Commons
Ministerial Statement
29 January 2026
Women’s State Pension Age Communication: PHSO Report
I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement.
As constituency MPs, we will all have met many campaigners from the Women Against State Pension Inequality campaign group—the WASPI women. I am sure that many Members will have received a large amount of correspondence on this matte…
Commons
Committee Stage
29 January 2026
8 contributions
Finance (No. 2) Bill (Fourth sitting)
It is great to hear the Minister talking about making the City of London a pre-eminent place in which to grow and list companies, and this is a very welcome measure. However, if he accepts that stamp duty is what has been holding back the listing of shares, why do the Government not go the whole hog…
The Minister talks about value for money and the cost, but the alternative is that there will be no listings, so it does not cost anything because this is revenue that the Government would not otherwise have. If they levy this stamp duty, people will not list—they will go to other markets. If they r…
+6 more contributions in this session
Commons
Westminster Hall
28 January 2026
Firearms Licence Holders: Mandatory Medical Markers
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making those really important points. I am the chairman of the British Shooting Sports Council, which brings together 15 leading shooting sports organisations, and an enthusiastic shooter, and I wholeheartedly agree with him. I have yet to find anybody who disagre…
Commons
Oral Questions
Work and Pensions
26 January 2026
State Pension Age Changes: Compensation
Thank you, Mr Speaker—I had better add my sympathies for your poor leg to those of the hon. Member for Harlow (Chris Vince).
The Labour party has performed, frankly, a spectacular U-turn on its support for WASPI women, but now it finds itself bogged down in judicial reviews and accusations of incom…
Commons
Debate
21 January 2026
6 contributions
National Insurance Contributions (Employer Pensions Contributions) Bill
I beg to move amendment 5, page 1, line 10, after “income tax” insert—
“at the higher or additional rate”.
This amendment would exempt basic rate taxpayers in England, Wales and Scotland from the £2,000 cap.
It is a great pleasure to be with you yet again, Ms Nokes. I enjoyed our last sparring with the Pensions Minister just before Christmas, which cheered us up to no end.
Let me speak to amendments 5, 7, 6 and 8 as well as new clause 4, which all stand in my name. It will not surprise the Pensions Min…
+4 more contributions in this session
Commons
Westminster Hall
7 January 2026
2 contributions
Bromsgrove: Local Government
My hon. Friend and Worcestershire neighbour is making a strong argument about the risks of a north-south divide, in which the north could be subsumed under a greater Birmingham. That is a very important point. Is he as surprised as I am that, of the district and city councils across Worcestershire, …
My hon. Friend has been very indulgent of me. I suspect one interesting point was not taken into account by the survey. That would be the fantastic cost of splitting up all the county-wide services, which range from adult and children’s social care to waste disposal. To divide that into two and then…
Commons
Debate
17 December 2025
3 contributions
National Insurance Contributions (Employer Pensions Contributions) Bill
I have to say that it is a joy to yet again be locking horns with the Pensions Minister on a topic that is important to us all: saving for our retirement. And it is important to note that there are many things that we agree on. We all acknowledge there is an impending issue with pension adequacy: wh…
Absolutely. The Government are really keen to get people to save for their futures and then they do everything they can to try to stop them doing that. The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. We are just going to kick another problem down the road. By the way, when the Minister talks about hip repla…
+1 more contribution in this session
Commons
Oral Questions
9 December 2025
Financial Inclusion Strategy
In the recently published financial inclusion strategy, the Government state:
“Our aim is to create a culture in which everyone is supported to build a savings habit, building their financial resilience in the long term.”
What is not to like about that, Mr Speaker? But that makes the Chancellor’s …
Commons
Oral Questions
Work and Pensions
8 December 2025
2 contributions
Topical Questions
The Chancellor’s Budget put a cap on salary sacrifice for pension savers at just £2,000. That was to raise an extra £4.8 billion in 2029, and it will affect 3.3 million savers and 290,000 employers. What research has the Pensions Minister done to understand and quantify the negative effects that thi…
Well, it was not us who put it in place; it was Labour.
This policy hits the private sector disproportionately: 14 times as many people save through salary sacrifice in the private sector as they do in the public sector. Whether it is kite-flying about lump sum withdrawal or taxing inherited pensio…
Commons
Debate
26 November 2025
Budget Resolutions
While we are talking about bonds, does my hon. Friend agree that, given the fact that we have an unusually large amount of index-linked gilts in the market and inflation is running at a higher rate than it was when Labour came to power, the cost of paying off the debt is going up at a disproportiona…
Commons
Westminster Hall
26 November 2025
Young People not in Education, Employment or Training
It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I add my congratulations to the hon. Member for Amber Valley (Linsey Farnsworth) on bringing this important debate to Westminster Hall.
Conservatives are the party of aspiration. We believe that work is not just a payslip; it is a pa…
Commons
Westminster Hall
13 November 2025
7 contributions
Rogue Builders
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the matter of protecting consumers from rogue builders.
I am conscious that we may have to go off for multiple votes before half-past 4, so I will crack on with what was going to be 45 minutes of the most magnificent speech—I will abridge it to just 42…
I will talk about that in my speech. The fundamental problem is that, at the moment, the only course of redress is through the court system, and it is not good enough.
The FMB does a lot of work in this area, and it is worth looking at some of its statistics. Thirty-seven per cent of customers repo…
+5 more contributions in this session
Commons
Debate
12 November 2025
3 contributions
Taxes
The OBR?
Even the Lib Dems agreed with the OBR. Danny Alexander agreed with the OBR. I will stop chuntering now.
+1 more contribution in this session
Commons
Petition
11 November 2025
Planning applications in Stourport-on-Severn
I rise to present a petition on behalf of over 600 of my constituents in Stourport-on-Severn in Wyre Forest whose lives and services are being adversely affected by unwelcome development in the neighbouring Malvern Hills district council. Because Malvern Hills district council has no local plan, the…
Commons
Ministerial Statement
11 November 2025
Pensions
I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement. As he rightly says, this is an important, albeit technical, statement, and we in the Opposition certainly accept the contents and the spirit in which it is given. It is about a legal process, and we respect that.
This relates to a m…
Commons
Oral Questions
4 November 2025
Banking Services: Rural Areas
In this month of blaming everyone else for every woe that befalls the Government and using it as an excuse to bust manifesto pledges left, right and centre, it seems that the Government are claiming credit for more banking hubs, but we all know that the rolling out of banking hubs is a purely commer…
Commons
Oral Questions
Work and Pensions
27 October 2025
Access to Work Scheme
Back in May last year, while in opposition, the Labour party was outraged to learn that the average processing time for applications to the Access to Work programme was running at 43.9 days. In fact, so outraged were Labour Members that they made it a manifesto pledge to tackle that problem. After m…
Commons
Statutory Instrument
22 October 2025
Draft Financial Services (Overseas Recognition Regime Designations) Regulations 2025
We welcome the general thrust of the regulations, which are all about the internationalisation of our financial services market, continuing our moving on from a post-Brexit Britain. I was not a fan of Brexit, but we are where we are. It is incredibly important that our financial services centre rema…
Commons
Westminster Hall
21 October 2025
2 contributions
Co-operative Sector: Government Support
It is a great pleasure to serve under your leadership, Mr Turner. I add my congratulations to the hon. Member for Oldham West, Chadderton and Royton (Jim McMahon) on securing this important debate, in which there seems to have been an outbreak of unanimity around the Chamber. As I start my remarks, …
It is not in her gift, as she says from a sedentary position, but it is quite interesting. Notwithstanding the £17 billion black hole in Thames Water’s balance sheet, the water utilities are very geographically prescribed and millions of people use them, so they have a built-in membership. The most …
Commons
Oral Questions
Treasury
9 September 2025
Financial Services Reform
I also congratulate the hon. Member on her elevation to Economic Secretary to the Treasury; I am sure she will do very well.
The UK banking sector provides a valuable service to our economy, keeping money in circulation, funding business and mortgages and all the rest of it. The financial services …
Commons
Oral Questions
1 September 2025
Pension Credit Uptake
Thanks to our Conservative winter fuel payments campaign, thousands of pensioners have signed up to pension credit, and millions more pensioners will receive winter fuel allowance, now that the Labour party has admitted that its policy on winter fuel payments was wrong. However, the Social Security …
Commons
Ministerial Statement
16 July 2025
Financial Services Reform
I am very grateful to the Minister for advance sight of her statement. There is much in these Leeds reforms—many of which were formerly known as the Edinburgh reforms—that can be welcomed, and some of the details were laid out by the Chancellor in her Mansion House speech last night.
The Conservati…
Commons
Westminster Hall
16 July 2025
2 contributions
Credit Unions
It is always a great pleasure to serve under you, Mr Twigg, and I apologise for nearly knocking you over on my bicycle first thing this morning.
Thank goodness I was called to speak after all.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch (Katrina Murray) on securing this debate. It has been fascinating to listen to all the great words used to describe credit unions. We have heard them described as lifeline services, comm…
Commons
Debate
7 July 2025
4 contributions
Pension Schemes Bill
It is a great pleasure to be here with you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and I welcome the Minister to his place. He has been here a couple of days over a year and is already taking an important Bill through Parliament. It is good to see him, and I very much look forward to working constructively with him …
It is an important question, and one that I will come to in due course. Watch this space for a fascinating manifesto in the run-up to the next general election—I am sure everybody looks forward to it.
+2 more contributions in this session
Commons
Debate
4 July 2025
Space Industry (Indemnities) Bill
I draw Members’ attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I speak on this Bill as the chair of the all-party parliamentary group for space. I congratulate the hon. Member for Glasgow East (John Grady) on having such a massive effect on the UK space industry by changing j…