Caroline Nokes MP: speeches 2024

Speeches

• 19 Jul 2024 · Planning, the Green Belt and Rural Affairs · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Hexham (Joe Morris). I thank him for his full tribute to his predecessor, Guy Opperman, who was loved on both sides of the House. Very early in my political career, in 1999, when I was first elected as a councillor, my dad told me that nothing in politics is quite as vexed as the politics of the southern area planning committee of Test Valley borough council. He was right, but I reassure the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, who is responding to this debate, that the council has already modernised its planning committee. It has already taken great strides and, until the nitrate issue in the Solent hit us, it was one of the councils delivering the highest number of houses in the country, but it has faced challenges. I welcome the announcement on compulsory purchase orders and the changes that might come, but we need detail. I seek reassurance that the detail will come and will give real powers to local authorities, because Test Valley borough council has faced a challenge since 1982, when the Romsey brewery started its last brew. I was at school at the local primary school and I remember the smell well. That brewery site has an extant planning permission that has not been built out in the last 40 years. It is a phenomenal shame to the town that every time the local council has tried to put place in a successful compulsory purchase order, the developer has simply started work on one more unit of accommodation to delay that from happening. Given the part of the country that you are from, Mr Deputy Speaker, you may be familiar with Stanborough Developments, the company that brings that curse to Romsey. Its actions mean that we have a brownfield site in the middle of the town, with extant planning permission for a project that has never been finished, and that could be providing homes for local people. I vividly remember a Westminster Hall debate on this subject back in 2019, brought forward by my former right hon. Friend the Member for Guildford, the great Anne Milton. That was the first occasion on which I had the dubious honour of trying to both chair and speak in a debate. Alex Cunningham, the former Member for Stockton North, said that the Labour party would bring forward “penalties” for this sort of developer. I appreciate that it will require retrospective legislation, but I seek reassurance that the Labour Government will make good on the promises made by Mr Cunningham about extant planning permissions, and that we will see developers like Stanborough suitably punished. I reassure colleagues that I will not bang on about green belt this afternoon, for the good reason that there is no green belt in Hampshire, save for a tiny corner in the very south-west, designed, as you will know, Mr Deputy Speaker, to prevent the spread of the urban conurbation of Bournemouth, which is in an entirely different county. We would love some green belt, but we simply do not have any. What we do have is an area that is under extreme water stress. We cannot take our foot off the brakes on building without also considering where the drinking water will come from. The Abbotswood development in my constituency frequently has to have water delivered by tankers because Southern Water repeatedly fails in its duty to provide water. It is not exclusively to blame, because although water companies can be consulted on development, they have no right to say no to it. They have no ability to say, “We simply cannot deliver water to this development.” In areas like the Solent, the situation will become increasingly challenging. I saw in the pages of the Daily Mail that the expectation is that southern Hampshire will take an enormous amount of development under this Government’s plans. It cannot do that if those homes cannot have a water supply.

• 18 Jul 2024 · Post Office Horizon Scandal · Hansard source

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  It is a delight to see you back in the Chair, Mr Speaker. There were many sub-postmasters and mistresses who were not convicted, but who are seriously out of pocket due to the shortfalls that they themselves made up and deeply traumatised by the experience that they went through. Can the Minister provide reassurance that the Department will seek to ensure that they are supported, and that the compensation scheme is swift, effective but also very straightforward for them?

• 18 Jul 2024 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  Immediately prior to Dissolution, the excellent Backbench Business Committee had granted a debate in the Chamber to discuss the performance of Southern Water. I know that the right hon. Lady will want to respond about sewage, but in fact the debate was to be about its failure to deliver clean water to significant parts of my constituency in addition to its failures on sewage. Will she please reassure me that in the absence of the Backbench Business Committee and the Petitions Committee, the Government will find time for Back Benchers to bring forward important issues that we wish to debate in the Chamber?