argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Airports National Policy Statement Review — House of Commons, 2020-03-12
Topic: Mixed Topics
David Timothy Simmonds (Conservative, Centre-right): I apologise for my earlier mistiming, Mr Speaker Does my hon. Friend agree that, as well as digesting what I agree are the complex implications of that judgment, she could take this opportunity to consider the report by the New Economic Foundation, entitled "Baggage Claim"? That report debunks many of the received wisdoms about the value to the UK economy of Heathrow expansion, and sets out in detail the economic opportunities created by regional expansion, especially in terms of levelling-up, which is a clear commitment of this Government.
Topical Questions — House of Commons, 2020-03-12
Topic: Mixed Topics
Questions: Greater Anglia, which runs the trains round our way, is currently introducing a £1.4 billion fleet of brand new trains—very good. Among other benefits, that will support the local economy and tackle social exclusion. However, the great eastern main line needs to be upgraded quickly. What steps is the Department taking to ensure that key upgrades, such as the Bow junction remodelling, extra loops between Chelmsford and Colchester, and the provision of digital signalling, are delivered within the next five to 10 years?; The A68 runs from the town of Darlington all the way up to Edinburgh and through five constituencies in the north of England, including mine. Given that 30% of its use is from heavy goods vehicles, will the Secretary of State consider Transport for the North’s recommendation that it becomes part of the strategic road network?; A recent survey of social media found that the M56 was the most complained about motorway in the whole country. Junctions 12 to 14 are a complete bottleneck, causing regular accidents and frustration for local people, so I hope that the Minister will be able to confirm that among the many announcements yesterday, those junctions on the M56 will also get some investment.; At a recent community event in Middlewich organised by Redeeming Our Communities, one of the loudest calls from young people was for improved bus services in the town. What support can the Government give to help to facilitate that?; Yesterday’s Budget provided no further clarity on the £350 million for cycling that the Prime Minister mentioned on 11 February. As a consequence, from the start of next month, local authorities outside London have nothing earmarked for their local cycling and walking infrastructure plans. Will the Minister explain why cyclists were forgotten in yesterday’s Budget?; A short-sighted decision by Transport for Greater Manchester and Stagecoach to scrap the 375 bus service, serving my constituents in Mellor and Hawk Green, has been met with dismay. Will my hon. Friend, the excellent Minister, meet me urgently so that we can maintain this important service and keep the wheels on the 375 bus going round and round?; I was pleased to hear the Chancellor announce a new £500 million a year pothole-filling programme in yesterday’s Budget. Will the Secretary of State commit to ensuring that this funding is targeted and gets to local authorities as quickly as possible, and will he confirm that the Government will work to improve the conditions of roads in Stafford?
Grant Shapps (Conservative, Centre-right): I am sure my hon. Friend was pleased by the £500 million a year—£2.5 billion in total, which is more than the £2 billion promised in our manifesto—to help fill potholes, and I look forward to working with her and other colleagues to ensure their potholes are filled as soon as possible.
Planning for the Future — House of Commons, 2020-03-12
Topic: Housing
Richard Michael Bacon (Conservative, Centre-right): Even if the shadow Secretary of State does not, may I warmly welcome the new money for affordable housing? I ask the Secretary of State to make sure that some of it finds its way to innovators such as the National Community Land Trust Network and the Right to Build Task Force, because the new ideas that will help us to change our whole approach to how we do housing are coming from them.
Planning for the Future — House of Commons, 2020-03-12
Topic: Housing
Robert Edward Jenrick (Conservative, Centre-right): I do support groups such as community housing organisations—I know my hon. Friend has an Adjournment debate later today to which the Minister for Housing, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tamworth (Christopher Pincher) will respond—and we want to ensure that they are properly resourced to take that forward. We want to help smaller communities, particularly in rural areas, to build small numbers of homes—five, 10, 15, whatever might be appropriate for their community—through rural exception sites and the other things he has championed over the years, such as self-building. We will bring forward more measures in the White Paper to help facilitate that.
Planning for the Future — House of Commons, 2020-03-12
Topic: Housing
Robert Edward Jenrick (Conservative, Centre-right): I will pay close attention to all those points. Everything the hon. Member listed is within the scope of the planning White Paper, and I would welcome his views and those of the members of his Committee. In reviewing local housing need, we will take account of the need to level up and rebalance the economy, both geographically, from the south to the north, and between areas—for example, by trying to ensure that cities that have depopulated in our lifetime can have more homes built in them to get people and families back into and living in some of our great cities where sadly fewer people are living now than 20 or 30 years ago. I welcome the work he did on the building safety fund, and I hope this will now make a significant difference in helping leaseholders, particularly in private buildings, move forward. We have also opened it up to the social sector, because some housing associations, particularly small ones, and some smaller councils do not have the finances readily available or the ability to borrow to do the work now required. This fund will be open to them to do that, so money should not be a barrier to their moving forward with the remediation works required.
Planning for the Future — House of Commons, 2020-03-12
Topic: Housing
John Michael Howell (Conservative, Centre-right): As the Secretary of State is aware, I have been much involved in reform of the planning system under previous Governments, and I urge him to be radical when he produces his White Paper. I am glad he has retained his commitment to involve local communities. Strengthening the role of neighbourhood plans against the problems put in their way by district councils would be a very good way of taking that forward.
Planning for the Future — House of Commons, 2020-03-12
Topic: Housing
Robert Edward Jenrick (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend raises an important point. There is evidence that some local plans have been undermined and that the hard work put in by local communities has not reaped the benefits those areas would have liked—they can spend years creating plans only to see development happening on other sites, not those they have chosen themselves. We are reviewing that, taking examples from across the country where we think that has happened and trying to learn lesson from it, and I hope that will feed into our work and create a strengthened plan-making system in the future.
Planning for the Future — House of Commons, 2020-03-12
Topic: Housing
Robert Edward Jenrick (Conservative, Centre-right): We are committed to a green revolution in the housing industry. We are doing that in many different ways, most notably through the future homes standard, which we have just consulted on. We have received more than 3,000 responses and will bring forward our final proposals shortly. We have consulted on a substantial reduction in CO2 emissions in new homes of between 75% and 80%. I do not want to pre-empt what we might choose to do, having listened to the views in the consultation. However, the evidence that we saw prior to the consultation was that that was the most credible reduction in CO2 emissions that we could deliver across the whole of the country, although some parts could go further and faster if they chose to do so. We are listening to the responses, and I want to see the industry respond, change and have much higher levels of energy efficiency and to see new heating systems come in as quickly as possible.
Planning for the Future — House of Commons, 2020-03-12
Topic: Housing
Kevin Paul Hollinrake (Conservative, Centre-right): I welcome my right hon. Friend’s statement. Supply alone will not solve all the affordability problems in the housing market. It will require intervention, such as his excellent First Homes initiative. Will he consider extending that initiative to directly commissioning first homes on public land and perhaps combining First Homes with Help to Buy to further improve the affordability of home purchase?
Planning for the Future — House of Commons, 2020-03-12
Topic: Housing
Robert Edward Jenrick (Conservative, Centre-right): That is a very interesting idea, and one that I will give careful thought to. My hon. Friend and I worked together on the creation of First Homes, and I am very grateful for his views on that. He is absolutely right that this will require both supply and demand-side reforms. That is why the planning system is so important in unlocking more land in the places where people want to live, but it is also important to have ways of getting people on to the housing ladder, and First Homes is just one of those options. It will enable people in their local area to get 30% discounts on new homes. I recently met the major house builders, who are fully supportive, and I hope that we will see those homes on the market in this country by the end of the year.
Planning for the Future — House of Commons, 2020-03-12
Topic: Housing
Robert Edward Jenrick (Conservative, Centre-right): I completely agree with the hon. Gentleman, and I hope that that is what he took away from the tone and substance of my earlier remarks. In reviewing the planning system and how we calculate local housing need, we will be trying to push development towards urban areas and existing clusters, and away from needless urban sprawl and the ruination of the countryside. We will be using the planning system to encourage that. Some of the planning freedoms, for example, will help people in their everyday lives, allowing them to extend their own properties or build upwards on their homes, and allow entrepreneurs to buy derelict, disused buildings and turn them into housing, to get housing going in towns and cities at a pace that we have not seen for many years.
Planning for the Future — House of Commons, 2020-03-12
Topic: Housing
Robert John Blackman (Conservative, Centre-right): On Monday, the Select Committee on Housing, Communities and Local Government heard some rather extraordinary claims from certain London councils about the cost of building council homes in London. My right hon. Friend’s announcement and the Budget are an excellent start on building new council homes. Can he set out how many council homes he expects to see and what safeguards he will put in place to ensure that those council homes can be brought under the right to buy and that the receipts from right to buy are then reinvested in new housing?
Planning for the Future — House of Commons, 2020-03-12
Topic: Housing
Robert Edward Jenrick (Conservative, Centre-right): The new affordable homes programme, which we announced yesterday, will be over £12 billion. We have not yet finalised the details, but will set them out shortly. They will show the proportion of those homes that will be for different tenures, from shared ownership and affordable rent to social rent. We want a significant increase in the number of those homes in the social rent category. I hope we can make a positive announcement on that shortly, when we have finalised the details, having spoken to and listened to the sector I am very sympathetic to the argument that my hon. Friend has made in the past about properties that are not eligible for right to buy and, indeed, about some councils and housing associations that are making it more difficult. I would like to work with him to take action on that. We need to ensure that the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, takes housing seriously. As I have said before, we will never be able to meet our housing targets and ambitions as a country unless London pulls its weight, and I am afraid that at the moment we have a Mayor whose ambitions are way below what we should all be expecting at every level of the market. As long as he continues in place, which I hope is not for very much longer, the Mayor needs to get building in London.
Planning for the Future — House of Commons, 2020-03-12
Topic: Housing
Robert Edward Jenrick (Conservative, Centre-right): The hon. Lady will know as a follower of Treasury matters that what we announced yesterday in the Budget with reform of the Public Works Loan Board makes it cheaper for councils to borrow to invest in housing and regeneration. I hope that she will support the changes that we made. The changes we are making to the PWLB will make it harder for councils to waste money on speculative investments outside of their boundaries and get highly indebted, and make it easier to spend money on things that really matter. We have lifted the housing revenue account borrowing cap, and many councils across the country are responding to that and building council houses at a pace that we have not seen for many years, as was reflected in the statistics I gave earlier. We built more council houses last year than we have done for many years, and I hope that her local council in Oxford will do the same, if that is what she wishes.
Planning for the Future — House of Commons, 2020-03-12
Topic: Housing
Lucy Allan (Conservative, Centre-right): I warmly welcome my right hon. Friend’s statement. It is absolutely right that we look afresh at the planning system, and I am so glad that he is doing just that. My right hon. Friend knows a great deal about the challenges that new-build housing can create for existing communities as well as for owners. What more can he do to ensure that developers properly consider the rights and needs of local communities, as well as of the new build home owners, which are often impacted by their behaviours?
Planning for the Future — House of Commons, 2020-03-12
Topic: Housing
Robert Edward Jenrick (Conservative, Centre-right): Quality is extremely important, and we have seen evidence of poor-quality development in this country in recent years, including by some of the most prominent house builders. That needs to change, and if we are going to reform the planning system to make it easier to build, then house builders must respond in turn by ensuring that homes are well designed, safe and environmentally sustainable. My hon. Friend has seen examples of poor practice in Telford and has campaigned on that. We are placing the new homes ombudsman on a statutory footing, and that will ensure that anyone who purchased a home has a proper system for redress if the usual complaints mechanism of the house builder does not suffice. I hope that that will see a big change in the quality of output from house builders very rapidly.
Planning for the Future — House of Commons, 2020-03-12
Topic: Housing
Robert Edward Jenrick (Conservative, Centre-right): There are sites like that in all parts of the country. It requires good local councils and, perhaps in this case, the Mayor of London, to get involved and to help unlock the land for development. I appreciate that there can be complexities in many cases, not least with illegal waste sites, for example. We created a fund in the last Budget to tackle that—a £20 million fund that perhaps the hon. Lady would consider bidding into. We announced in this Budget a £400 million fund to unlock brownfield sites, and that will be available for ambitious Mayors and local councils across the country to bid into very shortly. I hope that she will take us up on that.
Planning for the Future — House of Commons, 2020-03-12
Topic: Housing
Richard Quentin Fuller (Conservative, Centre-right): I welcome the wide-ranging initiatives in the statement, particularly the potential for four development corporations on the Oxford-Cambridge arc. My right hon. Friend will be aware of the pressures on public access to public services, particularly GPs, where there are significant increases in housing demand, especially in my constituency. Will those development corporations have specific accountability for filling gaps in access to public services? If not, what measures will he take to ensure that there is better co-ordination?
Planning for the Future — House of Commons, 2020-03-12
Topic: Housing
Robert Edward Jenrick (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend understands this issue well and has represented two constituencies with very serious affordability issues, but where there is also a great opportunity to build housing. We need to ensure that that is done in a very sensitive way and that the infrastructure flows with the new housing. That is the objective of creating the development corporations, which will be partnerships between the local community and the Government, and we hope that this will be well planned, environmentally sustainable, good quality, beautiful housing and that the services—GP surgeries, schools, roads, utilities—flow with the housing and meet the demands. I really hope that I can work with all of those communities to ensure that they are great successes.
Planning for the Future — House of Commons, 2020-03-12
Topic: Housing
Robert Edward Jenrick (Conservative, Centre-right): I welcome the work my right hon. Friend the Housing Minister has done on this issue, and I will take that away. We want to work progressively with all the stakeholders. We have built an effective operation on ACM above 18 metres in recent months. We have named contacts for all the buildings, and all, bar a very small number, now have plans to remediate. By opening the fund’s scope much more widely to other dangerous materials above 18 metres, we will have to put in place the same procedures for those materials to understand exactly where the buildings are, to understand who are the right people to work with us and to make sure that work is tendered for and that workers get on site as quickly as possible. That will be a very complex piece of work. At the moment, it can take up to six months to get workers on site to do ACM remediation, and some projects can take up to two years to complete. I do not underestimate the scale of the challenge, but I am keen to work with anybody who is interested to make sure it begins as quickly as possible.
Planning for the Future — House of Commons, 2020-03-12
Topic: Housing
John Henry Hayes (Conservative, Centre-right): A sense of place informs our personal and communal sense of worth. As one of those who served on the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, I welcome this statement and, in particular, the Secretary of State’s commitment to a fast track for beauty. In considering these matters, will he also look at sprawl and out-of-town and edge-of-town developments, both in retail and housing? If we can revitalise and rejuvenate our town centres, it will refresh the spirit of our people.
Planning for the Future — House of Commons, 2020-03-12
Topic: Housing
Robert Edward Jenrick (Conservative, Centre-right): My right hon. Friend is heavily involved in the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, and I commend its superb report to anyone interested in these issues. One point it raises, which we will now be taking forward, is the need to mitigate against the urban sprawl and the damage to the countryside we have seen over the past 50 or 60 years and more The answer to that is gentle density in urban areas, building upwards where appropriate—perhaps where there are existing clusters of high-rise buildings—and, building gently where building upwards is not appropriate. There are plenty of examples in the report of where that can be done in an attractive way that local communities could support. We need to ensure more homes are built in our town centres and around our high streets. The high streets and town centres fund that we have created through the £3.6 billion towns fund provides funding to many parts of the country to do exactly that.
Planning for the Future — House of Commons, 2020-03-12
Topic: Housing
Robert Edward Jenrick (Conservative, Centre-right): All those things need to happen. We are undergoing the greatest change in our building safety regime in most of our lifetimes. That will take time and will require a significant change in the culture of the industry. The new regime, which is now being established in shadow form and will be legislated for later this year, will place new duties on those involved in the construction industry and on those responsible for looking after buildings once they have been built An individual or entity will be criminally responsible for safety, from the moment construction begins, throughout a building’s occupation, many years into the future. That will be managed through our building safety regulator, which will sit within the Health and Safety Executive. The HSE has a lot of experience in this field and has seen significant changes and improvements in safety in other fields, such as oil and gas, in our lifetime.
Planning for the Future — House of Commons, 2020-03-12
Topic: Housing
Angela Joy Richardson (Conservative, Centre-right): To keep families together and strengthen our communities in Guildford and Cranleigh, it is vital that we can ensure we have the right homes in the right place at the right price. What plans does my right hon. Friend have to make it easier for people to get on the housing ladder in their local area?
Planning for the Future — House of Commons, 2020-03-12
Topic: Housing
Robert Edward Jenrick (Conservative, Centre-right): Part of the answer is building more homes in the places where they are most in demand. That will be at the heart of the reforms we will bring forward, and my hon. Friend represents an area that is in great demand. Some of the freedoms that we are encouraging—to build upwards gently and to reimagine town centres and high streets—will ensure that more homes are built sensitively in places such as Guildford, but we are also bringing forward a fleet of policies to help home ownership. One of them is our First Homes policy, which will enable local first-time buyers in her area to get a 30% discount on their first home. We are also looking at long-term fixed-rate mortgages, so that it is much cheaper and more certain when you are taking out your first mortgage. Of course, the Help to Buy scheme and our existing home ownership schemes have helped more than 600,000 first-time buyers on to the housing ladder since 2010.
Planning for the Future — House of Commons, 2020-03-12
Topic: Housing
Robert Edward Jenrick (Conservative, Centre-right): We will publish shortly the exact details of the new scheme, but it is our intention that it will be available for both the private and social sectors and that this will encompass all unsafe materials above 18 metres for what are commonly considered high-rise buildings. I would like it to include those buildings that are just below 18 metres, because there are some buildings where there has been a gaming of the system by some developers, such as the building in Bolton, for example, that was 17.8 metres. There will be a small degree of flexibility to resolve that issue, and this should enable no leaseholder to be trapped in their building. The funding should be available for all who require it, and, as I say, in the social sector it will be available to the relatively small number, but an important number, of housing associations and councils that do not have the resources available to do the work themselves.