Speeches by Holmes.

“I welcome the Minister to her place. Youth and overall homelessness have increased since the Government took office, and charities have been harmed by policies such as the national insurance rises imposed by the Chancellor. We welcome the additional money that the Government have allocated for tackling homelessness thi…”

“Q Thank you, Minister. The Government’s stated aim is to unitarise every local authority in England, so I would have thought there would be some indication of the savings for the Government, because there is a set level for the number of layers of government across England—”

“Q Thank you, Minister. On the point about 14 years of the last Government, the situation that was left by them was that planning committees, elected by local people, were still making decisions on behalf of the people who elected them. That is questionable under both aspects of the major legislation going forward. Can …”

“Q Minister, welcome to your role. I know that you have not been in it for very long, so well done for getting through today; it has been a joint effort, I think. Do you think that you have inherited a disjointed mess from your predecessors? On the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, and now this Bill, all parties on the …”

“Q I am pleased that you have mentioned the GLA, Ms Riddell, because it relates to a question that I want to ask you both. Mr Fletcher, you are absolutely right to say that this, as well as local government reorganisation, was not in the governing party’s manifesto. I therefore think that it is right that we try to make…”

“Q I have a quick follow-up question, particularly to Councillor Hicks: would it be fair to say that the policy on the local government reorganisation is a soft target, certainly, but it was portrayed as a hard target to local authority leaders at the time? Matthew Hicks: We certainly felt in the beginning that Suffolk,…”

“Q Good morning, everybody. I want to go back to something that was touched on by the previous panel. We are going through simultaneous restructuring of local government and setting up the strategic authorities, and in her questions the Minister has outlined that the 500,000-people target for LGR was never a hard target…”

“In case we do not get to it this afternoon, Donna Jones, one of the witnesses, is a personal friend of mine.”

“Hear, hear! Professor Denham: So I am familiar with town and parish councils, and there are some very good ones, including in Mr Holmes’s constituency. But they are not uniform everywhere within the area, so a single prescriptive approach is unlikely to work. There has also been, in the last 10 or 15 years, a transform…”

“I thought you might say that—thank you. Donna Jones: I have represented my two counties, with 2.2 million people, for four and a bit years now. It is tough, because I have two large geographical counties; it would take me three and a half hours to travel from north to south of my patch, and I know colleagues have the s…”

“I have one more question, if I may. We will move on, because it is clear that there was no assessment of the spending. On 16 December 2024, the hon. Member for Oldham West, Chadderton and Royton (Jim McMahon) sent a letter to local authority leaders setting out a target of 500,000 people per local authority. On 3 June,…”

“Q You are about to see that even though there was a south coast derby between Southampton and Portsmouth, we still can talk very politely, Ms Vaz—it was very boring, ending 0-0. Welcome back, Mayor Brabin; I wanted to ask about some of the evidence we heard earlier from the District Councils’ Network. There was a conce…”

“I associate myself with the Minister’s words about 9/11 and the untimely and tragic death of Charlie Kirk. Yesterday, it was reported that in 2008 Lord Mandelson emailed Epstein and said that his conviction in the United States “could not happen in Britain”, and encouraged him to go for early release. The whole House c…”

“On a point of order, Mr Speaker. This relates to the issue we have been discussing, but is about the House procedures. What I took from the Minister’s answer was that Lord Mandelson, a Member of the House of Lords, had not given a full account of his past actions while going through vetting processes. What disciplinary…”

“We ended them!”

“Will the Minister give way?”

“rose—”

“It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Madam Deputy Speaker. During an intervention on the Minister for Defence Procurement, I said that he was acting in a “duplicitous” way. I have already been rebuked by Mr Speaker, so you do not have to step in, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I would like to say that I misspoke when I…”

“If the hon. Gentleman had bothered to show up for the entire debate—I think that he has only just arrived in the Chamber—then he would have heard the answer to those questions in excellent speeches given by hon. Members from across the House. In response to his question, why is the deal also backed by so many counties …”

“I will tell the hon. Gentleman what one of those red lines was: not paying £35 billion to another country. In case he wants to read his Labour party briefing again, I remind the hon. Gentleman that another red line for the last Foreign Secretary was that he clearly did not accept unilaterally that the sovereignty of th…”