Peter Lamb

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

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1. 3 Nov 2026·Parliament·Peter Lamb

   Budget Resolutions

   The theme of today’s Budget debate is “fresh hope for the future”, so I would like to take the opportunity to review the pledges that I made to my constituents at the general election, how this Budget helps to deliver on them and, given that the Government have said we are at the start of the process, my fresh hopes for the future. But since Opposition Members are so interested in getting into a conversation, I will deal with them first. Last Wednesday, my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer set out a Budget that is the best-received Labour Budget in 23 years. That has been indicated very clearly, because the public and the markets have accepted it as a fantastic development. You can hear the disappointment from Opposition Members. You can hear that they are desperate for their attack lines, which are not getting through, in order to get public attention back on them, but what have we actually heard? From the Opposition Front Bench we heard about £30 billion of unfunded tax cuts. That is what the Conservatives’ plan is so far. On their own figures, the figure is £30 billion so far, but that is exactly what happened with the Liz Truss mini-Budget. They have learned no lessons from exactly that economic situation in what they put to us today. I promised my constituents that we would have a thriving local economy and support for the town centre, and Crawley’s economy is thriving. Anyone looking at it would have to accept that. Our major employers in the area are expanding. Developments such as the Government-funded Crawley Innovation Centre are bringing forward the new generation of technologies that will generate further economic growth in this country. Business rate changes are making it easier for properties on the high street. Many of the reforms set out in the Budget are going to make things considerably easier for people. High street rental auctions will enable us to tackle people who own property but, for their own financial reasons, are not putting people in. My hope for the future is that we can get further rate reform, and start addressing the unfair practices in the delivery industry that are allowing that sector and online retailers to kill off many of our high street businesses. My second pledge is to have housing that delivers for local people. We have the first-time buyer scheme—“Your First Home”—and first-time buyer ISAs. We have planning reforms coming through. We have £432 million for ending rough sleeping. We have over £40 billion for the biggest investment in affordable housing in a generation. We have new towns, and greater rights for private tenants through the Renters’ Rights Act 2025. We are delivering for people on housing. My hope for the future is more funding for affordable housing, moving away from the current financial structures, direct delivery from the Government, an end to hope value and housing revenue account reform. I have said that I want a better future for Crawley’s children, and what do we have? We have paid maternity leave so that fathers can spend the first critical weeks with their children, and more fathers can set the tone for their relationship to develop. We have the expansion of 30 hours of free childcare and SEND reform coming forward. We have the return of Sure Start—I do not know why it has new branding—in our communities. We have an end to the two-child poverty trap, which Opposition Members begged us not to remove. We have the expansion of free school meals, and the fastest reduction in poverty of any first-term Government in this country’s history. My hope for the future is that we continue to work towards ending child poverty, with action on those not in employment, education or training, ensuring every SEND child gets the support they need and creating real social mobility. I pledged real action on crime and antisocial behaviour, and we have the neighbourhood policing guarantee, an end to the £200 threshold for shoplifting, and new offences, including respect orders to ban repeat offenders from public places. We have preventive departmental spending, so we can really put in place the action necessary to protect our communities. My hope for the future is that we take the gloves off the police, bring in judicial reform to make it easier to send criminals to jail, make better use of automated technology and make greater use of on-the-spot penalties. Lastly, on a better resourced NHS that is there when people need it, we have the NHS 10-year plan and national plans for diseases such as cancer, rapid action on waiting lists, new capital investment, a huge expansion of diagnostic equipment and record investment in our national health service. My hope for the future is that the service focuses on keeping people well, rather than addressing their needs only when they are sick, and that we move services back into every postcode, where possible. There should be no limits on the aspiration of this Government or those of our constituents for our country. We should look at the progress that has already been made on the ills that affect our society. This Budget is taking us another step closer to the future that we all seek, and I look forward to many more Budgets from my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

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2. 2 Sep 2026·Parliament·Peter Lamb

   Representation of the People Bill

   Regretfully, I think that the hon. and learned Member is confused about the constitutional process. That 67-year-old constituent of his votes for a representative to come to this place, and <span id="315" class="column-number" data-column-number="315"></span>this place takes decisions on their behalf equally, on any part of the United Kingdom. This institution decided that it was in the best interests, and continues to be in the best interests, of this country and of Northern Ireland to maintain the Windsor framework in lieu of any better alternative on the table. I find using that issue to try to withhold the ability of 16 and 17-year-olds to have directly elected representation in this place to be spurious at best.

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3. 2 Sep 2026·Parliament·Peter Lamb

   Representation of the People Bill

   May I express my delight at my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green (Florence Eshalomi) making it on to the Front Bench? She is going to do a fantastic job. I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in this debate. I had 14 years in local government, and I was very involved in electoral administration in my area. So much of what we are talking about today involves the Elections Act. I was appointed to chair the Local Government Association working group that went through it, which was a cross-party group. By the end, we came up with a consensus viewpoint: based on the evidence and expert testimony we received, very little of that Act was thought to make much sense. I will not insult Conservative Members by saying that it was a nakedly political attempt to rig the electoral system to their benefit, but if they were going make a nakedly political attempt to rig the electoral system to their benefit, it would have looked exactly like the Elections Act. The basis on which they argued the case at the time was personation. It is vanishingly rare that people actually turn up and try and pretend to be anyone else at a polling station. I will deal with that in just a second, but I must respond to the remarks of the shadow Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Weald of Kent (Katie Lam), at the start of this debate. We knew that the Opposition would say something to try to explain why widening the franchise or making it easier for people to register to vote was a bad idea, but I was not expecting that. It was a good thing we had free hearing tests in Parliament just before recess, but I did not need one: the dog whistle across the Chamber was so loud that it was apparent to all of us. When Reform eventually turned up to say something, it was the exact same talking points. Conservative Members will not rebuild their party by aping the Reform party. Parties have had this issue time and again; what they are doing might play well within their own ranks, but it will not rebuild their party with the country. Although I have never voted for the Conservative party, I know that there are many moderate Conservatives who must feel a great deal of shame at what is happening to their party, which is driving towards the right and away from common-sense positions. Personation is vanishingly rare in our system. The reality is that someone would need to know that a seat was on an absolute knife edge to make it work at all. They could not do it as a single person going around all the polling stations—they would need hundreds of people to go around with them. It could not be rigged in a way that would not leak out; they would run into someone in the process. They would need decades of marked <span id="319" class="column-number" data-column-number="319"></span>registers, which are available to purchase only for six months after an election. Someone would need so many people and to run such a well organised campaign, and even then, they could just get unlucky in the process. I can confidently say that personation has never changed the result of any national election, and it is very unlikely that it has affected a local seat. What has caused a real problem—personation is not a real-world problem—is foreign interference in our political system. We know there are people who we may soon be at war with who are trying to intervene directly in our elections. We know that questionable money is a problem. Frankly, Russia was pretty happy to give the Conservatives money at one point. We know that tens of thousands of people have been turned away from polling stations since the introduction of voter ID. We know that millions of people are not registered. One in seven eligible voters is not registered in our system, and individual voter registration helped to make that the case. Disenfranchisement in our system is an absolute travesty, and this Bill gives control back to the British public by re-enfranchising them.

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4. 14 Jul 2026·Parliament·Peter Lamb

   Employees Travelling Outside the UK: Expenses Rate

   I beg to move, That this House has considered expenses rates for employees travelling outside the UK. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. I am calling on the Government to ensure that serious consideration is given to reassessing the scale rates for expenses and subsistence paid to employees who by nature of their work are required to travel outside the UK. My constituency of Crawley is home to Gatwick airport and many workers, including pilots and cabin crew, who are required to spend considerable time abroad with the flights they crew. That can last from several hours to several days for those working long-haul flights. Time spent away from home in foreign cities, without access to kitchens or other domestic utilities, can be overwhelmingly expensive, particularly for junior members of the cabin crew, whose salaries, according to the National Careers Service, begin at around £19,000. It is right, therefore, that employers pay tax-deductible subsistence payments to their employees, to cover the costs associated with travel necessary to do their jobs. Under the previous Government, to save companies having to check every single receipt that an employee accrues while abroad, His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs introduced a benchmark expenses rates for employees travelling outside the UK. Those were first published on the Government’s website in 2013, with unique rates produced for almost every one of the world’s major cities, setting out the average cost of drinks, breakfast, lunch and dinner, a night in a hotel room and even the journey from hotel to office. Each city had also been given broader non-specific subsistence reimbursement rates. Demarcated across specific time boundaries, that is a rate for when employees spent more than five hours in a given city, with another for when they spent more than 10 or 24 hours there. The detailed task of producing those rates over a decade ago is evidenced by the fact that HMRC went to the effort of making unique assessments city by city, and that the increase in reimbursement between five, 10 and 24 hours is not only non-linear but unique to each city. Despite the time and effort put into producing those bespoke rates, they have been upgraded significantly only once in the past 13 years—in October 2014, a year after they were first produced—and that only included a fraction of the cities listed. Despite assurances that the Government keep under review all taxes, including overseas subsistence rates, if we check their website, we see that rates payable to an employee who has travelled to Zagreb for work are listed in Croatian kuna, even though Croatia joined the euro on 1 January 2023. The subsistence rates for at least 15 European capitals, including Athens, Madrid, Lisbon and Dublin, have never received an update. Due to more than a decade of inflation, those benchmark values have been eroded in real terms. Ahead of this debate, using the total residual rates produced in 2013, and nation-specific consumer price index inflation figures from the World Bank Group, we <span id="335WH" class="column-number" data-column-number="335WH"></span>have calculated today’s expected subsistence rates for European destinations. Amsterdam’s total residual rate in 2013 was set at €71; a year later it was raised to €72, where it remains today. According to World Bank Group data, prices in the Netherlands in the 12 years since have risen by an average of 2.6% a year. That compounds to a 36% increase over that period. Had the 2013 rates for Amsterdam increased in line with inflation, workers who had spent more than 24 hours in the city would now receive more than €96. The fact that those rates have been ignored for so long means that cabin crew and pilots—including constituents of mine and those in adjacent areas—are losing out on subsistence payments of more than €25.

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5. 14 Jul 2026·Parliament·Peter Lamb

   Employees Travelling Outside the UK: Expenses Rate

   I take that fully on board. I am delighted that the hon. Member is here for this debate. There are cities in Europe where the situation is even more pronounced than in Amsterdam. In Budapest, the total residual rate set in 2013 and unchanged since 2014 has been eaten away by a compound inflation rate of 67% in Hungary. The current payment of 16,000 forints is well over 10,000 forints, or 40%, lower than it should be. The worst example among European capitals, however, is in Ankara. In the years since the overseas subsistence rates were first set, Turkey has experienced huge inflation. Prices have risen at an average of 22.5% every year. Despite that, Ankara’s residual rate remains at 240 lira, as set in 2014. If it had increased with inflation, it would be over 2,500 lira today, which represents an unrealised tenfold increase. In these situations, as a direct result of the Treasury not having revisited those rates over the last 12 years, airlines and other organisations are able to justify under-compensating their staff by pointing to what is essentially Government guidance. When I wrote to the Treasury with those concerns last year, the then Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, my right hon. Friend the Member for Ealing North (James Murray), informed me that in situations where expenses rates do not cover the actual costs of needing to eat, drink and sleep while abroad for work, the employers can instead choose to “pay actual expenses incurred”. Unfortunately, not every company chooses to do that for their employees, with many of them instead choosing—I do not think this will be a surprise to any of us—to pay the lower rate, the Government’s fixed rate. The issue has a real and detrimental impact on the working lives of cabin crew. A constituent of mine working for an airline operating out of Gatwick airport was blunt about this, telling me that the fact that the rates are so far behind reality means that they have been forced to “miss meals” while abroad for work. Another constituent stated that “current scale rate allowances do not reflect the real costs we face on these trips”,<span id="336WH" class="column-number" data-column-number="336WH"></span> and reiterated that “the allowance provided does not cover even the most basic meals.” It is evident, therefore, that overseas scale rates must be raised. That is why I was delighted when, in his written statement, my hon. Friend the Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury committed to reviewing and uprating them last month. This has been a long time coming. While simply increasing the 2013 rates in line with inflation would be welcome, I hope the Treasury takes the opportunity to undertake a full review of how subsistence rates can be systematically improved. Having secured this debate, I was contacted by Virgin Atlantic, which, among other things, raised concerns that there are some destinations where the current rate might not reflect the full cost of subsistence for an individual visiting or living in the city. For instance, it provided the example of Lagos where safety restrictions require pilots and cabin crew to remain in their hotels and rely on higher cost room service or onsite dining. It is its view—one that I share—that any review should give consideration to those concerns and ensure that safe accommodation is made affordable under new rates. I am well aware that questions related to tax pose difficult decisions for Governments, particularly in times of global economic uncertainty such as these. But I would hope that we would all accept that people should not go without meals while undertaking travel essential to their work, particularly where those individuals might already be on a very low wage. I will closely follow the outcome of the Treasury’s review of overseas scale rates, and I hope that the various issues I have highlighted today are reflected in its outcome.

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6. 2 Jul 2026·Parliament·Peter Lamb

   Commonhold and Leasehold Reform: Managing Agents

   I very much welcome, as I am sure do most of colleagues on the Labour Benches, the Government’s actions so far on commonhold and leasehold, and I look forward to their further steps. <span id="1088" class="column-number" data-column-number="1088"></span>Today, I would like to speak to the issue of property management agents, particularly in the context of unadopted estates. As with so many issues, the fundamental problem here is a lack of housing. Despite the enormous actions taken by this Government to get the housing market moving, the reality is that housing delivery collapsed in the wake of the 1984 housing legislation. Anyone who looks at a graph of housing delivery since that point can see that the mass exit of the state from the direct delivery of housing has never come close to being replaced by the private sector. That is one reason why I was very excited this week to see the Secretary of State’s comments on the potential mass re-entry of this Government into housing delivery. It is one of the very few things that could resolve the issue, because we have a broken market. People are forced to accept unreasonable housing conditions because they have no choice. Until we resolve the broken market, we will continue to have various forms of exploitation. The reality is that developers—there are good developers and bad developers—will, overwhelmingly, seek to minimise their costs as far as possible, whatever the impact on the communities they are creating. If we allow poor practices to be possible within the law, we will see poor practices being delivered by these people. We need to be mindful, of course, that regulation has an impact. As someone who has delivered local plans, I can tell hon. Members that I was always very mindful of the requirements I was putting on developers, because I knew that every single requirement was an affordable house being taken out of the system. As legislators, I think we have sometimes been a bit careless with unnecessary additional requirements. We must ensure that regulation is proportionate, but in this case it very much is. I have been dealing with the issue of unadopted estates for the better part of two decades now, and no worse example exists in my experience than that of Forge Wood. It is part of a new town that has all the services that the neighbourhood principal should deliver for a neighbourhood, but unlike in my other neighbourhoods the residents of Forge Wood are all having to pay for them a second time: once through their council tax and a second time through their management agency, with a fee that rivals the level of district authority council tax. They are paying more for fewer services. There are questions over the nature of the contracts and the contractors that are brought in. If we look at any of those property management agencies, the company secretaries are registered to hundreds, if not thousands, of such companies. How effective can someone be when they are registered as secretary for thousands of companies? It is frankly little more than fee farming from residents for no benefit. I have gone through the articles of association to try and find ways for residents to wrest back control, but the complexities mean that these people are completely unaccountable. It masquerades as ownership by those communities, while delivering an unaccountable system. What should we do? The Government’s existing proposals are an improvement, and I welcome the Committee’s recommendation of the independent regulator, which should come into effect. On the issue of unadopted estates, ultimately, we now have to turn off the tap. <span id="1089" class="column-number" data-column-number="1089"></span>We need to establish fixed conditions and fees, so that they are all adopted at the point they are completed and handed over to local authorities. We also need to establish a pathway for existing unadopted estates to be taken on by the state, with a need for local authorities to plan how they bring them in. I believe it is possible to adopt them within the existing system and within financial constraints. However, we cannot do that while running up a flag to tell every developer in the country to ditch their responsibility to get the estates adopted. I am pleased by the recommendations before us, but further action is needed on an independent regulator and on turning off the tap on unadopted estates.

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7. 23 Jun 2026·Parliament·Peter Lamb

   Green Book Wellbeing Guidance

   <Question HRSContentId="{A914EF1C-62FF-4C3E-A104-0C2CACAD4039}">6. <QuestionText HRSContentId="{E61361A9-17AD-4158-B875-FC35089A1321}">Whether she plans to update the Treasury Green Book supplementary guidance on wellbeing.</QuestionText> [R] </Question>

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8. 23 Jun 2026·Parliament·Peter Lamb

   Green Book Wellbeing Guidance

   I thank the Chancellor for her response. With the constantly growing evidence base behind it, wellbeing economics offers Governments an increasingly sophisticated means of supplementing conventional economics in decision making. It reveals that big-ticket items very often offer little wellbeing benefit to our constituents, while much cheaper interventions can have a dramatic impact. Wellbeing levels have even been shown across Europe to be a better predictor of electoral outcomes than traditional economic measures. Would the Chancellor be willing to meet me and other members of the all-party parliamentary group on wellbeing economics to discuss how wellbeing economics can enhance the work of the Treasury?

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9. 17 Mar 2026·Parliament·Peter Lamb

   Croydon Area Remodelling Scheme

   It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Huq. This issue has been on my radar for a very long time. I used to be the leader of the local authority in Crawley, and we have been aware for many years that the capacity limitations that are coming on the line will be so severe that they will gum up the entire network—the whole north-south link through London—from the coast in Brighton all the way through to Peterborough and Cambridge. Ultimately, we can address that only by resolving the bottleneck in Croydon. The Department for Transport has already commissioned scoping work and started the process of bringing CARS forward. A significant part of the land required to undertake the work has been purchased and is just sitting idle. Unfortunately, it was the victim of the great strategic vision of our previous Prime Minister, who cancelled HS2 and a number of other proposals. Since that point, it has been very hard for a Department to get things back on the agenda. The new Government have come in with a significant proposal for investing in infrastructure. People underestimate just how significant the Government’s proposals for infrastructure are. We are talking about £100 billion of additional infrastructure investment under this Government, which will transform a very large part of the country. The risk we run into, however, is where that investment goes. There are different pressures acting on the DFT as a consequence. Some of it is about trying to regenerate regional economies in the north of England and other parts of the country. As someone who lives in south-east, it is to my benefit for other parts of the country to develop. The direction of travel of policy in this country for many decades has been, essentially, “We are going to move the entire population of the United Kingdom to the south-east, and that is where the only jobs will be.” That is not sustainable. The housing pressures are just not sustainable. We have to have regeneration elsewhere. However, the risk with insufficient investment in the south-east is killing the goose that lays the golden egg. The south-east as a whole generates more economic activity than London. In combination with London, we are talking about a third of the UK’s economic activity. If we do not invest in the infrastructure that sustains that, we will run into very significant problems. The Gatwick airport expansion is supposed to come forward in my community. My community already has full employment, and it has a housing problem. With the capacity limitations expected on the line by 2030, my community will have a very significant transport problem—and I should add that those limitations will come into effect without Gatwick expansion.<span id="256WH" class="column-number" data-column-number="256WH"></span> Gatwick expansion will not necessarily bring any additional benefits to my community, but it brings benefits to the country. I can understand that, and I respect why the DFT is going in that direction, but if we are to see additional benefits to the country coming out of economic activity, that has to come with the necessary infrastructure not only to enable my community to avoid the negative consequences of the housing and transport pressure that will result if the scheme is not put into effect, but to enable the country to get the best possible rate of return on the investment. Ultimately, that is what those of us involved want. A large number of business groups now support the scheme and are making the point that we are cutting off investment in the area. I was at a meeting last week with my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon East (Natasha Irons), the hon. Member for East Grinstead and Uckfield (Mims Davies) and a number of business and transport groups. One business group, which tries to bring inward investment to the United Kingdom, said that people refuse to move here when they have experience the railway capacity or the delays on the line getting to and from Gatwick. That is a real consequence of the UK’s inward investment strategy. We need to ensure that we have the infrastructure to get the maximal benefits of the private investment that is coming in, and the south-east will deliver on that. This is the only profit-making line in the GTR network. The numbers coming through will quickly increase the rate of return for the Treasury, based on the investment. We are one of the very few areas where rail investment would do that, and subsidise other railway lines elsewhere. It will pay for itself in the long term, but we need the pump priming at the start. If we pump prime this part of the south-east with the relatively limited amount of capital we are talking about, it will deliver a much greater return to the Treasury and the UK, through the social and economic benefits of the resultant growth. It is worth noting that passenger volumes are projected to increase by 50% by 2045, which is 15 years after we run out of capacity on the line. If CARS is not the solution to that, what is the DFT’s strategy for dealing with capacity limitations of that scale on the line? I am happy to lobby for something else if I am pointed in the right direction, but my understanding, from talking to transport people, is that this scheme is the only thing that is going to resolve that particular problem. There will be some temporary stops along the way, but they can be dealt with. Despite the reduction in passenger volumes after covid, we are now essentially back to having the mid-week peak, so there is no time for delay. The works are urgently needed if we are going to move things forward. I appreciate that the Treasury needs to address a range of concerns, but this need is urgent now, and will ultimately deliver a much better offer for the United Kingdom in the long run. Please can we just get on with it?

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10. 17 Mar 2026·Parliament·Peter Lamb

    Automated Enforcement Technology: Evidence

    <Question HRSContentId="{4C673902-3B45-457A-947E-3E95CCC9BFFE}">9. <QuestionText HRSContentId="{0E2B6D7F-F941-4011-A1EF-050AD0733D1C}">What assessment he has made of the potential merits of allowing greater use of evidence from automated enforcement technology in trials. </QuestionText></Question>

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