Kit Malthouse MP: speeches

Speeches

• 19 Nov 2025 · Engagements · Hansard source

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  Q1. If he will list his official engagements for Wednesday 19 November.

• 19 Nov 2025 · Engagements · Hansard source

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  Many of us are becoming concerned that technical or procedural manoeuvres outside this House may be used to prevent Parliament from reaching a decision on the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. The Government are neutral on the Bill itself, but I presume they are not neutral on the issue of democracy or the primacy of this Chamber. Will the Prime Minister reassure the House that the decision of elected Members—and, indeed, the wishes and hopes of the vast majority of the people we serve—will not be frustrated in this way?

• 18 Nov 2025 · Gaza and Sudan · Hansard source

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  I am afraid that the Foreign Secretary has neatly illustrated the problem with the British Government’s position in the conflict between Israel and Palestine. She mentioned the welcome return of Israeli hostages, but made no mention of the Palestinian detainees who have been returned to their families. She mentioned the return of the bodies of Israelis, but made no mention of the dozens of bodies of Palestinians that have been returned to their families. Can she not see that until we value both people equally and bring accountability to both peoples, we will make little progress in this appalling situation? Specifically to avoid accusations of illegitimacy, how will the Palestinians be represented on this board of peace? Secondly, the UN resolution puts significant conditions on the Palestinians to ensure compliance. What conditions are being put on the Israeli Government to ensure their compliance in this project? Thirdly, the situation in the west bank is not just “appalling”, as the Foreign Secretary said in her statement, but the worst it has ever been, as the hon. Member for Aylesbury (Laura Kyrke-Smith) said. Will the Foreign Secretary fall into the same trap as her predecessor of being all talk and doing the bare minimum to keep those on her Benches from open revolt, or will she step forward and bring accountability for the daily acts of violence and terrorism that are taking place?

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

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  I completely agree with the hon. Lady. In my constituency, I have groups of volunteers who work very hard, including on the Anton river in Andover, and do a fantastic job. In fact, that river flows through part of the town centre, but gets lost, and it is about to be opened up with a new riverside park running down Western Avenue. I am pleased to say that I played a small part in that scheme obtaining a levelling-up grant from the previous Government. People in my constituency value these chalk streams almost as if they are members of their family. They are part of the identity of towns such as Whitchurch, Overton, Andover and other villages in my patch and yours, Madam Deputy Speaker. They would take the protection of those chalk streams almost as seriously as the protection of their children. Many Members—not just me—have campaigned for such statutory protection, and I would be interested in what the Minister has to say. I do not entirely accept his argument that spatial development strategies are completely inappropriate. As he knows, they can flag up areas of planning constraint and discuss corridors and green infrastructure. If there is a green infrastructure corridor, it is a chalk stream. Certainly in my part of the world, they are treasured such that a new mayor—if we have one next year—would be required to look at them as protected corridors and say as much in their plan.

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

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  I do not wish to detain the House terribly long; I just want to cover three matters, if I may. The first is Lords amendment 38, which deals with chalk streams. As the Minister knows, because I have told him before, my constituency is chalk stream central—as is yours, Madam Deputy Speaker, as my constituency neighbour. The River Test, the most celebrated of chalk streams, rises in the north of my constituency. We also have the Anton, which flows through Andover, and most famously the Bourne rivulet—about which books have been written, such is its beauty and importance. I know the Minister appreciates the importance of these incredibly rare ecological environments, which are almost unique to southern England. I heard what the Minister had to say about the appropriateness of spatial development strategies for protecting chalk streams, but he will know that those of us who are concerned about this issue have been disappointed by the seeming reduction of enthusiasm for protection of chalk streams since this Government came to power. Obviously, the chalk stream recovery pack, which had been hard-won in negotiations with the previous Government, was abandoned. In May, amendments to this Bill that sought to protect chalk streams further were voted down. The Minister is a good chap—he and I get on well—and at every stage he has reassured the House that he wants to do more for chalk streams, but we have yet to see the beef. Even today in his opening remarks, he said that he is minded to take further steps elsewhere to protect chalk streams. Given the Government’s record over the past 12 months or so, I am afraid that that is not terribly reassuring, so when he sums up, I would be very grateful if he could be a little more detailed about what exactly he intends to do.

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

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  I completely agree with the right hon. Gentleman. Interestingly, he may or may not recall that when I was a Westminster councillor, we had a project in Westminster called “Hidden Rivers”, which signposted where those rivers were. If any Members find themselves on the platform at Sloane Square station, for example—just a couple of stops away—and look upwards, they will see a socking great big pipe going across the top of the platforms carrying the River Tyburn. It rises at Marble Arch, where Tyburn convent is, and where the Tyburn tree used to stand for hanging people. It flows down, across the platform and into the Thames. The same is true, I think in the right hon. Gentleman’s constituency, where the Fleet flows down towards Fleet Street and into the Thames. People value and treasure such rivers, and they should be protected. I want to hear a little more on that from the Minister. For those of us who would support new settlements, for example, SDSs might be important for the protection of chalk streams, because they can point towards the areas where new settlements should be and protect such things as river catchments. For chalk downland constituencies like mine, that is key. While I accept that the Minister will get his way and get his party to vote for the second time against protection for chalk streams in this Bill, I would like to hear a bit more detail on what he is minded to do—I take him at his word—how firm that mindedness is, and when we can expect some of the protection to come forward, because this is an urgent matter on which many of us have campaigned for many years. The second thing I lament about the Bill, and ask the Minister to clarify, is its impact on neighbourhood plans. I have asked him this question in the past, particularly in the light of new housing targets. Both my borough councils, Basingstoke and Deane, and Test Valley, have had significant increases to their housing targets. I do not mind that necessarily, but the question is where those houses go. I have encouraged villagers and communities across my constituency to take advantage of neighbourhood plans and to put them in place. The significant alarm now is that some of the local plan implications from the new housing targets that are flowing through are riding roughshod over those neighbourhood plans, some of which took years to put in place. The Minister has given me an undertaking in the past that extant neighbourhood plans would not have to be varied in the light of those new housing targets, until they came up for refresh, and that constraints, such as protected landscape, would pertain. I would be pleased if he could reassure us on that point when he sums up.

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

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  I understand the undertaking the Minister is giving, but he will recognise that all of this is guidance; it does not preclude planning decisions that will impact on chalk streams. Given that he is set on his course, which we understand, and his appreciation of the fact that the amendment was proposed in the spirit of addressing the lack of any other sort of protection for chalk streams, will he reassure us that the intention in the planning guidance is to give chalk streams the same sort of protection as was put in place for, for example, veteran trees, which are deemed to be irreplaceable? That is the highest level of protection in planning guidance—I think I introduced this as Planning Minister. In that way, only in very exceptional circumstances could permission be granted for development that would impinge on chalk streams.

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

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  I sort of agree. We should be pushing developers towards brownfield—that is absolutely right. Brownfield first was the policy of the previous Government, and it makes lots of sense. The key thing, which I am sure the Minister accepts, is that if we are to overcome this problem with the generational contract—that we who are housed will build houses for those who are not—there has to be a compromise. For me, that compromise has always been neighbourhood planning. Far too often in my constituency, villages and towns feel as if planning is something that is done to them. They dread the land promoter showing up to ram some inappropriate planning through. Some of that compromise can be about beauty, and I lament the fact that the design standards were taken out of the NPPF and that that word is not used. [ Interruption. ] I welcome the Minister’s nodding—that is great. I have often said that in my constituency—for Members who do not know, it is 220 square miles of beautiful chalk downland—if developers would build thatched cottages, we would have thousands of them. People would be more than happy for developers to build villages such as St Mary Bourne all over the place, if they look beautiful and fit in. Unfortunately, we get the same ersatz development that everybody else gets around the country. We need to crack that. The other thing is putting planning in the hands of local people, and I hope the Minister will try to preserve that principle in the Bill. My third point, briefly, is about an omission in the Bill that the Minister and I have discussed before, which is the problem of undeveloped consents. My concern is that the Bill will stimulate the land promotion industry and stimulate lots of applications. However, as the shadow Minister pointed out, when the housing market is flat, stamp duty is at penal rates, when interest rates remain stubbornly high because of Government borrowing, and when the development industry is crippled by taxes, we will not get the level of development that the Minister aspires to—certainly not towards the 300,000 a year target and 1.5 million by the end of the Parliament. Instead, we will see a stacking up of consents, as we have seen in some parts of the country already, where there are thousands and thousands of undeveloped consents. The industry will bank them. In the absence of a market into which it can sell, it will occupy itself by banking the land for times when hopefully things will come good. Similarly, I am afraid that we will see some of the large infrastructure projects going through the process—the Minister and I are keen to see them accelerated—but people waiting for more propitious economic times to bring them forward, notwithstanding the lack, therefore, of the facility to the British public. I urge him to consider, as he looks to the next stage of his planning reforms, what he will do on undeveloped consents. I think I have said to him before that the Government should force local plans to have a 10-year housing supply that also takes into account granted consents. Then, developers can see a 10-year horizon, as can local authorities, but they also can see that if they want a life beyond 10 years, they will have to start developing that which they already have. If we deal with that issue, we will also deal with quite a lot of the resentment people feel when they see particularly large-scale planning applications coming forward. They ask, “We’ve already got 400 down the road that haven’t been built. Why do we have to take another 400?” Of course, the local council has to put huge amounts of work into the local plan, notwithstanding the fact that it might already have a five-year supply that has been consented but does not count toward the future target. This is a problem that Governments, including my own, have struggled with for some time, and it is one I struggled with when I was Housing Minister, but I hope the Minister will give some thought to at least giving councils the option of having a 10-year supply in which granted consents count. He might well find that he gets a lot more houses built.

• 12 Nov 2025 · Life Sciences: Economic Growth · Hansard source

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  I am chair of the all-party parliamentary group on life sciences, so I know only too well that the industry, which has hitherto been a jewel in our crown, has been struggling to justify further such investment in our economy. Could I press the Secretary of State further on her answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Havant (Alan Mak), and ask her to reassure the House that she has put in a specific, ambitious and vigorous proposal to the Treasury in advance of the Budget to recognise that the life sciences industry is taking more risks than other kinds of investors?

• 12 Nov 2025 · Taxes · Hansard source

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  The shadow Chancellor is laying out compellingly the calamitous choices that were made at the last Budget. Does he agree that fundamentally underlying them is the most calamitous choice of all, which was the strategic decision that the public sector would be expanded and the private sector contracted? The crowding out of the private sector is resulting in this doom loop that we are trapped in. We have fewer and fewer wealth creators and businesses paying for this bloated public sector, and their ability to shoulder that burden gets weaker by the day.

• 12 Nov 2025 · Taxes · Hansard source

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  On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I seek your guidance. The Minister has said that he is unwilling to discuss what might be in the Budget with the House. He did not, however, deny that he may have done so with journalists, or that he may have authorised others to brief to the media what may or may not be in the Budget. In the absence of that denial, are we within our rights to demand that the House be privy to what those conversations contained, in the same way that the business pages of The Times may have been?

• 12 Nov 2025 · Taxes · Hansard source

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  I hear what the Minister is saying about us waiting for the Budget. Could he reassure the House that he has not discussed anything that might be in the Budget with any journalist, and certainly that he has not authorised any members of his office or anybody within the Treasury press team to brief out some of the kites that have been flown about the Budget in the media over the past few weeks?

• 29 Oct 2025 · Gaza and Hamas · Hansard source

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  Once again, it is the children of Gaza who seem to bear the brunt of the violence, with reports that 35 of them were liquidated overnight in the casual dropping of bombs in retaliation. Equally as shocking is the realisation that there will be absolutely no accountability whatsoever for those deaths, likely no investigation into the targeting or intelligence used, and no sense of any punishment for what is very obviously a significant crime. Allied to that is the fact that it has proven quite a handy distraction from the significant violence and brutality taking place daily in the west bank. Given that we have now recognised Palestine as a sovereign nation, will there be any further measures to deter Israeli aggression on Palestinian soil?

• 28 Oct 2025 · Stamp Duty Land Tax · Hansard source

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  The hon. Lady should not assume from the outward utterances that there was not an internal conversation going on within the party about our tax strategy. Those in the Chamber who shared the Cabinet table with me will know that that was often a vigorous conversation. I will leave it at that.

• 28 Oct 2025 · Stamp Duty Land Tax · Hansard source

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  No, the people best positioned to decide where houses should go are local people. That is why, for many years, I have been a strong proponent of neighbourhood planning. It has been proven time and again that neighbourhood planning produces more houses—15% to 20% more—than other forms of planning, especially local plans. If we get the design right and put power in the hands of local people, they will very often make the right choices, not just for their community but for the next generation. A point that the shadow Chancellor has made powerfully is that we should recognise that a gummed-up housing market, which is currently stagnating, suppresses the renovation and construction supply chain. When people move house, they invest in redecoration; they invest in extensions, put a new roof on the house, build on the side, and do all sorts of things to their new house that are good, valuable, productive economic activity. At the moment, we are missing out on that activity.

• 28 Oct 2025 · Stamp Duty Land Tax · Hansard source

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  I will in a minute. The third point I want to make, which I guess is the one that might appeal most to Government Members, is that this tax is generationally unfair. Younger people move house more often, so they are more exposed to this tax. The younger someone is, the more likely they are to be building a family, to require more space, and to be moving up the ladder. Older people tend to sit still. They sit pretty on their capital, which is often in unmortgaged houses. Because of the lack of a market, they generally under-occupy the houses they own. When looking at stamp duty, we have to look at generational fairness, too. In my constituency, hundreds and hundreds of aspirational families need more space. They would like to move up the ladder. They have worked hard and accumulated a deposit and the money that would allow them to move, but they want to spend that money on curtains, carpets, decoration and all the rest of it. They are deterred from moving by this tax. If we are to be fair to the next generation, we have to not only build the houses that they want to buy, but make it cheap for them to buy them, and that means cancelling stamp duty. For all those reasons—to ensure fluidity and liquidity in a market that is skewed to produce artificially high prices; to ensure a market in which developers take a risk and build more houses, and landowners put land forward; but fundamentally for a generation who are being denied access to housing—we need to take seriously the idea that stamp duty is at the heart of the problem, and we need to abolish it entirely. The Liberal Democrats say that abolishing it will raise prices. It of course raises prices if we tell people that there is a window. That would result in frantic activity from those who are desperate to buy. If the abolition becomes permanent, we get a liquid market that achieves a real price, notwithstanding the initial bump. As for those who say that the savings cannot be found, we should be able to find this amount of money, given the size of the Government’s budget, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart) said. I had a look this morning, and I could find 50% of the amount in the Department for Transport’s budget, no problem. The other half could come from the welfare reforms on which the Labour party bottled it. We could easily find the money and do the whole country and the economy an enormous favour.

• 28 Oct 2025 · Stamp Duty Land Tax · Hansard source

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  My right hon. Friend is completely right, and he makes a powerful point. Anybody, whether overseas or here, who comes anywhere in the country, but particularly to London and the south-east, and wants to make a significant purchase is immediately presented with a massive bill that cannot be borrowed. It comes out of any equity that they may have spare lying around or that they may have saved up for years to build towards their housing decision. For the Government to show up and take it at that moment of significance in anybody’s life is extremely damaging. It is the same when the Government show up on the death of a relative and say, “We will take our slice.” Such taxes have enormous salience. As a result, stamp duty and inheritance tax are easily the two most unpopular taxes in the country.

• 28 Oct 2025 · Stamp Duty Land Tax · Hansard source

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  I was Housing Minister for 12 golden months, during which, I am pleased to say, the United Kingdom achieved its highest starts and finishes of housing for 10 years either side—not entirely due to my stewardship, but nevertheless, I will take the credit. I am with the hon. Gentleman in wanting to encourage the building of a significant number of houses, and I am very pleased that large numbers are to be built in my constituency, but they have to be built in the right places. We have to protect our landscape, our countryside and our heritage, while at the same time recognising that many of our market towns need to grow and reach a sustainable size. We can have the houses; they just have to be in the right places. I also think that we would be able to embrace more housing if we were somehow able to breach the conspiracy of crap. Excuse my language, Madam Deputy Speaker; it is a crass word, but it is a great way of summing up the fact that we are building terribly badly designed houses. There is a conspiracy between planners and the development community to produce ersatz housing across the country, rather than to build beautifully designed houses, as generations of housebuilders did before us. It will not come as a surprise to the hon. Member for Milton Keynes North (Chris Curtis) that in his constituency, as in mine, the most valuable houses—irrespective of size—are often the oldest ones, dating from the Victorian era and even earlier periods. Georgian houses command huge prices, as they are seen as desirable because of their beauty. We can have the houses, as long as we put them in the right places and they look good.

• 28 Oct 2025 · Stamp Duty Land Tax · Hansard source

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  I completely agree with my hon. Friend.

• 28 Oct 2025 · Stamp Duty Land Tax · Hansard source

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  I am perplexed by the argument the Liberal Democrats have advanced that abolishing stamp duty will raise prices. Presumably the quid pro quo is that raising it would lower prices, so why are they not proposing that policy?

• 28 Oct 2025 · Stamp Duty Land Tax · Hansard source

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  I understand the hon. Gentleman’s hope for the next generation, and I completely agree with him. As somebody with three children, I hope they get the same housing opportunities and economic opportunities as I did. Sadly, given how the housing market has gone and is going, it does not look as if that will be the case, but he neatly makes the point that I made in opening my speech. To get young people on the housing ladder, a subsidy scheme would see us come full circle. Instead, we should think again about how we can have a deregulated free market that functions for them and allows the houses to be built that can accommodate them. Taking tax off young people and then giving it back in the form of housing subsidy is nonsensical. To return to my point on the supply chain, thousands of small builders around the country are desperate for this kind of work and are seeing the housing market stagnating and their work reducing. Worse than that, in areas of high property value, those who do have capital decide, instead of moving, to build down, up or out. We therefore get densification, particularly in areas such as central London, which often causes significant problems. Moving on, this tax does not work very well for Government either. First, as Members will know, it is pro-cyclical and crashes when the Government need it most. During the 2007-08 crash, stamp duty receipts fell by 60%. We saw a surge in stamp duty receipts during the window a year or so ago, but since then, they have been falling significantly. The Chancellor, who is facing significant fiscal problems, will see that fall even further, so the tax does not work for Government on that basis. Secondly, stamp duty is a bad tax because of its salience. Economists have this idea that taxes have a salience, which is how much people notice they are being taken. VAT has low salience, because we do not really notice it. It is in the prices that we pay. Income tax and pay-as-you-earn have low salience. Stamp duty is enormously noticeable at a moment when people are making a huge decision about their lives. They are trying to progress their families and wham, here come the Government saying, “We are going to have a slice of your wealth.”

• 28 Oct 2025 · Stamp Duty Land Tax · Hansard source

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  I am very sorry to hear about the antipathy of the hon. Member for Pendle and Clitheroe (Jonathan Hinder) towards the south-east. I can assure him that it is not reciprocated, and no doubt the London Members who may or may not be present for this debate will have something to say to him about the wealth and welfare of their residents. Since this Government were elected, I have often called to mind the famous aphorism uttered by Ronald Reagan about Governments’ approach to the economy: “If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.” It feels to me as if, with housing in particular, we are moving into the third of those phases. I contemplate with some alarm the idea that in chasing their huge housing target—noble though it is, and shared by the Conservative party—the Government are about to pump enormous subsidies into the housing market in the Budget. That is precisely the wrong thing to do, particularly for a Government who are struggling to create growth in the economy. What the Government seem to have failed to realise is that if we allow capitalism to function—to do what it is supposed to do—it is brilliant at creating abundance. It has been the single greatest tool for alleviating poverty across the world that humankind has ever known, yet here in this country, Governments—not just this Government but, to my alarm, previous Governments over the past 20 years or so—have not appreciated the formula of incentives required for capitalism to function. It is particularly damaging for it not to function within the housing market, and that is especially salient for the United Kingdom, whose economy is so closely tied to its domestic housing market. Looking at the correlation between the two, it is pretty much one to one: if the housing market is doing well, our economy is doing well, and vice versa. That points to the problem that stamp duty poses. I want to raise a few points about this motion, as well as to say that I agreed entirely with the shadow Chancellor’s excellent opening speech. First, stamp duty is not a tax on wealth, or even on property; it is a tax on decision making. It skews people’s ability to conduct their life as they wish to, and it deters decisions from being made within the housing market and bungs it up so that it does not work for anybody, wherever in that market they sit and whether or not they pay stamp duty. For capitalism to work—for a market to work—there needs to be lots and lots of transactions. There needs to be fluidity and liquidity. That is what achieves a steady price and creates abundance; people know that they can take a risk in a market, because they will find a counterparty. Scarcity is what raises prices, and that is exactly the position we find ourselves in at the moment. Punitive rates of stamp duty do to the housing market precisely what none of us wants them to do, which is to reward scarcity. They push people into other forms of economic activity, with the result that they cannot fulfil the wishes and aspirations of their family.

• 22 Oct 2025 · Heathrow: National Airports Review · Hansard source

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  As the Secretary of State knows from her time at City Hall, Heathrow has been a planning disaster since it was accidentally sited to the west of London, forcing planes to land over millions of heads. While it might be amusing to watch her take the chainsaw to all those trees planted at Sipson by a series of Labour politicians, why she would compound that planning disaster I have no idea. More than that, if this goes ahead, she will also be compounding the Heathrow monopoly on long-haul flights. To her four rules, I suggest that she adds a fifth, which is the impact on direct connectivity to and from regional airports. There is the strong view that the expansion of Heathrow would kill connectivity from Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol and elsewhere.

• 14 Oct 2025 · Middle East · Hansard source

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  Setting aside the fact that we find ourselves in a situation where conditions have been placed upon the cessation of the annihilation of an entire people and the strange delineation between hostages on one side and prisoners held in administrative detention on the other, we should all of course, as the Prime Minister said, express profound relief at the end of the killing, not least of one child every 45 minutes for two years. Is not the lesson of the last two years that when the UK finally moves on from empty rhetoric to take concrete action, there is movement in the parties to a conflict like this, and that therefore we should be thinking about what more concrete action we can take, in particular in three areas? First, can we please have concrete steps to deter Israeli territorial ambition in the west bank, including a ban on settlement goods, now that we have officially recognised that territory? Secondly, could we have a reassertion of UK support for international law and the institutions that support it? In particular, could the Prime Minister use his relationship with President Trump to have the sanctions on individuals at the UN and the International Criminal Court lifted? Finally, if we are to support or participate in an international stabilisation force, could we insist that it also covers areas B and C of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, where the Israel Defence Forces too often act as cover for incidents of Israeli terrorism?

• 10 Sept 2025 · Qatar: Israeli Strike · Hansard source

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  The events of yesterday come as no surprise to those of us in the Chamber who have raised the issue of the Israeli Government’s crimes, committed with an air of complete impunity. It should now be crystal clear to the Minister, as it is to so many across the world, that the Israeli Government are not interested in the slightest in peace, or indeed in the fate of their hostages. In that light, I have two questions. First, what military and intelligence assistance will we provide to the Qataris to allow them to defend themselves against further attacks? Secondly, will the UK add its voice to the growing calls across the world for the formation of an international protection force to enter Gaza and enforce a peace?