Oral Answers to Questions

Matt Vickers Excerpts

Wednesday 7th May 2025 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I am deeply sorry to hear about Martin’s case, and I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend’s comments about every family deserving a safe and a secure home. In England, that is why we are investing an additional £2 billion to help deliver the biggest increase in social and affordable house building in a generation. But in Scotland it is, frankly, disgraceful that over 10,000 children have no fixed home to call their own after nearly 20 years of an SNP Government. That is the highest level ever and shows why Scotland desperately needs a new direction.

[Matt Vickers (Stockton West) (Con)]

Q10.   Last week I was talking to Jason, a pub landlord, and he told me that he has heard a rumour about the Prime Minister. [Hon. Members: “Ooh!”] Not that one, not that one. He has heard that there is a reason why the Prime Minister hates Britain’s pubs. Landlords such as Jason are being battered by Labour’s jobs tax and the slashing of small business rate relief, meaning that as many as half of Britain’s pubs could be closed by 2030. Why does he hate Britain’s pubs, and if he does not, why is he taxing them into extinction?

[The Prime Minister]

Nobody likes pubs better than me, and we support them. This is the same old nonsense: the Opposition say they do not want the rise in national insurance contributions, but they do not have the courage to say they would reverse it, because they know that if they did say that, they would be unable to say where the money is coming from. That is how we got into the problem in the first place.