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I am interested to understand why this consultation is before the public. It goes against the grain of the Law Commission’s 2015 report and the coroner’s report, which contained no such recommendation. Would the Minister also mind answering my question on fireworks? Fireworks are licensed, too, so why are the Government not willing to explore tougher fireworks regulation, given that in 2023 there were 35 deaths associated with firework usage?
I recently had the privilege of spending some time with the Jewish community of Stamford Hill. Those conversations reinforced that we must, as the Minister rightly said, do more to combat antisemitism. She cited the recent figures showing that antisemitism is at near record levels. When in government, we put in place the first multi-year funding for the Community Security Trust, and I thank the Government for recently extending and increasing that funding. Will the Minister join me in thanking CST volunteers and agree that anti-religious hatred has no place in our society?
Schools right across my constituency already have inclusion bases, but often there is already tension between the schools and the parents, who want better support through EHCPs, which they are having to wait for. What is the Secretary of State’s thinking on ensuring that the relationship between schools and parents remains strong, and that we do not inadvertently pit parents against teachers, given the new role that schools will play?
I will speak in part to amendments 1 and 2, although we will not vote on them this evening. Essentially, I am speaking because we do not believe that scrapping the two-child limit and lifting it in this way is the way to tackle child poverty. When the Conservatives introduced the two-child limit in 2017, we did so for one simple reason: fairness. We believed then, as we do now, that people on benefits should face the same financial choices about having children as those supporting themselves solely through work. Nine years later, we stand by that principle. The welfare state should be a safety net for people in genuine need, yet too many people feel that the welfare system has drifted from its original purpose. They see a system that rewards dependency while working families and individuals shoulder the tax burden. The two-child limit is a way of saying that work should pay, that taking responsibility should matter and that the system should stand with those who pull their weight.
We know that poverty decreased under the last Government; I will make some progress. True compassion for families in poverty means offering sustainable solutions, not just sticking plasters. We need to tackle the root causes of poverty, rather than masking the symptoms. That means dealing with structural issues that damage children’s life chances, rather than simply handing out more cash to families. It is worth noting that the two-child limit has had no significant negative effects on school readiness for third and subsequent children in England. School readiness is the cornerstone metric of the Government’s opportunity mission. Labour and other opponents may criticise the cap for all sorts of reasons, but scrapping it will not be a cost-effective way of improving children’s educational development. In terms of holistic solutions, we know that work is the single most transformative route out of poverty. Work provides stability, self-respect and the crucial stepping stones to a better future. We should be doing everything we can to ensure that families on universal credit can access meaningful employment. As I have said before, children in long-term workless households are four times more likely to be materially deprived, and they are 10% more likely to end up workless themselves. When we were in government, Conservatives oversaw a consistent reduction in the number of children in workless households, yet under Labour that number has reached a nine-year high: there are now 1.2 million children living in homes where no parent has worked for over a year. Without a working parent at home, children miss out on seeing the rhythms and rewards of working life—the morning alarm, the daily routine, the pride of earning a wage and the discipline of saving up for things that matter. This Government seem bent on disincentivising work and destroying jobs.
I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention, which provides me with a great opportunity to say something that I realised again while preparing for this debate. We know that lots of working people claim universal credit, but what we do not know is how many hours those people work, which would enable us to ascertain how many of them are full-time workers and how many are part-time workers. Of course, if they are full-time workers, there is one argument to be made, but if—as I would assume—the vast majority are part-time workers, we need to be encouraging them to work more hours. Later in my speech, I am going to get to a point where this is a problem, given all the other passported benefits that they get once they are entitled to universal credit. How can it be fair to expect working parents to subsidise other families’ decisions that lie beyond their own financial reach? We also must not forget the single people whose household overheads are higher than in dual-income households. In 2024, there were 8.4 million people living alone in the UK—nearly 30% of households. They, too, should not be saddled with the extra tax burden that scrapping the two-child limit will inevitably create. This Labour Government prefer handouts to hard choices. Giving away cash will always be more popular than exercising fiscal responsibility—the Back Benchers like it, and the left-wing think-tanks like it. The families who will get thousands more pounds every year like it, and who can blame them? Spending other people’s money is an easy way for the Government to feel good about themselves, but that money must come from somewhere. This Government are only pretending that they can afford to scrap the cap; originally, they said that doing so was unaffordable. That is true—the cost of this policy will be about £3.5 billion—but instead of sticking to his guns, our Prime Minister has capitulated to his Back Benchers. It requires backbone to bring the welfare budget under control, and backbone is exactly what Labour lacks. In contrast, previous Conservative Governments did indeed control spending; until the pandemic, spending on working-age welfare fell in real terms. That is why we have committed to save £23 billion. We will crack down on the abuse of Motability, we will stop handing out benefits to foreign nationals—because citizenship should mean something—and we will stop giving benefits to people with low-level mental health problems, to ensure that we can target support to the people who need it most. Under Labour, the overall benefits bill continues to balloon. By the end of this decade, health and disability benefits alone are set to reach £100 billion—I did read that right. Scrapping the cap is fiscally irresponsible and Labour knows it. This Bill will only increase the tax burden on hard-working men and women whose household budgets are already being stretched to the limit.
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. Of course how we care for the most vulnerable is the mark of our society, but as Conservatives we do not believe that it is simply about trying to lift them up by giving them extra cash. All we are doing is changing the relative poverty measure; we are not suddenly lifting all these people out of poverty because we are giving them more money. We do not know what they are going to spend that money on. What we need to do is spend the money not on sticking plasters, but on putting things in place that actually have a systemic impact. We need to bring people from long-term poverty into a long-term position in which they can afford what they need. Inflation has soared to nearly twice as high a level as when this Government entered office. Food prices are rising. Utility bills are rising. Even the cost of relaxing at the pub with a beer is rising. We cannot lift children out of poverty by making the whole country poorer, as my hon. Friend the Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Helen Whately) has argued so persuasively. When inflation rises, spending power falls. The money people earn buys less, because each pound is worth less than before; indeed, the money people receive on benefits is also worth less because of inflation. Families feel it at the checkout, at the petrol station and with every bill that drops through the door. Inflation not only squeezes families’ budgets, but narrows their choices. With the cost of everyday essentials continuing to climb, many working families are being forced to delay or even abandon plans for another child. Scrapping the two-child cap gives families on benefits a choice that many working households can no longer dream of: the ability to grow their family without facing financial choices. This unfairness erodes trust in our social contract. The social contract is an implicit agreement between citizens and the state that gives the state its legitimacy. People work and pay their taxes; in return, they trust the state to step in if they fall on hard times. They trust the state to spend their taxes responsibly on their behalf, but the welfare system has become totally lopsided. Over half the households in this country now receive more from the state than they pay into it. Taxpayers are supporting a system larger than themselves. Scrapping the two-child limit will further exacerbate the imbalance. The problem does not stop there. There is an entire shadow system working alongside universal credit. As I have mentioned, passported benefits are costing the taxpayer £10 billion every single year. They include healthy food cards, discounted broadband and free prescriptions. Together, they distort work incentives, leading to a cliff-edge denial of entitlements when a claimant comes off universal credit. Many parents want to work, but are better off remaining on benefits once they factor in their loss of eligibility for those extra entitlements. Yet again, they have been let down by a system that should be supporting them into work, not trapping them on benefits.
I am not particularly well today, so the right hon. Lady will forgive me if my memory is foggier than normal. That is why I am wearing my glasses, and it is why I am struggling not to cough throughout this debate. I am happy to have a conversation with her afterwards, but testing me on those sorts of things at this particular time is perhaps not the kindest thing to do. The two-child limit is about basic fairness to working parents—the very people whose taxes fund our welfare system. They are already making tough decisions about the size of their own families, and we cannot exempt people on benefits from those hard choices. Scrapping the cap is a direct insult to the working families on whom this country relies. The Government should remember the case that they once made for keeping the cap. When the Prime Minister suspended seven of his own MPs in 2024 for voting to scrap it, he did so on the basis that the policy was simply too expensive. He has now bowed to pressure from his Back Benchers, but nothing has changed—it is still unaffordable. Why are this Government preparing to spend billions by removing the two-child limit, when they cannot even get a grip on rising unemployment? We should be expanding real routes into work, not deepening incentives to remain on benefits.
I have been wanting to mention this point throughout the debate, but I have not had the right opportunity. Obviously a large number of these new clauses look at reporting back. I appreciate that the child poverty strategy involves a lot of reporting back, but is the Minister aware that the Department for Education does not yet have the records of which local councils have taken up auto-enrolment for free school meals? While the child poverty strategy has introduced universal breakfast clubs, there is no matrix to be able to decipher whether auto-enrolment for free school meals is working. In some cases, such as in the county that I represent, that has meant a significant amount of money for those local authorities deliberately to try to tackle poverty. Will he look into tackling that?
I draw attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. The key concern I hear from parents and carers in Reigate, Redhill, Banstead and our villages is that they fought for years, or are still fighting, to get support. Can the Education Secretary reassure my constituents that they will not lose the hard-fought-for support that they are entitled to?
Before we come to the statement from the Secretary of State for Education, I must once again note Mr Speaker’s disappointment about briefing to the media before important announcements are brought to this House, given the Government’s own rules in their ministerial code. As the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee recently stated, “making the most important statements in the first instance to Parliament means doing so before they are made to the media and not at the first available opportunity thereafter.” The Government need to either adhere to their own rules or change them.
We are under huge time pressure—there is another statement to come, and then two items of protected business—so not everybody will get in. Please keep questions short—and keep answers just as short, Secretary of State.
As the House will know, local plans are the method by which we can identify affordable homes and make sure that they are built in the right place at the right time. Since I was elected back in December 2019, I have consistently asked the Liberal Democrat Three Rivers district council to get on with the local plan. However, as the Housing Minister will know, the latest version of that plan did not have sufficient evidence. He has therefore rightly called it in. Does he agree that the Lib Dems need to get on with delivering the local plan and that they should not continue to fail my residents in South West Hertfordshire?
I thank the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister for the statement, which we received at 3.38 pm. I gently suggest to him that the 45 minutes referred to in the ministerial code is a minimum, rather than a target. On 4 February, this House voted, cross party, for a Humble Address to be presented. That is not a polite suggestion; it is a formal command from Parliament to the Executive, but three weeks later, the Government have moved with the urgency of a tired sloth on a bank holiday Monday. Before the recess, my hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart) sent a comprehensive list of questions to the Cabinet Office. He received nothing back—not a letter, not a postcard, not even an out-of-office reply, so let us try for some verbal clarity today. The Prime Minister previously staked the integrity of this process on the personal oversight of the Cabinet Secretary—and then he sacked him. Has the change in Cabinet Secretary caused a scoping delay, or are the Government simply using the handover as convenient long grass to kick this into? Reports suggest that a secret investigation into Lord Mandelson’s conduct took place last September. My hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar asked about this on the Floor of the House, and again in writing, but there has been silence. Can the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister tell us if that report exists? If so, who wrote it, and will the Government stop playing hide-and-seek and publish it? The Government call this an urgent review, yet the terms of reference remain as elusive as a coherent Treasury forecast. The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, the hon. Member for Brighton Kemptown and Peacehaven (Chris Ward) promised my hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar in the debate on 4 February that he would write with answers, yet there is still nothing. Can the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister tell us whether the scope includes the £241 million Ministry of Defence contract awarded to Palantir following Lord Mandelson’s off-diary meetings? Does it cover Global Counsel? Or are we looking only at bits of the noble Lord’s Rolodex that are not politically explosive? The Intelligence and Security Committee is being asked to help, yet its secretariat consists of Cabinet Office civil servants. As the ISC itself warned last May, an oversight body should not be beholden to the very organisation it is supposed to be overseeing. If this is a genuine audit, what steps are being taken to ensure that the committee can operate without conflicts of interest, when Cabinet Office staff are considering material that relates directly to decisions taken by the Cabinet Office itself? Mr Speaker, you could not have been clearer: “the police cannot dictate to this House.”—[Official Report, 4 February 2026; Vol. 780, c. 375.] Yet the Government remain coy about the legal basis for withholding documents. We need an unequivocal commitment today that once the police are finished, every withheld page will be published—no excuses, and no redactions by stealth—and that in the meantime, any documents that are withheld from publication at the request of the police are handed to the ISC immediately, as you indicated after the debate, Mr Speaker. Finally, will the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister commit to a Keeling-style register of all withheld documents? If the Government have nothing to hide, they should have no problem listing exactly what they are keeping from us, and why. The Opposition have acted in good faith. We have been patient, but careful work must not become a euphemism for managed delay. This House gave a constitutional instruction on 4 February. It is time the Government stopped treating Parliament like an inconvenient interruption to their schedule, stopped giving every impression that their priority is working out whose back to cover, and started providing some actual answers, so that we can start to get to the bottom of this murky matter.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Barker. I thank the hon. Member for South Norfolk (Ben Goldsborough) for so ably bringing forward this debate on behalf of the Petitions Committee, as well as the more than 121,000 people who signed the petition. It is clear from the turnout in the Chamber and the many valuable points made that the measures proposed are important and will have huge consequences for rural communities. A number of Members have been incredibly active in lobbying the Government on the issue, including my hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Stamford (Alicia Kearns)—not known for being quiet, let’s be honest—who has been unable to contribute to the debate due to her shadow role. She is determined to ensure that the Minister knows about the impact on her constituents in the real world. Public safety must always be the first duty of any Government, but when we legislate, particularly in an area as serious as firearms, we must ensure that what we do is proportionate, evidence-led and genuinely effective. If we are to change the law, we must be able to demonstrate clearly that those changes will actually make the public safer. Many such changes have been set out today, but the Government’s proposal is not one of them. The tragic cases that we have heard about in this debate are heartbreaking, and our thoughts remain with all those affected. Where there have been failings in the licensing system, and where improvements are needed, the Government must act. That is why previous changes were made following instances involving shotguns. It is also why the previous Conservative Government committed £500,000 to support the roll-out of a national training package developed by the College of Policing and the National Police Chiefs’ Council in an effort to strengthen firearms licensing standards. Standards matter, as the Home Office has repeatedly made clear. The UK already operates one of the strictest and most effective firearms licensing systems in the world. Between April 2024 and March 2025, there were 522 homicides. Of those, 32 involved a firearm, but just four involved a licensed firearm—the same figure as in 2023-24. Every loss of life is a tragedy, but the data shows that licensed firearms account for a very small proportion of those crimes. The National Crime Agency’s 2025 report confirms that firearms crimes in the UK remain among the lowest in the world. That is not a reason for complacency—far from it. We have seen recent reporting highlighting the growing threat of more powerful weapons being smuggled into the country. That underlines the importance of robust enforcement against illegal firearms. It does not automatically follow that additional burdens on lawful, licensed owners will address that threat. In fact, as has been pointed out, it perhaps illustrates the better use of targeted resource. The question raised by the petition is whether merging section 1 and section 2 licensing will actually improve public safety or simply create more cost, delay and bureaucracy without delivering meaningful benefit. When the policy was first announced, the Government said that a consultation would be published by the end of 2025. Can the Minister confirm when that consultation will be finished and give assurances that the voices of rural communities and shooting organisations will be properly heard? There is significant concern about the proposal among those groups, including the British Association for Shooting and Conservation and the Countryside Alliance, which have raised these issues directly with the Minister. Section 2 licensing, while distinct from section 1, is not lax. It involves robust checks and safeguards that are integral to protecting the public. The petition does not call for weaker rules, it calls for properly maintaining the current prudent framework. Shotguns and rifles are different, and Parliament has long recognised that distinction in law. The regulatory framework reflects differences in use, function and risk. If the Government now wish to remove that distinction, then they must explain clearly how doing so will enhance public safety in a way that is propionate to the hundreds of thousands of law-abiding shotgun owners who will be affected. We should also recognise that, for many, shooting is a legitimate and long-standing sport. If aligning the regimes increases cost, complexity and delay then the reality is that entry-level access will become harder. That risks pricing out younger participants and those from ordinary working families, making the sport less accessible at the grassroots level. The likely outcome of such a change will be fewer shotguns in lawful use. That will not be without consequence. In rural communities, shotguns are not simply a sport or leisure item, they are tools of work. Farmers and pest controllers rely on them. Wildlife management and conservation efforts are closely tied to responsible shooting activity. Surveys show that habitat management and conservation linked to shooting cover millions of hectares. Ground-nesting species such as curlew and lapwing are often cited as examples of wildlife that benefit from such management. We must also consider the wider economic impact. Research cited by the Gun Trade Association estimates that aligning the regimes could reduce gross value added in the UK shooting sector by £875 million, with a broader impact of over £2 billion across the wider economy. Protecting the economy carries costs, but those costs must be justified by clear, demonstrable gains in safety. There is also a practical point: the firearms licensing system is already under strain. Data from the National Police Chiefs’ Council shows that many forces struggle to meet service level agreements, even after the recent fees increase. A January 2026 inspection by His Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary and fire and rescue services found “significant backlogs” in some collaborative licensing units, including cases outstanding for more than two years. Adding further complexity risks compounding those delays and placing additional burdens on our already stretched police forces. Some have suggested a compromise: that any merger should not proceed until the licensing system is demonstrably efficient and effective. Given that the Government have also floated broader reforms—including possible centralisation of firearms licensing—is there not merit in ensuring the system works properly before imposing any further structural change? There is fear that moving shotguns from section 2 to section 1 will disproportionately impact rural communities and law-abiding citizens who use their shotguns responsibly. Our firearms legislation has helped keep Britain safe. It must remain robust and prevent those who pose a danger from accessing weapons. However, it must also be proportionate, workable and grounded in evidence. At present, I have yet to see clear and compelling evidence that this proposed alignment would deliver any level of additional public safety that justifies the costs, disruption and impact on rural Britain. Public safety must be strengthened by evidence, not weakened by unnecessary and disproportionate bureaucracy. If the Government cannot clearly demonstrate that this proposal will make the public safer, then they should not proceed with the delays, costs and bureaucracy that it will create.
I should alert Members that I am the chairman of the British Shooting Sports Council. On that point about mental health issues, does the hon. Gentleman agree that medical markers on doctors’ records would be a perfect solution to that problem, rather than necessarily doing what is proposed in the petition?
Last year, 88,000 new homes were meant to be started in London, but instead, 5,891 were started. That shortfall has a direct impact on rents in my Spelthorne constituency. Will the Secretary of State say why he is allowing Sadiq Khan to run circles around him?
As of today, what services—if any—is Labour Together providing either to the Labour party or to the Government?
I thank the Secretary of State for his statement. He mentioned Surrey, and he will know that my constituency is going to be in a unitary authority called West Surrey. I have received a huge number of representations from constituents who would like the Secretary of State to consider calling that unitary authority West Surrey and South Middlesex, to take account of the fact that Spelthorne has been in Middlesex for 1,000 years and has never really thought of itself as being in Surrey. Will the Secretary of State meet me, so that I can make further representations on my constituents’ behalf?
The SEND system needs urgent and serious reform. Families I speak to in Broxbourne have been battling against an unfair funding formula that sees pupils get thousands of pounds less than elsewhere in the country. Will the Secretary of State reassure me and my constituents that historical demand will no longer be a factor in allocating funding, so that the system is truly fair for every child?
Having decided that elections should go ahead after all, will the Secretary of State join me in congratulating Conservative-run Broxbourne council on defending democracy from day one and never once considering delaying its elections? Will he confirm that this Labour Government will not use the same tactics to delay the next general election?
I thank the right hon. Lady for advance sight of her statement, and her officials and advisers for briefing me over the weekend. I pay tribute to those who have pulled together a 300-page document, which I will now attempt to scrutinise in the five minutes that I have available to me today. I turn first to SEND. The principles of more support in schools, evidence-led packages, early intervention, and more speech and language therapists are welcome, but despite the 300 pages there is still much that we do not know. We do not know exactly how children will qualify for an EHCP in the future, and no clear eligibility criteria for the so-called specialist provision are set out. There will be around seven packages of support when someone gets an EHCP, but we are not told what these packages of support are, how people qualify for them or how much money will be associated with each. That makes it quite difficult to judge how effective the new system will be, let alone legislate for it. Many questions also spring from the individual support plans, or ISPs, which will take place in schools. It is not clear from the document what will trigger an ISP, nor the funding that will be associated with it. At the moment, schools generally have to cover the first £6,000 of support before an EHCP is triggered. What will be the new threshold for schools to cover? On funding, I note the £1.6 billion pot for inclusive mainstream provision over three years, which equates to £24,000 per year per school if divided evenly across every school in England. That is nowhere near enough for the extra work that schools will have to cover to write individually tailored ISPs for every SEND child. This is a mammoth burden to place on schools—one that I do not necessarily think is misplaced, but £24,000 a year is not enough to help them manage it. It is not a recipe for inclusion, but a recipe for disaster. Can the Education Secretary tell schools what additional funding will be available to help them hire extra SENCO support to help them deal with these pressures? Unbelievably, the workforce plan for 6,500 teachers—incidentally, it will not deliver 6,500 more teachers—says nothing about special educational needs provision within the workforce, perhaps because it tries to ignore primary schools altogether. On wider funding, the Government have still not said how the £6 billion black hole in SEND funding, identified by the Office for Budget Responsibility, will be filled. The latest I read today in the Financial Times is that the money will come from councils. Would the right hon. Lady care to confirm that? Are the funding pots announced today new money, or will they be coming from the Department’s existing overall budget? Has the DFE’s budget expanded beyond what was set out at the spending review at the Budget, and if so, by how much? Will these reforms save money, and if so, over what time period? Lastly on SEND, Ministers repeatedly failed over the weekend to give clarity on reassessments, so I will give the right hon. Lady one more opportunity. Will she rule out any child who currently has an EHCP having it removed—yes or no? Turning to the wider schools issue, we have the absurdity of a White Paper saying that trusts will be the main driver of system-led improvement, but the Department proposing, in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, to remove the academy order by which underperforming schools are taken over by trusts. Either trusts are a driver for improvement of schools or they are not. I think they very much are a driver, and it seems the Education Secretary now agrees, so will she, with the zeal of a convert, disavow her earlier sins and reinstate the academy order? On that theme, the White Paper says: “Our best school trusts…innovate and drive excellence in standards”. Well, they used to be able to do that, but the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill takes away their ability to innovate in the curriculum, on who they employ, on the terms and conditions of employment, and even on uniforms. Again, I am delighted by the turnaround from the Education Secretary, but I ask that that is reflected in the legislation she is putting through the House. I fundamentally disagree with the proposal in the White Paper to emphasise inclusion when it comes to suspensions and exclusions. That is the wrong approach. If a pupil is behaving in a way that makes fellow pupils or a teacher unsafe, it is utterly wrong to hesitate to exclude because of inclusion. When pressure is put on schools not to exclude, we have seen tragic cases of how wrong it can go, such as that of Harvey Willgoose, and we must not make the same mistake again. There is much more to cover—funding reform, admission codes and work I would actually praise such as on maternity pay—but I dare not risk your wrath, Madam Deputy Speaker, so I close by saying that we support the principle of reform, but there is precious little clarity for SEND parents today.
My hon. Friend is making some important points. We must have an eye, as the hon. Member for South Norfolk (Ben Goldsborough) said, for the overall lethality of the population of firearms. Will my hon. Friend reflect on whether we are in a “careful what you wish for” situation? I am a shotgun certificate holder and an owner of a shotgun. If I am forced to go through the procedure to effectively get a firearms licence, I am much more likely to acquire a firearm, so although the number of shotguns out there might fall, the number of rifles, and therefore the overall lethality of the population of firearms, might actually rise.
My hon. Friend is making a strong point about the administrative burden, but does he agree that the most burdensome element would probably be the restrictions placed on ammunition? In particular, individual licence holders would have a limit on the amount of ammunition they could own at any one time. I think something like 250 million cartridges are sold every year in the UK, and that would all have to be recorded and auditable; there would have to be an audit trail and probably an inspection regime to ensure that people were not buying or acquiring more than their limit. The administration of that would involve enormous numbers of people and probably result in the end in the acquisition of a huge computer system at vast cost, just to track something that is not at the moment identified as a problem.
My hon. Friend is giving us a fascinating perspective on the statistics, but if the Government were interested in reducing the overall harm from firearms, does he not think that there would be greater benefit from taking all the police effort that we acknowledge would go into the enforcement of this wider regime, and focusing it on those firearms that are more likely to be used in crime? If smuggled handguns, converted antiques or replicas, and blank-firing guns that are brought in illegally were enforced against, would it not have a bigger impact on harm than this measure? My hon. Friend has spoken to the tiny number of incidents involved.
We must see the documents that pertain to the appointment of Peter Mandelson. Given that any member of the public could have told the Government that Mandelson was dodgy, it seems amazing that the Prime Minister requested that this vetting happen in the first place. This is not a question of process; it is a matter of judgment. Does the Chief Secretary believe that these documents will reveal why the Prime Minister’s judgment is consistently so poor?
I will speak in support of amendments 1 and 2, tabled by my constituency neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Helen Whately). One of the most basic principles of any successful society is that those who work hard are able to reap the rewards, yet under this Government, millions of families are being squeezed by high tax rates, rising prices and increasing energy bills. They are not working any less hard, but many of them are ending up with less money at the end of the month, every month. That is less money to spend on day-to-day essentials, and less money to save for a house, a holiday, a birthday present or a school trip for their children. Those are the real-life consequences of this Government’s decisions. Many of those families see their money taken by the Government and wasted, or spent on those who choose not to work. A recent study suggested that once the cap is lifted, a family with three children in which both parents work would need to earn £71,000 to match the income of a three-child family in which neither parent works. How can it be right that one couple can wake up early every day, go to work and perhaps even take extra hours at their job, and end up with the same amount of money as their neighbours who do not work at all? It is their money that will pay for those who do not work. The Prime Minister and the Chancellor know that, but they are choosing to lift the two-child cap anyway. That is a disgraceful way to treat millions of people across the country who are doing everything they are supposed to do and are being punished for it.
A farmer in my constituency who runs a shoot in Hedgerley has told me repeatedly that, if the legislation goes through, he will lose his family-run farm business. This proposal will put him, and many other farmers who run shoots that have kept them viable, out of business. Does the hon. Member agree that the legislation is not the way forward?
It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Sir Alec. I thank the hon. Member for South Norfolk (Ben Goldsborough) for opening the debate on behalf of the Petitions Committee and the manner in which he did so, in a very measured speech. I acknowledge the deeply emotive and tragic cases that have been raised in wider debate on this issue and which are perhaps the motivation for the changes proposed by the Government. These incidents shock us all, and I know that the thoughts of everyone in the House are with those affected by gun crime. I thank the more than 400 people in the Scottish Borders, among 120,000 people across the United Kingdom, who signed the petition. I also thank the many constituents who contacted me to express their concerns about these proposals, including Paul Allison and Rob Pile, both from Hawick, Jeremy Bidie from Lilliesleaf and Mary McCallum from Lauder. The Government’s proposal to merge sections 1 and 2 firearms licensing has caused deep concern in our rural communities. Shooting is worth £3.3 billion to the UK economy and generates 67,000 full-time jobs, many in my constituency on the Scottish Borders. The proposal would represent one of the most significant shifts affecting countryside industries in decades and, most important, it would not make people feel safer. The UK already has one of the most effective and strictest systems of firearms licensing in the world. Between April 2024 and March 2025, only four homicide cases involved a licensed firearm—a similar number to the previous year. Sadly, in many of the cases that I am sure right hon. and hon. Members will raise today, the proposed change would not have prevented tragedy; however, it would have a significant impact on those such as farmers, land managers and pest controllers, who require a shotgun for their job. It could even affect clay pigeon shooting, which is an activity enjoyed by many who do not even consider themselves to be shooters or part of rural industry. It would also have a negative impact on gun shops—businesses whose expertise ensures that firearms are sold only to those legally permitted to possess them. Furthermore, plans to merge sections 1 and 2 firearms licensing would place an even greater burden on our already overstretched police forces.
The hon. Lady makes an important point, which nicely leads into my next point. Poorly resourced police forces could be overwhelmed, and might even refuse to accept new applications, which happened in Gloucestershire in 2024. That would have a significant impact on people who rely on firearms for their job and livelihood. I am afraid that this is an example of the Government not really understanding how rural communities work.
That is absolutely right. I do not know the club in question, but that is the same point that many of my constituents and others have made as part of the debate on this proposal. If the Government wish to improve public safety, I encourage them to accept the proposal for mandatory medical markers, which is backed by organisations such as BASC. They would ensure that medical concerns are identified as they arise, rather than waiting for licence renewal. That proposal has cross-party and industry support, yet the Government have rejected it. However well intentioned, the Government’s proposals would not improve public safety, but would simply harm our rural communities and the hundreds of thousands of people who use shotguns lawfully.
My right hon. Friend makes an excellent point. It is important that the Government and the civil servants supporting them consider the wider impacts of these changes if they are implemented. Firearms legislation has been crucial to keeping people safe and there are practical, workable measures that the Government could take to improve it, but this proposal is not one of them. It will make it harder for those who work in our rural communities to do their jobs. The Government must listen to the evidence, to those who have responded to the consultation and to the Members across the Chamber. I urge them to abandon these plans because they will not work and they will severely impact jobs, the economy and our rural way of life.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Alec. Scotland has been talked about quite a lot here today. Policing in Scotland is separate, but the proposed changes would affect Scotland, and it is worth having a look at some of the figures associated with Scotland. Figures from the British Association for Shooting and Conservation show that there are something like 68,000 active participants in shooting in Scotland, and many of them are in my Dumfries and Galloway constituency—it is not quite a gun by every fireside, but it is not far away. Much of the shooting in my area is not about toffs; it is not about people helicoptering in to shoot grouse. Obviously, there will be some people who use guns as tools of the trade, but it is mostly very much locals—locals who enjoy rough shooting, keep dogs and will go out of an afternoon in the beautiful Galloway hills and may fire off only one or two cartridges at pheasants, which are of course a non-native species. Shooting is also a great driver of tourism in my area. The area struggles, because it tends to be “go-through”—we have the port of Cairnryan, which is very close to the Northern Ireland constituency of the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon)—but we are trying to make it “go-to”, and shooting is one of the things that can help us with that. BASC puts the total economic activity in Scotland from shooting at around £760 million. That is not an inconsiderable sum considering the economy of remote and rural Scotland. It is a big number, but I like to bring it down to a smaller scale. I think of businesses such as D&W Countryways in Newton Stewart—a small shop that sells various items of clothing that people need when they are out and about, because we do occasionally get rain in Dumfries and Galloway. It also sells shotgun shells and associated items. That business would potentially disappear under this new burden, because the number of shotgun owners would reduce dramatically. That would leave a gap on the high street, and we have no end of difficulties with our high streets at the moment. We also have places such as the Penninghame estate, which, unusually, is a converted prison. It is trying to bring in high-end shooting parties. That is a great generator of the thing we lack most of all in Dumfries and Galloway: jobs. Depopulation is what kills areas like mine. When remote and rural Scotland suffers depopulation, it tends to be disastrous. Those jobs help insulate us from and protect us against that. With deference to my hon. Friend the Member for South Shropshire (Stuart Anderson), I do shoot but I have not been shot. I would like to keep it that way, if at all possible. As a schoolboy, I saved the life of someone who managed to shoot themselves—to be clear, the round that he shot himself with was stolen. The issue is that it is very difficult to legislate to prevent criminals from doing things. Obviously, they tend to ride roughshod over the law. We have heard from hon. Members that shotgun and firearms owners tend be among the most punctilious, careful and law-abiding people. They tend to avoid any involvement with the police; in fact, very often the only contact they will have with the police is when the police come to check up on their firearm certificate. As such, we are possibly looking at—to coin a phrase—the wrong target, and I wonder what problem we are trying to solve. Obviously, there are horrendous incidents, which are very difficult to prevent, and we must think about the people who are victims of those things, but we have some of the tightest regulations in the world already. I know how tight they are: when I was renewing a shotgun licence and the police came to interview me, they asked me where I kept the shotgun and I jokingly said, “Under my wife’s side of the bed, because no one ever goes there.” The officer said, “Shall I note that down?” and I said, “No, let’s not go there.” This is a really serious matter. The tone of the debate is tremendous, but let us not pretend for one second that this is a tidying-up exercise. The proposed change is really quite profound, and the move to merge sections 1 and 2 would have a deleterious effect on shooting, and thereby on the rural economy. The key message I am picking up—I hope the Minister might touch on this—is that better enforcement trumps more law for the sake of more law. There is no point in us passing laws here and saying, “Never mind the quality, feel the width.” The danger is that we pass the law that, unfortunately, we pass most often in this House: the law of unintended consequences. There are better ways to address the nut that we are trying to crack.
Thank you very much for chairing the debate, Sir Alec. I congratulate the hon. Member for South Norfolk (Ben Goldsborough), my constituency neighbour, on opening it in such a measured way, which I think has been noted by all of us. I need to start by declaring my interests. I hold a firearm certificate and a shotgun licence. I believe that I am still a member of the Countryside Alliance; I have not checked recently, but it is very good at taking the direct debit. I also represent a rural community. That is not a formal declaration of interest, but it is why I am here today. In my constituency, there is, overwhelmingly, a mixture of bafflement and anger. People are baffled because they cannot see what problem the Government are trying to fix with this potential legislative change, and they are angry—very angry. I recognise that it may not be the Government’s intention and that we are talking about a consultation, so it is early stages, but this feels like another ignorant attack on rural communities, with no proper interest as to the adverse consequences caused. We have heard many excellent speeches today, and I will do my best not to repeat the points that have already been made, but I want to start by acknowledging that this is a deeply emotive issue, because every death caused by a gun—or any other weapon, for that matter—is in itself a tragedy. However, we are legislators and it is our duty to put aside emotion, focus on the facts and take a rational approach, even if that can sometimes lead us to slightly uncomfortable and emotive responses, so let us try to do that. It is the first principle of government, when considering curbing individual liberties, that the Government must have cause and that the benefit sought must significantly outweigh the damage caused as a result of the removal of liberty, so what is the issue that the Government are trying to deal with here? The quick answer is public safety, but how much crime has been committed by legal holders of shotguns? Of all crime, it is a vanishingly small percentage. In fact, 0.00006% of crime is undertaken by legal holders of shotguns. I am told that homicides with legally owned shotguns averaged 3.8 per annum over the last decade, so people have a significantly higher chance of winning the lottery than of being a victim of homicide with a legally held shotgun. It is about a one-in-15-million chance. To put that in context, 50 people tragically lose their lives every year because of faulty cooking appliances and 40 lose their lives because of accidents with ladders. We are talking about an average of 3.8 people tragically losing their lives as a result of legally held shotguns, so that is the size of the prize: reducing a long-term average of 3.8 deaths per year—but to what? It will not be to zero, because any system will contain a remaining risk. Sensibly, we all recognise that no system would be 100% successful, other than a system that removed all shotguns from the public, and we know that even if the Government were successful at removing all shotguns, other forms of lethal weapon are readily available. There are more than 200 deaths per annum as a result of knives. For as long as we like to cook food and eat it, knives will be available, so even if the Government were successful at reducing the number of fatalities because of legally held shotguns, it does not necessarily follow that there would be a reduction in the number of killings. We are talking, at best, about a partial reduction in the number of killings from a maximum of 3.8, and yet the potential cost of the proposals that the Government are considering is enormous. We have already heard from right hon. and hon. Members that there would be a huge impact in the form of a need for increased police resources. People like me apply for a firearms licence, and at the moment about 3,700 of those are renewed each year, which places a significant administrative burden on our police forces. On average, 150,000 shotgun licences are renewed annually. Even if we look just at the economic cost of the application fee, that would amount to an additional cost of £7 million, and that is before the cost of the police resources. Many people will think that it is not worth the candle and will give up shooting because it is simply too onerous. Other Members have already talked about the potential loss of about 20,000 full-time equivalent jobs and a loss to the economy of getting on for £1 billion.
My right hon. Friend is of course right. I do not have the data—I am trying to stick with data in the argument I am constructing—but the principle he mentions is a sound one. If we focus our resources in the area where the risk is greatest, we are likely to have a better beneficial impact. [Paula Barker in the Chair] The Countryside Alliance estimates that the measures will have a huge impact on the value of shooting to the economy, with a loss of about £875 million. And for what gain? This is the difficult bit, because I am going to consider the value of a life. Of course, in one sense, every life is priceless, but in policy terms, we already attribute an economic value to life. In my other job as shadow Rail Minister, I asked the Office of Rail and Road to give me the economic cost of a saved life on the railways; the answer is £4 million. It is worth spending £4 million on a piece of infrastructure if, over the course of its use, it saves a life. That is the rule of thumb for rail. For road transport, it is actually much less than that. I am not suggesting that every death has the same value economically, because as a society we would be prepared to pay a lot more to prevent a violent murder than even a tragedy on the railway. But that is the level of magnitude at which, in policy terms, we as legislators have decided the economic value of a life sits. However, with these measures, the Government appear to be proposing a change in the law that will have an impact of several hundred million pounds—getting on for £1 billion—in order to reduce the number of deaths from a maximum long-term average of 3.8 to some number less than that, but still well above zero. On any rational basis, there is simply no argument that holds water that suggests the price of 20,000 jobs and an economic hit, particularly to the rural economy, of close to £1 billion, in order to save a percentage of 3.8 lives over the course of a year, is a credible policy position. I recognise that what I have said is deeply uncomfortable, because we are talking about real people who suffer from tragedies. I join everyone in my deepest sympathy for people who have been affected by this issue in their family, or among their friends, but as a legislator it is my duty to look beyond that. That is why I have set out the data—to help the Minister approach this issue in the right way. I have said that my constituents are baffled, but they are also angry, because this feels like a tin-eared approach to the rural way of life. The measures fail to understand the community connections that bring rural communities together, and it feels like a Government who would propose them have no idea of who we are or how we live our lives. It feels like the Government do not understand and do not care—or perhaps they do, which would be even worse, but instead disapprove of our way of life. It feels like an attack on the rural way of life and economy without justification. The previous Conservative Government, as has been mentioned, did not consult on the proposed change to the law for a very good reason: it is a terrible idea.
I thank my hon. Friends for their contributions during the passage of this Bill. In particular, I thank my hon. Friend the Member for South West Devon (Rebecca Smith), who has argued with true passion against the Bill, drawing on her own experience as well as her sound principles. I also thank my hon. Friends the Members for Solihull West and Shirley (Dr Shastri-Hurst) and for Hinckley and Bosworth (Dr Evans), my right hon. Friends the Members for Tonbridge (Tom Tugendhat) and for North West Hampshire (Kit Malthouse) and my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgwater (Sir Ashley Fox), who spoke on Second Reading, and my hon. Friend the Member for Weald of Kent (Katie Lam), who spoke in Committee this evening, and pointed out with customary clarity the flaws in the reasoning of Labour Members. We have all seen the strength of feeling among MPs who support this Bill, but passion does not make a policy right. Children are a blessing, but they are also a responsibility. Parents up and down the country work long hours and make sacrifices to bring up their children. Many couples question whether they can afford one child, let alone three, four or five. They make tough but responsible choices, yet this Bill means they will be taxed to fund other people who make choices they know they cannot afford, and that is fundamentally unfair. It is unfair to people who make responsible decisions, unfair to people who decide to live within their means and unfair to the people who cannot get a job, let alone afford to start a family, because this Government are wrecking the economy with ever higher spending and higher taxes. People do not get a pay rise from their employer when they have another child; they make their money stretch further. However, for people on universal credit, this Bill means their benefits will rise by thousands of pounds for each extra child they have. Some families are about to get tens of thousands of pounds extra. A single parent with five children will be able to get £10,000 more, and an annual income just from benefits of over £45,000 untaxed. To get the same through work, someone would need to earn £60,000. I heard that the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, who is standing behind the Chair, was due to talk about welfare reform this evening. I say to him and all Labour Members that anyone serious about welfare reform or about ending the welfare trap would vote against a Bill that makes benefits pay this much more than work. Anyone serious about fiscal responsibility would not vote for a Bill that adds £3 billion a year to the ballooning welfare budget and costs £14 billion over the next five years. That money is not just sitting there jingling in the Treasury bank account waiting to be spent on this; it will have to be taken from a small business desperately trying not to let staff go, from a family already struggling with food and energy costs, or from the next generation through higher borrowing. However Ministers dress it up, someone else will pay. Labour Members have said that this Bill cuts child poverty. What they generally mean is that it reduces relative poverty, a statistic that tells us nothing about whether children’s lives are actually looking up. They ignore that relative poverty tends to look better when the country gets poorer, which is exactly what their policies are doing to this country. They have done it before and they are doing it again—taxing more to spend more, killing growth and killing jobs. What really makes a difference to children’s lives is having their parents in work, but what are the Government doing about that? They are making it less likely. Under this Government, we have seen—[Interruption.] I know that Labour Members do not want to hear it, but we have seen the fastest increase on record of children growing up without a parent in work. Unemployment has gone up every month; now it is at its highest for five years. This debate is about more than just one policy; it is about two different visions for our country. Labour’s answer to every challenge is the same: spend more money. Labour Members see people as victims of circumstance, and their instinct is always to compensate rather than change the circumstance. We see it differently. We know that children are better off if the country is better off; if there are more jobs, higher wages, lower inflation and stronger growth. Look at the moments in our history when living standards rose for everyone. It was when people were motivated to strive, ideas were turned into businesses and hard work reaped rewards. That is how countries get ahead and their children thrive. [Interruption.] I do not expect the argument that I am making to be popular in this Chamber, although—[Interruption.] I am not expecting Labour Members to like what I am saying, but it is popular out there in the real world. I know that every other party represented here wants to expand the state—not just Labour, but the Lib Dems, the Greens, the SNP, Plaid, and who knows how Reform will vote tonight? I can see one Reform MP is here; maybe somebody will help his colleagues to find their way to the right Lobby tonight. I think Reform now says that it would keep the cap, but it still does not back it in principle; it is just a question of timing. Well, well. The Prime Minister has decided that the time is now because he needed to save his skin. He is not a Prime Minister who will take the tough decisions to control the welfare bill and make work pay, because that would require a backbone and the support of his Back Benchers. Only Conservatives are prepared to make the argument for welfare savings and stand up for principles like fairness, personal responsibility and living within your means. Other parties compete to be more generous with other people’s money; we do not. Conservatives believe in a country where work pays, responsibility is valued, and welfare is a safety net, not a lifestyle choice. That is the difference not just over the two-child cap, but over the direction of Britain itself.
The Prime Minister has today said that the independent ethics adviser will now investigate. Is this not another example of how poor his judgment is? Initially saying that the Cabinet Office could investigate someone who is now a Cabinet Office Minister was ludicrous; that was never going to be independent or comprehensive. The U-turn today is just so that his Chief Secretary had something to talk about in response to today’s urgent question, which my hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart) dragged him to the House for. Why is the Prime Minister’s judgment constantly so bad?
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Barker. I draw attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, and particularly to the deer management course that my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Blake Stephenson) also attended last December, which was hosted by the British Association for Shooting and Conservation. For transparency, I should also say that I am a member of the Countryside Alliance and of BASC, and both those memberships predate my election to this place. I myself shoot, and I am a shotgun certificate holder. However, I have come to this debate to talk not about my own passion for shooting—even though I am my own MP—but about the importance that shooting has for my constituency. Some 477 constituents signed the petition, and I have had many emails from fellow shooters in the constituency, as well as from those considering taking up shooting, having their first go at a clay ground and applying for a shotgun certificate. Indeed, I cannot exemplify the importance of shooting to my constituency better than my constituent Stuart, who said that you only need to spot the game feeders in the fields from any train passing through Buckinghamshire to see how important shooting sports are in the constituency. Of course, it is not just shooting sports that would be affected by the changes in the petition. As others have said eloquently throughout the debate, yes, it is about shooting sports; yes, it is about the clay grounds; yes, it is about game shooting; but it is also about farmers, pest control and predator control. It is about things like deer management, and if we did not have deer management and people willing to get a firearms licence to stop our countryside being overrun—people who often get called out by the police themselves to deal with a deer that might have been knocked over in the road and need humanely dispatching—we would be in great difficulty. My hon. Friend the Member for Keighley and Ilkley (Robbie Moore) concluded by saying that the wider economic impact is not just on those who hold a shotgun certificate or a firearms licence; it is also on people such as David and Nicky Florent in my constituency, who run—despite its name, it is in Buckinghamshire—the Oxford Gun Company in the village of Oakley, which is a gun shop and shooting ground. They do sell not just shotguns, rifles, cartridges and ammunition, but the clothing ranges, boots, glasses, ear defenders and everything else that goes into shooting at large. That would be at risk if the change that is being consulted on by the Government, and that this petition is about, goes ahead. As others have said, this change could lead to a huge number of people saying, “It’s just not worth it any more.” They would not put themselves through the process of renewing a shotgun certificate or even getting one in the first place. After the last significant reform of the licensing regime—back in 1988—there was a decline of about a third in the number of participants in shooting. Estimates out there suggest that this change from section 2 to section 1 would lead to a similar reduction in the number of people wishing to put themselves through the process of renewing their firearms licence.
I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman; he puts it very well. Someone said earlier that holding a shotgun or a rifle is a privilege. Yes, it is a massive privilege, but it also comes with an absolutely ginormous responsibility, and I believe that everybody who legally holds a shotgun certificate or firearms licence takes that responsibility very seriously. They have often been taught from a young age the proper safety protocols around handling a firearm, and the importance of keeping it locked away and of cleaning it, which is important for one’s own safety when handling a firearm—if it is not clean, that can lead to significant problems. We should acknowledge just how seriously legitimate, legal, properly licensed shotgun and rifle owners in this country take their responsibilities. We all want a safe system; for those of us who have the privilege of owning a shotgun or a rifle—I do not have a firearms licence, and I have never applied for one—it is imperative that there is a safe system underpinning that, because it protects those who own them as well as those who do not. My hon. Friend the Member for Broadland and Fakenham (Jerome Mayhew) went through the statistics in considerable detail, so I will not repeat them. It is worth acknowledging that our hearts go out to anyone who is affected by or a victim of a tragedy at the hands of someone wielding a firearm illegitimately—whether they somehow cheated the system and got a certificate or not. However, fatalities involving legally held firearms are extraordinarily rare: around one in 15 million annually, as other Members have said. The significance of that, which I do not think anyone else has mentioned in the debate, is that that falls far below the Health and Safety Executive’s intervention threshold of one in a million. That is not to say that there cannot be proportionate, evidence-based reforms to the licensing system. In many respects, there probably should be, to tweak it and make it safer. But what I do not see—I do not think anybody in the debate has advocated this—is that merging section 2 into section 1 will solve any problems or make anybody in our great country safer. It would, however, bring considerable cost and bureaucracy. I am lucky, with Thames Valley, to have one of the better-performing police force firearms licensing departments in the country. But as others have said, some forces have been found considerably wanting when it comes to new grants and renewal lead times. On the other side of the coin is the enormous financial cost to our economy: shooting is worth £3.3 billion each year in its own right and generates £9.3 billion of wider benefits. My constituent Scott believes that merging sections 1 and 2 could cost £1 billion a year and 20,000 jobs, and evidence from the Countryside Alliance looking specifically at alignment between sections 2 and 1 shows that it would reduce the total value by £2.38 billion in the first year, with a loss of between 13,600 and 17,400 full-time jobs. This debate is looking at a live consultation. I urge the Minister to stop and reflect on what she has heard this afternoon and what the shooting community in my—and I dare say in everybody’s—constituency is saying on this matter. As she goes through the process of reforming police forces, per se, she should perhaps pause any conversation on the changes until we know what those police forces will actually look like. I have heard arguments on the other side of the debate about a national firearms licensing scheme, and particularly that the existing system has local officers who, although they cannot know every certificate holder or licence holder in their constituency, are closer to the people they are licensing. The Minister should look at the bigger picture—where we have significant change to the policing landscape—and pause, look at the evidence, and understand the potential for significant damage to both safety and the economic survival of this sport and of wider conservation activity. Finally, a lot has been said about this being an urban versus rural matter, but I do not believe that it is. My constituency is entirely rural. Yes, there are many shotgun certificate holders and firearms licence holders in my constituency, and there are clay grounds, many shoots and lots of farms. But if we look at the number of certificates issued across the country, this is just as important to many people who live in our cities. Every year, 21,000 certificates are issued by the Metropolitan police to London residents. This matters to people who shoot, no matter where they live. They might go to a game shoot or a clay ground in the countryside but live in our cities. This is far bigger than just a rural issue.
When announcing reforms to the Building Safety Regulator last June, the Secretary of State’s Department promised to “enhance the review of newbuild applications, unblock delays and boost sector confidence”, but in London, where demand is highest, house building has fallen to its lowest level since 2009, which was under the last Labour Government. At gateway 2, towards the end of quarter 4 of 2025, there were still 740 live cases. On top of that, where decisions were made on applications, the vast majority were invalid, withdrawn or rejected; 67% were not classed as approved for one reason or another. That is not success, is it?