What Britain's parties say and do in public, recorded from the source.
Every entry links to Hansard, Parliament, the Electoral Commission or the party's own channel. Every party is tracked by the same rules. Methodology
Labour Party
Latest entry 11 Nov 2026
Conservative and Unionist Party
Latest entry 11 Nov 2026
Liberal Democrats
Latest entry 11 Nov 2026
Reform UK
Latest entry 11 Nov 2026
Scottish National Party
Latest entry 11 Nov 2026
Green Party
Latest entry 11 Nov 2026
Plaid Cymru
Latest entry 10 Nov 2026
Showing every spoken contribution, including 12,942 under 12 words. Hide short remarks
I am certainly happy to look at the model in the US around the right to try. I also want to update the House that we are appointing a national clinical lead for rare cancers, who will sit on the national cancer board. The benchmark is to improve outcomes and five-year survival rates for 14 less common cancers, including brain cancer. I know that Members will all hold us to account on that score.
I thank my hon. Friend for raising the late, great Tessa Jowell in this debate. I had the privilege of being the shadow Health Minister and speaking in one of the debates we had in the House, and her legacy does live on. I must move on, because I want to talk about brain cancer research.
This will have to be the last intervention.
I will come back to the hon. Gentleman’s point. I really do have to get through some things and respond to the number of people who spoke about brain cancer research, because nearly all hon. Members mentioned that. Through the National Institute for Health and Care Research, we have directly invested more than £32 million since the general election. My hon. Friend the Member for Colne Valley and so many other colleagues mentioned the £40 million commitment for brain cancer research in 2018 and the fact that it had not all been spent. Prior to the general election in 2024, that was the case, but I can confirm that since the general election, the spend from NIHR programmes alone has now been in excess of £40 million since 2018. That £40 million is not a funding ceiling. We will continue to fund research that is recommended by our funding committees and independent peer reviewers. That includes more than £25 million for the NIHR brain tumour research consortium, which brings together 48 organisations across the UK in a national, co-ordinated effort to help deliver better research faster. We are also partnering with Cancer Research UK, providing almost £3 million to co-fund the brain tumour centres of excellence; this collaboration will accelerate the delivery of innovative treatments to patients. We will continue to build on our investments and fund high-quality brain cancer research. As we reaffirmed in the national cancer plan, the Government will implement the Rare Cancers Act in full, starting with the appointment of an NIHR national specialty lead for rare cancers this summer. That appointment is under way, and that person, once appointed, will make sure that we are delivering research for patients. Implementing the Act will also make it easier for researchers to connect with patients living with rare cancers, including brain tumours, and streamline recruitment into clinical trials. Our 10-year health plan will make the UK a global leader in clinical research, because we want every patient in the country to have the chance to sign up to a clinical trial should they wish to do so. The hon. Members for Kingswinford and South Staffordshire (Mike Wood) and for Esher and Walton (Monica Harding) and my hon. Friend the Member for Mansfield (Steve Yemm) all asked me about clinical trials. We have announced a clinical trials accelerator, Be Part of Research, which allows users to search for relevant studies and register their interest. I turn to brain tissue freezing and to the specific points raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly (Chris Evans) and so many others. Earlier this month, I met him and other colleagues, as well as Ellie James, the campaigner for Owain’s law. Can I just say how moved I was? My hon. Friend knows that no one can fail to be moved by Ellie’s story. She spoke for many people, not just in Wales but across the United Kingdom, and I have asked the NHS to take action. NHS England has completed a gap analysis of the need for freezer capacity, as my hon. Friend mentioned, and is looking at how to support services to provide an equitable expansion of that capacity. I have also asked the Department and NHS England to work with professional bodies, including the Royal College of Pathologists, to review tissue retention guidance and consent processes, which is what we discussed. We are looking at ways to support trusts to expand freezer capacity, and I will be happy to update colleagues in the autumn. My hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye (Helena Dollimore) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) asked me about workforce. We will be publishing the 10-year workforce plan imminently; it will set out action to create a workforce ready to deliver the transformed services set out in the 10-year health plan. I want to end by saying that I do not see it as my job just to represent the Government to patients and campaigners. It is also my job to be their voice in Government, and I take that role very seriously. For the last 20 years, I have sat where other Members are or where the shadow Minister is, so I completely understand where everyone is coming from. I think I am going to run out of time, but 35 Back Benchers have spoken—
I congratulate my right hon. Friend on his appointment—he is very well suited to the job at hand. I am sure he will understand, though, if I also express my disappointment that his predecessor and my constituency neighbour, my right hon. Friend the Member for Rawmarsh and Conisbrough (John Healey), felt he had to resign because of the inadequacies, as he saw them, in the defence investment plan. I congratulate everyone involved on the seizing of the tanker. It is an important lesson for Putin that we are going to disrupt his war machine, but it is also a first; will the Secretary of State indicate if we are looking to undertake such operations more regularly in order to ensure that the many such tankers that sail in these waters are not free do so in future without the fear that our Government may act against them?
Leaseholders at Southend’s Meridien Point are trapped in an unbearable financial situation, as a result of an internal defects bill of £3 million, and a £450,000 fight against the building developer. Their block is 18 metres in height, and they are not entitled to funding for the support that they desperately need. They have been offered just £50,000 towards their legal fees by Homes England. How can we look at existing funding criteria for mid-rise buildings, and encourage Homes England to fully support leaseholders in taking on well-resourced developers?
2. What steps his Department is taking to reform the leasehold sector.
I met residents of the Hucknall colliery development in my constituency who have been left frustrated by high estate management charges, a lack of transparency and the appalling performance of managing agent FirstPort. Many cannot understand their bills or how they are calculated. Some are paying different amounts for similar properties, and many were led to believe that roads and public spaces would be adopted, only to find themselves facing ever increasing charges. They have been misled and ignored. Does the Minister agree that homeowners should not be trapped in these so-called fleecehold arrangements? Will he set out what action the Government will take to ensure that managing agents, such as FirstPort, are properly regulated, transparent and accountable to the residents who are ultimately funding them? My residents continue to be treated with contempt.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Chester South and Eddisbury (Aphra Brandreth) on securing the debate and on her work gathering her constituents’ views. I genuinely welcome the tone that she has taken. As a personal reflection, I miss the fact that a great many subjects that we used to debate in this place used to be debated in that tone, with a genuine desire to get the right outcome, with a bit less heat and a bit more substance. I hope that we can get back to that in debates about the energy sector. I will come to the points raised by the hon. Lady in a moment. I recognise that the project she mentioned has a lot of interest from her constituents, as well as those in neighbouring constituencies, but it is part of the wider carbon capture industry in the UK, so before I come to those specific points, I will take a moment to explain our wider position on carbon capture. Carbon capture, usage and storage will decarbonise industry and power in a way that drives economic growth and supports jobs, as well as our climate goals. Through CCUS we can produce flexible, low-carbon power, displacing the use of unabated gas when renewable energy sources such as solar and wind are not available. CCUS will be critical. I welcome the hon. Lady’s recognition that our pathway to reducing our carbon emission matters, and that the route we take to get there matters as well. In our view, carbon capture plays a part in that. I was reflecting on the commitment by previous Governments to this. The shadow Energy Secretary, the right hon. Member for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho), put it very well in December 2023, when she was the Energy Secretary: “Thanks to the UK’s geology, skills and infrastructure, we are in a unique position to lead the way on carbon capture technologies.” I welcome those comments because they set out the right approach to take, but I think there are now some new ideas among Conservative Front Benchers. CCUS at home is one part of the story, but the story is also about how we export that technology and expertise abroad. McKinsey recently forecast that the global investment in the industry could be worth up to £135 billion by 2035. We want the UK to be at the forefront of that and to capture as much of that potential as possible. We have several advantages that make us well placed to take that forward. Our first clusters in the UK are projected to support an average of 4,800 direct jobs, while the sector as a whole can deliver up to 50,000 jobs and £2.8 billion of gross value added by 2050, and includes jobs included in north-west England and north Wales. The question of how we reduce emissions from cement has been referenced. The HyNet cluster, which I visited a few months ago, and Padeswood cement works are examples of projects that are moving forward where carbon capture technology not only reduces our emissions and creates jobs in the process, but protects jobs at the cement works that have been rooted in that community for decades. This is about protecting our industrial base as well as building what we need for the future. Although I welcome the hon. Lady’s important point about low-carbon cement, this is not an either/or situation. There should be a place for innovation. Where we see technological solutions coming forward, we should support them as much as possible. I agree with her point about prevention being better that cure, but we also need to protect the industries that we have and the jobs that go with them. I hope that we can do both. I welcome the chance to talk about the specifics of the Peak Cluster project, which the hon. Lady particularly wants to talk about. I also welcome the conversations that I have had with a number of other hon. Members over the past few months on this issue. My hon. Friends the Members for Mid Cheshire (Andrew Cooper), for Chester North and Neston (Samantha Dixon), for Wallasey (Dame Angela Eagle), for Ellesmere Port and Bromborough (Justin Madders), for Derbyshire Dales (John Whitby), for High Peak (Jon Pearce), for Wirral West (Matthew Patrick), who joins me on the Front Bench, and the Mayor of the East Midlands, Claire Ward, have all raised questions, some very similar to those raised by the hon. Member for Chester South and Eddisbury. They are legitimate questions about how we ensure that safety is a paramount consideration—
I will take interventions in a moment—I have clearly started something. The major thrust of the hon. Lady’s speech was about how the voices of communities are heard in the consultation process.
My hon. Friend makes a very important point. The National Wealth Fund is independent in the decisions it makes. It has clearly made decisions based on the Government’s ambitions on carbon capture, but on this particular project it made investment independent of my Department, which has not made any funding commitments to the Peak project. That should be seen as just a decision for the National Wealth Fund and not as any wider support from the Government at this stage.
I agree with my hon. Friend, and I will come on to that point. I appreciate the importance of consultation, but I thought the hon. Member for Chester South and Eddisbury put it very well. Consultation is not a briefing exercise; it is a listening exercise, and a reshaping of things on the basis of what we hear back. I will say more about that in just a moment. Let me be really clear about how this project is being developed. The Peak project is being developed independent of Government and is at an early stage. It is crucial that developers engage fully with local communities as they develop the proposals, and they will have to work towards introducing a proposal into the planning system. I have been very clear with developers directly that the project has to take local views into account and offer clear benefits to local communities. If that does not happen, the submission will simply not be taken forward. I am aware that proposals have received a number of local stories in the press and that a public petition has received many signatures. Let me echo something that the hon. Lady said. There is a way to engage in this process. Robust comments are important, as people care deeply about these things, but abuse targeted at either those involved in the project or hon. Members is not a productive way to take this work forward. I hope that there will be a process in which people feel they can genuinely participate. As I understand it, the Peak Cluster has plans for more extensive consultation later this year, before any final proposals are made. No decision has been made by the Government either to support the project or on the development consent order process, which will be completed once the proposal is submitted and will be completed in the way that these processes always are—in a quasi-judicial way, by the Secretary of State. Let me respond to a couple of specific challenges raised in the debate. On safety, it is really important to make the case to the public that carbon capture is a very tried-and-tested technology that has been deployed across industry and power generation at scale for a long time. Geological carbon dioxide storage has been in operation for decades, and Norway has stored CO2 since 1996, with more than 20 million tonnes stored so far. Our regulatory regime rightly has to raise the safety levels to ensure that continues. The hon. Lady raised a number of other points, which I will happily pick up with her in more detail, but let me make a final point in closing. We want to be a Government who drive forward on reducing our carbon emissions and build the technologies of the future, but we do not govern by diktat. The views of local communities matter—they matter deeply to me, but also to the Secretary of State and to this process. The only way this works for everyone involved is if those views are taken seriously, and if communities feel that their views are taken seriously by all those involved. We must also all recognise the really important benefits that come from carbon capture and the pathway we are on as a Government. That is the balance that we seek to achieve as a Government—taking the views of local people seriously, but also building the infrastructure that this country needs for the future. I genuinely thank the hon. Member for Chester South and Eddisbury for bringing this debate before the House, and my hon. Friends for contributing to it. Question put and agreed to.
The Government continue to implement those leasehold reforms that are already in statute and to progress the wider set of reforms necessary to end the feudal leasehold system for good. In respect of the latter, the King’s Speech confirmed our intention to introduce the substantive commonhold and leasehold reform Bill, which will include fixes to the small number of specific but serious flaws in the previous Government’s Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024.
I thank my hon. Friend for her advocacy on this issue. Homeowners should not be subject to unfair management charges or poor standards of service at the hands of managing agents, and I commend her for bringing this case to the House’s attention. Our recent consultation on enhanced protections for homeowners on freehold estates closed on 12 March, and we are analysing the feedback received alongside continuing to develop plans to strengthen the regulation of managing agents.
My hon. Friend has considerable expertise on leasehold reform, and he is right to press for clarity on this important matter. To commence the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act’s enfranchisement provisions, we unfortunately do need to fix the flaws he refers to through new primary legislation, and we will do so in this Session. In the interim, we will need to establish what capitalisation and deferment rates to set, and I am pleased to tell him that I am aiming to launch a consultation on those in the coming weeks.
As you will recall, Mr Speaker, this is not the first occasion on which I have had to mention FirstPort at the Dispatch Box. We need to drive up standards across all managing agents. I shall be more than happy to meet the hon. Lady and a group of other Members, as she suggests, to discuss this particular provider in more detail.
As the hon. Lady is—hopefully—aware, the last Government asked Lord Best to chair a working group to look at the regulation of property agents in the round. We are giving careful consideration to the recommendations in its report, with a view to strengthening the regulation of managing agents. If the hon. Lady will write to me with more details about that specific case, I will look into it.
I commend my hon. Friend, the other members of her Committee and its officials for the thorough piece of work that they have done in scrutinising the draft Bill: that will make for a better Bill when it is introduced. My hon. Friend will forgive me if I do not comment on press speculation but merely build on what I said in my letter to her of 8 June, namely that the Committee and the Government are of one mind when it comes to the necessity of making progress with the substantive Bill as quickly as possible so that we can transform the lives of leaseholders. While I remain committed to ensuring that any Bill put forward is robust so that we do not have to fix problems in primary legislation, as we had to in the case of the 2024 Act, I am seized of the urgency of both presenting the Bill and commencing the ground rent provisions as quickly as possible.
The hon. Gentleman is as charming as ever, but all I can say to him is what I say in respect of this and many other issues: I am more than happy to help our counterparts in Northern Ireland to learn from the very good work that this Government are doing in relation to leasehold reform.
As I have said to the hon. Gentleman on previous occasions, I have a great deal of respect for him, but he has some front in standing up and accusing this Government of dithering when it comes to leasehold reform. The Conservative party had 14 years in which to end the system, and did not do it. It raised expectations, and let leaseholders down. We are going to end the system within a Parliament. We are going to strengthen the regulation of managing agents. We will respond to the Select Committee, and will set out further details in the near future.
As you are aware, Mr Speaker, the Government recently consulted on a new national planning policy framework. That consultation included proposals designed to promote healthy communities. We are currently analysing the extensive feedback received and will publish our response in due course.
I am in full agreement with my hon. Friend on the importance of local green spaces. Such spaces are vital community assets that provide significant benefits, not only for physical and mental health but to mitigate growing challenges, such as the urban heat island effect. Although I cannot speak for other Government Departments, the new NPPF recognises the importance of safeguarding local green spaces and ensures that such spaces are excluded from the definition of grey-belt land.
If the right hon. Gentleman would not mind sending me details of the two cases in question, I am more than happy to sit down and have a conversation with him about how he thinks those decisions interact with the proposals set out in the recent consultation.
The plan-led approach is and must remain the cornerstone of our planning system, and we have been very clear that we expect all local planning authorities to make every possible effort to get up-to-date local plans in place as soon as possible. To support LPAs seeking to protect their communities from piecemeal and speculative development by getting up-to-date plans in place, we distributed £19.8 million following the publication of the revised NPPF in December 2024. We recently supplemented that funding with a further £15.7 million through our local plan implementation fund to support nearly 200 local planning authorities to progress plan development.
I am afraid I refute the assertion the hon. Gentleman makes about what the NPPF will do to local plans. We do need local plans in place, and as I have said, the plan-led approach is the cornerstone of the system. The NPPF kicks in where in certain instances authorities do not have an up-to-date local plan in place, which is the case for far too many. I am very pleased that his local authority has taken the steps necessary to get one in place as soon as possible.
My hon. Friend makes a really important point. We have spoken before about the importance of rural exception sites and what more can be done. In the NPPF consultation, which I have referenced, we set out proposals to strengthen rural exception site policy. As I have said, we are analysing the feedback received before we can set out the next steps.
National planning policy makes clear that planning decisions should minimise potential adverse impacts resulting from noise. Associated planning practice guidance sets out that good acoustic design needs to be considered early in the planning process.
Building regulations already require protection against sound or reverberation in houses, flats, buildings that have residential rooms and schools, but I am always open to considering how sound insulation standards might be improved in new builds. I would work on any further information my hon. Friend might send to me about the referenced projects in her constituency, including the Oscar Acoustics innovation centre.
My Department is working closely with the Department for Transport to consider reforms to adoption and highways frameworks. We also recently consulted on reducing the prevalence of private estate management arrangements, including proposals to increase the adoption of estate amenities such as roads on new developments. That consultation closed on 12 March and we are analysing the feedback received.
Those cases sound particularly egregious, and I am sorry to hear about them. My hon. Friend is right to highlight the detrimental consequences of declining road adoption rates. The Department for Transport is reviewing barriers to adoption, with a view to identifying improvements and informing future reforms, alongside the consultation that I referenced. When it comes to individual local authorities, to put it mildly, some are better than others—we know that—and Central Bedfordshire obviously has some ground to make up. That is one of the issues we are considering as part of the policy development process in respect of that consultation.
We will do better than that. As part of our consultation on ending the prevalence of those arrangements, we specifically consulted on what more we can do on common adoptable standards, and we are exploring mandatory adoption for certain public amenities in certain circumstances. If the hon. Gentleman has read the Competition and Markets Authority report into the issue, he will know that the two are essential; we cannot mandate local authorities until we have common adoptable standards. If that is the route we go down, we have to do them at the same time.
Ministers in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government engage regularly with ministerial colleagues across Government in relation to a range of housing policy matters. We continue to consider what additional powers we might give local authorities to enable them to respond to the pressures created by short-term lets, as well as second homes.
To be clear, there is no credible solution to the housing crisis that does not involve significantly boosting housing supply, but my hon. Friend is absolutely right to argue that the distribution of homes in any given area has a significant bearing on housing availability and affordability. As she knows, the Government have already made changes to the tax system to reorientate the housing markets away from second-home owners and investors and towards local people looking for homes to live in. While I cannot commit to future legislation, I assure her that we continue to consider how best to ensure that local planning authorities have the full set of tools they need to manage challenges of the kind described by my hon. Friend.
My Department is not responsible for the national registration scheme for short-term lets. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport is responsible for that and is committed to implementing it as soon as possible. When it is implemented, the scheme will capture any property used as short-term rental accommodation, importantly including second homes that operate as short-term lets.
Event fees should be fair, transparent and communicated effectively. The Government continue to give careful consideration to the recommendations set out in the final report from the older people’s housing taskforce, including in respect of implementing the Law Commission’s 2017 recommendations to regulate event fees.
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his question—this is a really important issue. We consulted on a package of measures last year to strengthen leaseholder protections, including on the use of event fees, and will hopefully be responding to that consultation in the near future. More broadly, resale values are influenced by a range of factors, but the older people’s housing taskforce commented on resale values and on what might be done, and produced a series of recommendations, which we are carefully considering.
As I have just made clear, we are looking carefully at resale values and the recommendations made by the older people’s housing taskforce in this area. I wonder whether both my hon. Friend and the hon. Member for West Dorset (Edward Morello) might send me some of the examples they have referenced, as any evidence we can get on how this issue is affecting homeowners and their families across the country would be incredibly useful.
It was remiss of me not to welcome the hon. Gentleman to his place, and I do so now. He has diligently pursued the issue of conveyancing and buying and selling over many months, not least in his role on the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee. I cannot go further at the Dispatch Box than saying that we are carefully considering the recommendations from the older people’s housing taskforce, but I am more than happy to sit down with the hon. Gentleman and discuss this issue if he would like to do so.
Me again, Mr Speaker. We remain focused on implementing the five-step plan we published in July last year to deliver a decade of social and affordable housing renewal. We received incredibly ambitious bids for our £39 billion social and affordable homes programme and are in the process of assessing them with a view to a timely announcement of allocations. As Members will know, our Social Housing Bill, which will give affordable housing providers the clarity and confidence they need to build more social homes, is also making good progress in the other place.
My hon. Friend is right. I would go further than she did: I think the previous Government deliberately set out to engineer the decline of social rented housing, not least through the reforms that they made to the right to buy, which we are reversing through the Social Housing Bill. As I made clear, we received ambitious bids from affordable housing providers across the country, including in the north-east. That will allow councils and housing associations to start using the grant to build at scale once again.