Bobby Dean MP: speeches 2025

Speeches

• 18 Dec 2025 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  May I associate myself with the comments made by the Leader of the House about the victims of the Bondi Beach attack? Antisemitism has no place in our society and I am glad that the House is united against hate. Mr Speaker, I join in the well wishes to you and to all the House staff at Christmas time. The Government have been engaging in another Christmas tradition this week: rushing out lots of statements in the final week before recess. I calculated that we are up to double the normal rate, with 13 and a half statements per day this week—I will let you decide what half a statement constitutes, Mr Speaker! We had the statement on local government finance yesterday, and it seemed that many Labour Back Benchers seemed to have had access to the figures for each local authority in advance, in a way that we had not. Our spokesperson, my hon. Friend the Member for Guildford (Zöe Franklin), searched the internet for the figures in advance but could not find them, so will the Leader of the House ask the Minister for Local Government and Homelessness to clarify whether those figures were made available to Labour Back Benchers in advance? Moving on to more serious Christmas matters, the BBC reported this week that Father Christmas’s pay has flatlined this year. There is good news for the elves, as thanks to the national minimum wage increase, their pay is on the up. However, this wage compression is apparently demotivating for Father Christmas and some garden centres across the country are struggling to get him to turn up. As it happens, he is also upset about the Employment Rights Bill, because it has made it much more difficult for him to get the sack—ba-dum tish. [ Interruption. ] Oh, come on! Another important Christmas matter is the ongoing bitter dispute about Christmas films. The Liberal Democrat Chief Whip, my hon. Friend the Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain), insists that “Die Hard” is a Christmas movie; she even has a “Die Hard”-themed advent calendar in the Whips Office. It is of course set at Christmas time, but some say it is too violent to be a Christmas film, although in my experience violence is not absent from Christmas, usually. There has also been some controversy over “Love Actually”—it is of course set at Christmas time, but some people have been calling for it to be cancelled because of its dated romantic themes. I still like “Love Actually” and I encourage the Prime Minister to watch it this year; I would hope he might be inspired by Hugh Grant’s character’s courage. Finally, I would like to make the slightly controversial point that sometimes Christmas TV specials are better than Christmas films. I really enjoyed the “Gavin and Stacey” Christmas special last year and I am looking forward to “Amandaland” this year. All this demonstrates that there is a lot to be settled when it comes to the matter of Christmas films, so will the Leader of the House allow a debate in Government time on the matter of Christmas films?

• 17 Dec 2025 · INEOS Chemicals: Grangemouth · Hansard source

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  The Minister mentioned in his statement the £200 million for projects in Grangemouth from the National Wealth Fund. I would like to raise with him a concern that was raised in evidence to the Treasury Committee, which is that the National Wealth Fund has to operate on the riskier end of project proposals because it does not want to crowd out private investment, but that means necessarily that many projects will fail. The worry is that politicians will not be ready to defend projects that fail under the National Wealth Fund. Does the Minister agree with that assessment, and is he willing to accept that, given the risk profile of the National Wealth Fund, some projects will fail as part of the deal?

• 11 Dec 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  On a point of order, Mr Speaker. The Minister indicated to the House that the Liberal Democrats were against the national minimum wage in the ’90s. My own memories are hazy, but I am reliably informed that that was not the case, so I hope the Minister will correct the record.

• 11 Dec 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  T1. If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.

• 11 Dec 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  Thank you, Mr Speaker. As you probably know, south London is wonderful, but you may not know that it is one of the UK’s largest regional economies. Last week my local council, the London borough of Sutton, launched its economic growth plan, inviting businesses to take advantage of opportunities in the area. Will the Minister meet me and the local council leader to connect the business community with all the opportunities that exist in my borough?

• 11 Dec 2025 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  Before I begin, I join the tributes to Lance Corporal George Hooley. His tragic death reminds us of the courage of all our armed forces in their determination to protect our country. My inbox, like those of other Members, I am sure, has this week been full of correspondence from demoralised businesses, after they were hit by yet another tax rise. We have spoken a lot about the cost of living crisis, but we are now experiencing a cost-of-doing-business crisis, too. Nowhere is that felt more than in the hospitality and retail industries. We in this House are quick to talk about such businesses being the heart of our communities, but they have suffered a lot in recent years. They closed during the covid pandemic, have suffered the rise of the online competition, and were hit by employer national insurance rises last year—those industries were particularly hit by that change because they employ many of the low-paid and young first-jobbers in our economy. They were promised good news on business rates in the Budget, in the form of a fairer system and lower rates, but the revaluations, combined with the tapering of reliefs, have meant that many bills are set to rise. Businesses in my Carshalton and Wallington constituency, such as Wallington Cycles and the Sun pub in Carshalton, have sent me pretty desperate emails setting out their worries for the future. I have tried to reassure them about the transitional relief that the Government have put in place, which should offset some of the damage, but that is small comfort against the backdrop of so many rising costs. We talk about fairness, but Harrods’ bills are set to fall by over £1 million, while the bill of the average pub will go up by £1,400 every single year. The Government gave themselves powers to offer a discount of 20p in every £1, but so far they have offered discounts of just 5p. Will the Leader of the House ask the relevant Minister to make a statement to clear up all this confusion and reassure businesses that they will be supported in the coming years?

• 11 Dec 2025 · US National Security Strategy · Hansard source

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  I do not think we should tiptoe around this issue. The section on Europe talks of “civilisational erasure”. It says that the continent will be “unrecognizable in 20 years”. It says that they want “Europe to remain European”, and that within a few decades NATO members will be “majority non-European”. We need to recognise this for what it is. It is a document rooted in racist, white supremacist ideology, and it should be called out accordingly. The Minister has talked about respect, but they are currently showing us none. Mild disagreement will not cut it. History is watching us, so will the Minister take this opportunity to call that language out?

• 4 Dec 2025 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  I join the Leader of the House in his tributes to Sir John Stanley and Paul Barwell. He referred to the Christmas spirit getting going in and around the House, and I ask him to spare a thought for the Lib Dem staffers clutching coffees this morning after their Christmas party last night. I cannot confirm or deny whether I joined them. Earlier this week, the Government announced a trade deal between the US and the UK on drug prices and medicines. Having reportedly rejected a price increase of £2.5 billion earlier this summer, the Government’s negotiators went back to the table and will apparently now pay £3 billion more instead. There is a live debate over how much the NHS should pay for drugs, which I respect. Big pharma has always wanted to drive up prices and has clearly not liked the purchasing power of the NHS, but the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence thresholds have not changed for some time, and there are some who argue that that means we are missing out on particular medicines. Others make the alternative argument that the opportunity cost of that spending in other areas of healthcare means that the thresholds should stay where they are. Wherever we stand on that debate, two things are clear. First, this considered debate should not be settled by the bully-boy tactics of President Trump. He introduced 100% tariffs, breaking the World Trade Organisation rules on tariffs over this, and has come out with the explicit intention of putting Americans first. Secondly, the Government should explain how this huge price increase will be paid for. Daniel Elkeles, the chief executive of NHS Providers, says that “it is not yet clear how it will be paid for”, and there are fears among GPs, dentists and community pharmacists that they will be the ones who will suffer as a result of the increase in prices. Will the Leader of the House urge a Health Minister to come to the Dispatch Box to answer questions about the impact of this new deal?

• 1 Dec 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  When we cut through it all, the central choices in this Budget were to increase the fiscal headroom and spend more on welfare, and to pay for it via an income tax threshold freeze. I am not sure why Labour Members are reluctant to describe it in that way, because it does contain some legitimate political choices. I welcome the increase in fiscal headroom. It was creating far too much uncertainty in our economy. I pointed that out to the Chancellor when she was before the Treasury Committee in the spring, and I am glad that the Treasury has now corrected that mistake. I welcome the abolition of the two-child benefit cap, which the Liberal Democrats voted for—I think it was one of our very first votes in this Parliament. The Chancellor explained over the weekend that she was able to afford it because of taxes on the gambling industry, but that industry existed last year, so she could have done it then. My issue is not with those measures but with how they are to be paid for. There are others that could have paid their fair share, the first of which is the banks, which have been completely let off the hook. They have made unforecasted windfall profits over the last few years, particularly because of the quantitative tightening programme and the interest rates. Many, including the Liberal Democrats, have argued that we should tax those windfall profits and put them to good use, but it seems like the banking industry’s lobbying efforts have paid off. When comparing the top 10% with the bottom 10%, the Budget appears to be progressive, but a deeper analysis shows that the top 0.1% have been let off the hook, particularly with measures such as the dividend rates, where the additional rate has been left completely untouched, and the cap that has been introduced for non-dom contributions in inheritance tax. While we are on the non-dom regime, I know that some Members have said that all the non-doms have fled the country, but I point them to page 82 of the OBR’s Blue Book, which says that the estimated revenue from that regime will remain broadly unchanged. Really, all this discussion is a dead end. We are just talking about redistribution. What is really important is what is not in the Budget. As the Federation of Small Businesses puts it, we must get out of this doom loop of tax measures to balance the books. The Budget is far too short-term in its thinking, and we need more long-term vision. Last summer the Chancellor seemed to get this. She promised that her focus would be on growth, yet her first Budget hit businesses with the rise in national insurance contributions, which has hit employment and set a mood of doom and gloom in our economy. We had a zero-based spending review from which no significant changes to spending emerged. I cannot list a single area of Government spending that changed fundamentally after that review. We have seen tax measures that are piecemeal, and no significant efforts at reform. Economists from left and right all agree that the UK tax system is in a mess. Property taxation and the way that we treat different types of income are in desperate need of reform, and we have not seen that from the Government. Then, of course, there is the elephant in the room, which only the Liberal Democrats are willing to address: our relationship with Europe. The strategy with Europe is to have tiny negotiations over small measures. We need a proper customs union. That will deliver the growth that our economy needs. Ultimately, this Government lack the ambition to rewire our economy. We need to stop capital pouring overseas by changing the incentives to invest in this country. We need to look at corporate governance and make sure that it serves the British economy well. We need to look at devolving real economic power, not a reorganisation of local government, and we need to stop triangulating between the people who think net zero is a good or bad thing and ensure that Britain can be a green superpower in the 21st century. The Budget gets us through another year, but it does not excite me for the future. The country was promised change—where is it?

• 1 Dec 2025 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  The right hon. Member mentions that bet365 is based in Stoke. Could he explain to us why it is also based in Gibraltar and Malta?

• 27 Nov 2025 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  First, I associate myself with the comments made by the Leader of the House about the fire in Hong Kong. I have many constituents from Hong Kong who will be thinking about their family and friends. I also note that this is UK Parliament Week. I know you are very actively involved, Mr Speaker, and I thank you for your organisational efforts on that front. It will have been a relief to you, Mr Speaker, to hear the Budget officially delivered on the Floor of the House yesterday. I know that all the leaks over the past few weeks have been a source of frustration, but it did make that long list of taxes a little easier to digest and comprehend. It felt at one point as though almost every section of the economy was getting its own special tax, except of course for those in the banking industry, who, we hear, were popping champagne corks yesterday about avoiding the windfall taxes that the Liberal Democrats were calling for. It just goes to show that all their lobbying efforts have paid off. According to reports, they got away with no new taxes because they are going to be nice about the Budget on behalf of the Chancellor, so let us see if that holds. One under-reported bit of the OBR analysis yesterday—in the final pages of the Blue Book—is the potential danger to the UK economy of a major correction in the global stock market. There has been lots of talk recently about the potential for an AI bubble, with price to earnings ratios being comparable with those of a dotcom bubble. JP Morgan has done an analysis of current valuations and the physical limits to investment because of the need to build data centres and so on, and it thinks we could be up to about $5 trillion of investment by 2030. That means AI products will need to create an additional revenue of $650 billion a year to give a reasonable return to their investors. To put that into context, that is about 150% of the revenue that Apple makes, or the equivalent of about $35 a month for every customer it has in the world. It is my feeling that eventually investors will cotton on to that, and they will choose to moderate their investment. When that correction comes, the OBR thinks that it could affect the UK current deficit by between £15 billion and £26 billion, so will the Leader of House request that a Minister makes a statement about what contingency planning the Treasury is making for that scenario?

• 25 Nov 2025 · Pension Investment in UK Equities · Hansard source

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  I thank the right hon. Member for Salisbury (John Glen) for securing this debate. We are colleagues on the Treasury Committee, and I always find his contributions extremely thoughtful. He has the best interests of the country at heart, so I thank him for securing this debate. We probably all agree that the UK investment system is broken, and not because of a lack of capital. There is £2.2 trillion-worth of capital locked up in UK pensions, and I think the consensus is that it is just not targeted well from the perspective of UK growth. We have already heard some figures cited: less than 5% of the funds are being allocated to UK assets, down from the highs of 50% in the ’90s, and that compares poorly with a lot of our international peers. Of course, there is not one way to fix this problem. Other hon. Members have highlighted other structural issues to do with regulation, culture, tax and demand for capital—people often speak to me about the need to get the pipeline of investable projects up in the UK—but mobilising these pools better through pensions reform is surely part of the solution. UK pensions put too much into low-performing bonds and far too much into global passive indices. The effect is that funds such as the MSCI are putting more into Apple than they are into the entire UK market—I think 4.9% is allocated to Apple and 3.4% in the UK. That leads to a vicious circle, which other hon. Members have alluded to. Time and again, the UK’s best are sold to US big tech: we have heard references to Apple buying some of our best semiconductor and fintech firms, and another example is Google purchasing DeepMind. There are other factors here, including how the London stock exchange operates and the troubles with initial public offerings, which we have spoken about. However, it is worth thinking about how the role of passive indices amplifies that effect. I worry that with the advent of artificial intelligence-driven algorithms in the financial sector, it may be amplified further. What we see is that the capital goes to the US tech giants, they buy the most innovative UK companies, that makes the UK market less attractive, and that means that UK pensions feel like they need to put more money into US companies—and the doom loop continues. I fear that unless we break the doom loop, we will see complete and utter dependence on a handful of US tech companies. All this happens while UK pension funds receive around £49 billion-worth of tax benefits, so the Government have every right to do something about this issue and act in the interests of our own country. More than that, as the right hon. Member for Salisbury noted, UK pension savers are demanding this. They expect more of their money to be put into British funds, even if it means declining returns. I empathise with the reasons why the Government want to go down the route of reserve powers and mandation. There has been lots of talk of an industry backlash, but some funds I have spoken to say that they want much stronger guardrails in relation to any mandation. They worry about mandation being used as a substitute for the wider structural reforms that we have spoken about. They also worry about future—perhaps more interventionist—Governments, and they want a much stronger set of guardrails for mandation, if it is to come. In place of mandation, there is a middle ground. The right hon. Member referred already to the enormous power of default settings, which we have seen with auto-enrolment. Behavioural science and behavioural economics tell us a lot more about how people actually respond; what works is not always rational self-interest and incentives. If we change the default options about UK equities and allow an opt-out, we will probably find that most people do not opt out. Research from New Financial states that a 25% allocation to the UK in these default funds could be worth up to £95 billion. That alone would be transformative, without the need for mandation. At the moment, UK savers are losing out twice: not only because they are getting poorer returns over the long term, but because we are choking off investment in the areas where they choose to live and retire. We should keep both those things in mind.

• 24 Nov 2025 · Ministerial Code · Hansard source

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  It seems that the urgent question has been in part fuelled by rampant pre-Budget briefing, but I would argue that it is a symptom of wider dysfunction in our Budget scrutiny process. Parliament is generally relegated to the sidelines and has no real power to challenge or amend the Budget, unlike in other democracies. Will the Minister look to review the UK Budget scrutiny process and see what we can learn from other countries? More broadly, will he look to enshrine the ministerial code into law? Will he also look at the role of the ethics adviser and ensure that it is truly independent, able to initiate its own investigations, come to its own conclusions and publish reports in its own time?

• 20 Nov 2025 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  I join the Leader of the House in thanking Mr Speaker for the seriousness with which he is taking Chinese interference in our democracy. I represent many Hongkongers in my constituency, and they are deeply concerned about this issue. It was a relief to hear confirmation that the Budget will be taking place on the Floor of the House next week. I am sure it is also a huge relief to advisers in the Treasury, who have just days before they start leaking the 2026 Budget. One thing that people will be looking out for in the Budget next week is the provisions that will be made for children with special educational needs and disabilities. I am fully aware that this is a crisis that was inherited by this Government, but it was not an unforeseen crisis. Eighteen months into this Government, we hear that their major reform plans have been pushed back again, which is a disappointment to us on the Liberal Democrat Benches. We are seeing councils go bankrupt, teachers in despair and families held in legal limbo—and ultimately, children being failed. I appreciate that there are some really tricky issues to resolve—balancing legal entitlements on paper with quality provision in reality, and adjusting to a world with higher diagnosis rates—but there are some actions that the Government could take right away, in particular in relation to private placements. Those have trebled in the past decade, and they cost more than double a state placement—about £60,000. We know that private equity is really aggressive in this space; it is taking on institutions and eating up market share, and its profit margins are reportedly around 20%. In the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, the Government introduced the idea of profit caps on those who are being exploitative in the children’s social care sector. Will the Leader of the House ask the relevant Minister whether that can be extended to SEND schools?

• 20 Nov 2025 · Migration: Settlement Pathway · Hansard source

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  I thank the Home Secretary for her confirmation about the five-year pathway for Hongkongers—that is a promise kept to them. The statement was otherwise a series of push measures. I am always fascinated by how much more difficult it gets, when it comes to the individual decisions made within the system. To push the Home Secretary on the Boriswave, which she has criticised, the vast majority of those figures were made up of Hongkongers arriving here under the BNO scheme, Ukrainian refugees, and deferred student visas after the covid pandemic. Which of those measures does she think was a mistake?

• 17 Nov 2025 · Budget: Press Briefings · Hansard source

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  The Minister is right to point out that speculation ahead of a Budget is not abnormal, but we have had speculation throughout most of this year. I wonder whether he will accept that part of the reason for that is how the Chancellor has both constructed and applied her fiscal rules. She set them up, with good intentions—we do need fiscal rules in place—but left herself with minimal headroom in a pretty volatile global economy, which has driven speculation all year round about how she would fill the gaps that have emerged throughout the year. Does he think that was a mistake?

• 17 Nov 2025 · Illegal Waste: Organised Crime · Hansard source

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  Residents in the Woodcote area of my constituency have been living with the misery of being opposite an illegal waste dump for years. Despite all the photographic and video evidence that they produce, nobody seems to be able to shut the site down. Can the Minister look into what level of proof is required to take action, because it seems obvious to everyone that what is going on is wrong, but nobody seems to be able to put an end to it?

• 13 Nov 2025 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  Thank you, Mr Speaker. May I join the Leader of the House and the shadow Leader of the House in thanking you and all the staff for playing a role in organising the remembrance events of the past week? I, too, would like to focus on Ukraine this week. Russia’s war is rumbling on and we are about to enter a long and cold winter, in which it looks like temperatures will drop below minus 20°C. We hear that Vladimir Putin has a vicious plot to attack the energy infrastructure of Ukraine, threatening the heat supply to the very homes in which families are trying to survive. As Russia makes advances, it feels like Britain and its allies have reached a bit of a stalling point. We are standing around worrying whether it is legitimate to seize Russian assets, and we are worried about potential future legal claims by the Russian state. All the while, Putin is pouring petrol into his war machine. I feel that the time for deliberation is surely over. Several legal routes have been proposed, and it is now time to act. In the meantime, one of the weapons that we have in our armoury is the sanctions regime against Russia. It is important not only to impose these sanctions, but to enforce them. It was quite shocking to learn this week that the Government were unable to explain why over £30 million-worth of Russian planes were imported into the UK. I note that the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation is much smaller than its equivalents in the US and the EU. In the debate that we may have about Ukraine before the end of the year, I wonder whether we could focus on the role of OFSI and determine whether it is adequate, and whether it has the resources to properly deal with the scale and importance of the UK sanctions regime.

• 4 Nov 2025 · Official Development Assistance Reductions · Hansard source

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  The right hon. Lady is making an excellent case for international aid and is talking about the need for it to evolve and to be better and bigger in some ways. Why therefore is her party proposing cutting the aid budget to 0.1%?

• 4 Nov 2025 · Official Development Assistance Reductions · Hansard source

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  I declare an interest in that my wife works for Save the Children. Indeed, I met her while working in the sector almost 11 years ago to this day. I start by setting out some context around the erosion of the budget, because it has not just been reduced in absolute terms but as a proportion. That makes some of the arguments about not being able to afford official development assistance due to the lack of growth in the economy slightly disingenuous—because, of course, when the economy does not perform, the amount that we contribute goes down anyway. There has also been a lot of salami-slicing of the budget. The merger with the FCDO was bad for the amount of aid being directed to the global south; we have also heard about the Home Office eating into the budget. With regard to the latest reason for reducing the aid budget—which is about defence—a lot of the uplift in the defence budget has been on the capital side. We are borrowing to invest in that capital. Therefore it is also slightly disingenuous to say that there is a direct transfer between the international aid budget and the money that is going into defence. That needs to be made clear. The public misunderstand how much we commit to spending on international aid. In polls, they consistently overestimate it. I believe that if the British public truly understood that the commitment was 0.7%, they would stand by that commitment. It is like asking somebody who is down to their last £100 if they would give 70p to somebody more needy than them. I know that the British public are generous, and that they would not baulk at that figure. I think that they would maintain that commitment. I now move to the points that were excellently put by the right hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell) on how we have allowed public support to erode over time. The public’s perception of international aid is that a lot of it is wasted, that some of it is spent on woke projects, that it goes to corrupt Governments, and that the trade-off between investment in the poor overseas and the poor in the UK is a zero-sum game. It would be easy for me to say that it is the fault of right-wing populists, the media and so on. However, I think that the sector itself has failed to communicate properly. It has failed to tell a long-term story of its success. For 30 years, we have had the same images on our screens—starving African children with flies hovering around their noses. That is the image that we consistently feed to the public, instead of telling some of the stories of progress, such as how we have halved infant mortality and lifted a billion people out of destitution. Those are the stories that we should have been telling the public all along. I believe that the development sector was one of the most scrutinised in terms of its monitoring and evaluation. From time to time, I am sure that there have been pet projects that were useless. However, generally speaking we have achieved so much from our investment in international aid, so we need to get that message across. The following points were made by the hon. Member for St Austell and Newquay (Noah Law), so I will not go into them in detail. However, we need to sell the changing purpose of aid—how it is about not dependency but creating independence, how we work in partnership because it is not mere charity, and how it is based on shared values because we all want a good future for our children. It is about telling those stories of progress. Other Members have already made good points about how this is also in our self-interest—the raw, naked interest of Britain. If we vacate this field, it will be filled by others. When I lived in Uganda for a period, I saw how China is moving in where the UK is moving out, so this has an impact on soft power all over the world. The points made about conflict security have been well put; whether we feel it in inflation or migration, these problems arrive back on our shores. The arguments against the aid budget are rooted in moral confusion, they demonstrate a poor analysis of the efficacy of aid, and they are strategically short-sighted. That is why we need to restore the 0.7% budget and recreate an independent Department for International Development, so that we can start marshalling that money towards the good, effective and important work that it has always done.

• 30 Oct 2025 · Israel-Palestine Conflict: Government Response · Hansard source

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  I thank the Chair for her Committee’s report. She mentioned the possible determination of genocide and said that, in her personal view, that is what has taken place. Of course, a UN report has reached that conclusion as well. I am fairly certain that that should place certain obligations on the UK, so will the Committee commit to investigating exactly what the UK’s obligations are to any kind of international accountability process?

• 30 Oct 2025 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  Moving on to fraud—speaking of— I would like to focus on how fraud destroys lives. It eradicates people’s savings, it plunges people into debt and it diminishes people’s faith in human nature. Fraud is on the rise—it is up by almost a fifth—and it makes up nearly half of all crime in the UK. I know that the Government are set to release a fraud strategy soon, but there are worrying reports that a key component is about to be ditched. British banks pick up the tab for fraud in this country. They are the ones who reimburse the victims, even though the vast majority of fraud these days happens on online platforms. The Prime Minister himself recognises this, saying before the election that tech companies have a clear obligation and should have a clear financial incentive to tackle fraud. That commitment is what we are worried about being dropped—apparently to appease American President Donald Trump. The Government sent a gushing letter to big tech CEOs over the summer congratulating them on their efforts in tackling fraud, but UK Finance and the Financial Conduct Authority both disagree and say that big tech companies are not doing enough. Can the Government publish their fraud strategy and commit to holding big tech companies to account, ensuring that they are hit in the pocket for not tackling fraud?

• 30 Oct 2025 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  I associate myself with the comments about hurricane victims and, indeed, with the comments about Prunella Scales. Earlier this week, we were treated to the delight of a Conservative Opposition day, and the main thing we learned is that the Conservatives do enjoy being in opposition. We had the shadow Housing Secretary, the right hon. Member for Braintree (Sir James Cleverly), decrying the housing crisis that their Government left behind, and the former Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the right hon. Member for Central Devon (Sir Mel Stride), committing to reducing the welfare bill that went up on their watch. We hear that we are to get yet another Conservative Opposition day next week. The Conservatives are set to get 17 days to the Liberal Democrats’ three in this parliamentary Session. We would just gently suggest that, if we want to elevate the debate in this Chamber, we may want to redress that balance in the next Session.

• 30 Oct 2025 · Property Service Charges · Hansard source

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  The hon. Lady is making some excellent points. I really think it is the radical solutions that we need to consider. I should probably declare an interest as a director of a right-to-manage company—we got so fed up with the freeholder failing to manage our building properly that we took back control. However, as she points out, that is not the end of the story, and we still need to get a lot of people to agree on a lot of things, and building up the reserve fund is particularly difficult. I encourage the hon. Lady to keep coming up with ideas that are bolder than the ones that are out there at the moment, because it is a sticky problem to fix.

• 28 Oct 2025 · Stamp Duty Land Tax · Hansard source

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  Surprise, surprise, I do not. I will come on to the reasons why. Mortgage companies will lend around four times someone’s income, so we can see how big the problem is. A couple may stand a chance of getting a mortgage; someone on their own has no chance. The other problem with house prices accelerating away from wages so much is that the 10% deposit that people often need to raise is completely out of reach. To put this in context, in 1990 the average wage was around £8,000 a year, and a person might have needed to save about £2,000 for a deposit. Today, a person on the average wage of £33,000 would have to try to save £28,000. People simply cannot do it unless they have the support of their mum or dad, or others in their family. This is the death of meritocracy in our country. We now live in a society where a person’s family wealth, not their work or talent, defines their future financial security. We are back to Victorian-era levels of social mobility. That is absolutely abhorrent, and no amount of tinkering around the edges is sufficient to fix it. Scrapping stamp duty will not be a silver bullet. In fact, on its own, it might represent a bit of a giveaway to those who are already faring better than most in society. If we are serious about fixing the housing crisis in our country, we need a generational change in the level of house building, and a holistic approach to redesigning the property tax system.