Andrew George MP: speeches

Speeches

• 2 Jul 2025 · Prevention and Suppression of Terrorism · Hansard source

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  I agree with the Minister that MMC clearly meets the threshold for proscription, but when did its actions first come to the attention of the Government? Why have they left it so long to bring forward this order? Why did they leave it until it was politically convenient?

• 2 Jul 2025 · British Indian Ocean Territory: Sovereignty · Hansard source

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  I simply ask the Minister the same question that I asked when he first came to the House on this matter. In relation to the cost consequences of this deal, he knows that the lion’s share of the interest lies with the military base on Diego Garcia. Therefore, what contribution is the United States making to the very significant costs of compensating the Mauritian people?

• 1 Jul 2025 · Tax Evasion: High Street Businesses · Hansard source

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  Does the Minister agree that instead of handing £500 million of taxpayers’ money to those who are entitled to small business rate relief, which is what has happened in Cornwall over the past 10 years, it would be far better to invest that money in desperately needed first homes for local families in desperate housing need, rather than give it to second home owners? Would he be prepared to meet me, so that we can establish a better method of achieving housing justice through tax policy?

• 1 Jul 2025 · Tax Evasion: High Street Businesses · Hansard source

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  16. What steps she plans to take to close loopholes in the tax system.

• 24 Jun 2025 · Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government · Hansard source

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  I warmly congratulate the hon. Member for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green (Florence Eshalomi) on the way in which she introduced the debate, and I strongly support everything she said. Indeed, I support the sentiment and ambition of the Government’s announcement of £39 billion in investment. However, the Government must listen to local areas and, if they are intent on delivering their housing targets, must allow those areas to vary the way in which the targets are met. I will cite the example of my area of Cornwall. It is one of the fastest-growing places in the United Kingdom, almost trebling its housing stock over the past 60 years, but the housing problems of local people have got significantly worse over that period. That does not mean that the answer is building fewer homes; it simply means that the target-setting process is not in itself the solution to the housing problems that such places face. These targets are often based on the delusion that the private market will collude with the Government in driving down the price of its finished product, which is clearly not the case. The Government need to allow that in some places, areas can set targets to meet need. That would mean that planning applicants had to demonstrate how they would meet need, rather than simply building homes that people cannot afford. That is a method that the Government need to consider. Far too much of what goes into the planning system is about land value speculators taking far too much out of the development process. Setting high housing targets creates high hope value on all the land adjoining all our communities. It is like applying the rural exceptions policy, but around all our areas. We need to address the issues more effectively. The Government need to recognise that many shovel-ready projects are currently unviable, so when money is being considered for future housing projects, they need to look carefully at how they can get things moving very quickly. In Cornwall, over the past decade, £500 million of taxpayers’ money has gone into the pockets of second and holiday homeowners, because tax incentives and loopholes support that. I urge the Government to look again at wider questions of housing injustice, and at the way that houses are being misdelivered in areas like mine, and to try to work with local communities and the council to ensure that we meet need, rather than developers’ greed.

• 24 Jun 2025 · Department of Health and Social Care · Hansard source

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  I thank my fellow member of the Select Committee and stand-in Chair for giving way, and I congratulate her on how she is introducing the issues today. Does she agree that the length of time set for the Casey review to report does not give us a sense of confidence that the Government have injected sufficient urgency to address the serious problems of ensuring that we have a robust social care system that can stand up to the pressures that lie ahead?

• 24 Jun 2025 · Department of Health and Social Care · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale West (Mr Rand). Of course, in this debate we have to reflect on the fact that the Government inherited the NHS in the very worst state in its 77-year history, which the hon. Member for Chelsea and Fulham (Ben Coleman) reminded us of. The Government must pick up the NHS and try to restore it to the state that we would all like to see. I approve of the three shifts the Government are proposing—no one could argue against prevention rather than ill health. Obviously we want to see advances in prevention, technology and delivery of services into the community, with better integration and improvements in the workforce plan. With that, however, I would like to see the Government advance the case for safe staffing. When I was last in this place, I was part of a campaign on that, which sought to achieve, for example, a ratio of never more than seven on acute wards—seven acutely ill patients to every registered nurse on acute wards. We should be aiming to try to support staff on the frontline, rather than leaving them under the pressures they currently face where they are seriously understaffed. There are incredible pressures within the service itself. I know that, at the weekend, the A&E department of the Royal Cornwall hospital had more than 100 patients waiting to be treated, with ambulances often waiting outside. Our ambulance service is currently proposing to cut co-responders from some of our rural areas—where fire service staff support the ambulance service—which is a matter of great concern. The Royal Cornwall Hospitals Trust is also facing a £50 million cost improvement programme this year, and many other trusts on the frontline are also facing similar pressures. The Government must look at the capacity of the nursing home sector, as there are often many unused beds. We talk about the difficulty of discharging patients from a hospital, but there is also the risk of the independent sector cherry-picking the profitable bits of the NHS. We need, above all, to back up our NHS. As the hon. Member for Birmingham Erdington (Paulette Hamilton), the temporary Chair of the Health and Social Care Committee, pointed out, social care is vital. If one in four social care workers are leaving the sector every year, we know that we have a serious crisis. The Casey review cannot come soon enough.

• 24 Jun 2025 · Arms Trade: Israel · Hansard source

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  Will the Government let us know what assessment they have made of Israel’s stockpile of nuclear weapons?

• 16 Jun 2025 · Iran-Israel Conflict · Hansard source

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  Of course we should uphold the right of every state to live in peace, but in what way is the UK military involved in this? We have just heard that IDF soldiers have been trained on UK soil. Is this the same IDF that has been engaged in atrocities, including the murder of UK aid workers in Gaza?

• 12 Jun 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  Our farmers and growers can survive only if there is a functioning supply chain, but since the creation of the Groceries Code Adjudicator, they complain bitterly about continuing poor practice and the risk of de-listing. Does the Minister not agree that it is time to beef up this organisation, and to amalgamate it with the Agricultural Supply Chain Adjudicator?

• 11 Jun 2025 · NHS Funding: South-west · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Huq. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Torbay (Steve Darling) on the debate. I will try, in my remaining two minutes, to cover four subjects very quickly. The first is about the fair funding question or whether the funding to an area is sufficient. The hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth (Jayne Kirkham) rightly referred to the seasonality of the pressures and the rural nature of the geography, but in Cornwall there is also the issue of the peninsularity of the geography. People cannot call on an emergency service to the north, south or west in a place such as Cornwall and therefore we need to make provision for services so that they can cover all eventualities. Also, this year, during the settlement process, people are talking about cost improvements within the ICB spending programme over the future year. In Cornwall, it is a cost improvement—the rest of us might describe it as a cut in services—of £108 million, which is about 7% of the budget overall. That will create tremendous pressure in areas such as ours. The second issue is value for money estimates. I visited a brilliant project very recently: the Helston Gateway project, which has created a new GP surgery across 20 consultation rooms, and achieved that on the basis of a building cost of just £1,400 a square metre, which is half the cost that people would get if they went to private sector contractors doing it through NHS development programmes and certainly significantly less than in the private finance initiative programmes of the past. I strongly urge Ministers to look at such brilliant initiatives as a brilliant way to provide services. The third issue is stopping private sector organisations cherry-picking the profitable parts of the NHS and therefore undermining acute sector trusts. Finally, I would welcome clarity as to why the acute trust in Cornwall is not having its debt written off, unlike other provider trusts and ICBs.

• 11 Jun 2025 · Space Industry · Hansard source

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  The Minister mentions the importance of international partnerships. In the context of the unpredictable environment in which negotiations take place, particularly with regard to trade with the US, what conversations have taken place between the UK Government and NASA? It is clear that a lot of UK companies, large or small, depend on ensuring that such relationships and future contracts are well founded.

• 11 Jun 2025 · Space Industry · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts. I congratulate the hon. Member for Wyre Forest (Mark Garnier) on setting out the important case for the role of the space sector in the UK economy. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Congleton (Sarah Russell), who outlined the importance and significance of the totemic Jodrell Bank. Likewise, I will refer to an important and growing contributor to the space sector in my own constituency at Goonhilly—people have different ways of saying that, with some preferring a phonetic pronunciation—on the Lizard peninsula. In the early 1960s, the Post Office established a telecommunications and satellite base there that became a British Telecommunications base. In 2014, it was taken over by Goonhilly Earth Station Ltd, a local company that is cutting a significant reputation in the space sector. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Wyre Forest for mentioning Newquay as a potential launch site. All those experiments are important. They may come with failures along the way, but as he said, we learn from things that do not go fully to plan to improve our technologies. There will be successes and failures at the cutting edge of the space sector, but we will learn from that process. When I previously represented St Ives, before my nine-year sabbatical from this place, it took four or five years to get Goonhilly Earth Station on to the former BT site in 2014. Since then, it has been doing incredibly well, despite a difficult start on a small base. It has regenerated the site and generated a reputation as a place with world-leading capability. Its core business is deep space research and activity, as well as commercial and defence-focused communication services. It is currently supporting missions around Mars and observing solar weather, and it provided communications and support to enable last year’s private moon landing. The space sector is important to the UK economy, but we cannot take a “little England” approach to global communications because Earth turns on its axis and exists in a wider universe. In that context, as the hon. Member for Wyre Forest said, the positioning, navigation and timing—the PNT—of our sites in relation to the global sphere in which space science is being advanced is important. Goonhilly is in a critical location for tracking and managing satellites. The UK is an important geographic location from that point of view, but of course the context is one in which it has to establish contracts with companies and nations around the world.

• 11 Jun 2025 · Space Industry · Hansard source

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  Of course I agree. Clearly, the stronger the links made internationally, the more they will benefit the UK economy. Having seamless relationships with other countries is important. My hon. Friend mentions the Galileo programme, but also relevant is US GPS. All these connections clearly need to be maintained and fostered. Not only is funding an issue, but so are contracts. As well as making the point that the sector operates essentially in the global sphere, I want to highlight the need for co-operation with other countries on contracts. There is an essential role for the UK Government in fostering contracts, not just with the European Space Agency but with NASA. A lot of companies in the UK will be looking to the Government to play that role. I do not wish to take up anyone else’s time, so my final point is that we—and the Government—must back smaller enterprises such as GES in my constituency and many others. After all, they are the source of innovation and growth in the sector. Yes, the larger companies to which the hon. Member for Wyre Forest drew attention are very important; as he says, the space sector underpins 16% of UK GDP. A day without space would cost our economy £1.2 billion in its impact on financial transactions and so much else in how we live our lives in the modern world. This is an essential sector, but the small enterprises are there to expand the innovation frontier of the sector, and they are forging very strong links internationally as well. I urge the Minister to do all she can with the industry to facilitate contracts with NASA, the ESA and elsewhere internationally.

• 10 Jun 2025 · Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories · Hansard source

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  The two sanctioned Ministers have been enabled by Prime Minister Netanyahu, who is himself subject to an International Criminal Court arrest warrant, and I wonder what the Government will do to make sure that that is properly pursued. When I was in the west bank only a week after the two Labour Members were shamefully deported, it was very clear that the settlements are taking over. What sanctions will the Government take to ensure that there is no trade with those settlements?

• 9 Jun 2025 · Planning and Infrastructure Bill · Hansard source

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  It is clear that we are today debating methodologies, rather than values. Certainly, I do not dispute the Minister’s values at all; we all want to see growth, need met, and the environment protected. The question that we are debating today is the best methodologies for achieving those outcomes. I have submitted a number of amendments covering three areas, which I will rattle through as quickly as I can, all of which support the themes that my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton and Wellington (Gideon Amos) advanced today, and indeed that he has pursued in Committee in previous weeks. Amendment 148 relates to housing targets. It proposes allowing local authorities to adopt targets that reduce housing need, rather than simply targets to build homes. House building targets are in many areas part of the problem, rather than the solution to housing need. For example, since the 1960s, Cornwall’s housing stock has been among the fastest growing in the United Kingdom. It has almost trebled, yet housing problems for local people have got significantly worse over that time. Simply setting house building targets results in massive hope value being attached to every single community around Cornwall. Having worked as a chief executive of a charity that tries to build affordable homes, I can say that establishing house building targets makes it more difficult to address the housing needs of local people. Targets that are about reducing need would change the dynamics of the planning system in places that face these problems. Unfortunately, the approach to house building targets that has been adopted by parties over the previous decades is built on the delusion that private developers will collude with Governments to drive down the price of their finished product. We can no longer carry on in that delusion. We cannot and should not pursue counter-productive methodologies. Amendment 149 and new clause 108 are consequential on the fundamental change proposed in amendment 148. My hon. Friend the Member for Taunton and Wellington has spoken about introducing a use class order to address the prevalence of non-permanent occupancy in some areas. The previous Government were looking at bringing in a use class for holiday lets, but that should be extended to second homes and all homes of non-permanent occupancy. New clause 92, which is consequential on new clause 91, proposes introducing a sunset clause for planning permission to ensure that there is not a perverse incentive for people to apply to change a property’s use in order to enhance the value of their property when they sell it. This is not about the politics of envy but the politics of social justice. I think those who represent areas or constituencies with large numbers of second homes properly understand how these things operate. Finally, I tabled a number of amendments relating to affordability, including new clause 89 on affordable development and new clause 90. New clause 89 would prohibit cross-subsidy—or at least open-market development—on rural exception sites. Those sites should not be called rural exception sites; they should be called rural norm sites. That should be the methodology for delivering affordable homes in rural areas. It should be driven by wanting to have affordable homes in such locations.

• 9 Jun 2025 · Planning and Infrastructure Bill · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is right about that. Affordability is defined for rented accommodation—either 80% of market rent or the local housing allowance, whichever is lower—but it is not sufficiently defined for the intermediate market in rural areas, which includes shared ownership and discounted sale. There are ways that affordability can be achieved, and that should be done within local planning. We should give local authorities the power to define, for the purposes of their communities, what is and is not affordable, and we should strengthen the role of neighbourhood development plans in that respect as well. New clause 90 would put a cap on developer profit. A lot of people do not understand how planning authorities make their viability assessment when developments are brought forward. There is an assumption of a developer profit of 20%, but when developers ask for amendments to the way that their planning applications are viewed, they will often have undertaken two different valuations, and will come with both. One they present to the planning authority, and one they keep in their back pocket. One of the valuations comes with violins, and a sob story about how they will lose out because of the development, and how they are doing it only for the community. The other valuation is the reality. We know that they are making a killing out of other people’s poverty.

• 9 Jun 2025 · Planning and Infrastructure Bill · Hansard source

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  Is the Minister not concerned that he has lost the audience among wildlife organisations and trusts that say they are offended by Ministers’ portraying nature as a blocker to development rather than an enhancement to life and the economy, and are now asking for part 3 of the Bill to be scrapped?

• 3 Jun 2025 · Groceries Code Adjudicator · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Allin-Khan. I warmly congratulate the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) on the manner in which he introduced the issues and perambulated around the full range of factors that are clearly having a significant impact on this country’s extremely and continually marginal food production base. He went back almost to the prehistory of food production and highlighted the collective near-monopoly held by supermarkets, and the restricted opportunities for small independent food retailers in that infrastructure. The right hon. Gentleman was perhaps echoing the words of Lord Heseltine who, when he was President of the Board of Trade, memorably said that he was prepared to intervene before breakfast, lunch and dinner—or dinner and tea, to my way of thinking. The right hon. Gentleman is of that wing of the Conservative party that believes in free markets but recognises that they need to be regulated when they go in the wrong direction, as has clearly happened in this case. A number of interventions and comments touched on the potential of going back to retail price maintenance, which was introduced before the second world war to regulate the final price. I do not think any political party proposes that the GCA or regulation should morph into finished retail price maintenance, although it was interesting that the spectre of final prices was reflected on in the debate. The hon. Member for Salford (Rebecca Long Bailey) outlined the limitations of the GCA and the implied lack of teeth, a point that was echoed by many others. She called for its powers to be beefed up. My right hon. Friend the Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael), the Chair of the EFRA Committee, made a telling point that, amid all the briefings, the GCA seems remarkably silent in offering any advice on the many debates that we have had on this issue. He also highlighted that the GCA and the groceries code do not look at primary producers but the ultimate supplier to the supermarket, because that is how the code was written. Perhaps I need to go into some of the pre-history, and not because I am concerned that I have been airbrushed out of the history of the creation of the GCA. The late Colin Breed, the former Liberal Democrat MP for South East Cornwall, produced a report called “Checking Out the Supermarkets” in 2000, following an investigation, which resulted in a Competition Commission inquiry. I took on his work and chaired the Grocery Market Action Group, which had members of the NFU, the Country Land and Business Association and Friends of the Earth all sitting in the same room, along with Traidcraft—I see Fiona Gooch from Traidcraft in the Public Gallery—and other organisations not normally expected to work together, because they saw a fundamental injustice in the grocery supply system. We must work together. Further inquiries undertaken by the Competition Commission produced a report in 2007 that identified excessive risk and unexpected cost passed on from supermarkets because of their overwhelming power in the supply chain, and the impact that had on suppliers. That needed to be regulated and, hence, the groceries code was created. We campaigned and argued for the creation of the GCA as a means of policing the code. It could not simply sit on the shelf without anyone observing how the code operated. That code was never intended to be the finished product. It was simply a framework for the Government to commence a review of how the process should operate, so the GCA should not be held in aspic for all time. I understand the Government are undertaking an inquiry covering 2022 to March 2025. I hope that review will reflect on the comments of hon. Members, the impact on primary producers and the current limitations. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) emphasised the marginal status created for many farmers. The hon. Member for Lichfield (Dave Robertson) described the challenge of maintaining both a low retail price and a profitable supply chain. It is very difficult to get that right, but if there is fairness in the supply chain, then both can be achieved. All Members recognise that. My hon. Friend the Member for Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe (David Chadwick) has already ably led a debate on this issue, so he is well practised. He understands these issues and brought the Welsh perspective. My hon. Friend the Member for Glastonbury and Somerton (Sarah Dyke) proposed changes to protect whistleblowers and made particular reference to those affected by the bully-boy tactics of supermarket buyers. Let us say it: that is effectively what is going on in the sector. My hon. Friend the Member for North Norfolk (Steff Aquarone) emphasised similar issues affecting his area. It is really important that the Government look carefully at areas of the GCA where improvements can be made. The framework is there; what the Liberal Democrats are asking for is that the GCA be able to instigate its own investigations. That may well be on the basis of market intelligence or whatever it may be, but it is important that it is able to instigate its own investigations, while at the same time being aware of time-wasting fishing expeditions. Nevertheless, the balance can be struck. The pressure points in the supply chain are pretty clear. That freedom must be there. The reach of the adjudicator is far too limited. Only the ultimate supplier is reviewed according to the code. They need to be seen in the context of the full supply chain. Very often the people who are actually catching the cold and suffering the most are the primary producers, but they are not the final supplier. That needs to be reviewed, and I hope the Government will allow that change. A number of Members mentioned the lack of resources. Whether there are seven or 10 entirely seconded members of staff, this is a really shameful situation. The adjudicator has to control very large supermarkets, and the cost of a single investigation is greater than the GCA’s annual budget on many occasions. From 2013 to 2024, there were only 13 arbitrations and only two formal investigations. The GCA is rightly highly regarded and seen as efficient and effective, but with more resources will come more clout. The GCA is currently funded by a £2 million levy on the 14 supermarkets. Split 14 ways, that is only £142,857. Supermarket profits are in the hundreds of millions—indeed, billions—so it is really important that the Government review that. The Government should also be looking at sectors other than food, perhaps including the garments sector.

• 20 May 2025 · Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories · Hansard source

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  Although it is long overdue, I warmly welcome the sentiment behind the Government’s announcement. The hon. Member for Leicester South (Shockat Adam) and I visited Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories last month. What we saw there was absolutely shocking. Others have described it as apartheid; I think it is actually worse than that. The Foreign Secretary said that the question of the recognition of the Palestinian state is one which is stuck in a process, but can he not at least today accept that he can recognise the right of Palestinians to statehood and democracy?

• 20 May 2025 · UK-EU Summit · Hansard source

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  Fishermen in my constituency were let down by the Conservatives and their Brexit friends, and they now feel very disappointed by the news about EU vessel access within the six to 12-mile zone. Both before and since Brexit, we have retained regulatory autonomy in that zone. Will the Prime Minister ensure that we exercise our right to control the access of vessels in that area, and have control of grandfather rights, kilowatt effort and fishing methods, as well as other regulatory controls, to ensure that the area is properly regulated?

• 14 May 2025 · Gaza: UK Assessment · Hansard source

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  I have recently returned from a visit to the Occupied Palestinian Territories with the hon. Member for Leicester South (Shockat Adam). We were expecting an appalling situation, but it was far, far worse. Israeli Ministers are gleefully calling for the bombing of food warehouses because they believe it will help bring victory—in their eyes. It is clear that Israeli hostages are being used as a pretext to continue the slaughter and starvation in Gaza. Although I recognise the Minister’s sincere compassion in the way he has expressed himself on this issue, it is clear that he comes to this Chamber with a straitjacket around him. What we need here is the Prime Minister, who can make the decisions; otherwise, we are not going to see any action on arms supplies, on trade or in any other area, including recognition of the state of Palestine. If the Minister cannot do those things, can he at least recognise the right of Palestinians to statehood?

• 13 May 2025 · Local Housing Need Assessment Reform · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Hobhouse. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (John Milne) not only on securing the debate, but on the very erudite manner in which he took us through the issues and correctly analysed the weaknesses of the system. It is also a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Jess Brown-Fuller). I note that, before her, the omnipresent hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) referred to the importance of seeing this across the piece—not only in Scotland, England, Wales and Ireland—but he forgot to mention Cornwall. Well, I will forgive him for that. My hon. Friend the Member for Horsham recognised the need for a needs assessment, as it is an essential building block to resolving the issues. It is the methodology currently used that is both flawed and inevitably inaccurate, and sometimes leads the process in the wrong direction. I do not think it is ill-conceived in itself; rather, the interrelationship between that and the target-setting process is flawed. The target-setting process ends up with house building targets—we have housing need and then we have the house building targets. If we were to set targets to reduce need—rather than for developers’ greed, if one were to put it in pejorative terms—we would approach the matter in an entirely different way. Let us take Cornwall—I know it well and I live there. I have also worked there as a professional in the sector as a chief executive of a housing charity delivering affordable homes—during my nine-year sabbatical from this place—so I know how this market works. Over the last 60 years, the housing stock in Cornwall has almost trebled—it is one of the fastest-growing places in the United Kingdom—yet the housing problems of local people have got worse. We cannot necessarily deduce from that fact that building homes is therefore harmful to meeting local housing need; however, the build targets are not in themselves the answer. The answer ought to be setting targets to reduce need, and that can be done if one has a robust method to do it. Not only would that be better for planners, councillors and others who want to meet the local need in their communities, but it means that when applicants come forward with their planning applications, they would have to demonstrate not how many homes they can build towards a target, but how much need they can address by delivering their projects. Although the Government’s aims and policies are laudable, they need to look at the dynamics of how need and their build targets interrelate with each other. In my intervention, I referred to the delusion—it is a belief adopted by successive Governments of all parties, including, I am sorry to say, our own—that developers will somehow collude with the Government to drive down the price of their final product. My hon. Friend the Member for Chichester referred to the unviability of schemes that cannot be delivered with enough affordable homes, but that is only because of the way in which the methodology is used to permit those developments to go ahead in the first place. Once planning permission is granted, not only does the setting of high targets often create hope value on every piece of land around every community—which starts to make them unaffordable before the planning process has even started—but once the planning process is established, the value of the land becomes so great that the scheme becomes unviable for delivering affordable homes. The whole system is built to fail. I am afraid to say that we need to look at the methodology for delivery—that is, the building of a new lower rung on the affordable housing ladder of “in perpetuity” intermediate market homes, which needs to have a life of its own. We need to address the problems that a lot of social housing providers have in delivering homes, which is that they are prevented from delivering homes in low house price value areas, and low-income areas, because of the cost-to-value ratio. A lot of people probably do not understand that the places that need the homes most, where the incomes are lowest, are the most difficult to deliver on because of the cost-to-value ratio, which has to apply before providers can go forward with their schemes. There is a whole set of other methods that could be used to address the issue, but I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Horsham on what he has achieved. I hope the Government are listening, because this is a constructive debate. We are not attacking the Government, but urging them to adjust their approach in order to achieve the outcomes we all want to see.

• 13 May 2025 · Local Housing Need Assessment Reform · Hansard source

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  I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way and sorry I missed the first minute of his speech. I warmly congratulate him on the point that he is making. I agree that what he describing is a false premise, in the same way that the targets themselves are based on a delusion. The delusion is that private developers would be prepared to collude with Government to drive down the price of their final products in order to deliver affordable homes. That clearly is not the case. The combination of these two things is working against what the Government are trying to achieve, which is to meet housing need.

• 30 Apr 2025 · Parthenon Marbles: British Museum Act 1963 · Hansard source

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  I congratulate the hon. Member both on securing this debate and on the manner in which he is approaching it. He is absolutely right that we should not stray into the areas that the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) and the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) are getting involved in by arguing about the past. I declare my interest as chair of the British Association for the Reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures and as someone who has campaigned on this issue. I think it would be better to look forward. The UK’s relationship with the European Union is irrelevant to the strength of the case for having a deal with the Greeks on a return. Going forward, we need to undertake a gracious act. We have a dishonourable past on this issue, and there is a way to redeem ourselves by doing the honourable thing. We are on the cusp of being able to do that, given the chairmanship of the British Museum and the current political environment—I hope the Minister will confirm that.