Richard Holden MP: speeches

Speeches

• 26 Mar 2026 · Passenger Rail Services · Hansard source

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  It is clear that the Minister is not prepared to agree with the Secretary of State, so I ask him whether he agrees with himself. In an answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Broadland and Fakenham (Jerome Mayhew) on 23 March, he said that “public ownership is expected to save taxpayers up to...£110-150 million every year...This is several orders of magnitude less than the costs of scaling up DfTO staffing in anticipation of establishing GBR”.

• 26 Mar 2026 · Passenger Rail Services · Hansard source

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  We still do not know how or what the Government want to achieve with state control of the railways. They say that there will be simpler fares, but the public are seeing simply more expensive fares. They say that passenger growth is necessary, but there is no target for that growth in the Railways Bill. They say they want to reduce the taxpayer subsidy, but in written answer after written answer, the Minister refuses to say how they hope to achieve that. Is this lack of a plan why the Secretary of State has been reduced to trying to claim credit for the work of others? She has been left red-faced and community noted after posting on X about the phasing out of the old class 455 trains on South Western Railway. She said it was down to the “progress...on your publicly owned railway”, when it was actually delivered under a Conservative Government and by a private company.

• 18 Mar 2026 · Fuel Duty · Hansard source

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  My right hon. Friend makes an incredibly important point. The Government are forgoing tax revenue that is going into the coffers of other Treasuries right across Europe and across the world, but why? To what end? We will see whether Ministers will answer why they are willing to forgo hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions of pounds every year. [ Interruption. ] They could spend that on anything they wanted to, and they are not even going to do it.

• 18 Mar 2026 · Fuel Duty · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is entirely right. She is also a real champion for the North sea oil and gas sector, which is largely based in her constituency. What are we seeing on top of those taxes on railcards, ferries and airlines—through increased airline business rates—and, obviously, the 50% hike in bus fares? What else is Labour up to? Well, the Government have been talking quite a lot about something called “simpler fares.” What they are actually doing is cutting out the cheaper fares preferred by passengers and replacing them with more expensive ones. That has been confirmed, in a letter to me, by none other than the Secretary of State for Transport, who I note is not present today. She says: “Some passengers may pay more under this new structure but will gain” —perhaps— “more flexibility for their return journey”. Well, my constituent Mr Nottage, of Ramsden Bellhouse near Billericay, has been quite perturbed about having to pay an extra 10%, and he is having to pay an extra fiver a year for his senior railcard as well. That hardly suggests that rail prices have been frozen under Labour. In fact, rail prices are going up for working people across the country.

• 18 Mar 2026 · Fuel Duty · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend makes the really important point that this is about choices. She is also right that many people do not have such a choice about their cars, and nobody has a choice about going to a shop to buy food, which will be delivered by some form of road transport at some point. So everybody will be paying for Labour’s road tax or fuel duty increases, and that is what we are opposing today. My hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage) makes a broader point on the choices that this Government are making about on whose backs they are balancing the books. They are choosing to balance the books on the backs of working Britain. Businesses up and down the country are facing tax after tax and new bill after new bill, in the Government’s relentless pursuit to do our country down and throttle anything that seems to give a half chance of delivering growth, all to pay for a ballooning welfare bill. They would put Dumbo to shame, because they do not have the guts to reduce welfare—heaven forbid—and they do not even have the guts to try to slow the pace of the increase in welfare. We voted against tax hikes in the Budget because they are the wrong thing to do for growth in our country and for families in our country. We are voting against a tax hike today because of the circumstances now. Especially with an international environment of soaring prices, to saddle motorists with an extra hike in the cost of getting around is the wrong thing to do. That is why the Leader of the Opposition tabled our motion, and why we are urging right hon. and hon. Members across this House to say no to Labour’s hikes on fuel duty.

• 18 Mar 2026 · Fuel Duty · Hansard source

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  Of course not, Mr Speaker. The right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Ed Miliband) should always be given his proper title. This is very similar to the Government’s pathetic intransigence when it comes to the zero emission vehicle mandate. They remain entirely aloof, soldiering on, whatever the cost is to British companies, British workers and British taxpayers. This is just like the electric car mandate, with its impact on industry. The unions—Labour’s own paymasters, for crying out loud—the Financial Times , and even the renewables sector: everyone knows that we must have a change in the electric vehicle mandate. Everyone on the Opposition side of the House also backs driving ahead with North sea oil and gas exploration, but what do the Labour Government do? They just bury their heads in the sand and turn to taxation instead in order to pay for their policies.

• 18 Mar 2026 · Fuel Duty · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is right, and some of those tax rises are hitting many of the companies that will also be hit by these fuel duty rises. I have spoken to hauliers, in my constituency and across the country, who already face increasing business rates and increasing national insurance costs and are now being hit with a fuel duty rise as well.

• 18 Mar 2026 · Fuel Duty · Hansard source

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  No, I have already given way to the hon. Member. We in the Opposition are all praying for a U-turn on the fuel duty policy, which would be very welcome. We would rather that they had never come up with the policy in the first place because, just as with the previous 16 U-turns, we argued against each policy before the Government did it, and they then had to U-turn on them. Just as on the family farms tax, on which they have partially U-turned, the grooming gangs, on which they have U-turned, and winter fuel, on which they have had to U-turn, after sticking the boot in, we really hope they will think again about this, but I am not holding much store by that. What is really worrying me and families and up and down the country, as well as Opposition Members as they go back to their constituents, is that people are facing cost of living pressures right across the board. Those running businesses are really having to make decisions about whether they hire another person or in many cases, sadly, let people go because of the taxes already imposed by this Government. This is just another tax—another tax on businesses, pensioners and families up and down the country.

• 18 Mar 2026 · Fuel Duty · Hansard source

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  My right hon. Friend raises an incredibly important point. It is not just those who have a car who will be paying for this policy—although they will be paying the most—and it is not just those who rely on a van for their business or work to get around who will be paying; everyone will be paying, whether they use the bus or are just going to the shops. The truth is that everything has to be transported by road in this country. This tax rise will have huge inflationary pressures right across the board, not just for fuel, whether for heating or for road transport, but, as he is right to say, for so many other areas—areas that have not even been considered by the Treasury.

• 18 Mar 2026 · Fuel Duty · Hansard source

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  That is another important point, which has also been raised with me by companies such as electric vehicle charge point manufacturers here in the UK. Some of them are on the verge of collapse because of that high cost of electricity. Although the Government say that they are pursuing a green agenda, what they are actually doing is making electricity so expensive that no one can operate a business in this country without paying such high energy prices that it becomes uneconomical to do so.

• 18 Mar 2026 · Fuel Duty · Hansard source

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  I am sorry, but I need to make a little more progress, but I will happily come back to my hon. Friend later. However we travel, Labour is after us. Is it a boat? Is it a train? Is it a plane? No, it is Labour’s taxman coming for us. And where will this money be spent—all the extra money from Labour’s taxes on the public? It will not be spent on hard-working families or to create jobs and boost opportunities; it will be frittered away on more welfare, because this Prime Minister and this Government Front Bench are too weak to stand up to their own Back Benchers and ensure that welfare is kept under control. They are picking the pockets of hard-working people to pay for those who choose not to work. When it comes to paying at the pump, Rachel Reeves has been happy to try to lay the blame at the feet of the petrol stations, but what makes up most of the cost of a litre of petrol? Her fuel duty is by far the biggest chunk. In fact, taxes make up 55% of the cost of fuel, and it is going up under Labour. When the Energy Secretary was presented with these sickening statistics, he claimed: “That’s why we’ve frozen fuel duty.” Why on earth do the Government not do what we did by freezing it all the way through? They could do it today, but they are not going to do it because they are too afraid of their own Back Benchers when it comes to welfare. I am surprised that Members are aligning themselves with the spluttering spinelessness of Mr Miliband—I am sorry; I mean the right hon. Member for Doncaster North. We know that for her and Ed, when the facts change, when countries all around the world change, Labour just digs in.

• 18 Mar 2026 · Fuel Duty · Hansard source

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  That is an extremely important point. This is not just about the Labour Government; it is also about Labour mayors and Labour councils and their war on motorists up and down the country, whether it is the Dart charge or the ULEZ charge. We have even seen Zipcar having to cease operations in the UK because of the Mayor of London’s extension of that congestion charge to electric vehicles every day. We are actually seeing a reduction in shared transport options under this Labour Government and this Labour Mayor, here in our capital city, and it is an absolute disgrace.

• 18 Mar 2026 · Fuel Duty · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend makes an important point. He will be aware that when the fuel price goes up, the Government’s VAT revenues from fuel go up at the same time. They are already seeing hundreds of millions of pounds a year extra in VAT, purely from the fact that the underlying price has gone up. My hon. Friend makes another important point, which is that this is a moment for the Government to reconsider. We on the Opposition Benches opposed this measure at the Budget, because we thought hitting working families was the wrong thing to do, but it is doubly the wrong thing to do when prices are also going up internationally.

• 18 Mar 2026 · Fuel Duty · Hansard source

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  My right hon. Friend makes an incredibly important point, and he makes it clearly. He is in agreement with the Climate Change Committee, which says that we will have to be using oil and gas well in to the second half of this century. Why on earth should we not drill our own at lower cost and bring in those jobs and taxation, while getting the environmental benefits of doing it on our own doorstep under British regulations? It would not be extracted in other countries with lower regulations and lower environmental standards. The best environmental standards in the world exist in our North sea.

• 18 Mar 2026 · Fuel Duty · Hansard source

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  I beg to move, That this House believes that it is wrong to increase the main fuel duty rates on 1 September, then again on 1 December 2026, with a further increase on 1 March 2027, by a total of five pence per litre, as global oil prices are rising; notes that these increases will affect drivers, farmers, businesses and other hard-working people already struggling with higher taxes and higher cost of living as a result of the Government’s economic policies; and calls on the Government to maintain the five pence per litre cut to the main fuel duty rates introduced by the previous Government beyond September 2026. Once again, this House has come together to hear of yet another egregious tax on transport, pushed out by this Labour Government at a time when people across the country are worried about the cost of getting around. On this occasion, in their infinite wisdom, the Government have decided that this is the opportune time to cancel the fuel duty freeze that the last Conservative Government kept for 13 years, which protected hard-working people from paying extra to get to work, attend appointments and visit friends and family. The Conservatives cut fuel duty by 5p per litre in 2022—the biggest ever cut in fuel duty—which really helped when the economy was facing headwinds from Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. Under this Government, though, on top of the countless tax rises that they have already shafted us with, we cannot even get through two years before they decide that the British people need yet another tax rise. It is a tax rise that is being introduced in a sneaky and stealthy way. Labour is deploying its salami tactics—1p in September, the back to school tax; 2p in December, the Christmas shopper tax; and 2p in March, springtime for taxes. We should not forget that a 5p per litre increase in duty is actually a 6p per litre increase, because VAT is added on top of that tax. In September last year in this Chamber, the Transport Secretary trumpeted that Labour had “frozen fuel duty—that is what we have done” —[ Official Report , 11 September 2025; Vol. 772, c. 1021.] Yet we know that is simply not the case. It reminds me of my childhood, watching Chris Tarrant on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” saying, “But we don’t want to give you that.” The Transport Secretary has said that tax rises are now coming, not once or twice, but three times: in September, in December, and in March next year. With economic growth at a dismal 0%, the British people deserve better than underhand tactics swindling them out of the pounds in their pockets to pay for more welfare. It is a tax on every car, every van, every motorbike and every bus, and it is also a tax on hauliers, businesses and families—it is a tax on the country as a whole. Thanks to the Transport Secretary’s Government, those families will be forking out an extra £156 a year.

• 18 Mar 2026 · Fuel Duty · Hansard source

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  It is not often that I agree with an SNP spokesperson, but I very much do so today. The hon. Member makes an incredibly important point. The Labour party came to office talking about how growth was its No. 1 priority. Has anybody heard Ministers, or heard the Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury, the hon. Member for Swansea West (Torsten Bell), say that on the telly recently? I certainly have not. Their talking point has, sadly, been put to one side, and we can all see why. On their watch, growth has totally collapsed, inflation has gone up and unemployment has gone up. Growth has collapsed on his watch. For all of his high-falutin’ ideas, he is a member of a Government who have collapsed growth in this country, and he cannot even accept it.

• 18 Mar 2026 · Fuel Duty · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend makes an interesting point at this juncture. It is clear that the Government are trying to undo the damage they have done with their new tax. They are having to put more money into the electric car grant than they will get out from these pay per mile schemes, which they had previously said they would not introduce. The Government are costing themselves more money by imposing a tax. Whether it is the North sea or taxation policy, what they are up to is incredible. The TaxPayers’ Alliance has said that, after this tax hike, the average driver will pay almost £40,000 in fuel taxes over their lifetime, and it will be a higher proportion of someone’s income if they are in a lower paid job and need a car to get about.

• 18 Mar 2026 · Fuel Duty · Hansard source

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  I could not agree more with the hon. Member. We need to get back to drilling in the North sea. Norway is drilling on one side of the same basin and getting the benefit of those jobs and the tax revenue. It bemuses me why we are not doing that here. The shadow Energy Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho), has consistently said from these Benches that that is exactly what we should get on and do.

• 18 Mar 2026 · Fuel Duty · Hansard source

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  The hon. Lady raises an important point. As she suggests, the tax revenues from reopening the North sea for oil and gas could be spent in a number of ways, but we have to open the North sea—a cost-free and environmentally positive alternative—to obtain those revenues, and then we can consider all the different ways in which Members across the House would want to spend the money. Since the Labour Government came to office, we have seen just how much they have hit transport across the country. The fuel duty rise of 5p a litre is just the latest example. First they abolished the much-loved £2 bus fare cap, which the Conservatives had pledged at the general election to continue for the entirety of this Parliament: they have put bus fares up by 50%. They have also jacked up airport business rates, by a staggering average of 295%. Who is benefiting from that? Certainly not passengers, certainly not the airlines, and certainly not British business. They have also raised air passenger duty, with passengers facing a 15% jump in one year alone, followed by permanent increases, year after year after year, of between 3% and 4%, just to get on to a plane. In the last few weeks the Government have raised the price of railcards for the first time since— [Interruption.] Perhaps they would like to chunter about this one. Do you remember this one, guys? We hear nothing from them on this. They have raised those prices for the first time since 2013—the first time for more than 10 years. They have increased the price of senior railcards, veterans’ railcards, young people’s railcards. New taxes on people throughout the country are being raised by this Government. We are seeing a 16% rise for the first time since 2013, and they did not even know about it, because they do not care about young people, about old people, about those who are being affected by the tax rises that will be hitting people all over the country from September onwards. Labour has also just introduced a new policy that will leave ferry passengers on the Isle of Wight facing bigger crossing charges: £30 more per crossing. That will hit family holidays in the UK, and it will hit people from the Isle of Wight who are just trying to go about their daily lives. Labour is stealthily—

• 18 Mar 2026 · Fuel Duty · Hansard source

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  I will give way.

• 18 Mar 2026 · Fuel Duty · Hansard source

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  Indeed. On the hon. Member’s second point, inflation would have been higher overall if fuel inflation had been higher overall. He makes an important point about potholes and road maintenance. It is interesting that he stood on a manifesto at the last general election that promised to fill an extra million potholes a year. We saw the figures just a few weeks ago showing that exactly the same number of potholes were filled last year as were filled in the last year of the previous Government. I look forward to seeing his Government starting to deliver on any of their pledges. Perhaps they could do so a bit more easily if they had that tax revenue coming in from the North sea, as those on the Opposition Benches would like to see. This is Labour’s regressive tax raid. Do we expect those on the Government Benches to understand just how punitive this tax measure will be? Of course not. How could they understand, when it is rural communities that will be hit hardest, as it always is with transport? The truth is that the Department for Transport and the Treasury working together is more like watching an episode of “Hustle”. The con is on, and it is being perpetuated by this Labour Government.

• 18 Mar 2026 · Fuel Duty · Hansard source

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  I thank you, Mr Speaker, for reminding the hon. Member for Hitchin (Alistair Strathern) of his role.

• 18 Mar 2026 · Fuel Duty · Hansard source

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  Absolutely. The tourist tax is hammering working Britain. And those are just the taxes that Labour is imposing on transport. There are plenty of others, and I am happy to take interventions if any hon. Members want to mention them.

• 18 Mar 2026 · Fuel Duty · Hansard source

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  I have already given way to the hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington, but I will happily give way to the hon. Member for Upper Bann.

• 12 Feb 2026 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  Passengers want safe and reliable journeys, and those who work on our public transport system deserve to be safe at work, especially when they do the right thing in difficult circumstances. However, bus driver Mark Hehir, who was praised by the police for stopping a thief, was sacked. I have met Mark and the lady he saved from a robbery, but has the Secretary of State or anyone from the Department met him? Indeed, has anybody from the Department made representations on his behalf? More broadly, passengers deserve to feel safe on our railways. What are the most recent British Transport police figures?