Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Paul Holmes and Angela Rayner

Wednesday 18th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

I thank my hon. Friend for his comments. I am flanked by the two ladies—the Chancellor and the Home Secretary—who have ensured that those things happen. The Chancellor has guaranteed funding to accelerate projects like Peterborough’s new sports quarter, which will include a new Olympic-sized swimming pool. I can also confirm today that, subject to the business case approval, we will provide nearly £48 million of funding for a new city centre quarter and a refurbished eastern station building.

[Paul Holmes (Hamble Valley) (Con)]

Q14. A small family business in my constituency was recently burgled by a prolific offender serving an eight-month suspended sentence. The man was caught, arrested, charged and appeared in court, where he was given another eight-month suspended sentence and was released. The business was offered £200 in compensation. Does the Deputy Prime Minister think that that is justice served, or is this Government now soft on crime and soft on the causes of crime?

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

First of all, I am sorry to hear about that. Hard-working businesspeople who spend a lot of their time building up a business should expect the full force of the law to protect their property and their interests. Also, while I have the opportunity, can I congratulate the hon. Member on running Hamble Valley’s very first pub competition this year? I hope that I will get an invite. He is absolutely right that we have to have increased police numbers and ensure that they are responsive to people’s concerns. We are doing that; his Government let people down.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Paul Holmes and Angela Rayner

Monday 9th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Paul Holmes (Hamble Valley) (Con)]

The Deputy Prime Minister has repeatedly stuck to her commitment that 1.5 million homes, including social homes, will be built over the lifetime of this Parliament despite everybody knowing that she will not achieve it. And today, the latest people to say she will not are Savills, who have forecast that the true number she will build over this Parliament is just 840,000, and that means fewer social homes too. Now that she has emerged from the dark rooms of the Treasury to capitulate to the Chancellor, will the Deputy Prime Minister confirm that more social homes and 1.5 million new homes will be built by the end of this Parliament: yes or no?

[Angela Rayner]

The Opposition cannot have it both ways: one way they are saying we are failing to build the homes; and the other way they are saying we are concreting over the green belt. We said that planning reforms alone will not deliver our ambitions, which is why we have committed to delivering the biggest increase in social and affordable house building in a generation. And I say to the hon. Member, as I have said to many people in my life, underestimate me at your peril.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Paul Holmes and Angela Rayner

Monday 2nd December 2024 Commons Chamber

[Paul Holmes (Hamble Valley) (Con)]

We can see that after just five months, the Government’s target of 1.5 million new homes lies in tatters. The National Housing Federation says that the Government will miss their target by 475,000 without more grant—last week the Housing Minister said the same—and now Labour-run South Tyneside council says that the plans are “wholly unrealistic”, with other Labour councils agreeing. Is it not time for the Government to admit defeat, come back with a deliverable plan and provide the sector with the certainty that it needs to deliver more social homes across the country?

[Angela Rayner]

The hon. Member has forgotten that his Government failed to meet their housing targets every single time. The Government are committed to building 1.5 million homes over this Parliament. Under the Tories, house building plummeted as they bowed to pressure from their Back Benchers to scrap local housing targets. We are bringing back mandatory housing targets. The Chancellor has put more money into the affordable homes programme, and we will build those homes. The hon. Member does not know my history and how I work.

Building Homes

Debate between Paul Holmes and Angela Rayner

Tuesday 30th July 2024 Commons Chamber

[Angela Rayner]

I thank my hon. Friend for her question. Again, the short answer is yes, it will be a rapid review. We were already speaking about this issue before the election. We want to make sure that people take part in the review, but we are also very clear that the discounts that the last Government applied to the right-to-buy formula in 2012 mean that councils cannot replace the houses that are bought under the right-to-buy scheme. We believe that people should have the right to buy, but it has to be balanced against the discounts given to the public on our social housing stock, so that we can make sure that we replace that stock for those who desperately need it.

[Paul Holmes (Hamble Valley) (Con)]

Quite frankly, this announcement will be a disaster for my Hamble Valley constituency. Over the last few years, Liberal Democrat-run Eastleigh borough council has built double the number of houses required by targets and assessments. Can the Secretary of State confirm that she will take into account retrospective building numbers for areas that have already built more than their fair share? Why is she placing even more pressure on local services in the south-east, where house prices are the most expensive, but leaving cities alone and not increasing house numbers there too?

[Angela Rayner]

I say to the hon. Gentleman that the number of houses in cities will increase. The new method that we will be using is based on the stock and its affordability, so I ask him to look at the consultation. We will be honest: if there is a particular shortage—many areas have a particular shortage—we have to build homes. We stood on an election manifesto to do that. I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman’s local authority has local plans, but we will engage with it. We do not have the homes that we desperately need. I say to the hon. Gentleman that he should engage with his local authority, get the local plans in place, and work with us to build the houses that his constituents desperately need.

Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill

Debate between Paul Holmes and Angela Rayner

2nd reading
Monday 16th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Angela Rayner]

I will just educate the hon. Gentleman: although I used to be a trade union official and I am a member of a trade union, I do not negotiate on behalf of a trade union. But what I would do is sit around the table and resolve this dispute with the trade unions. That would be better than what the Conservatives have done.

I come to the liability this Bill places upon trade unions. It says that trade unions must take “reasonable steps” to ensure workers comply with work notices, but what would they be? Will trade unions be liable for non-union staff? As for the burden put on employers, have they welcomed the bureaucratic nightmare that they will face? How will our already overstretched public services spare the resources to work out how many workers are needed to meet the minimum service levels the Secretary of State arbitrarily imposes on them, and to identify which workers should come into work and which should not? What will these bodies have to do? Will they have to do this before each and every strike day?

[Paul Holmes (Eastleigh) (Con)]

I would like to try again on this, because the right hon. Lady aspires to be Deputy Prime Minister and wants to negotiate with the unions in future. Will she outline for the House, because the Labour party has been very quiet on this, whether she backs a 19% pay increase for nurses? What costing has her party put forward as to how much she would award in pay rises to those public sector workers?

[Angela Rayner]

What I can say is that the Labour party would not have crashed the economy like the Conservatives did. We would not have inflation at the record levels we have at the moment. We would not have the disputes we have at the moment because we would negotiate with the trade unions and find a settlement.

What protections are in place to prevent unscrupulous employers from targeting trade union members with work notices? Or is this legislation a licence for blacklisting? The Secretary of State is hiding behind warped misunderstandings of the International Labour Organisation’s statute book and misleading comparisons with Europe. The ILO says that minimum service levels can happen only when the

“safety of individuals or their health is at stake”.

Can he explain how that relates to the list of sectors in the Bill? This Bill also makes no provision for the compensatory measures the ILO requires alongside such regulations. Countries such as France and Spain may have minimum service levels, but they have not averted strikes there; both lose far more days to strike action than the UK.

This Bill is a mess. It makes no sense. It has more holes in it than the last Chancellor’s Budget, yet we are being given next to no time to scrutinise it. This legislation hands far-reaching powers to the Secretary of State to not just impose minimum service levels, but decide what those levels would be. The legal commentator Joshua Rozenberg has called clause 3

“a supercharged Henry VIII clause.”

Where is the consultation the Secretary of State promised? Where is the impact assessment? The Regulatory Policy Committee says, in a scornful statement today, that it has not even received it yet. So why have the Government given only five hours for debate on the Floor of the House?

Let us look at what this Bill is really all about: a Government who are out of ideas, out of time and fast running out of sticking plasters; a Government who are playing politics with nurses’ lives because they cannot stomach negotiation; a Government desperately doing all they can to distract from the economic emergency they have caused. We have had 13 years of failure, and working people of this country cannot take any more. What this whole sorry episode makes clear is that this country needs a Labour Government. The Conservative party has proven itself incapable of cleaning up its own mess, and the disruption of the past few months simply would not be happening under Labour.