Chris Curtis MP: speeches

Speeches

• 22 Jun 2026 · East Midlands Railway Collision · Hansard source

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  I join the Secretary of State in offering my deepest condolences to the family and friends of the driver, Shaun Burton. I thank her, the Rail Minister and staff at East Midlands Railway for keeping us updated in what I am sure were very difficult circumstances on Friday evening. As someone who represents the railway town of Wolverton, I know how such incidents have an impact on people right across the rail community. Will the Secretary of State join me in paying tribute to the emergency services, including brave firefighters from Milton Keynes, who acted quickly and professionally in the aftermath of this tragic incident?

• 11 Feb 2026 · Woodland Creation · Hansard source

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  I beg to move, That this House has considered the matter of woodland creation. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Lewell. I am grateful for the opportunity to open this debate on woodland creation, which my hon. Friend the Minister just described as the most wholesome debate we are going to have this week. I secured it because I really benefited from the beautiful blue and green spaces that I grew up alongside, and it is important to provide opportunities to benefit from accessible, beautiful blue and green spaces to everyone across the country. Green and blue spaces are not just a luxury but essential infrastructure for our climate, nature and people’s everyday lives. Trees and woodlands cool our towns and cities, reduce flood risk and revive biodiversity. They support both medical and physical wellbeing, strengthen social connections and give people access to nature close to home. We have many missions as a Government, but I think providing good blue and green spaces, including through the creation of new woodlands, is one way we can help to support them all. When green and blue spaces are planned well, they demonstrate that growth and environmental responsibility are not opposing forces but natural partners. I believe my home city is living proof of that. It is a new town created by the Harold Wilson Government of the 1960s, and from its very beginning the city was designed around green and blue corridors, with parks, woodlands and waterways woven into the fabric of daily life. That founding principle continues to shape the city today. Modern development sits alongside ancient landscapes, historic waterways and diverse habitats for wildlife. As a result, Milton Keynes now benefits from over 6,000 acres of parklands, rivers, lakes and woodlands, supported by more than 22 million trees—my fantastic city has 80 times more trees than the number of residents. Over time, the city has protected and enhanced its natural assets. Ancient woodlands remain accessible and cherished, while parks and waterways connect neighbourhoods. Nature is not pushed to the margins but placed at the heart of the city. Many places are now trying to retrofit that approach, but Milton Keynes understood it from the start. I have previously spoken to the Minister about the wetland arc project, led by the Parks Trust in Milton Keynes, with support from a National Lottery Heritage Fund grant. Once completed, this uninterrupted blue and green corridor will significantly enhance one of our city’s greatest assets. It supports wildlife, provides vital flood mitigation and carbon capture, and gives residents access to nature on their doorsteps. As the impacts of climate change become far more visible in our communities, the importance of wetlands and woodland creation cannot be overstated. According to the 2025 global wetland outlook, around 22% of the world’s wetlands have been lost since the 1970s, placing immense pressure on biodiversity and increasing flood risk. The wetland arc will stretch across the north of Milton Keynes, covering 355 hectares, which is around 500 football pitches of parkland. What excites me most about the project is the understanding of wetlands as multifunctional spaces: they are not only habitats for wildlife but places that protect communities from flooding, support active travel and connect local people. Under the stewardship of the Parks Trust, another great invention of the Milton Keynes Development Corporation, the wetland arc has the potential to become a distinctive and accessible landscape for the whole city, strengthening biodiversity while remaining open to everybody. We must not only create new woodlands for today, but think about stewardship into the future. I was reminded of the power of the Parks Trust’s local stewardship just last month, when I joined the trust to plant trees in Stanton Low Park. Among them was a “tree of hope”, a sapling grown from the Sycamore Gap tree. Only 49 of them were gifted across the UK, and I am proud that one now stands in my constituency. Elsewhere in my constituency, Linford wood offers another powerful example of how woodland can be protected and enjoyed within a city. This 97-acre ancient woodland, with its network of footpaths and carved timber sculptures inspired by woodland wildlife, is deeply loved by local residents across the city. It shows that ancient woods are not just a relic of the past, but living spaces that continue to enrich modern communities. What makes places like Linford wood so valuable is not only their ecological importance, but their role in people’s day-to-day lives. Families walk in the wood at weekends and runners use it for shaded paths. It is part of the route I am using to train for this year’s London marathon —the Minister is welcome to sponsor me, to support my local hospice. Woodlands are not just abstract environmental assets but part of the rhythm of community life. I hope that, throughout the debate, we talk just not just about the woodlands in rural parts of the country, important as they are, but the ones that exist in and support urban contexts. We might feel instinctively that spending time among trees lifts our mood and clears our mind, but the evidence increasingly backs that up. Aviva’s latest “Picture of Health” research, published in September 2025, highlights a growing shift across Britain towards embracing nature as an essential part of maintaining wellbeing. In a survey of 2,000 UK adults, 65% said they actively seek out nature to support their mental health or manage stress, 80% said nature boosts their happiness, and 74% reported a reduction in stress and anxiety after spending time outdoors. The research also found that regularly spending time in nature is linked to higher energy levels, improved concentration and better sleep. After the week some of us have had, I think we would appreciate all those things. The findings underline an important truth: access to nature is not just a luxury or a lifestyle choice, but a fundamental part of supporting the nation’s health and wellbeing. If more people are turning to green spaces to support their wellbeing, it becomes all the more vital that we protect, create and sustain the natural environments they rely on. Woodlands in particular offer accessible, restorative spaces close to where people live. Investing in their creation and long-term stewardship is therefore not only an environmental priority, but a social one, ensuring that the physical and mental health benefits of nature are accessible to everyone and not just a fortunate few. Woodland creation must sit at the heart of our national approach to environmental recovery. After 14 years of Conservative drift, England was left with a serious deficit in woodland creation and forest resilience, with tree planting falling to a 20-year low before Labour took office. The Government are turning that around, and planting rates are now at their highest level in more than two decades. More than 7,000 hectares were planted last year, with 10.4 million trees planted in 2024—a 46% increase on the previous year. We are back on track to reach 16.5% of woodland cover by 2050, meeting the Environment Act 2021 target. Backed by £1 billion of investment over this Parliament, it is the largest tree-planting and forestry programme that England has ever seen. The investment supports not only planting but long-term stewardship, skills and apprenticeships, nursery capacity and access to nature. The announcement of a new national forest across the Oxford-Cambridge arc, where my constituency sits, is fantastic news. I hope the Minister will consider that with reference to the forest of Marston Vale, in the constituency of the hon. Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Blake Stephenson). That would be a fantastic position and is obviously close to Milton Keynes. Milton Keynes shows what is possible and what has worked. I think I owe such a good start in life to the fact that my city provided so many things for me, up to and including fantastic access to green spaces and nature. I want to ensure that everybody right across the country has that same access. If we are serious about leaving a better environment for future generations, we must continue to invest in woodland creation, tree planting and new forests so that the benefits seen in Milton Keynes today can be enjoyed across the country for decades to come.

• 22 Jan 2026 · Local Government Reorganisation · Hansard source

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  I should make it clear that local elections will be going forward in full in Milton Keynes and that I look forward to continuing to work with my brilliant, hard-working Labour councillors locally. One of the reasons for delaying the elections is the time it is taking to go through the local government reorganisation process. That affects elections, but it also affects the creation of the new combined authorities, which is happening in parallel. Given the delays, will the Department look at the fast-track programme for the combined authorities, and at whether it is worth adding areas that do not face the reorganisation challenges, such as Bedfordshire and Milton Keynes?

• 15 Jan 2026 · New Towns · Hansard source

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  I thank the Minister for being generous with his time and for reinforcing the Government’s strategic direction, which I think most of us agree with. As we move on to the next stage, many of the local council leaders who he has spoken about feel like there is friction and frustration in the communication between them and the Department, with the Department making it feel like they are bidding for the money. Will he meet local council leaders to reset that relationship so that it can be more constructive in the next stage of the process?

• 15 Jan 2026 · New Towns · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch (Katrina Murray) not just for securing this debate, but for her passionate and moving speech. I will start by building on some of the comments made by the hon. Member for North Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller) about his constituents’ experiences of what is potentially the beginning of a new town process. It reminded me of a conversation I had after returning from the Labour party conference two and a half years ago, when we were in opposition. We had announced that if we won the election, we would move forward with the new towns programme. I got back to Milton Keynes—maybe slightly worse for wear—and popped into the family home to see my then 92-year-old grandmother with her friend Georgie in the living room. My grandmother had grown up in a small farmhouse in Wollaston, a village of about 300 people. It has since been consumed into what is now Milton Keynes. They were talking, as they often did, about how things used to be: the roads they knew by name, the rivalry between the cricket teams, and the local pubs in that small village. They also spoke of their fears at the time—I am sure that similar conversations are happening now in Tempsford—about how the new towns programme would change the tight-knit community they had grown up in and were used to, and their many concerns about what it would mean for local culture and infrastructure. It is easy for us, as politicians, just to stop there in our conversations with local constituents, but this conversation went further. My grandmother talked about how she lived long enough to see what a difference the community built in Milton Keynes—my home town—made to the lives of her daughter and her grandchildren. I am the first MP to have been born and to have grown up in the new town of Milton Keynes, and I owe almost everything to the fantastic start in life that Milton Keynes gave me. It meant that my parents could afford decent and affordable housing. It meant that there were good and decent jobs available because of what the development corporation did. It meant that public services were there when we needed them. Just like Tempsford, Milton Keynes was built on a floodplain—the River Ouzel floodplain—which I know is often a concern for people. The development corporation solution for that was to build balancing lakes. My grandmother and Georgie were pretty opposed to the balancing lake at the time. It was fields next to the farm she grew up on. There were massive diggers and slurry everywhere coming in. She used to call it “that daft puddle”. Today, because of what the development corporation was able to achieve—it was a pretty significant infrastructure project—not only does the balancing lake provide flood protection and alleviation to tens of thousands of homes, which allowed the city I call home to be built; it also means that my city has 5,000 acres of beautiful blue and green spaces that are enjoyed by thousands of people. The lake is also where my parents met, when my dad was teaching my mum—not particularly well—to sail. The city was determined to ensure that recreational activities were available to people whatever their background. I lost my grandmother just before Labour party conference last year, and the hospice that looked after her in the last weeks of her life looked out over that very same lake. I mention that because I owe so much to the vision, confidence and level of ambition that was shown to build somewhere truly special—Milton Keynes—in the 1960s and 1970s. It is the story of my life; it is the reason I am here. It is only with that same level of confidence and ambition that we can hope that people talk as positively about the work we are doing now as I can talk about the work that was done by the Milton Keynes development corporation in the 1960s and 1970s. I will mention a few points with the potential to make me nervous about whether we will fulfil that ambition, some of which were mentioned by the Chair of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee. These projects will not come cheap to the Government. We obviously need to maximise the financing options that we can use. We also need to look at maximising the amount of land value capture. Milton Keynes was given 700 million quid in the 1960s—about £14 billion in today’s money—which came back to the Government multiple times over because of the economic value generated by building the city. I do not think anybody has that level of ambition for a new town project, but we are going to have to see money—not just capital money and direction to the pots of money available for capital, but revenue spending in order to set up the development corporation. We have not seen enough from the Department about that approach yet. I also have a fear about death by consultation. The process to come up with a list of new towns was a very good piece of work by Sir Michael Lyons, and we should all pay tribute to him for it. However, the Government response is taking further months, and there will be a consultation on that. If development corporations are set up, there will be further consultation on that. We need to look at how we can streamline the process and get these projects going as quickly as possible. I will raise one final concern now. Following conversations with local councils, it seems to me that the approach from the team working on this is to go back to that kind of begging-bowl culture: to go back to the sites that have been selected, of which Milton Keynes is one, and to convince them—even though Sir Michael Lyons did the work on why these 12 sites were the correct ones—that they should get the resources required to deliver what the Government are saying needs to be delivered. That will not lead to success. A big part of the report talked about the importance of building communities that are not dependent on the car and that have good public transport options. My area is very car dependent, but if we are going to continue to grow, we cannot be; we will need support from the Department for Transport in order to do so. DFT’s approach has been, “Why do you need this money? Your roads aren’t congested yet.” That is completely out of line with the Government’s ambition and the new towns approach. We need to change the culture of how the Government is approaching the new town programme so that, in decades to come, somebody can stand in this Chamber talking about being the first MP for the new town of Tempsford and about how much of a success this programme has been.

• 3 Dec 2025 · Oxford to Cambridge Growth Corridor · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Jeremy. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) on securing this debate. The limited time means that I will not focus too heavily on the importance of the region, which has been covered by my colleagues, but as the first MP proud to have been born and grown up in the new town of Milton Keynes I want to remind everyone that it is the largest and most economically significant city in the corridor. Our economy is roughly the same size as Oxford and Cambridge combined. In fact, Milton Keynes is now the seventh largest city economy in England outside London, and we are on track to continue climbing that league table. One in three jobs in Milton Keynes is already in the technology sector, generating £3.4 billion a year. We are now home to national security engineering at His Majesty’s Government Communications Centre, global firms such as Santander UK and Red Bull Racing and hundreds of cutting-edge small and medium enterprises. Over 12,000 businesses call our city home. I set that out because, from time to time, it has been frustrating that the conversation about the corridor has been dominated by either end, with not enough focus on the middle. I can quietly live with Milton Keynes being dropped from the name—the National Infrastructure Commission first described the corridor as the Cambridge-Milton Keynes-Oxford arc in 2016—although I do feel it is a little odd to remove the largest economy from the title. It is a bit like renaming J. K. Rowling’s books “Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley”. I will allow my hon. Friends to decide which is which. It is not just about branding; even since the relaunch of the project, there are concrete examples of how that policy skew has played out in practice. Take the Chancellor’s announcement in Oxford last year on the new plans for the growth corridor: the press release that followed mentioned Cambridge 39 times, Oxford 25 times and Milton Keynes just four times. Two of those references were about how the Government would make it quicker for people to get from Milton Keynes to Oxford or Cambridge, despite the fact that far more people commute into my city than out of it every day. The recently released investment prospectus for the corridor barely mentioned any projects outside Oxford and Cambridge. My council submitted several high-impact Milton Keynes projects for inclusion—all of them were cut from the final draft. In the run-up to the Budget, the only corridor-related investments were for Oxford and Cambridge. Let me be clear: investment in those cities is welcome and necessary. They are world-class centres of research, talent and innovation. However, that skew is frustrating. The easiest way to correct that skew is through devolution. We had an oven-ready devolution deal across Bedfordshire, Luton and Milton Keynes—a deal that would have supercharged growth across our region and allowed us to get the many national infrastructure projects already planned delivered quickly. Will the Department work with us to get the BLMK devolution deal across the line as quickly as possible?

• 13 Nov 2025 · Access to Nature · Hansard source

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  I welcome the comments about Milton Keynes, the largest economy in the Oxford-Cambridge corridor, and we are very excited about the upcoming forest. The Wetland Arc, led by the Parks Trust, is another exciting project that spans the Great Ouse valley in my constituency. It will bring significant benefits for both people and nature, improving biodiversity, strengthening flood resilience and creating new opportunities for recreation and wellbeing across the area. We recently got some funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund to start the project. Can the Secretary of State assure me that the Government will continue to support strategic initiatives such as this across the country to deliver environmental protection, enhance community wellbeing and expand opportunities for everyone to enjoy and engage with nature?

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

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  I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his speech, and for his fight and campaign within his party in favour of abundance and against scarcity. I hope it is a fight that he can win, given the damage done by there not being enough of that attitude when the Conservatives were in power. Given that this debate cannot be isolated from the issue of the supply of housing, I hope that at the next election, I will not see Conservative leaflet after Conservative leaflet against building the new homes that this country so desperately needs. I thank the Opposition for bringing forward this debate, and I will start with a few points on which I hope we can agree. Stamp duty is a dreadful tax. It discourages behaviour that we should want to encourage: people moving out of homes that no longer suit them, and into properties that do. As many others have mentioned, stamp duty deters people from downsizing, which means fewer family homes become available for those who need them. In much of London and the south-east, where housing costs are already painfully high, that makes moving almost prohibitively expensive. When, for various reasons, the demand side of the housing market is struggling, stamp duty is also a barrier to building the homes that this country so desperately needs. When it comes to the drive to campaign against stamp duty, there is a lot to agree with, and we should find a path to removing it. However, I cannot support the motion for two reasons. First, a tax cut of around £9 billion must come with an honest explanation of how it will be paid for, as has been said. If there are apparently tens of billions of pounds-worth of cuts that we could make to the state, we can only conclude that it was pretty negligent of the previous Government not to make them in their 14 years in power. When they were handing out redundancy notices to police officers, why were they not making those cuts instead? Unfunded tax cuts are either a return to Liz Truss or a return to Tory austerity. There is a second, perhaps more important, point. I fear that the motion’s focus on stamp duty alone is too narrow. As was mentioned, we need a wider conversation about property taxes. The right hon. Member for North West Hampshire (Kit Malthouse) was wrong in one regard. I used to work in market research, and I know that stamp duty and inheritance tax are not the most unpopular taxes; council tax is consistently the most unpopular.

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

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  I am glad that the right hon. Gentleman has asked me to comment on the 14 years of Tory failure—years in which his party failed to grow the British economy and created a number of the problems that the country faces. While the shadow Chancellor made many good remarks in his opening speech, there was a little bit of amnesia about the state of affairs that was left to this Government. However, we do need an honest conversation about tax reform, including reform of property taxes. We have spoken a little about what the Institute for Fiscal Studies has said, and the IFS is right. The UK essentially relies on two big but fairly broken property taxes. Council tax does not create the distortions that stamp duty creates, but it is regressive; stamp duty creates distortions, but it is at least progressive, and mitigates some of the regressive elements of council tax. If we look at only one half of the equation and simply cut stamp duty, we will tilt the system further in favour of the wealthiest households, many of them in London and the south-east, while telling lower and middle-income families elsewhere that there is nothing in the system for them. We should consider just how unfair council tax has become. Given that the top band is capped so lightly, the bill for a modest family home in the north or the midlands can be similar to that for a multimillion-pound townhouse in London. Paul Johnson, formerly of the IFS, has already been quoted, but let me read out a tweet from him: “Buckingham Palace, valued at around £1bn, sits in band H and is charged £1,828 by Westminster City Council, less than an average three-bedroom semi in Blackpool...46% of households in England will receive a bigger council-tax bill than the Palace.” That is clearly a broken tax system, and if we ignore that and focus solely on stamp duty, we will only make things worse. Moreover, because successive Governments have not had the bravery to revalue, the tax bands are still based on 1991 values. In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee had just invented the world wide web, Nirvana had just released “Nevermind”, Will Smith was filming the first series of “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”, and I had not been born. A lot has changed since then, yet we have still not reformed the way in which we carry out council tax valuations. So yes, I agree that we should set a path to reducing stamp duty and ultimately reform the way in which we deal with it, but that should be part of a broader package that shifts tax away from transactions and towards ongoing occupation of higher-value properties. It could include revaluation and re-banding of council tax, so that bills reflect today’s values. There could be a higher rate or surcharge for the most expensive properties, and targeted reliefs to support downsizers and first-time buyers.

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

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  I will make some comments about the unfairness of the council tax system in a moment. We can have a conversation about tax and spend, and there is a much wider conversation to have, but today’s debate focuses on a very specific cut in a very specific part of property taxation, and there is a problem with having that conversation in isolation, rather than having the bigger, bolder, politically braver conversation that I would like the Opposition to start about wider reforms of our property tax market.

• 23 Oct 2025 · Building Safety Regulator · Hansard source

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  I beg to move, That this House has considered the performance of the Building Safety Regulator. It is an unrivalled pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Desmond. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting the debate and colleagues from four different parties for adding their names to the application. Since being elected last year, I have been searching for something that the hon. Member for Boston and Skegness (Richard Tice) and I can agree on, and I am thankful that we finally managed to find it. The breadth of support demonstrates the shared determination across the House to make the system work better. I also thank those from across the industry for their tireless campaigning on the issue, as well as for the constructive way they have worked to ensure that we can get safer buildings across the housing system and provide the supply that is so desperately needed. Across the construction and development sectors, there is rightly a growing frustration about how the new building safety regime operates in practice. Everybody supports the principle of safer buildings, but there is increasing concern that the system as it stands is holding back progress on building the new homes that are so desperately needed. My hon. Friend the Member for Northampton South (Mike Reader) and I sought this debate because of the growing concern across industry that the Building Safety Regulator, while well intentioned, is becoming a real barrier to hitting the 1.5 million homes target that we promised at the general election and that it is so important we achieve. We should be absolutely clear that this debate is not an attack on the principle of building safety—very far from it. Seventy-two people lost their lives in the Grenfell Tower fire on 14 June 2017—72 lives needlessly and tragically lost. It remains a stain on our national conscience that it took such a disaster to ensure that we have proper accountability and testing in the building industry. The Building Safety Regulator is a vital part of ensuring that nothing like Grenfell ever happens again, but it has to work. Time and again, developers and councils tell me exactly the same story: that schemes are stuck in the system and that, although the regulator is supposed to process applications within 12 weeks, tens of thousands of homes are still stuck to this day. The latest figures suggest that 22,000 homes are waiting for a remediation decision and that 33,000 new homes are waiting for approval. The cost of that is severe: according to the Centre for Policy Studies, there has been a 73% drop in housing starts in London over the past year, with the regulator one of the biggest causes. It is good to see today’s Government announcement on the ways we are going further to get the London housing market moving again, but the industry will still say the Building Safety Regulator is one of the biggest obstacles. Perhaps the biggest travesty is that if we do not build new safer homes, more people in this city and across the rest of the country are stuck in more dangerous and older properties. That is before we even start to consider the thousands who are stuck in temporary accommodation —one child in every classroom—or those who are paying extortionate rents because this country has failed for decades to build the homes that are needed. We now see a growing backlog in the BSR because telecoms infrastructure is being caught up in the new regulations for high-risk buildings—I say this in a building where I still cannot seem to get good phone signal, because we are not building the mobile phone infrastructure that is required across the city. That is causing real practical problems. It threatens to seriously impact the delivery of new buildings, particularly when rooftop installations are involved. If that is not addressed quickly, it could slow down construction and digital roll-out at exactly the point when this country needs to be improving both. The delays affect not just developers but people: the families living in buildings that are still awaiting remediation and the people who know that their homes are not yet deemed fully safe. The stress that causes day after day is unimaginable. When we talk today about process, paper- work and delays, we must remember the human beings at the heart of this issue. The economic impact is also huge: rising insurance costs, development finance drying up and higher up-front fees—all before a single brick gets laid. It has a real effect on the viability of building, particularly in our bigger cities. Peter John, the former head of Southwark council put it bluntly: “The greatest single burden developers have faced over the last five years has been the introduction of the Building Safety Regulator. The unintended consequence of improving building safety cannot be to cut off the supply of new homes.” He is right. Melanie Leech of the British Property Federation told the Select Committee that BSR delays are holding back two thirds of the build-to-rent pipeline. As we are rightly reforming the Renters’ Rights Bill, which was considered in the Commons again yesterday, we need to ensure that new build-to-rent properties are built, in order to keep the system unclogged. Fewer new rental properties obviously means higher rental prices for everyone else. The Home Builders Federation says exactly the same: the delivery of high-rise developments has “ground to a halt”. Earlier this week, the Government held their regional investment summit, and the message could not have been clearer: the UK is open for business, full of opportunity and led by a Government determined to drive growth. But investors also reminded us about the hard truth that investment is global, and if it takes too long or if it is too difficult to see a return here, capital will simply go elsewhere. We must pull down the barriers to investment and make it easier for growth to happen right here in the UK. If we are serious about growth, we need to back the builders, not the blockers. The good news is that fixing this does not require a huge amount of money from the Treasury—given how difficult it is to get money out of the Treasury—and it is not primarily about huge amounts of new spending. But it does mean investing in the right people: the experts who can process complex applications quickly and accurately. Will the Minister confirm whether the BSR will have the flexibility to offer market rates to attract those people, rather than being constrained by standard civil service pay bands? Secondly, it is about culture. Too many developers tell me they face a “computer says no” approach—an invalid application is simply rejected, forcing the whole process to restart. That would be frustrating enough over 12 weeks, but over nine months or more it is a killer for confidence. One of the most frustrating stories I have heard in all this is from a developer who was asked by someone at the Building Safety Regulator to slow down the speed at which they were making applications, to stop the BSR from becoming overwhelmed. At a time when this Government are rightly determined to speed up house building, it is frustrating to see an arm of government trying to slow the process down.

• 8 Sept 2025 · Indefinite Leave to Remain · Hansard source

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  I completely agree. Diversity is at the heart of Milton Keynes. We are a proud city that shows how people from many backgrounds can come together to enrich and strengthen our community. We have seen at first hand how the many people who have come to our city from Hong Kong have added to our local economy. The previous Government and this Government made a deal, a commitment, that was in keeping with our human rights commitments and our commitment to doing the right thing. It is important that we keep to that commitment. Like most people, I welcome the commitment of the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary to ensure that those who come to Britain are able to integrate and contribute to our society, rather than simply filling gaps left by uncertainty and under-investment in skills and training—changing the deal for BNO visa holders is not the way to do that. I do not think the Government intentionally aim to create uncertainty for the people who came here, but unfortunately that uncertainty has now been created, and everybody in this room sees it in our inboxes. I hope that today the Minister will be able to clarify the situation and provide certainty, so that those who came here seeking safety, freedom and opportunity know that this Government still stand with them and will not change the rules, and that the five-year journey committed to by the previous Government will remain in place even after the immigration White Paper goes through.

• 8 Sept 2025 · Indefinite Leave to Remain · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Jeremy. I will not speak for too long, given that most of the debate’s key points have already been made, so hopefully that will help with the average speaking time that you are aiming for. I, too, thank the Petitions Committee for this debate, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for South Norfolk (Ben Goldsborough) for his opening speech. I think it is important to add my voice to the many voices that we have heard expressing concern about the changes to BNO visas, particularly when it comes to the timelines for indefinite leave to remain. I have received emails from many constituents across Milton Keynes, and I can see my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes Central (Emily Darlington), who I know has received many more. I recently met Yvonne from 852 CIC, a fantastic organisation that represents and looks to integrate Hongkongers into the community in Milton Keynes. It has shared its concerns with me about the changes that it fears may be coming under the immigration White Paper.