Jeremy Hunt MP: speeches

Speeches

• 29 Apr 2026 · Community Infrastructure Levy: Homeowners · Hansard source

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  I absolutely accept that. Again, in that spirit of being non-tribal, the hon. Gentleman will know the number of times that his party and other parties have talked about the 14 years in which we had opportunities to fix things that we did not fix, so he will appreciate that the Liberal Democrats in Waverley have had seven years to fix the issue and have failed to do so. That is why so many people from Waverley are looking at this debate carefully. But he is correct to say that all councils have to operate within the law. I want to move on to the Minister’s comments. First, I thank him for the interest that he has shown right from the start. I want to put on the record that the number of people affected is relatively small in the grander scheme of things, and it would have been easy for the Minister to decide there were other priorities. It is about 100 families—maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less—so the Minister could easily have decided to focus on other areas, but he has not. He has spent an enormous amount of time trying to address this. That is the right and proper thing for a Minister in a democracy to do; if there is an injustice that even affects one person, it is incredibly important that Ministers take note, and he has really done that. The Minister also clarified the problems with the 2014 exemptions introduced by the coalition Government, which were designed to ensure that householders were not caught up in these regulations, but did so through such a bureaucratic and cumbersome process that many inadvertently have been. The issue of particular complexity relates to householders’ immediate liability from the moment that building starts, which seems entirely reasonable for a professional developer, but entirely unreasonable for a homeowner who may not be aware of that element of the law. It is extremely welcome that the Government are going to consult on the CIL regulations. As a former Government Minister, I feel a tremendous amount of frustration and pain at the need for endless consultations. They can be of value, but they also slow things down. I recognise that the Minister wants to do this fast—I did groan when he said, “as soon as possible,” but then when he said, “before the summer break,” I took some encouragement. I think this is something that is moving forward. In the options that the Minister consults on—he cannot respond to this, but it is something to take away—could we find a way of removing homeowners from CIL liability altogether? That way we move away from a system that is purely based on the square meterage of a development, to one based on the type of person doing the development. Could we change the regulations so that homeowners can at least always apply for an exemption retrospectively if an error has been made? Not being able to do so offends natural justice, and was an unintended consequence of the complexity of the original regulations. I am grateful to the Minister for confronting head-on the fact that for many people, this is about getting justice for something that has happened, not ensuring that injustice does not continue to happen. He has been very open with me about the legal complexities involved, and I know from my time as Health Secretary how difficult it is to reopen retrospective cases. The Minister’s Department has enormous influence over local authorities, however, not least through setting their grants, so if the Department chose, it could find a way to put councils under pressure, where there are outstanding CIL cases and injustice, so that those cases get solved. I recognise that what I ask is not easy, but it is absolutely the case that local councils are extremely dependent on the Minister’s Department for large chunks of their financing. I ask him to consider what levers he has at his disposal to make this happen, while at the same time thanking him for his ongoing interest and determination to address the issue. The final thing I will say is that I know someone in the Public Gallery got up at 4 am to attend this debate. I thank that person and all the CIL Injustice Group for their tenacious campaigning to try to right a truly awful wrong.

• 29 Apr 2026 · Community Infrastructure Levy: Homeowners · Hansard source

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  I beg to move, That this House has considered the impact of the Community Infrastructure Levy on private homeowners. Thank you, Mr Turner, for presiding over this debate on an issue that is having profound life-changing consequences for ordinary families across the country. I also thank the Minister for his interest in the issue. Politics can be very tribal, but I have already met him twice to discuss it, both times with Councillor Jane Austin from my constituency—once in July last year and once in December last year, alongside my hon. Friend the Member for Farnham and Bordon (Gregory Stafford). I know he wants to solve the issue. The community infrastructure levy, or CIL, was introduced for the best of reasons: to ensure that commercial developers contribute towards the cost of the infrastructure needed as a result of their developments. It was never intended as an extra tax on people doing home extensions, and certainly never as a retrospective tax that people are landed with unexpectedly after the event. Most councils understand that, but one or two have ruthlessly exploited loopholes that allow them to punish homeowners, including Lib Dem-run Waverley in my constituency, which charges over £550 per square metre, one of the highest in the country. But it is not just there. This morning, I heard about a case in Sevenoaks, where the district council pursued a stay-at-home mother relentlessly, in a case championed by my right hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks (Laura Trott). For many families the consequences have been devastating. Some have been forced to sell or remortgage their homes, and the financial burden, alongside the stress and uncertainty, has been immense. Some have fought their councils for years, hitting brick walls at every turn. I am aware of 15 families in Waverley alone who faced unexpected charges, ranging from £26,000 to £235,000. There are now more than 100 known other cases across the country. Here are some examples: Steve Dally and his wife Caroline have been forced to remortgage their home to pay a £70,000 CIL charge on a home extension in Godalming. As they explained to me and local councillor Jane Austin, they are not developers; they simply extended their home. They hit a brick wall when they challenged Waverley and had to risk additional penalties and compounded interest in the process. Another Godalming couple were hit with a £70,000 bill because they were living in rented accommodation while their home was being renovated. In Milford in my constituency, a homeowner was forced to pay a £120,000 CIL bill when forced to submit a retrospective planning application because two walls of his existing home fell down. For failing to give notice of the walls falling down he was charged £2,500 in penalties because he had failed to submit a commencement notice, something he had never heard of. Enton resident Helen Grant reluctantly settled a £56,000 CIL charge on the family home, only to be sent a bill for a further £3,000 in interest charges when the council reviewed her case, which had already been closed. It is not just Waverley; I pay tribute to the CIL Injustice Group, which operates across the whole country. Many of its members are watching from the Gallery today, including people from Wokingham, Tonbridge and Devon.

• 29 Apr 2026 · Community Infrastructure Levy: Homeowners · Hansard source

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  The hon. Member is absolutely right, and he is foreshadowing what I will propose as one of the solutions to this issue: that homeowners should be excluded from the potential ambit of CIL altogether, because that was not its intention. It is a loophole that is being exploited, and I hope to explain why some councils have been so keen to exploit that loophole. We need to remove the root cause if we are going to deal with this issue.

• 29 Apr 2026 · Community Infrastructure Levy: Homeowners · Hansard source

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  That is quite an unusual thing to be told by the Chair, Mr Turner. I thank you for chairing this important debate and I thank all hon. Members present for some excellent contributions. I particularly want to thank my neighbour and hon. Friend the Member for Farnham and Bordon (Gregory Stafford) for his tenacious campaigning on this issue on behalf of my former constituents in Farnham and Haslemere. He made an excellent contribution. I also want to thank the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Orpington (Gareth Bacon), who typically gave a very thoughtful and clear exposition of the issues we face. I also thank hon. Members from other parties who have spoken and intervened. Before I come on to the Minister’s comments, I want to comment on what was said by the hon. Member for Taunton and Wellington (Gideon Amos), because it was directly about my own local authority. He was right to say that a council cannot lawfully cancel a charge after it has become liable, but that does beg the question why there have been countless injustices in some councils, but not in others, and that is because there has been an element of choice in the way local authorities have decided to go about things. To make the point that I am not being party political here, Lib Dem West Berkshire has chosen to be reasonable, do the right thing and make sure there is justice for people unfairly caught in the CIL trap, but Lib Dem Waverley has not. It has been in power for seven years and Waverley residents, a number of whom are watching this debate, have suffered badly.

• 29 Apr 2026 · Community Infrastructure Levy: Homeowners · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Member; he always makes very thoughtful contributions. He makes two very important points. The first is that we do need developers to contribute towards infrastructure costs. The risk of the appalling injustice that I am drawing attention to today is that we lose social consent for very important contributions that enable much-needed infrastructure to be built. Secondly, he is absolutely right to say that not having CIL at all would be very bad. In my area in particular, there is constant concern about the lack of infrastructure to keep pace with new housing developments. I want to return to the CIL Injustice Group, because their accounts are extremely concerning. Some are nervous about dealing with their council because of the bad way they are treated. Others spend thousands of pounds on legal fees, often unsuccessfully. Part of the issue is that CIL is an extraordinarily complex process. Forms must be filled in in the correct order and are subject to strict timetables. Even professionals struggle. It is very unforgiving if someone gets it wrong. They have to pay within 90 days, under threat of seizure of assets and imprisonment, and if they do not comply, they get slammed with thousands of pounds in late charges and interest on top of that. There is effectively no right of appeal, and most importantly, there is no ability to correct errors. Ordinary homeowners inevitably do make errors, but there is no latitude in the system to allow them to correct those errors.

• 29 Apr 2026 · Community Infrastructure Levy: Homeowners · Hansard source

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  I absolutely agree with my right hon. Friend, who has much more experience of the housing sector than I do. He will know that countries like France—not very far away—that have been much more successful than us in building more houses also have a flourishing small builder sector. In this country, because of the enormous costs involved in the planning process and often the land, it is much harder for small builders to get involved. Of course, one of the other advantages of small builders is that they are more likely to get consent from local communities, because they are often from those local communities. I agree with my right hon. Friend entirely: that is one of the unintended consequences of the problems we have with the community infrastructure levy regime. CIL was drafted with very strong teeth to ensure that developers actually pay up, but for ordinary members of the public trying to do an extension, these Orwellian processes can be utterly terrifying. Some councils—not my own Waverley borough council, alas—recognise the inflexibility of the regulations and have taken a soft-touch approach to prevent homeowners from being captured. To its credit, West Berkshire, which as it happens is also a Lib Dem council, implemented a discretionary review and refunded £400,000 to affected householders. Others have not. I recognise that the difference in councils’ approaches makes the Minister’s job more difficult. So how should we fix the issue? First, we need to reform the highly complex CIL legislation to distinguish between commercial developers and householders. The problem with a system that is based entirely on the floor area of a project is that even a small increase in the size of a project—just a couple of extra metres on a patio—can suddenly mean that an ordinary homeowner is required to get planning permission, perhaps retrospectively, and can become liable, and they may not know it at the time. Homeowners should be outright excluded from the reach of the community infrastructure levy. Secondly, even in the absence of legislation, we need clear guidance from the Government to local councils so that no homeowners anywhere are charged for the community infrastructure levy. Thirdly, we need an effective mechanism for redress and the ability to correct genuine mistakes after a liability notice has been issued. Sadly, zero rating CIL liability does not work because a charge remains on the land, which may render the property unsaleable, so the Government need to find a way not just to avoid injustice but to secure justice for the hundreds of families who have been wronged to date by the problems in the system. Finally, we need to recognise that the root cause of the problem is that councils such as mine have been collecting the community infrastructure levy not just to build infrastructure but so that they can use the interest from unspent CIL as revenue. An estimated £9 billion is sitting in council accounts from unspent contributions by developers, of which an estimated £2.2 billion is unspent CIL. That means that some councils are effectively funding their core services from the human misery of their council tax payers. At a minimum, rules should specify that interest from unspent CIL should go back into the CIL account to avoid a perverse incentive for councils to do the wrong thing. British democracy rests on the principle of consent and fairness, both of which demand justice for those caught unfairly by the CIL system, which was never designed to capture them. All those people deserve clarity, and this should be prevented from happening again. I know the Minister and many other hon. Members here today want just that, and I look forward to hearing the Government plans.

• 24 Nov 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  I thank the Minister for Housing and Planning for his constructive meeting last week on the community infrastructure levy. Could he tell the House whether Liberal Democrat-controlled councils such as mine in Waverley should be charging the community infrastructure levy to private householders who do a straightforward extension on their house?

• 20 Nov 2025 · Bus Services · Hansard source

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  My constituents in Cranleigh, Shamley Green, Bramley and Shalford find it very difficult to get to their local hospital in Guildford, and to the community hospital in Milford. There is no direct bus service. A quarter of older people do not have cars. What will the Government do to help them solve that problem, which is becoming more and more difficult?

• 19 Nov 2025 · Myalgic Encephalomyelitis · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Lady for talking about that very sad case. I actually think that the NHS is better than it was because of long covid. The real cause for hope is Edinburgh University’s DecodeME study, which the chief executive of Action for ME, Sonya Chowdhury, described to me as being like a treasure hunt map with eight crosses where there is a genetic code that matches ME, but where we then have to go and dig up that treasure. That is what is now waiting to happen, and why funding is so important. Ultimately, with the quality of research in this country, there should be no need for anyone to have to go to the United States or Germany for their treatment. During the pandemic, more lives were saved through treatments and vaccines discovered in this country than any other country in the world. We have amazing research happening here. My plea to the Government is this: the last Government started the process by ignoring some of the scepticism in the medical community about whether ME was really a serious condition. It would be fantastic, and it would give so much hope, if this Government could now finish the job and invest in research that will transform the lives of so many people like Tom.

• 13 Oct 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  My constituent Steve Dally was charged £70,000 by Liberal Democrat-controlled Waverley borough council for the apparent crime of building a home extension. I met the Housing Minister earlier this year to talk about abuse of the community infrastructure levy. Could he update the House on his plans to stop it?

• 13 Oct 2025 · Baby Loss · Hansard source

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  It is a great privilege to follow the hon. Member for Rossendale and Darwen (Andy MacNae). I thank him for working with me and the hon. Member for Sherwood Forest (Michelle Welsh) to secure the debate, and I thank my many colleagues on the all-party parliamentary group on patient safety. I would also like to thank the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, the right hon. Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting), for being here himself today. It means an enormous amount to families up and down the country to see that commitment from him. I know it is an issue in which he has taken enormous personal interest. I think the most difficult meeting I had when I was doing his job many years ago was with a man called Carl Hendrickson, who came to see me a few days before I stood at that Dispatch Box to give the statement on the Morecambe Bay inquiry. Carl lost both his wife and his son at Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust. A midwife mistook some fitting by his wife as just fainting. His wife died an hour later from an embolism. The next day, his son Chester died from brain damage. He came to see me with his 11-year-old son, Conrad. I will never forget it, because it was obviously going to be a very difficult meeting and I asked him whether he would like his son to sit outside with some of the civil servants while we discussed what happened. He said no, because he wanted his son to know, for the rest of his life, that he had taken his concerns about what went wrong right to the very top and asked awkward questions. And that was what he did. I owe a great debt to the Morecambe Bay families: to Carl and to Simon Davey, Liza Brady, James Titcombe and many others. The American thinker Margaret Mead had a saying: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed individuals can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” For me, those Morecambe Bay families were that small group of thoughtful, committed people, along with the families from Mid Staffs, Shrewsbury and Telford, East Kent, Nottingham and many other places. As we reflect in this very sad and meaningful Baby Loss Awareness Week about what has gone wrong, it is also important to remember that progress has been made since then. Since the Morecambe Bay inquiry, the overall number of baby deaths is down by about 20%. That is about 700 fewer a year, or two fewer a day. The NHS is better than it was about being honest about mistakes. There have been a lot of reforms. We have a chief inspector of hospitals and a CQC that is set up to call a spade a spade when there is poor care. We have the duty of candour, which will be further strengthened by the new Hillsborough law. We have medical examiners, we have Martha’s rule and we have “freedom to speak up” guardians. Despite those improvements, there are some warning signs. Since the pandemic, the decline in baby deaths has plateaued. The number of maternal deaths has actually increased. As the hon. Member for Rossendale and Darwen just said, there is big inequality. You are far more likely to die as a black or Asian mum. You are far more likely to die as a black or Asian baby, or a baby from a deprived background, than other babies. Still we have a third of NHS staff, according to the staff survey last year, saying that they are afraid to raise safety concerns, and half saying that they do not think anything will happen if they do. The thing that is so important to remember—I have said this to the House on many occasions—is that if you are in a birthing unit and present at a C-section and something goes wrong, there is nothing as a professional that you want more than to be open, honest and transparent about what happened, so that lessons can be learned and you can make sure that mistake never happens again. But our system makes that practically impossible. We have the CQC, the NMC, the General Medical Council and the trust. Lawyers get involved and people worry. There is jeopardy for clinicians: that if they are honest and open about the ordinary human mistakes that anyone can make, they will be punished for it. The result is that the one thing that needs to happen more than anything else—truthfulness to the bereaved families and learning the lessons so that the tragedy is not repeated—can be the very thing that does not happen at all. Instead, we get a five-year legal process happening and the truth is not established for maybe five, six or seven years after that. So what needs to happen to put it right? We all have our lists of things, and I echo absolutely everything that was said in the wonderful speech before mine. For me, first of all, it is absolutely essential that we get the CQC back on its feet. It went badly wrong, but under new leadership that the Secretary of State has put in place, I believe it is now going in absolutely the right direction. We must return to the one-word ratings so that parents and families know absolutely whether the care in their local hospital or NHS organisation is safe. That is really important. Secondly, we have a litigation culture. At the moment we spend about £3.5 billion annually in maternity awards for where maternity care has gone wrong, which is not far off the £4 billion total cost of all NHS maternity units. It has gone so badly wrong that many parents think that when something goes wrong, their only friend is not a doctor but a lawyer—that cannot be right. We need to have much better accountability. The Government are rightly absolutely committed to bringing back family doctors. People having their own GP would make an enormous difference, because at the moment there is no one inside the NHS to turn to when these things go wrong, and going back to the system of everyone having their own GP could make a really big difference to that. We need to support the work of brilliant charities such as Tommy’s, Sands, the Clinical Human Factors Group and Baby Lifeline in their contribution to making maternity care safer. We also need to tackle the dangerous culture of “normal” births, which still sees too many mothers steered away from getting a surgical intervention when that would be the safest route for them and their baby. Those are all important changes. I would like to say one final thing, which is that we must not return to a targets culture. I have some concerns about the new NHS league tables. I know they are set up with the best of intentions, but safety and quality is not one of the factors that ensures a move up the list. I know the Secretary of State will take great care in the way that those are implemented, but I think it is really important that there is always a bottom line—a floor—on safety and quality below which the system never goes. What I really want to say to the House, in conclusion, is that we must not lose hope. If we had the same levels of maternity safety as Sweden, one fewer baby would die every day; if we got to the same levels as Japan, two fewer babies would die every day. If we could get the NHS back on the trajectory it was on in the years leading up to the pandemic, we would be able to get to care as safe as Sweden’s in the next five or six years, so it really is something within our grasp. I will finish by saying this. The NHS was set up on the premise of equality, and the idea that no matter who we are—whether we are rich or poor, young or old, from the north or the south, from the city or the country—everyone should be able to access the healthcare they need. Everyone means every baby, too. We talk about safety more than any other healthcare system in the world. In this very sad week, when we remember all the people who have lost their dear babies and their dear loved ones in the process of having babies, let us redouble our efforts to make the NHS the safest, highest-quality healthcare system in the world.