Any politician who is serious about tackling sexual abuse and exploitation of girls in this country must put the victims and their needs front and centre – not use the issue as an excuse to push their own agenda and try to make political capital.

I hope to see senior Conservatives distancing themselves from Badenoch’s comments this morning – as politicians we all have a responsibility to our communities to stop a dangerous race to the bottom in how we speak about these issues.”

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“The Green Party has long argued for a shift towards community focused health provision, and this approach is welcome. However, Keir Starmer is now talking about a “new agreement” to expand the relationship between the NHS and the private healthcare sector. We need clarity on exactly what this means for the long term as we do not need more backdoor privatisation. 

“It is vital that NHS capacity is built up, and that the promised Community Diagnostic Centres and surgical hubs are publicly run and GPs properly resourced to see their patients. We also need restored budgets for public health and clear long-term funding commitments for hospital trusts, so that they can better plan to deliver better care for us all.

“The Green Party has always proudly defended the NHS against creeping privatisation. We are committed to a fully public health service and to keeping the profit motive well away from our NHS.  

“With an ageing population and ever greater demand, it is more important than ever that we restore NHS founding principles and champion services that are publicly delivered as well as publicly paid for.”

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“For too long billions have been leaking out to shareholders instead of going into fixing our broken water system. But it will be water customers who are expected to bail out this failed model of privatisation through steep hikes to water bills.  

“The way to end this fiasco and ensure government and regulators keep within the law is to put failing water companies into special administration and ultimately to bring water back into public ownership.”  

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“There is much to be welcomed in this White Paper including strengthening the rights of communities to purchase cherished local assets such as youth clubs, libraries or sport facilities; increasing powers over control of local transport, better alignment of public services including police, health and probation and removing the need for government to sign off decisions for locally specific things like cycle lanes.    

“The big gap is the democratic deficit in Labour’s plans. This risks being devolution that steals power away from local people. We have to ask, how will local communities get heard? And who will hold mayors to account?  

“We need to keep the local in local government. That means decision making as close as possible to the people most impacted; it involves trusting local communities to know what is best for them and supporting them with investment to deliver real change. And true democracy must include a fair proportional voting system for local elections, which seems to be a glaring omission from this White Paper.” 

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“Local democracy is in urgent need of reform but this White Paper does not deliver the real change our local councils need.  

“It steals power away from local people and risks making the real changes required harder to achieve, including building the homes we need, cleaning our rivers, reforming social care and greening our local economies. 

“We should trust local communities to make the right decisions on homes, food, energy, nature and adapting to the climate crisis.  

“Instead, these plans risk moving power away from local councils to huge remote super councils and regional mayors. 

“Devolution must mean real decentralisation of powers and funding so local councils can deliver the improvements to services that their communities need. 

“If we want warmer homes; affordable, reliable accessible public transport, and flood defences that are fit for purpose, we must invest in local democracy. 

“Without power devolved down so that decisions are made closest to where they have the greatest impact, people will grow ever more cynical about politics. 

“Our fragile democracy can’t afford that. 

“We will be pressing for local government to be kept local and made more democratic. 

“That means: 

• taking decisions as close as possible to the people most impacted 

• trusting local communities to know what is best for them  

• supporting them with investment to deliver real change. 

• fair voting for local elections using proportional representation. 

“Then, we can have the green transformation our country desperately needs, including warmer, affordable homes for people to rent or buy, reliable public transport and adapting to the climate crisis which is already underway.” 

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By pitting what’s happening as a binary battle between builders and blockers, the government has insulted local communities and local government, all of whom desperately want affordable homes and fully understand the importance of balancing that with the need for food, nature and local energy.

Instead, the Government should be going head to head with the developers who are fixated on one thing only – maximising their profits by building yet more executive unaffordable homes at the expense of council homes for social rent and more affordable homes to buy.  That means being tougher with developers over requiring a higher proportion of genuinely affordable and homes to rent and to buy as part of new developments. Equally developers must be made to honour real commitments to invest in local services that housebuilding does put additional pressure on.

This all can be done and still reverse the disastrous decline in biodiversity and protect local democracy. But this has to be done with communities, including through strengthening the role of neighbourhood plans, not imposed onto them by profit driven developers.

And Ministers should be taking this opportunity to look in the round at the housing crisis, and prioritising funds for increasing supply and ending right to buy, alongside building the right homes in the right place and the right price.

As it stands, this planning framework confirms many of the fears of those who not only want to protect this country’s degraded nature. We are not on course to meet most of the legally-binding nature recovery targets we have signed up to and this Planning Framework makes it even less likely we will hit them. This is more than a missed opportunity, it’s a dereliction of duty. We can and we must tackle both the housing crisis and the nature crisis. This new NPPF currently does neither.

The Government isn’t only bringing more and more land into its definition of ‘grey belt’ which can be built on, it is removing any local democratic say in the process. The deputy prime minister’s claim that this will remove “chaos and subjectiveness” from the system doesn’t wash. People have the right to have a say over major changes to their local community. This is local democracy in action.”

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“The justice secretary is facing the reality that however fast the Government builds prisons, at the current rates of offending and reoffending, the respite from the current crisis of overcrowding will only last a handful of years.

“Instead of building more prisons, a planned programme of prevention and more effective alternatives to incarceration is required, particularly for women, young people and offenders whose crimes are driven by poverty and destitution.

“We need wholesale reform of short prison sentences, a focus on providing a real new start for people leaving prison, including safe housing, and a clear-headed look at the many ways people can repay their criminal debts to society more constructively.”
She continued,

“At the heart of this crisis is a continuous error from successive governments – amplified by misleading front pages – in assuming that the way to reduce crime is to keep locking up more and more of our citizens.

“Reducing crime means investing in services and job opportunities for young people, and I am confident that Justice Minister Lord Timpson knows this.

“The only question is whether the Prime Minister is bold and brave enough to allow him to bring forward common-sense reforms to bring prison populations back down, rather than trying to build their way out of this crisis.”

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He continued, “Instead of stripping more money from essential front-line services that are already on their knees, Labour could and should look to tax the very richest more to raise crucial funds.

“This could act as a lifeline for key services such as our NHS.

“We remain clear, cutting services always was and still is, a political choice.”

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“These milestones aren’t a clear route to real change. Today’s listicle, while pointing in the right direction on a handful of issues, is missing the wholesale ambition and drive that a government elected on a change agenda needs. We have a country reeling from severe flooding and facing more storms this weekend, a country where people are struggling to heat their homes this winter, and a country worried about finding the school places and doctor appointments that those they love need. Instead of listing out a few priorities, suggesting that these will be delivered at the expense of other important issues, we wanted today to see a gear change in this government where they accept that we need to ask the very richest to pay more tax so we could properly fund all our frontline public services.”

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