Chris Hinchliff MP: speeches

Speeches

• 2 Jul 2026 · Supply Chain Security · Hansard source

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  We have already seen the vulnerability of our economy to global supply chain shocks from the impact of wars on food, fuel and fertiliser prices, but scientists now warn that we are likely to be heading into a super El Niño—a global heating event that will trigger extreme weather around the world, threatening fish stocks and agriculture, disrupting the Panama canal and bringing climate-induced fires that destroy vital timber supplies. How are Ministers preparing for those risks?

• 2 Jul 2026 · Supply Chain Security · Hansard source

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  2. What assessment he has made with Cabinet colleagues of the adequacy of the security of UK supply chains.

• 30 Jun 2026 · Draft Town and Country Planning (Discharge of Local Planning Authority Functions) (England) Regulations 2026 · Hansard source

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  Is that not potentially reintroducing the same level of discretion and difference across the country if local planning authorities choose to use those powers in different ways?

• 30 Jun 2026 · Draft Town and Country Planning (Discharge of Local Planning Authority Functions) (England) Regulations 2026 · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Sir Desmond. This is a hugely consequential instrument. Little democracy remains in our planning system, and this legislation will cut the amount down further. We are elected to this place to serve the public, not treat them as a problem to be silenced. The measures will mean that individual councillors lose the ability to directly call in planning decisions completely, and that democratically elected councillors get to publicly scrutinise and vote on planning decisions only in exceptional circumstances, even for schedule 2 applications. With no committees for the vast majority of decisions, they will also mean that the public lose their chance to speak for a few minutes in front of those deciding on what gets built and where in their local area. In effect, in many circumstances, they will render our constituents and their locally elected representatives bystanders in the future of their own community. The measures seem to directly contradict Labour’s historic mission to redistribute power, not to mention the current drive for devolution and putting decision-making power back in local hands. Streamlining our processes, in my view, cannot justify to my constituents the loss of their voice through these measures. I fear that the case for these changes relies overwhelmingly on anecdote and the belief that locally elected councillors are too responsive to the hopes and concerns of those they represent, and that by taking councillors out of the equation, more planning applications will be approved in spite of the public’s hopes and concerns. It is not a lack of planning permissions that underpins our decades-long failure to address our nation’s housing needs, however, and these measures will do nothing to build the hundreds of thousands of council houses we need. Whitehall is also not the best place to define which planning decisions are important enough for local democratic scrutiny; it is our local councils that have the knowledge and understanding of their communities needed to inform that choice. I absolutely accept that years of incoherent tinkering have created a planning system that is no longer fit for purpose. It is procedurally complex, it does not secure public support for future development, it does not build the affordable homes we need, and it is producing poor-quality, unsustainable outcomes—but making more decisions behind closed doors will not remedy any of that. Some may argue that this measure represents a shift towards a rules-based planning system by taking democratic discretion out of the equation, but the irony is that it is the decades-long deregulation of our planning system and the ever-growing focus on developer-led, speculative applications for building new housing that make the application of discretionary scrutiny essential. If we wanted a truly rules-based system, we would focus on reform that puts powers in the hands of local communities to decide for themselves through a genuinely co-designed local plan where, how and in what way their housing needs could be met. To conclude, this is a bad piece of legislation that will do nothing to help our constituents off housing waiting lists or to secure public consent for development in this country. It will hang like an albatross around the Government’s neck. The public anger about and resistance to damaging and speculative plans put forward by profiteering land promoters and developers will not disappear if this legislation comes into force; it will simply be redirected to target the planning officers who will have to enact it, the Members of Parliament who allowed democracy to be quietly killed off in a Committee Room, and Labour Ministers every time a councillor has to explain to their residents that they can no longer publicly scrutinise and challenge inappropriate development because this Government abandoned their own best traditions and stripped them of their rights. All that the statutory instrument will achieve is more polarisation and yet further erosion of trust in our political system, so I urge the Committee to reject these proposals. I urge the Government to choose a different course that recognises communities as a positive force to be empowered and that focuses on securing the highest-quality development plans to win genuine social licence to build, rather than trying to silence opposition to the development of unhappiness given physical form, which has already done so much damage to our country.

• 25 Jun 2026 · Home Ownership Affordability · Hansard source

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  I declare an interest as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on council and social housing. The affordability of home ownership is one of the biggest issues in our country. I welcome many of the recommendations in this report around tackling empty homes, reforming stamp duty and ensuring that we are tying the definition of affordability to local incomes. I also want to take the opportunity to congratulate the Minister for Housing and Planning on his role in securing the highest number of social rent homes since 2010, as announced today. That is a major achievement. However, part of the affordability question, which perhaps could not come into the scope of the Committee’s report, still lies unanswered and unaddressed. Since the 1970s, the number of homes per capita in this country has risen, despite house prices massively outstripping ordinary people’s incomes in that very period. That seems in a large part down to private banks effectively being able to print money, which then flows into house prices. I wonder whether, in its future work, the Committee will consider the interaction between monetary policy and house prices in this country.

• 25 Jun 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  Earlier this month, the Government announced that they are putting yet more money into the lower Thames crossing, meaning that we will now spend more than £3 billion on a road that costs more per mile than High Speed 2, and we will privatise away Dartford toll revenues for the privilege. Meanwhile, despite welcome steps by the Government for market towns and villages such as those in my constituency, buses remain more of a hypothetical concept than a regular and reliable form of daily travel. May I gently request a debate on ensuring that transport spending matches the genuine priorities of our constituents?

• 24 Jun 2026 · Climate Change · Hansard source

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  I declare an interest as vice-chair of the climate and nature crisis caucus. It is time to put it plainly: if we fail to prevent man-made climate change from getting worse, we face an existential threat to the British way of life. As our weather becomes more extreme, we face the threat of repeated crop failures and the heat-related deaths of thousands of livestock. With our country built for a climate that no longer exists, the impact of storms and heatwaves on our roads, hospitals, schools and pylons will finish off the efforts of the previous Tory Administration to wreck most of our national infrastructure. Iconic wildlife species, such as the curlew and the salmon, may disappear from these islands, and the British seasons will lose their traditional rhythm. Even our veteran English oaks will begin to vanish from our landscapes. It is bitterly ironic that the Conservative party, which takes our oak tree as its symbol, has abandoned in recent years its commitment to the protection of the environment in a way that puts that icon of our national identity at risk. It has given up conserving anything. I fully support the Government’s determination to keep our country on track for net zero and to play our part in tackling the climate emergency. Failing to act would put 1,000 years of history and the prosperity of every generation to come at risk. Nevertheless, delivering the seventh carbon budget will be possible only if we face head-on the problems in our society that so often stand in our way. As the Government’s impact assessment shows, there are huge potential benefits to becoming a more environmentally sustainable society: new export industries, better insulated homes that are more affordable to keep at a comfortable temperature and, with less pollution in our air, healthier lives. We will never realise those opportunities, however, if we do not work towards meeting our carbon budgets in a way that also addresses the deep inequalities across the UK. With millions in our country already struggling for a decent standard of living, tackling climate change will be impossible if it becomes a threat to their jobs and livelihoods, and to their ability to pay rent, heat their home and put food on the table. The fight against climate change must also be a fight for full employment, decent wages, affordable homes and an end to fuel poverty. The Government’s impact assessment for this carbon budget is clear: there is a risk to delivery if efforts to deploy new technologies outpace the capacity of industry and households to respond. If it takes up-front spending to invest in net zero technologies such as solar panels and heat pumps to play our part and to benefit from long-term savings, the Government must ensure that everyone is able to do so, regardless of income. Similarly, for Ministers to secure public backing for the measures needed to deliver carbon budget 7, we must have a geographically fair approach that puts genuine decision-making power in the hands of local communities up and down the country. Once again, the impact assessment is clear that there is the potential for adverse ecological and landscape impacts from the delivery of net zero infrastructure. Rural communities such as those that I represent cannot just be told to lump it, and that is where I think the impact assessment is inadequate. It is not enough to say that there will be net benefits overall, so it is okay that places such as Stocking Pelham in north-east Hertfordshire are being inundated with speculative proposals for renewable energy schemes. Unless we address the clear disconnect between the development of new infrastructure, how it is done, who it benefits and who experiences the harms, public backlash will continue to delay and frustrate the essential progress that we urgently need. Will the Minister not only make more of the obvious win-win opportunities, such as rooftop solar on commercial buildings and over car parks, but invest more resources in local area energy planning so that rural communities are empowered to decide what technologies they host in their local landscape, where, and at what scale?

• 24 Jun 2026 · Farming Road Map and Profitability Review · Hansard source

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  For many years we have expected farmers to steward our environment and at the same time deliver food at rock-bottom prices to make up for the failure of politics to secure an affordable cost of living across the rest of society. That has made agricultural profitability increasingly difficult. Now, with the crisis posed by climate change to our national food security, we must pull every available lever to reverse that trend. At the general election, the Labour manifesto committed to a target of half of all food purchased across the public sector being locally produced or certified to higher environmental standards. Will the Secretary of State provide an update on progress towards that target?

• 16 Jun 2026 · Thames Water · Hansard source

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  Will the Secretary of State put an end to this unholy mess and rid us of this frankly parasitic company once and for all?

• 16 Jun 2026 · Thames Water · Hansard source

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  The Secretary of State has made the right decision in seeking to protect billpayers and opposing giving Thames Water a free pass to continue polluting our rivers. The thousands of hours of sewage spills into chalk streams and their tributaries across North East Hertfordshire that Thames Water has continued to oversee are unforgiveable, if not technically illegal. Thames Water is failing in practically every possible way. The level of incompetence is staggering, given that it has 16 million captive customers. My constituents are not interested in Thames Water being given any more chances— [ Interruption. ]

• 10 Jun 2026 · Railways Bill · Hansard source

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  This is a very significant piece of legislation. I have tabled a number of amendments that I believe would strengthen it even further, but in the time available I will focus on the issue that is without doubt the top priority for my constituents when it comes to rail reform: cutting fares, through amendment 32. Thirty years of the railways being run for shareholder profit has left British commuters with some of the highest fares in Europe and taxpayers shelling out more in subsidies than it cost to run a public service for the pleasure. It really was the worst of all worlds. When something basic that people need to live their daily lives, such as getting to work or school, visiting family or seeing a doctor, is treated as a commercial enterprise, what should be a service that facilitates our lives degenerates into a way of squeezing as much profit out of people as possible. When people are more or less turned into human cash machines just to get around, it is no wonder that extortionate fares put so many people off using the railways altogether, and I am sure that we have all seen the mind-numbingly bonkers stories of instances where it has been cheaper to fly to Europe than to get a train from London to one of our great northern cities. This is what happens when essential public transport is handed over to private capital in a sector where real competition cannot function. For too long, our ability to get around reliably and affordably has come second to extracting profit for shareholders, and we see similarly infuriating failures with our water and energy, too. Taking back control of our railways means that we can rewrite the rules so that they work for ordinary people at long last. I pay credit to the Labour Government for getting us here, but it is now vital that we grasp the opportunities presented by public ownership and use that control to make rail travel more efficient and accessible for all and, crucially—I turn here to my amendment 32—more affordable. Ultimately, we must always keep in mind that it will not wash to just tell the public that nationalisation has made our railways better; they need to feel it in their pocket. The good will for a different way of doing things is undeniable. The public overwhelmingly support the principle of public ownership, but that support will vanish if fares continue to rise. My amendment proposes a Great British Railways railcard, our own version of the schemes in Germany, Switzerland and Belgium. Instead of a morass of wildly varying fares, discounts based specifically on age or other characteristics, and schemes that almost seem deliberately designed by some fiendish mind determined to catch passengers out with validity only on certain routes and at specific times, amendment 32 would give every resident in the UK the right to a railcard offering substantially reduced fares on all rail travel, whatever their age, whatever the route and whatever the time of day. The best signal we could send to the public as we take over the railways is to use some of the savings from reduced waste and management costs and ending profit flowing out of the system to bring down fares. Seven in 10 Brits—a full 70%—say that the Government should wholly reinvest the savings from ending rail privatisation into cutting fares or opening new rail services. For decades now, the cost of existence in this country has been killing off hope and the chance to embrace so much of what makes life worth living, with death by a thousand costs. Energy bills are too high, rents are out of control and council tax goes up and up. We have to pull every lever available to us across every part of Government to lift the weight of the cost of living crisis, so that everyone can afford the basics of daily life without facing the constant stress and struggle of scraping by. For a key worker who schlepps into work each day on a train, or for a disabled person or pensioner heading for multiple medical appointments a month, knocking 25% or even 50% off their travel costs would make a profound difference to ensuring that the sums added up at the end of the month. Cheaper fares would benefit millions of people, from those at the sharpest end struggling to put food on the table to the squeezed middle who feel like the helping hand of Government is always reserved for someone else. Rail fares are a crucial way of showing that a Labour Government are on the side of all those people—a benefit to all and a loss to none. I believe that my amendment 32 is a chance to show tangibly, in a way that reaches across generations, geography and traditional political loyalties, that Labour values mean more money in your pocket.

• 8 Jun 2026 · Water Companies · Hansard source

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  We come to the Chamber almost weekly to highlight the failures of the water sector in our constituencies, but I want to highlight a wider point today. For years, economic policy in this country has been based on trying to achieve growth by unlocking private capital, often from abroad. In this essential sector, we are now seeing the end result: water bankruptcy, environmental devastation, non-existent infrastructure and the public left picking up the tab. What conversations is the Minister having with colleagues across Government, especially in the Treasury, about learning from this monumental failure?

• 4 Jun 2026 · High Street Businesses: Government Support · Hansard source

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  It is an honour to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Lewell. I congratulate the hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover) on securing this important debate. The question of support for our high street businesses cuts to the very core of what economic policy in this country sets out to achieve. For decades, a flawed orthodoxy has promoted the concentration of economic activity in a few urban centres, with the expectation that the rest of us will commute from the towns and villages we live in to the city centres for work. It is a vision for the economy that reduces the hopes and talents of citizens in every part of the country to units of social capital that should be deployed in the most “efficient” manner, and one that measures success in GDP figures rather than in thriving communities. The reality is that an economic theory based on principles of agglomeration and spill-over effects has next to no relevance for improving the daily lives of our constituents. Whether measures of productivity would be zero-point-something per cent higher over the next 10 years if we focused on high-growth centres is totally beside the point when it comes to what makes for true prosperity. That can come only from ensuring that every high street is a success. High street businesses give life to the heart of a community. Independent traders, entrepreneurs and innovators give a place its identity. Pubs, bars, coffee shops, community hubs, restaurants and the rest provide the social space for a town to come together and connect, rather than us remaining atomised in our private lives. These are the businesses that so often offer those first, defining jobs for young adults, and where staff build genuine connections with local customers, keeping an eye out for the elderly and vulnerable if they need a bit of assistance. In short, the success of our high street businesses is essential for a healthy, happy society. We are very fortunate in North East Hertfordshire to have many fantastic high street businesses, including G’s Deli, Vutie Beets and the Uniform Monkeys in Letchworth, the Cheese Plate in Buntingford, Bow Books in Royston and Café Luna in Baldock, to name just a few. There is no denying that our high street businesses are under enormous pressure, and we must take immediate, decisive action to help them. I ask the Minister to look at the following priorities as a matter of urgency. First, energy bills are crippling our high street businesses. They need support just as much as domestic users but have none of the protections, and that must change. Secondly, the business rates system is manifestly unfair and a huge burden. Frankly, the Byzantine complexity of the whole edifice is mind-boggling. We cannot keep debating discounts, transitional support and multipliers. In the manifesto that this Government was elected on, Labour—my party—promised to abolish business rates and replace them with a fairer, more transparent system. We must deliver on that promise now. I urge the Minister to ensure that, as we deliver reform, we not only remove the loopholes that allow huge corporations to practically choose how much tax they pay while independent businesses play by the rules, but shift the burden of taxation away from high streets, which give so much to our communities, and balance that with a fairer share being paid by online sales giants. Finally, we have to recognise that, to create the environment for thriving high street businesses, we need to reverse the huge damage done to our local councils by the years of austerity under previous Administrations. Only with properly funded councils will local democracy have the power to take back control of empty shops and give commercial opportunities to a wider range of retailers and local entrepreneurs, rather than the endless parade of vape and betting shops that too often seem to be the preference of absentee private landlords. What is more, properly funded councils are essential for tackling the scourge of overflowing bins, littered streets and crumbling roads, which do such a disservice to our high streets when it comes to attracting people. We need councils that are able to make more than a merely financial decision about the cost of parking around our high streets, and that can take a more creative approach to the differing needs of small market towns such as Buntingford and large towns such as Bishop’s Stortford down the road. To conclude, supporting our high streets is essential for spreading genuine prosperity across every part of our country. I hope to hear from the Minister today about more decisive action to achieve just that.

• 3 Jun 2026 · South East Water: Disruption of Supply · Hansard source

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  Alongside the failures in the south-east, during the recent heatwave there was a widespread disruption of water supply across swathes of my constituency, in Buntingford, Cottered, Ardeley and Throcking. In a country as wet as ours it should take a true organising genius to create disruptions in water supply, but we are on track for a water deficit of 6 billion litres in our country in the coming decades, and on top of that, AI data centres estimate that water consumption will reach up to half a trillion cubic metres every year. Does the Minister—whom I deeply respect—accept that if we are to prevent water supply disruptions from recurring year in year out, we cannot continue to have infinite increases in demand on our already vastly overstretched water resources?

• 21 May 2026 · Industrial Strategy · Hansard source

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  4. What steps he is taking to develop an industrial strategy.

• 21 May 2026 · Industrial Strategy · Hansard source

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  If climate breakdown accelerates, many of the international supply chains that we have relied upon for essential goods and resources for far too long will cease to exist. We are sleepwalking towards a situation in which this country can no longer guarantee the basic needs of its people. At that point, no amount of AI slop or casino capitalism will be an alternative to actually making things. Before ecological collapse makes it too late, will Ministers use their industrial strategy to pivot our economy back to producing more of the essentials that we use in our daily lives?

• 21 May 2026 · Costs for Motorists · Hansard source

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  The freeze in fuel duty will be a relief to drivers in North East Hertfordshire, but part of the reason there is such a problem is that the Conservative party’s last stint in government left public transport virtually non-existent in rural communities such as mine. We discussed earlier this week the enormous cost of HS2—more than £100 billion. If we were investing at that scale in bus services, we could provide a vastly improved network across the whole country for decades to come. Will the Government learn the lessons of the current crisis and redirect our public transport spending towards the journeys we need to make in our day-to-day lives?

• 20 May 2026 · Processed Russian Oil Products: Sanctions · Hansard source

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  I thank the Minister for clarifying that sanctions on Russia are tougher today than they were yesterday, but fundamentally the furore around licences to phase in the new regulations arises because we have an economy reliant on jet fuel, and as long as that remains the case these issues will continue to arise. What conversations is he having with others across Government to move us faster and even further away from our economy’s reliance on jet fuel?

• 29 Apr 2026 · Engagements · Hansard source

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  Q3. The war in Iran has exposed how dangerously reliant we are on imports for our food, fuel and medicine, but the reality is that climate breakdown will make the current instability look trivial. Will the Prime Minister use the upcoming King’s Speech to address this fact and redirect our economy towards food security, energy security and security in the supply of our medicines?

• 27 Apr 2026 · Animal Testing · Hansard source

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  It is an honour to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Twigg. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Irene Campbell) on an excellent opening speech. All life is a miracle and every living creature has an intrinsic value that we cannot measure or put a price on, so I am not in the least bit surprised that hundreds of my constituents signed this petition. We rightly expect the highest standards for animals bred in this country and should demand the same for those imported from abroad. The British people want tough penalties on cruelty. Labour’s animal welfare agenda, from tackling puppy farming to ending trail hunting, brings policy closer to the public’s values. Those same values matter when we consider animal testing. Given the invasive, painful and often lethal nature of these experiments, the burden of justification has to be immense. It is not enough to say that the ends justify the means; the ends themselves must be clearly achievable, necessary and proportionate enough to warrant such suffering. In other words, we cannot morally justify harming animals simply because we consider ourselves a more intelligent species. If some disagree with that statement, it is a useful thought experiment to consider whether we would accept it as morally justifiable and acceptable for a provably more intelligent species to experiment on our families and loved ones for their own purposes. Would we stand by and nod along stoically that all species can rightly be used however they wish by another that has a more developed brain? I think not. A genuinely moral justification can be attempted only if the scale of suffering prevented by testing on living creatures provably and overwhelmingly outweighs the suffering of the test patients themselves. Too often, that case is simply not made. When we weigh the public interest in research and medical progress against the imperative to minimise harm to animals, the balance just does not stack up to scrutiny. Animal testing is often cruel and would often pass for barbaric sadism in any other context. More profoundly still, the scientific value of animal testing is often overstated. As we have heard repeatedly today, there is growing evidence that animal models can be unreliable predictors for human outcomes, and we have an increasing range of scientific tools and models that offer a more accurate alternative. If the suffering we are inflicting on these animals is profound but the result is uncertain, can the means really be justified at all? Herbie’s law would help to correct that balance, through a phased transition by 2035 away from animal experimentation and towards more effective alternatives, including human-specific methods backed by training and support for scientists. More than 2 million animals were used in experiments in our country in 2024 alone. That is suffering on an immense scale, affecting animals alive today and countless more yet to be bred into a system of pain. Herbie’s law offers the chance to turn a historic page and reduce suffering, improve science and move our laws closer to the values that the public already hold. That would be a profound step forward for animals living now and those spared this fate in future. I urge Ministers to adopt Herbie’s law in full as a matter of urgency.

• 21 Apr 2026 · Alternative Measures to GDP · Hansard source

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  On the point about statistics and what GDP measures, I ask the Minister to take away the issue of imputed rent. A fairly strange part of GDP, it measures hypothetical rent on the value of existing houses, inflates the value of our GDP as a country, and could be part of what we are measuring when we say that we are trying to achieve GDP growth, though it is actually entirely theoretical.

• 21 Apr 2026 · Alternative Measures to GDP · Hansard source

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  Would the hon. Lady add to her list a request that the Minister consider a formal target to cut inequality in this country? We will never grow our way to a good life for all our citizens while we have a fundamentally unjust society; we will only break the environmental boundaries we are already rapidly burning past.

• 20 Apr 2026 · Security Vetting · Hansard source

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  In answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Sarah Russell), the Prime Minister said that he delayed coming to this House so that he could answer, among other questions, why UKSV was overruled. It seems wholly incredible that this decision was made on a personal whim by a senior civil servant. Is it not that it was made because of political pressure from No. 10 to advance a man who a particular faction of the Labour party has looked to for moral and spiritual leadership for years? Can the Prime Minister explicitly now confirm his understanding of why the decision to overrule UKSV was made?

• 14 Apr 2026 · Crime and Policing Bill · Hansard source

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  There are many important proposals before us today, and I congratulate the Minister on bringing them forward. I wholeheartedly support the Government’s efforts to tackle antisocial behaviour, offensive weapons, fly-tipping, the exploitation of children, and appalling sexual offences. However, Lords amendment 312, which was introduced in the other place, dangerously infringes on civil liberties. It is incumbent on all Members to jealously guard the rights of our constituents, and any restriction of their civil liberties should only be accepted by this House on the basis of overwhelming evidence that such proposals would strengthen, rather than undermine, the health of our democracy. On this occasion, however, we have had next to no evidence whatsoever, because these significant changes were only introduced after the original passage of the Bill through this House, which is ultimately a pretty sorry way to treat representative parliamentary democracy. Lords amendment 312 is out of step with the best traditions of this country and of the Labour party, which has always existed to redress the balance of power in favour of ordinary people. The Chartists, the suffragettes, the organisers of the Kinder Scout trespass, those who stood against fascism at Cable Street, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Jarrow crusade—these were protest movements and campaigns of direct action that were supported and led by giants of our party, and which we should celebrate, not disown. They were advancing Labour’s historic mission to wrest power from the established status quo, so that ordinary people have a real say over their lives. Lords amendment 312 contradicts that impulse, and risks shifting the balance of power in our society towards the vested interests that we ought to take on. The corrosive influence of the rich and powerful runs through every corner of our politics. It muddies policymaking and leaves our constituents asking whether decisions are made in their interests, or in those of the last donor who paid £2,000 a head at a lobbyist curry night. If tweaks are to be made to defend our democracy and prevent disruption to the life of our communities, that would be a far more apt target than the civil liberties of our constituents. Today, Lords amendment 312 is opposed across the Labour movement and civil society by many organisations that share the progressive instincts that should be guiding this Labour Government. That is hardly surprising, given the way this legislation is drafted. It is vague, with no definition of what is meant by “serious disruption to the life of the community”. It is widely drawn, with no necessary link between the events considered to be cumulatively disruptive. It does not define the area in question or the timeframe, and it has the blindingly obvious potential to be abused. The proposals could easily be used to restrict protests simply because they are considered inconvenient due to their persistence, and not because of their content or messages. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) pointed out, this may place substantial political pressure on the decision making of senior police officers. I want to address the concerns raised by several hon. Members in this debate about the intimidation of specific minority groups. I do understand those concerns and they are legitimate, but the legislation is not drafted tightly enough to address that problem. It is far too vague and far too broad to coherently address that point, and it is not what we will achieve by passing this amendment. Finally, since we are discussing notions of cumulative impact, whatever the stated intentions today, when these plans are considered alongside the recent restrictions on the right to protest against animal testing, a legally contested proscription and other legislation that I assume means that any of my constituents disobeying these plans would not have the right to a trial by their peers, assertions by the Government that they hold the right to protest sacrosanct are wearing so thin as to be clearly transparent. The case for Lords amendment 312 has not been made, we should not be asked to vote for it en bloc alongside other important but entirely separate changes, and I urge Ministers to drop these plans for good.

• 14 Apr 2026 · Crime and Policing Bill · Hansard source

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  Can I just seek clarity from the Minister? If Lord Macdonald comes forward with recommendations to go back in the opposite direction, will the Government then consider those and remove the restrictions they are currently proposing?