Chris Hinchliff MP: speeches

Speeches

• 14 Sept 2026 · Water Sector: Public Ownership · Hansard source

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  It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Mrs Barker. The case for public ownership of our water is unanswerable. We can all see the money being swindled out of the British public by the privatised system. We can all see the sewage pollution going on, even during a summer of drought. I beg the Minister, in her response, not to repeat the bogus figures that some use to argue that public ownership of one of our most essential national resources would be too expensive. Those claims have been so comprehensively debunked that using them now is just getting embarrassing. The truth is that the cost of the societal impacts of failing to take back control of our water resources would be far higher than that of taking action now, because—ludicrously for a country as wet as ours—we are on course for a water deficit of more than 6 billion litres of water every single day in the next 30 years. The truth is that there is currently no credible plan to avert that. All the reservoirs that currently we have planned will reduce that deficit only by a meagre 13%. There is no realistic prospect of water companies hitting the efficiency targets they have signed up for, either—and that is before the speculative proliferation of data centres claims its thirsty share of our dwindling resources. In all likelihood, we will face further and severe water shortfalls in the future. Fire services are already warning that water pressure in many areas is dangerously low for fighting the new wildfire season that we also face. Communities in my constituency have already seen the taps running dry. In the future, we will have to choose what we do and do not use water for. We cannot have a situation in which our democracy has to mediate the fundamental question of national security through the interests of private companies that have proven beyond all doubt that their overwhelming priority will always be profit. We cannot afford to leave our water in the hands of private vested interests. It must be brought back into public ownership.

• 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.

• 13 Jul 2026 · State of Climate and Nature · Hansard source

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  Our best hope in the fight to restore our environment is this country’s nature-loving public, but many across the House will be aware of the recent example of the Environment Agency threatening to take people to court for trying to clean up their dying river. What steps will the Minister take to ensure that the Environment Agency is empowering the public rather than threatening to prosecute them for protecting nature?

• 8 Jul 2026 · Societal Impact of AI: Government Policy · Hansard source

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  I apologise in advance, Ms McVey, that I need to go to a Select Committee so cannot attend the full debate. My hon. Friend is, as usual, right about everything. Does he agree that public resistance to the construction of data centres is due not just to concern about the impact on the environment, but to underlying public scepticism about the breathlessness with which politicians talk about economic growth driven by digital technology when we have an economy that has a completely unsustainable food system, is not delivering genuinely affordable homes, has rubbish public transport in many parts of the country, and is not delivering the basics?