North East Herts MP Chris Hinchliff dismisses Nimby claim and defends second home bill
Last Friday marked the end of the first year of the Labour Government - and a year since North East Hertfordshire welcomed its first Labour MP, Chris Hinchliff.
He sat down with the Local Democracy Reporter Christopher Day to discuss his time in office so far, the key votes he’s taken part in, and what his second year in the role might bring.
Life as a constituency MP
The first Labour MP for North East Hertfordshire - in fact, the first MP for North East Hertfordshire not called Sir Oliver Heald - Mr Hinchliff says his first year in the role has been “challenging”.
“There have been highs and lows. But overall, I think I and the team are in a very good place at the moment.
“I’m feeling like we’re really getting to grips with representing the constituency in a positive and meaningful way.”
He points to the “hugely important” casework his office has carried out for constituents, helping people who need support from the MP.
Successes on that front include helping a mum who wanted to keep her son, who has special educational needs, at his current school and getting him an Education, Health and Care Plan; pushing a property management organisation to properly maintain a leaseholders’ property; getting benefits reinstated for a woman who lost a third of her award during the move to Universal Credit; and ensuring that a man who had received incorrect payment demands from a utility company had his account cleared.
Mr Hinchliff said lots of his casework “if you draw it down to its essentials, is bureaucratic institutions failing to be responsive, trying to palm people off, going slow, not engaging properly”.
“That is a very frustrating experience for constituents, and it’s a sign that many parts of the country aren’t working perhaps as they should be.”
The Labour Government has been tasked with getting the country working as it should - but does Mr Hinchliff think it has had a successful first year?
“I think there have been many successes. I obviously have frustrations with the Government that I’ve felt along the way, and I want us to go further and faster … and make bolder changes in some directions. But it’s always going to take time to turn those things around.”
He points to a wide range of “successes”: extending free school meals to another 500,000 children; funding for in-school nurseries; £39bn for 300,000 new social and affordable homes; abolishing the 1824 Vagrancy Act; expanding the warm home discount so six million households get £150 off their energy bills; introducing mandatory solar panels on newbuild homes; increasing NHS funding; and new support for bus users, employees and renters.
Second home criticism
The first year in office hasn’t been completely plain sailing, though. Mr Hinchliff was criticised by some for claiming £2,550 a month in expenses for a second home in London.
He says: “I can totally understand the instinctive reaction to it.
“I’ve always said … the current set-up for MPs and accommodation in London isn’t very well managed.
“Given there are hundreds of MPs who are always going to be needing accommodation in London, I’ve always thought parliament should think about purchasing properties in London.
“The amount that we are able to claim to support our rent for London accommodation could easily service that, and then you wouldn’t have this silly situation of ‘I’m a new MP and, oh my God, I also need to go on RightMove to try and find somewhere to have a base in London’ - and that would bring down the costs in the long-run.
“The reality is that parliament finishes pretty late most weekdays, very regularly.
“When you add onto that … an hour and a half of travelling by the time you’ve done tube, train, tube, wait, walk, all the rest of it, then if you want to have any sort of sanity in your life, effectively you do need to be able to cut that down.
“The other option is to take hotels, and I know other MPs do that, but actually, you quite quickly rack up a higher cost.
“I chose in my life to move away from London, in many ways I would prefer not to be living in London, and I don’t claim for the bills associated with that property.
“But I understand the concerns.”
Winter fuel allowance
Nationally, the Government was hammered for its decision last year to restrict the winter fuel allowance only to pensioners who received pension credit, before changing the policy last month so that all pensioners with an income of £35,000 a year or less will receive the payment.
Mr Hinchliff was an early rebel when the Government first mooted the idea of restricting the payment, and signed a motion opposing the proposals - but then he voted against a Tory plan in September to block the change.
He says: “That was an incredibly difficult decision to be making very, very early on in my parliamentary career.
“I support a universal welfare system, and that was the case I was consistently making to ministers when I was arguing with them and discussing with them about this.
“A red line for me was having something from the Government that would address the real concerns from organisations like Age UK that the pension credit threshold was just too low.
“In those discussions, I got a commitment from ministers that they would review the pension credit threshold in the forthcoming budget … and they raised the threshold by several hundred pounds, which was welcome.
“I’d been elected just a few weeks ago on a Labour ticket, obviously I wanted to support my Government.
“They addressed my fundamental red line. I didn’t want to make a symbolic stand on a point of broad political principle about fighting for universalism.
“I thought it was more important to get tangible change for the constituents who were most likely to be impacted by that.
“Where we’ve got to now is actually exactly what I was arguing for all along.
“What the Government has actually done is restore a universalist position.
“Everyone will be paid the winter fuel allowance … and they will use the tax system to recoup the money from well-off pensioners who don’t need it, which was always my position.
“Time and time again, we have seen that the way to get money to the people who need it is through a universal system, not a means-tested system.
“We know that when you make benefits just for those who are in poverty, they quite swiftly lose public support and become difficult to sustain in the long run.
“I am happy the Government came to the right decision.
“I would have obviously preferred that they had come to the right decision when I told them about it in the first place, but we didn’t quite get there.
“What the Government has got to now is a really positive position which says yes, obviously, there are people who don’t need that financial support, we recoup that through the taxation system.
“But we will pay this out as a universal benefit so that you don’t need to claim, you don’t need to go through difficult paperwork, the stigma attached to it is withdrawn, and it is there for everyone who needs it, which is how our welfare system should work.”
Mr Hinchliff was also among the Labour MPs who, in recent weeks, opposed the Government’s plans to reduce the number of people eligible for disability benefits.
Assisted dying
Away from the day-to-day of party politics, Mr Hinchliff and his House of Commons Colleagues were tasked with voting on legalising assisted dying, which has now passed the House of Commons.
As an issue of conscience, MPs were able to vote as they wished, rather than being led by a party whip.
Mr Hinchliff voted for the legislation at its second reading, effectively backing the principle.
But this year, he voted against the legislation at its third reading, when MPs considered the specifics of the proposed law.
Mr Hinchliff says: “It was a very difficult issue and something that I had to give a lot of thought to.
“We ran a survey which got hundreds of responses … and I read carefully through all of those.
“I think there is a case … on compassionate grounds, to consider assisted dying as an option for people in the most severe circumstances.”
But, he says, he decided he “couldn’t support the bill” at third reading “due to the intervention of the Royal College of Physicians and, crucially, the Royal College of Psychiatrists.”
“The role of psychiatrists had become fairly crucial in delivering the safeguards.
“And the Royal College of Psychiatrists was fairly clear that they did not feel … that there are enough psychiatrists to deliver what this bill is going to expect of them.
“I didn’t feel that I could in good conscience then say ‘well, let’s go ahead with the bill anyway’.”
Legislative work
Mr Hinchliff has, it is fair to say, been more outspoken on legislation than many new backbenchers.
He says: “I think the thing that’s always most pleasing as a parliamentarian is to feel like the work you have done has influenced national legislation, national policy.
“I was part of pushing quite hard for rooftop solar [panels] as mandatory on new-build housing - we’ve now got that.”
Mr Hinchliff says he also made energy secretary Ed Miliband aware of an “obscure piece of legislation” from 2015 that could be used to “require renewable energy schemes above a certain size to offer shared ownership … to the community in which that project is based”, an idea that Mr Hinchliff thinks would be “very important for establishing greater community buy-in … for our renewable energy transition”.
And, he adds, he has worked with environmental organisations to “get the inclusion of a duty to consider nature restoration” as part of GB Energy, the Government-owned body set to invest in renewable energy projects.
Housing and planning
The area where Mr Hinchliff has perhaps been most openly trying to influence legislation, though, is on housing and planning - an issue that he says was “probably the most prominent issue that was raised throughout the general election”.
“Wherever you went in the constituency, there were serious concerns simultaneously about a lack of genuinely affordable homes to meet local need, and unsustainable development putting pressure on the environment, changing the nature of rural communities and [bringing] real cynicism and resentment about the way that system is currently working.”
Mr Hinchliff put forward a raft of amendments to the Government’s flagship Planning and Infrastructure Bill which he says would have helped “put people and nature before developer profits” - but saw him attacked by those who saw him as a ‘Nimby’, putting forward proposals that they argued would have made it harder for the Government to meet its target of building 1.5m homes by the end of this parliament.
Mr Hinchliff refutes the claim that he’s a Nimby - and believes his amendments would not have made it more difficult for the Government to achieve its housebuilding target.
Pointing to the 1.4 million homes that have received planning permission but remain unbuilt, he says: “It’s not an issue of the planning system.
“We’ve not had too much democracy, we’ve not had too much nature in the country - that’s not what’s holding back the housing that we need.”
The current system, he says, is “not delivering the housing that will actually solve the housing crisis, it’s delivering housing that they can sell at the largest possible profit margin to give money to their shareholders”.
And, while Mr Hinchliff says “inflated house prices are frustrating and challenging”, he adds that “bringing those down by a small proportion is not fundamentally going to change the situation for the people who are being completely left behind and failed by our housing model at the moment”, including three million people on housing waiting lists and 160,000 children in temporary accommodation.
He praises the Government’s £39bn investment in 300,000 new social homes, but is keen on further steps to increase the number of social homes being built.
“If you look across North and East Hertfordshire over the last ten years, it’s about 12,000 net new properties.
“Yet over the same timeframe, waiting lists are up.
“If even a reasonable proportion of those new homes had been social rent, we could have virtually cleared our housing waiting lists, but because we’ve got a profit-led system that’s all about making maximum money for developers, that’s just not going to happen.
“Public funding is needed up front.
“One of the continual frustrations of public policy is that we seem to have got ourselves into a place where, as a country, we see upfront costs, we only see the downside, and we seem to find it very, very difficult to get institutions to think about the long-term benefits.
“[Social housing] pays for itself really quite rapidly in terms of additional economic activity, lower housing benefit bills, income from the rent if it’s council housing.”
Mr Hinchliff has also called for compulsory purchase orders of land to be guided by the value of the land as it is currently used, rather than as it could be used if planning permission is granted for housebuilding.
“Effectively, paying those inflated land values makes it virtually impossible to afford to deliver the sort of communities that we might like to see.
“The solution to that … is to give stronger powers to local authorities to use compulsory purchase orders to assemble the land necessary to deliver the housing that we want to see, and do that at current use values.
“I think that’s perfectly fair. Pay people for the value of the land as they currently use it, rather than some artificial, inflated price that just puts money into the pockets of large landowners.”
While Mr Hinchliff’s amendments did not make it into the legislation that has passed its third reading in the House of Commons, he hopes that his efforts may still influence the bill as it is considered by the House of Lords.
He says: “Ministers were clear that they will be listening and continuing to engage.
“I’m hopeful that we will see more movement in the House of Lords so that when it comes back to the Commons, there will hopefully be some amendments that I’ll be really happy to support.”
And Mr Hinchliff is particularly keen to see protections for nature improved: “The concerns raised by academics, eminent ecologists and conservationists, nature charities, the office for environmental protection, around the current drafting of part three of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill as it went through the House of Commons, were significant, need to be addressed, and that is what my amendment that I pushed to a vote in the Commons was intended to do.
“We had a strong showing of support. I hope the Government is listening; I’m continuing to engage with them.
“Hopefully, we can find a solution that makes sure the bill does what ministers want it to do, which is to deliver a win-win for housing and nature.”
Second-year priorities
While housing and planning will continue to be an issue at the front of Mr Hinchliff’s mind, his second year as an MP will bring further focus on other topics too, such as special educational needs.
“The Government’s planned reforms will be published later this year, so [I’ll be] engaging with that.
“I’ve been working with other Hertfordshire Labour MPs on trying to push the Government to give Hertfordshire a fairer funding settlement.
“I’ll be continuing to push for that and for particular points around the provision of new schools.”
Buses will be another priority, with legislation coming forward to give local authorities more control over bus services.
“We do have some decent train lines connecting some of the towns [in my constituency], but the vast majority of the villages, if you want public transport, you’re going to be reliant on buses, and it’s pretty threadbare there.
“Hertfordshire has had some of the worst cuts in relation to bus services.
“The Government is bringing forward a lot of very positive proposals on that, and pushing them to go as far as possible in that respect will be important.”
QUICKFIRE QUESTIONS
Beer or wine?
Wine
Monarchy or republic?
Monarchy
Who is your political idol?
Barbara Castle
What’s in your supermarket meal deal?
Tuna and sweetcorn sandwich, mango and pineapple pot, and an Innocent smoothie
What’s your favourite book?
My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell. “It’s hilarious, it’s uplifting, it’s great about nature, you can’t read it and not be happy.”