House of Commons

Thursday 13th February 2014 Commons Chamber

Thursday 13 February 2014

The House met at half-past Nine o’clock

Prayers

Thursday 13th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker in the Chair]

Oral Answers to Questions

Thursday 13th February 2014 Commons Chamber

The Secretary of State was asked—

[George Hollingbery (Meon Valley) (Con)]

1. What future plans he has for spending on flood amelioration measures in Hambledon, Hampshire.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Dan Rogerson)]

May I begin by passing on the Secretary of State’s apologies for not being here this morning? He continues to recover from eye surgery and will be back soon. I am sure the whole House will join me in wishing him a speedy recovery.

As the country continues to experience the onslaught of stormy weather, I should like to express my deepest condolences to the friends and families of those who have lost their lives, and to put on record that our thoughts are with everyone who continues to experience the misery of flooding.

Hampshire county council is discussing a proposal with the Environment Agency, but the business case has not yet been submitted to the agency.

[George Hollingbery]

Yesterday marked the passing of 40 days and 40 nights of flooding in Hambledon since it was first flooded by groundwater, and no one yet has any idea when the floodwater will recede. Every night, the residents sleep in shifts to monitor their pumps, and every day they wake up wondering whether that will be the day on which their house will be flooded. The village has been cut off from the rest of the world for over a month now. An engineering solution that would avert most of this now almost bi-annual flooding has been drawn up and costed, but funding remains a sticking point. Will the Minister meet me and potential partner agencies to try to agree a deal and get this vital work done as soon as possible?

[Dan Rogerson]

I very much applaud the tremendous efforts of the Hambledon community in its response to the groundwater flooding and the issues it is facing. I know that the Environment Agency is working closely with Hampshire county council to support the community in making the strongest case in its bid for flood defence grant in aid, and I would indeed welcome a meeting with my hon. Friend and any representatives he wishes to bring along to discuss the matter.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. The question started narrow and remains narrow; it does not extend beyond Hampshire. However, there will be other opportunities for colleagues to come in.

[Mr Tim Yeo (South Suffolk) (Con)]

2. What assessment his Department has made of the potential effect of climate change on the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events and on the need for higher priority to be given to adaptation policy.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Dan Rogerson)]

We recognise that, in line with the latest scientific understanding of our changing climate, the frequency and intensity of many extreme weather events are expected to increase. The UK’s first climate change risk assessment, published in 2012, assessed the trend and informed the national adaptation programme that we published last year. This sets out a wide range of actions by the Government, business, councils and civil society to address the most significant climate risks that we face as a country.

[Mr Yeo]

Does my hon. Friend agree that, although concern is sometimes expressed about the cost of climate change mitigation, recent events are a stark warning that the cost of adaptation to climate change is also substantial, and is a bill that might have to be paid sooner rather than later?

[Dan Rogerson]

I thank my hon. Friend for making that case. He has a long track record of speaking on climate change, and on mitigation and adaptation. I agree that we must continue to ensure that this country meets all the demands that will be made of us by the changing climate.

[Joan Walley (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)]

Does the Minister acknowledge that the Adaptation Sub-Committee of the Committee on Climate Change recommended that the deficit of £500 million on flood defence spending needed to be urgently addressed? Will the Minister ask the Secretary of State and his Cabinet colleagues to ensure that there is a firm commitment from the Government in this spending review to providing that £500 million for flood defences, which is now urgently needed because of climate change?

[Dan Rogerson]

I very much welcome the work that Lord Krebs and his sub-committee have done on these issues. We think that some of the information is based on older data that have been updated by the Environment Agency, so we do not entirely recognise the figures he gives. The Government have secured a £2.3 billion capital settlement in the next spending review period, which will mean we are spending more than ever before on flood defences.

[Miss Anne McIntosh (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

Whatever the cause, we are seeing extreme weather events and we need to do more between floods. Will the Department consider restoring the balance between building new flood defences, repairing and making good the existing ones and maintaining watercourses? May I ask, in the presence of the Leader of the House of Commons, whether it would be a good idea to have a national statement on adaptation and on climate change generally for this purpose?

[Dan Rogerson]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend and her Committee for all the work they have done on flood defences—

[Maria Eagle (Garston and Halewood) (Lab)]

You were a member of it!

[Dan Rogerson]

Yes, I suppose I should admit to that. Sadly, I am no longer a member.

The question from my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh) about a statement is obviously a matter for the Leader of the House to consider, perhaps later this morning. On her questions on maintenance, given this year’s extreme weather events, the Government have made available a £130 million investment to ensure that we repair and maintain the existing flood defences, which of course will allow us to invest in new schemes in the coming year.

[Maria Eagle]

As I saw for myself in Somerset earlier this week, the severe floods are causing unimaginable distress for many people as they see their homes wrecked, farmland submerged and businesses suffer. As all the evidence suggests, and as the Minister has just accepted, climate change will lead to extreme weather events becoming more frequent, so will he explain why his Department has been forced to admit, thanks to a freedom of information request, that total spending on climate change mitigation and adaptation has been cut by more than 40% since last year?

[Dan Rogerson]

I suspect that the hon. Lady is referring to the freedom of information request submitted on behalf of Lord Lawson. I can confirm that total Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs climate change spending on mitigation and adaptation was £34.8 million in 2011-12, £49.2 million in 2012-13 and £47.2 million in 2013-14, and we have resources yet to be allocated in the coming financial year.

[Maria Eagle]

The figures for the domestic spend were £24.7 million in 2011-12 and £29.1 million in 2012-13, but that has decreased this year to £17.2 million, which is a 40% cut. The decision to cut the climate change mitigation and adaptation budget by 40% was a serious error of judgment, one that the events of the past weeks must lead the Government to reconsider. The Minister will know that funding for flood protection remains £63.5 million below 2010 levels, even after the additional funding announced last week. Will he now agree to review the stringent cost-benefit ratio of eight to one applied by his Department to flood defence spending, which appears to have prevented so many vital schemes from going ahead?

[Dan Rogerson]

As the hon. Lady also knows, in the first four years of this Government we have spent £2.4 billion on flood defences, which was more than the £2.2 billion spent in the last four years of the previous Government—so this Government continue to make tackling this a priority. Today, the focus remains on response and we will then move into recovery, but in the long term we have secured £2.3 billion on capital alone into the next spending review period.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

Are movements in the jet stream not more closely and demonstrably linked to our current adverse weather event than climate change is? To what extent is the Environment Agency using movements in the jet stream as a predictive tool for flooding?

[Dan Rogerson]

The hon. Gentleman is clearly spending a great deal of time studying these methods. Given the advice, which I respect, from scientists across government, all the signs point to the fact that the changes he is talking about are influenced by climate change. That is one reason why we have had more precipitation deposited in the country and had the rainiest January in a quarter of a millennium.

[Mr Frank Field (Birkenhead) (Lab)]

3. When he plans to publish his Department’s evidence review on food aid provision and access in the UK.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (George Eustice)]

The Government know that some of the poorest families are struggling to afford to feed themselves. Although it is not the Government’s role to control the price of food, the impact of food price inflation is of real concern to the Government, which is why we have commissioned a report. All Government-funded social research reports are required to go through an appropriate review and quality assurance process before publication, and the report will be published once this review is complete.

[Mr Field]

May I ask the Minister to answer the question now? The House wants a date from him. It is now a year since the Government commissioned this report. Does that not suggest that trying to prevent more people from becoming hungry in this country is not a Government priority?

[George Eustice]

No, I do not agree with that. As I said, if a job is worth doing, it is worth doing well. That is why these reports, like all Government reports, must go through a quality assurance process. Once that is complete, we will publish a report—we have been clear about that. But it is important also to note that the development of food banks and the growth in their use is not unique to the UK. Canada now has more than 800 food banks and 850,000 people helped; Germany now has 1 million people helped; and France also has about 1 million people using food banks. So rather than being critical of this, we should celebrate the good work that civil society does with some of these projects.

[Sir Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con)]

As Ministers will understandably be preoccupied for a while with the floods and flood policy, would it not be sensible for the time being to pass responsibility for that policy to the Minister of State, Cabinet Office, our hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (Mr Hurd), so he can engage with civil society? If that were to happen, the Church would be interested in setting up some regional meetings with bishops, senior clergy and people working at the sharp end in food banks to discuss the qualitative and quantitative research we are doing with organisations such as the Church Urban Fund and to make suggestions for how we move forward from food banks to make communities more resilient.

[George Eustice]

My right hon. Friend highlights an important point, which is that this issue around food banks touches on many different Government Departments. It is why, at the debate before Christmas, my hon. Friend in the Cabinet Office responded to that report. My right hon. Friend is right that a number of Government Departments have a role in this matter, but, focusing on the bit that is relevant to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, it is important to recognise that food price inflation is now falling. It was 1.9% in December, and that was below the average level of inflation, and food is now 4.8% cheaper in the UK than in France, 14% cheaper than in Germany and 18% cheaper than in Ireland. On food prices, the UK is in a better position than most other European countries.

[Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)]

That is extraordinary complacency. In December, a group of doctors and leading academics from the Medical Research Council wrote to the British Medical Journal with concerns over the surge in the numbers of people requiring emergency food aid, the decrease in the calorific intake of families and the doubling of malnutrition cases presenting at English hospitals. The Government are presiding over a national scandal in public health as well as a failure of social economic policy. When will the Minister publish that delayed report on food aid? Publish and be damned!

[George Eustice]

Let us look at the facts on food price affordability. In 2008, the poorest 20% of households were spending 16.8% of household income on food. In 2012, they were spending 16.6%, so the truth is that the poorest households are spending roughly the same amount of their household income now as they were under the previous Government. The Government have a number of projects to help them. Through the healthy start scheme, the Government are providing a nutritional safety net in a way that encourages healthy eating, which has helped more than half a million pregnant women and children under four years old who are disadvantaged and come from households on very low incomes. We also have a number of other projects under way.

[Bill Wiggin (North Herefordshire) (Con)]

4. What his policy is on vaccinating cattle against TB.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (George Eustice)]

In his letter of 14 January 2013 to the Secretary of State, Commissioner Tonio Borg said that in order to provide answers to the still open scientific questions on TB vaccination, substantial experimental research and large-scale, long-lasting field trials were needed. That experimental research is under way and we will commission the detailed design of the necessary field trials in the coming months.

[Bill Wiggin]

In 2017, I hope that the Secretary of State and I will be campaigning to leave the European Union. When we succeed, the excuse that it is the EU that is preventing us from vaccinating our cattle will no longer be valid. Will he ensure that his Department is ready to vaccinate cattle when we leave?

[George Eustice]

I hope that we will be able to reform the European Union and make it fit for purpose in the 21st century and campaign to stay in. On the point my hon. Friend makes, the European Commission set out the steps that would be needed to be taken in order for it to make proposals for new EU rules allowing trade in vaccinated cattle. Its tentative time line suggests that that would not be before 2023. We may be in a position to commence field trials next year. The trials will take between two to five years, and there will be a further two to three years to agree for trade in cattle to take place in the European Union. In reality, it will most likely be 2023, which underlines the importance in the meantime of our using every tool open to us to bear down on this terrible disease.

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

With so many developments on this issue, an increasing number of us are of the view that the problem is not so much to do with the badgers as with the Government who are moving the goalposts. In a not very heavy parliamentary schedule, will the Government commit to time for debates on the vaccination and the badger cull on the Floor of the House?

[George Eustice]

I regularly debate the issue—a debate was held in Westminster Hall before the Christmas recess—and we are now waiting for the independent expert panel to produce its report. When that report is concluded, we will make further proposals and announcements about the next step.

[Andrew George (St Ives) (LD)]

Even if the independent expert panel concludes that the Government’s cull policy is effective, which is highly unlikely, does the Minister not accept that the Government must consider a plan B that includes the vaccination of badgers, which they must get behind, as well as moving forward as quickly as they can with cattle vaccination?

[George Eustice]

We published a draft TB eradication strategy at the end of last summer and we will shortly publish a final version of that strategy. It accepts that there is a range of measures we should pursue, including developing vaccines, and we are doing some work to develop an oral vaccine for badgers as well as on cattle vaccines. We are considering other measures such as contraception for badgers and increased cattle movement controls, so we are covering a range of issues as we try to solve this difficult problem.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

5. What assessment he has made of the threat posed to ancient woodlands and their biodiversity by development in the area.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Dan Rogerson)]

Local planning authorities assess any potential threat to ancient woodland case by case while applying the strict test set out in the national planning policy framework. That test stipulates that planning permission should be refused unless the need for, and benefit of, any development in that location clearly outweighs the loss of any ancient woodland.

[Mr Sheerman]

That sounded like a civil servant’s brief. The fact is that the Secretary of State made a widely reported statement that suggested that we could have offsetting through a system in which ancient woodland was given up because other areas of the country would be planted with trees. In some people’s minds, that would be like introducing 100 rabbits for every badger shot. It is not good enough. This is precious habitat that must be defended in this country and in Africa, because wildlife depends on it.

[Dan Rogerson]

I am not sure that I entirely follow the hon. Gentleman’s logic when it comes to British mammals, but there we go. The key principle is that ancient woodland must be protected and the national planning policy framework is totally clear about that. Offsetting potentially offers benefits for less irreplaceable biodiverse areas that we can explore when planning applications are made. That is what any policy will be based on. I hope that there will be support across the House for introducing those solutions, but ancient woodland should be protected and the planning policy framework does that.

[Mrs Cheryl Gillan (Chesham and Amersham) (Con)]

I am sure that the whole House will join me in sending our best wishes to the Secretary of State for a speedy recovery. He must find it frustrating not to be at the Dispatch Box at this very difficult time.

What is the Minister doing to respond formally to the environmental statement on HS2? The Woodland Trust estimates that 40 ancient woodlands will be totally destroyed and another 38 will be threatened by noise pollution, shading and dust. That is a disgraceful situation and people want DEFRA to respond in public to the environmental statement. Will he give me an undertaking that he will do so?

[Dan Rogerson]

The right hon. Lady is a doughty campaigner on the route and proposals for High Speed 2. The issues with ancient woodland are of course of great concern and I have been looking at which areas of ancient woodland might be affected by the route. I would be happy to meet her to discuss that if she would like me to.

[Mr Simon Burns (Chelmsford) (Con)]

6. What estimate his Department has made of the number of properties protected from flooding during the recent floods.

[Nigel Adams (Selby and Ainsty) (Con)]

10. What estimate his Department has made of the number of properties protected from flooding during the recent floods. [R]

[Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) (Con)]

11. What estimate his Department has made of the number of properties protected from flooding during the recent floods.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Dan Rogerson)]

We estimate that to date a total of more than 1.3 million properties have been protected from flooding during the flood events since the beginning of last December.

[Mr Burns]

That answer will bring great satisfaction to those whose houses have been protected as a result of improved flood defences, but does the Minister accept that the critical issue now is to ensure that more houses are given that protection in future because of the terrible events going on in this country at present? What commitment do the Government have to continue the work of improving flood defences to protect people’s homes?

[Dan Rogerson]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right that, thanks to the efforts of the Environment Agency and all the money that has been invested, many homes have been protected, as I set out. It is crucial that we do more, however, which is why we are investing £2.3 billion in the next spending period and we announced £344 million last week for schemes that will go ahead in the next year. It is also why we are working hard on partnership funding and making the case locally to bring forward schemes that would otherwise not have been funded.

[Nigel Adams]

Will the Minister confirm that people whose properties have suffered flooding in the recent exceptional events will have insurance made available to them via Flood Re should their existing insurer decline to cover them owing to that flooding?

[Dan Rogerson]

Until the implementation of Flood Re, which is planned for summer 2015, the insurance industry has voluntarily agreed to abide by its commitments under the 2008 statement of principles, which means that insurers will not decline to cover those who already hold flood insurance with them. In practice, that means that people who are already covered by an insurer will be able to continue to access flood insurance from that insurer until Flood Re comes in.

[Rehman Chishti]

What progress are the Government making to meet their target of better protecting 145,000 homes by 2015? Experts predict that household insurance premiums might rise by about 5% after the floods, so what is being done to address that?

[Dan Rogerson]

The crucial measure that we are taking forward is the implementation of Flood Re and the Water Bill, which is being debated in another place. On the first part of my hon. Friend’s question, we have investment plans to improve protection for at least 465,000 households by the end of the decade.

[Mr Dave Watts (St Helens North) (Lab)]

Yesterday the Prime Minister refused to say whether he would reverse the massive cuts in the number of staff working on flood prevention. Will the Minister give us an assurance today that those cuts will not go ahead?

[Dan Rogerson]

I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman’s question, but there are no massive cuts in the number of people involved in flood protection. The Environment Agency, like all other agencies and Departments across government, is having to use resources more efficiently as we seek to sort out the financial mess that the previous Government left us. However, its chief executive has said that he is prioritising important front-line services, and I would like to take the opportunity to pay tribute to all the work that it did over December, Christmas and the new year, which it is continuing now, to protect people and keep them safe.

[Nia Griffith (Llanelli) (Lab)]

The Labour Welsh Government have also invested heavily in flood protection. In the light of the Prime Minister’s recent announcements about funding, will the Minister clarify whether it will involve Barnett consequentials for Wales?

[Dan Rogerson]

The hon. Lady will be aware that colleagues in the Wales Office and the Treasury will lead on how the Barnett formula operates, but if she would like to write to me or other Ministers with specific questions, I am sure we will get back to her.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

Does the Minister accept his Department’s climate change risk assessment that up to 1 million more properties, including 825,000 homes, are likely to be at risk of flooding by 2020? If he does, why is funding for flood protection £63.5 million less in the current year than in 2010, even after last week’s budget changes? What is the implication for the Government’s Flood Re insurance scheme, which the Committee on Climate Change has warned him does not factor in the impact of climate change at all?

[Dan Rogerson]

The view of Lord Krebs’s sub-committee on Flood Re is being debated in another place. I have been ensuring that, as Flood Re goes forward, it takes account of extreme weather events and factors involving climate change. As I have set out, the Government will be investing more in flood defences than any previous Government, given our spending review deal on capital investment. In the first four years of this Parliament, we have spent more on flood defences than the previous Government did in their last four years in office.

[Mr David Heath (Somerton and Frome) (LD)]

Farmers and others in Burrowbridge to whom I spoke last night are extremely grateful for the generosity of those farmers from the other side of the country who have sent forage to help feed their animals, and also very much welcome the Prime Minister’s announcement yesterday of an extra fund for farming that will help them to redrill the land and get it back into a productive state. Does the Minister have any more details about that scheme, how it will be applied and what the process will be?

[Dan Rogerson]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend and colleagues in Somerset for all their work in representing their constituents, and I look forward to the next meeting of the action group, which I hope he will be able to attend. The farmers have suffered a great deal since their land has been inundated, and I echo what he said about charitable efforts to help them. The fund announced by the Prime Minister will set aside money to improve the land to bring it back to the condition that we would like to see it in, and details on how to apply for that will be published in due course.

[Mr John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

7. What steps he is taking to tackle the contribution of rising water bills to the cost of living.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Dan Rogerson)]

Last year, the Secretary of State wrote to all water companies to stress the tough times that households are facing. In setting out their 2014-15 prices, several companies have decided not to take the full amount allowed in the 2009 price review. Ofwat estimates that the 2014 price review could reduce pressure on bills by between £120 million and £750 million annually from 2015.

[Mr Spellar]

While water bills are soaring, the water companies are making eye-watering profits. They are loading up their balance sheets with debt from tax havens abroad and are paying hardly any tax. Are not the public being ripped off in every possible way by these sharks in the water? Rather than those minor issues, why do not the Government really get a grip on the water companies and get them to serve the customer and the country?

[Dan Rogerson]

That is a very good question from the Whips, but the answer is that the current price review period mechanism was put in place under the previous Government. As I have already set out, prices will be held at the first opportunity, and some companies are reducing them in what remains of this period. We will see savings in the next price review period compared with the prices forecast had we carried on with the price review left to us by Labour.

[Caroline Nokes (Romsey and Southampton North) (Con)]

Two days ago, Southern Water announced its price rises for 2014-15 at a time when they are tankering in many parts of Romsey and villages throughout the Test valley to ensure that homes are safe from ingress of sewage. Please will the Minister assure me that he will work with Southern Water to ensure that this winter’s expenditure will not negatively impact bills in future?

[Dan Rogerson]

Ofwat works with companies to consider what is a reasonable amount for them to charge, and it will take into account all the costs that companies face. The key thing is that as we continue to invest in flood defences and deal with some of the problems, the sorts of issues that we face at the moment should have less of an impact on the water companies. I pay tribute to water companies for doing what they are to continue to provide service in these extreme weather conditions. I visited a water treatment plant yesterday to see how it is being defended and it is working well and its staff are working incredibly hard.

[Sir Bob Russell (Colchester) (LD)]

8. What steps he is taking to safeguard trees from the threat of disease.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (George Eustice)]

We have made rapid progress towards implementing the recommendations of the tree health and plant biosecurity taskforce. We have produced a prioritised plant health risk register; undertaken work on contingency planning; and recruited a senior chief plant health officer. Later this spring, we will publish a strategy which will set out a new approach to biosecurity for our plants and trees and will incorporate our response to the taskforce’s remaining recommendations.

[Sir Bob Russell]

I am grateful to the Minister for that positive response. Does he agree that, particularly in view of the flooding, we must also ensure that we protect all our ancient woodlands, keep all our trees and hedgerows, and more than that, plant more trees in our countryside and in our urban areas?

[George Eustice]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman, who has been a long-standing campaigner here and, I understand, even planted a tree at the Eden Project in Cornwall. I am pleased to be able to tell him that protection, improvement and expansion are the three key priorities in our forestry and woodlands policy statement. Ancient woodland remains strongly protected through the planning system, and refreshed advice on ancient woodland to aid planning authorities is being developed by Natural England and the Forestry Commission. We believe that in many landscapes, more trees will deliver increased social, environmental and economic benefits. Next year we will invest £30 million in woodlands, of which £6 million will fund 2,000 hectares of new woodland with about 4 million trees.

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

9. What assessment he has made of the value to the UK economy of food exports.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (George Eustice)]

The 10 years to 2012 saw agri-food exports grow by 40% to £18.2 billion. Exports in the first 11 months of 2013 stood at £17.2 billion, compared with £16.6 billion at the same point in 2012. The Government and industry are working together to increase exports in the agri-food sector. We launched a refreshed action plan last October. It commits us to deliver £500 million of value to the UK economy by supporting 1,000 companies by October 2015.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

I welcome the Minister’s answer. Ireland and France are currently our two largest export markets for food and non-alcoholic beverages. Which markets does he think will have the best growth prospects for producers in the United Kingdom, and indeed in my county of Staffordshire, in future?

[George Eustice]

Obviously the EU market will remain a very important one for UK producers. We work closely with the industry to identify key markets and prioritise negotiations, based on industry interest, projected value and achievability. Under the export action plan, our aim is to maintain access to existing markets and negotiate to open new priority markets for food and drink products in countries such as China, Russia, Brazil, the USA, Indonesia and India.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

Tests in West Yorkshire found that more than a third of food samples were not what they claimed to be or had been mislabelled in some way, with ham on pizzas made with meat emulsion or meat slurry that had been dyed pink, cheese analogue used instead of cheese and additives used in flame retardants used in fruit juice. Does the Minister agree that such reports are incredibly damaging to our food exports and that we need to address the problem by having proper testing of food produced in this country?

[George Eustice]

I understand that the statistic the hon. Lady mentioned—that 30% of the samples were mislabelled—is a little misleading, because the samples looked at were based on intelligence and from areas where there was greater concern in the first place. Nevertheless, we take this very seriously, which is why we set up the review by Professor Chris Elliott. He has published his interim report, and we look forward to his final findings.

[Pauline Latham (Mid Derbyshire) (Con)]

T1. If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (George Eustice)]

With the country having experienced another night of torrential rain and hurricane-force winds, I would like to thank the emergency services, the military, the Environment Agency, local authorities and public utilities for their work to safeguard both life and property. Many of those people have been working through the night to reconnect properties, get our transport network back up and running and alert people to the risk of flooding. There is still much more to be done, but their efforts must not go unremarked upon. As more rain is on the way, I ask the public to continue to take heed of the Environment Agency’s warnings. The Prime Minister will chair the first meeting of the Cabinet Committee on flooding this morning.

[Pauline Latham]

On my way here I saw some elephants near St James’s park—men dressed as elephants, I should say—because representatives of more than 50 Governments are gathering in London today for a conference on the illegal wildlife trade, which the Secretary of State and his ministerial team have played a key role in bringing about. What steps are the Government taking to help combat international wildlife crime, including the poaching of elephants, rhinos and other animals?

[George Eustice]

As my hon. Friend points out, we are hosting a major international conference on international wildlife crime. It aims to secure the high-level political commitment needed to tackle successfully the scourge of illegal wildlife trade. It will address three interlinked issues: improving law enforcement, reducing demand and supporting sustainable livelihoods for affected communities. The Government have convened the conference, but it is for all the Governments represented to demonstrate collective will by agreeing ambitious actions that will make a real difference on the ground.

[Julie Hilling (Bolton West) (Lab)]

T8. When I visited Atherton food bank, I was told that 30% of the users were in work and that 60% went there because of benefit changes. The Opposition believe that it is disgraceful that in the world’s sixth richest country hundreds of thousands of people are dependent on food banks. Let me give the Minister one more chance to answer this question: when will we get the report on food banks—this month, next month, or next year?

[George Eustice]

I have answered that question several times. We will publish the report once the quality assurance process concludes. The hon. Lady highlights benefit changes, but I simply point out that 92% of benefits are now processed on time, which is six percentage points higher than it was in 2009. This Government have done a lot to address people’s problems with the cost of living. We have taken 2.4 million people out of tax altogether, increased the basic state pension by 2.5% and frozen planned fuel duty rises, which means petrol is now 13% cheaper than it would have been.

[Julian Sturdy (York Outer) (Con)]

T2. With parts of the country experiencing the wettest January since records began, and sadly no let-up in sight at the moment, will the Minister clarify whether resources from the farming and forestry improvement scheme can be used to fund vital ditch-clearing and watercourse maintenance, which is absolutely essential for rural communities if they are to tackle flooding?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Dan Rogerson)]

As I said earlier, the Government have announced a £10 million fund to help farmers with the cost of recovering from flooding. We can look at how the farming and forestry improvement scheme might impact on those affected by flooding, but its primary purpose is to promote the long-term competitiveness of farming.

[Graeme Morrice (Livingston) (Lab)]

T9. I welcome the Government’s action plan for tackling wildlife crime and the renewal of funding for the national wildlife crime unit until 2016, even though it needs to be much more long term than that. Will the Minister explain his view on making wildlife crime offences recordable and what discussions he has had with colleagues at the Home Office?

[George Eustice]

One of the principles that we are looking at in the conference is making sure that the sanctions are adequate for those who commit wildlife crime. Issues of sentencing are a matter for the Ministry of Justice. However, I am happy to write to the hon. Gentleman to update him on further progress on this, because there has been some suggestion that the Sentencing Council should look at it further.

[Mr Nick Gibb (Bognor Regis and Littlehampton) (Con)]

T3. The Aldingbourne Rife is an ancient drainage river which historically protected the coastal plain in Bognor Regis from flooding. June 2012 saw 350 homes flooded in Bognor Regis and Littlehampton, and it is becoming increasingly clear that the decision to stop dredging the Aldingbourne Rife was a contributing factor to that flooding. Will the Minister urge the Environment Agency to reinstate the annual dredging that was mistakenly abandoned nearly 20 years ago?

[Dan Rogerson]

The Environment Agency is working with local agencies to look at the best way of managing water in the Aldingbourne Rife. A study is being undertaken of whether dredging and other measures might be appropriate to protect the properties that experience this flooding, and that will report in the summer of this year. I am happy to meet my hon. Friend should he like me to.

[Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)]

Does the offer of an open cheque book and “money no object” extend to people in Morpeth—flood victims in my area—or is the money solely on offer to people in the south of the country?

[Dan Rogerson]

The clear commitment that the Prime Minister has made is on ensuring that we have the facilities ready to respond to the incidents we are covering at the moment, no matter where they are in the country.

[Miss Anne McIntosh (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

T4. Our thoughts have to be with the flood victims at this time. Will the Minister update the House on the audit of existing sustainable drainage systems with a view to establishing what role they play in flood alleviation; and what help is being given to fishermen who are unable to fish at sea during the time of this flood event?

[Dan Rogerson]

My hon. Friend puts together two questions that cover areas for which both my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary and I are responsible. As she knows, I will table the regulations on introducing sustainable urban drainage later this year. I am happy to write to her about auditing existing provisions. My hon. Friend the Under-Secretary is visiting Newlyn soon to discuss with fishermen the problems they are facing.

[Mr Speaker]

I do not think the hon. Lady is the first person to wrap two questions into one, and I rather doubt that she will be the last.

[Mark Lazarowicz (Edinburgh North and Leith) (Lab/Co-op)]

In 2011-12, Britain received co-funding from the European Commission on a project to research the health of bees. As the Minister is aware, there is a growing awareness of the importance of bee health in the UK and concern about the use of pesticides. Yet in 2012-13, the Government withdrew from the project and did not take the funding that was offered by the European Commission. Why was that?

[George Eustice]

We are working on a national pollinator strategy. The Government take this very seriously and want to prioritise it. We have been very clear in all our consultations that we want measures in our common agricultural policy implementation that will promote bees.

[Bill Wiggin (North Herefordshire) (Con)]

T5. My hon. Friend the farming Minister will know that, though it may enrage Labour Members, it will be very popular with farmers when we amend legislation to allow more than two hounds to flush foxes to guns. When does he think that will happen?

[George Eustice]

The Government have had representations from a number of Welsh farmers about the problems of predation, and there has been a proposal that the legislation be amended to increase the number of dogs that can be used for flushing out. We are looking carefully at the issue, and we will let the House know when we reach any conclusions.

[Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)]

Last year the Secretary of State claimed that climate change could help the UK. He said:

“Remember that for humans, the biggest cause of death is cold in winter, far bigger than heat in summer. It would also lead to longer growing seasons and you could extend growing a little further north into some of the colder areas”?

Does the Minister feel that those comments are a little unfortunate, given what has just happened?

[Dan Rogerson]

The Government are clear that we are investing in adaptation and mitigation, and we are taking a lead in international negotiations on those issues.

[Andrea Leadsom (South Northamptonshire) (Con)]

T6. What assessment has my hon. Friend made of the adequacy of flood defences for the Nene and Ouse rivers in Northamptonshire? Does he consider the predictions for water flow through those rivers to be historically accurate?

[Dan Rogerson]

Northamptonshire county council and its flood and water management team in particular are working on that with the Environment Agency as the lead local flood authority. They are hoping to introduce schemes that will address the concerns that my hon. Friend raises, but if she would like to write to me on a particular local issue, I am happy to look into it.

[Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

I welcome the £5,000 that has been announced for households that are flooded, and I understand that it will be available to households that flooded in Hull during the tidal surge in December, but can the Minister explain to people in Hull why it has taken two months for that announcement to be made, and only after the playing fields of Eton flooded?

[Dan Rogerson]

Ministers have been on the ground across the country at various events. I visited a community to talk about how it was affected during the east coast flooding. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has also visited a number of communities. As the hon. Lady pointed out, the money that is available to help people will be there for all communities, no matter where they are in the country.

[David Mowat (Warrington South) (Con)]

T7. The Minister will be aware of the Arpley landfill site in my constituency. He may also be aware that planning permission for continued use has now expired, yet neighbouring councils such as Merseyside, Halton and Cheshire West continue to use it for the waste that they will not recycle or incinerate. Will the Minister consider issuing guidance to those councils so that if they will not upgrade their disposal mechanisms, they will at least dump the waste somewhere that has planning permission?

[Dan Rogerson]

Sites such as that in my hon. Friend’s constituency need an environmental permit from the Environment Agency and planning permission from the local authority. There is an environmental permit in place for that site. Any planning considerations would be a matter for the local authority.

[Chris Williamson (Derby North) (Lab)]

Further to the question from the hon. Member for North Herefordshire (Bill Wiggin) about the flushing of foxes, we know that there is a lot of support on the Government Benches for the repeal of the Hunting Act 2004. Will the Minister say what discussions have taken place inside DEFRA to promote amendment of the Act, specifically with regard to the flushing of foxes to guns?

[George Eustice]

As the hon. Gentleman said, there is a range of views on the issue on both sides of the House. That is why the coalition agreement said that at some point we would have a free vote on the full repeal of the Hunting Act. I made it clear that we have had a submission from some Welsh farmers and we have said that we will look at that, and when we are ready to respond, we will do so.

[Duncan Hames (Chippenham) (LD)]

Record rainfall has found the surface drainage infrastructure in historic towns such as Bradford on Avon severely lacking. Will the measures that the Government have announced extend to improving drainage in the built environment, or will responsibility for that fall entirely upon local councils?

[Dan Rogerson]

My hon. Friend has already invited me to visit Bradford on Avon. I am happy to do that and to discuss with the local authority any concerns it has about the current situation.

[Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)]

In the light of the Department’s withdrawal of the funding for the EU programme on bee decline, how will the Department provide an evidenced response at the end of the two-year ban on neonicotinoids as pesticides?

[George Eustice]

We have a number of work streams looking at this issue, including one by the Food and Environment Research Agency, but I repeat that this Government take very seriously protecting habitats for bees and promoting pollinators. That is why it is a key part of our common agricultural policy aims.

[Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)]

Deep-sea bottom trawling is one of the most destructive practices affecting our marine ecosystem and its value to the fishing sector is negligible. The EU is in the process of rewriting the rules in relation to deep-sea fishing in the north-east Atlantic. Will the Minister confirm that the UK will support the phase-out of the most destructive gears?

[George Eustice]

We share some of the concerns about the deep-sea access regime, but we did not agree with the European Parliament’s proposals for an outright ban. We think there would be problems in enforcing it. Instead, we favour—we have argued this case with the European Commission—management measures such as no-fish zones and other steps to help deal with the problem.

[Mr Speaker]

We must draw to a close at this point, but there will, of course, be an urgent question later on transport-related matters, so perhaps Members who were unlucky on this occasion might want to come in on that.

The right hon. Member for Banbury, representing the Church Commissioners, was asked—

[Laura Sandys (South Thanet) (Con)]

1. What plans the commissioners have to make their buildings and other Church property available for wider community use.

[The Second Church Estates Commissioner (Sir Tony Baldry)]

With your permission, Mr Speaker, before I answer this first question, it may be convenient to the House if I make a short comment on the progress made by the General Synod this week on the Church of England being able to consecrate women as bishops. On Tuesday, the General Synod completed the revision process for a new draft Measure to enable women to become bishops. The Synod also agreed to shorten the consultation period with the diocese to consider this new Measure, so the Measure is now likely to come for final approval at the July meeting of the General Synod. If the Measure is approved then, I would hope that the Ecclesiastical Committee would be able to give it early consideration and that both Houses would then separately consider it so that, if it is approved, the Synod might then be able to promulge the canon in November. That would mean that it would be possible for the first woman to be nominated as a bishop in the Church of England this year.

Turning to my hon. Friend’s question, the Church of England has changed legislation to make it much easier for church buildings to be used for a wide range of community and cultural uses. The Church of England encourages all parish churches to be open where possible for as long as possible.

[Laura Sandys]

Will my right hon. Friend join me in congratulating the congregation of volunteers at St Peter’s church in Broadstairs? He very kindly visited an award-winning tourism project called the St Peter’s village tour. Will he encourage other churches to use their facilities in order to open up to the community and develop tourism propositions?

[Sir Tony Baldry]

I much enjoyed my visit to my hon. Friend’s constituency. She is absolutely right. The church of St Peter’s in Broadstairs is an excellent example of a church that is a hub of the community, hosting local clubs and services to the elderly, as well as toddlers groups and young people’s clubs, and, as my hon. Friend says, organising popular tours of the village for visitors to Broadstairs. May I also draw the House’s attention to Holy Trinity Margate, which is another fantastic example of a church delivering almost 24/7 social action?

[Miss Anne McIntosh (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

2. If the Church Commissioners will consider creating a Church of England relief fund for flood victims to which the public could contribute.

[Sir Tony Baldry]

Last Friday the Bishop of Taunton wrote to all parishes in the Bath and Wells diocese, giving details of how parishioners could both provide and access much-needed financial and practical support. On the wider question of a relief fund for flood victims, I think my hon. Friend was present on Monday when my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government told me that a number of charities were offering help for flood victims and promised that the Government would do more to signpost those voluntary organisations to help people in distress.

[Mr Speaker]

I think we have time for the questions; it is hoped that we have time for the answers.

[Miss McIntosh]

When we had severe flooding in 2000, the then Archbishop of York, Lord Hope, created a Church of England relief fund, through which we were very humbled to receive not just national donations, but donations from Mozambique, which is a very poor country, but it wished to show solidarity. I hope my right hon. Friend will use his good offices to create such a fund through the Church of England, to which both national and international donors will be able to contribute, if they wish to do so.

[Sir Tony Baldry]

Every parish in flood-affected areas is, where possible and practical, giving help to those affected by the floods, including making churches available for people who have been evacuated, providing drop-in centres, visiting housebound people and delivering food parcels. On the question of an overall fund, there is a feeling that there are already a number of national funds available to help flood victims and that the Church setting up a further fund may confuse rather than help.

[Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)]

3. What guidance the Church Commissioners are providing to church congregations on supporting local credit unions.

[Sir Tony Baldry]

Substantial material on the Church of England’s website is publicly and readily available to church congregations to download to assist them in supporting local credit unions. The Archbishop of Canterbury has written to all clergy to encourage them and their parish churches to support the new resources, working with their local credit union and continuing to assist those in need.

[Andrew Selous]

The Dunstable deanery wants to set up a credit union, and the Money Matters credit union—I save with it myself—is working with Leighton-Linslade town council to set up a credit union in Leighton Buzzard. Churches can help there too. Do the Church Commissioners agree that we need more saving as well as more affordable lending?

[Sir Tony Baldry]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend. Ever since the Archbishop of Canterbury indicated that the Church hopes over time to help compete payday lenders out of business, there has been considerable interest from parish churches right across the country about helping to support credit unions in their local areas and dioceses.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

Will the Second Church Estates Commissioner take on board the fact that although many of us support credit unions, if we are to move with the times it is crowdfunding and crowdsourcing that are appropriate to local communities and congregations? That is being pioneered in some areas, so will he consider it?

[Sir Tony Baldry]

As the last debate on this subject in the House demonstrated, there are a number of responsible ways to help people in difficulties to access credit, other than recourse to payday lenders.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

Not just church congregations but individual members can use credit unions. Now that the law has been changed, organisations can set up community accounts. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that churches ought to look at investing their own funds in credit unions?

[Sir Tony Baldry]

Yes. Indeed, many churches are already doing so. I can send the hon. Lady details of a number of diocesan-led initiatives that are doing exactly that.

The Chairman of the Public Accounts Commission was asked—

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

4. What recent discussions the Commission has had on extending the scope of the NAO’s auditing of the Bank of England and any consequent changes to the NAO’s budget.

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough)]

There have been no recent discussions on extending the scope of the NAO’s role to auditing the Bank of England. As part of its wider discussions of the NAO’s budget in March 2012, the Commission considered the resource implications of the NAO’s new role in implementing the Financial Services Act 2012, in that it appointed the Comptroller and Auditor General to audit the Financial Conduct Authority. The Act did not change the audit arrangements for the Bank itself.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

The National Audit Office can audit every single Government Department, the BBC and even the Queen. Why does my hon. Friend think that the Bank of England should be an exception?

[Sir Edward Leigh]

I do not think that the Bank of England should be an exception. If the National Audit Office had audited the Financial Services Authority and the Bank of England during the financial crisis of 2007, there may well have been a very different result. When I was Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, I campaigned long and hard for us—this Parliament—to audit the Bank of England, which we should do.

[Mark Lazarowicz (Edinburgh North and Leith) (Lab/Co-op)]

The House will be aware that the Governor of the Bank of England recently made some important comments on the currency issue if Scotland were to become independent, and it will be aware that other statements are to be made about that today. Would it not be a good idea for the National Audit Office to commission independent studies on the effects of currency decisions in relation to independence, which would certainly illuminate the debate both in Scotland and the rest of the UK?

[Sir Edward Leigh]

I suspect that the National Audit Office would be very loth to be dragged into the debate on the future of Scotland. Clearly, if Scotland broke away, there would have to be completely different audit arrangements for the Financial Conduct Authority, which the House currently audits. Independence would indeed have implications for the National Audit Office.

[Martin Vickers (Cleethorpes) (Con)]

5. What support the NAO gives to Select Committees and how the effectiveness of such support is monitored.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

In addition to the support it provides to the Public Accounts Committee, the NAO supports Select Committees with informal briefings, advice on selecting and designing inquiries, new research and evidence gathering in support of a Committee’s interest or inquiry, and in providing experts on short-term attachments. On monitoring the effectiveness of that support, the NAO monitors the Government’s responses to PAC reports to ensure that individual Departments have accepted and implemented PAC recommendations.

[Martin Vickers]

The NAO provides valuable help and support for the PAC and Select Committees. Importantly, it is independent of Government. Is my hon. Friend satisfied that it has adequate resources to carry out its work?

[Sir Edward Leigh]

I am satisfied that the NAO has adequate resources, but the Commission has already imposed a 15% cut to its budget in real terms. If further cuts are demanded, the House will have to consider whether the NAO will be able to continue its excellent work to support the Committees of the House, including the Public Accounts Committee.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

What proportion of the National Audit Office’s parliamentary work is taken up in servicing the Public Accounts Committee?

[Sir Edward Leigh]

In 2012-13, the NAO’s support to the Public Accounts Committee cost £3 million and its support to other Select Committees cost £2.1 million. My hon. Friend will see that the majority of the funding supports the PAC, but the NAO does valuable work to help all our Select Committees.

The right hon. Member for Banbury, representing the Church Commissioners, was asked—

[Tessa Munt (Wells) (LD)]

6. What recent discussions the Church Commissioners have had on further consultation on the decision to relocate the residence of the Bishop of Bath and Wells.

[The Second Church Estates Commissioner (Sir Tony Baldry)]

At the invitation of my hon. Friend, I visited Wells on 25 January to attend a public meeting and listen to the views of local people. I promised that I would report those views to the governors of the Church Commissioners, which I shall do at their next meeting later this month. She also presented a petition at General Synod earlier this week. A number of questions on this matter were also asked and answered at General Synod.

[Tessa Munt]

Bearing in mind that there is unity between churchgoers and those who are not churchgoers, I will quote from a letter that I received last night, which said of the Church of England:

“It is most depressing to see it damaged by its own corporate actions…There are times when I look into the internal workings of the Church of England and despair.”

People understand that the investment arm can make a return on the latest asset of the Church Commissioners, the Old Rectory at Croscombe, by renting it out on the ordinary market. However, may I make a plea for a graceful and sensitive response to the thousands who have registered their disagreement with allowing the new bishop to move in, and for there to be real consultation?

[Sir Tony Baldry]

My hon. Friend has made her views on this matter very clear. I have promised that I will report those views to the governors of the Church Commissioners later this month. I am sure that they will reflect carefully on all the representations that have been made on this matter.

[Mr Speaker]

The hon. Lady has not merely asked a question, but offered the House a treatise. Some might even judge it to have constituted a sermon.

The hon. Member for South West Devon, representing the Speaker's Committee on the Electoral Commission, was asked—

[Tom Blenkinsop (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)]

7. What assessment the Electoral Commission has made of the potential effect on the number of young voters of its proposals to require photo identification for voters.

[Mr Gary Streeter (South West Devon)]

The Electoral Commission intends to carry out further consultation and analysis during 2014 to identify a proportionate and accessible scheme for verifying identity at polling stations in Great Britain. There will be consideration of the acceptable forms of photographic ID to be included in the scheme and the likely impact on different groups of electors, including young voters.

[Tom Blenkinsop]

A written answer from the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, the hon. Member for Wimbledon (Stephen Hammond) on 8 January stated that since 2007, the number of driving licences that are issued to people under the age of 22 has declined by 12.2%. Given that the number of young people who have photographic driving licences is decreasing, does the hon. Gentleman share my concern that requiring photo ID for voting would further reduce the number of young people who participate in democracy?

[Mr Streeter]

The experience in Northern Ireland is that the proposed photographic ID scheme is rather popular among young people, not least because it doubles up as proof of age so that they can access pubs. The Electoral Commission has advised the Government on this matter and it is for them to make the decision. However, the early evidence is that voter ID cards are popular with young people.

The right hon. Member for Banbury, representing the Church Commissioners, was asked—

[Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)]

8. What reports he has received on the recent visits to South Sudan, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Kenya by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York.

[The Second Church Estates Commissioner (Sir Tony Baldry)]

The Archbishops of Canterbury and York have both been overseas in the past month. The Archbishop of Canterbury’s recent visit to South Sudan, Burundi, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo were part of his programme of visits to all parts of the Anglican communion. He saw at first hand the devastating impact of conflict and the huge difficulties that are faced by the Church and the wider population in areas of conflict and instability, as well as the key role that is played by the Church and the urgent need for far-reaching efforts towards reconciliation.

[Fiona Bruce]

The persecution of Christians and those of other faiths is increasing in the regions that have been visited by both archbishops. What work is the Church of England doing with churches on the ground to promote peace and stability in those areas?

[Sir Tony Baldry]

It is difficult, in the time that is allowed, to encapsulate the seriousness of this issue. The churches are keen to help rebuild their countries by strengthening communities through reconciliation, healing and the overcoming of fear. As the Archbishop of Canterbury said, reconciliation requires people to face reality and to tell the truth about the suffering that has been experienced and the harm that has been done. He said:

“When there is enough confidence to meet each other, then honest talking is possible.”

He also stressed the importance of caring for those who have suffered. In each of those war-torn and conflict-stricken countries, one hopes and intends that the Church will be present, helping to bring reconciliation.

[Mr Speaker]

I hope that we all feel uplifted by the voice of Sir Tony. I feel sure that we do.

Flooding: Transport Disruption

Thursday 13th February 2014 Commons Chamber

10:34

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

(Urgent Question): To ask the Secretary of State if he will update the House on the transport disruption caused by the floods.

[The Secretary of State for Transport (Mr Patrick McLoughlin)]

In the past two months, Britain has been hit by truly exceptional weather. This has been the wettest January in more than 200 years, and the severe weather is set to continue. From extra pumps and sandbags to military support and emergency funds, the Government are committed to providing all the practical support and assistance that is needed.

Overnight a severe storm, with winds recorded at more than 100 miles per hour, added further to disruption on the transport network, with the railway network particularly badly affected and some motorways closed owing to wind speeds. Network Rail and the Highways Agency have been working through the night to address the damage caused, clearing scores of trees from blocked lines, removing debris from carriageways and tracks, and repairing overhead wires. Let me take this opportunity to thank all those people for their dedication and hard work in the most trying circumstances, and express my sympathy with all those affected by bad weather.

As a result of the repair work overnight, I can provide the following updates for those parts of the transport network affected by the storm. On the rail network, the west coast main line is open, apart from the spur from Runcorn to Liverpool, which is expected to be back in service later this morning. Most of the east coast line is open. Continued work on overhead line damage north of York is placing limits on the service, and trains are expected to run at 80 miles an hour between Newcastle and the Scottish borders until midday. The Welsh routes of Fishguard and Aberystwyth are currently closed as engineers work to clear scores of downed trees.

On the roads, with a few isolated exceptions, we have kept motorways and major A roads running through this unprecedented level of severe weather. Although the hard work of engineers has mitigated the worst effects of the storm, there is no doubt that the transport network has taken a battering over the past week. In Dawlish work continues apace to mend the route between London and the south-west. During my visit on Friday I met south-west MPs and council and business leaders to assess the impact of the severe weather on the region’s transport network and economy. That followed a briefing with local south-west MPs in the House last Wednesday. The collapsed wall has been shored up with material salvaged from the damaged section, and a temporary breakwater made of shipping containers and filled with rubble has been erected off the coast. Removal of the damaged platform continues, and work is estimated to be completed by 18 March.

At Maidenhead the water table is currently 20 metres higher than it would normally be at this time of the year. That has damaged the signalling and had a serious effect on the ability of Network Rail to run trains, with roughly one fifth of services currently running between Reading and Paddington. Network Rail is working urgently to assess the time scale and to repair the signalling. The M2 in Kent is now partially reopened in both directions, with repairs ongoing to the hole in the central reservation.

While we deal with the immediate fall-out from the weather conditions, my Department has announced measures that I believe will make a real impact on the ground. Those include £61 million funding for projects to help repair damaged roads and build greater resilience into our railway network. Yesterday the Government announced funding worth £31 million to pay for rail resilience projects, which includes money to continue the vital work at Cowley bridge in Exeter to improve resilience against flooding. In addition, a further £30 million has been found for road maintenance, including pothole repairs, for local authorities in England affected by the severe weather. That is on top of the £3.5 million from the £7 million flood recovery package announced by the Government on 17 January.

Because we recognise the importance of tourism to the south-west during half-term week, we have worked with the airline Flybe to enable it to double its daily flights between Newquay and London Gatwick. It will increase the number of flights from three to six per weekday, providing more than 4,500 additional seats each week. Flybe has also agreed to keep prices at the same level as before the weather disruption, ensuring that hard-working families are not penalised by the impact of the weather on their travel plans. On Monday this week the Prime Minister also announced a Government subsidy to allow Newquay airport to waive the £5 airport development fee usually charged to those departing from the airport. Together, that package is helping to keep the south-west open for business during these difficult times.

In addition, First Great Western, the rail operator, has put in place a special ticketing arrangement so that rail passengers affected by the flood disruption do not miss out on the cheaper advance fares while revised timetables are in place. That means that passengers will receive a 25% discount on walk-up fares for journeys that cross the Dawlish gap. First Great Western has also ordered hundreds of extra buses to provide alternative transport while the track is repaired.

Although the conditions are unprecedented, particularly because of their severity and sustained nature, it is important that we ensure that our network is resilient in the long term to such threats. The Department for Transport works very closely on resilience with other Government Departments, local authorities, other transport operators and the wider sector. Resilience to extreme weather and climate change also form part of our capital maintenance programme. The Government have asked the industry to build climate resilience into its plans for railway investment for the period between 2014 and 2019. The industry has responded by introducing more specialised equipment and trains that treat rails, and that clear ice and snow or compacted leaves.

We have embarked on one of the biggest programmes of rail modernisation ever. Over the next five years, more than £38 billion will be spent to improve and maintain our railways. Network Rail is developing strategies for securing the long-term resilience of the railways and has asked the Office of the Rail Regulator for nearly £500 million to invest in resilience projects.

On the roads, the Highways Agency has assessed the potential risks that climate change poses to the ongoing operation and improvements to the strategic road network. It has taken action to mitigate and is spending a huge amount a year on maintenance and renewal. Funding for local roads maintenance has increased by £650 million in this Parliament. That figure will increase by a further £500 million to £4.9 billion between 2015 and 2020.

As the Prime Minister said yesterday, we are in for a long haul. I will continue to keep the House updated, but I should at this stage pay tribute, as every Member of the House would like to do, to all those tens of thousands of people who are at the moment doing their upmost to provide services, sometimes in very dangerous conditions. They are trying to do their very best for the travelling public, and we owe them a great debt of gratitude.

[Mary Creagh]

I thank the Secretary of State for his reply. Our sympathy goes out to the families and friends of the three people who have tragically lost their lives in the flooding and storms. Our thoughts are with everyone who has been affected by the flooding.

I echo the Secretary of State’s tribute to the emergency and armed services, council workers, Network Rail, the Highways Agency, the Environment Agency and power company staff who have worked round the clock in very difficult conditions to keep people safe and to restore services.

The Secretary of State mentioned the severe weather in the past week that has caused huge disruption. Rail services on Southern trains, Southeastern trains, South West Trains, First Great Western and Virgin have all been seriously affected, and there is major disruption on the motorway, with the closure of the M2 and regional disruption overnight as trees were brought down by high winds.

The Secretary of State said that First Great Western has suspended its advance ticket scheme on the Dawlish route. Passengers must now pay for expensive walk-on tickets rather than take advantage of lower advance fares. Although the 25% reduction in those walk-on fares is welcome, some passengers must still pay more than £100 to travel from Paddington to Cornwall on rail replacement buses. Does he believe that is fair?

The Tunbridge Wells to Hastings line is shut as a result of landslips and will take several weeks to repair. One route to Exeter is closed with three quarters of a mile of track under water. The Windsor branch line is blocked at Datchet. In Wales, the Cambrian coast rail line has been damaged between Barmouth and Pwllheli—it was damaged in January but will not reopen until mid-May. Network Rail estimates that the cost of repairing that damage will be up to £30 million. What talks has the Secretary of State held with train companies to support passengers who have experienced substantial financial loss as a result of the travel disruption? The damage at Dawlish and Pwllheli alone will cost Network Rail £40 million to repair and Network Rail’s initial estimate of the repair and business interruption costs from flooding over the past two months is now £118 million. How much money has he asked the Treasury for to carry out those vital repairs?

In 2012, an 11-day closure of the Great Western railway line to Exeter caused by flooding was estimated by Cornwall council to have cost the regional economy £140 million. In January last year, the Prime Minister said that

“we will do everything we can to ensure that these important services are maintained, even when they are challenged by floods”.—[Official Report, 16 January 2013; Vol. 556, c. 870.]

Yesterday, the Prime Minister announced that £61 million was being made available by the Department for Transport to finance the repair and rebuilding of transport infrastructure, yet it transpires that £31 million of that money was what he promised to the south-west authorities and MPs last year for resilience repairs around Exeter. Network Rail has spent £5 million on small repair schemes, but the bulk of that £26 million from the Government, promised by the Prime Minister last January, has never been received. Why not? Why did that money failed to materialise in the autumn statement? Did he just forget?

Of the Prime Minister’s £61 million announcement yesterday, it transpires that the £30 million for council road repairs was actually announced on Monday by the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government. Will the Secretary of State confirm that the Prime Minister’s announcement yesterday was a rehash of old announcements and included not one penny of new money for the urgent rail repairs that are needed across the network? Will any additional money be made available to Network Rail for repairs to damaged transport infrastructure? Will any additional money be provided to improve transport infrastructure flood resilience?

The Government need to speak with one voice and their response needs to be speedier than it has been in the recent past. The Select Committee on Energy and Climate Change has warned that flooding is the greatest risk our country faces from climate change. The Prime Minister has said that “money is no object” and the Secretary of State has said that there is no blank cheque. Who is right? Communities and commuters face long weeks, potentially months, of transport disruption. They need leadership and clarity on what help they can expect and when. When will they get it?

[Mr McLoughlin]

In my answer, I tried to be open with the House on all the problems being faced by passengers and our constituents across the country. I do not think it helps when the Opposition try to suggest that money is not available. When I was here last Thursday, I was the one speaking up for all the passengers who were being inconvenienced by strikes that the Opposition were deliberately incredibly quiet about. I need no lectures on speaking up for passengers and the people who use our public services.

As far as money and investment is concerned, the simple fact is this: as the Prime Minister has made absolutely clear, there is no limit to the amount of money that the Government are providing for immediate flood relief. We will do everything we can to help those people who are very badly affected and will be affected for months to come. That is a commitment from the whole of the Government: the Government certainly speak with one voice on this subject.

I also point out very clearly that, between 2014 and 2019 in the next round of investment in the railways cleared by this Government, we will see record sums invested in our railways. Indeed, as part of the investment programme, a tunnel that is very important for the south-west, has just been relined. A lot of the money we are talking about—the £850 million being spent on Reading station—is all about improving resilience in the long term. A lot of the money being spent by Network Rail over the next five years—[Interruption.] The hon. Member for Blackpool South (Mr Marsden), like a parrot, keeps saying, “It’s not new money.” The simple point is that it is new money. It is the £38 billion that we are going to invest in Network Rail over the next five years. It is important, too, and represents a record level of investment—a level of investment never reached by the previous Government when there was plenty of money available. When the buckets were overflowing, they did not invest in our infrastructure; we are investing in it, rebuilding the British railways, and the roads as well.

[Mrs Cheryl Gillan (Chesham and Amersham) (Con)]

I would like to associate myself with the remarks of both Front Benchers about the victims and those people working around the clock to help people in trouble. I also congratulate Ministers on getting a grip of this situation and offering support wherever they can.

Following the flooding in 2008, the UK received about £127 million from the EU solidarity fund, which, in exceptional circumstances, can be used for regional disasters to help with clear-up work and infrastructure restoration. Our Welsh Conservative MEP, Dr Kay Swinburne, has been calling on the Government to co-ordinate with the Welsh Government to unlock funds from the solidarity fund in particular. Will my right hon. Friend work with Dr Swinburne, the Welsh Government and other parts of the country to ensure we unlock the maximum amount of money from this European fund during these terrible times?

[Mr McLoughlin]

I can reassure my right hon. Friend that this matter was discussed last night in the Cobra meeting, and my right hon. Friend the Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General is looking at all the avenues for collecting any money that might be available.

[Alison Seabeck (Plymouth, Moor View) (Lab)]

What work is the Secretary of State doing with other Departments to make an economic assessment of the loss of the rail network, both in the south-west and across the country? It is important that that work is co-ordinated.

[Mr McLoughlin]

The hon. Lady, along with council leaders and leaders of the local enterprise partnership, met me last week when I was down in Plymouth. I told them, following my statement in the House last Thursday, that I would want to look at the long-term resilience of the south-west—that is very important—but when we get a storm of the nature of last night’s, it is not just the south-west we need to consider, so we need to investigate what she says further and more wholly. She has made her case for the south-west, and I will certainly work with her and other Members who attended the briefing—unfortunately I could not attend because I was preparing for the urgent question—held by the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon (Stephen Hammond), just before this sitting.

[Mr David Heath (Somerton and Frome) (LD)]

The Great Western railway is effectively out of action and many of our roads are under water. This clearly demonstrates the vulnerability of the west country to weather conditions and our lack of resilience. Will the Secretary of State consider carefully the need to provide alternative main line railway routes into the west country and also look at the road situation, because at the moment we are dependent on the M5 and the totally inadequate A303?

[Mr McLoughlin]

I understand the points my hon. Friend is making. There are a few things we need to do. First and foremost, we need to reassure people that the south-west is open for business and that the road network overall is working well. This morning, I had a meeting with the country’s main coach operators about their laying on extra services, which they are doing, and as we approach next week’s half-term holiday, and the Easter break as well, people and businesses in the south-west want to get the message out clearly that they are open for business and that the south-west is not a closed area; and certainly the road network gives us that option.

On alternative routes, I want to see the Dawlish route reconnected as soon as possible—Network Rail estimates it will take six weeks, once it starts construction properly, to re-establish the line—but my hon. Friend is right that we should look at the lines that have been closed. It is not the fault of this Government, or even the last Government, that they are closed. Since 1965, successive Governments have seen development take place over some of these lines.

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

I am sure that the Secretary of State will join me in praising the work of East Coast staff who dealt with customers stranded on the Yorkshire moors last night.

When the Secretary of State and his team give figures on the late running of East Coast trains, will they attempt to differentiate in respect of the weather problems over the past two years—they have not occurred only this month—and will they not blame East Coast for them?

[Mr McLoughlin]

There can be many reasons for train delays, and sometimes they are completely outside the control of Network Rail or the rail operators. I readily accept that point. Some of the problems faced by operators, even leaving aside exceptional storms, are completely outside their control.

[Mr Simon Burns (Chelmsford) (Con)]

Conservative Members welcome the decisive action of the Prime Minister and the Department for Transport in seeking to tackle the immediate problem and the extra money made available to repair the network. However, will my right hon. Friend accept that the important thing over the longer term will be greater resilience and improvement to the whole rail network? Will he confirm that the £38.5 billion for greater resilience to be made available over the next control period will exclude the additional money for High Speed 2?

[Mr McLoughlin]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend, who knows better than most the immense work going into improving resilience. Not long after I was appointed to this post, I went to Shugborough tunnel, which was closed over the Christmas period as it was being relaid; about £3 million was spent on getting the rails up and putting new drainage in. The works meant that trains could run through the tunnel at 125 mph rather than 50 mph. Nobody will have seen that £3 million being spent but it was one part of the very many things going on across the whole rail network that improve the facilities and services for our constituents.

[Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)]

As the Secretary of State will know, if there is genuinely new money, there will be discussions about the Barnett consequentials. Are such discussions going on? If he cannot reveal a figure, will he at least confirm that the announcements over the past couple of weeks have been about new money? If so, there will be Barnett consequentials.

[Mr McLoughlin]

Network Rail serves Wales as well, so Wales will get its share of the money that Network Rail is investing in the whole railway structure.

[Anne Marie Morris (Newton Abbot) (Con)]

I thank the Secretary of State for his support for and visit to Dawlish; they were very much appreciated by one and all. I join him in thanking Network Rail. I also thank my local council and volunteers who did a sterling job in extremely difficult circumstances.

As the Secretary of State has seen for himself, the line is crucial not only to my constituency but to others further south-west. The local economy depends on it. Can he assure me that he recognises that and that he is committed to ensuring that the line is sustainable for the long term and to researching what needs to be done to make it truly resilient?

[Mr McLoughlin]

I can certainly give my hon. Friend a promise about the commitment that she seeks; the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr Heath) also asked the question. I know how important the main line to Dawlish and my hon. Friend’s constituency is. The other thing that we need to consider is whether we can build in better resilience than went into the wall when it was first built more than 100 years ago.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

Has there been any major damage to the west coast main line and will the Secretary of State invest any new money into it? Will he also find out why there are regular hold-ups on that line between Birmingham and Euston?

[Mr McLoughlin]

One of the reasons why there might be regular hold-ups was pointed out by my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Mr Burns) a moment ago: the question of capacity on that line. The hon. Gentleman will remember that the west coast main line saw investment of more than £9 billion, all north of Rugby. That went some way towards improving certain bits of the line’s capacity, but it did not improve the capacity into London.

[Miss Anne McIntosh (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

I thank the Department for the work it is doing. I understand that the East Coast trains were rescued by diesel trains following the catastrophic failure. Will the Secretary of State give the House an assurance that there will always be a fleet of diesel trains to use in scenarios such as these?

[Mr McLoughlin]

I might just want to think a bit more about promising that there will always be diesel trains. We are investing a huge amount of money in the new intercity express programme trains to serve on the east coast route. I cannot give my hon. Friend an absolute commitment at the Dispatch Box today, but I will certainly investigate the point that she has made.

[Wayne David (Caerphilly) (Lab)]

Given that the Secretary of State obviously has difficulties with Barnett consequentials, may I simply ask him how much extra money will be coming to Wales?

[Mr McLoughlin]

I think that that is a question for the Secretary of State for Wales—[Interruption.] I do not have any problems whatever with the Barnett formula. The point that I am making about Network Rail is that it serves England and Wales.

[Mike Thornton (Eastleigh) (LD)]

As the effects of climate change multiply and increase, it is likely that events that now seem unusual will become more and more usual. Can the Secretary of State assure me that his current plans for transport infrastructure strengthening will be reviewed in the light of the fact that what is happening at the moment will not be a one-off event?

[Mr McLoughlin]

The last major review we carried out covered the way in which the Department responded to extreme cold weather, and to snow and ice in particular. A lot of resilience factors were built into the network as a result of that. We learn from any kind of event, and we try to ensure that those lessons are put to good use. I hope that that answers the hon. Gentleman’s question.

[Angela Smith (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab)]

What is the Secretary of State’s estimate of the cost to businesses of the severe travel disruption?

[Mr McLoughlin]

At this stage, it is too early to give an exact figure. I have heard examples of some very stoical people going to exceptional lengths to get to work and keep their businesses operating, but at this stage it is too early to give the hon. Lady an exact answer.

[Oliver Colvile (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Con)]

I thank my right hon. Friend for coming down to Plymouth last Friday, about 36 hours after the great event at Dawlish. There is obviously considerable concern about what is going to happen there. Would he be willing to set out a timetable for the work that will ensure we have a resilient railway line in the long term? Will he also ask the Leader of the House whether we can have a proper debate on this matter? It is incredibly important that we get this right, and that people know what we are going to do.

[Mr McLoughlin]

I will not trespass on the responsibilities of others in relation to promising debates on the Floor of the House. I was once in a position to deal with such questions, but I no longer do so. I will therefore leave that matter to my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House, who will be making a statement after I have spoken. My hon. Friend also asked about long-term resilience, and he is absolutely right. When I was in his constituency, he told me specifically how these events were affecting his constituents. He also told me how determined he was to get a service for people to travel from Plymouth to London in under three hours; it is a matter of urgency for him. He has made his point, and I will look at ways in which we can try to achieve what he wants.

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

I would like to be clear about the exact figure on the cheque. I think the Secretary of State announced spending of about £125 million in his statement. How much of that is actual new spending, and how much of it relates to devolved competences?

[Mr McLoughlin]

The hon. Gentleman is fixated on new spending, but I do not see anything wrong, when coming to the end of the financial year, with looking at any underspending in the Department and using it. If there is cause for new money, I will have discussions with the Treasury about it. Likewise, the natural consequences of any decisions taken by the Government will flow through to Wales under the agreed formulae.

[Mark Pritchard (The Wrekin) (Con)]

During the night, Shropshire was hit by winds of up to 76 mph, and this morning more than 4,000 homes and businesses are without power. Will the Secretary of State join me in encouraging ScottishPower and other power companies to get the lights back on in Shropshire? Will he also join me in praising the hard work of West Mercia police, the Shropshire fire service, Telford & Wrekin council and Shropshire council staff?

[Mr McLoughlin]

I join my hon. Friend in saying that a number of people—and not only the ones he mentioned —have shown great stoicism in trying to make sure that services are provided, be they Network Rail staff, local authorities, the Environment Agency or the emergency services. A plethora of people have done fantastic work, and not just last night, which was when his constituency and his area of Shropshire were directly affected. Since Christmas a huge amount of work has been done by these emergency services, which have shown themselves to be right up to the task.

[Mark Lazarowicz (Edinburgh North and Leith) (Lab/Co-op)]

The incident at Dawlish highlights the problems that occur when no alternative rail route is available, and some of the disruption of the lines from England to Scotland in recent years has been exacerbated because of a lack of alternatives or because the available alternatives were not put into effect quickly. Clearly, one cannot build alternatives to cover every situation that might arise, but will the work on resilience—the word the Secretary of State is talking about—examine the possibility of making sure that it is much easier to use alternative routes when disruption occurs? Will there be an examination of the case for reopening currently closed lines to ensure that decent alternative routes are available?

[Mr McLoughlin]

Obviously, that is one thing we have got to look at in the long term. I am pleased to have been able to announce the reopening of several stations. There has been a huge change in the way people look at the rail service; they want a good reliable rail service, and that is important. We are seeing more people using the railways now than we have for a long time. In the past 20 years, the number of passengers has gone from 750 million to 1.5 billion, and there has also been a huge increase in freight on the railways, which we all welcome.

[Sir Richard Ottaway (Croydon South) (Con)]

The Secretary of State will be aware that the A22 in my constituency has been closed for several days, causing substantial disruption to traffic in south London. The closure is caused not so much by the flooding, which is adjacent to the A22, but by the installation of machinery to limit further flooding. Will he confirm that the package of compensation for businesses that has been announced applies to businesses that may not necessarily have been flooded but which are affected by the consequences of flooding?

[Mr McLoughlin]

I would like to look into the very valid points that my right hon. Friend has made and the particular cases to which he is referring.

[Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

Is the Secretary of State satisfied that rail passengers in particular are being kept up to date with information about travel disruption? If he is not, what more can be done?

[Mr McLoughlin]

The hon. Lady makes a good point. I have asked the train operating companies to do a lot more on the social media network, which they are doing. One of the frustrating aspects of this situation for people is trying to get information. A lot of people who use the railways do not use social media, and there is a difficulty there, but we are trying to make as much information available as we possibly can.

[Mr Marcus Jones (Nuneaton) (Con)]

These are unprecedented weather conditions, and I commend my right hon. Friend for the work he is doing. I also commend all the people across the country who are working so hard to get our rail and road network open again and back to normal. Many of my constituents depend daily on the west coast main line. What more is the Secretary of State doing to make sure that there is better resilience against this type of weather on that line?

[Mr McLoughlin]

As I said, north of Rugby, a huge amount of money has been invested on the west coast main line. There is still more work to be done; for example, there is more work to be done on signalling, which will be happening this year as far as Watford is concerned. That will have an impact, providing better resilience overall to the services to which my hon. Friend refers. As he rightly says, that line is one of the busiest railway lines anywhere in Europe.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

Not only do rail users in Bristol have to contend with the usual overpriced, overcrowded trains, but they are now being hit by disruption in both directions; it is affecting train services from Bristol to the west country and the Reading to Paddington section of the Great Western line. What support is available for rail users in Bristol? What compensation will be available for them?

[Mr McLoughlin]

I understand what the hon. Lady says. As I said just before this statement, I have had a meeting with all the coach operators, and they have agreed to put on extra services. Those services are available and a lot more are being laid on. They are seeing a rise in patronage, and their prices are very competitive indeed.

[Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)]

I welcome the additional support the Government are giving for extra flights between London Gatwick and Newquay Cornwall airports. I also welcome the fact that, since 2010, £11.7 million has been spent on the Upper River Mole protection scheme, which has certainly helped my constituency over the past couple of months. Last night, there were some concerns that groundwater levels in this unprecedented weather were causing some disruption to the London to Brighton main rail line. Will my right hon. Friend assure me that the Department for Transport will work on the important interchange between Gatwick airport and the rail route coming into London?

[Mr McLoughlin]

I can assure my hon. Friend that we are keeping a close eye, both with Network Rail and all the other services involved, on water levels. As I said earlier in my statement, the levels are considerably higher than they have been for some time. The point that he makes about Brighton and the line from Gatwick to Brighton is an important one. We are monitoring that closely.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

May I remind the Secretary of State that, in a crisis such as this where so many people are having a miserable time and we have had loss of life—thankfully, a small loss of life—it is nice to have all-party agreement? None the less, it is also the job of the official Opposition to hold the Government to account, whether it is over the 560 redundancies that the Prime Minister did not want to mention yesterday, or over the question of whether this is new money. On the substantive point of the resilience of our network, it is all very well having new rolling stock, but my constituents travel up and down from Yorkshire on the east coast line and every time, with much less weather disturbance than this, it is the overhead lines that go down. That is the resilience that we need to tackle. It is no good having new trains without changing the overhead lines.

[Mr McLoughlin]

I know that the hon. Gentleman always tries to be cross-party consensual in these sorts of questions in the House; he is renowned for it. On this particular occasion, I simply say that I agree with him.

[Mr Speaker]

What was that very substantial tongue that I saw firmly embedded in a cheek when the Secretary of State was addressing the House?

[Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) (Con)]

I welcome the statement by the Secretary of State. I thank him, his Department, the Highways Agency and all the other agencies for what they are doing to get the M2 back to normal following the discovery of a 16 feet sinkhole in the inner reservation. What steps are being taken to address the concerns about sinkholes, as they pose a real risk to road safety?

[Mr McLoughlin]

My hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State who is responsible for roads is looking at that particular incident this morning. Sinkholes are not common events, but obviously we need to learn any lessons that we can from them. We also need to do the proper work to ensure that no further damage has been done to the road network before we reopen it. However, that part of the road network is now partially reopened.

[Nia Griffith (Llanelli) (Lab)]

This month, we have seen the dramatic pictures of Dawlish, but last month the sea washed away part of the main line to south-west Wales in my constituency. We saw even more dramatic pictures in the north with the Cambrian coast line. Many of the railway lines along our coast are part of flood protection measures. Barnett consequentials for Wales are a matter for every single Department across Government. Will the Secretary of State work with his colleagues in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to work out exactly what Wales is due and then let us know?

[Mr McLoughlin]

As I have said, any Barnett consequentials that are necessary will take place.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

The Transport Secretary will know that the midland main line runs diesel services through Kettering to his constituency in Derbyshire. He will also know that all too often those services are disrupted because the overhead line south of Bedford, which is used by First Capital Connect and Thameslink services, has gone out of commission. I echo the point about the resilience of the overhead lines. Will the Transport Secretary assure us that Network Rail realises that point and will put more investment into ensuring those lines stay up?

[Mr McLoughlin]

I am very pleased to say that the Government will be electrifying the whole of the line to Sheffield, which has been called for for a very long time. The electrification of our railways—we are committed to electrifying more than 800 miles in the next control period between 2014 and 2019—is very important for the long-term future of the railways in this country.

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right to mention resilience and the importance of building that into any future lines. We have world-class tunnelling expertise from Crossrail, so can we ensure that far more of our rail lines are put in tunnels rather than deep cuttings? Earlier, he mentioned Shugborough tunnel in my constituency, which was put there to ensure that local residents—particularly, I believe, the Earl of Lichfield—were not disturbed by the line.

[Mr McLoughlin]

I cannot think what other tunnelling my hon. Friend might have in mind. Next year, we will see the completion of tunnelling for Crossrail, which has been a substantial investment in the rail infrastructure of this country.

Business of the House

Thursday 13th February 2014 Commons Chamber

11:15

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

Will the Leader of the House give us the business for the first week after the recess?

[The Leader of the House of Commons (Mr Andrew Lansley)]

The business for the week commencing 24 February is as follows:

Monday 24 February—Second Reading of the Criminal Justice and Courts Bill.

Tuesday 25 February—Motions relating to the draft Social Security Benefits Up-rating Order 2014 and the draft Guaranteed Minimum Pensions Increase Order 2014, followed by general debate on the transatlantic trade and investment partnership. The subject for this debate was determined by the Backbench Business Committee.

Wednesday 26 February—Opposition day (unallotted day). There will be a debate on an Opposition motion, including on Housing Benefit (Transitional Provisions) (Amendment) Regulations 2014 (S.I., 2014, no. 212).

Thursday 27 February—A debate on a motion relating to the effects of welfare reform on sick and disabled people, followed by a debate on a motion relating to parliamentary representation. The subjects for both debates were determined by the Backbench Business Committee.

Friday 28 February—Private Members’ Bills.

The provisional business for the week commencing 3 March will include:

Monday 3 March—Estimates day (2nd allotted day). There will be a debate on managing flood risk followed by a debate on Government levies on energy bills.

Further details will be given in the Official Report.

[The details are as follows: Managing Flood Risk, Third report from the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, HC 330, and the Government response, HC 706; The Levy Control Framework: Parliamentary oversight of the Government levies on energy bills, Eighth Report from the Energy and Climate Change Committee, HC 872.]

Tuesday 4 March—Estimates day (3rd allotted day). There will be a debate on defence and cyber-security, followed by a debate on the private rented sector. Further details will be given in the Official Report. At 7pm the House will be asked to agree all outstanding estimates.

Further details will be given in the Official Report.

[The details are as follows: Defence and Cyber-Security, Sixth Report form the Defence Committee, HC 106 of Session 2012-13, and the Government response, HC 719; The Private Rented Sector, First Report from the Communities and Local Government Committee, HC 50, and the Government Response, CM 8730.]

Wednesday 5 March—Proceedings on the Supply and Appropriation (Anticipations and Adjustments) Bill, followed by general debate on the Francis report.

Thursday 6 March—Business to be nominated by the Backbench Business Committee.

Friday 7 March—The House will not be sitting.

I should also like to inform the House that the business in Westminster Hall for 27 February will be:

Thursday 27 February—General debate on patient rights and access to NHS data.

[Ms Eagle]

I thank the Leader of the House for announcing the business for the week after the recess.

On Tuesday the House voted to ban smoking in cars with children present, despite the Government’s opposing the move in the Lords. Will the Leader of the House confirm that we will have a law on the statute book before the next election?

Yesterday the House voted by a margin of 226 to 1 in favour of the Bill to abolish the bedroom tax—a Bill introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery)—on the same day as we revealed that thanks to Government incompetence at least 13,000 people have been forced to pay it when they should have been exempt. The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions has tabled a statutory instrument to try to force those people to pay that hated tax again, but I want to make it clear that during our next Opposition day debate Labour will move to annul that odious measure. The bedroom tax is a callous attack on the poorest people in our country that might end up costing more than it saves, and we do not think that anyone should have to pay it.

It seems that the ever-eager Justice Secretary is the only Minister to have responded to a plea for some business to fill the gaping holes in the Government’s stuttering legislative agenda. The Criminal Justice and Courts Bill amends their own legislation from only two years ago. It has apparently been brought forward from next year’s legislative programme, which suggests that the Government are so desperate for business that they are already poaching Bills from their sparse draft of the next Queen’s Speech. Does the Leader of the House think it would be easier just to skip the Queen’s Speech altogether and leave us officially twiddling our thumbs until the next election?

The floods that are blighting many parts of our country are causing untold misery for thousands of people. As we have just heard, the huge storm overnight caused further travel chaos and left more than 100,000 people without power. On Tuesday, the Prime Minister said at his Downing street press conference that money would be no object in dealing with the floods, but within 24 hours we were told that there would be no blank cheques. Will the Leader of the House tell us which it is?

During Prime Minister’s questions, the Prime Minister failed to tell us whether he would commit to spending more on flood defences, so can the Leader of the House tell us whether he will? Yesterday the Prime Minister yet again cited inaccurate figures on flood defence spending, so will the Leader of the House finally admit that the Government cut flood funding by £97 million when they came to office in 2010, that they changed the Treasury rules to make it harder to give flood protection schemes the go-ahead, and that flood spending for this year is £63.5 million lower than in 2010, even after the extra money announced last week?

We learned this week that Barclays intends to increase its bonus payouts by 10% while cutting 7,000 staff in the UK. In 2011, the Prime Minister said:

“I want the bonus pools to be lower, I want the taxes that the banks pay to be higher and…I want the lending that they do to do business…to increase.”

As always with this Government, the results do not match the rhetoric. Bankers bonuses have increased by £600 million since 2012, net lending under the funding for lending scheme for small and medium-sized enterprises has fallen by £2.3 billion since June 2012, and since the election banks have paid more than twice as much in bonuses as they have paid in corporation tax. Labour would use a bankers bonus tax to fund real jobs for young people, but all the Government can do is refuse to rule out a cut in the top rate of tax. Will the Leader of the House arrange for a statement from the Chancellor on fairness so that he can explain why he stands up only for a few at the top?

As Valentine’s day approaches, the coalition will be conscious that it has been going through a bit of a legislative dry spell. Does the Leader of the House have any plans to spice things up, because everyone seems to be falling out of love? The Environment Secretary and the Local Government Secretary have been briefing against each other. Apparently the Deputy Prime Minister thinks that the Chief Secretary to the Treasury has “gone native” and is basically just a Tory, and Tory Back Benchers are busy describing their coalition colleagues as

“harder to pin down than a weasel covered in Vaseline”.

I understand that Lord Rennard is trying to sue to the Liberal Democrats so that he is allowed to rejoin the party, but he must be the only person in the whole country who would take legal action to become a Liberal Democrat.

[Mr Lansley]

I feared that the shadow Leader of the House’s contribution would not live up to her previous humour, but at least she managed it at the last moment.

[Ms Eagle]

It was a good one, though.

[Mr Lansley]

Yes, it was.

I was delighted that the House, in a free vote, expressed its view on smoking in cars—speaking personally, I entirely agreed with it. The Government now have to consider when we bring the relevant regulations before the House, but I am afraid that it will be a while before we can advise hon. Members of the timing.

The hon. Lady referred to the ten-minute rule Bill proposed yesterday by the hon. Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery), but I was sorry that she seemed not to understand the nature of proceedings on such Bills. The House votes not on the principle of a ten-minute rule Bill, but simply on whether it gives leave for the Bill to be brought in. As the House did not express a view on the principle of the hon. Gentleman’s Bill, I do not think that we can draw a particular lesson from those proceedings.

The hon. Lady anticipated Labour’s Opposition day debate on the next sitting Wednesday, when Ministers will set out their position clearly, but that gives us further evidence that the Labour party is in denial. Under the Labour Government, housing benefit doubled and the deficit quadrupled. We must arrive at a point where there is welfare reform so that the fairness of the system is established: the fairness of people in social housing having a similar system in relation to under-occupancy as those in the private rented sector; the fairness of recognising that there has been a dramatic increase, including under the last Government, of the number of people seeking social housing but unable to find it, while at the same time large numbers of people are in under-occupied properties. It is important to get that fairness into the system, and yet, again, the Opposition are resisting it.

The shadow Leader of the House again peddled the proposition that the House is not busy. The House is dealing with legislation. The Thursday before last, four Bills received Royal Assent. In the last three weeks, we have introduced three Bills, which will be carried over into the final Session of this Parliament. I am not sure what in the business statement that I have just announced the hon. Lady thinks does not constitute genuine business. Under the Standing Orders we are required to have estimates days, so we are having estimates days. Under the Standing Orders we are required to give the Opposition access to the time of the House, but she will have noticed that the next sitting Wednesday’s debate is an unallotted day. Is the hon. Lady saying to me, and through me, to the usual channels, that she does not think that that merits the attention of the House? If so, hand that time back to us, and the Government can use it to bring forward measures. As it is, we are busy with legislation and the House is busy debating the issues that are chosen not only by the Government but by the Backbench Business Committee and the Opposition. If she objects to the Backbench Business Committee and the Opposition having time for debates because it does not constitute scrutiny of legislation, the Government will take it back and scrutinise legislation instead.

The hon. Lady repeated the canard that the Government are saying two different things about money being available to support the response to flooding and disruption and the recovery from that. The position is clear. It is exactly as the Prime Minister said yesterday and my right hon. Friend the Transport Secretary said today. We will do whatever is needed to support people in responding to these events and in recovering from them, and we will not be constrained in doing that by virtue of resources. Resources will be available to make that happen.

I do not know whether the House can have any debate in relation to Valentine’s day, but in a spirit of amity I point out that we have agreed that about this time of year we will be looking towards the first opportunity to introduce measures on same-sex marriages. The hon. Lady will note that the two Houses will be dealing with the relevant regulations in the first week after the recess. At least at this time of year, in a romantic spirit, we can look forward to that happening by the end of next month.

The hon. Lady’s reference to bank bonuses reminded me of the shadow Chancellor. The Opposition, having access to time for a debate, have not chosen to debate the economy again, which reminded me that this week is national storytelling week. My nine-year-old son was asked by his school to look up “Aesop’s Fables”. The hon. Lady will recall the fable of the eagle and the arrow, where the eagle is flying and is shot by an arrow and falls to the ground, and seeing the arrow recognises one of its own feathers in the shaft of the arrow. The moral of the fable is that we often give our enemies the means of our destruction. That is a little story that she might tell the shadow Chancellor this week.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

May we have a debate on equal pay, and when we do perhaps the Minister responsible can explain why the Government Equalities Office pays men more than women, white people more than ethnic minorities and non-disabled people more than disabled people? Does the Leader of the House not agree that the Government Equalities Office should get its own house in order before it starts lecturing everybody else around the country about equal pay?

[Mr Lansley]

My hon. Friend recognises, as I do, that it is our responsibility to meet our obligations under the Equal Pay Act and, more generally, our obligation to ensure that there is access to equal pay. I do not know the circumstances in the Government Equalities Office. I will of course ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport so that she may respond to the points raised by my hon. Friend.

[Mr Jim Hood (Lanark and Hamilton East) (Lab)]

Last week the Leader of the House was almost boasting about the excellent hour he had spent on Wednesday in the Welsh Grand Committee, saying what an enjoyable time he had. We have not had a Scottish Grand Committee since 2007, and despite my repeated attempts the House business managers have refused to have one. In view of the Chancellor’s statement today on currency arrangements in the event of Scottish independence, does the Leader of the House agree that it would be a good idea to have a Scottish Grand Committee and to invite the Chancellor along to debate the matter with Scottish Back Benchers?

[Mr Lansley]

I will of course consider the hon. Gentleman’s proposal for a Scottish Grand Committee and discuss it with colleagues, but I point out that we debated Scotland’s place in the United Kingdom in this Chamber very recently, and a debate on currency and the Union took place in Westminster Hall yesterday.

[Miss Anne McIntosh (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

I warmly welcome the Leader of the House’s announcement of the estimates debate on managing flood risk. Would it be helpful to the House if we were to have an annual statement on adaptation so that we can look at critical infrastructure, including gas and electricity, pumping stations, roads, bridges and other national assets such as railway lines, take stock of the situation and have more of an overview between floods, rather than waiting for the next one?

[Mr Lansley]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend and I know that she has raised this matter with my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State. I cannot promise a statement, but I will of course look with our colleagues at whether, in the light of these events, there is something we can do, in addition to the debate I announced, to enable us at an appropriate time to look at all the issues relating to resilience and climate change adaptation and mitigation.

[Valerie Vaz (Walsall South) (Lab)]

Rather than raiding the Department for International Development budget, which is committed expenditure, may we debate urgently an application to the European solidarity fund, which exists to help people during a flooding crisis?

[Mr Lansley]

The hon. Lady will have heard what the Prime Minister had to say on that subject. From memory, a threshold of £3 billion—if I am wrong I will provide her with more details later—must be reached before an application can be made. An application for additional resources from Europe would also have implications for our rebate.

[Mr Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth East) (Con)]

Bournemouth is pleased to be receiving some emergency funding for the flooding that took place on the River Stour in my constituency, but storms have also affected the seafront—one of the beach huts has been washed away and 10 have been damaged. Sea levels are expected to rise by 3 feet over the next few decades, so may we have a statement on the Government’s thinking on financial support for improved sea defences?

[Mr Lansley]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I am afraid that other Members will have similarly sad tales to tell about the impact of flooding, and not only recently but all the way back to early December. I refer my hon. Friend to the answer I gave our hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh). We will certainly look for an opportunity for that if we can.

[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

When can we debate the actions of the ingrate President Karzai, who is about to release 65 Taliban murderers from Bagram prison and has insulted our armed forces by saying that the sacrifices they made in Helmand were a disgrace? Can we also look at the delusional complacency of the Government who say that the mission has been accomplished, at a time when civilian deaths are at a record high, heroin production is at a record high and large tracts of the country are occupied by the Taliban?

[Mr Lansley]

The House will know how strongly we feel about the work that has been done by our armed services and others in Afghanistan and the difference it has made in creating a much better position. We set about the process of ensuring that the Afghan national army and security forces were in a position to maintain security after we left, and I think our forces have made tremendous progress in that direction. What is needed alongside that is political commitment and will, alongside security capacity. I am afraid that in the past couple of days we have sometimes seen evidence of a lack of the political will to ensure that that security is maintained to the same extent.

[Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)]

Has my right hon. Friend seen my early-day motion on the future of independent petrol retailers?

[That this House notes that there are 5,000 independent petrol filling stations in the UK; recognises the valuable contribution that they make to the economy and the national infrastructure; further notes that independent filling stations are closing at a rate of four per week with the loss of 1,500 jobs per year; believes that this is a real loss for those in rural communities who rely on them, as well as Government due to lost revenue; and therefore urges the Government to implement a plan to ensure fair competition, fair taxation, and fair planning in this industry to secure a sustainable future for the UK's independent petrol filling stations.]

Is my right hon. Friend aware that independent petrol retailers employ thousands of people across the country, yet four such outlets close every week, causing about 1,500 jobs to be lost every year? May we have a debate in which we can discuss introducing fair competition, fair taxation and fair planning so that these retailers can continue to thrive?

[Mr Lansley]

Yes, I have seen my hon. Friend’s early-day motion. I recollect that he had one of a similar character at an earlier time and we had an opportunity to talk about that as well. He will recall that last year the Office of Fair Trading, having undertaken inquiries, published a report. I completely agree that fair competition is absolutely what this is all about. If there is evidence of any lack of such competition, it is important for it to be given to the Office of Fair Trading so that the competition authorities can look at it and intervene.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

Earlier this year, the Government told us that deaths from human-made air pollution had gone down. A freedom of information request has now revealed that this was because pollutants called PM 2.5s had been reclassified as residual and non-anthropogenic. It has now been admitted that that is not the case. May we have a debate on transparency in the classification of particulate matter?

[Mr Lansley]

Fortunately, I know that PM stands for particulate matter because of my former responsibilities for public health and the way in which Public Health England is responsible for assessing these things. Concerns were raised 10 or more years ago in my own constituency about the health impacts of given levels of particulate matter of different sizes. I will of course ask the Minister responsible at the Department of Health, in the first instance, to respond to the hon. Gentleman.

[Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)]

Yesterday I had the pleasure of giving the opening speech at the annual Love Business East Midlands conference at Donington Park in my constituency. I am pleased to inform the House that delegate numbers and business confidence were at record levels, replicating a report by BDO which said that business confidence is now at the highest level since 1992. As investment intention relies on confidence, may we have a debate on investment in UK businesses and the threats posed to it by the disastrous and reckless policies of the Labour party?

[Mr Lansley]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I applaud the opportunity he has taken, along with his colleagues in the east midlands, to bring together business and to continue to push forward that sense of business confidence, which is very important. What BDO found in the east midlands was mirrored nationally in the recent biannual survey undertaken by Lloyds TSB, which reported business confidence at its strongest since January 1994. That is a clear reflection of the success of this Government’s long-term economic plan, which is giving rise to that increase. Through reducing the deficit, creating more jobs and cutting taxes, we are inspiring business confidence and getting business investment coming back.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

Lord Lawson said on the radio this morning that there was no evidence to link climate change to floods. The Energy and Climate Change Secretary is due to give a speech saying that Conservatives who deny that human activity causes climate change are ignorant, and contribute to extreme weather events such as the recent flooding. Now the Energy Minister, the right hon. Member for Sevenoaks (Michael Fallon), has said:

“Unthinking climate change worship has damaged British industry and put up consumer bills.”

May we have a debate on climate change so that the coalition parties can have this out with each other once and for all?

[Mr Lansley]

The Government’s position is very clear. We, as a country and as a Government, are among those at the forefront of tackling climate change and recognising the risks it represents. Speaking personally as somebody whose constituents have included many of those who work at the British Antarctic Survey, I have never been under any illusions about the man-made impacts on global warming. But that does not mean we should ever close down a debate that says we understand—it is exactly this point—the nature of man-made impacts on the climate. What we have to understand equally are the causative effects that that leads to and how we can adapt and mitigate those, as well as trying to minimise man-made impacts on the environment.

[John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)]

My constituent Chris Taylor worked as a Civil Aviation Authority test pilot for 10 years but was recently made redundant. Will the Leader of the House make time for a statement from the Minister on how the CAA can retain the same capabilities and influence at a European level, given the loss of its last dedicated full-time test pilot?

[Mr Lansley]

I will ask my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Transport to respond to my hon. Friend, although I know that my hon. Friend has had a chance to meet the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Scarborough and Whitby (Mr Goodwill). He knows and the House will be aware that test pilots are employed to undertake flight tests to evaluate aircraft design as part of certification processes. The European Aviation Safety Agency is responsible for the type certification of aircraft manufactured inside the European Union or registered in an EU member state. The Civil Aviation Authority is not responsible for type certification and therefore does not require the services of test pilots to meet its statutory duties. That is enough from me, but I will ask my right hon. Friend at the Department to add a reply to my hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury (John Glen).

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is Valentine’s day tomorrow. In that spirit, may I inform the Leader of the House that we probably have in this country the envy of Silicon valley in the United States in the wonderful tax incentives for individuals to invest in new start-up businesses? With the Budget coming up quite soon, may we have an early debate on expanding that tax incentive to people who invest in social enterprises? The whole world of social enterprise, crowdfunding and social impact investment is changing. It is a great opportunity for our country. May we have a debate so that we can get those added benefits to include social enterprises?

[Mr Lansley]

I am sure the House will be interested in what the hon. Gentleman says. I will make sure that the Treasury sees what he has said and he may find other opportunities between now and the Budget to raise the matter. I entirely agree with him. I know from business angels in the Cambridge area that we in this country have a very strong environment in which to undertake start-up investment. One of the key things we need is to ensure that we have the quantity of venture capital available to support those start-ups through development, because we in this country have a very high level of the initial research and start-up businesses, but sometimes we lose control of the business as it grows.

[Mr David Burrowes (Enfield, Southgate) (Con)]

May we have a debate on Cyprus, following the courageous decision on Tuesday by President Anastasiades and Dr Eroglu to restart talks to reunify Cyprus? We can then join the Prime Minister in fully supporting efforts to reach a just, lasting and comprehensive settlement for all Cypriots.

[Mr Lansley]

I am glad my hon. Friend raises that. I saw that and I shared with him the sense of optimism that those brave steps generated. It was important for Cyprus and for the European Union and member states of the European Union that those steps were taken. I will, if I may, refer what he says to my hon. Friends at the Foreign Office, who might want to find an opportunity to say something about that to the House at some point.

[Dan Jarvis (Barnsley Central) (Lab)]

Given that the House rises today and that the Criminal Justice and Courts Bill is scheduled for Second Reading on the day of our return, may I raise a concern that relates to schedule 4, part 1, which deals with the restraint of children in custody? My concern is that in the light of a judgment by the Court of Appeal in 2008, permitting the use of force for good order and discipline in secure colleges may not be lawful. Will the Leader of the House use his good offices to liaise with his colleagues at the Ministry of Justice to confirm that this is indeed the intended position, as currently stated in the Bill?

[Mr Lansley]

Of course I will raise the point with my colleagues at the Ministry of Justice. The hon. Gentleman will understand that the Second Reading debate will offer an opportunity to debate the principles of the Bill, but the point he raises might also profitably be pursued then and in Committee.

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

There is now wide recognition that character and resilience are as important as GCSEs for young people as they enter adulthood. May we have a debate on what that actually means and implies and what more can be done in and out of school to help young people develop those key traits?

[Mr Lansley]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. I am happy not only that our Education Secretary has said, with verve and commitment, that he wishes to build activities in state schools that mirror those that often occur in independent schools, but that, only today, the shadow Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt), has followed his lead, as he is sometimes wont to do. Reinforcements such as extending school sport support and support for the development of cadet forces in state schools are just some examples of the ways in which we can help build character. Finally—sorry to go on, Mr Speaker—this is about not just character building in the sense of having a wider range of attributes and abilities, but the self-esteem that goes with it. Whatever can build self-esteem will develop in children and young people something that will be of value to them throughout their lives.

[Tom Blenkinsop (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)]

Charlotte Pocklington from Guisborough in my constituency was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer and needed treatment at the Freeman hospital in Newcastle after attending the James Cook hospital in Middlesbrough for diagnosis. She expected the ambulance that was to take her there to arrive at 4.30 pm on the same day she was diagnosed, but no ambulance arrived until 4 am the following morning—a 12-hour wait. This time last year I raised the case of an elderly lady in Marton in my constituency who had to wait 11 hours for an ambulance to respond. May we have an urgent about ambulance responses?

[Mr Lansley]

To assist the hon. Gentleman, I will make sure that my colleagues at the Department of Health hear what he has said. This also provides an opportunity for the North East ambulance service in particular to let the hon. Gentleman know what the situation is. If he wishes to raise the issue further, Health Ministers will be available to answer questions from the Dispatch Box on Tuesday 25 February.

[Andrew Jones (Harrogate and Knaresborough) (Con)]

Last week I visited Claro Precision Engineering, a high-quality company in Knaresborough in my constituency. The company is growing well and it has reported that one of the trends driving that is the reshoring of manufacturing projects and jobs, which is clearly a very positive trend. May we have a statement from the Business Secretary to update the House on what his Department is doing to promote that trend and so further boost UK manufacturing?

[Mr Lansley]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. He may have heard how positively the Prime Minister feels about the way in which reshoring opportunities have been used in recent years to help boost the 1.6 million private sector jobs that have been created since the election and the very positive steps taken in relation to manufacturing. I am pleased to hear my hon. Friend tell the House about Claro Precision Engineering and I hope that many other companies will share in the sense that they can do more here and not outsource and offshore their activities to other countries as much.

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

May we have a debate about altering the fixed-term provisions to four rather than five years? As has been intimated, the coalition currently resembles the characters from the film, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”, who sang:

“We’re busy doing nothing, working the whole day through, trying to find lots of things not to do.”

We could then have a general election in May and a change of Government.

[Mr Lansley]

Is that where it comes from? I thought it was the dwarfs in “Snow White” who sang that, but I am sure the hon. Gentleman is right, because his knowledge of music is so much greater than mine. Perhaps he should stick to music. I have no immediate plans for any debate on revision of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

May I add my voice to those of others and ask the Leader of the House for an urgent debate on flooding, particularly so that I can highlight Thames Water’s lack of investment in its sewerage systems in Cirencester, Fairford, South Cerney and other places? I have serious sewer flooding in my constituency and, unfortunately, it has been exacerbated this week by the grant of a large planning application for residential dwellings in the floodplain.

[Mr Lansley]

My hon. Friend will have observed that on Monday 3 March, which will be an estimates day, the House will discuss managing flood risk. I hope he will also emphasise to Ofwat—as I and other Members have done over the years—the importance of identifying, quantifying and supporting in its price control review the investment required to minimise sewer flooding of properties.

[Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

Given that the Prime Minister has announced that he wants to think again about his new flood insurance scheme—perhaps because of the Help to Buy scheme, which the Government are promoting heavily in areas that are prone to flood risk but will not be covered by the new scheme—and the fact that the clauses in the Water Bill for the scheme were tabled very late, may we now have one of the right hon. Gentleman’s famous legislative pauses to get the scheme right?

[Mr Lansley]

I remind the hon. Lady that the Water Bill is in the House of Lords, not this House, so her question does not relate directly to the business of the House at the moment. Her question was a bit rich, given that this Government worked incredibly hard to get an agreement with the Association of British Insurers to give people the security of knowing that access to affordable flood insurance was backed by a statutory scheme. That could have been done in the last Parliament, but it was not.

On the fact that the scheme was added to the Water Bill at a late stage, we made it clear from the outset, through the inclusion of place holder provisions, that we would consult on it and bring it in later, so I cannot accept the proposition that there is consequently any case for a delay.

[Martin Vickers (Cleethorpes) (Con)]

Good rail services, particularly to the capital, are essential for the economic development of our provincial towns, such as those I represent in northern Lincolnshire. Open access operators have demonstrated that they are well capable of filling the gaps left by the main franchise holders. Will the Leader of the House arrange for a debate so that we can discuss the availability of services provided by open access operators?

[Mr Lansley]

My hon. Friend makes an interesting point. It is probably best for my hon. Friends at the Department for Transport to respond to him. Other hon. Members may be interested in such a debate, and if he thinks that they might join him in seeking to secure time on the Adjournment or through the Backbench Business Committee, he might find that an interesting line to pursue.

[Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)]

Will the Leader of the House pass on my sincere best wishes to the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in his recovery from a very serious eye operation?

When the Leader of the House has a chance for a word with his right hon. Friend, will he, at an opportune moment, seek a guarantee that the independent expert panel report on the failed badger culls will be fully debated and possibly voted on by all Members before an announcement is made about any further roll-out of another 10 culls this summer?

[Mr Lansley]

The hon. Gentleman is very gracious, and I will indeed make sure that his good wishes are passed on to the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, who I know is making very good progress. As we might expect, it turns out that he is quite resilient.

The independent expert panel is still preparing its report. The timing of the completion of the report and of its submission to Ministers is a matter for the panel. The hon. Gentleman will know that the report will include an assessment of the costs, and an economic assessment is being prepared to inform decision making. We will of course keep the House informed about that.

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

I thank my right hon. Friend for providing Government time to debate the Francis report. Officials at the Department of Health have written to a constituent of mine in respect of the trust special administration of Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust that

“the Secretary of State cannot develop his own solution or accept the proposals only in part, nor can he require any amendments to the TSAs’ proposals other than by using his veto.”

With respect, I challenge that interpretation, given the Secretary of State’s overriding powers under sections 1, 2 and 4 of the Health and Social Care Act 2012. Although they accept the broad thrust of the trust special administrators’ recommendations, my constituents look to the Secretary of State to protect local services, especially for the most vulnerable in the areas of maternity and paediatrics. May we have a debate on the powers of the Secretary of State for Health?

[Mr Lansley]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for what he said about the debate on the Francis report and the Government response. I have said before that it is important that we have such a debate and I am glad that I have been able to announce it.

The foundation trust special administration regime could and should have been put in place by the Labour party as part of the creation of foundation trusts, but it was not. The regime has to be carefully specified. It is important that it does not become a means by which the independence of foundation trusts and the role of Monitor as the regulator of foundation trusts can be overridden, other than specifically in relation to the Secretary of State’s adherence to his general duties. The Secretary of State must use the measure only in exceptional circumstances, which implies that it is a veto, rather than to impose his view of how services should be configured over the views of the local commissioners.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

Is the Leader of the House aware of the online petition organised by Coventry City football club supporters and the local newspaper, which asks the Culture, Media and Sport Committee to take evidence from both sides in the dispute? Those on both sides of the dispute have agreed to give evidence. Will he nudge the Chairman of the Committee to take evidence from both sides in order to end the dispute, because they are calling for conciliation? Finally, can we have a date for when the Minister for sport, the Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, the hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Mrs Grant), will come to the House and tell us what her proposals are for reorganising the Football League?

[Mr Lansley]

The hon. Gentleman will be well aware of the important report that has been produced by the Culture, Media and Sport Committee. The Government will respond to that in due course, although I cannot recall precisely when we are due to respond or what the character of the response will be. Although I must not tell any Select Committee what it should or should not do, I will raise the issue of Coventry with the Chair of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee.

[Julian Sturdy (York Outer) (Con)]

With the country suffering some of the worst flooding in living memory—our thoughts are with the communities that have been affected—may we have a debate on the need to strengthen the safeguards in the planning system to prevent houses from being built on the floodplain? City of York council is proposing development on flood-risk areas in my constituency. Is it not time that we started to learn the lessons of the past?

[Mr Lansley]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. I am sure that people in York are only too aware of the risk of flooding, following the serious floods in 2007. He will know that the number of dwellings being built in areas of high flood risk is at its lowest since the land use change statistics began in 1989. To mitigate the risk of flooding, the Environment Agency is consulted on planning applications for areas that are at risk of flooding. In the last year for which figures are available, 2012-13, 99% of planning decisions on housing by councils were in line with the agency’s flood risk advice. I hope that that gives him some reassurance about the role of the Environment Agency in the decisions of his council.

[Mark Lazarowicz (Edinburgh North and Leith) (Lab/Co-op)]

In Environment, Food and Rural Affairs questions earlier, the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the hon. Member for Camborne and Redruth (George Eustice), said that the reason for the delay in publishing the report on food banks was that it was going through the quality assurance process. The quality assurance process seems to be taking longer than the writing of the report. Perhaps I should ask for a debate on the quality of Government reports, but, in all seriousness, will the Leader of the House speak to his colleagues and get the report published, because this issue is of interest to many Members and the report will inform the debate on both sides of the House?

[Mr Lansley]

I had the benefit of hearing my hon. Friend’s reply to the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field) at DEFRA questions. I have also responded to the hon. Member for St Helens North (Mr Watts) on this subject. We are ensuring that the report is in a position to be published. However, I am afraid that I am not in a position to say when that will happen.

[Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)]

Will the Government consider updating the role of the Minister for cities, the Minister of State, Cabinet Office, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark), to make him the Minister for cities and counties, in recognition of the fact that growth deals are just as important in non-metropolitan and county areas as they are in our great cities?

[Mr Lansley]

My hon. Friend will know that some 20 areas have been included in the second tranche of city deals. Those are not only major conurbations, but cities and towns with a population of about 100,000. Many of the deals include the surrounding rural areas, where an awful lot of economic activity and growth can be generated. I say that advisedly because Cambridge and South Cambridgeshire are promoting a city deal jointly. The Minister for cities and constitution is pursuing that model. He is identifying where growth is happening in order to construct city deals that support that growth.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

Will the Leader of the House take advantage of the relatively light legislative programme—which, in itself, is not a bad thing—to arrange for daily oral statements from Departments on a rota basis to enhance the accountability of the Government? Given the poor quality of debates on unallotted Opposition days, will he scrap them and replace them with extra days for Back-Bench debates? Will he consider creating a Back-Bench week that would be entirely devoted to issues that Back Benchers want discussed?

[Mr Lansley]

My hon. Friend tempts me. [Interruption.] Yes—a little bit. However, I will resist that temptation because we are a Government who believe in ensuring accountability and scrutiny in the Chamber. We have deliberately in this Parliament seen through reforms to the Backbench Business Committee, which has afforded time, and from now on in this Session time in this Chamber for that Committee will be in excess of its 27 allotted days. As I said earlier, the same is also true for the Opposition, which is fine and as it should be. We cannot have a sort of closed period for scrutiny and opportunities for debates generated other than from within the Government. Finally, I will take issue again with my hon. Friend. We have just seen the introduction of the 20th Government programme Bill in this Session, which, for a Session of this normal annual length, is broadly speaking what one would expect and what we have seen in previous Sessions. There is no merit in having a large number of Bills as such—perhaps the contrary—but the idea that there is a light legislative programme when we have introduced 20 programme Bills is, I am afraid, simply not true.

[Mr Speaker]

Order. We now come to the Back-Bench debate on the Normington report on reform of the Police Federation. Before I ask the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) to open the debate, I will mention that four hon. Members who have applied to speak are not currently present in the Chamber. Further and better particulars of those hon. Members can be provided to the Whips. It is incumbent on Members who apply to speak in a debate to be present at its start, both because it is a courtesy, and in this case because I feel sure that they would want to benefit from the wisdom of the right hon. Gentleman, from which the House is about to benefit.

Backbench Business

Thursday 13th February 2014 Commons Chamber

Police Federation Reform (Normington Report)

Thursday 13th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Relevant document: Oral evidence to the Home Affairs Committee from the Police Federation, on police and crime commissioners: progress to date, HC 757-iv.]

12:02

[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

As ever, you flatter me too much, Mr Speaker.

I beg to move,

That this House notes the Independent Review of the Police Federation conducted by Sir David Normington and calls upon the Government to take action to implement the report’s recommendations and to reform the Police Federation.

I spent a large proportion of the last decade defending the police one way or another, yet I have never experienced a time when public trust in the police was at a lower level. In my view that is a tragedy, both for the vast majority of decent officers who joined up to catch criminals and protect the public, but also for the wider public. We must deal firmly with those who bring the police into disrepute if we are to restore the reputation that most policemen properly deserve.

There was a similar crisis of confidence as far back as 1918-19 after the police strikes of those years, the first of which was called during wartime and caused a similar low perception of the standing of the police. That strike was ended after one day. The police were granted a considerable pay increase, but as a result, as a vital service they were forbidden both membership of a trade union and the right to strike. The Government effectively established the Police Federation in place of a union, to represent the concerns of police officers around the country. They gave it a statutory closed shop, which lasts to this day.

There is no doubt that the Police Federation had a noble beginning, and for many years it was a constructive force behind British policing, raising the reputation of the British copper to the position it ought to hold. Regrettably, the federation today is a bloated and sclerotic body, and has acquired the worst characteristics of the worst trade unions that we thought—and hoped—we had seen the end of in the ’70s.

[Mr David Burrowes (Enfield, Southgate) (Con)]

Police representation crosses boundaries. This is a matter for the police rank and file on the ground, whose confidence has been shaken, and for the public; and it is a matter for hon. Members on both sides of the House and should be beyond party politics. The federation has unfortunately engaged in party politics and has politicised itself by its actions. Does my right hon. Friend agree that hon. Members on both sides of the House need to express our concerns, and that it is therefore disappointing that there are Members in number on only one side of the House to engage in the debate?

[Mr Davis]

I accept one aspect of what my hon. Friend says. He has had cases relating to the misbehaviour of police officers in his constituency and has done a great deal to defend them, sometimes but not always with the help of the federation. [Interruption.] If the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) wants to speak from the Opposition Front Bench, I will happily take his intervention. The breadth of the appeal of the debate is an issue, but I do not want to make this party political. There are now two Members on the Opposition Back Benches and they have strong views—the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) has tabled a motion jointly with me in the past, and the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) is the Chairman of the Select Committee on Home Affairs. I would not make this a party political issue. Members on both sides of the House have something to gain from the police being truly apolitical and truly upholding our democracy rather than interfering in it in the wrong way.

[Julian Smith (Skipton and Ripon) (Con)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that leadership comes from the top, and that the Association of Chief Police Officers has not led from the top? Many of the criticisms in the excellent report could also be made of ACPO.

[Mr Davis]

My hon. Friend has a point. I do not want to broaden the debate to include all police issues, but he is right. ACPO is badly constituted and should never have been set up in the way that it was. There are signs that ACPO should have done more to lead firmly. We saw that in the west midlands cases, where the various chief constables were perhaps not as strong in upholding justice as they should have been.

That brings me to the federation itself. I am talking primarily about the national federation, but also about some of the regions. I say that because some of the local federation organisations do a very good job on very thin resources to represent, as they properly should, the interests of their members.

Nevertheless, there are many criticisms to level at the federation, including that it is inefficient and wasteful. There is a duplication of tasks and structures. It is profligate, spending its members’ money on grace and favour flats and on huge bar bills. It is badly governed, with no apparent strong leadership to guarantee direction and stability. It behaves in a manner that sometimes brings police forces into disrepute by pursuing personal and political vendettas—the sort of things to which my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield, Southgate (Mr Burrowes) has referred—against prominent public persons and bodies, and legal actions against private citizens, sometimes even the victims of crime.

After the Police Federation’s attack on my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), the view of the public, and damningly of the federation’s members, was that the federation had to change.

[Mr Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

Given my right hon. Friend’s reference to our right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), will he comment on today’s front page of The Times, which I am sure he has seen?

[Mr Davis]

I do not want to widen the debate and have a rerun of the Mitchell case, but I should say a couple of things about it. The House knows full well that I did not approve of the Leveson process—I strongly believe in a free press—but even I am astonished that, after Leveson, a police force has yet again leaked with an incredible spin a confidential document to which the victim in the case, my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield, has not had access. First, I expect the Metropolitan Police Commissioner to have a proper leak inquiry into that—I have told him that this morning. Secondly, an astonishing interpretation was put on the leak. The leak shows that an officer, four hours after attempting to stop my right hon. Friend going through the main gates of Downing street—this did not happen in a panic or a rush and was premeditated—wrote to his seniors not to say, “We have a security issue. Will somebody please have a conversation with Mr Mitchell to ensure he understands that we cannot let him through?”, which would have been the proper thing to do and what hon. Members would have done, but to set up a circumstance in which the situation would be resolved by a public confrontation at the front gate after the officer had ensured that his seniors supported him in doing so. If anything, that reinforces the story we were told by an anonymous whistleblower that this was a premeditated action. Today’s press coverage is not a good reflection on the police in two ways: it undermines their main case and it is something that they simply should not have done under these circumstances.

If the House will forgive me, I will try not to rest too much on the Mitchell case, because it is just one of many in which we have reason to be concerned about the role of the federation.

[Mr Dominic Raab (Esher and Walton) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend is right. Does he agree, as the Normington report sets out very clearly, that the Mitchell case is just one illustration of the, frankly, flagrant and endemic bullying and harassment that often goes on among the federation’s own members, whether online or in person? That is set out very clearly in the report.

[Mr Davis]

My hon. Friend—he is also an old friend—is entirely right. I will elaborate in some detail on some of those cases in a moment.

The federation chose a very good person to write the report. David Normington, a distinguished ex-permanent secretary at the Home Office, is a classic Whitehall mandarin. If anything, he is more tempted than most to be careful and sober in his language, and to pull his punches in his descriptions or at least to mitigate them. However, it is in the best interests of police officers across the country that we reveal very clearly, and perhaps in starker detail than Normington did, the extent to which the federation has failed.

Even in its sober language, the Normington report was, as my hon. Friend intimates, utterly damning of the federation’s performance. It made 36 recommendations, focusing on returning professionalism, democracy and efficiency to the Police Federation. To fully understand the extent of the problem, we should examine a number of areas where the need for reform is particularly apparent.

It is a matter of great concern that the Police Federation is as profligate as it appears to be. There are numerous examples of that. It spent £26 million building its Leatherhead headquarters. Frankly, that is extravagant enough to do justice to one of the London merchant banks at the height of the City excesses. The headquarters have a hotel, a bar, an indoor swimming pool and 11 grace and favour apartments. Even more outrageous is that, to pay for the extravagant cost, members’ subscription fees had to be raised by 23%. The federation’s officers, with their salaries still paid by their respective forces, receive salary enhancements of up to £25,000 from the federation. They are given those enhancements for doing what is, after all, an easier job than being on the cold streets of Britain on the night shift: sitting in their luxury headquarters, instead of performing public duties. I have been told that full-time federation officers have free use of the grace and favour flats and live on company credit cards. The purchase of large quantities of food and alcohol on those cards is apparently not uncommon.

To put a number on this, the accounts show a provision of £2 million in a tax dispute with Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. As I understand it, if that provision is to meet any tax liability, at a tax rate of 40%, that means that £5 million of claims have been made on perks, and perhaps unjustifiably claimed as a proper expense. That is astonishing.

In the newspapers only a couple of days ago a police widow—herself a serving police constable, if the report was right—said that federation officials treated memorial services, those most important and high-gravitas of occasions,

“like a drunken jolly, getting drunk on federation credit cards. Their drunken excess upsets families every year”,

so this is not an exception. I heard similar allegations about the behaviour of federation officials at conferences, at which bar bills of hundreds of pounds were again being charged to federation credit cards.

[Mark Pritchard (The Wrekin) (Con)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that the money might be better spent restoring the damaged national police memorial, on the Mall, which remains broken and damaged, and that that would be a fitting tribute to the brave and dedicated police officers who form the majority?

[Mr Davis]

That is an extremely imaginative suggestion. I have my own ideas about what should happen with the money, but my hon. Friend’s idea should be taken into account.

In making these assertions, I have largely depended on whistleblowers—people who have bravely come forward, shocked at what they have seen—but police whistleblowers are particularly at risk and so are loth to enter the public domain, which makes it hard to check what they have said. As a result, I called on the federation to publish its expense accounts and live up to generally expected standards of transparency. I did this so that I could confirm or deny whether these claims were correct. As far as I am aware, the federation has not published these expense and credit card accounts, which leads me to believe that the whistleblowers are right.

It is up to the federation’s members to say whether they consider this profligacy acceptable, because mostly—but not entirely—it is their money, but they cannot make that judgment unless they know exactly what is being done in their name with their money. So that is another reason to have total transparency in these accounts. Yet another reason concerns my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Damian Green), who as Minister for Policing, Criminal Justice and Victims represents the Home Office on the Front Bench today. We put taxpayers’ money into the federation—it is there properly to perform a function we want performed—so it might be the case that taxpayers’ money is being wasted at these conferences.

The federation appears to have a problem with transparency. It is telling that it failed to answer even Sir David Normington’s requests concerning the so-called No. 2 accounts used by the various branches. This money comes from selling insurance and then keeping a rake-off or commission, but so far the federation has not been willing or able to provide the information that Normington asked for. I understand that this probably accounts for £35 million of assets just sitting around the country. Again, this is money that belongs to serving police officers, not the organisation.

Contrary to the federation’s claims earlier this week, the full details of the 11 grace and favour apartments are not published in its accounts. I will not spend much time on this, but, to save colleagues time looking it up, I recommend they read note 3 of the federation’s accounts. It is the only reference to the apartments, but it does not contain what I would recognise as details telling us that these are grace and favour apartments used for the benefit of federation officers, with or without the approval of its members. It is clear that the federation does not know what transparency means, but it can only restore trust in itself if it imposes transparency on all its operations as a matter of urgency.

The federation’s use of funds raises another matter. It has formidable financial muscle. I guess its total assets come to about £70 million, the majority coming from subscription fees, but some from the No. 2 accounts. The last set of audited accounts showed the federation with a surplus, over and above all its costs and profligacy, of £3.5 million per annum.

In addition, we see in the costs that about £10 million was spent on administration, including the profligacies that I talked about. Most astonishingly, £8 million every single year was spent on legal actions. Furthermore, there are provisions against the loss of certain active legal cases—in one case, for up to £1 million. Other such provisions are for £350,000 or £450,000.

Let us understand something. The right hon. Member for Tottenham is here and will well understand that sometimes there are good reasons for the federation to act vigorously on behalf of its members. Big legal and individual interests will be in play in the Duggan case, and in such cases it is entirely proper that provisions should be made. I do not in any way criticise that element of legal defence, although I have to say that it should come about through an insurance function rather than through the discretion of a Fed rep. Never mind.

Such legal action is justifiable, but on many occasions aggressive litigation should not be carried out against those bringing complaints against the police. Chris Mullin, the distinguished predecessor of the Home Affairs Committee Chairman, has previously said that although most unions will not act on behalf of a member who is clearly in the wrong, the federation has a long track record of defending the indefensible and will gleefully launch claims against the victims of crime.

There are two recent examples of the federation’s appetite for litigation. PC Kelly Jones sued a burglary victim after she tripped on a kerb outside his garage and PC Richard Seymour sued another burglary victim after falling over a drain on his property. In both instances, it was the Police Federation that assisted in progressing the claims, despite the pleading of senior officers that such claims were detrimental to the image of the police force. This is based on press reportage, so I cannot be sure of it, but the federation has been accused of pressuring PC Kelly Jones into making her claim when she had no desire to do so. I hear from other whistleblowers that it is not uncommon for federation members to be actively encouraged to make claims that Members might find inappropriate. A particular concern—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. I gently remind the right hon. Gentleman that the Backbench Business Committee recommends that the opening speech should last for 10 to 15 minutes. He has now been speaking for 20 minutes. Ten Members wish to participate, and there is another debate this afternoon. We are all hanging on the right hon. Gentleman’s every word, but he should bear it in mind that other people are involved. I would be grateful if he concluded soon.

[Mr Davis]

Absolutely, Madam Deputy Speaker. I have been generous with interventions—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. I have to tell the right hon. Gentleman that that does not count; the 10 to 15 minutes are not qualified in any way. The right hon. Gentleman has been generous in giving way, but other Members will want a reasonable time to participate.

[Mr Davis]

I will be as brisk as I can, Madam Deputy Speaker.

I come to the most serious point of the debate: the bringing of defamation cases against people who disagree with the police’s version of events. There is no downside for a police officer when they pursue a libel action backed by the enormous resources of the Fed. That raises two distinct and concerning issues. First, action against the press, who must hold the police to account, is utterly against the interests of a fair and free society except in very clear-cut circumstances. Secondly, there is the action taken against members of the public, whom the police are charged with protecting, who disagree with the police’s version of events. That insulates the police from criticism and from being held to account for what they do. Such actions should not take place. If the federation is using its financial might to crush legitimate claims against officers or—worse—to pursue those who have already been subject to a police stitch-up, to take an extreme example, that huge injustice would compound existing injustices.

My next point is about the Normington report on politically motivated campaigns. It said:

“Throughout our inquiry we have heard allegations that some Federation representatives who have personally targeted successive Home Secretaries, Andrew Mitchell, Tom Winsor and others, bringing the Federation into disrepute and risking the police reputation for impartiality and integrity…If the Federation wants to be respected and listened to in the future, this has to stop.”

Such actions are completely unacceptable and contrary to the purpose of the Police Federation.

Finally, I turn to what should be done. As we consider whether progress and reform should be left to the federation, we should bear two simple points in mind. Are the interests of its officers, who have something to lose—a cushy job and good pay—or are the interests of the members being pursued? It is vital that the members themselves should be properly represented.

Last week, Fiona McElroy, a former principal private secretary brought in to help the federation achieve the reforms, was fired; her deputy also left the federation in outrage at her treatment. I ask the Minister to give the federation two ultimatums. First, it should immediately sign up to recommendation 1 and accept the revised core purpose to act in the public interest, with public accountability alongside accountability to their own members. Secondly, it should accept all the other Normington recommendations before its triennial elections this year, when it will lock in place a whole set of officers for another three years. If it does not do that, the Government will, I think, be properly authorised to intervene. In my view, if they do intervene, they should implement Normington-plus—put in place all the Normington proposals and in addition act to deal with the profligacy and misuse of public and members’ money.

Such a move, I am afraid, would mean selling the Leatherhead headquarters, centralising the money and giving back to members the funds that the federation has inappropriately used in the past several years. That would be about £500 a member and would still leave a viable federation. That is how we can make the Police Federation serve its members and, equally importantly, serve the public of the nation that its members are there to uphold.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. Eleven Members now wish to speak. I suggest that each takes no longer than 10 minutes, including interventions. I will not put that limit on the clock, but if it looks as if some Members who have sat here patiently will not get to speak because we are running out of time, I will impose a formal time limit. Hopefully, however, 10 minutes with interventions will be enough for the main points to be covered.

12:28

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) on an excellent speech. I thank him and the other sponsors of this Backbench Business Committee debate for ensuring that the House can discuss the recommendations of the Normington report at an early stage. This is our first opportunity in many years to have such a discussion, although we often discuss policing issues in the House; we discussed the police grant here only yesterday.

I begin by paying tribute to the hard-working police officers in the police service, including those such as PC Craig Smith. With an off-duty paramedic, David King, he struggled to free the driver of a burning car in Leicestershire and saved the person at risk. He was a runner-up in the police bravery awards, which I, with Ministers and others, attend annually to pay tribute to the marvellous work being done throughout the country by individual police officers.

I have to say that, following a proposal from the hon. Member for Northampton North (Michael Ellis), the Select Committee on Home Affairs has unanimously agreed to hold an inquiry into the Police Federation. The terms of reference will be announced next week, and I hope that they will provide an opportunity for a full-scale inquiry into the matters that have been raised. I shall return to this point at the end of my short speech.

Morale in the police service is at an all-time low, as the Stevens report recognised. Indeed, if Members talk to any police officer stationed here in the Palace of Westminster, they will hear that people are deciding to leave the force because of the current state of affairs in policing. That is regrettable. There is an obligation on all of us to ensure that we have the best police service in the world—which I think it is—and we also need to ensure that the concerns of Police Federation members are met.

I want to mention the case of the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell). It is not the subject of the debate—we are talking about the Police Federation—but the right hon. Gentleman and his family have gone through a terrible ordeal. I believe that he has now been vindicated, given that 11 of those involved have now become the subject of misconduct hearings and one has gone to prison. The cases of three witnesses who appeared before the Home Affairs Committee are still outstanding and are the subject of an Independent Police Complaints Commission inquiry that has been held in abeyance because of a judicial review application.

Those of us who have been around for a long time have asked ourselves: if this could happen to a serving Cabinet Minister, what hope would there be if it happened to one of our constituents? The right hon. Gentleman has done the House and the public a great service, from his position of power as an elected Member of the House, but his situation is quite different from those of people in Leicester and elsewhere in the country. He has been vindicated, and it is important that a line should now be drawn and that people should move on, for the sake of him and his family, and of the reputation of the police as a whole.

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

My right hon. Friend makes his point very effectively. Does he agree that in cases such as these, continuing litigation could eventually bankrupt someone, and that the organisation is capable of going way too far? What would that mean for our ordinary constituents, who simply would not have the means to defend themselves in similar circumstances?

[Keith Vaz]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his intervention. I am a little concerned at the number of cases in which someone criticises a serving police officer and ends up being served with a legal notice or threatened with legal proceedings as a result of raising issues of legitimate concern. The Select Committee inquiry will want to look at such cases.

The right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield and his family must have been through a terrible ordeal. It is time to draw a line and move on, and to think about how we can reform the structure, now that the personal issues have been resolved and people have gone to jail or faced misconduct hearings.

[Mark Pritchard]

rose—

[Keith Vaz]

I will give way, but this will be the last time, because I am mindful of what Madam Deputy Speaker has said.

[Mark Pritchard]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman. He mentioned moving on. Does he agree that the fact that carefully placed stories and leaks have found their way into national newspapers ahead of today’s debate does not help to restore public trust in the police service—particularly the Metropolitan police service? It is time to move on, and it is time for the Metropolitan Police Commissioner to get a grip of his officers. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the commissioner ought to have learned from Leveson, and from his previous mistakes in dealing with some parts of the media?

[Keith Vaz]

Of course I deplore leaks, but we have a free press. And of course it is important that everyone should learn the lessons.

Let me turn to the subject of the debate, the reform of the Police Federation. The Normington report is pretty scathing in its criticism of the federation. It says that it should be changed “from top to bottom”, and talks about the present crisis being the result of strategic failures. Sir David Normington also found that 91% of federation members wanted the organisation to change, so this is not a case of Parliament dictating to the federation and telling it what it should do. I am sure we would all want to step away from doing that. The members themselves are saying that they want change.

We need to ensure that the report’s recommendations are implemented by the current leadership of the federation. I pay tribute to Steve Williams, Steve White and Ian Rennie, the chair, vice-chair and general secretary of the organisation. It was Steve Williams who set up the Normington inquiry; we would not have had an inquiry, had the chairman not decided to do that. I also welcome the fact that they told the Select Committee that they intended to implement every one of Sir David’s recommendations. Our inquiry will commence shortly, and I hope that we will be able to look at the length of time it will take to implement them.

I see that another member of the Committee, the hon. Member for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless) is in his place. There were two things that caused the Committee some concern. One was the lack of knowledge about the No. 2 accounts that are being held across all the regions, which the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden mentioned. No one knows the figures involved. I would have thought that the chairman of an organisation as important as the Police Federation would know how much money it was holding locally. He told the Committee that he had written to every regional chairperson to ask for that information, and I hope that they will provide it. If the leadership of the federation is to succeed in implementing the Normington report, as we want it to, it must have that information.

The second issue that struck me and other members of the Committee was the fact that even Steve Williams did not know how many members the federation had, because the database was not up to date. That is also a matter of concern. Surely an organisation that speaks on behalf of thousands of police officers ought to have the names, addresses and e-mail addresses of every single member. That information is kept on a regional basis by the regional chairs and committees, but it is not passed on to the national headquarters, even though the national leadership has to speak on behalf of the federation. I hope that those two important issues will be resolved.

The leadership issue is an important one. The hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Julian Smith) mentioned the need for effective leadership earlier. I want to pay tribute to Paul McKeever, who sadly died at the end of last year. He was a splendid leader of the Police Federation. However, we can have the best leaders in the world, but if the structures are not right, we will not be able to implement change. The Normington report is about changing the structure of the federation, and I think we all agree that it has to change. The federation must also be open and transparent—not necessarily to Parliament, although I would love that to happen. It must be open and transparent to its members. In the end, we are all parts of organisations whose leaderships need to respond to the members, but the members also need to respond when leadership is shown.

I shall end by outlining some of the issues that I hope the Select Committee will look into. These are not agreed terms of reference—those will be agreed at the next meeting—but they are the elements that I think we need to look at. We need to look at the federation’s spending and its use of public money; the contents and usage of the reserves and the federation’s No. 2 accounts; the use of members’ subscriptions by representatives; and the leadership of the federation at national and regional level, including the elections; the current membership and ensuring that the Police Federation’s communications with all members are robust; and ensuring there is co-operation between regional and national boards. We do need to hear from some of the people who work for the federation and have made statements in the public domain—we would like to hear from them at Home Affairs Committee hearings.

Although the Normington report is damning—no organisation would like to read such a report about the way in which it conducts its business—I have confidence that the leadership is going to implement what Normington has said, because it has told the Committee that that is what it wants to do. The role of the Home Affairs Committee is to monitor that and make sure that those good words are translated into good deeds, for the benefit of the federation’s members and the country as a whole.

12:41

[Mr Henry Bellingham (North West Norfolk) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), the Chair of the Select Committee, who speaks many words of wisdom. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) on initiating this debate. As he has pointed out, the Police Federation was set up nearly 96 years ago, as part of a concordat between the police and Her Majesty’s Government. A simple deal was struck: in return for not striking and not joining a trade union, the police would have a federation that would have unprecedented access to Ministers and would receive taxpayers’ money. Over many years, the federation built up a superb reputation for being measured, fair-minded and discreet. It built that strong brand, which was the envy of many other representative organisations and trade associations in this country and around the world.

When I first became an MP, the Police Federation actually had parliamentary advisers on both sides of the House, as my right hon. Friends the Members for Haltemprice and Howden and for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) will well recall. When I first came here, the adviser was the then Member for Bury St Edmunds, Eldon Griffiths, and he was followed by Sir Michael Shersby, the Member for Uxbridge at the time. They were well paid, as indeed was the Labour representative of the Police Federation, they were always called early in debates and they had a status within the House that gave them the chance to speak up for the police. That was accepted as being within the traditions of the House and it was very much part of the concordat struck all those years ago.

As my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden has pointed out, there has been an incredibly unfortunate downhill spiral, which probably started 20 or 30 years ago, and professional standards have slipped. Part of the blame must lie with the previous Government, who in many ways undermined the police. They lost the confidence of the police on many different issues, not least through their determination to drive through force mergers and the fact that they encouraged the building up of this compensation culture.

My right hon. Friend has listed a large catalogue of examples that point to a totally unacceptable culture within the national Police Federation. I have had a lot of dealings with my local police federation in Norfolk, and I stress that at all times the people there have been totally professional and really impressive. They have gone out of their way to stand up for the interests of members of the constabulary within my constituency, and I do not believe they have ever leaked anything to the press or done anything that would undermine the integrity of the local police federation. Unfortunately, that excellent set of high standards and conduct has not been replicated within the Police Federation nationally. He described a culture of excess, explaining that it is so well exemplified by the new headquarters at Leatherhead and the whole saga of different incidents that have taken place over the past few years.

I wish to discuss two recent incidents that have led to grave concerns. The first is the behaviour of the three Police Federation members who went to the office of my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield in his constituency: Inspector Ken MacKaill, Detective Sergeant Stuart Hinton and Sergeant Chris Jones. Their behaviour was totally and utterly unacceptable. They were shown to have lied and to have misled the Select Committee, and they should have been dismissed immediately.

[Mr David Ruffley (Bury St Edmunds) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend share my disbelief that when the three midlands officers were invited to give an apology in the Home Affairs Committee they declined to do so?

[Mr Bellingham]

Indeed. Their performance was utterly abysmal and it brought the federation into huge disrepute.

The other incident relates to what happened outside the gates of No. 10 Downing street. PC Richardson, the officer on duty, was quoted the other day as saying that it was “so wrong” of federation officials to stage-manage the incident. He said:

“It was nothing to do with them. Certain people thought they had a silver bullet with which they could overturn police reforms.

I’m speaking out because I feel I have been betrayed by the leakers, mischief makers and sections of the Federation. It has caused me 18 months of grief and by going public I expect I’ll get a lot more.”

That speaks volumes about a culture that has to change, and change soon.

In conclusion, we now have the Normington report, which contains a set of positive, constructive recommendations. Every hard-working, decent police officer up and down the country must reclaim their federation and try to restore it to the glory days of the past, when they had a federation that was the envy of every other organisation in this country. The Normington report provides the opportunity to do it, if it is accepted in full and implemented in full.

12:47

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

It is wonderful that the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) has secured this debate, although it is sad that we have reached a point where there is such deep concern across the House about one of our most noble and great professions. It has been a great privilege for me, over the past year or so, to serve on the police parliamentary scheme and spend time with front-line officers across London and beyond. The scheme continues and I am looking forward to spending time with front-line officers next week. Overwhelmingly, the scheme has confirmed my childhood belief, which began at about the age of nine when I said to my parents that I wanted to be a police officer, that the men and women who serve in our police forces across the country do a fantastic job.

These officers do a fantastic job at a time when, as has been said by the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, morale is pretty low, they feel pretty battered and they feel that contracts forged with them, particularly in relation to their pensions, have been totally changed around them—reform has come, as it has to so many other professionals across this country. I know how these officers deal with the public not just because I was there to see it, but because I have met many hundreds of officers. I have seen how they interact with tricky situations. I have seen how they have dealt with the vulnerable—alcoholics, vagrants, drug addicts. I have seen them do an assortment of things, and I have seen armed officers deal with the huge burden and responsibility of carrying a gun, and it has overwhelmingly left me impressed.

It is against that truth that this discussion and this debate are so important. All of us have had the privilege of travelling to countries where corruption is endemic in the police force. I think of sitting in meetings in Brazil and also of the challenges and problems in eastern Europe. However, we all understand that, in a growing democracy such as ours, how we treat the most vulnerable and the areas of our life where light often does not shine is an indication of the state of our democracy. The day-to-day job of the police is to deal with a small criminal minority—fortunately, it is a small minority in our country. The light often has not shone and certain practices can build up. That is why it is so fundamental that here in this Chamber we are able to shine that light.

[Julian Smith]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the report shows that the light is not shining in the Police Federation on women or on people from ethnic minorities? One of the most shocking things about the report is the lack of effort that the federation has made on people and on serving members other than white men.

[Mr Lammy]

The hon. Gentleman makes his point strongly. That point comes across crystal clear in the report. I was going on to say that many of us have watched in this country as cases involving minorities have often been overlooked. The truth is that there are many cases, some of which emanate from my own constituency, where there have been concerns about the Police Federation and a closed shop, particularly in relation to getting at the truth. However, what is so startling is that what may have been a minority concern has broken into the mainstream. When three officers so blatantly tell mistruths and so blatantly refuse to apologise over an event involving a Cabinet Minister in a country such as this, it must tell us something about a culture of impunity that has become endemic in the system. It must also say something about the necessary reform that must now come. I am pleased, therefore, that the Police Federation has accepted the report’s recommendations. The tipping point must surely have been reached if it has come to pass in this way.

As we have this debate in 2014, it is clear that a number of our institutions need to reform and to look closely at these closed practices. We as Members of Parliament are premier among them. We have had debates about closed practices in the NHS and the need for a stronger whistleblowing culture. In the Leveson report, we saw real concerns about parts of the journalism profession. Now, as we come to the police, we must see an end to those closed practices and to the refusal to get to the truth.

We have such discussions not to attack but out of sadness. The practices under discussion have chronic effects on ordinary people’s lives and they put tremendous pressure on families. It is the nature of any state that it leaves the individuals caught up in this feeling desperately powerless. That is why we juxtapose the situation in which the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) has found himself with so many others.

[Mr Raab]

The right hon. Gentleman is making a powerful speech. Does he agree that the way in which the Police Federation uses its funds in litigation is critical to the balanced approach that he is discussing? It is one thing for it to defend its own members from litigation—to use the fund as a shield—but another thing to use those funds as a sword to pursue other people, especially victims or other members of the public?

[Mr Lammy]

Absolutely. The point is that some of those funds involve taxpayers’ money, which must demand close scrutiny. I am pleased that the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee suggested that scrutiny should be No. 1 on the agenda. It is also the case that the federation has seen fit to go after leading members of our society who are looking at police reform issues. Why is it that it thinks that it can get away with challenging a senior Cabinet Minister? Is it because parliamentarians, MPs and Ministers at this point in the cycle just happen to be a minority group that is up for attack and the federation thinks it can get away with it? There is a connection with the way it might deal with certain types of criminals. There is a connection with the way it might deal with some parts of the Irish community in this country, who would say that they have experienced some sharp practices from parts of the Police Federation. I am talking about the notion that, “It is a minority, the public don’t care that much and we can get away with this.” We must challenge that, because the honour of a great profession is at stake. Some £8 million is spent annually in relation to litigation. These are important budgets. We must ensure that they are being used for the right purposes.

I have been concerned, especially in the Duggan case, that officers have been advised by the Police Federation not to give interviews. Attempts to suspend officers facing serious allegations are always fought, whatever the circumstances. If any of us were caught up in a situation that involved the death of another individual, we would not be able to refuse to give an interview. Why would we accord that power to people who are in uniform? This is a very important issue.

One of the fundamentals of our system is the fantastic idea that we have policing by consent. That is at the heart of our police service. Here in London, there are only 32,000 police officers, and a population heading towards 10 million. In reality, it is the 10 million people who work alongside the police who give us that feeling that we are safe almost anywhere in London. The idea is that we police by consent, not by fear as is the case in America or in parts of continental Europe where police officers carry guns. It is an idea that we must treasure and protect. It is grossly undermined when a minority of police officers misbehave, they are not challenged sufficiently, there is not sufficient scrutiny, and there is the sense of a closed shop where even those who are blatantly lying are protected. That is why this report is so important, why the House must look closely at implementing it and why we must revisit these issues not just in Backbench debates over the coming months and years but in debates in Government time where we are absolutely rigorous about protecting this important fundamental of our democracy.

12:59

[Sir Richard Ottaway (Croydon South) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to have heard two excellent speeches from Opposition Members. I particularly welcome the decision of the Home Affairs Committee to look into this matter. In a Parliament that has been dominated by Select Committees, that is welcome. The right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) has just made an excellent speech. I agree with him that this is not a political issue and that it is not about my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell). Indeed, 99% of police officers are good people to whom still we turn in times of trouble.

Over the past couple of hours I have ascertained that the flooding situation in my constituency is seriously deteriorating, so I hope that you will accept my apologies, Madam Deputy Speaker, and forgive me if I do not stay for the whole debate.

Three words—transparency, accountability and credibility—go to the heart of today’s debate. They ought to describe the values of the Police Federation, which was set up by statute almost 100 years ago to protect the “interests and welfare” of rank and file officers, but they are conspicuously missing according to Sir David Normington’s devastating forensic review.

Our 21st century Police Federation has become a vehicle for a vocal minority to pursue their own personal agendas. That is punishing not just the public, to whom the independent statutory body is accountable, but some 130,000 members, many of whom are fed up with the antics of the federation reps who are bringing their profession into disrepute. I am struck by an independent poll that has found that 64% of the federation’s members are dissatisfied with its overall performance and 91% believe that it is time for the organisation to change. Those are opinion poll figures that any one of us would die for.

That vote of no confidence will have been consolidated by recent reports of the dismissal of a senior employee— Ms Fiona McElroy, the director of communications—after just three months because she dared to challenge the federation’s finances. Her deputy resigned in protest. As that resignation shows, finances are a touchy subject because cash is key. In Sir David’s words, finances

“are inextricably linked with some of the deeper cultural, structural and operational changes“

that he is trying to bring about. One of his recommendations is to publish for the public to see all accounts from which the federation derives income or to which it contributes revenue. In particular, we need greater transparency about the so-called No. 2 accounts, which are generated from fees in addition to membership subscriptions for additional legal and support services. Those accounts, held by several local federation branches, are worth an estimated £50 million, but they are largely kept off the books. Only 7 out of 43 local federation branches disclose details on their annual return. Why the secrecy? This cynic would say that secrecy is a pretty good way of avoiding scrutiny.

Let me pick up on the point that was made earlier about it being perfectly legitimate for the police to fund legal actions to protect their members. What needs to be scrutinised is why this organisation, which is secretive about its finances, is funding libel actions. It cannot be right for a police officer, who is after all a public servant, to be backed by the might of a multi-million pound outfit that is shrouded in secrecy to sue members of the public who do not have the resources to defend themselves. That seems an improper use of money for a statutory body that was established to look after its members, in cases ranging from misconduct allegations to personal injury claims, and, of course, genuinely to serve the public good.

This week, the human rights group Liberty has spoken out against this “dangerous” precedent, which it believes breaches the right to freedom of expression and other articles under the Human Rights Act. The public must be able to defend themselves against police claims without fear of civil proceedings, and Liberty raises concerns about the “discriminatory inequality of arms”, as police get financial support from the federation. Its excellent director, Shami Chakrabarti, says:

“It would effectively place officers beyond criticism, silencing those wanting to protest their innocence.”

I agree. What right does the federation have to pursue bloody-minded campaigns against individuals? Do these actions serve the public good, or do they serve the interests of the federation’s own members at a time when they are facing major policing reforms and changes to working conditions?

Sir David’s review described the federation’s opposition to police reforms and personal attacks as “strategic failures” and highlighted the case of my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield, among others, as an example of the extent to which

“some representatives feel they can pursue local action and campaigns regardless of the impact on the wider federation and the views of their colleagues.”

Just reading those words, one realises that they are out of touch. The price they pay is not just bringing the federation into disrepute, but risking the police’s reputation for impartiality and integrity. I cannot agree more with the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) that as far as that particular case is concerned, it is time to move on.

The federation’s dual accountability to its members and to the public has always been an implicit part of its statutory purpose. However, implication, by definition, is not a strong enough deterrent for some of the bad practice we have seen. There is evidence in the review that despite regulations containing

“a clear ethos of transparency”

in areas such as funding, for example, the spirit of those regulations is not adhered to.

In my judgment, only legislation can define a clear and non-negotiable core purpose for the federation. Only legislation can compel the federation to review its commitment to serving its members honestly, with integrity and with the public interest at heart, and only legislation can restore trust in the federation.

We know that the federation is resistant to change. Since the publication of Sir David’s review, we have seen nothing concrete to suggest that the federation will adopt its recommendations in full. The federation’s chairman has agreed that “deep cultural change” is needed, but actions speak louder than words, and my suspicion is that no matter how persuasive the proposed reforms are, a “powerful minority” will continue to do everything they can to protect their own positions and self-interest.

In conclusion, today we have an opportunity to give those three words—transparency, accountability, credibility—real meaning. I believe, and I hope that the Minister will take this on board, that legislating is a critical first step for Parliament in testing the federation’s commitment to meaningful change.

13:08

[Mr Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow my parliamentary neighbour, my right hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South (Sir Richard Ottaway). I hope that I will not have to detain the House for too long, as the tenor of my remarks will be completely consistent with everything that has already been said. The direction of travel is extremely clear.

Like the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), I have taken part in the parliamentary police scheme and have seen at first hand in both London and Surrey the terrific work that officers do on the front line. I want to pick up on the point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South: 91% of officers want change in their federation. That is an utterly devastating figure. I commend Steve Williams, the chairman of the Police Federation, who, as far as I can tell—I am not as close to these people as the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee—appears to be the driving force in seeking change and commissioning this report.

Let us be in no doubt: the report is utterly devastating. Its authors—Sir David Normington, Sir Brendan Barber, Sir Denis O’Connor and others—are people of enormous public standing who are worthy of our greatest respect. The devastating detail of the report is reflected in stories that are coming out about the federation’s actions, such as the discomfiting behaviour of its representatives on memorial day and the astonishing financial excess whereby £35 million or more in No. 2 accounts is not properly accounted for. I am delighted that the Home Affairs Committee will follow up the report, especially through an inquisition on the use of public money. My right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) suggested that police officers should receive a dividend from their federation by having their funds returned. The amount involved would be pretty substantial—£500 per police officer—but in these straitened times, the taxpayer probably has an interest, so I hope that the Select Committee’s detailed inquiry will examine whether it would be proper for the taxpayer to receive some restitution.

The federation has completely and utterly failed not only the people it serves in the police, but in its public duty outlined in its founding Act—the Police Act 1919. The federation has a responsibility to the whole country. If the representatives of the police are seen as rotten, what conclusion are we meant to draw about the police force itself? When we go out on the front line, we have the opportunity to see the police at first hand, so we know that most of the time they are doing a difficult job extremely well. It can be difficult to deal with members of the public who demand the highest standards of their police force, but that is precisely the standard that we should expect.

There have been huge strides forward in policing over the past two or three decades. The Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 brought about a profound change in policing, as did the reaction to the Macpherson report and the way in which senior officers have tried to lead on the culture of the police. However, in policing, as is the case in the federation, pockets of resistance remain, as do old-fashioned approaches that are simply unacceptable in this day and age. The federation must be a proper representative of all its officers, but it has comprehensively failed in that task.

Let me reinforce the message about the scale of legal actions taken by the federation. It is truly frightening that people can be intimidated so they do not properly criticise and complain about our police force as a result of legal actions initiated by the federation. The situation is so rotten that I understand that, informally within the federation, police officers are encouraged to bring actions that are known as garage or extension actions because the officers end up with a new garage or extension as a benefit of being persuaded to take legal action. Stories also circulate about the incentives that law firms offer policemen to take action. I hope that the Home Affairs Committee’s inquiry will cover such practice on legal action which, frankly, stinks and has an especially unhappy consequence if it makes the police seem to be as defensive and backward looking as the federation has been in its attitude to the public and dealing with straightforward requirements of substantial police reform. I hope that there will be at least restraint on decisions about whether legal action should be taken. Perhaps the Police Federation’s insurers should make decisions about whether actions should take place, rather than federation officials themselves aggressively pursuing actions by using their members’ and, no doubt, public money.

There are plainly one or two people in the federation’s senior leadership who are trying to do the right thing, which was why they commissioned this extremely authoritative report, and their evidence to the Home Affairs Committee is that they intend to deliver on all the recommendations. We have heard further ideas during the debate and there will no doubt be more. However, we should be absolutely clear that if the federation does not deliver on the reforms required by the report, it will fall to us to do so for it.

13:15

[Michael Ellis (Northampton North) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Mr Blunt) and the excellent speeches of hon. Members on both sides of the House. It is clear that something is very wrong in the national Police Federation, and has been for some time. The continual drip-drip effect is reaching its zenith—or, should I say, its nadir—and is causing considerable embarrassment and distress to the rank and file officers of a noble and honourable profession that has brought, and continues to bring, great honour to this country.

Our police service is genuinely the best in the world. It deals with extremely severe threats and incidents. It deals daily with historic episodes and threats to the state and security of this nation, and it does so without being armed and by consent. I am very proud of the profession, and we all can be very proud of it, which is why the Police Federation’s dysfunction is a humiliation to rank and file officers throughout the country. Many officers have told me that if they did not feel that they needed the protection of an organisation such as the federation in case they should get into trouble, they would not choose to be members of it and to pay the exorbitant dues that have caused it to become bloated.

The Police Federation may have started nobly in 1919, but owing to several recent scandals and cover-ups, it has lost that nobility. An opinion poll released only today, which has been the subject of media attention, indicates that a third of people have lost confidence in the police. The lowest level of trust in the police ever now subsists in this country. In large measure, that is due to the disgraceful misconduct of previous leaderships of the federation.

I have had dealings with police officers and my local Northamptonshire federation. They do a good job, but we have to address the egregious examples about which we have heard in the debate before they cause even greater damage to this country and its reputation.

As for the incident at the gates of Downing street, if my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), then a Cabinet Minister, can be traduced in such a way, in such a location and in such circumstances, what hope is there for any of our constituents, without that authority and without the resources to defend themselves?

The review, chaired by Sir David Normington, has done a good job. It was set up to examine signal failures within the federation. Its report, which was delivered a couple of months ago, found fault with almost every aspect of the federation’s operations. I cannot recall a report that was quite so damning. Federation tactics have been a particular source of shame, and I am appalled that, despite the publication of the report in January, they are still going on.

The report states that

“many from outside have criticised its tactics particularly in responding to the Winsor review.”

That was about police pay. The federation

“has too often fallen back on its traditional tendency to attack and try to undermine those who are proposing the changes, rather than take on the issues…This constitutes a strategic failure; the politics of personal attack and shouting has proved to be a wrong-headed response.”

It goes on to say:

“The Federation should be a powerful voice for standards in British policing but at present it is badly placed to be that voice. Throughout our inquiry we have heard allegations that some Federation representatives who have personally targeted successive Home Secretaries, Andrew Mitchell, Tom Winsor and others, bringing the Federation into disrepute and risking the police reputation for impartiality and integrity. We have also been given evidence of bad behaviour within, including poor treatment of staff at HQ and the targeting of representatives in social media, at Conference and elsewhere simply because they hold a different point of view. If the Federation wants to be respected and listened to in the future, this has to stop.”

These are nothing more than bully-boy tactics from those who are in a position to be bullies, and who are hiding behind their position to intimidate others, including democratically elected representatives. It is intolerable that successive Home Secretaries should be subject to this level of personal attack and abuse. The federation is incapable of making the arguments. That is the only explanation for such personal attacks.

I agree with the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee that my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield has been entirely vindicated. I was a barrister in criminal practice for more than 15 years, but the police case was so undermined that no case could rest on it. I understand that my right hon. Friend has already received an apology, and rightly so, from several chief constables, and several police officers now face internal misconduct or gross misconduct charges and one has gone to prison. However, I am appalled, as I know the House will be, that the federation is even now funding litigation that seeks to keep this matter alive.

[Keith Vaz]

The hon. Gentleman will remember the evidence given to the Committee by the officers from West Mercia, Warwickshire and West Midlands police, whom he cross-examined extremely effectively. He will recall that they had the opportunity to draw a line. Does he not agree that that could be done, even at this late stage, to bring the whole sorry episode to a conclusion?

[Michael Ellis]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman, who leads the way in putting Select Committees at the forefront of getting to the issues in this Parliament. An apology is still due, and he is right that those officers’ conduct and appearance before the Committee, on which we both have the honour to sit, was an embarrassment to the Police Federation. I have asked for an inquiry in the Home Affairs Committee, to which the right hon. Gentleman has already alluded, partly because of that, and partly because of the repeated episodes that we still hear and read about in the media. For example, the chairman of the Police Federation told the Committee that he did not know the exact figure, but he agreed with my suggestion that there were tens of millions of pounds in the No. 2 accounts. We do not have the answers. These are enormous sums, some of which have been funded by a huge 20% uplift in constables’ dues to the Police Federation. It is a shocking indictment. Meanwhile, £26 million has been spent on a luxurious headquarters that looks like something out of science fiction. Apparently, senior federation officials travelled to Italy to source the right slate for part of the edifice of that structure. Expense accounts have not been published and salaries are not fully disclosed. According to media reports that appear almost daily, Police Federation officials are misconducting themselves, embarrassing themselves, and behaving extremely improperly in regard to their conduct and expenses.

But it is the bully-boy tactics that most concern me, as they will concern hon. Members on both sides of the House. Ninety-one per cent. of members of the Police Federation—an extremely high figure; it is almost unprecedented in opinion polls to get 91% of people to agree with anything—of tens of thousands who apparently answered the questions, want change in their own federation. This change is not being driven by the House or by one political party; this is a cross-party issue and it is being driven by the members of the Police Federation, who want and need change. I do not think that I have ever agreed with the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) quite as much as I did when he spoke today.

Policing is an honourable and great profession. We owe the police a great deal, and that is why we want to see their leadership within the Police Federation changed, changed soon, and changed for the better.

13:27

[Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood) (Con)]

As my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton North (Michael Ellis) said, it is a shocking statistic that 91% of members of the Police Federation demand change. But another shocking statistic from a poll is that only 1% of police officers believe that politicians support the police. It is important that it is understood by police officers in particular that this debate is not Members of Parliament having a go at the police, still less the constables, sergeants and inspectors who do the vast amount of policing work. In terms of even-handedness I would add that last month I was fortunate enough to have a debate in Westminster Hall when we examined the Association of Chief Police Officers, and Members were as excoriating of that organisation as hon. Members have been today of the Police Federation.

The background to the Police Federation is important. We had four police strikes between 1872 and 1919, and the federation was a resolution of the labour discontent involving John Syme and Tommy Thiel, the people who set up the initial police unions, and what was seen in the first world war.

Of my various books on the history of the police, the one that I think contains the best summary of the setting up of the Police Federation is Richard Cowley’s “A History of the British Police.” He writes:

“The Police Federation was established in 1919 for the ‘purpose of enabling members of the police forces in England and Wales to consider and to bring to the notice of police authorities and the Secretary of State, all matters affecting their welfare and efficiency, other than questions of discipline and promotion affecting individuals’. At long last, for the first time in ninety years, the Police Federation gave the police what they had been agitating for—the right to confer; a representative, negotiating body.

But in granting this, constraints were placed upon it. The right of the police to take strike action was specifically withdrawn, and it was made a criminal offence for any police officer to strike or for anyone to induce him to do so. Thus it was called the Police Federation rather than a police union”.

That is really important in informing what we say today.

We also need to understand that the structures of the Police Federation date all the way back to 1919 and that much of its internal organisation relies upon statute. Those structures have changed significantly less, to put it mildly, than have most organisations and institutions over the past 95 years. That might require Parliament to change some measures in respect of the Police Federation, but I think that ideally any such changes should be led by the federation.

When Stephen Williams gave evidence to the Home Affairs Committee, in contrast to the three officers who appeared before us in our previous inquiry, whom we did not see as representative of the Police Federation—he was elected—we felt that our concerns were being listened to and that he was dealing with the federation’s affairs as openly as he could, subject to some serious constraints. We wish him well in changing that organisation, having commissioned the Normington report. We want to see it pushed through, so it is really important that we do not just have this debate today and then let the issue go off the boil. That is why the Committee is having the inquiry. We have followed up on a number of our inquiries, which I hope will be one mechanism by which we can keep accountability and public reporting of these changes.

Recent reforms to the police have contained so many detailed changes that it can be difficult to keep track. The Police Federation is almost unique in not having unionisation—there are also the armed forces, of course—as the police do not have the right to strike and do not have a union as such. Some of the recent changes for the police have been different from what has happened elsewhere in the public services. To give just one example, the police had their pay increments frozen for two years. That might sound like a small thing, but I do not believe that it is, because across much of the rest of the public sector, despite the vaunted public sector pay freeze and now the 1% maximum increase, public servants have been receiving rises almost automatically year on year as they serve in a post. Those increments push them up pay scales in a way that the police have been specifically excluded from. That is one source of discontent among the police.

Another thing that stands out about the police is that, uniquely in the public services, they cannot be sacked, except for gross misconduct. There is no mechanism by which one can insist that a police officer is made redundant. I thought that we were going to change that. Tom Winsor rightly drew attention to it. The idea that after two years of probation someone has a job for life, or at least for 30 years, has been done away with in every other sector, if indeed it was ever there.

I will enjoy hearing the Home Secretary when she strays beyond her brief and sets out some of the principles that we, as Conservatives, should seek to apply in future. It is difficult to reconcile those principles with leaving that “jobs for life” specific legislative exemption for the police while every other employee is potentially subject to that type of dismissal. Once a police officer has a job and has been in probation for two years, irrespective of the level of the crime or the amount of money in the public sector, they have that job and nothing can be done about it. That sets the police apart, and I was looking forward to seeing that changed. I will be disappointed if the Home Secretary does not take that forward.

Another area that we need to look at, in relation to the straitened financial circumstances, is facility time, meaning the number of police officers working on Police Federation business and the amount of their working time that is taken up by it. There have been reductions in police officer numbers overall, as the shadow Minister, the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson), vigorously emphasises, although they have not been as great as they might have been, as a result of the efficiencies and changes that we have made, for which the Minister deserves much support. However, when we have had those changes, have we seen similar, and indeed appropriate, reductions in the amount of time spent on Police Federation duties?

Although it is good to have wider consultation, I think that some of the structures of the Police Federation lead to a use of time that is perhaps not the most productive. We need to look carefully at the extent to which police officers could be spending more time on front-line duties and less on that part of federation business that might not be delivering directly the representative benefits that its members need. I hope we will consider that in addition to whether some of the police officers could get back the £500 that it is said is being held on their behalf.

I would like briefly to discuss the No. 2 accounts. I have not seen evidence that anything has been going on within the accounts that should not have been, and still less that there has been any misappropriation of funds—I would like to make it clear that I am not suggesting that there is. However, the very fact that they are known as No. 2 accounts raises, for many people, the idea that money might not be properly accounted for. We hear of people running a second book of accounts in a business: one that is real and one that is for the tax authorities. When people hear of the Police Federation No. 2 accounts, they wonder whether something like that is going on. I have no evidence that it is, but I am concerned that people will draw conclusions that may not be justified until such a time as that money is properly accounted for, the chairman of the Police Federation knows what is going on with those accounts and they are put properly into the public domain. As a body, the Police Federation should not operate only for its members, but act in the public interest.

In talking about the public interest, I think that legal action is an incredibly important area for us to examine. The Chair of the Select Committee, the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), spoke earlier about our terms of reference. I strongly questioned the officers who appeared before the Committee on what they were doing with regard to the legal actions. I think that is an area for us to include in our terms of reference and in our report. I do not think that should mean delving into the details of current legal actions, but we should look back and get some baseline about what actions the money has been spent on, how often the police defend a member and how often they proactively go out with a sword, as my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton North said, rather than simply defending their officers, making members of the public subject to a legal attack from the Police Federation and funded by it. That is an area of huge concern. We need first to understand how much of that is going on and what the baseline is before we can say what should be done about it.

I worry about how much the law firms involved are earning and on what basis they are given fees and are being commissioned. It is simply not good enough for the federation to say that it looks at the merits of each case and then decides on the basis of the prospects for success. Simply because a case might have a better than even chance of succeeding is not a sufficient reason for engaging in legal action. The federation also needs to take into account its reputation as an organisation, that of the police, the interests of its members, of course, and the public interest. I think that area of legal spending by the federation should be very closely examined.

Ultimately, I wish the chair of the Police Federation, all its elected officers and its members the very best in getting the organisation back into the sort of shape that will mean that both officers and the public can take pride in it.

13:39

[Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)]

We have heard some great speeches from colleagues on both sides of the House. I will try to be brief in bringing some additional thoughts to the debate rather than repeating too much of what has already been said so well.

The chairman of the Police Federation called for an independent review of his federation by Sir David Normington, and that was a brave and sensible decision. We have an opportunity to discuss the report and its findings and what it may mean in each of our constituencies. I am therefore grateful to my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) for successfully getting it debated today.

Let me start by summarising some of the report’s key findings. The first covered the whole issue of reform. It found that the federation had

“been a weak voice in the discussions around reforms”

due to indecisiveness and division. It continued:

“It has too often been unable to decide whether to oppose outright or seek changes which help its members.”

Reform is an issue for all of us in public service, and that comment in the Normington report clearly gives the federation an opportunity to take a different view.

On austerity, the report concluded:

“The Federation as a whole”

was

“trying to resist some of what was inevitable given the wider economic and public context.”

That has been a challenge for all public services, and again there is an opportunity for the federation now to focus on moving forward, recognising some of the reforms that have already been put in place and implemented.

On police pay, conditions and pensions, the report concluded that the federation has fallen back

“on its traditional tendency to attack and try to undermine those who are proposing the changes, rather than take on the issues.”

I suspect that all of us in our constituencies will have met members of the federation who echoed that tendency.

The report goes on to mention the federation’s habit of personally targeting “successive Home Secretaries, Andrew Mitchell, Tom Winsor and others, bringing the Federation into disrepute and risking the police reputation for impartiality and integrity.” It concluded:

“If the Federation wants to be respected and listened to in the future, this has to stop.”

I think we would all echo that from the point of view of our constituents. It has not been the approach of most of the police officers I know in Gloucester or in Gloucestershire as a whole, but for those who have held those views, the lesson is clear. Other Members have mentioned the views of federation members, particularly the large number who seek change. That aspect is vital, and it is the clue to future reform.

On the views of elected representatives, the report concluded that there was

“a tendency for the workload to fall on a few while others enjoyed the fruits of elected position and with the wish of some to play political games while ignoring the interests of their members.”

That comment could be relevant to all of us in this Chamber, as well as to people in other organisations. Again, it provides an opportunity for change. On the views of external stakeholders, the report concluded:

“Almost all expressed frustration at the negative behaviours and tactics of the Federation”.

That issue must also be tackled. Again, having it so clearly spelled out in the report gives the chairman an opportunity to take reform forward.

This leads on to constituency feelings and what happens close to home for all of us. MPs, bankers and estate agents compete for the occupation that is generally held in least regard and most contempt, and I would not wish for the police to join us in that league. The key locally for all of us is to enhance the reputation of our office through hard work and integrity. Although I, like others here, still have bruising e-mails and letters from a few officers in the constabulary who perhaps saw an opportunity to use plebgate as a negotiating tool during talks on police reforms, I do not believe that anything like plebgate could ever have happened in Gloucestershire. Our constabulary would never contemplate that sort of political stitch-up, which, as so often with conspiracies, has turned out to be a huge own goal.

Locally, our constabulary are rightly focused on the major problems of human and drug trafficking, reducing crime, and sorting out antisocial behaviour. The police community support officers are our bobbies on the street—the community face of the law—and they build confidence in our police and all the experts who are seen less often because they work behind the scenes. I am grateful for what all members of the Gloucestershire constabulary do in resolving these vital issues in our city. Crime is down in Gloucester, and that is what matters. That is also why I will be delighted—through the wider police service parliamentary scheme, which offers us all an opportunity better to understand policing—to spend time this year with our constabulary seeing what police officers learn, how they train, and how they pursue their aims.

The conclusion of the Normington report has 36 recommendations. They deal with issues that have been raised by other Members, including the transparency of the No. 2 accounts, which hold £35 million, and call for a 25% reduction in federation members’ 2015 subscriptions, which I suspect many police officers across the country would welcome. Above all, they call for an ambitious programme of reform, noting that the Police Federation itself commissioned this independent review in order to set and take control of the agenda. The test now, as the report concludes, is whether the federation can show the same leadership in implementing this reform programme.

The motion calls for the Government to implement the recommendations of the Normington report. I call instead for the Police Federation to implement the recommended reforms and for us, as parliamentarians, to give them all our support in doing so. As the report concluded, this is something worth striving for. It is what federation members most want, and it is now for their representatives to work together to deliver it. At this stage, it is not for the Government to interfere but rather to support and encourage, and that is what I will be doing locally.

13:47

[Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

Usually when reports are called for by bodies, they come out with anodyne statements saying that everything is pretty marvellous. It is a rare civil servant who comes out boldly and states what he views as the unvarnished truth. Sir David Normington’s report is absolutely stunning in its conclusions. Although my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) mentioned this, it is worth repeating: a statutory body—I repeat, a statutory body—used its powers to target personally

“successive Home Secretaries, Andrew Mitchell, Tom Winsor and others, bringing the Federation into disrepute and risking the police reputation for impartiality and integrity.”

That is an enormously damning statement to have been made about a body that has particular rights and protections by statute. Yet it is worse than that, because this body that behaves in such a way—the Police Federation—finds that many of its members, while they still look to it to represent them in times of difficulty or crisis, say that they would not otherwise pay their subscriptions. In an independent report that one might usually have expected to be relatively anodyne, the voice of policing is utterly damned by both its actions and the view of its members.

What concerns me most is the constitutional aspect. We know that the federation conspired, lied and leaked to remove a Cabinet Minister from office. We know this because we have the transcript of the meeting that took place with my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) in his own constituency, and the response after that meeting of Inspector Ken MacKaill, who said:

“I think Mr Mitchell has no option but to resign.”

At that point, therefore, a statutory body representing the police, who have very particular powers under our constitution, was conspiring to bring down a Cabinet Minister. That is what happens in third-world countries, where the democratic rights of the people are overtaken by the forces of law and order, which intervene to have the type of government that they want, rather than the type of government that the people want. It is such a dangerous position to have got into when a body that has particular protections and a place in the state is able to abuse them and undermine the very constitution that gives them those powers.

That is also very damaging, as the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) and others have said, to the concept we have in this country of policing by consent. When the police force was set up, there was great concern that having a permanent, paid police force would undermine basic civil liberties. The feeling was that they would be used to develop a police state, act as an arm of the Government, enforce laws unfairly and harass people, and that they would, therefore, lead us to being a less free society. We have been very lucky that that has not occurred and that the police have, by and large, been very responsible.

I am very glad that my right hon. Friend the Minister for Policing, Criminal Justice and Victims is sitting on the Front Bench and will respond to the debate, because he himself felt so personally and directly an abuse of the police’s power when they came into the Houses of Parliament—a royal palace—to search the office of an Opposition spokesman. We have, therefore, seen the leadership of the police—once involving the federation and once not—using their exceptional and extraordinary power to arrest an Opposition spokesman and to force from office a Cabinet Minister.

That should worry us extremely gravely, because our constitution works on the basis that we are a free society with a civilian police force that plays no part—no role—in the political life of the nation. That is why it has to have a Police Federation that is outside the political ambit, that is not a trade union—and that, therefore, might be supportive of a particular political party—and that is not able to strike because it is not able to wield its power in a way that could appear to be politically motivated. It is given special privileges and protections, but the Police Federation has abused them not just once but, as we have discovered, systematically in its approach to Home Secretaries of both parties and, indeed, Tom Winsor.

The report sets out the problems with extraordinary clarity and certainty. It also sets out what it perceives as being the solutions, but my goodness we should worry if membership of the Cabinet is decided not by the will of people, but by a conspiracy of dishonest members of the Police Federation. We should also worry, as other hon. Members have said, that if it can happen to my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield—one of the most senior Ministers in the Government at the time and one of the Prime Minister’s closest confidants—which of us going about our lawful business and which of our constituents, who do not have the protections of being a Member of Parliament, can feel safe?

That is the real problem of leadership in the Police Federation and perhaps more broadly in the Metropolitan Police. We all see at our local level and, indeed, in the Palace of Westminster the finest standards of traditional policing. There is a disconnect between the constable level and those who seek to lead them. It is damaging our constitution and it needs to be reformed.

13:54

[Mr Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth East) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg). I pay tribute to many of my colleagues for their comments. The words “change” and “reform” have been used a lot in this debate and I want to focus not on specific events, but on how the force needs to evolve. The Police Federation is made up of different levels, including constables, sergeants and inspectors, who make up the majority of the police force. If change is to come about, they must embrace it.

In a fast-changing world, I think we would all call ourselves reformers, but there are, perhaps, two kinds: those who want reform and those who want reform but not now. I wonder which category the Police Federation falls into. If we observe any major traffic incident, we will see that the efficiency and ease with which all three of our blue-light services work together—the gold-silver-bronze command structure—is extremely impressive. However, if the incident is more complex and involves other agencies or wider geographical areas—such as the tragedies at King’s Cross, the events at Buncefield, the 2007 floods and the 7/7 terrorist attacks—an altogether more complicated wiring diagram is relied upon, which attempts to link together organisations, agencies and Government Departments by using complex processes and protocols that have been built over decades, but that urgently need to be updated. They are so embedded that successive Governments have been reluctant to address them.

The Police Federation must appreciate that there are cultural and technical shortcomings that affect the ability of different constabularies to work together and with other agencies. Even today, different voice procedures are used in the 43 constabularies in different parts of the country. When Cobra sits, decision making is swift, as we have seen over the past few days, but when it breaks there are 43 separate police forces, 46 separate fire services and hundreds of local authorities running separate independent local resilience forums without any formal co-ordination from above.

We can all be very proud of the London 2012 Olympics. It was the largest and most complex event the nation has ever hosted and it was incident free, thanks to the years of preparation for a time-limited event and the additional resources and structures that have now largely been dismantled. The federation needs to appreciate that. I hope it will start to appreciate that there are strategic, operational and financial efficiencies to be gained from not only simpler and stronger ministerial leadership, but the streamlining of policy formulation and unambiguous inter-agency operational command at both national and local levels.

The federation recognises and is in fact involved in the Joint Emergency Services Interoperability Programme, designed to improve joint doctrine. The federation must appreciate that if a forum such as JESIP needed to be created, there is something wrong with the way in which our emergency services work together. Given the types of natural and man-made threats we now face, it is time to overhaul our resilience capability, from the local resilience forums—the basic emergency decision-making units found in every county—all the way to Cobra at the top.

[Mark Reckless]

Will my hon. Friend explain what specific role he sees the Police Federation playing in assisting that process?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. Before the hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) answers that, may I say to him that this debate is about the Normington report on reform of the Police Federation and that the debate on the police was yesterday? He needs to focus on the Normington report and not every so often in a sentence say, “Police Federation,” to make himself in order.

[Mr Ellwood]

I accept your guidance, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am also conscious of the time and that the Front Benchers want to conclude this debate.

My hon. Friend the Member for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless) makes an important point. The changes I have discussed can come about only if the federation itself embraces them. As we have heard again and again today, it has been an obstruction against, and a hurdle for, those changes. My hon. Friend is right to ask the question, but it needs to be put to the federation itself so that it can address what it needs to do to recognise the changes needed.

In conclusion, the Police Federation has an important role to play—from bottom up, not just top down. If changes are to take place and if we are to see greater collaboration between constabularies, that needs to be embraced and promoted by the federation itself. Even with the advances in communications and technology, traditional practices across the police force, as well as those between all three emergency services, have resulted in a silo mentality and a convoluted web of interoperability that successive Governments have been deterred from overhauling. The longer we wait, the more complicated it becomes to improve inter-service procurement, training, operations and ministerial oversight. I believe that the Police Federation will rise to the challenge of reform, and I hope that it will consider some of the ideas and solutions proposed in this debate.

14:00

[Mr David Hanson (Delyn) (Lab)]

I welcome you to the Chair, Mr Deputy Speaker, at the end of a very good debate. I congratulate the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) and his colleagues on securing this timely debate. I pass on the apologies of my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey), who is the official Opposition spokesperson on policing matters. He has a long-standing constituency engagement, so I have been repatriated back from immigration to police matters to wind up the debate.

I declare a sort of interest, in that as a former police Minister and as the then shadow Minister, I met Sir David Normington and members of his review team to give them my private view of the issues we are debating today. I am glad that the analysis that has come out—there is broad consensus on it across the House—is what I shared with Sir David at my meeting with him.

There is common consensus not only about the issues raised in the Normington report, but about how the police do a good job in very often dangerous and difficult circumstances. The hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) has just mentioned that point, as did the hon. Member for Northampton North (Michael Ellis), my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), the hon. Member for Reigate (Mr Blunt) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz); I look forward to his Select Committee’s report on this matter.

I had the very great privilege of attending the bravery awards, as the Minister will have done, for officers who have put their lives and limbs at risk in very dangerous circumstances. There is no officer who does not wake up every day of the week potentially to face a life-threatening situation or to have to seek a depth of courage that none of us in this Chamber has to experience. Even this week, police officers have been deployed to deal with floods and serious crimes. If the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden was in his place, I would tell him that every year I have had the privilege of attending memorial services for officers who have given their lives for their community. The police memorial services that I have attended have been dignified, solemn events, at which the police have paid tribute to their fellow officers.

On behalf of Her Majesty’s Opposition, I welcome the fact that the Police Federation itself commissioned the Normington report. I also welcome the fact that the Police Federation recognises that mistakes have been made and that it might be out of touch with its members, as has been discussed, and that it has acknowledged the need for reform. As has been expressed from both sides of the House, the Police Federation independent review is a candid, frank, hard-hitting and strong report. The hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) referred to that in his speech. The report looks in detail at how the federation operates and how its membership is represented, as well as at its structures, finance and professionalism, and it makes 36 wide-ranging recommendations for change.

We should remember a point that has been slightly lost in the debate, which is that Sir David Normington and his team were commissioned to produce the report by the Police Federation itself. Even given what hon. Members have said, there is scope for the federation to reflect on the report and its contents.

I spoke this morning to Steve Williams, who is the chair of the Police Federation. He happens to be from my local North Wales police, where he has been a senior officer for many years. He has been officially in post as chair only since last May, but he took over after the sad death of Paul McKeever in January. I think that he recognises the concerns expressed from both sides of the House about the need for reform and review. I know from talking to him that since the report was published that the Police Federation has held meetings across the whole of England and Wales this week in a two-day examination of the recommendations. I think that there is clear support for the direction of travel, and I hope that when the federation meets in May matters can be resolved in a way that meets the aspirations of every hon. Member who has spoken today.

[Mr Ruffley]

Is it the right hon. Gentleman’s understanding that the Police Federation has adopted all the Normington recommendations in full?

[Mr Hanson]

I have only had a brief conversation with the chair this morning, but I know that the Police Federation is trying to decide a response to put to its conference in May. I am not a member of the federation or party to its discussions, so I can do no better than to repeat the Home Secretary’s words at Home Office questions two weeks ago. She said:

“It is important that the federation has had the review.”

She went on that if changes are required, the Home Office would

“stand ready to work with the federation on them.”

She also said that the chair wanted

“properly to review the federation’s role and whether it represents officers”,—[Official Report, 27 January 2014; Vol. 574, c. 651.]

but that it is for the Police Federation, which initiated the review, to look at such issues. In his speech, the hon. Member for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless) reflected that the Police Federation should have a chance to look at the issues.

The hon. Members for Gloucester (Richard Graham) and for North West Norfolk (Mr Bellingham) and the right hon. Member for Croydon South (Sir Richard Ottaway) have all supported the recommendations. On behalf of the official Opposition, I want the federation to look very closely at resolving to support the recommendations, which include the important issues of having a revised core purpose; an annual public review of value for money; national guidelines on expenses, honoraria and hospitality; the publication of all expenses and of accounts; guidance for local forces about committee papers; a director of equality and diversity, which was a point made by the hon. Member for North West Norfolk; a rolling three-year equality plan; and an examination of professional standards, as well as ensuring that there is proper capacity of professional staff at head- quarters. The creation of an executive team, proper governance and decision making, a new professional means of selecting the general secretary and the election of the chair by the whole membership are positive recommendations to which I hope the federation will respond positively.

There may be some water between Government Members and me on the fact that I take the view that the Police Federation is a body in its own right, and that the best person to reform it is the federation itself. If it does not, there will certainly be matters for this House to look at, but only in due course.

The report relates to police professionalism and the need for reform more generally. The Police Federation needs to be part of that reform. The Independent Police Commission report on the future of policing, chaired by Lord Stevens, was established by my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper).

[Mr Ellwood]

On the right hon. Gentleman’s point about general reform, does he agree that it cannot be pushed by the Government or from up in Westminster? It could be argued that Dorset constabulary is now too small to exist on its own, but mergers or greater collaboration are hindered by grass-roots policing. Does that indicate that we should start to consider such general reform?

[Mr Hanson]

When I was lucky enough to hold the post of police Minister in the previous Government, I supported voluntary mergers—for example, between Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire. That was stopped not by the Police Federation, but by the elected members of what were then police authorities. The members did not want mergers, although the chief constables and the Police Federation were happy for them to happen. However, I digress slightly from the Normington report.

Reform is important, because we need professionalism and standards in officers. We need officers to be registered in relation to their core professionalism, and we need the potential to withdraw registration if officers transgress, as they occasionally do. They have done so in the case of the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), with an officer now serving a prison sentence because of his actions. It is important that such standards are set in place.

It is important, as Members have said, that there is diversity in Government action. It is particularly important, as the Stevens report mentioned, that the relationship between the media and the police improves. All contact between police officers and the media must be recorded. That will have an effect on the potential for transgressions.

I am conscious of the time and of the fact that we still have to hear from the Minister and the hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds (Mr Ruffley). The official Opposition believe that much of Sir David Normington’s report is welcome and we want the Police Federation to address the points that it raises. Steve Williams has had the confidence to take on the issues in the federation and I wish him well in seeing that through. I look forward to the federation responding to the issues in May. I will let my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington deal with this matter from the Front Bench when the report is examined and, I hope, implemented in due course.

14:10

[The Minister for Policing, Criminal Justice and Victims (Damian Green)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) on securing this debate and Members on both sides of the House on their heartfelt and thoughtful speeches, and on the clarity of the debate. Anyone who has listened to this debate or who reads it subsequently will see that it has sent a very clear message to the Police Federation about the Normington report.

I simply want to echo that message. I fully agree with the principles behind the motion. I agree that public trust in the police is vital. I agree that the federation, which represents 130,000 rank and file police officers, has a vital part to play. I agree that the federation must change significantly if it is to play its role effectively. I pay credit to the federation and its current leadership under Steve Williams for recognising that change is needed and for commissioning the independent Normington review to guide that reform. The report does that very clearly. I also agree with Members on both sides of the House that the vast majority of police officers do what is a difficult and sometimes dangerous job very well on a day-to-day basis. The tradition of policing by consent is a vital part of democracy and quality of life in this country. That is the background to the problem that the Normington review addresses.

The review was undertaken because of significant concerns about the transparency and integrity of the Police Federation and those who act on its behalf. It is important that the federation addresses those issues to ensure that it acts in the interest of its membership and commands the confidence of the public. To that end, I welcome the news that the Home Affairs Committee will produce a report on these matters.

As others have said, Sir David Normington and the other members of the panel have produced a report that is thoughtful, comprehensive and well evidenced. It is insightful on the issues that the federation faces and considered in the solutions that it recommends. We all agree with Sir David that the federation must operate with openness and integrity. The review suggests a great number of far-reaching reforms. We will soon see how the federation responds.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bury St Edmunds (Mr Ruffley) intervened on the former police Minister, who is revisiting former glories today, to ask about the federation’s response. Steve Williams said before the Normington review was published that he would accept it. Obviously, discussions are now going on inside the federation. I assure the House that those discussions are being monitored closely by the Government.

The Government agree with the sentiment that has been expressed by Members on both sides of the House that it is for the federation to reform itself and not for the Government to step in at this stage. We need to see what the results of the federation’s considerations are. We do not plan to change the legislation before the review has been considered and processed by the federation. However, it is important that the federation moves forward with reform. I do not rule out the possibility of new legislation or regulations because the federation was created by an Act of Parliament and many of the changes may need to be made in Parliament. We will come to that at the appropriate time.

One of the virtues of the Normington report is that it has produced a timetable for action by the federation. Outsiders with an interest, such as this House, will be able to see how the timetable is being met. The time to consider any legislative action that we need to take is after the federation has considered its next steps.

A number of important points have been made by hon. Members. The issue of federation expenses has been raised. I take any suggestion that expenses have been misused extremely seriously. Federation representatives are elected by their members to represent them. They must therefore act in their members’ interests in using federation funds. It rightly falls to the federation to handle and respond to those issues. It is important for the federation to demonstrate that it uses its finances, which are raised primarily through member subscriptions, in a transparent and responsible manner. If it does not show that it does so, it is difficult to see how it can command the confidence of its members or the public.

References have been made to the accusations of bad behaviour on national police memorial day by representatives of the federation. Like the former police Minister and the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, I have attended national police memorial day. It is a very moving occasion that is important to the friends and families of police officers who have given their lives in the course of their duties. I know that the leadership of the Police Federation would want to ensure that that occasion is treated with the dignity that it deserves. If there have been problems, I hope that action will be taken to ensure that they are not repeated.

There have been a number of references to the notorious No. 2 accounts that are held by some branches of the Police Federation. Those financial issues have been covered thoroughly in the Normington report. It makes a number of recommendations to improve the transparency and handling of federation finances. It recommends that all accounts, including No. 2 accounts, should be published and available publicly. As that information comes to light, we will gain a better understanding of how the money is being gathered and spent. It will fall to the appropriate authorities to deal with any unlawful or improper behaviour that is identified. That might be the police themselves or it might be Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. Clearly, we need to know more about what is happening in those No. 2 accounts. I look forward to seeing how the federation responds to the report’s recommendations. If help is needed from the Government to implement the changes, it will certainly be available.

As well as those specific reforms, the review recommends a great deal of far-reaching reform. I am sure that all Members expect there to be change. Behind all that, the federation must ensure that it performs its most important role, which is to represent rank and file officers. It is clear from the important surveys that many hon. Members have mentioned that those officers still want the federation to represent them. As such, our starting point must be to ask how we can make the federation reform itself in order that it can deliver that service more effectively. We are at the stage of giving the federation the opportunity to consider how it will change on the basis of the recommendations.

The final matter that has come up frequently is the events at Downing street involving my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell). It is clear that those issues have caused widespread concern about police integrity, and demonstrate that unless all officers operate to the highest standards of integrity, policing risks forfeiting public trust. The court has now decided on the appropriate sentence for the criminal conduct of PC Keith Wallis, and the IPCC has stated that its investigation has provided evidence to support gross misconduct proceedings against five officers, including PC Wallis. It will be for the Metropolitan police service disciplinary panel to decide on the culpability of the officers involved.

Hon. Members will also be aware that the Home Office is currently considering changes to the whole police disciplinary system, and the IPCC is independently investigating allegations that three Police Federation officers from West Mercia, West Midlands and Warwickshire police gave false accounts of their meeting with my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield on 12 October 2012, in an attempt to discredit him. As that investigation is ongoing it would obviously be inappropriate for me to comment further at this stage.

In conclusion, I am grateful to everyone who has contributed to what I think will be a significant and important debate that will mark progress and greater clarity in the necessary reform of the Police Federation in the wake of the Normington review. I hope and expect that the federation will address those concerns, so that it can become once again an institution that its members will be proud of, and of which the public will be proud, just as they are proud of our police.

14:21

[Mr David Ruffley (Bury St Edmunds) (Con)]

May I express my thanks to the Backbench Business Committee for granting this debate, to my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) who was its principal proposer, and to my 12 colleagues and both Front-Bench speakers who have contributed to it?

I contribute as a former special adviser in the Home Office during the rocky times with the Police Federation in 1992-93, when the then Home Secretary was trying to push through the Sheehy reforms. More recently, I was shadow police Minister in the previous Parliament. I am also contributing, and I declare an interest, as a friend and supporter of my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), whose treatment by certain elements of the Police Federation led ultimately to this debate and to discussion of the Normington report.

The Normington report is a scathing and searing deconstruction of a deeply dysfunctional organisation, and if there is a more critical report commissioned by a body of itself, I have yet to see it. The “top-to-bottom” overhaul of the organisation—those are the words of Normington—refers to

“its cultures, behaviours, structures and organisation”,

and I wish to emphasise at the start of my remarks that we should not allow this matter to become a cosy understanding with the Police Federation that it will reform itself. I have been in this place too long to see well-argued and important reports lost. Everyone agrees that the recommendations should be carried out, but then they plough into the sand. That is why I was delighted to hear my right hon. Friend the Minister say that he would not shrink from using the legislative tools at his disposal to ensure that the necessary reforms and recommendations in the report are implemented if the federation does not get on with doing that itself.

The report refers to

“a phased programme of reform over the next two to three years,”.

I would like the federation to publish a clear timetable that we can come back to and debate in this Chamber, to see how quickly it is implementing the reforms. The reason we need that is that Fiona McElroy, a former principal private secretary to the Attorney-General, no less, was sacked because she had “serious concerns” about the management of the federation’s accounts. Most troubling is that—this was only a few days ago—she was opposed by a “vocal minority” who were resisting attempts to implement the changes recommended by the Normington report. I am afraid I am not as sanguine as many colleagues who have contributed today about the ability of senior members of the Police Federation to reform themselves. Who are these individuals and to whom are they accountable? Given the evidence I have cited, they seem to be a roadblock to reform.

[Mr Blunt]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Ruffley]

If my hon. Friend will forgive me, I shall not give way as I am aware of the time.

The report mentions many things, but it begins by mentioning the police reform proposals—not just those by our excellent Home Secretary, but I think this would also apply to some of the reforms at the end of the previous Parliament—and states that the federation was

“a weak voice in the discussions around reforms.”

Speaking from experience, I found that too many senior leaders of the Police Federation were—and I regret to have to say this—much more interested in pay and rations, remuneration and pension changes, important though those are, than in changes to police working practices, reducing police bureaucracy, and all the things that are central to modernising the police service today.

On accountability and ethics, Normington has quite a bit to say:

“Throughout our inquiry we have heard allegations that some Federation representatives…have personally targeted successive Home Secretaries, Andrew Mitchell, Tom Winsor and others”,

Colleagues have mentioned that issue, but I was particularly struck by what my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) said. He reminded us of the constitutional position that the police service—and, by extension, the Police Federation—has in this country. It has a constitutional responsibility to be utterly impartial, to make judgments and decisions free from political interference or bias, and to do so without fear or favour. It should be beyond politics, but the history of the Police Federation over the past few years shows that that constitutional obligation to which my hon. Friend referred has not been fulfilled.

Then there are the views of the elected representatives and the people who run the organisation. Normington states:

“There was considerable evidence of distrust among elected representatives, exacerbated by divisions and mistrust at Head Office”

in Leatherhead.

What about the professionalism that we need to engender in the Police Federation and the change of culture? That is the subject of recommendation 1, which hon. Members have drawn attention to, and which I think is worth reading into the record:

“The Federation should adopt immediately a revised core purpose which reflects the Police Federation’s commitment to act in the public interest, with public accountability, alongside its accountability to its members. This should be incorporated in legislation as soon as practicable.”

I disagree with only one bit of that: it should not be “as soon as practicable” but now.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden said in his outstanding opening speech that we need an early adoption of the report, not this May when the Police Federation’s triennial elections are held. Before those elections we need a clear statement from anyone seeking to stand for office in May that they will adopt and sign up to every one of the Normington proposals. Without that, I think we are entitled to feel that they are not acting in good faith. There is unanimity across the party divide, including from the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) speaking for the Opposition, and who made a helpful speech, and from Conservative Members. It is perfectly clear, beyond peradventure, that no one can have any doubt about the necessity of these proposals.

We also need to remember the phrase “Follow the money”, although we should not read too much into the fact that it comes from the Watergate scandal. If I have gleaned anything from the debate, it is colleagues’ comments—they have obviously read the report—on the financial opacity and the scandalous lack of accountability, not only in respect of members’ subscription fees, as my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Mr Blunt) said, but of the taxpayer money that goes into the Police Federation, which, as has been mentioned, is a statutory body. Surpluses have been generated at national level and substantial reserves have been amassed. They put the organisation on a sustainable footing, but, by the way, that is largely the result of an increase in subscription charges of more than 23% in 2010 alone.

That is not the end of it. The 43 branch boards operate as separate businesses. Together, they have reserves of approximately £35 million. The report raises concerns about the lack of accountability. After its publication, I heard Sir David Normington say that although he was brought in by the Police Federation to undertake an independent forensic review, he was denied access to the No. 2 accounts. Who denied him access? We should be told. Why were there any bars on his looking into the No. 2 accounts? It is why recommendation 31 is:

“All accounts including Number 2, group insurance and member services accounts, funds, and trusts to be published. A general financial transparency clause is needed in regulations”

for which, I might add, the House will have responsibility,

“including a requirement to publish and report all income that derives from and funds Police Federation activity.”

Normington also says that all branches should be required to publish full accounts online. Those of us who are subject to the rigorous Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority regime will say that it is about time they did that. I very much look forward to that so I can look up the accounts of the branches in my part of East Anglia.

Recommendation 36, on finance, states:

“There should be a 25 percent reduction in subscription levels for one year in 2015 financed by the reserves of the rank central committees. An extension of this one-off reduction should be reviewed for subsequent years on the basis of existing reserves, reserves in unpublished accounts, and an estate strategy once the reform package is complete.”

The report demonstrates that a review could mean further reductions in the subscription levy. I believe that members of the federation should actively consider that and hold their elected representatives to account. In that respect, I want to steal a phrase from my hon. Friend the Member for North West Norfolk (Mr Bellingham) who, in an excellent speech, reminded us of a great tradition of the Police Federation and some of its good history, but also said that now is the time for its members to reclaim their federation. Subscription levels would not be a bad place to start.

On the estates strategy, my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden said that, ultimately, the sale and disposal of that palace of varieties, which has cost excessive amounts of money to build and run, could be a sign of true culture change on the part of the federation—the kind of change of ethos for which the report so powerfully calls.

I should like to comment on a few of the speeches that have been made in the debate that are worthy of note. The right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) repeated something that many colleagues have said. He said that recent events have shown that my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield has been completely vindicated. The right hon. Gentleman also questioned whether it was remotely sensible, appropriate or seemly to continue suing members of the public, including my right hon. Friend.

We heard eloquent contributions from the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) and from my right hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South (Sir Richard Ottaway). My hon. Friend the Member for Reigate reminded us that there could be a £500 per member dividend, but asked whether restitution could be made to the British taxpayer, who will have an interest in those huge sums, many of which are not accounted for.

My hon. Friends the Members for Northampton North (Michael Ellis) and for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless) spoke from huge experience as forensic members of the Home Affairs Committee. Both talked about the lack of accountability in financial accounting. They also said that many public services have been reformed, but that the way in which the police do business has not been reformed. I pray in aid a phrase used in 2006 by the current Prime Minister. I was speaking to Police Federation Members when the Prime Minister said that the police service is

“the last great unreformed public service”.

My word, they did not like that, but reform should be a reality. They should not fight history but embrace the future.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood), who pointed out that reform of the interoperability of the blue-light services requires the Police Federation to get with the programme.

I conclude with one observation. The Police Federation must not be a roadblock to reform. It must not block either Her Majesty’s Government’s policy programme of reform or reform of itself.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House notes the Independent Review of the Police Federation conducted by Sir David Normington and calls upon the Government to take action to implement the report’s recommendations and to reform the Police Federation.

Cancer Priorities

Thursday 13th February 2014 Commons Chamber

14:38

[Mr John Baron (Basildon and Billericay) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Cancer report on cancer priorities in the NHS.

The motion stands in my name and those of other hon. Members.

It is not an exaggeration to say that thousands of lives, if not tens of thousands, depend on our getting the cancer strategy right. That is the scale of things. I therefore thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting the debate and allowing the all-party group on cancer to debate its recent report, “Cancer across the Domains”. I thank fellow officers, Macmillan and the secretariat to the all-party group, particularly Tim Nicholls and his team, for their support and hard work.

The all-party group on cancer is recognised as the wider cancer community’s voice in Parliament and has a proud campaigning track record. It was an early advocate of the need to focus on survival rates as a means of promoting earlier diagnosis. It has campaigned on a range of other issues, including cancer networks and the cancer drugs fund. As hon. Members will know, the group hosts the annual Britain Against Cancer conference, at which the cancer community comes together. Last December, it attracted about 500 delegates and heard excellent speeches from the Secretary of State for Health, the shadow Secretary of State and other experts.

[Mr James Clappison (Hertsmere) (Con)]

I warmly congratulate my hon. Friend on his sterling work in this field. He mentions cancer survival rates. The most recent European study, published in December last year, showed that UK survival rates are still lagging behind those of comparable western nations in most, if not all, cancers. Does he therefore agree that the need to focus on cancer survival rates is as great as ever?

[Mr Baron]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. The fact remains that, although there have been good increases in survival rates and there has been progress when it comes to cancer care generally, we still lag behind European and international average survival rates. That alone means they are costing this country thousands of lives. Thousands of families are suffering as a result of our not being able to match international averages on cancer care. That is not to say that cancer care has not improved over recent decades—it has. Survival rates have improved, but they have done so in line with survival rates across the world. That is good, but it somewhat masks the fact that we remain well behind international averages.

Despite all the additional funding, we still have not managed to catch up with other health care systems and thousands of lives are being lost as a result. My hon. Friend alluded to the fact that if we matched European averages on survival rates we could save an additional 5,000 lives a year. The OECD recently ranked Britain towards the very bottom of the 35 countries whose survival rates it measured, and it suggests that up to 10,000 lives could be saved if we matched international survival averages. Indeed, the Secretary of State for Health himself, speaking at the Britain Against Cancer conference in December, described survival rates as disappointing.

Reliable predictions suggest cancer incidence is on the rise. The World Health Organisation suggests its incidence will increase by 70% in the coming decades. Macmillan Cancer Support estimates that by 2020 almost one in two people will receive a cancer diagnosis—a phenomenal increase. The challenge for the NHS is to ensure that the significant structural change it has seen in recent years is not allowed to obstruct the much-needed improvement in cancer services and survival rates that are necessary if we are to catch up with our neighbours and save those thousands of extra lives.

The report by the all-party group on cancer should be seen in this context. We now have an NHS based around five domains, each with a responsibility for delivering improved outcomes. The report makes recommendations across each of those domains, and is the product of an extensive consultation with the cancer community, from NHS England right through to cancer patients, carers and charities. The recommendations of this year-long project can therefore truly be said to reflect the views of the whole cancer community. I should take a brief moment to thank all those who are involved in the production of the report, from those who responded to the consultation to the charities that devoted significant time and expertise to crafting it, including Macmillan Cancer Support, Cancer Research UK, Prostate Cancer UK, Teenage Cancer Trust and Breakthrough Breast Cancer.

“Cancer across the Domains” makes 18 recommendations and believes that the Government have an important role to play. Although the recommendations are specifically aimed at NHS England—the body that now has responsibility for commissioning services—it is the Health Secretary who retains overall responsibility for health services. The support of his Department is invaluable in achieving these goals, so my first question for the Minister is: will she formally respond to the recommendations set out in the report, or commit her Department to do so?

Other hon. Members will address other parts of the report, but I want to focus on the importance of earlier diagnosis and accountability. There are very few magic keys— where someone can open a door and suddenly untold opportunities lie before them. In cancer, such a magic key does exist: earlier diagnosis, the importance of which cannot be overestimated. When the all-party group on cancer produced its 2009 report, “Tackling Cancer Inequalities”, we found that patients in this country who reached the one year point stood as much chance of making it to five years as most other health care systems. Where we fall down is in getting patients to the one year point. We came to the conclusion, which expert witnesses confirmed at the time, that this clearly showed that the NHS was as good, if not better, at treating cancer when it was detected, but very poor at detecting it in the first place, and that is why we fell so far behind on survival rates.

We sat down with the cancer community and asked: what is the remedy? Do we bombard the NHS with more targets and regulation to try to encourage earlier diagnosis? Should we adopt a much simpler approach—and this is what we concluded—and put up in lights one and five-year cancer survival rates, broken down at a local NHS level, then primary care trusts, now clinical commissioning groups, to encourage earlier diagnosis? We all know that late diagnosis makes for poor survival rates. Therefore, putting the survival rates up in lights and broken down by the local NHS should encourage underperforming CCG management to promote initiatives, at primary care level, aimed at promoting earlier diagnosis. It would be up to them to choose which initiatives suit their local populations: better prevention and awareness campaigns, better uptake of screening programmes, better diagnostics at a primary care level or better education or information for GPs. There could be a host of initiatives in isolation or in combination, but the bottom line is that it would be up to local CCGs to introduce them. Those at the bottom of the table would be particularly encouraged to do so. That was the logic behind the idea of one and five-year figures. We are happy to say that, with the rest of the cancer community, we now have one and five-year figures as outcome measures in the DNA of the NHS. This is to be welcomed. It is in the NHS outcomes framework and it is in the CCG outcomes indicator set governing CCGs at a local level. I will come back to the five-year outcome measure at the outcomes indicator set level a little later, but that is all encouraging.

I will not complicate issues by going on about the importance of introducing other proxy measures at a local level, such as staging and emergency admissions. We have recommended those initiatives, and they have been taken up as complementing the one and five-year figures at a local level because of the smaller population sizes of CCGs compared with PCTs. The campaign has been a success, but it is a success only in that we have managed to get these measures included. Actions speak louder than words and the true success will be judged on what effect these measures are having on survival rates. On that measure, the jury is still out.

That brings me on to my next point: accountability. There is no point in having these wonderful initiatives on one and five-year figures, staging and emergency admissions to try to promote earlier diagnosis if it is not followed through and there are no teeth in the system or levers of change to ensure that underperforming CCGs raise their game on behalf of their local patients. Key questions therefore remain on accountability.

How accountable is NHS England to Parliament? NHS England’s annual report is laid before Parliament, but it is the Secretary of State who must assess performance. The extent of ministerial accountability remains unclear. Parliament seems to have a very limited role in this process. So does the Minister agree that there appears to be limited scope for Members to scrutinise NHS England’s performance? Furthermore, how will the Department of Health monitor NHS England’s performance on cancer care against the NHS outcomes framework and address areas that need improvement?

If that is one concern, a greater concern I have is the accountability of CCGs themselves. While some cancer services, as hon. Members will be aware, remain the responsibility of NHS England, owing to their specialised nature, many vital services are CCG-commissioned, hence the importance of the CCG outcomes indicator set as a means of monitoring performance. What remains unclear is the extent to which NHS England will hold underperforming CCGs accountable. For example, what happens if a CCG is continually at the bottom of the one-year survival rate figures? Where are the levers of change to correct that? The mathematicians in the House will understand that if we raise the game of those at the bottom of the table, it will have a disproportionate effect on averages in general, and that is what we are talking about: catching up with European and international averages on survival rates.

We need clarity, therefore, about what action will be taken should CCGs continue to languish in poor performance. What support would NHS England give to a CCG to improve survival rates, and, should CCGs continue to languish, what powers will be used, what levers of change will be implemented, to ensure that improvements are made at a local level? There is no point having the CCG OIS if failure is not addressed and there are no teeth to the correction regime. We need clarity, both to ensure that corrective action is taken, if needed, and because CCGs need to know that the regime is in place.

Other questions remain, which our report addresses, about the differences between the last two CCG OIS iterations, and perhaps a little clarity from the Minister would be helpful to the wider cancer community. In the 2013-14 OIS, our call for indicators for one and five-year survival rates for all cancers was accepted, and in the 2014-15 OIS, our call, in the “Cancer Across the Domains” report, for indicators on staging and emergency presentations was also accepted—all very good news—but the indicators for the five-year survival rates were dropped from the 2014-15 OIS.

NICE argued there were potential problems with the five-year indicator, as the numbers were small, but those arguments had been made before, when we campaigned for one and five-year survival rate inclusion. Will the Minister help the House and the wider cancer community by explaining what changed in the data between 2013-14 and 2014-15? That would be helpful. We now have an NHS outcomes framework that retains one and five-year indicators, but a local CCG OIS that does not have the five-year indicator. This suggests a disconnect. It is important that the NHS speaks with one voice, yet it has measures nationally different from those at a local level. How will her Department work with NHS England to address this apparent disconnect?

While earlier diagnosis increases survival rates, without data on longer-term survival rates, it will be harder for NHS England to ensure that early diagnosis is being improved by CCGs. Will the Minister re-examine the case for five-year survival rates in the next iteration of the CCG OIS, or at least communicate to the cancer community the logic behind the move and carry the community with the Department so that it is clear for everyone to understand. It remains to be answered, however, why there was a difference between the 2013-14 and the 2014-15 iterations.

The removal of the five-year survival rate indicator raises questions about the process. The development of the CCG OIS is complex; suffice it to say that the system provides for newly suggested indicators, but does not appear to recommend indicators for removal. In the development of the 2014-15 OIS, while emergency diagnosis and stage of diagnosis were flagged for inclusion, five-year survival rates were not flagged for exclusion, meaning that the removal does not appear to have been consulted on. I find this particularly alarming.

The cancer community campaigned hard for the inclusion of one and five-year survival rates, both nationally and locally, to promote earlier diagnosis, but then, at the last minute and without any consultation, was made aware, practically on the last day before Parliament rose before Christmas, that the five-year figures were being removed. There was a lack of communication, and certainly the process itself raises questions. Will the Minister comment on this process? Why does she think it delivers appropriate transparency? It was not clear to the wider cancer community that the five-year indicators would be removed until the final document was published.

On 17 December, the hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) asked the Minister whether five-year survival rates would be included, and he received an unequivocal answer:

“NHS England will be publishing the 2014-15 CCG OIS next year…which will set out measures aimed at supporting improvements in the five-year cancer survival.”—[Official Report, 17 December 2013; Vol. 572, c. 594W.]

However, the OIS released three days later, on 20 December, excluded the five-year figures, and it would help to know why the position apparently changed completely in those three days.

I thank the Minister for responding to this debate. I appreciate that she has drawn the short straw, given that this is the last debate before the half-term recess, but the all-party group would welcome a detailed response to all our recommendations, if not in this debate, certainly subsequently. She has a great responsibility. She is well aware that few ministerial posts can literally save thousands of lives if policy is got right, and she brings to her post a dedication and professionalism that are welcomed across the cancer community, but I remind her, on behalf of that community, that the Government’s goal to save an additional 5,000 lives every year by 2015 will not be achieved unless the NHS raises its game, particularly on earlier diagnosis. With that thought in mind, I look forward to her response to our recommendations.

14:58

[David Heyes (Ashton-under-Lyne) (Lab)]

I am unaccustomed to being called to speak so early in a debate, and I shall do my best to make the most of the opportunity. I rather wish that I had prepared a much longer speech.

I start by thanking the Backbench Business Committee for scheduling the debate. I particularly commend the excellent work of the hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron) and the rest of the all-party group on cancer in producing its recommendations. I am especially pleased to speak in this debate as it gives me a chance to make a brief contribution based to some extent on my own skirmish with cancer, which has kept me away from this Chamber for much too long in the past couple of years.

My experience and treatment as a patient, at the Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, the Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust and the Christie NHS Foundation Trust in Manchester, has been excellent. I owe enormous thanks to the remarkable surgical skills of Mr Senapati and his upper gastrointestinal team, and to the care of the Macmillan clinical nurse specialists and many other NHS professionals whom I have encountered in the course of my treatment.

My comments will be based on the experience of seeing the delivery of cancer services from the patient’s viewpoint; and that experience places me among the 80% of cancer patients who rate their care as good or excellent. We have yet to see the full consequences of the major structural changes taking place in the NHS. Hopefully, we can expect an improvement in cancer services—and an improvement is needed if we are to save the extra 5,000 lives a year that we must achieve if we are to match average European survival rates. Goodness knows we ought to set our sights on being the best, not just the average.

Given the scale and extent of the upheaval in the NHS, there is a real danger that cancer services will end up being damaged and made worse. That is why the all-party group on cancer’s report is so timely and important. It sets out with admirable clarity what the Department of Health and, through it, NHS England need to do if we want to improve standards and deal successfully with the predicted increase in cancer diagnoses in the period ahead.

The report’s recommendations do not depend on the injection of large sums of money. Much of what is recommended is about doing things in a better way—shaping sensible policies and working practices, from GP and community care group level upwards. The recommendations are particularly aimed at promoting early diagnosis, which, as the hon. Gentleman says, is above all else the key to turning back the cancer tide.

I do not want to go through all the report’s recommendations; I just want to comment on a few points based on my own recent experience. One of the main reasons why I consider my patient experience to have been so positive was the close involvement of cancer nurse specialists at every stage of my treatment. The easy one-to-one contact with a named individual, a clinical expert in the field, meant that there was a way to raise concerns and get reassurance when it was needed and—this was very important for me—to give me the confidence to be an active player in mapping out my own care pathway.

The report is clear that access to clinical nurse specialists is patchy across the country and decreasing in some areas and specialisms. NHS England needs to be clear on how it will ensure the continuation and enhancement of access to clinical nurse specialisms to maintain their vital role in ensuring quality cancer care.

As has been said, early diagnosis is obviously the critical factor in improving cancer survival. My GP picked up reasonably quickly on my symptoms and I soon entered a pathway of diagnosis and treatment. In that respect, I was fortunate in having the right GP, but sadly more than a quarter of people diagnosed with cancer see their GPs three times or more before being referred to a specialist. Too many people are still being diagnosed in the advanced stages of cancer. Again, the report is clear on the need to improve GPs’ awareness of cancer symptoms as a vital factor in helping to identify cancer earlier and improving survival rates.

The starting point is for NHS England to make it clear to GPs, through its community care groups, that they will be held to account on the basis of their outcomes indicator set. Personally, I am encouraged that NHS England accepts the need to incorporate measures to encourage earlier diagnosis by recording the stage of cancer at diagnosis and whether the cancer is detected in an emergency. However, I agree with the hon. Gentleman that that can be effective only if it is recoupled with the survival rate measures to serve best as an important factor in pressing clinical commissioning groups to promote earlier diagnosis.

Under the previous Government, there was huge progress in improving cancer care. The national cancer plan and the cancer networks made a real impact on lifting NHS care for cancer patients towards the standards being achieved in other countries. However, the move from 27 cancer networks to 12 strategic clinical networks, each covering a larger area and with fewer dedicated cancer staff, is a backward step. The report reveals that the funding of cancer networks will be slashed by a quarter, and that 20% of their staff will go. Those worries are exacerbated by the uncertainty over what the strategic clinical networks will be able to deliver in comparison with cancer networks. We face a real risk that the lack of clarity surrounding these structural changes will damage outcomes for cancer patients. NHS England needs to recognise that concern, and to act to remove the uncertainty over the functions of the strategic clinical networks.

Being in a cancer treatment programme can cause big problems and great worry for patients of working age. I know from talking to fellow patients that holding on to their job and continuing or returning to work were major concerns for many. This is not just about keeping the money coming in. The world of work represents a sense of normality for many, and a target to aim for, to help them to get through what can be a debilitating treatment pathway. Again, I speak from experience. My treatment kept me away from this place for a long time, but my ability to continue with a good proportion of my constituency work gave me a sense of normality and helped to counter the negativity and uncertainty that can be a feature of living with cancer.

There are good economic reasons for supporting cancer patients to get back to work. The report refers to the findings by the Policy Exchange in 2008 that estimated lost productivity at £5.3 billion in that year alone as a result of cancer survivors not returning to work. It is for all those reasons that the report calls for NHS England to publish plans detailing how it will support people with long-term health conditions to stay in or return to work. That makes sense not only for the individual cancer patient but for the economy.

I am glad to have had this opportunity to make those few points, and I urge those on the Government Front Bench to respond positively to the report’s recommendations and to work with NHS England on implementing them as a matter of urgency.

15:06

[Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)]

It is a privilege to speak in the debate, and I should like to start by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron) on his work chairing the all-party group and on his excellent speech, in which he covered the whole area of cancer care. We are all grateful to him.

I am speaking today in my capacity as the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on brain tumours. I have not held the post for long and, like many MPs, I came to the issue through one of my constituents, an inspirational lady called Nicole Witts. She was diagnosed with a brain tumour many years ago, and she contacted me a few years ago and explained the effect that it had had on her life. She talked about the massive need for increased research funding for brain tumours and asked me to become the patron of her local charity, which raises funds for such research. I gladly agreed to do so, and I have been hugely inspired and impressed by all that she has done. It is she who caused me to become the chair of the APPG and to make this speech today.

I did not know a great deal about brain tumours before I met Nicole, and this has been quite a sharp learning curve for me. Brain tumours are among the very few conditions that are becoming more prevalent than they were a few decades ago. They are much more common now than they were in 1970. Cancer patients are reporting a worse experience in the NHS for brain tumours than for any other cancer. Unfortunately, 58% of men and women diagnosed with a brain cancer die within a year, compared with 5% of people with breast cancer, 35% of people with leukaemia and 7% of people with prostate cancer. There are also considerable regional variations in incidence, ranging from 108 per million in London to 145 per million in the south-west. Brain cancer is the chief cause of cancer deaths in children, in the under-25s and in the under-35s. The consequence of brain tumours striking so young is that the average tumour is responsible for over 20 years of life lost in the average patient, making it the most lethal cancer by that measure.

Let us look at the funding that brain tumour charities receive. I think that Members will be quite surprised by how low it is. The National Cancer Research Institute consistently devotes less than 1% of its research spending to brain tumours. Between 2002 and 2012, the figure was 0.8%, and in 2012 itself the figure was only 0.78%. There was an average of 6.9 deaths among the under-45s for every £1 million spent on research for all cancers as a whole, but the corresponding figure for brain tumours was 82.5 deaths, and more than £7,700 was spent on research for every death from leukaemia, whereas just £1,400 was spent for every death from a brain tumour.

Between 2002 and 2012, breast cancer research received £352 million of funding, leukaemia research received £291 million, prostate cancer research received £149 million, cervical cancer research received £47 million and, right at the bottom, brain tumour research received only £35 million, less than 10% of what breast cancer research received. As hon. Members can appreciate, brain tumour research funding is very much the poor relation. That is a particular problem because, unlike with many other cancers, brain tumour research does not benefit from general research, for a number of clinical reasons: brain tumours are very different from other types of cancer; the blood-brain barrier presents particular difficulties for researchers; and there are more than 120 different types of brain tumour, which makes research much more difficult. The conclusion to draw is that it is only through giving directly to brain tumour charities and funding laboratory-based research that all types of brain tumours—adult, paediatric, low-grade, benign, high-grade and malignant—will be cured.

Let us examine the experience of people living with brain tumours. I am indebted to the Brain Tumour Charity for its report on that just before Christmas, just as I am to Brain Tumour Research for its excellent report last July on the research issue. When we examine people’s experiences of care, we find that we clearly need to make improvements to make sure that they have the best possible quality of life before and after diagnosis. We know that 38% of people living with a brain tumour visited their GP more than five times before being diagnosed. We know that communication between health care professionals, and people living with a brain tumour and their carers, very much needs to be improved. The Brain Tumour Charity has made a number of recommendations in that area: it wants professionals to recognise and respond to the signs and symptoms of brain tumours more quickly; it wants data collected on the quality of care in different areas up and down the country, so that we can see who is doing well and who is not; and it wants to ensure that written information about treatment options is given to people, along with proper signposting to sources of expert help.

I also wish to highlight the importance of clinical nurse specialists, which was mentioned by the hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (David Heyes). We know from the 2013 cancer patient experience survey that there is a huge difference in the quality of care experienced by patients when a clinical nurse specialist is present. When a clinical nurse specialist was present 74% of patients were given easy-to-understand written information about the type of cancer they had, whereas fewer than half of patients—only 49%—received it when no such specialist was present. Some 87% of patients were given a choice of different types of treatment—that is pretty important—with a specialist, whereas only 67% were given it when no such specialist was present. If we look at those patients who were given information about support and self-help groups—a really important area—86% got that with a clinical nurse specialist and only just over half, 51%, when there was not one present.

For those patients who were eligible for free prescriptions, 78% were informed of that when there was a clinical nurse specialist present and only 55% when there was not. Prescriptions are expensive, so that can make a big difference. Similarly, with information on financial help and benefits to which patients might be entitled, 58%, who had a clinical nurse specialist were told what they could claim, and only 25% were told when there was not one present. I think the Minister will agree that those are pretty huge variations in the quality of care. I absolutely agree with what my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay said about the importance of early diagnosis.

The final matter I want to raise is the excellent campaign run by HeadSmart, which has produced information cards. I know that the Minister is aware of them. I pay huge tribute to the Brain Tumour Charity and to others who are absolutely determined to get these cards into schools across our country. I have written to every colleague in the House—I hope you got the e-mail as well, Mr Deputy Speaker—telling them about how we can do that, and have provided a sample letter that we can all send to our head teachers. I suggest that colleagues write to their local authorities as well. It is so easy to get these cards. HeadSmart provides them, so local authorities and schools do not have to pay anything. The cards provide the warning symptoms that we need to look out for in pre-school children, children aged five to 11 and young people between the ages of 12 to 18. Symptoms include persistent recurring vomiting, recurrent headaches, balance and co-ordination problems, abnormal eye movements, blurred or double vision, behavioural changes and fits and seizures. They are all on the card, which will fit in a purse or wallet.

My challenge to Members here today and to those who read this debate is to get these cards out to their schools, and to our young people. We know the vast difference that early diagnosis can make; it could literally be the difference between life and death. This is something practical that we can all do as a result of this debate, and I ask all colleagues to try to do it.

15:17

[Pauline Latham (Mid Derbyshire) (Con)]

I am delighted to be able to speak on this matter today and congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron) on securing the debate and the Backbench Business Committee on allowing it to happen. We would have had many more Members contributing to this debate if it were not on a Thursday afternoon immediately before a recess. Many Members also have problems getting home because of disrupted transport and, when they get there, they have to face flooding issues. It is disappointing that this debate was not scheduled for a much more popular time.

I also pay tribute to the hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (David Heyes) for coming to talk about his personal experiences, which must have been very difficult. I am pleased to see that he is fit and well—or appears to be—and delighted that he is in the Chamber today. Like many Members, I have been affected by cancer, but not personally. A number of members of my family have unfortunately died at very young ages from various forms of the disease. I take a great interest in what happens to people who are either diagnosed with it or who have various issues with it.

One type of cancer that is particularly close to my heart is melanoma, having lost my brother to the disease 13 years ago. In 2011, more than 11,000 people were diagnosed with melanoma. It is a type of cancer that is relatively easily treatable if it is caught early. Simply removing the affected tissue can usually cure the disease. Given that it is easily treatable in its early stages, it is shocking that 11 % of those diagnosed die within the first five years. These figures would surely imply that there is a problem with awareness of the symptoms of the disease, and, as a consequence, with how long it takes patients to be diagnosed. Doctors need to get better at it. As the hon. Gentleman said, it often takes three visits to a GP before referral to a specialist. My brother went to his GP three times in a year before the GP suddenly said, “Well, there is nothing really wrong with you, but I will refer you,” By that time, it was far too late, and he died of a melanoma a few years later.

I note that the APPG’s excellent report recommends that the current advertising campaigns should continue and I am very pleased that an advertising campaign about melanoma will start in May 2014. Although preventing skin cancer is vital, the focus of the campaign should be on identifying its symptoms because, as lay people, most of us do not know what to look out for. I met one consultant who used to work in Australia, who told me that Australian school children go to school with rucksacks on their backs to take their books and kit to and from school and on each side are mesh holders, one for water and one for sun cream. We must encourage that practice in the UK, and teachers must not be frightened to help young people apply the cream in case they are labelled paedophiles. That is complete nonsense and they need to get over it and help young children who cannot apply the cream themselves.

Through my involvement with the charity Melanoma UK, I know that five-year survival rates are hampered by NICE guidelines on the treatment available to late-stage melanoma sufferers. The first line of treatment offered to patients is dacarbazine, which is generally accepted by clinicians as insufficient to treat late-stage melanoma. There is a call for NICE to recommend a second-line treatment, ipilimumab or Yervoy, in the first instance rather than dacarbazine and I believe that NICE is consulting on that.

One study that recommends ipilimumab as a first-line treatment concerns a man named Richard Jackson, who was told that he had only weeks to live when he was diagnosed. He was deciding which hymns to have at his funeral, but when he went to his doctor he decided to give him ipilimumab straight away. As a consequence of the early prescription of ipilimumab, Richard is still alive seven years after diagnosis. It does not make economic sense to use a first-line drug with such a low success rate only, in the majority of cases, to progress the patient on to ipilimumab when they are much weakened by the first drug. That gives them much less chance of doing well. Given the Government’s commitment to fighting cancer, I think it is important that pressure should be brought to bear on NICE to ensure that ipilimumab is available in the first instance. This debate is timely, because NICE is considering the issue right now.

One type of cancer that has been part of a successful national advertising campaign is, of course, bowel cancer. Perhaps Members will remember that when we had not been here for long after the 2010 election one Member wore a tie that contained a musical device that played a tune and it went off. That probably did more to raise awareness of bowel cancer than any other event. Although the Be Clear on Cancer campaign has no doubt been helpful in fighting bowel cancer, it remains to be seen whether its effects have been positive, as the results of the national cancer audit are due to be published later this year. In the interim, I welcome the APPG’s suggestion that the advertising campaign should be extended, as it will undoubtedly lead to more people being diagnosed with bowel cancer earlier.

People do not like talking about their bowels, but they should. They should not be nervous or embarrassed about it, because if they talk about things, they might realise that their symptoms are the very symptoms that are causing problems for so many people. I speak about this from personal experience because three members of my family have died of that cancer between the ages of 51 and 54, and one at 66. That is incredibly young these days. It is such a deadly disease unless, like others, it is caught early. Then, it is curable.

Although there is no mention of cancer drugs in the report, one element of cancer care that particularly concerns me is the legacy of the cancer drugs fund and what will happen to the provision of cancer drugs after its closure in 2016. The east midlands cancer drugs fund closed in 2013, and in every year of its existence it was left with lots of money to spare at the end of the financial year. One constituent of mine, Jill Bilbie, contacted me when she was funding her own treatment for cancer. It did not matter what I said or did, I could not persuade the cancer drugs fund to pay for the Avastin she so desperately needed even when it had the funding. All the fund said was that Avastin did not work, but she survived for three years on something that did not work. Sadly, she has now died, but during her illness, she paid more than £31,000 for the drugs, and people should not have to do that. It goes without saying that the cancer drugs fund and whatever replaces it in 2016 must be more flexible to the requirements of those making funding applications for drugs and must prevent the situation whereby desperate people exhaust their limited finances to fund their treatment.

Selective internal radiation therapy involving spheres is another cancer therapy that my constituents have had difficulty obtaining on the NHS. I was contacted by a constituent, Kate, who I had known for many years, who had been diagnosed with colorectal liver metastases and was trying to get that therapy to reduce the progress of the disease in her liver. As the cancer had metastasised from the primary tumour in her colon, she was refused. Once again, the guidelines for that particular treatment are insufficiently flexible and lead to premature mortality in otherwise treatable cancers. Another of my constituents managed to get the treatment not because the NHS funded it, but because she had private medical insurance. She is still alive today, which shows that the treatment works, so people should be able to get it. I am disappointed that, regarding the treatments that my constituents can get, the east midlands is a poor relation in comparison with other areas.

I generally agree with the report’s findings. A lot of effort went into the report, so I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay, who puts in a lot of work on the subject all the time, on bringing it forward. There must be an emphasis on the early detection of cancer, but I am worried that not enough is being done to ensure that cancer patients get the right treatment at the right time. I am pleased that the Government are aiming to reduce the number of cancer deaths every year by 5,000, but that aim is less likely to succeed if the Department of Health does not deal with early diagnosis.

15:26

[John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this important debate. I congratulate the all-party group on its work and, especially, my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron) who, since I came to the House four years ago, has been a determined advocate on all matters relating to cancer, such as funding and NHS treatment. He has set a good example to us all of how to campaign forensically on such matters.

There is little need for me to repeat what other hon. Members have said: cancer is a devastating disease. It is obviously right that the Government do all they can to put the best support in place and to set up appropriate frameworks to prioritise finite resources. I welcome the all-party group’s report and its recommendations on improving survival rates and supporting patients through recovery. A third of a million people are now diagnosed with cancer each year, and despite the considerable advances in research, about half those cases will sadly still be fatal.

I shall focus my remarks on end-of-life care. There is a considerable gap between what people want and what they receive. We know that 63% of all patients would prefer to die at home, while a further 29% would choose a hospice. Just 3% of patients would choose to die in hospital, yet more than 53% ended up dying there last year. Among cancer patients, nearly three quarters—73%—want to die at home, but only 29% are able to do so, which means that 36,400 cancer patients died in hospital last year although they wanted to be at home, surrounded by their loved ones. That causes great distress to family members, and many hon. Members will have met constituents who have expressed a lot of frustration about what happens at such a difficult time in their families’ lives.

The national end-of-life-care strategy has rightly called for that to change as a priority, and it has support from across the House. However, practical barriers need to be overcome to make it a reality. This is rooted in reprioritisation of resources, which, if done properly, will not mean increased costs. That is the challenge with so much that happens in the NHS. If small changes are made in certain procedures—the way that things work and research is conducted, and the way that referral processes take place—money can be saved.

There are three challenges. First, high quality 24-hour community support needs to be available. Secondly, patients need to be able to see how their services perform in helping people to die at home. Thirdly, the NHS needs to use innovative tools more effectively so that hospital professionals know what a patient has told their general practitioner. Nearly half of all primary care trusts in 2010 did not provide 24/7 community services, despite groups such as Macmillan Cancer Support and Marie Curie Cancer Care emphasising its importance and despite the clear economic case for doing so. A day of community care costs around £145, compared with £425 for a hospital bed. Improving community care is one of the most effective ways to free up much-needed bed space and prevent emergency admissions, and, of course, give a better quality of life experience for the patients involved.

In Wiltshire, we have a dedicated community nursing team, and Sarum clinical commissioning group in my constituency has chosen to focus on improving end-of-life care. It has a clear target to ensure that there is not just 24-hour community care, but specialist support and advice, which is particularly important in the context of cancer. In addition, it has chosen to set an outcomes indicator on the number of patients who are supported to die in their place of choice.

I wanted specifically to highlight this as the APPG cancer report recommends that the national indicators set by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence should include it. I agree. It is important that patients can see how their local health services are respecting their wishes, or, in some cases sadly, not. It is important that where they fail to do so they can be held to account and a local dialogue can take place. This can only happen with clear and transparent data. If this measure were adopted nationally, it would mean that pressure could be exerted when patient preferences were not being respected.

Patient choice and accountability are at the heart of many of the NHS reforms in recent months and years. Those principles need to apply to end-of-life care. In some London boroughs, I understand that as many as 70% of all patients die in hospitals, yet fewer than half of Wiltshire patients end their days in the same way. It is unacceptable that one area can support 49% of cancer patients at home, while another can reach only 16% of patients. It is important that patients can readily see these numbers, and clinical commissioning groups can account for progress towards meeting their goals and targets.

In 2013, NICE recommended that death in the preferred place of care should be taken forward as an outcome indicator. I urge the Minister to make progress on this issue and ensure that the data will be available as soon as possible in a form that can be understood and digested by our constituents. But it is not just about data for patients; it is also about data for professionals. Innovation allows us to ensure that this is used more effectively, and electronic palliative care co-ordination systems are a real step forward in that area. The proportion of patients on EPaCCS who have died in their preferred place is 76%, and just 8% died in hospital. Not only is that a substantial relief for the families who have benefited, but it delivers, on average, a saving of £270,000 to a clinical commissioning group.

Salisbury district hospital, the outstanding hospital at Odstock that serves my constituency, has taken that concept further. Through greater integration with GPs in the area, emergency department doctors can now access medical records that include an end-of-life care plan. They have trialled an innovative rapid discharge pathway for patients in the last 72 hours of life, and 20 patients were successfully supported at home last year. As a result, the scheme is being rolled out across the hospital and will bring great benefit to patients in the last few days of their life.

Obviously, cancer will continue to present a significant challenge for the NHS, but I hope that the progress that has been made on palliative care can be built upon so that the NHS can support patients during an extremely difficult time. I would like to finish by once again reiterating my support for the work of the APPG and the considerable efforts being undertaken to challenge the Government, in a constructive way, to come forward with measures that will make such significant improvements in the quality of the experience for our constituents and to the functioning of the NHS.

15:36

[Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury (John Glen). On behalf of the Backbench Business Committee, I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron) not only for securing this important debate, but for agreeing to host it on such a difficult day—the last day of term before we break up for the recess.

I speak as someone who has a personal, family experience of cancer and I speak on behalf of my constituents. As I have said in the House before, both my parents died of cancer, as did three of my immediate family—uncles and aunts. They died many years ago, when the treatments now available were not available. Had they been, there is no doubt that they would have survived far longer. The good news is that progress has been made over many years in cancer treatment.

Most of this debate focuses on health matters, but I want to flag up an issue that can also affect people who suffer from cancer. A constituent came to see me. He had worked all his life, for 40 years, in a particular industry, doing quite heavy work. He was suddenly diagnosed with life-threatening cancer. He went to the jobcentre to get benefit while he received treatment. He was denied any benefit, for the simple reason that his doctor’s letter stated that his treatment was likely to last six months. He was therefore disqualified from receiving benefits. He was down to his last few hundred pounds to sustain his family. Fortunately, I was able to intervene and it was found that his treatment would last a minimum of six months, and more likely a year or longer, so he would be out of work for that period. Unfortunately, in many respects the way benefits are dealt with is not helpful to cancer sufferers. I do not expect the Minister to respond to that point today, but it is something we should flag up for Ministers in the Department for Work and Pensions.

I also speak from another perspective. When I was a local councillor, St Luke’s hospice in north-west London was founded in my ward. It has gone from strength to strength. It started out as an outreach service for people suffering from life-threatening diseases or who were at the end of their life; it helped them at home. It has now moved to its own headquarters, which is also a headquarters for Macmillan nurses. It treats many thousands of cancer sufferers across north-west London in an excellent way. St Mark’s hospital, which is world-renowned in the treatment of bowel-related diseases, particularly cancer, is also in my constituency.

As some Members may know, over the past year, I have been under the care of St Mark’s hospital following medical treatment, and I have personally witnessed the terrible distress that individuals go through when they are told that unfortunately they are suffering from some form of cancer. It is not until you see those people and see the terrible effect not only on them, but on their relatives and friends, that it really comes home to you what a terrible thing this disease is and how important it is that we continue to treat people in an appropriate and sympathetic manner. However, the good news is that just because someone has been diagnosed with cancer, that does not mean it is the end. There is treatment available and the capability of a full recovery, but often people do not realise that until they are thus affected.

Of course, as we all live longer and live healthier lives, there is a greater risk of suffering from cancer. As my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay said, within six years, one in every two people will be diagnosed with some form of cancer. That means that every family in the country will experience the terrible problem of having a relative diagnosed with cancer and the impact that that has on the whole family. We need to understand that this will not go away but get worse as a potential problem.

I congratulate the Government on the introduction of the cancer drugs fund, which categorises money and makes it available for treatment of cancer-related diseases. The sad fact is, however, that it is time-limited; it will end in 2016. Concerns are being raised—they are raised very strongly in the report by the all-party group—about what will replace it and what the impact will be on funding for treatment of the various diseases.

There is another big challenge in relation to the clinical treatment of cancers: quality of life issues versus the age of the patient and their ability to recover from the treatment—whether the treatment will actually kill the patient is a concern. More importantly, such issues are balanced against the cost of the treatment to be provided. If a patient is going to have their life prolonged by a week, the clinician can be asked whether it is worth the huge amount of money that may be invested in doing so. However, if they will be given another five years, there is no question about what should be provided. Then the challenge is what to do in between those time frames. That is a direct challenge to our clinicians and to all those making decisions about funding the cost of treatment and the provision that we make for it.

During this debate, we have talked about early diagnosis. There is no question but that if people are diagnosed early, their treatment is less severe and the chances of recovery are far greater. Women, in particular, have had strong advice over many years to check themselves for breast cancer. Smears have been available, as have other forms of treatment and checks. Men often do not want to talk about the fact that they may be suffering from early signs of cancer. They do not go to doctors early enough. They do not consider themselves to need treatment, and of course, by the end, it may be too late for that treatment to take place.

A system of screening across the country for the most common forms of cancer needs to be available for every single patient on the NHS. However, there must be a word of warning—after screening, the patient may be shown not to be suffering from a form of cancer at the moment, but that does not mean that they will not suffer from it next week, next month or thereafter. The risk is that people may feel that they are safe as a result of screening, but they are not. Therefore, screening must take place regularly so that people can understand that early treatment can get them into a good position.

There is also the aspect of specialist treatment that must be available. There are a number of rare cancer diseases where the cost of treatment is quite high but the number of cases is relatively few. We should therefore ensure that the people who suffer from those rare forms of cancer have a good chance of recovery through proper treatment, proper drugs, and proper specialist care.

I want to highlight in particular the work being done at University College hospital on blood cancers. One of the problems is that, while treatment kills many cancer cells, it leaves behind small numbers that are very difficult to detect and that at some future stage may spring back into action and infect the whole body via the blood. University College hospital depends on donations from members of the public for the equipment it uses. In my view, there should be far greater investment from the NHS in that research, which enables experts to make diagnoses and produce the detailed treatment needed by those suffering from blood cancer in particular.

Another issue is the drug companies that produce the drugs that treat cancers, be they common or rare. It is clear that the cost of research is enormous, that the failure rate of the drugs is difficult to determine and that there is a challenge—this is particularly true of rare cancers—with regard to the number of patients who can be treated. Will the Minister consider an open-book policy for the drug companies whereby they would say, “We’ve spent this much money on research and this is how much it has cost us to develop these drugs, so this is how much we need to recover from treatment using these drugs”? At the moment, there seems to be a battle between the drug companies, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence and the NHS with regard to the cost of treatment. It is clear that that needs to be addressed.

It would be remiss of me, during a debate on cancer, not to say that individuals also have a responsibility. If we can educate young people to have a better diet and not to start smoking in the first place, and if we can educate people who do smoke to give up, we have a chance of reducing the risks of contracting cancer. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Minister, who has been a Health Minister for only a short period, on the major change earlier this week to the Government’s policy on smoking in cars when children are present and on the issue of standardised packaging of tobacco products. She has made a huge impact.

We have not completed the job yet and we look forward to the regulations being introduced, but now we have another challenge, which is the treatment of cancers through the use of various drugs that assist people who suffer from those terrible diseases. It is a new challenge and a new opportunity, and I am sure that the Minister will take it up with gusto and zeal and that she will achieve the same degree of success as she has in relation to smoking.

15:48

[Mr James Clappison (Hertsmere) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron) on securing this debate and his work in the all-party group on cancer. I commend the group’s work and its recommendations to the Minister, and I hope she will respond positively to them. I am sure she will; as has just been rightly said, she is a very forward-thinking Minister.

I also commend the sterling work of Macmillan Cancer Support in bringing the issue to the attention of the public and Parliament. So many of our constituents hold that charity and other cancer charities in high regard. As my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) has said, few families have not been touched in one way or another by cancer, and mine is certainly no exception. It was also very good to hear the personal views of the hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (David Heyes) in his courageous and outstanding speech. It is always good to hear from personal experience.

Medical science has given hope to many people where no hope existed in the past, and survival rates are much better than they were 20 or 30 years ago. It seems to me, however, that the material question is whether this country harnesses the benefits of advances in medical science as well as other countries do. That raises many questions, as I suggested in my intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay.

Across the health services of the constituent nations of the United Kingdom, across the years and under Governments of both the main political parties, there has been a gap in survival rates for cancer compared with those of other countries. There is a gap in how well we harness the advances of medical science, certainly relative to comparable economies in Europe, other western nations and the United States.

It is a material question whether we are managing to close the gap. I drew attention to that in a debate about the cancer patient experience in Westminster Hall in October. Since then, further statistics have been produced by Eurocare. In December, it published a survey of cancer survival rates across Europe, which looked at the five-year relative survival rates of adult patients who were diagnosed with cancer from 2000 to 2007. I am indebted to the House of Commons Library for providing me with the results, which are the material comparisons we should make. Eurocare is a cancer epidemiology research project on the survival of European cancer patients, which is based on collaboration between some highly esteemed cancer registries and specialists, with results from 22 European countries.

I am afraid I have to report to the House that the survey of 22 countries suggests that the gap in cancer survival rates remains considerable. The clinical outcomes for cancer patients in this country lag behind those of many other countries. For every type of cancer, the United Kingdom is certainly well behind Scandinavian countries, and it is well behind western European nations with similar economies to our own, including France and Germany. We are also behind southern European nations for every type of cancer except, perhaps understandably, skin cancer.

The economies of those countries are certainly no larger than ours—in some cases, they are smaller—but it appears that their cancer survival rates are higher. For example, the prostate cancer survival rate is 9% higher in Portugal than in this country; the breast cancer survival rate is 6% higher in Italy than in this country, while that for stomach cancer is 15% higher; and the stomach cancer survival rate is 8% higher in Spain than in this country. We have to ask why that is the case. We are ahead of eastern European countries for most of the common cancers, but we are behind even them for some types, particularly stomach, lung and ovarian cancers. Why is the stomach cancer survival rate 5% higher in the Czech Republic than in this country, when it laboured for so many years under a very undeveloped communist system?

I invite the Minister to address those questions. As my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay and the Government have rightly said, we could save the lives of thousands of cancer patients in this country if we brought our survival rates just up to the European average. Why does this advanced economy, which is doing very well economically compared with other countries, have cancer survival rates that are so much lower than those of comparable nations? That question must be asked over and over again.

Some excellent points have been made about the early detection of cancer. I hope that the Minister will make a full response to those points. I invite her to respond on the question of cancer survival rates for older patients. Many people believe that older patients do not get as good a deal in this country as they do in comparable European countries. Will the Minister tell me—if she does not have the statistics to hand, I would be happy if she wrote to me—whether the gap that still exists is being closed? Have we made any progress over the years in closing the gap between ourselves and those European countries? Is it the Government’s ambition to close that gap? What specific measures does she think would help us to achieve that?

There is no reason why this country should have a lower cancer survival rate. The advances in medical science are as available to us as to other countries. We can afford them because we have a developed economy. This country has wonderful pharmaceutical companies that produce world-beating research. We also have excellent clinicians, doctors and nurses, and very good hospitals. Why is it that we have this stubborn gap in cancer survival rates, with survival rates for common cancers being much lower in this country than in comparable western nations?

I applaud the Government for their ambition, but I urge Ministers to focus on closing that gap. It is a stubborn gap that has been there for many years under Governments of both main political parties. There is no reason why the public in this country should have to put up with it.

15:55

[Liz Kendall (Leicester West) (Lab)]

Like other hon. Members, I thank the Backbench Business Committee for providing time on the Floor of the House for us to debate this excellent report by the all-party parliamentary group on cancer.

I commend the hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron) for his tireless work on this issue. Like the hon. Member for Salisbury (John Glen), I have been in this place for four years and have been amazed at the work that the hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay has done and at his forensic attention to detail. He never gives up and I am sure that he never will. I am grateful to him for that. I also pay tribute to the work of my hon. Friend the Member for Easington (Grahame M. Morris) and the noble Baroness Morgan of Drefelin, who are officers of the group.

The hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) was right to say that hearing the words “You have cancer” is one of the most frightening things that can happen to somebody. It is frightening not only for the person who is given the diagnosis, but for their family. He was also right that more and more of us will hear those words in the future. As we live for longer, the prevalence of cancer increases. Just last week, the World Health Organisation warned that the world faces a “tidal wave” of cancer, with the number of cases globally set to reach 24 million a year by 2035. We often think of cancer and heart disease as issues of the western, developed world. In fact, long-term conditions are becoming the primary health conditions in developing countries as well. We have made big strides in tackling conditions such as malaria and HIV, but long-term conditions such as cancer are big issues in developing countries.

In the UK, 330,000 people are diagnosed with cancer each year. That figure has gone up by 50,000 in a decade. The primary reason for that is the ageing population. Cancer Research UK has highlighted a number of other risk factors: alcohol and the increase in obesity are two of the biggest drivers of that change.

Cancer Research UK produced a report in December, which showed that cancer deaths have dropped by 20% over the past 20 years. I am proud of the Labour Government’s contribution to that record. We launched the first ever national cancer plan in 2000 and made cancer a top priority. That work was led by Professor Sir Mike Richards who, as Members will know, is now the chief inspector of hospitals. The plan was backed by increased funding and, crucially, by reforms to drive improvements in cancer care, including better diagnosis, reduced waiting times for treatment and better standards of care. As a result, survival rates have improved steadily and cancer deaths have fallen by 50,000 a year.

Many hon. Members have rightly highlighted the need to ensure that patients with cancer have the best outcomes and survival rates, and that we narrow the gap with other countries. Many figures have been cited, but in some areas we have seen the gap narrow. An article by John Appleby from the King’s Fund in the British Medical Journal in January 2011 reminded us that death rates for lung cancer in men peaked in the late 1970s, but they have steadily come down and are now lower than those for French men. There has been a similar trend in breast cancer mortality for which we have virtually closed the gap with France. As the all-party group on cancer report rightly said, however, we need to do much more to prevent, treat and cure cancer, which means raising awareness of the symptoms of cancer among members of the public and GPs.

[Mr Clappison]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for expanding my point because, as I made clear in my speech, I am not out to make any political point about this. According to Eurocare statistics, which I have been supplied with by the House of Commons Library and which refer to December last year—more recent than the article the hon. Lady mentioned—the survival rate for lung cancer in Frenchmen is 4% better than for people in this country. For lung cancer we lag behind nearly every other country in Europe, certainly western Europe.

[Liz Kendall]

I am not a statistician; I am reporting something from the British Medical Journal. There are different ways of cutting the statistics and different reports, but I absolutely agree that we need to do more to catch up with other European countries. There are a variety of statistics on that, and in some areas—but not enough—we have made big improvements in recent years.

We must raise awareness of the symptoms of cancer among members of the public and GPs, to ensure that everyone gets the earliest possible diagnosis. We must tackle variations in treatment so that everyone gets the best possible care, and we must provide better support to cancer patients and their families as they go through treatment, not just in terms of physical care, but emotional and social support such as help with finances, benefits and work. The hon. Member for Harrow East made an important point about how when they go through such a terrible time, many patients have a problem with their finances and benefits. I visited a brilliant multidisciplinary cancer team at Leicester Royal Infirmary, where Macmillan Cancer Support had a brilliant network of people providing financial information and support, as well as emotional support. That joined-up care is exactly what we need.

We must also ensure that people who have recovered from cancer can cope with life after cancer. People’s experience of the condition, as many hon. Members will know, does not end—hopefully—with the all-clear, because there are all sorts of emotional problems after that. As the hon. Member for Salisbury said, we must ensure that patients who cannot be cured, and their families, have real choice and control over the last days of their life, including where they die. The hon. Gentleman has probably not been reading the Hansard reports of the Care Bill Committee, but there is cross-party support for moving more quickly on that issue. In that Committee, the Minister of State, Department of Health, the hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb), said that he was personally committed to getting that up and running and sorted out quickly.

As the hon. Member for Salisbury said, we should help people to stay at home with the right social care and support, including support for family members. It can be quite frightening to think that one’s loved one may be dying at home, and people can feel panicked about that. If we can provide the right social care support, and Macmillan specialist nurses to sit with people through the night, it can be better for those families and also provide better value for money. I hope that when the Care Bill reaches Report, we will get some clearer commitments.

The overarching question that the all-party group focuses on is how we can make such things happen on the ground. It takes the new structure within the NHS and asks, “How are we going to make this work?” The Health and Social Care Act 2012 reform was not perfect, and it was clear that cancer networks took the lead in driving changes and improvements in cancer services. As my hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (David Heyes) has said, we had 27 cancer networks that brought together the commissioners of services and the providers of cancer care to plan high-quality services in their areas. They were staffed by people with specific expertise in cancer care and local knowledge of the different hospitals and services. They worked across primary and secondary care and on a wide range of issues such as increasing the uptake of screening, improving training for staff on the best possible treatments, spotting early symptoms and signs, and championing a focus on the patient experience and the patient’s pathway through the system.

As the all-party group’s report states, there is concern, including among organisations such as Macmillan, that the good work and vital expertise of those networks are being lost. I was first alerted to the problem by Dr Mike Peake, a lung cancer specialist at Glenfield hospital. He is also the national clinical lead for cancer and responsible for the national cancer intelligence network. The worry is that the Government’s reorganisation means that the dedicated cancer networks have been abolished and subsumed into 12 generic strategic clinical networks, which cover a larger geographical region and have fewer dedicated staff. The fundamental concern is that moving from a specialist to a generic focus will reduce the ability, which we desperately need, to drive improvements in cancer care.

Members on both sides of the House, and clinicians and staff, are saying that in every other part of the health system we need to concentrate specialist services like cancer services to improve outcomes, rather than having them delivered through every district general hospital. It does not make sense to people: we say that we want clinical advice to drive clinical improvements and change, but then we go the opposite way—from specialist to generic. That is a cause for concern.

There is also confusion about how the strategic clinical networks will work with all the other parts of the new system—the 10 specialist commissioning hubs, the 19 commissioning support groups, the 211 clinical commissioning groups, the 27 local area teams, the 152 health and wellbeing boards, NHS England, Public Health England and Health Education England. The new system is very confusing. People have to work together, so clear lines of responsibility and accountability are important.

We urgently need clarity on two points. First, will the Minister update Members on what is happening in the strategic clinical networks, and, specifically, how is the cancer expertise being protected? Secondly, will she outline precisely how the strategic clinical networks will work with other parts of the system?

The all-party parliamentary group report makes many excellent recommendations and raises many issues. I cannot go into all of them in detail, but will focus on the two that I believe are the most important for patients. The first, as most hon. Members have said, is early diagnosis. The second is improving the patient experience, which we have not discussed in detail.

Getting early diagnosis right is the key to improving survival rates. Several things would make a difference, but I shall describe the most important ones, the first of which is raising public awareness of symptoms. If the Government want to meet their target of saving an additional 5,000 lives by 2014-15, we must arm people with knowledge of the warning signs and symptoms. Once again, the Government’s reorganisation means that the responsibilities for public health are split between lots of different bodies and we are not clear how they will work together. The APPG report says that the responsibilities for increasing public awareness must be more clearly spelt out for NHS England, the Department of Health and Public Health England, and for local authorities and health and wellbeing boards. I hope the Minister will set out exactly who will be responsible for running public awareness and other campaigns.

Secondly, we have to improve the ability of GPs to spot signs and refer people to specialists for early diagnosis. As the report states, more than a quarter of people diagnosed with cancer see their GP three times or more before they are referred to a specialist. Under the old system, before the Health and Social Care Act 2012 and the reorganisation, cancer networks absolutely led improvements in training for GPs and other health professionals, but it is not really clear who is going to do that now. How will NHS England work with Health Education England, the royal colleges and other education providers to ensure that training programmes for health professionals are really there on the ground?

Thirdly—this is probably the most important point in the report, one which the hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay emphasised—how are we going to hold clinical commissioning groups to account for the one and five-year survival rates? The report states:

“NHS England has not provided any guidance on how the one- and five-year survival rates will be used to drive improvements in CCGs.”

The data may be available, but what will happen to them? Will NHS England identify poor performers? Will it make practical support and guidance available to CCGs? How will we know whether actions and steps have been taken? How can we hold them to account? As a local MP, I would certainly want to know how my CCG rates, what the problems are, what it has not been doing, what its action plan is and when it is going to report back. We do not know any of that. The survival rate targets are excellent, but we have to make sure we can deliver. At the moment, we simply do not have the mechanisms to do that.

The other point I want to focus on is improving the patient experience. This is not only absolutely central for patients, but a key driver of improvements in the quality of care and better value for money. As such, it should be a much higher priority in the NHS. We all know, whether from personal experience, the experience of those we love or those in our constituencies, that a good experience makes patients feel as though they have been supported and respected as an individual. A bad experience makes them feel at best that their needs do not matter, and at worst that their basic human dignity has been denied. Cancer patients I have spoken to, for example those at the Macmillan Cancer Support group in my constituency, constantly emphasise their experience of care and how they are treated by NHS staff. That would be important at any point, but for someone going through such a frightening time, it is even more important.

The importance of patient experience goes far beyond the personal value to individuals. There is now strong evidence that good patient experience is consistently and positively associated with better health outcomes, and safer and more clinically effective care. The British Medical Journal published a systematic review of 55 studies last year, which provided very clear evidence. Patients who have a good experience are more likely to stick to their recommended treatments and medicines, and more likely to use preventive services such as screening and healthy living programmes.

There is also increasing evidence, although I would say that it is from the US and not the UK at this stage, that a good patient experience is linked to getting better value for money. It is associated with reduced length of stay in hospitals and fewer problems with patient safety—the so-called “adverse incidents”. A good patient experience is also associated with higher staff retention rates and, in turn, lower staff turnover. That is common sense: when staff feel valued and respected they are more likely to treat patients in that way.

For all the reasons I have outlined, the patient experience in cancer care should be given an even higher priority. The cancer patient experience survey introduced by the previous Government has made a big difference in trying to drive improvements. I welcome the assurances given to the all-party group on cancer that the survey will continue, but for how many more years? We must ensure that we use that information to drive changes on the ground, and I will make some concrete proposals on how to do that. First, commissioners should be held to account through the inclusion of a cancer patient experience indicator in the CCG OIS. If that is how we hold them to account, we have to include patient experience. Secondly, patient experience should be much more central to the hospital inspection process led by the chief inspector of hospitals. Currently, out of 150 CQC indicators, only two concern patient experience. We need more patient experience indicators in the work of the CQC, including one specifically for cancer teams or services.

Thirdly, we need to look at how we improve professionals’ training in patient experience. I want to highlight a brilliant example from my own constituency that I hope the Minister will look into. Under a joint Macmillan and De Montfort university partnership project, people training to be nurses, pharmacists and NHS managers get training from Macmillan in patient experience and how to talk to and support patients. In return, those students volunteer for Macmillan in the community in order to increase awareness about cancer, particularly among black and minority ethnic groups—Leicester is a very diverse city. That is something to think about. Has the Minister spoken to Health Education England and the royal colleges about how to improve training in patient experience for professionals, and will she speak to Ministers in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to see what other universities could do to learn from the fantastic work at De Montfort?

To conclude, Members on both sides of the House want to see big improvements in cancer care. The new system in the NHS is confusing. Both as MPs and as people with families and friends, we want the right people held to account so that they take the right action, but it is not yet clear how that accountability will work. For me, that was at the heart of the all-party group’s report. The Minister might not be able to respond to all the many questions she has been asked in this debate, but if she cannot, I hope she will write to me about the specific issues I have raised. This is about improving patient experience and early diagnosis and ensuring that CCGs are held to account. We as MPs must hold them to account on behalf of our constituents.

16:17

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Jane Ellison)]

Before addressing only some—I fear—of the many points raised in this debate, I would like to thank the all-party group, which, as the shadow Minister and others have said, does astonishing work. It rightly, and regularly, holds Ministers’ feet to the flames—my feet regularly feel the heat—but that is a good thing, because this is about driving up standards and pushing us all to work harder and do the right thing in this important policy area.

I also pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron), who brought this debate, and to the Backbench Business Committee—it used to be more fun being on it than responding to its debates—and I also warmly welcome the contribution from, and the presence of, the hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (David Heyes), whose personal testimony greatly enhanced the debate this afternoon. We should also pause to think of our colleague, my hon. Friend the Member for Filton and Bradley Stoke (Jack Lopresti), who is being treated for bowel cancer; our thoughts are with him.

I shall try to reply to some of the many points raised in this fascinating debate. I shall try to respond, to some extent, on the structure of the report and the different domains, and to pick up on some other points made, and I absolutely undertake to get back to colleagues where I cannot respond substantively. As my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay said, this is part of an ongoing dialogue, and I am delighted that he will be meeting the national clinical director soon. Out of that dialogue, I think we can progress in some of these areas. Some of the issues are inevitably a work in progress. However, important points have been made and I shall try to respond to as many as I can while updating the House more generally on what the Government are doing.

Many of the report’s recommendations are for NHS England. As I said, I am pleased that the national clinical director is to meet the all-party group later this month. He will find the meeting a helpful opportunity to discuss the report in detail. As I prepared for this debate, I was particularly struck by the fact that NHS England is considering the report in great detail—indeed, it contributed during the consultation phase. I am really encouraged by that, as NHS England is absolutely critical in our new health structures. It is very aware of its responsibilities. Some of the challenge today has been about how we interact and how those new responsibilities settle.

I want to set out some of the actions under way that I hope will provide reassurance about the Government’s and NHS England’s commitment to delivering on our ambition, articulated by other Members, to make England among the best in Europe on this issue. My hon. Friend the Member for Hertsmere (Mr Clappison) said that we had major challenges and a long way to go in that regard, although the shadow Minister was right to say that we are beginning to make significant progress in some areas. However, we recognise that we have a long way to go.

I was first asked to respond formally to the report, and it would be improper if I did not respond to such a thoughtful and well put together piece of work. Obviously, I hope to respond to some degree today, but I will take the report away and certainly respond formally later. Some of that will be about the Government’s responsibilities in holding NHS England to account. I will think about how we can do that.

The first domain that the report addresses is preventing people from dying prematurely. It raises concerns about responsibilities and accountability in the new health system. It is right to challenge on such issues; we cannot pretend that, when there is such major change to a system, everything will immediately be settled and clear. I accept that there is a challenge. Our progress must be as speedy as possible in understanding who is responsible for what—particularly in understanding how we make accountability as transparent as possible and a driver of change and improvement.

We are responding to the new system and the inevitable tensions between devolving power on delivery in a way that empowers clinicians while also being accountable to Parliament. No one could pretend that that is not challenging. I certainly feel that challenge as a Minister; the responsibility for delivering most of that clinical care sits somewhere else, so the issue is about how we respond and account to Parliament for that.

I gently say that we should be careful not to suggest that, in such a large and complex health economy, all was perfectly clear and beautifully directed from the centre before. I respect the shadow Minister’s enormous knowledge of the NHS and I know that neither she nor anyone else is suggesting that. However, in highlighting concerns about where the new system is settling down, it is sometimes tempting to think that previously Ministers had a big lever under their desks that they could pull to make everything right. Even if that was the theory, it certainly was never the practice, as is evidenced by our persistent lagging in some of the key survival statistics discussed today.

The challenge is to respond to the new system and get clarity where there is none at the moment. A number of Members, including the shadow Minister, have mentioned how we hold people to account at the most local level. That issue emerges from this debate as the one on which we have the most work to do and to which we must give the most thought.

I want to discuss how the system is set out. I accept that the way in which we make it work in practice is not necessarily the same as that, but I will go through how we have set out the different frameworks and processes of accountability.

The indicators in the NHS outcomes framework provide the basis against which the performance of the NHS will be monitored. NHS England is responsible for delivering year-on-year improvement and is accountable to the Secretary of State. Those arrangements are set out in the Health and Social Care Act 2012, under which the Secretary of State set out the strategic priorities for NHS England through the mandate. The mandate makes it clear what is expected of NHS England with regard to contributing to the prevention of ill health through the better early diagnosis and treatment of conditions such as cancer.

The outcomes framework sets out different measures against which we hold people to account, and the Department has quarterly accountability meetings with NHS England, through which NHS England’s progress in delivering those improved outcomes is monitored. We will continue to monitor its progress in delivering against the mandate. The evidence showing how it has met the mandate is published, and forms the basis on which Ministers can ultimately judge the success or otherwise of NHS England’s performance.

I entirely accept the point that that is quite a macro way of looking at things, and that Members are also seeking a sense of what can be done on the ground. Perhaps I need to respond in more detail after the debate on the challenges relating to the role of the strategic clinical networks. Cancer has been made a priority for those networks. Making the new networks work is also a challenge for the national clinical directors and other colleagues in NHS England. Their role in relation to cancer is obviously to drive quality and innovation in prevention and screening, survivorship and end-of-life care. I know that NHS England is keen to see the links between the national clinical directors and those respective networks strengthened. There is clearly more to do, and I welcome the fact that the all-party group is in direct dialogue with the national clinical director. I will pick this up with the group and with him after their meeting.

With regard to clinical commissioning group accountability, NHS England is responsible for ensuring that the CCGs secure the excellent outcomes that we want, through commissioning. The assurance framework provides the basis for that assessment. It is an integral part of the agreement of improvements to be delivered locally. When CCGs are found to be at risk of failing to deliver improvements, NHS England will provide the necessary support. Statutory intervention powers exist, but they are to be used as a last resort only when CCGs are demonstrably lacking the capacity to make improvements.

Through “Everyone Counts”, the planning guidance for 2014-15, NHS England has asked CCGs to set a level of ambition for reducing premature mortality as part of their strategic and operational plans. They will be expected to demonstrate progress against those plans. The 2014-15 CCG outcomes indicator set is used as a tool by CCGs to understand trends in outcomes and to help them to identify potential priorities for improvement. It has a range of new cancer measures covering early detection, stage at diagnosis, and diagnosis via emergency routes. I pay tribute to the all-party group for championing the inclusion of those indicators, which have now been adopted, as the hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay said. The indicators will help to ensure that progress is being made on early diagnosis and, in turn, on survival rates.

With regard to the various bits of data, we will shortly have the one-year cancer survival information for patients diagnosed in 2012, which will tell us the stage at diagnosis. This will allow us to calculate stage-adjusted one-year survival, and that will probably represent the most accurate and timely cancer data that have ever been available in England. Using those data, we will be able to populate important indicators in order to drive up improvement, including the public health outcomes framework and the CCG outcomes indicator set, in relation to the proportion of cancers diagnosed at stages 1 and 2—the early stages.

On the five-year data, I am sorry that things have changed since the answer that I gave to my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay at Health questions. That was the information that I was working on at the time. NHS England has been working with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine to establish whether the five-year indicator was statistically valid. When I answered my hon. Friend’s question, the data had not been fully gathered in. Having gathered them in, however, the conclusion was that because of the small number of survivors at five years, disaggregating the data down to individual CCGs would not leave the data statistically robust enough to draw conclusions. It would therefore be unsafe to do so. They are not therefore planning to publish at the CCG level, but they are considering how it can be published at a level that is not only meaningful and helpful, but statistically safe. I understand that this has been disappointing, but I think that the all-party group and Members will understand that the data set is so sensitive that if it was not felt to be safe and robust, it could not be published in that way. We will talk to NHS England about it.

[Mr Baron]

I very much welcome that explanation, which goes a long way towards explaining the reason for the change in such a short period. May I leave the Minister with the thought that there appeared to be almost a complete disregard of the need to consult? Although I accept that this is NHS England’s ultimate responsibility, the cancer community came together on this issue and it seemed to be completely ignored from the point of view of consultation. Perhaps the Minister will look at that.

[Jane Ellison]

That is a fair challenge, and I will certainly take it up and raise it. On what we can do with data and transparency at the local level, the Department is looking at a number of things. The Government have tried to use data transparency in lots of different ways to drive improvement and accountability, and we are currently looking at some other ideas which I hope will produce a far greater sense of what is happening on the ground and in someone’s local area. We are very open to suggestions, and some have been made during the debate. I am happy to look at those, but this is an area under active consideration.

There has been a lot of discussion in this excellent debate about awareness and early diagnosis, and we know that it is one of the keys to getting better survival rates. It is central to meeting our ambition of saving the additional 5,000 lives each year by 2014-15, and we have committed more than £450 million in funding to achieving that and doing more on early diagnosis. To date, we have run national campaigns on tackling bowel and lung cancers; we have the Blood in Pee campaign, which hon. Members will be aware of, to raise awareness of bladder and kidney cancers; and we are currently running a breast cancer campaign for women aged 70 and over. The early response to that campaign has been really encouraging.

The shadow Minister raised some of the core public health issues which I spend much of the day job discussing: obesity, alcohol and smoking. I am slightly surprised that we have had relatively little discussion of those in the context of early diagnosis and prevention. Public health has been devolved to local authorities. They have more than £5 billion of ring-fenced money over two years, and all the local authorities I speak to—I was at the Local Government Association public health conference two weeks ago—are excited by the possibilities that that holds for them. There is a fair challenge about where the responsibility sits, but if everyone is doing work on awareness and early diagnosis, that can only be a good thing. Many local authorities are taking seriously the challenge of raising their game locally, and that is in addition to the national campaigns.

As hon. Members will be aware, many of the indicators are very mixed; there is a variety of statistics and variation around the country. I pay tribute to my local Wandsworth authority, whose six-week “get to know cancer” pop-up shop closes this Sunday. A local shopping centre gave the authority an empty unit and it worked with NHS London, staffing the unit for six weeks during the same hours as the shopping centre. It was run on a walk-in basis, and hundreds of people in my local community have popped in to that non-threatening environment to talk to trained nurses and get advice about cancer and some of those important awareness issues. Such local initiatives can only help us in our ambition to do much better.

My hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) has had to leave us for a constituency engagement, but he touched on the work of charities. I met people from the excellent HeadSmart charity recently and I undertook to write to health and wellbeing boards about its work, so I will give him that assurance when I next see him. I also pay tribute to the work that Cancer Research UK has been doing on pilots dealing with melanoma, which my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire (Pauline Latham) mentioned.

NHS England works with Public Health England and the Department to determine the focus of campaigns and to manage the development of the Be Clear on Cancer campaign. Decisions on the 2014-15 campaign activity will be based on the evidence and learning from the evaluation campaigns of the past two years, and it will be subject to all the normal clearances in terms of delivering really good value for money.

To deliver access to the best treatment, we have committed more than £173 million to improve and expand radiotherapy services. That includes £23 million for the radiotherapy innovation fund, which has supported centres to deliver increased levels of intensity modulated radiotherapy—a more accurate form of treatment that can reduce side effects.

The cancer drugs fund featured heavily in the debate. More than 44,000 patients have benefited from the fund so far, and last September we announced a further £400 million to extend it to the end of March 2016. Going forward, we will consider what arrangements can be put in place to deliver access to drugs previously funded through the CDF at a cost that represents value to the NHS. I recognise the nervousness that exists among those who understand what the fund has done and the impact it has had on individual patients. My hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire highlighted that matter, but clearly it is something that NHS England will be taking forward, and it will be aware of the concerns that have been expressed in the House.

Regarding the all-party group’s specific concern about NHS England’s duty to promote research, NHS England recently carried out an open consultation on a draft research and development strategy to deliver its statutory responsibilities and the NHS mandate duties. Again, we will learn more about that when the meetings take place, and as NHS England delivers that project.

The all-party group rightly highlights the importance of supporting cancer survivors. Increasingly, cancer is viewed as a long-term condition—that was certainly not the case when many of us were younger—as more are living with and beyond the disease. In March 2013, the Department’s national cancer survivorship initiative published “Living with and beyond cancer: taking action to improve outcomes”. It set out key recommendations to improve survivorship care, which were drawn from two years of evidence gathering.

I understand that the national clinical director is working closely with Macmillan, which provides the secretariat so ably to the all-party group, to encourage implementation and spread of the recommendations, including around stratified care pathways. The all-party group will be pleased to learn that ensuring all survivors benefit from the survivorship recovery package is a priority work programme.

We want to support people to stay in and return to work. A specific concern of the all-party group is how NHS England intends to support people to do that, as set out in the mandate. I can confirm that NHS England has issued an invitation to tender for a piece of work to examine the factors that impact on the employment rate of people with long-term conditions and to identify the useful interventions that can be made. It will be looking to consider the next steps. I think it is expecting to report on that in 2015.

The all-party group has also said that it would like to see wider use of the patient reported outcomes measure—PROM—data. This month, we have already seen the publication of “Quality of life of cancer survivors in England—one year on”. That is a survivorship update commissioned by the Department, which provides important information on recovery, unmet needs and the consequences of treatment. NHS England has already begun work to extend the PROM programme. A new pilot PROM data collection has recently started looking at quality of life issues for survivors of womb, ovarian and cervical cancer. For men, NHS England is supporting Prostate Cancer UK on a nationwide PROM data collection.

The all-party group makes a number of recommendations on the national cancer patient experience survey, which was referred to by the shadow Minister. I think we all acknowledge that it has been an invaluable tool in driving improvement in cancer care. When I first heard about it and looked at it in response to an earlier debate in Westminster Hall, I was very impressed with the level of detail that it can drive down to individual trusts. It uses what the best are doing to drive performance among those that are not meeting the highest standards.

NHS England recognises the value of the survey and currently has no plans to halt the programme. NHS England is the lead, but I think the more often we in Parliament recognise how important the programme is, and show how much parliamentarians value it and regard it as central to understanding the cancer patient experience, the more NHS England will feel that it is the right decision to go forward with it. I know that NHS England intends to examine the potential for a survey-related indicator as part of the future development of the clinical commissioning group outcome indicator set. That is a good thing. The shadow Minister made some interesting points and constructive suggestions in that regard, which I will happily look at after the debate and draw to the attention of NHS England.

The all-party group was concerned that more could be done to understand the experience of those who are close to people affected by cancer, and its members might be interested to know that following the NHS’s commitment to carers event, held last December, a number of priorities for supporting carers were identified. An action plan is in development and although it focuses more on the experience of carers in general, NHS England will consider cancer care as part of that. The 2014 cancer patient experience survey will begin in March and report in late summer. I am sure that there will be parliamentary interest in that report.

In order to realise the Berwick report’s vision of the NHS as an organisation devoted to continual learning and improvement, NHS England and NHS Improving Quality will establish a new patient safety collaborative programme to spread best practice, build skills and capabilities in patient safety and improvement science, and focus on actions that can make the biggest difference to patients in every part of the country.

NHS England is undertaking work to improve the collection and analysis of patient safety data, including introducing “safety thermometers” for medication error, maternity care and mental health, and revising the NHS serious incident framework further to support best practice. It is working with the Care Quality Commission and others to provide consistent and clear information for all on what patient safety data are available.

Let me try to pick up on some of the points made by hon. Members. My hon. Friend the Member for Hertsmere expressed a concern about older people with cancer. I will respond to him in more detail after the debate, but we know that older people sometimes do not get the support they need and what happens during diagnosis is often the primary driver of poor outcomes. He might be interested to know that we have worked on a £1 million project with Macmillan Cancer Support and Age UK to improve uptake of treatment in older people. That has established some key principles for the delivery of age-friendly cancer services and, as I mentioned earlier, we are seeing encouraging take-up of the over-70 breast screening programme in response to the current campaign.

Finally—I apologise, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I had many points to respond to and although I have not reached all of them, I will draw my remarks to a close—I am advised that NHS England will engage with the vision for the management of complaints and concerns developed on the recommendations of the right hon. Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd) and Professor Tricia Hart. I think the whole House acknowledges the amazing work done by our parliamentary colleague in that regard. The plan is to establish an advisory group of patients and patient representatives to feed into the complaints improvement work.

My hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury (John Glen) talked about palliative care. Work is going on in that area and I shall write to him after the debate. He might also be interested to know that NHS England is considering the potential for an indicator based on death in a preferred place of care. I will get back to him with more detail on that.

My hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) mentioned issues to do with work and pensions, which I shall refer to the Department for Work and Pensions. He also talked about procurement issues and smoking. I am afraid that at the risk of sounding a little boring after Monday I must put on the record the fact that the Government have not yet made a decision about standardised packaging. We have instead introduced regulation-making powers so that we can make a decision when we have received the Chantler review and considered the wider aspects of that policy while taking its findings into account. Ministers will make the final decision. I am sure that my hon. Friend understands why we must put that rather legalistic sounding statement on the record.

In conclusion, I apologise for the length of my response, but this was such a good debate and many interesting points were made. I will take away those that I have not been able to respond to in detail. Once the all-party group has met the national clinical director, that might be a good time for us to meet again, to reflect on the meeting and to consider what more we can do to take this important work forward. I thank everybody who has contributed to the debate, and the all-party group for its continued detailed work and the challenge it puts out to us all to do better in this area on behalf of all our constituents.

16:44

[Mr Baron]

I thank the Minister for her response and especially welcome her offer of a meeting, which we will be more than happy to take up.

This was always going to be a difficult slot to fill. Many Members who would have wished to speak are not here, and that is fully understandable, given the transport disruption caused by the floods. However, in that vein, I thank those Members who did make a contribution. We heard excellent speeches, and I thank those who courageously shared their personal experiences, whether as patients themselves or family members. Our thoughts are with those Members who are battling cancer, including my hon. Friend the Member for Filton and Bradley Stoke (Jack Lopresti).

If there is one message that I would like to relay to the Minister, it is: please, please focus on clinical commissioning group accountability. There is no point having the tools in the toolbox if they are not going to be used. We have the measures in place and we know that we are monitoring survival rates as a means of promoting earlier diagnosis, but we need to be sure that there is follow-through so that underperforming CCGs are brought up to the mark. If we fail to do that, we are failing thousands of NHS patients throughout the country, given that our survival rates are woefully behind the average on the continent and internationally. It is a national disgrace that a quarter—one in four—of all cancers are first diagnosed at A and E, when it is often too late. That is the challenge before us, so the NHS needs to raise its game, as thousands of lives depend on it doing so. I look forward to the Minister responding to our report in full in due course.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Cancer report on cancer priorities in the NHS.

Syrian Refugees (Schooling)

Thursday 13th February 2014 Commons Chamber

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—(Claire Perry.)

16:47

[Mr Gordon Brown (Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath) (Lab)]

If any one of us were to visit the children’s section of the museum commemorating the genocide that happened in Rwanda, we would immediately be drawn to a picture of a young boy called David. The words that describe what happened to that boy are very brief indeed, and the biographical details are sparse, but they say, “David, aged 10; favourite sport, football; pastime, making people laugh; ambition, to be a doctor; death, by torture; last words, ‘The United Nations are coming to help us.’” That young boy, in his idealism and innocence, believed that the world would honour the promise that it had made to help people such as him in times of need and desperate difficulty. His story, and the words that he said to his mother before he tragically died, have influenced me a great deal over the years.

As I look at the situation that is emerging in Syria, those words come back to me, and they did so particularly when I heard a young teenage girl in Syria issuing a plea to the world with the words, “Why have you abandoned us?” That young girl had been made homeless in her city of Homs. Her father, mother and sister—her disabled sister was in a wheelchair—were pushed out on to the streets, and her school had been bombed. She was without shelter, without accommodation, without food and, of course, without a return to schooling. That young girl issued a plea in a letter to me in which she said that she had been a champion at chess, she had been a leader of her youth group, and she had sung with her church choir. Now, she said, she had lost not only her school and her home, but she had lost hope. She said:

“Everything is lost. I feel like I should show you so you will believe me.”

That young girl dreamed of continuing her education despite the chaos, and by good fortune linking her up to a great charity in Britain, she is now studying in a college in the United Kingdom. She dreams that one day she will go back to Syria and use the skills that she is learning in service of her country.

But there are today 3 million girls and boys like her who are now the victims of the civil war in Syria, displaced from their homes in what is now a disaster of biblical proportions. It is officially, as you know, Madam Deputy Speaker, already the biggest humanitarian tragedy since the second world war. Some years from now the world will look back on what happened and wonder why we did so little, faced with a catastrophe that has made more people permanently homeless than the world’s most recent natural disasters, from the Asian tsunami of 2004 to the Haiti earthquake of 2010.

We know that, historically, children are the innocent but often forgotten victims of conflict, and that children need to be able think of a future ahead of them. They need to be able to dream. They need to have hope, and the best way to deliver that hope and to give them the future that is essential for them, is somehow to enable them to return to school: children, like the seven and eight-year-olds whom I have read about and heard of who have never been at school; children who are now in their teens and will never finish their education; young girls who are now being trafficked in Lebanon and in other parts of the region, who dream of a future that is violence free.

In this debate—I am grateful that the Minister is here to reply to it and that he had a meeting with me yesterday about these issues—I do not want to focus on the diplomatic complexities of the region, nor do I want to speculate on the foreign policy considerations that I know are involved. I am not here to do anything other than to acknowledge the Government’s £1 billion contribution to Syrian aid; to appreciate their recent announcement of £100 million of extra aid at the Kuwait pledging conference; to thank the Secretary of State in her absence for the £6 million that has been given to Lebanon for books for Syrian and Lebanese children. But I am here to join 50 international development agencies and departments from around the world, all known for their humanitarian work, which have today made an urgent appeal to Governments about an emergency that can be addressed by a very specific plan that they are asking this Government and other Governments now to support.

Tomorrow, the Minister—to whom we should be grateful —will be able to meet the Prime Minister of Lebanon. He is the Prime Minister of a troubled, divided country, bleeding from the biggest inflow of refugees, who now form one quarter of the population of his country. His plea is not only for more food, more shelter, more medical care for girls and boys and for adults, but, because he knows too that these young children need more than food, more than shelter, more than health care, his is an appeal that their right as children to have an education, even in these troubled times, be upheld, and be upheld during the crisis as long as it lasts.

I want to ask the Government today to accept and to contribute to what I believe is the most innovative plan that has so far been developed, by UNICEF and UNHCR, to provide education, not for a few hundred or a few thousand, but for 435,000 Syrian refugee children who are now located in Lebanon but who now are not at school, and without this plan may never be at school. The plan that I want to address today is one that will support the biggest number of pupils ever helped in an education conflict zone. I believe it could be up and running within weeks and months, not years. I believe I can show that it is cost-effective and affordable, and I believe that it establishes a principle that just as the Red Cross established a right to health care 150 years ago when it moved into war zones and said that health should be a right of people even in these troubled areas, so too the right to education can exist across borders and even when children are located and caught and sometimes trapped in areas of conflict.

Let us look at the figures we are dealing with. Today, of the 3 million children who have been displaced in and from Syria, 1 million have had to flee their country, and almost half of them are in beleaguered Lebanon. Those children are the subject of the call today by the 50 anti-poverty advocacy groups that—this is the slogan—“education cannot wait.” On best estimates, those child refugees are likely to spend at least 10 years away from their homes, in camps, temporary shelters or elsewhere.

However, if we adopted the plan submitted to the Government several weeks ago, which has been compiled by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and UNICEF, as many as 435,000 of those children could get to school, and it could happen quickly, as I have said, because the plan is beautiful in its simplicity. It would put existing Lebanese schools on double shifts, offering one set of classes by day and one set in the evenings. Thus, all the 435,000 refugee children, who are spread across the country in about 1,500 locations, rather than concentrated in one place, could be offered the chance of schooling. Because we would be using existing classrooms and would thus be spared the expense of building new schools, the annual cost would be an astonishing £5 a week per pupil, or $8, which is $400 a year.

The money, as I think the Minister knows, would go to five separate projects that are part of the Education without Borders initiative: 80,000 children would be in the schools; 100,000 would be catered for by non-governmental organisations and the Government in joint projects; 175,000 would be catered for in NGO-led projects—many of the NGOs that have signed the missive to the Government and other Governments are part of that—and at the same time 40,000 children would be in nursery schools, so that they could start school at age three; and 35,000 15 to 18-year-olds, many of whom may have missed out on education over the past three years because of the conflict, would be given skills and the chance to get jobs. It is a figure that offers almost every refugee child in Lebanon the chance to enrol in schooling and the hope of the better future that goes with it.

Proof that the double shift system is working, albeit on a smaller scale, can be found in a north Lebanese village called Akroum. In a unique effort, we have volunteer Syrian teachers, local Lebanese school heads and a small Scottish charity called Edinburgh Direct Aid operating the local school there, in what they call a timeshare, outside normal school hours to give those refugees the chance to be taught, this time in Arabic. Almost immediately, boys and girls who had fled from burnt-down and bombed schools, and who only a few weeks ago had been, in some cases, child labourers and even beggars, have started to recover their lost childhood and now have hope that there is something to live for. What has been achieved on that small scale in that village on the border with Syria can now be achieved at speed for 435,000 Syrian refugees, if we urgently adopt this plan.

My frustration, and the reason I called this debate, with the permission of Mr Speaker, is that that idea was conceived nine months ago. It was negotiated with the Lebanese Prime Minister six months ago—we have met, had talks and agreed the plan. It has been subject to two in-depth reports: one by the respected Overseas Development Institute, a British charity working in that area; and the other by UNICEF, with the UNHCR. It is now sitting on a table awaiting implementation while the problem has worsened and while all this winter children, with few exceptions, are walking the streets, some tragically trafficked into prostitution and some even forced into early marriage as child brides. That is why, for three reasons, I urge the Minister to be positive in his response today and to tell me not only that he supports in principle the plan being put forward by all the different agencies and led by UNICEF, but that the Government will contribute to it in the way that others have done.

First, since we started on this exercise, 300,000 more people have moved into Lebanon. In the past nine months, 150,000 children have been added to the list of those in need, and that number is growing at about 5,000 a week. If we do not act now, the problem will simply get worse. I think the Minister is aware of the politics of Lebanon, where in a divided country there is a huge dispute as to whether—

17:00

Motion lapsed (Standing Order No. 9(3)).

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—(Greg Hands.)

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)]

That was a mere procedural necessity. I call Mr Gordon Brown; the right hon. Gentleman has the Floor.

[Mr Brown]

After 30 years in this House, Madam Deputy Speaker, there are still procedures that I did not know. It is also very good to speak to a relatively empty House because there is not much opposition to what I say.

I was saying that, first, this is urgent and the Government should act because the problem is getting worse. Secondly, the Lebanese Prime Minister, as the Minister will particularly recognise after he meets him tomorrow, has sold this plan to a divided population, some of whom would want to throw out the Syrian refugees and some of whom would want to deny them any help. The Prime Minister is now asking why so much of the world has yet to support this humanitarian plan. One of the reasons why action is urgent is that his Ministers are risking their lives every day while his Government struggle to hold together around a plan that he has personally championed—and that I believe the Minister will wish to support.

The third reason why I think the Minister will want to respond positively, as I hope he does, is that other countries want to be part of this initiative and want to help. The United States of America, Norway, Denmark, the European Union, the United Arab Emirates and other countries, one or two of which will announce tomorrow that they are giving money, are committed to providing finance for this plan, and a consensus is growing in favour of it. It is money that will not be wasted and, as I can tell the Daily Mail, it is money that will be well spent. Given the International Development Secretary’s own personal commitment to the “no lost generation” plan, which is about helping children in all the different areas of the region, I want her to put her weight behind this plan as part of her own initiative.

I know from my own experience as a father that every single child is precious, every single child is unique, and every single child is special. That means that, if we can do something about it, every single child deserves the chance to fulfil their talents, to make the most of their potential, and to bridge the gap between what they are and what they have it in themselves to become. We have the chance to make that opportunity possible for not just a few but several hundred thousand children in this troubled region.

Given that the Minister and I agree that the Government have made a general commitment to this region and that we both appreciate that the sums announced at Kuwait include money that could be devoted this project, I hope that he will be able specifically to address the UNHCR-UNICEF plan. I think it is common ground that the Government have done a huge amount in this region and that they wish to do more on education for children, particularly for girls. However, what we need to agree on today—I hope the Minister will play his part in contributing to this—is that when we have an innovative plan, when we have the support of the Lebanese Government, who would find it difficult in normal circumstances to finance anything that is now happening with Syrian refugees, and when we have international aid agencies in support of this plan and prepared to unite around it, it would be a mistake for us to delay any longer in providing this urgent support that is needed in an emergency. It is needed for children like the girl I mentioned who are losing hope because, despite all our efforts, they do not feel that we are reaching their needs and those of their fellow children—boys and girls like them. I hope the Minister can respond positively to the desire not just that this plan be supported but that it be properly financed.

17:04

[The Minister of State, Department for International Development (Mr Alan Duncan)]

May I thank the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown) for securing this important debate and for bringing such an important issue to the attention of the House? I commend him for so tirelessly using his influence to champion the needs of Syrian children and for pushing education further up the global agenda. If there is one thing we can all absolutely agree on, it is that what is happening to Syria’s children is intolerable.

In this brutal civil war, children have been shot at, tortured and sexually abused. In parts of Syria today, children are starving. They are also dying from diseases that three years ago could have been easily treated. Indeed, polio has returned to the country 14 years after it was officially declared polio-free.

More than 1 million children have crossed the borders to escape the bloodshed; some have had their families split up and some have seen their parents and friends killed. Away from their home, many face neglect, exploitation and abuse. As the right hon. Gentleman has said, even very young children are being sent out to work or beg, while girls as young as 13 have been sold into early marriage. Whatever the degree of trauma children might have faced, what is true more widely is that millions of them are missing out on a basic education.

A destroyed childhood is a destroyed life. As this crisis rages on, an entire generation of children is being shaped by this relentlessly brutal war that has ripped every bit of normality away from them. That will have profound long-term consequences for Syria, the region and even much further afield.

We have a clear responsibility to invest in these children now and to invest in Syria’s future, because they are Syria’s future. That is why, right from the start of this crisis, this Government have highlighted the plight of vulnerable children and focused on ensuring that they have the basics that they need to survive.

The UK is leading the way. We have pledged £600 million for Syria and the region, which is three times the size of our response to any other humanitarian crisis. We are the second largest bilateral donor after the United States. UK aid is getting food to almost 320,000 people a month. We are getting water to 930,000 people a month, and we have provided more than 300,000 medical consultations. Our support is reaching children and their families inside Syria, and also those refugees who have fled to Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey and Egypt.

Food, water and medicine, however, are not enough. As the right hon. Gentleman knows all too well, bombs and bullets have forced nearly 2.3 million children out of school in Syria. Outside Syria, 735,000 school-age refugees are simply not going to school at all. As the number of refugees continues to rise, so will the number of children without an education—unless the world acts now.

Countries such as Lebanon and Jordan have been incredibly generous in welcoming these refugees, but their schools are coming under incredible strain. As many as one in four of school-age children in Lebanon are from Syria. We cannot afford to let these children—the future of Syria—become a generation lost to conflict.

That is why in September last year the Secretary of State played a leading role in championing the “no lost generation” initiative, which is designed to galvanise a global, co-ordinated effort to provide Syrian children with the education, protection and psycho-social support they all so desperately need. The UK has already pledged £30 million to the initiative, almost all of which has already been committed to specific projects.

For the past two years, I have personally worked with the United Arab Emirates on the Emirates-Jordanian camp for Syrian refugees, near Zarqa in Jordan. The camp is financed by the UAE, but it is the UK, through UNICEF, that is funding the education that is benefiting the more than 6,000 children in it. Furthermore, we have matched pound for pound the UK public’s generous contributions to winter appeals for Syrian children by UNICEF, War Child, Oxfam, and Save the Children. That is helping those agencies to deliver blankets, clothing and heating to help people to cope with winter conditions.

The right hon. Gentleman has asked the Government to support a plan to educate refugee children now in Lebanon, as well as vulnerable Lebanese children there. I want to make it clear that the Government fully support this excellent plan, which has been developed with the Lebanese Government and fits squarely within the “no lost generation” initiative that we have pushed. Lebanon has more Syrian refugee children than any other country, and the UNICEF “reaching all children with education” plan can make a huge contribution to achieving one of the key goals of the “no lost generation” initiative by ensuring that all children affected by the Syrian crisis can receive a good education.

The right hon. Gentleman has rightly drawn the House’s attention to the need to act now, and I share his sense of urgency. I am pleased to inform the House that the Department for International Development is already supporting one of the most urgent areas identified in the plan, namely the provision of textbooks for the current academic year. When she was in Lebanon in January, the Secretary of State announced that £4 million will be made available for 300,000 packs of textbooks for all children between the ages of six and 15 who attend state schools in Lebanon, including Syrian and Palestinian refugees.

The Government intend to provide further support for the “reaching all children with education” plan in Lebanon. I can assure the right hon. Gentleman that I want to work very closely with him as we assess just where UK assistance can add most value. As he said, I will discuss all this in more detail directly with the Lebanese Prime Minister tomorrow.

I am pleased to announce that the Secretary of State is planning a high-level meeting of key stakeholders—donors, host Governments, UN organisations and non-governmental organisations—to agree on how the international community can further ramp up its support for the education of Syrian children in the region, including by supporting the Lebanon plan. She has invited the right hon. Gentleman to attend that meeting, which will provide a further opportunity to rally support and to mobilise funding.

The right hon. Gentleman has done the children of Syria and Lebanon an inestimable service in fighting their corner. In this sphere, we respect and wish to support his work as a UN special envoy. Through DFID, this Government will do all they can to underpin his efforts. As a result of this debate, he can confidently tell other donors that the UK is there to support UNICEF’s Lebanese education plan. We will work with him to finalise the details.

It is the children of today who will have to rebuild their country tomorrow. The UK will continue to do everything possible to give them and Syria the chance of a better future. We continue to call on other nations to do likewise and to contribute more funding both to support this plan and to tackle the Syrian humanitarian crisis more broadly. The right hon. Gentleman’s role in this initiative is crucial, and his is an effort that we commend and support.

Question put and agreed to.

17:13

House adjourned.