Chris Hinchliff
MP for North East Hertfordshire · Labour · United Kingdom
“Today, I am not joining this debate to raise a series of detailed concerns about the latest redrafting of the NPPF—although I do still have such concerns, especially in relation to possible changes to the sequential test on surface water flooding and limits being imposed on local authorities to pursue more ambitious policies on climate an…”
“When Lewis Silkin created the planning system that rebuilt this country from the ashes of world war two, he described the distinctly Labour vision for a policy that would meet “actual needs, democratically expressed.” Yet what the NPPF has achieved for years—I am afraid the latest iteration will be little different—is almost the precise o…”
“The section 106 mechanism they rely on is not only obscure, but demonstrably incapable of securing the investment in the infrastructure—GPs, schools, sports grounds and public transport—necessary to keep pace with population growth, when hundreds of new houses are bolted on to towns that have already seen almost all their facilities close…”
“And thus we have a national system in which the notion of affordable housing is a running joke, and in which the environment that politicians so often protest their love for is repeatedly trashed as a secondary matter compared to the unequally distributed benefits of growth.”
“Now is the time to consign the NPPF to the dustbin of history where it belongs and start afresh instead of making further amendments. The one positive note I can strike is that it is not difficult to imagine something far, far better.”
“There can be no plan-led system when national policy introduces the overwhelming likelihood of caveats to local plans through an ever stronger and equally inaccurately named presumption in favour of sustainable development, which in reality functions as a passport to permission for all but the very worst speculative schemes.”
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“The reality is that an economic theory based on principles of agglomeration and spill-over effects has next to no relevance for improving the daily lives of our constituents. Whether measures of productivity would be zero-point-something per cent higher over the next 10 years if we focused on high-growth centres is totally beside the point when it comes to what makes for true prosperity. That can come only from ensuring that every high street is a success. High street businesses give life to the heart of a community. Independent traders, entrepreneurs and innovators give a place its identity. Pubs, bars, coffee shops, community hubs, restaurants and the rest provide the social space for a town to come together and connect, rather than us remaining atomised in our private lives.”
“It is an honour to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Lewell. I congratulate the hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover) on securing this important debate. The question of support for our high street businesses cuts to the very core of what economic policy in this country sets out to achieve. For decades, a flawed orthodoxy has promoted the concentration of economic activity in a few urban centres, with the expectation that the rest of us will commute from the towns and villages we live in to the city centres for work. It is a vision for the economy that reduces the hopes and talents of citizens in every part of the country to units of social capital that should be deployed in the most “efficient” manner, and one that measures success in GDP figures rather than in thriving communities.”
“Alongside the failures in the south-east, during the recent heatwave there was a widespread disruption of water supply across swathes of my constituency, in Buntingford, Cottered, Ardeley and Throcking. In a country as wet as ours it should take a true organising genius to create disruptions in water supply, but we are on track for a water deficit of 6 billion litres in our country in the coming decades, and on top of that, AI data centres estimate that water consumption will reach up to half a trillion cubic metres every year. Does the Minister—whom I deeply respect—accept that if we are to prevent water supply disruptions from recurring year in year out, we cannot continue to have infinite increases in demand on our already vastly overstretched water resources?”
“If climate breakdown accelerates, many of the international supply chains that we have relied upon for essential goods and resources for far too long will cease to exist. We are sleepwalking towards a situation in which this country can no longer guarantee the basic needs of its people. At that point, no amount of AI slop or casino capitalism will be an alternative to actually making things. Before ecological collapse makes it too late, will Ministers use their industrial strategy to pivot our economy back to producing more of the essentials that we use in our daily lives?”
“The freeze in fuel duty will be a relief to drivers in North East Hertfordshire, but part of the reason there is such a problem is that the Conservative party’s last stint in government left public transport virtually non-existent in rural communities such as mine. We discussed earlier this week the enormous cost of HS2—more than £100 billion. If we were investing at that scale in bus services, we could provide a vastly improved network across the whole country for decades to come. Will the Government learn the lessons of the current crisis and redirect our public transport spending towards the journeys we need to make in our day-to-day lives?”
“I thank the Minister for clarifying that sanctions on Russia are tougher today than they were yesterday, but fundamentally the furore around licences to phase in the new regulations arises because we have an economy reliant on jet fuel, and as long as that remains the case these issues will continue to arise. What conversations is he having with others across Government to move us faster and even further away from our economy’s reliance on jet fuel?”
“Q3. The war in Iran has exposed how dangerously reliant we are on imports for our food, fuel and medicine, but the reality is that climate breakdown will make the current instability look trivial. Will the Prime Minister use the upcoming King’s Speech to address this fact and redirect our economy towards food security, energy security and security in the supply of our medicines?”
“If the suffering we are inflicting on these animals is profound but the result is uncertain, can the means really be justified at all? Herbie’s law would help to correct that balance, through a phased transition by 2035 away from animal experimentation and towards more effective alternatives, including human-specific methods backed by training and support for scientists. More than 2 million animals were used in experiments in our country in 2024 alone. That is suffering on an immense scale, affecting animals alive today and countless more yet to be bred into a system of pain. Herbie’s law offers the chance to turn a historic page and reduce suffering, improve science and move our laws closer to the values that the public already hold. That would be a profound step forward for animals living now and those spared this fate in future.”
“A genuinely moral justification can be attempted only if the scale of suffering prevented by testing on living creatures provably and overwhelmingly outweighs the suffering of the test patients themselves. Too often, that case is simply not made. When we weigh the public interest in research and medical progress against the imperative to minimise harm to animals, the balance just does not stack up to scrutiny. Animal testing is often cruel and would often pass for barbaric sadism in any other context. More profoundly still, the scientific value of animal testing is often overstated. As we have heard repeatedly today, there is growing evidence that animal models can be unreliable predictors for human outcomes, and we have an increasing range of scientific tools and models that offer a more accurate alternative.”
“Given the invasive, painful and often lethal nature of these experiments, the burden of justification has to be immense. It is not enough to say that the ends justify the means; the ends themselves must be clearly achievable, necessary and proportionate enough to warrant such suffering. In other words, we cannot morally justify harming animals simply because we consider ourselves a more intelligent species. If some disagree with that statement, it is a useful thought experiment to consider whether we would accept it as morally justifiable and acceptable for a provably more intelligent species to experiment on our families and loved ones for their own purposes. Would we stand by and nod along stoically that all species can rightly be used however they wish by another that has a more developed brain? I think not.”
“It is an honour to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Twigg. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Irene Campbell) on an excellent opening speech. All life is a miracle and every living creature has an intrinsic value that we cannot measure or put a price on, so I am not in the least bit surprised that hundreds of my constituents signed this petition. We rightly expect the highest standards for animals bred in this country and should demand the same for those imported from abroad. The British people want tough penalties on cruelty. Labour’s animal welfare agenda, from tackling puppy farming to ending trail hunting, brings policy closer to the public’s values. Those same values matter when we consider animal testing.”
“Would the hon. Lady add to her list a request that the Minister consider a formal target to cut inequality in this country? We will never grow our way to a good life for all our citizens while we have a fundamentally unjust society; we will only break the environmental boundaries we are already rapidly burning past.”
“On the point about statistics and what GDP measures, I ask the Minister to take away the issue of imputed rent. A fairly strange part of GDP, it measures hypothetical rent on the value of existing houses, inflates the value of our GDP as a country, and could be part of what we are measuring when we say that we are trying to achieve GDP growth, though it is actually entirely theoretical.”
“In answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Sarah Russell), the Prime Minister said that he delayed coming to this House so that he could answer, among other questions, why UKSV was overruled. It seems wholly incredible that this decision was made on a personal whim by a senior civil servant. Is it not that it was made because of political pressure from No. 10 to advance a man who a particular faction of the Labour party has looked to for moral and spiritual leadership for years? Can the Prime Minister explicitly now confirm his understanding of why the decision to overrule UKSV was made?”
“Finally, since we are discussing notions of cumulative impact, whatever the stated intentions today, when these plans are considered alongside the recent restrictions on the right to protest against animal testing, a legally contested proscription and other legislation that I assume means that any of my constituents disobeying these plans would not have the right to a trial by their peers, assertions by the Government that they hold the right to protest sacrosanct are wearing so thin as to be clearly transparent. The case for Lords amendment 312 has not been made, we should not be asked to vote for it en bloc alongside other important but entirely separate changes, and I urge Ministers to drop these plans for good.”
“Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) pointed out, this may place substantial political pressure on the decision making of senior police officers. I want to address the concerns raised by several hon. Members in this debate about the intimidation of specific minority groups. I do understand those concerns and they are legitimate, but the legislation is not drafted tightly enough to address that problem. It is far too vague and far too broad to coherently address that point, and it is not what we will achieve by passing this amendment.”
“Today, Lords amendment 312 is opposed across the Labour movement and civil society by many organisations that share the progressive instincts that should be guiding this Labour Government. That is hardly surprising, given the way this legislation is drafted. It is vague, with no definition of what is meant by “serious disruption to the life of the community”. It is widely drawn, with no necessary link between the events considered to be cumulatively disruptive. It does not define the area in question or the timeframe, and it has the blindingly obvious potential to be abused. The proposals could easily be used to restrict protests simply because they are considered inconvenient due to their persistence, and not because of their content or messages. As my right hon.”
“They were advancing Labour’s historic mission to wrest power from the established status quo, so that ordinary people have a real say over their lives. Lords amendment 312 contradicts that impulse, and risks shifting the balance of power in our society towards the vested interests that we ought to take on. The corrosive influence of the rich and powerful runs through every corner of our politics. It muddies policymaking and leaves our constituents asking whether decisions are made in their interests, or in those of the last donor who paid £2,000 a head at a lobbyist curry night. If tweaks are to be made to defend our democracy and prevent disruption to the life of our communities, that would be a far more apt target than the civil liberties of our constituents.”
“On this occasion, however, we have had next to no evidence whatsoever, because these significant changes were only introduced after the original passage of the Bill through this House, which is ultimately a pretty sorry way to treat representative parliamentary democracy. Lords amendment 312 is out of step with the best traditions of this country and of the Labour party, which has always existed to redress the balance of power in favour of ordinary people. The Chartists, the suffragettes, the organisers of the Kinder Scout trespass, those who stood against fascism at Cable Street, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Jarrow crusade—these were protest movements and campaigns of direct action that were supported and led by giants of our party, and which we should celebrate, not disown.”
“There are many important proposals before us today, and I congratulate the Minister on bringing them forward. I wholeheartedly support the Government’s efforts to tackle antisocial behaviour, offensive weapons, fly-tipping, the exploitation of children, and appalling sexual offences. However, Lords amendment 312, which was introduced in the other place, dangerously infringes on civil liberties. It is incumbent on all Members to jealously guard the rights of our constituents, and any restriction of their civil liberties should only be accepted by this House on the basis of overwhelming evidence that such proposals would strengthen, rather than undermine, the health of our democracy.”
“Can I just seek clarity from the Minister? If Lord Macdonald comes forward with recommendations to go back in the opposite direction, will the Government then consider those and remove the restrictions they are currently proposing?”
“More social housing is essential but, as Members across the House will know, increasingly distant housing associations are often far too quick to put up fees and far too slow to tackle damp, mould and disrepair. What more will the Minister do to ensure that future public funding comes with clear strings attached to require better standards for our constituents?”
“I welcome this statement. The public must have confidence that political decisions are made in their interests, not those of wealthy donors. Nowhere is that more important than in relation to the housing crisis, where there are also significant concerns that vested interests are seeking to exert significant influence on policy making. Will the Secretary of State meet me to discuss my proposed amendment to the Representation of the People Bill to ban developers from donating to politics and restore trust in our planning system?”
“There are widespread concerns that we are way off our national biodiversity targets. Does the Minister agree that there must be no further backward steps on environmental protections, and that we must set clear red lines for nature?”
“I thank the Minister for setting the scene. Would he reflect back to the House that, notwithstanding what he has said, there is a clear pattern of a lack of reliable communication, a failure to enforce payments and what often seems like an inability to keep in line with legislation? Does he recognise that what we are all experiencing on behalf of our constituents is an organisation that does not seem to have basic administrative competence?”
“We cannot expect to instil civic pride in the next generation if this is how we leave the roads running through rural areas. We must invest in cleaning this up.”
“I guessed that others would raise the issue of potholes and poor safety today, so I want to make another point about the state of our rural roads. To put it bluntly, they are filthy. Driving through the countryside should be a reminder of much that is best and beautiful about our nation. Instead, in many places, it has been allowed to become an ever-present reminder of the sorry state of our country. With plastic bags, wrappers, cans, bottles, traffic cones, sandbags, tyres, equipment left over after works are completed and gales carrying all sorts of other detritus, some of our rural roadside verges are starting to look like a vast, strung-out landfill. Frankly, if we cannot even manage to keep our roadsides clean, we are hardly a proper country at all.”
“Over the last 25 years, companies that have donated tens of millions of pounds to political parties have been granted Government contracts worth more than £60 billion. It is pretty obvious to the public that these cosy, influential and lucrative relationships appear to be the precise opposite of high standards in public life. Does the Minister agree that companies donating to political parties should be automatically disqualified from Government contracts?”
“Half of England’s hedgerows, which now should be bursting into bud and sprays of blossom, have been ripped up and grubbed out. Eighty-five per cent of our heathland is gone, as are 95% of our chalk downland meadows—the European equivalent of tropical rainforests. Our traditional orchards have declined by 81%, and 85% of England’s salt marshes have also been lost. It is little wonder that one in six species in these islands is at risk of extinction. The scale of the wealth that we have squandered in pursuit of vapid notions of progress is staggering. It is more than just depressing; it is an existential threat to our way of life. The Government’s recent national security report on biodiversity loss confirmed that the collapse of nature is putting at risk the ecosystem services on which our society depends.”
“I beg to move, That this House has considered environmental protections and biodiversity trends. It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Sir Roger. Unfortunately for everyone involved, this will be one of my longer speeches, so I had better not take too many interventions. Let me also say at the outset that this speech is intended first and foremost to support and encourage the Minister in the task ahead of her. She has one of the most important jobs for the whole Government and for the future of the country. On that upbeat note, I turn to the litany of despair that constitutes a brief review of biodiversity trends in this country. Not a single one of England’s rivers is in good overall health. The same is true of our sea floor. Just 7% of our woodland is in good condition.”
“I completely agree with my hon. Friend. As I was saying, the ecosystem services—including water, food, clean air and critical resources—are all at risk. Even our soils, the very substance of growth, have lost around half their organic carbon, threatening the sustainability of our agriculture and our ability to keep our citizens fed. More than that, however, the collapse of England’s biodiversity is a threat to our culture, national identity and one of the essential components of happiness. As iconic species continue to disappear from these islands, I wonder how many of us in this room will see a swallow or mayfly to herald summer this year?”
“Such measures are not only bad policy but directly contradictory to the manifesto we were elected on and deeply unpopular. Only 14% of British people think politicians are aligned with their values on nature, and three quarters of young people actually want more of the UK countryside protected.”
“Then, after we managed to head off the worst of that, we have had the wholesale rejection of the Joint Nature Conservation Committee’s recommendations on species protections, as well as a nuclear regulatory review based on fundamentally flawed evidence that inflates the costs of environmental protections and downplays ecological risks. I would welcome the Minister taking this opportunity to distance the Government from that particular exercise in scapegoating nature for developer incompetence. Each additional deregulation and attack on environmental protections is a blow to the very root of what it means to be English. It is a truly bleak vision for our country to suggest that the only way to secure investment, build infrastructure or deliver homes is to rip up our environmental protections.”
“We continue to hear the unevidenced claim that Britain is held back not by a broken economic model but by bats and newts, and that profiteering developers would build genuinely affordable homes for all if only the last remnants of the natural world were less burdensome. Liz Truss may be gone, but the spirit and lazy rhetoric of deregulatory Trussonomics bulldozers inexorably onwards with a planning and infrastructure Bill that sought to allow developers to pay cash to trash nature, despite having no meaningful evidence to substantiate the claim that environmental protections slow down infrastructure.”
“Worse still, what stories will we have left to enchant the next generation of children with when the Hundred Acre Wood has been declared a blocker, Ratty and Mole have been evicted from their river home by decades of effluent, and—this is probably only a matter of time—someone tries to redefine Watership Down as grey belt? All in all, the scale of the nature crisis is difficult to overstate, and any move to lower standards risks turning that crisis into a catastrophe. Yet, despite all this, we still get senior politicians declaring war on what little remains of our wildlife, with repeated suggestions that even this dire baseline is somehow too high.”
“I completely agree with my hon. Friend about the importance of protecting our curlews, and the curlew action plan is a hugely important step, which the Government should be looking at. I also wonder how long it will be before the screaming sky falls silent, as each year, fewer swifts return to grace the air above our towns and villages. Even our English language is losing its power, as the colours of the countryside are allowed to run dry. How could Brontë have conjured Heathcliff to love Cathy without the wild of the Yorkshire moors? How could Tolkien have fathered an entire fantasy genre without a shire worth fighting for? What hope is there for a future Vaughan Williams with so few larks left to ascend?”
“I thank my hon. Friend for her support for the red lines campaign. She is absolutely right about what makes life worth living. Investing in our country, strengthening standards and restoring our natural world will do far more to improve the lives of ordinary people than a short-sighted race to the bottom. That is the Labour tradition: action to correct market failure, not dogmatic deregulation. There is a nature-loving majority in this country, including the millions of members of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, wildlife trusts, national trusts and so many more. Our Labour Government should be working alongside those groups, not squaring up to them. At the end of the day, there is a lot more of them than there are developer lobbyists. Let us stop this endless cycle of skirmishes. It does not have to be like this.”
“Now is the time for the honesty to admit that, for generation after generation, we have spent down and frittered away the vast wealth that was the natural inheritance of these islands. The truth is that the reality of GDP growth has been little more than a heaping up of virtual wealth—a hoarding of digital zeros in the bank accounts of the wealthy, while the real world around all of us suffered. Any further weakening of environmental protections will only push us over the edge into total bankruptcy. We cannot retreat a single step further. We must defend these last red lines for nature for the sake of every generation to come. My plea to the Minister is simply this: defy the lobbyists, side with the public and the planet over profit, and give us our nature back.”
“Across the country, we have a vast, untapped pool of potential crying out for employment and meaningful, healthy work. It is ready to contribute to leaving the world in a better state than we found it, and there is so much work to be done: restoring our meadows, orchards, coppices and temperate rainforests; relaying hedgerows; re-wetting the lost marshes; re-wriggling our rivers; bringing back the species that haunt our islands; saving the curlew and red squirrel; and monitoring, measuring and enforcing our essential environmental protections. There is enough skilled work to deliver a huge boost towards full employment across every region of the country. Like new Labour’s “New Deal for a Lost Generation”, we need a green job guarantee to deliver essential environmental restoration work now and brilliant careers for years to come.”
“I am very sorry, but I had better make progress at this point. Today, I am calling for clear red lines for nature: no further weakening of environmental protections, no funding cuts to environmental bodies and no more collapsing biodiversity but instead a fully funded nature recovery plan to meet our legally binding targets. There are no more branches left to prune without killing the tree. There can be no more backward steps. Hand wringing will not protect habitats. Lip service will not stop extinction. Let us have a little optimism and idealism instead. We know from projects such as Knepp and trailblazers such as my constituents at Finches Farm in Benington that with decisive action our biodiversity can come booming back again.”
“As a plan 2 graduate myself, before the Minister proceeds will he put on the record an acceptance that, with the misstep on the tuition fee repayment level, the cat is out of the bag? We need to deal with it in this Parliament. I urge him to reject the tedious, time-wasting suggestions from the Lib Dems and get on and deal with it with Labour values.”
“We need to put local authorities back in the driving seat, with the powers to design and deliver developments that genuinely deliver affordable homes in well planned and cohesive communities, with all the opportunities necessary for happy and fulfilling lives. Above all, to ensure that development comes with healthy and positive local transport connections, we must—the Environmental Audit Committee, on which I serve, called for this—amend the definition of “presumption in favour of sustainable development” in the national planning policy framework in order to strengthen the safeguards against environmentally unsustainable, unplanned and speculative development.”
“The presumption in favour of sustainable development allows the construction of developments designed to exist as commuter dormitories, rather than creating real communities with work, leisure and culture all within walking distance. It is the precise opposite of the idealism of the garden city principles originally put into action in Letchworth. By clearing the way for speculative, unsustainable developments, the presumption currently ensures that much of what is built in this country is defined by what is easy and profitable for developers, rather than what is good for people and planet. Above all, car-dependent developments like these squeeze the space for genuine society. Community connections will always struggle to thrive if the public realm is dominated by parked cars and traffic.”
“Few policies are more baleful or more egregiously misnamed. It may be called sustainable development, but in fact it does exactly the reverse of what it says on the tin. This legacy policy puts power overwhelmingly in the hands of developers, overruling the aspirations of local councils and trampling on the concerns of communities. It is responsible for the proliferation of bolt-on estates on the edge of towns and villages, with no realistic prospect that most people living there will be able to access the services and facilities that we all need in our daily lives, other than by driving—locking in car dependency from the get-go.”
“Despite warm words in national guidelines, right across the country the relentless reality of most new estates is more traffic, more toxic air pollution and more space given to car parking than to children for play. The reality is inadequate public transport, distant services, non-existent local employment opportunities and more noise, congestion and pollution blighting our lives. Few things shape the basic, day-to-day experience of life in the UK in 2026 more than the disconnect between transport policy on paper and actual development around our towns and villages. When we came to power, Labour promised change, but this experience will not begin to improve until we address one of the most harmful phrases in national planning policy: the presumption in favour of sustainable development.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under you in the Chair, Sir Desmond. I am afraid I have been lured into making some side comments before getting into the meat of my speech. This is in relation to the point about aggregate supply and meeting the housing needs of young people. It is really important that we bring some facts to that debate, and the reality is that from 2013 to 2023 the housing stock in this country expanded more rapidly than our population did. It is not an issue of aggregate supply, and focusing on that will never meet the needs of younger people in this country. The relationship between new housing and local transport, cuts to the core of why we need to end the developer-led, profit-motivated approach to planning in this nation.”
“The disgraceful scandals of recent days have left what little remains of faith in our democracy hanging by a thread. One of the lessons has to be that, while inherited privilege is no basis for a second Chamber, neither is self-interested patronage by political leaders. Does the Leader of the House agree that we must end the rotten system of peerages being granted to individuals, despite sickening behaviour, simply because they are rich and powerful, or to give jobs to the boys? Will he convey to his Cabinet colleagues the urgent need for legislation to reform the House of Lords from top to bottom, sweeping away these abuses and ridding us of all these politically partisan appointees?”
“As the chair of the recently formed all-party parliamentary group for council and social housing, I welcome the report’s conclusion about the importance of boosting the supply of social housing to meet the huge demand for new, high-quality, genuinely affordable homes and to replace older, lower-standard homes that are long past their lifespan. It is a daunting task, but we know that it can be done: the great reforming post-war Labour Government built more than 800,000 council houses between 1946 and 1951. Does my hon. Friend agree that we need bold policies now to match the scale of that achievement?”
“Instead, the nature sector has been left fighting endless battles with the Government simply to stop things getting worse. That is why I led more than 60 MPs and peers alongside major nature charities, including the Woodland Trust, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the Wildlife Trusts, in opposing proposals to weaken the habitat regulations recommended in the nuclear regulatory review. We must be clear: if someone cares about our woodlands and woodland creation, they cannot advocate for repealing our most important nature protections. Planting trees while weakening the habitats regulations is like planting flowers at one end of a field, while a bulldozer rips it up at the other. We need a joined-up approach that protects what we have and restores what we have lost. That is why I am calling for red lines for nature.”
“Essential woodland management—coppicing, pollarding, thinning, restocking and the rest—will require a new generation of tree surgeons and forestry workers, potentially offering brilliant careers right across the country. However, even the Woodland Trust or my hon. Friend the Minister—talented though they are—cannot recreate ancient woodland, nor restore other irreplaceable habitats or species once they are lost to extinction. Therefore, as we pursue woodland creation, we must also defend the protections we already have. The Woodland Trust has long argued that loopholes in the national planning policy framework leave ancient woodland vulnerable to damage and deterioration from development. We should be strengthening those protections alongside an ambitious programme of nature recovery.”