Chris Hinchliff MP: speeches

Speeches

• 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.

• 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?

• 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.

• 13 Apr 2026 · Social Housing Standards · Hansard source

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  More social housing is essential but, as Members across the House will know, increasingly distant housing associations are often far too quick to put up fees and far too slow to tackle damp, mould and disrepair. What more will the Minister do to ensure that future public funding comes with clear strings attached to require better standards for our constituents?

• 13 Apr 2026 · Social Housing Standards · Hansard source

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  22. What steps he is taking to improve standards for social housing.

• 25 Mar 2026 · Foreign Financial Influence and Interference: UK Politics · Hansard source

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  I welcome this statement. The public must have confidence that political decisions are made in their interests, not those of wealthy donors. Nowhere is that more important than in relation to the housing crisis, where there are also significant concerns that vested interests are seeking to exert significant influence on policy making. Will the Secretary of State meet me to discuss my proposed amendment to the Representation of the People Bill to ban developers from donating to politics and restore trust in our planning system?

• 24 Feb 2026 · Local Transport: Planning Developments · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under you in the Chair, Sir Desmond. I am afraid I have been lured into making some side comments before getting into the meat of my speech. This is in relation to the point about aggregate supply and meeting the housing needs of young people. It is really important that we bring some facts to that debate, and the reality is that from 2013 to 2023 the housing stock in this country expanded more rapidly than our population did. It is not an issue of aggregate supply, and focusing on that will never meet the needs of younger people in this country. The relationship between new housing and local transport, cuts to the core of why we need to end the developer-led, profit-motivated approach to planning in this nation. Despite warm words in national guidelines, right across the country the relentless reality of most new estates is more traffic, more toxic air pollution and more space given to car parking than to children for play. The reality is inadequate public transport, distant services, non-existent local employment opportunities and more noise, congestion and pollution blighting our lives. Few things shape the basic, day-to-day experience of life in the UK in 2026 more than the disconnect between transport policy on paper and actual development around our towns and villages. When we came to power, Labour promised change, but this experience will not begin to improve until we address one of the most harmful phrases in national planning policy: the presumption in favour of sustainable development. Few policies are more baleful or more egregiously misnamed. It may be called sustainable development, but in fact it does exactly the reverse of what it says on the tin. This legacy policy puts power overwhelmingly in the hands of developers, overruling the aspirations of local councils and trampling on the concerns of communities. It is responsible for the proliferation of bolt-on estates on the edge of towns and villages, with no realistic prospect that most people living there will be able to access the services and facilities that we all need in our daily lives, other than by driving—locking in car dependency from the get-go. The presumption in favour of sustainable development allows the construction of developments designed to exist as commuter dormitories, rather than creating real communities with work, leisure and culture all within walking distance. It is the precise opposite of the idealism of the garden city principles originally put into action in Letchworth. By clearing the way for speculative, unsustainable developments, the presumption currently ensures that much of what is built in this country is defined by what is easy and profitable for developers, rather than what is good for people and planet. Above all, car-dependent developments like these squeeze the space for genuine society. Community connections will always struggle to thrive if the public realm is dominated by parked cars and traffic. We need to put local authorities back in the driving seat, with the powers to design and deliver developments that genuinely deliver affordable homes in well planned and cohesive communities, with all the opportunities necessary for happy and fulfilling lives. Above all, to ensure that development comes with healthy and positive local transport connections, we must—the Environmental Audit Committee, on which I serve, called for this—amend the definition of “presumption in favour of sustainable development” in the national planning policy framework in order to strengthen the safeguards against environmentally unsustainable, unplanned and speculative development.

• 12 Feb 2026 · Social Rented Housing Sector · Hansard source

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  As the chair of the recently formed all-party parliamentary group for council and social housing, I welcome the report’s conclusion about the importance of boosting the supply of social housing to meet the huge demand for new, high-quality, genuinely affordable homes and to replace older, lower-standard homes that are long past their lifespan. It is a daunting task, but we know that it can be done: the great reforming post-war Labour Government built more than 800,000 council houses between 1946 and 1951. Does my hon. Friend agree that we need bold policies now to match the scale of that achievement?

• 29 Jan 2026 · River Habitats: Protection and Restoration · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Butler. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Lloyd Hatton) on his well-made speech opening the debate. The state of our rivers is a near-perfect metaphor for how badly we have got our priorities wrong as a society. Through a combination of carelessness, greed and wilful neglect, we have managed to poison and exhaust one of the essential elements of life. Not a single one of England’s rivers, which quite literally shape our country, is in good overall health. All of them are polluted with toxic chemicals. Clean waterways teeming with life—places that can refresh body, mind and soul—should be the absolute right of every English citizen. As it stands, we have squandered the vast natural wealth of our rivers and streams. In doing so, we have robbed the future generations of our nation of the best part of their inheritance. Restoring our rivers and streams is, above all, a question of changing what we mean by growth. Experiencing the glories of nature is one of the joys that make life worth living. That is what we should be focusing our efforts on—not on abstract GDP figures that mean next to nothing to anyone outside the imagination of the Office for Budget Responsibility. Instead of more chemicals, more concrete, more consumption, we will do far more to improve the wellbeing of all of our citizens from every background by returning to them the burst of mayflies at the start of summer, the chance “To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping”, as Rupert Brooke once did, without worrying what filth we might be swallowing; or even just the chance to mess about in boats in the streams that once flowed fully, but now have been choked to a pitiful dribble. A more potent symbol of national decline would be hard to invent. All the polling shows that the public are overwhelmingly in favour of decisive action to restore nature in this country. The inspirational efforts of groups across North East Hertfordshire such as RevIvel, the Friends of the Rib and Quin, and the River Beane Restoration Association prove the grassroots passion for seeing our rivers and especially our chalk streams restored. My party, the Labour party, should know this deep in its heart. Since the first inception of our movement, the demand of politics by the people for the people has always been to protect the natural world and to open it up to all so that ordinary working-class citizens can enjoy it, too. When politicians constantly attack the very nature that our voters love and the Office for Environmental Protection has to investigate the Government for their utter failure to deliver the statutory targets for rivers to be in good condition by next year—set out in laws that we politicians passed—it is little surprise that faith in politics is so miserably low. When we make promises to restore nature, we must never again fail to honour our words with action. If that means the Treasury has to adapt its plans, so be it. I will be explicit on this point. I know some people believe that putting more and more power in the hands of profiteering developers will somehow magically resolve stagnant productivity, but our model of speculative house building, combined with the legal obligation for water companies to supply water to new developments, is increasingly incompatible with healthy rivers in many parts of the country. There are environmental limits on the amount of water we can use without wrecking our freshwater systems, but currently we are just pretending that they do not exist. The over-abstraction from the aquifers that feed our precious chalk streams is a clear case in point. In a country as wet as ours, it should take a true organising genius to produce water shortages, yet a combination of planning, deregulation and a profit-motivated private market has contrived to do just that. It is time for a “chalk streams first” approach that protects them from over-abstraction and for long overdue recognition that genuine, sustainable development means accepting that environmental boundaries cannot be compromised. The truth is, if we measure economic success by the genuine improvement of our constituents’ lives and by the provision of good, meaningful work for all, the restoration of our rivers is in fact a huge opportunity. My plea to the Minister today is simple: go back to colleagues in the Treasury and tell them about the missing half of the clean jobs revolution. Tell them about the huge expansion in the number of ecologists and conservation experts we need to monitor the health of our rivers and advise our local authorities and hard-working farmers. Tell them about the thousands of skilled jobs needed to re-wiggle our rivers, and tell them to create and maintain riparian buffers such as carr woodland and floodplain meadows around all our waterways. Tell them about the jobs and vast increases in natural capital that could be created across every part of the country by restoring the small waters like ponds and headwater streams, and integrating those crucial areas at the top of river systems into the water framework directive. And tell them about the national mobilisation needed to prevent the next river pollution scandal from the highway run-off filling our rivers with a nightmarish cocktail of microplastics, heavy metals and herbicides. There are thousands of unpermitted and in many cases barely monitored highway outfalls across the country that must be urgently investigated, maintained and upgraded if we are genuinely to improve the health of our rivers. Collectively, those are tasks that would not just upskill and employ thousands of people, but would immeasurably enrich our nation by restoring our streams and rivers as the crown jewels of England’s countryside that they always ought to have been.

• 11 Dec 2025 · National Plan to End Homelessness · Hansard source

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  I welcome the Minister’s work on this important subject. Just after we came into office, Ministers committed from the Dispatch Box to a revolution in council house building. I have welcomed and noted the Minister’s statements on social housing, but she will be aware that there are growing concerns around an increasing corporate ethos in housing associations, many of which have a mixed record at best. I have heard directly from constituents about the stark contrast in security of tenure between when they were living in a council house home and now, when it is owned by a housing association. Given that Shelter estimates that nearly 400,000 people are currently homeless across the country, will the Minister set out what the Government will do to deliver that council housing revolution in constituencies such as mine?

• 8 Dec 2025 · Planning and Infrastructure Bill · Hansard source

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  I am not certain whether I or the Minister will be more relieved at the conclusion of debates on this legislation. I welcome the fact that the Minister has tabled an amendment to the remaining proposal from the other place; I support Government amendment (a), and welcome the additional parliamentary scrutiny it brings. Once again, this legislation is in a better place than it was the last time it came in front of us, and I welcome the fact that Ministers have committed to environmental delivery plans being initially focused on nutrient neutrality and that further EDPs will be preceded by a statement in this House presenting the evidence for them. I want to reflect briefly on further evidence that has come before us since our last debate on the Bill. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has published an assessment of England’s biodiversity that found substantially more indicators of our nature in decline than going in the right direction. The Environmental Audit Committee, on which I sit, published its report on environmental sustainability and housing growth in which it called for an end to “lazy” narratives and scapegoating of nature. New polling has also found that more than two thirds of voters think politicians are out of touch with the public’s values on nature. We are still a long way from a planning system that delivers genuinely affordable homes and social justice, values democracy and reverses the decline of England’s nature. I hope that, with the conclusion of this Bill, we can move forward to some more positive progress.

• 13 Nov 2025 · Planning and Infrastructure Bill · Hansard source

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  I declare an interest as a vice-chair of the Climate and Nature Crisis Caucus. At the outset of my contribution to today’s debate on this important legislation, there are a few general points that are probably worth reiterating. There need be no conflict between house building and nature; the real conflict is between greed and the sort of country we want to build. After 20 years of planning deregulation, time and again we see profiteering trumping public need and the protection of the countryside; cost cutting where communities deserve quality; and low-density, high-price housing while families wait for council homes. Since we last debated the Bill in this place, Key Cities has published a very useful report, which highlights that in a survey of its members, only 6% cited the planning system as the primary obstacle to house building. More than twice that figure pointed to developer delays, so I hope that we will shortly see similarly major Government legislation to tackle the profiteering developers that are blocking the delivery of genuinely affordable housing in this country. The recent announcement of plans for towns built within a new forest shows that good development and nature recovery can go hand in hand, and we must go further. A democratic programme of mass council house building could easily avoid the clashes that so often mark the developer-led system. What is needed are well-funded councils with the power to assemble land and identify the best sites for new homes—building not grey estates that are shaped by the defeatism of low expectations, but cohesive, thriving communities that are built for life to flourish. That is the solution to the housing crisis and would create a country that puts people and nature before profit. I welcome the several important amendments tabled by the Government in the other place. In my view, the most important is the stronger overall improvement test for nature recovery, which I campaigned for on Report. It is very good news that these amendments have substantially allayed the concerns of the Office for Environmental Protection. Nevertheless, it is clear that environmental experts and conservationists continue to have some concerns, which the other place has sought to address through Lords amendments 40 and 38 in particular. Our Labour Government were elected on a clear manifesto promise to reverse the nature crisis in this country, so it is essential we get this right. That is particularly urgent for our endangered species and irreplaceable habitats, including chalk streams such as the Rib, Beane, Ivel and Mimram, which criss-cross North East Hertfordshire and bring joy to so many people’s lives. I genuinely welcome the comments that the Minister has made to allay the concerns of nature experts, and I will dedicate my remaining time to a few short questions that I hope he can address in his wind-up. First, given the need for legal certainty, can the Minister confirm that the overall improvement test will guarantee that irreplaceable habitats and species cannot be covered by EDPs, and if so, will the Government set out a list of environmental features that they consider would be irreplaceable? Secondly, can the Minister confirm whether any EDPs are currently under consideration or development by Natural England, or proposed by the Government? If so, will any of them be affected if Lords amendment 40 remained part of the Bill? Thirdly, will the Minister give confidence to the many constituents of North East Hertfordshire worried about potential impacts on the wildlife we love by once again putting on record that the Government recognise the difference between diffuse landscape issues such as nutrient pollution, where strategic scale action is best suited for nature restoration, and protected sites and species that cannot easily be recreated elsewhere? Fourthly, given the widespread interest in this Bill shown by many of our constituents and by the wider nature sector, will the Minister consider providing further transparency and accountability through a Government amendment in lieu of Lords amendment 40 to ensure parliamentary approval of EDPs beyond diffuse issues such as air, water and newts? Fifthly, given that the “Catchment Based Approach” annual review published this autumn found that a third of chalk streams do not have a healthy flow regime, that over-abstraction due to development pressures is one of the main threats facing these crown jewels of our natural heritage and that there are currently no planning policies specifically protecting chalk streams, can the Minister set out in more detail how the Government foresee planning authorities being able to direct inappropriate development away from struggling chalk streams within the process of setting spatial development strategy plans, and would he consider opportunities for this through regulation, if not through the Bill? Sixthly, will the Minister provide further certainty from the Dispatch Box about ensuring that chalk streams are specifically added to the national planning policy framework as an irreplaceable habitat, and will he set out when this might happen given that an update of those provisions has been delayed since 2023? Seventhly, as one reason put forward for Lords amendment 40 is that it would mitigate concerns about the weakening of the Protection of Badgers Act 1992, what reassurances can the Minister give my constituents that these iconic animals will not be at risk from widespread licences to kill in EDPs paid for by developers in the absence of Lords amendment 40? Eighthly, can the Minister confirm whether the Government have assessed the potential impact of proposed biodiversity net gain exemptions on the private finance for nature markets that will be essential for the delivery of EDPs? Ninthly and finally, can the Minister reassure those who have raised concerns that the current legislation may allow money committed to the natural restoration fund to be redirected to other purposes?

• 30 Oct 2025 · Property Service Charges · Hansard source

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  The scandal of property service charges is one of the most unjust, indefensible and generally enraging issues facing my constituents. In many cases, the charges amount to little more than a form of parasitic exploitation of ordinary people by absentee landlords and businesses. It has been allowed to fester for far too long. Across the country, 5 million people are trapped in a broken system that leaves them beholden to obscure, often overseas companies with a licence to cream off their hard-earned earnings with almost complete impunity. They have got away with it for years because leaseholders simply cannot effectively challenge this unfairness. As so often in Britain today, wealth is translated directly into power and ordinary people are left without any sense of agency over something as basic as their month to month finances. The issue of unfair and arbitrary property service charges is impacting every corner of North East Hertfordshire, from Royston to Tewin and from Baldock to Buntingford. There are fleecehold estates where constituents have purchased a new build property under freehold conditions but found they are “hostages to the whims and desires of service companies who can charge any amount of service fee they wish and without redress”, making a mockery of the notion of freehold. There are housing association tenants paying eye-watering fees, yet left with neglected and inadequate services; residents in retirement accommodation facing extortionate maintenance costs that leave families struggling to pay care fees and trapped with properties that have little resale value; and leaseholders facing huge hikes in service charges by freeholders, yet seeing little evidence of the maintenance they are supposedly paying for. One constituent put the experience plainly: “They are committing service charge abuse” and “they are making people’s lives miserable.” I have previously criticised privatised water companies and housing developers for raking in vast profits despite substandard delivery, but in many ways they pale in comparison with the sheer audacity of the leasehold scandal. These are issues rooted in feudal concepts of property ownership, and those trapped paying these fees, with next to no ability to challenge or escape them, are in effect still suffering from a form of economic serfdom where those with the right title deeds can levy private taxes on ordinary people that bear practically no relation to services rendered. Nearly 1,000 years after William’s conquest, I think the English have suffered under this Norman yoke quite enough. The Government’s own Competition and Markets Authority found “no persuasive evidence that consumers receive anything in return” for the ground rents they pay. In communities like Letchworth, that rings painfully true. We should all welcome the Government’s recent victory in the High Court over wealthy private interests who threw millions at trying to block vital reforms. I also welcome Ministers’ commitment to finishing the job of reforming leasehold. I look forward to supporting further steps to end this scandal once and for all. The solution is clear: municipal estate ownership and the ability to move to commonhold as quickly as is reasonably possible. Home ownership should mean owning the bricks and mortar and should come with a sense of freedom, not exposure to exploitation. No one should be left behind as we put this injustice to bed. I would also like to take this opportunity to highlight the broader campaign for a charter of community empowerment. Many of its principles are relevant to the debate. If the Government are to achieve that historic Labour mission of redistributing not just wealth but power into the hands of the majority, in today’s context that must mean trusting that ordinary people are more capable of upkeeping their own estates and managing their homes fairly than offshore firms or the landowning aristocracy. For once, I will not rain down a series of detailed demands on the Minister, as I know he faces a complex legal situation left by the previous Administration. Today I want only to urge him to cut this Gordian knot in this Parliament and give my constituents a straight- forward way out of being forever tied to service fees by unaccountable companies. The economic benefits to our high streets, which are desperately needed in villages and market towns such as those I represent, would be enormous, as thousands of families across the country found their disposable income no longer slashed every month by charges that cannot be justified. The resistance that the Government have faced from the freehold lobby, clinging desperately to their ill-gotten gains and the sacred right to turn hard-working people into cash cows, should only renew our sense of urgency. I am sure that we will see more appeals and outcry from vested interests—the Government should know the Labour party and millions outside this place are united behind them. After the High Court’s ruling, the Residential Freehold Association warned that the decision “opens the door for Government to intervene in markets far beyond the leasehold sector”— in other words, the terrible spectre that democracy may be empowered to secure the public good before private profit. As my constituents lose out in an economy rigged against ordinary people—one that rewards wealthy property owners and unearned income rather than those who go out and work for a living—I say, quite simply: I hope it is right.

• 15 Sept 2025 · Provision of Council Housing · Hansard source

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  I fully agree that council housing is essential to meeting the housing crisis that we face, and I hope that we will hear ambitious remarks from the Minister. The question is not simply how much housing is built, but the type of housing built and for whom. As has been referenced, more than 1.3 million households in England are trapped on waiting lists—a rise of 10% in the past two years alone. The scale of our failure to provide homes for all our citizens is staggering and reveals in the starkest possible terms the absolute folly of relying on the private sector to meet the public’s basic needs.

• 15 Sept 2025 · Provision of Council Housing · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention, and I fully agree. Before I get to costs, I would like us for a moment to lift our eyes to the potential prizes to be won by a new generation of council housing across the country, because council housing is not just the most effective tool we have to cut waiting lists, it is not just the best policy for transforming the futures of the tens of thousands of children going to sleep every night in temporary accommodation, and it is not just the surest way to save billions of pounds from the housing benefits bill. As if each of those were not justification enough in their own right, council housing is also the best hope we have to create the new communities that foster the sort of life and society that the labour movement has always dreamed of and strived for. This does not seem to be debated too often in this place, but the built environment we go about our daily lives in matters profoundly. The provision of council housing is not just about progress towards social justice and the eradication of inequality; it is also about building a world around ourselves that contributes every day to the experience of self-worth, happiness, peace, connection and leisure in all our lives. If we are to be judged by future generations, not just on how many houses we build but on what we build, a policy dominated by council housing, with local authorities in the driving seat able to plan and design developments matching the hopes and identity of each community, is essential to avoiding the condemnation of history. Far too many of the estates thrown up in recent years by the private sector have been notable mainly for their identikit and bland miserablism. Even leaving aside the appalling quality of new build housing on many speculative developments, the status quo approach that housing policy has sunk into has in effect created a new phenomenon of spiritual slums, where a near total lack of facilities or features capable of instilling any sense of interest or civic pride condemns the young to a sentence of boredom. When we are building estates with more land given to car parking than space for children to play, rising disaffection and antisocial behaviour should not be a surprise to anyone. The choice facing the Labour Government in the provision of council housing is therefore between socialism and delinquency. Similarly, the record of private housing development when it comes to integrating nature into our lives, a basic need that we know more and more clearly is essential to our mental health, is shocking. Research has found that environmental features promised in planning conditions are not being delivered almost half of the time. Simple measures to help declining insect populations, birds, bats and other iconic species have all been regularly shirked by developers, and nearly half of the native hedges that were supposed to be laid do not exist. Once again, public goods, even when legally committed to, routinely fail to materialise when we rely on private interests to meet our nation’s housing needs. Public-led housing—council housing—offers the opportunity for different priorities that at last deliver something better. Just as 100 years ago the Independent Labour party trailblazer Ada Salter set about housing the working class of Bermondsey while also improving their lives by planting thousands of trees and filling open spaces with flowers, so now we can have council housing that goes hand in hand with nature. What is more, while so-called affordable housing set at 80% of market rates is often used to justify speculative developments, in reality it continues to price key workers out of many parts of the country. The promise of a new era of council housing, in which rents were linked to local incomes, would create a more democratic and less stratified society in which people of all incomes lived side by side. I would welcome the Minister’s reassurance that at least 60% of the affordable homes programme will be homes for social rent or council housing. Prioritising council-led delivery should also mean greater public accountability for maintenance and tenant support. That, sadly, is often lacking where housing associations have moved too far from their original purpose. If we want genuinely affordable homes for those currently priced out of the housing market, better place making, greener and more integrated communities, and all the things that our constituents are demanding, so that we can go from wishing for a better society to that being the lived reality across our nation, we must have housing funded by patient capital that can focus on wider benefits, rather than mere monetary calculations. Across the country, the evidence could not be clearer: only public funding is capable of mobilising the necessary resources at the scale required through long-term investments to deliver the public goods so conspicuously absent in recent years. Over six years, at a time of shortages, debt, constraints, and competing demands on public expenditure that were even greater than ours, the post-war Labour Government oversaw the construction of more than 800,000 council houses—some of the best ever built in this country.

• 15 Sept 2025 · Provision of Council Housing · Hansard source

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  I agree with my hon. Friend and will come to right to buy later in my speech. As Bevan described, “the speculative builder, by his very nature, is not a plannable instrument.” —[ Official Report , 6 March 1946; Vol. 420, c. 451.] They build what makes them most money, while we need our councils empowered to assess the needs of their communities and directly deliver for them, because that is in the public interest.

• 15 Sept 2025 · Provision of Council Housing · Hansard source

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  I fully agree with my hon. Friend. The points he raises perfectly exemplify why the provision of council housing is so important. England has seen 724,000 more net additional dwellings than new households since 2015, yet in the same period the number of households in England on local authority housing waiting lists rose by more than 74,000.

• 15 Sept 2025 · Provision of Council Housing · Hansard source

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  I had better make some progress. That is the yardstick the Government should measure themselves against. I now come at last to how we might go about achieving this. The place to start, as we have already heard, is with plugging the gap. We must stop draining our stock of council houses, year on year. It is a fact of mesmerising absurdity that in the last year of the previous Conservative Government, there was a net loss of social housing in this country, as over 20,000 homes for social rent were lost to right to buy. I welcome the determination of Labour Ministers to reform the right to buy, and to ensure that more homes are built than lost, and I especially welcome the planned 35-year exemption for newly built properties. I urge the Government to bring forward the necessary legislation for those changes as swiftly as possible. Next, we need further planning reform to empower our local authorities to drive forward a council housing renaissance up and down the land. We need new social housing targets, to make the delivery of council housing the urgent priority of every local planning authority. Ministers must bring together local authorities and charities like Crisis to create fairer rules for eligibility for social housing, so that homeless people are no longer unfairly excluded. We need to build on the welcome measures that Ministers have already brought forward on hope value, by allowing local authorities to disregard it entirely for the purposes of purchasing land to meet housing targets. That would not only make the provision of council housing on a vastly increased scale viable by ending the payment of inflated sums of public money to wealthy landowners, slashing an estimated 38% off the total development costs of a mass-scale building programme; it would also allow local authorities to capture the full uplift in land values associated with the delivery of their local plans, and to fund projects that combine high-quality council housing with improved space for nature and expanded public infrastructure. We must also face up to the reality of serious constraints on construction capacity due to a workforce that is too small and an inadequate supply of key materials. If we are to have the hundreds of thousands of council houses that we need in order to swiftly tackle the housing crisis, the Government should ensure that the new strategic planning authorities created through devolution have tools at their disposal to direct available resources where they are needed most, even if that means putting limits on construction for private profit. Of course, many of our local authorities will need substantial support to rebuild the capacity necessary for a major council house building programme. As Shelter has said, in trying to balance budgets after years of funding cuts, local authorities have been forced to shut down their building operations, transfer their council stock to housing associations or focus on building private homes for sale. We will only see the council housing that our country desperately needs if we reverse that trend. Alongside making more low-interest loans available to councils through the Public Works Loan Board, the Government should raise the money needed to invest in a new generation of local authority planners, ecologists, designers and architects through a windfall tax on the largest property developers, which have dominated the market and enjoyed super-normal profits for too long. On funding, the Government have already committed to a transformative £39 billion over 10 years for the new affordable homes programme. I will not try the Minister’s patience by calling for additional money today, but front-loading this investment and driving it primarily towards council housing could see us well on our way. I recognise that, even with all that, matching the scale of council housing delivery overseen by Attlee’s Government is a daunting task, but in the context of the upcoming Budget and increasingly vociferous debates on the merits of a wealth tax, I will take this opportunity to briefly fly the flag for the comparatively straightforward proposal of a levy on multiple home ownership. With so many in our society unable to access suitable housing at all, requiring those who own multiple homes to contribute to the public coffers a small percentage of the value of their additional properties would be both fair and proportionate. That leaves a final, concluding point. The case for more council housing and what it could deliver for our society is overwhelming in its own right, but even if we were to reduce ourselves to desiccated calculating machines, concerned only with economic statistics, the irrefutable fact is that we cannot afford not to invest in hundreds of thousands of new council houses over the coming years. A major council house building programme would deliver a huge counter-cyclical boost to economic activity in every region of the country. Alongside the vast savings to be made on the cost of temporary accommodation provided by councils, there would be knock-on benefits from secure decent homes: they would reduce costs right across the public sector, from the NHS to our schools. In short, it would be fiscally reckless not to invest in a new generation of council housing. We all deserve a warm, safe and affordable home, where we can put down roots and have the safety and security to flourish and grow. It is our duty to make that a reality. Hundreds of thousands of families cannot afford for us to delay or go slow. Now is the time for the Government to live up to their heritage and provide a new era of council housing that transforms lives up and down the country.

• 15 Sept 2025 · Provision of Council Housing · Hansard source

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  Council housing is the first, most important and only viable solution to the housing crisis and to creating a society that matches the hopes of both the Labour movement and the wider public. Not long ago, under the leadership of the current Prime Minister, Labour Front Benchers now sitting in Cabinet declared that housing is a fundamental human right, that Labour would restore social housing as the second-largest tenure ahead of the private rented sector and that the mantra of Ministers as they did so would be “council housing, council housing, council housing”. As voters continue to demand the change that the Labour Government were elected to deliver, now is the time to recapture the clarity and optimism of that vision. It bears repeating at the outset that solely expanding the market supply of housing is not a solution to providing the genuinely affordable homes that so many families across our country desperately need.

• 15 Sept 2025 · Provision of Council Housing · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is absolutely correct in his assessment of one of the many benefits of council housing. The provision of council housing is uniquely important for meeting the Government’s objectives, because of the risk in designing housing policy around a target delivered by a market over which we have limited control. Once again, Bevan was right when he said that committing to general housing targets would be “crystal gazing” and “demagogic”. He also stated: “The fact is that if at this moment we attempted to say that, by a certain date, we will be building a certain number of houses, that statement would rest upon no firm basis of veracity”. —[ Official Report , 17 October 1945; Vol. 414, c. 1232.] It is only with council housing supplied directly by public authorities that we can give real confidence to the electorate in our ability to deliver. The last time we were building 300,000 homes a year, nearly half the total was council housing, and if we want to secure an increase in construction to 1.5 million new homes over the course of this Parliament, the lion’s share of the balance must come through council housing.

• 4 Sept 2025 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  The current drafting of national planning policy is allowing developers to ride roughshod over local democracy, imposing completely inappropriate bolt-on estates to market towns such as Buntingford and Royston, while wholly failing to deliver the genuinely affordable housing that we need. It is difficult to imagine a system and state of affairs more likely to erode public support for the Government’s house building ambitions. Can we have a debate in Government time to ensure the presumption in favour of sustainable development achieves what it is intended to, rather than the current farce?