Bobby Dean MP: speeches

Speeches

• 10 Sept 2026 · Social Housing Bill [Lords] · Hansard source

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  Some £7.9 billion a year: that is how much the Chartered Institute of Housing estimates is spent on housing benefit for tenants renting privately. In my local area, a lot of that will be going to people living on the St Helier estate, one of the largest London council estates built during the interwar period, much of which has been sold under right to buy over the past few decades. That means that instead of our local authority receiving rent from those properties, the national Government are paying market rates to private landlords on homes that we built. That is maddening and it surely makes the scale of right to buy sales, alongside the failure to replenish the stock, one of the single greatest policy failures for a generation.

• 10 Sept 2026 · Social Housing Bill [Lords] · Hansard source

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  I am sure the hon. Member is aware that right-to-buy sales were happening throughout the ’90s and under the last Labour Government as well, so there is a stain on all parties from what has happened over the last few decades. The loss of stock has an impact not only on the taxpayer but on our constituents. My inbox is full of people struggling in the housing market. It is by far the biggest issue that I face in my patch, and it is the one I end up feeling the most hopeless about. Sure, we can get things fixed when it comes to the condition of people’s housing, and sometimes we are able to get people’s position on the waiting list successfully reviewed, but a lot of the time, the fundamental issue is supply. Thousands of people are waiting, and just a couple of hundred properties become available each year, and for that I have no magic wand. I have families living in one-bedroom accommodation where teenagers are sharing the only bedroom and parents are sleeping on the sofa. I have hard-working families come up to me all the time who are frustrated by being told that there is no point in them even applying to get on the list. It did not used to be that way. I benefited first hand from growing up in council accommodation. My parents are working class—a scaffolder and a cleaner—and they raised their family well. When my youngest brother was born—the third sibling —we managed to move from a two-bedroom flat into a three-bedroom house. That was considered normal back then, but now that sort of situation feels like a luxury. We have turned social housing into an emergency provision for the vulnerable, instead of being the foundation of our society. To fix the supply problem is going to require bold reforms to local authority resources and powers. They need greater staffing capacity, relief from the unjustified housing revenue account debts, and to be liberated to build directly. The right-to-buy reforms that form the centrepiece of the Bill are welcome, and will stem the losses, but they must only be the first step if the Prime Minister’s ambition in this area is to be realised. Given how precious legislative time is in this place, I hope that more work will be done as the Bill progresses through the House to also increase the supply of homes. What has happened to social housing in this country is part of a broader public policy failure, where the Government are forced into throwing good many after bad, and into intervening later rather than investing early. In the future, I hope we can recognise social housing as national infrastructure—part of our national resilience. The Government must invest to save more often. I welcome the Bill as a first step on the journey, and I look forward to the Government going further to reverse the failures of the past. As I have the time, I will make one more remark. It is notable that the Conservative party has put forward a wrecking amendment today that picks on minorities, but not a single Conservative Back Bencher has come to defend it. What a disgrace! They should have the bravery to make the argument in full, if that is what they want to do.

• 4 Sept 2026 · Infants, Parents and Carers Bill · Hansard source

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  I thank the right hon. Member for New Forest West (Sir Desmond Swayne) for bringing the Bill to the House—at first perhaps reluctantly, but I think now enthusiastically. Madam Deputy Speaker, you may be forgiven for thinking that we are from slightly different backgrounds, but I am here to make the case that we are from exactly the same background: we both started out life in nappies, weeing and crying out for our mothers. We both started out with approximately the same level of potential, with a hundred billion neurons in our brain waiting to be fused together as they tried to understand the world. This is what I think the Bill is about: maximising the potential of every single baby. I am arguably—I am not sure; people might want to intervene—Parliament’s newest parent. I am 141 days into the life of my first child, so I have had a front row seat for this amazing show. Getting to see the development of my baby over the summer has been phenomenal: her first smile, her first belly laugh, working out how to roll over from her back on to her front, and initially completely ignoring the dog and now wanting to tug its ears every time it goes past. It has been amazing watching every single one of those interactions and how her brain is developing and building an understanding of the world. I would be lying if I did not say that it was also a bit of worry. It is a worry because we are now hyper-aware of how critical these moments are; how each one of these interactions are setting out a pathway for the rest of her life. The first 1,001 days movement has been explaining to us how critical these early moments are for children’s long-run physical and emotional development—how, in each one of those early moments, we are shaping the development of their brains and directing the potential of the rest of their lives. Knowing that, of course, makes it unforgivable that so much provision for children and babies has been cut back over the past decade or so—as if it was some sort of luxury that is unaffordable now that we have other priorities, such as cutting the grass verges in our local areas. The Bill seeks to draw a line in the sand and say, “Never again.” It speaks up for babies, and will make it a statutory requirement for the state to demonstrate how it is meeting babies’ needs. It is a critical step forward in society’s recognition of how our brains develop and how we create opportunity for the next generation. As others have said, the Bill sets the floor, not the ceiling. We therefore look to the Government to build on the foundations that the Bill sets, and ensure that the principles, on which we all agree today, are built into a practical reality. The healthy babies programme is currently available in only 75 local authority areas, and it excludes places such as mine. The Government made a commitment in their 10-year plan to ensure that it is universal, and I urge them to accelerate that and deliver it as quickly as possible. There is not much specificity about what services are required, and it would be great if the Government came forward as soon as possible to bring clarity. I have my own request for a service that it will be essential to deliver to babies and parents in the coming years. Health visitors already talk to mothers about nutrition, safe sleep, and bonding between babies and parents, but we need to add another dimension: screentime. It is already Government advice that under-twos should not have solo screentime, but that is extremely poorly understood. Routine screen use is now normal for babies under two, and one in 10 are exposed to more than four hours of screentime per day. Instead of learning through social interaction, they are being induced into dopamine dazes, which affect their sleep, meal times and emotional regulation. The damage being done is so great that it should be an essential requirement to educate parents about this from day one.

• 1 Sept 2026 · UK Financial Services · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Member for Buckingham and Bletchley (Callum Anderson) for securing this debate and for bringing his great experience to it. I hope to build on his comments encouraging the Government to build on the momentum of the pension reforms they have recently introduced. The UK investment system holds £6 trillion-worth of investable capital, mostly via pensions and life insurance schemes, so there can be no doubt at all that the financial services sector will be key to growth when it returns to this country properly, but access to that capital has become a problem. We hear it all the time from businesses. That can only be a systemic failure. Central to the problem is the UK’s allocation of its pension funds, which, as has been noted, collapsed from levels of around 50% back in the ’90s to an average of just 4% now. Some of that is explainable. Some of it was inevitable, as capital markets went global and people diversified their portfolios—we were always going to see a decline from those heights of around 50%—but the UK sits below the global average of allocation, which is 13%, so the UK has a specific problem that it needs to address. We have to ask how we got here. I think the root is a certain naivety in the way that we applied laissez-faire economics. As a liberal, I support free and open trade with the world, but with a narrow interpretation of what free and open means. We have marginalised the state’s role. We have moved its role of shaping the conditions for UK businesses to thrive to the periphery. We have been so hands-off that we have allowed our economy to be dominated by a handful of actors who have accrued pretty unchecked power in a fairly anti-competitive manner. An example I would point to is the proportion of our pension funds that passively invest into big global indexes. An example is the MSCI world index. It allocates more of British pension savings to Apple than to the entire UK economy—around 5% to Apple and 3.8% to the UK. What does that mean in practice? It means that when brilliant UK tech start-ups want to scale and are seeking out capital, their only option is to be sold out to one of the big US competitors that pension savers in the UK are funding. So the cycle continues, whereby Britain fails to scale its businesses to the level required. Britain needs to be more streetwise and a bit more hands-on. We need to redesign our system so that it can still take advantage of global capital markets, while being clever about the way it incentivises and actively supports the growth of the UK economy. One way in which I believe we can do this has been suggested by the New Capital Consensus project, of which I am a member: to right-size some of our defined benefit pension funds so that they are big enough to actively manage funds and to identify and invest in the opportunities that exist across Britain. They should not be so big that they find those kinds of regional opportunities more hassle than they are worth, and they should not be so small that they choose to manage their funds passively in the way that I have just described. At the moment, we have around 5,500 small defined benefit pension funds, and while each charges low fees for a fair return, I ask: at what cost is that a fair return? Is it really good value to get over 8% for the individual saver if the country around them is in decline? Should the real test of value not be about the return to not only the individual but society? After all, this is the country in which they seek to live and retire. I encourage the Government to build on the progress they have made so far with the pension reforms and to look more broadly at investment funds across the sector. I believe that if we can right-size some of those pension funds to incentivise them to identify and invest in UK businesses, things will be delivered for not only those savers but the country as a whole.