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  • Anne-Marie Trevelyan – 2022 Statement on UK-Australia Free Trade Agreement

    Anne-Marie Trevelyan – 2022 Statement on UK-Australia Free Trade Agreement

    The statement made by Anne-Marie Trevelyan, the Secretary of State for International Trade, in the House of Commons on 5 January 2022.

    Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. In a former incarnation, I was indeed in that other role.

    I am really delighted to be able to report to the House that, just before Christmas, the Australian Trade Minister, Dan Tehan, and I signed a comprehensive free trade agreement between the United Kingdom and Australia. This agreement deepens our bond of common values and a shared belief in the combined power of democracy, free trade and high standards. This is the first new trade deal the UK has negotiated from scratch since leaving the European Union. It is truly a world-class partnership, allowing our businesses to trade and invest more freely.

    The deal will uphold high standards and foster collaboration on challenges such as tackling climate change, unfair trading practices and growing the low-carbon economy, going further than ever before in many important areas and showing what we can do as an independent trading nation. It eliminates tariffs on 100% of UK exports, and includes flexible rules of origin, meaning that UK businesses can use some imported parts and ingredients, and still qualify for the new 0% tariffs when exporting to Australia. It gives UK firms new legally guaranteed access to bids for over £10 billion of Australian Government contracts on an equal footing with Australian firms. It provides unprecedented new opportunities for young Britons to live and work in Australia, and it paves the way for the UK to join the comprehensive and progressive agreement for trans-Pacific partnership, or CPTPP, which would further open 11 markets worth £8.4 trillion in GDP for British exporters and investors. Accession to the CPTPP could see 99.9% of UK exports being eligible for tariff-free trade with some of the biggest economies of the present and future, from Japan to Mexico, and from Canada to Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. Unlike EU membership, it would achieve that while allowing us to continue to keep control over our laws, our borders and our money.

    This deal is expected to increase trade with Australia by more than 50%. It is expected to add £900 million to household wages, and to deliver a boost for the economy of over £2 billion by 2035—compared with what we would see if we did not have a deal—benefiting communities and helping to level up every region and nation of our United Kingdom.

    The agreement that I have signed delivers for the whole of the Union. The economies of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are estimated to benefit from a combined boost of £200 million, and the economic impact assessment that we have published shows that the west midlands, the north-east, the north-west, the south-east, the south-west and Wales are set to see the biggest proportional gains. The deal will benefit Scotland’s financial services industry, boost innovative aerospace design and manufacture in the west midlands, provide new opportunities for Welsh fintech companies, allow Northern Ireland’s manufacturers to export more competitively, and help car makers to support thousands of jobs in the north-east.

    The agreement means that Australia will remove tariffs from all its UK imports, making it more competitive for the 15,300 UK businesses who currently export iconic products such as Jaguar and Aston Martin cars, Scotch whisky, London gin and UK fashion to Australia. It will encourage new companies to enter the market, including small businesses and family-run firms which will find it easier, cheaper and faster to sell their fantastic goods and services to Australia for the first time. It also delivers for consumers. The removal of UK tariffs on Australian favourites such as Jacob’s Creek and Hardys wines will help to keep prices down. UK manufacturers will benefit from cheaper access to important Australian machinery parts, allowing them to be more competitive and to grow.

    The agreement means that investing in Australia will be easier than ever before. It more than quadruples the threshold that UK investments need to meet before being subject to review by Australia’s Foreign Investment Review Board, which will help to save time, save money and cut red tape. The UK’s world-class services industry will now have unprecedented and legally guaranteed access to the Australian market, allowing UK legal and engineering firms to compete on an equal footing with domestic firms in Australia.

    Ambitious tech start-ups, financial services firms and the creative sectors will benefit from new opportunities to trade digitally. The agreement secures the free flow of data while locking in a legal requirement for personal data protection in both countries, guarantees fair access to Australia for telecoms companies, and forges greater co-operation on 5G and cyber-security. It includes the world’s first dedicated innovation chapter in a free trade agreement, establishing a strategic innovation dialogue to ensure that the deal keeps up with technological developments and drives the commercialisation of new technologies.

    Our British businesses will also benefit from unrivalled new access to business visas, allowing staff to relocate more easily and travel more freely to work in Australia. It will enable Britons aged 18 to 35 to travel and work in Australia for up to three years, and they will no longer have to work on a farm to obtain a working holiday maker visa. Australian firms will no longer have to prioritise hiring Australian nationals over a British national. Additionally, executives and managers who are transferred to their company locations in Australia will have the right to stay for four years instead of two. They can also bring their spouses and dependent children, who will have the same four-year right to work.

    The agreement has been crafted through consultation with UK businesses and interested parties at all stages of the negotiations. It offers a suite of arrangements going further than Australia has ever gone with any other country in a free trade agreement, which is a testament to the strength of our relationship and the hard work of my brilliant officials at the Department for International Trade and their Australian counterparts. It includes ambitious commitments to work together in addressing the shared challenges of environmental conservation, women’s economic empowerment and poverty reduction. It includes a commitment to maintain high animal welfare standards.

    We have also secured protections relevant to the NHS and Australia’s health system in the agreement, which keep the NHS out of scope of the agreement. The NHS is not, and never will be, for sale to the private sector.

    British food and drink is world-renowned for its quality, and this trade deal will deliver benefits to the industry—from tariff-free access to the Australian market to faster customs arrangements. The deal could see a wide range of iconic UK products, including Scotch whisky, Irish cream and Welsh cider, given protected geographical indication status in Australia. By creating new opportunities, this deal will help continue a trend of booming UK food and drink exports to Australia, which have more than doubled in the last decade. So we should be unafraid of fair competition and positive about the export opportunities that exist.

    Let me also take the opportunity to alleviate the concerns of some colleagues regarding meat imports from Australia. The reality is that beef imports from Australia account for only a small fraction of our overall beef imports. Just 0.1% of all Australian beef exports went to the UK last year. Also, it is relatively unlikely that large volumes of beef and sheep will be diverted to the UK from lucrative markets in Asia, which are much closer to Australia. More than 75% of Australian beef and 70% of Australian sheepmeat exports last year went to markets in Asia and the Pacific—markets that we are also keen to grow in through our membership of the CPTPP.

    With regard to animal welfare and food standards, we have been clear throughout this process that we will not compromise on our high standards, and we have delivered on that. All imports into the UK will have to comply with our existing food standards requirements—including the ban on hormone-treated beef. The deal also includes a dedicated chapter and non-regression clause on animal welfare. This will help to ensure that neither country lowers their animal welfare standards in a manner that impacts trade.

    This agreement also supports the UK’s climate change commitments, reaffirming both parties’ commitments to all of the Paris agreement objectives—the first time that Australia has included a substantive climate change article in any trade deal. It also sets out areas for future co-operation on emissions reduction, zero emissions technology, energy efficiency and sustainable transport. So UK businesses will benefit from zero tariffs on all low-carbon exports to Australia, including of wind turbine parts and electric vehicles, creating more opportunities to grow the low-carbon economy.

    The Government are committed to transparency and inclusiveness in all our future trading arrangements, and the House will now have substantial opportunity to scrutinise this deal in detail. We have already presented the full treaty text, a draft explanatory memorandum and the independently scrutinised impact assessment to Parliament, and we anticipate that there will now be a period of several months before the agreement is formally laid before Parliament for the 21 sitting days of formal scrutiny under the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010, otherwise known as CRaG. That will allow ample time for the Trade and Agriculture Commission to prepare its advice, as well as for the International Trade Committee and International Agreements Committee to produce a report on the agreement, should they so wish. I have already written to the new Trade and Agriculture Commission to seek its advice on the deal with respect to our domestic statutory protections for agriculture. That will help me to inform the Government’s own report on this issue, as required under section 42 of the Agriculture Act 2020. I also wish to highlight that any legislative changes required to give effect to the deal will be scrutinised by Parliament in the usual way ahead of ratification.

    So this is a landmark agreement and will be a feature of the relationship between our two great countries for many years to come. As a newly independent trading nation, the UK is reaching out to seize the opportunities of the future—opportunities that we are uniquely well placed to take. The deal I have signed with Australia, one of our closest and most important allies, is just the latest chapter in our progress towards that brighter future, forging an open, enterprising economy, enabling us to build back better from the pandemic, and levelling up every region and nation of our United Kingdom.

    I commend this statement to the House.

  • Angela Rayner – 2022 Speech on Covid-19

    Angela Rayner – 2022 Speech on Covid-19

    The speech made by Angela Rayner, the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, in the House of Commons on 5 January 2022.

    I thank the Prime Minister for advance sight of his statement. I wholeheartedly back him in asking people to come forward to get their jabs and booster jabs. It is of course right that plan B measures must stay in place during this wave of the pandemic. It was the Labour party that made sure that the Government had the votes to pass those measures in the House. If not for Labour’s actions, the NHS would be facing even greater pressure, and the likelihood is that we would have needed much harsher restrictions. My message to the Prime Minister is that, despite the people sitting behind him, and those eyeing up his job alongside him, Labour will always act in the national interest and put public health before party politics.

    The Prime Minister said that we have to ride out the omicron wave, but the NHS is not surfing; it is struggling to stay afloat. We have seen several hospital trusts declare critical incidents, which means that they cannot provide services for cancer and heart disease patients. In my home of Greater Manchester, non-urgent surgery is being halted. I thank those trusts that have come forward and been up front about the reality that they are facing, and I thank our NHS staff who are going above and beyond, once again, to get us through this period.

    Is it not time for the Prime Minister to be straight with people and give a frank assessment of the state of our NHS? He mentioned the use of the Army, but how many trusts have declared a critical incident and what does he plan to do about that? People in the north-east are being told to call a cab or phone a friend if they are suffering a suspected heart attack or stroke. That is shocking.

    Even before omicron hit, however, thousands of suspected heart attack or stroke victims in England were forced to wait more than an hour and 40 minutes for their ambulance. Is it not true that our health service went into this wave of infections with the largest waiting lists on record, the longest waiting times on record and major staff shortages? After a decade of Tory mismanagement, the NHS was not prepared for covid and did not have the spare capacity to cope with omicron. It is not just that the Conservatives did not fix the roof when the sun was shining; they dismantled the roof and removed the floorboards.

    Getting testing right remains the best way to avoid further restrictions. It is welcome that the Government are requiring daily testing to protect critical national infrastructure, but that will not begin until next week. Our essential services are buckling under the pressure now. Doctors, nurses, carers, teachers and pupils cannot get the tests they need now to do two tests a week. Emergency workers are reportedly stuck in isolation because they cannot get their hands on a test. So why did the Health Secretary claim on 13 December that there is “no shortage” of actual tests? Why was the Government’s delivery service allowed to go on holiday over Christmas with no contingency plan in place? The Government have been asleep at the wheel, and the result is total shambles. I am sure the Prime Minister will join me in thanking the Welsh Labour Government for sharing 4 million tests with England. Thank goodness that they had the foresight to plan ahead and secure enough tests for this period.

    In April 2020, the Government published a strategy to scale up the covid-19 testing programme. They promised to work with the UK’s world-leading diagnostics companies to build a British diagnostics industry at scale, yet two years on, this has never materialised. How much taxpayers’ money was spent on this programme and why, Prime Minister, two years into the pandemic, are we still reliant on tests from China, instead of building the capacity to make the tests here in Britain?

    The Prime Minister

    That is rubbish.

    Angela Rayner

    The Prime Minister can chunter away, but he will have his opportunity in a minute.

    People will be returning to work this week, but the Government are refusing to guarantee all workers sufficient sick pay, leaving working people with the choice of going to work to feed their families or staying at home to protect public health. Will the Prime Minister finally raise sick pay so that people are no longer faced with an impossible choice of doing the right thing or feeding their family?

    In some of the poorest countries in the world, less than 10% of the population is vaccinated. This is shameful. We know we can do more to assist the international vaccine effort, and what are the Government doing about that? If we are going to break this endless cycle of new variants, we have to vaccinate the world. This is not just a question of doing the right thing for others; it is in our national interest, too.

    Finally, there are Conservative Members sitting behind the Prime Minister who have spent recent weeks attacking hard-working public servants. Is it not time that the Prime Minister stood by our experts, professionals and officials, who are doing all they can to protect public health? If he was happy to defend Dominic Cummings, the former Health Secretary and Owen Paterson, why will he not defend those public servants who are actually doing the right thing?

  • Boris Johnson – 2022 Statement on Covid-19

    Boris Johnson – 2022 Statement on Covid-19

    The statement made by Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, in the House of Commons on 5 January 2022.

    With permission, Mr Speaker, I will make a statement on the omicron variant and our measures to contain this virus, fortify our NHS and keep our country open.

    First, I am sure that the whole House will join me in paying tribute to everyone working in our NHS and social care for their extraordinary efforts in the teeth of yet another wave of this pandemic, and for all that they have done, together with thousands of volunteers, to get Britain boosted. Since we began the Get Boosted Now campaign just over three weeks ago, we have delivered 10 million extra boosters across the UK; we have doubled the rate of vaccination from 450,000 doses a day to a peak of more than 900,000; we have matched the NHS’s previous record day, then beaten it again and again; and we have met our target of offering a booster to every eligible adult in England a whole month early.

    As a result, we have a higher level of booster protection than all our European neighbours, with more than 34 million boosters having been administered across the UK, reaching in England more than 90% of the over-70s and 86% of the over-50s. Together with the evidence that omicron causes less severe disease than previous variants, and the way in which the public have conscientiously changed their behaviour in response to plan B, that level of protection means that we are in a very different position than we were during previous waves.

    I know that some hon. Members may therefore ask whether that means we can now do away with measures altogether, but I am sorry to report that hospital admissions are rising rapidly—doubling around every nine days—and there are more than 15,000 covid patients in hospital in England alone. We are experiencing the fastest growth in covid cases that we have ever known; over 218,000 cases were reported yesterday, although that included some delayed reporting. Potentially of greatest concern, case rates are now rapidly rising among the older and more vulnerable—doubling every week among those over 60, with the obvious risk that that will continue to increase the pressures on our NHS.

    In response to the latest data, the Cabinet agreed this morning that we should stick with plan B for another three weeks, with a further review before the regulations expire on 26 January. People in England should carry on working from home whenever they can, wear face coverings on public transport and in most indoor public places, and take a test before going to high-risk venues or meeting the elderly or vulnerable. All of these measures are helping to take the edge off the omicron wave, to slow the spread of infection, to manage the immediate pressures on our NHS and to buy time for the boosters to take effect. Those in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland should, of course, continue to follow the rules where they live.

    Faced with those pressures on our NHS, I know that some Members may ask the opposite question: whether we should go even further and move towards a full lockdown. But lockdowns are not cost-free; they impose a devastating toll on our physical and mental wellbeing, on our businesses, jobs and livelihoods and, worst of all, on the life chances of our children, so the Government do not believe that we need to shut down our country again.

    Instead, we are taking a balanced approach, using the protection of the boosters and the plan B measures to reduce the spread of the virus, while acting to strengthen our NHS, protect critical national services and keep our supply chains open. We are building on-site Nightingale hospitals and creating 2,500 virtual beds to increase NHS capacity. We have bought more antivirals per person than anywhere else in Europe, and we are working to identify those trusts that are most likely to need military support, so that that can be prepared now.

    From 10 January, we will provide 100,000 critical workers in England with free lateral flow tests for every working day to help to keep essential services running. That includes those who work on critical national infrastructure, national security, transport, and food distribution and processing. Those tests are separate—and in addition—from those already allocated to our public services, such as in education, where we have delivered 31 million testing kits to schools and colleges for the start of the new term.

    We have the biggest testing programme in Europe, registering almost twice as many tests as France, and four times as many as Germany. Last month alone, we distributed 300 million lateral flow devices, enabling millions of people to get tested and keep their loved ones, friends and colleagues safe in the run-up to Christmas. Thanks to the sheer size of the omicron wave, we still need to take steps to ensure that our testing capacity reaches those who need it most, so we will be suspending the need to do a PCR test to confirm the result of a positive lateral flow test. From next Tuesday in England, if someone tests positive on a lateral flow device, they should just record that result on gov.uk and begin self-isolating.

    Our balanced approach also means that where specific measures are no longer serving their purpose, they will be dropped. When the omicron variant was first identified, we rightly introduced travel restrictions to slow its arrival in our country, but now omicron is so prevalent, these measures are having a limited impact on the growth in cases while continuing to pose significant costs for our travel industry. I can announce that in England, from 4 am on Friday, we will be scrapping the pre-departure test, which discourages many from travelling for fear of being trapped overseas and incurring significant extra expense. We will also be lifting the requirement to self-isolate on arrival until receipt of a negative PCR, returning instead to the system we had in October last year, where those arriving in England will need to take a lateral flow test no later than the end of day 2 and, if positive, a further PCR test to help us to identify any new variants at the border.

    All these measures are balanced and proportionate ways of ensuring we can live with covid without letting our guard down, and we can only do this thanks to the biggest and fastest booster campaign in Europe. Yet there are still almost 9 million people eligible who have not had their booster. As many as 90% of those in intensive care with covid have not had their booster and over 60% of those in intensive care with covid have not had any vaccination at all.

    There are 2 million slots available in the next week alone, so I urge hon. Members on both sides of the House to do everything possible to encourage their constituents to get boosted now. This is the very best way to save lives, reduce pressure on our NHS and keep our country open. I commend this statement to the House.

  • Grant Shapps – 2022 Comments on Relaxing Testing Rules for Travellers

    Grant Shapps – 2022 Comments on Relaxing Testing Rules for Travellers

    The comments made by Grant Shapps, the Secretary of State for Transport, on 5 January 2022.

    I’ve always said that we won’t keep international travel restrictions in place any longer than they are necessary to protect public health.

    That’s why we’re removing the temporary, extra testing measures we introduced for Omicron in November, making travel easier and cheaper for fully vaccinated passengers and providing a big boost for the travel industry as we enter the peak new year booking period.

    We want to provide more certainty to passengers and businesses, and will do a full review of our international travel measures for 2022 by the end of the month.

  • George Eustice – 2022 Comments on Restoring Habitats

    George Eustice – 2022 Comments on Restoring Habitats

    The comments made by George Eustice, the Environment Secretary, on 6 January 2022.

    We want to see profitable farming businesses producing nutritious food, underpinning a growing rural economy, where nature is recovering and people have better access to it.

    Through our new schemes, we are going to work with farmers and land managers to halt the decline in species, reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, increase woodland, improve water and air quality and create more space for nature.

    We are building these schemes together, and we are already working with over 3,000 farmers across the sector to test and trial our future approach. Farmers will be able to choose which scheme or combination of schemes works best for their business, and we will support them to do so.

  • John Healey – 2022 Comments on Wasted Military Spending

    John Healey – 2022 Comments on Wasted Military Spending

    The comments made by John Healey, the Shadow Secretary of State for Defence, on 5 January 2022.

    The Ministry of Defence has blown billions of pounds at the same time as cutting back our Armed Forces.

    The MoD is a uniquely failing department, yet Ministers have taken no serious steps to secure value for taxpayers’ money.

    This scale of waste is totally unacceptable. Ministers are failing British troops and British taxpayers.

    A Labour Government would get to grips with these deep-seated problems from day one. We would commission the NAO to conduct an across-the-board audit of MoD waste and make the MoD the first department subject to our new Office for Value for Money’s new tough spending regime.

  • Bridget Phillipson – 2022 Comments on Ventilation in Schools

    Bridget Phillipson – 2022 Comments on Ventilation in Schools

    The comments made by Bridget Phillipson, the Shadow Education Secretary, on 5 January 2022.

    Vaccination, ventilation and testing are key to ensuring children and staff can continue to learn together in school, but Ministers are again falling short with a lack of tests, only half of eligible children vaccinated and just a fraction of the ventilation systems our schools need.

    Labour called for decisive action to be taken over the Christmas break to get these problems solved but the government has again failed to get ahead of the virus.

    We’ve got a new Education Secretary, a new team of government ministers, but our children are still being treated as an afterthought with chaotic, last-minute announcements hampering their education. It is incompetent, complacent, and inadequate.

  • Rachel Reeves – 2022 Comments on Cost of Living Crisis

    Rachel Reeves – 2022 Comments on Cost of Living Crisis

    The comments made by Rachel Reeves, the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, on 5 January 2022.

    Right now, people are being hit by a cost-of-living crisis which has seen energy bills soar, petrol and food prices up and the weekly budget stretched.

    That’s why Labour is calling on the Government to immediately remove VAT on household heating bills over the winter months.

    On top of the highest tax hikes in 70 years, Conservative complacency is leaving working people paying the price.

  • Justin Madders – 2022 Speech on New Homes and Management Companies

    Justin Madders – 2022 Speech on New Homes and Management Companies

    The speech made by Justin Madders, the Labour MP for Ellesmere Port and Neston, in the House of Commons on 5 January 2022.

    It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Betts. Happy new year to everyone who is here today. I congratulate the hon. Member for Wantage (David Johnston) on securing the debate, on his useful introduction and on the interesting points he made. This may be the first debate of 2022 and it may be a new year, but, as we have heard, many of the issues we are debating are not new and, aside from the leasehold scandal, have had insufficient attention from this place.

    We absolutely need more places for people to live; I doubt there is a Member in this place who disagrees with that. While the Government set some general targets about how many homes should be built, the detail is rightly left, in the main, to local councils. In reality, they and the communities they represent have limited say over what sort of homes are built, where they are built and, as the hon. Member for Wantage mentioned, how the infrastructure that goes with them is delivered. That is the nub of the problem, because we are often told that the wrong type of home is being built in the wrong type of place. That can be argued ad infinitum, and it often is. The bottom line is that we are continually falling short in achieving enough decent affordable housing.

    Decent housing is critical to the national infrastructure. It is the bedrock of people’s lives, yet it is too often left to the market to resolve, and the market is clearly failing. In my experience, developers all too often show contempt for local communities by riding roughshod over the development conditions imposed on them: working longer hours, making more noise, and building higher and closer than they should to existing properties. That creates more work for the beleaguered planning department and puts more demands on councils that, after a decade of austerity, simply do not have the powers and resources to keep up.

    By the time the council manages to catch up with a complaint, quite often the house is already built and the drains put in. It is a massive financial, logistical and legal battle to get developers to stick to plans when they have got that far down the road. Many councils simply do not have the capacity to get into such fights, especially when the case is about a couple of metres. It might not look much on a plan, but for someone living next door, a couple of metres makes a huge difference.

    What about roads being brought up to an acceptable standard, so that they can be adopted by the local authority? People are waiting years for roads to be adopted. I do not blame the local authority, which sets out what needs to be done but does not have the resources or time to continually chase developers who have sold the homes and moved on. Where is the incentive for developers to come back and finish the job they started?

    I want to say a few words about the massive expansion of estate management companies. It seems that the idea of the developer paying the local authority a commuted sum to cut the grass and maintain common parts has had its day. This reduces developers’ costs, although it does not seem to lead to cheaper house prices. It costs the homeowner far more in the long run because they are, in effect, paying twice for the maintenance of open spaces: once through a management fee and once through their council tax. Once again, though, it is the council that gets lumbered with all the grief and blame.

    With developers looking to replace their lost funding streams, with what I hope will be the end of leasehold, I am concerned that estate management companies will become the new payment protection insurance of the house building industry. There is little regulation or transparency and, if we are honest, little need for estate management companies in most settings, so why do we have them? House builders build houses—that is their core business; they are not interested in managing estates. Indeed, they cannot wait to get rid of them to a company that specialises in such things.

    Developers creating an estate management company is nothing more than a calculation on the balance sheet. They have zero interest in keeping the verges neat and tidy after they have gone. If they can make the bottom line look more attractive by getting in a management company, they will. They keep getting away with it because we let them. Why can we not start from the basic principle that the local council should be doing those jobs and that estate management companies are an unnecessary tax on homeowners? How many people are told of the implications of an estate management company or how much it costs?

    What developers say to new buyers in the showroom and what is in the final contract are often very different. By the time the paperwork arrives, it is too late. People may have spent thousands on the move, never mind the psychological commitment they have made. What is said in the showroom often does not appear in any documentation. There is a classic example in my constituency where residents now look out on a 30-feet-high warehouse, which the developers conveniently forgot to mention already had planning permission when they sold buyers their homes. They are still waiting for the KFC that they were told was going to be there. Because that is just sales patter, there is no legal accountability for the lies that are told.

    This is the biggest single purchase people will ever make. There needs to be far greater accountability for what developers say and what they build. At the moment, they seem to have a free pass. Developers with household names work across the country, moving from one project to the next, sometimes leaving behind problems that take years to resolve. Another development in my constituency has ended up in court, with one group of residents pitted against another and maintenance bills racking up in their thousands, because the developers did not do the paperwork or the job properly in the first place. I know that they are causing havoc elsewhere, because other hon. Members have told me. What can councils do? They have no grounds to refuse planning permission on the basis that the developer has been a poor performer elsewhere. How about a fit and proper person test for the directors of those companies?

    In conclusion, I would like much greater political direction and oversight of the house building industry. After all, it will build the homes that we need, but at the moment it quite understandably organises affairs to maximise profits. Housing is a critical part of our infrastructure—having a roof over one’s head is fundamental—but it has been shown time and again that we cannot rely on the market alone to deliver that. Four and a half years on from Grenfell, we still have not really had a decision on who is liable for the defects that were created there, and there is clearly a reluctance in Government to grasp the nettle and take some ownership of the industry.

  • David Johnston – 2022 Speech on New Homes and Management Companies

    David Johnston – 2022 Speech on New Homes and Management Companies

    The speech made by David Johnston, the Conservative MP for Wantage, in the House of Commons on 5 January 2022.

    I beg to move,

    That this House has considered the role of developers, housebuilders and management companies in new homes.

    It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts. Happy new year to you and to everybody else who is here this morning. This is a 90-minute debate, and I have said to quite a number of people that I could easily speak for at least 90 minutes on this topic—it will be a relief to everyone that I am not going to do that. The reason is that it is a source of huge frustration in my constituency. Owning a new home and the development of new homes should be a source of great joy, but too often it is a source of great distress. There are a few reasons for that that I want to talk about, but before I go into those, I want to say at the outset that, contrary to some of the media stereotypes about areas such as mine, most people in my constituency are not opposed to new homes. If they are homeowners themselves, they entirely understand why other people want to own a home. They often have children and grandchildren whom they are trying to help get on the housing ladder. They know that we need housing for key workers. They know that sometimes people just want to move into one of these new homes from where they already live in the constituency. But people have real frustration with the way in which these things are developing and the problems they are causing in the local area.

    The first issue is simply the quality of a lot of the homes that go up, because it is often poor. Sometimes it is very good, but too often it is poor, and constituents’ homes have major defects that take years to try to deal with. I have constituents who have spent two, three or four years—sometimes more—trying to get these defects repaired. This is not like buying a cheap version of something on eBay, half-expecting that there might be something wrong with it. This is the biggest purchase that any of us will make, and we do not expect to then have years of trying to sort out the problems with it. Unfortunately, when constituents try to do that, they feel completely outmatched by the builder that built their home. Sometimes the builder will blame the contractor; sometimes they will say that there is nothing wrong: “We signed it off according to building regulations.” But I have been in some of these places and we can see these huge issues. It is completely unacceptable that people are experiencing them.

    The second issue is about the impact of these homes on the environment. That has two major aspects to it. One is what it does to the local environment around the area. Naturally, people can see greenfield sites disappearing. One constituent wrote to me and said that the biodiversity commitments that a particular house builder had made had not been kept whatsoever. There is an impact on air quality and water quality, but the other aspect is how the homes themselves are built. I am continually asked by constituents, “Why are we building so many homes that we know we will have to retrofit in a few years’ time?”, and there is no easy answer to that. I am continually asked, “Why can’t every new home have solar panels? Why can’t every new home have a heat pump?” I understand why: there are various reasons why we might not put the same thing in every kind of house.

    I completely welcome the Government’s commitment to having electric charging points in every new home. I really welcome the future homes standard, which will make new homes from 2025 net zero ready, with a 75% reduction in their emissions. But the point still stands that thousands of homes are going up right now and we know that because of our ambitious net zero goals, we will have to retrofit a lot of them. The reason is that it is cheaper for the house builders to build them that way today.

    The third issue is affordability. I have said a few times in this place that no one who rents has ever said to me, “There are too many new homes going up.” They say only that those homes are not affordable. They say that they have saved for years and years, and it does not matter how much they save; they do not get close to being able to afford one. The average house price in my constituency is £335,000. The average house price in my constituency is £335,000. To London ears that might sound fine, but it is 9.2 times median income, and that is out of reach for most people. An affordability threshold of 80% of that is still not affordable. Again, we run into bad practices. We all know that developers commit to a certain number of affordable homes, but time after time that number is driven down on the grounds that the development would not be viable if that commitment were maintained, so broken promises are a constant theme.

    Justin Madders (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)

    The hon. Gentleman makes a particularly important point about affordable housing. I am often told that developers who make such arguments about viability are working on a 20% profit margin per property. Does he agree that that is completely unsustainable?

    David Johnston

    The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. I was just about to say that when the taxpayer is subsidising the development of affordable homes and when the profits of house builders are so large—often bordering on 30%, come rain or shine; they are making these profits in all weathers—it is completely unacceptable for them to play this game so that people are unable to get on the housing ladder.

    The fourth aspect that I want to talk about is the role of management companies. After someone has purchased one of these new homes, the costs do not always stop. People are often signed up to quite expensive contracts with management companies who purport to provide services to maintain communal areas, and it is often very difficult for residents to find out what is being done for that money. The charge goes up year after year, but their communal area is not maintained. They are told that staff are employed to do things, but they never see the staff. They work hard to try to get transparency about what is being provided for the money, but they cannot get it. They get a basic summary, and that is about it. The people who try to get the information are often well qualified, but they cannot get it.

    I know of a management company—the residents do not want me to name them, so I will not—where many of the residents are elderly, sick or vulnerable, and they feel completely bullied and exploited by their management company. Right now they are being pressured into taking a new lease, which they do not want to take because they know it will be bad for them, but they fear the repercussions if they do not or if they go to someone to talk about it. They have talked to me, but, as I have said, they do not want to me to talk about who they are. That is an appalling situation for people to be in. Far too often there is a real problem with the way in which management companies fleece people in new homes when those people have already spent so much money.

    Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)

    I thank the hon. Gentleman for securing the debate. In preparing for it, I looked into leasehold in the United Kingdom. In England, Wales and Scotland, people are unable to buy their leasehold, but Northern Ireland is one part of the United Kingdom where they can. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that when it comes to purchasing the freehold, people certainly get a “fleecehold” in England, Wales and Scotland? In Northern Ireland they have a chance to buy it out. Does he feel that that should happen here on the mainland?

    David Johnston

    I completely agree with the hon. Gentleman, and I expect the Minister will address that point when he speaks later. Most people think that they own their home, but they can often end up feeling like tenants. I experienced that myself until recently. I used to get a bill for £300 on Christmas day every year. The bill, dated 25 December, was £300 for absolutely nothing, but constituents of mine are in a much worse situation.

    The fifth aspect I want to talk about is the overall broken system in which the process operates. I do not blame the Government entirely. Councils have some responsibilities: if they do not enforce the planning conditions when developers go above the assessed numbers that they are supposed to build; and if they allow the same application to be made over and over again, when they could refuse it after two tries. They do not take a bigger-picture view. There are villages in my constituency, such as Sutton Courtenay, that feel hugely overdeveloped because individual applications are all being approved and nobody is looking at what is happening to the whole area and why it might not be a good idea to keep approving those applications.

    Ultimately, these companies have to be held accountable for their behaviour. They apply for sites that they know the local plan does not allow them to apply for, as is happening in Grove, in my constituency. They continually try to build on flood plains. They continually fail to adhere to their section 106 agreements and community infrastructure levy agreements—sometimes not building infrastructure at all, and sometimes building pointless things, such as a pathway that goes only halfway across an estate or a bike path that leads to nowhere, just so they can say that they have done it. All those things are going on with new developments in my constituency. I do not blame Government for it all, but it is the Government’s job to ensure that the system does not operate in that way.

    If I had to sum up the problems in my constituency, it would be, “Too many homes, too little infrastructure.” The two district councils that my constituency covers are, relative to their size, in the top 10 areas for house building in the country, yet they are in the bottom third for infrastructure spending. That is a huge bugbear. To put that in numerical context, an estimate of the population change between 2017 and 2027 found that the largest town and surrounding area in my constituency, Didcot, will increase from 36,000 to 51,000. The second largest area, Wantage and Grove, will increase from 17,000 to 27,000—that is in a 10-year period. Faringdon is getting thousands more people, and Wallingford is getting thousands more.

    The infrastructure is not following that. It is harder to get a GP appointment, the roads in the constituency get more and more congested and it is harder to get a school place. One village has a 220-child school, and 300 houses have been built right next to it; just last year, the catchment area became less than 470 metres. People who have lived there for a long time and who expected their children to go to that school now cannot get in. When my constituents hear that planning reform may mean new houses and that they will not be able to oppose them, or that the Oxford-Cambridge arc may mean more houses, or that the council’s Oxfordshire 2050 plan may lead to more houses, they are not concerned out of nimbyism; they are concerned because of their experience, over many years, of so many houses being built and so many promises being broken.

    To conclude, I will talk about a few things that I think should happen. There are lots of things, and there are plenty of experts in this room who I know will talk about other aspects. First, we need a much tougher regime for the quality of new buildings. I know that the new homes ombudsman will deal with some of these issues, but it is completely unacceptable to pay that much money and have that many problems. We need very tight quality conditions, and the threshold needs to be raised. If it is not met within a certain timeframe, there should be penalties; issues must not go on for years.

    Secondly, we need “use it or lose it” planning permissions. I know that there are debates about how best to do this, and I am frequently written to about the 1 million permissions that have not been built on. I know that there is a debate about land banking and whether it happens; hon. Members would be hard pressed to persuade me that it does not, at least from the developers’ point of view. We in this place are familiar with the phrase “dig a trench.” The emphasis has been on starting the building: companies dig a trench to suggest that they have started building, and the houses then take years to appear. We need these homes to be completed within a certain period. If they are not, taxes might be levied or fines paid, but I think that the permission should be lost entirely.

    Thirdly, I want to talk about environmental standards. If it takes several years for these houses to be built, they should be built to the latest environmental standards, not to those that existed when the developers got permission. That is what is happening at the moment: companies are building houses to an environmental standard of several years ago, when they should be building to a standard of the future. That needs to change.

    We have got to make developers and house builders commit to their affordability criteria. Our big house builders are doing completely fine for profits for their own viability, so they cannot keep saying that developments would not be viable if they committed to what they originally promised.

    When it comes to management companies, we need a much stricter regime, because the current one is very murky. Companies are getting away with appalling practices, bullying residents into things and fleecing them, year after year, for things that are not being provided. We need a tougher regime under which companies cannot keep hiking charges without an extraordinary set of circumstances. The charges often go up because of things the company itself has done and got wrong, and it passes the cost on to residents who had no say in the first place. Much more transparency is needed, and penalties for such bad behaviour.

    I understand that house builders want a level playing field, because an individual company does not want to commit to expensive things if its rivals are not doing so. That is where there is a role for Government in raising standards, so that all house builders have to do the same. I want more of a level playing field for smaller companies, such as Greencore Construction in my constituency. Many such companies are more environmentally friendly and more efficient, and produce higher-quality homes, but they are often outbid by the financial muscle of the big boys. Perhaps we need to reserve a greater proportion of development sites for such companies or give them greater access to capital. I am all in favour of smaller organisations rather than larger ones—I ran small charities, not larger ones. I think we can get a better product from smaller house builders, and we need to help more such companies into the market.

    My final point is that infrastructure needs to go in first. It is not right to pile more and more houses and people into an area, but to do nothing to support local services and infrastructure. I have been campaigning for Grove station to be reopened, for improvements on our roads and for better medical facilities. GP surgeries are bursting at the seams because thousands more people have been added to the area—Members have heard the numbers. GP surgeries and school places have not been added along with the people. Infrastructure must go in first. Unfortunately, over decades my constituents have been told too many times that the infrastructure will come with the houses, but it never has, and now they do not believe it. That has to come first. As part of that, we might better capture the land value increase that comes with planning permission. At the moment, the increase all goes to the owner. Some of it ought to go to the local community who will live with the new houses, not to the landowner who has sold the land.

    The balance of power is wrong. Management companies, house builders and developers have too much power, and local residents have too little. The Government cannot be blamed for every single thing that a private company does, but they can help to restore the balance, so that local communities do not see new houses as a curse on the area they used to love.