Commons
Westminster Hall
15 January 2026
Food Inflation
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dame Siobhain. I thank the hon. Member for Hornsey and Friern Barnet (Catherine West) for securing this debate.
I am a member of the Work and Pensions Committee, and we have been looking at the impact of the cost of living crisis on a range of vuln…
Commons
Westminster Hall
14 January 2026
2 contributions
Horse and Rider Road Safety
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. Horse riders are not a marginal group on our roads and we should stop treating them like one. They are a vital part of rural life.
I want to thank Sophie from Billingshurst, a village in my constituency, who wrote to me ahead of the debate…
I thank the hon. Member for the intervention.
We must also place this debate in the wider context of changing rural road use. In Cowfold parish, the accident rate has doubled in the past five years, with three fatalities and 20 serious injuries. Traffic volumes have increased but road infrastructur…
Commons
Debate
13 January 2026
Finance (No. 2) Bill
I recently met Richard, a publican in my constituency, and he told me the trade had never been so tough. He said:
“The truth of the matter is, for the first time I’m thinking I shouldn't have bothered taking the risk of going into business. I should have stayed with the big brewer, taken my salary …
Commons
Westminster Hall
13 January 2026
2 contributions
Airport Drop-off Charges
Will the hon. Member give way?
Gatwick is precisely the airport that I was going to raise. It jumped to £10 in very short order, over a couple of years. That is an enormous amount of money for something that takes a couple of minutes. The objective is allegedly to cover the increase of business rates and to fund airport expansion…
Commons
Oral Questions
Energy Security and Net Zero
6 January 2026
National Grid: Supply Point Capacity
Access to the grid for new energy suppliers is patchy across the country, and it leads to an overconcentration of solar farm and battery energy farm applications in unexpected places, such as the village of Cowfold in my constituency. What action will the Government take to ensure a fair distributio…
Commons
Westminster Hall
6 January 2026
BBC Charter Renewal
We have talked a lot about the BBC’s news output today because clearly that is what is going to interest a room full of politicians most. However, I am glad that we are now focusing a little on the creative output. We have a fantastic creative and cultural industry, which is a major export and one o…
Commons
Westminster Hall
6 January 2026
Poverty and Welfare Policies
We keep hearing that disability spending, and welfare spending in general, is spiralling out of control, but the truth is that, as a percentage of GDP, it has barely moved since the mid-1980s, under Margaret Thatcher—that famous supporter of welfare. Does the hon. Member agree that if we are going t…
Commons
Ministerial Statement
5 January 2026
Venezuela
This Government have bent over backwards to not criticise President Trump directly, but that only makes him think he can get away with more and more. If President Trump really does invade Greenland, it is the end of NATO and the end of the special relationship, so will the Foreign Secretary accept t…
Commons
Westminster Hall
17 December 2025
2 contributions
Housing Development: Cumulative Impacts
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. I thank the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) for bringing attention to this important issue. As far as local planning authorities are concerned, what matters is not the national target for housing but the local target as…
I very much agree with what the hon. Gentleman is saying about the lack of infrastructure provision and with his previous comments on the failure to prioritise brownfield, but does he recognise that all those errors were inherent in the previous system under the Conservative Government? The problem …
Commons
Debate
16 December 2025
Finance (No. 2) Bill
In 2023, the Prime Minister told the National Farmers Union that
“losing a farm is not like losing any other business”.
He has also said,
“If somebody makes powerful representations, then my instinct is to consider what’s being said. Getting it right is more important than ploughing on with a pac…
Commons
Oral Questions
16 December 2025
2 contributions
Legal Aid
1. What steps his Department is taking to ensure adequate provision of legal aid.
My constituent Steve is currently being denied access to justice because he cannot afford to take action against a publicly funded body under Competition and Markets Authority legislation. His only other option is to proceed on a no win, no fee basis. Will the relevant Minister agree to meet me and …
Commons
Oral Questions
9 December 2025
2 contributions
Economic Growth: Rural Areas
11. What fiscal steps she is taking to help increase growth in rural areas.
Later today I will chair a meeting of the all-party parliamentary group for rural business and the rural powerhouse, which focuses on generating rural growth. If we could push rural productivity closer to western European averages, it would fix the Government’s budgetary black hole all by itself. Wi…
Commons
Westminster Hall
9 December 2025
3 contributions
Water Scarcity
I beg to move,
That this House has considered water scarcity.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stuart. In a country where we always complain about the rain, we have somehow contrived to have a water shortage. I am reminded of the words of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
“Wa…
I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention; I very much agree. We need to look at every measure to utilise water that is already there, in addition to reservoirs, which take up lots of space.
When it comes to our groundwater bodies, 40% are already classed as over-extracted, and only 16% of Englan…
+1 more contribution in this session
Commons
Oral Questions
Work and Pensions
8 December 2025
Motability
The shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions recently stated that
“millions are getting benefits for anxiety or ADHD along with a free Motability car.”
That is clearly nonsense, because only 200,000 claimants—at most—would be eligible to apply in the first place, and many of them also have …
Commons
Debate
3 December 2025
Pension Schemes Bill
I shall speak to new clauses 8 and 13, which stand in my name, among others.
With its title, the Pensions Schemes Bill, this piece of legislation was probably never destined to grab headlines—sorry, Minister, but that is the case—which is a pity, because it contains some genuinely intelligent measu…
Commons
Oral Questions
2 December 2025
2 contributions
Ukraine
19. What assessment she has made of the potential implications for her policies of US foreign policy on Ukraine.
A lasting peace in Ukraine can only be achieved if we remove the incentives for war. However, President Trump’s initial peace plan—badly translated as it was from the Russian—included such measures as a dramatic cut in Ukrainian army manpower, the surrender of key fortress positions, a pledge never …
Commons
Debate
25 November 2025
English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill
I will speak to new clause 10(a) in my name. Devolution may be in the title of the Bill, but not everything in it lives up to that name. In many respects, the Bill actually takes power further away from the people back towards the centre.
When I look at my constituency, which will be affected by bo…
Commons
Oral Questions
24 November 2025
Social Housing: Local Authority Funding
We are facing a national affordability crisis, but handing out planning permissions like confetti did not bring down prices under the last Government and there is zero reason to expect it will do any better this time. Does the Minister accept that relying on private developers to bring down prices c…
Commons
Westminster Hall
19 November 2025
Suicide: Reducing the Stigma
As chair of the all-party parliamentary group for rural business and the rural powerhouse, all too often I hear devastating stories of suicide in the farming community. Campaigns such as the Farm Safety Foundation’s Mind Your Head play an important role in encouraging frank and honest conversations.…
Commons
Westminster Hall
18 November 2025
2 contributions
Land Use Change: Food Security
In relation to the intervention from the hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner), the fundamental problem is that although successive Governments have said, “We favour brownfield,” there is not sufficient push behind it. In my constituency, we are legally driven to accept every application on it…
In my constituency of Horsham, the peaceful rural village of Cowfold has experienced a bewildering surge of applications for green energy projects. Locals could be forgiven for thinking that the industrial revolution has arrived a couple of hundred years late. Why is that happening? I think the poin…
Commons
Westminster Hall
17 November 2025
Parkinson’s Disease
In the interest of time, I will concentrate on PIP. The evidence of the past 10 years tells us that the PIP system copes very poorly with fluctuating neurological conditions. As a member of the Work and Pensions Committee, I constantly hear of people being denied PIP even when diagnosed with some of…
Commons
Debate
13 November 2025
Planning and Infrastructure Bill
There has been great anxiety about the possible negative impacts on the environment of this legislation. Lords amendment 40 seeks to restore site specific protections for most cases where they do not involve wider issues, such as nutrient neutrality, but it has been opposed by the Government, as we …
Commons
Oral Questions
Solicitor General
13 November 2025
2 contributions
Rural Crime
9. What steps she is taking to help ensure the effective prosecution of rural crime.
Earlier this year I carried out a survey among farmers in my constituency, who said that they did not bother to report over a third of rural crimes because they felt that not enough happened when they did so. I would not say that nothing has been done, because we now have a specialist rural crime un…
Commons
Westminster Hall
12 November 2025
Carbon Budget Delivery Plan
It is estimated that we would have to plant a forest twice the size of Greater London to cancel out all the extra emissions created by the expansions of Heathrow, Luton and Gatwick, next to my constituency of Horsham. Does the hon. Member think that that suggests the Government are entirely serious …