Speeches by Curtis.

“Outside of that, is there anything else that you think should be looked at?”

“Moving on to social housing, I might link it to that question. We talk about developers a lot but, broadly speaking, the way the model works at the moment is that developers bid for how much they can buy land for, with a local plan, having a reasonably good estimate of what the requirements are going to be when they bu…”

“This is my final question. If you speak to most people across the country and ask what the biggest objection to new housing is, one of them is that the new housing is not going to come with the infrastructure that is required. If the system is working right, if you have a good local plan in place, as everywhere should,…”

“I will come back to that point specifically in a second. You touched on the 300 extra planning officers that we are putting in. When I speak to local authority leaders across the country, they say that—I am not blaming anyone specifically—given the challenges of local government finances again this year, they are not s…”

“Not me. Make it higher.”

“I will come on to some of the other blockages in a minute, but if it looks like we need to be increasing the annual number towards the end of this Parliament, will you look again at that 370,000 number and potentially look at increasing it? It may not be high enough to hit the kind of numbers that we need to be hitting…”

“A lot of the discussion we have had today has come back to you as an organisation being able to provide data and recommend changes that the Government are therefore responsible for enacting, and that is the process that we have gone through with voter ID. What makes many of us quite uncomfortable with that process is t…”

“With respect, that was not quite the question. I appreciate that there were some bad things that some people said were going to happen or we feared might happen that did not happen. What worries many people, or certainly worries me, is that there was a recommendation made by the Electoral Commission to bring this in in…”

“I am still not completely convinced on those arguments either. You don’t say, “We are going to make a change because other people are doing it,” in order to solve a problem that does not exist. That does not feel like a particularly compelling argument either; neither does, “Well, it worked in Northern Ireland eventual…”

“Is that literally turned up and spoke to the polling clerk? Obviously, there may have been people who got discouraged before that who you are not counting in those numbers.”

“It is clearly fantastic to see the ambition on housing and planning and what has been achieved already by this Government. Do you want to set out, quickly, how you see us moving towards 1.5 million, given the fact that 221,000 homes were completed in the last financial year? We clearly need to significantly improve on …”

“I support the measures in the Budget. Given the speech that we heard from the shadow Minister, before we get into the policy I want to pause and acknowledge the extraordinary contribution of small businesses in my constituency and throughout the country. Every single day, countless individuals take on the challenge of …”

“Thank you, Ms Nokes. I am happy to count the number of times I have mentioned national insurance in my speech, but I can guarantee Conservative Members that it has been quite frequent. I will mention it again in the following sentence. The Budget, including the NICs changes, makes hard decisions to fix the foundations …”

“I thank the hon. Lady for her contribution. I refer her back to the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Earley and Woodley (Yuan Yang). Our tax system has got even more complicated, particularly after the last 14 years, and we do not want to see the level of complexity, which costs businesses and organisatio…”

“I thank the Minister for the ambition he has shown in his statement, particularly on how we can get local authorities to support the building of the 1.5 million homes that this country needs. Before the White Paper’s publication, the Department saw expressions of interest from various areas. However, some of those init…”

“That is okay. Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. Thanks to the failure of the Conservative party, over 150,000 children will be waking up on Christmas day in temporary accommodation. If that is a record to be proud about, I have absolutely no idea what would make Opposition Members feel any shame. May I get two reassuran…”

“It is good to see the Government’s recommitment to the importance of local plans. In July this year, Milton Keynes city council went through the important process of developing a local plan. During the election campaign, the former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Richmond and Northallerton (Rishi Sunak), visi…”

“I thank the hon. Gentleman. I was looking at some research the other day that shows that parachute jumps end up costing the NHS more money because of the risk of injury than they raise for the charities concerned. Does he agree that, rather than parachute jumps, what our NHS needs is the £22.6 billion investment that h…”

“Will the hon. Gentleman give way?”

“Under the last Conservative Government, 10 pubs closed every single week. Before the hon. Member talks about our record, will he apologise for the record of the last Conservative Government, which was incredibly damaging to businesses, particularly hospitality businesses, across the country?”