Chris Curtis

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Parliament's party history for this member: Labour (4 Jul 2024 – present).

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1. 2 Nov 2026·Parliament·Chris Curtis

   Immigration: Earned Settlement

   I welcome the changes announced today, and thank the Home Secretary for the way that she reached out during the consultation. In particular, when it comes to our responsibility to <span id="610" class="column-number" data-column-number="610"></span>BNO visa holders, she has listened. In the past, one of the challenges in seeking to move towards a contributory system has been that the Office for Budget Responsibility has struggled to model correctly the importance of contribution in our welfare system. It has made some changes, but that change should continue. Will the Home Secretary call on the OBR to continue to improve the way that it models the economics of migration?

   Hansard source
2. 2 Nov 2026·Parliament·Chris Curtis

   Budget Resolutions

   I will speak about the devolution measures announced in the Budget and the fiscal devolution pathway that has been set out. We normally hear two arguments for devolution: first, that decisions should be made closer to the people they affect rather than in Whitehall, and secondly, that investment should be spread more fairly beyond London and certain pockets of the south-east. I agree with both those arguments, but I think there is a more important argument: devolution can help us grow the economy and make the British state work better. After nearly two decades of stagnation, we desperately need to raise productivity, build infrastructure more quickly and unlock growth across the country. I believe that devolution can be one of the best ways of doing that, but it needs to come with fiscal devolution. Some 95% of tax revenue in Britain is raised by central Government, rather than at a regional or local level. Meanwhile, France raises three times as much at a sub-national level, and in Germany it is much higher still. The Centre for Cities has found that there is a strong relationship between fiscal devolution and wages across devolved economies. Correlation is not always causation, but there are obvious economic reasons why that relationship exists. Today, when councils approve new housing, attract employers or build infrastructure, they take the political risk and bear many of the up-front costs, but much of the additional tax revenue goes straight to the Treasury and eventually gets redistributed elsewhere. Even when councils retain that money, it can disappear at the next funding reset, as we saw earlier this year. Local leaders bear the cost of growth, while the Treasury collects the proceeds. That is why I welcome the Chancellor’s commitment to increase business rates retention, giving mayors a share of business rates growth from next year, and to give mayors a share of income tax receipts from 2028. If we want local leaders to take difficult decisions in favour of growth, their communities need to share in the rewards. Stable future revenues can also allow local areas to borrow against future growth to pay for the infrastructure needed today, and it is good to see the Government looking at how that can happen through bodies such as the Greater Cambridge Development Corporation. I hope that is something we can look at in Milton Keynes in the future.<span id="660" class="column-number" data-column-number="660"></span> I want to finish by saying that although many areas across the country will benefit from the proceeds of the Government’s announcements on devolution, I am disappointed that it was announced this week that my local area will not be one of them. That is despite the hard work and determination of many MPs across this Chamber to get devolution across Bedfordshire and Milton Keynes. Indeed, the Government came forward with a package of nearly £1 billion to get this over the line. It was unfortunately vetoed by one local government leader in Central Bedfordshire, who decided to put politics ahead of the people he was elected to represent. He has let the local area down, and I hope the Government will continue to work with all local leaders in the area to see if they can find a solution.

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3. 26 Oct 2026·Parliament·Chris Curtis

   Performance of Royal Mail

   Like many others, I will start by paying tribute to our fantastic posties, particularly the one who delivers my mail to Richmond House—constantly reminding me, through letters from constituents, just how dreadful the service that they are experiencing from Royal Mail has become. I will not spend too long listing the many examples of atrocious service <span id="106" class="column-number" data-column-number="106"></span>that Royal Mail has been delivering in my constituency, but let me give one example. A letter dated 7 July arrived on 4 August, five days after the recipient was supposed to have had an operation. Just in case that was not bad enough, Royal Mail also messed up on follow-up letters from the NHS about cancer checks. We have heard that Royal Mail is planning to get this service fixed by Christmas. I should like to know which Christmas, because in August one of my constituents managed to receive a very, very late Christmas card. I am not sure that we have got last Christmas fixed, let alone Christmas this year. No one is going to argue that this is acceptable but, like many Members, I find it particularly frustrating that every couple of months or so I go to the delivery office and we have that conversation in which the people running it tell me that, yes, they have been facing challenges, but don’t worry, they are on track now. I go back two months later and it is just like groundhog day: we have exactly the same conversation. I am told, “Yes, there were problems when we last told you that we would fix them, but don’t worry, they are being fixed now.” We have heard all the statistics showing that Royal Mail is completely failing to meet the targets that it has set, although those targets have been lowered. We have also heard that prices have been rising at the same time. I think people appreciate the challenges that Royal Mail is facing—there has been a dramatic drop in the number of letters, from the 20 billion that we saw years ago to just 6.5 billion today—but there is something fundamentally wrong with the idea that every time Royal Mail fails to meet the standards required of it, our response should be to lower those standards until they become achievable. When investors bought shares in Royal Mail, they knew that they were buying into a business with certain regulatory obligations attached. Those obligations were part of the deal. While circumstances change and regulations sometimes need to catch up with them, we cannot have a system in which shareholders get to enjoy the potential rewards of private ownership while the public are expected to accept an ever-diminishing service. Even if this is a difficult problem to solve, solving it should start with an acknowledgment that the decision by the Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition to privatise Royal Mail was a mistake. The argument for privatisation is normally that the discipline of the market will drive improvements in efficiency and service. If a company does a bad job, customers can go somewhere else, and the threat of losing those customers gives the business an incentive to improve. But, as should have been obvious at the time, that mechanism does not work with Royal Mail. If my constituents do not receive their hospital appointment letters, they cannot just decide to have them delivered by somebody else. They do not get to choose which postal network the NHS uses to reach them. We have lost the accountability that comes with public ownership, without securing the competitive pressure that is supposed to make private ownership work. There is a much bigger problem with the way in which we regulate many of these privatised monopolies. In the short time that I have left, let me build on the argument advanced by my right hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West (Darren Jones) about the options for renationalisation, which is certainly something that I believe we should look into. However, this challenge goes way beyond Royal Mail. We now have a problem <span id="107" class="column-number" data-column-number="107"></span>across our economy with unaccountable, regulated monopolies that simply do not work. If you speak to Ofcom—I may be the only person here who has some sympathy with Ofcom’s position—it will tell you that Royal Mail, like so many other regulated monopolies, such as the water companies, is in financial distress. We cannot use fines as a way to stop those companies being in financial distress, but we still need to produce an incentive for them to improve their behaviour. I urge the Government to consider more innovative ways than just using the fines and the regulatory model to incentivise better behaviour. For example, they should be looking at using—

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4. 7 Sep 2026·Parliament·Chris Curtis

   Economic Growth

   We are now on the fourth round of consultation on East West Rail, the latter rounds of consultation consulting on the outcomes of the earlier rounds of consultation. At the same time, we are in the middle of building the most expensive nuclear power station in the history of the human race because of the four rounds of consultation required for Sizewell C. When we tried to build the lower Thames crossing, the total consultation for the development consent order process was 359,000 pages. That is 250 times the length of “War and Peace”. It is right to go to war on these consultations, but can the Minister tell us how she will stop at nothing to ensure that we get infrastructure projects built more efficiently, so that we can save taxpayers far more money and drive economic growth?

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5. 2 Sep 2026·Parliament·Chris Curtis

   Rewiring the State

   I want to ask about devolution and transport. Since we introduced Transport and Works Act orders in the 1990s, we have dramatically decreased the number of new tramlines, which we know are a big driver of local growth, being built in the UK. France has a mass rapid transit system in every town and city with a population of over 150,000 people, yet Leeds is the biggest place in western Europe without any mass rapid transit system at all. Will the First Secretary please tell us what powers she will push downwards to combined authorities to allow them to build new tramlines, and how she will make that a success?

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6. 2 Sep 2026·Parliament·Chris Curtis

   Representation of the People Bill

   In line with that, is the right hon. Lady calling for the age at which one can get a job to be raised from 14 to 18, ruling out 16 to 18-year-olds from being able to work? Is she calling for the age at which one can learn to drive to be raised from 17 to 18? To follow her argument, it would be inconsistent not to support those things.

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7. 2 Sep 2026·Parliament·Chris Curtis

   Representation of the People Bill

   Before I turn to the substance of the Bill, may I take a moment to put on record how much I enjoyed serving on the Select Committee under the chairship of my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green (Florence Eshalomi)? I am proud of the work we did together, including on tackling rough sleeping and confronting Britain’s housing crisis. I know she will take that into government as she takes on her new role. New clause 56, standing in my name, concerns the implementation of automatic voter registration. It is hopefully slightly less controversial than some of the other topics we have covered today, and I hope the Minister will support it, given that the new clause stood in her name until just a few weeks ago. Fundamentally, if we want high participation in our elections, we should make it as frictionless and easy as possible for eligible citizens to take part.<span id="304" class="column-number" data-column-number="304"></span> We know that participation is too low. Turnout at the 2024 general election was a little under 60%, which was the lowest figure since 2001. However, that does not tell us the whole story, because the published turnout figure is the percentage of registered voters who go out to vote in the election. It excludes the estimated 8 million people, according to the Electoral Commission, who are eligible to vote but do not do so, because they are not on the electoral register. That could be because they are registered incorrectly, they have moved home or they did not get around to registering. Meanwhile, research from the University of Manchester showed us that we make it harder to register to vote here in the UK than almost any other democracy. This problem is not evenly distributed across our constituencies or across demographics. Young people, private renters, disabled people and those who are more transient are all less likely to be registered to vote. For too long, we have operated a slightly absurd system whereby the British state can know where you live, your age, your demographics and whether you are eligible to vote, and yet you still have to fill out a separate form to be registered to vote. The Bill creates a new process through which electoral registration officers can register eligible voters without requiring them to make that separate application once the necessary commitments are met. It allows existing registrations to be updated without requiring somebody to submit a fresh application, and it creates a data sharing and piloting framework needed to move towards a genuinely modern system of electoral registration. These are all brilliant things that really move automatic voter registration in the right direction. The purpose of new clause 56 is simply to ensure that we now turn that legislative framework into a reality. At the moment, the Bill gives us the architecture for automatic registration. What it does not yet give us is a clear public timetable for when the different parts of that architecture will actually be implemented. It would be good to hear from the Minister something on that timetable in her closing remarks today. We should have a clear pathway to delivering substantial change during this Parliament, which the Electoral Commission says is possible. New clause 56 asks for just that. Within two months of the new clause coming into force, the Government would have to publish a plan setting out the steps needed to implement registration without an application, the dates by which those steps would be completed, when they expect regulations for the registration pilots to be laid before Parliament, and how many additional people they expect to be registered by 15 August 2029 as a result of implementing part 2. I will just make one very quick point on the pilots. I mentioned it on Second Reading and I still think we need a response. The fear about piloting automatic voter registration projects is that if they are done on local authority boundaries, as they would be, because local authorities are responsible for voter registration, there might be constituencies—Vauxhall and Camberwell Green is a perfect example, given that it is in both Lambeth and Southwark—where one part stands under the new scheme being piloted and another part of it does not. That can create a problem if part of one party’s votes come from a system where the registration has gone up and another part does not. So, may we please get a commitment from the Government or the <span id="305" class="column-number" data-column-number="305"></span>Electoral Commission that when they are running pilots they will consider that point and preferably not run them in places where constituency boundaries do not line up? Finally, I completely understand the Government’s arguments that reform cannot happen overnight and that we need to do it securely, accurately and carefully, especially when it comes to ensuring that only those who are eligible to vote, go out and vote. The Government have made the right decision to put a legislative framework in place for automatic and direct voter registration. We just need to know when it will be implemented.

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8. 1 Sep 2026·Parliament·Chris Curtis

   Direction of Government

   When the Prime Minister travels up the west coast main line through Milton Keynes and Bedfordshire, he will be travelling through a bit of the country where there is a lot going on. We are building many new homes, we are building a new hospital, a new railway line and a new theme park, and we are expanding Luton airport. Without a devolution deal, however, we cannot make those projects a success for the area, and there is a fear that we will be left behind. Will the Prime Minister work with local councils and Members of Parliament to deliver a devolution deal as quickly as possible? Unlike many of the local MPs, including me, some local councillors are still not convinced of the benefits of devolution. What would the Prime Minister say to them about the benefits that it would bring to Milton Keynes and Bedfordshire?

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9. 30 Jun 2026·Parliament·Chris Curtis

   Draft Town and Country Planning (Discharge of Local Planning Authority Functions) (England) Regulations 2026

   It is a privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Desmond. I would like to make a couple of additional points, adding to the really important comments made by the Minister about why these changes are important. It is worth dwelling on the fact that housing in this country is prohibitively expensive for too many people. That is the reason why people are increasingly having to wait so long to get on the housing ladder. Fundamentally, housing is too expensive because, first, there is not enough of it and, secondly, increasingly it is too expensive to build new housing units. If we <span id="8" class="column-number" data-column-number="8"></span>want to bring the cost of housing down, we have to address those two problems. We have to increase the number of new homes that are built, but also decrease the cost of building them. On the latter, increasing global pressures, from supply chain disruptions to the impact of geopolitical events, are pushing up construction and labour costs. Most of those headwinds are outside our control, but when we have difficult headwinds it is even more important that we do everything we can with the levers that are within our control to bring down the cost of construction. I mention that because one of the most damaging, self-inflicted and unnecessary costs in our current house building system is uncertainty. Right now, there could be companies out there—including developers, housing associations or, as the shadow Minister said, local councils—that are looking to build new homes. They could be doing everything right; they could be putting the land together and coming up with a plan that builds the right amount of affordable housing, gives local planning gains and supports local infrastructure. After putting all that investment and support in, coming up with a plan and designing a project, they could still face the daunting prospect of having that development blocked at the eleventh hour by the whims of a small number of local councillors, who are often responding completely rationally to local political incentives. Obviously, those trade-offs exists. That uncertainty comes at a cost: we either add to the price of a house that constituents are paying for, or we decrease the amount of planning gain that we can make from the developers. By definition, it either means higher housing costs or it means fewer GP surgeries, less road infrastructure or fewer affordable homes being built. That is the cost of having more uncertainty in the system. It is right that we reduce that uncertainty; one way to do that is by having decisions made by officers who are following planning laws, rather than by people who are responding to political incentives.

   Hansard source
10. 30 Jun 2026·Parliament·Chris Curtis

    Draft Town and Country Planning (Discharge of Local Planning Authority Functions) (England) Regulations 2026

    I do not believe that democracy is changing it. It is fundamentally the incentives of certain local politicians to do this when they can have a veto power over a development that has a wider gain, often outside their local constituencies. That is a wider consequence. I am democratically elected, as is the shadow Minister, so in this sovereign Parliament we have the ability and right to set the rules under which that democracy operates.

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2024 General Election: Milton Keynes North

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