Speeches by Curtis.

“I am Chris Curtis, the Labour MP for Milton Keynes North.”

“I should make it clear that local elections will be going forward in full in Milton Keynes and that I look forward to continuing to work with my brilliant, hard-working Labour councillors locally. One of the reasons for delaying the elections is the time it is taking to go through the local government reorganisation pr…”

“Local elections will be going forward in full in Milton Keynes this year, and I look forward to continuing to work with my brilliant hard-working Labour councillors. The ongoing process of reorganisation is delaying elections, but it is also delaying the creation of new combined authorities across many parts of the cou…”

“I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch (Katrina Murray) not just for securing this debate, but for her passionate and moving speech. I will start by building on some of the comments made by the hon. Member for North Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller) about his constituents’ experiences of what i…”

“I thank the Minister for being generous with his time and for reinforcing the Government’s strategic direction, which I think most of us agree with. As we move on to the next stage, many of the local council leaders who he has spoken about feel like there is friction and frustration in the communication between them an…”

“Those three pots are capital spend. What you also need here, in order to set these, is probably quite substantial, significant day-to-day spend.”

“Who is your favourite child?”

“I realise that you do not want to talk about the specifics, but if you were to ask local councils or people from the development industry about their experience of the last few months in this first stage of the implementation progress, do you think that would be the experience they have had of this bit of the process, …”

“Some people would say that lots of consultations do not equal doing it properly.”

“There is an important machinery of government question that I assume you can talk about, regardless of the specific sites. Some of these are quite ambitious programmes. If you talk about my site, you are effectively talking about doubling the size of quite a substantial city in this country. It is quite a substantial p…”

“Thank you for joining us, Sir Michael, and thank you for all the work you did in producing this important report. As someone who grew up in a new town, I think it is good that the Government have taken on this agenda. Do you want to start off by giving us a brief overview of the report, perhaps something that you think…”

“On this question, coming back to what Sir Michael said on urgency and work beginning quickly, it took just over a year to produce the report. We now have the SEA process. You have then said there will be a consultation on that process that might recommend delivery vehicles. There will then be another consultation on wh…”

“Yes, but meanwhile—”

“You said the normal planning process will apply. If the normal planning process applies, that means local councils being able to sign off and veto, effectively, new town programmes that have been put forward by the national Government. Surely there will have to be some mechanism outside the normal planning process that…”

“Thank you very much. Moving on, Minister, previous iterations of this exercise in recent decades have not ended up in as ambitious a place as the people who wrote those reports, like Sir Michael has, would have liked, primarily because once the report is done, the implementation has just not worked. What are you doing …”

“We have just had what I think most people regard as an incredibly successful planning process where over the course of a few months your Department has signed off on an incredibly substantial, significant infrastructure project with Universal in Bedford through an SDO process, which I do not think has been used for man…”

“Minister, we heard from Sir Michael about the urgency and the direction that was given from the original piece of work, ensuring that work can begin quickly on all these sites. Do we think that three sites with spades in the ground—whatever “spades in the ground” means—by the end of this Parliament meets that sense of …”

“There could be 10 pence sitting somewhere or there could be tens of billions of pounds, or billions of pounds.”

“Yes. We have all read the report.”

“Chris Curtis, Labour MP for Milton Keynes North, and my constituency is one of the sites recommended in the report.”