really worth at market value, and I hope all farmers across the country understand the Liberal Democrat position, which is to disregard that hope value.

I want to know whether the Government have undertaken an impact assessment on the Valuation Office Agency. As we go through the compulsory purchase process, there will be many a challenge—quite rightly—by land agents or valuers acting on behalf of those many landowners to understand the true value of their land. I fear that the Valuation Office Agency will not be able to cope with the level of scrutiny there will rightly be of the Government’s position.

[Wendy Morton]

My hon. Friend has set out some of the challenges the Bill presents for the farming community. Part 5 provides authorities with significant compulsory purchase powers, but with no definition or limits whatsoever. For our farming community, this all comes on top of the changes to agricultural property relief, business property relief and inheritance tax, and the increased national insurance for employers. What is it about the farming community that this Government do not like?

[Robbie Moore]

The farming community faces so much uncertainty not only as a result of the Bill, but because of all the additional pressures, whether it is the family farm tax or the increases in overheads, that are hitting cash flow this year.

That is why my new clause 127 and amendment 153 —and, indeed, Opposition new clause 42—are so important. It is frustrating that the Government are just throwing out these amendments and are not willing to consider them, because they have been put forward in the best interests of our farming community and our landowners, so that the state does not have the control that this Government are willing to give it. I urge the Government to consider these very practical, sensible amendments to the Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

[Wendy Morton]

Fear not, Madam Deputy Speaker, I shall keep my comments very, very brief. I cannot let this Planning and Infrastructure Bill go without saying that it was an opportunity to create the homes that we need, to support our communities, to support our farmers and farming, to support the environment, and to ensure that good development is supported by good infrastructure. I have sat in this Chamber for two days listening to amendments and debating amendments, including my own on battery energy storage systems. Time and again, the Government have just rejected them. What we have ended up with is legislation that drives a coach and horses through accountability. It seeks to steamroll over local people and to concrete over our precious green belt. It gives local people no rights, no voice and no say over how their communities are shaped for the future. On that basis, I will be voting against the Bill on Third Reading.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Wendy Morton Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 9th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Paul Holmes]

The Conservative party has always believed in the rights of locally elected councillors and planning committees to make decisions for the people they serve; we have said that consistently through the passage of this Bill. The hon. Member for Taunton and Wellington (Gideon Amos) has tabled new clause 1 to ensure that planning committees have their current powers reinstated under the Government’s proposals. The Minister is saying this afternoon, as he will say tomorrow, that he does not trust any planning committee or any Labour-controlled council to make decisions based on the wishes of the constituents in their local areas. We think that that is a disgrace.

[Wendy Morton (Aldridge-Brownhills) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that our constituents expect to have their voice heard on a local planning committee? Provided that councils are well-trained, the system that we have is working quite well.

[Chris Curtis (Milton Keynes North) (Lab)]

Oh, is it?

--- Later in debate ---

[Wendy Morton]

To put it more simply, the sense of urban sprawl is about the green belt not just between specific villages but between communities. We see that between Streetly and Pheasey in my constituency on the edge of Birmingham. Does he agree that it would help to tackle the problem if the Government adopted a truly brownfield-first approach by developing the 1.2 million homes that it is estimated are available on brownfield sites?

[Blake Stephenson]

I absolutely agree with my right hon. Friend. Those green spaces on the edge of and between towns are at risk. It is not just the fields that are at risk but people’s access to green space, which is vital for mental health and wellbeing.

--- Later in debate ---

[Neil Duncan-Jordan]

The current system is broken, absolutely, but I do not think that hard-pressed planning officers are the problem. I think developers are the problem, and that is the point that I am coming on to make.

Last year, less than 2% of new homes were social rents delivered through the planning system. Private developers prioritise maximum profit with high-end luxury builds, particularly in constituencies such as mine. At the current rate, we would need to build over 5 million homes to deliver just 90,000 social rent properties, yet there are over 1 million people on waiting lists. That is why I signed new clause 32 to introduce binding quotas for affordable and social rent homes. If we are serious, as I believe Labour is, about getting families out of temporary accommodation and off waiting lists, local authorities need the power and funding to lead a new generation of council house building.

We also cannot ignore the fact that the developer-led model creates conflict with nature, as under-resourced councils are forced to accept whatever sites developers propose, regardless of how suitable or unsuitable they are for sustainable development. There is no amount of killing badgers or red tape bonfires that will fix that. It is too simplistic to argue that this is a debate of builders versus blockers. The overwhelming majority of planning applications are approved, which is why we had more than a million planning permissions approved in the past decade that have yet to be built. Developers continue to drip feed developments into the system, prioritising properties that maximise profit and are far from affordable for local people.

It is time, therefore, to move away from the failed market dogma and, I believe, to return to Labour values. The post-war Labour Government built millions of homes supported by the planning system our party created, and it is time we did it again.

[Wendy Morton]

I rise to speak to new clause 84, in my name, and to add my support for new clause 51 on solar and battery energy storage systems, and new clause 39 on solar.

New clause 84 seeks to prohibit the development of battery energy storage systems on higher-quality agricultural land. In a debate on this topic in this Chamber just last week, we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Sarah Bool) that there is 78 GW of battery capacity that is either operational, awaiting construction having received planning permission or awaiting consideration, which is equal to supplying 200 million homes—10 times the number of houses we actually have. This is ludicrous.

There are numerous questions over safety, fire risk, accessibility and proximity to homes and communities, yet these storage systems are replacing land that could be used for crops and grazing for animals with metal containers, eating into our national food security at a time that we should be increasing food security and strengthening our food chains. Farmland, as we all know in this place, is irreplaceable—when it is gone, it is gone. We are seeing far too many planning applications coming forward that would risk green-belt land being trashed, with the term “grey belt” used to create a grey area that planning inspectors will take advantage of. I hope the Government are listening to this point, and those made by others on solar, as well.

In the time I have, I want to support a number of other new clauses and amendments that I know matter to my constituents, such as new clause 79, on the duty to co-operate. It is not that we do not expect to have targets in constituencies such as mine; we just do not expect to do all the heavy lifting. We do not expect to have to pick up the can and let failing authorities such as Labour-led Birmingham off the hook. The council certainly cannot manage Birmingham’s bins and it cannot manage its housing, either; three years on, none of the properties in the Commonwealth village in Perry Barr has been let.

It cannot be right that housing targets in areas like Birmingham and London are being placed on authorities such as Walsall, where our targets are being hiked up— not least when evidence points to more people wanting to live in towns and centres. Surely what we should be doing is regenerating these areas and building on our brownfield. If we do it sensibly, it will protect the green belt, protect our environment and protect the green and open spaces that we all love and enjoy.

I will also speak in support of new clause 45, on intentional unauthorised development, something that really irks some of my constituents. They write to me and come to see me about developers or individuals who flagrantly breach or ignore planning regulation or permissions, creating misery for their neighbours. How can someone simply get away with doing that sort of thing without repercussions, when others abide by the rules and are left picking up the pieces?

I have already spoken of my support for new clause 43 on preventing the merging of villages. That is crucial to constituencies like mine, which is on the edge of Birmingham, and has communities that are at risk of being consumed into its urban sprawl. Finally, there is so much I could say on Natural England. I worry that the Government are giving more powers over planning to an unelected quango, while taking power away from local authorities and councillors.

Birmingham: Waste Collection

Wendy Morton Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd April 2025 Commons Chamber

[Jim McMahon]

There has been almost daily communication with the council, and the trade unions have made representations, too, but we need to be clear about appropriate roles and responsibilities, and about the lines of accountability. The council, not the Government, is the employer of the workforce in Birmingham, and it is for the employer and the employees to reach an agreement that both can accept. We urge both parties to negotiate in good faith. We believe that the deal on the table is a good deal. The right hon. Gentleman is correct to say that workers have the right to make their representations, but the council has to take into account all its workforce, including over 7,000 women, who historically were paid far less than their male counterparts for equivalent roles. That is the foundational issue at the heart of the dispute.

[Wendy Morton (Aldridge-Brownhills) (Con)]

Despite assurances from the Dispatch Box before the Easter recess, we continue to see piles of rubbish on the streets in Birmingham. The costs are mounting, and the rats—the squeaky blinders—continue to roam the streets of Britain’s second city freely, so I ask the Minister again: what are his Government and Labour-run Birmingham city council doing to bring an end to the strike? Enough is enough—residents want an end to the situation.

[Jim McMahon]

Work is still taking place. I should address the question about rodents, because that is a serious issue. Nobody wants to see rats in the streets, particularly around the accumulated waste. We welcome the council’s decision to suspend the charge for calling out pest control, so that households that report rodents are not financially disadvantaged. On the Government’s response to the situation, from day one we said that the accumulated waste was unacceptable and a public health hazard. The Government stepped in to support the council, to ensure that we could get more trucks out of the depot, increase the amount of waste collected and regularise the number of routine collections. I am pleased that progress has been made, but what will ultimately resolve the dispute is the trade unions and the council reaching an agreement that brings the strike action to an end.