Chris Hinchliff MP: speeches

Speeches

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

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  I declare an interest as chair of the all-party parliamentary group for council and social housing. The scale of the housing crisis in our communities today represents, in a crowded field, the most consequential and damaging retreat of the public realm in the UK, and a dereliction of its most basic duties. Everyone deserves a safe, comfortable and stable home where they can put down roots, so it is very welcome that, through this Bill, our national politics begins to recognise that the provision of things that people cannot live without cannot be left to private markets, which respond to demand, not need—and those will never be the same thing in a deeply unequal society like ours. The consequences of the failure to understand that fundamental economic reality are writ large across our nation. More than 130,000 households are trapped in temporary accommodation; many of them are stuck in bed and breakfasts and hostels, which are no place to raise a family. Frankly, it will remain difficult to talk seriously about national pride while 170,000 kids are homeless in this country, and are left without the space to learn, play, grow and simply enjoy their childhood. The human cost, measured in the futures and happiness of a generation, is proof enough of the urgent need for a change in direction. The choice before us, then—our new Prime Minister is absolutely right on this—is whether we continue with a model that provides unsuitable accommodation at extortionate prices, or put the public back in the driving seat. I welcome the attention in the Bill to retaining the social housing stock we already have. For far too long, we have lost social homes faster than we have built them. Putting a firm stop to that trend, alongside the Prime Minister’s commitment to a new generation of council homes, puts us in a position finally to get the housing crisis under control. I remind the House that in six years—at a time of shortages, debt, constraints and even greater competing demands on public expenditure than we face now—the post-war Labour Government oversaw the construction of more than 800,000 council houses, some of the best ever to be built in this country. Now is the time to recognise once again that the only way to get high-quality homes that those on waiting lists can actually afford is to directly plan and deliver council housing for people on low incomes, and that only the Government on behalf of the people can mobilise the patient capital capable of realising all the wider benefits that decent homes for all will secure for our society. With fresh leadership in the Department, I look forward to supporting this important legislation to ensure that we deliver the quality social homes that our communities need.

• 2 Sept 2026 · Draft Nature Restoration Levy regulations 2026 · Hansard source

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  It is an honour to serve with you in the Chair, Sir Alec. I will try to keep my questions brief. I want to be clear from the outset: I am not here to oppose the principle of the regulations—indeed, I agree with the Minister that they must work for the sake of nature restoration. However, some serious concerns have been raised with me about how they are drafted, perhaps because they have not gone through a formal consultation process. I will focus on one key point. As I understand it, there is no third-party oversight to ensure that the levy is calculated at the right amount to secure the objectives of the environmental delivery plans, although I understand that there is third-party oversight within comparable regulations for the community infrastructure levy. That matters because I understand that a key element of the primary legislation is that the overall improvement test should be based on whether the EDP, if delivered in full, would secure an overall improvement in the environmental feature in question. Although the EDP might be sound, if the nature restoration fund levy amount is not set at an appropriate level there is a risk that the overall improvement test could be null and void because there would not be the right amount of funding. I also understand that the regulations allow the Secretary of State to change the levy rate at any time without notice. That presumably creates considerable jeopardy for developers who do not have a legal route to exit once they have committed. It would also seem to create an avenue for a lot of political pressure to be brought to bear to reduce the amount of the levy—possibly to improve the viability of certain development schemes. I would welcome the Minister’s response to those concerns and encourage him to consider how they might be addressed before the regulations come into effect.

• 2 Sept 2026 · Representation of the People Bill · Hansard source

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  A political system, even one with regular elections, is not really a democracy if rich individuals and corporations are able to use their wealth to buy access and influence, and shape decisions in a way that ordinary citizens will never enjoy. That is what new clause 25, tabled in my name, seeks to address. The British people will never be able to trust the fact that we are genuinely representing their interests if those with deep pockets can wield disproportionate political power. Unless we use this Bill to drain the influence of money from our politics, that doubt will continue to rot away at the foundations of our democracy, driving more and more of our constituents to disbelieve that Parliament is here to serve them, and meaningful engagement with politics in our country will continue to sink to ever more dismal depths, until no Government have the mandate to legitimately call themselves representative. The amendment in my name focuses on a specific aspect of this problem that is particularly pernicious and should be banned in its own right: developers donating to political parties to weight the planning system in their own favour. What gets built and where shapes our daily lives like nothing else, and the decisions made through our planning system are often the most tangible touchpoints with democracy for local communities. Yesterday, the Prime Minister spoke about the urgent need to put agency and power back in the hands of the people, but in recent years the near universal experience of those engaging with the planning system as ordinary citizens is that their hopes and concerns are dismissed and trampled on by decision making that overwhelmingly favours the interests of speculative developers. This is not an accident. Developers are among the biggest donors to political parties, and the successive waves of planning deregulation that have served to silence and curtail community participation in planning decisions have allowed these businesses to make vast sums of money throwing up expensive housing that most young families could never hope to afford, while providing as few amenities as they can get away with and destroying our countryside in their pursuit of profit. Our constituents are not daft. They can see the depressing results of the triumph of speculative developers’ interests all around them, and they can also see those same developers and their lobbyists donating huge sums to political parties. The public can read the reports of exclusive fundraising events and access for those able to pay thousands for dinners with Ministers, and they can put two and two together.

• 16 Jul 2026 · National Planning Policy Framework · Hansard source

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  I agree with those concerns. As I understand it, many of the applications for grey belt are in fact on greenfield sites, and that needs to be addressed. For all its labyrinthine processes, the NPPF makes a mockery of local democracy, which breeds disillusion and contempt for politics in this country. The system we have created through the NPPF traps communities in a never-ending cycle of adversarial confrontations with corporations that see our local landscapes as easy pickings and cream off much of the wealth of new developments, while leaving the public to carry the majority of the costs. The section 106 mechanism they rely on is not only obscure, but demonstrably incapable of securing the investment in the infrastructure—GPs, schools, sports grounds and public transport—necessary to keep pace with population growth, when hundreds of new houses are bolted on to towns that have already seen almost all their facilities closed. The housing the NPPF produces is often both miserabilist and identikit. It is seemingly designed to erase local identity and shorn of local traditions, with no space for community and with a built environment that is best described as unhappiness given physical form. All in all, the damage that successive iterations of the NPPF have done to our country is difficult to forgive. Now is the time to consign the NPPF to the dustbin of history where it belongs and start afresh instead of making further amendments. The one positive note I can strike is that it is not difficult to imagine something far, far better. We need to return to Labour’s democratic principles, stop treating the public as a problem to be silenced and embrace them as a source of optimistic solutions for meeting the needs of the future. It is time to replace the constant nonsense that traduces our constituents as nimbys, and to put power in their hands so that they can decide where and how to meet the housing needs of their communities in a way that expresses their hopes and priorities for the future. It is time to bring back architects in every local planning authority, working with each community to shape plans for future development on an appropriate scale for each settlement, and with a renaissance in the local vernacular that strengthens and reinvigorates the culture and identity of each unique town, village and city. In short, it is time to ditch the NPPF and build a new system that puts power in the hands of the people and allows planners to genuinely plan with communities.

• 16 Jul 2026 · National Planning Policy Framework · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Sir Desmond. I declare an interest as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on council and social housing. I congratulate the hon. Member for Wells and Mendip Hills (Tessa Munt) on securing this very important debate. On a personal basis, a debate on national planning policy feels like a very fitting bookend to the outgoing Administration. The issue of what gets built where defines our daily lives like no other issue, and I have found my first two years in this place defined by those debates. Without wanting to cast myself as a latter-day Cassandra, I shared early on my view that, try though Ministers might, there would be no appeasing the developer lobby—no amount of deregulation will ever satisfy them—and so it has proven, with the clamour for relaxed fire safety standards and the weakening of environmental policies, and for there to be less opportunity for ordinary people to influence decisions in the planning system, as loud as ever. However, my views on the subject have changed. Today, I am not joining this debate to raise a series of detailed concerns about the latest redrafting of the NPPF—although I do still have such concerns, especially in relation to possible changes to the sequential test on surface water flooding and limits being imposed on local authorities to pursue more ambitious policies on climate and nature restoration. The point I really want to make today is that I believe we have reached a point where national planning policy is completely broken and the NPPF is beyond reform. After decades of deregulation, the genius of Labour’s post-war democratic settlement has been degraded and reduced to a system of fiendishly complex processes, combined with overwhelmingly negative outcomes, which, for all the world, seems to have been designed by an evil genius to drive all those involved mad. When Lewis Silkin created the planning system that rebuilt this country from the ashes of world war two, he described the distinctly Labour vision for a policy that would meet “actual needs, democratically expressed.” Yet what the NPPF has achieved for years—I am afraid the latest iteration will be little different—is almost the precise opposite of Silkin’s idealism. Pretty much ever since the first version of the NPPF in 2012, what we have seen is the proliferation of speculative development across the country, with democratically produced local plans ridden roughshod over and housing built first and foremost for profit, not for people. In fact, a national planning policy framework is not even an accurate name for what we have. There can be no plan-led system when national policy introduces the overwhelming likelihood of caveats to local plans through an ever stronger and equally inaccurately named presumption in favour of sustainable development, which in reality functions as a passport to permission for all but the very worst speculative schemes. This is not planning in any reasonable sense of the word—it is merely reacting. Under the NPPF system, more and more of the initiative, the influence and the advantage lies with the vested interests of land promoters and major developers, whose private profit will never accord with the public good. And thus we have a national system in which the notion of affordable housing is a running joke, and in which the environment that politicians so often protest their love for is repeatedly trashed as a secondary matter compared to the unequally distributed benefits of growth. It is a national planning policy framework that overwhelmingly produces outcomes that lock us into car-dependent, unsustainable lifestyles, with polluted air that chokes the lungs of our children and costs the NHS billions, and utterly fails to secure public consent for the development we very desperately require to meet the needs of those stuck in temporary accommodation and in cramped, crowded and unsanitary conditions.