Budget Resolutions

Peter Lamb Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd November 2026 Commons Chamber

[Peter Lamb (Crawley) (Lab)]

The theme of today’s Budget debate is “fresh hope for the future”, so I would like to take the opportunity to review the pledges that I made to my constituents at the general election, how this Budget helps to deliver on them and, given that the Government have said we are at the start of the process, my fresh hopes for the future. But since Opposition Members are so interested in getting into a conversation, I will deal with them first.

Last Wednesday, my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer set out a Budget that is the best-received Labour Budget in 23 years. That has been indicated very clearly, because the public and the markets have accepted it as a fantastic development. You can hear the disappointment from Opposition Members. You can hear that they are desperate for their attack lines, which are not getting through, in order to get public attention back on them, but what have we actually heard? From the Opposition Front Bench we heard about £30 billion of unfunded tax cuts. That is what the Conservatives’ plan is so far. On their own figures, the figure is £30 billion so far, but that is exactly what happened with the Liz Truss mini-Budget. They have learned no lessons from exactly that economic situation in what they put to us today.

I promised my constituents that we would have a thriving local economy and support for the town centre, and Crawley’s economy is thriving. Anyone looking at it would have to accept that. Our major employers in the area are expanding. Developments such as the Government-funded Crawley Innovation Centre are bringing forward the new generation of technologies that will generate further economic growth in this country. Business rate changes are making it easier for properties on the high street. Many of the reforms set out in the Budget are going to make things considerably easier for people. High street rental auctions will enable us to tackle people who own property but, for their own financial reasons, are not putting people in. My hope for the future is that we can get further rate reform, and start addressing the unfair practices in the delivery industry that are allowing that sector and online retailers to kill off many of our high street businesses.

My second pledge is to have housing that delivers for local people. We have the first-time buyer scheme—“Your First Home”—and first-time buyer ISAs. We have planning reforms coming through. We have £432 million for ending rough sleeping. We have over £40 billion for the biggest investment in affordable housing in a generation. We have new towns, and greater rights for private tenants through the Renters’ Rights Act 2025. We are delivering for people on housing. My hope for the future is more funding for affordable housing, moving away from the current financial structures, direct delivery from the Government, an end to hope value and housing revenue account reform.

I have said that I want a better future for Crawley’s children, and what do we have? We have paid maternity leave so that fathers can spend the first critical weeks with their children, and more fathers can set the tone for their relationship to develop. We have the expansion of 30 hours of free childcare and SEND reform coming forward. We have the return of Sure Start—I do not know why it has new branding—in our communities. We have an end to the two-child poverty trap, which Opposition Members begged us not to remove. We have the expansion of free school meals, and the fastest reduction in poverty of any first-term Government in this country’s history. My hope for the future is that we continue to work towards ending child poverty, with action on those not in employment, education or training, ensuring every SEND child gets the support they need and creating real social mobility.

I pledged real action on crime and antisocial behaviour, and we have the neighbourhood policing guarantee, an end to the £200 threshold for shoplifting, and new offences, including respect orders to ban repeat offenders from public places. We have preventive departmental spending, so we can really put in place the action necessary to protect our communities. My hope for the future is that we take the gloves off the police, bring in judicial reform to make it easier to send criminals to jail, make better use of automated technology and make greater use of on-the-spot penalties.

Lastly, on a better resourced NHS that is there when people need it, we have the NHS 10-year plan and national plans for diseases such as cancer, rapid action on waiting lists, new capital investment, a huge expansion of diagnostic equipment and record investment in our national health service. My hope for the future is that the service focuses on keeping people well, rather than addressing their needs only when they are sick, and that we move services back into every postcode, where possible.

There should be no limits on the aspiration of this Government or those of our constituents for our country. We should look at the progress that has already been made on the ills that affect our society. This Budget is taking us another step closer to the future that we all seek, and I look forward to many more Budgets from my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Commonhold and Leasehold Reform: Managing Agents

Peter Lamb Excerpts

Thursday 2nd July 2026 Commons Chamber

[Peter Lamb (Crawley) (Lab)]

I very much welcome, as I am sure do most of colleagues on the Labour Benches, the Government’s actions so far on commonhold and leasehold, and I look forward to their further steps. Today, I would like to speak to the issue of property management agents, particularly in the context of unadopted estates.

As with so many issues, the fundamental problem here is a lack of housing. Despite the enormous actions taken by this Government to get the housing market moving, the reality is that housing delivery collapsed in the wake of the 1984 housing legislation. Anyone who looks at a graph of housing delivery since that point can see that the mass exit of the state from the direct delivery of housing has never come close to being replaced by the private sector. That is one reason why I was very excited this week to see the Secretary of State’s comments on the potential mass re-entry of this Government into housing delivery. It is one of the very few things that could resolve the issue, because we have a broken market.

People are forced to accept unreasonable housing conditions because they have no choice. Until we resolve the broken market, we will continue to have various forms of exploitation. The reality is that developers—there are good developers and bad developers—will, overwhelmingly, seek to minimise their costs as far as possible, whatever the impact on the communities they are creating. If we allow poor practices to be possible within the law, we will see poor practices being delivered by these people.

We need to be mindful, of course, that regulation has an impact. As someone who has delivered local plans, I can tell hon. Members that I was always very mindful of the requirements I was putting on developers, because I knew that every single requirement was an affordable house being taken out of the system. As legislators, I think we have sometimes been a bit careless with unnecessary additional requirements. We must ensure that regulation is proportionate, but in this case it very much is.

I have been dealing with the issue of unadopted estates for the better part of two decades now, and no worse example exists in my experience than that of Forge Wood. It is part of a new town that has all the services that the neighbourhood principal should deliver for a neighbourhood, but unlike in my other neighbourhoods the residents of Forge Wood are all having to pay for them a second time: once through their council tax and a second time through their management agency, with a fee that rivals the level of district authority council tax. They are paying more for fewer services.

There are questions over the nature of the contracts and the contractors that are brought in. If we look at any of those property management agencies, the company secretaries are registered to hundreds, if not thousands, of such companies. How effective can someone be when they are registered as secretary for thousands of companies? It is frankly little more than fee farming from residents for no benefit. I have gone through the articles of association to try and find ways for residents to wrest back control, but the complexities mean that these people are completely unaccountable. It masquerades as ownership by those communities, while delivering an unaccountable system.

What should we do? The Government’s existing proposals are an improvement, and I welcome the Committee’s recommendation of the independent regulator, which should come into effect. On the issue of unadopted estates, ultimately, we now have to turn off the tap. We need to establish fixed conditions and fees, so that they are all adopted at the point they are completed and handed over to local authorities.

We also need to establish a pathway for existing unadopted estates to be taken on by the state, with a need for local authorities to plan how they bring them in. I believe it is possible to adopt them within the existing system and within financial constraints. However, we cannot do that while running up a flag to tell every developer in the country to ditch their responsibility to get the estates adopted. I am pleased by the recommendations before us, but further action is needed on an independent regulator and on turning off the tap on unadopted estates.

Paternity Leave and Pay

Peter Lamb Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd October 2024 Westminster Hall

[Peter Lamb (Crawley) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Telford (Shaun Davies) on bringing forward the debate. I similarly have an appalling personal experience. My employer was down-sizing, so I was forced to change jobs during my wife’s pregnancy and, despite being open with my employer about the situation, I was completely ineligible for any statutory leave. They were a good employer—they actually happen to campaign on this specific issue—but the reality is that the overwhelming majority of people do not have that opportunity. Most people in this day and age do not stay with employers for an indefinite period of time, either through their choice or that of the employer. They cannot be cut out of the system, particularly when 92% of the cost of paternity pay is being paid out of their taxes by central Government in the first place. No father will be operating at peak levels of efficiency under those circumstances. Frankly, we have an appalling birth rate in this country that is dropping, and this is one of the reasons why that is happening.