Speeches by Hinchliff.

“2. What assessment she has made of the potential implications for her Department's policies of the approval under the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 between April and June 2025 of the use of 1,656,930 animals over the next five years.”

“I fully agree with my hon. Friend. The points he raises perfectly exemplify why the provision of council housing is so important. England has seen 724,000 more net additional dwellings than new households since 2015, yet in the same period the number of households in England on local authority housing waiting lists ros…”

“Council housing is the first, most important and only viable solution to the housing crisis and to creating a society that matches the hopes of both the Labour movement and the wider public. Not long ago, under the leadership of the current Prime Minister, Labour Front Benchers now sitting in Cabinet declared that hous…”

“I thank the hon. Member for that intervention. As usual, he makes a good point, and I wholly agree. As our whole nation loses out on the stifled energy, talent and creativity of so many people held back by not having a secure home where they can put down roots and flourish, it is ever clearer that the magic of the invi…”

“I fully agree that council housing is essential to meeting the housing crisis that we face, and I hope that we will hear ambitious remarks from the Minister. The question is not simply how much housing is built, but the type of housing built and for whom. As has been referenced, more than 1.3 million households in Engl…”

“I speak in support of the Bill and in favour of new clause 22 in my name. We can now say in complete confidence that the privatisation and deregulation of our bus services has been a catastrophic failure for rural towns and villages such as those across North East Hertfordshire. Decades of dogmatic adherence to flawed …”

“Given the unanimity of feeling in the Chamber today on the importance of BNO visas and the uncertainty that the consultation is creating, will the Minister put it on record that he recognises that uncertainty, and that it will be foremost in his mind as he develops policy going forward?”

“I thank the Minister for his answers, and I fully agree that there can be no place for violence in our politics. However, does he accept that elderly retired priests and disabled veterans would not be protesting in the way they are if they genuinely believed that Palestine Action was a similar organisation to ISIS or a…”

“The current drafting of national planning policy is allowing developers to ride roughshod over local democracy, imposing completely inappropriate bolt-on estates to market towns such as Buntingford and Royston, while wholly failing to deliver the genuinely affordable housing that we need. It is difficult to imagine a s…”

“My final set of questions picks up specifically what you have just said, Ms Bradley. You have talked about how no one is measuring this properly. As a layperson, is that perhaps because it is a more diffuse problem and harder to track in the way that you can just go to a sewage outflow, or perhaps I am missing somethin…”

“For the sake of the record of the Committee and for any of our viewers, could you perhaps provide a bit of detail on the impact of sewage pollution as compared to pollution from our roads and what that is doing to our waterways?”

“I thought, Ms Bradley and Ms Moncrieff, I would begin by highlighting a news story that caught my attention recently. You may well be aware of recent reports in the press of chronic contamination of chalk streams by microplastics. Thousands of tonnes of these pollutants are entering our surface waters from tyre wear ev…”

“I also find in my constituency that the cost of a decent home is far too high for far too many of my constituents. Does my hon. Friend agree that the solution to that problem is not, as is believed in some quarters, to give the developers the right to strip away our environment and destroy nature, but rather to get on …”

“Those are all very legitimate points. My question was about whether you think that the presumption in favour of sustainable development is currently being used to allow such developments to go ahead. You have just said you want to move to a system that does not see such developments or minimises them. You quite rightly…”

“I think that is very clear. I will try one final time: are you confident that the current presumption in favour of sustainable development is only allowing sustainable developments to proceed, or do you have any concerns that unsustainable developments are being approved on the basis of that presumption?”

“How would you respond to the view put to this Committee by Professor Scott of Northumbria University, that the NPPF should explicitly incorporate the UN sustainable development goals in its definition of sustainable development?”

“That is a perfectly legitimate question to ask.”

“I will give you a specific example of a small market town, Buntingford, in my constituency—I apologise for it being parochial—which is currently subject to numerous hostile speculative housing applications that are leading to large, car-dependent, bolt-on estates far from the infrastructure and amenities that you have …”

“Thank you for putting that on the record. I am sure the Professor understands that as well.”

“Minister Pennycook, in this inquiry we have received a notable number of comments in written evidence highlighting concerns about the absence of an official definition of sustainable development in the most recently revised NPPF. How would you define sustainable development?”