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Oral Answers to Questions
(12 years ago)
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Valerie Vaz (Walsall South) (Lab)
1. What recent assessment he has made of the effect on families of recent trends in food prices.
Nick Smith (Blaenau Gwent) (Lab)
13. What recent assessment he has made of the effect on families of recent trends in food prices.
The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr David Heath)
My Department actively monitors retail food prices and their impacts on household expenditure. We know that some households are seeing the amount that they spend on food increase. The Government provide safety nets through welfare to support those on low incomes and out of work. We also provide a number of schemes, such as Healthy Start, to help the most vulnerable in our society afford and have access to nutritious food.
Valerie Vaz
The Minister will be aware that the Department’s own book of statistics states that there has been a 12% increase in food prices, and that people are going without fruit and vegetables. The Netmums website states that one in five women are going without food to feed their children. What discussions has he had with his colleagues in the Treasury and the Department for Work and Pensions to ensure that families can feed themselves?
Mr Heath
I do not in any way minimise the hon. Lady’s point, but I talk not about food poverty but about poverty. The fact that food prices have gone up means that people are finding it more difficult to make ends meet. We need to continue to talk to colleagues in the DWP and others to ensure that we provide as much support as possible. We also need to do what we can with manufacturers, processors and retailers to ensure, for instance, that vegetables that are perhaps not the best quality are available at a lower price that people can afford. If we do all those things, we can help people through what is undoubtedly a difficult period.
Laura Sandys (South Thanet) (Con)
I am pleased to hear the Minister talk about waste within the supply chain. I was much involved in a project called Ugly Food. Can we ensure that we do not just target retailers, who say that they have no waste within their system, but increase waste in the supply chain at the producer and consumer end?
Mr Heath
The hon. Lady touches on an important point. Ugly veg is still tasty veg, and there is absolutely no reason it should not be sold. We need to bear down on waste at all points in the food chain. The Love Food Hate Waste campaign is dealing with exactly that and looking at whether we can improve products and practices right the way through the system, to ensure that we minimise waste and get the best possible value for the consumer.
Nick Smith
Ebbw Vale food bank fed more than 1,000 Blaenau Gwent families last year, and each month my office issues more and more food vouchers. I am alarmed that low-income families are struggling to put food on the table. What representations has the Minister made to the Chancellor and the Work and Pensions Secretary about growing food poverty and the impact of universal credit?
Mr Heath
The hon. Gentleman should recognise that, as I said earlier, what we are talking about is poverty. One thing that I have always stressed is that poverty exists right across the country, in rural areas as well as urban ones, and we need to deal with it. The Government have been taking action to help protect the most vulnerable, and we will continue to do so.
Mr Mark Spencer (Sherwood) (Con)
What message would the Minister give to my local authorities, which are taking land out of food production to develop on the green belt when there are perfectly adequate brownfield sites available in the borough?
Mr Speaker
Order. That is tangentially related indeed to the question, which is not to be encouraged. I am bound to say that a brief reply of a sentence will suffice.
Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)
Does the Minister accept that the Government’s plans for minimum alcohol pricing will make alcohol more expensive for hard-working, moderate, responsible drinkers while doing nothing to tackle problem drinking and the problems associated with it? It will also be devastating for the west country cider industry. Will he make representations to his ministerial colleagues to scrap that ill thought out scheme, which is not based on any evidence whatever?
Mr Heath
I do not think I need any lessons on the west country cider industry, and indeed I was at apple day in Kingsbury Episcopi only last weekend.
I do not think this matter is directly related to the question asked by the hon. Member for Walsall South (Valerie Vaz), but of course there is a continuing debate on the issue, which will involve the Home Office and the Department of Health.
Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)
We know that the spending power of hard-working families is being hit by the Government’s flatlining economy and wage stagnation. Shoppers are using self-imposed rationing, putting products back at the checkout and skipping meals to feed their children, yet the Secretary of State has urged shoppers to tackle his so-called “dessert deficit” by eating more UK-produced ice cream. Does he ever feel that he is living in a parallel universe?
Mr Heath
This may come as news to the hon. Lady, but there are people in this country who still eat ice cream, and on the whole it is better if they eat British products rather than those imported from overseas. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State is absolutely right.
Mary Creagh
The Minister’s right hon. Friend is in danger of becoming the Marie Antoinette of the Cabinet, but perhaps I should move on.
Last week, the Secretary of State announced the abolition of the Agricultural Wages Board, and the Minister has spoken about the existence of poverty, in particular rural poverty. More than 1,000 workers in the Secretary of State’s constituency will be worse off as a result of his decision, and his own impact assessment states that abolishing the board will take £238 million of pay over 10 years from rural workers and the rural economy—
Mr Speaker
Order. I must ask the shadow Secretary of State to relate her question to food prices, not wages, and in a short sentence.
Mary Creagh
The abolition of the Agricultural Wages Board will take money out of the pockets of workers and put it in those of their employers. On the Opposition Benches we believe that the person who picks the apple should be able to buy the fruit. Why does the Minister not agree?
Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)
2. What steps his Department is taking to support the dairy industry.
The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr David Heath)
The Dairy Supply Chain Forum and the Dairy 2020 initiative are focused on the future of the industry and opportunities to boost growth and exports. After months of hard work, not least by my predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for South East Cambridgeshire (Sir James Paice), the many beneficial terms of the industry code of practice can be translated into contracts. Implementing the EU dairy package will provide new opportunities for innovation and collaboration, and £5 million of additional funds from the rural development programme for England are available for high-quality projects from the dairy industry.
Neil Parish
Dairy farmers in my constituency are facing high feed costs. Consumers are paying enough for milk, but not enough of that end price goes back to the famer. What more can we do?
Mr Heath
I am optimistic that with the voluntary code we have for the first time the basis to be fair to producers, processors, retailers and consumers. I want to make that stick, and I believe that it can make a real difference. As I have said all along, if the voluntary code is not successful, we have the opportunity to bring forward a statutory code, and I will consult on that later this year if necessary.
Ms Margaret Ritchie (South Down) (SDLP)
Further to our discussions last week, what discussions has the Minister had with ministerial colleagues in the devolved institutions about the introduction of a similar voluntary code for the dairy industry in Northern Ireland, where prices are particularly volatile?
Mr Heath
That is a matter for the devolved Administrations who have responsibility for agriculture and for what they feel is appropriate for their own jurisdictions. The Government will offer any support and help they can, and provide advice to further the objective of a voluntary code, is that is what is wanted. The Department maintains contact and has conversations with counterparts in the devolved Administrations, and will continue to do so.
Roger Williams (Brecon and Radnorshire) (LD)
In consulting on the European Union dairy package, will the Minister take into consideration the wish of dairy farmers to set up producer organisations to strengthen their hand in the milk market?
Mr Nick Gibb (Bognor Regis and Littlehampton) (Con)
3. If he will make it his policy to intervene when measures introduced by the Environment Agency or Natural England to enhance the natural environment threaten the safety and security of people’s homes.
Hugh Bayley (York Central) (Lab)
15. How much his Department spent on flood alleviation schemes between (a) 2008 and 2009 and (b) 2010 and 2012 to date.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Richard Benyon)
There are times when legal requirements to protect the environment could make it more difficult or expensive to protect people’s homes, such as properties at the top of eroding cliffs that are protected for their natural character. However, such cases are rare. If there is a conflict between meeting a requirement to protect the environment and protecting people, there are clauses that allow things to go ahead for imperative reasons of overriding public interest if there are no other solutions.
Mr Gibb
I do not know how well my hon. Friend knows the West Sussex coast, and the Pagham coast in particular, but over the past few years, a build-up of shingle and sand, known as a spit, has developed at the mouth of the Pagham harbour nature reserve. That spit is causing scouring of the beach through the action of the waves and the seawater trying to escape, and that is eroding the beach by up to several metres a year and beginning to put people’s homes at risk. One solution would be to carve a channel through the spit, but both the Environment Agency and Natural England are resisting that approach. Will the Minister come to Pagham so that I can show him at first hand the problem we are facing?
Richard Benyon
I had a premonition that Pagham might be mentioned, and therefore yesterday at some length I consulted Natural England and the Environment Agency. They assured me that there are no environmental reasons why solutions cannot be found on that part of the coast; I know that the coastline is extremely dynamic in that part of the country. I am keen to assist my hon. Friend, and I would gladly make such a visit if that would ensure that local people’s fears were allayed, and so that nothing done by any Government agency will be taken as a measure that puts people’s homes more at risk.
Hugh Bayley
When places face flooding, it is important not to ignore the human cost. Fortunately, the floods in York a month ago were not as bad as 12 years ago, but I have once again visited constituents who were hacking plaster off the walls in their homes. They will be out of their homes for months to come and must pay for very expensive renovations. One café owner had to throw out tonnes of food. Can the Environment Agency take responsibility for providing advice to local authorities and for getting the insurance companies to move quickly?
Richard Benyon
I am well aware of the hon. Gentleman’s concerns. The residents of Water End in his constituency have waited long for a scheme, and it is due to start in the new year. I have huge sympathy for everybody who was flooded throughout the summer. I can assure him that the Environment Agency and any other Government body will take what steps they can to make life easier, including by providing advice to residents through the local authority or directly.
Chris White (Warwick and Leamington) (Con)
4. What recent steps his Department has taken to promote farmers markets.
The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr David Heath)
I welcome and support farmers markets. I and other DEFRA Ministers have been visiting local communities across the country and encouraging people to eat and drink local produce. I have recently visited a farm near my hon. Friend’s constituency, where I saw farmers produce wonderful food. In buying and eating local food, consumers will support rural jobs and help rural economies to grow. Farmers markets are an excellent way of bringing local producers and consumers together.
Chris White
Farmers markets are very important to both rural and urban communities, and provide an opportunity for local people to purchase excellent local produce directly from source. The markets also provide a valuable opportunity for independent retailers to access new customers and help them to compete with their larger rivals. Will the Minister consider working with local authorities to champion the importance of farmers markets and promote awareness to people throughout the country of markets in their area?
Mr Heath
I welcome what my hon. Friend says. The first successful farmers market was established in Bath in 1997, not a million miles from my constituency. There are some 750 regularly occurring farmers markets in the UK. The National Farmers Retail and Markets Association—FARMA—brings them under a membership organisation. I encourage local authorities to establish farmers markets wherever there is local demand. They make a valuable contribution to local choice, and to the vitality of our town centres.
Ms Gisela Stuart (Birmingham, Edgbaston) (Lab)
5. What recent progress he has made on flood insurance.
The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr Owen Paterson)
The availability and affordability of insurance in flood-risk areas is an important issue for this Government. We are in intense yet constructive negotiations with the insurance industry on a range of approaches that could succeed the current statement of principles. In the meantime, the Government are continuing to invest in managing the risk of flooding. We are on course to exceed our target to provide better protection to 145,000 households by March 2015.
Mr Paterson
I am sorry the hon. Lady is disappointed. Within two days of taking office I had a meeting with Otto Thoresen, the head of the Association of British Insurers. We are engaged in detailed discussions, which I obviously cannot reveal, because we do not negotiate in public. However, I reassure the hon. Lady that the Government take this matter very seriously. We know that the statement of principles runs out next year and that it must be replaced—I hope by something that is more comprehensive and effective.
Miss Anne McIntosh (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)
About 450,000 homes and properties in the country are at risk of flooding. People will find it increasingly difficult to obtain flood insurance, particularly for properties that are built on functional floodplains. Will the Secretary of State take a lead, with his colleague the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, to end house building in totally inappropriate areas? Builders leave, developers go away and home owners are left with no insurance.
Mr Paterson
I thank my hon. Friend for that question. She is aware that it was agreed in the national planning policy framework that there would be no more building on floodplains. She is quite right that it is absolutely idiotic to build houses in such inappropriate places. However, I reassure her, too, that the Government take this matter seriously. We want to find a solution that follows from the statement of principles, but that is better and more comprehensive.
Gavin Shuker (Luton South) (Lab/Co-op)
I welcome the right hon. Gentleman to his new role as Secretary of State and to his first DEFRA questions. When he took up his new position, was he briefed by his civil servants that the number of schemes deferred had risen, that spending on defences had fallen, that climate change meant that flood risk had risen and that this announcement was dangerously overdue?
Mr Paterson
I thank the hon. Gentleman for welcoming me to my new post.
We are spending £2.17 billion on flood defences. I have visited Nottingham and was in Northwich recently, and there is real value in these schemes, which is why, despite the difficult financial circumstances we inherited from the last Government, these schemes saw only a 6% reduction. They are really good value.
James Morris (Halesowen and Rowley Regis) (Con)
Many residents in Halesowen were badly affected by flooding in 2008 and are concerned about whether they will be able to obtain appropriate flood insurance in the future. Will the Secretary of State reassure them, as I think he already has, that they will be able to obtain appropriate flood insurance and that the Government are doing everything possible to ensure that they can do so?
Mr Paterson
I would like to reassure my hon. Friend emphatically that we are determined to arrive at a solution to this problem that—I repeat—provides availability and affordability to those who might suffer from floods.
Dr Phillip Lee (Bracknell) (Con)
6. What steps he is taking to ensure that rural areas have access to reliable and high-speed broadband.
The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr Owen Paterson)
I recently met my right hon. Friends the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport and the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government to discuss speeding up the roll-out of the £530 million rural broadband programme. Together, we are determined to deliver this quickly in order to provide 90% of premises with superfast broadband at 24 megabits per second and elsewhere with standard broadband of at least 2 megabits per second by 2015. The Government’s £20 million rural community broadband fund helps extend superfast broadband in the most rural locations.
Dr Lee
Many of the good people of Bracknell and Finchampstead have long had to suffer from poor broadband access despite my constituency being close to the heart of the UK’s IT industry. Does the Secretary of State agree that it is vital that the Government make the right decisions so that all my constituents can take full advantage of the digital revolution?
Mr Paterson
I entirely sympathise with my hon. Friend. If he thinks it is bad in Bracknell, he should come to North Shropshire. This is an absolute priority for us. At one bound, broadband overcomes the centuries-long disadvantage of working in a rural area. We are determined to roll it out, which is why I am working closely with my Cabinet colleagues and why we have relaxed the planning constraints for five years—to get this through and done.
Ian Paisley (North Antrim) (DUP)
No, Secretary of State: come to Rathlin Island—the situation there is absolutely abominable. It is an island off an island that requires reliable broadband so that people who require medical scripts and everything else can get them quickly. I hope that he rolls out the new broadband service across the whole of the UK, including Ulster and Rathlin Island.
Mr Paterson
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for inviting me to Rathlin Island. He will be pleased to know that I was there a few months ago, in my previous post—it has the most wonderful puffin reserve, which is well worth visiting. He touched on health, which is an important element. We all think about the business angle, but there are real advantages in delivering health care in rural areas. Another key element is helping elderly people, for whom it is a boon, when they are isolated, to be able to contact their relations, shop online and stay in touch with the real world.
Mr Speaker
As we are undertaking a Cook’s tour, we might hear about broadband in Cornwall.
Dan Rogerson (North Cornwall) (LD)
I am happy to focus on broadband across rural areas, Mr Speaker.
Will the Secretary of State ensure that all the programmes that the Government are funding, such as the one in Cornwall, which involves European Union structural funds, prioritise the areas that are still on dial-up? I am concerned that we are concentrating on superfast broadband—areas that some companies would have got to in a few years anyway—when we need to prioritise those still on dial-up.
Mr Paterson
I entirely sympathise with my hon. Friend’s comments about the problems in rural areas—I have already touched on the problems in my constituency. It is an absolute priority for us to get functioning broadband that works right across the country by 2015.
Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)
This week I met representatives of the Federation of Small Businesses, who were almost as eloquent as the Secretary of State in expressing the desire of small businesses in rural areas to play their part in reviving the rural economy. However, they cannot do so because of a lack of rural broadband. Will the Secretary of State admit that abolishing Labour’s universal broadband pledge—a pledge to bring broadband to everybody by the end of this year—was a huge mistake?
Mr Paterson
I am happy to accept the hon. Lady’s comment on my eloquence, but I do not accept her criticism of what we are doing. We think that what we are doing is going to work. We are working closely with the European Commission, with local government and with BT and the other providers. We have to get this done. We have a plan and we are going to deliver it.
Gavin Williamson (South Staffordshire) (Con)
7. What steps he is taking to support rural businesses in Staffordshire.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Richard Benyon)
A £165 million package of measures to support rural economic growth is being rolled out across England. Of that, £100 million of rural development funding is targeted at improving rural businesses, with 38 projects in Staffordshire already receiving funding under the farming and forestry improvement scheme and seven projects being actively considered for rural economy grants. Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent local broadband plan has also been allocated £7.44 million from the Government’s £530 million rural broadband programme.
Gavin Williamson
Halfpenny Green vineyard in my constituency has over the past 30 years been producing some of the finest quality English wines. It has become an important local employer and is a perfect example of the importance of farm diversification. Indeed, Mr Speaker, the wine is so good that I am sure I would even be able to provide you with a bottle—if I was able to get called earlier in statements. [Interruption.] Maybe even two bottles. Can my right hon. Friend explain what steps he is taking to encourage rural diversification for farmers?
Mr Speaker
The hon. Gentleman may wish to develop his thoughts at greater length in an Adjournment debate.
Richard Benyon
I am only mildly piqued that I have not been offered a bribe. I can assure my hon. Friend that this Government are serious about offering encouragement. For years, Ministers have been telling the farming community that it has to diversify its business, but then, in other directions, they have been putting up barriers to that. We are doing that work with highly focused grants, such as the ones I have described. We are also providing broadband, which is a key deliverer, and support across a range of other measures to ensure that businesses precisely such as the one that my hon. Friend describes can function and are economically effective.
Stephen Phillips (Sleaford and North Hykeham) (Con)
8. What research his Department is conducting on the means by which honey bees are exposed to agricultural pesticides.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Richard Benyon)
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs fully appreciates the importance of honey bees and other pollinators. We need to understand the possible threats in order to tackle them. To that end, we continue to fund a number of research projects on the potential impacts of pesticides. That will enable us to develop the way in which such risks are assessed and regulated. In addition, DEFRA contributes to the insect pollinators initiative, which supports research into the main threats to insect pollinators.
Stephen Phillips
My hon. Friend will know that research at Stirling university has recently found that exposure to even low levels of neonicotinoid pesticides can have a serious impact on the health of bumble bees. Given the importance of bees, both to our farmers and to all those who are interested in pollinating crops, does the Minister agree that his Department needs to look again at the use of these pesticides?
Richard Benyon
Yes I do, and we are. The Health and Safety Executive’s chemical regulation directorate, along with the Advisory Committee on Pesticides and the European Food Safety Authority, have looked in detail at Stirling university’s research. They believe that it is interesting and adds to the debate, but that on balance the risks do not require a ban of neonicotinoids. However, in DEFRA we have commissioned further research, through the Food and Environment Research Agency, using expertise from Stirling university, which provided the original piece of research, because we want to make absolutely sure that we are getting this right.
Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)
The Minister will be aware that the Environmental Audit Committee is undertaking an inquiry into hive collapse, bees and pesticides. Will he undertake to ensure that his Department supports the inquiry to the best possible extent and also responds at the earliest possible date to its outcome?
Richard Benyon
I hope that in the reply I gave to my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Stephen Phillips) I showed the seriousness with which we are looking at this issue. We know that pollinators benefit our economy by around £450 million a year. That is a service that nature provides. We want to make absolutely sure that we are protecting that, and we will work with any organisation that is doing research of that kind.
Graeme Morrice (Livingston) (Lab)
9. What recent assessment he has made of the potential risks of a badger cull.
Bridget Phillipson (Houghton and Sunderland South) (Lab)
11. What recent assessment he has made of the potential risks of a badger cull.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
12. What recent evidence he has considered on the effects of badger populations on dairy herds.
The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr Owen Paterson)
The badger culling pilots, which we now plan for next year, will test the effectiveness, safety and humaneness of controlled shooting. Our plans for an independent expert panel to oversee the design and analysis of the data collection have not changed. Monitoring will include field observations and post-mortems. If monitoring indicates that controlled shooting is an acceptable technique, the policy will be rolled out more widely.
Graeme Morrice
Obviously, I am aware that there will be a major debate on this subject later today, but may I ask the Secretary of State why DEFRA got the number of badgers living in each pilot cull area so wrong? Why did he undertake a survey only last month, weeks before the cull was due to start?
Mr Paterson
The answer is that we did not get the numbers wrong: we got them accurately and in a scientific manner, but the National Farmers Union, which had geared up for a lower number, requested that we postpone the culls. We and the NFU are following the science rigorously.
Mr Gary Streeter (South West Devon) (Con)
But if we do not proceed with the culls next year is not the risk that the impact on farmers’ livelihoods and mental health will continue? This is a dreadful disease and it is extremely distressing to farmers that they have to cope with it.
Mr Paterson
My hon. Friend is absolutely right: it is not just the trauma of the appalling loss—26,000 cattle last year—but every time a herd is tested it is difficult for farmers. Some animals become violent, and the disease, not just the culling, is causing regular stress. It is essential that we go ahead with the culls next summer and prove that they work, so that we bear down on disease in wildlife and in cattle.
Bridget Phillipson
If the cull does not go ahead, what is the risk that the Secretary of State will be sued by farmers for the losses they will incur, and what will the chaos cost the taxpayer?
Mr Alan Reid (Argyll and Bute) (LD)
Will my right hon. Friend explain why circumstances next year will be different from those this year, enabling the culls to go ahead and reduce the incidence of bovine TB and not spread it?
Mr Paterson
I explained at some length in my statement the other day, in which I spoke for, I think, 90 minutes, that certain circumstances led to the NFU’s decision to request that we postpone. There will be time to prepare. There will be no hitches next year: we will deliver this policy.
Mr Sheerman
The Minister might be aware that I made myself very unpopular among Labour Members when I voted against the ban on hunting with dogs. I therefore know what it is like to make an unpopular decision, but the badger cull is wrong: it is wrong because these wonderful creatures roamed this country before we did and it is wrong because it would destroy tens of thousands of living animals. There is no scientific evidence that it would do any good, so the Secretary of State should stop listening to farmers and listen to the great British public and Mr Brian May.
Mr Paterson
I respect the hon. Gentleman for his independence of judgment but—I am sorry—we disagree. The science is clear: after nine years there was a 28% reduction in the culled area. If we look at New Zealand, Australia or the Republic of Ireland—I talked to a farmer in France on Monday—we see that there is not a single country that is struggling with TB in its cattle industry that is not bearing down on wildlife and cattle, and we will do that.
Mr Tom Harris (Glasgow South) (Lab)
The Secretary of State blames the NFU for stopping the cull and the media blame No.10, but either way we can all understand the Secretary of State’s reluctance to take responsibility for this setback. May I ask him, on a scale of one to 100—I know that is a risky prospect, as arithmetic is not his Department’s strongest suit—how likely it is that the cull will go ahead next June?
Mr Paterson
I am not blaming anybody. I have been working very closely with the NFU since I took office. I have been studying this issue since I was the shadow spokesman and put down 600 questions, taking a serious, detailed interest in it. This is the right policy. It is the policy pursued by every other country, as I have said. Unlike with the vapid pronouncements we have had from the Opposition, this Government will take on a deadly disease, which is a zoonosis, so if we do not get a grip on it, it will prove a risk to human beings.
Andrew George (St Ives) (LD)
In view of that and of my right hon. Friend’s answer, it is important to base things on sound science. If he has read the science and understands the answers he has received to the 600 questions, he will know that the 12% to 16% reduction has to be viewed against a rise elsewhere. It will not rise as much as it would have done otherwise, but it is still a rise in bovine TB. Does he not accept that?
Mr Paterson
No, I dislike disagreeing with the hon. Gentleman, with whom I used to work closely on the EFRA Committee and when I was the shadow spokesman. The evidence is absolutely clear: there was a 28% reduction in disease after nine years in the cull area. That is why we are going ahead next year.
Lisa Nandy (Wigan) (Lab)
10. What recent assessment he has made of the effectiveness of the Financial Reporting Council in respect of mandatory carbon reporting.
The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr David Heath)
Officials are in discussion with the Financial Reporting Council ahead of the introduction of mandatory carbon reporting to ensure effective enforcement of this new requirement.
Lisa Nandy
In a recent written answer, the Minister estimated that the benefits of mandatory carbon reporting stood at £741 million over 10 years compared with just £28 million in compliance costs. Given the clear economic, social and environmental benefits of mandatory carbon reporting, with he give the FRC the teeth it needs to crack down on companies that continue to flout the law?
Mr Heath
My Department does not have responsibility for the Financial Reporting Council—the hon. Lady will understand that—but it has proved very effective at ensuring that legislation that applies to carbon reporting is upheld. We recently held a consultation on the draft regulation, which closed on 17 October, and we received about 100 responses. We will look very carefully at them.
Mr Speaker
I remind Back-Bench and Front-Bench Members alike that topical questions and answers are supposed to be brief. We have a lot to get through; let us be brisk.
Mr Graham Allen (Nottingham North) (Lab)
T1. If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.
The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr Owen Paterson)
I begin by paying tribute to the great work done by my right hon. Friends the Members for Meriden (Mrs Spelman) and for South East Cambridgeshire (Sir James Paice). I want to build on their efforts over the past two years by galvanising the rural economy while improving the environment. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will welcome this morning’s growth figures. We should not all jump at one set of figures, but growth of 1% is significant, and I really want the rural economy to play a part in future growth. Abroad, I will represent the United Kingdom in the European negotiations and I will promote British exports at every opportunity.
Mr Allen
I welcome the Secretary of State to his new responsibilities. Does he know that in my constituency the big water users such as textiles and brewers are now in decline—and many have disappeared—with the consequence that the water table is rising? Will he meet me, representatives from the city of Nottingham and the Local Government Authority to discuss sustainable urban defences against flooding? Would he please meet us soon?
Mr Paterson
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his question. Happily, I was in Nottingham during my first week in office, looking at a £45 million flood defence scheme. I thought it was brilliant, not only in protecting 16,000 houses but, more importantly—I did not realise this until I went there—revealing 500 acres of previously blighted land that is now open for development by the private sector. I am interested in what he has to say. I will work on this issue with the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Richard Benyon), who is the big expert, so it might be better for him to meet the hon. Gentleman.
Alun Cairns (Vale of Glamorgan) (Con)
T2. I was encouraged by the Secretary of State’s earlier comments on fixed line broadband, improving accessibility, reducing red tape and speeding up the planning process. Will he reassure me that that action extends to mobile communications in rural areas, as we need to extend the mast size and reduce red tape in this sector, too?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Richard Benyon)
My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State is dealing with this matter at Cabinet level. This is vital to the roll-out of the broadband scheme. We have already made a decision to relax planning for a five-year period to make sure that nothing can get in the way of the roll-out of broadband 2 for the most remote rural communities.
Angela Smith (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab)
T6. In response to the recent statement on the badger cull in the House of Lords, the noble Lord Krebs urged Ministers to gather together scientific experts and rethink the Government’s strategy altogether. Why does the Secretary of State not do just that?
Mr Paterson
We have been over this ground on several occasions during the last few days. We are absolutely clear about the fact that the scientific analysis of the trials conducted by the Government that the hon. Lady supported show a 28% reduction in the culled area. That is the information that we are going on, because it is scientifically based.
Simon Hart (Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire) (Con)
T3. What steps is the Department taking to deal with ash dieback disease?
Mr Paterson
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising this issue. There were reports on the radio this morning about the horrific danger to our 80 million ash trees. We have already launched a consultation on the ground, involving a detailed investigation into whether the disease has taken root in the country. The results of that consultation will be reported to me tomorrow, and I shall discuss it over the weekend with the head of the Forestry Commission. However, on the basis of the evidence that we have seen so far, I intend to introduce a ban on imports and tight restrictions on ash movements in Great Britain on Monday.
Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)
T7. We were told that the Government would help local authorities with the costs of the floods. Now we have been told that those in Newcastle do not count, and that the city council will have to find £10 million from a budget that is being halved by the Government. Why is it that in Newcastle we have the wrong sort of water?
Richard Benyon
An improved scheme called the Bellwin scheme kicks in when spending related to flood damage hits a certain threshold, enabling local authorities to apply to the Government for extra funds. If the hon. Lady wishes to raise specific concerns with me, I shall be happy to consider them, but the Bellwin scheme has been accepted for many years.
Graham Evans (Weaver Vale) (Con)
T4. What assessment has my hon. Friend made of the impact of onshore wind farms on local environments such as Frodsham Marsh in my constituency? Plans for a wind turbine farm there have just been confirmed.
Richard Benyon
Along with the Department for Energy and Climate Change, we are conducting a review of policies relating to onshore wind. I hope that my hon. Friend will contribute his concerns and those of his local community to that review, because we want to ensure that local communities work with the Government and do not feel put upon by them when it comes to renewable energy systems.
Jack Dromey (Birmingham, Erdington) (Lab)
T8. In 2009, the Minister said :“any weakening of the Agricultural Wages Board or its abolition would further impoverish the rural working class, exacerbating social deprivation and the undesirable indicators associated with social exclusion”.What has changed, and how would he explain that change to the 1,020 workers who were previously protected by the board in his constituency?
The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr David Heath)
I think I know rather more about workers in my constituency than the hon. Gentleman. I am aware of the circumstances in the agricultural industry, and I am also aware that there are now many protections for low-paid workers. I would not be proceeding with the consultation unless I was convinced that this was in the interests of those who work in my constituency and throughout the country.
Laura Sandys (South Thanet) (Con)
T5. Forty-eight animals have been slaughtered in the port of Ramsgate owing to the resumption of live animal exports. What procedures have been introduced to deal with the crises that we have been experiencing in Thanet?
Mr Heath
As my hon. Friend knows, the circumstances in Ramsgate—about which we have spoken—were entirely unacceptable. I want to make that absolutely clear. I immediately asked for a report to be drawn up by officials who were working on animal health regulation, which they will submit to me shortly. I shall be happy to share their findings with my hon. Friend.
We have no power to ban live exports, but I do have powers to ensure that the regulations that are in place are enforced strictly and rigorously, and I shall do so.
Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
When I introduced my Food Waste Bill earlier this year, I thought that I was making good progress in convincing the then Minister in the House of Lords of the need for legislation to protect good-faith donors of food to charities from criminal and civil liability, but I now have the impression that DEFRA is trying to hide behind EU food safety standards. What are Ministers doing to move things forward?
Mr Speaker
Order. So that the Minister does not feel sorry for himself, I should point out that the Speaker likes all hon. Members. I call Mr Bob Blackman to ask Question 9. He is not here.
Stephen Metcalfe (South Basildon and East Thurrock) (Con)
T10. Although Thurrock is an urban constituency on the edge of London, a large proportion of it is rural and lacks decent broadband provision. In light of the Minister’s previous answer, can he confirm that villages such as Bulphan, Orsett and Horndon-on-the-Hill will be in line for improved broadband provision?
Richard Benyon
My hon. Friend might like to encourage those villages to apply for the third round of the rural community broadband fund. That will be running from January, so there is time for his communities to get their bids in. He makes a good point: instead of talking only about the most remote communities, we must remember that there are rural communities close to urban areas that have appalling broadband, too.
Mr Russell Brown (Dumfries and Galloway) (Lab)
Towards the end of last week I met a constituent whose new insurance premium has gone up by some 8%. She lives in an area that has occasionally been flooded, and the massive increase plus the excessive excess means this lady will have to abandon her home. Does the Minister know how many businesses and residential properties are now being abandoned because people cannot afford flood insurance?
Mr Paterson
The hon. Gentleman makes a highly pertinent point. The statement of principles is not working at present, and affordability is a key part of that. I have meetings coming up shortly with the Association of British Insurers and I will establish its latest figures, but we want to resolve this: we are determined to get to the bottom of it, because I totally sympathise with people such as the hon. Gentleman’s constituent.
Harriett Baldwin (West Worcestershire) (Con)
Can the Minister confirm that the moneys available in the rural community broadband fund that come from the European Union will not be subject to European state aid rules?
Richard Benyon
We hope in the next few weeks to make an announcement about satisfactory conclusions in respect of negotiations with the European Commission. That will be a major step forward.
Dame Joan Ruddock (Lewisham, Deptford) (Lab)
The Secretary of State should have banned the import of ash seedlings the minute disease was found in nurseries in this country. He will not be forgiven for any delay by the people of this country, who so value the ash trees. Will he ensure that the Forestry Commission has all the resources it needs to be able to confront this terrible threat?
Mr Paterson
I think the right hon. Lady is being pretty unfair. The minute we heard about this, we launched a consultation. That will report tomorrow. On the basis of evidence—[Interruption.] All the right hon. Lady’s colleagues are shouting at me about evidence and science-based information, and from tomorrow evening I will look at the evidence, and if it is sensible to ban imports, I will take that decision and make restrictions on Monday.
George Freeman (Mid Norfolk) (Con)
I congratulate the Secretary of State on his Department’s announcement last week of the launch of an agricultural science strategy. Does he agree that British agricultural science has the potential to boost our great industry and support emerging markets around the world?
Mr Heath
I very much welcome the initiative, which is a joint venture between ourselves and our colleagues in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. I believe we have an enormous amount to offer in both growing our own industry and offering technology which is of value across the world in dealing with issues of food security.
Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)
1. What annual savings the Church Commissioners expect to make from the creation of the Diocese of Leeds?
The Second Church Estates Commissioner (Sir Tony Baldry)
Before I answer the question, may I take this opportunity to pay tribute to my predecessor, Sir Stuart Bell, who served as Second Church Estates Commissioner for some 13 years, the longest period anyone has served in that post since Parliament created it in the mid-1830s? He did so with considerable diligence and sensitivity. He will be much missed, and may his soul rest in peace.
Following consultation on its initial draft reorganisation scheme for the dioceses of Bradford, Ripon and Leeds and Wakefield, the Church of England Dioceses Commission expects to publish a revised draft scheme on 29 October. Accompanying its report will be a statement on the effect of the proposals, if implemented, on the mission of the Church of England and a detailed estimate of their financial impacts.
Philip Davies
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that answer. We all appreciate that savings need to be made, but with the proposed abolition of the Bradford diocese and its incorporation into a larger Leeds diocese, what steps will be taken to ensure that the communities across the Bradford district will not be given less priority in the Church of England?
Sir Tony Baldry
May I suggest to my hon. Friend that he discuss his concerns with the Bishop of Bradford, who I am sure will be able to reassure him that the Christian and Church of England mission in his constituency will in no way be diminished by these proposals? One of the greatest threats to the Church’s mission in his constituency is the continuing theft of lead from churches. No fewer than six churches in his constituency have had lead stolen from their roofs—St Peter’s church in Shipley has had lead stolen on four separate occasions, notwithstanding protections such as SmartWater. So may I take this opportunity to entreat my hon. Friend, as I know the Bishop of Bradford and the Archbishop of York will, not to frustrate the Third Reading of the Scrap Metal Dealers Bill when it comes before the House soon?
Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)
2. What assessment the Church Commissioners have made of the likelihood of the Church of England making a decision on women bishops in 2012.
Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)
3. What recent discussions the Church Commissioners have had with Church of England bishops on the Women Bishops Measure.
Sir Tony Baldry
The General Synod will resume on 20 November the final approval debate on the legislation to enable women to become bishops. I will be voting for the Measure, and I hope and pray that at least two thirds of the members of every house of the General Synod will vote to ensure that, at last, we can have women bishops in the Church of England.
Simon Hughes
May I associate myself and my colleagues with the thanks and the tributes to Sir Stuart Bell for his service in this area?
The message I hope this House will send via my hon. Friend to the Synod is that not only do we want the Synod to make a final decision this month that clearly says women can be bishops in the Church of England, as a legacy of the outgoing archbishop and as a tribute to his work, but we need the Church of England to catch up into the 21st century if it is to do a good job for everybody. I hope that there is no more shilly-shallying, that the Synod gets on with it and that we get a clear decision so that we can move to having women bishops.
Sir Tony Baldry
I entirely agree with my right hon. Friend. May I commend to his attention, and to that of other right hon. and hon. Members, an article written by the Archbishop of Canterbury in last week’s Church Times, which is available in the Library? He stated that
“a Church that ordains women as priests, but not as bishops, is stuck with a real anomaly, one that introduces an unclarity into what we are saying about baptism and about the absorption of the Church in the priestly self-giving of Jesus Christ.”
We have been waiting far too long to enable women to become bishops in the Church of England—now is the time to take action and resolve this issue, once and for all.
Mr Bradshaw
In his conversations with the bishops, will the hon. Gentleman tell them that just because House of Lords reform has been abandoned they should not feel any less pressure to do this and that a failure to agree a Measure that gives women bishops equal status with male bishops would still lead to a severe constitutional crisis between Church and state?
Sir Tony Baldry
In fairness, I think that the House of Bishops recognises that, and when it met last it amended the Measure in a way that should commend support. Indeed, the bishops took a lead on that from the Archbishop of Canterbury, who, in the same article, made it clear that he thought the ordination or consecration of women as bishops was good for the whole world. He said:
“It is good news for the world we live in, which needs the unequivocal affirmation of a dignity given equally to all by God in creation and redemption—and can now, we hope, see more clearly that the Church is not speaking a language completely remote from its own most generous and just instincts.”
There is clear leadership from the House of Bishops and from the archbishops that we now need to consecrate women bishops.
Miss Anne McIntosh (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)
May I say how much Sir Stuart Bell will be missed by all in the House?
I hope that a strong message will go out from this House that we support women bishops and that the next Archbishop of Canterbury will be drawn from the widest possible church in this regard.
Sir Tony Baldry
I am sure that that message will be heard by the General Synod.
John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)
I wish to associate myself with the comments about Stuart Bell, who is very badly missed.
The Church has spent many years avoiding this issue, so if the Synod fails to do the right thing, what does the hon. Gentleman think the consequences will be for the future of the Church of England?
Sir Tony Baldry
I think that the consequences for the Church of England will be very grim indeed. I hope that the General Synod, and those who might be tempted to vote against this Measure in it, will reflect on that point.
Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)
4. What assessment the Church Commissioners have made of the contribution of Church of England cathedrals to the UK’s cultural and spiritual life.
Sir Tony Baldry
The evidence of a recent report shows a 30% increase in attendance at cathedral services in the Church of England over the last 10 years. The Church of England’s figures estimate that 12 million people visited an Anglican cathedral or royal peculiar, such as Westminster abbey, last year. A recent report confirms that finding by stating that more than 27% of England’s adult population made such a visit in the last 12 months.
Fiona Bruce
I assume my hon. Friend is referring to the recent Theos report, “Spiritual Capital: The Present and Future of English Cathedrals”. Does he agree that cathedrals are much more than vital tourist destinations and play an important role in building social and spiritual capital? They act as a hub to connect communities through social action work, such as that of street pastors or homeless projects, and also allow many people to feel, as the report states, that
“the cathedral gives me a greater sense of the sacred than I get elsewhere”.
Sir Tony Baldry
I entirely agree that cathedrals are centres of spirituality, reflection and history. Some 300,000 children visited cathedrals last year and 15,000 people are regular volunteers at cathedrals. They are a fantastic resource for England and are much to be celebrated.
John Mann (Bassetlaw) (Lab)
5. What assessment the Church Commissioners have made of the potential Church sites available for the reburying of King Richard III.
Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South) (Lab)
10. What discussions the Church Commissioners have had on laying to rest the remains of King Richard III at Leicester Cathedral.
Sir Tony Baldry
The remains that are thought to be those of Richard III are at present with Leicester city council’s museums department and the university of Leicester’s archaeological department, which are carrying out tests to see whether it can be demonstrated that the remains are indeed those of Richard III. Once those tests are concluded, the nature, place and marking of any reinterment will need seriously to be considered.
John Mann
Will the hon. Gentleman let it be known to the warring factions of York and Leicester and to the Church Commissioners of the Church of England that the great priory of Worksop, which is halfway between the two cities at the end of the road through the forest, and which is at the centre of the kingdom of Richard III, can provide the most appropriate final resting place for the king?
Sir Tony Baldry
I can see that there will be quite a lot of competition. If there is conclusive evidence that these are the remains of Richard III, the tradition would be that they would be reinterred in the nearest Christian church or cathedral, which happens to be Leicester cathedral. In such circumstances, I hope it would be possible to arrange a meeting with the dean of Leicester to see how that could happen.
Jonathan Ashworth
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann). I am sure that Worksop has many fine qualities, but given that it was the Grey friars who took the body of Richard and buried him at what was then the Greyfriars church—a site just a stone’s throw from Leicester cathedral—and that he has been in Leicester for 500 years, is it not most appropriate that he should be finally laid to rest at Leicester cathedral?
Sir Tony Baldry
I understand that point of view, and once we know the provenance of the remains I shall seek to use my best offices to arrange a meeting with the dean of the cathedral and others to ensure that this can be done in a proper and timely way.
I was concerned about how many other kings might come up, as I never thought my career would involve the question of how we might bury kings. I am glad to say that the Church can account for all of them. I am afraid to say that the head of Charles, king and martyr, is still separated from his body, but they are both at St George’s, Windsor. The only one still missing is Henry I, who seems to have got lost somewhere in Reading after the dissolution of the monasteries. I can account for all the other kings and queens being properly and Christianly buried.
Mr Speaker
That is greatly reassuring both to the House and, I am sure, to the nation.
Hugh Bayley (York Central) (Lab)
I must say to my dear and hon. Friend the Member for Leicester South (Jonathan Ashworth) that it is not 500 years but 527 years since Richard was killed. Despite that passage of time, he is still very well regarded in York. [Laughter.] We have a museum to Richard III—
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
Is he still on the electoral roll?
Hugh Bayley
My hon. Friend should not tempt me down that path.
We respect Richard III enormously. But to argue on the Floor of this place over his mortal remains is more like medieval cathedrals fighting over saints’ relics. I do not think it is appropriate. I have heard what the spokesman for the Church Commissioners says, and they are wise words.
Guy Opperman (Hexham) (Con)
6. What steps the Church Commissioners are taking to prevent metal theft from war memorials in church grounds.
Sir Tony Baldry
The theft of metal from war memorials is a distressing and despicable crime and an affront to the memory of those who gave their lives to the service of this country.
The Church of England has been active in its support of the Scrap Metal Dealers Bill, which will shortly have its Third Reading in the House. At a local level, the Church of England continues to offer advice and support to help churches to implement security measures that will make the theft less attractive while allowing the public to visit memorials without hindrance, and the Church is also working at local level with communities and the War Memorials Trust to preserve the names recorded on memorials and to clean, renovate and repair memorials in advance of the centenary of the commencement of world war one.
Guy Opperman
All of us welcome the Scrap Metal Dealers Bill to deal with this heinous crime, but does my hon. Friend agree that the churches themselves need to engage with local scrap metal dealers so that there is not the repetition of this offence on a local basis?
Sir Tony Baldry
Yes, and dioceses and churches are already doing that. Responsible scrap metal dealers should be conscious of their responsibilities in that regard as well.
Gavin Shuker (Luton South) (Lab/Co-op)
8. What steps the Electoral Commission is taking to increase voter registration (a) in general and (b) among young people.
Mr Gary Streeter (South West Devon)
The commission runs public information campaigns before elections and referendums to encourage people to register to vote. The campaigns are targeted towards groups less likely to be on the electoral register, including young people. The commission also provides guidance and sets standards for awareness to be raised locally by electoral registration officers, for which it has provided a range of resources to help them to do this, including template posters, press advertisements and press releases. Where underperformance is found, the commission provides EROs with targeted support.
Gavin Shuker
I am aware that many initiatives focused towards young people involve the use of social media, and I can twitter with the best of them, but will the hon. Gentleman give me the assurance that these social media tools will not be used as a replacement for more practical ways of getting young people to sign up to vote?
Mr Streeter
The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. It is important to target public awareness campaigns towards young people in a way that is most likely to attract their attention, for example, by using TV and radio advertising, but on channels that they are likely to watch, which you and I, Mr Speaker, are probably not likely to watch.
Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)
9. What assessment the Church Commissioners have made of the potential support which they can provide to Christian communities in Syria.
The Second Church Estates Commissioner (Sir Tony Baldry)
Lambeth Palace and the Church of England are in regular contact with Christian development and mission agencies as to how best the Church might support vulnerable communities in Syria. However, the nature of the conflict in Syria means that it is proving incredibly difficult to give support to those communities in most need. The Archbishop of Canterbury remains in regular contact with religious leaders in Syria as well as with religious leaders from neighbouring countries.
Mr Hollobone
The Christian community in Syria is one of the oldest in the world and one of the largest in the middle east. Indeed, was it not St Paul himself who was converted on the road to Damascus? Is there not a very grave danger that if the wrong people come out on top in the present conflict in Syria there could be a bloodbath of Christians on a biblical scale?
Sir Tony Baldry
Yes, and that is why the Church of England is using such influence as we have to talk to the Russian ambassador and others here and in other countries around the world to present humanitarian concerns arising from the conflict in Syria and to encourage the Russian Government to play a more constructive role in resolving the conflict to try to seek to avoid a bloodbath of Christians and others.
Business of the House
(12 years ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)
Will the Leader of the House give us the business for next week?
The Leader of the House of Commons (Mr Andrew Lansley)
The business for next week is as follows:
Monday 29 October—Second Reading of the Public Service Pensions Bill.
Tuesday 30 October—Second Reading of the Growth and Infrastructure Bill.
Wednesday 31 October—Consideration of Lords amendments to the Local Government Finance Bill, followed by a motion to approve European documents relating to EU budget simplification and the multi-annual financial framework.
Thursday 1 November—A debate on a motion relating to the beer duty escalator, followed by a debate on a motion relating to air passenger duty. The subjects for these debates have been nominated by the Backbench Business Committee.
Friday 2 November—Private Members’ Bills.
The provisional business for the week commencing 5 November will include:
Monday 5 November—Second Reading of the European Union (Croatian Accession and Irish Protocol) Bill.
Tuesday 6 November—Second Reading of the HGV Road User Levy Bill, followed by a motion to approve European documents relating to banking union and economic and monetary union.
Wednesday 7 November—Opposition Day [8th allotted day]. There will be a debate on an Opposition motion. The subject is to be announced.
Thursday 8 November—A debate on a motion relating to the medium-term financial plan for the House of Commons administration and savings programme. The subject for this debate has been nominated by the Backbench Business Committee.
Friday 9 November—Private Members’ Bills.
I should also like to inform the House that the business in Westminster Hall for 8 November will be:
Thursday 8 November—A debate on regulation of claims management companies.
Ms Eagle
I thank the Leader of the House for announcing the business for next week. We welcome the fact that Britain has finally emerged from recession, but we should never have been in a double-dip recession in the first place. It was a recession created in Downing street by a part-time Chancellor who cut too far, too fast.
The Jimmy Savile case has rightly caused widespread disgust. There are serious questions for the BBC to answer, questions that were not answered during the director-general’s unsatisfactory appearance before the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, but the issue goes much further. As happened in the Rochdale scandal only this year, it appears that in the Jimmy Savile case victims’ complaints were not taken seriously. We need to learn these lessons and, for the sake of the victims, uncover the truth. An independent inquiry is needed, so may we have an urgent statement from the Home Secretary?
I have been keeping a list of the occasions when Ministers blame the weather for the omnishambles. So far, the Government have blamed the poor performance of the economy on the snow, before deciding that the reason was in fact too much rain. Then the Immigration Minister blamed the chaos at Heathrow border control on the wrong type of wind. Now the Environment Minister has blamed too much rain for the U-turn on the badger cull. We have seen the badger U-turn, the Energy Bill shambles, the west coast main line fiasco, plebgate, and only today it appears that Ministers have got their sums wrong on tuition fees. It is not the weather that is to blame; it is the Government’s incompetence. Ministers need to get a grip, so may we have an urgent statement on what has gone wrong from the man who is meant to be in charge of Government competence: the Deputy Prime Minister?
The abolition of child benefit for higher earning taxpayers was one of the Government’s first shambles. The complex rules introduced by the Chancellor mean that from January an estimated half a million households will have to complete self-assessment tax forms for the first time. Many people have raised concerns that, weeks away from this change, Revenue and Customs has not written to families to warn them. There are those who have suggested that the Government’s reluctance to send out those letters might have something to do with the upcoming elections for police and crime commissioners. May we have an urgent statement from the Chancellor setting out how his Department will let families know of impending child benefit changes?
Only a few weeks ago, following the Prime Minister’s botched reshuffle, at business questions I paid tribute to the right hon. Member for North West Hampshire (Sir George Young), saying:
“Over the years, he has surprised political pundits with his Lazarus-style tendencies, and perhaps even this time he is merely on a sabbatical and will be back.”—[Official Report, 6 September 2012; Vol. 549, c. 383.]
And he is back! It is a miracle. Given my predictive powers, the House might be interested to know that my tip for the 4.25 at Doncaster tomorrow is Flashman. I also predict that there will be another omnishambles along soon.
May we have a statement from the Transport Secretary on fare dodgers? Will the Leader of the House join me in congratulating the conductor on the Virgin train service who refused to let the Chancellor have a free ride? The hapless part-time Chancellor was bundled out of the goods exit at Euston to avoid the waiting media, and it was left to the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) to bat for the Government. His explanation was that “train tickets are so confusing it is easy to get into the wrong carriage.” No wonder this Government have gone off the rails.
This week the man in charge of crisis management in No. 10 emerged from the bunker, blinking into the light of day, to offer his own explanation for the shambles. In a bizarre interview, he said that
“you’ll get surprised by what’s going on”
and that he was
“surprised on a day-to-day basis”.
But Government Back Benchers will be pleased to know that Mr Dowden—for it is he—has a strategy:
“the first thing I do in the morning”,
he said, is to
“turn on the Today programme and hear what’s going on”.
So two and a half years into office, the Government are divided, Back Benchers are in revolt, and Government policies are unravelling daily, and the best strategy that No. 10 has come up with is to listen to the “Today” programme. We just can’t go on like this.
Mr Lansley
I am grateful to the shadow Leader of the House; I enjoyed that. I am not a betting man, but if I were I would never bet against my right hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire (Sir George Young)—that’s for sure. It is a pleasure to have him back among our colleagues, although I have always valued my right hon. Friend the former Chief Whip as a colleague and pay tribute to his time in Government. We should all reflect on what a tremendous contribution he has made around the world as International Development Secretary.
To pursue the hon. Lady’s analogy, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and, indeed, the Government are on the right track. The figures published this morning for quarter 3 growth, to which she referred for about 12 seconds, are a reflection of the right approach being taken by this Government. I understood her to say that we should not have been in this position; indeed we should not. We were in this position because we inherited an economy that was close to bankruptcy from a Government who had spent without thought and put us into enormous debt. The debt has been at the heart of this, and Labour Members seem never to learn. They never seem to understand that the answer to this country’s problems in resolving the deficit and the debts is not more borrowing.
What the shadow Leader of the House said was entertaining, but, when it comes down to it, it was, frankly, trivia. What really matters is what is actually happening in this country, and she neglected that. This morning’s growth statistics are very encouraging and illustrative of the progress that is being made. The Chancellor said at an early stage that the recovery would be choppy, and indeed it has been, but these figures illustrate where we are going.
Another illustration of our being on the right track is that the employment situation is so much improved. The latest statistics show that there are over 1 million more people in private sector employment since the election, that youth employment is improving, that the number of people on out-of-work benefits is down, that inflation is down, and that new company creation in 2011 was the best ever, with over 1,230 new companies being created per day.
Beyond the economic sphere, the latest figures show that crime rates are down by 6%. In the NHS, which is of course closest to my heart, waiting times are among the very best we have ever seen, including a reduction in the number of those waiting over a year for their treatment in the NHS, which was some 18,000-plus at the time of the last election and is now down to nearly 2,000. I hope that the shadow Leader of the House will reflect on the realities across the country rather than on Westminster trivia.
The hon. Lady made an important point about the investigations relating to Jimmy Savile. Independent inquiries are being undertaken by the police, as a criminal investigation, and by Kate Lampard on behalf of the NHS, and there are two BBC inquiries led by Nick Pollard and by Dame Janet Smith. All those inquiries are independent and I see no reason at this stage for us to think that there would be any merit in seeking to overturn those inquiries, which are making progress. We must simply make sure that, as I know they will, they all respect and understand the fact that the police’s criminal investigation must take precedence.
The shadow Leader of the House also asked about business relating to—[Interruption.] Actually, perhaps she did not ask any other questions, so I will leave it there.
Mr Speaker
Order. A very large number of hon. and right hon. Members are, as usual on this occasion, seeking to catch my eye, but I remind the House that business under the auspices of the Backbench Business Committee will follow. There are two pieces of such business, both of which are of intense topical interest. The second piece is a debate and I can tell the House—because I have the list—that it is extremely heavily subscribed. If I am to accommodate colleagues now, within a limited time frame, brevity from Members on the Back and Front Benches alike is essential. We will be led in that by Caroline Nokes.
Caroline Nokes (Romsey and Southampton North) (Con)
My right hon. Friend the Leader of the House will no doubt be aware of the announcement by Ford today of the closure of the Transit factory in Swaythling in my constituency, with the loss of 500 manufacturing jobs and potential further losses in the supply chain. Will he please find time for a debate on this serious matter, which affects not just my constituency, but the surrounding constituencies of many right hon. and hon. Members?
Mr Lansley
I am sure that the whole House will share my hon. Friend’s regret at the loss of any jobs, particularly those in a major plant in her constituency. She will know that Ministers will be focused, as they have been elsewhere, on trying to provide whatever help and support they can. She will also know that this is in the context of many very positive announcements in recent months by the motor vehicle industry, including that this country is a net exporter of cars for the first time in many years, and of investments at Honda, Nissan, BMW and Jaguar; but that does not take away at all from the distress that today’s announcement will no doubt have caused in my hon. Friend’s constituency. I undertake that Ministers will respond and keep the House informed on action to support the staff affected.
Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)
May we have a debate on early-day motion 607?
[That this House notes that Ministers have recently repeated the claim that the lives of British soldiers should be put at risk in Afghanistan to counter the alleged Afghan Taliban terrorist threat to the UK; believes that there is no truth in this claim and that the lives of British soldiers should not be sacrificed when no threat to the UK exists; and calls on the Coalition Government to adopt an independent foreign policy.]
Canadian and Dutch soldiers have returned to their own countries from Afghanistan with their heads held high after large sacrifices in blood and treasure. We have heard today the dreadful news of two further deaths of British soldiers. There will be many tributes to them that will be sincere and heartfelt, but will not history judge that their epitaph should be, “They died to protect the reputation of cowardly Ministers”?
Mr Lansley
The House knows not only that we will pay heartfelt tribute to service personnel, including the two who it was announced yesterday have tragically died in Afghanistan, but that the people of this country and this House will take the view that they have died in defence of the interests of this country and to protect this country and that we are in Afghanistan to combat a terrorist threat and, alongside that, to help put in place in Afghanistan a sustainable and more democratic country for the future. That is why they are there and we should honour and value the contribution that service personnel make.
Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)
May we have a debate on the £1 billion-plus of losses in derivative trading by Network Rail? Some of us would like that money spent on trains and bridges over railway lines instead of in a second-grade investment bank.
Mr Lansley
I do not have an immediate opportunity for a debate on that subject, but if I contact my right hon. Friend the Transport Secretary, he may well be able to give a reply to my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood).
Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)
After nearly 11 years of being held without charge or trial, British resident Shaker Aamer is still in Guantanamo Bay, in spite of the fact that both US and UK authorities have said that he can be released. May we have an urgent debate to try to understand what the obstacles are to getting this man released and make that a real priority?
Mr Lansley
I know that hon. Members of all parties have taken a close interest in the situation of those who are at Guantanamo Bay. The hon. Lady may care to consider raising the matter at Foreign Office questions next Tuesday, but it also seems to me to be a subject on which she might like to seek a debate on the Adjournment.
Sir Bob Russell (Colchester) (LD)
May we have a debate on the independence of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority? You will recall, Mr Speaker, that in February I established through a written question that Ministers had met IPSA on nine occasions in the previous four months. I suspect the dead hand of the Treasury, because I asked a question in September, and the answer given this Monday at column 636 of Hansard refused to give information on the number of occasions on which the Treasury and Treasury Ministers had had discussions with IPSA.
Mr Lansley
I can tell the House that I have met IPSA since becoming Leader of the House, and nobody at that meeting would have regarded it as in any way compromising IPSA’s independence. I regard it as my responsibility to be fully informed, not least as a member of the Speaker’s Committee for the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, so that we can express views to IPSA. Members have rightly taken the view that there should be independent scrutiny of their pay, pensions and terms and conditions through IPSA. It is important that having established that independence, we make it real.
Mr Dave Watts (St Helens North) (Lab)
The Government’s council grant cuts, housing benefit cuts, welfare benefit cuts and health funding cuts are having the worst effect on the poorest families and individuals. May we have a debate on the overall impact that all the Government’s cuts are having on the poorest families and communities?
Mr Lansley
The hon. Gentleman should recognise that our policy is about the reform of the benefits system. As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions is making clear today, if we can encourage people into work, that is the best route out of poverty. The benefit reforms will change the culture for good.
Anne Marie Morris (Newton Abbot) (Con)
May we have a debate on university technical colleges? They have been a great success story, and Members have not had an opportunity to examine what drives that success so that we might see more and more of them.
Mr Lansley
My hon. Friend makes an important point. Many Members might envy the position that I am in, because a university technical college is being established in Cambridge, which is enabling many young people to come forward and acquire training in skills that will support the life sciences industry. That is a tremendous step forward, and I pay tribute to the Baker Dearing Educational Trust and those who have taken the initiative forward. I hope that many Members, like my hon. Friend, will encourage UTCs in their area. She might like to raise the matter with our colleagues at Education questions on Monday.
Mr David Hamilton (Midlothian) (Lab)
In 2010, the Government decided to defer a decision about sport on free-to-air television, because they were waiting until digital TV came fully into operation. It is now fully operational, but Culture Ministers have told us that there will not be a discussion on the matter. Will the Leader of the House find time for a debate? After all, top sport should be for the masses, not the few.
Mr Lansley
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising the matter. I must say, I was struck last week at business questions—perhaps it will be true again this week—that there is a lot of interest in sport, from governance through to the Olympic and Paralympic legacy and on the point that he raises. That might make it appropriate for issues related to sport to be debated in the House at some point. Perhaps those of us who timetable business can discuss that.
Sir Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con)
May I ask my right hon. Friend a question in my capacity as Second Church Estates Commissioner? The Scrap Metal Dealers Bill will soon have its Third Reading debate. It has had two years of hard work put into it, with consultation with Home Office officials and other Departments, and there is support for it throughout the House. If it is frustrated and talked out on Report or Third Reading by just one Member, will he undertake to find Government time for it to complete its passage through the House? Churches, communities and the transport system up and down the country cannot allow Back-Bench filibustering to prevent the Bill from passing into law.
Mr Lansley
I heard what my hon. Friend said when he responded to questions on that matter on behalf of the Church Commissioners. He knows that the Government fully support the Bill tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South (Richard Ottaway). Members throughout the House will know, as I do from my constituency, of the damage, distress and expense caused by metal theft. That is true not only in relation to churches but perhaps particularly in relation to the theft of metal from memorials in the run-up to Remembrance Sunday. I cannot give him the undertaking that he seeks, not least because I am hopeful that the Bill will attract the House’s support on the day in question.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
Has the new Leader of the House seen the Chartered Management Institute’s commissioned report on the quality of management in Britain, which shows that 38% of managers—public and private sector—are awful, and that only 40% of managers in our country have any training at all? Does he find it worrying that very few of those GPs who will be running clinical commissioning groups have any management training?
Mr Lansley
The hon. Gentleman may like to look at the composition of clinical commissioning groups with great care. They combine managerial and clinical expertise, and he should not diminish the importance of clinicians being directly involved in the commissioning process. Securing the right medical and clinical services for patients in an area is not simply a managerial task; it is both managerial and clinical.
Guy Opperman (Hexham) (Con)
May we have a debate on equal pay for women? That request arises first out of yesterday’s landmark decision on the issue by the Supreme Court, but also because county councils up and down the country are facing a problem caused by a failure to pay the women they have employed over the years. In Northumberland, for example, hundreds of my constituents face a five-year delay to be paid.
Mr Lansley
The Government very much support equal pay—yesterday’s decision seemed a bit of a “Made in Dagenham” moment, did it not? Although the circumstances of that case are particular to it and relate to time limits and jurisdiction, I hope that it conveys a message about how to ensure equality and equal pay in every work force, which should be in every employer’s mind.
Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)
May we have a debate on plans by the NHS in south-west England to introduce regional pay? Those plans are opposed by south-west MPs from all political parties, and we are still waiting for a delegation to see the Minister. I have asked for a debate several times, and we need to have one urgently.
Mr Lansley
I attended Health questions earlier in the week, and thought that that issue was ably responded to by the Under-Secretary of State for Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Dr Poulter). What he said is clear: the Government support the “Agenda for Change” framework and, like NHS employers, we support the reform of that agenda to provide the flexibility that employers are looking for, so that it can be achieved within a national framework. That is what we are looking for.
Simon Kirby (Brighton, Kemptown) (Con)
Given today’s excellent GDP figures, will the Leader of the House find time for a debate on whether plan B is now redundant?
Mr Lansley
As my hon. Friend will appreciate, the debate scheduled for next week on the Growth and Infrastructure Bill will no doubt afford an opportunity to demonstrate that the Government are on the right track, as demonstrated by the GDP figures. Quarterly figures have been, and will be, choppy, but it is important to establish the right framework for the longer term. That is about achieving investment in infrastructure, and instilling confidence so that we can see that investment coming through. It is about deregulation and ensuring that business has a lower-cost environment, and recognising that we are in a global race and must ensure we are competitive in terms of tax, regulation and skills. The Government are making positive progress on all those things.
Ann Coffey (Stockport) (Lab)
The children and families Bill will be a significant piece of legislation in a complex area, and I fully support its aims. Will the Leader of the House ensure that when it reaches Report, sufficient time will be made available so that hon. Members who may not have been on the Bill Committee have a full opportunity to discuss the legislation’s complex provisions?
Mr Lansley
As the hon. Lady will be aware, since the election we have been able to timetable more opportunities for debate on Report, and I pay tribute to my predecessor and the Whips for ensuring that. Often, not just one but two days have been allocated for the Report stage of major Bills. As the hon. Lady says, the children and families Bill is very important. It has not yet been introduced, although we look forward to that.
Greg Mulholland (Leeds North West) (LD)
May we have a debate on the issues faced by older people who are seeking to save money for retirement? The all-party group for ageing and older people has just launched a report on older savers which shows that £13 billion is lost through poor advice and a failure by banks to switch accounts.
Mr Lansley
I take note of what my hon. Friend says. People feel strongly about that very important issue. We will of course look at the business, and no doubt the Opposition and the Backbench Business Committee will also consider the matter. It could be considered in the context of the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards and the approach taken by banks to their customers.
Yvonne Fovargue (Makerfield) (Lab)
Will the Leader of the House investigate the delay in publishing the results of the pilot scheme on recording Atos assessments, and ensure that they are published as soon as possible?
Mr Lansley
I cannot answer the hon. Lady’s question at this moment, but I will ask my colleagues at the Department for Work and Pensions to respond to her.
Gavin Barwell (Croydon Central) (Con)
With the economy growing, inflation lower than expected, public borrowing lower than expected and more people in work than at any time in our history, I am sure the Opposition will use the next Opposition day to talk about the economy, but if for some inconceivable reason they do not, will the Leader of the House ensure that Government time is made available?
Mr Lansley
Yes; I reiterate my hon. Friend’s extremely good point and commend it to the shadow Leader of the House when she considers the business on—I believe— 7 November, when the Opposition will no doubt take the opportunity to debate the latest positive figures on growth, employment and the reduction of inflation, and the simple fact that since the Government came to office, we have cut the deficit we inherited by a quarter.
Grahame M. Morris (Easington) (Lab)
I understand the Leader of the House used to have an interest in health. In that case, will he use his influence with the current Health Secretary to persuade him either to have a debate, or at least to make an oral statement, on access to radiotherapy? There was an announcement at the Tory party conference, which the Health Secretary mentioned in question time, but it would be a courtesy to the House if we were allowed to understand the detail. The issue is about not just capital, but revenue.
Mr Lansley
The hon. Gentleman might like to know that the Leader of the House still has an interest in health, and I was at Health questions this week. He is right that the Health Secretary made it clear that he has made an announcement relating to a new radiotherapy innovation fund, which will support hospitals to ensure that patients have intensity-modulated radiotherapy if it is appropriate for them and that there is more access to stereotactic ablative therapy, both of which the hon. Gentleman has asked for and both of which this Government are now supporting.
Martin Vickers (Cleethorpes) (Con)
Northern Lincolnshire has had some promising announcements recently to boost the local economy, but yesterday Kimberly-Clark announced the closure of its factory at Barton-upon-Humber in my constituency with the loss of 378 permanent jobs and 120 others. Will the Leader of the House find time for a statement to give details of additional Government support that might be made available to benefit the local economy?
Mr Lansley
As I said to my hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes), that is further evidence of the choppy waters through which the economy is moving, which are a consequence of global competition. The investment that is coming to this country, which is positive, and contrary announcements that cause us considerable regret, are both a consequence of global competition. Our job is to ensure that, whenever we can, this country is the best possible place for investment. This is about rebalancing the economy, which is bringing additional investment into manufacturing. Rebalancing is important, but I entirely take my hon. Friend’s point that it will also mean that we ensure we give support to individual businesses to maximise their activity in this country—as we are doing, through, for example, the regional growth fund and local enterprise partnerships. I will ask my hon. Friends in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to respond on the issues my hon. Friend raises.
Mr Denis MacShane (Rotherham) (Lab)
May we have an early debate on the emergence of two-nation Britain, because, although the figures are good for London and the south, according to House of Commons figures given to me today, in Barnsley unemployment is up 6% on last year, in Bradford 9%, in Leeds 3% and in my own constituency 1%? We are now seeing an emerging disconnect between the north and the Tory and Liberal Democrat shires of the south. We need a one-nation Government, not this Government of the south, by the south, for the south.
Mr Lansley
As a one-nation Conservative, I believe that we are a one-nation Government. If the right hon. Gentleman wanted any more evidence of that, he would have paid more attention to the announcements made by the Deputy Prime Minister last Friday, I think, on regional growth 3, which will support the kind of innovative investment in the north of England that is integral to its economic development.
Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)
Not only has the number of jobseeker’s allowance claimants in Stafford fallen by 14% since April 2010, but we have just had the welcome news that a record 272 new companies were formed in the first six months. May we have a debate on how to support these new companies, so that they create the jobs and pay the taxes we need?
Mr Lansley
My hon. Friend makes an important point, and I am happy to say that those figures are reflected in many constituencies across the country. Stafford is clearly working well, and I applaud what they are doing there. Yes, I hope we will have the opportunity, not least in the debate on the Growth and Infrastructure Bill, to see how we are creating that kind of environment. I would draw particular attention to the work being done through the youth contract and apprenticeships to ensure that young people are finding the kinds of jobs with skills training attached that will enable them to support industrial development in the future.
Derek Twigg (Halton) (Lab)
May we have an urgent debate or statement from a Minister to explain why the Minister with responsibility for welfare reform, Lord Freud, has agreed that in Northern Ireland payment of housing benefit directly to landlords will continue, while in the rest of the country payment must be made directly to tenants—despite all the problems, highlighted by many people, with that—and to explain the unique circumstances for this decision?
Mr Lansley
I will of course talk to my hon. Friends at the Department for Work and Pensions, so that they reply specifically to the hon. Gentleman, but my understanding is not that the changes to universal credit rule out the possibility of direct payment, but merely that it is important that they be assessed and examined to ensure they are appropriate. Wherever possible, we want those in receipt of universal credit to feel like they are in work. We do not want to change the sense of that, so that they get their pay and it is their responsibility to live within their means.
Oliver Colvile (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Con)
Earlier this week, I attended a meeting of the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly in Glasgow. One issue discussed was that of marine and renewable energy. It appeared that few people were aware of the role that the south-west was playing in delivering that. May we have a debate on this important issue, so that we can promote the south-west and its contribution in this area?
Mr Lansley
I am grateful to my hon. Friend, not least for attending the BIPA, which I know is valued on both sides of the Irish sea. I hope that we will have the opportunity for that debate. He might want to look to have it when we consider the Energy Bill. The Government attach considerable importance to this matter and have invested more than £17 million in testing and academic facilities for marine energy in the south-west, and are encouraging the region to become the first UK marine energy park. I am sure he will want to illustrate that contribution to our future energy requirements and security during our debate on the Energy Bill.
Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)
Last week, the quiet rituals of Friday afternoon in west Cardiff were shattered by a series of hit-and-run incidents that left a young mother dead, her three children motherless and many more injured and traumatised by the events. Will the Leader of the House find a slot where I can put on the record my thanks to the emergency services—the police, the fire service, the ambulance service and the NHS—whose swift and well-co-ordinated actions undoubtedly saved many lives?
Mr Lansley
I am sure that the House will join me in expressing our sincere condolences to the family and friends of the young lady who died and in extending our best wishes to those who were injured. We were all shocked by what happened. The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to express appreciation for the emergency services. We in this House should do so every time we have the opportunity, because these terrible, shocking moments illustrate how much we depend on their prompt and effective action.
Michael Ellis (Northampton North) (Con)
Will my right hon. Friend support the planting of a Red Windsor apple tree in honour of the Queen’s diamond jubilee by Mr Speaker on Speaker’s Green next Wednesday at half-past 2? Will he attend the planting and will he encourage Members on both sides of the House to do so too, to support the Woodland Trust, among others, which is planting 6 million trees for the environment of this country this year?
Mr Lansley
Yes, I do indeed support that. I and the Deputy Leader of the House look forward to being there, and I think the shadow Leader of the House hopes to be there too. I am sure that that is supported by hon. Members on both sides of the House and look forward to the Speaker joining us in expressing our appreciation to Her Majesty on her diamond jubilee.
Valerie Vaz (Walsall South) (Lab)
Will the Leader of the House find time to remember Noor Inayat Khan who was an operative in Winston Churchill’s Special Operations Executive? May I express my thanks to the Speaker for helping in the campaign and to Members of the House who signed early-day motion 109?
[That this House congratulates the Memorial Trust of Noor Inayat Khan set up to honour and to recognise her extraordinary bravery; notes that Noor Inayat Khan was posthumously awarded the George Cross as one of only three women in Winston Churchill's Special Operations Executive and was also awarded the Croix de Guerre by France; recalls that under the code name Madeleine she was the first female radio operator in occupied France in 1943; further notes that despite being tortured she remained silent and her last word was Liberté; further notes that she was executed in Dachau at the age of 30; welcomes the permission given by the Vice Chancellor of the University of London for a bust to be installed in Gordon Square, near the house where Noor lived and from where she left on her fatal mission; further notes that the majority of the funds needed to fund the statue has already been raised by the Trust; congratulates the donors; encourages further donations to the Fund; and looks forward to the unveiling of the first memorial to a British Asian woman when the sculpture by Karen Newman is completed in Autumn 2012.]
May I also thank the university of London, which agreed to my request to place a memorial to Noor on its land in Gordon square? The sculpture by Karen Newman will be unveiled on 8 November. Noor was executed in Dachau concentration camp; this will be an opportunity for us to remember a true British heroine.
Mr Lansley
I am sure that the House is grateful to the hon. Lady, especially at this time of year, for drawing attention to the courage and example of the men and women of the Special Operations Executive, and of Noor Inayat Khan in particular. The House will also recall early-day motion 109 in that respect. I hope that the memorial to her—the sculpture to which the hon. Lady referred—will constantly remind people of the remarkable courage of those in the Special Operations Executive and the contribution they made.
Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)
The leader of Cambridgeshire county council recently wrote that global warming “may not exist” and that if it does, it is
“not caused by human activity”.
He described it as a theory espoused by “bourgeois left-wing academics”. Does the Leader of the House join me in condemning this irresponsible and anti-scientific position, and will he find time for a debate about evidence-informed policy?
Mr Lansley
I will not join my hon. Friend in that respect, although that does not mean that I agree with the leader of Cambridgeshire county council. We are all allowed our views, and he is allowed his. My hon. Friend and I will have talked to many of the scientists at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge. When one does so, it amply illustrates the character of climate change, what is really going on and the threat it poses.
Mr Tom Harris (Glasgow South) (Lab)
Will the Leader of the House offer a helping hand to Scotland’s First Minister, who recently mislaid some important legal advice on the future of an independent Scotland in the EU? We have searched everywhere for it. It may be under the sofa; the First Minister may have left it on a bus; his dog may have eaten it—we just do not know. It could have been mislaid in the Foreign Office—and it is the Foreign Office, not the Scottish Government, that has responsibility for external relations with the European Union. Will the right hon. Gentleman implement a cross-departmental hunt for the advice? It must exist; the First Minister says so and the only alternative is that he is a liar, and that would be unthinkable.
Mr Lansley
To be honest, in this context I suspect that the hon. Gentleman would be better to instigate a search for the credibility of the First Minister in Scotland, because as far as I can see, earlier in the year he was saying that he had legal advice, but then it turned out that he had not even asked for it. As the Prime Minister quite rightly said yesterday at Prime Minister’s questions, that just exposes the lack of credibility of the arguments being presented by the Scottish National party for the break-up of the Union.
Alun Cairns (Vale of Glamorgan) (Con)
My Twitter feed is often packed with comments from Opposition Members whenever there is negative economic news, but today it is remarkably empty. Will my right hon. Friend arrange a debate on the economy so that we can discuss today’s data as well as recent positive data?
Mr Lansley
My hon. Friend makes a good point. Although parliamentary time is tight, it is awfully tempting to arrange a debate on the economic figures—on growth, employment, inflation and borrowing. I fear, however, that we might not be able to do so. I reiterate the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon Central (Gavin Barwell): as the Opposition have time available in the week after next, perhaps they might like to debate the issues.
Dame Joan Ruddock (Lewisham, Deptford) (Lab)
Will the Leader of the House join me in congratulating the Clerks and staff of the House, including Hansard, on their enabling us to make a smooth transition to our earlier sitting hours? Will he quash the ugly rumours that this is a mere experiment and confirm there are no plans to review the earlier hours?
Mr Lansley
I of course share the right hon. Lady’s appreciation of the way in which the Clerk and staff of the House assist us in our business. The House was invited to make a decision and a decision was made.
Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)
May we have a debate on the creation of the excellent new Blue Collar Conservatives group last week? As the Labour party has abandoned the working classes and appears to want to stand up only for people who do not want to work and appears to believe in suppression rather than aspiration, would not such a debate show that the natural political home for anyone in the working classes is the Conservative party?
Mr Lansley
Yes, I share my hon. Friend’s view. We are now in a coalition Government, but the Conservative party has always been most successful when it has reached out to all the nation. That is why I am a one-nation Conservative and why in the 1980s more trade unionists voted Conservative than voted Labour. They were right to do so and our country has consequently been transformed. It continues to be my ambition and that of my party that we continue to be a home for people of aspiration, wherever they come from.
Tom Blenkinsop (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)
On the theme of aspiration and working people, may we have a debate and statement on why the Government regard people doing unpaid work experience as being in employment?
Mr Lansley
I shall gladly ask my friends at the Department for Work and Pensions to reply on how the statistics are calculated. The latest figures show an increase of more than 50,000 in the number of young people in employment and a decrease in the number of people on out-of-work benefits, and he should celebrate that.
Jason McCartney (Colne Valley) (Con)
My local council, Kirklees, is going through the latest stage of its consultation on the local development framework. May we have a debate on the five-year land supply and the scrapping of the regional spatial strategy housing targets to ensure that development is sustainable?
Mr Lansley
I know from my own circumstances of the importance that was attached to abolishing top-down housing targets set under the regional spatial strategy, and why the local development framework is so important. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government has said that the local development framework must meet the test of providing locations for sustainable housing sufficient to meet an area’s need for a number of years ahead. To help my hon. Friend, I shall ask my right hon. Friend to write to him.
Lisa Nandy (Wigan) (Lab)
The Foreign Office is due to publish its landmark strategy on business and human rights any day now. Will the Leader of the House talk to Ministers about exactly when the strategy will be published and ensure that time is found for a ministerial statement to the House to accompany its much-awaited publication?
Mr Lansley
I know that my colleagues at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office are well aware of the hon. Lady’s points, but I shall draw their attention to them. She might like to bear it in mind that an opportunity to ask that question will arise at Foreign and Commonwealth Office questions on Tuesday.
Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)
E-petitions have garnered considerable public interest and attention, so may we have a debate on their impact?
Mr Lansley
I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for raising that. It is worth our making the point in our constituencies and to our constituents that Parliament is connecting with the public in a way that has never happened before. Fourteen e-petitions have crossed the 100,000-signature threshold, and we and the Backbench Business Committee have enabled debate to be held on all of them. In addition, the Government will respond to every petition that passes the 10,000-signature threshold. On behalf of the Government I am putting the responses on the website, and some 20 will have gone up by now. I hope to complete the process of responding to all those that have passed the 10,000-signature threshold in the next few days.
Nick Smith (Blaenau Gwent) (Lab)
Improving home energy efficiency is essential to combat fuel poverty. The Insulation Industry Forum has just told me that there will be 16,000 job losses in its sector soon. May we have an urgent debate to help prevent this loss of key skills, given that investment in energy efficiency is so important?
Mr Lansley
It is tremendously important, and it is the green deal, which began its implementation at the beginning of October, that will make such a difference in enabling that to happen. The green deal support, the largest such programme we have ever seen, is specifically designed to support some of the measures, such as insulation, that will make the biggest difference to energy efficiency. I hope that exactly that will happen as we get behind this programme.
James Morris (Halesowen and Rowley Regis) (Con)
Unemployment in my constituency is now at a lower level than it was at the general election. May we have a debate about how the Government can make it easier for small charities, such as Black Country Foodbank and Loaves and Fishes in my constituency, to take on jobseekers on work experience without those jobseekers fearing that they will lose their benefits?
Mr Lansley
I share with my hon. Friend the feeling of encouragement that we get from the employment figures, as they show the number of people in work and reflect the support we are giving them. I will, of course, ask my hon. Friends at the Department for Work and Pensions to address the specific point he raises.
Andrew Jones (Harrogate and Knaresborough) (Con)
In the Harrogate area, this year is on track to be the record year for the opening of new business bank accounts. Last year saw a record half a million new businesses created in the UK. Before coming to this place, I was involved in starting businesses, and I am sure they play an important role in our economic recovery. May we have a debate to recognise the progress made and to explore what more could be done to make the UK the best place to start a business?
Mr Lansley
As my hon. Friend says, the progress is tremendously encouraging. The rate of new business creation in 2011 was the highest ever at more than 1,230 a day. Along with my colleagues, I will try to encourage debate on this issue and take advantage of whatever opportunities we can. New business formation is vital. As we know, the support we can give for small business—including finance for lending and small business lending—and the initiatives we have announced will make a considerable difference, but we are looking tirelessly at how we can stimulate effective lending to businesses to enable those businesses that are being created at an unprecedented rate to go on to grow and expand.
Backbench Business
International Development Committee Report (Afghanistan)
(12 years ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Speaker
We now come to the main business. I would like to remind the House that the first piece of business under the auspices of the Backbench Business Committee relates to the publication of a Select Committee report. This is not a debate; it takes the form of a statement by the right hon. Member for Gordon (Sir Malcolm Bruce), who chairs the Select Committee. There will an opportunity to intervene on him, but we also have a very heavily subscribed debate to follow. I know that Members, including the right hon. Gentleman, will wish to take account of that important fact in tailoring their contributions.
Sir Malcolm Bruce (Gordon) (LD)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the matter of the publication of the Sixth Report from the International Development Committee, on Afghanistan: Development progress and prospects after 2014, HC 403.
I am happy to accept interventions, while taking Mr Speaker’s restrictions into account.
It is worth recording that, since 2001, approximately $30 billion has been spent on development and humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan and $243 billion on security. Our own Department for International Development has spent over £1 billion since 2001 and currently spends £178 million a year in Afghanistan.
Sadly, the report has been published on a day on which two more British service personnel have been killed. A total of 435 men and women from our forces have lost their lives in Afghanistan—along with thousands of Afghan people—to enable the country to reach its current position, and the main thrust of our report is that we must not abandon it now.
The Committee visited Afghanistan in June. We thank our adviser, Ashley Jackson—who is a research fellow at the Overseas Development Institute—and we commend the dedication of DFID’s staff, including those recruited locally, on their commitment in difficult and challenging circumstances.
Pauline Latham (Mid Derbyshire) (Con)
My right hon. Friend will recall our visit to the hospital of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which was doing incredible, innovative work with amputees who had been injured in land mine and other accidents. He will also recall the workshop next to the hospital, where false limbs were being manufactured. All the people working there were amputees, demonstrating very effectively the possibility of returning to work. Does my right hon. Friend agree that that was a really good example of part-funding by DFID and that we should encourage the Department to increase its funding to ensure that more people are helped?
Sir Malcolm Bruce
I agree with my hon. Friend. Contrary to what Members might think, our visit was truly inspirational in terms of what it told us about amputees’ recovery and recuperation. The Red Cross runs seven such centres throughout Afghanistan, and its valuable work is supported very effectively by DFID, but it could indeed benefit from further support.
Our main concern is that we cannot predetermine where Afghanistan will go after 2014. There will be elections, but we do not know who will be elected. There will also be security challenges. Threats to security and development potential will vary and may fluctuate across the country. We recommend that DFID’s engagement should be flexible according to the prevailing circumstances at any given time. That may mean acknowledging that delivering development assistance may be more achievable in some provinces than in others. There are provinces in which virtually no violence has occurred, but not all of them are receiving the aid and support that they need.
Hugh Bayley (York Central) (Lab)
Given the current security situation, especially in Helmand province, it is much harder for DFID officials to get out and about and supervise and quality-control DFID projects than it was during the Committee’s earlier visits. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that it is important for us to maintain the ability to carry out development work in that province—particularly given the loss of so many British lives in Helmand—and that it might be sensible to appoint more Afghan staff to manage DFID projects in the more conflicted areas of the country, given that they have less difficulty in getting out and about for security reasons?
Sir Malcolm Bruce
The hon. Gentleman puts his finger on a very important point. We acknowledge that Helmand will present difficulties, and we accept that DFID has decided that it will not be able to maintain an office there once the troops have been withdrawn. However, I agree with him that, given that the British forces’ engagement in Afghanistan has focused on Helmand, it would be a total negation of that if we could not deliver projects in that province. As he says, we need to find local partners who can probably operate much more effectively than armed foreigners.
Dr Eilidh Whiteford (Banff and Buchan) (SNP)
I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on the Committee’s report. What role does he see for non-governmental organisations in the delivery of DFID’s aid in Afghanistan?
Sir Malcolm Bruce
NGOs will have a substantial role. We recognise that a limited number of very effective NGOs—some international and some local—can operate in circumstances in which foreign Government agencies cannot. The fundamental reason for that is their ability to reach an accommodation with local leaders and to defuse situations that international organisations would sometimes appear to provoke. We argue that we need to develop links of that kind much more effectively in the future.
Mr Michael McCann (East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow) (Lab)
The British public are owed honesty, and the media have rightly reported today on whether the development efforts in Afghanistan are worth the sacrifices that are being made. Does the Select Committee Chairman agree that when Committee members visited Afghanistan we witnessed the problems that our aid efforts were having with full military support, so logic dictates that when that military support is drawn down the current problems will, at best, remain the same, and at worst there is the potential for the situation to deteriorate further?
Sir Malcolm Bruce
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, but the point is that we do not know what the situation will be. Our argument is that we need to be flexible. We should make a fundamental commitment to continue to provide support where we can, although we might have to find different ways and mechanisms.
The Minister of State, Department for International Development (Mr Alan Duncan)
May I begin by joining in the expressions of sadness about the deaths of the two British service personnel? We value enormously the role played by our military in Afghanistan. We simply would not be able to operate without the support that they provide.
I assure the right hon. Gentleman that we welcome his Committee’s valuable report, to which we will reply formally in due course. No one is suggesting that Afghanistan is a fully viable state yet, but, as his report says, DFID’s efforts have made a big difference to a lot of people by helping to improve basic services and support economic growth. We completely agree that our focus should be on the position of women and girls, and that will remain a key focus of our development work in Afghanistan, so the report’s recommendations in this critical area are very welcome. I assure the House that our commitment to that desperately poor country will continue for many years to come.
Sir Malcolm Bruce
I thank my right hon. Friend for that very constructive intervention. Although we are suggesting changes in priorities, our main point is that the UK Government and DFID need to be flexible in what is a very challenging situation.
Of course the Committee would wish to see Afghanistan functioning as a normal state in due course—we certainly do not want it to be a rogue state—but we are a little sceptical about whether a British Government fund of £178 million a year can itself achieve a viable state. The danger is that if that aim becomes the overriding focus, it might be at the expense of delivering material, practical progress in terms of livelihoods, the rights of women and health and education. We are asking the Department to balance those aspects in a way that does not compromise what has been achieved.
We have articulated the view that the post-2014 litmus test on the extent of the changes in Afghanistan and whether improvements have been secured and are progressing will be the status of women. It is about the worst country in the world in which to be a woman, but progress has been made. If that progress is reversed, we will be able to assume that the condition of all Afghans is deteriorating—and if that progress is continued, we can assume that the situation of all Afghans has improved further. The status of women will be the best indicator of whether everyone’s quality of life is improving.
Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)
The entire House is grateful to the right hon. Gentleman and his Committee for adding a dose of reality to the myths that have surrounded this topic. Our efforts have been well-intentioned but ludicrously over-ambitious in that we have tried to change a 13th century society into a modern state. Is not the message of the report that we cannot win hearts and minds with bombs and bullets and that we must do our best not to raise hopes—particularly for women—that will be sadly and cruelly dashed in the future? We should see what we can do not as soldiers and a military force, but as people offering aid, to rescue what we can from the wreckage of the past 11 years of failed policies.
Sir Malcolm Bruce
I accept part of what the hon. Gentleman says, but I do not entirely accept his apocalyptic version of events. Real progress has been made; we should not underestimate that. Although Committee members’ opportunities to travel and engage were limited, we were impressed that people, especially women, told us, “Please be in no doubt that what you’ve done has dramatically improved the quality of our lives, and please don’t abandon us when your troops withdraw.” That is a crucial point.
Mr Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth East) (Con)
As co-chair of the all-party group on Afghanistan, may I welcome the report and the Minister’s comments? I have been visiting the country regularly since 2005 and am worried that the improvements to security that we have seen have not been matched by advances in sustainable economic development and governance. Afghan fatigue seems to be setting in. Does my right hon. Friend agree that, once the US elections are over, the international community must redouble its efforts to assist Afghanistan in preparing for the situation post-2014, when the international security assistance force finally withdraws?
Sir Malcolm Bruce
I absolutely agree. It is important that we say to our taxpayers and to the people of Afghanistan that we have no intention of seeing a curtain come down in 2014, which means that we have withdrawn. There will be a transition, a change and something different.
Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab)
I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman and the International Development Committee on this excellent report. I wish to pick up on his point about the UK Government talking a great deal about women’s rights in Afghanistan but not following up with substantial action. Does he agree that the UK Government need to place a much greater emphasis on women’s empowerment and human rights? Those things need to be at the heart of the development agenda. There are concerns that the idea of development and poverty eradication is too narrow in the Minister’s mind and that rights and women’s empowerment are not fully understood.
Sir Malcolm Bruce
We argue that there is not enough evidence in DFID’s programme that the rights of women are central to its objective, and we suggest that DFID should prioritise those. I am sure that Ministers will say that a lot of what they are doing is beneficial to women, but it is not clearly focused in that direction. ActionAid, which I cite merely because it is an evidence base that we had, said that only one out of 92 listed DFID projects had
“an explicit commitment to gender or women’s issues.”
Of course we do have a female Secretary of State for International Development, whom we met yesterday, and a female Under-Secretary—I say that with no disrespect to the Minister of State, who I am sure will share their commitment. I think that we can be assured that women’s rights will be central to the future commitment.
Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con)
I congratulate my right hon. Friend’s Committee on making the central point that, unless a significant part of our aid budget is devoted to projects designed to empower women, women will lag behind and the whole development effort will suffer. What assessment did the Committee make on its visit of the capacity of the NGOs that represent women, such as Humanitarian Assistance for the Women and Children of Afghanistan? How strong is the women’s NGO sector’s capability to deliver on some of the DFID programmes in the future?
Sir Malcolm Bruce
A number of NGOs have a strong commitment, and there are some powerful female voices in Afghan society that speak out for women. However, there is real fear that they will be pushed back after 2014, and they need continued support. There is also a recognition that international NGOs are sometimes compromised because they are seen to be interfering in a traditional culture. So it is important that we develop civil society in Afghanistan, and support those women in Afghanistan who can fight for themselves and ensure that they know that they have extra support outside. I take the view that not only in Afghanistan but across the world the key to development—the single most important thing—is the development of women’s rights. That is the most transformational thing that we can do.
Jack Lopresti (Filton and Bradley Stoke) (Con)
There is no question but that corruption is a real problem in relation to the international community’s efforts in Afghanistan and other places. Is my right hon. Friend satisfied that the UK has put in place enough safeguards to ensure that UK taxpayers’ money is being used for the purposes for which it was intended?
Sir Malcolm Bruce
The answer is no, it has not. There is no evidence that money has been misspent, but the Independent Commission for Aid Impact has said that the proactive mechanisms are not strong enough. The Department is taking strong action to deal with that, and rightly so. Afghanistan is an extremely difficult place in which to operate. As David Loyn of the BBC said in evidence, it is a rentier society, and where a lot of foreign money is swilling around, all kinds of people try to get in on the action, by whatever means they can. We have to be aware of that and be rigorous, but we also have to recognise that we can spend the money effectively. We can make a change, and the job of the Committee, the independent commission and the Department is to ensure that that is precisely what we do.
Sir Robert Smith (West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine) (LD)
I welcome this valuable report, which comes at a crucial time in the run-up to 2014. On maximising the effort as regards the money going into Afghanistan, what role is DFID taking in ensuring that the other donor nations recognise the need to work beyond 2014?
Sir Malcolm Bruce
DFID has played an active part in the Chicago and Tokyo conferences, and we have of course made our own commitments beyond that period, so we set an example. Ironically, DFID’s ability to provide leadership might be strengthened post-2014, when we are freed from engagement in military activity, as it will become apparent that the UK Government’s overwhelming priority is to provide development support. That will help the leadership provided by DFID across the world.
Richard Burden (Birmingham, Northfield) (Lab)
Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that because the Committee tries to be realistic and pretty sober about the situation in Afghanistan, we sometimes receive the response that we are suggesting that nothing has been achieved? After our last visit, the front cover of our report featured a picture of some girls who would not have been in school were it not, in part, for the efforts that have been made. It is important that we focus our activity where we can have an impact. That does not mean that we should focus on areas that are easy; empowering women is not easy in Afghanistan. It is important that we do not oversell or over-claim and that we target our efforts on crucial areas where we can make an impact.
Sir Malcolm Bruce
I absolutely agree, although I would add a word of caution. We visited the same school in June as we did five years ago and we were unable to visit a girls’ class, because that was thought to be inappropriate. That shows the negative changes, but at least the girls were still being taught, which is important. We also visited Bamyan, where we were told that there was a rising number of undergraduate women at the university and that fathers were actively pushing their daughters to take university education. That demonstrates that the situation is patchy, with progress in some areas and push-back in others. The job of DFID and the international community is to support the progress and to help resist the push-back, in co-operation with Afghans themselves.
In conclusion, it is important that people understand that the evidence that we have received shows that most Afghans do not want the Taliban back. They want a better Afghanistan that they have some ability to determine, and people need livelihoods and to be free from violence and extortion. Our report says that now that we have gone so far, walking away prematurely, as some people suggest, would be a betrayal of the sacrifice of our armed forces, as well as of the Afghan people. Having intervened, we have a moral and practical obligation to walk beside the ordinary people of Afghanistan, as long as we can improve their quality of life on their terms.
Question put and agreed to.
Badger Cull
(12 years ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
16:58 - The House divided: - Ayes: 147 / Noes: 28 - Question accordingly agreed to.
Mr Speaker
Apart from the hon. Member who will move the motion, 36 hon. and right hon. Members are seeking to catch my eye. As a consequence, I have imposed an eight-minute limit on Back-Bench speeches. That limit will take effect after the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) has made her speech to move the motion, and she knows that she should not exceed 15 minutes.
Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)
I beg to move,
That this House notes the e-petition on the planned badger cull, which has gathered more than 150,000 signatures; and calls on the Government to stop the cull and implement the more sustainable and humane solution of both a vaccination programme for badgers and cattle, along with improved testing and biosecurity.
The motion is supported by a wide-ranging cross-party group of MPs and let me make it clear that I and, I am sure, all those who support the motion do not in any way underestimate the hardship and distress that bovine TB causes to farmers. Indeed, it is because we recognise the urgent need to address the problem that we are anxious to ensure that we have a scientifically robust and cost-effective strategy that actually works.
Although Tuesday’s announcement that the pilot cull will be postponed until next summer was very welcome, it does not amount to a change of policy. Today’s motion calls on the Government to stop their ill-judged, unscientific and deeply unpopular culling policy for good, not just for a few months. The motion is about an abandonment of the cull, not just a postponement, and that is why it is so important that today’s debate goes ahead. That is what the majority of the public want and it is what the science demands. Public opinion overwhelmingly opposes a badger cull, including in those regions where the pilots were to take place. More than 163,000 members of the public have signed the e-petition launched by animal campaigner and Queen guitarist Brian May. I pay tribute to all of them, to Brian himself, to Team Badger and to all those individuals who played a role in mobilising public opposition to the cull.
Mr Denis MacShane (Rotherham) (Lab)
Might the hon. Lady accept my paying tribute to the late Peter Hardy, a great Rotherham MP, who introduced the first Badgers Act in 1973, which is why I am proud to stand here in his memory, and honour his dedication to the cause, by voting with her and other hon. Members on this important issue, so that we say no to badgercide?
Caroline Lucas
I very much welcome the right hon. Gentleman’s intervention. He rightly reminds me of the precedence in this House of previous battles that have tried to ensure that we do not have a misguided badger cull as a response to the serious problem of bovine TB.
The Government say that they support an evidence-based approach, so let us look at the evidence. Bovine TB cost the taxpayer £91 million in 2010-11 in testing, in the slaughter of animals and in compensation to farmers. The scale of the problem is such that it is deeply irresponsible and unfair to gamble, as the Government are doing, with farmers’ livelihoods and with the future of one of our best loved wildlife species.
George Freeman (Mid Norfolk) (Con)
The hon. Lady mentions farmers’ livelihoods, but has she seen the NFU briefing, which makes it clear that it regrets the need for culling and says that other methods, such as cattle controls and vaccination, are being deployed? But it says that culling is a vital component and misleading and emotive campaigns that play on sentimental affection for badgers and unfair depictions of farmers threaten to undermine the chance that we now have of getting on top of this horrendous disease once and for all.
Caroline Lucas
I have seen that briefing, but I would say that the emotion is coming from those on the Government Benches. The science is with the Opposition, and I refer the hon. Gentleman to what Lord Krebs said in the House of Lords just a few days ago, which makes it absolutely clear that quite a lot of misinformation is unfortunately being spread by the NFU and others about the seriousness of the issue in terms of how effective a cull can be. It is clear that the best that a cull can achieve, under strict conditions—not the conditions of these pilots—is a 16% improvement.
Caroline Lucas
I will take interventions in a moment.
The planned pilots would not have got anywhere near to that 16%, because they did not follow the rigour of the randomised badger culling trial and other Krebs reports.
Caroline Lucas
I will give way when I have made a little more progress.
The independent scientific group on cattle TB conducted the most thorough and rigorous study of bovine TB in the UK to date—the randomised badger culling trial. That trial took place over nine years, cost the taxpayer £50 million and destroyed 10,000 badgers. The report on the trial is described by Professor Denis Mollison, the independent statistical adviser to the RBCT, as “painstaking, expert and balanced”, and I commend it to Ministers as an exemplar of how to bring high-quality science into public decision making. The consultation from the coalition Government said of this RBC trial that it was the only one that was conducted as a rigorous scientific trial. The conclusions of that ISG report for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, published in 2007, are well rehearsed, but they are worth repeating. It states:
“Detailed evaluation of RBCT and other scientific data highlights the limitations of badger culling as a control measure for cattle TB.”
It goes on to recommend
“that TB control efforts focus on measures other than badger culling”
because
“In contrast with the situation regarding badger culling, our data and modelling suggest that substantial reductions in cattle TB incidence could be achieved by improving cattle-based control measures.”
That is precisely the approach that today’s motion advocates.
Sir James Paice (South East Cambridgeshire) (Con)
The hon. Lady easily reads out what the report says, and she is right that it says “substantial reductions”. But is she not interested in more than substantial reduction, which is elimination of this awful disease? If so, does she agree that even Professor Bourne, who headed the study, has said that it quite clearly cannot be eradicated without eradicating it in badgers?
Caroline Lucas
Were we to eradicate every single badger, we would certainly eradicate bovine TB, but we would also eradicate a very important species.
The ISG concluded that
“badger culling can make no meaningful contribution to cattle TB control in Britain.”
That is the conclusion of what the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs itself says is the most scientifically robust trial that has ever taken place in the UK. We want policy to be based on the science, which is why we should be looking at what the ISG says.
Andrew George (St Ives) (LD)
If we are to talk about eradicating bovine TB, it is important that we go back to the science and try to put emotions aside, as my right hon. Friend the Member for South East Cambridgeshire (Sir James Paice) mentioned a moment ago. The trials clearly showed that the best possible outcome would be a 16% reduction, but that is a reduction in the context of an increasing incidence of TB. Indeed, the Secretary of State has talked about the incidence of bovine TB doubling in 10 years. In those circumstances, all a cull would do is reduce the increase. It will not result in a reduction in bovine TB.
Caroline Lucas
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I think that it is worth reading what Lord Krebs said in the House of Lords, because it is exactly the point the hon. Gentleman identifies. He said that
“the long-term, large-scale culling of badgers is estimated to reduce the incidence of TB in cattle by 16% after nine years. In other words, 84% of the problem is still there. To reflect on what that means, this is not a reduction in absolute terms”,
as the hon. Gentleman rightly said,
“but actually a 16% reduction from the trend increase. So after nine years there is still more TB around than there was at the beginning”.—[Official Report, House of Lords, 23 October 2012; Vol. 740, c. 148.]
That is the key point that Government Members are not taking on board.
Caroline Lucas
I will make a little more progress before giving way again—as you have pointed out, Mr Speaker, this is a heavily oversubscribed debate.
A number of eminent individuals have also spoken out in opposition to the Government’s proposed course of action. Significantly, the Government’s chief scientific adviser, Professor Sir John Beddington, has refused to back the cull. In a letter to The Observer on 14 October, more than 30 scientists wrote that
“the complexities of TB transmission mean that licensed culling risks increasing cattle TB rather than reducing it… culling badgers as planned is very unlikely to contribute to TB eradication.”
Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)
I am extremely grateful to the hon. Lady for giving way. I rather suspect that in Brighton Pavilion there are few dairy famers, if any, so will she agree to come to Shropshire and spend the day meeting my dairy farmers and the local NFU to hear their perspective on the crisis and how they believe it should be tackled?
Caroline Lucas
Even coming from Brighton Pavilion does not stop someone reading the science. I would like the debate to be based on the science, not on emotional calls from the Government Benches. Professor Lord Krebs, who devised the randomised badger cull and is firmly opposed to the cull, has said:
“I have not found any scientists who are experts in population biology in the distribution of infectious diseases in wildlife who think that culling is a good idea… People have cherry-picked certain results to try to get the argument that they want.”
Mr James Gray (North Wiltshire) (Con)
The hon. Lady is being extremely generous with her time, for which I am most grateful. The arguments about which scientists said what should surely be answered by a paper that was produced by DEFRA following a meeting, held by the Department on 4 April 2011, of the key scientific experts, including Lord Krebs and many other eminent scientists. Its No. 1 conclusion was:
“The science base generated from the RBCT shows that proactive badger culling as conducted in the trial resulted in an overall beneficial effect compared with ‘survey only’ (no cull) areas”.
Scientists at DEFRA were in agreement and came to that conclusion. That is a Government paper. Surely we should move on from going backwards and forwards on which scientists said what. There is some benefit to be had from a cull. It is not the only answer.
Mr Speaker
Order. Before the hon. Lady responds, I remind Members that she is due to speak for 15 minutes or thereabouts and has already taken several interventions. I gently encourage Members to be economical with interventions. Many Members wish to speak in the debate. The more interventions, the longer we will take, and you can bet your bottom dollar that people will be queuing up to complain and ask, “Why didn’t I get called to speak in the debate?” Answer: the time was taken up earlier. Let us get on with the debate.
Caroline Lucas
Thank you, Mr Speaker. In order to do so, I go back to what I said just before the hon. Gentleman intervened, which is that Lord Krebs himself is saying that people are cherry-picking certain aspects to try to get the result they want. If the hon. Gentleman looked at the full set of recommendations from the document instead of those that he cherry-picked, he would see that in fact the vast majority of the evidence is that culling does not make a significant contribution.
Caroline Lucas
I will not give way; I want to follow what Mr Speaker said and make some progress.
The case against culling on the grounds of efficiency and effectiveness is overwhelming. That approach is also potentially entirely counter-productive. The independent scientific group initially found a decrease in the disease of approximately 23% in the centre of the culled area but an increase of approximately 29% on neighbouring land outside the culled area. Those results can be explained partly by what has been termed the perturbation effect. That has been studied by Professor Rosie Woodroffe of the Zoological Society of London, who has also found that repeated badger culling in the same area is associated with increasing prevalence of the BTB infection in badgers.
The objective of the Government and the NFU is healthy cattle and healthy badgers. I agree with that, but how does culling improve badger health? Professor Woodroffe states unequivocally that it does exactly the opposite and that
“all the evidence shows that culling badgers increases the proportion of badgers that have TB”.
Yet the Government’s approach ignores that evidence. As with the ISG trials, conditions have been imposed to try to limit the effects of perturbation, such as identifying natural barriers to badger movement, but these have generally been less rigorous than those recommended, with farmers essentially being encouraged to develop a “not in my back yard” approach to cattle TB without any real thought for the long-term impact on rates of the disease elsewhere.
Earlier this week, the Secretary of State warned that the cost to the taxpayer of tackling bovine TB will rise to £1 billion over the next decade if the disease is left unchecked. I agree that that is a very alarming prospect. That is why it is crucial that on this, as well as on the scientific evidence, he listens to the experts who, let me remind him, have concluded:
“The financial costs of culling an idealized 150 km2 area would exceed the savings achieved through reduced cattle TB, by factors of 2 to 3.5.”
DEFRA has tried to keep the costs down by allowing licensed farmers to do the culling in its planned pilots and allowing for the licences to permit shooting, but by cutting corners in that way it undermines the very effectiveness that it claims for a culling strategy.
Ian Paisley (North Antrim) (DUP)
I appreciate the hon. Lady’s giving way on this important and passionately felt issue. I speak as a member of the British Veterinary Association, which states in its most recent report, first, that culling is necessary, and secondly, that there is no available vaccination that can address the reservoir of the disease within the wildlife population of badgers. Is she aware that this year 30,000 cattle will have to be slaughtered because of bovine TB? What are we going to do about that problem?
Caroline Lucas
I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman’s intervention. In fact, a vaccine is a lot closer to being developed than he and others suggest, so there are alternatives to culling. Earlier in the week, the Secretary of State made much of saying that there no alternatives. The tragedy is that there are alternatives but this Government seem extremely reluctant to bring them forward.
On tackling cattle-to-cattle transmission of the disease, the ISG report states:
“Movement of cattle from infected herds in the periods between routine herd tests has long been recognised as a cause of new herd breakdowns, and it is generally accepted that most of the sporadic herd breakdowns in relatively disease-free areas of the country result from movement of infected animals.”
The evidence suggests that focusing on the role of badgers in the spread of bovine TB is a distraction and that priority should instead be given to preventing the spread of the disease between cattle. That is why the motion calls on the Government to introduce a programme of vaccination, which eminent scientist and former Government scientific adviser Lord Robert May points to as an important tool in tackling TB. He says:
“What is particularly irritating is that we have the vaccines in the pipeline, but the commitment to really go in and test them is…not there”.
DEFRA confirms that. A statement on its own website reads:
“BCG…is the most suitable cattle TB vaccine candidate in the short term. Experimental studies show that BCG vaccination reduces the progression, severity and excretion of TB in cattle…and field studies show that it can reduce transmission of disease between animals.”
Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)
Does the hon. Lady agree that farmers’ voices are not unanimous on this issue? I have been contacted by Gloucestershire dairy farmers who support the vaccination model being developed by the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust and, in the short term, the model of meticulous biosecurity that has been advanced successfully by Gloucestershire farmer Steve Jones, who has managed to contain bovine TB despite the fact that his farm is in the very centre of the bovine TB area.
Caroline Lucas
I welcome the hon. Gentleman’s intervention. He is absolutely right that farmers are not speaking with one voice on this issue. Many of them recognise that we need an effective strategy but that culling is a costly distraction from achieving that.
Caroline Lucas
Let me make some further progress.
DEFRA cites the EU prohibition on the vaccination of cattle against TB as the reason why studies to date
“cannot provide a definite figure for vaccine efficacy when administered to cattle under field conditions in the UK”.
Vaccinated cows can test positive for TB when using the current tuberculin skin test and the gamma interferon blood test, making it impossible to differentiate an animal that has been vaccinated from one that has the disease. However, a complementary test called the DIVA—differentiate between infected and vaccinated animals— has been developed, which confirms whether a skin test positive result is caused by vaccination or by TB infection. That is what should be validated and certified by the end of the year, according to the DEFRA website. It has the potential to open the door to a change in EU regulation. This Government should go to Europe now—they should have done so years ago—and prepare the policy framework to allow us to use the DIVA test; yet there are precious few signs that DEFRA or, indeed, the Government are pressing aggressively for the legal framework in which a cattle vaccine could be widely deployed. I echo the sentiments of those many Members who earlier this week urged DEFRA to stop hiding behind the excuse of EU law and to step up its efforts to change it.
A 2008 DEFRA paper on options for vaccinating cattle against bovine TB was endorsed by the NFU and concludes that
“BCG based vaccines will need to be used in conjunction with a DIVA test and that such a programme of vaccination could be cost-effective.”
It identifies the most significant barriers to use as legal and resultant trade implications. That was three years ago and we really should have made more progress than we have to date.
As the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood) has said, biosecurity is a very important issue. Vaccination needs to go hand in hand with excellent biosecurity. According to Professor John Bourne, former chairman of the ISG:
“Despite some improvements, the government is still going nowhere near far enough with biosecurity”.
He went on to say:
“It is not badgers that spread the disease throughout the country; it is cattle”.
The most recent European Commission inspection of England’s biosecurity in September 2011 uncovered a catalogue of failures, including missed targets in the rapid removal of cattle infected with TB and
“weaknesses in disinfection at farm, vehicle, market and slaughterhouse levels”.
A belated crackdown has resulted in a slight improvement, but we need to go much further.
The hon. Gentleman also mentioned Steve Jones, a farmer who is deeply concerned about biosecurity. He says:
“Water troughs are a reservoir for TB because they are rarely cleaned out. It’s not uncommon for trough water to be left stagnating through the winter, collecting dead birds, rodents and various bacteria, only to be drunk by cattle in the spring. Badgers also use these troughs but it’s unfair to isolate badgers when the culprit is the bacteria soup itself. Making troughs badger-proof is not rocket science, but more fundamental is the adoption of better hygiene standards by the agricultural industry.”
Recent DEFRA data indicate that improving biosecurity would cost famers an average of £4,000, compared with £27,000 to deal with the TB herd breakdown. That is why the motion has a very strong focus, alongside its other measures, on comprehensive national biosecurity policy.
Mr Laurence Robertson
It is important to recognise the wider context in Gloucestershire. One of the trials was going to take place in my constituency and farmers are very disappointed that it cannot go ahead for the moment. One of the first ministerial meetings that I had in this House 15 years ago was with the then Agriculture Minister, Jeff Rooker, and nothing has happened since. Does the hon. Lady not understand the frustration of farmers, including those in Gloucestershire? Does she not accept that, as the hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley) has said, the British Veterinary Association says that the disease is being spread by badgers and that a trial cull is necessary?
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. A lot of Members want to get in and interventions will slow us down. I am sure that the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) will want to get to the end of her speech very quickly.
Caroline Lucas
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker.
I welcome the hon. Gentleman’s reminding us that farmers are deeply concerned about the matter and feel frustration, but that frustration is because we have had years and years of inaction. Suddenly pulling a badger cull down from the shelf is the wrong way to respond to that frustration. The Government should have gone to the EU and made the case for the DIVA test so that we could get on with vaccination. All the evidence suggests that vaccination, combined with biosecurity, better hygiene and better husbandry, is a much better way of eradicating this horrible disease. No Member is complacent about the seriousness of the disease, but we differ on the most effective way of addressing it. The science is on the side of those who oppose the cull, because it shows that it is not the most effective way forward.
As I said, modern husbandry practices place chronic stress on intensively farmed animals, and a number of scientists are also pointing to the way in which cattle have been inbred for many years as a significant contributor to why cattle do not have the resistance to cope with such a disease.
I want to say a few words about vaccinating badgers. I agree that vaccinating wildlife should be given proper consideration, alongside the vaccination of cattle, yet the coalition Government have slashed funding for the badger vaccine deployment project. Only one of the six original five-year trials to learn how best to address some of the practical difficulties of vaccination is still under way. If those projects had gone ahead as planned, we would have been much further along the road towards finding a solution by now. That is exactly why farmers are frustrated. Instead, two years on, nothing more has been done.
Mr David Hamilton (Midlothian) (Lab)
I agree with much of what the hon. Lady is saying. Will she explain for a layperson such as myself why, although a third of the land mass of the United Kingdom is in Scotland, Scotland has not taken the decision to do what is being done in England? Wales has also withdrawn from the cull, so we are arguing about an English thing, not a British thing.
Caroline Lucas
I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention, which brings me neatly to the situation in Wales, about which I know something. The Government there have used the same scientific evidence as DEFRA and have begun a five-year badger vaccination programme, starting in parts of Pembrokeshire. More than 700 badgers have been vaccinated since the start of that programme, which is about halfway through the land that it needs to cover. That part of the programme is on track to be finished towards the end of October. I hope that England will be able to learn from Wales and elsewhere to see how the problem can be tackled most effectively.
Mel Stride (Central Devon) (Con)
Does the hon. Lady not accept that until there is an oral vaccine, it is totally impractical to try to vaccinate the badger population? First, they have to be caught. Secondly, the person doing the catching has to be licensed by Natural England at huge cost, and thirdly, the cost is estimated at £2,250 per square kilometre.
Caroline Lucas
Trying to kill badgers is also extremely difficult. The original randomised badger culling trial was about killing badgers by capturing them in cages first, but the Government have dismissed that as too expensive. In doing so, they have reduced the likely effectiveness of the policy. It will lead to people trying to shoot badgers, which are difficult to kill outright because of their shape and size. That is extremely costly, and crucially it also spreads the disease even more widely. Vaccinating badgers is not easy, but it is a lot easier than shooting them in the way that the Government propose. It is also an awful lot more effective in stopping the spread of TB. That seems to me a good argument for not going ahead with shooting.
Caroline Lucas
No, I have given way to the hon. Gentleman.
Rather than pursuing an approach that is widely discredited, should not the Government invest in studies to determine exactly how and whether badger vaccination can work on a larger scale, in co-operation with organisations such as the National Trust and the wildlife trusts, which are already taking a lead in carrying out vaccine trials?
I am coming to the end of my speech, Mr Deputy Speaker, because I can see that you are looking a little perturbed. Even were all that I have said about the science, the alternatives to a cull and its lack of effectiveness to be discounted, the Government’s proposals remain deeply flawed. Although the pilot culls in west Gloucestershire and west Somerset have been postponed, I am sure that other Members will want to raise concerns that the specific licensing criteria that were set out would not have been met. They will also want to raise concerns about the degree to which the Government’s current policy deviates from the conditions of the RBCT, despite advice from experts that the more a future culling policy deviates from the conditions of the RBCT, the more likely it is that their effects will differ and that there will be variability in outcomes between areas. Professor Bourne, chairman of the independent scientific group, claims that the key differences between his team’s methodology and the Government’s pilot culls—including a very different killing method and much longer killing period—are “significant”. Although he has been mentioned by those on the other side of the argument, he stated that the cull,
“could make TB a damn sight worse.”
The news that badger numbers are higher than anticipated suggests that methods used by Natural England to set the minimum and maximum number of badgers that can be killed across licensed zones are inaccurate.
Caroline Lucas
I will not.
That inaccuracy makes it impossible to guarantee that local extinctions will not occur. I welcome the fact that the Government and the NFU have concluded that the pilot culls cannot take place this year. They must now look again at other problems that have been identified, and abandon their culling policy altogether.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. An eight-minute limit on speeches has been imposed, but we want to try and get everybody in. Fewer interventions will ensure that everybody will be able to speak.
Miss Anne McIntosh (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) on initiating this debate so eloquently, and it is an honour to follow her. Although I note that the petition has 150,000 signatures, I firmly and passionately believe that a silent majority in the countryside care strongly about controlling bovine TB and believe in the need for an eventual cull, as well as in other measures such as those called for by the hon. Lady. I am not convinced of the need for Team Badger or a team cattle; I believe there should be one team, one nation and one countryside. I hope that the House will send a message this afternoon that we are convinced there can be both a healthy badger population and healthy livestock.
I will restrict my remarks to the positive role that I believe the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee can play. Only two hon. Members who served on that Committee during the previous Parliament remain—my hon. Friend the Member for North Cornwall (Dan Rogerson) and myself—[Interruption.] And, indeed, another survivor, my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (Mr Gray). The Committee stated:
“We also recognised that under certain well-defined circumstances it was possible that badger culling could make a contribution towards the reduction in incidence of the disease in hot spot areas. However, we acknowledged that badger culling alone would never provide a universal solution to the problem of cattle TB.”
The point is this: we will never eradicate or control the spread of TB by vaccination alone; we need a controlled cull.
Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)
Does the hon. Lady accept that if the vaccine were available, there would be no need for a cull? I think some Government Members want the cull regardless.
Miss McIntosh
The hon. Gentleman will hear what my right hon. and hon. Friends say when they speak on this issue with some passion.
May I commend the work of the Food and Environment Research Agency, based in Ryedale in my constituency of Thirsk and Malton and, in particular, its work on progressing vaccinations for badgers? I note that it is already undertaking badger vaccines. My hon. Friend the Member for Central Devon (Mel Stride) asked about the cost of those individual vaccines, and it would be helpful if the Minister would confirm that.
In the pause before an eventual cull, I believe that the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee can make a major contribution precisely on the vexed issue of vaccination, which was raised by the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion. Not only do we have the cost and difficulty of vaccinating badgers, but there is currently no effective test to tell the difference between vaccinated and infected cattle—the wider issue raised by the hon. Lady. It is, therefore, impossible to identify clean animals from infected animals for the purpose of export.
Caroline Lucas
I am sorry to intervene so soon, but that is not correct. The test to differentiate between infected and vaccinated animals—the DIVA test—exists and is ready to be used once we get permission from the EU. The obstacle to the problem is getting that permission—there has not been much effort on that—not that the test does not exist.
Miss McIntosh
I am afraid that is a point of disagreement, which is why I believe there is a role for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee to examine the state of the science. Members of that Committee can use their role to encourage the Government to use good relations with the European Commission and the Council of Ministers, and colleagues in the European Parliament who have co-decision, to make plans to lift the ban on exports. That raises the wider issue of how we can encourage FERA to develop the badger vaccine, and encourage the Animal Health and Veterinary Laboratories Agency to look fully at developing the efficiency of a cattle vaccination.
There is one issue that I regret the hon. Lady and Team Badger do not accept. Government Members recognise the issue of badger welfare, but I would like to see the whole House rise up and agree that it is unacceptable that almost 60,000 cows in calf—they were carrying an unborn calf—were slaughtered in 2010 and 2011. My hon. Friends have already alluded to the human grief suffered by farmers, and this year everything that could have gone wrong has gone wrong. We have seen a rise in fuel costs for transporting animals, and in the cost of feed. There has been bad weather; the potato crop is going wrong and pig farming is going wrong—everything is going wrong and farmers are battling with the elements.
We are talking about herds of cattle that have been raised by generations of farmers, and when a herd is slaughtered, that lifeline can never be regained. The contribution of such herds to the rural economy should not be underestimated, and they will be lost and gone for ever. I would like the House to unite to show that we care for the loss suffered by farmers, and that we recognise that this broader wildlife and countryside issue goes to the heart of the rural economy and farming in this country.
I have the honour of representing two livestock marts—that in Thirsk is the largest, or joint-largest, fatstock mart in the country. Farmers who produce those animals live in fear of one rogue beast coming into the herd.
Jesse Norman (Hereford and South Herefordshire) (Con)
My hon. Friend is right to stress the human effects of the difficulties in which farmers now find themselves. Robert Davies, a farmer in my constituency, is an owner-occupier who has a closed herd on one farm. Over the past few years it has been shut for months on the trot, and nearly 400 animals have been tested every 60 days. Let us imagine the pain, suffering and difficulty experienced by him and his family, and the welfare of those animals.
Miss McIntosh
I could not have put that better myself, and I hope the House will unite and recognise the contributions that farmers make to the economy. In terms of health and diet, nothing could be more nutritious than milk, dairy produce, beef and other meat products that are the lifeline of hill farmers in the north, and lowland farmers across the country.
No other country in the world has been able to control the spread of and incidence of TB in cattle without a controlled, limited cull. I bitterly regret the circumstances in which the NFU, Natural England, FERA and particularly the Government, have found themselves by postponing the cull. Farmers in my area and across the country will look for a controlled cull, and we should examine the results of that. Let us use this pause to examine the science—including the vaccination of badgers—and establish the cost and efficacy of that. Most importantly, we should look for a vaccination that will not only control levels of infection in cattle, but allow our meat and dairy products to be accepted across the EU and the world. Let us rise as one nation, one team, and one countryside.
Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)
I challenge Government Members’ attempts to portray this subject as an urban against rural issue, as they did with fox hunting. I am a west country MP. Admittedly, I represent an urban constituency, but I occasionally venture outside Bristol. I know from representations made to me from people in south Gloucestershire and the Forest of Dean area, Somerset and around the west country that there is widespread opposition to the badger cull, including opposition from people in rural areas, from farmers who do not want the cull on their land, and from people across the board. It is totally wrong to say, “Only townies who don’t understand the country or farming are opposed to the cull.” It is incredibly patronising to say that the many people who have written to me and MPs who represent rural areas do not understand the science. I have looked at the science.
Angela Smith (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab)
The Chair of the Select Committee, a Conservative, spoke of one nation and one countryside. Does my hon. Friend agree that the device of dividing the country between town and country is unhelpful?
Kerry McCarthy
That device is completely unhelpful. I have taken an interest in food policy in my time in Parliament—I introduced a Food Waste Bill. Food policy is about farming only to an extent, but people eat food, including in urban areas. Food policy is also about food distribution networks and supermarkets. It is completely ludicrous to portray the issue as one that is just for farmers.
Richard Drax
There has never been a view among Government or Opposition Members that this is townies versus country folk. That has never been said or suggested. The hon. Lady—dare I say it?—is stoking up a political animosity that does not otherwise exist.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. If we are to have interventions, they must be short, but those Members who intervene and wish to speak should recognise that they will go to the bottom of the list. That is just a warning for all.
Kerry McCarthy
The hon. Gentleman is completely wrong, as we have heard in the debate and in the statement on Tuesday.
Many hon. Members will want to discuss vaccination. I am pleased that, in the west country, there have been efforts to roll out badger vaccination programmes. They seem to have been successful, although it is the very early stages. Many hon. Members will discuss the scientific evidence, which seems to me to be overwhelmingly in support of the notion that badger culling would have a limited impact if any—I believe it says there would be a 16% reduction in bovine TB over nine years.
However, in the time available, I want to focus on cattle-to-cattle transmission. The hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) probably misspoke when she said that if every single badger were eradicated, we could eradicate bovine TB—she went on to say that we could not eradicate all badgers and mentioned cattle-to-cattle transmission. In response to a question from the shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in September this year, the Government accepted that about 50% of cases of bovine TB in areas where the randomised badger culling trial took place were attributed to badgers. The other 50% were attributed to cattle-to-cattle transmission. In areas where there is lower incidence, there is a much higher rate of cattle-to-cattle transmission.
It is important to address that point. I was concerned that the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs did not seem to be willing to acknowledge in Tuesday’s statement the very significant role that cattle-to-cattle transmission plays in spreading the disease. Indeed, when he was asked a question about cattle husbandry, he said that the problem was that badgers can get into sheds. He also said that famers grazing cattle in fields cannot prevent badgers from getting to them. That is not what the cattle husbandry issue is about—the Secretary of State was focused totally on badgers, rather than on what happens when cattle spread disease. The fact is that many of the badgers that carry TB are not particularly infectious—[Interruption.] I can cite evidence on that.
Kerry McCarthy
I do not want to give way again in the time I have left.
I was concerned that the new Secretary of State seems not to have got to grips with cattle-to-cattle transmission, but I accept that tighter controls will be introduced from next year, which I welcome. When his predecessor as Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Meriden (Mrs Spelman), made a statement on the cull just before the Christmas recess, she failed to mention cattle-to-cattle transmission, as I pointed out to her at the time, although she did mention it in her statement in July. There is a degree of complacency in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs on cattle-to-cattle transmission, which needs to be addressed.
On the history of bovine TB, it is clear is that, in the 1960s, when strict quarantine rules and the rigorous testing of cattle were in place, bovine TB was almost eliminated from the UK. However, farmers were not happy with the regime and complained, and, to quote George Monbiot:
“TB returned with a vengeance”.
Professor Graham Medley of the university of Warwick has said that the only way to eradicate TB in cattle would be a return to the stricter and more effective controls that were in place 40 years ago. Professor John Bourne, who led the randomised badger culling trial—which, as we know, concluded that badger culling could make “no meaningful contribution” to controlling bovine TB—agrees with Professor Medley. Professor Bourne has said that only stricter biosecurity can control bovine TB. The RBCT report states:
“Weaknesses in cattle testing regimes mean that cattle themselves contribute significantly to the persistence and spread of disease in all areas where TB occurs, and in some parts of Britain are likely to be the main source of infection. Scientific findings indicate that the rising incidence of disease can be reversed, and geographical spread contained, by the rigid application of cattle-based control measures alone”.
A European Commission report of September 2011 revealed significant evidence of bad practice in English farms. It found that failure to abide by cattle TB prevention measures was widespread. The Commission gave the UK €23 million in 2011 for bovine TB control measures. Its inspectors found that the removal of cattle with TB was below the target of 90% in 10 days, and that, in the first half of 2011, more than 1,000 cattle had not been removed after 30 days. It found that there were 3,300 overdue TB tests as of May 2011 and that many calf passports, which are used to track movements, were incomplete. It also found that only 56% of disease report forms had been completed on time. Funding cuts were cited as the reason for the failure of local authorities to update their databases.
The Commission report concluded that local authority surveys provided evidence that
“some cattle farmers may have been illegally swapping cattle ear tags, ie retaining TB-positive animals in their herds and sending less productive animals to slaughter in their place.”
A couple of Government Members are shaking their heads, but farmers have been prosecuted for that in the west country.
Kerry McCarthy
I am not going to give way.
The Commission found that there were missed targets on rapidly removing cattle with TB, and on the follow-up of missed tests. It found numerous shortcomings and
“weaknesses in cleaning and disinfection at farm, vehicle, market and slaughterhouse levels, exacerbated by lack of adequate supervision”.
All those problems increase the risk of TB spreading between cattle.
David Fisher, who was a DEFRA-funded TB inspector in Wales until 2011, has said:
“It is an open secret that isolation of [TB] reactors and inconclusive reactors is rare.”
He has said that DEFRA’s database showed that, in 2009, there was 20.8% non-compliance on bovine TB issues. There was only one instance that year of a dairy farm being checked for compliance with an isolation notice.
I welcome the fact that DEFRA has indicated that new rules and a crackdown on cattle movement, and increased TB testing, will take place from 1 January 2013, with restrictions on farms where a TB case is identified, but I support Mark Jones, a vet and executive director of the Humane Society International UK, who has said that Ministers should wait and assess the impact of tighter biosecurity measures. As has been said, in Wales, bovine TB has fallen since the badger cull was stopped in Wales and tighter measures were introduced. He says:
“There is some evidence…that TB in cattle is coming down. There needs to be time to see if there has been an impact, before going ahead with a massacre of badgers…It is cattle, not badgers, that are the main transmitters of bovine TB so it is utterly outrageous for badgers to pay the price for farmers’ failure to abide by proper biosecurity measures.”
I could not end on a better note than that.
Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)
In Shropshire in 1997, 47 cows were slaughtered as a result of bovine TB. Last year, more than 2,000 were slaughtered. There has been a huge increase in the disease in my constituency and throughout Shropshire.
I have spent a lot of time with many of my Shropshire dairy farmers and sometimes, having gone around their farms with them, I have found myself sitting at their kitchen tables, having coffee and talking about the impact of that slaughter on them and their families. I do not mind saying that sometimes we—grown men—have sat around the table and cried, such is the emotion. The impact—not just on them but on their families and, in particular, young children—of whole herds being taken away for slaughter is devastating.
I hope that hon. Members who oppose this action will take the time—I invited the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) in good spirit—to come to Shropshire and areas of the country facing this extraordinary crisis, and to meet our constituents and hear the emotion in their pleas for action. Hon. Members would then begin to understand why so many Government Members feel strongly that action must be taken now.
Martin Horwood
The hon. Gentleman makes a powerful case. I stood beside a dairy farmer in my constituency as their herd was loaded for slaughter, and it is an extremely distressing experience, but that is all the more reason to listen to the science and not make the situation worse. It is simply wrong to suggest that that is not what people on both side of the debate are trying to achieve.
Daniel Kawczynski
Of course, we will be arguing about the science, and both sides feel strongly that their scientific arguments are correct and that they have the correct scientists’ feedback on their side. That will continue throughout the debate.
Angela Smith
I echo the comments by the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood) about how much sympathy we all have for farmers and the dairy industry. We have to deal with this disease. However, the years that the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) mentioned—1997 and, more recently, 2007 to 2012 were marked by one event that changed the picture of disease in cattle, and that was foot and mouth. Will he comment on the contribution that foot and mouth made to increased cattle movement and the decrease in testing for bovine TB in cattle?
Daniel Kawczynski
In the few minutes I have, I would like to focus on my constituents. I am sure that others will take up the hon. Lady’s point.
One of the first things I did when I became a Member of Parliament in 2005 was to form an all-party group on dairy farmers. I did so because of the direct lobbying I received from Mr Stuart Jones of Pontesbury and many of my other dairy farmers, who wanted me to campaign on this issue. More than 190 Members of Parliament joined the all-party group, making it one of the largest in the House of Commons. To my great pleasure, the then Leader of the Opposition, now the Prime Minister, joined it—it was the only one he joined in the last Parliament.
We used this caucus of more than 190 Members repeatedly to try to engage with Labour Ministers, and we took the National Farmers Union—many of our farmers came—to meet various DEFRA Ministers and Secretaries of State. I shall not mention all of them, but I am happy to list all the meetings we had; and yet, month after month, year after year, no action was taken, and this disease continued to spread and decimate the industry in our constituencies. A delegation also went to Brussels to meet the European Commission and to Ireland and France to find out what they were doing and how they were coping with bovine TB. We wanted to find out at first hand how the French had managed to eradicate it almost completely, and part of the solution there, as in Ireland and many other EU countries, was a badger cull.
Shropshire MPs have met the Shropshire wildlife trust, whose symbol is a badger. It has more than 8,000 members, making it the largest organisation in our county. The Secretary of State, my constituency neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow (Mr Dunne) and I met the trust just last week, and we are having very effective discussions with it as we argue and debate in a professional and peaceful fashion the best way forward. It is extremely important to keep the dialogue going. I highlighted to the trust the triangle in my constituency between Pontesbury, Westbury and Minsterley, where this disease is getting completely out of control. Very kindly, the trust has agreed to come with me to meet my dairy farmers in that part of Shropshire to hear at first hand the problems they are facing.
I am extremely grateful that we have a Secretary of State from Shropshire who understands the problem and who is also a man of great courage, integrity and honour. My dairy farmers and I can trust him to fulfil the commitment he gave the other day that, despite this pause, next summer we will finally start to tackle this problem and take action for our hard-pressed, long-suffering dairy farmers.
Mr Iain McKenzie (Inverclyde) (Lab)
I speak in an effort to unite the House, because the Opposition share the concern for farmers. I have a dairy farmer in my constituency, and my constituency contains a mix of urban and rural areas. I have spoken to that dairy farmer, and we both understand the impact of bovine TB on farmers and their business.
Having said that, most organisations in the UK have united in opposition to the badger cull, while the e-petition against it has been signed by 142,000 people. Even some who live and work in the countryside are not convinced that it will do what it is meant to do. Quite simply, free shooting of badgers in the dark is just that—a shot in the dark to control bovine TB. Independent scientific studies have shown that culling would be of little help and probably make the situation worse in some areas.
Mr McKenzie
I would like to think that farmers in my area would not be convinced.
There is no accurate way of knowing how many badgers there are in an area, so how would we know when a cull had reached its quota of 70%? The culls are non-selective and would equally destroy healthy local badger populations. It is not possible to take out diseased badgers only. The research that the Government cherry-pick to try to justify their onslaught on badgers shows that even in TB hot spots most badgers are not infected. Licensed culling risks increasing cattle TB rather than reducing it. Imminent pilot culls are too slight to measure impacts before wider roll-outs of culling, and badger culling risks becoming a costly distraction from nationwide TB control. Vaccination is now possible for both cattle and badgers, and should be implemented as soon as possible, as it has been in Wales.
Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)
Will the hon. Gentleman deal with the criticism of vaccination, which many feel is not a solution?
Mr McKenzie
What is equally not a solution is going out in the middle of the night and shooting badgers indiscriminately.
Vaccination is the most humane way forward, and, if it can happen, we should pursue it. I understand that the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee will be considering it. How can this be a science-based badger cull, as claimed by the Government and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, when the Government’s chief scientist is among those who dispute the evidence used to justify killings? The Government should be asking whether the culling of badgers produces a significant effect in eliminating bovine TB. We believe the answer is no, it will not. Is culling badgers cost-effective? The answer is no. Is it morally and ethically appropriate? Again, we feel that the answer is no. The public costs alone of licensing and policing a cull will exceed £1 million in each pilot area. Shooting badgers in the pitch black is not a good idea. There are serious doubts about whether controlled shooting of free roaming badgers would actually achieve any worthwhile reduction in bovine TB at all.
We know how dreadful bovine TB is—I mentioned that our sympathies are with the farmers whose cattle are struck down by this terrible disease. We need to focus on other measures—those that will protect both cattle and badgers. We believe that vaccination is the way forward. Progress should be made on cattle vaccinations and DEFRA should secure change in the EU to permit commercial use of a cattle vaccine. There are far better ways to deal with bovine TB than the mass slaughter of badgers. We do not support a cull this year, next year or any year. We say: stop the cull and move to vaccinations.
Mr Adrian Sanders (Torbay) (LD)
In some ways it is disappointing that we have got to this point without finding a proper solution to TB. Successive Governments prevaricated over policy, and we are left in a tragic situation, where cattle and badgers continue to suffer and where farmers continue to have their livelihoods threatened by this disease. No one should be under any illusions whatever about what a nasty disease TB is, for both cattle and badgers, or how devastating it is to farmers and farming communities.
I thought that governmental prevarication had ended in 2008, with the recognition that culling was not the solution and that vaccination would provide a much surer way forward in the long term. The coalition agreement originally provided some comfort that TB control would be based on science-led policy. The apparent willingness of Ministers to take a rather curious interpretation of the scientific evidence is far more worrying. The independent scientific group, the bovine TB eradication group and the majority of scientific opinion conclude that culling is not the way forward. Lord Krebs has described the Government’s policy as “mindless”, so it is even more curious that the Secretary of State maintains that his decisions wholly conform to the science. They might conform to someone’s science; they do not conform to the majority of scientific opinion.
Mr Laurence Robertson
Would the hon. Gentleman like to refer to the British Veterinary Association’s opinion as well?
Mr Sanders
There is scientific opinion on both sides; the nub of the debate is that the majority of scientific opinion is against the cull.
Although Ministers and the National Farmers Union are clear that what has been announced is a postponement and not a U-turn on policy, the delay gives us an opportunity to scrutinise the evidence properly and to hold a wider public debate. I hope that that is beginning today. It is important to highlight the fact that opponents of the cull are not opposed to bearing down on TB. The ultimate goal for us all is to have better animal welfare—both of cattle and badgers—so it is essential that we find the most effective policy that eradicates the disease. I want to discuss the three main issues that demonstrate why the cull of badgers is the wrong way to deal with the spread of bovine TB: the scientific evidence, value for money and, of course, the overwhelming public opinion that a cull is an inhumane and unnecessary option.
Mr Sanders
It has a lot to do with it, frankly. Killing animals that do not carry the disease is simply wrong.
There is a significant body of scientific evidence on the efficacy of culling, both supporting and rejecting the idea. The majority conclusion, however, is that a cull could be not only ineffective, but potentially counter-productive in controlling the disease, by increasing the number of infected badgers and cattle through the perturbation effect. That was highlighted by the research carried out by the independent scientific group in the randomised badger culling trial, which published its results in 2007 and warned against the results of badger culls. Dr Rosie Woodroffe, who was referred to earlier, is a former member of the ISG on cattle TB. She said earlier this month that
“all… evidence shows that culling badgers increases the proportion of badgers that have TB”.
As the Government have now admitted, there is also great unpredictability surrounding the logistical element of the cull. Using so-called shooting, it is unknown how many badgers will be destroyed or whether the shooters will have managed to fulfil their quota. The longer-term consequences on local ecosystems—such as an increase in fox populations—are not entirely foreseeable. The cost of the cull seems to be increasingly complex, but there is a general consensus that it is a bad deal for taxpayers.
As Professor McInerney, emeritus professor of agricultural policy at the university of Exeter—right in the heart of the worst bovine TB-affected area—said,
“You pay about £1.5 million to get the disease avoidance worth about £900,000.”
It seems that not enough research has been done into the most cost-effective way to carry out a cull, but also that spending money on an ineffective cull would be a disastrous step in the battle to control TB. If the Government were to redirect those resources into further research and the development of alternative options, such as a vaccination, they would get far better value for taxpayers.
Let me turn to public opinion. It is obvious to most that the vast majority of the public are against the cull, as is evident from the e-petition. The Government seem to have lost sight of public interest and have developed the cull, which seems to be attractive only to understandably desperate farmers. It seems unfair to present those farmers with a quick fix that has no hope of a sustainable or successful future and to entice them with it. The responsible thing to do would be to back down from the cull altogether and explore the alternatives, to which I will now turn.
Of course, vaccinating cattle is the obvious solution to the problem. However, until we can develop a test that can distinguish between vaccinated and infected cattle, there is no hope of getting EU law changed, although some people contend that there has been a major breakthrough even in this area—an argument that others will no doubt pick up. In the meantime, we could start a badger vaccination programme. We have been vaccinating badgers since 2010, and there have been positive results. Research published by Dr Mark Chambers in 2010, using evidence gained in a field trial, showed a 73.8% reduction in positive serological test results in badgers. Just as in humans, when enough of the population is vaccinated, prevalence of the disease reduces.
According to the Gloucestershire wildlife trust, vaccinating badgers costs £51 per hectare, but that cost could be lowered. Getting groups to combine their operations with nearby areas and to share fridges, traps and other costly items drastically cuts the costs, making vaccination not only a more ethical option, but cheaper than culling. The money saved from not carrying out the cull should be used to fund the development of an oral vaccine for badgers. We know that oral vaccination is a much more practical solution, and the sooner one is developed, the better.
The Welsh Government’s TB eradication programme is something that we should monitor closely and consider adopting for England. The programme has combined badger vaccination with stricter cattle controls and improved biosecurity and has had some success.
Andrew George
On top of the efforts that my hon. Friend is talking about and the science, which should be taken into consideration, the recent results of research commissioned by DEFRA and headed by Dr Andrew Conlan at Cambridge university showed that one in five of the herds that had been given the all-clear on bovine TB were actually still harbouring the disease. We should be concentrating a great deal of effort in that area as well.
Mr Sanders
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for drawing the House’s attention to that research, of which I was not aware.
The Welsh Assembly Government have been offering biosecurity advice to farmers within the intensive action area, and the Government should be doing the same in Devon and other heavily affected areas. It is an easy and relatively cheap way to ensure that farmers have the knowledge and guidance that they need to limit the spread of bovine TB. That of course will not solve the problem overnight, but better farming practices and a general build-up of immunity in the badger population will slowly lead to a much lower rate of TB infection.
As someone lucky enough to have been born and grown up in the county of Devonshire, it is now my privilege and honour to represent a constituency in the county. No one from the west country is unaware of the issue, and what unites us across the south-west, as I hope it does in the House, is a desire to find a workable solution to this appalling plague on our cattle, our wildlife and the lives of our wonderful farmers and the communities in which they live. But a cull is not it.
Andrew Miller (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)
I want to start by commenting on the use of language in the debate. In his statement to the House a couple of days ago, the Secretary of State, who is not in his place, used the words “evidence” 15 times, “scientific” nine times and “science” 16 times. It is interesting to read his qualifications. On his website, he describes himself as having
“read History at Cambridge University”
and that as
“Agriculture spokesman he became an expert on bovine TB and campaigned for the dairy industry.”
We must use language carefully, because it is pushing the boundaries to say one is an expert on a subject. My good friend Lord Krebs, who chairs the sister Committee of mine in the other place, has considerably more expertise on this subject than I have, but I doubt whether he would call himself an expert. It is bold of the Secretary of State to describe himself as an expert.
This subject is hugely complicated. Humans and animals, especially food animals, are far more mobile than they were, so we must take very seriously the risk of zoonotic diseases. If the Government want to do something positive during the so-called closed season, I strongly advise them to invest in research into zoonotic diseases. I am pleased to say that one of this country’s major veterinary schools at Leahurst, which is in my constituency and which the former farming Minister visited, leads the way in zoonotic research.
Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)
Does the hon. Gentleman, who is not an expert, think that there will be sufficient time before the cull recommences to get a vaccination that works? Most people suggest that we are several years away from that.
Andrew Miller
I know that the hon. Gentleman is fascinated with firearms, but shooting badgers will not work either. I do not say that a cull will have no effect; of course it will have an effect. Killing any of the species that carry TB—not just badgers but including cattle—will have an effect, but it will not solve the problem. Indeed, killing every badger will not eradicate bovine TB. I hope that the step proposed by the hon. Gentleman will not prove necessary in years to come, given the work that is being done on the biology, because I believe we can move closer to eradication by investing the huge sums that we are discussing in research programmes aimed at establishing a vaccination regime.
Roger Williams (Brecon and Radnorshire) (LD)
I have huge respect for the hon. Gentleman, who chairs the Science and Technology Committee. Evidence given to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee in the previous Parliament suggested that this is a question not of money but of time, because to develop the vaccine we need generations of badgers and cattle.
Andrew Miller
There is a chicken and egg argument and a serious challenge facing us. My concern is that the House is not taking the issue of zoonotic conditions seriously enough. We must take a much more mature view on the inevitable consequences of the greater mobility of people and of animals in the food chain while they are alive; otherwise, we shall be dealing with not only bovine TB but other conditions. I hope that when Ministers press the Treasury on the comprehensive spending view they will pass on the message that, without sensible investment, we will have this debate time and again and that, even if all badgers were culled, farmers would still be disadvantaged by this dreadful disease.
It is easy to criticise one side or the other of the argument, but even DEFRA’s nine-point summary states:
“If culling is undertaken, it should be in addition to, not instead of, existing bTB control measures in cattle, which should be maintained and strengthened.”
I have yet to hear a single word from a Minister on the strengthening of the regime.
Sir James Paice
Notwithstanding Mr Speaker’s earlier injunction, I must tell the hon. Gentleman that if he had been paying attention on Tuesday or had read any farming magazines in the past two or three weeks he would know that on 1 January another big tranche of measures will be introduced to which farmers object because they are so tough.
Andrew Miller
The hon. Gentleman speaks of a big tranche, but I have not seen research and the necessary investment, without which we shall be making a dreadful mistake.
I shall use the time remaining to me to refer to the situation in my constituency. The Cheshire wildlife trust, which the right hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Andrew Stunell) mentioned when the statement was made on Tuesday, is funding its own vaccination campaign and calling for investment, which is a good move. I have a note from my constituent, Mr Huw Rowlands, a farmer, in which he says:
“Nobody can have missed the controversy raging about culling badgers. Quite how the proposed operations can be described as a cull is beyond me; my dictionary defines a cull as being ‘to take out inferior or surplus animals from a flock.’ We have badgers on the farm which to date have not caused problems”.
He opposes culling but supports the Cheshire wildlife trust’s campaign. By the way, his farm is part of the higher level stewardship scheme, which is supported by DEFRA, and I recommend using Rowlands’s farm to buy red poll meat, if I may advertise on its behalf.
The opinions of local people, including farmers, suggest that there are other ways to address this problem. It is a very challenging one and nobody can stand here and honestly say that they have the 100% correct solution, as the thoughtful speech preceding mine well illustrated. Unless we see serious investment in scientific research into zoonotic conditions, we will not see the eradication of the problem. Without such actions, we will simply delay a debate that will have to take place in years to come.
This debate is, I suppose, about what happens during the interregnum. I urge the Government to think seriously about making that kind of investment during the interregnum; if we do not make it, we would be quite right to criticise the Government for failing in their duty to care not just for the animals on our land but for human beings, too.
Sir James Paice (South East Cambridgeshire) (Con)
I start by reminding the House of my declared interests in this matter. I would like to comment briefly on this week’s announcement and statement, but I want to spend most of my time trying to explain how the policy that we are debating was devised. I think I am the only person in the Chamber who was involved right through that development work. I am delighted that it has been taken on by the Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr Heath), who is in his place on the Front Bench.
I think, in the circumstances, the Government were right this week to make the decision to postpone the cull. I regret that those circumstances arose. The main reason is that it is far too late in the year to start a cull. Badgers are going into semi-hibernation, slowing down and are not as active, so fulfilling a cull of any size would have been made much more difficult. In my view, it should have happened in the summer, notwithstanding the Olympics, and it should certainly have started by 1 October. I am concerned that the groups of farmers and their contractors were not ready to go when the first licence was issued in September.
I was pleased to hear the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) refer to the European context. She is absolutely right: the European auditors came here over a year ago to investigate how we go about this matter. She is right, too, to make the point that we get considerable sums of money from Europe. What she was unaware of, understandably, is the fact that this time last year, the European Commission threatened to withdraw our funding because it was not satisfied that we were taking sufficient actions, including dealing with badgers. I had to go to Brussels to make a personal plea to the then commissioner to sustain Europe’s support of our programme.
It is interesting that several Members have referred to the situation in Wales. More recently, the Commission has said that the Welsh decision to stop the proposed cull damages the likely fulfilment of its eradication plan. There should be no doubt about the European position. I was as angry as the hon. Member for Bristol East about some of the reports of what was happening on the ground. That is why we toughened up right across the board, as she was kind enough to say, and it is partly why we agreed to this latest tranche of further restrictions, including a significant extension of annual testing into new parts of the country where the problem did not exist. I am pleased that my hon. Friend the Minister has endorsed the position that I took.
Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)
I happen to represent one of the areas worst affected by TB. I want to commend my right hon. Friend as one of the most outstanding Agriculture Ministers, who knows a great deal about this subject. Does he acknowledge that there is not only human misery in every case where a farmer loses cattle, but a huge economic cost to all these biosecurity measures, such as pre-movement testing, reactor testing and all the additional measures now announced? Those come at a huge economic cost for farmers.
Sir James Paice
My hon. Friend is entirely right. Several Members, including the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) who introduced the debate, referred to cattle-to-cattle transmission, which is of course a major factor—nobody denies it—that has to be properly addressed. The tranche of new measures to which I referred a minute ago is the third tranche; it started under my watch, but I had already introduced two tranches of much tougher measures. To be honest, the previous Government had done the pre-movement testing as well. The suggestion that cattle-to-cattle movement is not being addressed is nonsense. The other measures are hugely important, but we come down to the fact that no country in the world has got rid of bovine TB—I mean get rid of, not just reduce—without addressing the reservoir of relevant wildlife. In this country, as in Ireland and France, this means badgers.
Angela Smith
The right hon. Gentleman’s point has been made repeatedly over the last few days, but does he not agree that we are not comparing like with like here, in that the methodology used in other countries to deal with the problem has been quite different?
Sir James Paice
I accept that, not least because the reservoir involves different species of animals. Clearly, we do not deal with badgers in the same way as we deal with wild buffalo in the Northern Territory of Australia. That is blatantly clear, but if we are to address the issue of the reservoir of badgers, there are only two ways of proceeding. Either we vaccinate them—I shall come back to that—or we have to cull them.
I hope that the whole House accepts that no Minister from any political party wants to court the unpopularity or, indeed, face the security challenge caused by this issue. Let us be frank: I, the Minister, other Ministers and officials are all under special security arrangements because of the threats from a small minority of opponents. None of us wants any of that. If there were a better way, we would adopt it. To pretend that we are somehow not interested in vaccines is, I have to say, absurd. The fact is that we have a licensed injectable badger vaccine; no one has mentioned that the Government are making some money available to pay for it where people want to use it. If wildlife trusts want to continue to roll it out, that is fine, but the costs of rolling it out on a national scale are so incredible that I think it is wrong to suggest it is a panacea.
The hon. Member for Torbay (Mr Sanders) referred to an oral vaccine for badgers. We believed this would be likely for many years, but I have to tell the hon. Gentleman that, for two reasons, it is now further away than ever. First, the intellectual property will be difficult to get hold of; it is owned by a New Zealand institution. More importantly, the promising first tests have never been repeated. All the tests carried out showed much worse problems. That is because the vaccine is being destroyed in badgers’ acidic stomachs.
On cattle vaccine, I can tell the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion that, yes, it has been developed and we know, as my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said the other day, that it is not very effective, although it has an element of effectiveness—about 60%. Yes, too, the DIVA test—differentiation of infected from vaccinated animals—is well on the way to being perfected. The hon. Lady is right about all that, but neither of them is licensed or officially proved and they still have to go through all the processes, which takes time, however much effort is put into it. What the hon. Lady seriously underplayed, however, is the European context when it comes to the cattle vaccine. I can assure her that, almost from day one of taking office, or within a matter of weeks, I pressed the Commission on this issue. I remember talking to the then Commissioner John Dalli, from D G SANCO, who said, “When you have your licensed vaccine and your licensed DIVA test, then we will start thinking about it, but don’t forget that it is only you, Ireland and possibly France that want this. All the other member states will be against it. Lifting the ban will take many years, so the question is what can be done in the meantime.”
Caroline Lucas
The case that the right hon. Gentleman describes is not the same as the discussions that I know have taken place at the European Commission, with very different messages coming back. Of course Britain is the only one that wants this vaccine at the moment, because we are the only ones who have had to face cattle TB this badly, but the suggestion that it is years away is simply not the case. I have in front of me a text from DEFRA’s own website, which talks about things happening by the end of the year. [Interruption.]
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order, Sir James. I will make the decisions, although it is good of you to offer advice. I am sure that the hon. Lady recognises that she has had a good run already; we ought to make sure that everybody else has a chance to express their views.
Sir James Paice
In the limited amount of time that is now available, let me deal with the issue of science. Everyone, including the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion, recognises that Lord Krebs and countless others accept that the randomised badger culling trials showed a 16% reduction. There is a great deal of debate about whether that is sufficient justification, but let us start there.
As has already been said, the study group concluded that culling badgers could “play no meaningful part”, but we thought it necessary to delve deeper into the research and to establish what was behind its conclusions. First, that 16% is a net figure. In the culling zone the gain was more like 30%, but it was offset by the problem of an increase in incidence in the perturbation area outside the zone. Some effort was made to reduce perturbation in the original trials, but it was nothing like the effort that is being imposed on the groups as a condition of their licence applications. If perturbation can be minimised, the net effect will be radically increased, although we do not know by how much because that has not yet been done. Let me stress again, however, that the 16% is a net figure which includes a problem outside the zone, and that that problem can be addressed.
As for the “meaningfulness” conclusion, it relates to the costs incurred by the RBCT. We all know that the trials were hugely expensive, but those are the only figures that we have to work on. We wanted to find a way of carrying out a cull more cheaply. We opted for controlled shooting as the predominant method, although cages would have to be used as well. I remind the House that controlled shooting of foxes, rabbits and, more recently, some species of deer takes place almost daily—or nightly—out in the countryside. To suggest that it is brand new is nonsense.
We addressed those two conclusions, and tried to find ways of achieving the same result through slightly different methods. Let me finally remind the House that these are pilots—
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. The right hon. Gentleman’s time is up.
Meg Munn (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab/Co-op)
There should be no doubt in the minds of Members on both sides of the House that bovine tuberculosis has serious economic and emotional implications for a number of farmers in the United Kingdom. We need to find a sustainable and human solution to this scourge.
According to the scientific evidence, to achieve a significant reduction in bovine TB, badger culling would need to be take place over a huge geographical area—as large as 500 sq km. It would also need to be very intensive, virtually wiping out the badger population in the area.
The Government must make clear what they intend to do following the initial trials. Will their policy be to allow culling over a much larger area, with much larger numbers of dead badgers? That could pose a risk to the badger population as a whole. As Members are well aware, the problem is that a cull of less than 70% means ineffective disease control, while a cull of more than 70% means a risk of eradication of the badger population across the country. The Government claim to have devised much more effective culling methods, but how can we know when those methods have not been tried yet? Given that shooting badgers has never been used in the UK before as a means of control, it must be doubtful whether it would lead to the same results in bovine TB eradication as the badger trials conducted by the Independent Scientific Group on Cattle TB.
A follow-up report on the randomised badger culling trial, published in February 2010, warned of the need for any cull to be well planned and co-ordinated, and of the potential for small-scale or irregular culls to result in increases rather than decreases in bovine TB incidence. The Government have so far failed to co-ordinate the figures for the number of badgers in the cull areas for the purpose of meeting their 70% target. The latest survey data show the number of badgers in each cull area to be double the figure used by DEFRA to calculate the costs of the cull. DEFRA used a figure of 1,300 badgers in each 300 sq km cull area, but on 17 October it revealed in a written answer that the figures were actually 3,600 in west Gloucestershire and 4,300 in west Somerset. The Minister’s response to my question about the figures this week was also confused.
It is clearly difficult to monitor the badger population accurately. This week, Lord Krebs referred to a variation of between 1,000 and 5,000 in the space of just a few days. However, Natural England needs to know the actual number of badgers in each area in order to know how many must be killed. Without such accurate population data, it is hard to assess whether the 70% target can be met, or how the results of the trial can be compared with those of previous trials that were conducted on independent scientific basis.
Roger Williams
One of the problems with the Krebs trials was that they were interrupted by the foot and mouth outbreak. Instead of five annual culls in five years, there were four culls spread over a period of between five and six years.
Meg Munn
I am not sure exactly how that relates to what I have been saying, but the hon. Gentleman has put his point on the record.
Protecting wildlife is something about which I feel strongly, and I know that many Members in all parts of the House feel the same. The Council of Europe’s convention on the conservation of European wildlife and natural habitats, also known as the Berne convention, is a legally binding convention that aims
“to conserve wild flora and fauna and their natural habitats”.
There are currently 50 signatories, including all the members of the European Union and the Union itself, as well as several other European and north African countries. The United Kingdom Government have been a signatory since the 1970s. Badgers are listed in appendix III of the convention, and contracting parties are committed to prohibiting
“the use of all indiscriminate means of capture and killing and the use of all means capable of causing local disappearance of, or serious disturbance to, populations”.
Article 9 provides contracting parties with the conditions under which exceptions can be made to the rules protecting appendix III-listed species. They include the prevention of “serious damage” to livestock, but only in circumstances in which there is “no other satisfactory solution”, and only when the action taken
“will not be detrimental to the survival of the population concerned”.
Owing to the controversial nature of this badger cull, secrecy is required in its planning and start; but we know, farmers know, and the local populations know what is happening, and that must place a question mark over the effectiveness of the operation. The safety of the public in the two areas involved poses a potential problem. If the public are to be 100% safe, the boundaries will have to be revealed, but that would prevent the identity of participating farmers and landowners from remaining secret. Moreover, the taking of precautions to avoid any criminal activity by protesters—not only to avoid damage, but to ensure the effectiveness of the cull—would become harder to achieve. It should be borne in mind that, according to the 2011 consultation, more than 50% of public opinion is against the cull.
The Government’s impact assessment has already shown that the cull will cost farmers more than it saves them. In a follow-up to DEFRA’s document containing the estimated costs of various culling methods, a report on the randomised badger culling trial pointed out that those estimates did not include any capital cost to farmers or costs of training and co-ordinating efforts, and concluded that the costs of this culling method could exceed the long-term financial benefits. Following Natural England’s updated figures for the badger population, the National Farmers Union has admitted that the cost to farmers would be too high. If the ultimate objective is to prevent the slaughter of cattle and therefore a loss of farmers’ livelihoods, why do the Government believe that the appropriate solution is to put a greater financial strain on farmers and on the public purse?
The Government recognise that vaccination is the real strategy for the long term, but they are downplaying the current possibilities. As other Members have pointed out, although the oral badger vaccine would have greater potential for more widespread use, we must accept that its development is some years away. However, developing and using the injectable vaccine would be a step in the right direction.
In 2007, the previous Government decided not to license farmers to cull badgers, but to make vaccination a priority, and increased spending on vaccines. Over the last 10 years, DEFRA has spent more than £7 million on research into badger vaccines, and in March 2010 the first TB badger vaccine was authorised. The plan had been to deploy it in six areas in England, but that was reduced to one area in June 2010. The hon. Member for Torbay (Mr Sanders) has discussed the 2010 study, which showed that positive TB tests among badgers were reduced by almost 74%.
Vaccinating cattle to give the herd a level of combined immunity, which slows the spread of the disease until it reaches zero, should be developed. I will not discuss that point in detail as it has already been addressed. We know, however, that vaccinating cattle and having a DIVA test are the right things to do.
This debate is titled, “Badger Cull”, but it is not just about saving the lives of badgers; it is also about saving the lives of cattle. The key point is that we must do what is effective not only for the short term, but for the long term. I believe that the Government have got this seriously wrong. There is an alternative, and they should take it.
Bill Wiggin (North Herefordshire) (Con)
I have great pride in declaring that I breed Hereford cattle, and even more pride in saying they all passed their TB test in September.
One of my constituents sent me a book called “The Geek Manifesto” about why we need more scientists in politics. That was very kind of him, and it was a very interesting book. It has served to show me, however, that our current debate highlights one of the problems with science and political discussion. Scientists are constrained in how they write their reports, which makes it too easy for people to quote from them to confirm their prejudices.
I had the privilege of meeting Professor Bourne and asking him how he would deal with TB if he were in charge. The gist of his answer was that he would not do as he did when he worked for DEFRA because the constraints put on him made for poorer science. I agreed with him, and he was good enough to point out the cost-benefit and animal welfare considerations and other barriers to pure research.
From 1992 to 2011, the number of cattle slaughtered annually as a result of TB has risen from 2,000 to 38,000. Therefore, the status quo is not working, so we can safely rule out the “do nothing” option.
Nick Herbert (Arundel and South Downs) (Con)
The hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas), who moved the motion, has just left her place, but—[Interruption.] I am very sorry; she is still present. In her speech, she barely referred to the current situation. Some 26,000 cattle had to be slaughtered last year. As my hon. Friend the Member for North Herefordshire (Bill Wiggin) suggests, if the status quo continues, cattle will continue to be slaughtered, and that—
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. Mr Herbert, you should know better. A lot of Members wish to speak. We have asked for short interventions. Please do not make a speech. If you want to speak, you should put your name on the list.
Bill Wiggin
I entirely agree with my right hon. Friend. He is absolutely right: it is a tragedy not only for the cattle, but for the farmer, and it is also a great tragedy for badgers.
The figure that is hardest to ascertain is how many badgers catch this disease every year. I am not aware of any evidence, but what I do know is that badgers are tough and they can cope with this infection for some time. Some badgers first display lesions in their bladders and then, as the disease progresses, they develop in other organs. The badger will become increasingly sick and eventually be driven out of its social group. When that happens, the badger will leave the sett territory and wander into other badgers’ territories where it may have to fight, and fighting is bad, because the risk of passing the infection, through scratches and bites, increases greatly. That, too, is beyond dispute.
I remember tabling a written question some years ago asking what would be the right thing to do if someone were to find an injured badger by the side of the road. The answer that came back was: “Consult your lawyer before doing anything.” This situation cannot be allowed to continue. There needs to be a humane way of ending suffering—for badgers, not lawyers, of course!
I have real concerns about the skin test we currently use to identify the disease. Here is a challenge for the armchair scientists. If we carry on testing and culling cattle, we will succeed in breeding cattle that do not show a reaction to the skin test. That is happening already. A constituent of mine tested her cattle, then took one for slaughter, only to find two lesions in different organs of that cow. That meant that the cow was unfit for human consumption and she lost her beef—which was probably worth about £2,000. She was very angry as her cow had been tested and passed and then been condemned. She wanted compensation from the Government for such a rotten test. She is right. This is another example of what happens if we carry on with the “do nothing” policy we have inherited.
As well as breeding test-proof cows, we are also allowing the disease to spread in the badger population. Not one of the letters I got from supposed friends of the badger pointed out that, by doing nothing, more badgers would become infected. In fact, many said that diseases in wild animals were no concern of theirs—and they call themselves animal lovers. I have nothing but contempt for people who allow badgers to suffer, which is why I pushed for longer prison sentences for genuinely evil people who bait badgers. Sadly, Opposition parties voted down an amendment I tabled on that.
The Dutch vaccinated “to die” during the foot and mouth outbreak, and that is based on the principle that a vaccinated animal must be traceable throughout its life. Perhaps we should be seeking permission to trial vaccination in areas that have not been selected for a trial cull, despite EU directive 78/52/EEC, article 13.
Beef suckler cows could be considered as “not for export”. By that, I mean a farmer may decide to keep a beef heifer calf for the rest of her life. She will never be sold for export, nor would her beef go into the export market. This would shift the decision on the risk of TB from DEFRA to the farmer. The risk would be the farmer’s. After a cow has passed a TB test, she would be vaccinated. Her passport would be stamped “TB vaccinated, not for export.” She would stay in the UK for the rest of her life. At the end of her days when she went for slaughter, if lesions were found in her body, the meat would be condemned and the farmer would lose the £900 or so she was worth as beef. That decision and risk would belong to the farmer. Any calf born could be tested, and bulls or cattle that would be worth exporting could be left unvaccinated. If the cow were to develop the disease, it would be picked up every time she had a calf, which is annually, and which is when we test for the disease.
Mathematically, every animal that is protected from the disease makes it harder for the disease to spread. Dairy cattle that are to be milked would not qualify for vaccination. Even if bacillus Calmette-Guérin vaccination is not much better than 50% or 60% effective, ways of reducing the costs, reducing the chances, reducing the possible vectors, and reducing the bill to taxpayers are all worth exploring. I urge the Government to look into this as one of the tools in the box.
Data from the randomised badger culling trial led to the conclusion that
“in the absence of transmission from infected badgers, only 3.4% of herds per annum would be expected to have a TB breakdown”
and that
“TB in cattle herds could be substantially reduced, possibly even eliminated, in the absence of transmission from badgers to cattle.”
I believe that vaccinating badgers could contribute to that, but there are constraints. We do not vaccinate infected cattle; we cull them, and we should do the same for infected badgers. One of the ideals would be a test for badgers. I urge the Government to look at having more research done into the PCR—polymerase chain reaction—test at Warwick university. Accordingly, the British Veterinary Association announced its relief that there has been no U-turn on the badger cull. It reiterated that scientists think culling badgers does reduce levels of infection in cattle herds.
As I said, I am in favour of vaccinating cattle and badgers, but we are all aware that we cannot wait. I am aware of the hundreds of e-mails that colleagues have received, as I have, but they largely cite the alternative of vaccination as the answer to the TB problem. That sounds better in theory than it is in practice: the badger vaccine is injected and is therefore difficult to administer, as badgers need to be trapped; and it is difficult to record which badgers have been vaccinated, and some may be trapped again and again. Furthermore, EU legislation currently bans the cattle vaccine, as it can interfere with the tuberculin skin test. The Government are right to develop the DIVA test.
Geoffrey Clifton-Brown
Does my hon. Friend agree that the ideal in terms of getting rid of this problem is a cattle vaccine as well as a badger vaccine, but the problem is that we are a long way from both of those and a badger vaccine has no effect on badgers already infected with TB?
Bill Wiggin
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We do need a suitable vaccination to be developed and to be legal in the UK. No one wants to cull healthy badgers. So an experimental pilot cull in the highest-risk areas, with all the barriers to spreading the disease, such as coastlines or rivers, and with the local farmers in support, would prove whether culling was worth rolling out in other high-risk areas. People should be clear that the whole badger population is not at risk from culling, just those badgers that are highly at risk themselves of being infected.
Professor Bourne told me that a cull would not work the way he did it, so the Government have rightly changed the parameters. Culling will not be done in the way it was done before; it will not be done by the same people and it must be done to a level that commands scientific respect, within hard boundaries and in a specifically large area. Without vectors I believe the chance of infection drops dramatically, although M. bovis does live in soil for up to two years. If the chance of infection remains high and the pilot culls do not work, we would be glad it was only a pilot and we could then spend all our time and money on vaccinating alone—that is why we should vote down today’s motion. But vaccination is illegal under article 13 of EU directive 78/52/EEC, so that approach may not work either. That is why I think we should seek a derogation so that we can pilot vaccination in this country as well.
Mr Jamie Reed (Copeland) (Lab)
May I begin by saying how much I regret that the Secretary of State is not in his place? I regret even more the fact that he left the Chamber chuntering into the microphone that he had had enough of this debate.
I should declare some interests at the outset: I am the proud Member of Parliament for England’s most remotely accessible constituency from Westminster; I am married into a dairy farming family; and I am proud to represent scores of farmers. I have not seen for a long time as big a mailbag as has come in against this proposed cull. Today’s debate will take many forms and touch on many issues. In many ways, the Government are to blame for that, because this should have always been and should always be a scientific debate. There is no doubt that it should be an environmental debate and a debate about animal welfare, but those debates should always be based on science if they are to carry the weight and meaning that we want them to.
Before I go through the scientific evidence, I wish to pay tribute to all the organisations that have argued against what is clearly a scientifically flawed set of proposals used to support a cull. I also pay tribute to those figures with a high public profile who have used that to forward the aims of this cause. We live in an era characterised by a rampant, feckless celebrity culture that has begun to disfigure our society, where infamy, rather than fame found through any positively worthwhile achievements, leads to instant riches and celebrity status. This has led to the creation of a wealthy, C-list zombie class who do not believe they are subject to the laws of this country. So I applaud those who have used their profile for a cause that is not self-serving, lucrative or glamorous. They deserve our respect; they have rocked this Government.
The science is clear, and Lord Krebs has left no doubt on the efficacy of the proposed cull and its ability to address the problem of bovine TB. He has rightly said that
“'bovine TB is a serious problem, and it deserves serious science to underpin policy.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 23 October 2012; Vol. 740, c. 148.]
He has also pointed out that the proposed cull will result, after nine years, in 84% of the problem still remaining in place. That means that there will be a 16% reduction in the trend increase of bovine TB, and so, after nine years, there will still be more bovine TB around than there was at the beginning. It could not be clearer that this proposed cull simply will not work.
DEFRA’s own figures show that fewer cattle have been slaughtered because of bovine TB each year from 2008 to 2011, so it is clear that the Government are cherry-picking data in an attempt to support a flawed case. The question must be asked: why? The answer is really hard to fathom. In one respect, I think it is a genuinely confused attempt to help. One myth I would like to dispel is that this is being done at the behest of the National Farmers Union. We have all noticed the Government’s nudges and winks over recent weeks in an attempt to blame the NFU for the proposal, but that simply will not wash. The NFU is an important, effective organisation that is duty-bound to represent the many disparate interests of farms and farmers of very different sorts. Clearly, there is more than one voice of farmers on the issue of bovine TB and the cull.
Farmers want solutions to bovine TB, as we all do. My constituency will never forget the devastating consequences of foot and mouth disease. It was not just an animal welfare disaster and an economic catastrophe; it was a very real human tragedy, as lives were ruined and generations of work were destroyed. Nothing like that must ever be allowed to happen again, so on the issue of bovine TB farmers are well within their rights to look at the Government and wonder why they have been led down the garden path and sold a false prospectus. There can be no doubt that they have been, and they are sick to death of the goalposts for ever moving as the Government continue to drop the ball. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the proposed cull was a sop from a shambolic Government—the political equivalent of magic beans. This shambles is not the fault of farmers and it is not the fault of the NFU.
I am sick and tired of redundant notions of rurality running riot across this House and within all political parties. In some parts of this House, rural areas are seen in the mind’s eye as consisting of corpulent farmers chewing a blade of grass and resting on a gate post; they are seen as simply a playground for those who have wealth and have left urban areas to gentrify rural areas with large homes and Range Rovers. Those who think that never see the young farmer struggling to stay afloat, and rarely consider what it means for people to have literally no access to public transport and, as a result, to schools, hospitals and other services, which their taxes pay for just as much as anyone else’s. Those who think that never see the struggling villages, which are fighting every day to stay alive and have never known affluence, or the pensioners, parents and children who occupy this forgotten country. That must change. As the economic squeeze worsens, as the public sector and the state retreat further, and as areas of market failure become ever more prominent, all of us need to pay urgent attention to the plight of ordinary people in this forgotten England, because they need our help and they have little or no interest in the colour of our respective rosettes. So I commend those Government Members who will support today’s motion.
This Government have done little or nothing for the people I am talking about, and show no signs of doing so. The cull was also a sop based on a redundant and clichéd misconception of farmers and rural life, which can now be seen through. That, in part, has led to farmers receiving anonymous threats about what will happen to them and their property if a cull takes place. That is a despicable state of affairs, and I hope that the Minister, the Secretary of State and the Government in general will join me in urging that the full weight of the law be brought against the people who have made those threats.
For the sake of bovine welfare, for the sake of badger conservation, for the sake of rural businesses and the rural economy, which, in so many ways, relies upon dairy farming, and for the sake of everyone in this House, on either side, who cares about rural England, the Government should urgently begin bringing forward sensible proposals to tackle bovine TB, not pointless, scientifically disproven, dog-whistle policies.
Mike Weatherley (Hove) (Con)
I am sure my hon. Friends are aware that bovine tuberculosis is the most infectious type of TB. It is able to infect most mammals, although, thankfully, the threat of humans contracting TB from animals today is very remote. The disease originated in cattle, it is a farming problem and it has had an impact on wildlife throughout the world, with devastating effects. Culls and mass slaughters have been carried out in an attempt to combat TB, but they have never been successful; no country has eradicated bovine TB by removing a wildlife population. The recent UK randomised badger culling trial—RBCT—is at the centre of this dispute and it is the basis of the Government’s policy, which has cherry-picked data to the detriment of our domestic animal populations. Perturbation is the scientific term for the effect of spreading an infection to an area outside the cull zone. This occurs when infected populations within the zone migrate out to new areas, and it is highlighted as a concern in the Krebs report.
Hard boundaries were recommended, but DEFRA offered roads and rivers. Badgers cross roads each night and 99% of them survive. They also swim extremely well and in many areas cross rivers and canals nightly to feed. They are sensitive and highly intelligent animals that will flee the culling zone if shooting is prolonged. The entire wildlife population will migrate out of the location in those circumstances, and we know that deer and boar are vectors for bovine TB, along with rats and many other mammals. It is irresponsible at best and dire at worst to displace any of the wildlife population that is suspected of carrying disease.
The recommended period for culling to keep a population within the cull zone is five days of intense culling. That ensures that in most cases the wildlife population stays in place and does not migrate out, spreading bovine TB as it moves. The RBCT took 12 days and saw perturbation have a negative effect on culling. The Government have ignored the recommended cull period and allowed six weeks. That cull period will see the entire wildlife population within the cull zone permanently move out, spreading infection from the cull zone.
It is true that many farms continually suffer from bovine TB, but 40% of all farms in the hot spot areas have been TB-free over 10 years. Such migration will infect the TB-free farms and simply spread bovine TB. The spread of TB slowly across the country has been caused by cattle movements and not by badgers, as they do not migrate. Cattle movements can be the only factor in the spread. Poor and sloppy biosecurity and lapsed testing has led to cattle spreading the disease in many cases.
The cull would be industry-led and would not be carried out by specialists and scientists in the area of population and disease control. Level II hunters will have had only one day of training, which will make them neither an expert at shooting an animal they have never encountered before nor a specialist in population control. Those people might well never have shot a badger and are unlikely to understand how it moves.
The test and cull regime would take decades to achieve official TB-free status. We can kill all the badgers in England and we would still have bovine TB, so what would we do then—remove all the deer, all the boar and all other wildlife? The cull must be halted and the only alternative is the vaccination of both badgers and cattle, as we heard earlier. Vaccination is the only alternative to culling that does not risk making TB worse. An injectable badger vaccine has been available and in use since early 2010 and trials have shown that it is effective in reducing the severity and progression of TB in badgers. It reduced the incidence of positive tests in badgers by 74%.
One of the reasons cited for not pursuing a wider vaccination programme is that modelling suggests it will take slightly longer to have an impact on bovine TB than culling. However, given the length of time that it has taken to implement a cull, a wider vaccination programme from 2010 could already be bringing benefits for both badgers and cattle. Although one solution is to vaccinate badgers, the permanent solution must be to vaccinate cattle. The preoccupation with badgers has prevented successive Governments from tackling the real issue but the cattle need protecting and we cannot continue to slaughter wildlife that we deem to be infected. We need to address the real issue—the source—and vaccinate our cattle. We will never address bovine TB if we do not stop it at source.
The cost of a cull exercise is increasing and policing will cost millions. The policy will be deeply unpopular and will not solve the problem of bovine TB. The only long-term sustainable and sensible way forward is to vaccinate. A European vaccine is months away, not years as we heard earlier, and needs to be pursued by a committed Government and the farming community. Vaccination is the only sustainable solution that is cost-effective and ethical. Most importantly, it works.
Jim Fitzpatrick (Poplar and Limehouse) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Hove (Mike Weatherley), who made a very thoughtful speech and showed that just as there is no one opinion on this question in farming there is no one opinion on the Government Benches.
I speak as a former Minister of State at DEFRA who tried to address the issue in 2009-10. I saw at first hand the emotional and financial effect on farmers and their families and the pain inflicted by bovine TB. For most people in the country, except to those who watch the BBC’s excellent “Countryfile”, that is invisible. In the Adam’s farm section of the programme, viewers will have heard Adam Henson’s vet confirm that his prize beasts were infected with TB. They will have seen the pain that he felt and how that announcement affected his family. I am sure that that brought the issue home to millions more people than would otherwise have been the case.
Miss McIntosh
Does the hon. Gentleman remember that he had the opportunity to respond to the Select Committee’s 2008 report on the incentives and financing that the Government of whom he was a member were giving to farmers for biosecurity measures? We received no answer. Does he regret that now?
Jim Fitzpatrick
I will come on to what the previous Government did at DEFRA when I was Minister of State. The hon. Lady will forgive me, but I do not have the record for 2008. I know that her Committee did sterling work on the subject and I respect the activity in which it was involved.
My former boss at DEFRA, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn), states in an article to be published today:
“Some of the facts are agreed. Bovine TB is a terrible disease. It has a huge impact on the farmers affected and they are understandably desperate to find their way out of this nightmare.”
He goes on to say:
“But we all have a responsibility to take action that will work.”
That is the starting point for our disagreement with the Government.
The forced delay to Government plans announced this week shows how difficult the subject is. There is no easy answer and that is why I want to refer to comments made by the Secretary of State on Tuesday. He said in his statement:
“The previous Government took forward the RBCT in a whole series of trials and then stopped and decided to do nothing.”
He went on to say that
“after the trials, the Labour Government stopped dead.”—[Official Report, 23 October 2012; Vol. 551, c. 839-44.]
With the greatest of respect to the Secretary of State, that is entirely wrong. Yes, we decided against a further or widespread cull, but our decisions were based on the evidence of the science presented to the Department and to Ministers at the time. Moreover, my right hon. Friend, who is in the Chamber, implemented the findings of the independent scientific group after the Krebs trials of the 10-year randomised badger cull. As the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) mentioned, John Bourne’s recommendation was not to cull but to tighten cattle controls. That is the answer to the question asked by the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh), the Chair of the Select Committee, and that is what was done.
We went further. We set up the TB eradication group, which comprised members of the British Veterinary Association, the NFU, Government scientists, individual farmers, DEFRA officials and others. For the Secretary of State to say on Tuesday that we stopped dead is insulting to the dedicated work done by those people on the issue of bovine TB and that was grossly unfair of him.
We also lobbied the Treasury for every penny we could get for compensation for farmers afflicted by the disease and, critically, we kept up support for the search for vaccines for badgers and cattle. In contrast, one of the first things the coalition did at DEFRA, as mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Meg Munn), was cancel five of the six vaccine pilot trials. That looks like an even poorer decision today than it did then, and it looked pretty awful when it was announced.
For the Secretary of State to say that we stopped dead was plain wrong. If badger culling was proven scientifically to have worked, I am convinced that the Labour Government, having supported the trials with appropriate controls, would have pulled that trigger to protect cattle, to protect badgers and to protect other wildlife. It did not work then, however, and despite the coalition’s changes, such as harder boundaries and so on, we do not think that it will work now.
Sir John Beddington was quoted by the Secretary of State on Tuesday. He was reported as having said that
“we might expect a 12 to 16% reduction in bovine TB…after nine years”.—[Official Report, 23 October 2012; Vol. 551, c. 839.]
That is hardly a vote of confidence. Those figures have been put in perspective in a number of speeches, as well as during DEFRA questions earlier today. I can understand that farmers, some Government Members and others want to be seen to be doing something—anything—and to be doing it now. As we heard in the statement, however, nothing will happen until next year, if then.
As the new Secretary of State has found out, there is no easy solution, no quick fix and no silver bullet. Vaccines and vaccination for badgers and cattle are the way forward. If there is a vote tonight, I will support the motion and I hope that the majority of Members will do the same.
Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)
I want to concentrate on the effect of TB-infected herds on farmers, especially in the west country, particularly in Devon. For nearly 20 years, and certainly for the past 15 years, cases have been increasing. In Devon, we started off in 1998 with some 1,700 infected cattle, and now there are 5,000-plus. We should not forget that those farmers who have herds with TB have been restricted throughout that period, when they have been testing their cattle every 60 days. Under restriction, dairy farmers can sell their milk and beef farmers their finished animals, provided that they do not have TB, but they cannot sell any young stock. They are restricted throughout the period, so one can imagine the effect on family farms and their finances.
I declare an interest: I am a farmer. Most hon. Members will not have heard me say anything else but that. Farmers whose cattle are restricted and who cannot sell their young stock see only an ever-rising overdraft. Not to put too fine a point on it, every time the bank statement arrives, farmers feel suicidal. They are trapped because nothing can be done; they cannot rid their cattle of the disease. There is not only the emotional impact, but the impact on all the cattle of being for ever tested. Cattle do not like being put through a crush every 60 days and injected. Would any of us? Those are the sorts of things that we have to face up to.
We have talked a lot today about vaccines, which are always a year away. For 20 years, farmers have been told that. The last Labour Government spent virtually all the time saying that to farmers. I have much respect for the hon. Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick), but the last Labour Government got very close to having a cull and they chickened out, which the Secretary of State has no intention of doing.
Neil Parish
No, I think not. I want to carry on in this vein.
I object to Opposition Members’ comments that farmers have not restricted cattle movement. There have been a few such cases, but the vast majority of farmers have had ever-stricter regulations imposed on them. They clean those cattle; every summer and winter, they come in and are tested and the TB reactors are taken out. In the spring, those cattle are put back out to grass. I might be being simplistic, but they then graze on grass infected with badger urine. Do not forget that whatever the percentage of badgers with TB, we can be certain that the biggest percentage of infected badgers are where the most TB is in cattle, so they are giving it to one another. However, we are taking out cattle with TB, but we are not taking out and controlling badgers.
We know that the vaccine will not work on infected badgers. Government Members are not bloodthirsty. We do not love the idea of a cull, but we must take out badgers in those areas with the highest concentration of infected badgers. We must not forget that these are pilot culls in areas that have been chosen because they are TB hot spots with harder boundaries. Yes, badgers will cross roads, but with a large motorway, a river or the sea, there will be much less perturbation. We all accept that there will be some, but if it can be restricted, that is right.
Neil Parish
No, I will not, because I did give way earlier. I will carry on.
This is mainly an Opposition Back-Bench debate—[Interruption.] I did say “mainly”. If one looks at the list of speakers, I would not be far wrong. But it is the Government Benches rather than the Opposition Benches that are packed out. We have real concern about prevaricating and doing nothing, as the previous Labour Government did, and the Government are making a real effort to control the disease.
Badger numbers are interesting. Let us not forget that the Badger Trust has argued for years that there are not such numbers of badgers in the country, but the badger population has continually increased and become more diseased. As that population grows, badgers become more adventurous and are much more likely to enter cattle sheds and infect cattle. Increased numbers of badgers and diseased badgers create a problem not only for cattle, but for wildlife and wildlife management.
Duncan Hames
I am very grateful. On perturbation, what happens to the setts of badgers that are culled in the trials? Are they then occupied by healthy badgers or by diseased badgers? Are they destroyed to prevent them from being occupied, or do natural processes mean that they are not occupied by badgers after the trial?
Neil Parish
The whole idea of the trial is to get a 70% reduction in the number of badgers—
Neil Parish
I have not really answered the previous intervention, but I will give way.
Angela Smith
The evidence is that the setts are left untouched. That has already been demonstrated. They are often repopulated by healthy badgers, which then pick up the disease.
Neil Parish
My point, in answer to both interventions, is that the whole idea of the trial is to carry out a cull of at least 70% of badgers in the given area over a four or five-year period. That is key to ensuring that we cull the diseased badgers. I cannot say which badger will go back to which sett, but I am certain that if we reduce those numbers, we will reduce their movement, and if they cannot spread beyond the cull area, we will see a reduction of much more than 16% in TB in cattle in those areas. It has been found throughout the world that where infected wildlife are culled there is a much greater effect.
The Government are right to carry on with the culls. I respect what the NFU has had to do. Because of the Olympics, it was late in the day before the culls could be started. We are getting towards much darker nights and we have had probably one of the wettest summers and autumns that I have ever known, so now is the wrong time to go forward with the cull. But I dispute the idea that we can do nothing about the situation and that culling badgers in the infected areas is wrong.
Until we tackle those concerns, farmers in my constituency and across the country, especially in the west, will be unable to rest, because they know that more and more cattle will become diseased and more and more restrictions will be imposed on them, and in the end many of them will decide, because of the weather, the price of feed and the disease, to give up cattle farming. Do we not want to see those farmed cattle healthy and grazing in the fields? Of course we do, which is why we need to take action. I very much respect the Secretary of State for sticking to the plan to have a cull.
Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)
The hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) has just given us a wonderful example of how politics can stray down paths that are unwise. Babies cry, dogs bark and politicians legislate. When we have a problem, sometimes even one that is beyond solution on heaven or earth, we feel that we have to so something. It is often better to do nothing, as history proves. Under the previous Labour Government, 75 Bills were passed that have never been implemented; they went through the House but nothing happened afterwards. It is the futile urge of the political class—that is what we are—to feel that we must always do something, usually by legislating, but often that multiplies the problem that we are trying to address.
In 1991, my friend and colleague Roy Hughes, who was a Member of the House for 30 years, first for Newport and then for Newport East, managed to bring through the Bill that designated badgers as a protected species. It was part of a movement that has been going on for a long time to ensure that we, as the superior species, treat all other living beings with respect and protect them from gratuitous suffering.
One of the issues that I have with the House is the need to make it more representative of the population as a whole. We have certainly made great progress in that regard by increasing the number of women Members, of whom you, Madam Deputy Speaker, are a splendid example, as are the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) and my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy). What a splendid debate we have had. I have been tempted to go and have my lunch, for which I have been waiting for some time, because I feel a sense of redundancy as a result of the brilliant way that they put their case in their speeches and in their interventions, some of which were not answered. My hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith) intervened on the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) to ask a very pertinent question: why has there been an increase in bovine TB?
One of my jobs in ensuring that the House is more representative relates to a group—there are millions of them in the population—that is grossly under-represented: we have a desperate shortage of octogenarians. I am looking forward to the people of Newport West putting that right in 2015. One of the joys that come with old age is a long memory. I can recall the fuss about bovine TB in 1946, when I was 11 years old. There were then 47,476 cases of bovine TB in 1946, but the figure had fallen to 628 in 1979. It would be simplistic to suggest that that was because of the arrival of Clement Attlee and the glorious dawn of socialism between 1945 and 1951, before the beginning of the dark age of Thatcherism in 1979. It was not Thatcher. We know that we went for 20 years with fewer than 1,000 cases of bovine TB a year.
Roger Williams
Almost eradicating bovine TB in the 1950s and ’60s was a truly remarkable achievement, but the difference between then and now is that there was no wildlife reservoir back then.
Paul Flynn
The hon. Gentleman ignores the fact that we went for 20 years without doing anything, as has been suggested. We did not interfere. I do not believe that the cull will do any good, because the evidence suggesting that is overwhelming. The hon. Member for North Herefordshire (Bill Wiggin) complained about “The Geek Manifesto”, which asks for science-based policies in the House, which are rare. He went on to say, “I have absolutely no evidence for this, but…” before putting forward a preposterous claim.
The trouble with the House is that so often we have no evidence for what we do. We are rich in prejudice in what we do. Nowhere is that more obvious than in the way that we treat farmers. As far as the Conservatives are concerned, we know that what the NFU wants, the NFU gets. I suggest that those Members should start to do a little more thinking for themselves, stand up to farmers—I and many other Members have many farmers in our constituencies—and tell them when they are wrong. They are certainly wrong on this.
We went through a long period during which bovine TB was not a special problem. Why is the concern always about bovine TB, because 10 times as many animals die on the farm as a result of other diseases and no compensation is paid? Why are the farmers not desperate about that? Why do we concentrate on this one disease?
The turning point when the disease became out of control and a major problem was the epidemic of foot and mouth disease. The controls were laid off because the focus was on eliminating the foot and mouth disease and the other problem was restocking. Cattle were moved to different areas, and we suddenly had a massive problem with bovine TB, which was mostly the result of cattle-to-cattle or soil-to-cattle infection. Some people want to seek a simple solution, but the solution is a false one. We should look at the geek manifesto and have policies that are rich in science and in the truth. Otherwise, we will do nothing now to solve a problem that will evolve. In the near future, vaccination will become a practical solution. I believe that the decision taken by the Welsh Government is the right one.
Let us look at what is going on. I believe that last week the coalition Government grabbed the statement by the NFU as manna from heaven because they knew that they were politically embarrassed. They are redefining themselves as a new party that is nastier than ever before. The public do not see the justification for a mass slaughter of a beloved animal as reasonable or practical. In a year’s time, when the coalition Government have done everything they can, having enthusiastically blamed the previous Government, the European Union and civil servants for everything that goes on, and if they get another year and a half to build the incredible ineptocracy that they are creating, where will their courage be then? Will they tell the public, “We need a badger cull now”? Will they get deeper into unpopularity? Will they advertise themselves again as the even nastier party, by attacking defenceless living creatures?
A group of people in my constituency have been caught indulging in badger culling. I think that many of us would agree that there is an element of sport which, sadly, many people enjoy. They enjoy killing wild animals. It is not part of the growing civilisation of this country, as we go from decade to decade and treat other living species with greater respect, not contempt.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)
Order. A large number of Members still wish to participate in the debate. To ensure that all of them can do so, I am reducing the time limit to seven minutes. Members can sit down, which is normal when the Speaker or a Deputy Speaker is on his or her feet.
Simon Hart (Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire) (Con)
I do not know what it is about debates in this House involving animals, but the speech by the hon. Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn) reminded me that we generate much more heat than light during such important debates, which bring out almost the worst of all our characteristics. However many years we try, we will never quite manage to have a coherent, sensible and measured debate involving animals; goodness knows why. Perhaps we can at least try to do so now.
TB is a dreadful human tragedy just as much as it is a dreadful animal tragedy. It is made worse, as we have all admitted today, by political inaction going back over decades. During the course of this debate, at least eight farm animals—probably 10, perhaps 15—have been slaughtered, some of them needlessly. Herds will have been devastated, businesses will have been damaged, families will have been upset—all sorts of consequences will have occurred only in the time that we have been here lobbing the occasional insult across the Chamber at each other. Many of those animals will have been perfectly healthy. Some of them will have been in calf, and some of those, because they were so much in calf, will probably have had to be slaughtered on the yard, in many cases in front of young children. This is the policy that we have now. It behoves all of us, whether we are in favour of or against the cull, to recognise that not doing anything has some very serious consequences.
To echo my hon. Friend the Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski), I wish that some people who are opposed to the cull—they have every right to be so and to make their case—would come and examine at close quarters its real human consequences. I was going to make an offer to Dr Brian May, had he still been in the Public Gallery, to come to Pembrokeshire. He has been there before, of course; he came at the last election to campaign for the Labour party. Let us not think that there is not some politics in this, because there is. I invite Dr May and some of his colleagues to come and not just speak to a farmer over a cup of coffee at a table but to be there when the farmer has to prepare for a 60-day TB test. They will see the moving of the cattle, the stress that that causes to the family and the cattle, the preparation of the machinery and the buildings—all the things that go with that and have to be fitted in around an already busy lifestyle. These things cause stress to those animals, yet people are apparently disregarding that for the purposes of their arguments, which seemingly relate only to badgers.
Then I would like those who oppose the badger cull to sit with us while the farmer waits for the results of the test and these thoughts go through his mind: “Will we be tested positive again? Will more of our animals have to go to slaughter? Will our business be further damaged? Will our family be further upset?” That is a dreadful experience for farmers who have been through it all before, or in some cases have never been through it before, as they wonder whether this is the beginning of the end for their farming business. Several of my constituents—some of them are sitting in the Public Gallery now having come all the way from west Wales to listen, I hope, to some sense in this debate—are seriously wondering whether it is worth continuing in the dairy industry because of the decades of inaction to which I referred.
May I ask the shadow Minister to agree with our policy on this? I hope that we can persuade her to condemn what I consider to be a pretty vindictive attack by the RSPCA on our dairy farmers. I have here a letter from Freedom Food, which says:
“Freedom Food members are required to apply all reasonable non-lethal and humane methods of wild animal exclusion/control—the RSPCA believes it is unacceptable to use lethal methods of wild animal control as routine practice.”
Well, for a start, what is being proposed is not routine practice. To threaten a financial penalty for taking part in this is a breach of the RSPCA’s charitable conditions. It would be helpful if the Opposition would join us in that view. I cannot believe that many Freedom farmers do not at some stage control rats, mice, rabbits, deer, or some other farm pest, and they should not be blackmailed by a charity in this regard.
Mark Pritchard (The Wrekin) (Con)
May I sound a note of caution? While my hon. Friend may have a difference with the RSPCA, it is the leading animal welfare charity in this nation, established by a former colleague in this House—William Wilberforce. What we can agree on, I hope, is that we all want to see healthy cattle and healthy badgers. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government need to do more—far more than the previous Government, I hasten to add—on getting a vaccine as soon as possible? That would satisfy everybody—farmers and those who care for animal welfare.
Simon Hart
My hon. Friend makes a good point. I concur with what he says about the RSPCA, which is why I am so annoyed and disgusted by its behaviour in this particular context. I will turn later to his comments about the need for a vaccine.
What we are trying to do is discover the truth, and it is frustrating that others are always trying to avoid the truth. Of course we want to discover what improved cattle movements will do for the control of this disease, of course we want to clamp down on biosecurity and see what impact that has, of course we want to investigate the legal, effective and affordable vaccines that might be out there imminently or some way down the line, and of course—this is completely consistent—we want to ascertain once and for all whether a cull can play an important part in this. I stress what my right hon. Friend the Member for South East Cambridgeshire (Sir James Paice) said: this not a definitive policy but a pilot to ascertain once and for all whether this particular part of the mix is effective or otherwise.
I am frustrated, as I think are fellow Members, that while we are attempting to examine the benefits or otherwise of a pilot cull that might cull 4,000 badgers—slightly fewer than 1% of the UK total—thousands of farm animals, many of which will be healthy, are dying needlessly. Millions of pounds will be lost, more businesses will be damaged, and more families will be upset. The frustration lies in the fact that opponents cannot get over the hump of believing that if something involves the death of a single animal in any circumstances they will construct an argument around it that will prevent it from happening. We have to be more open-minded. Culling might have a positive effect. We cannot make progress until we accept that there is a case for at least exploring what the implications may be.
As we heard from the hon. Member for Newport West, we in this House can get in a terrible muddle about the difference between cruelty and suffering. It seems that most people look at cruelty as an attribute of human activity, whereas we should be looking at suffering, which is, to some extent, a more measurable scientific judgment. We constantly confuse the two. I ask opponents of the cull this simple question: why is it apparently perfectly satisfactory to continue killing many thousands of farm animals needlessly—one every 15 minutes—whereas culling a relatively small number of wild animals as part of an important experiment is somehow completely unacceptable? We have not got anywhere near to that answer.
Let me finish with a tribute to the British Veterinary Association, with reference to a comment by the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas)—she is not in her place now, but I hope she might read this. In her speech in our debate on circus animals she described the BVA as one of the most respected scientific organisations for animal welfare in this country. I agree. The BVA has assessed the evidence just as we have. It has looked at all the pros and cons and concluded that the proposals before the House are important and should be pursued. I might not be a scientist or understand the science, but I do trust the vets. There is an old saying: “You never trust something which has been doctored, but you can always trust something which has been vetted.” I agree with that. The BVA is a shining example of an organisation that has taken a measured view.
The Secretary of State has taken a brave decision. Let us not think for one minute that he would not have gone down the vaccination route if he could have possibly managed to do so. We owe it to our farmers, our cattle and our badgers to give him the support that he deserves.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)
Order. I want to take the opportunity to remind the House and the hon. Gentleman that it is not in order to refer either to a person or to the Public Gallery. That is quite clear in “Erskine May”. I did not want to interrupt his flow, given the time limits, and I will be loth to interrupt any other Member, unless, after my having reminded them not to refer to the Public Gallery, they proceed to do so.
Angela Smith (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab)
In following the hon. Member for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire (Simon Hart), let me say that I was disappointed at an attempted politicisation of this debate, which has so far been incredibly cross-Bench and non-partisan. What Members are doing today is putting the issue first. This is not about party politics; it is about animal welfare. More than anything else, it is about the future of farming in our country and the attempts that we need to make effectively to tackle bovine TB.
Tuesday of this week was a day on which a degree of common sense prevailed in DEFRA. Although I welcome Tuesday’s announcement, it was only for a postponement and I, along with many others, want to see this madness stopped and will not rest until the Secretary of State sees sense and stops the cull permanently. That is what the motion is about.
Let me be clear: there is no doubt that bovine TB is a major problem. If there is one thing on which I agree with the Government it is that bovine TB presents a serious threat to both cattle and wildlife. Where we differ, however, is on the actions needed to tackle this awful disease. In order to answer that question, one has to ask why, after the successful reductions of the disease in the 1950s and ’60s, it has become more prevalent, particularly during and after the 1990s. I do not believe that the rise was due to an increase in the number of badgers, which is an equation often made by the myth makers.
What is clear is that changes to farming practices are not helping matters. The intensification of farming means that we have ever bigger herds, and all the evidence says that the bigger the herd, the faster the disease will spread within it once it takes root.
Husbandry is another issue that we cannot dismiss. Yesterday in the Lobby we had a visit from Steve Jones, who is a dairy farmer in the Forest of Dean. He described eloquently the often less than ideal conditions in which cows were—and still are in some instances—kept, along with the increasingly intensive regimes to which the animals are subjected. For example, water troughs are often said to rarely be cleaned out. Over time, they can become reservoirs of the disease as the stagnating water collects various bacteria, typically over the winter months. He also talked about the practice of some farmers—not all of them by any means—who, even now, collect the slurry deposited during the course of a farming day, spread it over the land and immediately let some of their cattle feed off those fields.
Neil Parish
I cannot believe that the hon. Lady believes that farmers who have had the disease and who have been testing their cattle every 60 days do not clean their water troughs. If she had suffered the same pain as a farmer, she would not make such a comment.
Angela Smith
I will not comment on particular instances of the husbandry practices of farmers and how they keep their herds. All I can say is that there is some evidence that water troughs, particularly those kept at ground level, can be a source of the disease and that some farmers do not keep them as clear as they ought to of disease.
It is also argued that cows infected are often not quarantined quickly enough and that animal stress levels caused by pain and suffering can reduce immunity and make cattle more susceptible to diseases such as bovine TB.
As the instances of bovine TB started to climb in the 1990s, the then Secretary of State, Jack Cunningham, asked Professor Krebs to report on the matter and then to conduct the randomised badger culling trials, which have been referred to so often today. The important point is that they still stand as the most extensive study ever completed into the relationship between bovine TB and badgers. A two-page paper produced two or three years later does not stand in the context of the extensive trials carried out as the legitimate view of the scientists.
Although it is true that the independent science group concluded that in the cull areas the incidence of bovine TB fell by 23%, it also found that in neighbouring land outside the culled area the incidence of the disease rose by approximately 29%, thanks to perturbation, whereby surviving badgers move to new areas as a consequence of disturbance.
Overall, the study concluded that the benefits of culling were, at best, modest, with an average reduction of just 12% to 16% in the incidence of infection over a period of seven years. The ISG concluded that
“badger culling can make no meaningful contribution to cattle TB control in Britain.”
That point was reiterated by Lord Krebs on Monday when he said in the other place that, after nine years of culling,
“there is still more TB around than there was at the beginning; it is just that there is 16% less than there would have been without a cull. The number is not the 30% that the NFU quoted; that is misleading—a dishonest filleting of the data.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 23 October 2012; Vol. 740, c. 148.]
Another problem is that the test used to check whether cattle are infected with bovine TB—the so called SICCT, or single intradermal comparative cervical tuberculin test—is not accurate. A recent scientific paper has suggested that as many as two in 10 infected cattle might be missed by the test. That is a staggering 20%, meaning that a significant proportion of cattle-to-cattle transmission of bovine TB may be going undetected and that the role of badgers in the spread of bovine TB to cattle may be overestimated.
Culling, therefore, is not the way forward. Its impact, the science tells us, would be marginal, and if we get it wrong, the results could be disastrous. It is demanded that 70% of badgers in the pilot culling areas must be culled; otherwise, the incidence of bovine TB could get worse—hence this week’s U-turn. Given the lack of credible assessment of the number of badgers in the pilot areas, it is difficult to get the 70% figure right. Equally, it is also difficult to avoid breaching the law by killing too many and taking the species to the brink of extinction in the specified areas.
When I started my contribution, I said that bovine TB is a major issue for farmers and I stand by that. I want the Government to take the opportunity over the next few months to work more intensively on developing the badger vaccination programme, which all experts believe is a better way forward in diminishing the instances of bovine TB in that species. We also have to do more to develop a vaccine for cattle, which is the long-term answer to this problem. I am told that there is now a suitable DIVA test to identify and separate cattle with bovine TB from those that have been vaccinated, and that it is in the process of being licensed.
I appeal to the Minister to take seriously the points that have been made, to invest in getting the cattle vaccine licensed and on the table, and to talk to the EU to get it sorted.
Mel Stride (Central Devon) (Con)
I rise to speak against the motion. It strikes me that many who have spoken in its favour have done so having assumed for themselves the mantle of majority support and that the country is behind them, but I can tell hon. Members that my constituents are not behind the motion. I can say that with some authority, because I surveyed some 30,000 households over the summer and one of the questions I asked was whether they were in favour of the Government’s approach to pilot culls to tackle bovine TB, and the results were that 59% were in favour of pilot culls, 27% were against and the others did not voice an opinion.
The reasons why a majority of almost 2:1 of my constituents are in favour of the Government’s courageous policy are simple and have been rehearsed many times during this debate: the huge loss of our cattle—some 26,000 last year; the huge expense to the taxpayer of almost £100 million last year and £1 billion over the next decade, if this is left unchecked; and a cost for every farm where there is an outbreak of £30,000, of which £10,000 is borne by the farmer. This is unsustainable; it cannot be allowed to continue.
As many hon. Members have said, there is a human cost to farmers, their families and the communities in which they live. That cannot be underestimated. One of my most special constituents is Mr Brian Warren, who runs a voluntary organisation called Farm Crisis Network, which provides pastoral support to farmers in distress. I invite any Opposition Member who supports the motion to come to Central Devon, sit down with Brian and listen to some of the stories about the misery that our farmers are going through as a consequence of this scourge. On most occasions, it is nothing short of harrowing.
I wish to deal with a couple of arguments that have been made by those on the other side of the debate. The first is that we somehow claim that our approach will be 100% successful. We do not. The culls will be pilots, from which we will learn. We accept that we will not eradicate bovine TB in the cull areas, but we have to accept that no other approach will lead to quick and certain 100% eradication either. We therefore have to use the proposed approach, along with increased biosecurity. The Government announced as recently as last week that biosecurity would be tightened up. We also have to look to the ongoing use of vaccination and the development of vaccines in future.
The second argument that has been deployed is that our approach will have no effect whatever on TB, or indeed will make it worse. Many Opposition Members have mentioned the independent scientific group and the Krebs trials as evidence, but time has moved on and so has the assessment of those trials. New analysis and new research has challenged some of their conclusions. I refer specifically to the report of one member of the ISG, Professor Donnelly. As recently as last September, she wrote:
“In the time period from one year after the last proactive cull”—
the Krebs trials—
“to 28 August 2011, the incidence of confirmed breakdowns in the proactive culling trial areas was 28.0% lower…than in survey-only areas”—
as used in the trial—
“and on lands up to 2km outside proactive trial areas was 4.1% lower…than outside survey-only areas”.
As time has gone on, the evidence in favour of the effectiveness of culling has hardened.
Andrew George
Professor Donnelly has also shown that that reduction still represented an increase in the incidence of herd breakdowns, but at a lower level than would have been the case had the cull not gone ahead. That reduction is at the nub of the justification of the Government’s policy, but it was not an absolute reduction.
Mel Stride
In the absence of any other factors, that is correct. However, the pilot culls that are now envisaged for next year will be held on a different basis. The area over which they will be held will be substantially larger than for the Krebs trials, which is an important factor. We have talked much about the effects of perturbation, which will be reduced by having hard boundaries such as coastlines, rivers and motorways.
I turn to the issue of vaccination. It is simply impractical, as things stand, to consider the vaccination of badgers as a sensible way forward. Until we achieve a reliable oral vaccine we simply do not have the resources to go out and trap badgers individually, on an annualised basis, and have trained, registered and licensed personnel to go out and inject them with vaccine. That is simply not going to happen. I laud the Government for spending a considerable sum—some £16 million a year recently—to help develop the vaccines that we need.
It must be reiterated that even if we vaccinate cattle, we still do not have a reliable, licensed and usable test to differentiate cattle that have been vaccinated from those that are carrying TB. The DIVA test is not yet licensed and usable.
I have one or two quick points to make to Ministers. First, one reason why the NFU decided to ask the Government to postpone the pilots was that there was a fairly significant under-estimate of the number of badgers in the pilot areas. I press the Government to ensure that the same mistake is not made next time around, and to ensure that the badger survey that is being conducted, which I believe will be concluded next year, is carried out with great rigour and examined extremely carefully. We need to know what the numbers are.
Secondly, I ask that the Government press hard to ensure that the DIVA test is made available, fully licensed and put in place, so that we can use it if we can move forward on the efficacy of vaccinations and our position with the EU.
Thirdly, I ask Ministers to consider the fact that we need the consent of landowners who own 70% of the land in the pilot areas. In fact, it is important that we achieve well in excess of that, because it is quite conceivable that landowners will be leant upon at various points during the pilot, and that some may drop out of the scheme. We need to get well above that threshold.
Finally, we need to press on. We should recognise the courage and decency of the current Secretary of State and the Ministers who came before him, including my right hon. Friend the Member for South East Cambridgeshire (Sir James Paice). They have a done a sterling job of standing up for our farmers, their families, our communities and those who believe in the rural way of life.
Nic Dakin (Scunthorpe) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Central Devon (Mel Stride), who spoke with great authority about the impact of this dreadful disease on cattle, badgers and our farming community, and about the economic cost to the Government and the taxpayer.
I welcome the Government’s decision not to go ahead with the pilot cull at this time. The pause is welcome and allows this time to be used not only for debate in the House but for a proper examination of how to make sensible progress on dealing with this terrible disease in future.
Bovine TB is a truly dreadful disease, endemic in cattle in the UK. As we know, there are hot spots in the south-west and the west midlands. About 26,000 cattle were slaughtered in 2011 as part of the control of the disease, costing the taxpayer about £87 million in compensation for farmers. It is a dreadful disease in every respect. As I have listened to the debate, I have heard huge consensus about that. The question is what to do about it. We all fully understand the frustration in communities where bovine TB is endemic, and the desire to do something. As several of my hon. Friends have pointed out, however, it is not right to do something that will be unhelpful and make matters worse.
Bovine TB has consistently been a problem for decades in some parts of the UK. When the disease was found in badgers, it was easy to jump to the conclusion that a solution had been found—kill the badgers, eradicate the disease. Simple. Unfortunately, it has not worked like that. Right from the beginning, there were problems with that theory. There were cases of cattle herds testing positive for TB while local badgers were disease-free, and other cases of cattle being free of TB when local badgers were carrying it. There were also cases in which both badgers and cattle were carrying it. Nobody disputes that badgers can carry the disease, but it is not fully understood whether they infect cattle and how the pathway of the disease’s spread works.
Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)
Professor Donnelly has already been mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Central Devon (Mel Stride), and it is worth noting that she also observed that up to 50% of cases of TB in cattle could be attributed to infectious badgers.
Nic Dakin
As we have heard, the weight of scientific evidence goes in a certain direction, but some scientific voices fall outside that. The assumption about proximity and the fact that badger populations in some parts of the country are infected, is based on the balance of fact, rather than on scientific evidence. The history of badger culling to control TB in the UK has, in reality, been one of abject failure. Culling has gone on since 1971 although gassing was abandoned in 1980 as it was considered inhumane. The culling policy was not considered effective and was replaced by the so-called interim strategy in 1986. That followed the Zuckerman and Dunnet reviews which, while supporting badger culling at the time, acknowledged that there were insufficient data on the whole approach to badgers.
The interim strategy, which was based on identifying diseased badgers where there had been a cattle outbreak and then killing the whole sett, was seen largely as a placebo for farmers, rather than to tackle the real issue. It was a complete failure and disease outbreaks continued to rise and spread to other areas of the country throughout the period. I fear that the current Government strategy appears to be repeating that error, albeit confined to smaller areas.
As we have heard, in 1997 the incoming Labour Government stopped randomised culling and oversaw the establishment of a detailed scientific trial introduced by Professor John Krebs and overseen by the independent scientific group, chaired by Professor John Bourne. The trial demonstrated the complexities of the link between badgers and disease in cattle, and, importantly, showed that culling could actually make the disease worse by increasing spread and incidence of TB on the perimeter of trial areas. We have heard from hon. Members on both sides of the debate a recognition that those scientific facts are true.
My hon. Friend the Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick) spelled out clearly that the Labour Government would have gone ahead with culls had the scientific evidence supported it. Since it did not, however, the process did not go ahead. These matters involve closely balanced determinations.
In the summary of his report, Professor John Bourne states that
“although badgers contribute significantly to the cattle disease in some parts of the country, no practicable method of badger culling can reduce the incidence of cattle TB to any meaningful extent, and several culling approaches may make matters worse… rigidly applied control measures targeted at cattle can reverse the rising incidence of disease, and halt its geographical spread.”
Two weeks ago, that was echoed in a letter published in The Observer from 30 leading scientists, including Lord Krebs and Professor John Bourne:
“As scientists with expertise in managing wildlife and wildlife diseases, we believe the complexities of TB transmission mean that licensed culling risks increasing cattle TB rather than reducing it.”
As we have heard, that is the last thing we all want. They continued:
“We are concerned that badger culling risks becoming a costly distraction from nationwide TB control.”
Sir James Paice
Is this not the crucial point? Yes, those scientists have quoted their expertise, but the fact is that nobody actually knows. There is no science to demonstrate whether controlled shooting will effectively reduce the population by 70%, or whether it is humane. There are differing views, but there is no science because—I readily grant this—it has never been done. I believe, however, that it is right to carry out a pilot test to find out whether it will work. Is that not a sensible way forward? Those scientists, however esteemed they are, know no more than the hon. Gentleman or I about whether the cull will actually work. Why can we not find out? It might work.
Nic Dakin
The right hon. Gentleman did some good work as Minister of State, and I welcomed his contribution when he drew attention to measures that will be introduced in January on husbandry and biodiversity. Those measures were driven forward under his watch, which must be applauded.
The right hon. Gentleman puts his finger on the nub of the matter, but there is a danger that these trials will create more TB in those areas, which is what evidence from previous trials appears to suggest. There is therefore a risk in proceeding with them, as well as in not doing so. The opportunity created by this pause allows a vigorous examination of those risks, so that we can come to the appropriate answer. I think both the right hon. Gentleman and I would agree that that is the right way to proceed.
We have heard about the things to which the Government should be applying their effort and mind. I have mentioned the biodiversity and husbandry measures that have been introduced, and we should apply further pressure in those areas, working with the farming community and others. We must try to proceed with the DIVA test, and ensure that work on a cattle vaccination, as well as a badger vaccination, progresses as fast as possible. DEFRA should be working urgently with the European Union to permit commercial use of the vaccine. We need the Government to apply their energy. The pause provides them with the opportunity to put their shoulder to the wheel and work harder in that direction, and therefore get an outcome that does not risk further increases in TB but tackles the problem in a way that everybody can support. Not only is the science against going ahead with the cull; public opinion is also against it. We need to ensure that we take this opportunity to drive things forward in the best possible way.
Mr Geoffrey Cox (Torridge and West Devon) (Con)
Devon is the county worst affected by bovine TB in the entire country. Six thousand cattle were slaughtered in 2010, and there were 800 herd breakdowns. My constituency is arguably the most densely infected. The toll is taken not only on thousands of animals representing generations of toil and long family traditions of rearing and breeding, which are destroyed by the fatal hand and the stroke of the pen of the inspector who finds a reactor in the herd. There is also the human toll on the families, which has been well described and I will not dwell on it.
I sat on the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee in the last Parliament and participated in the production of its report. It was authored not only by Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, some of whom are in the Chamber, but by some very distinguished Labour Members, for whom I came to have considerable respect for the neutral, impartial and thoroughly disinterested way in which they grappled with the problem. It was not necessarily in their interests to subscribe to the political solution that we subsequently recommended, but the report was clear in its recommendation that culling needed to play a role in a package of measures, no one of which would be successful in either dramatically reducing or eliminating the disease.
We had to grapple with the science in making our recommendations. The summary of the report draws attention to the problem that we found as we interviewed the various witnesses who appeared before us. It was apparent that the independent scientific group, which had overseen the random trials, concluded that, in principle
“modest reductions in the overall incidence of cattle TB would result from simultaneous, coordinated and repeated culls of badgers over extremely large areas of the countryside”,
which it defined as around 300 sq km,
“using skilled staff and ideally within geographical barriers to badger movement”.
However, the ISG concluded that
“trying and failing to achieve this”
would
“make matters worse”.
Thus, it was not practically or economically feasible to carry out culling on that scale. It was for that reason, and not for any principled reason that culling might not have a reductive effect, that the ISG rejected culling as contributing meaningfully to the elimination or reduction of the disease.
My right hon. Friend the Member for South East Cambridgeshire (Sir James Paice), in his tenure as Minister of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, have looked at the conclusions of the Krebs trials and the ISG and drawn the inevitable logical inferences. Professor Bourne, Professor Krebs and the ISG concluded that modest reductions were possible provided the culling was carried out in a sustained way, efficiently and over a significant terrain.
All that those who currently have stewardship of policy are doing is taking that in-principle conclusion, which nobody can doubt is contained in the ISG’s report, and applying it and saying, “Let us try. Let us have this controlled experiment in these two areas.” They are adding one more dimension that was not included in the Krebs trials, and that is hard boundaries. The sea, large rivers and motorways all have an inhibiting effect on the movement of badgers, and if we place that dimension into the mix, we can help to reduce the effects of perturbation. As my right hon. Friend the Member for South East Cambridgeshire said, it was not that there was no reduction inside the core area. There was in fact a 23% reduction. That figure, however, was obtained by counting done in the first 12 months, but many scientists believe that the first 12 months of the Krebs trials should be disregarded because of the time lag before the measures took effect. Many scientists believe that the correct figure is 27%.
The problem was not that the trials did not have a dramatic reductive effect within the culling area but that it spread disease on the outer boundaries. As my hon. Friend the Member for Central Devon (Mel Stride) said, two things have happened. First, continuing analysis has demonstrated that those perturbation effects diminish with time, and, secondly, we are able to put in place hard boundaries that should reduce that effect. I contend, therefore, that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State is drawing the logical inference and conclusion from the scientific evidence. That is why he said that he was applying the science and that that was a common-sense and logical thing to do, and it is why his decision deserves the support of every Member and why it commanded the support of the Labour-dominated Select Committee in 2008, when precisely that recommendation and prescription was suggested.
I urge the House to understand that we do this not out of some bloodthirsty desire to kill, as was shamefully and disgracefully suggested by the hon. Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn), but because it is a serious reaction to a pressing problem. It is sincerely intended to tackle a disease that badly needs tackling for the sake of the country.
Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)
Bovine TB is a £100 million problem in cash terms but a much larger human problem for dairy farmers, who are devastated year after year by having to destroy herds that they have nurtured for years and sometimes generations. I do not wish to engage in an either/or dispute, but to speak about what can be done between now, when the cull has been stopped, and next year, when, if the Secretary of State is correct, a cull will go ahead.
Before that, I want to respond to the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish), who said that the Labour party was close to a cull but chickened out. That was not a fair remark. I was a Minister when the ISG report came in, and I remember the hours and weeks of deliberation on it. We never saw this as a virility test, and it should not be seen as such by any Government. It is a tremendously serious issue. It was the Labour Government who authorised the trials in the first place. We did so because we wanted to see if they would work, and the decision that was ultimately taken was an honest one based on what we understood of the science of the trials.
The ISG report concluded that substantial reductions in cattle TB could be achieved by improving cattle-based controls, and I welcome the measures that the Government will be putting in place from next January to increase those controls. I simply ask that the Secretary of State provides financial support to farmers carrying out their duty to put in place those increased controls, including on cattle movement through zoning and herd attestation, the pre-movement testing of herds before new cattle are allowed to join them, the quarantining of purchased cattle and the shorter testing intervals. All those things were set out in the ISG report as ways to improve the situation—not as solutions, but as improvements. I am glad that the Government are taking renewed efforts to put them in place, but I hope that when the Secretary of State winds up the debate he will recognise that they will be burdensome and costly for farmers, who should therefore be recompensed and incentivised appropriately to ensure the success of those measures. Those controls should be supported by measures to improve biosecurity on farms, particularly around feeding and water troughs, which hon. Members from both sides of the House have mentioned.
Let me be clear: I will vote against a cull, but I recognise that the Government may get their way. Therefore, when and if the Government go ahead with the cull next year—and in the following three years, because it will take place over a four-year period up to 2016—I would ask the Secretary of State to do one further thing in the next nine months: change the licence condition to allow only cage trapping and shooting, rather than what is referred to as the “controlled shooting” of badgers. He has said that he wants to proceed only on the basis of sound science. I welcome that commitment, and I trust that he will therefore recall that the independent scientific group pointed out that culling required “co-ordinated and sustained effort” and that what it called the “modest overall benefits” came only from a clinically executed trap-and-shoot exercise. Free shooting of badgers was no part of the scientific trials that form the only basis for a sound policy. Indeed, the Game Conservancy Trust stated:
“A…problem with shooting at or near the sett”—
that is, free shooting—
“is that a wounded badger will almost certainly attempt to bolt underground, preventing a second shot (and preventing safe disposal of the carcass).”
If the Secretary of State persists with the cull next year, I would urge him to use the next nine months to change the licence conditions and stop the free shooting of badgers.
I desperately want to see a solution to the scourge of bovine TB. Sometimes we find it difficult to accept that we do not have a solution to a problem. Ultimately, I believe that oral vaccination of both cattle and badgers will bring us that solution, but any frustration at the lack of a current solution should not lead us to adopt a false solution. The proposed cull is a false solution, and I shall vote against it.
Dan Rogerson (North Cornwall) (LD)
The debate has unfortunately become perhaps a little polarised, but we have had a determination to focus on the science. The interesting thing is that the same scientists are being used—if I might use that expression—by both sides.
The hon. and learned Member for Torridge and West Devon (Mr Cox), my near neighbour, has highlighted the issue as it was set out to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee. I am still a member of the Select Committee, and I have served on it since 2005. As the Chair of the Committee, the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh), said earlier, we hope to look again at some of the vaccination issues in the near future. However, the main piece of work that the Select Committee carried out during that period was the one to which the hon. and learned Gentleman referred.
I will come back to the science, but I want briefly to re-emphasise something that many hon. Members on both sides of the debate have pointed out. This is a very pressing issue in terms of cost to the rural economy and to the Treasury—indeed, to all of us as taxpayers—because of the amount of money having to be spent dealing with the effects of the problem, even if we are not dealing with the causes. Those costs will continue to rise, as has been freely admitted on both sides.
There is a human effect, too. We have heard about the disease’s effect on farmers—not just the distress caused, but the fact that ultimately it will push some people out of farming. I wrote to a court where a company was trying to repossess a farmer’s property, on the basis partly of the farm being under TB restrictions and therefore not being able to trade efficiently. The farmer and his family and others employed by the business constantly live with that worry.
The disease has an animal welfare cost for livestock and the wildlife population.
Roger Williams
Some people who keep cattle are saying, “I can’t put up with this any more,” so they sell their cows and buy a plough, with the result that more wheat is being grown, which is not what we want for the landscape.
Dan Rogerson
That is absolutely true, although in parts of my hon. Friend’s constituency and of mine that choice is not available, so land will go out of production, with the loss of all the environmental “goods” such as stewardship and protection of the landscape.
The only piece of work that we have on which we can base an understanding of the science is, as hon. Members on both sides of the debate have said, the report that the ISG submitted to the Government based on the randomised culling trials. The hon. and learned Member for Torridge and West Devon was right that its conclusions are crucial to the debate, but the question is whether one stops just before the end of the report, where the group said that culling has an effect and can help, or goes on to the coda, where it outlines its ultimate position and states that it does not think culling is practical. I argue that that is for the Government, politicians and those who will implement the policy on the ground to resolve. That I why the Select Committee felt that we needed to give the Government a chance to respond.
The hon. and learned Member spoke of the Select Committee’s membership in the previous Parliament: the late David Taylor, an active Member on many issues and on culling; the former Member for Stroud, David Drew; and Dr Lynne Jones. They were of such independent minds that it was a great comfort to Lord McAvoy when the Committee visited rural North Yorkshire or the south-west to look into the issue, because if instead they had been here, they might have been a little more challenging of the then Government’s position on whatever matter was being debated. They freely admitted that they were not convinced that culling was the answer to the problem, whereas others wanted to give those in the farming community the opportunity to show that it could work. The collective view that we reached appears in black and white.
The scientists—Professor John Bourne, Christl Donnelly, Rosie Woodroffe and Sir David King—gave evidence before us. The atmosphere between them was interesting; it was probably more of an atmosphere than we sometimes have in here for Prime Minister’s Question Time, such was their commitment to the work they had done. None the less, the Select Committee reached the view that it did.
I should like to look at the alternatives to the culling trials. I emphasise that we are discussing pilots, not country-wide implementation overnight, and moving forward carefully, sensitively and in line with the science in two areas to demonstrate that culling is effective.
Andrew George
Of course, after these two pilots merely assess the effectiveness and humaneness of the culling method, the intention is then to roll it out throughout the country at a very much accelerated pace.
Dan Rogerson
We will see what happens during the pilots. Looking at the methodology is one of the key issues, as my hon. Friend rightly points out. It might be that other problems are pointed out, which would make it impossible to continue, but we have to give the people involved the chance to carry out and test what happens. As Opposition Members have said, we will not have the data that we need to move on unless we try to do what the ISG findings point towards: using the hard boundaries, using the wider area and getting on and doing it.
I have heard some hon. Members say that the coalition Government have cut spending on vaccination. Actually, since 1994, just over £40 million has been invested; over the next four years, the Government are planning to invest over £15 million. That means an acceleration of the effort towards vaccination. We still have problems with the tests. It is possible that the DIVA test will get us where we want to be, but we are still not there yet. The practicality of vaccination is another issue. We have talked about the practicality of a cull, but there are huge problems around vaccination.
We would all like to get to a state where it is not necessary to carry out intervention of this sort in wildlife. We would all like farmers and others concerned about animal welfare issues to unite around something—but we are not yet there. Effectively, we are saying, “Let’s do nothing.”
On biosecurity measures, the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy), who, as she said, has looked a great deal at food policy, painted a bit of a picture of farmers who were completely lackadaisical and not at all interested in biosecurity. It is in their interests to be interested in biosecurity, as they are the ones who suffer in their businesses from restrictions and all the other problems that we have now. Of course they are taking the issue seriously. The one or two of them who are not will be rejected by the rest of the industry, which is absolutely committed to delivering on the further restrictions that the Government are introducing.
To say that the cull is an easy option and that farmers are going to hang up on biosecurity, forget all about it and just get on with killing badgers is absolute nonsense. I do not want to over-characterise what the hon. Lady said, but the gist was that farmers do not care. Of course, the hon. Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn) was quite scathing in what he had to say.
I am running out of time. To Members who think that those of us with rural constituencies are doing this because we are after votes, I should like to say that we are not. Huge numbers of people even in my own constituency where bovine TB is a problem have told me that they are worried about a cull of badgers. We are doing this and supporting it because it is the only game in town at the moment—it is the only thing that we can possibly do to bear down on this problem. If we fail, we will deserve to be roundly criticised.
Ian Paisley (North Antrim) (DUP)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) on the generous way in which she introduced this debate. It is a difficult debate, but the hon. Lady should be recognised for allowing people to intervene and ensuring that a proper debate took place. She knows that I come from a different perspective, but I congratulate her again on introducing the debate so well.
Bovine TB is a complex, infectious, zoonotic disease in animals and in man. It is caused by a bacterium that presents itself as a serious and significant risk to animal health, and it is especially prevalent among the UK cattle herd and among wildlife—mainly badgers. It is one of the UK’s most significant animal health issues. We discussed earlier in the week the significant cost posed by this disease to the economy—effectively 100 million smackaroos a year. We are talking about 100 million quid every year; that is what this disease costs, and we need to accept that it is a major problem or a crisis.
Frankly, some of the debate has been tainted by misinformation and by some emotion—emotion that is misplaced in this argument, because this nation deserves the House debating this matter properly and with some authority. No one takes the decision to cull wildlife or to cull our national milk herd lightly. For people to suggest otherwise is criminal, and we should recognise that and state it clearly.
We should also recognise some of the myths that have been put about. It is said that this is about town versus country, which is utter piffle. This is about animal health; it is about animal welfare and good animal husbandry; it is about our milking herd and our cattle; and—most importantly—it is about the food that we eat and are prepared to tell our consumers to eat. We should not lose sight of that.
People say that this cull is a shot in the dark, which will lead to the indiscriminate killing of wildlife. That is misinformation, which has the potential to “felon set” those who are asked to carry out the cull. We should consider the consequences of careless talk about indiscriminate shooting. There is also the nonsense about a readily available vaccine that will solve the problem. There is no vaccine that will have an impact on wild badgers that are already infected. The reservoir of badgers that carry the disease cannot be controlled by a vaccine.
“All badgers will die” is another piece of misinformation. It is said that this is about the mass slaughter of animals. As many Members have pointed out—as, indeed, the Government have pointed out—it is not about mass slaughter, but about a targeted pilot in a limited area of the United Kingdom that will be cordoned off. That cordon sanitaire will allow target shooting.
Caroline Lucas
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his gracious remarks. However, in condemning misinformation, he is also spreading it. He says that vaccination has no effect on infected badgers, but in fact it slows the progress and the severity of the disease. It reduces the risk that the animal will become infectious, and therefore reduces the chance that one badger will pass it to another or, indeed, to cattle.
Ian Paisley
That is a relevant point. I shall say more about the vaccine issue in a moment.
The hon. Lady commended the work of the British Veterinary Association, of which I am a long-term member. Let us hear the expert views of that association. Its most recent report on bovine TB states:
“Whilst the slaughter of cattle found to be infected with TB…has been an essential part of the strategy to control the disease in cattle for many years, the BVA believes that targeted, managed and humane badger culling is also necessary in carefully selected areas where badgers are regarded as a significant contributor to the persistent presence of bTB. In addition, the BVA believes that risk-based biosecurity, surveillance and Farm Health Planning at a national, regional and farm level is essential for the control”
of the spread of the disease. In other words, we need a cocktail of measures that includes culling on a limited basis.
Andrew Miller
I acknowledge that, as a member of the British Veterinary Association, the hon. Gentleman has expertise in the subject, but the BVA also says in its briefing:
“We do not know how successful the proposed methods will be.”
Does he agree that what we really need is significant investment in research on zoonotic diseases?
Ian Paisley
It goes without saying that the research must be carried out, that it must be ongoing and that it must not be prevented as a result of what we are trying to do here.
I commend the Republic of Ireland—shock, horror, stop the presses: Paisley commends Republic of Ireland!—which has already carried out a cull. I should make it clear that this has nothing to do with jealousy on the part of those of us north of the border who do not get to shoot. The cull in the south of Ireland has led to a significant reduction in confirmed new infection rates among cattle herds. I believe that if this scheme is tried and proved to be effective, especially in countries where a land border is shared with another nation, we should adopt it. I believe that we should be learning—yes indeed, learning—from the Irish Republic on this important matter. I am happy to concede that point.
The BVA made a strong and significant point about vaccination. Although the badger BCG vaccine is currently available and undoubtedly plays a role in managing the disease, it is not proven to protect fully against infection. It merely reduces the progression and severity of the disease in animals that become infected later, and it has no impact on those infected prior to vaccination. We in Northern Ireland are currently carrying out a trapping test; we are trying to get animals trapped. As has been suggested, perhaps we should only use trapping to cull badgers.
Andrew George
The hon. Gentleman must accept that as badgers die at a very rapid rate—25% attrition each year—vaccination would result in a significant decrease of infection in badgers, whereas culling increases the preponderance of infection in badgers.
Ian Paisley
We have to accept that culling is not a silver bullet—it is not the magic answer—but vaccination is not the magic answer either. We have to try to tackle this problem, however. We have to continue searching for a vaccine that will work and will not destroy our herds and prevent us from selling our product.
We have to try this cull to see whether it can succeed. The costs are £100 million a year. We have to do something. This is robbing money from our hospitals, schools and roads. We are wasting taxpayers’ money; we are pouring it down the drain. We have got to address this problem.
The BVA has made it clear that there is no existing data to prove that badger vaccination has an impact on the incidence of BTB in cattle. Even if it does, it will have a much slower impact than the removal of badgers by culling.
I want to say a few words on the impact of TB in Northern Ireland. We have spent £200 million in the last six years trying to eradicate the disease, but we have failed. We want to spend £20 million this year trying to do it, and we are going to fail—and we are going to wipe out a number of our best milking herds. We also have criminals in Northern Ireland who deliberately try to infect herds so that they can get compensation. This problem has got to be addressed now. I hope the Government have got the guts to get on and do it. It will not be nice—it is not going to be pleasant—but we have to solve this problem.
Tracey Crouch (Chatham and Aylesford) (Con)
It is a pleasure to have an opportunity to speak in this important debate, and to follow the hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley), whom I admire immensely, but disagree with entirely on this issue.
It is an incredibly emotive issue, and one that has caused me to rethink my position. I had originally been in favour of the cull. I had—and still have—enormous sympathy for the farmers who are affected by bovine TB. There is not just the monetary cost to the farm, but the immense strain on farmers. That should not be underestimated. So when the culling of badgers was announced as a means of eradicating bovine TB, it seemed to be a sensible solution. However, it became clear that the science did not stack up. As someone who is rather proud of their track record on animal welfare issues, I began to feel uncomfortable with my original position. Having looked into the issue in more detail—which I am glad I did—I am convinced that the badger cull is absolutely the wrong way to tackle bovine TB.
The issue is very sensitive. It affects farmers’ lives and livelihoods, and often their mental health, but it is an issue that has been tainted by misinformation. For example, it is often stated that the eradication of TB in badgers would lead to the eradication of the disease in cattle, but that is simply not the case. Cattle-to-cattle transmission would continue, as demonstrated in low incidence areas such as Kent, where there is evidence that cattle-to-cattle transmission accounts for 80% or more of cases.
While there is an indisputable link between badgers and bovine TB, many other animals also carry TB: deer, wild boar, foxes, alpacas and even cats and dogs. We need to be clear, therefore: instead of saying “No other country in the world has eradicated TB in cattle without tackling it in wildlife”, the Government should state, “No other country in the world has eradicated TB in cattle.” Therefore, we need to be realistic about what precisely a badger cull would achieve.
Other cattle-farming countries have learned lessons from attempted culls. In Australia, Asian buffalo—an introduced alien species thought to be spreading TB—were culled by shooting from helicopters. However, TB in cattle was reduced only by draconian testing and the culling of cattle, with whole herds slaughtered—that effectively kept TB under control for many decades. In New Zealand, brush-tailed possums, another introduced species, were poisoned for decades—that went alongside draconian cattle-testing regimes. However, it has since been realised that poisoning is unsustainable, and scientists have recommended the vaccination of possums instead. In the USA, white-tailed deer in Michigan were found to be sharing feeding stations with cattle, thus allowing TB transmission. The simple solution was to separate the deer from the feeding stations.
The proposed badger cull will not eradicate bovine TB from our cattle. Our leading scientists note that it will reduce the incidence by, at best, 16%, so a long-term, large-scale cull of badgers would leave 84% of the problem remaining. I heard what my right hon. Friend the Member for South East Cambridgeshire (Sir James Paice) said about that figure being 16% net, with a more likely figure of 30%, but that still means that 70% of the problem remains. In addition, the Government are not proposing a long-term, large-scale cull; they are proposing two pilots in areas where they do not know how many badgers there are. The original estimates were that it would be necessary to cull only between 500 and 800 badgers in each of the two areas, thus achieving the 70% culling target. However, in the space of a weekend that number was increased to more than 5,000 in the two areas—that represents a massive increase in the badger population in just a few days, and if badgers are breeding like rabbits, we are facing an entirely different problem.
As Lord Krebs eloquently told the upper House:
“What this underlines is that if the policy is to cull at least 70% of the badgers, we have to know what the starting number is. This variation from just over 1,000 to more than 5,000 in the space of a few days underlines how difficult it is for us to have confidence that the Government will be able to instruct the farmers to cull 70% if they do not know the starting numbers.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 23 October 2012; Vol. 740, c. 148.]
That is why our scientists and animal welfare activists, and many, many of my constituents, believe the proposals to cull badgers when an accurate figure cannot be circulated—leaving aside the welfare issue of indiscriminately shooting badgers, 75% of which will be TB-free—are simply mindless.
Other nations have not simply resorted to culling, but have looked at alternative options. Wales, where most of the UK incidences occur, has decided to vaccinate, not cull. The Minister will have heard, and will continue to hear, calls for a stronger focus on vaccination, and he needs to go back to the Department and reinstate the five—out of six—vaccination trials cancelled when we took office.
Sir James Paice
As it was me who cancelled those “trials”, I feel that I need to respond. May I make it absolutely clear to my hon. Friend and to the House that they were not “trials”, as she has just described them, but vaccine deployment projects? They were nothing to do with testing vaccines; they simply sought to work out how to trap, inject and so on. They were about the mechanics. I decided, rightly or wrongly, that we did not need six of these things, costing £7 million or £8 million, and that everything could be learned from one. That is why we did what we did.
Tracey Crouch
I am grateful for my right hon. Friend’s intervention, but I still think that we need to put more investment into our trials programme, in order to learn more.
Reactive culling does not work. It will spread the disease—evidence suggests that it may even increase the incidence of the disease. So it is clear that the Government need to listen to the scientists and rethink their strategy.
Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)
There are three principal reasons I support today’s motion. First, I believe that a badger cull would be damaging to wildlife. Secondly, the science suggests that a cull is unnecessary and that there are more effective solutions. Thirdly, and most importantly, evidence suggests that a cull would not significantly reduce the incidence of bovine TB and would therefore not benefit cattle herds and the agricultural industry across the country. As we have heard this afternoon, bovine TB is a real and devastating issue for many farmers. I think we all agree that it is vital that we find an effective long-term measure to eradicate the disease.
I welcome the Government’s announcements on improving cattle testing, movement controls and biosecurity. However, the most reliable scientific evidence suggests that badger culling is a short-term, unsustainable and ultimately ineffective approach. Allowing the shooting of free-ranging badgers in TB-affected areas is an untested and dangerous move that has no place in a science-led policy. Indeed, rather than solving the problem, it risks making matters worse by disrupting the social structures and allowing the spread of badgers to new areas.
Licensing the shooting of one of our best loved native species has also, unsurprisingly, generated considerable public opposition. A more sustainable approach to the problem should involve pushing forward with the injectable vaccination of badgers in areas in the south-west and other parts of England along with increasing efforts to develop a vaccine for cattle. The vaccination of both badgers and cattle, together with enhanced cattle testing and improved biosecurity measures, is the publicly acceptable and ultimately effective long-term solution.
If badgers are to be trapped before being shot, as DEFRA suggests, why not simply vaccinate rather than kill the badger while it is caged? The DEFRA announcement comes despite scientific studies that have shown that culling would be of little help in reducing bovine TB and could actually make matters worse in many areas. Indeed, the cull could see badger populations decline by more than 70% and in some areas none might survive.
Culling cannot be selective, so many perfectly healthy badgers will be slaughtered as some awful collateral damage. After 10 years’ work, the independent scientific group concluded in 2007 that
“badger culling can make no meaningful contribution to cattle TB control in Britain.”
Subsequent monitoring of cull areas showed a very modest drop in cattle TB levels, averaging just 16% after nine and half years. Indeed, DEFRA’s wildlife advisory body, Natural England, which will have to implement the Government’s proposals, has said that it has little confidence that such an approach can deliver the predicted benefits.
At least a fifth of cattle herds, and possibly up to half of them, might be harbouring bovine TB even after they are thought clear of infection according to a recent Cambridge university research article. Worse still, there is greater potential for TB to spread within the larger herds that are now becoming more prevalent. Those conclusions further justify an urgent introduction of both cattle and badger vaccination. Those conclusions emphasise that the effect of cattle-to-cattle contact is even greater than previously thought and so wildlife culling is even less significant.
A second problem has been the massive increase in liver fluke, which affects the accuracy of the standard test for bovine TB. This parasite is carried by snails and both thrive in warm, wet summers. Up to a third of cattle with bovine TB could be missed by the standard test for the disease if they are also carrying the parasite, hampering the eradication programme according to research by Liverpool university. The research carried forward work published in May last year by the veterinary sciences division of the Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute of Northern Ireland.
The significant scientific doubt over the effectiveness of a badger cull and the strong evidence that it might make the incidence of bovine TB worse means that DEFRA must urgently reconsider the killing of badgers, if it wishes to proceed next summer, until the comparatively enormous reservoir of disease in herds is cleared. It should introduce compulsory annual testing of all cattle with the more sophisticated techniques that are now available.
The killing of a protected wildlife species such as the badger is even less relevant. The Cambridge research estimates that there is a high rate of reintroduction, particularly in high-incidence areas. The authors add that the high rate of external infection, both through cattle movements and environmental sources, must be addressed if recurrence is to be reduced. Its results are in line with the main conclusions of the £50 million randomised badger culling trial of 1998 to 2007, that while badgers are implicated in bovine TB, killing them will make no meaningful contribution to its control, and that weaknesses in cattle testing regimes mean that cattle themselves contribute significantly to the persistence and spread of the disease in areas where bovine TB occurs. It added that in some parts of Great Britain, cattle are likely to remain the main source of infection, and called for the rigid application of cattle-based control measures.
Bovine tuberculosis is a serious problem for UK farmers, deserving the highest standard of evidence-based management. Increasingly, that is why many farmers are against the cull, including, I might add, my brother, who has been farming for over a quarter of a century. New figures issued by DEFRA show a marked drop in bovine TB levels, and that is mostly down to increased testing. There has been a notable decrease in the incidence rates over the past six months, mainly as a result of the increased number of tests on unrestricted herds compared with last year. The provisional June 2012 incidence rate is 4.2%, compared with 6% in June 2011.
By increasing biosecurity, which the British agricultural industry needs properly to address, we can reduce bovine TB. By increasing vaccination in badgers and cattle we can prevent the unnecessary killing of this much loved British species, and by increased testing we can ensure that our agricultural industry recovers from this most damaging disease.
Julian Sturdy (York Outer) (Con)
It is always a privilege to be called to speak in the Chamber, certainly in such an important debate, but let us be clear: the issues being debated today are not pleasant ones. The problems facing the farming industry, and by extension the Government, are neither easy nor straightforward. Likewise, it is important to state early on in my contribution that I am a keen supporter of animal welfare, and I take no pleasure whatsoever in advocating a pilot cull. However, as I shall set out, I believe, sadly, that we have no choice.
To be absolutely blunt, bovine TB is out of control, akin to wildfires raging across our countryside, causing widespread damage.
Caroline Lucas
The myth that the disease is out of control needs to be nailed. Fewer cattle have been slaughtered because of BTB each year from 2008 to 2011. Those are the figures. It is not to underestimate how serious it is, but the idea that it is out of control is simply wrong.
Julian Sturdy
I do not agree. I talk to many farmers and when one looks across the country, and in certain key areas in the west, one can see that it is out of control and that it is causing huge impact on our farming community and the families, on which a number of hon. Members have already touched.
I appreciate that Members on both sides of the debate have already quoted a number of figures, but the striking one for me is that more than 30,000 cattle will be culled this year due to TB—one every 15 minutes. That is five times the number in 1998. Therefore, when we discuss animal welfare, we should consider the welfare of those affected cattle as well as the welfare of badgers.
First, I want to join a number of Members in clarifying a few key points about today’s high-profile debate. Increasingly, this choice is being presented as cull versus vaccination. Such an interpretation is deeply flawed. Yes, vaccination must be part of a wider TB crackdown, and Members will look at the Government’s policy and see why the badger vaccination is to play a vital role over the coming years, as will, and rightly so, stronger cattle control obligations. However, we must be honest about vaccinations. First, they will not cure infected badgers. Thus, those badgers that have already contracted TB will not be cured by any vaccination currently available. Yes, it might slow the disease, but ultimately they will not be cured. Secondly, the development of an oral vaccine, which ultimately is the only way we will vaccinate the badger population against this destructive disease, is sadly some way off.
Several Members touched on the problems with a cattle vaccine in the short term, no one more thoroughly than my right hon. Friend the Member for South East Cambridgeshire (Sir James Paice). Sadly, the reality is that, alongside cattle control and future vaccinations, a pilot cull is essential in the short term. The Government’s wider long-term plans to control TB will prove successful only if they are supported by a pilot cull. Put simply, we must break the cycle of infection if we are serious about tackling TB.
The second point I wish to discuss is compensation for farmers who have to slaughter infected cattle. As Members might know, I was a farmer before entering Parliament in 2010, although not a livestock farmer—I have no personal interests in that regard. It is often argued that livestock farmers receive compensation for slaughtered animals, but it is not adequately explained that the compensation does not cover any consequential losses to the farmers. Losing cattle has huge knock-on effects for a herd because of the progeny it loses, with breeding lines that have been built up over many years being wiped out in an instant by the disease.
Farmers also have to meet the costs of additional cattle control measures and frequent testing for the disease. The economic consequences for small farmers and the strain put on their families, which several Members have touched on, can be enormous. The economic factors can have a direct impact on local communities and the rural economy. Of course, there is also an increasing cost to the general taxpayer, as has been mentioned. More than £500 million has already been spent on compensation for farmers, and the figure is estimated to rise to over £1 billion within the next decade unless we act decisively.
Finally, I come back to the idea of animal welfare, which is ultimately the key element of the debate. In a situation in which TB has become so terribly out of control, taking proper action to secure the future of both badgers and cattle is genuinely the responsible thing to do. By doing so, we will be safeguarding the welfare of badgers and cattle in the years ahead. The suggestion that farmers should simply keep their cattle locked up, hidden away from fresh pastures and natural conditions, completely flies in the face of animal welfare, yet some farmers are now doing just that because allowing their herds outside would be akin to a death sentence, given the prevalence of TB in certain areas.
In conclusion, if a practical and effective alternative existed, I would back it. Sadly, no such choice exists at the moment. Therefore, this debate should not be framed as one that is about either vaccination or culling. Rather, it should be a question of a rampant disease that causes widespread damage to our countryside, to sustainable farming and to long-term animal welfare. We must choose action, not inaction, to preserve sustainability and health in our countryside, for both the wildlife and the livestock industry.
Dr Sarah Wollaston (Totnes) (Con)
I ask colleagues to imagine a bowl of fresh green salad, but rather than sprinkling it with the salad dressing of their choice, I would like them to imagine sprinkling it with some diseased badger urine—urine from a badger that has lesions in its kidneys, which sadly is commonly the case. Before pasteurisation made milk absolutely safe to drink, countless thousands of people died from bovine TB, because the disease can be spread through ingestion. It is very important to understand that for several reasons, particularly those related to biosecurity.
I absolutely support the comments that have been made about the importance of biosecurity and preventing cattle-to-cattle spread. However, a farmer can take all the effort he or she wants to keep badgers out of cowsheds, but those cattle are still grazing on infected pastures and will still be at risk. We are talking about closed herds with no concerns about TB being imported from outside, which is an important route for transmission.
Reference has been made to super-dairies and huge herds of cows, thousands strong, being kept inside. We do not want that. We all saw last year’s campaign, “Cows need grass, not concrete”, and I absolutely support that. However, in parts of South Hams in my constituency, putting cattle out on to infected pastures is tantamount to a death sentence—a form of culinary Russian roulette. We have to take this very seriously.
Let us look at the figures. In 1998 in my constituency, fewer than 600 cattle were culled; in 2010, that figure had risen to just short of 6,000. This is a dangerous zoonosis that is spreading inexorably year on year; we can look at the geographical maps and see the edge spreading. As other Members have said, sporadic cases are arising elsewhere which are undoubtedly due to the movement of cattle, but the inexorable spread that we see on the charts is due, in part, to the reservoir in badgers. Let us imagine how a dangerous zoonosis like this might spread out to other mammals; we are seeing it increasingly in deer, alpacas and pigs, and now in domestic pets as well. This is a real threat, so why have we not got a grip of the situation?
I should like to say something quite uncomfortable—that we are seeing the rise of the celebrity mammal. Indeed, we have a celebrity mammal here with us today, and very welcome he is too. We are beginning to focus on a single species, and that is unhelpful. I would challenge anybody to come down to south Devon and lay their hand on the side of one of the beautiful south Devon cattle and tell me that that animal is less important than the badger. All these animals are important, but there is a balance to be struck. When I step outside my door of an evening in south Devon, I frequently see badgers; they are a wonderful sight. The last time I saw a hedgehog was over five years ago. That element of balance is sometimes missing from this debate.
The rise of the celebrity mammal has been a barrier to science. Those on both sides of the debate rightly quote scientists, who will disagree about the issue; that is what scientists do. We want a robust debate, and I welcome it. The problem is that there were some flaws in the randomised badger culling trial, particularly regarding the size of the triplets and the edge effect. In that circumstance, the right thing to do is to take matters further and consider pilots that explore the edge effect, but we are prevented from doing so because of the effect on politicians and the public of a focus on the needs of a specific animal, lovely as it may be. We need to tackle that issue head on.
Will the Minister say whether we are exploring the PCR—polymerase chain reaction—test further? We want to have a test of greater sensitivity and specificity that will allow us to test badger droppings, and then perhaps look to a further trial, even on whole-sett humane underground culling. There are also issues to do with perturbation, such as the effect of picking off one animal at a time. I suggest that we would be perturbed in an entirely different way if someone picked off members of our families one by one.
Let us see more focus on the science. Let us tackle this as a dangerous zoonosis. Let us also look at vaccination. The important point is that if any Member in this House developed any sort of TB, they would be looking at weeks and weeks of a complex antibiotic regime. Any doctor who treated them with vaccination would be struck off. It is not possible to cure an infected badger with a vaccination. Of course I want to see vaccination and prevention in disease-free animals. However, we should not pretend that we can extrapolate the results from an injectable vaccine, which may indeed show a slight reduction in the amount of TB excreted in urine by infected badgers, to oral vaccines. Oral vaccines and injectable vaccines are entirely different, and so we must be very careful.
I fully support a move towards greater investment in vaccination, but perhaps that is because I am a people person. I went into medicine rather than go to veterinary school because I think that people matter more. I was rewarded for that—I was never bitten by a patient in 24 years.
Dr Wollaston
No, I am going to carry on, if I may.
The point is, yes, let us see investment, but we want to see an oral bait vaccine. I want to leave a question in the air: is there something obscene about the amount of money we are going to spend on trapping and vaccinating every single wild badger in this country, year on year, when there are other things that that money could be spent on? I want to see an oral bait vaccine and an improved test, but we have to be honest and tackle a dangerous zoonosis. We have to be honest about the need for further scientific pilots and I am afraid that we have to do it now, because farmers in my constituency are suffering. These are the people who feed the nation—they put food on our plates and care for our countryside.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. Unfortunately, I am going to have to introduce a five-minute limit to get everybody in. Everybody will get in if we can be disciplined and not take interventions. I call Glyn Davies.
Glyn Davies (Montgomeryshire) (Con)
This is a complex and controversial issue, which is hugely important in my constituency of Montgomeryshire. I declare an interest in that I have been a livestock farmer all my life and have been very much involved in the impact that this disease has on the farming industry.
I want to begin by stating unambiguously that I am in favour of a targeted pilot cull of badgers and deeply disappointed that the proposed cull has been deferred until next summer. I start with that unequivocal statement because I hold other attitudes towards wildlife and farming that sometimes lead my friends to accuse me of inconsistency, although I disagree with them.
I have a great love of wildlife. Before entering this place, I was a trustee of the Montgomeryshire wildlife trust for three years—I still would be if I was not an MP—which does hugely valuable work. I have been involved in campaigns to promote the interests of the otter, the brown hare and red kites in particular where I live, and of red squirrels, whose protection, ironically, involves the cull of another much-loved mammal. There seems to be very little objection to that, but the issue is exactly the same.
I concede that, although I am very much in favour of a targeted pilot cull, I have never felt absolutely certain that it will have the effect that we want. Ironically, that uncertainty makes me even more sure that a cull is the right way to go. We have to identify ways in which we can deal with this terrible disease, which is having such a devastating effect on the countryside. We need to know whether a cull is the right thing to do. The cull in Ireland was general, as it is in other countries. We need a targeted pilot cull in an area to see how much difference it makes. If it makes a difference, it will become a general cull, but if it does not work, I would not be in favour of extending it.
Several references have been made to Wales. I was a Member of the National Assembly for Wales for eight years, and for five of those years I was Chairman of the Rural Affairs Committee and this issue was hugely important throughout that time. We spent three days in Ireland, looking at what they were doing there, and almost everything pointed to the need for a targeted pilot cull of badgers in Wales. In fact, three or four years ago the Welsh Government decided to hold a targeted cull and legislated for it under their then system of law-making powers under the Government of Wales Act 2006, but there was an error in the law and the measure fell—it could not happen. The new Labour Government have decided not to go down that road and to introduce instead a system of vaccinating badgers in south-east Wales, but most people I talk to think that it is a complete and total waste of money and that it will be hopelessly ineffective.
I do not have time to go into the scientific arguments for and against a vaccine, which has been discussed a lot. All I will say is that if this Chamber or I were to receive genuine advice saying that a vaccine would deliver the sort of control that we want, I would not be in favour of a cull. I have heard the arguments today, and also the rebuttals. It is highly technical stuff, but as several Members have said, the reality is that we do not have a viable, legal vaccine that the Government are in a position to use. It is only on that basis that we need a targeted pilot cull, and I desperately hope that there will be one.
Bovine TB is a devastating disease for cattle, for wildlife and for people. I would love to spend a lot more time talking about my experiences of foot and mouth disease. For 12 months people were telephoning me to talk about the impact on their families. Usually it was parents and grandparents saying that they had real concerns about their children’s mental health. Bovine TB is even worse, because it has lasted longer and spread out over a wider area. The impact is devastating, and we simply have to deal with it. To leave it not dealt with would be completely irresponsible.
Mr Mark Spencer (Sherwood) (Con)
I am delighted to be called to speak, but of course disappointed that we are under such time restriction. I suppose it is a symptom of how engaged Members are with the subject that they want to get on their feet and speak about it.
I draw Members’ attention to my declaration of interest. As a Nottinghamshire farmer I am very much interested in the subject, because we have a healthy badger population and I am keen to ensure that it stays that way. We have talked about how TB is spreading across the south-west, and it is now in Derbyshire and certainly spreading towards me, which makes me fearful.
As a farmer operating in that part of the east midlands, it is difficult not to take offence at some of the things that have been said today. It has been implied that farmers do not care about animals and do not have animal welfare at the top of their agenda. I put it to individuals who make those accusations that someone simply does not get out of bed at 5 am every day of the week, every week of the year to look after animals if they do not care passionately about their welfare. The implication that people want a cull for the sake of a cull causes great offence in some rural areas, and that needs to be addressed vigorously.
For me, this is not about badgers. It is about TB. It is ironic and pretty disappointing that TB is not mentioned at all in the motion. Members on the opposite side of the argument have attempted to skew it away from tuberculosis control and solely on to badgers. We all have the same aim, which is to prevent the culling of cattle and the spread of bovine TB, and we have to use the tools that are available to us. It would be wrong to rule out one of those tools at this early stage.
I do not want to cull a single badger or a single cow, but this disease is out of control. We are not controlling it. One Opposition Member actually said that we should do nothing, but that seems to me like the Tinker Bell approach of standing still, closing our eyes and hoping it gets better. That does not seem like the answer to me. We have to take action and do something to control the spread of the disease.
We all welcome the fact that a vaccine is coming very soon, but it has been coming very soon for the past 15 years. In fact, we heard earlier that it is months away. I am delighted if that is the case, because then the vaccine will be here by next summer. However, if we get to next summer and no oral vaccine for badgers is available, we will be in the same position as we are in today. We have to take action to prevent the disease from spreading.
We have heard Members say that we should vaccinate badgers, but the practicality of that seems to have escaped them. Individual badgers would have to be physically caught and tagged to ensure that we could identify which had been vaccinated and which had not, so that we did not waste our time revaccinating the same badgers. We would have to go through the whole process again every 12 months, which is simply impractical.
We must somehow break the cycle of infection from cow to badger, badger to cow, badger to badger and cow to cow. We are doing one part of that, and by taking out infected cattle we are breaking the spread of the disease between cows, but we are not tackling the infected badger population, and we must find a way to do that. A vaccine is not available, and unfortunately the only other tool is a cull. We must make use of all the tools available if we are to be effective.
We are short of time so, in conclusion, we must remember the impact that bovine TB is having on UK food prices and milk production. We all get out of bed in the morning and enjoy milk on our cornflakes, but if we do not tackle this issue, the supply of fresh milk from our dairy farmers will be under severe pressure—and I, for one, want my cornflakes in the morning.
Roger Williams (Brecon and Radnorshire) (LD)
I declare an interest as I am a cattle keeper; indeed, over the past five years I have had a herd that went down with TB. My comments will not be made on a personal or anecdotal basis, and certainly not on an emotional basis, but rather they shall be based on sound science.
It is interesting to reflect a little on the history of this issue. Until 1950, bovine tuberculosis was endemic in British cattle herds. As a zoonotic disease that can be transmitted from animals to humans, that was obviously a danger, so the Government decided to eradicate it. They were spectacularly successful, and by about 1960 there were few instances of bovine TB in cattle herds. That situation was maintained for about 20 years, but in 1971 a dead badger was found to be infected with bovine tuberculosis on a farm where cattle had gone down with the disease, and from then on it became ever more apparent that badgers were involved in the spread of the disease.
The Badger Trust website states that bovine TB
“may also be caught through contamination of feeding and watering sites and from infected wildlife, including badgers”.
That is what led to the trials by Lord Krebs, which I commend as a piece of scientific work, but only in as far as they went.
When that work was concluded, Sir David King, chief scientific adviser at the time, was asked to prepare a report. I do not have time to go through that report, but I recommend it to hon. Members. It is an extraordinarily balanced and insightful piece of work that needs looking at. Sir David King came to the conclusion that by building on trials by Lord Krebs, and by identifying their weaknesses, pilot schemes could be introduced that would lead to the minimisation of bovine TB in this country.
Sadly, in 2007 the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) rejected that report and we have had five wasted years. Although the Government introduced extra measures for farmers, nothing was done to address the wildlife reservoir, and five years on, we must deal with a much more difficult situation than in 2007. Sir David King’s report is a wonderful piece of work, and I commend it to Members.
Let me say a little about vaccination. The hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) said that the most appropriate vaccine to use at the moment is the BCG vaccine. That is true because it is the only vaccine. It was developed in about 1910, first used in 1921, and whenever and however it is tested, its effectiveness ranges from about 60% to 80%. In some circumstances, it is not effective at all, and it was withdrawn from human use in this country in 2005. We are told that a wonderful new vaccine is on the horizon—new technology—but no, we will still be using the vaccine that I was given 50 years ago, as, I am sure, were many other hon. Members.
Caroline Lucas
The hon. Gentleman is being somewhat misleading. The DEFRA website states that
“in January 2012 an application for marketing authorisation…was submitted to the UK’s Veterinary Medicines Directorate…for assessment”
in relation to the BCG vaccine. It was submitted almost a year ago, and the website states that it will come to fruition in a year. The DIVA test is also ready to go. The idea that we are going back to 1910 is simply misleading.
Roger Williams
My point is that it is the same old vaccine—we have not made progress and there is no magic bullet.
I am sticking my neck out a bit, but I cannot think of any farmers, and certainly not in my constituency, who, given the choice between culling badgers or having an effective programme based on vaccines for eliminating bovine TB in the cattle herd, would not choose the vaccination route. They would be very strange if they did not in those circumstances. Farmers regularly vaccinate their stock for various diseases, but only because those vaccines have proved to be efficient and effective.
We have reached the stage at which we cannot wait any longer for the promise of an effective vaccine. I support the Government in going ahead with their pilot trial culls of badgers, to take forward the work done by Lord Krebs and to tease out how we can better eliminate the disease in both badgers and cattle. That would benefit farmers throughout the country, and wildlife.
Mr David Amess (Southend West) (Con)
I apologise to you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for not being present throughout the debate. I was chairing proceedings in Westminster Hall, and before then I was with you at the Westminster dog show. The House will wish to congratulate you on your rottweiler coming third; my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield, Southgate (Mr Burrowes) on owning the runner-up; and my two rescued pugs, Lily and Botox, on winning best pugs in the show. They were presented with a bottle of champagne by the worshipful mayor of Southend and are now both sloshed.
I hope that my record on animal welfare is well established—it is there in the green bound copies of Hansard. Indeed, the Protection against Cruel Tethering Act 1988 is in my name. In 1991, I spoke in the Third Reading debate on the Protection of Badgers Act 1992, which was introduced by my noble Friend Lord Waldegrave. I thank Professor Brian May and Lorraine Platt from the Blue Badger campaign for all the advice and assistance that they have given to me and others.
I welcome the Government’s decision to delay the cull. Key alternatives, such as vaccinations and biosecurity, must be considered. They could be a viable alternative to the cull. I now represent an urban area, but I had 32 farms in my constituency when I was MP for Basildon, so I have some insight on the difficult situation that farmers face. However, I have a number of concerns about the cull and the number of badgers that might be injured.
Given that badgers are nocturnal creatures, how will the shooting be supervised at night? I am also concerned about the balancing act required for the cull to be effective. It has been reported that at least 70% of badgers need to be culled to reduce bovine TB effectively, but culling much more than 70% could entirely eradicate local badger populations. Balancing that is very important.
I have listened carefully to what hon. Members have said about vaccinations, but we should take the issue further. DEFRA has wisely invested in research into badger vaccination, which I support, and I welcome measures already taken on biosecurity.
When I spoke in the 1991 debate, I showed some naivety. I said then that I would be joining the badgers at the bottom of my garden in celebrating the passage of the Bill. Little did I think that, over 20 years later, the badgers must have got together and decided to try to tunnel under my own house. Whether this is a socialist conspiracy to collapse the house on top of me I do not know.
I represent an urban constituency. When my constituents get badgers in their back gardens, it is a nightmare. I do not know whether they have all got together in Southend West and said, “Right, the door’s open tonight. Let’s get into the back garden.” I have three cases in my constituency where it has taken two years to deal with Natural England, English Heritage and DEFRA to get the badgers moved. It is very difficult in urban constituencies to get badgers moved.
In conclusion, this has been an excellent debate, and I congratulate the Backbench Business Committee, of which I am a member, on selecting it. The Government have got a good deal right: they have a policy of action rather than inaction; they are investing £15.5 million over the next four years in the crucial oral vaccine; and biosecurity has been promoted and will continue to be promoted. I urge the House, though, to consider the way forward carefully and how effective the proposed cull would be. I strongly encourage vaccination, including the development of a better oral vaccination.
Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)
I have been a livestock farmer for two decades, so I am familiar with the difficulties that cattle farmers in particular face: the eradication of brucellosis, the threat of BSE, the arrival of foot and mouth and now, of course, TB. I am familiar with the challenges both financial and emotional.
The best farmers look after their livestock and have a healthy respect for wildlife. It is important that the House understands that point in this excellent debate. I represent a Gloucestershire constituency, so I know that farmers are suffering from the effects of TB and am fully aware of the devastation that it has caused to many businesses. It has been disastrous for many families. That is something that we have to bear in mind.
It is with huge reluctance that I support the pilot culling scheme. I emphasise that it is a pilot aimed at finding out whether the scheme works. It will be a properly controlled and managed scheme, as ironically the postponement largely demonstrates. The consideration behind the pilot scheme has been intense. I accept that information on the numbers of badgers has not always been completely accurate. It must be a properly managed scheme, however, and enable us to make judgments on the matter in the future.
It is important to emphasise the value of controlling movement and how animals are looked after. I welcome the fact that the Government have further strengthened movement controls. All farmers will welcome that step, because it is part of a package that must be introduced to deal with this threat. My hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston) was right when she reminded us that there is little point vaccinating something that already has the disease. It just does not help. Instead, we must find a vaccination that works but that is used as part of the process to deal with the problem.
I have mentioned movement, which is one part, and I have mentioned vaccination, which is another. I salute the Government’s decision to increase expenditure on developing the vaccination. I hope that it yields results. However, we cannot simply wait and wait, so the two strands of the strategy to deal with TB must also include culling. Some 26,000 cattle have been culled this last year alone. That is a significant figure, and it represents the scale of the problem. It is reasonable for Members to recognise that that amounts to huge difficulties for farmers, as well as huge difficulties for the cows. We talk a lot about badgers, but let us give the cows a boost, because they are animals and deserve fair treatment, too. I love badgers, but I also love cows. That must be how we look at this issue.
There are three things to do: control movements, look at vaccination and run a pilot scheme for culling. That amounts to a reasonable way to proceed, and I certainly hope that people give the cull that opportunity. I have one last question, however. It would be quite interesting to analyse the movements of TB after the slaughtering during the foot and mouth crisis. If there is evidence that there was latent TB, we must explore that issue; it ought to be analysed and discussed. I conclude with this quotation by Professor David King:
“In our view a programme for the removal of badgers could make a significant contribution to the control of cattle TB in those areas of England where there is a high and persistent incidence of TB in cattle, provided removal takes places alongside an effective programme of cattle controls.”
Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
I remind Members of my declaration of interests.
It is very good news that we are having this debate on St Crispin’s day, because what we want from the Government is the sort of leadership that we had on St Crispin’s day 597 years ago. I see my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State as Henry V in this particular act.
We have talked a great deal today about the science involved and the views that scientists take. I would like also to look at the extraordinary coincidence of the growth in the badger population and the re-emergence of TB among cattle. We heard an excellent speech from the hon. Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn), who showed the advantages of age and approaching the status of being an octogenarian. That is much to be admired, but one of the things he missed out in his speech was the fact that the fall in TB in cattle was coincident with a programme of exterminating badgers through gassing. Oddly enough, when that stopped in the 1980s, so the incidence of tuberculosis in cattle started to rise again. It is also worth noting that where there is the largest badger population, so there is the most bovine TB. Can it be purely coincidence that Scotland, which has a relatively low badger population, has very little bovine TB, but the west of England—including, of course, God’s own county Somerset—has a high incidence of bovine TB? As the badger population has increased—the figures drawn up in 1997 showed a 77% increase in the badger population—so that has coincided with an increase in bovine TB.
So yes, we have listened to all the science about what the effects of a cull may be, but we know what happened in Ireland. We heard from the hon. Member—my hon. Friend in many respects—for North Antrim (Ian Paisley) about what happened in southern Ireland and how that saw a 30% reduction. We have also seen what has happened from our own history, yet we are to put all that aside and just say, “Well, there may’ve been some problems with the last pilot.” That cannot be right, and the Government must be right to pursue the strategy that they are following.
We have also talked at great length about the vaccine and the benefit or otherwise of the vaccine in curing the problem. I am glad you are sitting down, Mr Deputy Speaker, because I am going to quote with approbation an official of the European Union, who yesterday said the following in response to articles in the newspapers:
“Vaccination of cattle against TB is forbidden under current EU rules—agreed by all Member States, including the UK.”
That is not such a strong point, because a lot of EU rules are nonsense, but the next bit is much more important:
“This is because there is no effective test to tell the difference between vaccinated and infected animals making it possible to protect the food chain and identify which animals could be exported.”
That was the European Union saying yesterday that there is no satisfactory test. We have heard much talk that there might be tests and that at some future date there will be tests. We have now had years and years of inaction awaiting the tests, yet the livelihoods of farmers in my constituency are being ruined and their lives possibly being put at risk.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I would love to, but I am under strict orders. It is the first time I have refused to give way, for which I apologise to the hon. Lady.
The lives of farmers in my constituency might be at risk. A constituent who lives near me keeps bulls. Bulls are not the softest and easiest of animals and they do not like being pricked in the neck on a regular basis before being moved to perform the duties that they carry out. When this is done to them they become uncomfortable and restless and place the health and safety of that farmer at risk.
Are we really saying that we shall continue to do nothing when we know what we ought to be doing, we know from experience that it has worked, we know that if we act we will have a viable dairy industry and make farmers’ lives better, and, perhaps most importantly, as Members have said, we will save more cattle, even if we kill a few badgers?
Andrew George (St Ives) (LD)
It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg), but I would like to return to a point that the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh) made at the start of our discussion: that the debate can easily become polarised between “team badger” and “team farmer”, when what we need is “team science” and “team TB” and to address the issue much more calmly and rationally, because outside the Chamber there has been much light as well as a certain amount of heat.
I should like to emphasise from a constituency point of view and from my farming background the need fully to understand what is driving the issue and the disease’s emotional and financial impact over decades on very committed people in west Cornwall. Many Members have this afternoon conveyed the emotions that are felt from the impact of this devastating disease.
I strongly supported the RBCT in my constituency, which involved a proactive cull on the Penrith moors, and faced down the very strong campaign against the line I was taking just over a decade ago in support of the trials because I believe in sound science being the basis by which we take forward policy to bear down on TB. In a climate where the science might encourage legislators to prevaricate, to recognise dilemmas and perhaps to see only the need for further research and not to take action, the Government should ensure that they do not make the situation worse. We say that policy making must be evidence based, but as the Government former chief scientist, Lord Robert May, said in The Observer just a couple of weeks ago, the Government risk transmuting evidence-based policy into policy-based evidence.
There are a number of knowns in the science, one of which I put to the Secretary of State at DEFRA questions today—that some of the figures from the RBCT have been exaggerated or cherry picked to justify the policy. For example, there is the argument that TB in culling areas was reduced by 30%. The research itself showed a reduction of somewhere between 12% and 16% in the net impact. Overall, this resulted in reducing only the increase in TB infection.
Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that two of the other knowns are the recent breakthrough in the DIVA test, which could lead to it being put forward for licensing, and a 60% efficacious BCG vaccine for cattle, which could also lead to licensing, although it would require the Government to negotiate with the European Union for field trials within the UK?
Andrew George
There are certainly significant gathered knowns now that were not available 10 or 15 years ago. To go forward, we need to build a policy on a sound foundation—not simply on selective evidence.
In his summing up, I hope that the Minister will deal with the evidence in support of the Government’s policy. Will he recognise that the 12% to 16% reduction in incidence of infection for herds within culled areas in the randomised badger culling trial is not an absolute reduction, but a net reduction, which means only that the incidence is increasing at a lower level than it would have been without the cull. It would be helpful and reassuring if the Government were to acknowledge that.
Let us use the opportunity provided by the pause to go back and speak to the many scientists who are still saying that the Government have got this one wrong. Instead of having a war of words through the media, let us make sure that those scientists—the majority behind the ISG—are brought in. I believe that they should be involved.
Finally, I hope that the Government will accept that we should go to Europe, as was implied by the hon. Member for North East Somerset and, indeed, by the hon. Member for Ogmore (Huw Irranca-Davies) in his intervention. These matters are not, after all, pre-ordained by God; these are decisions taken by human beings in Europe. We need to take a strong case to Europe in order to sort out the regulations and advance the testing of the vaccine and the DIVA test. That should allow us to come to a solution that is generally workable and does not make the situation worse.
Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)
I rise to oppose the motion. Farming is an industry vital to the economy of Cheshire. It is an industry that has had difficult times over recent years. In 2001, it was ravaged by foot and mouth disease. More recently, we have seen dairy farmers struggling to sell milk at a price that covers the cost of production, let alone one that provides them with a modest profit.
A few short years ago, farmers told me of their concerns about bovine TB travelling towards Cheshire. Now, it is very much there, and it is causing massive problems across Cheshire East, impacting on dairy and beef farmers and infecting our wildlife. Let me quote some statistics. The National Farmers Union says that in 2006 there were 108 TB reactors slaughtered in Cheshire; in 2011, there were 641. Just last week, on 19 October, the whole of Cheshire was classified as an annual testing region, reflecting the increased incidence of the disease. All cattle must also be pre-movement tested.
As if to highlight the level of concern about this problem in Cheshire, a motion was passed last week by Cheshire East full council. It states:
“That Cheshire East endorses measures to halt the current high incidence of Bovine TB with the ultimate aim of both healthy wildlife and cattle population, never mind vital protection of the economic, social, wealth, health and wellbeing of our rural community. In so doing Cheshire East supports early liaison with both EU and DEFRA to ensure infected areas within the Borough are tackled speedily.”
A proposer of the motion, while not promoting a cull locally—it is not one of the areas for which a cull has been proposed—made things very clear when she said:
“We cannot sit back and do nothing. This insidious disease is causing massive problems for the farming community.”
She also said:
“All options need to be reviewed.”
In my view, one of those options must be the targeted pilot culls proposed by the Government.
What are local farmers saying? Although I live in the farming community, I am not an expert, but those farmers certainly are. Councillor Rhoda Bailey, the wife of a Cheshire farmer, writes:
“the cull should be allowed…in order for it to provide…evidence of its effectiveness”.
Councillor Steve Wilkinson, one of the proposers of the motion, writes:
“It is a public health issue…Cheshire is on the edge of the disease spread as it progresses northwards and whilst any cull may assist with problems in the southwest, we need to take action here in Cheshire to halt the relentless movement further north.”
Another farmer, Stuart Yarwood, writes:
“Culling diseased badgers is the only option.”
In his view,
“If we dither, our livestock industry will disappear…Society has to accept that the only predator to badgers is man and disease and since government protected the species, disease is now doing its best to control its population and polluting the countryside in the process.”
The Cheshire county chairman of the National Farmers Union, Rob Ford, wrote to me this week saying:
“TB is spreading across the county… wildlife infection has been cited…as contributing to the spread of the disease in…Nantwich and Macclesfield…which is illustrated by infection being detected in herds where no cattle have been brought in…Cheshire and Greater Manchester are key to stopping the spread of TB as they are in the periphery of the area of infection…The Science is clear that a well-managed cull will reduce the levels of Bovine TB.”
He says that if the problem is not addressed, we will continue to see
“levels of the disease in the county grow and Cheshire will end up in the same situation”
as other parts of the country.
A vet and farmer writes that misleading information must be corrected. According to him,
“no country in the world has ever successfully controlled TB in cattle without culling infected wildlife.”
He says that the suffering caused to badgers by TB will be prevented by culling, and that the public need to know that compensation for the animals that are slaughtered is far less than the replacement cost and the full losses of farmers.
Another farmer says that the “misery of TB” cannot be calculated, but
“However unpalatable it may be, there really seems no other option to culling.”
He says that
“from a wildlife point of view”
other species will benefit.
“Badger numbers have increased dramatically in recent years, often at the expense of…hedgehogs and bumble bees.”
My hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) shares my concern for the welfare of farmers in our area, and my concern about the distress that the disease is causing to our farming community. I could give many other examples, but shortage of time prohibits me from doing so.
Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)
We have heard a range of passionate and fairly well-informed contributions to this debate on a very difficult subject. I was pleased to hear from the Chair of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh), and I look forward to the Committee’s report.
Today’s debate certainly forced all of us to view the issue at a much deeper level. My hon. Friends the Members for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) and for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith) spoke of the weaknesses in on-farm biosecurity. We heard passionate speeches from the hon. Members for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski), for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) and for Central Devon (Mel Stride), the hon. and learned Member for Torridge and West Devon (Mr Cox) and the hon. Members for North Cornwall (Dan Rogerson), for North Herefordshire (Bill Wiggin), for Totnes (Dr Wollaston), for Montgomeryshire (Glyn Davies), for Sherwood (Mr Spencer), for Brecon and Radnorshire (Roger Williams), for Stroud (Neil Carmichael), for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) and for Congleton (Fiona Bruce). They all spoke about the devastating impact of the disease on farmers.
We heard alternative views from my hon. Friends the Members for Inverclyde (Mr McKenzie) and for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin), who spoke of the risk that bovine TB would spread in the short term as a result of a badger cull. The hon. Member for Torbay (Mr Sanders) criticised the design of the Government’s cull. The hon. Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch) made a thoughtful speech from an international perspective, drawing attention to the costs of the cull. The hon. Members for Crawley (Henry Smith) and for Southend West (Mr Amess) suggested other options, as did the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George) and my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Andrew Miller), who gently punctured some of the Secretary of State’s claims to expertise in this matter.
We were privileged to hear from former Agriculture Ministers, including the right hon. Member for South East Cambridgeshire (Sir James Paice). My right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn), who is in his place, also struggled with these issues when he was in government, and my hon. Friends the Members for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick) and for Brent North (Barry Gardiner) described what happened under the Labour Government. It is important to put on the record that so far only a Labour Government have actually carried out a badger cull and tested the science in the field. I strongly predict that we will remain the only Government to carry out a badger cull in the field. I will explain why I make that prediction shortly.
My hon. Friend the Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn) coined a new word: the ineptocracy, which will be on the record in Hansard. The hon. Member for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire (Simon Hart) described the heartache of farmers, and the hon. Member for Hove (Mike Weatherley) and my hon. Friend the Member for Copeland (Mr Reed) talked about the effect of perturbation.
I congratulate the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) and the Backbench Business Committee on securing the debate and on making sure such a wide range of perspectives was expressed. The existence of this motion and debate—and vote—have certainly contributed to the Government’s decision to drop the badger cull. The Opposition have warned the Government for two years that the cull would be bad for farmers, taxpayers and wildlife. It would be bad for farmers who have to deal with this terrible disease. I also know the toll the disease takes on farmers and their families, both personally and financially, but the Government’s own cost-benefit assessment said the cull would cost farmers more than it would save them.
We saw in the last six weeks that farmers were moving away from the free shooting of badgers and moving towards the cage trapping of badgers, yet the Government’s statistics show free shooting is 10 times cheaper than cage trapping. Will the Minister tell us the true costs of this to the farmers? I would also like to hear from the Minister about the size of bond that the two farm companies had lodged with Natural England. So far we have heard no mention from Ministers about how much farmers are required to pay up front to cover the full four-year costs of this cull. If there is a move to cage trapping and shooting, what training has been given to those responsible for carrying that out, because that is a different skill from free shooting? We know that the people involved in free shooting had to go on a badger anatomy course so as to get a clean kill when shooting badgers. Pistols are used for cage trapping and shooting, so that is a totally different technique. Will the Minister tell us whether that training has been given, because it certainly seems from the evidence on the ground that that was what was planned?
There has been a lot of talk in this debate about the science, and we heard a good exposition from the hon. Member for St Ives. It is important that we go back to John Krebs. I do not advocate that we go back to 1997 as the Secretary of State does. I am disappointed that he is not in his place, and I am disappointed about his earlier remark in the House that he “couldn’t take any more.” He has only been in the job six weeks. I have been studying the issue of the badger cull for 18 months—as have other hon. Members, along with farmers out there in the community who are living with this problem—and I think the Secretary of State will have to show a little more backbone.
Professor Lord John Krebs instigated the randomised badger culling trial, and took part in the review of the evidence with Sir Bob Watson last year. Lord Krebs stressed the fact that culling badgers makes TB worse at the beginning by spreading the disease. He stated clearly in the Lords on Tuesday that the badger cull would reduce the incidence of TB in cattle by 16% after nine years, leaving 84% of the problem still there. He said that
“this is not a reduction in absolute terms but actually a 16% reduction from the trend increase.”
In other words, as the background trend is going up, BTB still increases but not by as much as it would have done had the cull not been conducted. This cull is not the silver bullet the Secretary of State makes it out to be. The eminent zoologist Lord John Krebs continues:
“The number is not the 30% that the NFU quoted; that is misleading—a dishonest filleting of the data.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 23 October 2012; Vol. 740, c. 148.]
Disappointingly, it appears, judging by his response to the debate in this morning’s DEFRA questions, that the Secretary of State has not read the Hansard record of that Lords debate, where the scientists were sitting there. He persisted in misusing a snapshot figure—the 28%—instead of using the one figure that the scientists are agreed on, which is the 16% figure. The Minister is looking puzzled. I hope that he is still not confused, because he is going to get a lambasting from the scientists. The Government are cherry-picking the data. Perturbation increases bovine TB, in the perimeter areas, by 29%, but I have chosen not to use that figure in any of the rhetoric or debate on this matter because it represents a snapshot; those perturbation increases happen in the early stages and are not borne out by the reduction that occurs afterwards.
The Secretary of State is not in his place, but he referred to Christl Donnelly as a “he” during his statement on Tuesday—Christl is a she.
Mary Creagh
Well, that is a relief. I do not know why the Minister has not told the Secretary of State that, because he is reported in Hansard as saying that she is a he. [Interruption.] He appears not to have read his own Hansard record or corrected it. He obviously has not spoken to the scientists, who faced down the animal rights activists during Labour’s badger cull in order to carry out the Labour Government’s research into culling badgers. We are not talking about some animal rights activists; these are scientists in the field wanting to get the right outcome for farmers and for the nation.
Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend agree that the Secretary of State’s comparing the research on a vaccine to Sisyphus, who, as you doubtless know, Mr Speaker, rolled a rock up a hill only to watch it roll down again for all eternity, demonstrates not only a complete lack of understanding of the scientific method, but contempt for scientific research? We can have no confidence in the promotion of a vaccine under the Secretary of State’s leadership.
Mary Creagh
The Secretary of State got his Sisyphus mixed up with his Tantalus. I think he will find that he has undertaken the labours of Hercules in DEFRA—I will not go any further on that, but the Augean stables spring to mind. I agree with what my hon. Friend said, because I am concerned that the scientists are being ripped to pieces on this, and the situation is difficult. She rightly says that there is a scientific method: the scientists are paid to come up with solutions, and then we try to roll them out and test them in field conditions. That is what needs to be done.
I have asked a lot of parliamentary questions. The Secretary of State asked 600, but perhaps some of his data are less than fresh. My data are pretty fresh. Last year, I asked the Government how many cattle herds breakdowns would be prevented over nine years if the cull went ahead. The answer came back that using a 150 km area, 47 cattle breakdowns would be prevented over nine years. So if we double the cull area and if it was to go ahead in a 300 sq km area, 94 herd breakdowns would be prevented. That, again, is not a fantastic result for the huge investment involved in this cull.
There has been huge concern from the scientists about the lack of Government rigour in the design, implementation, monitoring and efficacy of these culls. We know that there would be no post-mortem testing of whether the badgers had bovine TB, but there would be post-mortem testing to see whether they had been shot cleanly. So those who are interested in science, and who want to know how much of a vector in this disease the badgers are, will again have to go back to Labour’s cull, which showed that only 12% of the animals actually carried the disease.
Sir James Paice
I want to challenge the hon. Lady again on these figures. I did not dispute, in my speech, the 16% figure, and I do not believe anyone else has done. That is the figure agreed by all the scientists. I want her to confirm that that 16% is the net overall figure, and that if we could reduce or even eliminate perturbation, the net figure is bound to be much higher than that. That is part of the objective in the design of these pilots.
Mary Creagh
The scientists gave a range of between 12% and 16% if the cull was carried out under exactly the same conditions as Labour’s RBCT. The cull that the right hon. Gentleman proposed differed significantly, as it would have taken place over six weeks rather than two and would have involved free shooting rather than cage-trapping and shooting. As any GCSE science student knows, as soon as we depart from the methodology, we immediately increase the range of the differentials in the results. That is why the scientists were concerned.
The lack of rigour in the methodology was shown in Tuesday’s announcement. A cull that depends on killing at least 70% of the animals was about to begin with no reliable estimate of how many needed to be shot. On 19 July 2011, I asked a question in Parliament on that exact point, because it had occurred to me, a mere humble member of Her Majesty’s Opposition. I received the answer
“there is no precise knowledge of the size of the badger population”.—[Official Report, 19 July 2011; Vol. 531, c. 815.]
That prompts the question of why Ministers did not ask that. Why did they not start the count then so that farmers could plan properly? Instead, they allowed the farmers to submit their own estimates of the numbers, thought, “Mm, that looks a bit low,” and left it until September to go out into the field and conduct the analysis that should have been done a year ago. I want Ministers to tell us whether those numbers were calibrated to test their accuracy. It seems clear to me that they were not.
Mary Creagh
I will not give way, because I want to hear some answers from the Minister.
We also warned that the cull would be bad for taxpayers. What are the taxpayer costs so far? A freedom of information request to the Badger Trust reveals the cost of the big society badger cull. To date, licensing activities by Natural England have cost £300,000. The sett monitoring that only took place right at the very end of the process in September has cost £750,000. The independent expert panel that is meeting to oversee the two pilots has cost £17,000. Since April 2012, there have been 6.5 full-time equivalent staff working on the cull. This cull, which I confidently predict will not take place, has already cost taxpayers well over £1 million. We can add on £500,000 per cull area per year for policing. Let us not forget that all leave has been cancelled for the police in Gloucestershire until Christmas. Although I am sure they will be relieved to have their leave uncancelled, how much has that cost the police? Again, the Secretary of State said on Tuesday that he would write to let us know
What about the future costs? Humaneness monitoring will cost £700,000. Badger post-mortems will cost £248,000. My parliamentary question to Ministers, however, about the net reduction in compensation and testing were the badger cull to go ahead received the answer that it would save just £2.9 million over 10 years in each cull area. That is just not good enough. It will carry on costing taxpayers until Ministers cancel it definitively.
The writing is on the wall for this badger cull. The costs to farmers and taxpayers will continue to stack up if Ministers continue to pretend that the cull will go ahead. We need to ensure that any solution works closely with farmers and I hope for their sake that the Minister will drop this charade that the cull will go ahead. Any solution will also require the consent of taxpayers and we must ensure that we get the best value for them, too.
Mr Speaker
Order. The Minister of State has the remainder of the time available. If there is a minute or two for the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) to wind up, there will be a winding-up speech. If there is not, there will not.
The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr David Heath)
In my previous ministerial role, I instituted the e-petition concept and also introduced the Backbench Business Committee. This is a perfect example of why that was a very good idea, because Back Benchers were given the opportunity to debate matters of real importance that ought to be discussed. I was the first person to say that this matter should be debated in the House. Of course, the Government have only legislative time, so this is the right mechanism to use.
There are some issues on which most of the House will agree. Bovine TB is the most pressing animal health problem in the UK and the importance of the epidemic for our cattle farmers and their families and communities cannot be overemphasised. I hope that we can also agree about the geographical spread, although I was slightly worried by what the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) said at one point. This was once a disease isolated to small pockets of the country, but it has now spread extensively through the west of England and Wales, and the number of new cases is doubling every nine years. So I do think that it is spreading like wildfire, and one has only to look at the map to see that that is the case. Someone mentioned rather hyperbolically the prospect of a massacre. Well, there is a massacre going on: it is the slaughter of 26,000 cattle last year at the cost of nearly £100 million, and we cannot afford to shy away from tackling the rampant spread of bovine TB throughout our cattle herds. If we do not take the action needed now, this disease could cost us £1 billion over the next 10 years. That is the answer to the hon. Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick). I will accept that he, within the parameters that his Government set, took action to try to deal with it, but the fact is that it has not worked. The problem has carried on getting worse and worse, and that is why we are determined to do better.
I hope that we will also agree that bovine TB is transmitted from cattle to cattle, badger to badger, badger to cattle and cattle to badger. The task of managing bovine TB and bringing it under control is difficult and complex. I resent a little bit the caricature that we are blundering into an approach not based on evidence; that we are blind to obvious alternatives and guaranteed to make things worse; and that we have failed to understand the science. Ministers do not make decisions in this way, certainly this Minister and the previous Minister did not.
Plenty of people have told us that the cull will not work and what we should not be doing, but none of them—not the critics, the scientists or the politicians—has come up with a single workable alternative to the cull that would give us the positive impact that we need right now. Nobody wants to kill badgers, but no one can deny that they are a significant reservoir of the disease, which is contributing to the spread of TB. All the experts agree that we cannot hope to tackle the disease without addressing the problem in wildlife. That is why we are determined to use all the tools at our disposal, and continue to develop new ones, as a package of measures to tackle the disease. Some people say that the cull not the silver bullet. No, it is not the silver bullet, but it is not the only thing that we will do. This will not cure the problem, but it will contribute to curing the problem. People say that it will only be a 16% net reduction. Well, if I were to say that we were reducing cancer incidence in this country by 16%, people would say that it was a very good policy indeed. Let us be clear about that.
Cattle controls have been in place for many years and are vital. In high-risk areas, herds are tested annually, any cattle that test positive are slaughtered and infected herds are placed under movement restrictions. Restrictions on cattle movements have been further strengthened to reduce the chance of disease spreading from cattle to cattle. Only last week, we announced plans for a new surveillance testing machine and stricter cattle movement controls. We also continue to look at ways of improving the testing of cattle for TB, and—a point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston)—PCR testing to identify infection in wildlife is also important. However, despite the robust use of cattle measures over many years, TB has continued to spread. We need to accept that we are at the point where cattle measures alone are not enough to prevent the spread of disease in the worst affected areas. That is why the Government support a policy of badger control as part—I stress, as part—of a package of measures to tackle bovine TB.
Mark Pritchard
I am unsure whether the matter will be put to a vote, but on the principle of whether people are for or against a cull, will the Minister put on the record that the Government will respect the will of the House?
Mr Heath
We will of course listen to what Back Benchers have to say. As a member of the Government, I will not have a vote today because we do not believe that the Government should be taking over the views of Back-Bench Members. We will listen to Members of the House; that is the purpose of this debate.
The eradication of the badger was mentioned. That is utterly ridiculous. No one is talking about that. I think the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Meg Munn) referred to the Bern convention. We have now had a categorical response that we are not in breach of the convention. Just like every other legal challenge, we have won categorically.
Let us go back to the science and consider what we can do. There has been much discussion about how evidence underpins the policy. Research in this country over the past 15 years has demonstrated conclusively that cattle and badgers transmit the disease to one another. That is what Professor Krebs found in the randomised badger control trials. It has also been demonstrated—there is no getting away from this—that culling badgers can lead to a reduction of the disease in cattle if it is carried out over a large enough area and for a sufficient length of time. That is why we designed the pilots in the way we did, with hard boundaries. The hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion said that the hard boundaries are not rigorous enough. I do not know what she thinks would be more rigorous than the Bristol channel.
Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
The Minister referred to Professor Krebs. What does he have to say about the fact that Professor Krebs described the work the Government are doing as a crazy scheme? Surely he also ought to listen to him on that and stop this crazy scheme.
Mr Heath
I listen to a range of scientific opinion and take the evidence that was revealed by Krebs and Bourne in their trials. It shows that a cull would reduce the incidence of the disease by 16%, which the Government believe is a worthwhile objective. Through a range of measures that we can take, we can finally start to bear down on the disease, and not a single country has ever successfully borne down on the disease without dealing with the reservoir in wildlife. The decision to cull badgers has certainly not been easy and has not been made lightly, but we have to take action and get on top of this devastating disease.
The vaccines that we all hope will be part of the solution are still years away, despite what some people would have us believe. It is not as simple as jumping on a plane, going to talk to an official in the European Union and getting the vaccines ready for use. More research is needed. We are demonstrating our commitment to vaccines by investing a further £15.5 million in vaccine development over the next four years. Let us remember that £43.7 million has been spent since 1994.
So that Members understand the process, I will explain what is needed to get a vaccine into use. Six tests have to be passed before we have a usable cattle vaccine. We first need in-principle agreement from the Veterinary Medicines Directorate to a market authorisation for the vaccine. That is what the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion said had appeared on the DEFRA website: the use of the BCG—hardly a new development—which has been partially successful in dealing with cattle, with a 60% to 70% success rate. That is the stage we have reached.
We have to get international validation of the test to differentiate infected from vaccinated animals—the so-called DIVA test. That is quite difficult to substantiate because we must demonstrate that the vaccine is efficacious, which we cannot do in this country because vaccinating cattle here is illegal. Only after that is done can we discuss with the European Commission a joint application to the European Food Safety Authority for an opinion on cattle vaccination. We then need to secure the agreement of member states to remove the vaccination ban. Only then can the Commission remove the ban and will the Veterinary Medicines Directorate be able to grant marketing authorisation, which enables the vaccine to be manufactured and deployed.
If anyone thinks that will be done in a week or so, they are sadly deluded. I would like to have a vaccine that had been shown to be efficacious and that we could use legally in this country, but we do not have such a vaccine—[Interruption.] The hon. Member for Glasgow South (Mr Harris) says that the cull will not start until June. The vaccine will take years, not months.
Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)
A reduction of between 60% and 70% sounds pretty good when compared with the 12% to 16% reduction that a cull would yield. The problems the Minister identifies are largely bureaucratic. Surely the Government could take a more robust approach with the European Union and just get on with it.
Mr Heath
I wish it were that easy. I wish we could ignore all the regulations and precautionary measures that are taken for the licensing of vaccines and just go to the EU and say, “Sort this out. Do it tomorrow,” and then come back and start using the vaccine. However, it is not that easy. We cannot put at risk several billion pounds-worth of produce from this country by implementing something that is illegal. Last week we saw a lot of nonsense in the newspapers about people going over to the European Commission to sort it all out because we stupid Ministers could not quite bring ourselves to do it. We have had an announcement from the Commission; it was mentioned earlier. It said that the Commission was disappointed to see an article by Brian May in The Mail on Sunday on 21 October, that some of the quotes were out of context or inaccurate and therefore misleading, and that vaccination of cattle against TB is forbidden under current EU rules agreed by all member states. That is very clear.
I will happily arrange for those who are genuinely interested in this issue and who want us to develop a vaccine, as we do, to speak to Glyn Hewinson at the Animal Health and Veterinary Laboratories Agency—our chief scientist who is working on this—and he will tell them directly, as he told me only two weeks ago, the exact state of play with vaccines. I want a vaccine to be in position at the earliest opportunity, but I have to face facts, and wishful thinking is not going to get rid of bovine tuberculosis in this country. We must have programmes and measures that work, and we must use all the tools in the box.
Dan Rogerson
I am glad that my hon. Friend has set out the Government’s intention to persist, with determination, with vaccines but also to look at the testing regime, which is crucial in allowing the whole process to work in future. In the meantime, I am pleased that he is also continuing to pursue pilots to ensure that the science is further improved so that we are completely ready and have all the arguments at our fingertips.
Mr Heath
Let me be absolutely clear: we will use every tool in the box to bear down on bovine TB. That is why we are not going to reject something that has been shown by experimental evidence to be efficacious as part of the answer, as some would have us do. That is why we will continue to put a lot more money into research and push ever further on the research into vaccines. That is why we will continue to do everything we can on controls for the movement of cattle and on biosecurity. If the question is, “Will you not do the cull and will you lock up every cow in the country in a shed to prevent them from having contact with badgers?”, the answer is no.
The Government are determined to tackle bovine tuberculosis by all the means available to us. Having looked at all the evidence over many years, I am utterly convinced that badger control is the right thing to do. Indeed, the higher than expected badger numbers only serve to underline the need for urgent action. I remain fully committed to working with the farming industry to ensure that the pilot culls can be delivered effectively, safely and humanely next summer.
Caroline Lucas
This has been a comprehensive debate, and I genuinely thank everybody who has taken part in it and the Backbench Business Committee for granting it.
There is much that we agree on. We agree that bovine TB is a terrible disease that is inflicting huge amounts of harm on people in our farming communities around the country. However, this is not about a split between city and rural or farmer and non-farmer, and it certainly is not about a split between those who want a cull and those who want to do nothing. Those of us who are against the cull are against it because we do not believe that it is the right way to protect cattle.
I will finish now, Mr Speaker, because I want to make sure that we get the chance to put the motion to the vote.
Question put.
Mary Creagh
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. May we have an indication from the Minister that the Government will go back and look again at the whole policy of the badger cull, and respect the democratic voice of this Parliament?
Mr Speaker
The hon. Lady has made her point with force and alacrity and, as she will know, it is on the record of the House. As she will also know, that is not a matter for the Chair; it is not a point of order although it will have been heard by the Minister on the Treasury Bench.
I call Mr Mark Pritchard on a point of order—I hope it is a point of order.
Mark Pritchard
I am sure you will guide me if it is not, Mr Speaker. For clarity, is it still the case, as has been the tradition over centuries in this place, that a vote carried in the House of Commons is binding on the Government?
Mr Speaker
The answer to that, in short, is no. Only legislation binds. The hon. Gentleman will have heard the response, as will other hon. Members. The House has voted and offered its view. I will leave it there. That is as pithy an encapsulation as I can offer to the hon. Gentleman.
Nicola Shipley
Mr Speaker
Before I call the hon. Member for Birmingham, Hall Green (Mr Godsiff), I appeal to right hon. and hon. Members who, however unaccountably, are leaving the Chamber to do so quickly and quietly, so affording the same courtesy to the hon. Gentleman as they would wish to be extended to them in similar circumstances. Therefore, the consultation of notes and BlackBerrys and conversations that might be taking place between hon. Members—for example, on the penultimate Government Bench between the hon. Members for The Wrekin (Mark Pritchard) and for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless)—could usefully cease, so that the hon. Member for Birmingham, Hall Green can make progress.
Mr Roger Godsiff (Birmingham, Hall Green) (Lab)
I am most grateful for your assistance in clearing the Chamber, Mr Speaker.
I should like to place on record that the overwhelming majority of staff who work in Birmingham’s housing department are dedicated and provide a caring service for their customers, but the case that I shall describe raises serious questions about certain individuals, as I shall explain.
My constituent is called Nicola Shipley. She is a young lady who is seeking to carve out a career for herself by working in a very demanding job. She lives alone, having bought a house in Jakeman road, Balsall Heath. That road consists of terraced houses. Most of the properties are owner-occupied and some are owned by housing associations. She bought her house in 2006.
Nicola Shipley lived happily in the house in Jakeman road for five years until October 2010. The property next door to her was owned by the Moseley and District housing association, and she had excellent relations with the tenants, as she did with her other neighbours in the multi-ethnic community living in Jakeman road. In 2010, a new tenant moved into the house next to her. The tenant had formerly been a council tenant who had effected a mutual exchange from his former property in Billesley.
Mutual exchanges within social housing are commonplace, as the Minister well knows. Tenants wishing to exchange need the approval of their respective landlords. On the form that is used by Birmingham city council, the tenant is required to provide certain information, and there is a section headed, “For Office Use Only”, where a housing officer carries out a check of the tenant’s housing file to ascertain whether there are, for example, rent arrears or breaches of any tenancy conditions, such as antisocial behaviour. The form is then signed by a housing manager and the tenant is advised of the decision.
Since the new tenant moved into the property next to Nicola Shipley in October 2010, her whole life has been turned upside down. I shall quote from the letter that she sent to me in December 2011, when, in desperation, she made contact with me having tried for a year to get her concerns addressed by the housing association and Birmingham city council’s housing department, which was the new tenant’s former landlord. She said:
“I am a homeowner and had previously lived peacefully and quietly in this respectful family community and neighbourhood for five years. Since October 2010 I have felt unsafe, vulnerable, harassed, intimidated and threatened in my own home. The constant extreme noise from the playing of loud dance band music and intimidatory and anti-social behaviour has severely affected my quality of life and those of my neighbours”.
What is scandalous is that that pattern of behaviour was known to the tenant’s previous landlord—Birmingham city council—but the officers in the housing department who approved the transfer deliberately and wilfully conspired to ignore the council’s mutual transfer procedures and did not tell the housing association about his past appalling record. The council officers knew that the housing association would not have allowed the transfer to proceed had it known—the housing association has made that clear to me on many occasions. In essence, certain officers in the Birmingham’s housing department dumped this problem on the housing association by omitting to tell them the true facts, wrecking the life of a young woman in the process.
As I have said, since October 2010, Nicola Shipley has had to experience constant noise throughout the night until 4 or 5 am. The police have been involved, individuals have been arrested at the property during continuous all-night parties and the tenant has had his children taken into the care of the council. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals has been involved with the dogs kept at the property. There have been numerous complaints about the condition of the property’s front and back gardens, but neighbours are fearful of the consequences if they collectively complain or offer themselves as witnesses in court. Furthermore, on 13 July 2011, the individual was sentenced to an 18-month community order and £100 costs for having an offensive weapon and neglecting his two children.
My constituent is left scared and fearful of living in her own home, but she cannot put it on the market for sale or rent because she would be obliged to divulge the behaviour of her next-door neighbour to any prospective buyer or person wishing to rent her property, otherwise she could be sued. These problems were not caused by the young lady and her neighbours. They were caused because certain officers in the council’s housing department, including the housing manager who signed the transfer form, conspired to get rid of their problem by deliberately withholding information about the tenant’s past behaviour, which had resulted in the council taking him to court in August 2009.
On 17 August 2009, it was reported in the Birmingham Mail under the very bold headline, “Loud music made Birmingham neighbour’s life hell” that a Birmingham dance fan made his neighbour’s life a misery for seven months by playing loud music into the early hours. It reported that
“the noise coming from Lee Sinclair’s”—
his name is mentioned—
“flat made the victim’s kitchen vibrate and although at one point he found his equipment had been confiscated it did not stop him”.
Mr Sinclair, aged 25, admitted two charges of failing to comply with an abatement notice and was fined £115 plus costs. The magistrate’s chairman, Dr Burton, told him:
“You have caused your neighbour so much stress, anguish and worry”.
The article in the Birmingham Mail details the fact that the first complaint about Mr Sinclair’s behaviour was made by his former neighbour in November 2008, and that the city council obtained an abatement order on 9 January 2009. That had no effect on Mr Sinclair’s playing of extremely loud dance band music and a warrant was eventually obtained by the city council to remove the recording equipment, including a CD player and television speakers. Again, that had no effect on Mr Sinclair’s behaviour, and after the council had investigated further complaints made by his neighbour, another warrant was issued. Mr Sinclair’s newly purchased sound equipment was again taken away.
That is surely clear evidence that the tenant breached his tenancy agreement with the council and that his antisocial behaviour towards his neighbours went way beyond an occasional occurrence and was part of a lifestyle whereby he had no regard for anyone else. Those serious breaches of his tenancy agreement ought to have resulted in Birmingham’s housing department pursuing a course of legal action to have him evicted from his property, but instead it allowed a mutual exchange and kept quiet about his background.
When Nicola Shipley first wrote to me, I pursued the matter with Moseley and District housing association and the city council. I wrote to the director of housing, Elaine Elkington, asking for an explanation of why the mutual exchange was sanctioned and why the housing association was deliberately not told about Mr Sinclair’s case history, which was in the public domain.
Elaine Elkington passed the matter to Sheila Espin, the head of landlord services, who then involved a Tracy Radford, the head of integrated services for landlord services. So began a game of pass the case, which went on until eventually I received a letter from Sheila Espin, dated 1 February 2012, in which she offered apologies on
“how this case was managed,”
and said that she had written to Moseley and District housing association and Nicola Shipley to apologise for the distress caused. There was, however, no explanation of why the mutual exchange had been agreed or who had approved it. The letter also contained a patronising reference to
“a number of learning experiences regarding policies, procedures, systems and Birmingham City Council relationships with external partners regarding such matters”
that Sheila Espin said had been identified.
I then had a meeting with Sheila Espin, Nicola Shipley and the communities manager for Moseley and District on 4 April, at which I was advised that the events leading up the approval of the mutual exchange were still under investigation. However, despite repeated requests, no explanation has been given since that time, over six months ago, of why the mutual exchange was authorised; why Moseley and District was not told about the council’s problems with Lee Sinclair, despite the fact that there was nothing confidential about them; or which officers had discussed the mutual exchange and agreed that it should go ahead without the true facts being made known to the housing association. No one has held up their hands and taken responsibility for what has happened, least of all the person who was responsible for the housing department.
Moseley and District has tried to assist Nicola Shipley by taking the matter back to court. Earlier this year, the court ruled that Lee Sinclair should give up possession of his property in Jakeman road, but that the possession order will not be enforced if the defendant complies with seven conditions and four undertakings. The order lasts for two and a half years, but since that time Nicola Shipley has reported continual breaches of the order. Eight months on, she is still suffering, as are other local residents, who are terrified of the consequences of appearing in court to support their witness statements.
Let me conclude. I said at the beginning of the debate that there are many good people working in Birmingham’s housing department. There are also, I regret to say, people who were involved in this case who put their own self-interest and desire for a quiet life before their duties as housing officers and public servants. Those people ought to suffer the full consequences of their actions. However, the fact that no information has been forthcoming about the council’s internal inquiries leads me to the conclusion that senior officers, right up to the director of housing, seem to be more concerned with covering their backs than with seeking the truth of this disgraceful episode and trying to put right the grievous wrong inflicted on the young lady.
Elaine Elkington should have involved herself in the case by taking disciplinary action against those members of her staff who conspired to keep the truth about Lee Sinclair quiet and authorised the transfer exchange. She should have looked at innovative ways to help Nicola Shipley, who is trapped in her own house because she cannot move. Elaine Elkington could, for example, have made the council offer to buy the property and add it to its list of housing resources. She could have authorised compensation to Moseley and District housing association for the costs incurred in management time and for court costs, but she has instead presided over a cover-up, with no one being held responsible and accountable, because Lee Sinclair is no longer a council tenant. Elaine Elkington should take responsibility for what has gone on in her department, and I believe she should go.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Mr Don Foster)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Birmingham, Hall Green (Mr Godsiff) on securing the debate, although I suspect he wishes it had not been necessary. I bet he wishes that his constituent, Nicola Shipley, had not had to face such appalling antisocial behaviour over so many years. I hope he will pass to her my very best wishes and my hope that she will shortly enjoy the peaceful life she should have been entitled to for many years.
I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will recognise that I am unable to comment in detail on the specifics of the case, but it might help if I set out a few of the areas in which the Government are acting, which I hope will ensure there will be fewer cases of the type Mrs Shipley has had to endure. He will know only too well as a constituency MP that, sadly, all Members have similar cases, albeit that the one experienced by Mrs Shipley was particularly extreme. She has my best wishes for a more peaceful life.
It is important that the Government do all they can to reduce the pain, fear and damage caused by antisocial behaviour, whether it is caused by or inflicted on owner-occupiers or by tenants in the private or social rented sectors. Let me emphasise that antisocial behaviour is not simply a problem that occurs within the social housing sector. The Home Office's White Paper, “Putting Victims First—More Effective Responses to Antisocial Behaviour”, produced in May, sets out what we will do to turn our commitment into practical action, working across Government, but in the end it is the quality of responses locally to antisocial behaviour, to which the hon. Gentleman referred, that will change things on the ground. The White Paper moves us from the top-down, centrist approach of the past and instead takes as its starting point the impact antisocial behaviour is having on victims, how they can best be supported and how they and local communities can best hold local agencies to account.
Equally, local agencies need flexibility and the right tools and support to tackle antisocial behaviour. The White Paper proposes replacing 19 existing powers, some of which have proved slow and ineffective, with six simple, flexible and adaptable new ones. My Department is leading on the proposals in the White Paper that make it quicker and easier for landlords to evict their most antisocial tenants. Eviction for antisocial behaviour should remain exceptional: the loss of one's home is a serious sanction and eviction may simply displace the problem rather than provide a long term solution. That is why eviction for antisocial behaviour is used sparingly: there have been only about 2,000 evictions annually by social landlords in the context of around 4 million social homes in England.
Prevention and early intervention, which would have so helped in this case, should be at the heart of all landlords' approaches to tackling antisocial behaviour. One of the Government's initiatives to reduce antisocial behaviour is the troubled families programme, through which £450 million has been made available to provide expert help to local agencies to turn around the lives of the country's most troubled families and make a positive change to those who live alongside them. We know that up and down the country social landlords are engaged in creative and innovative work to provide diversionary activities for young people, to ensure that tenants understand the need to respect their neighbours and to nip antisocial behaviour in the bud before it becomes a problem. Sadly, that did not happen in this case.
There are many good examples of work that is being done. South Essex Homes, one of the 54 arm’s length management organisations that manage between them about 50%, or roughly 800,000, of council properties successfully uses what it calls community circles to bring together residents, perpetrators and relevant agencies to seek solutions to problems identified by the community in areas where antisocial behaviour is an issue. But we know, and this case illustrates it well, that where landlords turn to possession as a last resort in order to provide respite to neighbours and communities that process can take far too long. Landlords face delays because, for example, defendants do not turn up or turn up unrepresented, because further evidence is required, or because there are difficulties in finding court time for a trial that may last over a day.
As happened in this case, the court may decide to grant a suspended rather than an outright possession order, meaning that the landlord has to go back to court yet again if the terms of the suspended order are broken. The possession process itself is likely to come after many months and sometimes years during which neighbours and communities have suffered from continued antisocial behaviour. So we are proposing to legislate to provide a faster route to eviction for the most serious criminal or antisocial behaviour, to bring relief to victims and communities more quickly.
Currently, when a landlord seeks possession for antisocial behaviour, the court has discretion in deciding whether or not to grant possession. We are proposing that where serious, housing-related antisocial behaviour or crime has already been proven by another court, the landlord could instead choose to apply for possession on an absolute ground. Where they do so, the court will be required to grant possession, provided the landlord has followed the correct procedure and, in the case of public sector landlords, subject to considerations of proportionality. The discretion of the court to suspend or postpone a possession order would also be limited.
We think this new absolute ground for possession has the potential significantly to expedite the eviction process in the most serious cases of antisocial behaviour. Instead of leading to a potentially lengthy trial, perhaps following adjournments many months after initial hearings have taken place, an absolute ground should significantly increase the chance that the case can be determined quickly in a single hearing. The court will need to establish only that the criteria for awarding possession are met, rather than having to undertake a fuller consideration of the case.
Although we think the absolute ground for possession should help speed up the eviction process, I want to make it absolutely clear that it is not our intention to increase the number of evictions—nor do we think it will do so. Consultation responses to our proposals received from landlords support the view that the availability of a faster, more visible sanction might have a positive effect on changing behaviour, thus reducing the antisocial behaviour or nipping it in the bud. Of course we need to respect the rights of those faced with losing their homes, but we need to focus more on the rights of those victims whose neighbours’ behaviour has made their homes places where they live, as Mrs Shipley did, in distress and fear. We must, as the White Paper says, put victims like Mrs Shipley first.
We also need to do more to identify vulnerable victims earlier, assess risks and provide joined-up responses. Some good work is already going on. Community harm statements are being used by a number of social landlords as a way of better demonstrating to the court the damage that the antisocial behaviour of an individual is having on those living in the neighbourhood.
Across the country there are examples of landlords doing good work to support victims and witnesses before, during and after the court process. In Newham, for example, a charter setting out minimum standards for witnesses has been agreed between the local partners, including 22 local housing providers. I am aware that Moseley and District has a witness support group that works with affected residents. Although there is a lot of good practice locally and although we are ensuring local agencies have better tools and powers to tackle antisocial behaviour effectively, we also need to ensure that when they do not take action, victims and local communities can hold those agencies to account and secure redress. The hon. Gentleman has shown the need for that very clearly.
That is why the White Paper includes proposals for what we have called a community trigger. The trigger would give victims and communities the right to demand that agencies that had ignored repeated complaints about antisocial behaviour take action. The duty could be activated by the public when their complaints reach a certain threshold—I suspect that threshold would have been met many times over in the case raised by the hon. Gentleman—although we think it right for that to be determined locally and not nationally.
Relevant authorities at district council level or above will be required to decide and publish the thresholds, criteria, processes—including a single point of contact—and the reporting mechanism they intend to use locally. The police and crime commissioner will have a role in ensuring that there is democratic accountability. Local pilots to test the trigger on the ground are taking place in Manchester, West Lindsey and Boston, Brighton and Hove and Richmond.
I hope that my remarks have given the hon. Gentleman a sense of what the Government are doing with the aim of ensuring that fewer people and communities have to endure the type of antisocial behaviour that his constituent endured over such a long period. More particularly, I hope that as a result of the highlighting of this case and the hon. Gentleman’s advocacy on Mrs Shipley’s behalf, effective action will be taken locally, very soon, to bring the misery that she has been experiencing to an end.
Question put and agreed to.
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Working-Age Disabled People
(12 years ago)
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Each debate is chaired by an MP from the Panel of Chairs, rather than the Speaker or Deputy Speaker. A Government Minister will give the final speech, and no votes may be called on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Mr David Amess (in the Chair)
A number of colleagues want to speak. I understand the time pressures and the arrangements, and I will accommodate everyone. I hope that we can work together so that everyone is satisfied in terms of their commitments. I call Anne Begg.
Dame Anne Begg (Aberdeen South) (Lab)
I am glad to hear you say that you hope to accommodate everybody, Mr Amess. Rather a lot of people have turned up, I am glad to see.
As Chair of the Select Committee on Work and Pensions, I shall speak to our report published in February. Although the title is “Government support towards the additional living cost of working-age disabled people”, most people know the issue as the switch from DLA to PIP, but we thought that that might be confusing, which is why we used the long title.
I begin with a declaration: since 1977, I have been a recipient of, first, the mobility allowance and then the mobility element of disability living allowance. Therefore, any changes to DLA will directly affect me in terms of the benefit for which I qualify. Some people might think it a handicap that I have to make such a declaration, but I hope that having been the recipient of the benefit in question gives me not a unique perspective, because everybody else who receives the benefit will feel the same, but an unusual perception and understanding, in parliamentary terms, of how important the benefit has been.
When I first qualified for the original mobility allowance, I was an impoverished student finding it difficult to get around. I certainly could not afford to own a car and did not come from the kind of family who could afford one, although I had been able to drive since the age of 17. The mobility allowance and then access to a Motability car revolutionised my life as a young teacher on a not particularly high wage. It made my life so much easier, and I have always paid great tribute to the late, lamented Lord Alf Morris, whose idea Motability was. He will be sadly missed for all the work he did in that area.
Returning to the report, the Select Committee’s first finding was that there is considerable scope for reform of DLA. Much of the evidence that we got, even from people who might be critical of the new scheme, admitted that many things about DLA perhaps needed to change. The claim form was long and complex, the criteria were not straightforward and there was no proper or rigorous system for reviewing awards where necessary. Having accepted the need for reform, many of the people from whom we took evidence went on to say that that could have been done by reforming DLA, and not necessarily by introducing a completely new benefit, although the Government said that the new benefit could represent an opportunity to address the problems of DLA while improving support for disabled people. In their response to our report, they said:
“These reforms present an ideal opportunity to start afresh, keeping the best elements of DLA… but bringing the benefit up-to-date in order to better reflect 21st century society.”
However—this is a big “however”—the Committee felt strongly that part of the problem was that the backdrop to the introduction of the reforms got them off to a poor start. The first knowledge that anyone had of an intention to reform, and indeed replace, DLA came not from the Department for Work and Pensions, but from a Budget document in 2010. Page 36 of the Budget policy costings said:
“This measure will introduce an objective medical assessment and revised eligibility criteria… The assessment will follow a similar process to the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) used for claims to Employment and Support Allowance, with a points based system to assess eligibility… the central assumption for this policy is that it will result in a 20% reduction in caseload and expenditure once fully rolled out.”
That was the introduction to the change. Because it mentioned a 20% reduction, people in receipt of DLA and many of the disabled organisations that represent them immediately felt that the reason for the change was not to improve the benefit, but to save money. The mention of the WCA and the fact that the Government would follow the kind of framework used for employment and support allowance also rang a large number of alarm bells among disabled people. By the time the Government’s proposals were published, the WCA had already obtained a bad name for being mechanistic, uncaring and unfeeling, and for getting assessments wrong. Putting all those together, we find that the principle of reforming DLA was somewhat overshadowed, because those to whom it would apply were immediately suspicious about the Government’s motives. We said in our report that we thought that that was unfortunate, because it certainly did not get the reform off to a good start.
It is true that during the process the Government listened to some of the criticisms. They dropped the proposals in the original draft of the Welfare Reform Bill to end the payment of the mobility component to care home residents. They also agreed, as the Bill went through the House, to extend the personal independence payment qualifying period, and it is certainly true that the first consultation on the first draft of the eligibility criteria produced some welcome changes, particularly on, for example, people’s ability to get around and preparing a meal. Important changes were made.
However, there are still a lot of questions. I hope that the Minister will not mind, but most of what I am about to say takes the form of questions. I know that she is a new Minister and keen, but I suspect that she will not be able to answer them all today. It will be good if she answers what she can. I know that she has already agreed to appear before the Select Committee some time in November; perhaps this debate will give her a taste of what we might ask her when the time comes. In some cases, she might be in a position to write to us with explanations, and about what has changed.
Part of the problem is that we do not yet know a lot of the detail of what will happen. The framework in the Welfare Reform Act 2012 was very vague. Everything is being done through regulation, but we still have not seen the final regulations. The most recent criteria were published in November 2011. Considering that PIP will be paid to new claimants from April next year, time is getting tight, and a lot of people are concerned about exactly how it will be tested and what the impact of the reform will be.
The first issue I want to raise is the lack of an impact assessment. Although the Government introduced the original PIP proposals in December 2010, it was not until January 2012 that they estimated the claimant count reduction—at about 500,000 people by 2015-16, which would be 23% of the claimant cohort. The published criteria included a number of hypothetical case studies that showed which types of claimant would and would not qualify for the new PIP, and at which rate. Crucially though, the case studies did not state whether, and at which rate, claimants would have qualified for DLA, so, without that information, it has been impossible to do a comparison and get an idea of who would and would not get the new benefit, and which types of claimant would lose out.
According to a survey published this week by the Hardest Hit coalition, entitled “The Tipping Point”, some 94% of disabled people fear that losing their DLA would be detrimental to their health, with 65% feeling that they would be unable to work and 75% saying that losing DLA would increase their local authority care needs. Without a full impact assessment, we are unable to answer a number of questions. How many people will lose their adapted Motability cars, and how will that affect their ability to work? Many people use a DLA care component to pay for local authority services, so what will the impact be on local authorities if those people do not qualify for PIP? What assessment have the Government made of DLA’s role in preventing people’s health conditions from worsening? What could the impact be on NHS budgets?
The Government need to consider the cumulative impacts on disabled people of welfare reforms, including the reform of DLA. We also have the 12-month time limit on contributory ESA, the incapacity benefit reassessment to move people on to ESA, cuts to local authority care budgets and the lowering of disability premiums under universal credit. Some claimants might be hit by only one or two of the changes, but some might have to deal with them all as they come in over the next three years. That would be an enormous change for them.
Our report said that we were glad to hear in evidence that there had been a form of co-production of the PIP criteria and the implementation of PIP, involving organisations that represent disabled people. However, we have spoken to some of those organisations, and they said that calling the PIP policy development “co-production” is somewhat absurd. There has been some consultation, but until we get the final assessment criteria, we, and they, will not know whether the Government have listened to them and acted. The Government consulted the organisations and might have heard what they had to say, but action is a different matter.
Disability groups have not been consulted about the framing of the PIP assessment contracts or the guidance to assessors, so, although there has been limited consultation, the wider implications of how the measure will work in practice have not been subject to any kind of co-production. In one meeting, the Disability Benefits Consortium told us that the documents had been counted in and counted up, and that it had been given 15 minutes to look at them. That, again, is hardly co-production.
On the PIP assessment, the Government have said that there will be a requirement for face-to-face assessments for most claimants. That also raises a number of questions. On what basis did the Government come to that conclusion? Will the Government not be able to take account of existing evidence in most cases? That leads me to a question on a slightly different point: will there be any transfer of information already held by the Department for Work and Pensions, so that people do not have continually to remind it of such things as, “This is a glass eye, and of course I am not going to see out of it.” That is not as daft as it sounds. Sometimes, when people have gone for a WCA they have been asked what vision they have in their left eye when they have not had a left eye for decades.
The Department clearly has that kind of information—for example, details of a claimant’s need for different formats—or information that highlights the fact that a claimant is particularly vulnerable or lives in a care home or supported accommodation, which might not be clear from their address, so will it be passed to whoever is administering PIP assessments so that people are not insulted by constantly being asked questions the answers to which would be obvious to anyone who knew them.
There is another question about the face-to-face assessment. Does an arbitrary decision to require a majority of claimants to undergo such an assessment not risk subjecting large numbers of disabled people to unnecessary stress and anxiety, and wasting a considerable amount of public money? I understand that the companies that might deliver the assessments have come up with wildly different figures for the number of home visits there will be.
The other concern regarding the PIP assessment relates to the assessment of fluctuating conditions, which has also been an ongoing problem with the work capability assessment. The activity descriptors attempt to capture the effect of fluctuating conditions by considering impacts that are present on over 50% of days, and that is a welcome change to the provision.
Where two or more activity descriptors apply on fewer than 50% of days individually but reach the 50% threshold when combined, the descriptor that applies for the greatest proportion of time will apply. However, people with such conditions can experience enormous fluctuations; one person might have a condition that fluctuates in such a way that they walk well one day but need an electric wheelchair the next. The difference between their good days and bad days is so extreme that they need the adapted house and all the equipment, although the bad days account for less than 50% of the time. Can the Minister shed some light on that?
The other big concern is the contracts. Atos has won the contract for two of the three areas that cover most of Great Britain, and Capita has won the other. Some of the criticism of the work capability assessment falls unfairly on Atos, and some of it perhaps not. Atos is delivering a contract that was written by the Government, so any problem with that contract is the Government’s responsibility. There has been little public discussion about what the Atos and Capita contracts will hold, so we do not know whether the Government are likely to get those contracts right.
One of the flaws of the WCA contract is that providers get paid for every assessment, regardless of whether they get them right, and right first time. On what basis will the providers be paid? The Committee argued that they should be paid for assessments that are right first time. There might be some leeway, but given the number of wrong WCAs there should surely be a penalty in the contract so that the companies would not be paid regardless of the accuracy of the assessments.
On top of that, will there be robust sanctions for provider failure? Will the Department look at the different approaches of the two providers and compare their accuracy and assessment reports? I think that will be crucial, a number of months in, in judging how the providers compare with each other and how they are doing. I know part of the reason why the Government adopted the framework approach to the contract, rather than a single contract covering the whole country, was, hopefully, to get that information and to see which provider was the most successful.
On the PIP assessments and the new assessments for the transition from IB to ESA, we recommended that the Government be sensitive to the timing of WCAs when scheduling PIP assessments. The Government should not underestimate the cumulative impact on vulnerable people of frequent reassessments. There is ample evidence that the WCA has been damaging individuals’ health and may be a factor in some suicides. The Government’s response to the Committee’s report was vague on that matter. They said they would try to ensure, where possible, that claimants will not be called for multiple face-to-face assessments in close proximity. How will they ensure that? Will there be data sharing from the part of the DWP that deals with employment support allowance and the part of the DWP that will deal with the new PIP?
The claim process is meant to be streamlined and very fast, which is to be welcomed, but that may cause some problems because it might be too fast for some people. We know the Government are saying that PIP claims should take about a month, yet, at the moment, the average waiting time for a citizens advice bureau appointment is six to eight weeks, which may be a problem for people who need expert help.
Will four weeks be sufficient to gather medical evidence and for vulnerable claimants to get the help and advice they need? How many people are likely to drop out of the process? If the claimant has a lifetime award, might they think that the reassessment does not apply to them? If the DWP does not hear back from people, will it send reminder letters to say that there may be an issue that has not been picked up? Again, some people will get the letter and think it is a circular, not realising that it is very specific to them and their position.
If the providers’ deadline is to be 30 days to make a judgment, and the end-to-end process is likely to take about two months, will there be flexibility in the time allowed to complete the end-to-end process to ensure that all relevant medical evidence can be collected?
What responsibility will the assessment provider have to seek relevant medical evidence? That is what happens at the moment with DLA, but it looks as if it might be different with PIP. Will all the evidence have to be supplied to the claimant? More crucially—again, this has been a problem with the WCA—who will pay for that medical evidence? Doctors, consultants and other health care professionals are being inundated at the moment with requests to provide such reports. Traditionally, they do not always charge the patient, although they do charge the DWP. Who is going to pay for, in some cases, multiple medical letters, especially as there is a good chance that a large proportion of claimants have a limited income?
Another thing is the scale of the task and the implementation timetable. As I have already said, new PIP claimants will start to be assessed next April. The figures involved are mind blowing. We as a Committee concluded:
“It is…essential that DWP allows itself sufficient time to get the assessment right and to be able to convince disabled people and their representatives that this is the case.”
It is very difficult to see how that can happen under the existing timetable. How can the DWP hope to learn from the early implementation of 10,000 new claims a week from April 2013 in time to implement new claims nationally from June 2013? The Department has from April to June to see whether the thing is working for new claimants. Why is there no pause before national implementation to make that assessment and see whether there is anything that has to change? We know that with all welfare benefit changes there are always unintended consequences and difficulties that people did not expect—they start hammering our doors, as MPs, saying, “This is what has happened.”
What happens if the assessments are found to take much longer than anticipated in the planning? What if there is found to be a greater need for home visits than was envisaged? All that takes longer. What if the descriptors are simply found not to work in real-life situations? I know there has been some testing, but there seems to be no time to test the final descriptors, which we have not seen yet.
I have done a very quick calculation—I suppose it is called a back-of-a-fag-packet calculation—that we have almost 2 million DLA claimants, and the Government will have 31 months end-to-end to assess all of them. We should remember that, to begin with, they will assess only 10,000 claimants a week, but the DWP will have to reassess some 70,000 claimants a month. That, in itself, is a huge amount. The calculation is fairly rough and ready, and I am not saying that that is the figure, but it will be in that ballpark.
The DWP is already assessing people for the move from IB to ESA. At the moment, the number is meant to be some 11,000 a week, but we know the providers are finding that incredibly difficult to manage. They are finding 11,000 a week—44,000 a month—difficult to achieve, and they will have 70,000 DLA/PIP assessments and 40,000 or 50,000 IB/ESA assessments to do, so to deliver their timetable they are looking at having to assess 100,000-plus disabled people face-to-face each month.
I do not think that is going to be possible, because I do not think there are enough health care professionals in the country for Atos or Capita to get through such a work load. I would not be particularly perturbed if the timetable slipped, which might be what is needed, but the Government have set a rod for their own back by trying to get so many people through the assessments when we know, anecdotally—we do not have the final figures—that they are really struggling to deliver the much lower numbers who are being put through the work capability assessment.
We know that being online might speed up the process—as a Committee, we have some concerns about that—but the online claims system will not be available for April 2013. Is that not indicative of a rushed implementation process? The most important thing is that we need the claimants’ outcomes to be tracked. Will the outcomes be tracked as part of an evaluation strategy? What monitoring will the Government put in place to ensure that all that is working and not falling apart?
Mr Amess, you will be glad that I am about to draw my remarks to a close because I know other people want to speak. I realise I have asked a lot of questions, and other colleagues will have questions, too, so I appreciate that the Minister will not be able to answer them all, but we look forward to taking evidence from her.
I have one last question on the legislative process. When will the final regulations and the final assessment criteria be laid before Parliament? Will the criteria be published in draft before the regulations are laid? If so, when?
We think that time is running out and that the Government have, unfortunately, started off on the wrong foot on what could be a useful reform by giving a lot of wrong messages to disabled people. It is understandable why disabled people feel that the reform is not to help them but merely a cost-saving measure.
The people who will be involved in the process are the most vulnerable people in society. It will be difficult for all of them, including those who will qualify for the benefit and for whom there is no doubt that they will qualify. If the WCA and the change to ESA are anything to go by, even those genuine claimants feel very stressed at having to go through this process. It is incumbent on the Government to get the process right and make it as easy for people as possible and to listen to the criticisms and do something about them, because the people who will lose out are those who need the money they receive through the DLA, and consequently PIP, to survive and have any kind of quality of life at all. They depend on that money to participate fully in society. I am sure the Government agree that that is the absolutely correct and laudable aim of any benefit, and they have to ensure that they deliver.
Mr David Amess (in the Chair)
I apologise to the hon. Lady for not addressing her by her correct title, which is Dame Anne Begg. Secondly, on behalf of the House, I should have welcomed her back after her awful accident, which I learned about in The House magazine. I am sure I speak for everyone in welcoming her back.
Stephen Lloyd (Eastbourne) (LD)
It is a privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Amess. It is also a privilege to follow the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg), Chair of the Work and Pensions Committee, of which I am a member.
Some of my colleagues already know that, unfortunately, and in true DLA style, my hearing aid conked out a few days ago, so I do not have it with me. I am rather deaf, so if the folk on my right want to intervene, they should wave furiously. If I miss that, Mr Amess, please let me know. I apologise, but that is the reality of disability.
Introducing a new disability benefit in place of one that has been around for a number of years is fraught with complexity, anxiety, and often inaccurate media reporting. Consequently, I intend to drill down to a number of the specific features and concerns that the Select Committee has with the new personal independence payment benefit, and the current response from the Department for Work and Pensions. This is a complex issue. The hon. Lady mentioned a number of areas where we have concern. I have flagged some of them up before, and I am going to be precise.
I hope that all of us in the Chamber agree, to a varying extent, that disability living allowance is a benefit based on unclear criteria, is not well understood and has no proper system of reviewing awards. The Committee recognised that. For example, the 2004-05 national benefit review found that approximately £630 million of DLA per year was overpaid as a result of unreported changes in circumstances, while £190 million was underpaid—vital support not reaching the people for whom it was intended.
The concept behind the introduction of PIPs is to ensure that the state, rightly, can continue to support those individuals experiencing the greatest barriers to living an independent life while ensuring that the benefit continues to remain affordable and sustainable. It is also worth noting that the new PIP assessment has been developed in conjunction with a group of independent health, social care and disability experts, and the DWP believes that it will be fairer, more objective and consistent. The theory is that there will be a more responsive and individualised process for ensuring that claimants continue to receive the right support. In taking evidence, the Committee found that the complex DLA claim forms can make it difficult for people to make a claim. Therefore, I and the Committee broadly support the Government’s intention to address those issues.
In addition, we found that there is no proper system for reviewing DLA awards; for instance, 24% of working-age DLA claimants have either had no change in, or no review of, their award for more than a decade, which underlines the Government’s point.
Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)
The problem I have with the 24% figure is that it mixes up two things. We have to acknowledge that. It seems to refer to people who have never been reviewed and to people who have had no change, which is not the same as not being reviewed. It could well be that they have been reviewed, but have had no change in their circumstances. The 24% figure is often put across as if people are not assessed. My experience with constituents is that a lot of working-age recipients of DLA are being assessed, because they come to me with their problems.
Stephen Lloyd
That is a moot point, because I know some people, even in my constituency, who have not been reviewed for many, many years, and who, in normal and sensible circumstances, would be going through a review process. The DWP has come up with the statistic and I think it is reasonably robust, but I take the hon. Lady’s criticism. Perhaps the Minister will clarify the matter.
Media coverage is one of the most challenging issues. The Department says that it recognises the need to work together and to do more to challenge and change negative attitudes towards disabled people. That is why, according to the Department, it is in the process of developing a new cross-Government disability strategy to give renewed impetus to the Government’s commitment to disability equality. Frankly, I do not think it is doing a very good job. I am disappointed with some of the media coverage in the past year or so, and, on occasion, with some of the responses, or even some of the stories that have been set running by either Ministers or the DWP.
The Committee recommended that the Government take on as a priority the fact that public opinion towards disabled people and disability benefits can be and is influenced by the media. We felt that the Government should take more stringent steps to ensure that their own contribution to media stories is accurate and contextualised by actively encouraging robust reporting of their own statistics on benefits.
Anne Marie Morris (Newton Abbot) (Con)
Does the hon. Gentleman agree—I think this emerged from the Select Committee report—that no Government and no political party can control the byline in a newspaper? I suspect that one of the challenges we have is that while we clearly need accuracy, we need to be mindful that we cannot control what the media write.
Stephen Lloyd
I agree to a great extent. The way that some of the media, particularly some of the tabloids, have been reporting the issue has been disgraceful. I have said that more times than anyone can possibly imagine. However, the DWP and the Government have an enormous responsibility when they are introducing such a seismic change to a benefit. Some of the time, the Government and Ministers have been good and positive, pushing strongly and actively the social model and what they are trying to achieve; at other times, they have been guilty of pandering to people who are more focused on what I might term the tabloid agenda.
The Government have an enormous responsibility, and I would like them to be aggressive. If one of the papers—I do not even need to mention them; we all know the ones I am talking about—comes out with a particularly inaccurate story, I would like to see the Minister and the Secretary of State dealing with it aggressively on the airwaves.
Glenda Jackson (Hampstead and Kilburn) (Lab)
Bylines in newspapers may not be the responsibility of the Government, but it is certainly the responsibility of the Government and the DWP to point out the fact that DLA is an in-work as well as an out-of-work benefit, which they markedly fail to do. They should also highlight the fact that more than 35% of families who claim housing benefit are in work, and that the reason they qualify for housing benefit is because their pay is so very low.
Stephen Lloyd
I agree entirely. A lot of people do not understand that the DLA was introduced to help to support disabled people in leading independent lives. I do not know the exact figures, but I know that an enormous percentage of people on DLA are in work. That is a very important point.
I retain doubts about whether that Select Committee recommendation has been followed, either by Ministers in their speeches or by the DWP, and urge that it be made a priority for the Government. However, I strongly support the steps taken by the coalition Government to involve disabled people in the process for devising and implementing PIP, which have proved effective. The DWP has continued to engage extensively with organisations that represent disabled people since May 2011, through its implementation development group, which has more than 50 members and represents a broad range of national and local disability organisations. Engagement at such a level should ensure that the operational design, implementation and ongoing operation of PIPs considers the informed perspectives of disabled people and their representative organisations.
As a consequence of advice and lobbying from me and other Select Committee members, the Department dropped its original proposals to end payment of the DLA mobility component for care home residents, after the Low review, and to extend the three-month qualifying period under DLA to six months under PIP.
I urge the DWP to continue to listen, consult and take on board advice from disabled people and their representative organisations, particularly about the descriptors in PIPs, which I shall come to later. For the record, the disability pressure groups and charities also have a responsibility to be factual in their advice, lobbying and media coverage, as much as the Government do. The victims of misreporting on both sides are disabled people themselves. That simply is not right.
I welcome the Government’s decision to support a three-month qualifying period for PIP, rather than extend it to six months as they originally intended. However, I support the Select Committee’s view that there is evidence of significant financial hardship caused during the current three-month DLA qualifying period, particularly for those with sudden-onset conditions. I ask the coalition Government seriously to consider the Select Committee’s recommendation to implement a facility for early eligibility, which could operate in the same way as that for terminal illnesses.
I welcome the changes made to the first draft of the PIP assessment criteria, which demonstrate that the Government have listened to concerns expressed by disabled people and their representatives. I have had a number of discussions with Lord Freud and his office, drilling down on how some descriptors written into the initial draft were inadequate. I look forward to the final draft, as does the Select Committee.
The DWP deserves credit for the way it has involved disability groups and disabled people in the co-production approach it has adopted to the development of the PIP criteria. However, thus far, mobility descriptors still concentrate too heavily on the ability to move a fixed distance and do not include barriers to accessing public transport, or the difficulties of some locations for individuals where routes to shops, public transport and so on are particularly challenging.
The PIP assessment criteria also tend towards the medical model of disability. This is an incredibly important point. I value the fact that the DWP understands, or appears to understand, the social model of disability and that it is about providing support for disabled people so that they may lead independent lives. However, within the PIP criteria, we seem to be slipping back to the medical model. I urge the Minister to watch that closely. For instance, those criteria do not properly take on board the barriers to being independently mobile that a blind person may have face. Yes, they may be able get to the shops or their workplace via a route they know, but the descriptors do not take into account the challenges that a blind person might face if they were travelling to a destination they did not know, which is not uncommon for all of us on a weekly basis. If I had a visual impairment and was using a route that I do not know, I would face a series of different challenges. The descriptors need to show understanding of that and to take it into account.
I was encouraged by the language used by the Minister’s predecessor, who described the PIP assessment as a conversation between claimant and assessor. It is vital that the PIP assessment does not take the same mechanistic approach, based on an inflexible computer system, as originally adopted for the work capability assessment by the previous Government. In time, though, I would like there to be a checking system or review system—call it what we will—that allowed PIP recipients to be reviewed without having to go through the stresses of face-to-face assessment. I suggest that a letter of support from a consultant or other expert in the field—someone with knowledge of their disability—should suffice once the face-to-face assessments have been completed.
I understand why the coalition Government are going through the process of face-to-face assessment—some people have not been reviewed for many years—but it is important that the DWP take on board the profound worry and stress that many disabled people and their families are going through because of the proposed changes. If the Government do not take this on board, they will be perceived as uncaring and their stated desire—our stated desire—to support the social model of disability and to provide additional support for those who need it while being properly careful with the public purse will turn to nothing. I for one will become not a supporter of the Government’s objectives, but a highly vocal opponent. I really do not want this to happen.
My many years in the field of disability lead me to recognise that the system is not good enough. An annual overpayment of more than £600 million and an underpayment of almost £200 million show that it is heavily flawed, but I request that the Government do all they can to ensure that we replace DLA with something better and fairer, and that works. PIP could be that, but it is not yet. I believe it can be and profoundly hope that it will be, by the time it is rolled out in the pilot scheme in April 2013. The coalition Government must get this right, because people’s financial security, their level of comfort and their daily lives heavily depend on it.
Mr David Amess (in the Chair)
Order. The winding-up speeches will start at 4 pm. I do not want to impose a time limit and I want to call everyone, if we can share the time out.
Glenda Jackson (Hampstead and Kilburn) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Stephen Lloyd). I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg), as Chair of the Select Committee, for her prescient, direct analysis of what we have found in our deliberations to be the areas that the Government must address with no small haste, because if they mess this one up, hundreds and thousands of people will suffer grievously for the inadequacies.
Concerns have already been expressed, which all hon. Members must have heard from our constituents, about the whole assessment process. We all have horror stories to tell about the previous Atos regime. It does not seem to have got any better, because the number of appeals against existing assessments, although not necessarily with regard to DLA, are rising exponentially and being upheld almost exponentially.
One of the most glaring holes in the Government’s approach to the assessment process is in the area of illnesses and disabilities that fluctuate, the most obvious to me, having had representation from my constituents, being Parkinson’s disease. I have also had representations on multiple sclerosis and myalgic encephalomyelitis, and that is long before we get into the variabilities of people who are lifelong sufferers of mental health problems, not least those who are bipolar. My hon. Friend gave an example of someone who may be perfectly capable of getting out of bed one day, but the next day is completely incapable of moving, but under the present structure they would possibly be deemed to be perfectly capable of moving every day. That is simply not the case.
Aside from the Government’s black propaganda agenda for people who claim the whole range of benefits, which we touched on earlier, the great irony of what is being proposed is that no one in Parliament or in the country would argue with the concept of assisting disabled people into work. That seems to be fundamental—why else do we have Equality Acts or laws against discrimination? We want people to work, and people with disabilities are themselves desperate to work, but the great paradox of the Government proposals is that they are actively working against the possibility of people with disabilities being able to get into work because the process is so cloudy and unclear, as is the other issue of what passported benefits—to use that good old cliché—they will still be able to claim.
Anne Marie Morris
Throughout the House there is acceptance that we want to do everything we can to enable people with disabilities to take a full part in life, whether working or not. If I may correct or add to what the hon. Lady said, I think it is true that more appeals have been unsuccessful than successful. My second point is the result of an interesting conversation that I had with our new Minister, who is dedicated to helping disabled people get into work. My constituents have said, “Well, that’s a lovely idea, but how can we do that when many of the jobs are nine-to-five?” I am pleased that the Minister is now looking carefully at what is happening in other jurisdictions to ensure that flexibility is available in the work on offer, so that those who have good days and bad days may still participate in the world of work.
Glenda Jackson
On the hon. Lady’s point about appeals not being upheld, the length of time taken to hear an appeal is growing exponentially—my favourite word—so we do not know. People are having to wait months before their appeal is heard, because of the increase in the number presented.
On the changes with regard to nine-to-five, with all due respect that applies to every woman who works—that situation already exists for women. The only job that they might be able to obtain is nine-to-five, although they have children who go to school and the times are completely outside their range. That is not something new that the Government have to address in particular for people with disabilities. If we are looking at the accessibility of existing jobs for people with disabilities, I give the example of one of my constituents who is profoundly deaf. One of the Government’s arguments on accessing the work capability assessment for DLA is that if people do not get the letter they can phone, but that is of absolutely no use to anyone who is profoundly deaf. It certainly does not help my constituent: if he goes along to the jobcentre because he has read about a job he could do, there is no one there to translate for him, so there are holes in the existing system, and I am concerned that they will become crevasses if the Government do not get their timing right and their assessment of people with DLA done within a reasonable period.
The assessments also need to take on board what we were told when the Government initially introduced their changes to the whole of the benefits system: the assessment process, which they accepted in the past had not been up to snuff, would be infinitely more flexible and sensitive. I see absolutely no signs, given the time scale for assessment of people with DLA, of greater flexibility and more sensitivity, which are absolute givens when talking about people whose lives will be fundamentally overturned if they fail to meet the precepts set down by the Government. With all due respect to my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South, who as I said gave a remarkable oversight of the evidence and the concerns expressed, the organisations that work in concert with and on behalf of people with disabilities remain seriously concerned because such questions are not being answered now. We had evidence before us in Committee last week of a coroner in Leicestershire, I think, who attributed a suicide to the individual’s concerns about having to go through the DLA assessment. From our constituents we all know of the anxiety already out there, which is actively having an effect on people now.
That was my introductory rant, but what I am most concerned about is the linkage between services for people with disabilities and local authorities providing such services. Owing to the massive cuts imposed on local authorities, we are already seeing a major downturn in, or removal of, services that many people with disabilities have been or still are dependent on, my favourite example being day centres. They can be a major part of enabling someone who, for example, cares for a person with disabilities to work and to maintain their families. Those day centres are being closed, without there being any idea how support will be provided in the area and made accessible to all those who need it. That is another major issue, as is the accessibility of affordable transport, which is seemingly being taken away every five minutes. The argument that has always been made is that the kinds of services required by people with disabilities should be in their local communities, where they can be reached. An example given to me was of a six-year-old boy who needs a hydrotherapy pool. There is such a pool at the end of his street, but although it is in a state school, he does not attend it, so he is precluded from using it and his family have to drive 23 miles there and back to take their child to a hydrotherapy pool.
The overarching argument that I am attempting to put forward is that local authorities have a vital part to play in ensuring that people with disabilities can work, and that they can make a contribution not only in the workplace but in their local communities so that their quality of life and that of their whole family is improved. As we all know, in many instances if one or possibly two people in a family are disabled, the entire family is focused on supporting those people. The needs of the family can often be as great, if not greater, than those of the one family member.
I have probably exhausted the points that I wished to make. I am grateful for everyone’s patience. I stress to the Minister, however, that this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity not only for her Government but for the people in this country who have disabilities and for the much wider community—namely, the whole country. In future, do we really wish to be presented as a people who rejected the most vulnerable in society and who believed the black propaganda and accepted that the vulnerable were all workshy, when we all know that that is the antithesis of the truth? We have a duty to ensure that our best might possibly be demonstrated by the care we take of our weakest.
Jane Ellison (Battersea) (Con)
Unfortunately, I have to go to a meeting between 3 and 4 pm, so I apologise to all colleagues in the Chamber and in particular to the Front Benchers if I miss any part of the wind-ups. It is nice to get an opportunity to comment, but as someone who hopes to join the Select Committee officially in the next few weeks, once the bureaucracy can be sorted out, I leave the detailed commentary to those who have helped to prepare such a detailed report and can comment with more expertise. I will confine myself to a few general observations and to a couple of things that I have taken from a brief glance at the report and the Government response.
One of the striking things is the consensus on the need to reform DLA. Clearly there are diverging views on how that might be done, but the consensus is interesting to see. I think it is generally agreed that DLA is a confusing benefit. I understand that fraud levels are low, so I agree with those comments, and I shall come back to the points about media coverage and so on. The DWP’s own figures estimate, however, that there is more than £600 million of overpayment and, more significantly, nearly £200 million of underpayment. Any benefit involving that level of misallocation of resource clearly needs to be looked at carefully to see how it can be reformed.
Once I knew I was likely to be joining the Select Committee and, in particular, to be contributing to this debate—although I have tried to speak in other debates on disability-related benefits—I made a particular point of talking to disabled people. I also have a disabled staff member, and over the last few days I have talked to carers of disabled people and looked at the case load that comes to my constituency surgery to try to get an insight into people’s lives and how they can be supported.
I took from the Committee’s report the concern about a big bang approach, and I note that the Government have said that the reforms will be phased in, although the Chairman of the Select Committee raised some concern about the phasing-in looking fairly big bang-ish, and I am sure the Minister will comment on that. However, it is sensible that some of the reforms have been characterised by not being big bang changes. The previous Government introduced some big bang reforms, and I understand from what former Ministers have said that they spent several years afterwards dealing with the consequences. I am sure that the Select Committee’s work is invaluable in trying to advise on how some of the reforms can be introduced without causing people unnecessary problems.
I also took from the Committee’s report—this goes partly to the point about coverage—concern about interaction with disabled people and the groups that represent them. The Government have responded positively to that. The snappily named personal independence payment implementation stakeholder forum is now holding a dialogue, and I am sure that the Minister will comment on its work and how it is informing the Government as they proceed.
I was interested to see that the Government have responded to some of the Committee’s recommendations, but other issues have been raised today to which they must also respond. I am firmly in the camp of my hon. Friend the Member for Eastbourne (Stephen Lloyd) as someone who very much wants the reforms to work, but I will use the knowledge that I have gained on the ground in my constituency and feed it back into areas where we may need to do something differently, because there is a slight danger. To put that into context:
“Our goal is to make responsibility the cornerstone of our welfare state.”
That could have been said by the Secretary of State, but it was in the Labour party’s manifesto at the last general election.
There is enormous consensus on the cornerstone of responsibility. I am not being partisan, but there is sometimes a danger that throwing up a series of practical concerns about implementation may add up to a cumulative whole that, if followed to its logical conclusion, might present an overwhelming case for not pressing ahead. I believe that there is an overwhelming case for pressing ahead and working through some of the implementation challenges, because there is a huge danger in not doing so. It may sometimes appear that throwing up such problems amounts to saying, “Let’s just put this in the ‘too difficult’ tray and come back to it in a few years.” That has been happening for decades, and it does a great disservice to the welfare state.
I want to pick up something that my hon. Friend the Member for Eastbourne said about the dialogue on welfare reform, and particularly that involving disability. I completely agree with the comments about some of the tabloid coverage, and I am sure that Ministers have taken on board the need for all of us to be responsible, but there is a flipside, and those charged with representing disabled people—the activist groups, charities and pressure groups—also have a responsibility not to alarm people unduly. I will give a practical example.
I recently went to the annual general meeting of an organisation that provides support and advice to people with disabled children. A lady from a welfare advisory group gave a 25-minute presentation, during which she presented, almost without exception, the possible downsides of the reforms without knowing anything about the personal circumstances of the people in the room, many of whom I knew pretty well because they were constituents and people I had dealt with. Some of them had much to gain from some of the reforms she was talking about, but her starting point was how things could get worse.
Two things struck me about the lady’s talk. In 25 minutes, she did not at any point mention work. She made an assumption that none of the people she was addressing were in work or would progress towards work. That was dispiriting. It is important that those on both sides of the argument do not exaggerate for effect, and the Chairman of the Select Committee made the point about some people’s vulnerability.
I take issue with the suggestion that all disabled people are among the most vulnerable people in our society. I do not believe that. An obvious and clichéd example is that many of the Paralympians we admired during the summer—they were clearly not vulnerable. They had a disability, and we wanted to help them to get over that disability and make the most of what are already fulfilling lives. My friend who works for me has a disability and needs help to fulfil his working life, but he is not intrinsically vulnerable. I take slight issue with that suggestion.
There are two recent reports—“The Tipping Point”, and “Holes in the Safety Net” which Baroness Grey-Thompson introduced last week.
Stephen Lloyd
My hon. Friend reminds me that I was at a meeting only last week when the partner of a blind person said that because his wife was blind and could not work they needed support. That was frustrating because, although I am sure he loves his wife, he was making the assumption that a blind person could not work. I know blind people who are earning more than £100,000 a year. We need to change public perception.
Jane Ellison
I could not agree more. It is central to these important reforms that we ask people what they can do, instead of what they cannot do.
Glenda Jackson
I take on board the hon. Lady’s point about overstatement of the most vulnerable, but some people who are asked that question are totally incapable of answering. A constituent who is 27 years old with a mental age of a six-year-old went to be reassessed. She is already in the system, and the assessor’s report was a million miles from the facts and the actuality. Without the new change that allowed her to take her mother with her, she would have been not only vulnerable but completely unsupported.
Jane Ellison
Absolutely. That intervention illustrates two points. First, there is an enormous range of disability; we are talking about huge diversity. We must be mindful of the fact that it is difficult to say anything that is true of all disabled people because of the extraordinary span of people covered, from the example just given to some of the people we saw winning gold medals for Britain during the summer. Secondly, the system has already been changed to respond to that concern, and that is exactly as it should be. I am sure that the Select Committee plays an important part in looking at evidence from life to see how a small tweak to the system can enable someone who is exceptionally vulnerable to be properly represented in the system.
Glenda Jackson
The hon. Lady is missing the essential point that I clearly failed to make. The decider in that instance is someone who has been appointed and financed by central Government. They make the decisions, and we have already spoken about the number of appeals arising. That individual should have said immediately, “This is absurd and no one should have sent you to see me”, but they went through the process. My only point is that the deciders of an individual’s life are sometimes a million miles from understanding. They are appointed by the Government, so it is the Government’s responsibility to ensure that assessors are up to the job.
Jane Ellison
I completely agree, but that is not a reason not to press ahead with important reforms.
To return to my previous point, it is sometime possible to give the impression that when a series of practical concerns amass to so great a number—many have been brought up today—that is a reason not to proceed. That is exactly why we have made the mistake of leaving things in the “too difficult” tray in the past.
Teresa Pearce (Erith and Thamesmead) (Lab)
I thank the hon. Lady for giving way; she is being very generous. On the problems that are being experienced, is it not the job of Government, the Opposition and all of us here to use our experience to ensure that when contracts are drawn up, they are the best contracts possible? It is not fair to say that it is oppositionism; it is experience. The hon. Lady said that there have been amendments to the Atos contract, and she is right, but this time we would like there to be no need for further amendments. The contract should be right in the first place. What we are saying is, “Let’s look at what could go wrong and what has gone wrong, and let’s get it right this time.”
Jane Ellison
I do not disagree with the hon. Lady, and I have not used the word “oppositionist”. What I am trying to convey is that by constantly focusing on the things that might go wrong or sometimes do, we are not always talking about the things that have gone wrong; sometimes, we project forward and consider things that could go wrong, and that in itself can become a reason to doubt the point of the reform. That is the point I am making. We need to try to show some balance.
Finally, I believe in the welfare state. It is an enormously important, civilising aspect of our modern society. A problem we have at the moment is that there is not a general buy-in from the general public. We have talked about the media and some of the red-top coverage, and so on. This is a critical juncture for the welfare state. If we care about it and believe that it is vital to everything that we are as a country, that should make us more determined to press on with reforming the parts of it that clearly are not working.
Stephen Lloyd
I thank the hon. Lady for giving way. Does she agree that the welfare state, which I, too, passionately support, should be about a hand-up and not a handout? There are many tens of thousands of people with disabilities and disabled people already in work, and many more who would do outstandingly in jobs if they were given the right support to do those jobs and not seen by society as victims, which they are not.
Jane Ellison
I absolutely agree, and that is why it is so important to rebuild the general confidence across our nation in our welfare state. Reform cannot be put off any longer, and although there might be difficulties and practical hurdles, we have to work through them. So long as people do not see the welfare state and disability support through the prism that my hon. Friend described, but instead have an unhelpful, negative, tabloid view of it, we will continue to lose the trust and the buy-in. That point is absolutely fundamental, and I hope that as part of the Work and Pensions Committee I can play a thoughtful and responsible role in holding the Government to account. I support the broad thrust of the Government’s reforms, because the future of the welfare state and the respect in which it is held are at stake if we do not press on and get this right.
Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)
Thank you, Mr Amess. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, and I look forward to welcoming the hon. Member for Battersea (Jane Ellison) when she becomes a full member of the Work and Pensions Committee.
This is not a partisan point, but for clarification I should say that the Opposition support genuine reform when there are clear issues. We have never said that we do not. The issue raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg), the Chair of the Committee, is that the reforms are cuts. That is an important point to have made. There are practical issues that we need to address, but fundamentally, the evidence supplied to us independently indicates that the reforms are cuts.
Debbie Abrahams
I give way to the hon. Member for Newton Abbot (Anne Marie Morris).
Anne Marie Morris
The hon. Lady is very generous. As I understand it, when we look at the figures in terms of the reduced amount available in future—the 20% cut, as she would describe it—and the assessment for the old DLA, which took account of expected changes, there is no difference. I am not sure, therefore, that the talk about cuts is correct. It is more about recognising that the current system does not work, because people who need the support do not get it, and the people who do not need it, do. The cuts are really about trying to rebalance that.
Debbie Abrahams
I should also have said that I have to leave soon. I apologise because I will not be taking any more interventions, but I am happy to answer that question. What the Chancellor said in the emergency Budget in June 2010 was clear:
“It is right that people who are disabled are helped to lead a life of dignity. We will continue to support them, and we will not reduce the rate at which this benefit is paid. However, three times as many people claim it today than when it was introduced 18 years ago, and the costs have quadrupled in real terms to more than £11 billion a year, making it one of the largest items of Government spending.”—[Official Report, 22 June 2010; Vol. 512, c. 173.]
As my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South said, there will be a 20% reduction in the number of people who are able to have a disability-related benefit awarded to them, and significant savings, again, can be identified within the Government’s impact assessment.
I want to unpick what the Chancellor said in that statement. He was, and is, saying that even if the prevalence of people with disabilities has grown by three times—there was a very unpleasant undertone implying that it had not—sorry, folks, it is just not sustainable. That is the key message that has been coming through, as my hon. Friend made clear. The impact assessment on the personal independence payment was, again, telling. It said:
“The new benefit will help to ensure that expenditure on DLA is sustainable and resources focused on those most in need of additional support.”
It goes on to assert that although there is an association between low income and poor health, there is limited evidence that providing money will improve health, which is correct. However, it continued:
“It is possible that the policy could have positive impacts on health if it leads to more disabled people moving into work.”
That, too, is very telling. First, the evidence was deflated or inflated, depending on what it said, to support the policy to get rid of DLA and replace it with PIP. The evidence was clearly manipulated and the lack of a comprehensive evidence base is shameful; my hon. Friend referred to that. There is real concern that the policy is being railroaded through. As we have discussed, there are a number of independent disabled people who are able to work. That is absolutely fantastic, but there are also some very vulnerable disabled people. The benefit should take them into account as much as it does those who are independent.
Secondly, the impact assessment makes an association with the positive impacts of work on health—which again, there are—when DLA has always been about helping contribute to the extra costs of being disabled. It is not an out-of-work benefit, so that relates to shifting the mindset of what the change is about. That is so important. The allowance has always been about supporting people with disabilities to lead as normal a life as possible.
For the record, the evidence on the trends in disability reflects our industrial heritage. The regions with heavy industries and occupations that did people’s health no favours have the highest rates of disability and ill health. There are diseases such as coal miners’ pneumoconiosis, asbestosis and silicosis. Of course, many of those diseases have long latencies, and there are industrial accidents that Members will be familiar with. Most work is good for people’s health, but not all, and there is strong evidence about that.
As I have said, we can agree—there is consensus across the House—that the DLA system, as it stands, is flawed. For example, a clear system for reviewing some awards is needed, but we should not restrict the access to support to overcome the barriers to day-to-day living that a person with a disability faces. That is what we need to address.
As I said before, the Government’s own estimates predict that more than 500,000 people will not receive this support. As many expert witnesses in the Select Committee’s inquiry concluded, cutting DLA is nothing more than a cost-cutting exercise. It is part of the wider erosion of the welfare state. As has been said, public buy-in is achieved by changing our view of what welfare is about. Unfortunately, the Government have a willing accomplice in the media to help them to do that.
I am really disappointed. We have talked about the role of the media. We have done a number of reports highlighting the importance of the media’s role and of responsible press releases and statements. However, this morning on the “Today” programme, the Secretary of State was talking as though people who are claiming benefits are a drain on society. It was a very inaccurate portrayal of benefit recipients. It was an attempt once again to suggest that the majority are workshy scroungers when the facts are that most people on benefits are in work and most are net contributors to the Treasury. That was not being reported; it was as though people were really abusing the system. There have been a number of such reports, and that has to change.
In addition to the reporting and the way in which attitudes to welfare are being changed, a system is being created in which people on higher incomes see themselves as separate to or outside the welfare state. We are not in post-war Britain. At that time, there was buy-in to the welfare state by everyone. Everyone saw themselves as contributing to and gaining from it. We were literally all in it together.
The final issue—this happened in the US under Reagan—is the putting in place of policies whose implications are unclear. Little has been done to assess the impact on the people they will affect. We have talked about the shameful impact assessment. My hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South talked about the lack of information available on the implications of this benefit change.
Despite a detailed, evidence-based inquiry by the Select Committee, the Government have rejected our recommendations out of hand. They seem determined to press on with what they are doing. I really have concerns about that. My hon. Friend mentioned the case in which a coroner reported that a suicide could be directly attributed to the pressure that was felt by someone with mental illness as a result of having to go through the work capability assessment. Is this really the type of society that we want to live in? I ask that question because I have—
Debbie Abrahams
I will not. I am sorry, but I have only a few minutes and then I have to make a school visit.
I appreciate that I am talking about work capability assessments, but we have seen from the evidence that there is a link with the process that is to be adopted.
I want to touch briefly on the issues that have been mentioned in depth by colleagues. I have already talked about access to benefits being restricted. The application process is made as complicated and bureaucratic as possible, so that people already on DLA have to opt in rather than migrate across—the so-called “brown envelope syndrome”.
The assessment process is another issue because of the criteria used. They have little clinical relevance. It is a case of trying to set a very high minimum bar. I know, because I have met their representatives, that the royal colleges and the British Medical Association are really concerned that the criteria have not been developed in conjunction with them; they are often punitive and meaningless.
Similarly, there is an issue about assessors not being qualified in the conditions that they are assessing. That is an absolute nonsense. In addition, little attention is paid to the medical reports submitted in the assessment process. As an aside, I think that it is rather bizarre that Atos was contracted to undertake PIP assessments after such a poor performance on the WCA, but in Scotland it is sub-contracting the undertaking of the assessments to the NHS. What is going on? If this is about saving money, surely that is not the way to do it. In addition, there is little reassurance that someone will not be subjected to myriad assessments, potentially exacerbating their existing condition.
[Jim Sheridan in the Chair]
On the point about evidence, I have said this already but it is inexcusable that we do not have a comprehensive impact assessment that is able to predict—there are methods by which this can be done; I have used them myself—what the impacts will be, not just on claimants but on other services and on society as a whole. We should be doing that. I welcome the new Minister, but I hope that she will reflect on the recommendations that we have made and reconsider this change, in light of the huge concerns about its implementation.
Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Mr Sheridan. Given the colour of your shirt and tie, you are obviously celebrating “Think Pink” week or whatever it is. That is germane to some of the people who have to claim the kind of benefits that we are dealing with today.
I sincerely welcome the hon. Member for Battersea (Jane Ellison); I am sure that she will indeed be joining the Select Committee. We have missed our Conservative members at the last few meetings. It might be thought that we would find that a bit of a relief, but actually it is very good to have the debate that we usually have. I am sure that the hon. Lady will be relieved to know that it is a Select Committee in which we do not necessarily spend a lot of time berating one another; there is often a wide area of agreement.
I would like to take up a couple of points before going on to the more detailed issues that I wanted to raise. People think that this is a change for the worse because of the context from which it started. That is very important to remember. It is still about reducing the number of people who will be on PIP compared with DLA. That is in the Department’s own impact assessment. It is about saving money. That not only coloured the beginning of the process, but has continued to colour the process. People are very concerned that things may get worse for them or members of their families.
I take slight issue with the comment made by the hon. Member for Battersea that previous Governments left all this in the “Too difficult” tray. My right hon. Friend the Member for Stirling (Mrs McGuire), who will be answering this debate on behalf of the Opposition, will have the scars to prove that that was not the case. Changes were made to many of the benefits that existed; I do not think that it is true to say that nothing changed.
I find slightly odd some of the language that has been used in relation to the need to reform DLA. The suggestion has sometimes been that it is a very old benefit that has to be modernised and brought up to date. In fact, it is not that old—20 years old is not Victorian; it cannot even be described as post war. There is a tendency to exaggerate some of the claims, and if people do that, there is a danger—
Jane Ellison
On the point about exaggeration, I take the point made a moment ago about where things started—the way a debate starts out and how it is framed can influence the tone of it thereafter. I accept that point.
Would the hon. Lady accept that there is a duty and responsibility on those who support the best interests of disabled people not to assume the worst in every circumstance—not to highlight only the cuts aspect or whatever of reforms, but to present them in a more balanced way? Many important reports, including the two I referred to in my speech, are based on opinion surveys of disabled people or their families. Colouring opinion by misrepresenting the facts feeds directly into how people feel and becomes self-perpetuating. I seek balance on both sides in the tone used in the discussion.
Sheila Gilmore
I would not suggest that exaggerated comments have not been made. In answering or writing to constituents, I certainly find myself at times being careful to say, “I think this is wrong” or “I think this should not be done”, while not panicking people, so I tell them that it is not happening tomorrow, that there is time and that they should seek advice. It is important that people are not unnecessarily concerned.
The atmosphere in which the debate is ongoing is not helping. It is easy to blame the media, but there is still a tendency on the part of Ministers, whether they intend to or not, to juxtapose benefit claimants with hard-working people. Only the other week, the Prime Minister spoke about people heading out to work in the early hours of the morning, seeing their neighbour’s curtains closed and feeling rightly angry.
That neighbour with the curtains closed might be a night-shift worker or someone with an illness, which might not be visible. It is clear that those with mental health difficulties or less obvious conditions are those who people see and think, “What are they doing on benefit? How is that happening?” It does not help to compare and contrast continually in that way. It engenders some of the responses that we get.
The Government have to be careful about how they present their statistics. There have been improvements of late, in that not quite such provocative statements have been made in response to statistics, but it is not all about media spinning. There is a tendency with the statistics—this week, for example, on the outcome of ESA assessments—to emphasise how many people are found fit for work, with an undertone of, “which means that they were previously scroungers or not entitled to the benefit.” We have not had the migration statistics on ESA, so they were new claimants; they are claiming for the first time.
Let us have a comparator. Let us see what happened previously with incapacity benefit, for example, when people claimed for the first time. I hope that we are careful not to fall into the same trap when the PIP statistics come out. Some 50% of those who try to claim DLA are refused, so if 50% of those who try to claim PIP are also refused, I hope that it will not be hinted at or suggested that that in some way proves that people were getting a benefit that they should not have had. Remember what a baseline is and look at it that way.
Teresa Pearce
Does my hon. Friend agree that a possible unintended consequence of such media reports and skewed statistics is that employers who have read those reports may be more prejudiced against people with disabilities, who already face prejudice, who want a job, and against those who have been on benefit and want a job? It makes it more difficult to get those people back to work.
Sheila Gilmore
I hope that employers would not form that view, but there are dangers.
If the Government wanted to reform, the way to start would have been to discuss seriously the issues around DLA, not to start from an assumption that it was somehow old-fashioned, not working and that people did not understand it, so we had to throw the whole thing in the air and start all over again. That leaves aside how the reform was couched in terms of financial savings.
If the Government wanted to make a change, it would have been helpful to have the discussion and carry out the research. If we think back to when the White Paper came out in late 2010, an extraordinarily short time was given for people’s responses. It was a generalised paper, and the extensive response to it was responded to in a very simplified fashion. That did not help. If we had sat down with a lot of the groups in the first place, we might have come out with a better ending.
Obviously, as a Select Committee, we look at the details. The hon. Member for Battersea was correct to say that we have to be careful that we do not end up seeing the trees and not the wood, but details are part of the job of a Select Committee. One thing that we all say, and we all feel strongly about, is that we must get the assessments right first time, which is precisely what appears not to have happened with the WCA.
We know that the cost of appeals is met by the DWP, not the provider.
Stephen Lloyd
I completely concur with the hon. Lady about the statistics on the WCA and the level of successful appeals. Does she agree that the changes to the WCA that the coalition Government have brought in, with Professor Harrington’s reports, will mean that the first assessment is wrong for fewer people and that the new WCA is more effective and productive?
Sheila Gilmore
Unfortunately, the statistics do not yet show a huge change. The latest statistics show a small reduction in the number of successful appeals, but the number is still very high. Statistics always lag back a few months, so it may be that further improvements are still to come, which would be good. It is particularly important that we get this benefit reform right.
Many people, including those in the disability field and Opposition Members, have asked whether there is any penalty of any sort on the assessor for not doing the job as they should. We are constantly told that we cannot have the information because it is all commercially sensitive. I can understand that perhaps being the case during the tendering process, but I am not clear why it is deemed to be quite so commercially sensitive once the contract is awarded. We still do not know. Public money is going to these organisations, so it is important that we have confidence that this time there is a system in place.
The Select Committee’s recommendation was:
“DWP contracts with private companies for the delivery of the PIP assessment”
should
“directly link the payment of public funds to the production of reliable assessment reports that are ‘right first time’.”
Now that the contracts have been awarded, I hope that the Minister can tell us whether that has been done and whether it will be monitored and reported on. Obviously, if the assessments are much better, there will not be many penalties, but we need to know now whether that link has been made. It would give people more confidence in the process.
The Chair of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg), briefly mentioned contracting. The PIP assessments have been let on a regional basis. In Scotland and the north of England, Atos won the contract, but it appears to be subcontracting to NHS Lanarkshire to carry out the assessments.
If Atos is not doing the work, what is it getting out of the contract? How much of the contract price goes to Atos and how much to Salus? Salus is the not-for-profit arm of NHS Lanarkshire; it does other forms of occupational health work, which is why it was selected. It is not unreasonable to ask those questions. Such arrangements are becoming all too typical in this new world of outsourcing to large, all-purpose, public service, private companies.
We saw it in the Work programme. At the apex are the big boys such as G4S, A4e and Serco. Sometimes they do the work themselves; sometimes they subcontract; sometimes the subcontractors subcontract. At the bottom of the heap some of the sub-subcontractors see little of the payments. That is a major problem.
What are some of those big companies being paid to do? Are they being paid just to put the contract together? Are they just creaming something off the top? They are certainly not shouldering the risk for their subcontractors, because when those get into trouble—with the Work programme, at least—they are not bailed out by the prime contractor. The main contractors do not carry a financial risk of that kind.
We need to know what is happening with the process. The question arises whether it might not have been easier to contract the work in the first place directly to the NHS. If we talk about these things a lot, it is because people naturally think there may be a connection. My hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams) pointed out that in statements that have been made in the past the connection with WCA was made overtly. It is not only we who make it.
The question of targets has been controversial. Atos has said there are no targets in relation to WCA. The Government have vehemently denied that there are targets. However, it now seems clear from people who have worked as health care professionals in this field for Atos—and this came out of the television documentaries in the summer as well—that there are expectations about normal and correct outcomes of assessments. Health care professionals whose performance deviates from those expectations are audited so that their performance can improve towards them. We must ask ourselves at what point an expectation becomes a target, or when there is very little difference between the two.
If there are such expectations, what cognisance will there be of regional variations in ill health—and even variations within regions? Partly because of industrial history, certain forms of ill health are more prevalent in some areas and they are likely to have a greater number of people with certain conditions than others. If there are to be targets or expectations, whatever we may call them, such things must be taken into account. However, since we do not know the guidance, we do not know whether they are taken into account. I hope that they are.
If the Government want people to be more confident about the changes, they must be more open and transparent about them. In the absence of such openness and transparency people reach conclusions, rightly or wrongly, which tend, in modern parlance, to go viral around the disability community. People then get very frightened.
Another aspect of the matter that has, I suppose, come out of the WCA experience, is to do with what kind of assessment is being carried out and the attempt to restrict complex conditions to a simple set of descriptors. The aim from the outset seems to have been, certainly with WCA, to create a system that could perform large numbers of assessments and achieve reliable and replicable results. People have often complained about a tick-box approach, and that seems to me to be a direct result of that attempt.
It is not just bad practice by Atos; sometimes, critics concentrate too hard on Atos and not enough on the underlying system. I think that what happens is inherent in the adoption of what is effectively a computerised test approach. I am sure it was sold to the Government as the IT answer to carrying out assessments. I think that we all know that IT magic miracle cures are often oversold by those who sell them. Before the Minister says so, I know that it was the previous Government who introduced the WCA and the form of test in question. The fact that they turned out to have inherent difficulties should not mean that we should not criticise them and consider whether we were perhaps naive to think an IT solution could deliver all that was needed.
Mrs Anne McGuire (Stirling) (Lab)
Does my hon. Friend also accept that the previous Government had already established some monitoring and evaluation of the WCA as it was initially introduced? They did not go for a big bang approach but were going to role it out gradually, so that lessons could be learned.
Sheila Gilmore
Certainly the system had been operating for some time before the roll-out to all the existing invalidity benefit claimants, but it is not clear that the evaluation was put in place first. I think at the time we said that as some concerns were being considered, and new ways of doing things were being found, it would have been more sensible to put those changes in place before moving everyone else across.
The WCA experience tells us that IT is a tool, and should never become the master of the process. The computerised test should not be the whole of the assessment process. What comes through loud and clear from Professor Harrington’s report is the importance of seeing the computerised assessment as only a part of the whole. Gathering essential documentary evidence early in the process is important. I often heard the previous Employment Minister say that people come to WCA appeal tribunals with information that was not there in the first place—as if people keep it hidden at home and deliberately wait for the appeal to produce the information. Many of the appellants say that no one asked them for it. Some people have even said that they turned up at assessments with information that was not looked at. We must ensure that information is made available from the outset.
The other important thing, according to Professor Harrington, was that DWP decision makers should not simply rubber stamp the computerised assessment. They should consider the position in the round—look at the documentary evidence and consider the situation again. That change should now be in place for the WCA, and there are signs that that is happening, although when I have asked the Government questions about how many Atos assessments are changed by DWP decision makers, I have been told that the information is not kept in that form. Again, it is quite difficult to know exactly what is happening.
The Minister’s predecessor gave us to understand that the PIP assessment would be very different. In the Government’s response to our report, they said:
“The face-to-face consultation, as part of the Personal Independence Payment assessment, is fully intended to be a two-way conversation between the claimant and the health professional, allowing a detailed exploration of how the claimant’s health condition or disabilities affect their day-to-day lives. The discussion at the consultations should not be mechanistic and should be tailored to individuals. This is being clearly expressed to potential providers as part of the tendering for Personal Independence Payment assessment contracts and will be set out in detail in the supporting guidance for providers and their staff. The guidance will stress the importance of positive interaction throughout all aspects of the assessment. The contract will require assessors to have excellent interpersonal and communication skills, including the ability to interact with people sensitively and appropriately.
The Department is not placing targets on the time required for face-to-face consultations and is making clear to potential providers that consultations will need to be as long as necessary to reach evidence-based conclusions on individual cases.”
That sounds wonderful, and if it happens we will definitely have a much better assessment process than the WCA one that we have criticised. I have a problem reconciling it with the contract approach. Has it been built into the contracts? How will it work? If an assessment on one day, for one person, takes as long as is needed, what happens to the other people sitting in the building waiting to be assessed?
Are those people going to be sent home or asked to come back another day? What effect will that have on the number of assessments carried out? What are the targets or expectations of how many assessments should be carried out each week or month? There is a conflict—a tension, at least—between those hopeful and optimistic words and a contract-based system that has expectations of putting through a large number of people over a short space of time.
The Committee was also concerned about the frequency of reassessments. Although we accepted that there should be more reassessments than previously, we had concerns about how often people should have to go back through that process. It is very stressful and expensive for claimants. Stress can affect people’s health and make them worse rather than better.
Dr Eilidh Whiteford (Banff and Buchan) (SNP)
I am glad the hon. Lady has raised that point. The whole question of getting to assessments has been one of the biggest issues around the WCA for people who live far away and often depend on relatives or friends to take them. It can mean a whole day trip for a simple—and sometimes unnecessary—assessment process.
Sheila Gilmore
That is where I hope we will see a more flexible approach that in some cases allows for a decision to be made without the absolute necessity of a face-to-face assessment. That should certainly apply in the case of reassessment, even if not always for the first assessment. There will be some cases, even when it is the first occasion, when the obviousness of someone’s situation should make a face-to-face assessment unnecessary.
There is sometimes a reluctance to accept that anybody falls into that category. It is important to give people optimism and hope. I had a constituency case concerning WCA, although it could have applied equally to DLA. A constituent’s son has a number of conditions but basically he is a 21-year-old toddler. He had no concept of what he was to be put through, but his mother did. He had been kept at his special education school for some time beyond normal school leaving age. However, he now had to apply for the benefit. His mother asked whether it was absolutely necessary to take him to an assessment. His inability to handle new situations is so great that she cannot get him into strange places and buildings.
When she phoned to ask about that, she was repeatedly told that there would have to be an assessment and that she would just have to do it. She filled in the form and sent it in. She was then told that he had been granted the benefit without an assessment. That is good, but she had been put through a lot of unnecessary stress, because one bit of the Department did not seem to know that that was possible under certain circumstances. Anyone who had met him would quickly see that the young man was clearly entitled to the benefit and to be in the support group. There was no way he could undertake employment any more than any toddler could.
There are real cases of people who should not be put through all that and the extra difficulties. Apparently, one of the providers is proposing to do quite a lot of home visits and that might take out some of the difficulty. However, that prompts the questions of whether the process will take longer and of how to deal with the large numbers involved. It has been described as a much bigger challenge than the migration from incapacity benefit to ESA. The Department is taking on a bigger challenge before it has completed the previous one.
One problem encountered by people who appeal under the WCA process is that the reassessment comes through quickly thereafter. One oddity is that the decision on the reassessment period is based on the recommendation of the original assessment. The original assessment might say that someone should be reassessed within a year. The person might then appeal and win. If the appeal takes 10 months, that person could still be called back for reassessment two months later, even though the decision to call someone back within a year was based on an original flawed assessment. It does not seem sensible to operate such a procedure. There seems to be no reason why a decision about reassessment should not be reviewed if someone wins an appeal.
The Government response said that the recall time for reassessments could be almost any length; they could be a year or 10 years. They would never again be indefinite. A year is a very short time when one considers that to qualify for the benefit in the first instance, it is necessary to demonstrate that the condition is likely to last for at least a further six months. I would suggest that over-short periods will put everybody through unnecessary difficulty.
Other speakers have mentioned the piloting phase. It defies belief that a proper evaluation of a pilot can be done within two months and then the results applied. That is what is being suggested. The initial roll-out in the Bootle office will start in April. The roll-out to new claimants in the whole of the UK will start in June. There is barely time to get enough data to make an appropriate evaluation, let alone carry out that evaluation and then make changes.
The Department constantly tells us in connection with this benefit and universal credit that it now has an agile system that allows details to be changed as things go along and it can keep rolling out in different ways. That was not our experience with the Harrington changes in WCA. It took months for most of those changes to be put in place. When we asked about it, we were told, “We have got to draw up new instructions to staff. They have to be sent out to staff. New training has to be put in place.” In effect, between the first Harrington report in November 2010 and the following summer, some of the changes began to be rolled out. The explanation we were given for the time lag was that that was the time it takes to go through a process of getting staff ready for the changes.
How is it that suddenly, only a year later, the Department is confident that it can have a pilot, evaluate it and roll out changes and make a real difference to people who are making claims? In October next year, the process of ending people’s DLA claims and inviting them to apply for PIP will begin. The whole process is quite tight and does not give opportunity for proper evaluation and tracking of what is happening to people. Perhaps the Minister can tell us whether there will be a proper evaluation of the Bootle pilot. Who is to carry it out? When will the results be known? Does she think it makes sense to move to the full roll-out in June?
Monitoring and tracking changes of this sort is important. We need to know how this will be monitored in an ongoing way. I was appalled to discover how little tracking seems to go on of the results of the ESA process. Parliamentary questions that I have asked about the destinations of people who are found fit for work are often answered with, “We do not keep that information. We may know who is on benefit and who is in employment, but as for other things, we do not know.”
The previous Government put in place a research project that started to track such information, but I think that it has now stopped. It had a first and second wave, but there is no sign of the research continuing. Perhaps the Minister will let me know whether I am wrong.
On ESA, the project found that within a year of people being found fit for work, 43% were neither in work nor in receipt of an out-of-work benefit. That is an awful lot of people simply to disappear. There are a whole lot of reasons for that; people may have gone on to jobseeker’s allowance, run out of the contributory JSA or they may have a working partner. Some may have a small pension because they were retired from work early on health grounds—even though they were then found to be fit for work, which is not uncommon.
There may be lots of reasons, but, as a responsible Parliament and Government, we really should know the effect that this measure is having. These people are seeing a substantial reduction in their incomes. They may have been in a two-income household, which then becomes a one-income household plus a benefit and then a one-income household possibly with the additional costs of having an illness of some kind.
What happens to those people and their standard of living is important. It is the same with the change we are discussing. Some may say that making the change will be good. We were even told by the Minister’s predecessor that some people who previously did not get this benefit—especially mental health applicants—will do so now. We may have even more people getting the benefit. We need to know all the information. I hope that we will have a proper research project and that the Minister will tell us that it is being fully funded by Government.
As for the housing benefit changes, the Government have put in place a research project, which is being carried out by one of the universities. A baseline piece of work has been done, so that we know what we are measuring against, and then it will look at the effect of the changes. If we are going to do that, we should have been doing the baseline now, but perhaps we are and I simply do not know about it.
Data collection is important as well. There have been some hints that the Government will be doing less reporting and data collection on benefit recipients. However, if we do not collect the data, we cannot do the research, even if we try to do it later. At the moment, we can find out how many people claiming DLA are doing so in relation to different conditions. We can tell the proportions of people who are receiving the benefit because of Parkinson’s or other such conditions. If we stop collecting these data—I hope the Minister will reassure me that there is no such intention—we will have a much less clear view of what is happening. Hopefully, we will go on collecting them.
Finally, the implications of the change not being a migration are important. People will consider it to be a migration if they had received incapacity benefit and are now on ESA—of course, not every DLA recipient is in that category. The notion that people will necessarily respond, and respond in time, is fraught with difficulty. Possibly the first time people will notice it is when their benefits stop. Suddenly the benefit will stop, and they will say, “What has happened here?” They will go and get advice and then discover that they have missed the boat—they had not gone ahead as they should have done.
The time scales are short. From the letter’s dropping through the door, a recipient has four weeks to get in the first part of the application. When they get the stage 2 form back, they have four weeks in which to return it. Voluntary and advice agencies say that if people are going to get assistance with some of this process—for some people it is very important to get such assistance—four weeks is not a long time. In many areas, people can wait that sort of length of time for an appointment with an advice agency or a welfare rights adviser, so the time scale can be a serious problem.
If people have to get additional information, which the form will apparently ask for, people will need time. The time scale seems short, and that may be revealed by the pilot. Will the Minister assure us that if it turns out that a large number of people are either not making the claim that they should be—they are not responding to the stage 1 letters and are dropping out—or are having difficulty with the four-week period for returning the form, the Government will move to change the process fairly quickly?
We do not want to see a lot of people losing out over this. If, as the Government claim, the change has genuinely been made to improve the situation for people with disabilities and to give them a personal independence payment that enables them to play a full part in our society, we have to get it right. No Government should be unprepared to accept that.
Let me touch briefly on the issue of our Olympians and what people can and cannot do. Sadly, the success of the Paralympics could turn out to be a double-edged sword for some disabled people, although I hope that it will not. Not everyone can be a Paralympian. Just because some people can, it should not be assumed that other people who are not able to find work, volunteer or play sport are somehow not trying very hard. Although it is good for people to see that disability is not about being a victim and that people can do lots of things when they are disabled, we should not make the obverse mistake of thinking that everyone is up to that and that they are just not pulling their weight.
As many of the Paralympians said, DLA was one of the benefits that helped them to achieve some of the important things that they did, whether it was getting to their training sessions or being able to have a carer so that they could concentrate on getting to places, doing their training and having a home. Many of them specifically said how much they benefited from DLA. We must remember that someone can be a Paralympian and still need benefit.
Graham Evans (Weaver Vale) (Con)
I am sorry that I was not here for the start of the debate, Mr Sheridan, and thank you for calling me to speak. I would like to make a brief contribution.
Since the introduction of disability living allowance in 1992, the number of claimants has increased from 1.1 million to 3.2 million, with a 30% increase in the past eight years alone. It is clear from the escalation of those figures that a proportion of the claims need to be reviewed. The Government are committed to disabled people’s services, will continue to spend more than £40 billion a year on them and anticipate spending £13 billion on personal independence payments next year. We also know that reform is needed.
We understand that each individual’s situation is different, and we also know that circumstances change—illnesses can progress or, on the other side, treatments can help to manage symptoms or even provide cures. No one person is the same as anyone else, and someone’s health can change rapidly. That is why it is vital that we look to guarantee that each person is supported according to their own needs, not according to a checklist, which was ably shown in the speech of the hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Sheila Gilmore).
The Government will not write off people as unable to work, pushing them to the sidelines to feel that they can never contribute to society. DLA is considered a benefit for life: 130,000 people have not had their award changed since the inception of the policy two decades ago, in 1992. Some 71% of people receiving DLA do so on a permanent basis. That is clearly wrong. The state has failed to recognise and adapt to the changing needs of claimants.
There have been about £630 million DLA overpayments —clearly, that is wrong—but it is much more important to focus on the fact that £190 million has been underpaid. It is our duty to ensure that we provide vital support to the most vulnerable in our society. A more tailored approach will prevent those failures.
About 50% of assessments are made without any additional medical evidence being provided. That is a deeply concerning state of affairs, especially when we consider individuals with mental health issues or learning difficulties who might struggle to identify needs that a medical professional could identify. The best way to make assessments is to use face-to-face consultations, dependent on the individual’s personal conditions, to find out how people’s disabilities affect their day-to-day lives.
I also welcome the increased number of definitions of criteria in the assessment, to ensure that we make assessments objective and consistent. Examples of that include splitting the “communicating with others” category into “communicating” and “engaging socially”. I am sure that my colleagues will agree that those are two very separate issues that affect an individual’s interaction with society very differently.
I welcome the Government’s overhaul of an outdated and inefficient system that forces a one-size-fits-all mentality on the welfare of disabled people across the UK. We have a duty of care and a duty to enable. PIPs will provide us with a way to achieve that.
Mrs Anne McGuire (Stirling) (Lab)
Thanks very much, Mr Sheridan, for calling me to speak. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship.
First, I welcome the Minister to what I think is her first set-piece debate on an issue in her portfolio. She follows a distinguished line of Conservative Ministers for Disabled People. We should never forget that her colleague, the Foreign Secretary, piloted the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 through the House. Frankly, he did so in the teeth of opposition from his own party, and he should be recognised for the contribution that he made with that first step along the road of legislating for the rights of disabled people. I welcome the new Minister to her post.
I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg) for mentioning Lord Morris of Manchester, who was the first Minister for Disabled People, and certainly a great source of advice and opinion to me when I was the Minister. Along with his colleague, Lord Ashley, he made sure that we all kept on our toes on these issues. They were at the forefront and the pioneers of parliamentary activity, as well as activity outside Parliament, in ensuring that the rights of disabled people were recognised. The memorial service for Lord Morris will be held soon and I hope that many colleagues can attend.
I also particularly thank members of the Work and Pensions Committee for their valuable report. I appreciate the time and effort that have gone into accumulating the evidence and presenting the report to Parliament. It is an interesting comparison that we in Westminster Hall this afternoon are competing with a badger cull debate in the main Chamber. I will let that comment stick to the wall and say no more.
I offer a vote of thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South, who has been a Member of the House since 1997. She came into Parliament with me as one of the so-called Blair babes. At times, we felt like Blair’s grannies, but never mind. My hon. Friend has served the House with distinction since that time, no less than during the past two years in her chairmanship of the Work and Pensions Committee. She brought to the report, and indeed to her contribution to our deliberations today, her very particular and personal insight into disability benefits.
Sometimes I think that MPs give the impression that somehow they are not real people, and that we do not live lives out there that have nothing to do with politics. I know from my hon. Friend’s activities, both as a teacher and as a political activist, that she has provided inspiration to many people who are disabled—not only in the way that she conducts campaigns and is articulate on behalf of disabled people, but because of a very particular knowledge. We should recognise that and not hide her particular light under a bushel. I want to pay that particular compliment to her. She has done that work while managing yet another difficulty, having just spent more than three months in hospital.
I thank the Work and Pensions Committee for providing a pretty comprehensive picture of the changes that are taking place. I appreciate that the report is a little dated now in some respects, but the views that underpin it have not dated, not least the view of the context and environment in which the changes are taking place. I will come back to that point shortly.
I also welcome the Government’s response to the report, although I must say that in many places it is pretty inadequate. It is full of fine words, but as some people in some parts of the country say, “Fine words butter no parsnips.” There are a lot of people out there who think the Government response is camouflage rather than one of substance.
However, I welcome the Government’s recognition that more work needs to be done before personal independence payments are introduced in April 2013. We have heard some of the reasons why more work needs to be done. We are talking about an incredibly tight timetable for a change that will throw the financial stability of many disabled people in this country up in the air. We should not run away from that, and I hope that the Minister will not run away from it. Therefore, will she update us on the progress on her deliberations on those changes that are necessary and that the Select Committee report has identified as necessary?
I hope that the new Minister will not underestimate the distress that the uncertainty is causing out there; I do not think she will. Yesterday, I met with some young people from a Royal National Institute of Blind People group called Haggeye. You, Mr Sheridan, will not be surprised to learn that that is a Scottish group; they have amalgamated our national food with their own disability to name the group. They were joined by some other young blind and visually impaired people from other parts of the country. They had a tour of Parliament, and they met with some MPs and Mr Speaker.
At one point during the day, I had a conversation with them and I must say to the Minister that that conversation with those young blind and visually impaired people encapsulated many of the discussions that I have had, and I am sure other Members of the House have had, during the last several months. We talked about their fear of the future. One young woman said to me, “I don’t think I’m going to qualify.” There are grave concerns out there among visually impaired people about whether they will qualify for the new PIP. She also asked, “What happens to me?” The financial underpinning that allows her to conduct her life could be taken away.
The Government must accept responsibility for the environment that they have created. I welcome the words of, I think, the hon. Member for Battersea (Jane Ellison), and indeed of the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Stephen Lloyd), who are supporters of the coalition Government. They recognised that throwing a hand grenade into the debate on the disability agenda in June 2010, without any warning or consultation, did not set the right tone for the debate.
The Minister needs to look again at what is meant by “co-production”. The hon. Member for Eastbourne made a valiant attempt to say that that announcement in June 2010 was an example of co-production. It was not co-production; co-production would have meant that disabled people were involved in discussions before the announcement was made. If he wants to see some experience of co-production, in 2005, my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett) started on the route to our welfare reforms and he did so by talking to disabled people and involving them from the beginning, rather than saying, “The Chancellor has said that and we now need to manufacture a new benefit around it.” The Chancellor effectively said that there would be a cut of whatever billions of pounds he happened to conjure up at that time. I appreciate that the Minister is new to her post, but the Government must accept some responsibility for that environment.
I also want to highlight some other issues that I hope the Minister will address. I note, for example, that the response by the Department for Work and Pensions fails to reply effectively to the evidence given by Professor Sainsbury, who, at paragraph 38 on page 15, says that
“he was ‘at a loss’ as to where the 20% figure came from”
and did not know how it could have been put into the public domain
“before any work had been done on the criteria and thresholds for the benefit.”
Although we have heard fine words that the change is about serving the needs of disabled people and so on—we all know the script—the reality is that the figure was put into the public domain and policy arena as a savings target, not to define a new benefit to meet the needs of disabled people. No matter how much work has been done in recent months to try to ameliorate that impression, it still sticks, because that is where it emanated from. I hope the Minister will allude to that initial statement by the Chancellor.
Moving on, the Government’s response says on, I think, page 5 that the 20% figure was
“a high level assumption”
and that further work is being undertaken on
“assessment criteria and the detailed policy that will underpin primary legislation. More detailed and updated expenditure savings figures will be provided”.
Will the Minister provide us with some of that information to allow people to start to flesh out exactly what is meant by this new benefit? It is disturbing that anguish has been caused to many disabled people on the basis of a high-level assumption of a 20% cut, translated into the withdrawal of benefit from between 500,000 and 640,000 people—that is the rough spectrum, depending on how we cut the statistics. I hope she will refer to that. Are there current working assumptions for the reduction in spend and numbers? If so, will she share them with us?
I was pleased that various Committee members here, and indeed the Committee as a whole, highlighted the issue of media coverage. The reality is that the Government set the initial context. We should not run away from that, and I hope that the Minister will not because some of her ministerial colleagues were disgraceful in how they never or rarely rebutted any of the scrounger stories in the national newspapers. I was delighted that the hon. Member for Eastbourne mentioned some of those issues. Indeed, on occasion, the Secretary of State fuelled such media stories. I remember one about disability living allowance for children and Motability cars. He said—it was in quotation marks—that all people had to do was fill in an application form for DLA and, Bob’s your uncle, they could move almost directly into their new Motability car.
Dr Whiteford
The right hon. Lady is making an important point about how disabled people have been vilified in the press in recent months. Does she agree that far from being a benefit paid to people who cannot help themselves, DLA actually helps a lot of disabled people keep themselves in work, making them and their families less dependent on the state?
Mrs McGuire
That is right, and it is a part of this debate that has been missed. Although a significant number of people on DLA are not in work, an equally significant number are, and they use their disability cars, if they have them, to get from home to their workplace. If they are not on the higher rate, they can use their allowance to meet some of the additional costs. One of the young visually impaired people I met in my discussions with Haggeye yesterday said that he used his DLA for a taxi to work, because it was too difficult for him to navigate the roads. He worried about that. The hon. Lady is quite right.
I will give the Minister a bit of flexibility, as this is her first outing, but the newspapers have been awash with stories equating in the public mind those on disability benefits with scroungers. Glasgow university, commissioned by Inclusion London, delivered a report showing that the number of negative stories about disability had increased. Frankly, many people felt that the Government had set up an Aunt Sally and then knocked it down. Instead of being honest about what disability living allowance is for, they set up the image that everybody who claimed it was not entitled to it. There have been instances of hate crime, with people being harassed because others did not think they were as disabled as they made out to be. The way that the debate has been conducted has had a domino effect.
I thought optimistically that the Secretary of State had seen the error of his ways but, disappointingly, he has proved himself a serial offender. He was at it again this morning, this time talking not about disabled people but about people with families. I use this to illustrate my point about setting the context. I was aghast to hear him say in his interview this morning that there are tens if not hundreds of thousands of families out there on benefits who have multitudes of children. A freedom of information document published by the DWP on 12 September shows that there are 10 families in receipt of benefits who have 13 children. It is not until we get to families with one, two and three children that the numbers run into hundreds of thousands.
I do not think that a family with three children is large. I certainly do not think that a family with four children is large, having come from one myself. To set a context by saying that reform—in this case, reform of other benefits—is essential because tens of thousands of people are out there abusing the system is disrespectful to the people who, more often than not, want to get out of the benefits system. The Government certainly set the context quite nicely in terms of disabled people, because disabled people have been feeling threatened since then.
I was interested to read on page 5 of the Government response that the Department is
“developing a case study approach to illustrate the contribution disabled people make to society”.
Again, what exactly is happening? When is it happening? What newspapers have been approached? It is fine for the Minister for Disabled People to write features for major disability organisations, but it is not the opinions of those organisations that we need to change; it is those of the mainstream press. I am interested to hear her response.
I appreciate that we have taken a lot of time and will probably run out of time, and that the Minister has a lot of questions to answer. On the assessment of the impact of introducing PIP, will she consider a cumulative impact assessment of all the benefits affecting disabled people? The previous Minister used to say that it was too difficult, but it is astonishing to me that a Department with more than 100,000 civil servants should find it too difficult to come up with a cumulative impact assessment of their policies on disabled people. Disabled people know what the impact will be, and if the Government are not prepared to accept some of the findings of the Hardest Hit campaign and Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson’s report earlier last week, they are duty bound to come up with their own impact assessment. They cannot just discredit everyone else’s and say, “We’re not going to do one.” I hope that the new Minister will think about that.
Can the Minister tell us when we will see the final regulations? Time is getting tight; there is no doubt about that. PIP is coming in next April, and we have not yet seen the final regulations. I am also interested in knowing what the Minister’s interpretation of co-production is. It is not just consultation after the effect; it is the involvement that I have mentioned.
I, too, welcomed the comments made by the previous Minister for Employment, the right hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling), about the idea of there being a “conversation”, but let me test the logistics of that idea because this is a crucial issue. The Government’s response says that there will be no time limit, which I am sure is a welcome statement, but although there might not be explicit targets, if a company has to carry out some 100,000 reassessments in a short time, as my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South has said, there is an implied target. There might not be a target in the contract, but one is certainly implied, particularly I understand that Capita has already found out that 60% of people would like home visits. I just do not know how the Government will do this.
On the prime contractors, many colleagues have identified that there is no great confidence in at least one of them, and the Minister might be aware that in Scotland Atos has contracted with an NHS social enterprise called Salus. Atos told Third Force News, the newspaper of the voluntary sector in Scotland, that
“subcontracting the work to the NHS would help assessors make more informed decisions as they would work alongside local health boards when it came to assessing claimants.”
Why would Atos contract with an NHS unit only in Scotland? Is there a particular reason, perhaps concerning the politics of Scotland or because Atos feels that there is more sensitivity there? To whom is it subcontracting in the other areas in which it has the contract? Regarding the trail of public money, is it not ludicrous that the Department for Work and Pensions, as a public sector organisation, is contracting with a private sector organisation, in this case Atos, which is then subcontracting to a public sector organisation? What way is that to run a business?
Dr Whiteford
The right hon. Lady asks a valid question. Does she share my view that we might now get more accurate assessments?
Mrs McGuire
The expectation would be that there might be more accurate assessments, but we must also take on board the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh East (Sheila Gilmore), who said that the assessment criteria are set not by Atos but by the Government. The issue is how those assessment criteria are interpreted further down the line. We might get better, more valuable assessments, but as the previous Minister said on more than one occasion in this House, the ultimate decision is made by the decision maker in the Department for Work and Pensions, and the criteria are set down by that Department. We must always remember that.
I want to come on to an issue relating to Atos, of which the Minister may or may not be aware. I understand that this afternoon some major disability organisations are up in arms about the fact that Atos has apparently named them in the contract. They did not know anything about it. As a matter of fact, they are incandescent with rage, because their being named in the contract has given the company an element of credibility. In one instance the contract states, I think, that those voluntary organisations are going to carry out the disability training of Atos staff and do various other kinds of partnership work with the company. Someone in one of the organisations has said, “It is difficult to know whether we should fall about laughing, because it is so ridiculous.”
Will the Minister tell us whether Atos named in the contract organisations that it had not contacted? What is happening now that those organisations are challenging the fact that Atos has put them down there? If the contractual system has proved to be flawed, will the Minister say that she will have to review the contracts? We cannot have a situation in which a private sector contractor uses as cover disability organisations in the voluntary sector, when those organisations have not given their permission and have in some instances said that they would have nothing at all to do with Atos.
Sheila Gilmore
Does my right hon. Friend agree that this is all part of the opacity of the contracts? Public money is going out, and we do not know what is in the contracts or, in the case of the subcontracting, who is getting what money and what Atos is even being paid for, if it is getting other people to do the work.
Mrs McGuire
My understanding is that the disability organisations involved did not know that they were listed as Atos partners, if I can call them that, until some of the information was published recently. There are serious questions here. I do not know whether the Minister will have an answer this afternoon, but if she does not, I suggest that she might need one pretty quickly, because some organisations are up in arms.
Finally, I want to come on to young people. I note from page 19 of the Government’s response that they still think that the age of 16 is the appropriate cut-off. There is a myth that the changes will have no impact on young people and children, but by the end of the roll-out of the process a 14-year old who is in receipt of disability living allowance now will be affected by the changes brought in with PIP. The previous Minister told me that 16 was the appropriate age because it is the natural point at which a child transitions to adulthood, but I suggest that the Minister reconsider that. The school-leaving age is going up, and I assume that that will have an effect on disabled young people at school. If a child or a young person was moved from a benefit at the age of 16, when they were still going through their school career, they could be in the ludicrous position of having qualified for DLA but not for what the Government have promoted as the tighter benefit of PIP. Young people in what would be fourth year in the Scottish education system—I do not know what it would be in England—should not be put under such additional stress. I suggest that 16 is no longer the appropriate age. The Government have stated that they are considering a transitional arrangement for people aged 16 to 18, and I am keen to find out the Minister’s view on that.
In conclusion, I will quote an optimistic sentence spoken by the Chancellor just before the emergency Budget, which is highlighted in the Hardest Hit report:
“Too often, when countries undertake major consolidations of this kind, it is the poorest—those who had least to do with the cause of the economic misfortunes—who are hit hardest.”—[Official Report, 22 June 2010; Vol. 512, c. 180.]
There is a strong sense out there that disabled people are the hardest hit. [Interruption.] I am delighted that the hon. Member for Battersea is back in her place. I am sure that she will be a great asset to the Select Committee.
In the Hardest Hit report that I have mentioned, the Paralympian David Clarke stated:
“There are hidden costs [to being disabled]. Computing what those costs are is very difficult…but fundamentally they exist. Withdrawal of [that] additional funding to cover those additional costs, if that is being planned, will jeopardise the independence of disabled people.”
Paralympians did wonderful things this summer, but many of them will say that one reason why they could do those things was because of the additional support from something like disability living allowance. I hope that the Minister will address that issue because we need to consider that there are extra costs to disability. PIP will, according to the Government, recognise the people who are most severely disabled and those in the greatest need, but there are people in great need, and people in greater need. No matter how laudable, if we concentrate all the effort and finance on those who are most severely disabled, there will still be disabled people who require some help to meet those additional costs. That is the dilemma the Government face.
Jim Sheridan (in the Chair)
Before I call the Minister, I remind colleagues that we are scheduled to conclude at 4.30 pm. As has already been said, the Minister has been asked to answer a number of serious questions, but the Chair of the Select Committee has indicated that she would like a few minutes at the end to conclude.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Esther McVey)
I begin by congratulating and thanking the Liaison Committee for calling this debate. I thank the members of the Select Committee and other right hon. and hon. Members who have spoken today, some with very personal knowledge of this most important subject.
In summing up I hope to get through all the questions. As Members can see, I have papers on those questions across my desk, but should I not get to answer all of them, I am sure Members will catch my eye and pursue the matter that most concerns them.
I am pleased, Mr Sheridan, that you are chairing the debate today. Thank you.
I believe that the change will be of the same quality and standard as the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, which was introduced by my right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond (Yorks) (Mr Hague). I thank the right hon. Member for Stirling (Mrs McGuire) for mentioning that Act, because I think all of us here are concerned about, committed to and believe in the rights of people with disabilities. We want the changes that we seek to be implemented as best they can be and brought about for the right purposes. The coalition Government are committed to enabling disabled people to fulfil their potential and to have opportunities to play a full role in society.
We have been clear about our welfare reform plans, which are designed to rebalance the benefits system so that it is fair to claimants and affordable for the taxpayer. Key to ensuring those objectives is replacing the disability living allowance with personal independence payments for people of working age.
Esther McVey
I have only just begun, but the hon. Lady may intervene if she wishes.
Sheila Gilmore
I regret that the Minister has fallen into the trap of counterpoising claimants and taxpayers. Many claimants are indeed taxpayers. Many are income tax payers, but they all certainly pay VAT. The two groups are not distinct.
Esther McVey
I never sought to put them in two distinct groups. I said “affordable for the taxpayer”. I am afraid that it is the hon. Lady who distinguishes between the two. I certainly did not.
The Government currently spend almost £50 billion a year on disabled people, including more than £15 billion on adult social care, £1 billion on free transport for elderly and disabled people, £13 billion on disability living allowance, £15 billion on a range of other benefits and £320 million on disability employment programmes. We are also putting an extra £15 million into Access to Work. We should be proud that we are doing all of that. We spend a fifth more than the EU average, and we are acknowledged as world leaders, which is a very good point to start this debate.
Those services enable disabled people to make their own choices and live independently, and for the services to continue to be available they must be sustainable and keep pace with the needs of disabled people today, which is considered no longer to be the case with disability living allowance. As hon. Members may be aware, from May 2002 to February 2012 the number of people claiming DLA rose by almost 34%. DLA, therefore, is financially unsustainable. We, like many others, including the Select Committee, consider DLA to be outdated and in need of fundamental change.
Dame Anne Begg
Those figures have been mentioned elsewhere today, and they should be put in context. The growth in the numbers claiming DLA is because people are living longer. Most of that growth comes from those over 65, because if people qualify before they are 65, they effectively keep DLA until they die. Of course, the introduction of PIP does not apply to that cohort. It is therefore wrong to say that the growth in DLA will be halted by the changes, because the large proportion of the growth is purely down to demographics.
Esther McVey
I checked the numbers before I came here today, and the over-65s are not the vast majority, but a third of the total. Interestingly—I think my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale (Graham Evans) brought this up, although many people have touched on it—DLA is not a static benefit; it is a dynamic benefit in so far as 3.3 million people are on it and the conditions they have will change. Some might stay the same and some might get worse, but some people’s condition may get better, and we have to acknowledge that when people get better, they will move off the system. There is a natural movement within the system, and we have to consider all those incidents, which is why we believe the reform is required.
I know I am short of time, so I will address the assessment and answer as far as I can some of the specific questions that were raised. If I do not have enough time, because there were so many points, I will write to hon. Members.
Esther McVey
I will get to that at the very end. Perhaps the right hon. Lady should wave to me about a minute before the end so I can ensure that I get there with what I have.
Jim Sheridan (in the Chair)
Order. That will need to be a few minutes before the end so that the Chair of the Select Committee can wind up.
Esther McVey
Thank you, Mr Sheridan.
I have been corrected, so perhaps the right hon. Member for Stirling could wave to me a few minutes before the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg) speaks.
When hon. Members spoke about the whole DLA reform and consultation, I do not think they necessarily knew the full length of the consultation that has been embarked on. The consultation has been very thorough and has taken place over a long period. The Government code of practice on consultation recommends a minimum of a 12-week consultation, but I will put into context how we set about this consultation.
When there was a debate on whether we should change DLA to PIP, there was a consultation with disability groups, health groups and social care groups. That consultation was long before any change came into being and lasted for 10-and-a-half weeks. After that, there was a 10-week consultation on the reforms to which more than 5,500 people responded. There was then a 16-week informal consultation on the initial drafts of the assessment, followed by a further 15-week formal consultation on the second draft of the assessment, after which there was a 14-week consultation. In total there have been 55 weeks of consultation, which is a year-plus. By anybody’s reckoning that is a considerable amount of consultation. The consultation has been a real listening exercise, because there is no point in having it if we do not amend and change things as we see fit. As the Bill progressed and became the Act, key things were altered. Again, we are listening, and when we do finally table all the assessments, I believe the consultation will be reflected in them, too. Questions have been asked about when that will happen; it will be later on in the year, but it will be as soon as possible. There are many things to balance: we have to fit a specific timetable, which, as the hon. Member for Aberdeen South said, begins in April, but it would be incorrect to put something in play if we had not listened to everyone for as long as we possibly can.
I will pick up some of my notes, because the hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Sheila Gilmore) asked whether there are targets for the length of assessment. No, there are no targets for how long an assessment should take or for how many assessments should be completed in a week or a day. She is right: there are challenges, and it will be tough, but this is written into the contract. I met the two key providers yesterday to discuss how they have to engage with people and how the system has to be humane. They have to listen and be caring and all of those things, because—she is right—we need rigour and confidence in the system.
On the monitoring of quality and consistency across the PIP providers, guidance has been very strict, and training will be strict, too. They will be closely monitored for quality, auditing and the work of the health professionals. We are seeking feedback from claimants. They will be monitored again in two years, as well as this being ongoing. Should we see any discrepancies in appeals and reassessments where there seem to be issues, that will be monitored, too.
The hon. Member for Edinburgh East asked about other types of targets. There are no targets or expectations for assessor performance in the work capability assessment, and there will not be any in PIP. Yes, performance is monitored and assessors are audited. Where abnormal results occur, we will look into them, but everything has to be of the highest possible quality.
The hon. Lady talked about the initial start-up in Bootle and how it would roll out across the country. The Department will test the effectiveness of the IT system, and the assessment and referral and claiming process. The Department will also be able to validate assumptions about the timings of the process: the initial telephone call, the claim form, the completion and the assessment duration. All of that will be tested in the original bit, which goes from April to June.
The hon. Lady asked many more questions, but I wonder whether I should move on to another question, which I think all hon. Members asked, about how disabled people are portrayed in the media. The right hon. Member for Stirling correctly pointed out that the superheroes of the Paralympics make up a tiny percentage of people with disabilities. Just as I will never be an Olympian, most people with disabilities will never be a Paralympian. However, the Paralympics shone a light on an area that we hope to capitalise on and open up disabled people to mainstream media. To that end, as somebody who worked in the media for 14 years, I hope that I can bring some insight and knowledge. I have asked straight away for—I would like to say a media summit, but that might make it sound even more highfaluting than it actually is—for a media round table. When one considers that there are 11 million people with disabilities in the UK and what percentage of the population that represents, it seems only right that such organisations as the BBC or ITV would look at that as a significant audience they should be reflecting, not just occasionally but daily, in all their programmes, whether they are dramas, news or current affairs.
It may be that we have to be even more careful about the language we use. If we know that the issue will be polarised and put into headlines and TV captions—we know that that will happen—then we need to be more careful about how we talk. I have never mentioned the word “scroungers”. I am mentioning it now because other hon. Members have mentioned it, and maybe we should all stop using it.
Stephen Lloyd
I thank the Minister for giving way. She is covering a lot in a very short time, and I forgot to congratulate her on her new post. As I asked in my speech, will she commit, when the Government get it wrong, to going out on behalf of disabled people and very aggressively putting it right in the media?
Esther McVey
I agree that we should all do that, and that is what I am aiming to do. I have, in fact, been interviewed myself and felt that the interviewer was using the wrong language. I picked up on that, because I thought it was inappropriate. Whether that was to catch me out or whatever, I felt it was inappropriate.
I am aware of the time, so I would like to answer some of the questions raised by the right hon. Member for Stirling. Many hon. Members brought up the figure of the 20% cut. The right hon. Lady said that the impression sticks, so let me try to unstick it. Where did the 20% figure come from? I have to say, and I say this hand on heart, that when I walked into the Department and took on this daunting position—a huge task, with huge shoes to fill—I said, “I want to know how those numbers came about, because I do not honestly believe I can stand up in front of people unless I know the integrity of what I am saying.” If it is not right, I will change my words accordingly. As the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Stephen Lloyd) said, if this is not what he thinks it will be, he will be a vocal opponent of it.
I have the figures. I have the numbers of what the spend would be, and this is what it was about. I asked all the medics who were setting the assessment, “Where did the numbers come from?” They said, in all honesty, they were given the task of looking at what a benefit would be for 2013—looking at the disabilities now as we perceive them. We are not looking at DLA of the 1990s—that was very much skewed towards people with physical disabilities. This had to take in everything: sensory, mental conditions, learning difficulties, and how that would be done and how it is best placed to fit. They said that they came back with this assessment, this is how it was structured, and these were the results.
The actual sums that were paid out were £12.5 billion in 2010-11, and by 2014-15 the expected, real-terms spending will be £13.2 billion. The 20% cut that people talk about was the cut in the expected rise in the benefits, because they had risen exponentially by 40% in 10 years and everybody felt that that was unaffordable. Therefore, if we wanted to give the benefits people wanted, if we wanted to look after those who were most in need of support, but equally those with great needs as well as the greatest need, this is what had to be done to be sustainable. Those were the figures and those were the facts I was given. I believe them, and that is why I am standing here today.
Let me see if I can come on to any more questions. The hon. Member for Aberdeen South asked rather a lot. I reaffirm my commitment to working with people on disability benefits. Wherever possible, we will be working with everybody. As I am running out of time and the hon. Lady will be speaking in a moment, I will come to a conclusion and send her my response.
In conclusion, the London 2012 Paralympic games truly captivated the hearts of the nation, and undoubtedly helped to shift attitudes towards and perceptions of disabled people. We now have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to capitalise on that. The Government want to build on that success and I am adamant that I will do so.
I have just remembered that the right hon. Member for Stirling asked a question about Atos. I am not fully aware of the answer, but it is of concern. I will address it, and my team will look at it straight away.
We have to ensure that those who face the greatest barriers get the support they need. By replacing DLA with PIP, we are safeguarding that support for the future. Not only are we doing that, but we are modifying a benefit to ensure it keeps pace with the needs of disabled people today.
I hope my comments have reassured hon. Members. I know that they wanted more reassurance, but I do not have the time. Our proposals have been developed following extensive collaboration and consultation with disabled people and, when viewed as part of a wide package of support available, are intended to enable those disabled people who face the greatest barriers to lead full, active and independent lives.
Dame Anne Begg
The hon. Member for Battersea (Jane Ellison) rightly pointed out that not all disabled people who receive DLA are vulnerable, but—this is a big “but”—the most vulnerable in our society are all disabled and will all qualify for DLA. That is why the Government must get this right. That is why the Select Committee must do its job of scrutinising the Government’s proposals, which does mean ringing alarm bells and asking lots and lots of questions.
DLA has been an extremely useful benefit and has helped to transform lives. PIP must do the same, which means that the assessment must be sensitive and supportive so that disabled people have the wherewithal to continue to be all that they can be, be that a Paralympian, an MP or a person incapable of any independent movement. It is imperative that the Government get this right. If they do not, we will turn the clock back to a time when disabled people were neither seen nor heard, and we cannot let that happen.
Written Ministerial Statements
Concurrent Jurisdiction (DPP Interim Guidelines)
(12 years ago)
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The Attorney-General (Mr Dominic Grieve)
The Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) has today published interim guidelines to prosecutors on decision making in certain cases involving concurrent jurisdiction. The guidelines, which take immediate effect, follow a recommendation in the report of the review of the UK’s extradition arrangements by Lord Justice Sir Scott Baker that there should be more transparency about the principles that are applied by prosecutors in this jurisdiction when determining whether criminal proceedings should be brought here or in another jurisdiction.
The guidelines have been issued on an interim basis and are the subject of a consultation exercise that will last until 31 January 2013. The DPP will publish his final guidelines early next year, once he has considered the responses to the consultation, and any cases that have fallen to be considered by prosecutors during the period in which the interim guidelines have been in place will be reviewed in the light of the final guidelines if changes have been made.
The director of the Serious Fraud Office has indicated that his prosecutors will consider themselves bound by this guidance.
Copies of the interim guidelines will be placed in the Libraries of both Houses.
National Minimum Wage
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills (Jo Swinson)
I am pleased to announce that the Government have written to the Low Pay Commission setting out what we would like the Commission to consider on the national minimum wage. The document contains the Government’s interim evidence on economic and non-economic issues, including the minimum wage rates, the youth labour market and apprenticeships. An updated version of the evidence will be published later when the latest information on earnings and economic forecasts will be included.
A copy of the evidence will be placed in the Libraries of both Houses and will be available from the BIS website at: www.bis.gov.uk.
Business Rate Retention Scheme
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Brandon Lewis)
I am today publishing for consultation, drafts of the key regulations that will underpin the business rates retention scheme. The scheme will give all councils a strong incentive to go for growth and could add a £10 billion boost to the wider economy by 2020.
The publication of these regulations in draft form is intended to give local authorities and interested parties greater clarity about the detailed implementation and operation of the scheme. It will also give local authorities the opportunity to make comments on the draft regulations, to help ensure that they work as intended so that billing authorities are able to implement the scheme smoothly.
Five sets of regulations are being published in draft form today:
The Non-Domestic Rating (Rates Retention) Regulations 2012 —which include the key income definition for the purposes of calculating central, billing authority and major precepting authority shares, the making of payments and operation of billing authorities’ collection funds under the rates retention scheme.
The Non-Domestic Rating (Levy and Safety Net) Regulations 2012—which provide for calculating whether levy or safety net payments from/to an authority are due and the amount of any such payments, including provision for safety net payments on account.
The Non-Domestic Rating (Transitional Protection Payments) Regulations 2012—which make provision for payments to/from local authorities where their income is less/more as a result of the operation of transitional arrangements.
The Non-Domestic Rating (Designated Areas) Regulations 2012 —which enable local authorities to retain a greater proportion of the income in enterprise zones and new development deal areas. They also provide the means by which authorities will be reimbursed for qualifying rate relief given to ratepayers in enterprise zones.
The Non-Domestic Rating (Renewable Energy Projects) Regulations 2012—which enable local authorities to retain a greater proportion of income from renewable energy projects.
Following consultation, and subject to the passage of the Local Government Finance Bill, the Government intend to lay regulations in Parliament with a view to them coming into force before the start of the 2013-14 financial year, subject to parliamentary approval.
I am placing copies of the consultation and draft regulations in the Library of the House. The Government are inviting responses by 23 November 2012.
Offshore Oil and Gas Licensing
The Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change (Mr John Hayes)
After thorough consideration of the applications made in the 27th offshore oil and gas licensing round, I am very pleased to be able to announce an initial tranche of offers of 167 production licences. The number of licence offers is a very good result from this latest licensing round, continuing the trend in recent years of encouraging results.
This demonstrates the continuing attractiveness of the United Kingdom continental shelf as an oil and gas producing province. Oil is a global business and the companies are deciding where to allocate their capital in a very competitive environment. The UK remains a favoured destination, with the industry clearly seeing lots of potential and new opportunities.
These new licences will help us to continue to make the most of our indigenous energy resources.
As required by the habitats directive, my officials have carried out a screening assessment of the blocks applied for. As a result, licences for 61 of those blocks, those which are close to, or in, certain special areas of conservation (SACs) and special protection areas (SPAs), will be subject to environmental assessments before any offer is made. The EU habitats directive requires that “appropriate assessments” be conducted where proposed activities are likely to have significant effects on any SACs and SPAs. The assessments will examine the implications for these protected nature conservation areas of awarding oil and gas licences, and will be subject to appropriate consultation, before any decision is made on whether to offer any of these blocks.
Details of the offers that have been made can be viewed on the DECC oil and gas website at: www.og.decc. gov.uk
Environmental Council
The Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change (Mr Edward Davey)
My noble Friend, Lord de Mauley, Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Resource Management, the Local Environment and Environmental Science, and I will represent the UK at the Environment Council in Luxembourg on 25 October.
At this Council, the presidency will hold a legislative orientation debate on a proposal for a regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on ship recycling (First Reading). This item is on the agenda as it is currently going through the First Reading ordinary legislative procedure (OLP—formally co-decision) process in the Council and the European Parliament.
The presidency has confirmed that the focus of the debate will be on some of the bigger issues such as safeguarding the competitiveness of the EU-flag; enforceability and effectiveness; whether the regulation should be closely aligned with the Hong Kong convention or should introduce additional requirements; and whether it should set out detailed provisions on penalties and access to justice or leave these matters to member states.
Ministers are then expected to adopt non-legislative Council conclusions on Rio+20: outcome and follow-up to the United Nations conference on sustainable development (UNCSD) 2012 summit. Rio+20 initiated four intergovernmental processes on: sustainable development goals (SDG); a financing strategy; a new high level political forum; and on strengthening the United Nations environment programme (UNEP). This item is on the agenda as the EU’s attention is now turning to implementation. The UK will seek conclusions demonstrating support for the Rio outcomes and a commitment to take a constructive role in follow-up activities, in particular keeping a broad view of what SDGs might look like.
Following the morning session the presidency will host a ministerial lunch which will focus on climate change. The topic of this lunch is a
“presentation and discussion on the outcome of the pre-COP 18/CMP eight ministerial meeting on climate change held recently in Korea”,
which I attended.
In the afternoon session, Ministers will seek to adopt non-legislative Council conclusions on preparations for the 18th session of the conference of the parties (COP 18) to the United Nations framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC) and the eighth session of the meeting of the parties to the Kyoto protocol (CMP 8). COP18 will take place in Doha, Qatar from 26 November to 7 December 2012, and these conclusions will form the basic framework of the EU’s negotiating position at C0P18.
At the end of the day, the following topics will be covered under “any other business”:
Information from the Commission on the Nagoya protocol on access and benefit sharing of genetic resources (ABS)/proposal for a regulation on EU implementing measures.
Information from the Belgian delegation on the importance of the EU legislation for meeting environmental objectives—the example of the air quality.
Information from the Swedish delegation on chemicals in textiles.
Information from the Commission on the emissions trading scheme in aviation.
Information from the presidency and the Commission on the timing of auctions of greenhouse gas allowances (“Back loading”)—state of play.
Information from the Czech delegation on guidelines for the mutual acceptance of low emission zones vignettes and the exchange of best practice.
Dementia Funding
(12 years ago)
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The Secretary of State for Health (Mr Jeremy Hunt)
I am announcing a £50 million capital funding in 2013-14 for the NHS and local authorities to work with providers to create care environments to help people with dementia live well with the condition.
Dementia is one of the biggest challenges we face as a society as our population ages and we are determined to transform the quality of dementia care for patients and their families. In March, the Prime Minister launched his challenge on dementia, which sets out the Government’s ambition to increase diagnosis rates, raise awareness and understanding and to double funding for research by 2015.
Research by the King’s Fund demonstrates that good design can help with the management of dementia. People with dementia are less likely to get confused or become distressed within an environment designed with their needs in mind. Examples include an intelligent use of colour to mark out different areas to aid memory, clearer signage and the opportunity to take part in activities such as gardening.
Local authorities working in partnership with social care providers and the NHS will have the opportunity to bid for a share of £50 million capital funding to invest in 2013-14 in improved care environments to help people with dementia and their carers manage their condition better. The funding is aimed at expanding the range of health and care services offering dedicated dementia friendly environments—and to stimulate further use of supportive environments to help the growing number of people with dementia get the best possible care.
Projects that are successful in securing funds will form part of a national pilot to disseminate best practice and evidence across the NHS and social care system of the best examples of “dementia friendly environments”. The findings and evidence will be used to develop future guidance in this area, assisting organisations that provide services to people with dementia as well as commissioners of services and local health and wellbeing boards to become one of the best in Europe.
The criteria for applying for funding and the deadline for receipt of applications will be announced shortly. The successful projects will begin from April 2013 and will be subject to national evaluation.
EU Transport Council
(12 years ago)
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The Secretary of State for Transport (Mr Patrick McLoughlin)
I will attend the first Transport Council of the Cypriot Presidency (the presidency) in Luxembourg on Monday 29 October.
The presidency hopes to achieve general approach on three proposals:
The first is a proposal for a regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on common rules for the allocation of slots, repealing Council Directive 95/93/EC. The proposed regulation has been subject to intense official-level scrutiny by Council working groups and these discussions are ongoing. Progress to date has been mixed, but the proposition remains acceptable from a UK perspective. I believe that the resulting regulation could help promote the most effective use of airport slots and build on the existing transparent, market-based approach to encourage the more efficient use of scarce capacity at congested airports, while minimising administrative and financial burdens for industry. However, at this stage, it remains unclear whether or not it will be possible to seek a general approach at the October Council.
The second is a proposal for a directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on the enforcement of certain provisions of the maritime labour convention by flag states. The proposed general approach represents a satisfactory outcome for the UK and I will support it as it allows appropriate flexibility to member states, and will not require the UK to make any substantive changes to its proposed implementation of the provisions of the maritime labour convention on flag state responsibilities.
The third is a proposal for a directive of the European Parliament and of the Council amending Directive 2009/16/EC on port state control. I will support the proposal which will not require the UK to make any substantive changes to its proposed implementation of the provisions of the maritime labour convention on port state responsibilities.
An orientation debate will be held on a proposal for a directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on roadworthiness testing for motor vehicles and their trailers (First Reading). The UK strongly supports the ongoing roadworthiness testing of vehicles as a worthwhile contribution to road safety.
However, the UK is very concerned by the potential cost burden of the European Commission’s proposal as it is currently framed. The UK alone has identified costs of over €1 billion without any discernible benefit in road safety. We have also identified significant administrative burdens embedded in the proposal that similarly would produce no road safety benefit. In the current economic climate the UK does not wish to see any additional cost to European citizens, businesses or Governments unless clearly justified by road safety benefits.
The presidency will be seeking a political agreement on the proposal for a regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council amending Council Regulation (EEC) No 3821/85 on recording equipment in road transport and amending Regulation (EC) No 561/2006 of the European Parliament and the Council (First Reading). The UK supports the proposal which strikes a sensible balance between improving the security of the tachograph while ensuring that additional burdens on industry and enforcement authorities are minimised.
The Council will be expected to adopt a proposal for a Council decision on the signing, on behalf of the European Union, and provisional application of the agreement providing a general framework for enhanced co-operation between the European Union and the European organisation for the safety of air navigation (Eurocontrol). The UK supports the proposed agreement. It is important that the significant work Eurocontrol performs on behalf of the European Union is put on a sound contractual and financial basis to help ensure value for money from the proposed €40 million expenditure over four years.
High Speed Two
(12 years ago)
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The Secretary of State for Transport (Mr Patrick McLoughlin)
In January the Government announced that we would proceed with plans to build a high speed rail network linking London with Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester. High Speed 2 (HS2) will have a transformative effect on Britain, bringing cities closer together and providing the new transport capacity we need to meet the challenges of the 21st century.
We need to drive forward with this vital national project. In doing so we need to provide support for those facing the disruption that the plans for the railway are causing, while also protecting the interests of taxpayers who will ultimately pay for compensation. We have been clear throughout that we are committed to providing appropriate compensation and assistance for those affected by the building of HS2.
The statutory system of compensation already provides fair compensation for the vast majority of infrastructure schemes. However, given the particular circumstances of HS2, in this case I believe it is right to go above and beyond what is required by law. Today I am launching a generous proposed compensation and support package for public consultation.
Under the proposals set out today all those living closest to the route of HS2, in the so-called “safeguarded area”, will be able to choose to sell their home to the Government—whether it is required for construction or not—at any time after the HS2 route is safeguarded, which is currently expected to happen in spring 2013. Those choosing to sell their homes will receive its full unblighted value (that is, what the property would have been worth had there been no plans for HS2), a home loss payment of 10% of the value of the property (up to a maximum of £47,000) and be reimbursed for reasonable moving costs, including stamp duty on the purchase of a new property of equivalent value.
In rural areas we will establish a “voluntary purchase zone”, extending out from the boundary of the safeguarded area up to 120 metres either side of the line, within which homeowners will have the option to sell their homes to the Government at their full unblighted value at any time after the HS2 route is safeguarded.
For those living beyond both the safeguarded area and voluntary purchase zone but who need to move house during the development of HS2 and find they are unable to sell their property, there will also be a “long term hardship scheme” under which the Government will buy the homes of successful applicants at their full unblighted value.
In addition, under the new sale and rent back scheme, homeowners whose property will need to be acquired will have the option to sell their homes to the Government early and stay in them as tenants until the properties are required for the railway.
We recognise that the owners of properties above tunnels may also be concerned about the potential impact of HS2 and therefore we are bringing in a series of measures designed to provide confidence in these properties.
Finally, we will work with local authorities, housing associations and affected tenants to agree a joint strategy to replace any social housing which is lost.
I must stress that we have already written directly to all those whose homes we currently expect to need to buy in order to build and operate HS2 on the London—west midlands route. The wide-ranging proposals set out today reflect the significant nature of the concern that currently exists in the property markets near the HS2 line of route, they are not a reflection of what the Government believe the long term impacts of HS2 will be. We fully expect that the impacts of HS2 will be considerably less than feared and that property prices will recover over time. However, we recognise that the current property markets near the HS2 line of route may not reflect this.
HS2 will be the backbone of a new transport system for the 21st century, offering the new railway capacity that our country will need to compete and grow. However, we fully recognise that the line will have unwelcome impacts on people living close to the route and I believe that this package of compensation demonstrates the strength of the Government’s commitment to provide the right compensation and assistance to those affected.
Alongside the property consultation published today, we are also publishing a consultation on safeguarding directions for HS2. This will set out the proposed area of land considered necessary to protect the line of route from conflicting developments, that is to say planning permission being granted for developments on land that will be required for the construction or operation of HS2. This will also set the “safeguarded area” within which compensation measures will apply.
Both consultations will close on 31 January 2013.
House of Lords
Disabled People: Blue Badge Scheme
(12 years ago)
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Lord Harrison
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what are the results of the consultation on the workings of the blue badge scheme for the disabled.
Earl Attlee
My Lords, the consultation on the personal independence payment and eligibility for a blue badge closed just three weeks ago. The responses are currently being read and analysed. This is an important decision to make and Ministers will take the time needed to ensure that all the relevant issues are taken into consideration. The Government will announce their decision shortly and will publish a summary of the responses.
Lord Harrison
My Lords, given that general practitioners know best the mobility and medical capabilities of current blue badge holders, was it not a bureaucratic and costly folly to vest within overpressed and understaffed local authorities the sensitive task of assessing eligibility for a blue badge, especially when that task was so often assigned to box-ticking junior staff with absolutely no medical knowledge? When will this Government respond to this semi-detached Prime Minister and do something about those who deserve blue badges getting them?
Earl Attlee
My Lords, the only thing I agree with the noble Lord on is his point about box-ticking. Applicants’ GPs act as patients’ advocates and are not always best placed to assess mobility or to advise on badge eligibility. In 2008, the Transport Select Committee reported that using an applicant’s own GP to assess eligibility,
“is likely to produce a bias in favour of approving the application”.
Earl Attlee
My Lords, we think it is better to have an independent assessment.
Lord Reid of Cardowan
My Lords, why are GPs considered to be qualified to decide on just about everything else on commissioning but not on this?
Earl Attlee
My Lords, the policy is to have independent assessment to avoid putting the GP in an invidious position.
Lord Elystan-Morgan
Is it the case that the ministry took the view that it could not rely upon the integrity and the professional competence of the practitioner, and was there any evidence to support that prejudice?
Earl Attlee
My Lords, disabled people’s groups, such as the Disabled Persons Transport Advisory Committee, agree that greater use of independent mobility assessments is needed to determine eligibility fairly and robustly.
Lord Richard
My Lords, will the independent assessors be medically qualified?
Earl Attlee
My Lords, independent health professionals such as physiotherapists and occupational therapists are often best placed to assess eligibility due to their professional knowledge of mobility.
Baroness Gardner of Parkes
My Lords, is it not a fact that in the central London boroughs, where disability badges are slightly more restricted and you must have an additional badge from the local borough, the system has been working very well? People from the borough also rely on a report from a GP. Does the Minister not think that the more serious problem is abuse of the blue badges, whereby very fit people are using them when they have nothing to do with a disabled person?
Earl Attlee
My noble friend makes a very good point. There is nothing to prevent an applicant producing evidence from his or her GP outlining their condition. My noble friend is quite right to identify the abuse, which is a big problem. However, the blue badge improvement service will greatly assist in reducing the abuse.
Lord Wigley
My Lords, if there is a reduction in the number of badges given out as a result of the consultation, will those who lose their badges be eligible for an appeal process and will that not add a further cost to the whole system?
Earl Attlee
My Lords, there is an appeal process—I have unfortunately forgotten exactly what it is, but I shall write to the noble Lord. It is important to understand that the number of blue badges issued has gone up and up. There are already 2.5 million badges. As you increase the number of blue badges, you can get into a position where you dilute the benefits.
Lord Dubs
My Lords, in assessing the results of the consultation, will the Minister bear in mind that there are sometimes quite confusing differences in the operation of the scheme for disabled drivers from one London borough to another? If one lives in a particular borough and uses a blue badge only there, it is easy, but if one goes into the central London boroughs—Kensington, Westminster and Camden—the rules are different and it is extremely confusing for people because they do not know what the rules are and they are not clearly stated anywhere. The best thing might be if all the boroughs operated in the same way.
Earl Attlee
My Lords, I shall draw the noble Lord’s points to the attention of my honourable friend Mr Norman Baker.
Baroness Brinton
My Lords, given the debate that has gone on about the new process, I have just been through it and have found it to be very smooth and very fast. It is extremely helpful and the advice from various medics was useful. The noble Baroness, Lady Gardner, asked about abuse of disabled bays. What can the Government do to encourage the reduction of abuse? In France, the supermarket chain, E.Leclerc, has a notice under wheelchair signs that says, “You take my space; you take my handicap”.
Earl Attlee
My Lords, I should make it clear that the blue badge scheme has no effect off road on private land. However, supermarkets are bound by the provisions of the Equality Act and need to provide disabled parking bays. I am quite confident that a supermarket will take into consideration that a blue badge is on display and I would imagine that most responsible supermarkets would do their best to avoid abuse of disabled parking spaces because it is a morally bankrupt thing to do.
Lord Davies of Oldham
The Minister has adduced two reasons for why there may be improvements to the blue badge scheme. The first is that it may reduce fraud, which we would all welcome. The second, which I think much of the House would be very doubtful about, is that doctors have been too lenient in the past and that it is best if they are kept at some distance from the issue. In that case, what estimate has the department made of the reduction that is likely to occur in the number of blue badges issued?
Earl Attlee
My Lords, in future, the number of blue badges to be issued will depend on the results of the consultation and on what decision Ministers make. Our problem is that the passported benefit is from the personal independence payment rather than the higher rate mobility component of the disability living allowance. That is going to be a different system. It is bound to produce a variation but we do not know exactly what that variation will be. Another difficulty is that the data sets are quite poor, so it is difficult to assess what the outcome will be.
Government: Cars
(12 years ago)
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Lord Hoyle
To ask Her Majesty’s Government why the Government Car and Despatch Agency car allocated to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills was not manufactured in the United Kingdom.
Earl Attlee
My Lords, the main car allocated to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has recently been replaced with one manufactured in the UK. Since 17 September 2012, the Japanese-produced Toyota Prius was changed for a Toyota Avensis manufactured at the Burnaston plant in Derbyshire.
Lord Hoyle
I welcome that news because—and I think the Minister will agree—the department should act as a shop window for our highly successful British motor industry. I believe that the news will be welcomed all around this House.
Earl Attlee
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for his comments. The government ministerial car fleet is about 50% British and 50% foreign. However, I will add a note of caution, because the supply chain for the motor industry is international now. For instance, the BMW Hams Hall engine plant produced 433,000 engines for BMW plants around the world.
Lord Brabazon of Tara
My Lords, Toyota is a leading manufacturer in this country and a great asset to British manufacturing. It makes a great many cars here and, better still, exports a great many of them. Does it really matter if the particular model concerned is not made here, when Toyota contributes so much to this country?
Lord West of Spithead
My Lords, carrying this over to other areas of manufacturing, does the Minister agree that if we do not buy something in this country, other people will not buy it? This is particularly pertinent to defence contracts. In the White Paper, we said we would try to sell lots of things abroad; but no one will buy stuff if you do not buy it yourself. It is rather important that we buy things that we make here.
Earl Attlee
The noble Lord is absolutely brilliant at asking questions that are wide of the Question on the Order Paper.
Lord Wright of Richmond
My Lords, is the Minister aware that, when I was in the Diplomatic Service, there was a requirement that ambassadors and heads of mission abroad should use British cars? I had great difficulty in getting a definition out of the Department of Trade and Industry as to exactly what a British car was.
Earl Attlee
My Lords, the reason for that was in one of the very first answers I gave—that the motor industry supply chain is very much international. Another point to remember about government procurement is that we are bound by the European procurement rules, which restrict our course of action. However, we are 50:50 British and foreign in the fleet.
Lord Davies of Oldham
My Lords, an undoubtedly British car is the London taxi, which is symbolic of everything London stands for in terms of transport. The company Manganese Bronze is in very serious trouble, to the extent that 400 taxis have been withdrawn because of steering difficulties and the firm is not able to manufacture any others. This is extremely serious as far as the London taxi service is concerned, which is of course valued by very large numbers of people. Has the department begun thinking about the answers to those problems?
Earl Attlee
The noble Lord is even more ingenious than the noble Lord, Lord West. He knows perfectly well that the specifications for London taxis, which are very peculiar, are determined by the mayor’s office.
Lord Anderson of Swansea
My Lords, the change is welcome, but would the Minister speculate on what would be the response in France, for example, which is subject to the same EU rules, if government entities were not to buy vehicles wholly manufactured in France?
Lord Addington
My Lords, is it not a point of pride that this Government are using far fewer cars and that our Ministers are now travelling on public transport, and thus might be in a better position to make decisions about the future of that transport?
Earl Attlee
My noble friend makes an important point. I do not even use public transport to get to the Department of Transport. I walk; it takes me 10 minutes exactly. The important thing is that we have reduced the size of the ministerial car fleet from about 200 to 92.
Lord Bates
Will not my noble friend consider increasing the number of cars available to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, so that it can travel widely communicating the news that we have had the fastest growth in GDP, by 1%, over the past quarter and that employment is at a record level in this country?
Earl Attlee
My noble friend is ingenious as well. Government cars are issued to Ministers when they are needed.
Viscount Simon
My Lords, following the question from my noble friend Lord Davies of Oldham, and, again, I fear, being slightly wide of the Question on the Order Paper, is the noble Earl aware that the company that manufactures black cabs has ceased trading and that the companies that will replace them are, I believe, based in Germany?
Earl Attlee
My Lords, I am aware of the difficulties of Manganese Bronze and the cabs, but that is of course a little wide of the Question on the Order Paper.
Armed Forces: Local Overseas Allowance
(12 years ago)
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Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is the rationale for the reduction of the local overseas allowance (LOA) in relation to Operation Kipion.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Defence (Lord Astor of Hever)
My Lords, local overseas allowance is paid to service personnel serving abroad to contribute to the necessary additional local cost of living in a particular country. Rates are not directly linked to Operation Kipion or any other operation. The most recent review of LOA was conducted during the strategic defence and security review, and the subsequent LOA conventions were implemented worldwide in two phases: on 1 May 2011 and 1 April 2012. Their impact varied with location, depending on the total cost of living differential relative to the United Kingdom. As with all allowances, the Government are concerned to ensure that LOA is managed in a way that is fair to service personnel but also, in a time of austerity, to respect the taxpayers’ need for value for money and financial restraint.
Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe
My Lords, I thank the Minister for that informative response in what is a rather complicated area, but I wonder whether I can press him a little further. During a visit to the Gulf this summer, service men and women raised with me the unfairness that they perceived in allowances, particularly for junior ranks. Will the Minister commit to looking again at the local overseas allowance in Bahrain which, as I understand it, has been cut substantially, is much less than that paid in the UAE and no longer reflects the cost of living, making it difficult to go off-ship when alongside? Will he consider including in this year’s budget the hotel allowance, which allows service men and women to spend time away from the service environment with family and friends, to repeat its welcome inclusion in the current budget? Given the Government’s commitment to the key principles of the Armed Forces covenant, does he accept that those cuts have had a real impact on in-theatre personnel?
Lord Astor of Hever
My Lords, the delivery of the policy that the noble Baroness mentions lies with the Service Personnel and Veterans Agency LOA team at Gosport. It conducts visits to the main locations, including Dubai and Bahrain, and decides the rates based on the local cost of items that service personnel need to buy. There may be legitimate reasons why rates differ even in postings quite close to each other, but the noble Baroness makes a very important point. We recognise the role that a fair system of allowances plays in keeping morale high. I have therefore asked my officials to look into the whole issue of Dubai and Bahrain to see whether the system is working as it should and will get back to her.
Lord Palmer of Childs Hill
My Lords, on a more general theme, when the cuts to local overseas allowances were announced, it was suggested by the Army Families Federation that because of the reductions, the Army might find it harder to find volunteers to go overseas and that Army messes would fill up, with unaccompanied postings becoming the norm. Can my noble friend tell us whether those fears were justified?
Lord Astor of Hever
My Lords, I do not think that the fears were justified. The SDSR set out a requirement to reduce expenditure on service personnel allowances by around £250 million in order to achieve the level of savings required by the economic situation in defence. It is accepted that these changes will be unpopular, and some of them may require adjustments to lifestyle, but they are a necessary part of the department’s contribution to the Government’s overall programme to reduce the deficit. To reassure my noble friend, we regularly review these allowances.
Lord Burnett
My Lords, over recent decades much of the outstanding work done by the Royal Navy has been sensitive, and therefore it has not been publicised. I hope that my noble friend agrees that the Royal Navy’s minesweeping expertise is second to none. Is he able to tell the House the value and importance that our allies attach to the Royal Navy’s contribution to Operation Kipion?
Lord Astor of Hever
My Lords, the success of Operation Kipion is measured by the fact that our efforts to reassure our Gulf partners through providing a constant presence in the region continue to ensure access and basing in Gulf states. This is vital to support Operation Herrick. The Royal Navy is at the forefront of mine countermeasure capabilities in experience, expertise and technology. The US/UK/French patrols in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz are a routine part of our commitment to the free movement of international shipping in the region. In recent years our ships have played a significant role as part of the combined maritime forces of the Bahrain-based coalition naval force drawn from 25 nations, with missions including counterpiracy, counterterrorism and the maintenance of security in and around the Gulf. These are all highly valued by our allies, including the United States.
Lord Rosser
My Lords, an MoD survey of which the Minister will be well aware has shown that nearly two-thirds of officers in the Army, the Navy and the RAF now rate their own morale as low. That is twice the level it was in 2010. What plans do the Government have for improving the morale of our Armed Forces?
Lord Astor of Hever
My Lords, I do not share the noble Lord’s pessimistic view of the morale of the senior Armed Forces but, as I said, we are constantly reviewing morale, allowances and everything else that leads to morale in the Armed Forces.
Lord Geddes
My Lords, I was fervently hoping that some other noble Lord would ask this question—but, in my appalling ignorance, what is Operation Kipion?
Lord Astor of Hever
My Lords, Operation Kipion replaced Operations Telic and Calash. It covers operations in the Arabian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, the Gulf of Aden, off the coast of Somalia and in Iraq. The latter is a defence section at the embassy, where we have a number of service personnel.
Lord Reid of Cardowan
I thank the Minister for his willingness to have his officials investigate the alleged anomalies. When he does so, I am sure he will bear in mind that although, of course, in a time of austerity, all the sacrifices and cutbacks must be shared, the Armed Forces are unique because very few of those who have a contract with the country or the Government have a contract stating that their service will be accomplished even until death. Will he bear that in mind when he looks at some of these matters affecting morale in the Armed Forces?
Lord Astor of Hever
The noble Lord makes a very good point. I have looked very carefully at all the rates that the noble Baroness brought to my attention, and I think there is an issue. The amounts are very small, but it is very important to sailors, soldiers and airmen who are out there, and it is very important that we look at it again.
NHS: Children’s Congenital Heart Services
(12 years ago)
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The Lord Bishop of Leicester
To ask Her Majesty’s Government why the removal of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation equipment from Glenfield Hospital does not form part of the review by the Independent Reconfiguration Panel into children’s congenital heart services in Leicestershire, Lincolnshire and Rutland.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health (Earl Howe)
My Lords, the Independent Reconfiguration Panel—the IRP—provides advice to the Secretary of State on the plans that the NHS puts forward for significant change to services. The legislation does not allow it to review decisions taken by the Secretary of State. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State has asked the IRP to review the Joint Committee of Primary Care Trusts’ decision on the future pattern of children’s congenital heart surgery and its consideration of the impact of that, which may include possible consequences for this service at Glenfield.
The Lord Bishop of Leicester
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for his Answer. In the east Midlands we appreciate the Secretary of State’s decision to review his predecessor’s decision on the future of children’s congenital heart services in Leicestershire, Lincolnshire and Rutland. However, in view of the unique and exceptional network of expertise with a world reputation supporting the so-called ECMO unit—expertise that, once dismantled, would be very difficult to reassemble—does the Minister accept that its future is inextricably linked to the future of children’s congenital heart services? Will he give an undertaking to this House that he will press that point on the Secretary of State?
Earl Howe
My Lords, I accept that there are interdependencies between the provision of children’s cardiac surgery and the children’s ECMO service. If new evidence emerges or there are exceptional circumstances, such as a change in circumstances following either the Independent Reconfiguration Panel review or any judicial review that may occur, then my right honourable friend the Secretary of State may wish at a future time to review the earlier decision.
Lord Bach
Is the Minister aware of how absurd it would be to have an independent report on the future of the heart unit but to exclude any consideration of the fate of the ECMO unit? As the right reverend Prelate said a few minutes ago, they are inextricably linked; indeed, the Minister seems to have conceded that there is a link between them. I remind him that Members of another place from all parties and from different parts of the country made it clear in their excellent debate earlier this week that the two are linked. As the Minister’s right honourable and learned friend Sir Edward Garnier said:
“We all know that the current decision is wrong and needs to be dealt with”.—[Official Report, 22/10/12; col. 188WH.]
Will the Government please look at this again before the whole country—
Earl Howe
My Lords, I hope that my initial Answer will have made it clear that we expect the Independent Reconfiguration Panel to look at the issue in the round, and that includes the consequences of the JCPCT’s decision, were that to be carried through. I hope that that is sufficiently reassuring. However, what the panel cannot do, in law, is review the decision of the Secretary of State. It can, however, take all the circumstances into account, and I believe that it should do so.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, I remind the House of my health interests in the register. I would like to press the Minister on that point. In the other place on 22 October, the Minister there made it clear that the decision to transfer the ECMO to Birmingham was made as a consequence of the decision of the Joint Committee of Primary Care Trusts. Given that the Independent Reconfiguration Panel is now reviewing the decision of the Joint Committee, are the Government not being unnecessarily legalistic on this point? It would be quite open to the Secretary of State to ask the reconfiguration panel for its advice on the question of the ECMO position. Why on earth does he not do that?
Earl Howe
My Lords, I can only repeat what I said in my initial Answer to the right reverend Prelate: my right honourable friend has asked the IRP to review the decision around children’s cardiac services and its consideration of the impact of that, which may include consequences for the ECMO service at Glenfield. I hope that that Answer puts this question into context. While the IRP cannot review the Secretary of State’s actual decision about the ECMO, which, as the noble Lord rightly said, followed on from the original decision of the JCPCT, nevertheless there are interdependencies between the two services that we expect to be taken into account by the panel.
Lord Walton of Detchant
My Lords, may I express the hope that this review will be concluded speedily? The whole issue of the facilities for paediatric cardiac surgery across the UK has been under consideration for about two years. I have an avuncular interest, of course, in the future of the cardiac unit in the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle, which is one of the most outstanding in the country. I ask for a speedy conclusion because the whole organisation and reorganisation of cardiac paediatric surgery have to await the Secretary of State’s decision.
Earl Howe
The noble Lord, as ever, makes an extremely important point. Children’s heart surgery has been the subject of concern for more than 15 years. Clinical experts and national parent groups have repeatedly called for change, and there is an overwhelming feeling that the time for change is long overdue. I accept the noble Lord’s point that a decision should be reached as speedily as possible. I am advised that the IRP will report to the Secretary of State on 28 February 2013, or following the conclusion of any judicial review if such a review takes place.
The Lord Bishop of Leicester
My Lords, is the Minister aware, in spite of the technically clear Answer that he has given, that the overwhelming medical opinion is that the removal of this unit could lead to significant loss of children’s lives? Are he and the Secretary of State able to contemplate that possibility with equanimity?
Earl Howe
My Lords, of course I do not regard any possibility of children losing their lives with equanimity. I can only say that that aspect was carefully looked at by the JCPCT with strong clinical advice. It reached the conclusion that it would be safe to move the ECMO service to Birmingham.
Business of the House
(12 years ago)
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Lord Strathclyde
That the debates on the Motions in the names of Baroness O’Neill of Bengarve and the Earl of Listowel set down for today shall each be limited to two and a half hours.
Baroness Anelay of St Johns
My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in the name of my noble friend on the Order Paper.
Arrangement of Business
Baroness Anelay of St Johns
My Lords, this will be a rather longer statement but, I hope, somewhat welcome.
My right honourable friend the Leader of the House of Commons made a statement last week about the sittings of the other place up to its return in January 2014. It may be for the convenience of this House if I now do the same. It is rather a long statement, since we are looking rather a long way ahead. Therefore, to save Members from reaching for their diaries, a note of all the dates that I am about to give is, of course, available in the Printed Paper Office and will be circulated with the next edition of Forthcoming Business.
I make this statement with the usual and very necessary caveat that all of these dates are subject to the progress of business. I have already announced the dates of the autumn long weekend and Christmas Recess. I do, however, propose to add one day to the Christmas Recess, namely Thursday 20 December. The House will therefore rise on Wednesday 19 December. However, we do not actually lose a day of sitting. We will sit an extra Friday because I have substituted Friday 14 December in order to enable the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury to lead a debate that day, shortly before his retirement from office.
I hope to provide for a short recess in February, rising on 14 February and returning on 25 February; which, before noble Lords think to consider it, on this occasion coincides with an adjournment of the House of Commons.
I hope that we will rise for Easter at the end of business on 27 March, and return on 15 April; and for Whitsun at the end of business on 22 May, returning on 3 June.
It remains my intention that, subject to progress of business, this House should not sit in September 2013.
Baroness Anelay of St Johns
To that end, my Lords, we will rise for the Summer Recess on 30 July and return on 8 October. There will be a short adjournment in the autumn, from the end of business on 12 November, returning on 18 November. We will rise for Christmas at the end of business on Wednesday 18 December 2013, and return on Tuesday 7 January 2014.
I hope that noble Lords will accept this as a long-range forecast and that, as ever, everything has to be subject to the progress of business. But I am very optimistic that we will be able to keep to those dates. If we follow this pattern, we will sit for the same number of weeks as the Commons in 2013. It will be a slightly, although not much, different pattern but I think that it will better suit the Members and business of this House.
I expect that the Queen will open a new Session of Parliament in state in the course of the spring but, as ever, the dates of Prorogation and State Opening will be announced later in the normal manner.
Arrangement of Business
(12 years ago)
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Baroness Stowell of Beeston
My Lords, the next debate is time limited, as noble Lords have resolved today. As is clear on the speakers list, the Back-Bench contributions are limited to eight minutes, with the exception of that of the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill of Bengarve. My reason for highlighting the eight minutes is that, as noble Lords will know, the Whips Office takes great care to ensure that the maximum amount of time is allocated to Back-Benchers within the constraints of the two-and-a-half hours. On this occasion, if everyone sticks to the limits that have been set out, we will have only one minute spare for the noble Baroness to respond. This debate is very tightly timed. Therefore, if when the clock shows eight minutes I look a little agitated, I hope noble Lords will understand why.
Media Standards and Media Regulation
Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve
That this House takes note of the relationship between media standards and media regulation.
Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve
My Lords, it is a privilege to open this debate on media standards and regulation, and to do so at this stage in events. Some noble Lords may be wondering whether this is the right time to debate this topic, given that Lord Justice Leveson has yet to report on his inquiry into the sad and sometimes criminal practices that have made media standards and regulation an urgent issue. Ministers will, of course, not wish to take a position on media standards and regulation in advance of his report. I think that we all recognise that as the context of this debate. However, I believe that we still lack a clear view of the sorts of issues that will be at stake when Lord Justice Leveson reports. Therefore, this is, on the contrary, rather a good point at which to have an initial debate, which I hope can help pave the way for later and more detailed consideration. I look forward with great pleasure to hearing the speeches from so many noble Lords today.
I begin by declaring an interest as the incoming chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission. The issues raised by this debate bear on rights of freedom of expression, rights to privacy and many related rights. Everything that I shall say in this debate draws on work done across the previous decade on a wide range of speech rights, including international debates in political philosophy and jurisprudence. None of it draws on positions taken by the commission that I shall shortly begin to chair.
I shall focus on two questions. The first is whether media regulation can be used to support media standards without risk of censorship. I think that that is a formulation of the fundamental issue. And, if it can, what sort of media regulation would be compatible with a free press? Discussion of the first question is already widespread and it is often said that any regulation, other than self-regulation, far from supporting media standards and freedom, would corrupt them. Others think that media regulation and media freedom need a statutory basis; namely, regulation that can use specific and limited powers to investigate and to sanction failures.
The particular form of regulation provided by the Press Complaints Commission has come in for a lot of criticism, even by those who think that self-regulation of some other sort could be made to work. In my judgment, however, the details of the PCC complaints process are only part of what has been defective. We should not expect a complaints procedure of any type to make more than a minor, if useful, contribution to maintaining media standards. Media content is not a consumer good in the standard sense but is a public good in the economists’ sense of the term. Complaints procedures alone therefore cannot do much to secure media standards. That may, of course, have been part of the appeal of the PCC approach in certain quarters. In the event, the governance and funding of the PCC did not enable it to achieve even those benefits that a good complaints procedure might have achieved. The defects of its complaints so-called resolution procedure have been amply documented by Full Fact, an independent fact-checking organisation, whose recent briefing demonstrates the sad limitations of the PCC’s supposed commitment to accuracy and the ways in which complainants have been let down.
Those who are searching for alternative and more adequate forms of self-regulation have made many suggestions, and I will be interested to hear proposals that other noble Lords may think could be made to work. My own belief is that there are strong reasons to be sceptical about the possibility of devising adequate forms of self-regulation, even if the format of a complaints procedure is seen for what it is. Let me remind your Lordships of a few of those reasons. This is certainly not a new problem, and the evidence that self-regulation will not work is now very substantial. Since the first Royal Commission on the Press, set up in 1947, there have been repeated attempts to find an effective form of media self-regulation. Across more than 60 years, all have come to grief, as has been documented by the Media Standards Trust in its recent report A Free and Accountable Media and covered in recent briefings from the Foundation for Law, Justice and Society. So the burden of proof that self-regulation can work now sits squarely with its proponents. The history of successive failures in self-regulation provides strong evidence that it always ends up as self-interested regulation.
Secondly, the task of convincing others, and above all the public, is much harder than it would have been in the 1940s, for several reasons. Society has changed in immense ways; other institutions and professions have lost the privilege and the culture of self-regulation, making it hard to see how such privilege can be justified or can work for the media. Thirdly, self-regulation is not, contrary to some assertions, necessary to protect media freedom. We know that because other countries which also enjoy a free press have found approaches to media regulation, not self-regulation, that are compatible with press freedom. I call attention to Lara Fielden’s recent report for the Reuter’s Institute, titled Regulating the Press: A Comparative Study of International Press Councils.
Finally, proponents of self-regulation all too often assert that the press should be free, “apart from requirements to comply with the law”. That may be true, but shows nothing about what form the law should take. The assertion simply begs the question of showing which forms of media regulation are, and which are not, compatible with a free press and adequate standards of journalistic practice.
I turn now from the question of whether regulation must be ruled out in principle to consider which sorts of regulation are and which are not acceptable. Why should we support and protect one or another conception or configuration of media freedom? What do appeals to freedom of the press, or freedom of expression justify? What limits do they set on permissible statutory regulation? Do they require specific approaches to statutory regulation? These fundamental questions cannot be settled by mere assertion, yet recent discussions often do no more. Appeals are made to rights of free speech and a free press or, as we have been used to saying since the Universal Declaration and the European Convention on Human Rights 50 years ago, rights to freedom of expression. So far, so good, but an appeal to a charter, declaration, constitution or convention is in itself no more than an argument from authority. But these documents are respected authorities. Similarly, US debates of press freedom appeal to the First Amendment to their constitution, which asserts that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of press, and they too appeal to good authority. These august documents do not justify any specific configuration of media freedom. That is both because declarations and constitutions do not do justifications, and because they are very indeterminate. They offer only starting points for justifying press freedom, and each requires interpretation. The accounts of press freedom that emerge from the best reasoned interpretations of human rights documents will be the best justifications that we can offer for specific configurations of media freedoms.
If this point seems contentious, it may help to remember that these authoritative documents do not proclaim absolute rights. They point to a range of rights each to be realised in ways that respect other rights. Article 10(1) of the European Convention starts with a ringing and well known assertion:
“Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers”.
However, Article 10(2), so much less read and so much less cited, qualifies this point by stating that:
“The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others”,
and so on. So much for the thought that a mere appeal to human rights documents is going to settle anything, but what else do we have? I believe we have a lot more. The best arguments we have will not justify unconditional media freedom but they will show us something about the acceptable limits of media freedom, and thereby the acceptable limits of regulation.
One argument often invoked is that media freedom is necessary for discovering truth. The argument has deep roots in British political thought: John Milton wrote in Areopagitica,
“though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”.
It pains me to say this but Milton’s argument is doubly defective as a justification of media freedoms. Truth is often worsted in free and open encounters: that is why we regulate speech where truth matters: for example, in courts of law and academic publishing.
Secondly, we need media freedom that also protects speech that does not even aim at truth, such as literary and artistic expression and horoscopes. Where media speech aims to discover truth, disciplines analogous to, but different from, those needed in other truth-seeking endeavours matter. Pausing for a moment on that specific point, we shall need to think about special protection for genuine—I emphasise “genuine”—investigative journalism. We discussed this to some extent exactly three months ago today in a debate on the Select Committee on Communications report on investigative journalism, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood.
We also hear frequent references to another landmark of British political thought, John Stuart Mill’s famous argument on behalf of rights of self-expression for individuals. However, it is one thing to say that individuals have rights of self-expression, and Mill’s argument applies to individuals, not to organisations, which are not “selves” in the relevant sense. In general, I believe we are right when we think we should regulate the speech of powerful organisations, and we must consider the case for statutory regulation of media communication, but the problem is: how is this to be done in a way that is compatible with the necessary media freedoms? My suggestion is that the media should be free to communicate any content they choose provided that the processes they use enable their intended audiences to follow, understand and assess that content. Regulation of process but not content would protect media freedom but also media standards. Good journalism has always aimed to do this.
I finish with brief examples not drawn from the grand heights of investigative journalism, on which we are so often rightly asked to focus, but from the daily content of humbler journalism, in which much is hidden from audiences that they need to know if they are to assess content. I suggest that if the media were required to be transparent in some of the ways in which they have insisted other organisations and professions should be transparent, we might add a great deal to media standards. I suggest three possible forms of transparency. One is openness about payments from others. At present we cannot tell whether money has been paid to secure certain content. Did celebrities pay for it? Who paid for the lovely clothes, hotels and meals that are supposedly reviewed? I think that readers, listeners and viewers should be able to tell. Why should advertising standards not apply to all paid-for content, including that paid for or provided in kind?
Secondly, there should be openness about payments to others. At present, audiences cannot tell which media content has been purchased. Even where it is not possible to reveal the name of the vendor, surely it could be made clear that certain content had been acquired by payment.
Thirdly, there should be openness about interests. Owners, editors, programme makers and journalists, like many others, have interests. However, they remain curiously exempt from requirements to disclose them. The media often demand transparency about the interests of others in powerful organisations. I suggest that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander too.
Finally, we must, of course, protect investigative reporting and think with care. There is much more to be said about the protection of genuine investigative journalism, about the limited nature of anti-monopoly provisions and about the domination of British newspapers by owners who are not taxpayers. I have merely pointed to some of the things we need to consider at this stage and I look forward to hearing other contributions.
Lord Wakeham
My Lords, I begin by saying how pleased I am to see my noble friend Lord Younger of Leckie sitting on the Front Bench. His father was a great friend and colleague of many of us over many years and I am tempted to say that if he makes half as good a speech as his father would have made in these circumstances he will do very well indeed.
I congratulate the noble Baroness who initiated this debate. She did it with the style and wisdom that we expect from her. While I am not sure I agree with everything she said, she put her case extremely well and it needs to be taken notice of.
We all wait with interest to see what Lord Justice Leveson will say and I will try to set out as best I can what I said when I gave evidence to him. Many people have grappled with the issues of press regulation and standards for many years. We have had royal commissions, and inquiries have come and gone. In the 1990s, I was involved in government when we were trying to decide what to do, and I was the chairman of the Press Complaints Commission for seven-and-a-half years. The truth is that there are not many potential models of self-regulation. Either the industry runs it or the Government run it. I do not believe that there is any magic formula that has not been tried.
My experiences as chairman of the Press Complaints Commission led me to conclude that self-regulation is certainly not perfect, but it did work, by and large, for the public and that should be our main concern. Self-regulation is practical and flexible and I am extremely glad that my noble friend Lord Hunt has found a way to develop it through the use of contract law, which is a real improvement. Statute, on the other hand, is fraught with difficulties. First, let us consider the public. Self-regulation may provide rough and ready answers but it does it quickly and it does it free and with common sense. Regulation through statute drags on for years. For example, there was a recent case involving Ofcom where it reached an adjudication 18 months after the programme was broadcast. That is crazy, and if it had happened when I was running the PCC, there would have been a dickens of a row. It is costly because statute means lawyers. The newspapers would fight it and people complaining would have to drag in lawyers as well, so the public would lose. The cost would be prohibitive. I read in the paper the other day about a footballer who lost a privacy case. He probably deserved to—I do not know enough about the case—but it cost him £500,000 to fight it. If that is what is offered by a statutory system, it is of no use at all to ordinary people in this country.
Then there are the unforeseen consequences. When the Human Rights Bill was going through this House—I see in his place the distinguished former Lord Chancellor, who disagreed with me pretty strongly at the time—I said that my worry was that Article 10 would produce a privacy law that would be available to the rich and those who wish to conceal things from the newspapers, but would be of no use at all to the ordinary person in this country. That is what has happened. As a result, we have an expensive system of taking cases to court, but 99% of the public are not able to access it. We also had the difficulties of injunctions and so on, which brought the law into disrepute.
There is also the practical problem of the internet. How could you put statutory controls on a weekly paper, such as the one in my former constituency, the Maldon and Burnham Standard, when a blogger with half a million followers can escape those statutory controls? You cannot make statute work when there are so many content providers. The world is a completely different place from 10 years ago and it will change again in the next 10 years. A statute would be out of date long before it ever left the House.
Finally, there is for me the crucial question. I do not see how you can make a statutory system work without a licensing system. What do the Government do if publishers refuse to sign up? Many would refuse to do so. Do you fine them? Do you send them to prison? Or, ultimately, do you stop them publishing? Unless you are prepared for those things, you can never make a statutory system work.
So we await Leveson. But as I told him—and he was not very pleased with this—even if the Government do not act on his report, he will have made a real contribution because he has caused us, once again, to focus on these important issues.
Lord Puttnam
My Lords, 10 years ago the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, delivered a seminal series of Reith Lectures entitled “A Question of Trust”, which quickly become a touchstone for many in your Lordships’ House. Had it enjoyed a similar influence on the proprietors and editors of sections of our national press, we would almost certainly not be here this morning. That is because, when it comes to it, this debate is all about trust and the vacuum created when it ceases to exist.
Few of us could possibly have imagined, when the news became public that Milly Dowler’s phone had been hacked, that the result would be a horrifying and long drawn-out exposure of sections of the UK media—one that has at times beggared belief in the descriptions of criminal behaviour by those who, for many years, had acted as though they were all but untouchable. It is understandable that they had come to feel that way with regard to a self-administered Press Complaints Commission; it is a great deal more troubling in their relationship with “the long arm of the law”.
Here was a small but immensely powerful clique of people who appear to have acknowledged no rules other than those that accelerated their personal and political ambitions. More disturbingly, it quickly became evident that this was not simply about an “out of control” media. No, these systemic behavioural patterns, with their pragmatic self-justifications, had leeched far deeper into civil society—into the police and politics and, in fact, into just about every nook and cranny of British public life.
A few years ago, when I was travelling the world with UNICEF, I found myself in countries where the notion of democracy—certainly as we know it—was, to put it mildly, something of an abstraction. At the time I concluded that, so long as a nation could develop a reasonably well-trained, honest and impartial judiciary, it would eventually manage the difficult and sometimes painful transition to a fully functioning nation state. However, the trail of deception, as it began to emerge from the Leveson inquiry, made me begin to question that assumption.
I was forced to come to terms with the fact that once the media, politicians and the police begin to collude with each other, or to discover a shared agenda that is neither transparent nor in the best interests of the public at large, even the finest judiciary in the world is at that point rendered effectively powerless. If there is a toxic triangle of a needy and fragile politics that believes itself to be dependent upon, or is simply in thrall to, an element of the media—an element that in turn has managed to infiltrate the very highest levels of law enforcement—once those relationships have become corrupted, then the game is effectively up for the rest of us. I understood for perhaps the first time that, taken together, these seeming “pillars of society” form an intricate and interrelated ecology, and that the development of malign intent in one leads almost inevitably to the corruption of the others.
Surely I am not alone in feeling angry at the way in which, for well over 20 years and without any apparent sense of irony at the extent of their own mendacious hypocrisy, sections of the media have been exploiting the rest of society—angry at the predatory manner in which they have pounced upon our frailties, exploited our weakness, preyed on our fears, fanned our petty jealousies and trumpeted our inadequacies, all in the guise of freedom of expression. One has only to look at what we now know went on in relation to the Sun’s coverage of the Hillsborough tragedy to see it as part of a systemic pattern of behaviour—a pattern of behaviour of an entirely different order from that which the BBC would appear, quite wrongly, to have permitted. It is my most sincere hope that nobody—at least, here in your Lordships’ House—will attempt to claim any kind of spurious equivalence between what is alleged at the BBC and the litany of crimes and misdemeanours revealed by the Leveson inquiry. To do so would be the purest humbug.
Why does all this matter? It matters because I believe that Britain, not much over a year ago, came frighteningly close to a kind of silent putsch. Ironically, it was only the tragic death of Milly Dowler and the media frenzy that followed that allowed us to get a good, long, hard look at what had been going on, and most reasonable people discovered that they did not much like what they saw.
I am the son of a newspaper man. I have a blood tie to the notion of a free press that is every bit as great as that of Elisabeth Murdoch. However, as she emphasised in her recent, and altogether excellent, MacTaggart lecture:
“With great power comes great responsibility”.
That being unarguably true, the crucial question becomes: has the great power of the press been handled with appropriate levels of responsibility, let alone empathy? Most of the evidence gathered by the Leveson inquiry would suggest that that has been far from the case.
In a speech on Monday, the Prime Minister made the point that personal responsibility lies at the heart of our criminal justice system, and of course he is absolutely right. Similarly, I am sure that I was not the only Member of your Lordships’ House to experience an overwhelming sense of admiration at his handling of the Bloody Sunday and, more recently, the Hillsborough apologies. Nor could I have been alone in finding his use of the phrase “double injustice”—a phrase which I understand he personally coined—to be absolutely profound. Surely the political and social catharsis generated by those two announcements should encourage politicians of all parties to see that there are very real alternatives to the traditional world of cover-up and evasion.
Given the lessons learnt from those recent experiences, it seems reasonable to hope that the Prime Minister, having caught the Zeitgeist and understanding the possibilities opened up by a new type of visible justice, will not allow himself to become the latest in that long line of well-intentioned leaders who, when push came to shove, buckled in the face of media intimidation. He has a unique opportunity to take the side of those who want to clean the stables and against those whose sole objective is to continue to make hay in the way they always have done, whereby in their desire to shock and stupefy, they have managed to become the actual enemies of the possibility of social harmony—the type of society we briefly glimpsed during those few magical Olympic and Paralympic weeks.
We have arrived at an important watershed, and Lord Leveson and his colleagues have some difficult and incredibly important judgments to make in the next few weeks. Without the backstop of some form of legislation, whatever system of regulation Lord Leveson recommends can only be as robust and honest as its most reluctant participant, against whom rapid and affordable access to justice must be guaranteed.
I searched the evidence obtained by the inquiry for signs that serious journalists, as they move between print and broadcast media, find the regulatory environment of the latter in any way inhibiting. I could find none. Similarly, if you ask any British editor why American newspapers and magazines, protected as they are by their first amendment rights, continue to employ fact-checkers, you will find it very hard to get a coherent explanation. The truth is that the British press and its editors have to become as accountable as the rest of civil society. They are not a special case and they have only themselves to blame for having lost the argument for exceptionalism and, with it, the right to self-regulation.
In conclusion, I suggested earlier that what we have been encouraged to think of as individual and self-sustaining pillars of freedom are in fact an intricate eco-system, all elements of which are required to prove themselves capable of trust and all of which are required to behave with equal probity, or, quite inevitably, each will infect the other until all have become corrupted.
Lord Razzall
My Lords, although the noble Baroness’s Motion clearly refers to the media generally, from the debate so far and, I suspect, from the interest in the debate, it is obvious that it will focus on press regulation and what should be done about it. I think two principles should underpin any reform of press regulation. First, the system needs to be capable of putting a stop to the kinds of ethical, immoral journalistic practices that have emerged from the Leveson inquiry. During the course of several months, we have heard a powerful and depressing catalogue of the distress suffered by ordinary people—not just celebrities—at the hands of a press that often appeared to be acting cynically and ruthlessly to exploit other people’s pain. Of course, there are not just the victims of phone hacking, but also the Liverpool supporters at Hillsborough who, all those years ago, witnessed the deaths of 96 football supporters and who were victims of recklessly inaccurate reporting in the Sun newspaper. The second test, it seems to me, should be that any reform should prevent any government intervention in a free press. As the Deputy Prime Minister said last week,
“Of course it would be completely unacceptable to do anything that allows politicians and governments to intrude upon the content of what the media do”.
However, turning to the criticism that the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, had indicated to those who are suggesting some statutory underpinning, there is a very clear distinction between a statute that allows political interference in what newspapers want to publish and an entirely independent body, established in law, that holds powerful press interest to account for implementing their own codes of conduct. In other words, it is certainly possible to keep front-line self-regulation that allows the press to police itself and deal with complaints at the speed that the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, referred to and then establish an independent backstop regulator, with powers carefully prescribed in law, which does not interfere with content but simply ensures that the self-regulated keep their own promises. Of course, one would not allow any politicians any place on that backstop body.
We surely all agree that we cannot allow the continuation of a system that has failed time and time again. Since the 1940s, there have been three royal commissions and three further inquiries or reviews that took evidence from newspaper proprietors and editors, each publishing a report and recommendations. We all remember the Calcutt committee—I think that is what the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, referred to—which was established in 1989, after flagrant and repeated breaches of ethical standards by national tabloid newspapers in the 1980s. That was when reference was made to a drink in the last chance saloon. We need to remember that it was the friend of the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, Rupert Murdoch, who prostrated himself before that committee promising real change. Despite the recommendation from Calcutt in its second report in 1993 that some statutory element was required, the Government were persuaded not to implement those recommendations and, 20 years later, we are back to the same issue.
I am not being sycophantic in commending what my noble friend Lord McNally said during the progress of the Communications Act 2003 when he introduced an amendment which would have required the PCC to send an annual report to Ofcom, to be included in Ofcom’s report to Parliament, in order to allow more parliamentary scrutiny. However, Labour resisted those amendments with suggestions that that was a slippery slope to a state-controlled press. I see the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, nods, remembering that debate. My noble friend Lord McNally also talked in that debate about the need for the PCC to be formed into a genuinely independent body at arm’s length from editors with compulsory membership and with the power to impose serious financial sanctions of up to seven figures. That, I suspect, is where we shall end up again now, nine years later.
Reference has been made to the press industry. To refer to the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, as the press industry is probably inappropriate but he has proposed a new contractual arrangement to which there are a number of ingredients of which noble Lords will be aware, but they all require the continual involvement of editors and proprietors. A truly independent system of regulation requires independence from editors and proprietors as well as independence from government. It requires the ability to provide redress and sanctions, including fines. It requires the ability to investigate when things go wrong, and it needs the ability to compel membership from large and powerful press corporations that have, for far too long, thought themselves untouchable, Mr Desmond.
It works perfectly well in other industries. Virtually every other industry in this country has been subjected to comprehensive overhauls in transparency and accountability. The medical profession, the legal profession, the financial industry, pharmacists, coroners, social workers, teachers, local councils, and the BBC have all been reformed in accordance with modern, 21st century demands for justice and fair dealing—all except the press. Let us take the judiciary. We jealously guard the independence of our judiciary and judges are appointed by an independent and statutory Judicial Appointments Commission. We do not complain that our judges are state appointed.
We must surely agree that the system now needs to be changed. The Government must have the resolution and determination to stand up to the newspaper editors and proprietors and say, “We will not allow this to happen again”. It is a unique moment in British media history in terms of promoting great public interest journalism and making sure that the kinds of abuses that have gone on for years in some of our newspapers can never be repeated without proper redress for victims and proper respect for the vast majority of journalists who want to get on with a vitally important job.
The public agree. A recent opinion poll by the organisation Hacked Off demonstrates that 78% of the public want an independent body established by law to regulate the press and 77% believe that it is no longer acceptable for proprietors and editors to control the complaints system. The Deputy Prime Minister has made it clear that the Government have asked Mr Justice Leveson and his colleagues to do a job. Assuming that he comes up with proposals that are proportionate and workable, we should implement them. We should support that view.
Lord Janvrin
My Lords, I add my thanks to my noble friend Lady O’Neill for instigating this debate this morning, particularly as I was a member of the Joint Committee on Privacy and Injunctions that reported earlier this year.
I pay tribute to my noble friend’s contribution to the thinking in this area over many years, not least in her Reith Lectures of 2002 entitled “A Question of Trust”. I mention that, as did the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, because the question of trust lies at the heart of this issue of effective press regulation, a point to which I shall return.
I agree that it is timely to have this debate on some of the key principles underlining the whole question of regulation before the Leveson inquiry reports, because it offers an opportunity to probe a little more deeply into the “what” and the “why” of effective press regulation before tackling the “how”, and in particular whether there should be a new system of self-regulation or the introduction of some form of statutory underpinning.
The “what” of effective press regulation is trying to answer the question, “What should that regulatory system be for?”. The distinction to which my noble friend drew attention is important. She drew attention to the fundamental distinction between the regulation of content and the regulation of process. It goes without saying that anyone should tread exceedingly carefully if talking about the regulation of content. I do not think that anyone seriously doubts that a regular supply of independent, informative, critical, investigative, irreverent, entertaining press content is essential to any free and democratic system as we understand it, certainly in this country.
There are of course restrictions on press freedoms, which were mentioned by my noble friend, particularly in terms of defamation or the difficult balance to be struck with the individual’s right to privacy. That raises the related question of how best to define the public interest. Those crucial issues, which will rightly be drawn into the debate on effective press regulation are hugely important, but I want to concentrate my brief remarks today on the regulation of process and conduct.
What do we mean by the effective regulation of journalistic conduct? We are talking, for example, about standards of fairness, balance and the separation of fact and opinion, or the conduct in the way in which stories are obtained or inaccuracies are corrected. This seems to be the key point: how can effective press regulation maintain, and if possible improve, standards of practice and behaviour? Certainly accepted codes of conduct have a crucial role to play, setting out what is judged acceptable and what is not. Any new regulatory system needs to be the setter of standards and, if possible and where necessary, the mechanism of change as society’s views on those standards evolve. It seems to me that the best people to determine what those standards should be are those in the media and the press industry itself. They know their business and how best to define best practice; in other words, self-regulation has relevance when setting the rules.
But the question of what a regulatory system should be for does not end there. It is about upholding those rules and standards: how do people seek redress when they think that standards have been breached? An effective system will allow a quick, simple and affordable way for individuals to challenge newspapers on their behaviour and standards. Some form of arbitration or ombudsman role—one with teeth, as many now accept—seems essential. Here, independence is imperative and this to my mind is where self-regulation in the form of arbitration, however it is dressed up, seems to undermine the whole principle of independence and weaken trust in the system.
That brings me on to the “why” of press regulation. Why is effective press regulation so crucial in today’s age? In my view, the greatest threat to the best of our media in this country lies not in overregulation, but in the commercial pressures of the digital age. Fewer people are buying newspapers, local or national, because they can get their news elsewhere—online—and they can get their opinion elsewhere, from the blogosphere. But we are much more likely to be willing to continue to pay for news and opinion if we know that they are of the highest standards; in other words, if we trust the provider. This seems to be the best reason for effective press regulation. If it helps to maintain and drive up standards, effective press regulation can contribute to the commercial viability and health of the industry, not detract from it. As a point of detail, I am not sure that those who argue for self-regulation have thought creatively enough about certification or kite marking in this whole business, not only as a way of driving up standards but in order to encourage the widest possible adherence to any regulatory system.
This brings me to the “how”. The question in my mind is: how do you arrange an effective system of press regulation that is truly independent of government, business or the newspaper industry itself? It has to be universally accepted by the press, it has to set standards, to act as an arbiter and ombudsman, and have the teeth and the sanctions to ensure that those standards are met. Can it do all these things without some form of statutory underpinning and yet be considered to be truly independent? I look forward to seeing what the Leveson inquiry concludes.
Lord Fowler
My Lords, first, I congratulate the noble Baroness on initiating this debate, and the very cogent way in which she put the issues. I find myself in great sympathy with the points she made; rather more, I might say—very mildly of course—than the case put by my noble friend sitting beside me. But I join him in welcoming the noble Viscount, Lord Younger, whose father we all remember with enormous affection.
I am so old that when I joined the Times at the beginning of the 1960s, the front page was entirely covered with advertisements; there were no garish headlines; the writers were anonymous; and the paper took pride in the fact that it was accurate and a journal of record. One might think that it was an old, fuddy-duddy newspaper, waiting to be told what to write rather than to investigate, but that was not remotely the case. I remember the then editor, William Haley, a very upright and honest man, telling the assembled staff what their role was. “The job of a newspaper,” he said, “is to reveal”, and he was right—that is its job. Years ago it was to reveal the conditions in the Crimea; in recent years the equipment of the British troops in Iraq or Afghanistan, or the position with regard to thalidomide.
I entirely defend the right of the media to reveal, to probe behind what officialdom wants kept secret, and I entirely defend and applaud the media when they stand up for human rights and expose injustice. That is overwhelmingly in the public interest. But do not ask me to defend the activities of those who pry, sometimes illegally, into the private life of the citizen, or employ photographers with long-range cameras to get personal shots of celebrities, or bribe the police or other officials in order to get a story. The task is to offer a defence to the public against the rogue reporters while allowing newspapers the total freedom to expose the truth and work in the public interest.
No one claims that that division is easy. That is why, many months ago, I advocated an independent inquiry into phone hacking. I am told that I was the first in Parliament to do so, so I applaud very strongly the way that Lord Leveson has gone about his work. His inquiry has been comprehensive and fair. Frankly, what I deplore is the undoubted effort that is now taking place to denigrate and rubbish the report, even before anyone in Parliament or the public has had the opportunity of reading it. Let no one doubt that there is a campaign in motion to do just that.
Perhaps I might say in parenthesis to my own Front Bench that it was the Prime Minister and the Government who set up this inquiry and they were totally right to do so. It is certainly not open to any member of the Government to dissociate themselves or attack the inquiry process. There may well be differences of view at the end, but we should at least wait to see what Lord Leveson has to say. We should also acknowledge the part that the inquiry has already played in revealing what has been taking place. We now know that around 1,000 people were the likely victims of phone hacking, that it was not an isolated rogue reporter who was responsible but an organised conspiracy, and that the abuse stretched way beyond the News of the World to other newspapers.
The inquiry has given the clearest indication that the country is getting serious about the abuse that has taken place. It has also shown how truth can be revealed, not in a piecemeal way but comprehensively. That is what concerns me about the various different inquiries that are taking place into the Jimmy Savile case. Of course, the action or inaction of the BBC should be investigated but to get a complete picture so should other areas, such as the health service. I was Health Secretary for six years. I met Mr Savile once or twice in that time, as did my predecessors and successors. Did no one at Stoke Mandeville, Leeds or Broadmoor know about his activities? Was information passed on, and if it was, what then happened? These are not just questions of historic importance; they have total relevance today if any similar thing should happen again. That is why I believe that the public would be best served by one inquiry designed to reveal what really happened and the lessons that could be learnt from it.
As far as the BBC is concerned, I am bound to say—and I speak as a defender of the BBC—that its response to the allegations has been somewhere between woeful and shambolic. I return to a point that I and my former committee made previously: the BBC in responding to issues of this kind would be much better served by a chairman who was the real chairman of the BBC and an independent body for complaints, rather than a system that is ridiculously divided between the executive on one side and the BBC Trust on the other.
Therefore, the perennial problem of the BBC is the trust and the perennial problem of the press is the Press Complaints Commission. Let us be clear on one point, to put it at its most moderate: the national press—because it is predominantly the national press that we are talking about—has a case to answer. Since Leveson was set up, we have seen a newspaper closed down and 40 journalists arrested, and the clearest evidence has been accumulated that the public interest has been ignored. If this was some other industry, it would be the press themselves who were calling for radical reform and saying that action should be taken.
We need a complaints system which is demonstrably independent and which is not seen as a defence mechanism for the press; we need a system where the public interest is put first; we need a system which is as fearless as the best of the newspapers that it is reviewing; and we need a system which includes all newspapers and where there is a power of investigation into abuse.
Then, of course, there is the question of whether there should be a statutory element. Having argued that we should wait for Leveson, I just say this: no one is arguing for overriding statutory controls that limit the legitimate interests of the press. Equally, however, I find it difficult to accept the argument that any kind of statutory underpinning will lead to the end of free journalism as we know it. That is a ludicrous overstatement of the case.
Following Leveson, we have the opportunity of putting things right. I say to the Government that we do not want any more words about drinking in the last-chance saloon. That time has passed. What we want now is action in the public interest, providing us with a free press but with proper safeguards for the legitimate rights of the public. We have all seen in the past how reports have been shelved due to the opposition that can be whipped up. We all know what the easy way is to get newspaper headlines, but I hope that, this time, Ministers will consider most the interests of the ordinary citizen.
Lord Sugar
My Lords, there is a need to crank up regulations controlling the media. They have, for far too long, run wild with very little control. A few weeks ago in this Chamber, we discussed the Defamation Bill, and this debate today touches on some of the same ground. Regrettably, in the case of defamation, your Lordships are considering easing up and, some may argue, actually making life easier for the media to continue to run wild.
What we have seen in the past few years is the complete decay of decency and morals in the media. They do not seem to exist at all in the printed media and sometimes, I regret to say, in television. Desperation to get a story has led editors to stray from honesty and truthfulness to using unfair means of finding or creating devious angles on a story, or even tricking the subject of the story by illegal means. Of this, of course, your Lordships are fully aware in light of the recent inquiry carried out by Lord Leveson.
It is my opinion that journalists should be licensed. Moreover, editors should be made responsible for what is printed in their newspapers or broadcast on their TV channels and they, too, should be licensed. I do not see any room for self-regulation. There should be an authority which dishes out, for want of a better expression, yellow cards or ultimately red cards for those who continually abuse the system—or, to use our American cousins’ terminology, “three strikes and you’re out”. In other words, we should say, “Your newspaper, your television channel, has been guilty of publishing lies or indulging in irresponsible journalism under your watch and, therefore, you are banned from operating as a newspaper or television editor”—in the same way that company directors are disqualified from running companies when they act irresponsibly and illegally.
The Press Complaints Commission, I regret to say, is weak—I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, because I know that he was the chair of it. However, I take a point that he raised about a footballer having to spend half a million pounds to defend himself and to get some justice. Well, does that not answer the question? If the Press Complaints Commission actually had some clout among the press, one would not have to go and spend any money with lawyers; it would actually punish the media. I do not care what anyone might say to argue with that statement; I can assure you that there are very few, if any, in the printed media who take the PCC seriously.
There was a day when the once great newspaper, the Sunday Times, would spend months working on a story, breaking news on some revelation. The journalism was carried out very diligently and carefully so that the content of the finished article was accurate. Those stories would take weeks, if not months, to develop and were kept under wraps until they broke, bringing massive revelations. These days, newspaper editors are demanding a story a day. They are forcing their staff to fabricate stories—to make up stories—to provide compelling headlines for their front pages. It is this pressure which is inducing staff to act illegally in the manner which the Leveson inquiry has covered in full.
It is impossible for journalism to be treated in the same way as a production line. You can not fabricate stories in matters of public interest simply because events are not occurring as regularly as newspapers would like them to. It is because of this that you get low-class journalism where journalists are trained to trick contributors to their articles or programmes, where content is edited in such a manner that is misleading, and where headlines are created from throwaway remarks or taken completely out of context. A double-page spread in the Sun today accuses the noble Lord, Lord Sugar, here of “blasting” the BBC. The other day, I made the fatal error of giving somebody an interview about enterprise and youngsters, and it resulted in me “blasting” the BBC. Of course, this morning, my telephone was blasting with calls from executives at the BBC—as if they have not got enough to worry about at the moment—asking me what this was all about.
Let us consider a situation where a camera crew has forgotten to switch off a microphone or deliberately left it switched on. This of course happened to the former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. It was quite natural that he may have had some comments to make privately in the car, but, unbeknown to him, his microphone was still on. This was not proper journalism; this is the sort of thing that needs to be controlled.
Another example is the murder of Jo Yeates in Bristol, where the pressure on journalists was such that they effectively accused her landlord of her murder—he was questioned by police and found not to be guilty—but, nevertheless, they had him hung. That was absolutely diabolical journalism at its worst. The whole Madeleine McCann story is another example where, because of the same pressure to produce something when there was nothing new to report, the press just made stuff up and it all ended up with them having to print front-page apologies. The damage was done and you can never repair that damage.
I hope that the Leveson inquiry not only reaches conclusions about things that have been done but produces some practical recommendations on regulating the media, with provisions that can result in prosecution for people who act illegally and, more to the point, the suspension of high-profile editorial staff—as well as significant fines of a quantum similar to those imposed by, for example, the FSA when a financial services company steps over the line. If necessary, those responsible should be banned from practising their profession in the same way as a lawyer or doctor would be struck off if they had acted improperly.
Lord Grade of Yarmouth
My Lords, I declare an interest as a current, and fairly recent, lay member of the Press Complaints Commission. In the interests of meeting the eight-minute guillotine, I hope that the noble Baroness will take my thanks and congratulations on this debate as read.
I declare my sympathy for Lord Justice Leveson. It is hard to imagine a more difficult task than the one with which he is currently engaged, evidenced by your Lordships’ debate today. Recent events suggest that it is not getting any easier. We have just had two press controversies involving unethically obtained photographs of members of our Royal Family—Prince Harry in Las Vegas and the Duchess of Cambridge in France—which have vividly highlighted the problem of content regulation in a global digital media market. I doubt it has escaped Lord Leveson’s attention that the photographs of the Duchess were published in countries with regulatory regimes offered as possible solutions for the UK. On this evidence, his menu of available options seems to be shrinking.
Publication of the Duchess’s photographs started in France, the country cited as having the model of strict privacy legislation—the same law that was ignored by the French magazine editor, who seemed confident that any resulting court penalty would be comfortably offset by increased circulation. Pictures were then published in the Republic of Ireland, whose system of press regulation is regarded by many as the model for the UK, with an ombudsman recognised by statute—the “statutory underpinning” many commentators and many of your Lordships are seeking for the UK. Photos then appeared in Sweden, where they have the only self-regulatory press council in Europe with the ability to fine publications that transgress. One of the only countries in Europe to operate a statutory press council is Denmark, which even has the power to jail a recalcitrant editor; and the pictures of the Duchess appeared there too. All the while, blogs across America were reproducing the images based on the freedom written into their own constitution.
I say all this not to suggest that any of the systems in other countries are wrong or that their examples should be ignored, but rather to make the point that the issue is a remarkably complicated one, however simplistic some of the rhetoric around it has become. Regulation of the press is a paradox, and a problem that has been around for hundreds of years, not because of a lack of willingness to solve it but because there are no easy answers. However, just because a perfect solution does not exist, that does not mean that we cannot now have a better system. If nothing else, I am hopeful that Lord Leveson’s deliberations will redefine, and then codify in writing for the first time, the role of a new, enhanced, self-regulatory body.
In the usual blame game that follows any controversy in the UK, the old PCC has been accused and found guilty in the court of the commentariat for failing to act in ways that were well outside its remit. It was not set up or resourced as a policeman for the press, to instigate investigations into suspected wrongdoing by the press or proactively to oversee standards. It was set up to offer a free, fair and fast service for those seeking redress from publications for falsehoods, inaccuracies and so on. It has carried out this role, and continues to carry it out, with commendable independent diligence. Some Members of both these Houses of Parliament who have publicly criticised the PCC have themselves enjoyed the benefits of the PCC’s ex-post—and often more important ex-ante—abilities to prevent or correct inaccurate or intrusive stories.
We are all aware, of course, of the genesis of the inquiry: the shameful actions of the News of the World et cetera. Criminal acts were perpetrated and must be punished. I cannot resist asking your Lordships what the old PCC was supposed to have been able to do to prevent phone hacking when the threat of a prison sentence proved an inadequate deterrent. However, that is a matter not for regulation but for law enforcement. Indeed, Lord Leveson himself has acknowledged that the question of criminal behaviour is for the police to examine. His inquiry, thus far, has scarcely illuminated the issue of phone hacking at all.
When Lord Leveson reports, he will be doing the British public interest a great service if he lays out a new and much enhanced written remit for the successor to the PCC, giving it powers and resources to continue its complaints role, investigate proactively and play the lead role in auditing compliance arrangements within individual titles and in naming and shaming where there are deficiencies. I believe that the proposals put forward by the newspaper industry, with some input from the Press Complaints Commission and my noble friend Lord Hunt, will become a valuable part of the solution, subject to some preconditions.
The creation of a new body with a new written remit is necessary, enshrining some principles: it must be independent, and the appointment of all its members, and the chair, must be public and transparent and independent of the press; its funding must be secure and adequate, and there needs to be a commitment that the industry will provide sufficient funds to allow the regulator to do its work; it must have powers to investigate without the trigger of the complaint, and have the mandate, resources and powers of investigation to examine systemic issues as they arise; and it must be wide-reaching. In an online age, universality of regulation is not possible. Ofcom, a statutory body, currently has no powers over broadcasters’ websites, so we cannot envisage that the new system will catch everyone. However, all the major players must see that it is in their own interests to join in and to stay in.
As your Lordships may well know, my experience comes mostly from the world of broadcasting. However, while I applaud the effectiveness of statutory broadcast regulation, I do not endorse it as a model for the press. Broadcasting regulation is a creature of a peculiar circumstance: the ability to exploit spectrum, a national resource that is rightly controlled by government, such that licensing is therefore necessary. Because of the universal distribution of content enjoyed by television, there are statutory requirements of taste and decency, and, of course, impartiality. None of this is true of the press. Rightly for a statutory regulator, it is worth noting that Ofcom has no ex-ante powers to restrain publication, a crucial PCC function.
We do not have long to wait for Lord Leveson’s report. He has the opportunity to produce something that will be so much clearer and more wide-ranging than what has come before. I finish by saying that, meanwhile, we should not forget that it was the journalism of the Guardian newspaper that laid bare the shortcomings of News International and the British press.
Lord Stoneham of Droxford
My Lords, I welcome this debate and agree especially with my noble friend Lord Fowler, who said that we should not pre-empt Lord Leveson. He deserves the respect of our listening to what he has to say and considering his recommendations. There are two principal issues for him to address. I do not think that there is any argument but that we have to strengthen the regulation of press standards. The other question is whether market dominance was a major contributory factor to the problems we have recently experienced.
On the first question, I think it is accepted that we are going to have to strengthen regulation of standards. We also have to recognise that public perception in this is as important as the reality of what we are doing. The question is how to do that while continuing to encourage accessibility and help for the ordinary person in the street who has a genuine grievance; and whether the public will let us build on what we have or whether we have to have a complete transformation by getting it on to a statutory format.
I do not want to spend much time on the second question, of whether market dominance was a factor, but I believe that it did contribute to the problem. An arrogance grew up in part of News International—I saw it because I worked there—that made senior people think that they were untouchable because they had politicians, the establishment and the police in their awe, if not in their pay. In their tabloid titles, no one was worrying about the risks of what they were doing or the consequences when they were finally challenged and found out.
There are some key points that Leveson needs to look at in detail. It is not generally a popular thing to say, although some today are saying it, that the Press Complaints Commission has a list of achievements and has made considerable improvements. It is not right to say that the press ignores it—in fact, huge sections of the press respect it and work with it assiduously. It deals with complaints and has drawn up, over 20 years, a comprehensive, regularly updated code of practice which stands scrutiny—it is what we want. Practically everything is in there, it just needs enforcing and following.
However, the public perception has not caught up with the reality; I accept that. Leveson will obviously have to take things on further, but how? Politicians have failed to deal with the market dominance issue over the past 30 years. It clearly needs an independent process with clear parameters to deal with that. I have to say that the problems in that area do not bode very well for politicians setting up a statutory system. Also, Lord Leveson cannot ignore the ongoing revolution in the industry. There has been a huge decline in print media. There is a convergence of print and all forms of broadcast media, and the growth of social media and blogs means that they, rather than the press or the broadcasters, are often setting the press agenda. Frankly, there is no point introducing heavy-handed regulation of print media when all below are free to ignore it and, as the courts have shown, very difficult to regulate.
What does Leveson need to do? I believe that he needs to build on what we have and strengthen a new Press Complaints Commission. He needs to build on what I think—despite what the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, said—is the pretty effective complaints handling system that it has put in place over the past 20 years. The reforms initiated by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, deserve support. However, standards of behaviour in individual companies need addressing—the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill. We need to look at the process; the errors and weaknesses of the PCC in that regard need to be addressed. As we know, it failed on the hacking issue and there was a weakness in our system. In all respects, the successor to the PCC needs to be and to be seen to be independent of the industry in all respects—on appointments and development of the editors’ code—and it must cover everyone. All newspaper companies and the new generation of bloggers must sign up. We cannot have companies simply dropping out of the system when they dislike a particular decision.
The test for what Leveson recommends for regulation is for me as follows. First, he needs to concentrate on how we protect and support the ordinary person in the street—not the rich and famous, with respect to the noble Lord, Lord Sugar. People such as the noble Lord have the resource and advice they need to protect themselves. We need to look at how someone such as Christopher Jefferies, the retired teacher who was pilloried and harassed by the media frenzy of the Bristol murder case, can be helped and protected. We need to look carefully at how the PCC has started to develop its pre-publication support services for people caught in such situations. A flexible, low-cost system will always be better than one dominated by lawyers.
Leveson also has to ensure that every media company is in the system. We must have incentives to join or penalties for not joining. Involvement in the new body may have to be through encouragement, because it provides better protection for those companies in the courts on defamation or public interest cases, cheaper insurance or even tax incentives. The public also accept the need for some sort of sanction. The only thing that I would say is that we have to be careful not to be too severe, because that would drive everybody to the lawyers, slow the process, reduce accessibility and increase costs. When I worked in the media, I always found that a small donation to charity was the best way to resolve disputes. We need to have a culture of that and use larger fines for systemic and repeated breaches.
The successor to the PCC needs to raise its public profile; it needs to be effective and to deliver. It is not good enough if the public perceives that it is simply reacting to the pressure of statutory regulation threats when it comes forward with reforms. It needs to be more proactive and to take over promotion of the profession of journalism, so that it is not seen as just a trade rather than a profession.
The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, ended his witness statement to Leveson by saying:
“This would not be a case of self-regulation being granted one grudging, last chance; it is independent self-regulation being given its first chance. The public interest, for me, is embodied by a free and responsible press—a press that recognises and cherishes the considerable privileges it enjoys, and conducts itself accordingly”.
I agree wholeheartedly with that.
Lord Inglewood
My Lords, I begin my few remarks by joining other speakers who have thanked the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, for introducing this debate. I must declare an interest as the chairman of the CN Group, a regional media company based in Cumbria.
As the noble Baroness said in her elegant introduction, I also chair the Select Committee on Communications and, as she said, just before the summer break we debated our report on the future of investigative journalism. I do not propose to go over anything in that document, other than to draw attention to our discussion of the issues thrown up by journalists breaking the law—they contend, in the public interest—and our conclusions, which are very similar to those reached independently by the Director of Public Prosecutions. Indeed, the committee may come back to a number of those issues.
Currently, the committee is working on a report on convergence which, as my noble friends Lord Grade and Lord Stoneham pointed out, will throw up a number of difficult questions of regulation. At this stage, the problem seems to be getting bigger and more difficult, so I shall not add any comments on that at this point.
I have always taken the view that, in general, people are basically decent. Although our ideas and definitions vary, we all want to live in a world and society where, by and large, things are what they seem to be. As for the media, people expect that what is sold to them as news or comment on news is not incompatible with the facts underlying the story and concerns things of significance.
The media, certainly in this country, are not merely private fiefdoms for their paymasters, owners, editors or journalists to promulgate whatever they like. In some way, that is analogous to the expectation that advertisements should have some recognisable relationship with the product being promoted and its attributes. Indeed, in all civilised societies, constraints are placed on individuals’ freedom of action to protect the legitimate and proper interests of other people and to stop them being harmed gratuitously. Because there has been widespread concern about those issues, regulation above and beyond the general law has been introduced to surround the media. After all, the purpose of regulation is to hold the ring and ensure that trust is embedded in the institutions and organisations affected.
The current crisis—for that is what I think it is—has caused the public to believe that regulation in respect of the media, in all its various forms, is not working properly. We must not intellectualise this too much—we must not be too clever about it—because if we try to do that, we miss the fundamental point. I am sure that there is a widespread feeling across the country, regardless of the underlying truth of the details of some of the propositions, that things have gone awry.
As a matter of principle, it is essential that the Government and Parliament—which is different from the Government—are kept as far apart from the detailed regulation of the media as possible. It is one of the consequences and characteristics of the crisis that we are in that both the Government and Parliament are not the subject of widespread trust at present. The problem is compounded when we realise that the press and the media more widely are equally no longer fully trusted. While I believe that we must not overstate the case, there is real scepticism of regulation in whatever form it may come because it is felt variously that on occasions it is less than completely impartial, that it has no real teeth, or both.
It all boils down to a lack of confidence and trust. Whatever the outcome of the current debate and the discontent through which we are going, no amount of changing the regulatory architecture will help by itself, nor will changes in the modus operandi of those engaged in the sector, unless that trust and confidence is restored. Everything boils down to that, and whatever changes come—and changes must come, but let us not forget that there is more than one way of skinning a dead cat—unless that trust is restored, our current nationwide discontent with the media and of the media will remain. I do not believe that to be a healthy state of affairs for a free country since a plural, confident, free but fair media is a defining characteristic of the kind of country we want the United Kingdom to be.
Lord Soley
My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, and I share her view that a free press is a vital ingredient of a free society. A free press is an extension of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. It is not, and should never have become, a freedom for large corporate organisations to trash the lives of others and—when they chose to do so—to mislead the British public by presenting factual inaccuracies on quite a large scale.
Although it is important that we wait for Leveson, I hope that when the report comes the Government will indicate very quickly that they intend to legislate for a new regulatory system, which I shall come to in a moment. If they do not do so, I will look at bringing forward a Bill of the type that I presented to the House of Commons in 1992. I would make significant changes to that Bill, but the core would stay the same on media standards, to which the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, referred. Had that Bill been accepted at the time and become law on those issues of media standards—and I say this to the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, who, as Chief Whip of the Conservative Government of the time, played such a crucial part in seeing that that Bill did not become law—then the press would not have had such a bad time as it has had in recent years. It is very important to understand that. I say that knowing that I did not get everything right in that Bill, and there is one crucial change I would have made.
We would do well to remember that CP Scott said 90 years ago:
“Comment is free, but facts are sacred”.
If the media could get back to that, then we would go a long way to solving many of the problems. There is a tough choice to be made between state regulation and self-regulation. I do not agree with my noble friend Lord Sugar that we should have licensed journalists, but I also disagree profoundly with the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham. As I said to him back in 1992, just because you have a regulator that is backed up by statute, that does not mean, as he said in his speech, that you have to license journalists. There are other ways of dealing with this, and I will come to them in a moment.
One reason why we want regulation kept out of state control of any kind is that there is a difference, as the noble Lord said earlier, between electronic media and printed media. Print media in this country have always been campaigning media, which means that they pursue political objectives; so the Guardian is seen as left wing and has a left-wing spin—and it is a spin—on its stories, and the Daily Mail has a right-wing spin on its stories. The BBC and ITV do not, although anybody on the left will tell you that they are on the right and anybody on the right will tell you they are on the left—but that is the way it goes. By and large, the campaigning nature of newspapers is an important thing to protect. That does not mean that the BBC and ITV are not capable of doing good investigative journalism with state regulation; they are, and they do. It is clearly not an either/or. It is more subtle than that.
I would favour a non-statutory body, but a non-statutory body has to have real teeth. That is what I want to say a little about. An independent Press Complaints Commission has to be independent of the media. I found nothing more offensive in the old Press Complaints Commission than the fact that the code of conduct was drawn up by an editor—largely by Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail at the time. The fatal flaw in that is that they tended to write something with let-out clauses. I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Stoneham, who said that the Press Complaints Commission’s code is good. It is not; it is bad. If you read it as a straightforward thing, it seems right. It says all the right things about not invading privacy unnecessarily and so on, but it has big get-out clauses. One of those says, quite simply, that it is all right to print anything if it is in the public interest to do so. That overrides all the other things and conditions. The press can say, “It is in the public interest, so we’ll do it”. There are other clauses where, had I more time, I could point out how cleverly worded they are. They allow a big let-out from the PCC.
Any regulation should not include pre-publication censorship. In a way, that is one of the core points. Do not put in pre-publication censorship: pre-publication censorship of a story would inhibit the freedom of journalists and editors. However, the other side of that is that they must take responsibility for what they do, whether in the court or in front of the regulatory body. That is what I mean when I talk about the freedom and responsibility of the press. There should be a conciliation service, but it should be backed up by some help for those people who complain. Those who need help are not people like me or people in powerful positions. They are small people who need someone to take their case for them, and possibly take it to court. The regulatory body should be funded like other regulatory bodies—I shall not go into that now because it is a long issue—and it should also have, and I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Grade, here, the power to call for evidence and witnesses and be able to assert that power.
Let me deal with what happens in the case of a breach. Again, I disagree profoundly with the noble Lord, Lord Wakeham, on this. There are a number of ways of dealing with a newspaper group or person who does not follow the PCC code or join the PCC. I shall give two simple examples in view of the limited time. If an organisation refuses to join the new independent body, one of the things you can do is say that its right to have the VAT exemption on newsprint is lost. That is a helpful fact. The other thing you can do—and you can do both these things—is allow the courts to recognise that a newspaper that is a member of the PCC and has shown a good record in its general observance of the PCC code will get a reduced sentence when it breaches, but one that is not and has not would receive a heavier fine if it breached the code. There are a number of ways to punish the newspaper if it tries to avoid the code.
Bear in mind that, by and large, although there are obviously very big exceptions to this, and clearly Jimmy Savile is one, people’s sexual lives should not be on the front pages of newspapers. Most sex stories are run because they sell newspapers. Newspapers’ hypocrisy is enormous. I always made it very clear that I would feel much more confident in defending the right of newspaper editors to protect privacy if I had seen photographs of, for example, their wives sunbathing semi-naked in a private setting, but you never see that and you never hear about their private lives. You only hear about the private lives of others, although there are one or two exceptions to that. The public interest is to have some form of regulation backed up by statutory powers, which must provide the new regulatory body—not unlike the Advertising Standards Authority—with the ability to take a case to court. Those are the ways forward.
My final point is about the coverage of politics. I disagree again with my noble friend Lord Puttnam. I think he was very naive in the Power report about the relationship between politics and the press. It is a very important relationship that needs to be protected, but it is being abused, as he rightly says. The reality is that politicians need the press, and vice versa. The way in which we use that is important, but it ought to be publicly open, and there also ought to be some controls on it too, not least in announcing the relationship between the press and politicians at times. Remember, though, at times stories would not run if you did not have a relationship between the elected politicians and the press.
Lord Black of Brentwood
My Lords, I declare an interest in this debate as a director of the Telegraph Media Group and chairman of the Press Standards Board of Finance, and draw attention to my other media interests in the register. I join other noble Lords in our gratitude to the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill.
Over the past few years, the media have been subject to the most unprecedented scrutiny. We have had the criminal investigations into phone hacking and payments to public officials. This has been the biggest police operation in British criminal history, bigger even than the investigation into Lockerbie. At its height it has had over 170 police officers involved, conducting dawn raids on the homes of journalists, which, if they had taken place in Zimbabwe, we would rightly have condemned.
We have had at least six parliamentary inquiries scrutinising every detail of this subject. None of them has recommended statutory controls of the press. Then, of course, we have had the Leveson inquiry, which has deployed powers of investigation even more sweeping than those granted to the Chilcot inquiry into the origins of an illegal war. It has cost £5.6 million, taken evidence from 474 witnesses and the record of its hearings runs to 3.2 million words. No industry in modern times has endured such in-depth, microscopic scrutiny.
In passing, I regret that in this maelstrom of inquiries two key issues have largely been overlooked. The first is the absence from the debate of the one thing that is changing the face of the media more than anything else and will have a far longer-term impact on the culture, practices and ethics of the press than any other factor: the internet. The second is the international perspective—namely, how what happens here in the UK will be magnified around the world. A little more of that later.
I am not an apologist for the past nor for some of the terrible things that we have heard about and the abuses that have taken place. My concern today is not so much history as the future. Change, as we have heard, is coming; a new regulatory system is to be put in place. Tougher controls are needed to protect the public. The key question, though, is what kind of change will raise standards and protect the public’s right to know. The answer, in my view, is a stark choice. Here I am afraid I disagree with my noble friend Lord Fowler. That choice is: do we want state regulation of the press or a free, independent press? We should be clear at the outset that this is a binary choice—there is no easy middle way. We either have self-regulation, rooted in the industry but independent of it, or we have some form of state regulation. You can dress it up as “underpinning” or “recognition”, but at the end of the day they amount to the same thing.
Here is the reality of that choice, going forward. On the one hand we have a model for self-regulation pioneered by my noble friend Lord Hunt and worked up in co-operation with him by editors and publishers. It is a proposal for an entirely new system of tough, independent and durable regulation. It would be a radical departure from the past. For the first time, it would be buttressed by law—not statute law, which would be so damaging to free speech, but civil law. It would have real powers of investigation of the sort that we have heard demands for today, and of sanction to deal with breakdowns in standards, including fines against newspapers of up to £l million. It would provide speedy redress for complainants. For the first time, it would have guarantees of structural independence from the industry. Above all, it would bring about a renaissance in internal governance within publishers because of a new system of certification, which would have a real impact on standards. I assure the noble Lord, Lord Janvrin, that kitemarks and certification would be a key part of this system. I also assure my noble friend Lord Stoneham that many of the very sensible requirements that he pointed to in a new regulatory system would be met by my noble friend’s proposals. This system would be deliverable swiftly, without the need for legislative intervention. Even if there were no legal challenge to some form of statutory-based system, it would probably take three years to set up. If we got a green light, the industry could have this up and running in three months.
The other option, on the other hand, is a statutory one. That brings with it huge implications for our democracy. The Lord Chief Justice said recently that,
“the independence of the press is a constitutional necessity”.
Indeed—all other freedoms depend on it. However, the press cannot be independent if politicians are involved in regulating it in some way, no matter how slight or how tiny—no matter how much of a dab of statute there was in regulating it. Statutory controls, however small, would produce what Professor Tim Luckhurst in a pamphlet today describes as a “constitutional absurdity”:
“parliamentary scrutiny of a body the electorate depends upon to scrutinise parliament”.
The imposition of statute would not simply be a constitutional abomination, striking at the heart of the thousands of newspapers and magazines in the UK whose voice was never heard at Leveson, and which bear no responsibility for the problems that gave rise to it. More importantly, it would be totally unworkable. It would certainly require a form of licensing to make it operate, as my noble friend Lord Wakeham said—not licensing of journalists, as the noble Lord, Lord Soley, suggested, but the licensing of publications and publishers. And I am afraid that the noble Lord’s alternative of some form of VAT exemption has already been ruled out by the European Commission.
It would be impossible to define the “newspaper industry” in a digital age. It would drive many successful online publishers abroad, ironically meaning that the coverage of a statutory system would be much smaller than a self-regulatory one. It would be unstable, subject to constant legal challenge, and it would be of little use to members of the public. As my noble friend Lord Wakeham said, statutory complaints systems are slow and legalistic.
Embarking on such a massive constitutional change and introducing even the tiniest political interference into the press would require overwhelming evidence of need. In my view, none has been presented. It is therefore little surprise to me that a Joint Committee of Parliament, of which I and the noble Lord, Lord Janvrin, were members, concluded:
“we do not recommend statutory backing for the new regulator”.
I mentioned just now the impact of decisions about press regulation beyond our shores. We have responsibilities there too; this is not just a domestic issue. The UK has been blessed with three centuries of press freedom but many around the world do not have that luxury. This is an area that this House should care deeply about. Across the world, freedom and self-regulation are on the march. In Sri Lanka, Botswana, Swaziland, South Africa, Tanzania and Zambia, real progress has been made in recent years in dismantling state controls. Those new-found freedoms are fragile, though, and an ill wind from the UK would easily hand the initiative back to those who wish to control the press, a point made to the Leveson inquiry by the World Press Freedom Committee.
Rushing to embrace statute in response to events that were above all the result of a failure of law would place us in great danger. It is playing with fire. At risk are not just the personal freedoms of the British public, which depend on a free press, but also the future of many countries in the world that look to us for an example. I began by saying that change is coming—radical change. The proposal for a new self-regulatory regime will create here the toughest system of press regulation anywhere in the free world. Let us grasp that opportunity for change, rooted in the constitutional necessity of an independent press that is the guarantor of all our freedoms, and let us get on with it.
Baroness Uddin
My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, for bringing this debate to the House. Since the events of 9/11 and 7/7, media attention on Muslims and the Muslim community has dramatically increased. Studies conducted by Cardiff University media school, among others, and commissioned by Channel 4 analysed some 974 stories and found that approximately two-thirds of all “news hooks” for stories about Muslims either involved terrorism, religious issues such as Sharia law, women in the context of forced marriage and highlighting the cultural differences between British Muslims and others or were simply about so-called Muslim extremism. These stories all portrayed Muslims as a source of conflict, emphasising differences. By contrast, however, only about 5 per cent of stories were based on problems faced by British Muslims, and only on very rare occasions was there a mention of anything inclusive or positive.
Noble Lords will be familiar with sociologists’ thinking on how media impact on society. They refer to the two concepts of “agenda setting” and “framing”. “Agenda setting” refers to ways in which the media, through an emphasis on some issues and not others, help to shape particular concerns of our time. “Framing” contextualises it so that society can make sense of that issue. Take immigration as an example. For decades now, the media have framed this issue in terms of colour and threat rather than the desperate demand for labour required in post-war Britain. This has successfully led to immigration being looked at as an alien concept and immigrants as aliens.
Similarly, the agenda set by the British media has been distinctly anti-Muslim. One study found that terrorism was the dominant issue in headlines referring to minorities. When the text of the reports was analysed, terrorism was the second most frequent issue, with immigration being the first. Where Muslims were referred to in the texts, the report showed that they were overwhelmingly referred to in relation to terrorism. In the few cases where Muslims were given a direct voice as speakers in the story, the majority were associated with terrorism.
Clearly, then, there is a disconcerting amount of evidence which indicates the partisan and partial way in which Muslims and Islam are represented in the British media. The consequence of this anti-Muslim agenda set by the media is a framing process which sees a war between “us” and “them”. “Us”, according to the media, happen to be harmless individuals who are being taken advantage of by “them”, who are a burden on the state, agents who corrupt or pollute our culture, or criminals and terrorists who are a threat to our society, our security and way of life.
The British media profess tolerance but the daily news coverage and comment columns demonstrate just how conditional that tolerance is, and they promote a regard for Muslims not as citizens with equal rights and varying views but as visitors in “our” country. Such is the demonisation process that media stories are deliberately manipulated to attack Muslims. We know that these attacks impact significantly on all aspects of their lives including—and this is deeply troubling—employability.
Many noble Lords may be aware of the Department for Work and Pensions study conducted a few years ago, which brutally illustrated the highest discrimination that exists against those with Muslim-sounding names. Take one newspaper which splashed a front-page story in 2006 which described a “Muslim hate mob” vandalising a house near Windsor and leaving an obscene message on the drive. According to the paper, the house was due to be rented by British soldiers returning from a tour of Afghanistan. An MP was quoted in the article as saying:
“If there’s anybody who should f*** off”—
I apologise to the House—
“it’s the Muslims who are doing this kind of thing”.
It may come as no surprise to your Lordships’ House to learn that there were no Muslims involved in the story. The house was in an affluent area and anonymous callers had objected to the arrival of the soldiers as it might lower house prices.
Such headlines and stories are legion. It would make depressing listening if I recited any number of them. They are a shameful illustration of the worst kind of press reporting, where a particular section of the community is targeted. But why should the media adopt this approach? Why do we not hear about the Ministry of Justice statistic that 2.3 million “show and account” powers were used? There are twice as many stop-and-searches of Asian people per head of population compared to others. Further, there are 37,000 racially and religiously aggravated offences recorded by the police which are hardly reported. Well, we now know through submissions made to the Leveson inquiry how closely sections of the media work collaboratively with law enforcers, politicians and government. We have since come to learn and understand that individuals and organisations do not operate in a vacuum under these circumstances. They are influenced and guided by the political and accepted norms of the culture around them. It must be obvious to many of us that media coverage of Muslims and Islam is far from being of the proper standard we should and must expect from our media.
Many I have spoken to, young and old, men and women, professional and housebound, believe that the response to 9/11 and 7/7 by leaders in the US and UK, and the ensuing reporting in our media, have inexorably led to a rise in anti-Muslim feelings in our society which has, in a number of high-profile cases, been recognised as institutionalised discrimination. The consequences are significant. I can detail many examples of institutional discrimination which are faced by British Muslims in terms of education, the criminal justice system and, simply by having a Muslim name, their prospect of employability.
It must therefore be said that the state and its institutions must bear some responsibility. Through its pronouncements, declarations, laws and edicts, it sets the tone and tenor of this progressively corrosive climate in society, of which the press is a part, where Muslims and Islam are the fifth column. The Leveson inquiry has given us a unique opportunity to redress what has been a systematic demonisation and criminalisation of a community. We must hope in the next few weeks, when Lord Justice Leveson reports, that his inquiry has taken heed of the seriousness of the evidence provided in this regard by an assortment of witnesses including former tabloid and broadsheet reporters.
Nothing should hold back the ability of the press to hold government and public officials to account. Equally, there must be something to allow ordinary citizens, including affected communities, to hold the press to account. Lord Justice Leveson needs to recognise the hurt caused to our communities and the anger within them, and to make recommendations which allow all citizens, regardless of their origin, culture or faith, to live without fear.
Viscount Eccles
My Lords, I need to be forgiven for not directly following the noble Baroness, Lady Uddin. I will start with something of a challenge. There has been quite a lot of talk about independence, and independence of statutory arrangements. We will be debating these matters further, and I shall be looking for examples of true independence where there is statutory regulation. I do not quite see, where Parliament is sovereign, that you can ever arrive at what I would describe as independence.
When thinking about media standards, I want to follow much of what my noble friend Lord Stoneham said, and concentrate upon those who are the subject of human interest stories and did not expect or wish to be caught up in media attention and become news. They may on many occasions—there is plenty of evidence for this—find it difficult to cope with the questioning, cameras, offers of advice, talk about money and everything that goes with a long-running human interest story, and even with less important stories.
There seem to me to be two questions to ask about these stories. How accurate are the facts which come across in the telling of these stories? Are the conclusions reached interim conclusions or final conclusions and are they believed by the writers to be true? I have two tests from long ago; I do not believe that there was a golden age when everybody behaved incredibly responsibly. One was the story of a Catholic priest. I was probably 17 at the time. He told us that he had been caught up in the Underground when there had been an accident in the late 1940s. There were injuries and, as I remember it, there were deaths as well. He went down into the Underground and did his job as a Catholic priest. He came up after a considerable period of time, pretty shattered, to be greeted by the cameras and the questioners who had not been allowed down into the Underground. In his exasperation, he said, “My God, mind your own business”. The next day his picture appeared in the newspaper and the caption below was, “I am here on God’s business”.
The second story concerned Beaverbrook. You have to be quite old to remember much about Beaverbrook. I think that it was the “Beachcomber column” which hounded—I do not think that that is too strong a word—my father. It was a gossip column, which came to no conclusions because it wanted the public to come to their own conclusions. However, the gossip was handled, with scant regard to the facts, in such a way as to try to make sure that the public thought, “Well, this is a man not to follow. This is a man with views that cannot be right because look what sort of a person he is”.
Therefore, I start with a scepticism about the press and great caution. Subsequently, in pretty mundane appearances of things close to what I was doing, just occasionally I have been reinforced in these views. In a small headline, I was described as a civil servant. Never mind what the article said, but it would have taken about two minutes, or possibly five, for the sub-editor—it was in a headline—to check whether I was a civil servant. Of course, I was not. Over that period, I would give the press about six out of 10, which is possibly generous, for the accuracy of the facts.
What about the truth of the conclusions? I do not think that the press is much interested in the truth of the conclusions because the story dominates. Its test is not what is in the public interest but what interests the public, which I think has always been the case. Probably, it was exactly the same in 1800 as regards the satirists and the broadsheets on the high street.
In facing up to this reality, what is to be sensibly done? The first thing that we should remember is not to underrate the public, who have a healthy scepticism. There perhaps is a tendency—we fall to this temptation in your Lordships’ House—to think that others do not keep up as well as we do ourselves, which is probably a mistake. I also think that we should remember that we all love a drama, to be excited and to have something which has been built into a story that we would like to read. Perhaps we get the media that we deserve.
Much has been said about Leveson. I believe that the most brilliant evidence was that given by Matthew Parris. I commend it to noble Lords and hope that they will read it among all the other millions of words. There was a disenchantment in that evidence as regards the reality and the acceptance. He suggests that phone hacking is only the logical consequence of double mirrors, impersonation and long-range lenses.
Statutory legislation will not work. As has been correctly said, it is slow and process is more important than outcome. Perverse incentives come in. If I am subject to rules and I am very clever, I may think, “You’ve set the rules; now I am going to see how I can get round them”. That is what happens always and everywhere with statutory regulation. Again, I challenge people to find a system of statutory regulation where that does not happen. Better would be the common sense of the people; a shake-up of the PCC; peer-group pressure; establishment of the things that we do and do not do; and some internal system of penalising those. The idea of civil law contracts is very good. That would serve us better than legislating for statutory regulation.
Lord Stevenson of Balmacara
My Lords, I should like to add my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, for securing this timely debate and to congratulate her on her new role as chair of the EHRC, which she joins at interesting times. The noble Baroness laid out the issue with her customary clarity and set the standard for this excellent debate. I should also like to pick up on the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Janvrin, who helped us to focus on the key issues which have underpinned so many of the speeches that we have heard. What exactly is the problem? Why is the status quo unacceptable? How should we, if we decide to do so, resolve matters going forward?
I think that it is common ground in this debate that it is in the public interest to have a free press, which, as many noble Lords have said, is fundamental to our society and to our democracy. However, we have to balance that against the fact that at the moment print journalism as we have known it for so many years is under intense pressure. I am afraid that it is no longer about revealing matters. To use the phrase used by the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, it is no longer about breaking the news because this comes to us in so many different forms, particularly from Twitter and the blogosphere. It is no longer sustainable as a business because the advertising that has supported it has moved to the internet or is moving that way.
Finally, there are few media barons who are willing to pay the losses in return for the influence that they might gain from supporting print journalism as they have in the past. All those factors taken together have contributed to an unacceptable culture and a practice to which many noble Lords have referred today and which I am sure will continue to be in our thoughts as we move towards the Leveson report.
Several noble Lords, particularly my noble friend Lord Puttnam, mentioned that the consequence of all this was a loss of confidence and trust, especially among the public. In some of the lobbying that was sent around in advance of this debate, it was interesting to read that some 75% of voters favour regulation that is independent of the newspaper industry. We should perhaps listen to that voice.
Why is the status quo unacceptable? As my noble friend Lord Puttnam said, this crisis seems to be different from all the others that we have been hearing about. This seems to be systemic and the ecosystem itself may be collapsing. Two deep-seated problems have led to abuses such as the phone hacking and invasion of privacy suffered by the Dowlers, the McCanns and others, which led to the establishment of the Leveson inquiry, as well as the concentration of media ownership and an inadequate system of press complaints.
We need to think again about definitions of media. The internet, particularly the growth of self publication, is a game changer. Nevertheless, it is important not to have monopolies of ownership in our media. A monopoly generally inhibits a diversity of views, competition and new entrants to the market. It is bad for our democracy and bad for consumers. Increasingly, we have to look at cross-media ownership and ownership across different media platforms. Labour’s evidence to the Leveson inquiry suggested that there could be a percentage cap on the media market for a single organisation not owning more than 30%.
On press complaints, Labour supports a strong and free press that can hold politicians to account, which is essential in a democracy. But a strong and free press must have responsibilities too. The Press Complaints Commission has failed victims of press abuse, and it was a system appointed by the press, financed by the press and run by the press for the press. Any new system for press complaints needs to be independent of politicians but also of serving editors and proprietors. It must be accessible, straightforward for anyone to use and not just for the rich. It must apply to all newspapers and be able to enforce its rulings against them.
What needs to be done? The noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, said that even if the evidence of failure by the recent history of self-regulation was not overwhelming, the burden of proof that self-regulation can work lies with the proponents. We have heard powerful arguments from the noble Lords, Lord Wakeham, Lord Grade and Lord Black, although not, sadly, from the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, who is carefully scribbling away but not speaking.
Lord Hunt of Wirral
As the noble Lord has raised the point, perhaps I may assist. It is very important that I of all people who has put forward a model should not be seen in any way to pre-empt the decision of Lord Justice Leveson.
Lord Stevenson of Balmacara
I thank the noble Lord for that gracious intervention.
I think that the arguments are not very strong and I wonder whether the noble Lords protest too much. I do not think that the test set by the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, would have been satisfied. Politicians have a habit of setting up false questions and then giving the answers that they want; so I profoundly disagree that this is a binary choice. It is not a question of self-regulation or some sort of draconian statutory regulation. As we have heard, most other professions, including judges, are regulated and there do not seem to be so many problems there. It is unhealthy for any industry to be its own judge and jury; it is all the more unhealthy for the press, which has the power and has used that power in recent times, to cover up its own wrongdoings by failing to report it. Any successful system should include the following: independence from proprietors and editors; independence from other interests, including government; the ability to provide effective and speedy redress; the ability to investigate when things go wrong; the ability to impose sanctions, including a must-carry-apology-and-corrections power; the ability to compel membership; and a regular submission to external inspection.
We may be able to learn from—but we do not need to follow—other models, such as the Irish press council, as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Grade, which is recognised by statute but not set up by statute, or the new Australian body, which is an independent statutory body constituted through independent appointments procedures whose constitutional role is defined as “enforced self-regulation”.
A new law introducing effective regulation could contain safeguards against political abuse and guarantees of independence from politicians. Effective regulation does not prevent solicitors or doctors doing their jobs, nor would it prevent journalists from doing theirs. The press has great power, and with great power goes greater responsibility.
Journalism in the broadcast media is subject to regulation backed by statute. It is the most trusted in the country and very clearly free from political influence. Journalism is already subject to statute in relation to defamation, data protection, contempt of court and human rights, not to mention tax, without that meaning political control. Effective regulation would surely benefit and protect journalists in their work, as it would bear down on the practices of the culture that gave us hacking, blagging, serial libelling and bullying. It would protect the public and begin the work of restoring public confidence in the press.
Viscount Younger of Leckie
My Lords, first, I take this opportunity to thank the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, for tabling this debate and drawing attention to this most important issue, and at such a significant moment, as we await Lord Justice Leveson’s findings on his inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the press. I also take this opportunity to congratulate the noble Baroness on her recent appointment as chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and I am sure that it will flourish under her leadership. The noble Baroness is of course a most respected contributor to this debate, tackling the issue of press and media freedom a decade ago as part of her 2002 Reith lecture series, “A Question of Trust” and more recently in contributions including her 2011 Reuters memorial lecture, “The Rights of Journalism and the Needs of Audiences”, and a development of that argument which she presented earlier this year in evidence to the Leveson inquiry.
In terms of the Leveson inquiry itself, it will be of little surprise to your Lordships that it would not be appropriate for the Government to prejudge its findings by speculating here about what it may contain, or indicating any sense of preference for the recommendations. But that does not stop this Chamber from debating the issues that will need addressing once Lord Justice Leveson has reported. It is important to state very clearly that, come what may, the Government recognise the fundamental importance of freedom of speech and a vigorous press to support this as part of the democratic process. The press plays an essential role in holding the powerful to account; it brings matters of public interest to the fore, informing citizens, and enabling them to exercise their democratic rights. Of course, it also entertains and educates them. As the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, states, it secures the communication on which social, cultural and political life depend. Whatever steps are taken, it is vital that we maintain a press that is free to conduct this important role in our society. My noble friend Lord Black highlights the important point that Great Britain is a beacon in the Commonwealth, and indeed the world, for setting the bar high for press freedom.
The Government set up the Leveson inquiry last year in response to the phone-hacking scandal, culminating in the news that Milly Dowler’s phone had been hacked by the News of the World. The Government are determined to get to the bottom of all that journalists and their agents were doing in hacking into phone messages, what the police knew when, what they did about it, and how we might learn lessons for the future. But it is important to remember that phone-hacking is illegal; regulatory reform should not therefore be about creating a system that prevents illegal behaviour, as that remains a matter for the courts. What it must do, however, is tackle the culture and practices that provided the context in which that illegal behaviour became widespread. In doing so, we need to separate out actions that were, and which remain, illegal and subject to the criminal law from those which are issues of culture and operational standards, though the two are linked. I agree with my noble friend Lord Fowler that the Leveson inquiry is proving to be thorough, full and detailed.
It is important that going forward the regulatory framework for the press is effective, ensuring that the systematic failings as evidenced through the inquiry are not repeated, as my noble friend Lord Razzall iterated in strong terms. When he set up the inquiry, the Prime Minister said that he wanted to aim for independent regulation of the press. That remains the Government’s ambition and, as the Prime Minister has recently said, we must be able to look the Dowler family in the eye with any future solution.
In considering these issues, the noble Baroness’s work gives us some very useful tools which help us to frame the debate. She asks us to take a step back, to consider what role we expect of the media in society more generally; what we mean by media freedom; and importantly, where the corresponding balance may lie between its freedom and its responsibility towards the public it serves. The noble Baroness also articulates the importance of understanding first what we are trying to regulate—that is, the standards—before it is possible to understand or debate what may be an appropriate form of regulation to uphold these. As she points out, there is a crucial distinction between regulating media processes and attempting to control media content, or the difference between the how and the what. Let us be clear, the Government agree with her that we must not stray into the regulation of content itself, beyond the application of the general rule of law as it already applies today. The noble Lord, Lord Janvrin, also made that important point. By articulating media process as the focus of regulation, therefore, it is possible to distinguish very clearly where we should engage in debate in order to assess whether regulatory solutions are likely to encroach upon media freedoms.
The noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, goes on to state that media standards as currently formulated are not sufficient. She argues there are three essential ingredients needed to ensure the public are presented with accessible, intelligible and assessable information through the media. It is the last point, the assessability of information presented to the public by the media, that she feels is least well served, as she has highlighted so eloquently today.
I turn now to a number of observations from noble Lords who have spoken. First, my noble friend Lord Eccles rightly focused on the human interest stories, when individuals are caught up unwittingly in a media storm. I agree with him that they have a particular right of protection—but, as he pointed out, without statutory regulation.
My noble friend Lord Stoneham pointed out in detailed terms the importance of looking at market dominance. I can confirm that Lord Justice Leveson is looking at media ownership and plurality—and there is hope that he will comment on that when he reports.
The noble Lord, Lord Janvrin, made a strong point about having a stronger and more effective code of conduct. I agree with that, and I have noted it. This particular code of conduct has of course to be accepted and respected by all stakeholders.
The noble Lord, Lord Sugar, made the point that there has never been such a demand for stories. He said that these stories are produced so quickly, to keep the media going, that media standards are lowered. Certainly that is something that needs to be looked at in terms of media process. It comes back to the lack of assessability.
Several comments were made about the internet and convergence. My noble friends Lord Inglewood and Lord Black spoke on that subject, making some powerful points, along with my noble friend Lord Wakeham and the noble Lord, Lord Janvrin, about the increasing power of the internet and the power of media contact and stories that can be experienced across a wide variety of platforms, from print to online publishing to TV, video, smart phones and tablets. In other words, it has become an extremely complex landscape. Stories can go viral and almost immediately they are global, so there are very important issues around convergence. These will be considered by the Government in their communications review. As your Lordships will know, a White Paper will come out in the new year. Surely responsibility for process must ultimately lie with the originator. Only the originator of a story can answer for that, as the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, pointed out.
I note from following the inquiry that Lord Justice Leveson has received a range of proposals for future press regulation. I felt it was easiest to present these by placing them on a continuum or a sliding scale. These proposals ranged from at the one end a continued form of self-regulation through to a fully fledged statutory approach at the other. However, I note that today no speaker has focused on the regulation side in great depth.
I would like to pick up a number of comments that were made about self-regulation and the degrees of self-regulation that we hope are being considered. The noble Lord, Lord Black, referred to the work that my noble friend Lord Hunt has done in making some proposals and, indeed, pioneering a form of self-regulation that they believe will be a way forward. It is a form of self-regulation backed by contracts between the press and the regulator. As my noble friend Lord Black pointed out, that regulation would essentially be buttressed by civil law and would not be statutory. It would have real powers of investigation and sanctions to deal with breakdowns. My noble friend Lord Black mentioned that fines of up to seven figures would be possible. However, such fines would need to be proportionate to the size of the media involved. Then the question arises of why a publication would sign up to this. Let us presuppose that publications signed such a contract. We assume that this would be a rolling five-year contract. In essence, if any publication decided to pull out, that would be a breach of contract and penalties would be involved. Let us assume that those penalties would be strong enough to prevent them so doing.
A number of incentives to join such a scheme are being considered, as has been mentioned by noble Lords today. They include legal incentives: for example, partial defence in defamation cases, as in the Irish cases, and a defence can be claimed by members of a regulator. In addition, there would be a cap on damages in civil court cases as an incentive to join and a delay in court proceedings to allow complaints to be followed up. The noble Lord, Lord Soley, mentioned a financial incentive. Publications that signed up to the scheme would be subject to a zero rate of VAT.
Kitemark schemes have been mentioned. I believe this is an interesting way forward in that publications that did join up would in effect be accredited and would have a kitemark attached to them, which would give them a great deal of credibility. This was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Janvrin. The noble Lord, Lord Soley, was very helpful in highlighting these incentives.
Taking a further step along the sliding scale, the introduction of an underpinning statute was suggested. This option would still see the continuation of self-regulation in day-to-day practice, but with the provision of backstop powers for use in the event that it was failing. Put forward by the Media Standards Trust among others, this option would provide additional teeth and involve creating a small body which would oversee the regulator or regulators. Such a body would be able to intervene if certain agreed standards were not met by the regulator, adding a further layer of accountability to the system and a safeguard if the regulator was not performing as it should.
Returning to the arguments made by the noble Baroness in opening this debate, I note that, having established that regulation should be limited to media process, she argued that an element of statutory underpinning is now needed to place it on an effective footing. While any system needs to safeguard media freedom, the distinctions made by the noble Baroness today are helpful in focusing the debate more specifically on the question we must all consider: the extent to which the freedom to publish would be impacted by underpinning the regulation of some aspects of press processes. If such a course were taken, we would need to think very carefully and safeguards would need to be put in place. I note the passionate argument of my noble friend Lord Black of Brentwood against state intervention, particularly that any use of statute risks sliding down a slippery slope. However, I think it is helpful to be clear that regulating process may not be the same as regulating content if it came to a form of statutory underpinning.
The outcome of any new system must be to give the public confidence that the press is operating responsibly and that all complaints will be transparently and fairly handled, while allowing the press to remain free to continue pursuing world-class journalism. The key question must be: what constitutes the most effective way of achieving these ends? They would be achieved by a system that is appropriately independent of the press, government and politicians, is accountable, has teeth and is capable of delivering access to fair, cheap, quick and reliable justice for victims, which is what everyone has called for during the Leveson inquiry.
As the Prime Minister has recently commented:
“We don’t want heavy-handed state intervention”.
However, he added:
“The status quo is not an option”.
Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve
My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part in the debate. There cannot be any of us who has not learnt a great deal. I particularly wish to thank the Minister for the care with which he has followed my lines of argument. It is rare to find at the Dispatch Box such a detailed grasp of the various lines of argument that are put forward round the House and I appreciate that very much.
As we listened to positions that challenged each of us in various ways, it occurred to me that we have to be very careful about our future use of the term “independent”. Surely what we want are independent media. Sometimes I felt that the adjective was sliding to and fro between the media and the regulation. There are many different forms of regulation. I would be extremely critical of—what shall we call it?—a full waterfront mode of regulation for the media. I do not think that it could serve its purpose. As I suggested, I would be highly appreciative of a complaints service that really served the needs of the public in a way that at its best the Press Complaints Commission has succeeded in doing. However, one has to say that often it has not left members of the public feeling that their complaint was heard or that the corrections had an adequate prominence to constitute any sort of reparation.
There is a long way to go. We wait for Lord Justice Leveson to give us the next chapter, but I am sure that we will be back debating these things in the not-too-distant future. When we do, I hope that we can, as it were, put on one side the thought that there is one position that owns the label “independent regulation”. As I suggested, self-regulation does not automatically count as independent regulation. It is too often and too readily a form of self-serving regulation. But, equally, we can all of us imagine forms of statutory regulation which would probably kill the goose as they sought to protect it. I believe that statutory regulation will in the end be needed but only on a very narrow front to enable independent bodies to have the necessary powers. The thought that it can be done by the civil law is, of course, highly attractive but you have to contract in at the beginning, and there is the rub. Not everybody will wish to contract in at the beginning. Therefore, departing will carry no sanctions for them and we will have perhaps a small, high-quality press that has contracted in and others who see that there is profit and advantage in remaining an outlaw. Therefore, we have not solved the problem. We did not expect to do so this morning, but I do not regret having this debate at this time. I thank everybody who has contributed.
Children: Looked-after Children
(12 years ago)
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The Earl of Listowel
That this House takes note of the standards of service for looked-after children and, in particular, the Government’s response to changes in residential childcare in the light of recent child protection failures.
The Earl of Listowel
My Lords, I am most grateful to my Cross-Bench colleagues for allowing me a slot for this debate, to my noble friend Lord Laming, the Convenor, for prompting me to table this Motion and for his advice, and to the noble Lords who have decided to contribute this afternoon. I also pay tribute to Tim Loughton MP, for many years a consistent champion for looked-after children and the social workers who serve them and until recently Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Children and Families. As a Minister, he never tired of speaking to looked-after children and care leavers. It was good for the morale of the whole service that we knew we had a Minister who was listening to our concerns. I am reassured that his replacement as Minister also has a long track record of experience, most recently as chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Looked after Children and Care Leavers and of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Adoption and Fostering. Mr Timpson has also recently produced a report on the education of looked-after children which I commend to your Lordships and which is available on the website of the Who Cares? Trust, the charity that clerks one of the parliamentary groups.
Finally, I thank Ann Coffey MP, chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Runaway and Missing Children and Adults. Her report on children missing from care, together with the work of campaigning journalists such as Andrew Norfolk of the Times, exposed the great variability of quality in residential care and gave rise to some very good work from the Government in response.
I declare my interest as a trustee of the child welfare charity the Michael Sieff Foundation. As vice chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Looked after Children and Care Leavers, I have listened for 10 or 12 years to young people from care, to their carers and their social workers, who come into Parliament to share their experience with us. I am very grateful for the trouble they have taken to warn us of their concerns.
It may be of assistance to begin with a brief description of the principles behind working with children who have experienced the kind of trauma experienced by many children taken into care. To the best of my understanding, the principles are as follows: early abuse, including neglect, of children by their principal carers can cause a significant impact on their development which may be enduring and difficult to reverse. The impact of parental abuse, including neglect, may be mitigated by many factors, the most important of which is the child’s genetic inheritance. Children who have experienced trauma of this kind may find it difficult to trust carers, to permit intimacy and to allow themselves to be loved. They may seek to sabotage relationships or test them to the point of destruction. They may be overly self-critical and critical of others. They may have an unquenchable need for attention. They may find attention very uncomfortable. They are often very complicated and needy young people. If they do not receive adequate early support in recovering from their trauma their personalities may become less flexible with age and they may develop a persistent personality disorder.
Key to recovery from early trauma is finding a person who can stick with the child and whom the child cannot, as it were, destroy through his overt or veiled attacks. Most of us have experienced in our lives the sensation of a love that is not returned. There is a similarity between this and a child’s experience. For a child, it may be as if the love of his life has spurned him and he can never love or trust another again. Learning to love again is the key to recovery from such trauma.
I would like to explore certain themes and questions with you. Most important is the development of the workforce: the child and family social workers, the residential childcare workers and the foster carers. Will the Minister undertake today to improve the qualifications of staff in residential childcare? Will he look very carefully at the call to move to a foundation degree level workforce in children’s homes? On the subject of consultation, the practice of providing groups of staff, managers, foster carers and social workers with an appropriately qualified clinical professional to help them reflect on their relationships with their children and families on an ongoing basis is widely recognised as necessary but is far from universally practised. In particular, given the mental health needs of children in residential care, it is beyond belief that there is no consistent support for staff to help them manage the needs of these children. Will the Minister consider introducing regulations to require that children’s homes receive ongoing clinical support from a professional from an accredited list?
Children’s residential care needs an institutional base to ensure steady improvement over time. Will the Minister examine carefully the Scottish Institute for Residential Child Care and the College of Social Work and see how the best of these models can be adopted for our own children’s homes?
Finally, residential childcare needs a champion. Will the Minister look, for example, at the work of Louise Casey the former homelessness tsar, champion for victims and, most recently, lead on families with complex needs? Will he seek to appoint someone of the ilk of Moira Gibb, the Chief Executive of the London Borough of Camden, who led the work on social work reform or Professor Eileen Munro, author of a very important report on child protection services? Both have been effective champions for social work.
These are the key themes I would like to explore today. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Laming, who will look more closely at recent child protection concerns. He authored the report of the inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbié and has been a chief inspector of social services. I regret that there will not be time for me to speak about the health needs of looked-after children, concerns about their education, about transition from care or about the introduction of looked-after status for 16 and 17 year-olds on remand. On these matters I will say only that the mental health needs of these children must not continue to be overlooked. Their health assessments need to capture mental health needs. The dedicated looked-after child and adolescent mental health services need to be funded and protected in this difficult time. In particular, the mental health needs of pre-schoolers, the children under five who account for about 30% of those coming into care, need to be better identified.
On education, the looked-after children virtual school heads have been a very welcome introduction in recent years. The concern now is that they are being cut. Will the Minister ensure that this vital role is put on a statutory basis to make sure there is no deterioration in the educational attainment of looked-after children?
On leaving care, it is absolutely vital that the pilots allowing young people to stay with their foster carers past the age of 18 are rolled out across the country as soon as possible. Can the Minister give a timeframe for when this will happen? The Deputy Children’s Commissioner has found that sexual exploitation of children in care—as concerning as that is—is but a drop in the ocean compared with the exploitation of young people as they leave care and move into often inappropriate accommodation.
The Government are moving to bring children on remand into looked-after status. This will significantly increase the burdens on local authorities at a time when they are most hard pressed. Local authorities may find themselves with responsibility for these young people to the age of 24. Can the Minister assure the House that local authorities will be resourced adequately to meet this new challenge?
Both this and the previous Government have made significant improvements to services for looked-after children. The previous Government introduced ring-fenced funding for looked-after children under Quality Protects, introduced a minimum qualification in children’s homes of national vocational qualification level 3 and saw an increase in young people leaving care to go on to university from 2% to 8%. This Government have raised the bar for entry to social work, have implemented the newly qualified status for social workers introduced by the previous Government, and are implementing many of the important recommendations of Professor Eileen Munro’s review. They have promised the appointment of a chief social worker. I ask the Minister when he expects that appointment to be made.
Nevertheless, increasing numbers of children entering care, the worst recession that we have known and particular concerns about the sexual exploitation of children in residential care indicate that forward momentum has to be sustained. I suggest that this can be done by taking the following steps—or at least steps that can contribute. I would encourage the Government to place the development of social workers, foster carers and residential childcare workers right at the top of their agenda. It was heartening to read this week of the winner of the annual teaching awards, a woman fast-tracked into teaching with an excellent academic record and strong interpersonal skills. This is just the kind of person needed in services for looked-after children. It is most encouraging to see the fast-tracking model being applied to social work. I praise here the work of the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, who regrets that he cannot be present, and others in doing this.
On the continent, we see far more teachers and social workers choosing to become foster carers. Please can the Government support teachers and social workers to make that choice? Please will the Minister consider a similar fast-track approach for residential childcare—a care first, which learns from the experience of placing pedagogues in children’s homes and ensures that candidates need to be placed in supportive environments and not just parachuted into homes unsupported.
I invite noble Lords to remember the research by Professors Petrie and Cameron, and others at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, which compared homes in Denmark, Germany and England. Some 90% of staff in Danish homes had degree-level qualifications; the figure was 50% in Germany but only 30% in English homes. Yet in Germany and Denmark, half the children in care are in residential care, compared to 10% in this country. Homes in England are generally the last resort. Our children’s needs are generally of a much higher level of complexity and urgency, yet our staff are far less well equipped than their continental peers.
I can recall visiting the manager of a children’s home in Maida Vale, north London, five years ago. She had 30 years’ experience as a manager, postgraduate qualifications and a couple of degrees behind her, but she deeply regretted that many of her staff were barely literate. My experience of working in and visiting children’s homes has led me to admire many of the staff. I have met remarkable people making a difference to vulnerable children, often against great odds. These are extraordinary people. Some of the therapeutic communities in particular are remarkable and tremendous places to work, but the quality of staff is highly variable between and within homes. Our most vulnerable children need and deserve consistent expert care—staff who are confident about what they are doing; who understand the principles behind what they do; who can reflect and respect teachers, clinical psychologists and social workers and are respected by them; who have excellent interpersonal skills; who can engage children who may spit and hit; and sustain a relationship with such children over months and years. This work can be the most rewarding imaginable—working with a team and seeing the immense difference that one can make in a child’s life. It has attracted people of the calibre of Paul Ennals, the former chief executive of the National Children’s Bureau; Hilton Dawson MP, founder of the parliamentary group and now director of the British Association of Social Workers; and Sue Berelowitz, Deputy Children’s Commissioner. They all started their careers in children’s homes. This work is among the best ways to learn about children. It can attract the best, as it does in Denmark and Germany, if staff feel supported and valued in what they do.
Paul Connolly, best-selling author and a graduate of an abusive children’s home—now a father of two and an entrepreneur—spoke to me recently about why he succeeded while four of his contemporaries died before they reached the age of 30. He explained that he had always sought out adults to whom he could aspire. For him, he found them in the boxing gym neighbouring his home. He was befriended and became a boxer himself. What he wants most now for children in children’s homes is that they, too, have adults to whom they aspire. The chief executive officer of the Mulberry Bush Organisation, John Diamond, has convened a group of academics to look at establishing a foundation degree for residential care. I very much encourage the noble Lord to consider this as the next step forward.
I must shortly conclude. I should like to remind your Lordships of the words of Sir William Utting in his report in the 1990s on children living away from home, People Like Us. He wrote, and I paraphrase, “The best safeguard for children is an environment of overall excellence”. Confident, carefully recruited, well qualified and well supported staff are less likely to be awed by some celebrity or be bullied into silence or complicity. Confident staff are more likely to gain the trust of their children and minimise the child’s risk of running away—or follow that child if he or she seeks to disappear. Effective staff are more likely to be trusted by their children and to learn of any abuse from guests, volunteers or staff.
The best gift that we can give these children is to surround them with professionals and carers of the very highest quality. If this Government continue to address the status of residential childcare workers, foster carers and social workers adequately, they will be leaving an inheritance of which they can be well proud.
Baroness Brinton
I start by declaring an interest because my husband and I provided foster respite care for a brother and sister to whom, 11 years ago, we then became formal guardians. Their experience is very different to many of the experiences that I am sure that we will hear about, in that they came just to one placement—us.
I thank the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, for bringing forward this vital topic for debate in your Lordships’ Chamber. We often say those words but here it is particularly pertinent. Looked-after children, especially those in residential childcare, are the responsibility of each and every one of us, but sadly the catalogue of child protection failures just continues, and we do not seem to learn the lessons from the individually tragic cases, whether they are Victoria Climbié or the young girls so horrifically abused—and ignored by social services and others involved in their care—in Rochdale.
This week is National Care Leavers’ Week, and it is good that looked-after children can now get proper transitional support, rather than being dumped by the state at the age of 18. Transition to independence is vital, but it is shocking that less than 4% of care leavers stay on with their foster carers past the age of 18, with well over a third living on their own. Only a handful—8%, as we heard from the noble Earl, Lord Listowel—go on to higher education, which is often, I am sorry to say from my experience working in the university sector, not supporting them appropriately and ill prepared to give them the support they need. This situation results in a much higher drop-out rate from among looked-after children than from the average student body.
I commend the Prince’s Trust’s From Care to Independence project, which will provide 1,000 care leavers with one-to-one support, and will form the basis of a much-needed long-term research study. We need to understand exactly what support these young people need. Advocacy is critical to successful transition. I ask the Minister if the Government will consider giving all children in care a statutory right to independent advocacy as a part of care reviews and placement planning, not just as part of the complaints process.
The incidence of children running away from either foster homes or residential care homes is shocking. In fact, it is three times more likely than for other children. These children are the most vulnerable in our society. Many have been through repeated placements that have not worked for a variety of reasons. Regardless, each placement breakdown further compounds the child’s lack of sense of worth and esteem, and is more likely to bring further disruptive behaviour. These children are often scared and angry—a potent mix. It is estimated that 10,000 looked-after children go missing every year. These children are much more likely to be sexually or physically abused, involved in substance misuse or resort to stealing and begging to survive: a fast-track route into the criminal justice system or, worse, self-destruction.
I said that the number of children going missing was an estimate, because we have a serious failure of information-sharing at present. When Ofsted publishes reports of residential homes, it does not automatically send copies to either the local authority with direct responsibility for the child or the local authority where the home is based, and these days the number of out-of-borough placements are increasing. It is vital that this happens, not least because the receiving local authority may not be aware of all the out-of-borough children placed in its area and so cannot alert other important local services, such as education, health and particularly the police, to provide the appropriate support.
I ask the Minister whether that error can be rectified. It is a simple matter of adding one or two local authorities to the circulation list, rather than relying on the authorities to peruse the Ofsted website as reports on individual homes come out. It seems to me that this is part of the joined-up thinking that every inquiry into the failure of safeguarding cases talks about. Let us make it easier for them. Can the Minister also report on the DfE task and finish group looking at out-of-borough placements and say when the Government will publish its findings?
Another problem is that the Department for Education data on missing children is collected differently from the police data. ACPO’s definitions make a distinction between missing and absent children and often do not trigger searches until a child has been away for more than 24 hours. Frankly, that is too long. I know that there is frustration with children who repeatedly go missing from residential homes but, as the Rochdale case showed us, 24 hours is too long away: the abuse can happen within a very short timescale. The child then returns to the residential home and may disappear again. The Children’s Society’s Still Running survey shows that 52% of looked-after children in the survey had run away overnight on at least one occasion.
The Serious Organised Crime Agency and UK Missing Persons Bureau report on children missing from care highlighted the problem of the difference in the way that data are collected. Can the Minister encourage the DfE, the Local Government Association and ACPO to agree on a standard definition, and please can it be collected consistently? We need to know the scale of the problem. The Still Running survey gives a much higher level of running away than the figures supplied by the police, and it is suspected that many of the police data are under-reported, whether by them or by local authorities.
I add my congratulations and thanks to those expressed by my noble friend Lord Listowel to the Minister, Tim Loughton, who has done an enormous amount of work in this area. He made a very positive statement in another place on 3 July about the skill set needed for staff in residential homes. It appears that in a number of places the professional relationship between the staff and the looked-after children in their care just has not worked. There have been reports of staff unable to prevent children running away and, with children moving from placement to placement, there is virtually no time for staff to get to know a child and their background before the first crisis hits. Knowledge of their background might prove helpful in knowing how to handle the crisis. That must change. We need professional qualifications for staff in residential homes, as has already been mentioned. These staff, after all, are looking after children with the most complex problems imaginable. With fewer and fewer local authority-run homes, what check is there on the qualifications of residential home staff in private homes? Can the Minister say whether there will be further requirements on privately run residential homes to demonstrate that their staff have qualifications and to undertake continuing professional development on a regular basis?
If noble Lords have ever talked to looked-after children in the care system, or met them later in their lives, they will know that it is obvious right from the start where the system has worked for them or failed. I want to end by talking about a young man whom I met 10 years ago when Cambridgeshire County Council reviewed its fostering arrangements, including a new and comprehensive guide for foster parents. I was one of the councillors on the panel. We were lucky enough to have as one of our expert members on the panel a young man who was just starting out at university and who had been in foster care since he was seven. I shall call him Tom. He had moved from placement to placement in the early years but had been with one family for the preceding six years, and that relationship had transformed his life. He said that without their love and care, including that of his foster siblings, he would probably not have managed to stay on at school until, let alone beyond, the age of 16. He was the first person in his family to go to university. Through the generosity of his foster parents—and at no inconsiderable cost to them—they had kept his room for him during the holidays, otherwise he would have been on his own at his university halls of residence in the holidays.
Tom knew exactly what we needed to do, including the need for support after the age of 18, which thankfully is now much more available. His sage advice then meant that Cambridgeshire was able to give its foster parents a really effective head start in their support for youngsters in their care. Do enough local authorities actually seek the advice of the young people in their charge?
Sadly, Tom’s experience is not the norm. Local government talks about corporate parents, and rightly so, but I think that this term needs to extend beyond councillors and the professionals involved in the work with looked-after children. All of us in public life have a responsibility. That responsibility extends beyond learning the lessons from the dreadful incidents of the past—although we must do so—to ensuring that looked-after children get a consistent, supportive and reliable service that will give them the basis to rebuild their lives after their traumatic start.
Lord Laming
My Lords, I also congratulate the noble Earl on securing this important debate. His commitment to this subject commands the respect of the whole House. It was a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, who has already made such a helpful contribution to the debate.
I feel sure that on all sides of the House it is recognised that removing a child or young person from the care of their parents is a decision of immense significance. The state has to be careful about exercising such power. Clearly checks and balances must be in place so that the exercise of such authority is reasonable and demonstrably in the best interests of the child.
If the state makes the momentous decision to remove a child from parental care, then at the very least that brings with it the huge responsibility of ensuring that the state is a “good parent”. Sadly, it is all too clear that often that may not be so, yet the state has not only a legal duty but a moral responsibility to ensure the safety, well-being and proper development of each child and young person for whom it becomes a substitute parent. It has a responsibility to ensure that that child or young person has the best opportunity to recover from what has happened in his or her early life and to develop into a fulfilled citizen in our community.
Sadly, the reality is that many of the children coming into the care of a local authority have been let down by the adults in their lives to whom they were entitled to look for care and protection. Instead, they will have experienced chaotic lifestyles, serious neglect or even deliberate harm. The duty of the state is, first, to ensure that these children and young people are provided with a safe place to live that provides a consistent, reliable framework offering a structure to their daily lives. It is from this foundation of that secure framework that it is possible to make an individual assessment of their needs and the beginnings of an individual care plan that will promote their recovery and development.
In the past, most children and young people coming into care had an initial experience in a specialist residential home. These homes generally had skilled and highly regarded staff. Of course, we all know that some establishments turned out to be absolutely ghastly, and appalling things were done to children who were easily exploited and even abused. The haste with which foster care has come to be relied on as the main and, generally, the only way of responding to the needs of children has led to residential care being neglected, downgraded and often regarded as a placement solely of last resort.
In my view, the rush into foster care was influenced, sadly, not by a belief that it was right for every child for most of their time in care but, regrettably, because it was seen as a much cheaper option. Of course, there can be no doubting that our society is deeply indebted to a large number of wonderful foster parents who should rightly be regarded as heroes of the state. That phrase in no way overstates their contribution to our society. They are heroes of the state. However, that is not a justification for the serious neglect of residential care. We need the widest range possible of facilities to meet the needs of these very damaged children and young people. The very best homes provide not only stability but also the staff who are able to begin the important therapeutic work which facilitates the healing process so that a young person can begin to trust adults again, to develop self-confidence and become optimistic about their future.
By 1998 it became evident that some local authorities, particularly inner-city local authorities, were closing all of their children's homes and moving the residents to distant places which offered—guess what?—the cheaper option. In exceptional circumstances, we all know that it may be right to send a child a long distance from their home area and their environment but, sadly, these decisions are seldom taken with the needs of the child or young person in mind, and are almost entirely dictated by the financial cost to the authority. When a placement is hundreds of miles away, who ensures the quality of care that is provided to that young person? Who provides continuing contact with the child? Who can the child or young person turn to when things go wrong in their lives?
My fear is that these placements are often characterised by nothing more than “out of sight, out of mind”. Is it any wonder that many of these young people receive either seriously inadequate or no education? Is it a wonder that they run away? Given so little opportunity for them to develop their potential or to be helped to prepare for adulthood, is it any wonder that so many end up in penal establishments? One of the most chilling comments I have ever read came about when a senior officer concerned with the recent cases in Rochdale was asked how a 14 year-old girl in care was able to be out of the home so late at night being sexually abused. He is reported to have said that for this child, “This was a lifestyle choice”. No vulnerable child in the care of the state should be given the option to be away from the protection of the services designed to promote their well-being.
I hesitate to burden the House with a personal experience, but I am encouraged to do so only because it is of no credit to me, yet the impact on me has endured. I hope it will have an impact on the Minister, who is very well respected in this House. For more than 20 years, I had been responsible in a large local authority for all of the social care services. The announcement that I was leaving the authority to take up another post attracted the attention of the local media. Before I left I attended a well publicised event, which was at a facility for adults with special needs. During the visit, the officer in charge of the day centre told me that there was a young man outside who wanted to meet me. She had invited him in to meet me and offered him tea but he refused. He would not come in so I had to go outside, which I was happy to do. I met a young man in the second half of his teenage years. He told me that he had been in the care of the local authority almost throughout his life; I had been the director of social services throughout his whole life. The few formal letters that he possessed had my name at the top, so before I left the local authority, he wanted to meet me so he could put a face to my name. That young man had spent his entire life in the care of the authority for which I was the chief officer responsible for his services, yet I did not even know that he existed. Nothing has been so powerful in making me realise the burden of responsibility that we have for the care, protection and development of these young people. I was then, and I remain, chastened by that experience because we must never allow these young people, who are our responsibility, to be lost in the system. It happens so easily.
I met a young woman who had been in care and who told me she had been sent to 19 different placements, and that with every placement there came a move to a different school. Is it any wonder that her education had been disrupted? We must take the needs of these young people more seriously than we have done in the past. We know the ingredients of good-quality residential care. We know how to ensure that children and young people in care can have the disruption in their lives minimised by our facilitating continued contact with their wider family, their grandparents, their friends and their school. I urge the Government to set up an independent, comprehensive and robust review of residential childcare services in this country. I believe that nothing less will do. In an earlier report, I ended by saying, “Just do it”. Today, I end with a plea to the Minister, “Please do it”.
The Lord Bishop of Leicester
My Lords, it is a privilege and somewhat humbling to follow the noble Lord, Lord Laming, who has made such an impassioned speech. I express my gratitude to the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, for tabling this important debate, for his eloquent and passionate introduction and for his clear explanation of what it takes to introduce a damaged young person to the idea of trust and love as a basis for adult life.
Given the recent cases of child sexual exploitation in Rochdale, Derby and Torbay that have been widely publicised and the clear failures in our child protection system, this is a timely debate. The stories from those places seem to have a number of features in common. First, children and young people end up in residential care after multiple placement breakdowns caused by their challenging behaviour, or rather caused by the inability of adults to support their needs and uncover what is behind such challenging behaviour. As one young person involved with the Children’s Society put it recently, “No one thinks there is a problem with the placement; it is always the child”.
Secondly, these incidents involve adolescents who have experienced serious abuse and neglect or have witnessed very traumatic events in their lives. Such children need high-quality support but, as others have said so persuasively, they often experience the very opposite. Thirdly, they have run away or have gone missing on numerous occasions, especially while in residential care and those episodes have not been adequately responded to. Fourthly, the most important common thread is that these children were often seen by professionals involved in their lives as troublemakers, unco-operative and beyond help, rather than as troubled young people, crying out for help.
It is important for us to grasp these things if we want to understand why, in many cases, residential care is not meeting the needs of children and young people. It would not be possible to erase a child’s past experience but patience, empathy and perseverance, combined with knowledge and clear systems for multi-agency working and accountability, should help each child to be able to look, with hope, into the future.
It is not only the cases of child sexual exploitation that demonstrate some of the failures in our care system. Serious child case reviews show children in care taking their own lives or dying of drugs overdoses. One of the key indicators that a child is at risk is if they run away. Many of these children have had difficult starts to their lives and experienced neglect, abuse or trauma. As a consequence, these children are often extremely vulnerable, and when they go missing they are in great danger of being physically or sexually exploited.
The recent all-party parliamentary group inquiry into children who go missing from care highlighted, as others have said, the failure of the state to look for the most vulnerable children and laid bare the often appalling and shocking results. So my first major point is that running away should be seen as a sign that a child or young person needs help.
As has already been pointed out, it is estimated that around 10,000 children go missing from care every year, but many of these children go missing repeatedly, amounting to more than 40,000 incidents a year. The link between frequent episodes of running away and the risk of sexual exploitation is absolutely clear. The APPG inquiry into children who go missing from care found that perpetrators target children’s homes specifically because of the high vulnerability of the children in them and how easily they can make contact with the children. I would like to raise with the Minister a point that has already been mentioned. When will the new definitions of “missing” and “absent” currently being piloted by ACPO be published? Will it include an assessment of the risks related to children categorised as absent?
My second point is that placement stability is one of the most important factors determining the success of care experiences, and has a significant impact on long-term outcomes for children in care. Of the 65,000 children looked after in England in 2011, 14,500 children, which is 22%, had two placements during the year, and 11% had three or more placements. Children in care need stability and to build trust with the people in their lives. How can they feel safe if they are moved so many times a year?
I know that the Government are also concerned about the number of cross-boundary placements. From April 2011, local authorities have a duty not only to ensure that there is enough provision in their local area to meet the needs of the children but that decisions about placements outside their local area are made only by request to a senior nominated officer in the authority. Justification has to be presented in each case to demonstrate the benefits of such placements to the young person.
Surely there is a need now to ensure that local authorities are complying with that duty and that children are placed outside of the authority only when it is clearly in their best interests. What are the Government’s plans to ensure that local authorities comply with those duties?
Thirdly, when the Children’s Society consulted with young people in care about the quality of care that they received, young people said that they wanted an opportunity to have regular chats about their lives with someone. Some suggested that it would be good to have informal meetings with their social worker every six weeks “because sometimes you do not understand the badness of the thing you are in”. For young people placed away from their families and friends, “the care system is an isolated place and you do not want to isolate people further”.
Although young people have a right to express their views when decisions are made about their care to and participate in review meetings, and the local authority has a duty to ascertain their wishes and feelings, they often say how powerless they feel and that they are not in control of events that shape their lives. As a result, running away is one of the only ways that they can express that control.
Research demonstrates that where children are listened to, take part in decisions about their care and get explanations about the decisions made, they are more likely to be happy about their placements, more likely to achieve stability and to share information if they do not feel safe. Advocacy is instrumental in ensuring that children are supported to participate in these decisions. What are the Government doing to ensure that children and young people have the support of an advocacy service when they need help with communicating their wishes and feelings to those who make decisions about their lives?
Finally, as others have said, the support and quality of the workforce in children’s homes is critical to a young person’s experience of care. The variable quality of staff in children’s homes working with very vulnerable children is a concerning issue, with standards often unacceptably low, as others have clearly demonstrated. Workforce development and the academic standard of the residential care workforce in England is much lower than in other European countries. The poor levels of training for staff are also often exacerbated by the high changeover in children’s homes due to low pay and an overreliance on agency workers. What are the Government doing to ensure that staff who work in children’s care homes have the same high standards of qualification and training as in other European countries?
Above all, changes are needed in attitudes. As one young person put it to the Children’s Society, “Basically, I used to go missing all the time … and I mentioned to one of the workers, I went to a girl’s house and there was like prostitution going on there. I went back and told one of my care workers about what had happened. They just saw it as prostitution, they thought ‘she might be a prostitute’ and that’s all they wrote down. They never took time to listen to how I felt about it”.
The phrase “they never took time to listen”, is telling. That, above all, illustrates the need for cultural change in residential child care that we must seek in the years ahead.
Baroness Benjamin
My Lords, I thank the noble Earl for securing this important debate and congratulate him on his excellent speech. I declare an interest as a vice-president of the children's charity Barnardo’s, which has extensive knowledge and experience of looked-after children in residential care. I speak today about the charity’s concern.
There are currently more than 6,000 children in residential care homes. These are often the most vulnerable children with the highest levels of need. These children usually do worse on a whole range of measures, including educational achievement and social well-being, than other children in the care system—that is, those who are being fostered or who have been adopted. This is not to argue against the use of residential care. For some, it is the most appropriate, and sometimes the only, option. But we need to make sure that we get it right for these particularly vulnerable children.
I am particularly concerned about the vulnerability of young people in residential care to sexual exploitation. This issue has gathered much attention in the media recently, but Barnardo’s has been working on it for several years. Barnardo’s works with young people who have been exploited and staff hear how men wait outside care homes to befriend these unwitting children. They befriend them with gifts and pretend kindness, waiting for the child to fall in love with them before abusing them.
I want to be clear about what I am talking about. The term “sexual exploitation” is a euphemism. We are talking about young people being manipulated by predatory abusers who often use drink and drugs, and then being raped, often repeatedly. One 15 year-old girl whom Barnardo’s worked with went missing from her residential care home. Eventually, she revealed what was happening to her. A man aged 33, more than twice her age, had been taking her away, abusing her and tying her up, then taking videos of her and posting them on the internet. Barnardo’s hears of how other children return to their care homes with severe physical damage from the rape they experience time and time again. This all makes me weep, and I am sure it makes noble Lords weep too. It shames us as a society that we allow this horror to happen.
Organisations such as Barnardo’s do a lot to repair the damage that is done to these young people, but where a child’s home is provided by the state they should be able to feel safe there, especially as many of these vulnerable children have already been through abusive and traumatic experiences in their young lives. So what needs to be done? We need to look at who is charged with the responsibility of looking after these children. I find it greatly concerning that such a low qualification standard is required in order to work in residential care homes. Underqualified staff may have excellent experience, empathy and interpersonal skills, but specialist qualifications would, if administered correctly, only add to these skills. The national minimum training standards are welcome, but surprisingly they are not a requirement, and therefore we must ensure that best practice becomes common practice. To safeguard and protect these vulnerable children, all staff should be trained to recognise the signs of sexual exploitation such as, for example, prolonged or unexplained absences from the care home, or frequently having unexplained gifts or money. Most important is that they should know how to respond effectively.
Noble Lords may have seen the map of the location of children’s homes published in the Times earlier this year. It shows a clustering of homes in certain areas of the country and demonstrates that the majority of care homes are located in those areas where property is the cheapest. As the noble Lord, Lord Laming, said in his speech, it cannot be right for the price and availability of property to be the key determining factor in where residential care is placed. We clearly should not be putting our most vulnerable young people into areas of high crime, drug use and established sex industries, areas where young children can easily be preyed upon. It does not have to be like this and it should not be like this because there is considerable scope for alternative forms of provision. For example, Barnardo’s is piloting a project that involves using specialist, highly trained foster carers to care for children who are the most at risk of sexual exploitation. It is great that the Government have supported this time-limited pilot, but I urge them to consider how it can be continued and to look at other innovative approaches.
In the debate on the Queen’s Speech, I mentioned that there is also a need for much more joined-up working, in particular between those concerned with child protection and looked-after children, who sadly do not always communicate well. We need to see a real focus from the Government on this issue. They have been paying a lot of attention to adoption and fostering, and this looks to be continued in the children and families Bill. That is most welcome, but we also need to look really carefully at residential care. I want to ask my noble friend if the Government will take this issue seriously and give it some consideration. I await with great interest the report due in December of the quality expert group. It has been looking at the quality of provision in children’s homes, including the commissioning, location and ownership of the homes, as well as the qualifications and skills of the workforce.
Improving the experiences of young people in residential care is not a simple matter and there is certainly no magic bullet. But we have an absolute moral and social duty to do everything we can to care for children who have no one else to care for them. The Government have shown real leadership with their publication of an action plan on sexual exploitation. However, we are only at the beginning of a long road. I urge the Government to consider this matter very carefully, and to act decisively and with urgency to protect the most vulnerable children in society. They deserve it, and we must all make sure that this happens.
Lord Ramsbotham
My Lords, I begin by joining in the congratulations offered to the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, on obtaining this debate and pay tribute to his continuous championing not just of the causes of the children we are talking about, but particularly of the staff who have the responsibility of looking after them. I also thank Edward Scott in the Library for producing, as is so often the case, such a comprehensive briefing for us. I want to talk not so much about the particulars of this subject, but rather more generally around the service of looked-after children. Like other noble Lords, I shall quote some of my own experiences as justification for making suggestions.
When I took over as the Chief Inspector of Prisons in 1995, my first experience was that of inspecting Holloway prison, where I discovered that four 15 year-olds were somewhere in the establishment who the governor knew nothing about. When we found them, it turned out that all four had been in care. Immediately I went to see the then Chief Inspector of Social Services, my noble friend Lord Laming. We decided that we had to have some form of partnership so that whenever I went to inspect anywhere where children were incarcerated, I would have a social services inspector with me. My noble friend ensured that an inspector would be available. During the first inspection we carried out of an establishment holding children, the social services inspector and I found all sorts of horrors which should not have been happening, not least that the Prison Service was claiming Crown immunity from the Children Act 1989; in other words, the status of children was not being officially recognised. We fought against that, even threatening to take the Secretary of State to judicial review. Eventually it was overruled.
It was symptomatic of the way children were being treated. We were also shocked to find that 55% of young offenders had experience of care and, as others have said, many of them had been in care either for their whole lives or in excess of two years. Most disturbing of all was the frequency of change of location, foster parents and social workers. The result was that we agreed that it would be sensible for the different inspectorates to come together and produce a joint inspection to which we would all contribute since we were all dealing with a particular aspect of safeguarding children. The first joint inspectors’ report was published in October 2002, and I shall quote two paragraphs from it. Paragraph 4.18 states that,
“some young people in care have reported in the past that they had had five or six social workers over the past year, and so had lost confidence in social workers and looked for continuity and consistency of planning to the chairperson of their reviews”.
That is absolutely the wrong way of going about it. Further on in the report, paragraph 4.41 states:
“Staff from many agencies emphasised the importance of regular supervision. They saw it as a key element in maintaining quality and therefore safeguarding children. They reported that frequency and quality of supervision could vary. The quality of supervision was strongest within the probation service where it was backed up with regular appraisal”.
Before taking part in the debate I checked to see whether that last sentence was still the case. Sadly, it is not, because of what has happened to the probation service in recent years. I would ask the Minister to take note of that, because next week we are to start work again on the Crime and Courts Bill, and we will focus on the importance of having a viable probation service, which makes a very important link to some of these looked-after children.
What are we doing about this? I will tell the House a little bit about where we are getting with an organisation called the Secure Foundation—formerly the Young Offenders Academy—which is an attempt to produce a different type of looking after children who come into the hands of the criminal justice system and the state. It is a combination of the Foyer Federation’s accommodation for homeless children, custody for those who are the bottom end of the criminal spectrum, and looking after those serving community sentences, who are on the cusp between the two. The idea is to set up one site within a one-mile radius by public transport so that people are available, and give these children activities, education, work and substance abuse treatment, of course, but also other activities linked to the local area.
The key thing that came out of the advisory board that looked at all this, which included social workers, local government and other people, was that it is essential that there should be long-term contact with a responsible adult. That is why people should not be moved. This project is now called the Secure Foundation because the emphasis is on the security of young people, and it is currently being targeted in Haringey following the riots. Thankfully, the Mayor of London is co-operating with a number of organisations which have produced money for a pilot. It is interesting that this focusing also includes the problem of the children in care, who of course will qualify for attending such an academy, where they will have that long-term contact with people who can help them.
I am chairman of the All-Party Group on Speech and Language Difficulties, which has been conducting an inquiry into the link between social disadvantage and speech, language and communication needs. I pay tribute to the Minister because his interest in this subject is recognised and hugely appreciated by all those working in the area. We have come up with some very disturbing facts and figures that show that children with high IQs from poor backgrounds—I do not mean poor financially but in terms of care—are overtaken at the age of five and a half by children with low IQs from good backgrounds. This is not acceptable.
I am very encouraged that the Department of Health and the Department for Education are developing pathways for regular assessment of children linked to remedial treatment to enable them all to engage with education at the age of seven, and go on through the system. I am aware that there is a lot of work going on with those with special educational needs and disabilities, but we must not forget the ones with difficulties, and who do we find coming out as the most victimised in all the disadvantage that we see? It is children in care. As they are the state’s responsibility, this should not be.
My final two points concern oversight and supervision. I was very sad when the office of Chief Inspector of Social Services was abolished in 2005, not because it was failing but as a budgetary measure. Thankfully, this House saved some of the other inspectorates but not that one. I think that the movement of young people to Ofsted and the elderly to the CQC has made social services the poor relation of both, and that there is a link between some of the troubles that have happened and the loss of that inspectorate. I ask the Minister very seriously to investigate bringing back the Social Services Inspectorate so that there really is a champion, as there used to be, to make certain that the consistency of delivery of services, particularly to children in care, can be restored.
Secondly, in the Queen’s Speech it was said that the roles of the Children’s Commissioner and the Children’s Rights Director would be brought together. I understand that that is going to be discussed in the children and families Bill that is to come before this House next year. At the moment the Children’s Rights Director has responsibility for children in care. It is very important that whoever takes over the joint post should have responsibility for all children in the care of the state, whether in care or custody or wherever. The key word that must be in all their care is consistency. The chances are that if someone is overseeing the result of the neglect that happens in care when children come into custody, they may be the champion to lead us out of this.
Finally, I cannot help citing an experience in 1812—I was not there myself—when my regiment was marching to inevitable disaster at Walcheren. The people whom my regiment was relieving called out, “Bad luck, boys—you, too, are being made the sport of theory”. I hope to goodness that theory can end and fact can drive forward the treatment of these children.
Baroness Howe of Idlicote
My Lords, it is always a great pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham. As usual, we have all learned a great deal from what he has said. I join other speakers in thanking my noble friend Lord Listowel for this debate and paying tribute to his undoubted expertise in and concern for high standards in the area of looked-after children.
This afternoon’s debate is not dissimilar from the one that took place a few weeks ago on the importance of child development and well-being—except that this debate is focused not just on ensuring well-being for all UK children, vital though that is, but on effectively protecting the most vulnerable group of children from exploitation and sexual abuse. Of course, I mean children who, for one reason or another, have had to be placed in the care of their local authority.
I am not going to repeat the concerns I expressed in that debate about the potential for exploiting such vulnerable children through the rapid growth of complex modern media techniques—except perhaps to say that Jimmy Savile’s horrifying and equally undetected volume of crimes has reminded us of yet another area of child abuse and exploitation that has remained hidden for far too long. That appalling discovery is on top of the Rochdale gang of nine men recently sent to prison who, as we know, had deliberately targeted, groomed and sexually abused looked-after children from local residential care homes.
We also know that the number of children trafficked into the UK has risen, with the official number of 234 children in 2011 believed in reality to be more than double that, with about half of these trafficked for sexual exploitation. Today, like other noble Lords who have spoken, I want to be reassured that some of the most glaring inadequacies in service standards are going to be addressed and tackled; above all, that there will be much better information-gathering and indeed agreement about what basic information is required as well as shared.
The Children’s Society is surely right to be concerned that children who go missing repeatedly are not, apparently, always considered to be at risk. It is surely not sensible that Ofsted does not share the location of children’s homes with local police, thus reducing their ability to safeguard effectively. I hope that the Minister will be able to report that a change in this practice is under way.
Another issue is that, in some parts of the country, looked-after children often experience multiple placements and are often located a long distance from family and friends, also involving quite often a change in school. Surely, as others have said, the only acceptable reason for moving a young person out of their home area is if it is clearly in their best interests. There is far too little emphasis as well on what each looked-after child wants and whether the local authority has genuinely listened and acted on their wishes. For them to have the right to an advocate to speak on their behalf on these issues is therefore essential. So it is disturbing to hear that, although theoretically available, one third of all local authorities do not report any spending on this service. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester, I hope that the Minister will confirm that the Government are considering giving all children in local authority care a statutory right to independent advocacy as part of placement planning.
It is surely interesting—in fact, I would say extraordinary—that nearly half the 5,000 children living in children’s homes are apparently placed outside their local authority area despite the fact that local authorities have a duty to provide sufficient homes within their own area. It will be valuable to hear the Government’s view on that.
As I have mentioned already, placements outside a child’s home local authority often also include the need to change schools, which can have an unsettling effect on looked-after children’s academic results. A 2011 study showed that only 53% of looked-after pupils achieved the expected level in English and only 52% in maths at key stage 2, compared to the average student’s achievement of 82% in English and 80% in maths. Therefore, monitoring and supporting looked-after pupils’ academic achievement is clearly important. School governors have some responsibility for admissions, and under certain circumstances, as we know, a looked-after child can be admitted even if the school is already full. That is in addition to the school’s duty to prioritise looked-after children if the school is oversubscribed. All these are fairly recent changes, but we need to hear how they are working and that they are being followed. Again, I hope that the Minister will agree that all our schools should continue to give particular emphasis to ensuring that looked-after pupils achieve their potential.
The last issue that I want to address is the importance of the use of early intervention policies, particularly with families which have had problems for generations. So much money could be saved and the potential of young lives realised if this approach was prioritised. Certainly, the fact that many more midwives and health visitors are being recruited over the next few years will be an important step in the right direction, particularly if that is combined with more co-operation, training and information-sharing between all professionals involved. Voluntary organisations such as Home-Start already play an important role here. They need proper recognition and support, as do kinship carers and foster parents. Noble Lords have already mentioned the importance of additional support or funding for fostered children who need an additional period of placement from, for example, age 18 to 22. With all these schemes, as we all know, adequate resources are vital to seeing that results are achieved.
It is heartening to note that all directors of children’s services across the country are clearly concerned about these inadequate standards. In their paper, What is Care For?, they ask for a total re-examination of the care system. Andrew Webb, vice-president of ADCS and one of the authors of the paper, has said:
“The care system serves some of the most vulnerable children and young people in our society, and sometimes, frankly, it does not serve them as well as it could”.
Let that be encouragement to the Minister and the Government to show what really important changes they can make.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford
My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, for introducing this very timely debate and pay tribute to the work that he has done in this House. Ever since I have been in it, he has been a great champion for looked-after children and done a great deal to bring them to our attention and that of successive Governments, which is a substantial achievement.
Perhaps it is because I am an economist by training that I quite often like to start by trying to put a problem into perspective in terms of figures. Therefore, I found the House of Commons briefing, which came out in May this year and provides some of the statistics about children in care, very interesting. It told me—and a number of people have mentioned this already—that there are some 65,000 looked-after children in England, which is a very small proportion, about 0.6%, of the total number of children in this country. The figure has increased slightly during the past five years. In 2007, it was 59,000. Perhaps the influence of Baby P and the Haringey affair connected with it have meant that more children have been placed into care.
Most of these young people in care—58% of them—are aged from 10 to 18, while 36% are aged one to nine and 6% are under one. Boys account for 56% of them and girls 44%; 77% are white and 23% black, ethnic minority or of mixed race. I found this an interesting set of statistics: 62% are in care because of abuse or neglect at home, 12% because they come from dysfunctional families and 9% because of family stress. In other words, 83% of those in care are there because of problems with their families and 62% of them because there has been neglect or abuse at home. That is very significant. Only 14%, about 8,000, are in residential accommodation, putting children’s homes, residential care homes and residential schools together. Although there has been a change in the law, approximately half of these are still outside the area where their family is located. In other words, they cannot easily meet up with their families, with all the consequences that a number of noble Lords have drawn attention to.
The cost to the state of those in residential care is about £1 billion a year. In other words, each one of those young people costs the state rather over £100,000. The cost of those in foster care—the large majority of them—is £2.5 billion, approximately £37,000 per child. When the noble Lord, Lord Laming, talked about the financial advantages of putting children into foster care, you can see the difference. I know that the local authority where I live, Surrey County Council, has been much influenced by the very substantial cost of putting children into residential care, partly because it managed to close most of its own residential homes and has had a very expensive time trying to cope with the number of young children.
As my noble friend Lady Brinton mentioned, it is not surprising that we see quite a number of children running away, particularly from residential care, yet there are no adequate statistics at the moment. Again, I echo noble Lords who have asked the Minister whether we are going to get some adequate statistics about those who are running away. In the light of all this, it is not really surprising that these vulnerable young people, many of whom have been abused to start with at home, should find themselves involved in the many cases there have been over the years including, recently, those in Rochdale and Derby, and perhaps not least the Jimmy Savile situation, which has been very much before us over the past few weeks.
I was interested in the quotation that was given in the briefing produced for us by the Library. I pay tribute to Edward Scott, because I thought it was an extremely useful briefing. It quoted the chief executive of Barnardo’s, who said:
“Our services have heard countless stories of men waiting outside care homes to befriend these unwitting children, some as young as twelve, desperate for love”,
which picks up a point made by the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, about the need for these young people to feel, and to be, loved. The chief executive continued:
“Men attract them with flashy cars, gifts and feigned kindness, waiting for the child to fall in love with them before abusing them on a scale which is incomprehensible to most, but sadly very real”.
I will quote two further bits that come from the same briefing. One is from the review from the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre:
“Offenders often act together, establishing a relationship with a child or children before sexually exploiting them. Some victims of ‘street grooming’ may believe that the offender is in fact an older ‘boyfriend’; these victims introduce their peers to the offender group who might then go on to be sexually exploited as well. Abuse may occur at a number of locations within a region and on several occasions. ‘Localised grooming’ was the term used by CEOP in the intelligence requests issued to police forces and other service agencies in order to define the data we wished to receive”.
Given that situation, it is and was extremely disturbing that the internal review from Rochdale stated:
“However, for those children who came into contact with children’s social care, it often appeared that ‘no further action’ would be taken. Case files state that the children were often considered to be ‘making their own choices’ and to be ‘engaging in consensual sexual activity’”.
That is extremely disturbing, but there is a real dilemma for those who run children’s homes. They often contain some of the more difficult young people, 14, 15 and 16 year-olds who have proved to be difficult to put into or keep in foster care. Do you treat those young people reasonably as grown-ups, or do you lock them up? Locking them up just makes them more resentful. If you want them to grow into adults and take responsibility for their lives, the last thing that we want to do is for those homes to be seen as prisons.
The response one sees in Rochdale reminds one very much of the problem that arose in relation to Victoria Climbié and Baby P: a failure of joined-up working on the part of the local agencies, which, because of those failures, missed opportunities to take early and preventive action. I had cause to discuss issues of youth policy with Surrey Police not long ago, and one issue that came up on that occasion was its feeling that it wanted to work much more closely not just with local social services but with schools. As it pointed out, often, if the family is chaotic and dysfunctional, the schools see things happening before anybody else, because the children react at school. It said that it would be so useful if it knew when children were misbehaving in school sometimes, because that would make it aware of the fact that problems were rising in that family and then it, and social services, could take preventive action.
Many of us have asked: where should we go? I pick up on the basic recommendations of the Munro report. What should be done about this? One aspect is early intervention. Where there are dysfunctional or chaotic families or where abuse is known, the sooner one can put together teams that work with that family, the more probable it is that something can be done about it. We want early intervention wherever possible.
Eileen Munro’s second recommendation is to give professionals the time and scope to do the job properly. The story that we have heard so frequently is of inconsistent care, of so many placements, so many social workers—due to the turnover, and so forth. We also know how hard pressed many social workers are, what huge caseloads they are often expected to bear and the fact that they are not given the time to do the job properly. It came up in the Munro report that too much time is spent on bureaucracy and that there are too many tick-boxes, and not enough time looking after the children—developing, as the noble Lord, Lord Laming, said, the therapeutic and healing processes necessary.
I have two final points: the need for more joined-up thinking; and the point that the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, and others made, the need for proper training, continued emphasis on training and the quality of people in the service.
Baroness Hollins
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Listowel for securing this debate and for his important opening speech. I worked for many years as a child psychiatrist and a psychiatrist with children and adults with learning disabilities, and have had a research and clinical interest in the mental health and behavioural consequences of abuse.
My daughter is also a consultant psychiatrist working with troubled parents and their infants, so I will start my contribution by reflecting on the importance of secure attachments for all children. As my noble friend said so powerfully, children who have been rejected, neglected or abused have to learn to love and learn to trust—possibly for the first time. Early intervention is critical, and we know from American research that family health partnerships are effective in reducing the need for care away from the child’s own family, and have longer-term intergenerational benefits. Do not forget that a large percentage of girls leaving care are pregnant within a year. The provision of peer mentors is a promising initiative that is being evaluated in a study at St George’s, University of London by Gill Mezey and her team in the hope of easing the transition to adulthood for these vulnerable young women.
Some of the most vulnerable parents are those with learning disabilities. This is a group that I have worked with as a psychiatrist. It is almost standard practice for their children to be taken into care. I will say more about this shortly. I will also draw attention to the high number of children with learning disabilities placed in care. Commissioning the right mental health services is very important. Child and adolescent mental health services treat serious diagnosed disorders, but we need more preventive services too and we need more skilled practitioners who recognise the signs of abuse and its emotional and behavioural impact. This means better training of front-line staff, but also more integrated services and better awareness of the mental health needs of disabled looked-after children. In the light of recent child protection failures, the emotional well-being of looked-after children must be first and foremost. It is the key to the prevention of abuse and exploitation, and it is equally important in the healing process after abuse has occurred. What we see time and time again is how crucial early identification and intervention are for those entering the care system. Crucially, since the national child and adolescent mental health services review report in 2008, little seems to have changed according to both young people in care and professionals.
Children under five raised in institutions experience more psychiatric disorders, but those placed in stable foster homes have much better mental well-being and securer attachments. One review of data sources in England estimated that disabled children constitute between 10% and 25% of the looked-after population. Disabled children may be particularly vulnerable to abuse and neglect, which is a common reason for entry into care. The NSPCC reports that children with disabilities are 3.8 times more likely to be neglected, 3.8 times more likely to be physically abused, more than three times more likely to be sexually abused and four times more likely to be emotionally abused than other children. Children with learning disabilities in care are even more likely to run away than other children.
Disabled children in England are a distinct subgroup who are less likely to achieve a permanent placement. Research suggests that disabled children are more likely to display a high level of behaviour that their carers find challenging. This is particularly relevant when we think about stability. Evidence suggests that emotional and behavioural problems have a strong association with placement breakdown. Research shows that the prevalence of mental disorders decreases with the length of time a child has spent in a stable placement. Half of those who have been in their current placement for less than a year have mental health problems compared to a third of children who have been in their current placement for at least five years. That is an improvement.
The findings show that, despite various changes in policies and provision of care, the prevalence of children with recognisable mental health disorders—around three-quarters—has not diminished. For those trying to access services, Sheffield City Council and NHS Sheffield found that in February more than 260 looked-after children had been waiting for child and adolescent mental health services for more than 18 weeks, with some facing waits of up to 44 weeks. This is not acceptable. Services are not flexible enough. Children are expected to go to them instead of the services being flexible and approachable, which these children need.
Difficulties that local authorities have in finding placements for disabled children result in inappropriate placements, including the use of 52-week-a-year boarding schools or, and I myself know of examples of this, disabled children being placed in respite provision, where every week different children will be sharing their corridor, their bathroom and their mealtimes. Permanent placements for disabled children in respite facilities are not acceptable. Disabled children might be placed in adult residential facilities rather than family placements. Local authorities have also documented an increased use of out-of-area placements for disabled children so they are likely to live further away from their families and communities, creating problems in monitoring and problems for their families in maintaining contact. This is especially the case for children with learning disabilities, who may sometimes require psychiatric in-patient admission as well. There are very few specialist units that would accept children with a learning disability who had mental health problems or challenging behaviour. One of the learning points from the Winterbourne View abuses was that abuse is more likely to happen when the person is placed far from home. The victims in that case were adults, of course, but we should have the same concerns for disabled children who are placed away from home.
Then there are the children with a mild or borderline learning disability. They are unlikely to attend youth groups of any sort and often have a background of abuse, making them more vulnerable to sophisticated grooming techniques. This form of exploitation, as we know and have heard today in several speeches, often begins with positive attention from adults, something that these children particularly crave. Flattery and gifts are a new experience for them and they welcome it. They may not have the insight into social behaviours and relationships to determine that while this is how things are beginning, it is most certainly not how they will end.
The education of front-line staff is necessary with regard to spotting the tell-tale signs of possible abuse: a new mobile phone, new clothes or an older man presenting as a boyfriend. Not only is education necessary but the empowerment of front-line staff and carers to communicate their concerns to relevant bodies is essential. Carers may not have the confidence that they have the skill set necessary to make a judgment call over a complex situation. They may feel that they are not expert enough to determine a young person’s capacity to engage in a particular behaviour. These carers need support and training to help them with these difficult situations. Even for a professional it can be difficult to make a capacity assessment on a 17 year-old girl with a mild learning disability, a complex social background and mental health issues who is engaging in sexual behaviours.
Education is also needed before children reach care. Many parents try to use social services to assist them with the emotional and behavioural difficulties that they are experiencing with their children, but they often do not get past the duty desk. Those who do not meet the threshold criteria for a service but who often have a need for mental health services may not be recognised, and may not know where to turn for help. A survey of 440 childcare social workers found that 30% were unaware of local resources available to support the children and families of, for example, those with ADHD. Many inexperienced practitioners did not recognise the importance of psychiatric assessment.
Without appropriate support, training and confidence, how can we expect carers to know that they are the ones probably best placed to carry out such an assessment and, if required, intervention? Empowering those who care is the key to offering these children the protection that they deserve and the chance to enjoy the innocence of childhood.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch
My Lords, I thank the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, for tabling this debate today and add my tribute to his tenacity and effectiveness in pursuing the interests of vulnerable and looked-after children. As it happens, regrettably, child protection issues have been highlighted in the media again recently, but the noble Earl’s strength is that he has continued to champion these issues consistently, long after the media circus has moved on. I also thank all the other noble Lords who have contributed to this thoughtful and challenging debate.
Although we will have differences with the party opposite on some issues, this is not primarily a party-political debate. There is no monopoly of wisdom when it comes to managing the damaging fallout that can occur from family breakdown. There have been child protection failures under both Labour and Conservative Governments. While we remain proud of the progress that the previous Government made on child safeguarding, clearly more needs to be done.
Many of the issues raised in the debate today go to the heart of good parenting. Good parents struggle to balance their children’s welfare with their freedoms. The rules and expectations change from generation to generation, complicated by the fact that new models of family unit are becoming more common. Meanwhile, we know that children are reaching puberty at an earlier age. The sexualisation of young girls through media and celebrity is heightening the pressures upon them. Personal, social and sexual education is being marginalised in the curriculum, leaving children without the tools to spot and avoid exploitation. For example, at its very simplest level, teenagers need help in differentiating between lust and love. They need to identify what is a real boyfriend, as a number of people have mentioned in the debate this afternoon.
For good, committed parents, guiding their children’s growth and development in this minefield is a challenge. When the state has to step in as a substitute parent, the dilemmas quickly multiply. The noble Lord, Lord Laming, rightly emphasised that there is a moral duty on the state as well as a statutory responsibility to step up to the plate in the role of a good parent. He has talked about how challenging that can be.
I am not saying the care system cannot get things right. Of course it can. As we have heard, there are wonderful success stories of transformative fostering, adoption and residential home placements. We need to learn from these examples and celebrate them, but the reality is that they are still not getting it right in sufficient numbers enough of the time.
We are all too aware of harrowing stories of care system failures and we are rightly shocked and angry that this can be allowed to happen. However, regrettably, behind the headlines are everyday stories of parental neglect and abuse with which the care system is struggling to cope. The noble Earl, Lord Listowel, gave a moving example of the potential personality disorders that can be faced by children who feel at a young age rejected and unable to be loved and respond to love. What is the fate of those children? We know, for example that the number of children in local authority care is rising from a number of statistics mentioned this afternoon. The research that I have uncovered talks about the number reaching over 67,000 last year. The prime cause of those children being taken into care is to protect them from neglect or abuse.
Unfortunately, however, we also know that the subsequent life chances for those young people are not good. For example, the gap between the educational achievements of looked-after children compared with their peers is actually growing, with just 13% of children in care achieving 5 GCSEs A to C grades last year, compared with 57% of all children. We also know that looked-after children are three times more likely to end up unemployed than their peers. These failings in the care system are not headline grabbing, but they still stand as a reminder of how we are failing these young people on a day-to-day basis.
What needs to be done? One of the things that became clear when I was researching material for this debate was the wealth of independent analysis and advice on child protection issues which has been commissioned in recent years, including Select Committee reports, all-party parliamentary group reports and the excellent reports from the noble Lord, Lord Laming, and Professor Munro. All have provided wise and thoughtful counsel on this issue, and contain good, practical advice on assessing and managing the complex issues involved. I also pay tribute to the work of the all-party group on children who go missing in care, and that of the deputy children’s commissioner into child sexual exploitation. Both reports contain far-reaching recommendations on the training of staff, the location of residential homes, the role of safety risk assessments, the need for better liaison with the police and the responsibilities of local authorities and Ofsted to drive up standards.
Their recommendations are urgent and compelling, and I join other noble Lords in hoping that the Minister will be able to update us this afternoon on the progress being made, for example, to improve the data on children missing from care; on clarifying the responsibility of Ofsted to share locations of children’s homes with the police; and on the steps being taken to prevent the scandal of out-of-borough placements being made for economic reasons rather than in the interests of the child.
Beyond that, there are three more fundamental themes that I would like to highlight today. First, improving the quality of relationships between the child and those charged with protecting them is crucial. Children have to have adults in their lives who they absolutely trust. The adults have to understand the children’s lives and have high expectations and aspirations for them. Continuity and the provision of long-term support from a caring and loving adult should be at the heart of our care provision. As we have heard, the more that placements break down, the less likely it is that a subsequent placement will be a success. It becomes a downward spiral. Even though we know that, more than 10% of children in care are being moved more than three times a year. As the noble Lord, Lord Laming, quite rightly expressed it, they simply become lost in the system.
I agree with the previous Children’s Minister, who argued that the possibility of a placement breakdown should be treated with as much concern as a child being removed from its birth family. Therefore, will the Minister update the House on the steps being taken by the Government to minimise these multiple placements? Decent relationships cannot be formed if front-line professionals do not have the time, resources and training they need to support the child. Social worker caseloads are on the increase, with one in six social workers having more than 40 cases and more than half believing that their caseload is unmanageable.
The sector continues to suffer a crisis in morale and there is a worrying lack of experienced social workers staying in the system, with many quoting burnout as a key reason for the high turnover. That is why we support initiatives to raise the professional standing of social work, including raising the status of the College of Social Work, the appointment of a chief social worker and a fast-track system similar to Teach First in education which would train top graduates and guarantee employment, provided they commit to a minimum of two years working with disadvantaged children. As we have heard today, we also need to address the particular skills gap and the undervaluing of the work of those in the residential care sector, as has been effectively highlighted by a number of noble Lords.
However, regrettably, the situation on the ground is destined to worsen as the huge cuts in the early intervention grant, youth services and local authority children’s services feed through the system. The Children Act 2004, quite rightly, made it a statutory duty for the police, health and children’s agencies to work together on child protection but the funding for all those sectors is under attack and they are retreating back to their core functions rather than prioritising co-operation. The noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, and the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, both gave very moving examples of what can happen when you do not have joined-up working and, conversely, the advantages that can occur when this is addressed effectively.
Meanwhile, there are now more than twice as many staff employed in the education department’s free school unit as there are in the safeguarding unit. So while we all understand that there is pressure on budgets, it does also come down to government priorities. Will the Minister agree to look again at what more can be done to ensure that agencies involved in child protection are obliged to work collaboratively with adequate, and ring-fenced, funding?
Finally, it is absolutely paramount that we continue to put the needs of children and young people before their parents or any other adults, and that they are given a strong voice in decisions that affect them. They have a right to be heard, and systems have to be in place to ensure this is a reality. As we have heard, running away from care or befriending potential exploiters is a graphic way of children asserting some control over their own lives, however misplaced that can be. As the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, rightly said, the solution cannot simply be to lock them up as a result of that. I echo the views of the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and others, in supporting the case for an independent advocate who can form a lasting, and I hope trusted, relationship as a vital first step in strengthening children’s voices. I hope that the Minister can confirm that that will be actioned.
Sadly, we cannot guarantee that there will be no further child protection failures, but we already know many of the steps that are needed to minimise such tragedies in future, including those proposed by Professor Munro and the deputy children’s commissioner. The very least that we can do is to ensure that their recommendations are implemented speedily and in full. I look forward to hearing that the Minister concurs with this view and that the Government are now ready to act.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Hill of Oareford)
My Lords, we have heard, as the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, said, a number of thoughtful, powerful and at times moving contributions to this afternoon. Like others, I am grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, for giving us this opportunity. It is a timely debate in a number of ways, because the issues that we have been discussing are very much in the news at the moment and because precisely the issues that have been raised by noble Lords are ones that my honourable friend Mr Timpson, the Children’s Minister, and the Secretary of State are considering actively. We have set up various groups, looking precisely at those issues, to which I will come back in a moment. I will ensure that all the contributions that we have had this afternoon are fed into that process, and I know that Mr Timpson will be interested to see all of them.
I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, for the way in which she approached the issues this afternoon. I agree this is not a party political issue. Governments of all complexions have tried hard, and often sadly come up short, to make progress. I would argue that early on this Government signalled their determination to improve the life chances of children in care, and have acted with urgency to bring about reform. My Secretary of State was himself adopted, and the new Children’s Minister grew up with over 80 foster children. I say this, not to claim some virtue on their behalf, but because both of them know from their personal experience the transformational power of care when things go well and the terrible waste when they do not. I speak for both of them when I say that they certainly understand the urgency of action, which is a theme that all noble Lords this afternoon have picked up in different ways.
We certainly know that the life chances generally and the educational achievement of most looked-after children is far worse than for other children. We have heard some of the figures already about performance in GCSEs. We know that over one-third of care leavers are not in education, employment and training, compared with around 17% for other young people. But behind the headline figures that we have heard this afternoon, there is quite a lot of variation across the country. We know that in some local authority areas 26% of children who have been in care for 12 months will get their 5 GCSEs, including English and maths, while in others that figure is only 6%. The rates for care leavers who are not in education, employment or training range from 15% in some local authorities to 69% in others. This variation shows how far we have to travel, but also gives us grounds for hope, because if all areas could do as well as the best, we could make real progress. That is one of the reasons why last year the Prime Minister announced that we will publish performance tables which show how well local authorities are looking after children in care. That will help us share best practice.
We have talked this afternoon about a whole range of issues affecting looked-after children: adoption; the importance of the workforce, which was a recurring theme; fostering; and healthcare. I will come back to what we are doing in all these areas, but I think it is important to start by taking head on, and talking about, the most extreme cases of failure of the sort that were brought so horribly to our attention by the case in Rochdale, but also others about which we have heard this afternoon. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, rightly asked me for an update.
On the day that the Rochdale court case ended, my right honourable friend the Secretary of State asked the deputy children’s commissioner to produce an accelerated report of her child sexual exploitation inquiry focusing on the particular risks facing looked after-children in children’s homes. The Government have also benefited from the excellent joint inquiry carried out by the two all-party groups, in which I know the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, had an important hand. Together, those highlighted three main areas for action, of which the first was raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, but others alluded to it. The first main area for action concerns the need for better and more consistent data and for better information sharing. I agree with noble Lords that we cannot have a situation where the figures published by the Department for Education on the number of children missing from care are so different from those produced by the police. Neither should we have a situation where Ofsted cannot share the names and addresses of children’s homes with the police, as the noble Baroness, Lady Howe of Idlicote, rightly pointed out.
The second area that was raised concerns out-of-area placements. While there can be reasons for children to be placed out of area, a figure of 45% seems on the face of it to be far too high. I agree with the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Laming, about the questions that that high figure gives rise to, some of which are economic, as he rightly pointed out.
The third area concerns the quality of the care and the provision offered. We announced at the beginning of July the immediate steps that we would take and I will quickly run through them. My noble friend Lady Sharp of Guildford referred to data. We have written to all local authorities asking them to review their own data collections and to check their figures against those collected by local police forces. The department has been working over the summer with an expert group involving representatives from children’s services, Ofsted, ACPO, The Children’s Society and others to develop a proposal for a better data collection system. That group’s work has largely concluded and my ministerial colleagues will consider the recommendations put to them. I hope that as a result of that we will be able to address these important issues that have been raised. The deputy children’s commissioner’s report and the joint inquiry both recommended that we should make it possible for Ofsted to share information about the location of children’s homes with other relevant authorities, not just with the police, as appropriate. Work on that is already in hand and we will consult on amended regulations to make that possible later in the autumn.
Out-of-area placements were raised initially by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester and, towards the end of the debate, by the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins. We announced in July that we would set up a group specifically to advise us on out-of-area placements. It has been looking at a range of issues, including the dependence of some local authorities on out-of-area children’s homes, which are often situated a considerable distance away—indeed, many miles away. The group has been considering how to ensure that there is much better scrutiny, planning and assessment of needs and risks before decisions are taken to place a child at a distance. It has also been looking at whether further changes to the care planning framework are required to ensure that local authorities will always respond appropriately when difficulties emerge in children’s placements and at the need for all children’s homes to work collaboratively with their local police forces and other local safeguarding services. It has also been looking at the respective responsibilities of the placing authority and the host authority to make sure that there is no slip between those, and at their responsibilities for monitoring the quality of the care in homes and the steps they should take if they consider that a home is failing to offer children the supervision and support that they need. That group has been meeting frequently over the summer. It finished its work at the end of September and its proposals will shortly be made for Ministers’ consideration.
I turn more generally to the quality of provision. A third group was set up and given a broad remit to look at the quality of provision, including the qualifications and skills of the workforce. It is looking at questions relating to models of ownership and location of homes, a point raised by my noble friend Lady Benjamin; how to improve commissioning practice; considering how homes can offer better environments to help children overcome their difficulties; what staff development is needed to manage children’s behaviour; and considering the effectiveness of current arrangements to drive improvements across the sector. It is open to this group to consider the kind of issues raised by the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, when he talked about the appointment of a champion. The group has been meeting monthly over the summer and is carrying on meeting. It is due to finish its work in December, following which Ministers will consider what further action is necessary in the light of its recommendations. I am not able to announce precisely what those next steps are but I hope I have been able to demonstrate that a large amount of work is being taken forward which looks precisely at the issues raised today. Over and above this, officials have been getting a better understanding of the issues by visiting 20 local authorities. In addition to visits to children’s homes, they have spoken to practitioners, commissioners and, of course, children and young people themselves.
That is a quick update on where we are on residential childcare. If I may, I will summarise other steps we are taking to improve support for looked-after children across a broader front. We have been taking action to improve the progress of adoption, to increase the number and quality of foster parents, to raise the quality of the workforce, to raise educational achievement and, importantly, to improve support for care leavers.
On adoption, in March 2012 the Government published an action plan for adoption to speed up the process. We will introduce new primary legislation to prevent local authorities from delaying an adoption by searching for a perfect match, particularly around the child’s ethnicity. We will make it easier for children to be fostered by approved prospective adopters while the courts consider the case for adoption so that they can stay in one home with the same parents and the chopping and changing that noble Lords have referred to can be minimised. If a match has not been found locally within three months of a child being recommended for adoption, they will be referred to a national adoption register so they can find a match in a wider pool of prospective adopters.
As far as fostering is concerned, we are working with the sector to strengthen long-term fostering arrangements, particularly for older children. We are trying to increase the numbers and range of people coming forward to foster and to increase placement quality and matching. We will develop training and support for foster carers and the social workers involved in fostering to improve knowledge sharing and support good practice. I would argue that fostering is consistent with a regular family setting and that children and young people can benefit from placements, but I agree with the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Laming, that for others a children’s home may be a more appropriate offer. We should not think that that is a placement of last resort and that all children should automatically be placed in foster arrangements.
The quality of the workforce was an important theme discussed this afternoon. The noble Earl, Lord Listowel, talked particularly about a workforce having the confidence to be able to work with these vulnerable children and stand up to a range of different people in the promotion of their interests. We are looking to receive proposals from the expert group looking at quality on how to raise the skills and competence of care workers and managers in children’s homes.
The very first review set up by the Secretary of State after the Government came in in May 2010 asked Professor Eileen Munro to conduct a wide-ranging review of child protection. She noted concerns that social work had become over-regulated and that the profession needed to move towards greater professional control, which was a point made by my noble friend Lady Sharp of Guildford. The 15 recommendations made by Professor Munro in her final report will help to create a less bureaucratic system and an environment where social workers are better able to focus on the needs of children, young people and families. I completely agree with the points about the need to raise the level of skills and qualifications in the children’s home workforce. That is why the expert working group is looking at whether the entry level of skills and qualifications needs to be raised. It will explore models used in other countries, the potential place of specialisms and the scope for professional registration.
I was asked specifically about progress on the appointment of a new chief social worker, which was one of the recommendations in Professor Munro’s report. The Department for Education and the Department of Health carried out a recruitment exercise for the chief social worker over the summer but, first time around, that did not lead to a suitable candidate being identified. Ministers are looking at a revised specification and we expect to advertise shortly. I will be able to update the House on that soon. The Government are extremely supportive of the work led by the Social Work Reform Board and the College of Social Work to drive up standards in the social work profession. As to the specific point about learning from the Centre for Excellence for Looked After Children in Scotland, DfE officials have had discussions with it and I agree that we should seek to learn from that experience, in particular in relation to the scope for professional regulation and improved qualification requirements.
Education was another theme. The Government have taken a number of steps to try to promote the interests of looked-after children. For example, they now attract the pupil premium. We have made sure that looked-after children have top priority in school admission arrangements, which is important. One piece of evidence that comes up repeatedly is that too many children in care end up in the poorest schools. Therefore, we should consider giving them priority in admissions arrangements for the best and most popular schools. Looked-after children are a priority group to receive the maximum amount for the 16 to 19 bursary. We have also made sure that they will be prioritised for a free early-years place for two year-olds.
We have encouraged local authorities to have a senior education officer, a virtual school head, to track the progress of every child in care so that they receive the support they need. I accept that practice varies, and we will therefore continue to explore what more can be done to bring greater consistency to the role of the virtual school head. Every school, including academies, also has a legal duty to have a designated teacher for looked-after children. That teacher works with the virtual school head to make sure that the child’s personal education plan is being implemented.
The interests of the child are clearly not just educational—as the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, and the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, reminded us; the emotional well-being and the broader well-being of the child are equally important. All local authorities have to ensure that looked-after children have a health plan, and the pathway plans for care leavers address health issues. They must have an annual health assessment that covers their mental and physical health. There is statutory guidance in place, binding on local authorities and the NHS, about their respective roles and responsibilities in meeting those needs. The headline message the guidance seeks to emphasise to local authorities and the NHS is that the health assessment for looked-after children should not be an isolated event but part of a continuous activity to ensure the provision of high-quality healthcare. The Government’s mental health strategy places a new emphasis on early intervention and prevention to help tackle the underlying causes of mental ill health.
We have tried to maximise the incentives to care leavers to attend further and higher education courses. There is a personal adviser when they wish to resume education and training up to aged 25, and we are funding local authorities to give care leavers a higher education bursary of £2,000. We have supported the development of children-in-care councils to share best practice and argue for the best from their local authorities.
We will also be launching a care leavers’ charter, as part of National Care Leavers’ Week, which we are in the middle of. This charter will summarise young people’s statutory entitlements as well as make clear the core expectations, values and intentions around good corporate parenting.
My noble friend Lady Brinton and the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, highlighted the importance of the staying-put arrangements. I agree with them that the best local authorities are using staying-put arrangements to ensure that care leavers can continue to live and get support from their foster carers. We know that those who are in staying-put arrangements are more than twice as likely to be in education as those who are not. The revised leaving-care guidance issued in April 2011 encourages local authorities to consider introducing staying-put provision as part of their range of options to provide care leavers with suitable supported accommodation.
The issue of multiple placements was raised. I certainly accept and agree entirely that it is disappointing, to say the least, that the number of children moving placements three times a year has not fallen. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester first brought this to our attention. We think that our programme to improve the quality of foster placements and children’s homes will lead to greater stability for more young people. However, the quality of commissioning and placement planning are critical so that children are matched to the placements that best meet their needs. Therefore, we urge local authorities to consider how to strengthen their practice, including using evidence-based interventions such as keeping multidimensional treatment foster care and multisystemic therapy.
A recurring theme was the importance of children in care having an advocate. It is obviously right to put children at the centre of the care planning process. Each looked-after child has a social worker and an independent reviewing officer. They also have access to an advocate, as well as to an independent visitor. I was asked specifically about putting this on to a statutory basis. I am not able to provide an answer to that today but I can say that the Government are exploring how advocacy services can be strengthened further.
The noble Lord, Lord Laming, stressed the importance of urgency and called for an independent inquiry. I hope and believe that the extensive programme of work under the three working groups that I have spoken about will cover the ground and lead to an action plan for improvement. Because that is urgent, we want to press on with that work, but I hope and believe that by the end of the year, when the noble Lord, Lord Laming, sees the outcome of this work, he will feel reassured that the Government are gripping the matter in a way that I know he would want.
I do not pretend that the Government have all the answers but I hope I have shown that we are trying to address the issues in a range of ways. As my noble friend Lady Benjamin said, we are at the beginning of a long road and there is a way to go.
The debate this afternoon has highlighted many of the issues that we face. It has shown some of the good things that are happening, but it has given us a sobering reminder of some of the problems and has underlined the need for urgency. The Government share that sense of urgency. I know that my honourable friend Mr Timpson will consider anything that can improve the life chances of the vulnerable children who most need our support, and I will ensure that all the practical suggestions and advice that the Government have been given this afternoon are put before him, and he will reflect on them.
The Earl of Listowel
My Lords, I am very grateful for the care with which the Minister has replied. As I said, I was most grateful for the Government’s response back in June, when these concerns were raised, and for the setting up of the working groups. All that is very welcome indeed. Recently the Minister invited me to meet the head teacher of Rugby School with regard to the setting up of the Springboard charity, which helps vulnerable people on the edge of care to get into some of our best boarding schools. I take my hat off to him for this endeavour.
I am most grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part in the debate. A number of important themes have been raised but I know that at this stage I should not go into any detail. I shall look very carefully at what the Minister has said. Many of the young people from care who have come before our parliamentary group over the years have voiced the anxiety that Members of Parliament and Members of the House of Lords may not be hearing their concerns. I shall ensure that this debate is circulated as widely as possible among them so that they know their concerns are being heard and acted upon.
Again, I thank noble Lords for taking part today.
Treatment of Homosexual Men and Women in the Developing World
(12 years ago)
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Lord Lexden
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the treatment of homosexual men and women in the developing world.
Lord Lexden
My Lords, I bring before your Lordships an international issue of great importance. Injustice and inhumanity stalk our world and, sadly, they take many forms. I have sought this short debate in order to draw attention to one of their cruellest and most pervasive manifestations: the gross discrimination suffered by homosexuals in many countries of the world.
Millions of our fellow human beings today are liable to arrest, conviction and punishment—punishment of great severity—because of their sexual orientation and that alone. Their human rights, enshrined in internationally agreed conventions for the benefit of all mankind, are breached many times over. Equality, privacy, dignity, freedom of expression, assembly and association, freedom from torture and from inhuman and degrading treatment—all these and other rights which form part of the established code of human rights law are being flouted in many countries where homosexuals are concerned.
Under international law, popular dislike or moral disapproval of homosexuality can never be a sufficient justification for setting aside human rights. As the head of the Supreme Court of Zimbabwe, Chief Justice Gubbay, stated, in 2000, as regards equality rights:
“The courts cannot be dictated to by public opinion … Those who are entitled to claim the protection of rights include … the marginalised members of society”.
Yet in many developing countries, homosexuals are marginalised, unprotected and oppressed because of the lack of respect for their human rights in the laws under which they live. In at least 76 countries, consensual, adult, same-sex relations are criminal offences for either men or women, or in some cases both. Punishment can be death in seven countries, including Iran, Sudan, and parts of Nigeria and Somalia. In six others, including Malawi and Malaysia, same-sex relations are punishable by hard labour or by corporal punishment.
Long terms of imprisonment, often far in excess of 10 years, can be imposed on homosexuals in 38 countries, including Jamaica, Barbados, Kenya, Gambia, Tanzania, Libya, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Even if they are not enforced rigorously, these grossly discriminatory laws create a climate of grave anxiety and fear for homosexuals in the many countries where they are on the statute books. It is a climate in which violence and persecution can flourish virtually unchecked. Its victims cannot seek protection from the state, for the state regards them as criminals, and the forces of law and order may well collude with their persecutors. Many instances of persecution and suffering have been carefully recorded and documented by the Human Dignity Trust, an international non-governmental organisation dedicated to challenging discriminatory laws against homosexuals, with which I have worked closely in preparing for this debate.
Here are just two case studies. The first relates to Uganda where a young man, Toby, was attacked at school for being gay. The police were called; they beat him severely. Returning home, he told his parents about his sexuality. Fearing for his safety, they hid him in the attic of the house. That night a mob, accompanied by the police, came to the house. Unable to find Toby, they turned on his family. When Toby came out of hiding after the attackers had departed, he found, in his words, “The house covered in blood and his own family, his mother, father, two brothers and two sisters dead in the sitting room. They had all been shot”. Toby now lives in the United Kingdom.
My second shocking story, which comes from the Human Dignity Trust’s thick files of cases, is set in Jamaica whose criminal code prohibits sex between men. A wave of persecution and violence has been suffered by gay people connected with the Jamaican Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals and Gays, known as J-Flag. Its co-founder was brutally murdered in 2004. But a 30 year-old social worker, Gareth, refused to be deterred from working for the organisation, despite sustained threats. “No matter where you go”, he was told, “we are going to find you, kill you and burn J-Flag down”. Yet for years Gareth remained in Jamaica, committed to promoting the welfare of the homosexual community. Eventually, with many misgivings, he felt forced to claim asylum in Canada. The Human Dignity Trust is now bringing a case on behalf of Gareth and J-Flag before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Last week, Gareth and a group from Jamaica came to Westminster. It was a privilege to listen to them describing in calm, resolute and unemotional terms their determination to secure humane and just treatment for homosexuals in the land they love.
There are many Tobys and many Gareths in many countries in our world today. They are the inevitable consequence of laws which criminalise homosexuality. The Organisation for Refuge Asylum and Migration has this year estimated that more than 175 million people—nearly three times the population of the United Kingdom—live in circumstances where they are at risk of persecution because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. But as we grieve and as we protest at this state of affairs, we must also remember where the laws criminalising homosexuals in many countries came from. They came from Britain, which alone among the European empires of the 19th century possessed a criminal code under which homosexuals faced severe penalties just for expressing their love and physical desire for one another.
In India in the 1820s, Thomas Macaulay, later the greatest of all the Whig historians, devised a legal system which incorporated Britain’s then firm and unbending intolerance of homosexuality. The Indian penal code became the model for the legal systems of Britain’s colonies in most of Africa and Asia. The love that had freely spoken its name and found expression in their native cultures became, in the definition of their new British-imported law, an unnatural offence. Thus it is that today, 42 of the 54 nations of the Commonwealth criminalise same-sex relations.
A wind of change has blown briskly and steadily in other parts of the world since that remarkable turning-point in 1959; the publication of the Wolfenden report. The strength of the movement for change has been powerfully assisted by rulings of the European Court of Human Rights, most notably, as far as the United Kingdom is concerned, by the case brought by my friend Jeff Dudgeon which extended the legalisation of homosexuality to Northern Ireland. The crimes for which homosexuals were once punished for simply being homosexuals no longer exist in any European country from the Republic of Ireland in the west to Vladivostok in the Russian Federation in the east, although the threat of discriminatory laws remains in some parts of the east. They have also been eliminated from the older countries of the Commonwealth.
Voices of compassion are being heard strongly in the world today, particularly in the Christian churches. The most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York has affirmed,
“the equality of all human beings, ‘heterosexual’ or ‘homosexual’”.
The Anglican Church of Southern Africa has made clear its opposition to the criminalisation of homosexuality. In 2008, the Vatican’s delegation to the UN General Assembly called for the elimination of,
“every sign of unjust discrimination towards homosexual persons”.
Many people the world over are now asking the Churches to put their position beyond all doubt by saying simply and clearly: criminalisation is wrong.
How is the message of justice and compassion that is coming from so many quarters, particularly our Churches, to be translated into action? It has been, and continues to be, done through the courts of law. Judicial challenges have helped to overturn laws criminalising homosexuality in countries as diverse as Fiji, Ecuador, the United States and India. This very day, a challenge is being mounted in the Belize courts supported by the Human Dignity Trust, the International Commission of Jurists and the Commonwealth Lawyers Association. Their leading counsel is the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, who is as a result unable to contribute to this debate as he wanted to do. He has authorised me to say on his behalf that “the case, if successful, is likely to have an important impact on similar laws in other former British territories. In my view there is no conceivable legal or moral justification for continuing in the 21st century to criminalise homosexual activity between adults. To treat this as criminal conduct has no single redeeming feature”.
The time has come for all the world’s principal international institutions to commit themselves unequivocally to this important cause. The United Nations has this year given a ringing endorsement of the case for urgent action. Speaking in March, the Secretary-General gave powerful support to decriminalisation. Clear plans are now needed to put his strong and most welcome words into practice.
Here in Britain, we look naturally to the Commonwealth too, not just because of historic ties, but because under this Government it features more prominently in our foreign policy. In 2010-11 an Eminent Persons Group was established to consider the future of the Commonwealth. Its report called for the repeal of laws criminalising homosexuality. Their existence, the report said, called into question,
“the commitment of member states to the Commonwealth's fundamental values and principles, including fundamental human rights and non-discrimination”.
This is probably the first debate to be held in a national legislature on the global persecution and criminalisation of the LGBT community. I pay tribute to all the organisations and campaign groups which strive for the full application of human rights to the LGBT community. On many occasions, the Government have underlined their strong belief that compassion and justice must prevail. I ask my noble friend the Minister to make it clear in her reply to the debate what action the Government are taking now, and whether they are considering fresh initiatives to help rid the world of laws which have sustained inhumanity and injustice for far too long.
Lord Rea
My Lords, many people in the developing world will be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, for raising so cogently this important and disturbing issue. Although we may condemn the draconian laws and practices he has described, we should not forget that it is only quite recently in historical terms that this country and other industrialised democracies have repealed laws which prohibited same-sex relationships. Although the law has been liberalised in the UK and other countries in the north, and many prominent people, including MPs and Ministers, are now able openly to declare their sexual orientation, powerful prejudice is still there among a substantial minority of the population. A well-known example of that is the problem that the most reverend Primate has had with some of his bishops both here and abroad. The noble Lord, Lord Lexden, has pointed out that the intolerant and puritanical attitudes to gay sex that prevail in many developing countries may be a relic of colonialism, and that before the colonial era there was a much more permissive attitude.
How does this social and legal condemnation of homosexual people affect their health, particularly in terms of HIV infection? I was privileged to serve last year on the House of Lords Select Committee that looked into HIV and AIDS in the UK, which was chaired very ably by the noble Lord, Lord Fowler. Although sexual orientation and HIV infection are different entities, there are parallels, particularly regarding stigma and social rejection. To quote from the Select Committee’s report, we found that:
“Stigma and lack of understanding can undermine HIV prevention efforts … and can also impact upon adherence to treatment”.
The double prejudice that gay people with HIV suffer from makes it even more difficult for them to get access to treatment and the follow-up which is necessary. In many countries they are thwarted in obtaining treatment by laws and attitudes that criminalise or shun them.
HIV infection was of course first discovered 30 years ago among gay men, so the disease is associated with gay sexual behaviour. However, heterosexual transmission in Africans is now more common than homosexual transmission both at home and among the diaspora. HIV infection itself is nevertheless still much more common in gay men than heterosexuals both here and in Africa; 19 times more common, in one study quoted in the recent excellent report of the Global Commission on HIV and the Law. Stigma and discrimination play a significant role in causing and maintaining these high rates. In Caribbean countries where homosexuality is criminalised, such as Jamaica and Guyana, which are both Commonwealth countries, the prevalence of HIV is around one in four gay men, while in countries that do not criminalise same-sex sexual activity, such as Cuba and the Bahamas, it is only around one in 15. Can the Minister who is to reply outline the response of DfID to this unacceptable situation? I am aware that the Government are concerned about the issue and that they have played an important role in bringing it on to the international stage.
However, there is still a long way to go, with discriminatory legislation being passed or debated in Uganda and several other countries in the Commonwealth and elsewhere; I mention particularly eastern Europe. A fundamental step should be to encourage and support citizens and civil society who oppose these outdated and misguided laws in those countries. We should encourage them to put pressure on their Governments to repeal them as soon as possible.
This is not an impossible task. For example, the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon, the Independent Commission on AIDS in Asia and the UN special rapporteur on the right to health, as well as a meeting of Commonwealth Foreign Affairs Ministers, have all recommended repealing laws that prohibit sex between consenting adults of the same sex, as have courts in Hong Kong and Fiji, as was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Lexden.
However, action on the ground is less evident than declarations of intent. The clear evidence that punitive discriminatory laws encourage the spread of HIV infection should act as a stimulus to repeal them. I hope that the noble Baroness can outline the moves the Government are taking to encourage international action as well as words.
A further line of attack should surely be to encourage treatment centres for HIV and AIDS to be freely open to people of any sexual orientation. DfID devotes a substantial proportion of its budget to the prevention and treatment of HIV. I hope the noble Baroness can assure the House that the special problems encountered by gay and other sexual minority groups in getting access to medical help are taken fully into account.
Lord Lester of Herne Hill
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, for his powerful and comprehensive speech. I declare a number of interests. I am a patron of the Human Dignity Trust; I am also a friend of the Sigrid Rausing Trust and on the board of the OSI Justice Initiative, both of which have given vital funding support to the Human Dignity Trust, without which the work could not be done.
This is a unique human rights issue. There is an overwhelming body of comparative domestic and international case law which treats provisions that purport to criminalise private, consensual, adult homosexual conduct as contrary to fundamental human rights and constitutional protection. This is in no sense about the imposition of western values in supporting decriminalisation; all that is being asked is that each state uphold its own properly understood guarantees of dignity, privacy and equality.
I am to be followed by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester. Whatever the different views on gay marriage within the church, I am sure he will confirm that there is no disagreement among the Bishops that criminalisation is wrong and unjustifiable.
This is also an important refugee issue. The words of wisdom of the two Scottish members of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom in the Cameroon case that was decided in 2011 warrant repetition. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, explained:
“For many years the risk of persecution in countries where it now exists seemed remote. It was the practice for leaders in these countries simply to insist that homosexuality did not exist. This was manifest nonsense, but at least it avoided the evil of persecution. More recently, fanned by misguided but vigorous religious doctrine, the situation has changed dramatically. The ultra-conservative interpretation of Islamic law that prevails in Iran is one example. The rampant homophobic teaching that right-wing evangelical Christian churches indulge in throughout much of Sub-Saharan Africa is another. The death penalty has just been proposed in Uganda for persons who engage in homosexual practices. Two gay men who had celebrated their relationship in a public engagement ceremony were recently sentenced to 14 years’ imprisonment in Malawi. They were later pardoned in response to international pressure by President Mutharika, but he made it clear that he would not otherwise have done this as they had committed a crime against the country's culture, its religion and its laws. Objections to these developments have been greeted locally with derision and disbelief”.
The noble and learned Lord continued:
“The fact is that a huge gulf has opened up in attitudes to and understanding of gay persons between societies on either side of the divide. It is one of the most demanding social issues of our time. Our own government has pledged to do what it can to resolve the problem, but it seems likely to grow and to remain with us for many years. In the meantime more and more gays and lesbians are likely to have to seek protection here, as protection is being denied to them by the state in their home countries. It is crucially important that they are provided with the protection that they are entitled to under the Convention”.
This is a very different issue. Lord Rodger, the other Scottish member of the Supreme Court, also went into the extent to which we are obliged under asylum law to give protection to gay people who are facing persecution elsewhere. We have a direct, practical interest in this country in eliminating elsewhere persecution of gay people who otherwise will have to seek safe haven here. I hope that this debate will help to stimulate the work already being done by the Government.
I have written to my noble friend the Minister with some questions in order that she might be able to seek advice on some of them, and I very much hope that she can. They are: where does the decriminalisation of homosexuality across the globe fit into the Government’s priorities? Should the protection of the LGBT communities from persecutory harm not be a specific priority of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office? Can the Minister clarify exactly how the Government work with the Commonwealth to promote decriminalisation? Can she also clarify the Government’s position on aid conditionality as it relates to serious systemic violations of gay and lesbian people’s rights in countries which receive UK aid? Do the Government agree that the criminalisation of consensual sexual relations between adult men in private is a violation of international human rights law and the rule of law? Finally—I apologise for so many questions, but at least I have given notice of them—will the Government consider joining as a partner Government making a donation to the Global Equality Fund established in December 2001 by the United States State Department to advance and protect the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons around the world?
The Lord Bishop of Leicester
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, for spelling out so powerfully and persuasively the scale and horror of the threats faced by many gay people around the world. Noble Lords will be aware that in 1967 it was the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, who spoke in this House to support the decriminalisation of homosexuality in this country, thus making a clear distinction in British law between a moral and a criminal issue.
As noble Lords will now know, no such distinction exists in many parts of the world and, as a result, people are suffering horrendous abuse and even death for being who they are and loving who they love. Many of us have met people who have shared the most disturbing personal stories, including a very small number who have been granted asylum on grounds of sexual orientation in this country.
Others in this debate have rehearsed the ways in which laws criminalising same-sex sexual activity between adults have been repeatedly found in international law to violate fundamental human rights, and this debate serves also to highlight effectively the way in which criminalisation gives rise to persecution. I want, however, to concentrate on the way in which discriminatory interference in the private sexual conduct of consenting adults is an affront to the fundamental Christian values of human dignity, tolerance and equality.
It is of course no secret, as others have made clear, that on the ethics of homosexual practice the churches in general and the Anglican communion bishops in particular are deeply divided, but that cannot and must not be any basis for equivocating on the central issue of equality before the law of all human beings whether heterosexual or homosexual. Further, many of us who are bishops in this country value and treasure our links with particular dioceses around the Anglican communion. We respect and appreciate the different, and often sharply divided, theological approaches which lead to different stances on the ethical issues. But, as the Lambeth Conference of 1998 made clear, there is not and cannot be any place for homophobia in the church, and all are to be welcomed regardless of sexual orientation.
Few have spoken on this issue as unequivocally as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who said in 2010 at the United Nations High-level Panel on Ending Violence and Criminal Sanctions on the Basis of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity:
“All over the world, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are persecuted. They face violence, torture and criminal sanctions because of how they live and who they love. We make them doubt that they too are children of God—and this must be nearly the ultimate blasphemy”.
Indeed, in recent years, successive statements from the leaders of major Christian denominations in the West have made similar points, including perhaps most consistently, those from the Society of Friends, which has stated:
“We affirm the love of God for all people, whatever their sexual orientation, and our conviction that sexuality is an important part of human beings as created by God, so that to reject people on the grounds of their sexual behaviour is a denial of God’s creation”.
The noble Lord, Lord Lexden, has issued a direct challenge in his opening speech. He said that many people the world over are now asking the churches to put their position beyond all doubt, by saying simply and clearly that criminalisation is wrong. I will put my position beyond all doubt—and I know I speak for other Members of this Bench—by stating it in as clear terms as I can. If criminalisation leads, as it evidently does, to gay people concealing their own identity, that must be wrong; if criminalisation leads to many living in fear, that must be wrong; if criminalisation leads to the prospect of persecution, arrest, detention and death, that must be wrong; and if criminalisation means that LGBT people dare not turn to the state when facing hate crimes and violence, that must be wrong too.
It is within the adult lifetime of most of us in this House that the law was changed in this country to decriminalise homosexual acts. However, for our children’s generation, such a state of affairs must feel like ancient history—as appropriate to the moral climate of today’s society in this country as the burning of witches. We must all urgently pursue this journey to a completely new climate in those many countries of the world where same-sex relations are criminal offences. I very much hope that this debate will serve that cause.
Lord Fowler
My Lords, I strongly agree with everything that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester has said and applaud the lead that he has just given. It was an exceptionally strong speech and one that deserves to be well heard around the country.
The trouble with this House is that you wait for weeks for a debate that you want to take part in and two come along on the same day. My noble friend spoke with great force and I congratulate him on two counts: first, on the debate itself, which is of crucial importance around the world; and, secondly, on choosing a subject that I and the noble Lord, Lord Black of Brentwood, can agree on after our slight difference of emphasis on the media.
The extent of discrimination against homosexual men and women is not really remotely in dispute. The figures speak for themselves, and many of them have been given already: 175 million people are living under conditions where they are at the risk of persecution on account of their sexual orientation, and 76 countries criminalise consensual, adult, same-sex relations, among them 42 of the 54 countries of the Commonwealth.
I want to concentrate for one moment on some of the consequences that that discrimination can have. As perhaps one or two Members of the House know, I seek to work and help in the HIV/AIDS area and will just remind the House of the position there. Some politicians talk, optimistically, about a cure, but the fact is that almost 2 million people a year die from AIDS. For every person put on treatment, two new people are infected. Hundreds of thousands of people do not get the treatment they need, or come to it too late for it to be fully effective
Consider what effect discrimination can have in that context. If there is the threat of criminal sanction, people do not come forward for testing, let alone for treatment. The result is that HIV spreads. Health providers are obviously less likely to offer their services if they can be accused of aiding a crime. The laws are often used by the police to prohibit HIV prevention activity. That is a disastrous position. I must add that it is by no means restricted to developing countries. The Culture Select Committee in the other place said that it thought that homophobia in football was a bigger problem than racism.
The worst problem in Europe is in Russia, where the treatment of gay and lesbian people can be discriminatory and severe, and where Madonna, no less, is being prosecuted. Her offence is calling for tolerance towards sexual minorities. I remember being in another country and talking to the organiser of a group who was hoping for better treatment. I said, “You must be on radio and television a lot”. “Oh no”, he said, “I am not that brave”. He feared the ostracism that he would encounter.
I give just one further example. Earlier this year, I spent a week in Ukraine, considering the HIV situation. At a meeting with groups representing men who had sex with men, sex workers and drug users, I heard a long list of complaints about police harassment and corruption, backed up by the courts, which would invariably accept the police story. I must have looked a bit sceptical until a worker with the excellent international HIV/AIDS Alliance intervened to say, “I can confirm it all; I worked for the police for 12 years”. That is the nub of the position. In Ukraine, there is now the prospect of a new law which would prevent essential health education and information aimed explicitly at the homosexual community.
In brief, five o’clock on a Thursday evening in a short debate may not be exactly the best time to start this debate, but the public should be in no doubt of the importance of the subject that my noble friend has raised. They should be in no doubt that discrimination against gay and lesbian people around the world is not just a major problem, it is an affront to everything that most of us feel is decent. We should also recognise that, in some countries, far from advancing, the position is getting worse. We need to take action against that.
Baroness Nye
My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, for initiating this important debate. As he and other noble Lords have so clearly stated, criminalisation of homosexuality violates international law. It denies rights to privacy, equality and dignity and has a negative impact on HIV/AIDS prevention, as the noble Lords, Lord Fowler and Lord Rea, so powerfully argued.
The figures that form the backdrop to this debate deserve repetition: 76 countries around the world still have penal laws; that is 42 out of the 54 Commonwealth countries. That includes 11 in the Caribbean which, in the short time available, is the area on which I shall concentrate. Most Caribbean countries have penal punishments of 10 years or more. There are a few, such as the Dominican Republic, Cuba and the Bahamas, where the LGBT community enjoys some degree of security, and the British Overseas Territories, such as Anguilla and others, where the law was changed in 2001. Although celebrating the fact that the law has been changed, public antipathy is still high and discrimination remains. So it was good that the issue of human rights, including discrimination against the LGBT community, was raised at CHOGM in Perth last year.
The Prime Minister, in an interview, went further and linked human rights reform to the allocation of British budgetary support. While I agree with his motives, I am unsure that this approach will work. When you look at the response in the Caribbean, I think the Government need to think again. No independent Caribbean country receives general budget support from Britain and therefore would not be affected by this policy. However, this fact did not get in the way of an angry response in the media about an ex-colonial power exerting undue influence over other Governments, especially as it was the same colonial power that had devised the laws in the first place.
Some civil society groups think that this announcement will be counterproductive as it will,
“tend … to exacerbate the environment of intolerance in which political leadership scapegoat LGBTI people for donor sanctions”.
Moreover, the Caribbean Vulnerable Communities Coalition has said that the threat, if acted upon, would erode gains made by the Caribbean over the past 10 years in reducing deaths from AIDS through access to retroviral treatments. There have also been accusations of foreign intervention by opponents of the legal challenge mounted by the United Belize Advocacy Movement to Section 53 of the Belize criminal code which, as has been said, is being supported by international organisations.
I share the view of many in the developing world when I say that I do not believe that support for advocacy groups in the countries where change is needed causes the same problems as imposing conditionality by donor nations. This is especially true in Caribbean countries where there is a lack of educational information, a reluctance to engage in the issue of decriminalising homosexuality and where a culture shift is required. Sadly, most churches in the Caribbean also have a strong influence on the political parties to maintain the status quo. However, if they heard the speech by the right reverend Prelate they would probably change their minds because it was very powerful. Supporting civil society groups in changing the nature of the debate and understanding would go a long way to help change public opinion, and I would like to hear from the Minister what the Government are doing to promote civil society groups.
The Caribbean will be affected by the European Parliament’s decision to concentrate future support on the least developed countries, as highlighted by the new Jamaican Prime Minister in her address to the General Assembly. During last year’s Jamaican election campaign, Portia Simpson Miller, as leader of the PNP, responded to a question about homosexuals in government in a TV debate by saying:
“Our administration believes in protecting the human rights of all Jamaicans. No one should be discriminated against because of their sexual orientation. Government should provide the protection”,
and that she would review the legislation. Given that Time magazine had asked if Jamaica was the most homophobic place in the world, given the violence and the culture of murder music, this was a very courageous thing to say in the middle of an election campaign. However, since her landslide election victory she has made no moves to change the law. Reports to J-Flag, which is the only gay rights organisation in Jamaica, show that violence and discrimination have tripled since 2008, but Time magazine has selected Portia Simpson Miller as one of the world’s 100 most influential people because of this stance. Activists have welcomed her inclusion on the list, even though there has been no action, as a way of incentivising her to follow up on that election commitment. Perhaps in the parlance of No. 10’s nudge unit, she should be nudged to make some progress. As the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, said, advocacy groups have lodged a case with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and a favourable ruling would obviously add to the pressure for change.
Pressure and support for civil society groups must continue to be applied at every opportunity. In January this year, four British Ministers, led by the Foreign Secretary, attended the biennial UK-Caribbean Forum in Grenada. The meeting took place on a Cariforum-wide basis with the Dominican Republic as a full participant and Cuba and the British Overseas Territories attending as observers. Instead of the usual communiqué at the end, there was a more detailed action plan talking about the economy, security and all those very important issues which promote British and Caribbean interests, but nowhere can I find any reference to the Secretary of State raising the issue of human rights and the treatment of homosexual men and women in the Caribbean. I know that the Secretary of State raised it at the Commonwealth People’s Forum in Perth last year when he said:
“The UK would like to see the Commonwealth do more to promote the rights of its lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender citizens. It is wrong in our view that these groups continue to suffer persecution, violence and discrimination”.
Everyone would agree with that, and I think it deserves repeating, but I am concerned that no opportunity is lost to raise these issues, and I would be very grateful if the Minister could allay my fears and confirm that this issue was raised by the Foreign Secretary or any of the other Ministers who attended that meeting, and that they will continue to do so.
Baroness Brinton
My Lords, I express my gratitude to my noble friend Lord Lexden for securing today’s debate on this significant human rights issue and for his excellent and helpful opening speech. I am glad that the coalition Government promote homosexual rights around the globe, pledging support for LGBT rights worldwide and working with the European Union and United Nations in persuading other nations to do the same.
The EU and the UN agree that LGBT rights are human rights. However, as we have heard in this debate, the picture elsewhere is not so encouraging. The African Union does not mention LGBT rights in its charter, and some developing nations in Africa abuse homosexuals with what amounts to a state mandate. What is the UK doing within international organisations to encourage developing nations to adopt policies for the protection of homosexuals?
In the 2012 DflD Equality and Diversity Information Report, the Government claim that:
“Quiet diplomacy is often the most effective way to make progress in this sensitive area”.
However, our complicity in these abuses endangers the lives of individuals in these nations, to which the UK provides millions of pounds in aid.
According to the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association, it is illegal to be a homosexual in two-thirds of the world’s least developed countries, as categorised by the UN Office of the High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries and Small Island Developing States. Although the Government say that they intend to improve this situation, not enough is being done to inhibit those nations from prosecuting, jailing or killing people simply for being gay.
Two of the world’s worst offenders are Somalia and Sierra Leone. In Somalia homosexuality is a crime punishable by imprisonment, flogging or even death. Somalis who dare to speak out in gay support centres online often receive death threats. In Sierra Leone the police harass and beat citizens as punishment for their sexual orientation. Shockingly, the rape of lesbians in Somalia is sometimes arranged by the victim’s own family in a cruel attempt to alter their sexual preferences, according to a US Department of State report. Discrimination against LGBT individuals is rampant in Sierra Leone’s education, employment and housing and, sadly, the Sierra Leone constitution offers no protection to homosexuals for the abuses committed against them.
The Prime Minister hinted that UK foreign aid will be contingent upon LGBT rights in Prime Minister’s Questions on 26 October last year, yet the UK has made no official indication of any requirement for either of these countries to improve their treatment of homosexuals. In fact, DfID is actually increasing aid by millions to both Sierra Leone and Somalia. The Government clearly have the resources to confront those countries about their horrific human rights records but they remain virtually uninhibited in terrorising their own people for homosexuality. What is the UK doing to promote the protection of homosexuals in each of these countries? I also ask the FCO what the UK can do to promote LGBT rights in developing countries not linked to us by aid.
It is time that more nations emulated developing nations like Nepal. Though local activists admit that there is a lot more to be done, Nepal’s LGBT rights have been determined in its people’s own terms. Instead of translating European labels and terms, Nepal uses its own concept, “metis”. This culturally relevant identification has led to widespread acceptance and support of homosexuals. In fact, Nepal is home to Asia’s first openly gay parliamentarian, Sunil Pant. Mr Pant is an iconic LGBT rights advocate in Nepal. He founded the Blue Diamond society, credited with persuading his Government to make reforms such as including the defence of homosexuals in its budget. In 2011 Nepal began to collaborate with NGOs in formulating even better protections for LGBT individuals in its new constitution. Nepal is a least developed nation but also a pioneer of LGBT rights.
Sadly, as other noble Lords have suggested, past British colonialism has been credited by Human Rights Watch, among others, with spreading homophobia worldwide. It is time for the Government to ensure that there are fewer cases like Sierra Leone and Somalia and more like Nepal. Are we encouraging developing nations to formulate culturally relevant definitions to promote LGBT rights? The time has come for the Government to help to replace a legacy of hate, which we condemn, with one of tolerance and acceptance that we strive for.
Lord Black of Brentwood
My Lords, we should all be indebted to my noble friend Lord Lexden, who has worked hard to secure this debate. His speech was extremely powerful, its contents raw and shocking, and its message profoundly important.
I start with a simple question: why should this matter to us? It is important to explain why the UK, with this House in the vanguard, should care. I have four reasons. First, as my noble friend explained, we caused this problem. That so many people around the globe still suffer from legal discrimination is one toxic legacy of empire. It is our duty to help sort that out.
Secondly, we must recognise that if we do not do anything to tackle the problem, it will manifest itself at our borders, as the noble Lord, Lord Lester of Herne Hill, said, as people persecuted on grounds of sexual orientation rightly seek asylum here, for in their own country they may be degraded, tortured or killed. It is our duty to help.
Thirdly, we should understand that this is not a problem simply confined to faraway parts of the globe. It occurs in countries that we regularly visit. Many do business in Russia, yet many regions in Russia, most notably St Petersburg, have introduced legislation to punish homosexual propaganda. In Lithuania, a member of the EU, the Parliament is currently progressing an anti-gay Bill. In Tunisia, where many people go on holiday, the Government have recently refused to decriminalise homosexuality. This problem is on our doorstep. It is our duty to help.
Finally, we owe it to those who fought prejudice and legal barriers to equality in our own country to take their legacy, and apply it in those countries where intolerance and bigotry still exist. As a gay man who has lived his life in a tolerant, liberal atmosphere and who has never had to fight discrimination because my forebears fought that battle for me, I believe we need to act in gratitude and, sometimes, in memory of them. That is why we should care, and should help.
In those tasks, we have the support of a number of organisations: the Human Dignity Trust, which is tackling the issue at its core, Stonewall and Kaleidoscope, which are working to make this world a better place. I salute them.
I am an optimist. The march of history is on our side. We should recognise that some progress has been made. In recent years, Fiji, as we have heard, India, Nicaragua, Panama and Nepal have all decriminalised homosexuality, with others such as the Seychelles committed to do so. Botswana, Mozambique and Mauritius have adopted legislation to prevent workplace discrimination, though penal codes still punish private behaviour in those countries.
The awful news is that as we debate this here today, at least 12 people world wide are currently in prison for violating laws that punish those who are born gay, lesbian or bisexual. Another 13 await trial. Three imprisoned are in Nigeria and eight in Cameroon. One—a 27 year-old man—is in Saudi Arabia, where his five-year prison sentence was accompanied by 500 lashes. In Cameroon, Jean-Claude Rogere Mbede is appealing a three-year sentence for sending an intimate text message to man who he thought was his friend. I am delighted that the Human Dignity Trust, supported by Clifford Chance, will be using his case to challenge the law criminalising homosexuality. In the same country, Yntebeng Pascal is awaiting trial for being “too effeminate”.
Perhaps they are in some ways the lucky ones, for they are still alive. Those figures of the number of people in prison do not include people executed in one of the seven countries where being gay is a capital crime. They do not include thousands who die from AIDS because LGBT people are excluded from effective HIV prevention programmes, or where stigma drives the illness underground where it is untreated. I was appalled to hear from the brave Jamaicans that I met with my noble friend Lord Lexden that HIV infection rates in that country are 32 times higher among men who have sex with men than among heterosexuals. Nor do the figures include the gay men who commit suicide because of the scorn they suffer when the structure of law discriminates against them—as many as 250 in Peru in recent years. They do not include those, such as David Kato in Uganda, who have been murdered for standing up for gay rights, or the Kenyan man stoned to death in a Nairobi slum by a mob in June of this year. In the chronicle of man’s inhumanity to man, in too many parts of our world, the suffering of gay men and women still stands out as a terrible indictment, including a significant number, as we have heard to our continuing shame, in the Commonwealth.
I said earlier that I was an optimist. I am also a realist and I know that there is a limit to what our Government can achieve. But we can do something. Of course, resources are tight, but we should, as a priority, commit to supporting decriminalisation programmes. We can work with the EU, which magnifies our influence, to tackle the problem. DfID can make sure that its human rights commitments include LGBT rights and decriminalisation in particular. That would sit in tandem with the vital work that the Human Dignity Trust is doing to tackle the problem at source in the structure of law. We must hold the feet of the Commonwealth to the fire to turn its fine words into action.
Finally, success in the areas that we have been talking about today—legislation, human rights, litigation and institutional barriers to equality—is but one first step. In many ways, the second is even more difficult; that is, cultural change. Let us consider this: in the UK, the structure of law changed in 1967. It probably took four decades for public opinion to catch up with the change in law. In the Commonwealth, in the developing world, that task will be even greater. That is but one reason why we must not delay in the first step. Time is not on our side.
Lord Smith of Finsbury
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, for tabling this important debate and for the compelling way in which he introduced the subject to us. During the past 15 years, we have made huge progress in the UK in securing the rights and liberties of lesbians and gay men. We have recognised, thank goodness, that the love of one man for another or one woman for another does not make them any less valid or human.
Across all Europe and some parts of the United States, the same is true. But elsewhere, especially in the developing world, it is a much sadder story. In this debate, we have already heard about the 76 countries which have criminal laws against same-sex relationships, especially that 42 of the 54 countries of the Commonwealth have such criminalised laws. The continued existence of discrimination, violence and criminalisation in so many Commonwealth countries is particularly shaming. There is a bitter irony, as we have already heard, in that most laws in these countries have been inherited from us. I believe that that gives us a special responsibility to do whatever we can to help to change things.
There is an even more perverse irony. Many of these countries justify their laws and behaviour by arguing risibly that somehow homosexuality is something imposed on them and imported from the colonial West. In fact, precisely the reverse is true. Discrimination was imposed on them by the colonial West. There are horrific stories of the treatment meted out to people simply because they are gay.
In Jamaica, Brian Williamson and Steve Harvey were brutally murdered because they had dared to found the Jamaican Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals and Gays. In Uganda, a young lesbian woman was denounced and beaten by her father, thrown into prison, and beaten and brutally raped by the police in prison. Two young women in Cameroon were attacked by a mob for being lesbian, with their arms broken by being snapped. Of course, the anti-homosexuality Bill now proposed in the Ugandan Parliament by Mr David Bahati MP would impose life imprisonment and, in some cases, a death penalty for sexual acts between men. These sorts of laws and actions shame our humanity; they mock any hopes that we might have of nurturing civilisation and decency across the world.
So what can we here in the UK do to help to bring about change? First, we can support the excellent work of organisations such as the Human Dignity Trust, the Kaleidoscope Trust and Human Rights Watch, which are challenging what is happening. Secondly, as individuals and Governments, we can speak out about these abuses, highlight them, give international publicity to them and protest formally and informally. International pressure can work; we have already heard about the Malawi case of the two gay men who were convicted of unnatural acts and gross indecency for holding an engagement ceremony. They were sentenced to 14 years’ hard labour in prison. Because of international pressure, the president pardoned the couple in question—but even more, the president who then took over from him, Joyce Banda, has announced that her Government will repeal the ban on homosexual acts. She has since indicated that progress may not be very fast in doing this, but the principle has been established as a result of international pressure.
Thirdly, we can ensure that when desperate people flee to our shores seeking asylum because of their fear or experience of discrimination and violence arising from their sexual orientation, we do not turn them away. Fourthly, we can and should support as strongly as we can those brave people who are standing up for their human rights and dignity in their own countries. Last week, I met a young man called David Kuria Mbote, who is the first openly gay black person to run for national office in Africa. He is a candidate for the Kenyan senate in next year’s elections; he is a remarkable person, and very brave. Part of his argument to his electors is that he is an outsider; he is different—he is not part of the establishment. That gives him a real advantage when it comes to rooting out corruption and reforming the political system. People are responding well to his message, although I fear that there are tough times for him ahead.
Ultimately, this is about winning the world for diversity and a welcoming of difference. Some 28 years ago, the leaders of the then group of seven major countries said:
“We believe in a rule of law which respects and protects without fear or favour the rights and liberties of every citizen, and provides the setting in which the human spirit can develop in freedom and diversity”.
That is what it is all about—recognising, accepting, welcoming and enjoying diversity, seeing it as an essential ingredient of freedom and making sure that that message is spread right around the world.
Baroness Jenkin of Kennington
My Lords, I am delighted to join other noble Lords in supporting my noble friend Lord Lexden in this debate. For the second time this week, I find myself a tail-end Charlie, at the end of a debate in which many points that I planned to make have been powerfully and eloquently made by other noble Lords. The red pen has once again been busy through my speech.
Being gay in many countries may be legislatively legal but a practical impossibility. The sad reality is that oppressive regimes and political persecution deny homosexuals the rights that we here in Britain have come to take for granted. Simple acts, such as Pride marches or even efforts to tackle HIV among homosexual men, are outlawed. When modest progress has been made, it is often all too easy to turn back the clock and deny people the rights that they have only just begun to enjoy. That is why this debate is so important. Britain’s strength lies in the freedom that it offers and the tolerance that it shows to all individuals; we, therefore, must be committed to supporting fundamental principles of human rights. In my view, that must include standing against efforts to persecute and discriminate against individuals on the basis of their sexuality. While accepting our international obligations, there are limitations to how Britain can influence and guide. As we have heard, many countries, especially those within the Commonwealth, still wrestle with legislative structures from a bygone colonial era which codify punishment for homosexual activity. As the noble Lord, Lord Smith, said, we have also seen recently in countries such as Uganda a highly effective propaganda effort to caricature homosexuality as a western affliction imported to threaten traditional values.
We should also take this opportunity to reflect on the scale of the challenge that remains. As we have seen in this country, legislative change is an important precursor to changes in society, with strong political leadership precipitating huge shifts in public attitudes to homosexual men and women. Consequently, while government efforts to ensure that British aid is not abused by homophobic regimes are welcome, we must also strive to ensure that these efforts do not inadvertently deprive deeply vulnerable people of vital aid to feed or care for themselves and risk inflaming further homophobic sentiment. The UK’s approach, set out in July 2011, goes some way to remedying this situation. The Government, while reducing the amount of aid given to support the budgets of other Governments by half, will ensure that trusted NGOs and other channels will be used to make sure that poor people in poverty do not suffer as a result. I believe that this approach will make better use of UK aid money and at the same time target support for the most vulnerable people in our world.
However, the Government are only one agent for change. We must also recognise the importance of business and commerce which provide vital inward investment and employment in many developing countries. They are engines of change, too. In preparing for this debate, I read Stonewall’s helpful, recently published booklet which provides guidance for employers on how they can further support their homosexual staff wherever they may be based around the world. It features the work of major employers such as Barclays, Ernst and Young and Simmons and Simmons, which are making enormous strides in practical ways to ensure that they can have the best personnel wherever they need them around the world. By doing so they are beginning to shift attitudes of their global workforces, both in their offices and beyond, whether in London or Lagos, São Paulo or Singapore.
In conclusion, what further efforts are the Government making to ensure that British aid is reaching the most vulnerable in our world while at the same time ensuring that this aid is not abused by homophobic regimes? How are the Government working with British businesses to support equality in the developing world? Finally, what are the Government doing to promote the idea that our success as a 21st century nation has been, and will continue to be, best secured by ensuring that all our citizens can live and work free from this discrimination?
Baroness Barker
I wish to speak briefly in the gap and raise two issues which I think have not been raised in the debate. A number of noble Lords have referred to the fact that in October 2011 the British Government announced conditionality in regard to the overseas aid budget. Will the Minister tell us exactly how the Government intend to monitor that policy and its implementation? The noble Baroness, Lady Nye, well expressed the fear that that policy could create a gap into which right-wing evangelical churches might step to influence poor people in developing countries. I do not think any of us would wish to see that. However, we do wish to see the overseas aid budget being used to advance equality and diversity. If our Government were to monitor this carefully, we could come up with a new model of overseas aid funding for ourselves and other Governments. That would be an important provision.
My second point is a very minor one. Could the Foreign and Commonwealth Office operate a scheme whereby its travel advice states the factual case of each country in relation to the law governing lesbians and gay men? I think that many people know about the awful situation in Uganda, Ghana and perhaps in the Ukraine. However, there are other countries where the situation is perhaps as bad but is not as well known. I would like travellers to be able to use their own independent economic power to not support those countries which are highly discriminatory and to support the ones which are not. We might include in that some of the states of the United States of America which currently appear to be going back to a time of discrimination which we thought had passed.
Lord Collins of Highbury
My Lords, if there is a coalition I am extremely proud of it is the one that has initiated and backed this debate. In particular, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, for putting down the Question which has prompted the discussion.
This country can celebrate the fact that all the major parties are united on this subject. Over the last 25 years the situation for lesbian, gay and bisexual people in Britain has changed significantly. I am also proud that much of that progress was made under the last Government though we should not underestimate the problems that remain, in particular the level of homophobia in our schools. However, Britain can now rightly claim to be a beacon of equality to the world of gay people. Sadly, as we have heard in this debate, this progress is not reflected in the developing world. From Iraq to Uganda, lesbian and gay people are still systematically persecuted. As we have also heard in this debate, this prejudice often stops gay people accessing the healthcare, education and employment they need.
This is why decriminalisation worldwide is so important. However, even in countries where homosexuality is legal, lesbian and gay people are often subjected to human rights abuses. South Africa was the first country in the world to enshrine the human rights of gay people in its constitution in 1993. Yet lesbians in South Africa still live in fear of so-called “corrective rape”. As we have also heard, the freedom of expression and association of gay people is regularly denied in countries closer to home such as Russia, Ukraine and Serbia.
As the noble Lord, Lord Black, has said, we cannot pretend that this does not affect us here. Gay people around the world look to Britain to offer them refuge from this discrimination. Britain and our partners have an important role in challenging these human rights abuses. It is not, however, without risk. There is increasing opposition to the “western” notion that gay rights are human rights. We need only to look at the recent resolution, proposed by Russia at the United Nations Human Rights Council and passed with the support of 25 other states, affirming that “traditional values” should be the basis of human rights. This has given credibility to the abuses perpetuated by anti-gay Governments around the world. This is one of the many reasons why diplomatic action is so important. I welcome the way that the FCO is now working closely with organisations such as Stonewall, the Kaleidoscope Trust and others that have been mentioned in the debate, on how they can oppose these efforts to legitimise human rights abuses of gay people worldwide. Placing conditions on the recipients of development aid might also play a role, but we cannot ignore the risk that removing aid from countries for human rights abuses against gay people may affect the poorest in those countries. Not only would that give fuel to those who argue that homosexuality is something being imposed on those countries by the West, it may—as we have also heard in this debate—worsen the situation for gay people. They are likely in any case to be among the poorest and most disadvantaged in countries that receive aid, and unable to access jobs, education or healthcare. Nor can we ignore the fact that we are not the only suppliers in the aid marketplace. It would be disastrous if we pushed recipient countries into the arms of donors such as Iran and China, and we must not lose what influence that we already have in those countries.
As we have heard—and this is a main issue—real progress on gay equality will ultimately come from grass-roots movements. However, we need to help create the conditions where those local gay rights movements can emerge. So in conclusion I should like to ask questions of the Minister. What direct assistance will the Government provide, either financially or politically, to support the development of lesbian, gay and bisexual movements worldwide? What will the Government do to encourage aid charities, through which significant amounts of DfID investment is delivered, to support lesbian, gay and bisexual individuals and movements globally? Finally, will the Government ensure, through the UK Border Agency, that lesbian and gay people are provided with a real safe haven when they flee from the persecution that has been described today?
Baroness Northover
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Lexden for introducing so effectively this important debate on the treatment of homosexual men and women in the developing world. We have heard from him, the noble Lord, Lord Black, and others the terrible circumstances that many homosexual people face across the world.
I am glad that we have given sanctuary to Toby, whose terrible case my noble friend Lord Lexden cited, but I recognise that he can never fully recover from his appalling experience. I hear what my noble friend Lord Lester has said about religious fundamentalism and how this may be becoming worse. I welcome the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester’s statement that discrimination is “an affront” to Christian values. I welcome his clear condemnation of such discrimination. I also commend the work of the Human Dignity Trust, Kaleidoscope and other organisations that are working to address these issues internationally.
We are talking about people who are often scared to be who they are. In many cases they conceal their sexual orientation or gender identity from their family, friends and societies. They often rightly fear victimisation, violence, detention, imprisonment and even death, simply because of who they are.
We are absolutely clear that human rights are universal and apply equally to all people. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948 affirms as much, but we hear from my noble friend Lord Lexden and others how these rights are breached. However, I can confirm to the noble Lord, Lord Lester, that criminalisation of homosexuality is clearly a violation of international law. We have strong commitments both to international human rights and to international development. Development cannot be achieved without respecting rights, and my noble friend Lady Jenkin is right to link those.
UK aid is used to promote an environment in which all people can claim their rights in open societies. We look for ways to ensure that people who are marginalised or excluded for whatever reason, including sexual orientation, can access the information, service and resources they need to lift themselves out of poverty. It is often those people who are at the risk of human rights abuses in developing countries who need our help the most. In 2011—various noble Lords referred to this—we strengthened our partnership principles. These require that before providing direct support to Governments, we assess their shared commitment to reducing poverty, respecting human rights, improving public financial management, fighting corruption and being more accountable to their own citizens.
The noble Lord, Lord Smith, noted the actions taken in Malawi. Recipients of aid are aware of the pressure in relation to human rights, and I hope that that is also reassuring to the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin.
The noble Lord, Lord Collins, asked about the assistance that we provide to support the development of relevant movements world wide and what we do to encourage charities to support these movements. As other noble Lords, including the noble Baroness, Lady Nye, and others, have noted, civil society plays an important role in supporting the rights of homosexuals in developing countries. We provide targeted support to locally led groups so that they can tackle discrimination and support communities in accessing the resources and services that they need. For example, through a £52 million partnership with the International Planned Parenthood Federation, we are supporting members of the LGBT rights organisations in improving access to health services.
The noble Baroness, Lady Nye, was right that it is very important to support groups in civil society, but she pointed out the difficulties of being, as it were, heavy-handed—a point reiterated by the noble Lord, Lord Collins. Clearly, working internationally to ensure the recognition of human rights law is very important, although I heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Nye, that that can be counterproductive. She also asked what we are doing to challenge these countries. Obviously, how we approach this matter varies from country to country.
Noble Lords have heard what is happening in Malawi. I point out that we have raised our concerns about the Bill in Uganda at the most senior levels. The former Minister for Africa raised this when he met President Museveni in March and he did so again with the vice-president in August. We have also raised our concerns regarding the Bill in the Ukraine, and that has been reiterated through the EU. In Ethiopia, Lynne Featherstone, my honourable friend in the Commons, has raised this issue with the former Prime Minister. In Russia, we have made it clear that legislation is incompatible with Council of Europe guidelines.
My noble friend Lady Brinton asked about Somalia and Sierra Leone. In relation to Sierra Leone, the principle of human rights will kick in because that country has just received the last tranche of budget support. Therefore, human rights provisions will be applied if and when more money is sent through.
If I miss out anything, given the number of issues that noble Lords have raised, I shall write to them.
The noble Lords, Lord Rea and Lord Fowler, raised the issue of HIV/AIDS and the stigma attached to it, as well as the difficulty that people have accessing the care that they need. Both noble Lords will be aware that the United Kingdom is strongly supporting the funding of the International HIV/AIDS Alliance. We are acutely aware of the particular challenges that homosexuals face in this regard. Alan Duncan, the Minister of State, announced in July new DfID resources for the Robert Carr fund, supporting global and regional networks to improve HIV responses reaching key populations.
My noble friend Lord Lester asked whether the Government are considering joining, as a partner Government, the Global Equality Fund. We are impressed by the model of the Global Equality Fund. We are not currently considering supporting it but we are funding work that complements the fund. When I was briefed on this, I was particularly pleased to hear about the support that we are giving to a four-year programme at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex to strengthen effective policy options on sexuality, poverty and law. This is the biggest programme of its kind that we know of, and the UK is putting £1.25 million into it. That is a very welcome development.
We support country-level funding for LGBT programmes and groups, as well as providing opportunities to access funding through the FCO’s human rights and democracy programme. Noble Lords, including my noble friend Lord Lester, asked me about that.
Clearly, this is a major challenge and despite the work we are doing, we do not underestimate the huge amount that still needs to be done. The UK is working internationally, as I have mentioned. It plays a key role in building support through a number of international organisations, including the United Nations, working towards global decriminalisation of homosexuality. We also work with EU partners, which is increasingly important in this area. EU member states and the European External Action Service have committed to develop a strategy on co-operation with third countries on the human rights of LGBT persons, including working through the UN and the Council of Europe. We are determined to contribute fully to a robust and effective EU strategy in this regard.
We are also pleased that the refreshed Canada-UK joint declaration, signed by our two Prime Ministers and by the Foreign Secretary in September, now includes a commitment that we will work together to continue to press countries around the world to repeal aggressive and punitive laws criminalising homosexuality, which are incompatible with human rights.
My noble friends Lord Lexden, Lord Lester, Lord Black and others mentioned the Commonwealth. We are hugely encouraged to hear that Commonwealth Foreign Affairs Ministers, at their meeting on 29 September, agreed the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group recommendations that access to treatment for HIV/AIDS should be without discrimination and that discriminatory laws that impede access to treatment should be addressed. As a valuable partner in promoting human rights globally and in helping to deliver UK human rights priorities, we are committed to working with the Commonwealth to help them to uphold the values of human rights.
The Commonwealth modernisation agenda for 2012 includes the delivery of a charter for the Commonwealth which reflects its core values, including strengthening language on opposing discrimination on all grounds, which would cover this area. I can assure my noble friend Lord Lester and others that our embassies and high commissions around the world also play an important part in this regard. I know that the Department for International Development is seeking opportunities to promote human rights, including in this area.
My noble friend Lady Barker flagged up an interesting point. The FCO travel advice includes guidance specifically on the situation for LGBT people in relevant countries. It may be that some of that information might be used to good effect in the way that she suggests.
The noble Lord, Lord Collins, is right: we are united on this. The UK has an important role to play in international efforts to promote tolerance and non-discrimination against homosexuals and to address discriminatory laws. This debate has been an important reminder of how this is indeed a case of human rights and individuals’ ability to live their lives free from poverty or fear.