April 2026

I completely agree that we must ensure that women and trans people feel safe and are protected from harassment. We will treat everyone with the dignity and respect they deserve, because those are our values, and that is made clear in the Equality Act 2010. We have also been clear that we expect duty bearers to follow the Supreme Court ruling, and to seek legal advice where necessary. I recently received an updated code of practice from the EHRC. I am grateful to it for its work. My intention is

My message to nurses and to anyone working in our NHS is that they deserve dignity at work. They deserve to be treated with respect, and they should not face abuse, intimidation or harassment. We have seen some shocking cases, and that is completely unacceptable. The right hon. Lady will appreciate that the regulator is independent of Government. It is independent for a reason, and that is the right approach. She will also know that the code of practice that I intend to lay before Parliament doe

No one should face pressure or undue influence around their voting behaviour; let me be absolutely clear on that point. But let me also be clear to the House that I am fed up to the back teeth of Opposition politicians coming here time and again to sow division across our country. I am proud of the tolerant, compassionate and respectful nation that we are, and the shadow Justice Secretary should have been sacked for his shocking and shameful racist comments against Muslims in our country.

I thank my hon. Friend for her important question. She will appreciate, I am sure, that I cannot comment on the draft code of practice, but I want to reassure the House that trans people will continue to be protected from discrimination under the Equality Act. We will not treat this issue as a political football, as many others have done in the past. As I set out in earlier answers, I intend to lay the draft code before Parliament as soon as possible, once we are through the election period.

I absolutely accept that. Again, in that spirit of being non-tribal, the hon. Gentleman will know the number of times that his party and other parties have talked about the 14 years in which we had opportunities to fix things that we did not fix, so he will appreciate that the Liberal Democrats in Waverley have had seven years to fix the issue and have failed to do so. That is why so many people from Waverley are looking at this debate carefully. But he is correct to say that all councils have t

That is quite an unusual thing to be told by the Chair, Mr Turner. I thank you for chairing this important debate and I thank all hon. Members present for some excellent contributions. I particularly want to thank my neighbour and hon. Friend the Member for Farnham and Bordon (Gregory Stafford) for his tenacious campaigning on this issue on behalf of my former constituents in Farnham and Haslemere. He made an excellent contribution. I also want to thank the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Me

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that residents need redress. I will simply place on the record again that the nature of the errors or mistakes in charging can be different from one authority to another, which was very much the case with West Berkshire, where the nature of the charges being made wrongly was a different procedural error and therefore a different remedy could be applied. I hope that, in the spirit of being non-tribal with which he began this debate, he will accept that

The amount of flexibility that can be exercised depends on the nature of the error in the process that is being discussed, so not every council can operate the same redress in the same situation. The hon. Gentleman confirms that it was a Conservative administration that drew up the CIL charging schedule, the forms and all the processes that underlie and guide—in fact, not just guide but narrowly dictate—how the council exercises control over CIL. Where the hon. Gentleman is right is that the rul

My hon. Friend is absolutely right that the Government should do that. There have been opportunities to do something about this; there are opportunities to change the law. He seems to have read the later part of my speech, and is quite right to mention our hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Mr Dillon), who not only made that point in respect of that Bill but brought it to the attention of the Select Committee last year. Liberal Democrats in Parliament have been trying to get resolution and a ch

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. He makes the excellent suggestion that not only should we have guidance, but the regulations themselves need to be changed, in many of the ways that other hon. Members have already mentioned.

Since I last raised the subject of suicides after domestic abuse, the domestic abuse homicide project has reported on the previous 12 months and seen a significant rise in cases. This morning, I held a roundtable with some of the organisations campaigning to ensure that suicides in cases of domestic abuse are investigated from the outset as homicides, and they all agreed that action is needed now. One small change that they said would make an important difference is requiring police officers to

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Turner. I congratulate the right hon. Member for Godalming and Ash (Sir Jeremy Hunt) on bringing this important and overdue consideration of CIL to Westminster Hall. We have heard some powerful contributions, and it is clear that there is a widespread and serious problem. Families are facing bills of £40,000 to £70,000—in some cases over £200,000—for what often amounts to a missing form. That is an awful and unacceptable situation, and it can b

I absolutely agree with my right hon. Friend, who has much more experience of the housing sector than I do. He will know that countries like France—not very far away—that have been much more successful than us in building more houses also have a flourishing small builder sector. In this country, because of the enormous costs involved in the planning process and often the land, it is much harder for small builders to get involved. Of course, one of the other advantages of small builders is that t

The hon. Member is absolutely right, and he is foreshadowing what I will propose as one of the solutions to this issue: that homeowners should be excluded from the potential ambit of CIL altogether, because that was not its intention. It is a loophole that is being exploited, and I hope to explain why some councils have been so keen to exploit that loophole. We need to remove the root cause if we are going to deal with this issue.

I thank the hon. Member; he always makes very thoughtful contributions. He makes two very important points. The first is that we do need developers to contribute towards infrastructure costs. The risk of the appalling injustice that I am drawing attention to today is that we lose social consent for very important contributions that enable much-needed infrastructure to be built. Secondly, he is absolutely right to say that not having CIL at all would be very bad. In my area in particular, there i

Here we go again, Mr Speaker. I note that an investigation by a King’s counsel into the hon. Gentleman’s conduct concluded that there was “credible evidence” that he had mistreated two female team members in a way that seemed “to amount to harassment”. I do not want to hear anything from him about violence against women and girls or harassment.

Q12. This Labour Government have backed the reopening of Doncaster Sheffield airport from the very start. It means jobs, investment, growth and opportunity, not just for Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme, but for the whole region. Reform councillors in Doncaster are considering reversing their decision to support the investment that would currently facilitate the airport’s reopening. Does the Prime Minister agree with me that the airport remains a huge priority for the area, and will he con

Parliamentary appearance by Matthew Pennycook

I beg to move, That this House has considered the impact of the Community Infrastructure Levy on private homeowners. Thank you, Mr Turner, for presiding over this debate on an issue that is having profound life-changing consequences for ordinary families across the country. I also thank the Minister for his interest in the issue. Politics can be very tribal, but I have already met him twice to discuss it, both times with Councillor Jane Austin from my constituency—once in July last year and once

Before we leave the House for several weeks, I feel it is absolutely necessary to raise an issue in my constituency, about which I have been trying to get an answer from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and from the Environment Agency. We have a landfill site in Calne that is producing a sulphurous smell that is causing residents to need to close their windows and leading to children with sore throats, but I am not getting answer except that the Environment Agency itself ad