Speeches by Cane.

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Furniss. I congratulate my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone) on securing this important debate. Businesses in Littleport, Soham and Ely work hard to keep the high streets lively, but they are undermined by increa…”

“6. What steps he is taking to support off-grid communities with energy prices.”

“Many of my constituents, as well as being off grid, have homes built of non-standard materials—clunch or wattle and daub—and those homes are also often listed. What support will the Minister provide to my constituents who are looking to retrofit their homes to move away from oil and improve insulation?”

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Jardine. I congratulate the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) on securing the debate. I refer hon. Members to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests: I am a district councillor. Everyone deserves a decent home and should be able to f…”

“I agree with the hon. Member, and we need to look at the salaries for the trainers as well. We stand ready to support the Government to get more houses built, including in rural areas, but the planning reforms must work with local communities, not cut them out of the process. Local authorities must be resourced and emp…”

“T1. If she will make a statement on her departmental responsibilities.”

“Ministers have talked quite a bit today about expanded powers for magistrates courts. Could the Secretary of State tell me what additional funding is being made available and what training there will be for magistrates to assist them with this expanded role?”

“I agree entirely that we need to retrain in order to ensure that everyone can benefit from this transition.”

“I draw attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests: I am an unpaid director of Reach community solar farm. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South Cotswolds (Dr Savage) on bringing this important Bill to the House, and on all the negotiations she has had to try to secure cross-party…”

“I agree with my hon. Friend and will come to that in a few minutes. Wetter winters and drier summers mean that our farmers cannot plant when they plan to, and sometimes they miss a whole crop round. The crops do not fully ripen, so they have reduced harvests. The Ouse Washes flood earlier each winter and the floods las…”

“I absolutely commend those restoration projects in the right place. As I say, in the fens we need the food as well as the wetlands, so we have to do the right thing in the right places. Something I like about this Bill is that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Minehead (Rachel Gilmour) said, it provides su…”

“I agree entirely with my hon. Friend. Freya and the many other constituents I know have written to all of us should be assured that we are working together across this House. In conclusion, I support the Bill entirely. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for South Cotswolds for working hard to get concessions from the Go…”

“I congratulate the hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Bradley Thomas) on bringing us this important debate. Ely and East Cambridgeshire has many beautiful listed places of worship. They form part of the fabric of our villages and towns, and of course Ely cathedral watches over Ely and the fens and villages for miles around. T…”

“I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Marie Goldman) on securing this debate. Like many others, I am horrified by the amount of correspondence I get about this issue. Just this month I was contacted by a constituent with a child who was well supported in school and was looking to do well in their GCS…”

“Picking up the Chair’s question about the long hours they work, has any work been done to look at the safety element? Certainly, where I am, someone puts the ballot boxes in their car and drives sometimes quite a long way on dark rural roads, having already been working for 16 hours. Is that safe?”

“I am interested in resilience going forward. If I understood what you said earlier, the number of letters going through your system has reduced from 20 billion a year to 6.7 billion. You will have changed your processes and your staffing accordingly. You also said that during the election there are a quarter of a billi…”

“In the same way you can go by a certain date to get your postal vote, is there a mechanism in place where a disabled person knows that they could go to their electoral registration officer and say, “I have this issue; how are you going to support me with it?””

“You are saying you will make the best reasonable adjustments you can, but there may be some individuals who will still struggle.”

“The Elections Act 2022 introduced new requirements for accessibility. How do you think those operated in practice?”

“I agree, because we were advised that we could not do what we wanted with our local plan, as it would have gone beyond the national planning policy framework. The local community want to do it, so we should be empowered to do it. I entirely support the Bill, because it would make so much sense to everybody if we were t…”