Oral Answers to Questions

John Milne Excerpts

Monday 13th April 2026 Commons Chamber

[Steve Reed]

Of course, the most exciting thing about Pride in Place is that communities themselves, rather than politicians, make the decisions about how the money is spent. They will come together, from across the area that is benefiting from the funding, to decide what they want to do to put pride back into a place that had pride ripped out of its heart by the Conservatives.

[John Milne (Horsham) (LD)]

There are real concerns that Pride in Place is just another example of this Government’s blind spot on rural areas. Groups such as the Rural Services Network and Plunkett UK warn that villages are being left behind. Key rural assets are disappearing fast, and Plunkett is calling for a targeted £10 million rural community ownership fund to help. What are the Government doing to ensure that rural communities are not left out again?

[Steve Reed]

Of course, the funding was distributed according to data provided by the indices of multiple deprivation, so it is going to the most deprived areas, wherever they may lie in the country—be it in urban or rural areas. The fair funding review also ensured that funding targeted the areas that needed it most and were most deprived of it by the previous Government. It included a measure on rurality to ensure that rural areas get their fair share.

Power to Cancel Local Elections

John Milne Excerpts

Monday 2nd March 2026 Westminster Hall

[John Milne (Horsham) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. I thank people in my constituency and across the country for signing this petition in such numbers and with such great speed; that is very revealing of the distress that has been caused.

The first question is how we got into this mess. This Government’s handling of the local government reorganisation process has been nothing short of shambolic. Councils across the country, including in my area of Sussex, have been forced to make complex and controversial decisions at breakneck speed. Local government reorganisation was not in the Labour manifesto. It is such a huge change, but it was not even mentioned. In Sussex, as in many places, it was obvious that councils operating under a rainbow of different political persuasions would struggle to find consensus over new boundaries and structures, but the Government insisted on going ahead anyway.

The decision to allow councils to postpone their elections was even worse. It has become very apparent that the councils that asked for delays did not do so for practical, logistical reasons, but simply because they were afraid they would be dumped out of office. That is exactly the situation at my council, West Sussex county council, where the Conservative ruling group has known for some time that it would face oblivion at the next election. When offered the chance to save itself last year with what was described as an election postponement, it reached out and grabbed it. It probably could not believe its luck when it was given the opportunity to cancel elections again this year—at least until the Government’s handbrake U-turn in the face of probable legal embarrassment.

Holding elections at such short notice places great strain on council officers, especially given the pressures of ongoing unitarisation—I really feel for them, given the pressure they are under. However, it is the right outcome, even if we have reached it in the worst possible way. Repeatedly denying residents the right to vote was wrong, wrong, wrong. By the time it had finished, the Conservative group in West Sussex would have retained control for seven years—far beyond the four years it was originally voted in for and for which it had a mandate.

The Government’s U-turn, which means that elections are back on, is tough on councillors who were recently voted in in by-elections, which were called only because of the delay, and that includes two Lib Dems in my own constituency of Horsham. If the Government had let elections go ahead when they should have done last year, we would never have wasted money on by-elections that never needed to happen.

Across the country, of the 30 councils that asked for a delay this year, 26 were Labour, three Conservative and one Lib Dem, which was in Cheltenham. In defence of Cheltenham, the position is unique because of recent ward boundary changes. All 40 councillors were only recently elected, in 2024, in what was a specially timetabled election. They are currently just two years into their normal four-year term, but will now be forced to hold another election halfway through.

I am not surprised that the elections issue has caused such anger across the country—leading to this petition—because it is about something that is as fundamental as you can get: the right to vote. I fully support the petitioners in my own constituency, and I am glad they are going to get their chance to vote after all, even if it means I am going to have to spend a lot of my weekends until May knocking on doors, like everyone else here.

I do not doubt that the Conservatives will be swept from power in West Sussex. In the last few years, the political map of Sussex has changed beyond recognition. In 2023, Horsham district council became Lib Dem for the first time this century, and in 2024 I had the honour of becoming the first non-Conservative MP for Horsham in 144 years. So I look forward to 7 May, when we can finally bring West Sussex county council kicking and screaming up to date.

To conclude, this was a mess we did not need to get into, so I support the proposal in the petition to remove the Secretary of State’s right to cancel elections. We have only to look at recent events to be certain that such a right is wide open to political exploitation, as has just happened. I hope the Minister will consider amending the legislation, as proposed.

Local Government Finance

John Milne Excerpts

Wednesday 11th February 2026 Commons Chamber

[John Milne (Horsham) (LD)]

We have heard a lot about the coalition years and austerity, to the extent that I began to wonder whether I had misread the title of the debate. Whatever the rights and wrongs of austerity, it was the conventional wisdom at the time. Had we been in coalition with Labour, I think the same thing would have happened, perhaps under another branding. At the time, I was living and working in the Republic of Ireland, which carried out a much more severe austerity, and its economy bounced back very well. Whether that was because of or despite austerity is an argument for the economists.

I thank the hon. Member for St Helens South and Whiston (Ms Rimmer) for her comments about not wanting this to be a zero-sum game, taking away from some at the expense of others. I very much agree with her and other Members who said that deprived areas and inner urban areas had been unfairly treated over a very long time. I wholly agree that something needed to happen, but not at the expense of rural areas such as the one I represent.

I applaud the Government for taking action on this issue—it had been kicked down the road for many years—including by writing off 90% of SEND deficits. That must have been a difficult decision, but it had to be done; those deficits could never have been paid for by local authorities. The Government are committed to centralising SEND spending for 2028-29, but we are not sure how far that commitment will truly go. Will it cover only the high-needs block deficits, or will it reflect other costs around SEND provision, such as home-to-school transport? In counties like West Sussex, where my constituency is, SEND transport costs have risen dramatically over recent years. Those pressures do not sit neatly in one budget line; they rip across children’s services and transport budgets.

We are still awaiting clarity on what will happen with education, health and care plans. Michelle Catterson, the head of Moon Hall school, has spoken clearly about how vital EHCPs are to families. Sustainability cannot be achieved by weakening the legal right to EHCPs, or by diluting councils’ duties to fund them. I am concerned that that is about to happen. When Ministers are asked directly about what will happen to EHCP protections, the answers are far from clear. Parents must have certainty. EHCPs must not become a back-door route to cost-cutting.

I also have serious concerns about the evidential basis for elements of the settlement. My local council, Horsham district council, was initially projected to operate with a healthy surplus, but the Institute for Fiscal Studies has now flagged miscalculations in the business rate valuations, and the council’s position has been inverted into a deficit. Many councils operating with business rate pools, as Horsham district council does, have found that funding formulas did not properly account for those arrangements until very late in the process. As the District Councils’ Network has warned, changing allocations between the provisional and final settlements because of revised policy assumptions is deeply destabilising. Councils are entitled to ask on what evidential basis those formulas are constructed.

Departmental research from 2018 suggests that population is often a more accurate predictor of need than deprivation alone, yet the settlement has put all the weighting into deprivation. Why? Can we see the justifications and rationales? Deprivation exists across the country, including in rural communities, such as mine. It may be in pockets, but it is still there, and it is felt just as deeply. We know that geography is a major cost driver for councils. Rural councils face longer travel times for care workers, higher transport costs for schools, dispersed populations, thinner provider markets and recruitment challenges, yet metropolitan councils are projected to receive significantly higher per-head funding increases. In some comparisons, Government-funded spending power rises by around 20% in metropolitan areas, but just 2% in rural areas. In county areas like West Sussex, when it comes to the funding increases, approximately 98p in every pound will have to be raised locally, as opposed to just 58p for metropolitan areas, which is a terrific difference. That imbalance raises legitimate questions about fairness between places.

That brings me to what may be the most fundamental inconsistency. The Government recognise remoteness as a cost factor in adult social care, so why is remoteness not consistently recognised in children’s services, school transport and wider service delivery? How can distance and sparsity increase costs for adults, but apparently not for children? If geography drives costs—in rural counties, it definitely does—then that must be reflected consistently across all funding formulas.

Finally, the reintroduction of the recovery grant is welcome in principle, but why is its allocation still based on deprivation indicators from 2019, when more recent data exists and has been used elsewhere across Government? When millions of pounds are being distributed, councils deserve clarity that allocations reflect current realities, particularly given the economic shifts of recent years. Without that transparency, we have mistrust. Councils stand ready to work with Government, but in return they must have fairness, clarity and clear evidence.

Local Elections: Cancellation

John Milne Excerpts

Monday 19th January 2026 Commons Chamber

[Alison McGovern]

No, you’re fine. The Secretary of State will take into account those representations and others, and make a decision without any undue delay.

[John Milne (Horsham) (LD)]

For the second year running, Conservative-run West Sussex county council has applied to cancel local elections, in which the Conservatives face wipeout. Their excuse is that it would be too hard to organise, but it is the seven district and borough councils that run the elections, not the county council, so will the Minister speak to the councils that have an actual democratic mandate, rather than the county administration, which is trying to cling to power long past its sell-by date?

[Alison McGovern]

We are in regular contact with local authorities. The Department and the Secretary of State will have heard what the hon. Gentleman has said, and we will make sure that those views are fed in.

Local Government Reorganisation

John Milne Excerpts

Thursday 18th December 2025 Commons Chamber

[Alison McGovern]

I am sure that the hon. Lady’s council will have heard what she has said and understood her views—and it is right that it has. Having stood in one local council election and five general elections, I am not afraid of democracy.

[John Milne (Horsham) (LD)]

This feels like some kind of unholy Labour-Conservative alliance to avoid electoral humiliation. At West Sussex county council, the dysfunctional Conservative administration will surely grab the chance to cling on to power for yet another year past its sell-by date. To make sure that any decision to delay is taken for the right reasons, will the Minister agree to require that any council seeking to cancel elections will also be required to see out the rest of its term under a cross-party rainbow coalition comprised of existing councillors?

[Alison McGovern]

I am not sure I have the power to do that.

Housing Development: Cumulative Impacts

John Milne Excerpts

Wednesday 17th December 2025 Westminster Hall

[John Milne (Horsham) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. I thank the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) for bringing attention to this important issue. As far as local planning authorities are concerned, what matters is not the national target for housing but the local target as set by the standard method. At heart, the standard method compares local house prices with local wages. With a little jiggery pokery, that produces a number allegedly related to local needs. Unfortunately, the standard method is an especially bad way to devise a housing strategy. It was bad when the Conservatives invented it, and it is no better now under Labour, now that the numbers have been tweaked to produce even higher results. Far from solving the housing crisis, the standard method is the direct reason why we now have 1.4 million unbuilt permissions—wrong permissions in the wrong places at unsaleable prices. The more we load further badly allocated permissions on to what is already there, the worse it will get.

My constituency of Horsham will be granting new fantasy permissions on the edges of estates that do not exist yet and may not do so for decades to come. Multiple new estates will be attempting to attract customers within a few miles of each other. Of course, each new estate slows down the build-out rate for what is already there, so the net gain in housing delivery is questionable. It is also the most wasteful way to use land that one could possibly come up with. Most local planning authorities, like Horsham, are obliged to choose from whatever sites private developers promote to them. As a result, we are plagued with edge-of-town suburban developments that cost too much when they are built, and take up too much land in the process. Relying on private developers to bring down house prices always was a grossly over-optimistic strategy. And guess what? It is not working.

In Horsham, we have also been faced with a unique additional circumstance called water neutrality. This started with a ruling by Natural England that came out of the blue, prohibiting any increase in water abstraction from our main source in the Arun valley, in case it compromised a rare wetland habitat. For a four-year period, Horsham district council was not allowed to approve any new development at all if it increased water consumption by so much as a single litre. Needless to say, that was a stiff challenge to meet. As a result, the council slipped from being one of the best in class for housing delivery to one of the worst today. Extraordinarily, throughout this whole period, planning inspectors continued to assess HDC against its centrally mandated house building target of a little more than 900 a year. They took no account at all of the reason why the houses could not be built. It was literally against the law for Horsham to obey the law, and that was a gross injustice that remains uncorrected.

A few weeks ago, just as abruptly as the water neutrality was imposed, it was lifted. Horsham has now been left exposed to almost unlimited speculative development because we are so very far from being able to show a five-year land supply—it is probably under one year now. The immediate major consequence has been the approval at appeal for 800 houses at a site known as Horsham golf and fitness village. That development was not included in the emerging local plan, because it was judged to fatally undermine the green gap between Horsham and Southwater. It has no school or clinic and is on the wrong side of a dual carriageway. It is also barely half a mile from a much larger potential site for 1,200 homes, known as West of Southwater. The Southwater site is in the local plan and does have the relevant facilities. That is the site that should be built on.

Because the Government have thus far refused to help Horsham out of its unique problem, we have a chaotic situation of planning by appeal. The whole strategic logic of plan-led development is in jeopardy in my area. There is no present way for Horsham district council to argue the impact of cumulative housing development, because there is always a presumption in favour of development for almost anything that comes forward, as previous speakers have mentioned.

In the worst case scenario, it could be several years before Horsham has an approved local plan, by which time untold damage will have been done to our strategic planning and countryside. Under the previous Government, Ministers seemed to confuse water neutrality with nutrient neutrality and nothing was done. To his credit, the current Minister understands the situation perfectly well. We still do not have a solution, however.

That is very disappointing because a solution would be easy to implement and could be done without compromising the Government’s overall housing ambitions. In fact, I believe it would deliver the Minster’s intentions more completely. The Minister has already kindly agreed to meet me in the new year. I hope we can have a satisfactory conversation and find a solution to this problem, which is grossly unfair to the people of Horsham. There has to be a way forward.

--- Later in debate ---

[Paul Holmes]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely correct. My right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire and my hon. Friend the Member for Farnham and Bordon made that point, I was about to make it, and the hon. Gentleman’s Liberal Democrat colleagues also made it, so there is universal acclaim for his claim, but it is also absolutely correct. I hope the Minister addresses that.

As the amount of housing increases, community infrastructure and resources must be expanded accordingly. That means more schools, GP surgeries, train and bus stations, hospitals, paved roads, bin collections and street lighting, to name just a few of the essentials. The list goes on and on; those are just some of the things we need to consider when looking at where to build. We must get better at prioritising those vital services, while recognising that not every development is right for the area it is proposed for.

We all know that under section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, as amended, local authorities can secure investment to fund new services and infrastructure in the local area, but the system is struggling to keep up with demand. Over a third of all section 106 agreements took longer than 12 months to finalise. Some 76% of local authorities reported an average timeline exceeding a year, and in over a third of councils it was over 500 days. In 2024-25, 45% of local planning authorities had agreements finalised that had taken over 1,000 days to complete. Dose the Minister agree that in order to unlock some of the housing that is needed, we need a simplified and standardised method for section 106 notices across the country? [Interruption.] He says yes from a sedentary position. I look forward to his affirming that in his comments shortly, but we would support that.

[John Milne]

I very much agree with what the hon. Gentleman is saying about the lack of infrastructure provision and with his previous comments on the failure to prioritise brownfield, but does he recognise that all those errors were inherent in the previous system under the Conservative Government? The problem is that they have not been corrected. They were always there, and that is why MPs across the country have been complaining.

[Paul Holmes]

I disagree with the hon. Gentleman slightly. I remember that in the last Parliament, under the Conservative Government, there absolutely was a commitment from Planning Ministers and Secretaries of State to prioritise brownfield development. That was announced during our time in government by the former Prime Minister but three, and by a number of Ministers in the MHCLG.

English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

John Milne Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 25th November 2025 Commons Chamber

[Dr Beccy Cooper (Worthing West) (Lab)]

I very much welcome this devolution Bill, and today I speak in support of Government new clause 45 and amendments 153 and 107 proposed by my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Dr Opher).

New clause 45 and amendment 153 relate to the essential role of our local councillors. As a recent councillor and leader of Worthing borough council, I can attest to how hard my fellow councillors work for very little remuneration—contrary to public perception—and how much they contribute to the health and wellbeing of our local communities. As my hon. Friend the Member for North West Cambridgeshire (Sam Carling) alluded to, as the temperature has risen in politics in recent years, these local residents who have put themselves forward with the aim of contributing positively to their communities have increasingly found themselves the target of online and in-person abuse. While it is no more acceptable for them than it is for us in national politics, we must do all we can to ensure that they and their families are safe. It is therefore good to see that recognised in new clause 45 proposing that council members’ home addresses will no longer appear in published registers of interests.

Amendment 153 acknowledges the different forms of council structure, and there has already been some debate on this matter today. My constituency of Worthing West houses two councils—Worthing borough council is a leader and cabinet system; Arun district council is a committee system. Again, as a former council leader, my preference and experience tells me that the leader and cabinet system is highly effective, but I acknowledge that the committee system can potentially allow greater involvement in decision making across the councillor groupings. With that in mind, I am supportive of the intent stated in amendment 153 that if the local authority’s committee system is protected, a review should be undertaken to see whether it is in the best interests of that local authority to move to the leader and cabinet system.

For my constituency, which is also undergoing local government reform alongside moving to a devolution model, our councillors in Worthing and Arun will need to consider the best option for the area as part of our new unitary authority when these footprints are agreed.

Amendment 107 asks that environmental interests be considered as criteria for community right to buy, provided that the land is not allocated in the local development plan. It is positive to hear already from the Minister today about the protections for local sports grounds. The environmental wellbeing of local communities, alongside economic and social benefits, is an area close to my heart as a public health consultant living on the south coast. Worthing has the smallest amount of green land per head of population in the UK—less than a snooker table per person. We have limited green land left in our constituency’s urban areas, and even though we are undoubtedly blessed with the English channel to the south and the south downs to the north, people do not live in the sea and very few of us live in our national park. Our wellbeing is therefore determined by our densely populated urban strip bordering the coastline.

Our remaining green spaces in this area are incredibly precious for our mental and physical health, air quality and climate mitigation measures. Green spaces can help to reduce our ever-increasing flood risk. I therefore would welcome any additional guidance from the Minister in this area for our current and soon-to-be devolved regions, such as my own in Sussex. The health of our population should be our No. 1 priority, and devolved government is ideally placed to help deliver those much-needed protections and improvements for our communities.

[John Milne (Horsham) (LD)]

I will speak to new clause 10(a) in my name. Devolution may be in the title of the Bill, but not everything in it lives up to that name. In many respects, the Bill actually takes power further away from the people back towards the centre.

When I look at my constituency, which will be affected by both devolution and local government reorganisation, like that of my hon. Friend the Member for Worthing West (Dr Cooper), I am particularly concerned about the fate of key community assets. Across Horsham district, parish councils run much-loved services including parks, village halls, allotments and sports fields. For the town itself, the jewels in the crown are the council-run Capitol theatre and Horsham park. Why do we still have a theatre when so many others have closed down? It is because Horsham’s theatre is owned and run by the Horsham people and their local council.

The two-tier local government system was never designed as a means of protecting community assets, but in practice, that is how it worked out, because as a side effect it separated and saved at least some local services from the bottomless pit that is the adult social care and special educational needs and disabilities budgets. Upper-tier authorities’ un-ringfenced budgets, such as those for leisure and culture, have been put to the sword over the years. If Horsham had been run entirely out of West Sussex county council for the past decade, with no district council, we would surely have lost our theatre years ago—it would have been sold off to plug ever-growing holes in the county budget. That sacrifice would have been for nothing, because in reality the SEND and social care deficits can never be met by council tax contributions alone. One day soon, the Government will have to recognise that.

Oral Answers to Questions

John Milne Excerpts

Monday 24th November 2025 Commons Chamber

[Steve Reed]

The Government are supporting councils to invest in new and existing social housing through the new 10-year rent settlement and our £39 billion social and affordable homes programme. A further £14 million is being provided this year to boost council house building skills and capacity. In addition, the warm homes social housing fund will provide £1.2 billion from 2025 to 2028, and we have committed over £1 billion between 2026 and 2030 to support cladding remediation for social landlords, ensuring equal access to building safety funds.

[John Milne (Horsham) (LD)]

We are facing a national affordability crisis, but handing out planning permissions like confetti did not bring down prices under the last Government and there is zero reason to expect it will do any better this time. Does the Minister accept that relying on private developers to bring down prices can never work, because they simply stop building whenever prices start to fall?

[Steve Reed]

Respectfully, I wish to correct the hon. Gentleman. The reason we are allocating £39 billion to build more social and affordable housing—the biggest amount in a generation—is precisely to avoid the very scenario to which he refers.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

John Milne Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Thursday 13th November 2025 Commons Chamber

[Mike Reader]

I take the point. The intention behind amendment 40 is well meant: there are situations, as my hon. Friend has said, in which EDPs will not be needed and there are other ways to deal with those situations through existing legislation. Having such a finite definition in the two lines of the amendment, which people have focused on, creates what the Corry review calls the problem: adding more complexity to the process, not simplifying it.

I make no complaints about starting my career as a civil engineer and working in industry, and I am sad to hear that some of my colleagues and some of those across the House have the idea of greedy developers taking all our money and making millions of pounds in profit without ever giving back to society. I am interested to see, through this debate, the very well-funded environmental lobby. I am proud to be an environmentalist and to be on the executive committee of SERA, Labour’s environmental campaign, and I am grateful for the debate that I have had with them through this process to inform my thinking.

My hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins) mentioned the 3% stat—that only 3% of planning fails because of nature. The truth is that the assessment would be done long before the planning process, and I am surprised that schemes have got to that point on nature, as I am by the 3%. The chances are that when going for early viability on a project, nature challenges will be looked at. The complexity and difficulty of delivering in this country, because of the way our legislation is set up and the risk entailed, means that many schemes do not go ahead in the first place. I recognise the stat that my hon. Friend has presented, but it is slightly erroneous, because when there are particular nature issues, most projects will never get to the planning stage.

It is really positive, however, to see so much brought forward by the Government—nearly 30 additional amendments—as they listen to the concerns of both Houses, to the environmental lobby and to those who build the homes we desperately need, and improve the way the law will work. There are great opportunities to support that going forward.

I will add a slight observation. Through my career, I coined the three Cs of delivery, whether I was working on the Hudson tunnel connecting New Jersey and New York; on the Peru reconstruction programme, a project that was championed by another former Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, as a great example of exporting British expertise to a country and working in partnership to deliver nature restoration, new schools and new hospitals; on airports in places such as Keflavik in Iceland; on regeneration schemes in Greece; or even on the new hospitals and prison programmes and other things that we deliver in our great country. Those three Cs are certainty, commerciality and cost—and that is what it fundamentally comes down to when delivering projects.

I am sure that everyone recognises that cost is critical. If we cannot afford it, we cannot deliver it, so we have to get cost right. At the moment, viability particularly impacts our ability to deliver homes, and this legislation will start to improve that. Commerciality is the one that I like to focus on when talking to industry, because how we deal with apportionment of risk, change and commercial incentivisation is how we get projects working well, such as the Silvertown tunnel in Newham, and how we get projects that run very badly, such as HS2 phase 1, where the commerciality is completely wrong.

The third C is certainty. That is what we have to give the market after 14 years of failure of a Conservative party that flip-flopped on housing policy, with a revolving door of Housing Ministers—we have all heard the tropes, so I will not keep going. We need certainty in the timescales around how planning works. The Bill simplifies that, making it clear how the judicial review process works and how we go through planning to give certainty to the communities that are impacted and which need those homes.

The amendments brought forward by the Lords that the Government are taking forward improve that certainty of the legal process. Even yesterday, in the Energy Security and Net Zero Committee, we heard evidence on the planning process for delivering community energy, and I am sure everyone would support more small-scale community energy. We were blown away by the complexity of planning regulation in trying to get, say, solar panels on to a community building or a small-scale district heating scheme delivered in a local community for their benefit. The scale of complexity of our planning process is such a big challenge. As well as improving certainty of the legal process, the Bill improves certainty around nature protection. The engineering design process will help us deliver more homes and protect nature.

Since coming to this House, I have chosen to add a fourth C to my three Cs: the C of courage. What I saw in industry was a Government who did not have courage and that flip-flopped on their decisions, and that meant chaos. As has been said, we have inherited a system that fails to deliver the homes that we desperately need. That political courage to do difficult things, find compromise and drive forward is what the Bill represents, and I am proud to give my backing to my Government in pushing it through and ensuring that we deliver homes for people right across our country.

[John Milne (Horsham) (LD)]

There has been great anxiety about the possible negative impacts on the environment of this legislation. Lords amendment 40 seeks to restore site specific protections for most cases where they do not involve wider issues, such as nutrient neutrality, but it has been opposed by the Government, as we have heard. Can we trust the Government to have their heart in the right place when it comes to nature versus development? We can pick up a big clue by looking at what has been happening in my constituency in West Sussex.

For the last four years, Horsham district has been contending with the complications of water neutrality, which is often wrongly confused with nutrient neutrality. It is something that applies only to my district and a couple of neighbouring areas. It concerns possible damage to a unique wetlands habitat on the River Arun, which is home to a rare species of snail and many birds. On a precautionary basis, Natural England has required a halt to any new development that would increase demand on the water supply abstracted at nearby Hardham. Natural England was wrong to impose such a draconian limit. The “not one litre more” rule prevented small businesses from building even the smallest project, and that seriously damaged the local economy.

I do not have any confidence either in the abrupt lifting of all restrictions, as happened a fortnight ago. Southern Water promised to reduce its Hardham abstraction licence by a few million litres a day, but that will not make any difference, because it never used the whole allowance anyway—it was just a notional figure set many decades ago.

The immediate crisis for Horsham is how the changes affect planning and housing development. For the past four years, Horsham has been in the ludicrous position of having to obey two totally contradictory laws. One law says that we have to build circa 1,000 houses a year. The other law says that we cannot build any houses at all if they will use extra water. That is clearly quite a challenge. As a result, we have fallen from being an authority that exceeded our housing targets, even though they were very stiff, to being one of the worst performers in the country, with a land supply of less than one year. It is literally against the law for us to obey the law.

As a result, Horsham district council has been forced to accept a series of applications that contradict its local plan and that make complete nonsense of the strategic plan-led development that the Government always profess to support. Complications around water neutrality have prevented a new local plan from being passed, and that has prevented major new environmental provisions from coming into force.

This legal nonsense has done huge damage to Horsham district and is set to do even more. The sudden lifting of water neutrality today leaves us exposed to wholly unconstrained development, which will do major damage to our environmental ambitions. It is impossible to make meaningful plans for new schools, clinics and community services to support the enormous targets that we will be forced to build when speculative developments keep going through that have none of those attributes.

Do I trust the Government to have their heart in the right place when it comes to environmental protections? No, I do not. Do I believe that they are committed to plan-led development? No, I do not. The Government are content to see holes dug all across our beautiful Horsham countryside in the hope that it might dig the Chancellor out of her own personal fiscal black hole.

I therefore urge the Minister to support Lords amendment 40, and to consider how the legislation is affecting my constituency. I invite him to meet me and Horsham district council so that we can explain that what he is doing will not just sacrifice our local environment but make the delivery of affordable housing—my overall key ambition for Horsham—harder, not easier.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

I call John McDonnell.

Oral Answers to Questions

John Milne Excerpts

Monday 13th October 2025 Commons Chamber

[Matthew Pennycook]

The hon. Gentleman is conflating two separate issues. Genuine asylum seekers who have been granted refugee status and who can stand on their own two feet and work will rent, in some cases in the private rented sector and in other cases in market housing. Some dispersal accommodation for those seeking asylum will, of course, be in the private rented sector, and that can add pressure to local rental markets. That is why decisions must be made in co-ordination with local authorities and taking into account local housing pressures. More importantly, that is why the reduction in hotel use needs to be proceeded with in an ordered and managed way, not the chaotic way that the Conservatives have been calling for.

[John Milne (Horsham) (LD)]

4. What steps he plans to take to ensure that new housing developments have adequate access to infrastructure.

[The Minister for Housing and Planning (Matthew Pennycook)]

The national planning policy framework sets out that:

“The purpose of the planning system is to contribute to the achievement of sustainable development, including the provision of…supporting infrastructure in a sustainable manner.”

We made changes to the framework in December last year that will support the increased provision and modernisation of various types of public infrastructure. Local development plans should address needs and opportunities in relation to infrastructure, and identify what infrastructure is required and how it can be funded and brought forward.

[John Milne]

In my constituency, we have seen promises of new schools and clinics repeatedly broken, but in every case it was not the developer or local council that let people down but national bodies such as the Department for Education and integrated care boards. They do it to save money by cramming more kids into existing schools and more patients into packed clinics. In the light of the 21,000 extra houses that have just been announced by the Chancellor for Horsham district, will the Minister meet me to discuss how we can legally ensure that key local infrastructure promises are met?

[Matthew Pennycook]

The hon. Gentleman knows that I am always happy to sit down and talk to him about these and other issues. It must be said that when preparing a local plan, planning practice guidance recommends that local planning authorities use available evidence of infrastructure requirements to prepare an infrastructure funding statement. Local authorities are not doing that in all cases, which is why the chief planner wrote to all local planning authorities recently to remind them of their statutory duty to do so. We can discuss that and other issues when I meet him.