Chris Hinchliff MP: speeches

Speeches

• 24 Jun 2025 · Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government · Hansard source

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  For millions, the affordable housing crisis is the clearest sign that Britain is broken. That is why I welcome the Government’s announcement of £39 billion for the affordable homes programme in the spending review. That is a significant investment, but getting the 160,000 homeless children out of temporary accommodation is a national emergency, and it demands urgent action. I ask Ministers to comment, in their response to this debate, on reports that much of this funding is back-loaded until after the next general election, with only relatively modest increases over the next three years. We cannot ignore the human cost of delay. This is not a static problem, or a building waiting to be repaired. Childhood does not pause. We need to prove to the public that we are tackling the housing crisis now. When we fail to provide the basics of shelter and stability, we undermine the talents and contributions of the next generation. That failure not only harms those children, but diminishes our collective future. I urge Ministers to consider Shelter’s proposal that two thirds of the announced funding be spent in the first five years. Matching this would show true commitment to change, and offer real hope for the future. We must also ensure that this funding is used to deliver the genuinely affordable homes needed to bring down spiralling waiting lists. My constituents are understandably hugely cynical; they are promised affordable housing, but so often what gets delivered is anything but. All the evidence shows that it is council housing that is desperately needed by families at the sharp end of the housing crisis. The affordable homes programme should deliver an end to decades of under-investment in housing for working-class communities—and I know that is what Ministers intended. The way to get there is with a clear public commitment that 80% of this investment will be for social rent. To conclude, I welcome the fact that the headline figures are ambitious and encouraging, but the details must be refined to deliver the homes that workers need. Yes, that means more up-front investment, but there are solutions. Housing developers fuelled this crisis by building at rates that maximised profit while families waited, and by prioritising luxury builds while key workers struggled to find affordable homes. Just as the Government rightly used a windfall tax on oil and gas giants to lower energy bills, we should consider a windfall tax on the supernormal profits of the biggest housing developers. The major developers put profit before the public good, raking in billions while failing to deliver the homes that we need. They should help pay to fix the mess that they helped create.

• 10 Jun 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  Making community energy the centrepiece of the Government’s clean power plan will foster support for new schemes by putting the public in the driving seat to choose where, and at what scale, projects can fit into local landscapes. To unleash the full potential of community energy, will Ministers consider implementing the long-standing proposals to enable these schemes to sell electricity directly to local people?

• 9 Jun 2025 · Planning and Infrastructure Bill · Hansard source

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  I rise to speak in favour of the amendments in my name, particularly amendment 69, which has 53 supporters from across the House. Every family stuck on a housing waiting list, and every child suffering the insecurity of temporary accommodation, represents a moral stain on our country. I welcome Ministers’ urgency in seeking to address those corrosive failures, which, for millions, underpin a lingering sense that our country is deeply broken. However, I fear that the Government have misdiagnosed the root cause of the housing crisis, which is fundamentally that private capital will never deliver the public good that we need. The evidence is clear that processes that uphold democracy and nature are not the problem; profit maximisation is. The planning system consistently approves more homes than the private sector delivers, and when homes are built, they are too often unaffordable for those at the sharp end of the housing crisis. Last year, less than 2% of homes delivered through section 106 were for social rent. After 20 years of deregulation, hoping that just one more wave will finally make the market deliver is simply not credible. It certainly does not justify stripping away the few protections that we have left for our natural environment, especially when the Government’s own assessment could provide no concrete evidence that it would work. We are already one of the most nature-depleted nations in the world, and we can spend what little remains of our natural inheritance only once. If the Government press ahead with their proposals, the national account will soon be empty. There is the kernel of a good idea in a nature restoration fund, but the weight of evidence against the way that it has been drafted is overwhelming: nature organisations, academics, ecologists and the Office for Environmental Protection have all raised serious concerns. I welcome the tone of earlier commitments from Government Front Benchers, but amendment 69 gives Ministers the opportunity to rescue something positive from the wreckage of this legislation by ensuring that environmental delivery plans serve their purpose without allowing developers to pay cash to destroy nature, and that conservation takes place before damage, so that endangered species are not pushed close to extinction before replacement habitats are established. The amendment outlines that conservation must result in improvements to the specific feature harmed. That will protect irreplaceable habitats such as chalk streams. Our natural capital, which underpins all prosperity in this country, declined by a third from 1990 to 2014. This is a chance to reverse that trend. Given that Letchworth Garden City in my constituency sprang into life without a single mature tree being felled, we can build the homes that we desperately need to clear our housing waiting lists in harmony with nature. To conclude, the primary value to which our politics has sought to appeal has for decades been self-serving ambition, but as the party of change and of the people, Labour has a duty to serve a higher virtue: hope. I am talking about hope for a future in which our nation no longer imagines housing as an ever-appreciating financial asset, and instead builds homes that provide the secure and healthy environment essential for our physical and mental wellbeing, and that allow everyone to put down the roots necessary to grow and fulfil their truest potential; hope for a future in which we create connected communities of friendship and co-operation, rather than having the grey and miserable utilitarianism of commuter dormitories; hope for a future in which we take every possible opportunity to restore the glories of British nature and can meaningfully say, for the first time in generations, that we have left the nation richer than we found it; in short, hope that we choose by design to surround every man, woman and child in these islands with constant proof that life is beautiful.

• 28 Mar 2025 · Water Bill · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend has criticised the proposal for citizens’ assemblies, saying that we should have the confidence to make political judgments in this House for the future of our water companies. Will she explain why she supports having an independent water commission but does not support the proposal for citizens’ assemblies?

• 28 Mar 2025 · Water Bill · Hansard source

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  I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich South (Clive Lewis) on introducing a Bill that directly addresses one of the most strongly felt public sentiments in my constituency and across the country. The work he has done on this Bill, with Unison and others, deserves great respect. I support many of the measures that the Government have swiftly taken to address the failures in our water system since taking power. Blocking bonuses for bosses of polluting water companies to end the absurd financial rewards for the destruction of our natural heritage, and ringfencing billpayers’ money for long overdue improvements to infrastructure are positive steps in the right direction.

• 28 Mar 2025 · Water Bill · Hansard source

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  The Minister is shaking her head, but I agree that it is difficult to see how any boss could qualify for a bonus in the current system. I would be failing to adequately represent the constituents of North East Hertfordshire if I did not make it clear that they have no faith whatsoever that private water companies, after years of disgraceful neglect, can now be trusted to restore the health of our rivers. The residents who sent me to this place are rightly furious at being asked to pay more to make good the malpractice from which water companies have been profiting. The public do not want to pay towards rescuing discredited corporations that have spent decades extracting wealth from our countryside and polluting our rivers to the detriment of wildlife, the pleasures of wild swimming, and any ordinary citizen who cares about the natural world. No doubt, some of the activities and profits of these companies have been included in the calculations of our nation’s GDP. Nothing could demonstrate more clearly that, so often, what passes for valuable economic activity in this country in reality inflicts enormous costs on the public, while threatening the very environment that underpins true prosperity and wellbeing for all. Frankly, it is difficult to disagree with my constituents when they say that, given the damage done by water companies to our rivers through a combination of over-abstraction and pollution, Ofwat is wrong to allow them to charge so much as an extra penny on bills, never mind the staggering 31% increase granted to Thames Water. The residents contacting me about this issue have repeatedly called for water companies to pay for the damage they have done. They say that if the water companies cannot afford to do so without going bankrupt, then let them. And should nationalisation be required as a result, then let Parliament set the appropriate level of compensation for shareholders, netting off not just company debt, but all the dividends shelled out while our rivers and streams have choked with pollution. I recognise that Parliament is not yet ready to accept the radicalism of the wider public on this issue, but this Bill offers a clear and pragmatic solution both to restoring democratic faith in the management of our water system, and to ensuring that it puts people and nature before profit. The whole saga we have witnessed in our water system means that we can now say, in all candour, that the capitalism of Adam Smith, in which the aggregate of self-interested economic decisions produces the collective good, in so far as it ever did exist, is now just a folk story told to justify the actions of the richest members of our society. When it comes to our water system, the free market is a myth, and pretending it exists has only served to inject more pollution into our environment and inequality into our economy, as has happened on almost every occasion on which we have privatised one of our nation’s major assets. The Bill offers a solution to reassuring residents in Baldock that the Ivel will flow fully once again; to residents in Buntingford that planning consultations will no longer be waived through, where they will cause already overloaded infrastructure to flood people’s homes with sewage; and to residents in Barkway that effluent will no longer flow into our rivers for hundreds of hours every year. Something which unites the rivers at each of the locations I have just referred to is that they are all chalk streams. We are proud custodians of 10 of these internationally significant waterways in North East Hertfordshire and I would be remiss not to take this opportunity to ask Ministers to publish the ready-to-go chalk stream recovery pack. It would be a move warmly welcomed by many local groups in my constituency and across the country. I would like to extend an invitation to Ministers to join me in visiting the River Ivel in my constituency to discuss a superb chalk stream restoration pilot project that could be implemented there. To conclude, the Bill has my full support and I hope that Ministers will reflect its whole spirit in their responding remarks today.

• 18 Mar 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  Will Ministers consider exercising the community electricity right within the Infrastructure Act 2015 to require commercial renewable energy developers to offer communities the opportunity to part-own schemes developed in their area?

• 12 Mar 2025 · Sustainable Farming Incentive · Hansard source

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  I have also been contacted by concerned and impacted farmers in North East Hertfordshire. Will the Minister assure me that, for the remainder of this Parliament, the revamped SFI that he alluded to will allow farmers to plan seasons ahead, as they need to?

• 24 Jan 2025 · Climate and Nature Bill · Hansard source

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  I make a brief declaration of interest: my former employer, CPRE, supports the Bill. Does my hon. Friend agree that the rate of climate change that she is describing in her constituency poses an existential threat to our most loved landscapes, our iconic wildlife species, the pattern of our seasons and some of our most valuable farmland, and that a rapid and just transition is therefore essential for rural communities so that we can hand over our countryside to future generations in some recognisable form?

• 17 Jan 2025 · New Homes (Solar Generation) Bill · Hansard source

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  I begin by making a declaration of interest: my former employer, CPRE, the countryside charity, is a supporter of the Bill. Many of my constituents are also passionate supporters of the proposal for mandatory rooftop solar on new buildings; it is one of the issues on which I have had the most correspondence in recent months. In North East Hertfordshire, the towns of Royston and Buntingford have seen rapid development in recent years, as have smaller villages such as Barkway, Puckeridge and Standon. In the near future, a new estate will be built on the edge of Letchworth Garden City and the town of Baldock is due to roughly double in size. At the same time, we face many challenging decisions locally to balance the need for renewable energy with the protection of our high-quality farmland, while also preserving and enhancing space for nature. It is therefore unsurprising that residents in North East Hertfordshire can see the common sense in making the best possible use of our finite land by putting the solar panels we need on rooftops. Our approach to delivering the renewable energy we undoubtedly and desperately need has been far too laissez-faire.

• 17 Jan 2025 · New Homes (Solar Generation) Bill · Hansard source

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  I agree that speed is of the essence in multiple ways, and I encourage the Government to move as quickly as possible. Empowering households to generate the electricity that they use will help families to lower their bills far more rapidly than commercial schemes that feed into wholesale energy markets influenced by international commodity prices. This strikes me as a well-drafted Bill, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Max Wilkinson) on its clarity and flexibility. The only thing that I might suggest is a widening of the provisions to cover commercial buildings as well, given the vast opportunities provided by warehousing space. It is estimated that we currently use only about 5% of warehouse rooftops for solar generation. Claims that the regulations would hinder innovation are clearly spurious, especially in view of the provisions for exemptions where other forms of renewable energy generation are installed. It is high time that our country had common-sense standards for rooftop solar on new builds, and I hope that the whole House will support the Bill.

• 17 Jan 2025 · New Homes (Solar Generation) Bill · Hansard source

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  I find myself, once again, in wholehearted agreement. Ensuring that solar panels are installed on the rooftops of new buildings specifically could deliver a generating capacity over six times greater than that of Sizewell C. Clearly, if we start applying a strategic approach beginning with the provisions in the Bill, we can host the vast majority of the solar panels we need on our rooftops. Other nations are already proving that this can be done, with similar regulatory measures currently in place in Germany, China and Japan. Better yet, enacting this legislation would not only accelerate our progress toward meeting our climate targets, reducing the industrialisation of our countryside and protecting rural communities; it also offers the most effective way to ensure that the net zero transition lowers electricity bills for consumers.

• 11 Nov 2024 · Rural Affairs · Hansard source

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  I thank the Government for so guilelessly bringing forward such a broad debate allowing those of us with rural constituencies to make wide-ranging demands on behalf of the towns and villages that we represent. I look forward to further inundating Ministers’ in-trays with legions of letters about agriculture in Anstey, school buildings in Baldock and potholes in Furneux Pelham. However, before I am accused of being excessively parochial, I will address the wider systemic issues that undermine rural life in this country. Fundamentally, the problem facing towns and villages such as those across North East Hertfordshire is that for decades almost every aspect of national life has been increasingly geared towards putting profit maximisation before the needs of our communities. Nowhere is that more evident than in our housing sector. Rural areas must deal again and again with totally unsustainable speculative developments dominated by houses designed to maximise profit, on a scale completely unrelated to local needs for organic growth. At the same time, house prices have continued to rise—almost always far beyond the reach of those who have grown up locally—rural homelessness has risen by 40% and local facilities have declined. In one of my local towns, Buntingford, hundreds of new houses have been built, yet it has lost its youth centre, the bank, the community swimming pool, a GP surgery, a daycare centre and the local waste disposal site—those facilities are all gone. The volume of new housing is putting such strain on the infrastructure that residents are repeatedly flooded by raw sewage. I am afraid it is of little consolation that the big developers, which the Tories allowed to force through applications on appeal, have been enjoying supernormal profits as a result. The systemic failures are not unique to rural housing. Our public transport system is next to non-existent in many villages—cutting off young adults from opportunities for work and education, and stranding older residents in loneliness and isolation—because the only bus services that ran under the Tories were those that made profits for shareholders. We expect farmers to steward our land for future generations, but they have—between the monopsonistic power of the major supermarkets and the pressure of global commodity markets—been pushed into the absurd position whereby it is increasingly impossible to make a fair living out of feeding the nation. All that points to economic policy that has consistently failed to recognise the intrinsic value that my constituents place on the rurality of their communities. For too long, economic orthodoxy that is obsessed with agglomeration and utilitarian accounting has proven incapable of recognising the social value of investing in less densely populated areas. To conclude, given the vast change in political representation of rural areas at the recent election, the Government clearly have a unique opportunity and obligation to deliver systemic change that creates a future in which our towns, villages and hamlets thrive as communities in their own right. Ministers have made an important start with policies to refocus house building on delivering new social homes, by paving the way for re-regulation of bus services, by delivering the largest ever budget for sustainable food production, and with a clear commitment to community energy. Today, I urge them to press on further as swiftly as possible by restoring services to our towns and villages and retaining their rurality; by recognising at last that, depleted as it is, the natural capital of our countryside is the better part of the wealth of our nation; and by redirecting investment, leaning into the growth of distributed technologies and remote working, and delivering a new revolution in cottage industries to once again spread economic opportunities across places such as those I represent.

• 23 Oct 2024 · Independent Water Commission · Hansard source

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  The chalk streams in North East Hertfordshire and across England are of international significance, but too often these waterways are not just polluted, but running dry. Will the Secretary of State assure me that the commission will look at the regulation needed to bring an end to not only sewage spills, but the over-abstraction of aquifers and chalk streams?

• 8 Oct 2024 · Farming and Food Security · Hansard source

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  I do not doubt the motivation of Opposition Members, but the inescapable fact is that the Conservative party is ideologically incapable of putting forward real solutions to bolster our national food security. I share some of the concerns about the use of high-quality farmland for ground-mounted solar schemes, which is an ongoing issue in North East Hertfordshire, and we need a land use framework to give strategic direction to where we generate the solar energy that we need, instead of allowing a chaotic proliferation of profit-driven schemes wherever grid capacity, which the Conservative party failed to sort out, allows. Under the previous Government, just 5% of houses had installed rooftop solar, and neither did they take any of the obvious steps to mandate solar panels on new build houses or car parks. For 14 years, they allowed that situation to develop unchecked, and it will be this Labour Government who deliver the land use strategy that we need to provide a framework to ensure that we are making the best possible use of our finite land. On other challenges, it is estimated that one third of UK soils are degraded, yet the previous Government ditched the planned soil health action plan for England. On biodiversity, the previous Conservative Government authorised the use of harmful pesticides, despite knowing that that would have a devastating impact on pollinators. On new entrants, it is well known that the average age of farmers is too high, yet when it was in power the Conservative party’s austerity measures led to the closure of 15,000 acres of county farms estate, which is crucial for getting younger people into a farming career and contributing to national food security.

• 5 Sept 2024 · Great British Energy Bill · Hansard source

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  Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for the opportunity to give my maiden speech in this important debate. The ongoing transition of our energy system is having a profound and, sadly, often harmful impact on many of the communities in my constituency, so I am very hopeful that the provisions in the Bill will begin at last to put the future of renewable energy in the service of those I represent. I warmly commend to my hon. Friends on the Front Bench the proposals, of which I am sure they will be aware, for Great British Energy to be given a duty to deliver nature recovery alongside its other objectives. I begin this speech by paying tribute to my predecessor, who served our constituency and this House faithfully for many years. The clear proof of the diligence with which he carried out his duties and the respect he earned from his constituents was plainly obvious from the feedback on the doorstep throughout the general election. I especially want to thank my predecessor for the work he did to support the campaign for Hugh’s law to secure better financial support for parents caring for seriously ill children, and also for his work fighting for the restoration of the several internationally significant chalk streams that flow through North East Hertfordshire. I look forward to doing what I can to further both of those important projects during my time in this place. Although the many years of my predecessor’s incumbency have all but erased it from our memory, I am not in fact the first Member of my party to represent communities in North East Hertfordshire. The late, great, trailblazing Shirley Williams, when she was first elected as a Labour MP, represented many of the areas that make up my constituency. Despite the intervening 60 years, I found reading her maiden speech from 1964 very helpful in preparing for this moment, for, as she said then, the constituency I represent is in “many ways…a microcosm” of much of our country. North East Hertfordshire from Hinxworth to Bayford contains many small rural communities full of important history and culture—from the home of George Orwell in Wallington to the stained-glass windows designed by William Morris and pre-Raphaelite artists in Waterford. In Baldock, Buntingford and Royston, we have quintessentially English market towns, home to fantastic independent businesses as well as nationally significant companies such as Johnson Matthey. In Letchworth, we have the world’s first garden city, built on the principles of the common ownership of land, which to this day offers a radical example of how to better design and build the communities of the future. Surrounding it all, we have some of the best agricultural land in the country, with local farmers such as those near Groundswell in Weston and Finches farm in Benington spearheading the ecological innovation we need to grow fantastic food in harmony with nature. Yet in my experience of speaking to residents right across North East Hertfordshire, the recurring theme is of communities dispirited and frustrated at having their needs put aside in the interests of what others have called progress, so I will close by mentioning one debt of honour that I want to bring to hon. Members’ attention at this time. I have been asked to keep the following story anonymous by the family in question, but I believe it illustrates powerfully how the communities outside our urban centres are too often treated. During the general election, as I reached the last road canvassing in a particularly idyllic village in my constituency, I came to knock on the final door in a quiet row of terraces. After initially waiting without answer, I was about to leave when I was called over by a voice from the passenger seat of a nearby car. The gentleman sat there was not old and was keen to speak, but was clearly very ill. Between painful coughing and laboured breathing, he explained to me how in the construction of new housing in the meadow beyond his street, agricultural sheds containing asbestos were demolished with almost incomprehensible recklessness in a single afternoon by workers who were themselves equipped with virtually none of the necessary protective equipment. Rather than the asbestos being carefully removed, it was smashed up on site, creating large clouds of hazardous dust right next to the existing homes. The gentleman I was speaking to had, tragically, subsequently contracted asbestosis, which had ruined his health and left him barely able to travel from his front door to his car. Despite the concerns he raised at the time, no one was ever held to account for these actions, and he urged me passionately to raise the dangers associated with the rushed and unsafe demolition of agricultural buildings containing asbestos at the earliest opportunity if I was elected as his MP. I am sorry to inform the House that when I returned a few weeks later to speak to him about honouring his request and including this story in my maiden speech, I was told by his widow that he had recently passed away. The chance for any meaningful justice for this family has now gone with him. Meanwhile, developers have no doubt pocketed a return on investment that much fatter for having fatally cut corners at the expense of local residents. Whether it is profit-led developments, the cancellation of bus routes, or the closure of banks and village schools, the fundamental experience of towns and villages like those in North East Hertfordshire has too often been one of being done to and expected to endure, rather than one of being looked after, worked with and empowered to contribute. It is this, above all, that I hope to chip away at in my contributions in this place. I thank the House for listening patiently to my first attempt, and my constituents for giving me the opportunity to do so.