Speeches by Irons.

“On that point about making an economic choice, we are talking about the creative industries, which are worth hundreds of billions of pounds to our economy. Ensuring we have a diverse voice and qualified people in those jobs and having access to those skills is really important. I was a working-class child who ended up …”

“Will the hon. Member give way?”

“I wanted to intervene on the point about principles, content and responsibility. I worked for Channel 4 before I came to this place, and we were regulated by Ofcom. Channel 4 did not create its own content, but was responsible for the editorialisation of that content. It was beholden to certain standards. Does she agre…”

“I am new to this place and clearly still learning, but I am wondering why, in that case, measures on designing out at source the harms that the hon. Member is talking about were watered down in the Online Safety Bill. She is absolutely right: we are creating online worlds, and they should be designed to be safe. Just a…”

“I sincerely thank the hon. Lady for giving way. When we talk about the consultation, it is not necessarily about seeking consensus in this place; it is about seeking consensus with parents and children, and with people outside this place. Banning social media for children is a good approach, but this is not just about …”

“I thank the Minister for the decisive action that he took over the recent Grok incident. Given the scope of the consultation and the fact that we are talking about online harms, I want to flag the issue we have around content on YouTube, which is a video-sharing platform, not necessarily a social media platform. The ty…”

“I appreciate the hon. Member’s concerns. My constituency is an outer-London borough that has long been deemed as having inner-London support through finance, and it has inner-London problems—it is not particularly leafy, and deprivation is tough and takes a massive toll on our councils. Does he understand that addressi…”

“I join colleagues in thanking the Secretary of State and the Minister for Local Government for their work on this matter. We talk about outdated data; places like my Croydon East constituency, in an outer-London borough, have been treated as though we have an endless pot of cash, or are endlessly wealthy. However, my c…”

“I want to add my voice on this point. In Croydon, we find ourselves in a similar situation, in that inner London boroughs put their children into our part of London because the housing is slightly cheaper. I also have constituents who have faced exactly the situation that my hon. Friend outlined: being threatened with …”

“rose—”

“Just to pick up on the point around developers, what are we doing to ensure that people are not just buying these sites and letting them decay? There is nothing worse for a community to see than a heritage site bought and left to rot into the ground. If we have 670,000 homes sitting out there and developers are land-ba…”

“I used to be a local councillor so I understand how terrible planning departments can be. They are decimated, and it has become harder and harder, so scaling up those people is really great. But you said you hope that they would have those skills. Could we not just ensure that they did if we are now on lining a whole n…”

“When you are looking at the whole estate and thinking strategically about how you are going to protect and reuse these sites, is housing a priority in those discussions?”

“Sorry, just so I understand, your process of thinking is: can this be used, is it necessary to keep it for Government use—obviously, once you sell off a piece of estate you cannot really get it back—and then the next step is to look at disposal. Are you giving greater weight to projects that have housing as a focus or …”

“That prevents the developer from making their money back until they have done the hard graft.”

“The kick-off question I had was more broadly, if it is not a publicly owned building, but it is a heritage building, what kind of pots of funding are available to developers or groups locally that want to repurpose a historic building for housing?”

“We are going to talk about the One Public Estate, but at the moment just what the Government own.”

“You said there is a potential for 670,000 homes just by repurposing heritage sites?”

“Given the 1.5 million target and given where these locations are because they will be in communities that probably very much need these properties, is enough priority being given to repurposing these sites for housing? Do you think there is enough weight and focus in Government to repurpose these sites?”

“I am going to move on to housing and the role that these sorts of sites can play in helping the Government reach its ambitions to tackle the housing crisis. What Government funding is available to help achieve the Government’s wider plans to increase housing supply by enabling the reuse of historic assets?”