Gareth Bacon MP: speeches

Speeches

• 5 Nov 2025 · House Building: London · Hansard source

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  I am afraid I cannot, because we are under time pressure. A report recently released by the Centre for Policy Studies described London as “The City That Doesn’t Build”. It is impossible not to agree with that when the mayor’s record is put under scrutiny. Under Sadiq Khan, housing starts have collapsed in London, with the number of private homes under construction set to slump to only 15,000 in 2027—a mere a quarter of what should be expected. Analysis from the Centre for Policy Studies has shown that, over the last financial year, only 4,170 homes have been started in London, amounting to less than 5% of London’s 88,000 home target. In the first half of this year, that has hardly been improved on, with just 2,158 private housing starts, again versus a target of 88,000 per year. Those totals are disastrous. The mayor, the Secretary of State and the Prime Minister should be reversing those figures, not indulging or excusing them. The picture becomes even worse when we look at affordable housing. Affordable homes had just 347 starts between April and June, which is around 15% of the total starts for 2023-24, and just 9% of the total starts in 2024-25. Prior to the general election last year, the Mayor of London was telling anyone who would listen that he needed £4.9 billion per year for the next 10 years to build affordable homes. The Government elected last July did not accede to his request. Given his appalling record over the past decade, I cannot say I entirely blame them for not trusting his ability to deliver. At the last spending review in June, as has been mentioned, £11.7 billion was awarded for the next affordable housing programme, which will run from 2026 to 2036. At the last round of Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government questions, when I asked the Secretary of State what he was doing to hold the Mayor of London to account for his lamentable record of failure, he alluded to a pending announcement. As the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Luke Taylor) noted, a written ministerial statement was snuck out without fanfare a couple of weeks ago that announced temporary reforms to London house building to try to cover the mayor’s decade of failure. Some of those proposals are welcome, including the sensible removal of elements that can constrain density, such as dual aspect and units around the core of a building, as well as some of the changes to the insistence on arbitrary and unviable affordable housing targets. However, it is deeply concerning that the Government are proposing to reward the mayor’s decade of failure by giving him more power to intervene on democratically elected local councils and take planning powers away from them. Most worryingly, that gives the mayor considerable additional powers to concrete over the green belt. There is nothing in the statement about facilitating brownfield development, despite the CPRE report published last month that shows that Greater London has the capacity to deliver in excess of 462,000 new dwellings on brownfield land. The Minister is a very decent man; he is respected across the House, including by me. When we hear him speak in a few moments, I am sure he will give us invaluable insight into how the Government justify these shocking figures. However, to me, they are simply not doing enough to build or to hold the mayor to account for his failures. The Home Builders Federation has written to the independent Office for Budget Responsibility to say that, without changes to boost affordability for first-time buyers and tax cuts, the Government will miss their national housing target. Another study by the planning and environmental consultancy Lanpro suggested that, at the present of rate of building, the Government would fall 860,000 homes short of their national target—that amounts to missing the target by 57%. Together, the Mayor of London and, more recently, the Government have shown that they are anti-business and anti-growth, with spending and borrowing rising, and with inflation at almost twice the target level, as well as anaemic growth, over-regulation and rising taxation curbing any chance of a housing recovery at every turn. As I have outlined, this is being felt most in our capital city. I am deeply proud to be a Greater London MP, to have been the London Assembly member for Bexley and Bromley, to have been the Conservative leader at City Hall, to have been a London borough councillor, and to live and work in this great city. That is why I care so much about holding this Government—and specifically their shambolic colleague, the Mayor of London—to account for their abject failures to get house building in London to flourish. Action is sorely needed and desperately wanted. The Government need to do a lot more, and they need to do it now.

• 5 Nov 2025 · House Building: London · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell, and to take part in this debate about Government support for house building in London. As is the case for all hon. Members here today, this issue is of great importance to my constituents and to me, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Mr French) for securing this important debate. I also thank all hon. Members for their contributions. London is Europe’s wealthiest city, one of the world’s most desirable destinations and the capital of our great country. I am deeply proud to have represented part of it for the past 28 years, having previously served for 23 years as a local councillor in a London borough—a period that overlapped with my 13 years as a London Assembly member—and been the Member of Parliament for the wonderful people of Orpington since 2019. What we have seen in recent years in Greater London is a constantly worsening housing shortage, and a mayor seemingly completely incapable of tackling a problem that is spiralling out of control. Sir Sadiq Khan has been mayor for nearly 10 years, and continues to oversee one of the greatest housing failures this country has ever seen. I can remember sitting in the chamber at City Hall in his first year as mayor when he boasted about having negotiated the highest housing funding settlement in the history of the mayoralty. He was awarded £4.82 billion to deliver 116,000 affordable homes between 2016 and 2021, and a further £4 billion to deliver 35,000 affordable homes between 2021 and 2026. That is a total of £8.82 billion to deliver 151,000 homes in a decade between 2016 and 2026. Naturally, he gave no credit at all to the Conservative Government who gave him that money, but let us gloss over that. Instead, let us focus on Sadiq Khan’s record. To date, 77,622 affordable homes have been completed from the two programmes—barely half of what was envisaged, with only six months to go. Including those programmes and other house building, in his almost decade-long tenure at City Hall, he has averaged 8,240 affordable homes per year. That compares with an average of 11,750 per year between 2008 and 2016 under his predecessor Boris Johnson. That is a 30% decrease under Sadiq Khan, despite what he boasted at the outset was the highest housing funding settlement in history. The fact is that development has become so costly and over-regulated on Sadiq Khan’s watch that, incredibly, as my hon. Friends the Members for Old Bexley and Sidcup and for Bromley and Biggin Hill (Peter Fortune) pointed out, 80% of housing developments finished in London last year received planning permission under the London plan set out by Boris Johnson before he left office as Mayor of London in 2016, rather than under Sadiq Khan’s London plan.

• 4 Nov 2025 · Employer National Insurance Contributions: Business Impact · Hansard source

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  19. What assessment she has made of the potential impact of the increase in employer national insurance contributions on businesses.

• 4 Nov 2025 · Employer National Insurance Contributions: Business Impact · Hansard source

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  It was always blindingly obvious that increasing employer national insurance would lead to an increase in business costs, which would lead to higher prices hitting working people directly, and to rises in inflation. Sure enough, inflation has risen steadily under this Government, and it is now at almost twice its recommended level. At the last Budget, we were told it was necessary to raise taxes on businesses by £25 billion to pay for the NHS, and large amounts of money have indeed been paid to unionised workers, but just yesterday the Office for National Statistics announced that NHS productivity had fallen by 1.5% since Labour took office. Can the Chancellor explain what exactly my Orpington businesses are paying more tax for?

• 30 Oct 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  T7. Earlier, the Secretary of State said that he was committed to growing our car industry, but British car manufacturers face huge fines for selling cars that consumers actually want, while the Government use taxpayers’ money to subsidise the purchase of foreign cars with Chinese batteries in them. What are the Government’s plans to end the nonsensical zero emission vehicles mandate, and to restore a normal market, from which our car industry would benefit?

• 23 Oct 2025 · Building Safety Regulator · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Desmond, and to take part in this debate on the building safety regulator. I thank the hon. Members for Milton Keynes North (Chris Curtis) and for Northampton South (Mike Reader) for securing this debate and for their opening speeches, both of which I thought were extremely reasonable and set the tone for what has been a largely reasonable debate in which there is much common ground. It is a primary duty of any Government to ensure that everyone has a safe and high-quality home to live in. Progress has been made in recent years to ensure the nation’s housing stock, with the share of non-decent and unsafe homes witnessing a decline in the last decade. Official statistics from the National Centre for Social Research, funded by the Government, show that under the last Government the prevalence of non-decent homes fell from 17% in 2019 to 15% in 2023, with falls across every tenure. The focus of this debate is the building safety regulator and its performance since being established by the last Government. Through the Building Safety Act, the BSR was created with the intention of regulating higher-risk buildings, raising the safety standards of all buildings, and helping professionals working in the sector. It was established in good faith, with sensible aims that any Government would agree were needed at the time; and, pertinently, as I think every speaker has referred to this afternoon, it was done in the light of the tragic loss of 72 lives in the appalling Grenfell Tower fire. As a former chairman of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority, I was taken to Grenfell Tower by the London Fire Brigade a week after the fire. I went to the top of the building and saw at first hand the devastation that had been wreaked there and the consequences of years of inadequate building safety control, so I believe the motivations behind the creation of the BSR were entirely understandable. However, there is simply no point in denying that the BSR is not working today as it was originally intended. The truth is that it is proving to be a major additional contributor to a malaise that Britain has been suffering from pretty much since the turn of the millennium. Put simply, we struggle to build. Britain is now constrained within a self-imposed straitjacket of over-zealous red tape, which prevents much-needed development while at the same time causing absurd outcomes such as £100 million bat sanctuaries. The context of this debate is worth noting. As we know, the Government have ambitious targets for housing delivery, having insisted that they will build 1.5 million new homes by the end of this Parliament; but with at least 25% of this Parliament now behind us, they are miles behind schedule, and barely a third of what should have been built by now is actually completed. The new Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, the right hon. Member for Streatham and Croydon North (Steve Reed), has publicly said that his job should be on the line over whether or not he meets the target. Unfortunately for him, nobody believes that this Government will meet their housing target in just one Parliament: not the Office for Budget Responsibility, not Savills, not the Home Builders Federation, not Professor Paul Cheshire of the London School of Economics and not the National Federation of Builders—the list goes on and on. In London the situation is particularly dire, not least because of some of the policies in the Mayor of London’s London plan. A further problem coming down the line is the possibility of the Government’s making changes to the landfill tax. At present, potentially toxic landfill is taxed at £126.15 per tonne, whereas harmless inert waste such as soil or concrete is taxed at £4.05 per tonne, and nothing at all if it is used to fill up former quarries. However, there are strong rumours circulating that the Government are thinking of abolishing the quarry exemption and switching all landfill up to the higher rate. Building industry experts have estimated that that rise, which is in excess of 3,000%, will add up to £28,000 to the construction cost per home. That is especially an issue in London, where the high proportion of apartment buildings generates much more landfill than elsewhere. The impact of such a change on the construction industry is obvious. As inflation sits stubbornly at nearly 4%, twice the target level, alongside anaemic growth and increased costs to the industry, including materials and fuel, additional costs to the building trade are stacking up. It is in that context that we need to consider the performance of the building safety regulator. The BSR is not only moving too slowly to fulfil its purpose, but wielding the axe to too many of the applications crossing its desk. As the hon. Member for Northampton South said, the Building Safety Regulator rejects about 70% of applications to begin construction, compared with roughly 10% to 15% of applications that get rejected in the wider British planning system. Something is very clearly wrong here. When 150 high- rise residential construction projects are delayed across the UK because of the BSR, when schemes are delayed 38 weeks longer than the target time for approval, and when 60% of affected schemes are in London, the city with the highest need and the greatest demand, it is clear that we must work together to realise a better future for the BSR and to unchain the industry from some of the restraints it currently wears. The Building Safety Regulator is all too often a handbrake on development, rather than an accelerator of safe and effective development. I welcome the Minister to her place in her first Westminster Hall debate, and I know she will be eager to tell us about the Government’s attempts to reform the BSR and solve this issue in June earlier this year. On the face of it, increasing the BSR’s headcount could be a positive move, but only if the staff brought in have the requisite technical expertise in building and fire safety and are thus able to accelerate the planning process. By simply increasing the BSR’s capacity, the Government have not yet been able, as was promised in an MHCLG press release, “to enhance the review of newbuild applications, unblock delays and boost sector confidence”, because it has not solved the core issue: the number of application rejections. As the British Property Federation has argued, improved dialogue with applicants and more guidance on the BSR application process would go a long way to speeding things up by vastly increasing the likelihood that applications are right first time, rather than their having to be revised after being rejected. In the age of artificial intelligence, mandating machine-readable submissions and building an electronic file management system that ingests structured data would be immeasurably useful, enabling the use of commercially available AI to triage completeness, flag inconsistencies and vastly speed up the process for both the applicants and the regulator. As was said earlier—I believe by the hon. Member for Kensington and Bayswater (Joe Powell), but I stand to be corrected—introducing greater transparency around the BSR’s performance is certainly welcome. The new fast-track process seems like a good idea, although it remains to be seen whether it is effective, but clearly more needs to be done. Reforming the operation of the BSR should not be about making developments less safe. Changes must instead tackle the fundamental problem: being process-focused to the point that we fail to deliver. That is particularly true in places such as London, where it has now become difficult to build anything at all. The existing urban environment lends itself to denser developments, which are inevitably viewed as higher risk under the BSR and therefore face very lengthy delays and huge additional construction costs. Consequently, there is a danger that we risk urban sprawl into the countryside and the destruction of the green belt, with homes being forced into communities with an inability to meet the infrastructure demands of all new residents. It is important that all sides work constructively, across Government and Opposition, to deliver remediation, building safety and the best outcomes for local communities. This debate has encouraged me that we can work across the House to tackle burdensome regulation in the housing and planning industry, including where the Building Safety Regulator is playing its well-intentioned, but undeniably imperfect role. That requires real and serious focus from the Government, who will have to act far faster than they have done to date. I will listen with interest to what the Minister says.

• 21 Oct 2025 · Ending Homelessness · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford, and to take part in this debate about the progress on ending homelessness. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) and the hon. Member for Liverpool Wavertree (Paula Barker) both for securing this debate and for their opening remarks. I know that both those hon. Members have made combatting homelessness a central part of the force that drives them in Parliament. As we have heard, their excellent work as co-chairs of the all-party parliamentary group for ending homelessness has been solid, earnest and methodical, and has produced robust conclusions. My hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East in particular has made a demonstrable difference in this field, with his 2017 private Member’s Bill, which went on to become the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017, which I will refer to shortly. I do not doubt that all Members gathered here today share a strong desire to end rough sleeping and homelessness for good. Homelessness is a social tragedy, wherever it occurs and for whatever reason. No one in our society should be forced to live on the streets, and it is incumbent on us all to do our best to ensure that constituents can live in a safe, decent and secure home. Although progress was made to that end under the previous Government, work remains to be done, as my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East said in his opening speech. I offer my full support to the Government for their shared desire to end homelessness once and for all. As policymakers have increasingly come to appreciate, homelessness does not simply begin at the point someone finds themselves on the street; rather, it is rooted in long-term causes, whether persistent issues with mental health or substance abuse, offenders stuck between prison and the streets, with no place to go, or young people in care leaving the system without a fixed destination. The Homelessness Reduction Act 2017, sponsored by my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East and implemented by the previous Government, recognised that fact in law, placing an enhanced duty on local authorities to intervene at an early stage in an effort to prevent homelessness from occurring. Over 740,000 households have been prevented from becoming homeless or were supported into settled accommodation since the introduction of the 2017 Act—an achievement that should be acknowledged. As my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East and the hon. Member for Liverpool Wavertree said in their opening speeches, prevention must be at the heart of any national strategy for tackling homelessness, which is why I welcome the Government’s decision to continue the previous Administration’s approach of offering more effective support to prevent rough sleeping from happening in the first place. At the heart of the previous Administration’s approach was the rough sleeping initiative, which saw pioneering work across society between local authorities, voluntary organisations and healthcare providers to tailor support where homelessness occurs, meeting the individual needs of people facing homelessness and helping them to build an independent life once off the streets. Ending rough sleeping for good will require a whole-Government and a whole-society effort to be achievable, which is why it is vital that there is a sense of purpose from the very highest levels of Government to drive change. Although the Government’s ambition to carry on this work is laudable, it is disappointing that the full cross-Government strategy for ending homelessness that they promised in their manifesto has yet to emerge, despite repeated promises from Ministers of its publication. Commentators such as the Institute for Government have already warned that a lack of co-ordination between Government Departments is undermining progress when tackling homelessness, preventing public bodies from working together to be proactive and focus on the root causes of homelessness. The previous Government’s “Ending rough sleeping for good” strategy brought together seven Departments from across Government to that end. I fear that, without a similar statement of intent from the current Government, their approach to ending homelessness will fall short and fail those in need. The consequences of the lack of clarity are already becoming clear, not least in the effects of the Government’s Renters’ Rights Bill on the housing market. Although Ministers and Labour Members continue to claim that that legislation will make it easier to find a home, the message from the private rented sector appears to be quite the opposite, with 41% of private landlords saying, at the end 2024, that they were planning to sell their properties. The Government’s proposals look set to cut supply in the private rented sector, which will in turn inevitably risk driving rents up and making it harder for people to find a rented home. That is exactly what we have seen in Scotland, where similar measures to what the Government are proposing were implemented in 2017. In England, we have already seen a seven-year drop, with Savills reporting that the number of rental properties on its books dropped by 42% in quarter 1 of this year compared with the same period in 2024. That means 42% fewer homes available for families, less choice and more pressure on rents. That is not theoretical; it is happening now, and the Renters’ Rights Bill is accelerating that trend. Of equal concern is what effect an increasing number of people who are unable to rent privately will have on the temporary accommodation provision. An accessible private sector is vital to providing the housing stock that reduces homelessness pressure. If the Government are serious about reducing the demands on local authorities for temporary accommodation, they need to do far more than simply announce stop-gap measures. That is especially pressing, as has been repeated during this debate, when 172,420 children in England are living in temporary housing, which is up 7.6% on this time last year. Only by making a concerted effort to reduce the cost of living and make private housing more affordable will the Government get people out of temporary accommodation and into long-term secure homes of their own. Sadly, the signs on that front are not encouraging, and the same goes for the Government’s plans to deliver 1.5 million homes. The most recent estimates for additional net dwellings for 2024-25 show the Government on course to miss their house building target by more than 100,000 homes this year. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the latest spending review, which promised more funding for the affordable homes budget, is less generous than on first appearance, with funding hardly different from previous levels. I am sure hon. Members will agree that Britain desperately needs new affordable homes to ensure the long-term supply of housing for those currently without a place to call their own. That is why under the previous Government, 800,000 people bought their first home, through schemes such as Help to Buy and stamp duty relief. Yet in the current economic climate, more social and affordable homes look increasingly difficult to deliver. Ending homelessness must not be simply an idealistic ambition, but a clearly defined goal, with policies set out to achieve it. None of that is possible without a clear vision of what steps need to be taken. I urge the Government finally to publish—

• 21 Oct 2025 · Ending Homelessness · Hansard source

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  With great respect to the hon. Gentleman, given that I have to allow time for the Minister and the two proposers to speak, I cannot give way. I urge the Government to finally publish the strategy in full and provide much-needed clarity to the individuals and organisations on the frontline of tackling homelessness about how they plan to support them to do so. No amount of good intentions or Government interventions can compensate for the unaffordable economic reality facing those trying to find permanent housing. I further urge the Government to consider the long-term consequences of many of their housing policies. A private rented sector, where supply is driven out of the market by over-regulation and costs that continue to rise, can lead only to even more people being unable to find a secure place to live—a fate the Government must do everything they can to avoid. I end my remarks by calling on the Minister to respond more quickly and effectively to ease the temporary accommodation issue, to work with local communities to supply good-quality homes for families, and to publish the homelessness strategy, which was promised more than a year ago.

• 13 Oct 2025 · Social and Affordable Housing · Hansard source

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  It falls to me to open the bowling for the Opposition Front Bench, so I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on his appointment and welcome him to his place today. The previous Government awarded the Mayor of London almost £9 billion of funding to build a total of 151,000 affordable homes in London. The second tranche of that money amounted to £4 billion, which was to build 35,000 homes between 2021 and 2026. To date, only 997 have been completed, with 443 of those homes being acquisitions rather than newly built. What plans does the Secretary of State have to hold the Mayor of London to account for this lamentable failure?

• 13 Oct 2025 · Social and Affordable Housing · Hansard source

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  The whole House will have heard that the Secretary of State has no plans to intervene on the Mayor of London. Under section 340 of the Greater London Authority Act 1999, the Secretary of State has the power to direct the Mayor of London to review and revise specific policies of the London plan if they are seen to be hindering housing delivery. There are a plethora of policies—including an obsession with dual facing and twin staircasing and a bizarre aversion to corridors—that developers are united in saying are massively hindering development in the country’s largest city, which has the highest demand for affordable housing. The Secretary of State is holding all the cards and the purse strings. Why will he not intervene?

• 9 Jul 2025 · Draft Transport Act 2000 (Air Traffic Services) (Prescribed Terms) Regulations 2025 · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Jeremy. A glance at the draft regulations might give the impression of a proposal that is short and easily resolved but, as the Minister’s speech demonstrates, this is not an issue with simple answers. In fact, the regulations are part of a wider topic of airspace modernisation, which is a matter of considerable complexity. I have no doubt the Minister is aware, from what I suspect are hundreds of pages of reports and strategies placed on his desk by officials since he he arrived in office, of the significant work that was conducted by the previous Government, the CAA and a wide range of other stakeholders on airspace modernisation. Recognising the importance of airspace modernisation, the previous Government provided £9.2 million to maintain progress and enable sponsors to co-ordinate their programmes during an existential period for the industry during the pandemic. That work has, without doubt, gained fresh impetus following the Chancellor’s announcement of airport expansion earlier this year. While that announcement appeared to have been made by the Treasury without a full appreciation of the scale of the task involved, this draft statutory instrument is an important part of delivering on that intention. At the time, I said to the Transport Secretary that the Opposition support aviation expansion in principle, because it delivers economic growth. I reiterate that stance today, and we will not divide the Committee this afternoon. I do, however, have some questions for the Minister, which I will come to at the close of my remarks. The arguments in favour of airspace modernisation and the actions taken to facilitate it are obvious, and the Minister has outlined many of them. Anyone who has returned home from holiday and found themselves circling the airport endlessly will welcome the measures to improve the efficiency of our air corridors. In September last year, easyJet published its work illustrating the potential for emissions reductions through greater efficiency. The Government’s own impact assessment suggests that the current proposal will result in substantial fuel savings over a 15-year appraisal period. At a time when the Government are increasing costs for travellers, it is all the more important that the draft regulations allow operators to fly more efficiently and, I hope, pass those savings on to passengers. The aviation sector is one of the UK’s most successful industries, and our focus should be on how we support and improve it, not hold it back. In that light, not to embrace this opportunity to increase efficiency, to reduce fuel use and emissions, and potentially to reduce delays and noise would be a significant mistake. However, it is not that simple, because airspace modernisation will inevitably create winners and losers. While it will deliver greater fuel efficiency, reduced flying times and associated cost savings to airlines and, I hope, to passengers, changing flight paths will of course be a double-edged sword. Some people who live under a flight path will be removed from it and no doubt grateful for that, but others who do not live under flight paths now may may do so in the future; they can be expected, naturally, to be far from happy. As with airport expansion, the creation of the UKADS to simplify that process may also face challenges. While a majority of the stakeholders supported the principle during the consultation, 33% of those who did not oppose the proposal did in fact answer “maybe” in their response. That included one third of the respondents from the commercial aviation sector, whose buy-in the Government will need for the proposal to succeed. NATS, the only organisation the Government say is capable of handling those responsibilities—we do not dissent from that—responded to the consultation by stating that therefore “the accountabilities and responsibilities of UKADS must be more clearly defined.” That is not to say that the proposal will not work, but I believe that further clarity is needed on some broad questions. For example, can the Government confirm that the necessary skillset is available to lead the changes? Will the Minister provide assurances to smaller airports that the structure of the new arrangements will recognise and reflect the unique challenges that those locations face? Does he believe that there will be sufficient expertise within the UKADS to support airspace modernisation outside London in a timely manner, so that progress elsewhere is not held back simply because the initial focus is on London’s vastly more complicated airspace? Finally, I will address communication and transparency. During the consultation and following the policy announcement, it seems that some local organisations responded negatively and suggested that the concerns of local communities were being overlooked or ignored. I therefore ask the Government to give serious consideration to how they can provide maximum transparency around the process. In that light, my final question is: will the Minister commit to ensuring that the new body communicates its proposals with full transparency?

• 8 Jul 2025 · Road and Rail Projects · Hansard source

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  Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I thank the Secretary of State for her statement and for advance sight of it. Make no mistake: infrastructure is the connective tissue that binds our economy together. Our railways and strategic roads are the veins and arteries of our economy, connecting businesses up and down the country. That is why these announcements are to be welcomed, just as they were when they were previously announced by the last Conservative Government. For example, the M54 to M6 link road and the Portishead branch line were both announced and granted permission under the last Conservative Government. The new stations at Wellington and Cullompton and the midlands rail hub were all approved under the previous Conservative Government. The development consent order for the A66 northern trans-Pennine project was signed in March last year under the last Conservative Government. [ Interruption. ] The Secretary of State calls from a sedentary position, “Where was the money?” As she well knows, that was in the last spending period, and the forthcoming spending review was always going to be after the general election. I could go on and on, because every single scheme announced by the Government today is the result of the work of the previous Conservative Government. I therefore cannot muster the same enthusiasm as her when it comes to today’s announcement. The truth, whether they know it or not, is that the Secretary of State and her Ministers have been sent to this House today to stage a distraction, because in recent weeks we have seen the economic credibility and political unity of this Government implode. We have seen the Chancellor, who promised to maintain an “iron grip” on the public finances, forced to contend with unfunded U-turn after unfunded U-turn, all because the Prime Minister has lost control of their Back Benchers. We know what it means: more taxes for families and for businesses—the Chancellor has admitted it herself. We also know the impact that this will have on the economy. In the last few months the Office for Budget Responsibility, the Bank of England and the OECD have all downgraded the UK’s growth forecasts—by as much as half, in the case of the OBR—so I am afraid that the Government are kidding themselves if they believe that reannouncing transport infrastructure projects that are already in the pipeline will revive an economy that is faltering after a disastrous first year in office. With the tax burden reaching an historic high, inflation almost double the Bank of England’s target and inactivity rising because the Government are seemingly incapable of implementing any kind of meaningful welfare reform, far from fixing the foundations, they are actively undermining them. Quite aside from the fact that these reannouncements on their own will not revive our faltering economy, no deadline has been set for the completion of the projects, and in the light of that I must question whether the funding for them is as secure as the right hon. Lady claims. Given that the OBR is expected to downgrade growth and productivity forecasts—not to mention Labour’s U-turns—we know that the Government have created a black hole of billions of pounds in the public finances, so I must ask the right hon. Lady how confident she is that funds will not be cut from these projects to fill the Chancellor’s economic black hole. Does she recognise that these projects alone will not revive an economy that is faltering under the Government’s economic mismanagement, and will she give a timeframe for them not just to be started, but to be completed? What we have seen in recent weeks is the following: a Prime Minister whose unpopularity with the public is apparently exceeded only by his unpopularity with his own Back Benchers and who is now clearly at their mercy; a Chancellor who is wilting under the strain; and a Government with no new ideas, out of steam after only one year in office and forced to rely on ideas thought up by other people. It is no surprise that Ministers would like to speak about anything other than their own record in office, but Britain deserves better than this.