Jayne Kirkham MP: speeches

Speeches

• 9 Sept 2024 · Housing: Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly · Hansard source

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  Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for granting extra time for a debate that is so important for Cornwall and for giving others a chance for speak about its very particular housing issues. I also thank the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George) for initiating the debate. As he said, about 27,000 people are on Cornwall’s housing waiting list, and about 800 are in temporary and emergency accommodation. Many of them are families with young children, who are placed in caravan parks and holiday homes that are up to an hour and a half or two hours away from their support networks, their schools, their jobs and where they live. This is really affecting community cohesion, upsetting families and causing real hardship. The council is struggling with the need, and the cost is vast. It is providing bunk cabins in council car parks for people to live in as emergency and temporary accommodation, which is very difficult. So many people in Cornwall are now living in their vans, because they simply have nowhere else to go. I am finding that families are moving into emergency accommodation, and that the single people who were becoming homeless when I was first a councillor in Cornwall are now living in their cars. The situation has become really dire. Businesses are now finding that key workers have nowhere to live, so we have people coming down to work in the hospitality sector or in agriculture. The same is true for professionals, such as teachers, nurses and doctors—a headteacher in Cornwall struggled to find somewhere to live, and she had to give up her job and move away again. There is now a movement called Homes for Cornwall, whereby businesses are coming together to try to find alternatives solutions to deal with the housing crisis, which has become so bad that they cannot find staff. As the hon. Member for St Ives said, we have a very low number of social houses in Cornwall—only 10,300 council homes. I want to talk about the affordable housing programme grant, which a previous Secretary of State, Michael Gove, suspended for Cornwall because of the poor performance of the housing provider Cornwall Housing, which is an arm’s length company owned by the council. That performance has now improved, and the grant is desperately needed for a new social housing scheme in Redruth, but it has not been returned. I ask the Minister to look into that, and to see whether other local authorities in this situation have been treated in the same way and lost their grants. Has that grant moved to other registered providers in Cornwall, or has it left Cornwall completely? Is there any way we could get that back and backdate it? The other issue, which the hon. Member for St Ives spoke about, is second homes and holiday lets, which have absolutely exploded in Cornwall, particularly since covid. The private rented sector has been decimated and is now virtually non-existent. We have struggled so much with section 21 notices, which explains to a great extent why so many of our families are now in emergency and temporary accommodation.

• 9 Sept 2024 · Housing: Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Member for that point. I wanted to talk about council tax in particular, because, strangely, one of the few things that the entire council agreed on—we have a Conservative council in Cornwall at the moment—was doubling the council tax on empty second homes. In fact, we wrote to the Secretary of State at the time to ask whether we could triple the council tax on second homes, as they do in Labour Wales—that was a very unusual thing to do. Of course, as has been discussed, this is about looking at closing the loophole so that the owners of the property cannot flip between business rates and council tax. That would mean an £18 million a year gain in council taxes. I agree with the hon. Member that we should encourage co-operative and community housing in Cornwall. That is very popular, and if it was supported more, there would be a great deal more of it. In fact, our cabinet housing member in Cornwall has said that if every village built 10 homes, that would deal with the housing crisis completely. Discouraging hope value, particularly in certain parts of Cornwall, would be very helpful. I know that forcing developers to deliver their affordables rather than relying on the viability defence is part of the Government’s plans, because so often developers get to a point and say that they cannot afford to build the affordable houses that they promised. Another real problem is that the cost of building has shot up because the contractors in Cornwall have dropped in number and have become a great deal more expensive.

• 9 Sept 2024 · Housing: Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Member for his intervention. I will shortly move on to some of the ways in which we can deal with the proliferation of second homes and holiday lets, and address the imbalance. I want to reinforce the point that the hon. Member for St Ives made about the tax loophole. I think £18 million is now lost in council tax because so many housing providers have taken advantage of the loophole whereby they can claim business grants and the zero rate of exemption, rather than pay council tax, if their houses are let out for 10 weeks of the year. As the hon. Member said, so much money was lost in business grants during covid. I think £170 million in business grants went to properties that were registered as holiday lets. I want to mention my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard), who cannot speak in this debate. He has worked hard with us in Cornwall on the issue of protecting first homes, rather than second homes, and he has supported us, as I know that the same issue applies up in Devon. We have spoken with the Minister about potentially having a toolkit of measures that could be used to deal with issues relating to second homes and holiday lets. I know that our Government will introduce one of those measures: the licensing of holiday lets, hopefully with fees and safety checks on those lets, which is not done at the moment—some properties are not checked for fire safety, or for safety in any way. That is a massive loophole that needs to be dealt with. The hon. Member for St Ives talked about planning requirements. The previous Government had a review on introducing a use class for holiday lets—but then did not do very much about it—so that is one possible measure. The default could be second home owners having to apply for a change of use if they flip their homes to holiday lets.

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

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  Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Cheadle (Mr Morrison), whose experience and passion will be of great benefit to both his constituents and his local hospital, and to my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford and Bow (Uma Kumaran), who will be a very worthy successor to those suffragettes. It is a real honour and a privilege to be standing here as the MP for Truro and Falmouth. I arrived in Cornwall quite by accident nearly 20 years ago, having been swept off my feet by a naval pilot who tempted me away from life as a London trade union lawyer, with images of beaches and sunsets. He flew search and rescue helicopters at Culdrose naval station. Unfortunately, as is often the case, our military marriage was short, and I was left as a single mum with a small son. But I chose to stay and bring him up in Cornwall, and it is very much our home. Becoming a single parent was sudden and difficult, but I was fortunate. I benefited from the opportunities offered by the last Labour Government and was able to get back on my feet. I retrained and took a job as a teaching assistant working in a local secondary school for seven years, first in special educational needs and later as an unqualified teacher, which shows the journey that education has been on. I pay tribute to my predecessor, Cherilyn Mackrory. She served in a number of roles in this place; she showed her passion for the environment in her work on the Environmental Audit Committee and as chair of the ocean conservation all-party parliamentary group. She also drew on her own personal experience to help others. She did a huge amount to shape the women’s health strategy and maternity safety awareness, and was integral in introducing the new pregnancy loss certificate. Both Cherilyn and her predecessor, Sarah Newton, worked to secure a new women and children’s unit at Treliske hospital in Truro, one of the previous Government’s 40 new hospitals or units. It is desperately needed and a long time coming. I had my son in the existing unit nearly 19 years ago, and the building was not fit for purpose then. I really want to ensure its speedy completion. Truro and Falmouth has existed as a constituency only since 2010. It sits in the middle of the Duchy of Cornwall, spreading from Falmouth on the south coast to Crantock on the north coast. Falmouth is my home, and where I have sat as a councillor for the past six years. It is a vibrant and welcoming town enveloped by the ocean. Falmouth has played its part in the history of Great Britain. In the late 1600s, the town was appointed the Royal Mail packet station, receiving and sending mail and messages all around the globe, making Falmouth —for 150 years at least—the information super-highway of the British empire. However, Falmouth is more than its seafaring past. We still have two splendid castles, Pendennis and St Mawes, protecting the entrance to the Carrick Roads, but the constituency is also the site of Falmouth University, built on the legacy of the famous art school that is still found on Woodlane, but now anchored across the border in the state-of-the-art Tremough campus in Penryn, which it shares with the University of Exeter. The area brims with creatives, scientists and engineers—whom Dawn French, the university’s chancellor, described as “enterprising dreamers”. If we follow the River Fal upwards, we reach Truro, Cornwall’s capital and only city, with its impressive cathedral and award-winning theatre Hall for Cornwall. It has Lys Kernow, the home of Cornwall council, as well as Treliske, the acute hospital. The constituency also has a large rural element, with an array of beautiful villages and areas such as the Roseland peninsula, where farming and fishing are still vital industries. When researching for this speech, I was struck by the words in the maiden speech of one of Cornwall’s most well known and loved Members of Parliament, David Penhaligon. Exactly 50 years ago in this House, he referred to an economy that relies on tourism, traffic conditions in the summer months that strangle much of the industry that keeps the place going for the rest of the year, tremendous pressure on hospital services, sewage problems, pressure on housing, the problem of summer lets and the lowest average wage in Britain. I am pleased that the measures in this Government’s programme—a real living wage, the water Bill, devolution and renters rights—will help to address some of those issues, but it is shocking that many of the issues that he mentioned then are, sadly, still very much in evidence today, half a century on. For a place on the edge of the map, Cornwall is too often at the edge of our thoughts in this place. Like Penhaligon, I believe that Cornwall, with its proud and independent heritage, deserves better. Turning to the topic of this debate, there is so much to be excited by. As well as Cornwall’s potential for onshore wind, we have 20% of Europe’s requirement for critical minerals and geothermal energy beneath our feet, buried in our granite. We only have to look at a horizon dotted with the ruins of engine houses to know that the people of Cornwall are more than happy to dig for their treasure. Falmouth is a town with its face turned to the sea. The port still has a very busy harbour and docks, which have businesses servicing both military and commercial ships, as well as hosting cruise and leisure vessels. But there is potential for so much more, and the port of Falmouth is poised to take advantages of a new generation of offshore wind production in the Celtic sea. With the support of the new energy company GB Energy, the £1.8 billion ports fund and investment in the skills training we so desperately need, our young people will be able to grasp with both hands the well-paid jobs of the future, while securing our own home-grown energy and facing down the challenge of climate change—a challenge that is so important to a place like Cornwall, which stares the impacts of the changing climate in the face every day. We were the first large rural authority to declare a climate emergency and the 2030 net zero target. Now, we will play our part in getting the country to meet a similarly ambitious target. Falmouth’s time truly has come again as part of the Government’s mission to become a clean energy superpower. Truro and Falmouth is the most magical place to live. It well and truly hooked me and my small family, and has become part of me. My journey, despite its ups and downs, has been a charmed and happy one. Truro and Falmouth has given so much to me, and it is overflowing with promise and brilliant, independent-minded enterprising dreamers. I am determined to serve my home as well as it has served me. A bright future lies ahead for it.

• 3 Sept 2024 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  The Chancellor’s plans for growth are welcome in Cornwall, but in the meantime we are relying upon shared prosperity fund and towns deal money. The deadlines for the completion of those schemes are March 2025 and March ’26. To ensure that investment is not lost, will the Chancellor consider extending the deadlines for completion of those schemes by up to 12 months?

• 19 Jul 2024 · Covid-19 Inquiry · Hansard source

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  I recognise the conclusion in Baroness Hallett’s clear report and thank her for it. In Cornwall, our peripherality made it so much harder. Our local authority’s public health test and trace was halted by the Government on 12 March when fewer than half a dozen cases were in existence in Cornwall. PPE came very slowly. Citizens were making masks and some councillors and officers drove up to Exeter to pick up some. Care homes and workers in particular were slow to get PPE. In many care homes in my constituency, there were tragic results. Will we ensure that local authority public health directors can be more involved with decision making and setting up local solutions such as test and trace?

• 18 Jul 2024 · Clean Energy Superpower Mission · Hansard source

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  Cornish ports such as Falmouth, which the Secretary of State visited during the campaign, have well-advanced plans to reconfigure to service floating offshore wind in the Celtic sea. Cornish further education providers are keen to gear up to provide specialised courses to support the speedy growth of that industry so that young people in Cornwall have the opportunity to train for those high-skilled jobs of the future, but in the past they have struggled because of a lack of Government support. Will the Secretary of State please confirm that support will be available to ports, businesses and educational establishments in Cornwall, to enable them to plug into the vast opportunities opened up by floating offshore wind in the Celtic sea?