Conservative and Unionist Party MP for South Northamptonshire since (elected).
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| Party | Office | Area | Period | Began | Ended | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Conservative | MP | South Northamptonshire | – present | elected | — | Party history |
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Transport is a really pressing issue in rural areas such as South Northamptonshire, and the closure of the Ability bus service earlier this year has left many of my residents isolated. We need to do so much more, so could we have a debate in Government time on securing greater support for community transport?
The Chancellor started his remarks yesterday by praising the previous Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Leeds West and Pudsey (Rachel Reeves). He said: “She brought fiscal discipline to this country.” He also said: “She took the decisions required to boost investment”.<span id="vol792_col301" class="cross-reference" data-house-id="1" data-column-number="301" data-volume-number="792" data-external-id="43ED9E3F-577E-4A82-8D03-0485B75600D6">—[<em>Official Report</em>, 28 October 2026; Vol. 792, c. 301]</span>— apparently! However, what he omitted is actually more telling. The previous Chancellor increased taxes on business, crippled farmers with taxes, and ballooned the welfare bill and borrowing. If that fiscal discipline was so great, perhaps she might have been delivering the Budget yesterday. The Chancellor also talked about giving Britain some “breathing space” on the cost of living and the cost of business. If this is breathing space, he needs to be very careful of a misrepresentation—the Budget was a faulty inhaler at best. I am particularly concerned by some of the devolution measures in the Budget. There was a lot of discussion about devolution, but Northamptonshire is not being considered at the moment, and we are battling for any provisions around mayors. We are battling to be considered as part of a unit of six, but the Government are looking at Bedford, Luton and Milton Keynes. When so many decisions will apparently be devolved to these authorities, it is important that Northamptonshire has its right place in the discussions. I hope that we can continue to make the case for Northamptonshire to be part of that unit. The defence of the realm is absolutely essential, and we all know how vital it is that we get to spending 3% of GDP on defence by 2030, but some of the Defence Secretary’s comments earlier were incredibly shocking. Conservative Members asking detailed questions about how we will achieve that spending should not be dismissed or joked about. It is absolutely right that this Chamber is the place where those questions are answered, so I ask that the Secretary of State reconsiders his approach the next time that the Opposition ask such questions. When the Chancellor was the Secretary of State for Defence, he resigned for exactly the reason that we could not necessarily reach that 3%. All that was mentioned yesterday was a target. I remind everyone that a target is defined as something that we aim for; we need a full-on commitment here and now. The Budget was given a title that mentions “Fresh Hope for the Future” but this is not about hope for the future; this is about the Government delivering. Hope, as they say, is a little like a rocking chair: it gives us something to do, but it gets us absolutely nowhere. Actions speak much louder than words.
Will the Minister give way?
I was formerly a commercial property lawyer, so I want to bring up a practical point about enforcement. The ambition behind the regulations—to make sure that everybody, including tenants, has the information that they need—is positive, but the practical reality is that if they cannot be enforced properly, it will cause problems and delays in the rental sector. I advocate for a pause—that is essential. If information needs to be gathered and uploaded for potentially up to 10,000 properties—an extremely large number—it will probably take a year or more to get that information up. Have we thought through the knock-on impacts? I encourage exercising caution, having seen the practical reality of being on the other side when I was a lawyer back in the day.
Will the Minister give way one more time?
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Jeremy, and to take part in this debate about the delivery of council housing. It is a debate on a very important topic and I thank the hon. Member for North East Hertfordshire (Chris Hinchliff) for securing it. Building more homes is a critical mission for anyone governing England and Wales today, in order to make the dream of home ownership a reality for even more hard-working families. With a record number of people homeless, and with 177,530 children and 49,120 adult households in temporary accommodation, clearly the priority must be to build more council homes. That is what the Opposition want to happen, but that is what the Government are currently failing to do. Let us take a look at the Government’s own data. Just 208,600 net additional dwellings were added in England in Labour’s first year of power. That was a 6% drop from 2023-24, which was the last Conservative Government’s final year in office. Of these, 190,600 were new homes, a fall of 8,000, around 4%, on 2023-24. Taken together, the Government are on track to build around 400,000 fewer homes than they promised at the election, meaning yet another broken promise made to the British people. The Government know that—the Minister’s boss, the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner), admitted this on national media. That poor showing on homes directly impacts the pressing issue we are debating today, which is the delivery of council housing. We heard the Prime Minister proudly making his summer promise of the comeback of the council house, but what little details we do know on that policy show that the money he has earmarked would equal just 15,494 homes a year, barely 5% of the Government’s annual housing target. That is in exchange for another £79 billion added to the housing subsidy bill, despite the fact that the UK already spends the most on housing allowances as a percentage of GDP of any OECD country. One might have been forgiven for thinking that the aptly-titled Social Housing Bill introduced earlier this year might have been the answer to get local authorities, the Government, industry, and the nation building again. However, as is becoming a theme in this Government, we are left severely disappointed by the reality. The Government have presented a Bill to the House that fails to build a single new council house. Instead of making social and affordable housing sites viable and pushing developments through the pipeline at pace—the Government love to use that phrase—to get people off the street and help children into permanent homes, they have chosen to use up parliamentary, Government and civil service time on an ideological assault on right-to-buy. It is a shameful course of action, and far from what the 1.34 million people on the social housing wait list need. Even worse is that the Government know this Social Housing Bill will not deliver new homes. According tousb data from the Minister’s own impact assessment, in 2026-27 the pre-November 2024 baseline <span id="103WH" class="column-number" data-column-number="103WH"></span>was 8,050 right-to-buy sales, leading to 5,450 replacement homes. The document goes on to show that if this Bill were to pass and the legacy impacts were to wind down in the period of 2031-35, annual right-to-buy sales would fall to around 1,100 a year, with around 1,450 replacement homes. That means that by their own analysis and admission, the Government will be overseeing a housing system in which there would be 4,000 fewer new social homes funded every year. Moreover, research conducted by the House of Lords Library shows that only a net 3% of social homes become available each year to new tenancies. That means that around 90 additional homes will be available for a new tenant each year instead of 5,000. The Bill would not only mean no new homes built, but would actively prevent them from being delivered. The Government really must refocus their efforts on building more council housing, and that requires serious reforms to the viability of sites for social and affordable homes. We are halfway through a Parliament in which we have spent much time debating the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025, various updates to the national planning policy framework and the aforementioned Bill, yet after all of that we are still left without a clear route to building more homes. Projections from the Government show they will have managed to build just 26% of their target in 50% of the time.
Of course, it is always important to reflect on any of the legacies but we have to talk about the here and now. It has rightly been said that this Government are in control; the Social Housing Bill is supposed to unlock the system and yet it will not do that. Our questions should be directly to the Minister about how the Government will unlock the potential that everyone in this room wants to see. That is why the Conservative party proposes taking £50,000 off the cost of building a new home in England and Wales by cutting back on regulations and taxes; backing a genuinely brownfield-first approach to see new homes built on the existing 1.41 million sites viable for development; building, not blocking; a genuine council house comeback; and supporting aspiration.
I am just concluding. I call on the Minister to commit to changing the Social Housing Bill, to back the delivery of council housing and to help bring the shocking number of people in temporary accommodation down. That is the only way to see more council houses built, to see more people into safe and affordable accommodation and to get Britain building.
This is an important debate about support for our farmers. A few weeks ago, I was absolutely delighted to speak to the Towcester Young Farmers Club, in a room full of our best and brightest—our custodians for the future. We talk about supporting them, and I want to do that; however, I also want to recognise the support that they are giving back to us already, at their young age. Whether it is Rosie Burt, who ran a gruelling 50k ultramarathon in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support, or the young farmers organising their charity Halloween tractor run on 1 November to raise money for the Cynthia Spencer hospice, they give so much back to our community already, and I think it is very important that we recognise that. That is why I am so hurt and saddened that in the face of such optimism from this younger generation, we are having to fight so hard against the Government to make them realise the impact of the choices that they have made. We have already rehearsed the family farm tax, the family business tax, the issues with SFI, the increase in national insurance contributions and the fertiliser tax. Rather than speaking about rejoining the EU and the options on the table, or about electoral reform, as the Prime Minister is doing, why not prioritise these decisions that can make a massive difference to our farmers here and now? I urge the Minister to take the message back to the Prime Minister that this is what we should be focused on. As we have said, farming is a vocation, and it needs long-term planning and certainty for the future. At Prime Minister’s questions today, the <span id="1216" class="column-number" data-column-number="1216"></span>PM talked about the EU summit bringing a better deal for farmers, but the proof ultimately will be in the pudding. We have had zero details about the upcoming sanitary and phytosanitary agreement. We have asked the relevant Minister numerous times to come before the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee to answer questions, but we have been refused on numerous occasions. The SPS agreement is very important, because we will potentially be moving to a system of dynamic alignment, and that will have a massive impact. We are well ahead in this country on matters such as precision breeding and on our animal welfare standards. We all want to understand exactly what this deal will mean, and I do not think it is right that we are not being given a chance for full scrutiny before it comes around. The market is talking about the importance of implementation periods. Our farmers need to know what is happening and when. Again, I urge the Minister to give us more transparency on the future SPS agreement. Forgive me if I am slightly concerned about these matters, given that the Government have sold us out on our fishing rights and we could not even agree Security Action for Europe funding. I want to finish on a more positive note. While many farmers are struggling as a result of the Government’s decisions, they are none the less very industrious, and want to come up with measures to support themselves. One great measure that I think we could all support is that of Ben Aveling, of Radmore farm in my constituency, who is trying to encourage support for farmers by bringing back the Sunday roast. The idea is that we can all sit together and chat as a family while also buying British products. I think we should support that wholeheartedly. Can we please recognise that?
Although the MOD Bicester site is outside my constituency, it is approximately 11 km from my nearest settlement. I wrote to the Home Secretary on 1 September on behalf of not only female constituents, but Piddington women, who I am so pleased to see in the Gallery today. They contacted me to express their concerns for their safety, and I reiterate that the guidance entitled “Understanding behaviour and expectations in the UK” reinforces their concerns. I have a migrant hotel in my constituency, and we know the issues that come from having migrants in the area. One big question is what they will do with their time. Rural crime is already an issue, and they could be exploited by existing criminal gangs. I ask the Minister: why have stab vests been issued to security staff working at the base in the last month, when they have never been needed before? The site was deemed unsuitable for an open accommodation centre by the Planning Inspectorate and the local authority more than 20 years ago, and little has changed since then. In the early 2000s, the High Court ruled that no more than 750 people could live there, but now the figure is 1,250. The Home Office argues that not using hotels is ensuring the “better use of public money”, but these large accommodation sites could cost £46 million more, according to the National Audit Office. All that could be avoided if only the Government would take a robust approach to our asylum system, which means reviewing our position on the ECHR. As Lord Wolfson’s excellent report highlights, the ECHR places significant legal constraints on the Government’s <span id="415" class="column-number" data-column-number="415"></span>ability to address issues such as immigration. Other countries across Europe are reconsidering their relationship with the ECHR in the light of immigration issues—countries such as Belgium, Italy, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Lithuania and Austria. We are not alone.