Newspaper Column – The Voice – 17/06/26

Thank you to all those who kindly offered advice and suggestions for my forthcoming Private Members’ Bill. It has been a very difficult decision to make. I want to take all these proposals forward as a parliamentary Bill, but must select just one. I’ve decided that to help address the serious and ongoing housing crisis should be prioritised. The Bill will receive its first reading in Parliament this week.  

I realise many will be disappointed that I haven’t chosen one of the more than dozen very worthy causes I’ve been exploring in recent weeks. I’m grateful to the thousands who took the trouble to lobby me.  

The lack of genuinely affordable homes remains a most intractable and damaging problem facing families here. Our housing market has become a stark symbol of widening inequality — rewarding those wealthy enough to treat our homes as investment assets, while penalising those who struggle to secure their first home, whether to rent or buy.  

My Bill will be drafted to give government, communities and local authorities a wide range of tools: mechanisms to deliver more social housing, and planning controls to better manage the proliferation of second and holiday homes, especially where they inflate prices and reduce the availability of homes for local families.  

To everyone who contacted me with proposals on health, the environment, nature restoration, business development, food security and more — thank you. Those campaigns will continue, and there are other parliamentary routes to advance them. But this Bill must focus on the crisis pushing too many families to the brink.  

 

• I welcome the Government’s announcement that the culling of badgers will end. In 2014,Professor Rosie Woodroffe of the Zoological Society of Londonand I instigated the first community‑led badger vaccination programme in the country. Even then, the evidence had become clear that culling could play no useful role in tackling Bovine TB in cattle.  

Bovine TB has had a devastating impact on hundreds of farms in our part of the world. It is frustrating that decades of potential progress were lost to politically-driven rather than evidence‑based measures. I congratulate the Steering Group of the Bovine TB Partnership for bringing forward proposals grounded in science — combining improved cattle biosecurity with wildlife measures.  

Back in 1997, during the Agriculture Select Committee Inquiry (of which I was a member), we were told the DIVA test (ie to differentiate between infected and vaccinated animals) was “about ten years away”. Nearly thirty years later, we’re told it should be available by 2030. I will work with Ministers and farmers to ensure progress is real.  

  

•  A further concernraised in the Commons thisweek is the Government’s newly announced sanctions against Israel’s far‑right Netanyahu regime. I again questioned the Foreign secretary whether they really had any teeth. Do Ministers really believe Netanyahu will take any notice? This week, stolen Palestinian land has been openly marketed in London at an “Israeli Real Estate event”. It’s time to get tough.  

 Andrew George MP