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.

• 8 Sept 2026 · Health Bill · Hansard source

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  I am sure that many Members from across the House are aware of the campaign in memory of Hugh Menai-Davis, the son of my constituents Ceri and Frances who tragically passed away at the age of just six. As part of that campaign, the amendments that I have tabled to the Bill are designed to support families at the most difficult time imaginable. Our national health service and welfare state have changed and evolved over almost a century, and we should always keep a close watch on how faithfully they remain connected to their founding principles. Support “from the cradle to the grave” should not a dusty slogan; it must be a constant aspiration. Wherever gaps or shortcoming are identified, we must address them. It should concern us all that support for parents of seriously ill children is one such gap. When a child becomes seriously ill, the NHS mobilises around the child, quite rightly, but parents must mobilise around everything else—getting to work and hospital appointments, looking after other children, managing existing caring responsibilities, and somehow keeping on top of bills, rent or mortgages that do not stop when a child becomes ill. When all of this takes place alongside the fear that their child may die, the pressure on families is near impossible to bear.

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

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  As we have heard many times in today’s debate, there is a vast difference between trade unions—which are made up of millions of members making small contributions that are collectively donated to the Labour party, which they support—and corporations and rich individuals seeking influence and to further their own vested interests. To continue where I left off, what confidence can the British people have that the houses that will be built in their area will meet the actual needs of local families and enhance the beauty of their communities, when the developers throwing up sprawling, characterless, rip-off estates across the country are able to buy seats for a quiet chat with Ministers, during which they can lobby them? It is time to ban developers from donating to political parties, to wash away the stain of undue influence, and to deliver a housing and planning system that puts people before profit.

• 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.

• 14 Jul 2026 · Political Donations and Housing Developers · Hansard source

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  I rise to present a petition alongside a corresponding online petition signed by hundreds of my constituents in North East Hertfordshire calling to ban housing developers from donating to political parties. Developers are some of the largest donors in politics, pouring in massive sums to tilt the planning system ever further in their favour. Cash for access leaves the impression that the same developers are wrecking nature and failing to deliver affordable homes. Those profiting from low-quality, overpriced housing are also writing the rules. This cements inequality at the heart of democracy because the people living with the consequences of a profit-driven housing crisis never get a seat at the table. The petition states: The petition of residents of the United Kingdom, Declares that housing developers are among the largest donors to political parties and donate massive sums of money in an attempt to tilt the planning system further in their favour; further declares that cash-for-access leaves the impression that the same developers profiting from low-quality, overpriced housing are also helping to write the rules; and further declares that the corrupting influence of big money should be removed from the planning system and politics should be refocused on genuine solutions to the housing crisis that bring down housing costs for ordinary people and give local communities more of a say over their future. The petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urges the Government to ban housing developers from donating to political parties. And the petitioners remain, etc. [P003225]