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Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)
1. What recent steps the Crown Prosecution Service has taken to ensure that prosecutors are able more effectively to prosecute cases of domestic abuse.
The Solicitor General (Robert Buckland)
Crown Prosecution Service legal guidance on domestic abuse was updated ahead of the introduction of the new offence of coercive or controlling behaviour in intimate and familial relationships. To support the introduction of that guidance, training has been developed and made available to prosecutors.
Mr Walker
I thank my hon. and learned Friend for that answer. Women’s groups in Worcester and national campaigns such as Women’s Aid have warmly welcomed the new law of coercive control as a real step forward in the protection of victims. Does he anticipate a further rise in the number of domestic abuse cases coming to court as a result of that change in legislation?
The Solicitor General
I pay tribute to all those groups that do so much to support male and female victims of domestic abuse. Yes, I think we can expect a rise in prosecutions. There has been a similar precedent in the case of stalking and harassment offences, which were introduced several years ago, and I was proud to be the Minister who took the coercive control provisions through this House.
Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)
Given that conviction rates for rape, domestic abuse and other sexual offences have fallen in the past year, what reassurances can the Solicitor General give to the House that further budget cuts will not damage attempts to secure justice for the victims of those crimes?
The Solicitor General
The hon. Gentleman makes a proper point. Conviction rates for domestic violence remain broadly flat, but the volume of convictions continues to increase, which is good news for every single victim. For example, rape convictions now exceed 2,500 a year, whereas there were only 2,000 some five years ago. I assure him that the CPS, in the light of the comprehensive spending review settlement, is placing continued priority on rape and serious sexual offence units, and no prosecution will be prevented as a result of any budget problem.
Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)
The strength of the victim’s evidence in a domestic violence trial can often depend on recalling recollections as close in time to the incident as possible. Does the Solicitor General agree that we should consider allowing victims to record evidence remotely, perhaps via an app on their phones, rather than having to flog off to a police station?
The Solicitor General
Like my hon. Friend, I am always enthusiastic about the sensible use of new technology. Police in London are already piloting body-worn cameras, which capture the immediacy of events of domestic abuse. That sort of technology needs to be very much part of the tools available to police officers when investigating such cases.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I thank the Solicitor General for his responses so far. Domestic violence accounts for about a fifth of all crime in Northern Ireland, with police officers attending 60 domestic incidents a day. That is massive, but we still have problems with people failing to come forward, particularly men. Is the CPS considering taking steps to work alongside police forces to encourage people to report all domestic incidents?
The Solicitor General
I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising the issue of male victims. About 15% of domestic abuse victims are, indeed, men, and proper emphasis is being placed on the need to encourage men to come forward. It is not a badge of shame for someone to admit that they are a male victim of domestic abuse, and that message needs to be heard loud and clear throughout the length and breadth of the kingdom.
Jeff Smith (Manchester, Withington) (Lab)
2. Whether he has had discussions with the Prime Minister on the legal form of the UK’s renegotiation deal with the EU.
Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab)
7. Whether he has had discussions with the Prime Minister on the legal form of the UK’s renegotiation deal with the EU.
The Attorney General (Jeremy Wright)
I regularly meet ministerial colleagues, including the Prime Minister, to discuss issues of common interest, including EU law matters, but I am not able to talk about the legal content of those discussions, because, by convention, whether Law Officers have given advice is not disclosed outside Government.
Jeff Smith
The President of the EU Council has said that we should expect a concrete proposal in February. Given the timescale involved, can the Attorney General tell us what legal form the renegotiation of the deal will take?
The Attorney General
Of course, I cannot discuss the legal ramifications of an agreement that has not yet been reached. When the agreement is reached, the House will, of course, be able to see it and form its own judgment, including on its legal aspects, on which we will be able to say more. The hon. Gentleman will recognise, however, that the final say on the matter will come from the British public, who will have a referendum to determine their verdict—a referendum that a Labour Government would not have given them.
Stephen Kinnock
Article 50 of the Lisbon treaty states that, on announcing its intention to withdraw from the European Union, the withdrawing state will automatically be excluded from all meetings of the European Council and, if agreement is not reached within two years, the withdrawing state will be automatically excluded from the negotiated terms. Does the right hon. and learned Gentleman agree that a withdrawing state is therefore liable to suffer what would amount to a punishment beating to dissuade others from withdrawing, and that therefore there is no such thing as a soft Brexit?
The Attorney General
These matters will be discussed in the course of the referendum campaign. The hon. Gentleman is several stages ahead of where we are now. The first thing that needs to happen is a renegotiation. Conservative Members believe that the renegotiation is necessary, and we wish the Prime Minister all success in achieving it. When he has, there will be a referendum to determine whether or not the British public believe it is a good enough deal. Both the renegotiation and the referendum were opposed by the hon. Gentleman’s party. We believe that they are the right things to do.
Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)
The plan appears to be to have an agreement as a first stage, which would later be confirmed in a treaty change. As the voters in Denmark and Ireland have shown in the past, the outcome of national referendums cannot be taken for granted. How can the Government be certain that any proposed treaty change in the future would actually be approved by each of the other 27 EU states?
The Attorney General
My hon. Friend, too, will recognise that these matters will be debated fully in the course of the referendum campaign. I know he will play a full part in that campaign. Of course, in relation to both Ireland and Denmark, international agreements were reached and subsequently enacted. The Government and the public will of course wish to consider that, if that is the outcome of the renegotiation.
Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)
Were this country to vote to leave the European Union, would the Attorney General’s advice to Her Majesty’s Government be that the article 50 direction ought to be tabled straightaway so that the negotiations for our exit, which the British people would have so willed, could begin straightaway?
The Attorney General
My hon. Friend will recognise that we are some way away from that. I know he will also recognise that, as I said in my initial answer, I cannot discuss in the Chamber or elsewhere legal advice that I may or may not give to the Prime Minister. I hope my hon. Friend will therefore forgive me for not doing so now.
Keir Starmer (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)
One of the risks of leaving the EU is that the UK will no longer be able to rely on crucial EU criminal justice measures to fight serious and organised crime and terrorism. Has the Attorney General given any advice on that risk, and if so, to which Departments?
The Attorney General
I am afraid that I am going to sound like a broken record. I think the hon. and learned Gentleman, like most Members of the House, understands full well that I cannot discuss in the Chamber the advice that I may or may not have given to the Government, and I am not going to do so.
Richard Arkless (Dumfries and Galloway) (SNP)
In my view, the legal position surrounding the so-called renegotiation is confused at best. It appears to me that this confusion may be delaying potential withdrawal from the European convention on human rights. Do the Government intend to hold the EU referendum before addressing the UK’s membership of the ECHR?
The Attorney General
I do not accept what the hon. Gentleman says about the position being confused. As I have already said, I cannot comment on the legal status of an agreement that has not yet been negotiated. In relation to the ECHR, he will know that my ministerial colleagues in the Ministry of Justice are working very hard on the Government’s proposals, and he will hear them in due course.
James Berry (Kingston and Surbiton) (Con)
3. What recent steps the Director of Public Prosecutions has taken to improve co-ordination between prosecutors and police in the handling of cases involving sexual violence.
The Solicitor General (Robert Buckland)
To ensure a consistent approach to the investigation and prosecution of rape cases across all CPS areas, a joint CPS and police national steering group and a delivery board have been established, and they meet regularly.
James Berry
What assessment has my hon. and learned Friend made of the CPS’s action plan to improve the investigation and prosecution of rape and sexual assault? Does he agree that the publication of the action plan demonstrates the willingness of this Government and of the CPS to increase the number of prosecutions in those areas?
The Solicitor General
I agree with my hon. Friend. The publication of the plan shows a very clear line of intent. That is reflected in the increased volumes of prosecutions, and in the careful consideration given to any withdrawal of prosecution cases before a jury has properly considered them.
Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith) (SNP)
4. Whether he has given advice on the legality under international law of the bombing of Syria.
The Attorney General (Jeremy Wright)
As I have mentioned, the long-standing convention adopted my predecessors in Governments of all hues is that neither the fact nor the content of Law Officers’ advice is normally disclosed outside the Government. In this case, the Government’s legal position in relation to taking military action against Daesh in Syria is reflected in the Prime Minister’s response to the Foreign Affairs Committee. The hon. Lady can take it that I am in agreement with that position.
Deidre Brock
I appreciate the fact that the right hon. and learned Gentleman’s advice to the Government is privileged, and rightly so, but will you do Parliament the courtesy of sharing your view on the legality of the current military action in Syria either now or in a statement?
The Attorney General
Well, Mr Speaker, I do have a view on the matter. My view is that these were legal actions. As I have said, the Government’s legal position on these matters has been set out, I believe with clarity, so the House is aware of it. I do not intend to set out the specific advice that I have given, either on the individual drone strike in Syria or on military action against Daesh, but, as I have said, in both cases the Government’s legal position is set out and I fully agree with it.
Jessica Morden (Newport East) (Lab)
5. What recent discussions he has had with the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Director of Public Prosecutions on the role of the national wildlife crime unit in increasing conviction rates for wildlife crime.
The Solicitor General (Robert Buckland)
The Crown Prosecution Service’s senior wildlife champion and the head of the national wildlife crime unit work together closely and regularly discuss policy and casework issues. Both parties sit on the partnership for action against wildlife crime, which is chaired by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
Jessica Morden
Does the Solicitor General agree that if conviction rates for wildlife crime continue to increase, it is crucial that the Government commit to funding the national wildlife crime unit not just for a year or two, but as part of a much longer-term wildlife crime strategy?
The Solicitor General
In the year from July 2014 to June last year, the overall conviction rate was 71%, which compares favourably with other types of crime. There were 605 defendants prosecuted, with 349 entering guilty pleas. The decision on the funding of the wildlife crime unit will be made very shortly.
Rebecca Pow (Taunton Deane) (Con)
In my constituency and in the wider south-west, the wildlife crime unit plays a crucial role, particularly in cracking down on poaching, but also in protecting hares, other precious creatures and birds’ eggs. If the unit were disbanded, there would be no one else to step into its shoes, so I urge the Solicitor General to think carefully before withdrawing what does not amount to very much funding for so much valuable work.
The Solicitor General
I hear what my hon. Friend says, as I am sure do DEFRA Ministers. With about £1.7 million of funding since 2010, the unit has indeed played an important role in the prosecution of these serious offences. As I said, a decision on funding will be made very soon.
Tom Elliott (Fermanagh and South Tyrone) (UUP)
Does the Solicitor General feel that there is enough protection in current legislation not only for wildlife, but for individuals who are involved in rural sports?
The Solicitor General
Britain has led the world in legislation that criminalises acts of cruelty against wildlife and that relates to the protection of wildlife. While the relevant laws are in place, they will be properly enforced and prosecutions will be applied using the tests that prosecutors have to use, following the evidence wherever it leads them.
Judith Cummins (Bradford South) (Lab)
6. What discussions he has had with the Director of Public Prosecutions on the consequences of the Law Officers’ Department’s spending review settlement for the Crown Prosecution Service’s operations.
The Attorney General (Jeremy Wright)
The Director of Public Prosecutions and I have regular discussions about Crown Prosecution Service operations. We both believe that the spending review settlement enables the CPS to respond effectively to a changing case load and an increase in complex and sensitive cases. We also continue to discuss how the CPS can be more efficient and effective in the work that it does.
Judith Cummins
Does the Attorney General agree with the former Director of Public Prosecutions, Lord Macdonald, that as the CPS is forced to shed thousands of jobs, a potentially dangerous situation could develop in which the CPS no longer has the necessary expertise to do its important job of delivering justice to the people of this country?
The Attorney General
No, I do not agree, and, more to the point, neither does the current Director of Public Prosecutions. I draw the hon. Lady’s attention to two things in the settlement and what they have led to. The CPS can almost double in size its counter-terrorism unit, which has a growing case load, as she will appreciate. It can also recruit 100 more prosecutors to conduct work on serious sexual cases. In both those areas, the number of cases that the CPS has to deal with is growing substantially, and it is now in a position to do so.
Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)
Will the Attorney General confirm that his response is entirely consistent with the evidence that the Director of Public Prosecutions has given recently to the Select Committee on Justice? The willingness of the Crown Prosecution Service to look innovatively at the ways in which it organises itself is being reinforced by its co-operation with the chief inspector’s proposal to carry out thematic reviews of its financing at a corporate level, which will drive further efficiencies.
The Attorney General
Yes, I agree with my hon. Friend, and it is important that the Crown Prosecution Service inspectorate takes that role. As I have indicated, it is keen to ensure that its work is conducted as efficiently as possible, and it will need to do that in continuing difficult economic times. It is not right to suggest that the CPS does not have the resources that it needs to do its job well.
Karl Turner (Kingston upon Hull East) (Lab)
This time last year the Director of Public Prosecutions asked the Attorney General for an extra £50 million to prosecute complex cases properly, but the spending review revealed a real-terms cut of 2.1% to the Law Officers Department. Given that the vast majority of the budget is taken up by the CPS, will the Attorney General confirm that the DPP is saying that she no longer needs the extra £50 million for which she was pleading just 12 months ago?
The Attorney General
May I start by congratulating the hon. Gentleman on his well deserved promotion? I point out, however, that I think four people have done his job in the time that I have been doing mine, so I wish him at least a comparatively long career in opposition.
As he knows—we have discussed this issue across the Dispatch Box previously—it is important to listen to what the CPS is saying now, not what it said a year ago, and what it is saying now is what I read to him in my initial answer. At the time, the CPS comment, with which the DPP fully agrees, was:
“This settlement will allow the CPS to respond to a changing caseload and the significant increase in complex and sensitive cases, such as terrorism, rape and serious sexual assaults and child sex abuse.”
That is what the DPP believes. She says that this is a good settlement, and I agree with her.
Mr David Hanson (Delyn) (Lab)
10. What recent steps the Crown Prosecution Service has taken to improve the conviction rate for rape and domestic violence.
The Solicitor General (Robert Buckland)
The CPS has taken a number of steps to improve the conviction rate for rape and domestic violence abuse cases, including refocusing resources to strengthen the rape and serious sexual offences unit’s extensive training on rape cases for prosecutors, an update of domestic abuse legal guidance, and closer working with the police.
Mr Hanson
That is all very well, and I am grateful for the Minister’s reply, but it will not hide the fact that the conviction rate for rape has fallen by 5.6% in the last four years, and is now just over 56%. The conviction rate for domestic abuse has also fallen. Clearly, something is happening, and I would welcome the Minister’s view of what that might be, and a clear indication of what action he will take to increase conviction rates, particularly for rape.
The Solicitor General
The right hon. Gentleman has taken a long interest in this matters, and he is right to raise those issues. I remind him that the volumes of outcomes continue to increase to their highest ever levels. I have mentioned rape, but domestic violence outcomes have also increased dramatically to their highest ever levels, which means justice for thousands more victims. It is incumbent on the CPS to examine the reasons why prosecutions do not succeed, and the key for the Attorney General and me is to ensure that the prosecution does not bring charges and then drop them without good reason. It should allow such cases to go to a jury, so that juries and magistrates can make decisions.
Michael Fabricant (Lichfield) (Con)
May I take a slightly contrary view? As we all know, about a year ago a colleague of ours was found innocent of rape, and more recently a young student was also found innocent of rape. It is important that the Crown Prosecution Service does not prosecute people lightly, and if it thinks that a person is innocent, it should ensure that they are not prosecuted.
The Solicitor General
I assure my hon. Friend that in every case the prosecution must apply the test of a reasonable prospect of conviction, and of whether that prosecution is in the public interest. That should apply to everybody, whether they are in this House or any other part of the country. There must be equality before the law, and the evidence must be followed wherever it leads.
Jo Stevens (Cardiff Central) (Lab)
Despite what the Solicitor General has said, conviction rates for rape, other sexual offences and domestic abuse have all fallen, and the Government need to do far more to reduce the incidence of those offences, as well as more to support victims. Last year the Labour party made a manifesto commitment to legislate with a violence against women and girls Bill, just as the groundbreaking Welsh Labour Government have done. The Bill would include provisions to appoint a commissioner to set minimum standards to tackle domestic and sexual violence. Will the Government do the same?
The Solicitor General
First, may I warmly welcome the hon. Lady to her position? It is a pleasure to see her. Indeed, we worked together for many years in the south Wales legal fraternity.
The Government are absolutely committed to funding the combating of violence against women and girls. A cross-ministerial group, of which I am a member, meets regularly, and we have introduced new legislation to criminalise coercive control. We have enhanced the tools the police and the prosecution have at their disposal, which is why the number of prosecutions for domestic abuse and rape continues to rise.
Mr Speaker
Now a lawyer who is not a member of the Welsh legal fraternity, but we want to hear from him anyway. I call Huw Merriman.
Huw Merriman (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)
13. What assessment he has made of the effectiveness of the law on the discharge of firearms by police officers.
The Attorney General (Jeremy Wright)
For the purposes of clarity, Mr Speaker, I am not a member of the Welsh legal fraternity either.
In the aftermath of the tragic events in Paris last month, the Prime Minister asked for a review into the legal framework and investigatory processes relating to incidents involving police use of firearms. I will play my part in that review, which will conclude later this year.
Huw Merriman
My name may suggest otherwise, but Wales is not my home.
Last week I met the chief constable of Sussex police. We agreed that our firearms officers do a job that is difficult and often dangerous, and that they are more likely than ever to be called on to protect the public. They fully understand, quite rightly, that they will need to account for their actions if they use lethal force. Is the Attorney General comfortable that our investigating authorities support this difficult balance?
The Attorney General
I agree with my hon. Friend. As he says, it is important that incidents are properly investigated, but it is also important we recognise the need to treat police officers fairly. If, as we do, we need to recruit more police officers to do the difficult work of using firearms, and we need to retain experienced officers who already do that work, then they need to feel as though the system will treat them fairly. That is, I hope, what the review will do.
Mr David Burrowes (Enfield, Southgate) (Con)
14. What discussions he has had with the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government on the effect of the Supreme Court ruling of 13 May 2015 on local authorities’ ability to meet their legal duties towards people facing homelessness.
The Solicitor General (Robert Buckland)
I have to observe the proprieties of the Law Officers’ convention, but the Government welcome the clarity the judgment provided. It explains that any assessment of vulnerability must be made in the round, looking at all aspects of a person’s situation.
Mr Burrowes
A rough sleeper is likely die by the age of 47. Homeless people are inherently vulnerable. Can the Solicitor General assure me that, as the law currently stands, a safety net is provided for vulnerable and homeless people who are unintentionally homeless?
The Solicitor General
I commend my hon. Friend for the considerable work he has done on this issue, both in the capital and generally. The Government intervened in that case precisely because they were concerned that the test would disproportionately affect vulnerable homeless people. I am glad the Supreme Court has rebalanced the law in what I think is a fair way.
Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)
1. What assessment she has made of the effect on equality of recent changes to the Government’s definition of child poverty.
The Minister for Women and Equalities (Nicky Morgan)
Before I begin, may I, on behalf of the whole House, welcome the new female First Minister in Northern Ireland, Arlene Foster, to her role and wish her all the very best? I am sure the whole House will also want to offer its support to my right hon. Friend the Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell), who made his personal statement yesterday.
The Government have not changed the definition of child poverty. As the Prime Minister set out on Monday, we are committed to attacking the root causes of poverty and improving children’s life chances. In the spring, we will publish a comprehensive life chances strategy. Our proposals in the Welfare Reform and Work Bill introduce new measures on worklessness and educational attainment.
Alan Brown
I thank the Secretary of State for her comments. Those of us on the Scottish National party Benches agree with what she said about the right hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell) and the First Minister for Northern Ireland.
If we are only talking about additional measures to tackle poverty, I agree that they would be useful. However, it is clear that the Welfare Reform and Work Bill abandons the poverty reduction targets in the Child Poverty Act 2010. Given that 64% of children living in poverty are in working families, does the Minister agree with the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, the End Child Poverty Coalition, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the Child Poverty Action Group and the Resolution Foundation that income assessment must be retained? Otherwise, the new measures will remove children from poverty in statistics only and not in reality. That is a cynical manoeuvre.
Nicky Morgan
I disagree with the hon. Gentleman’s last remarks. We remain absolutely committed to tackling child poverty and making sure that as many children as possible do not grow up affected by the blight by poverty. Since 2010, the number of children growing up in workless families has fallen by 480,000 to a record low. As I said, we want to tackle the root causes of poverty, and worklessness and educational attainment, both of which we are measuring, make a critical difference to whether a child grows up in poverty and continues to live in poverty throughout their life.
Jonathan Reynolds (Stalybridge and Hyde) (Lab/Co-op)
Since 2010 I have seen more people destitute, homeless and dependent on food banks in my constituency. Do the Government understand that changing internationally agreed definitions of poverty will seem like a cynical attempt to mask the true condition of Britain?
Nicky Morgan
I also suspect that the hon. Gentleman sees more people in work and being helped into work in his constituency. As I said, we remain absolutely committed to tackling the root causes of poverty—worklessness and low educational attainment—and to making sure that children do not grow up affected by the blight of poverty. He will probably agree that an arbitrary consideration of whether somebody is over or under a financial income line by a matter of pounds does not change lives. What changes lives is tackling the issues set out by the Prime Minister in his speech on Monday.
Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)
16. The Secretary of State insists that the Government are not changing the definition of child poverty, so will they accept the findings of several respected organisations, including, most recently, the Resolution Foundation, which has indicated that, as a direct result of the summer Budget alone, between 300,000 and 600,000 children and 3.7 million and 3.9 million people on these islands will move into poverty by 2020? What discussions has she had with the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions about the likely impact of the changes on poor children on these islands?
Mr Speaker
I gently point out to the House that there is a difference between asking a question and leading an Adjournment debate.
Nicky Morgan
Some 11.8% of children live in workless households, which is down by 4.4 percentage points since 2010. If the hon. Gentleman wants to talk about the impact of Budgets on people in Scotland and elsewhere in the UK, he might like to know that 176,000 women in Scotland have been taken out of income tax since 2010 because of UK Budgets. Those sorts of measures have a direct impact on children’s life chances and families’ prospects.
Jeff Smith (Manchester, Withington) (Lab)
2. What discussions she has had with her ministerial colleagues on the effect of the increase in the state pension age on women.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Mr Shailesh Vara)
Ministers regularly discuss matters of policy spanning their responsibilities, and the hon. Gentleman will be aware that this issue was debated very recently.
Jeff Smith
That is correct. Last week’s Back-Bench business debate resulted in a unanimous decision, with Members on both sides of the House calling on the Government to correct the unfairness in the rules. Is it not time for the Government to lay down a strategy for introducing transitional arrangements to help the women most affected by these rules?
Angela Crawley (Lanark and Hamilton East) (SNP)
It is estimated that, with the new threshold to qualify for auto-enrolment set at £10,000, 1.28 million people will miss out on accessing their pension. Does the Minister agree that the Government’s pensions policy negatively impacts women, and will he support the establishment of an independent pensions commission to look at all pensions issues, including investigating the inequalities facing women in the current system?
Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)
Does the Minister share the Prime Minister’s view that the good settlement for pensioners extends to 1950s women, and will he explain the bits of that settlement that are best for them?
Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)
I was disappointed with the Minister’s response to my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Withington (Jeff Smith). The Minister is correct that last week’s Back-Bench business debate is not binding on the Government, but will he admit that the Government have absolutely lost the argument on this case? Will he commit to justice for those women born between 1953 and ’56, who now face a huge pensions pay gap after they led the fight for my generation on the pay gap in the workplace?
Mr Vara
This issue was not in the manifesto of either the Labour party or the Scottish National party. That is not surprising, given that undoing the 2011 measures would cost over £30 billion. If the hon. Lady persists in pursuing this policy from the Labour Front Bench, it is important for her to outline from where it would get that £30 billion.
Stuart C. McDonald (Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East) (SNP)
3. If she will discuss with the Home Secretary the treatment of pregnant women detained for immigration purposes.
Callum McCaig (Aberdeen South) (SNP)
10. If she will discuss with the Home Secretary the treatment of pregnant women detained for immigration purposes.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Karen Bradley)
My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary takes these matters very seriously. Last year, she commissioned Stephen Shaw, CBE, former prisons and probation ombudsman, to carry out a review of the welfare of vulnerable people in detention. Mr Shaw’s report will be published today, and the Government will take appropriate action in response to his recommendations.
Stuart C. McDonald
I am grateful for that answer, and we look forward to hearing what Stephen Shaw has to say, albeit that we are slightly sceptical about the remit that he was operating under. What steps will the Minister take to ensure that Government policy of detaining only in exceptional circumstances is, at the very least, put into practice and is not fiction? It would be even better if she ensured that the detention of pregnant women came entirely to an end.
Karen Bradley
It is Government policy that pregnant women should be detained only in exceptional circumstances. In normal circumstances, they should not be detained. Where a matter affecting a pregnant woman being detained comes to light, it is looked at with the utmost urgency.
Callum McCaig
I draw the Minister’s attention to the all-party parliamentary group’s report of 2014 on immigration detention, which dealt with the issue of women in detention centres more widely. Many women had been subject to quite horrific violence, including sexual violence. What steps is she taking to ensure that detained women, whether pregnant or not, are safe? Does she agree with me that these centres should not be detaining women at all and that detention should very much be a last resort?
Karen Bradley
I agree with the hon. Gentleman that detention should be a very last resort. It is regrettable in many ways that we have to have detention, but as part of an immigration system that is fair to all, detention is needed in those exceptional circumstances where people refuse to leave the country when they have been ordered to do so. Women are treated with the utmost dignity, and it is important to treat all people in detention with dignity.
Michael Fabricant (Lichfield) (Con)
4. What steps the Government are taking to address the issue of low body confidence in girls and young men; and if she will make a statement.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Women and Equalities and Family Justice (Caroline Dinenage)
Strong body confidence is obviously really important for both physical and mental health wellbeing. That is why the Government are working with partners on projects such as media literacy that equip young people to be resilient and realistic about body images that they see in print and on our screens.
Michael Fabricant
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. She will know that photographs in glossy magazines have been retouched by Photoshop, with little wrinkles smoothed out and little bulges slimmed in—in my case, of course, you see what you get—[Interruption.] Well, part of what you see is what you get, but we will not go into that. Does my hon. Friend agree that schools have a role to play in educating children in having realistic ideas about what is possible and what is not?
Mr Speaker
The hon. Gentleman’s status as an exotic Member of the House is not in doubt.
Caroline Dinenage
I entirely agree with you, Mr Speaker: there is almost nothing we could do to enhance the appearance of my hon. Friend—in my book, anyway.
My hon. Friend is right and his interest in this important issue is commendable. We want all young people to be informed and resilient. That is why we aim to improve media literacy. Our PSHE Association guidance on body image helps teachers to approach this topic sensitively and points them to the best quality-assured material. We also produce media-smart literacy resources for parents and teachers of primary school children to help them better to promote understanding of the images that young people see in the media.
Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)
PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that the cost of eating disorders to society is about £15 billion a year. What extra measures are the Government introducing, not only for prevention purposes but to support those who are currently experiencing eating disorders, in order to ensure that the problem is tackled adequately?
Caroline Dinenage
The hon. Gentleman is, of course, absolutely right: this is a key issue. We know that anorexia kills more than any other mental illness. On Monday, the Prime Minister set out our commitment to investing in mental health services. We will invest nearly £1 billion in a revolution in mental health treatment throughout the country, which will include the first-ever waiting time target for teenagers with eating disorders. They will be able to obtain help within a month of being referred, or within a week in urgent cases.
Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)
Young trans people can struggle greatly with their body confidence. Will the Minister, and her colleagues throughout the Government, undertake to look at the first report of the Women and Equalities Committee? It is published today, and it makes specific recommendations on how to improve the lives of young trans people.
Caroline Dinenage
Absolutely. I warmly welcome that report, and I thank the Chairman of the Select Committee—and, indeed, the whole Committee—for the valuable work that they have done. The report follows the Committee’s first inquiry, and it sends a clear signal about the importance of this issue. I look forward greatly to working through the report carefully and thoughtfully with those in other Departments, and looking closely at every one of my right hon. Friend’s recommendations.
Mr David Burrowes (Enfield, Southgate) (Con)
5. What discussions she has had with her ministerial colleagues on tackling revenge porn; and what assessment she has made of the effectiveness of the revenge porn helpline.
The Minister for Women and Equalities (Nicky Morgan)
As I have said before, the Government are absolutely clear about the fact that what is illegal offline is illegal online. We have criminalised this abhorrent act, and the revenge porn helpline has supported more than 3,000 callers since its launch last February. It is there to support anyone who is affected, regardless of gender, sexuality, race or age. No one should have to suffer as a result of this repulsive crime, and we will ensure that we continue to support those who are affected by it.
Mr Burrowes
Will the helpline, and other measures, help more victims to come forward for support? Will they also help to take down the vile and abusive content from the internet, and prosecute and, indeed, take down the vile and abusive offenders?
Nicky Morgan
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Obviously it is important for victims to receive the right support, but we want to go further and make it clear, through education and awareness, that this is a crime and that it will not be tolerated. The internet can be a huge force for good, but it can also be a platform for abuse and intimidation. Staff monitor the helpline and provide support, but they have also been very successful in ensuring that content is quickly removed from the internet, and they work directly with social media and website providers.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I thank the Minister for her earlier comments about the elevation of Arlene Foster to the position of First Minister. The Stormont fresh start agreement already looks brighter with her in charge.
My question relates to the ever-increasing digital society. The press is still full of stories about revenge porn incidents. Does the Minister recognise the need to raise awareness of people’s rights, and of the new offence in the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015, which is intended to tackle the increasing amount of online revenge porn?
Nicky Morgan
I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman. This is an offence of which people are more aware, but, sadly, that means that there are more cases of it, which is why we have criminalised it and established a helpline to offer support. However, we must go further and make it clear that this is not an acceptable way for people to behave. We must also give guidance to potential victims, advising them to think very carefully about images that they share and how they could then be abused.
Mr David Hanson (Delyn) (Lab)
6. What progress the Government are making on negotiating the removal of VAT on women’s sanitary products.
The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Mr David Gauke)
I have written to the European Commission and to other member states setting out our strong view that member states should have full discretion over what rate of VAT they can apply to sanitary products, and that the matter should be considered in the context of the Commission’s action plan on VAT, which is now expected to be published in March
Mr Hanson
I am sure that the letter is very good, but I think the Minister should do more than that: I think that he should pursue the issue. When he does so, and when he succeeds—as I am sure he will—will he ensure that the money that he is currently providing from this unfair tax to finance domestic violence services is raised from general taxation? As a man, I think that it should be, so that the whole of society owns this problem.
Mr Gauke
In terms of the action the Government are taking, the right hon. Gentleman will be aware that VAT rules currently do not allow us to reduce the rate below 5%, which is why when the previous Labour Government reduced it, they reduced it to 5% not zero. But we are making the case to other member states and the European Commission, and the right hon. Gentleman highlights the fact that, as the Chancellor announced in the autumn statement, for the first time we are using the funds collected from VAT on sanitary products to provide support specifically to women’s charities. We will, of course, review that in the event that we are able to reduce it to a zero rate.
Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)
The Minister will know that I voted with the Opposition on this issue. He is a good man and I am sure he is doing his very best to battle away on this issue, but is it not the case that those who want a zero rate on sanitary products at the earliest possible opportunity should find the easiest way of doing that, which is by voting to leave the European Union, and then we would be able to do it straight away?
Mr Gauke
My hon. Friend’s answer to this question does not entirely surprise me; it is in fact his answer to quite a lot of questions. The Government are engaging constructively with other member states and the European Commission. It is the case that EU rules prevent us from lowering the rate below 5%, but we are engaged in negotiating with other member states.
Paula Sherriff (Dewsbury) (Lab)
While any action is better than nothing, it does not appear that the issue has been placed alongside the Prime Minister’s other demands in the EU membership renegotiation, so we may not even have a report back prior to the referendum. Can the Minister reassure the House today that women’s rights are not a second-class issue on this Government’s European agenda by making those commitments, and will the Prime Minister or Chancellor come before the House to make a statement on this, as they have done on other EU issues?
Mr Gauke
The Chancellor of the Exchequer addressed this issue in his autumn statement, when he announced the additional funding for women’s charities, reflecting the sums that are raised from VAT on sanitary products. The Government are taking this issue seriously; previous Governments have done so too, but we are doing everything we can, and we are, I think, the first Government who have gone to the European Commission and to other member states and made the case for flexibility.
Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)
Will my hon. Friend explain why this is not part of the Government’s renegotiation strategy? Surely this country and this Parliament should be able to decide levels of VAT not just on sanitary products, but on fuel, defibrillators and so on—on all of which I think it would be better if there were no VAT?
Mr Gauke
We are engaged in a wide-ranging renegotiation addressing issues about economic competitiveness and the roles of Parliament and so on. This is not explicitly part of that renegotiation, but we are, as a Government, going out making the case to other member states, and we will have the report from the Commission in March and we have made our position very clear.
Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)
The funding the Government are putting into services for women fleeing sexual and domestic violence has been described as like filling a bath with the plug pulled out. End Violence Against Women says the tampon tax cannot possibly fill the gap, while across the country refuges and specialist services are closing. Will the Minister commit to a full review of the effect of the Government’s fiscal policies on the availability of services and to publishing the information?
Mr Gauke
We have already announced £40 million in funding for domestic abuse services between 2016 and 2020, as well as a £2 million grant to Women’s Aid and SafeLives to support early intervention. The hon. Lady raised a very broad point, and, in reply I would say the best future for the entire country is to ensure we have strong public finances, a credible economic policy and a long-term economic plan that delivers jobs and growth. That is what this Government are doing.
Kate Green
I am afraid that the Government’s economic policies are not protecting women from violence. Research published yesterday by Professor Sylvia Walby of the University of Lancaster shows that violent crime against women has been under-reported and has in fact been rising since 2009. That is a result of cuts to services, cuts in the police, a lack of housing to move into, financial pressures on relationships and difficulties accessing justice. Does the Minister not recognise that the holistic effect of the Government’s policies has been to place women in danger? Will the Government take urgent action to address this?
Mr Gauke
The hon. Lady makes the point that domestic violence is under-reported, and we accept that that is a problem, although reporting has increased. Indeed, the number of convictions has increased. She also made the point that there had been cuts in police services. The Chancellor made it clear in his autumn statement, however, that because the economy was performing better than had been the case before, we could afford not to cut police funding over the course of this Parliament. Again, I make the point that Labour can oppose every single cut and every single change that we make to try to bring the public finances under control, but if we do not take those decisions, I am afraid that we will run into a crisis. That was what the 2015 general election was fought on, and the result was very clear.
Liz McInnes (Heywood and Middleton) (Lab)
7. What steps she is taking to tackle misogynist bullying on social media.
Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)
14. What steps she is taking to tackle misogynist bullying on social media.
The Minister for Women and Equalities (Nicky Morgan)
Bullying of any kind, whether online or offline, is absolutely unacceptable. There is also no place for misogyny or trolling in our society. My Department has set up the Stop Online Abuse website to provide women and LGBT adults with practical advice on how to recognise abuse, including on social media. I also want to echo the welcome for the report from the Women and Equalities Select Committee on transgender equality, which was published today. It makes specific recommendations for addressing online safety and the treatment of transgender people, which we will take very seriously.
Liz McInnes
What conversations has the Minister had with social media providers about misogynistic online abuse, and will she make a statement?
Nicky Morgan
I and other Ministers, including my hon. Friend the Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy speak to social media providers all the time about these issues. I welcome the recent statement from a Twitter director saying that it thought it was doing better on dealing with trolls, but I think it recognised that it needed to do more.
I hope that the hon. Lady will also recognise that there are issues closer to home. She will remember the statement made by her own party leader at her party’s conference last autumn, when he had to appeal to activists. He said:
“I say to all activists, whether Labour or not, cut out the personal attacks, the cyber bullying and especially the misogynistic abuse online”.
I hope that the hon. Lady will tackle her own party in regard to this issue.
Steve McCabe
Will the Secretary of State tell us what evidence there is of improved data collection to give us the true scale of this abuse? What evidence is there that police officers up and down the country are receiving appropriate training to enable them to identify and deal with the perpetrators of the abuse?
Nicky Morgan
I will have to come back to the hon. Gentleman on the question of data collection, which I am happy to do. I suspect that some organisations are better than others. I mentioned the revenge porn helpline earlier, which clearly is monitoring and keeping data. We want to evaluate such data one year on, in February or March of this year. I have already said that what is illegal offline is also illegal online, and that has been made very clear to all police forces up and down the country. We continue to make that case to them.
Mims Davies (Eastleigh) (Con)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that the increasingly digital world in which we live makes it absolutely vital to help children, parents and carers to deal with this vile online abuse and cyber-bullying?
Nicky Morgan
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Of course it is much better to educate young people against any of this in the first place, to ensure that they are robust and resilient if they come across unwanted images or cyber-bullying. She is also absolutely right to mention parents and carers. There is a range of websites and organisations to help parents to understand how to discuss these issues with children, and the Government Equalities Office and the Home Office have invested £3.85 million in a new phase of our This is Abuse campaign, which tackles abuse within teenage relationships and will be launched later this year.
Ben Howlett (Bath) (Con)
Following on from the earlier response to the question of my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller), will the Secretary of State recognise the huge amount of online bullying that is being directed towards the trans community, leading to high levels of mental ill health and suicide within that community? Will she ensure that it is tackled when she reviews the trans inquiry?
Nicky Morgan
My hon. Friend is a member of the Select Committee and I warmly welcome the landmark report that has been published today. It has highlighted lots of actions that are needed to be taken across government. He is absolutely right to mention the issue of social media and online bullying, which I have already mentioned, and the effects that that has on mental health, and the ability of members of the transgender community to take part in life, the workplace and elsewhere. We take such issues very seriously. We need to look at all the action we have taken on online abuse, and work out how we can ensure that it is also accessible to members of the trans community.
Lucy Allan (Telford) (Con)
9. When the Government plan to publish their response to the closing the gender pay gap consultation, published in July 2015.
The Minister for Women and Equalities (Nicky Morgan)
I am delighted that our consultation on closing the gender pay gap has had such a positive reaction, receiving around 700 responses, including more than 200 from employers and business organisations. We will publish the Government’s response to the consultation shortly.
Lucy Allan
I thank the Minister for her reply. Excellent work has been done on tackling the gender pay gap, but regional differences remain. In my constituency of Telford, women in full-time work earn 16% less than men in full-time work. What further action can be taken to address that kind of discrepancy?
Nicky Morgan
The gender pay gap regulations, when published and put into practice, will help, because they will get employers to start thinking about these issues, and reporting on them. I encourage my hon. Friend to host an event in her own constituency. As a proactive and new Member of Parliament, she can highlight best practice and show the advantages of narrowing the gap. She might also like to think about the breakdown of the businesses within her constituency and work out how we can get more women and girls to participate in sectors such as manufacturing and financial services.
Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)
The north-east has one of the highest gender pay gaps in the country owing in part to the disproportionate numbers in the public sector, which has been cut, and in the sort of low-paid jobs that the Prime Minister yesterday called “menial”. Does the Secretary of State agree that failure to publish a response to a consultation six months after its publication is disrespectful to the many organisations and individuals who responded to it in the hope of doing something about the situation?
Nicky Morgan
I am really sorry to hear the hon. Lady make those points, because they are not worthy of her. First, on the north-east, she is wrong. The gender pay gap in the north-east fell by 0.4 percentage points between 2014 and 2015. People want us to get the Government response right and to ensure that we have thought through the regulations and their impact. I have said that we will publish the response shortly, and that is exactly what we will do.
Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)
I hope that the Secretary of State, and indeed the whole House, will welcome the establishment of the all-party group on women and work, of which I am vice-chair. I know that she sent a member of staff to it the other day. Will she resolve to work with the all-party group to look at the challenges faced by women returning to work after having children or caring responsibilities, the impact of which is often seen in the gaps in their income, their progression and their career?
Nicky Morgan
I thank the hon. Lady very much indeed. I warmly welcome the all-party group. Another group has also been set up on women and enterprise. I really welcome the fact that parliamentarians are setting up these groups, which will work on a cross-party basis. Of course Ministers and I will work with all of them. She is absolutely right. Evidence was given to the Select Committee which showed that, if women take more than a year’s maternity leave, it becomes much, much harder to get back into the workplace; we must change that.
Huw Merriman (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)
11. What steps the Government are taking to help older female carers balance the demands of work with caring for older relatives.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Women and Equalities and Family Justice (Caroline Dinenage)
Unpaid carers are the unsung heroes of our society, which is why the Care Act 2014 gave carers new rights, focusing on their wellbeing, which includes their employment. In 2015, the Government extended the right to request flexible working arrangements, and we are also investing £1.6 million in nine pilot sites, exploring ways to support people who are combining work and caring responsibilities.
Huw Merriman
I thank the Minister for her response. According to a recent report from the Department of Health, the cost to the Exchequer of carers being unable to continue working has been estimated at £1.3 billion a year. Will the Minister confirm what incentives are in place for employers to support carers in the workplace?
Caroline Dinenage
The report my hon. Friend refers to was a landmark one in demonstrating the business case for investing in carer-friendly policies. The Government have been working to raise awareness among employers of the issue and of the cost of leaving it unaddressed. Our £1.6 million project will be invaluable in helping us to establish the most effective forms of support for carers. We are also backing the Employers for Carers network run by Carers UK, which provides resources to implement carer-friendly policies.
Keir Starmer (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)
12. What discussions she has had with her ministerial colleagues on securing long-term funding for domestic violence services.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Karen Bradley)
The Government have already announced £40 million of funding for domestic abuse services between 2016 and 2020, as well as a £2 million grant to Women’s Aid and SafeLives to support early intervention. We will shortly publish a refreshed cross-Government violence against women and girls strategy setting out how we will do still more to secure long-term funding for domestic violence services and support for all victims.
Keir Starmer
Domestic violence is an enduring stain on our society, and while Government funding is welcome, a long-term sustainable approach is needed. What discussions has the Minister had with service providers, including Rape Crisis, about the long-term solutions, and what does she consider to be long term in this context?
Karen Bradley
I thank the hon. and learned Gentleman for his questions. I must admit, I am used to seeing him on the Front Bench, but it is nice to see him anyway. As part of refreshing our violence against women and girls strategy, I have taken part in a number of round tables with service providers, commissioners and others to make sure that we understand the issues facing them and to look at that long-term solution, because he is absolutely right: service providers need to know that their funding is on a sustainable footing, so that they can continue to deliver services and focus on victims, as we all want them to do.
Craig Tracey (North Warwickshire) (Con)
13. What steps the Government are taking to improve the gender balance of the boards of FTSE companies.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Women and Equalities and Family Justice (Caroline Dinenage)
We appointed Lord Davies in 2010 and have fully supported his work ever since, which has achieved an unprecedented increase in the number of women on boards. We welcomed his final report and back his new recommendations for a business-led 33% target for FTSE 350 boards. We are also in the process of establishing a new review focusing on the all-important executive layer.
Craig Tracey
What plans do the Government have to ensure that businesses of all sizes understand the financial and productivity benefits of diversity in their senior teams?
Caroline Dinenage
My hon. Friend is absolutely right: companies with more diverse boards benefit from better decision making and better corporate governance; they are more responsive to the market and they can access the wider talent pool. It is a no-brainer: diversity is better for business. We have seen real progress with our business-led Government-supported approach, but we are not complacent by any means. We will continue to engage with businesses of all sizes and in all sectors to push this work forward.
Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)
15. If she will discuss with the Secretary of State for Health ways to address the relative inequality of health outcomes for men and women.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Women and Equalities and Family Justice (Caroline Dinenage)
There are gender differences across a range of health outcomes. Women live longer than men, but that gap is closing. The Government are tackling health inequalities by addressing the social causes of ill health and promoting healthier lifestyles, all now underpinned by legal duties. Action is led locally to ensure that there are solutions to local gender and other health inequalities.
Mr Hollobone
Over the past 30 years, female suicide rates have declined from 11 per 1,000 to five per 1,000, but male suicide rates have remained stubbornly high, at 19 to 20 per 1,000, and in that period 130,000 men have committed suicide. What will the Minister do, together with the Department of Health, to tackle that very serious problem?
Caroline Dinenage
My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. The Under-Secretary of State for Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Jane Ellison), was keen to be here today, but she is at an LGBT conference. Suicide is the largest cause of death of men under 50, so this is a really important issue. That is why the Prime Minister’s commitment earlier this week to investing in mental health services will be so important in this space.
Business of the House
(8 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
Will the leader of the Out campaign give us the business for next week?
The Leader of the House of Commons (Chris Grayling)
The business for next week is as follows:
Monday 18 January—Second Reading of the Energy Bill [Lords].
Tuesday 19 January—Opposition day (16th allotted day). There will be a debate on the cost of public transport, followed by a debate on prisons and probation. Both debates will arise on an Opposition motion.
Wednesday 20 January—Remaining stages of the Psychoactive Substances Bill [Lords], followed by a motion to approve statutory instruments relating to the proceeds of crime.
Thursday 21 January—Business to be nominated by the Backbench Business Committee.
Friday 22 January—Private Members’ Bills.
The provisional business for the week commencing 25 January will include:
Monday 25 January—Remaining stages of the Childcare Bill [Lords], followed by business to be nominated by the Backbench Business Committee.
Tuesday 26 January—Motion to approve a money resolution relating to the Charities (Social Investment and Protection) Bill [Lords], followed by remaining stages of the Charities (Social Investment and Protection) Bill [Lords].
Wednesday 27 January—Opposition day (17th allotted day). There will be a debate on an Opposition motion. Subject to be announced.
Thursday 28 January—Business to be nominated by the Backbench Business Committee.
Friday 29 January—Private Members’ Bills.
I should also inform the House that the business in Westminster Hall for Monday 25 January and Monday 1 February will be:
Monday 25 January—Debate on e-petition 115895 relating to tax reporting for small businesses and the self-employed.
Monday 1 February—Debate on e-petition 110776 relating to transitional state pension arrangements for women born in the 1950s.
Chris Bryant
May I start by warmly congratulating the Secretary of State for Scotland on joining the ranks of out gay MPs yesterday? His announcement was made with considerable charm, I thought. He said he hoped that he would not be treated any differently because of his sexuality. May I assure him that being gay does not necessarily make you any better as a politician? [Laughter.] Oh, I did not think that was very funny.
It seems particularly appropriate that we should be having a debate this afternoon on space, especially following the death of David Bowie, the ultimate Starman.
I asked for a debate on the English language last week. May we have a debate on the use of the word “menial”? The Prime Minister used it yesterday with quite a sneer on his face, but is that not where he gets it wrong? Those are the people who really graft in our society and he does not demean them by using such language; he demeans himself. There are no menial jobs, only menial attitudes.
May we have a debate on a series of mysterious disappearances that have happened over the past week? It is a bit like Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None.” First, there was the mystery of the missing Health Secretary. They sought him here, they sought him there, but oh no, even when the first strike by doctors for decades was happening, he was nowhere to be found, not even in a television studio, which he normally loves. Surely he should be here, explaining how he has completely lost the respect and trust of the whole medical profession.
Then there was the disappearance of the Government’s consultation on the future of the BBC. I know the Tories all hate the BBC, but the closing date for the consultation was 99 days ago today and it is still nowhere to be seen. The charter runs out in less than a year, so when will the Government publish the consultation and the new draft charter?
It is not just consultations that have disappeared, though. On Tuesday afternoon a whole Committee disappeared—European Committee A, which was meant to meet at 2.30 pm in Committee Room 10 to consider the Ports Authority regulations, something I am sure all hon. Members think is very important. Members of the public turned up from far and wide in their droves to hear what the Minister had to say, but the Government had pulled the meeting. Why? This is an important matter that affects 47 UK ports. Port workers are very concerned about it. The European Scrutiny Committee has said that it remains
“deeply concerned that the Government continues to refuse to have a floor debate on this issue”.
How can the Leader of the House portray himself as a serious Eurosceptic when he will not even allow the House to debate EU measures?
That is not the only debate to disappear. Do you remember, Mr Speaker, the Leader of the House’s promise of a debate on abolishing student grants, which he made here on 10 December? Yes, that is what he said, is it not? I know he is doing his huffy-puffy “I’m going to get very angry about this later” face, but he should admit it. His precise words were:
“On student finance regulations, the hon. Gentleman is well aware that if he wants a debate on a regulation in this House all he has to do is pray against it. I am not aware of any recent precedent where a prayer made by the Leader of the Opposition and his shadow Cabinet colleagues has not led to a debate in this House.”—[Official Report, 10 December 2015; Vol. 603, c. 1154.]
We took the Leader of the House at his word. Early-day motion 829 is on the Order Paper praying against the statutory instrument.
[That an humble Address be presented to Her Majesty, praying that the Education (Student Support) (Amendment) Regulations 2015 (S.I., 2015, No. 1951), dated 29 November 2015, a copy of which was laid before this House on 2 December 2015, be annulled.]
Therefore, according to the Leader of the House’s own promise to this House, we should be having a debate in this Chamber. But that is not what is happening, is it? Instead, he has arranged for the only debate to be held not in this House, but in a Committee at 11.30 this morning. Because it is in a Committee, even if every single member of that Committee voted against the motion, it would still pass into law. That is not democracy; that is government by diktat.
Let me be absolutely clear that this should not be introduced by secondary legislation. This is a major change that will deprive around half a million of England’s poorest students of maintenance grants, forcing them to graduate with debt—[Interruption.] The Deputy Leader of the House is talking a whole load of guff. If she does not know the rules of this House, she should go and get another job. Those students will be forced to graduate with debts of up to £53,000 for a three-year course, rather than £40,500 at present. Therefore, as a man of his word, will the Leader of the House now ensure that there is a proper debate and vote in this House before 23 January?
That brings me to the curious case of the missing ministerial backbone. I thought that Ministers were men of integrity and principle, and that when they believed in something, they would fight for it. Last week I suggested that it was time the Leader of the House came out as an outer. There is a vacancy, because the outers want a leader. Surely the time has come—“Cometh the hour, cometh the man.” Come on down, Leader of the House, the new leader of the Out campaign. Mr Speaker, you heard it here first.
I am delighted that the Leader of the House has started to take my advice. He has even written a piece for The Daily Telegraph about it. I was hoping for a proper, full-throated, Eurosceptic, intellectual argument from him. But oh no; it is the most mealy-mouthed, myth-peddling, facing-both-ways piece of pedestrian journalism that has ever come from his pen. What is the phrase from the Bible? It is,
“because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.”
I know that the Leader of the House was born on 1 April, but he cannot treat all of us like fools. I know that he is desperate to keep his place in the Cabinet, and even—God bless us!—become leader of the Tory party, but this is becoming a farce. He is pretending to support the Prime Minister’s renegotiation strategy, when really he is desperate to burst out of his pink shirt and mount the barricades with the banner of English nationalism. Apparently the Business Secretary is going to pretend that he is in favour of leaving the EU in order to bolster the prospects of his favourite candidate for leader, the Chancellor.
But this really is not a game. It is not about the leadership prospects of one or other Tory Minister; it is about our constituents’ jobs and our standing as a nation. It is the most important decision that this country will make in this generation. The Leader of the House says that it would be disastrous for us to stay in the EU. I say that it would be disastrous for us to leave. It would abandon our historic destiny at the heart of Europe, it would leave our economy on the sidelines of the largest market in the world, and it would undermine the battle against environmental degradation, international crime and terrorism. You leave; I’m staying.
Mr Speaker
Order. Just before we proceed, may I—keeping the temperature down—thank the shadow Leader of the House for referencing so favourably my childhood hero, David Bowie, the most innovative and talented rock star I ever had the pleasure of seeing or hearing?
Chris Grayling
First, may I endorse the shadow Leader of the House’s words about the Scottish Secretary? As a colleague of his, I am very proud of the statement he made yesterday. I also send the good wishes of this House to the people of Indonesia, after this morning’s dreadful terrorist attack. I also wish you, Mr Speaker, a happy birthday for next week.
I also wish to thank you, Mr Speaker, and all the Clerks for the work you all did to ensure that the first England and Welsh Grand Committee, held under the new Standing Orders, passed smoothly on Tuesday. In our manifesto we committed to introducing English votes for English laws, and we have now delivered that. Those of us on the Government side of the House thought—I suspect that you did, too, Mr Speaker—that it was a tad ironic that the longest contribution we heard in that debate was from the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart). His claim that he was being excluded from the debate seemed a little on the hollow side.
I remind hon. Members that the Joint Committee considering the restoration and renewal of the Palace of Westminster is currently consulting Members and staff who work in the Palace, with a closing date of 26 January. There will also be consultation with members of the Committee and Members and staff in both Houses. I encourage any Member with an interest in the project to take part in the consultation.
Let me now turn to the shadow Leader of the House. Today we have heard another seven-minute rhetorical flourish from the hon. Gentleman, with his usual wit and repartee. But what on earth does he think he is doing? He represents Her Majesty’s loyal Opposition. Last week, on the day that Kim Jong-un announced that he had developed a hydrogen bomb, the hon. Gentleman was joined at the shadow Cabinet table by a shadow Defence Secretary who believes that we should unilaterally disarm our nuclear defences. He sits alongside a shadow Chancellor who attended an event with the organisation, CAGE, which has claimed that Jihadi John was a “kind and beautiful young man”.
The hon. Gentleman works for a man who sacked the right hon. Member for Wolverhampton South East (Mr McFadden) for having the effrontery to criticise terrorists. Over the past week, we have seen several more junior members of his Front Bench have the courage to stand up to a situation that most people in this House regard as utterly distasteful and wrong. They gave up their places on the Front Bench while the hon. Gentleman and more senior people clung on to their jobs. So it is all very well his coming here on a Thursday morning and cracking a few jokes, but I have a simple question for him: given the disgraceful turn of events in the Labour party, what on earth is he still doing here?
Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)
May I call on the Leader of the House to hold an urgent debate in Government time on the recommendations that have been made today by the Women and Equalities Committee in our first report on trans rights and the real problems that trans people face in Britain today? The Government need to take swift action on these problems, and a debate on the Floor of the House would demonstrate the commitment of the whole House to resolving them.
Chris Grayling
I congratulate my right hon. Friend on the work she is doing. I am proud to be a part of a Government who are leading the way in addressing equalities issues, and she reflects the best of this House in also doing so. Of course, the Government will consider very carefully the report that she has brought forward this morning. I commend her and the Committee for this work. I have no doubt that she may also look to the Backbench Business Committee to ensure that there is an opportunity for the House to debate her report.
Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)
I, too, thank the leader of the Eurosceptics and putative leader of the “Britain out” campaign for announcing the business for next week.
It is like the proverbial bus, Mr Speaker—you wait decades for a nasty, brutal, inter-party civil war to come along, and two come at once. I listened very carefully to the Leader of the House’s mild-mannered right hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Damian Green) lambasting him today for his Euroscepticism. This is serious for us in Scotland. It is quite likely that our nation may be pulled out of Europe against its will. We need to hear a statement from the Leader of the House to say that he will respect the views of Scotland on this issue. Meantime, it is popcorn time here for me and my hon. Friends as we watch both the UK parties not only knock lumps out of each other but knock lumps out of themselves.
Earlier this week, I felt pretty much like an international observer as the first meeting of the English Parliament got right down to business. It was quite a remarkable event—the first time a quasi-English Parliament has met since the 18th century. We had to make sure it was done properly, and what did the Government do? They put signs in the Lobbies saying “England and Wales”. We looked in vain for the “No dogs and no Scots” signs, but thankfully they were not there. Suspending the House’s business while you, Mr Speaker, had to go and seek out the Clerks to see if something needed to be re-certified is no way for one of the great Parliaments of the world to conduct its business. [Hon. Members: “Once great.”] Indeed, a once-great Parliament, as my hon. Friends say. It was a sad day for any notion or idea of a unitary Parliament of the United Kingdom being a place where all Members are equal. I am sure that the Scottish people were observing these events where their Members of Parliament, who they had so recently elected, became second-class and diminished in this nation. There is real anger in Scotland; a Union-saving exercise this is not.
There was a written statement from the Secretary of State for Scotland—who I, too, congratulate on the dignified way in which he announced his sexuality this week—that ruled out a post-study work scheme for Scotland. Now, let us forget about the fact that a post-study work scheme is wanted by all the higher education institutions in Scotland, all the business organisations, all the employer organisations and even the Scottish Conservatives; the Scottish Affairs Committee, which I chair, is currently undertaking an inquiry, with a report, on post-study work schemes. That report is made practically irrelevant because of that written statement. What do we have to do in Select Committees now? Should we seek a statement from the relevant Department before we undertake such inquiries? That written statement was a gross discourtesy and showed gross disrespect to a Select Committee of this House, so I am interested to hear the Leader of House’s view on these things.
This has been a week when the real Opposition—the new Opposition—have established themselves in this House. It was us who led the opposition to EVEL, as the Leader of the House noted, it was us who had the debate on trade and the economy and it will be us leading the two important debates today, including the one on space. You are absolutely right, Mr Speaker, and I was devastated at the news of the death of David Bowie this week. I saw him several times. We have lost an absolute musical icon in this country. One of the things that thrilled me—and, I am sure, thrilled my hon. Friends on the Benches behind me—was an endorsement from Sulu from “Star Trek” for our space debate today. That shows that when Labour and the Conservatives are ripping themselves apart, it is the Scottish National party that is boldly going where no party has gone before.
Chris Grayling
The hon. Gentleman’s party was of course previously led by one of this House’s foremost Trekkies, so there is probably a juxtaposition there.
I have to say, as I always do on these occasions, that I have the greatest regard for the hon. Gentleman, but he does talk an awful lot of nonsense at times. The first thing to say is that my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Damian Green) and I have been friends for more than 25 years and we will carry on being friends. The difference between those of us on the Conservative Benches and those on the Labour Benches is that when we have a debate, we do it with good grace. When Labour Members do it, it is because they hate each other—and they really do hate each other, Mr Speaker.
The hon. Gentleman talks about the real Opposition, and it still baffles me how those who purport to be sensible figures in the shambles that is the Labour party today can hold their heads high and still sit on the Opposition Front Bench representing a leadership that I regard as being utterly beyond the pale and something we should keep completely away from ever having the chance to run this country.
Let me return to the hon. Gentleman’s propensity to exaggerate just a little bit. I have to say that his comments about the debate on Tuesday did not really ring true. The idea that he is excluded from the debate—a debate in which, if I remember rightly, he spoke for the best part of half an hour, to the great enjoyment of my hon. Friends, who enjoyed his rhetorical flourishes enormously —is, I am afraid, stretching the point just a little bit. I remind him that every poll that has been conducted in Scotland says that the Scottish people support a fair devolution settlement for Scotland and for England, and that is what we are delivering.
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his kind words about the Scottish Secretary. I would also like to extend the thanks of myself and my colleagues to the Scottish First Minister and other leading figures in his party, who also made some very gracious statements about the Scottish Secretary yesterday. We all very much appreciated that.
On the post-study work scheme, it is right and proper that we have a managed immigration system. People can come to this country to do a graduate-level job, but it is also right and proper that we have appropriate safeguards in place. That is what our electors expect, it is what we will deliver and have delivered in government, and it is what electors across the United Kingdom—of which, happily, we are all still part—all want us to do.
Sir William Cash (Stone) (Con)
I am glad that the European Scrutiny Committee, with all-party support, forced the Government to cancel the European Standing Committee on the ports regulation, which may yet continue to damage 350,000 jobs in the United Kingdom. This is a vital national interest. Does the Leader of the House recognise that the issue must be debated on the Floor of the House and voted on? Furthermore, does he accept that, because of the European Union arrangements, the Government are effectively in a position where they can only wring their hands or accept either a majority vote or a seedy compromise, and that this is a perfect example of why so many people in this country want to leave the European Union?
Chris Grayling
Raising an issue in business questions can be effective and I hope that my hon. Friend will take comfort from the fact that his raising this issue last week has led to the changes he suggested. The Chief Whip and I have been talking about how to address what are issues for many hon. Members. We will, of course, revert to them shortly and I thank my hon. Friend for the work he has done in raising this and other issues.
Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)
My constituents have been suffering all week from cancelled trains because of a landslide on our local rail line. Can we have a statement from the Transport Secretary, because the knock-on effect is complete chaos on all lines? People have received no information from Southeastern about when the service is likely to be reinstated and they are suffering trying to get to and from work. Businesses are also suffering, so we really need someone to get a grip of the situation.
Chris Grayling
I absolutely understand the problems that such events cause the hon. Gentleman’s constituents and, indeed, others. Other parts of the network have also suffered in recent weeks because of extreme weather. I will make sure that his concerns are drawn to the attention of the Transport Secretary this morning. The Transport Secretary will be here in 10 days’ time, but the issue is clearly urgent so I will make sure that the hon. Gentleman’s concerns are passed on immediately.
Sir Paul Beresford (Mole Valley) (Con)
My accent states my interest, although I believe a declaration is not necessarily required. Will my right hon. Friend persuade the Government to have a debate on the UK’s relationship with the Commonwealth, particularly the old Commonwealth? I have just returned from visiting New Zealand. It is definitely there and I am very conscious that, in our drive to reduce immigration, the UK is losing out on highly educated English-speaking people, generally graduates, who have very much to offer this nation in health, education, agriculture, banking, research, the armed forces and—dare I say it?—even rugby. There are kith and kin issues with such nations. They have stood with us—and they continue to stand with us today—in major and less major wars. We need to recognise that.
Chris Grayling
My hon. Friend has family roots in and originates from New Zealand, so he has a particular understanding of the issue. Of course, we try to maintain a sensible balance in our immigration system. It is necessary, right and proper to have controls. At the same time, we have routes for experienced people to come to this country and work. Many from Australia, New Zealand and other parts of the Commonwealth have done so over many years. I am sure that Home Office Ministers will have heard my hon. Friend’s comments and that they will do their best to take as pragmatic an approach as they can, but he will understand that there have to be limitations—our electors expect it.
Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)
Given that the abolition of student grants will hit 500,000 university students from the poorest backgrounds, can the Leader of the House explain why it will not be debated on the Floor of the House? People in my constituency certainly did not vote for those on the Government Benches, and their democracy is under assault.
Chris Grayling
The statutory instrument will follow the usual route. If it is prayed against, it will not pass without a vote of the whole House, and it will be debated again in this House, which is more than just this Chamber. The Labour party, as I have just announced, has a number of Opposition days coming up. If this is a significant enough issue, I suggest to the hon. Lady that she encourage her Front-Bench colleagues to bring it to the Floor of the House.
Mark Pritchard (The Wrekin) (Con)
The Minsk agreement is supposed to settle the dispute between Russia and Ukraine. Part of the agreement says that all illegally held persons should be released or exchanged. Will the Leader of the House arrange an early debate and join me in calling for the release of Nadiya Savchenko, who is a Member of the Ukrainian Parliament and of the Council of Europe?
Chris Grayling
My hon. Friend makes an important point. I hope that due consideration will be given to it by those involved in the detention, and I am sure that my Foreign Office colleagues are aware of and are pursuing the issue. Clearly, we want a peaceful situation between Russia and Ukraine and for all areas of dispute to be resolved quickly.
Jessica Morden (Newport East) (Lab)
Last October, the Government hosted a steel summit at which the UK steel industry laid out the urgent actions it needed them to take to protect it in extremely challenging times. Can we have an update from Business, Innovation and Skills Ministers on how fast the Government are acting? Although there has been some movement on energy costs, many areas still need Government action and the situation is critical.
Chris Grayling
Obviously, this is an ongoing concern for Members, and not just those with steel concerns in their constituencies. I will certainly ask for an update from my colleagues in the Business Department. They are not due back in this House soon, so I will ask them if they will write to the hon. Lady with an update. There was due to be a Westminster Hall debate on steel this afternoon, but I believe that the Member who secured it has withdrawn it, which is a shame. I have no doubt there will be other opportunities to debate the issue shortly.
Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)
In the light of my right hon. Friend’s important article in today’s edition of The Daily Telegraph, will he organise an early debate in Government time on the issue of ever closer union and on how to ensure legally that the European Court of Justice and EU majority voting rules cannot prevent this sovereign Parliament from being able to exercise its sovereignty in future?
Chris Grayling
My hon. Friend makes an important point. That is one of the things that the Prime Minister has put at the heart of his renegotiation. When he returns from the Council in February, or whenever the negotiation reaches a conclusion, he will undoubtedly include it in the package he will put forward. The people of this country can then judge whether the package is sufficient for their future to be in the European Union or to leave it. I suspect that there will be a lively debate.
Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)
There are many reports in the media today that a mini-beast has spoken on the subject of Brexit. Has the Leader of the House considered making time available for his own mini-personal statement to update the House on the views of his constituents who work in the EU, whose children aspire to study or work in the EU, who have homes in the EU, who want to retire to EU countries or who are EU citizens about the impact of Brexit on their ambitions and opportunities?
Chris Grayling
The only mini-thing I am aware of in the Chamber at the moment is the Liberal Democrat cohort, which has been reduced from 56 to eight in the past few months.
Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)
Following my right hon. Friend’s important contribution to the EU debate today, may we have a wider debate in the House on the merits of leaving or of remaining in the European Union? In such a debate, we would be able to see that the only arguments of those who want to remain in are scaremongering arguments. We would also be able to see that those most enthusiastic about our membership of the EU are exactly the same people who were most enthusiastic for this country to join the euro. They include the shadow Leader of the House, who, despite loving the sound of his own voice, seems to be very reticent about his past enthusiasm for joining the euro.
Chris Grayling
Oh, it is.
My hon. Friend makes his point with his customarily articulate and strong views. He is right about the debate that lies ahead. There will undoubtedly be extensive discussions in the House and around the country as, over the coming months, both politicians and, more importantly, the public as a whole decide where the future of this country lies.
Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)
When can we debate what the Daily Mirror has described as the “gravy train” of 25 former Ministers in the previous Government who are enjoying lucrative jobs in areas that they once regulated, and of the five former Select Committee Chairs who have jobs in firms on which they once adjudicated? Is that gravy train not bringing this House into disrepute, because of the feeling that people are hawking their insider knowledge to the highest bidder? Last week, the right hon. Gentleman said that he was happy with the situation and that all is fine. Previous holders of his office have led in making reforms in the House. When will he, as Leader of the House, start to lead?
Chris Grayling
In response to the issues raised in the Daily Mirror article, there is of course one simple two-word answer: Tony Blair. As I said to the hon. Gentleman last week, there are plenty of opportunities for him to raise his concerns with the relevant Committees of this House. I suggested last week that he should do so. I am sure that he will make his point and seek the changes to the rules for which he is asking.
Pauline Latham (Mid Derbyshire) (Con)
Drum Hill in my constituency has served scouting and other uniformed organisations and community groups for 90 years. A 45-year-old wooden building, which is collapsing, is to be demolished, which will leave the organisations with the problem of raising funds to replace it. Will my right hon. Friend facilitate a debate in which we can explore how such big society organisations that serve the wider community are able to access funding to replace much-loved facilities?
Chris Grayling
I pay tribute to the volunteers in my hon. Friend’s constituency, who are clearly doing a fantastic job of working with and providing opportunities for young people. Every one of us as constituency MPs has a story to tell about voluntary sector groups, whether the scouts or other groups, doing fantastic work to help our young people. One thing that I hope the Backbench Business Committee will do with the time available to it is hold one or two annual debates, such as one to celebrate our voluntary sector. I think that would be in tune with the wishes of this House and it would provide precisely the opportunity that my hon. Friend has just asked for.
Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP)
With more job losses announced in Aberdeen this week, the UK Government need to take action to ensure that a drive for increased productivity in the North sea does not come at the expense of health and safety on the rigs. When can we hear a ministerial statement on this matter?
Chris Grayling
The hon. Lady makes an important point. The North sea oil industry remains very important to the United Kingdom. It is, of course, under great pressure because of the fall in the oil price. We do not wish to see safety standards in the North sea compromised as a result. We will debate the Energy Bill next week, which contains measures that we believe will bring costs down for the energy industry. All of us should work together to do everything we can to help that industry through what is clearly a difficult time.
Sir David Amess (Southend West) (Con)
I pay tribute to Sir Albert McQuarrie, a great parliamentarian who died yesterday.
Will my right hon. Friend find time for a debate on the impact of the c2c timetable changes on Southend commuters? There are health and safety issues such as overcrowding, lack of seats and the slow delivery of passengers to Fenchurch Street. I shall be joining passengers in a non-violent demonstration tonight at Fenchurch Street at 5.30.
Chris Grayling
I congratulate my hon. Friend on his continuing work on behalf of his constituents. The questions that we have had about Eltham and his line to Southend show that there is work to be done by our train companies in ensuring that they deliver the best possible service. The Secretary of State for Transport will be here in 10 days’ time to take questions. I am sure that my hon. Friend will take advantage of that opportunity to raise this issue again. As I said to the hon. Member for Eltham (Clive Efford), I will make sure that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State is aware of the concerns he has raised today.
Angela Rayner (Ashton-under-Lyne) (Lab)
As a Greater Manchester constituency MP, I am really concerned that Greater Manchester fire and rescue service has been treated disproportionately once again, when compared with other fire and rescue services across the country. The £16 million of cuts equates to the removal of 16 fire engines from action on the streets of Greater Manchester. These are the very engines and community heroes who responded to the recent floods in our city region. Will the Minister grant Government time to debate the cuts that are being imposed on Greater Manchester fire and rescue service following the comprehensive spending review?
Chris Grayling
Of course, it is our hope and belief that as we unify many of the aspects of the workings of our emergency services, including the sharing of political leadership through police and crime commissioners, that will provide an opportunity to deliver savings while ensuring that we protect front-line services. That is the approach that we are taking. My right hon. and hon. Friends in the Department for Communities and Local Government and the Home Office will work to try to ensure that that happens. There is no option but to take tough decisions to address our financial challenges. We are doing so in a way that we believe will make efficiencies without affecting services.
John Howell (Henley) (Con)
May we have a debate on the activities of Network Rail in landscape-sensitive areas, such as the area of outstanding natural beauty in which the Goring gap sits? Nobody wants to hold up electrification, but sensitivity in such areas over the installations that are used to carry the electrification wires would be very much appreciated.
Chris Grayling
I am aware of the concerns that my hon. Friend raises. Indeed, I walked through the Goring gap recently and saw the work that is taking place on the line. The electrification of the Great Western main line is great news for people in his constituency and, indeed, in south Wales, so it will be of benefit to the constituents of the shadow Leader of the House. It is long overdue. When Labour was in power, only 10 miles of railway were electrified. We are now doing the job properly. However, my hon. Friend is absolutely right that Network Rail needs to be careful and thoughtful in areas of outstanding natural beauty to ensure that this essential work does not damage the landscape.
Jim Fitzpatrick (Poplar and Limehouse) (Lab)
Further to the question from my hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner), in the wake of recent floods there have been calls for flooding to be made a statutory responsibility of fire authorities. The answer from the Government seems to be that if there is an emergency such as flooding and the fire brigade are called, it will attend—which, of course, it will. However, fire brigades attended fires for many years before it was considered a good idea to make it a statutory responsibility for them to do so. Is the Department for Communities and Local Government likely to make a statement to determine whether it is examining that issue, because at some point in future flooding ought to be a statutory responsibility of the fire service?
Chris Grayling
I have high regard for the hon. Gentleman and his work in this House, but I am afraid that we simply disagree on this issue. The idea that we need to pass a law to tell the emergency services to respond to emergencies would be a waste of Parliament’s time, utterly unnecessary, and frankly insulting to a group of professionals who work hard on our behalf, day in, day out, and week in, week out.
Nigel Huddleston (Mid Worcestershire) (Con)
A record 10.2 million passengers passed through Birmingham international airport in 2015. With all the attention currently on Heathrow, will my right hon. Friend find time for a debate on the positive economic contribution of the UK’s regional airports, and how the Government could further support them?
Chris Grayling
My hon. Friend makes a valuable point. Birmingham airport is an essential part of the midlands economy. It has been particularly encouraging to see the development of routes between Birmingham and far-off parts of the world where there are strong business links, such as the Indian subcontinent and the middle east. That has been helped by the work of local Members of Parliament, who have argued in support of the economic development of the area. My colleagues in the Department for Transport regard this issue as immensely important, and they will listen carefully to what my hon. Friend has said. I know they will continue to work alongside him and other midlands MPs in an attempt to continue the successful development of that airport.
Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab)
What message does the Leader of the House believe he is sending to young people watching our proceedings today, when a Government elected with a majority of just 12 on a minority share of the vote, and with no manifesto commitment, in a Committee that most of our constituents will never have heard of, abolish student grants, which will hit the poorest students the hardest?
Chris Grayling
I say simply that this matter will be voted on by this House, and the House may choose to vote against it. It will be before the House and be divisible on the Floor of this House, and if Members want to vote on it, they can do so.
Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)
The Chair of the Backbench Business Committee, the hon. Member for Gateshead (Ian Mearns), is unfortunately indisposed; we send him our best wishes for a speedy recovery. On behalf of him and the Committee, may I invite Members to apply for the opportunity to secure a Backbench Business Committee debate, as the Leader of the House has just set out? We currently do not have a huge amount of requests for debates. Through your good offices, Mr Speaker, may I ask Members to complete the forms thoroughly, and to follow the guidelines so that the process is speeded up?
One current concern is that the transport unions are threatening three further strikes on the London underground, which will bring misery to commuters across London. May we have an urgent statement on what is to be done to prevent that action from inconveniencing commuters and disrupting the business of London?
Chris Grayling
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for the work that he and his colleagues on the Backbench Business Committee are doing, and I echo his call to Members. We are making a lot of time available to that Committee; there are sections of time during the parliamentary week, and over the next couple of weeks a day and a half or even two days are available for debates such as that on the rail sector which has just been raised. I hope that Members who are raising issues to be debated, as my hon. Friend has just done, will look on the Backbench Business Committee as a vehicle to bring those matters to the attention of Ministers and before the House in order to address them.
Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)
In my written question No. 20725 I asked the Chancellor
“what discussions his Department had with financial institutions prior to the introduction of new rules for Tier 1 Entrepreneur visas in January 2013.”
The subsequent response said simply that the Government have met financial institutions many times since 2013, which is completely inadequate. Can the Leader of the House assist me in getting a more substantial written response?
Chris Grayling
If that had been raised as a point of order, you would offer advice to be persistent, Mr Speaker, and to keep asking questions that are more specifically targeted on individual groups, people, institutions or meetings. The City Minister, or those Ministers involved in migration matters, have regular meetings with representative groups and will discuss such issues on a regular basis. The hon. Lady should not think that such matters are not discussed, because they are.
Chris White (Warwick and Leamington) (Con)
A recent report on UK consumer spending found that 2015 was the second strongest year since 2008. Such figures are encouraging and are reflected in my constituency. May we have a debate on the steps that need to be taken to ensure that this positive trend continues?
Chris Grayling
My hon. Friend’s question speaks for itself as a sign of continued economic progress. It is encouraging that we are seeing that economic progress in the midlands and in the north, where the economy has been growing faster than the economy in the south. There is a lot of work still to do. We have a lot of ground still to cover, but we are making good progress. The country is moving in the right direction. All I can say is thank goodness that it is we who are steering the country at a difficult time, rather than the Labour party with a set of economic policies that would be disastrous.
Gerald Jones (Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney) (Lab)
Despite the Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ stating, in response to my question on 5 November, that she would be happy to discuss the future of the National Wildlife Crime Unit, and despite a number of emails chasing a response, the matter remains unresolved. Given that Members across the House showed support for the unit at an event last week, will the Leader of the House arrange a debate on the issue in the near future?
Chris Grayling
This is a matter of concern and I understand the issues. Wildlife crimes in this country are not just those that take place within the United Kingdom. We all wish to see the smuggling of rare species, bush meat and products from endangered species stamped out. I will follow up the hon. Gentleman’s question. If he has not received a response, I will seek to ensure he receives one quickly after today’s debate.
Martin Vickers (Cleethorpes) (Con)
EU membership is particularly unpopular in my constituency because of the damaging impact of the common fisheries policy. Will the Leader of the House arrange for a statement to reassure my constituents that reform of the CFP is taking place during the renegotiations?
Chris Grayling
I absolutely understand the concerns my hon. Friend raises. The fishing industry is enormously important to his constituency, as it is to the constituency of the shadow Deputy Leader of the House, the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Melanie Onn). It is a long-standing and important part of the economy in their part of the world. There have been many calls over the years for more responsibility for the fishing sector to be taken at a local level. The Prime Minister has set the principle of subsidiarity at the heart of his renegotiation. Whatever the outcome of the renegotiation and the referendum, I think we can all agree that decisions should not be taken at a level above that which is necessary.
Tom Blenkinsop (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)
Yesterday, I and colleagues from the Energy and Climate Change Committee met the Vice-President of the EU Commission, Maroš Šefcovic, and I asked him about the European Union’s position on Chinese market economy status. He said that that debate had to happen and that the decision would be taken in autumn. Energy-intensive industries such as steel, chemical processing and manufacturing are really relying on that decision. Why is it still the case, and may we have a statement on why it is still the case that the Government, irrespective of whether we will be a member of the EU or not, are backing Chinese market economy status without any clarification or qualification?
Chris Grayling
It is clear that China is one of the largest economies in the world. It is a country with which we have historical links. It is right and proper that we engage with China economically. China has also, as we saw at the recent Paris summit, now recognised the imperative of addressing environmental issues. Thanks to the work of several international figures, including my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, the outcome of the summit has started the world on a path going in the right direction.
Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) (Con)
MidKent College in my constituency is doing a phenomenal amount of work to encourage and promote apprenticeships. It informs me that its greatest challenge is to ensure that young people and their parents see apprenticeships as a good and viable alternative to university. May we have an urgent statement on the Floor of the House on what the Government are doing to assist colleges such as MidKent to promote apprenticeships as an equally valuable career option?
Chris Grayling
Apprenticeships are one of the Government’s great success stories. Since 2010, we have seen 2.5 million young people start apprenticeships. That is clearly a step in the right direction. My experience, and I suspect my hon. Friend’s experience, is that I am starting to see young people in my constituency recognise the potential of apprenticeships. There is still a lot of work to do, however. We all have a duty as constituency Members to promote apprenticeships in our constituencies. Some colleagues have held apprenticeship fairs in their constituencies. The point he makes today is one we should continue to deal with and debate on the Floor on the House.
Mr Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)
First, may I thank the Leader of the House for his excellent timing of the Easter recess—or, rather, the lambing recess—which he could not have timed any better? I also draw his attention to another constituency matter—early-day motion 936, in my name and that of many colleagues, on the goodness of Stornoway black pudding and its recognition as a superfood.
[That this House welcomes the recognition of black pudding, Marag Dhubh in Gaelic, as a superfood; notes that its calcium, iron, magnesium, potassium and protein-rich nature make the black pudding an excellent addition to a healthy, balanced diet; expresses pleasure at the economic benefits to Stornoway butchers of its EU Protected Geographical Indication, one of the many great benefits of EU membership; and encourages everyone to discover the great taste of Scottish food.]
Black pudding is rich in calcium, iron, magnesium and potassium; it is protein rich; and it has a low glycaemic index—very healthy indeed. Will the Leader of the House keep himself in good health and google “Stornoway black pudding” so that he can again time recesses perfectly?
Chris Grayling
The most unusual email I have had since taking over this job was from the hon. Gentleman, who asked me, “Could you tell me when the Easter recess will be, because I need to work out when to put the ram out with the ewes?” We should have a taste contest between him and my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) to see whose constituency can deliver the tastiest black pudding. Perhaps you should be the judge, Mr Speaker. Next week, they should bring in some fare from their own constituencies and you could be the arbiter, although I suspect that a draw might be diplomatic.
Mr Speaker
The hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil) and the unusual have always been very much more than nodding acquaintances.
Jake Berry (Rossendale and Darwen) (Con)
I recommend the Bacup black pudding from Rossendale.
May we have a statement on the use of smart technology for reporting potholes? Tomorrow, national pothole day, is a great day for people to download the “Tell Jake” app, developed with streetrepairs.co.uk, which has seen the number of potholes in my constituency reported and sorted double and the response times for repairing them slashed. It is a really good bit of technology that the Department for Communities and Local Government should encourage local authorities to embrace.
Chris Grayling
I think I see the emergence of an all-party black pudding group.
Particularly at this time of the year, with all the rain we have had, potholes are an issue for constituencies across the country, so my hon. Friend makes an important point. I am sure Members with an excess of potholes in their constituencies will take note of his comments and offer guidance to constituents affected, but of course we hope they will be repaired as quickly as possible.
Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)
At the last general election, the Conservative party promised to protect social security for disabled people, and, in addition to the cuts proposed in the Welfare Reform and Work Bill, just before Christmas—just two years after they introduced it—the Government announced a consultation on the personal independence payment process that will, in effect, reduce disabled people’s eligibility. Will they explain why they have reneged on their promise, and when may we have a debate in Government time on this important issue?
Chris Grayling
The whole point about the PIP system was that its predecessor, the disability living allowance, was not being used for the purposes intended. DLA and PIP were designed to provide extra financial resource for people with disabilities, to help them cover the extra costs incurred in their daily lives, but DLA had become a sickness benefit and was being used by people who self-referred and had temporary illnesses rather than disabilities. The system was designed to pay benefits to people who needed them for their disabilities, not to those who did not have genuine disabilities but had health problems. That is what the new system was designed to achieve, and it is perfectly reasonable to review it two years in, to make sure it is delivering that objective.
Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)
Yesterday saw the launch in the terrace pavilion of Open Doors’ 2016 “World Watch” report on the persecution of Christians, which regrettably is growing and has reached the stage where Christians are now the most persecuted group. Will the Leader of the House welcome the work of Open Doors and ask for an update from our right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for International Development on how we might implement its proposal that the UK use its position as a major aid donor as leverage in ensuring plurality and proper respect for faiths in aid-recipient countries?
Chris Grayling
I am happy to do both, and I think we should say very clearly as a Parliament and as a nation that the persecution of Christians around the world is to be abhorred. This is a world that should respect the freedom of individuals to follow their religion. No one should be persecuted for their religion. My hon. Friend is absolutely right that around the world, some Christian minorities are being persecuted for their religion. It is for this country as a beacon of liberal democracy to stand up for them—we should do that and we will.
Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
The Leader of the House may be aware that yesterday the House allowed my ten-minute rule Bill on the English national anthem to pass to Second Reading. Downing Street has briefed that it is open to allowing time for this to be properly pursued. It would be a great shame—there is a huge amount of interest in the subject—if when the Bill next comes before us, it is simply batted away without a debate or a vote. What steps can the right hon. Gentleman take to enable the voice of England to be heard and to decide on whether to have a different national anthem?
Chris Grayling
Yesterday’s debate was certainly interesting, but I am not sure that there was complete unity among his Front-Bench colleagues on the subject. I believe “Jerusalem” to be a magnificent part of our musical heritage, but I have to say that as it was being broadcast on a loop yesterday morning around Westminster and as I heard it for the 20th time, I was beginning to think it might be appropriate on selective occasions. I commend the hon. Gentleman for the work he is doing on an issue that will be discussed further. It is a matter that he could bring to the attention of the Backbench Business Committee and have it debated on the Floor of the House if it agreed to that.
Robert Jenrick (Newark) (Con)
I am sure that the whole House will support the proposal to erect in Trafalgar Square a reconstruction of the Temple of Bel arch from Palmyra in April and May this year—and perhaps for longer. That proposal coincides with the Queen’s Speech, with which my right hon. Friend will be involved. To increase the symbolism of our defiance against Daesh, will he include in the Queen’s Speech the ratification and bringing into UK law of The Hague convention, which has complete cross-party support? This could be concluded swiftly here and in the other place, and it would be an important symbol for this country.
Chris Grayling
My hon. Friend makes a really important point. We have all looked with dismay at the gratuitous destruction of parts of our collective heritage in the middle east at the hands of a group of people who are nothing short of barbarians. If my hon. Friend will forgive me, it would not be appropriate for me to give advance billing of the Queen’s Speech, but I know that this is a matter of concern to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport and the whole Government. I welcome what is happening in Trafalgar Square. We need to work collectively across the world to try to protect the architectural and archaeological treasures that should be a part not simply of our heritage but that of future generations.
Conor McGinn (St Helens North) (Lab)
My constituent Mark Middlehurst is in a critical condition in hospital in Perth, Western Australia, after suffering a severe brain injury as a result of an accident. Unfortunately, Mark did not have travel insurance, and his family need to raise over £50,000 so that he can make the journey back to the UK, accompanied by a full medical team. Will the Leader of the House ask the UK high commissioner to Australia to make urgent representations on this matter, and ask the Foreign Secretary to publish a written statement next week with the response?
Chris Grayling
Let me first extend my best wishes to Mark and his family and to the hon. Gentleman for the work he is doing. It is always distressing to us as constituency Members when we come across tragic cases such as this one. After business questions has finished, I will ask my office to contact the Foreign Office and to follow up the hon. Gentleman’s points. Clearly, it is unfortunate when people travel without insurance, and we would all advise our constituents not to do so. I am sure, however, that the diplomatic service will wish to do everything it can to help the family.
Dr Matthew Offord (Hendon) (Con)
Following the issue raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick), will my right hon. Friend meet members of the all-party parliamentary group on cultural heritage to discuss The Hague convention and how to ensure that it becomes part of UK law in the next Queen’s Speech?
Chris Grayling
I would be happy to discuss the issue with my hon. Friend and colleagues. Of course, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport will be here for questions next week, providing my hon. Friend with an opportunity to raise the issue with him. The Government are well aware of this issue.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
There are growing concerns across the whole of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland about sharia law and the use of sharia councils. There can never be two legal systems in the United Kingdom: the law created and processed by this House is the only law of the land. Will the Leader of the House agree to a statement on this most important legal matter?
Chris Grayling
Let us be absolutely clear about this. We have one law of the land which applies to every single citizen of this country—to every single person who is in this country—regardless of race, colour or creed. That is beyond question, and, in my view, it can never be different. Systems that offer arbitration services within, for example, religious groups are ultimately not legally binding. Ultimately, the only places in our country that deliver legally binding rulings are our courts, and people in this country can always have recourse to the courts in the event of matters of challenge in their lives.
I know that this matter is of concern to the Home Secretary. She will be here next week, and I encourage the hon. Gentleman to raise the issue with her, as, indeed, will I.
James Berry (Kingston and Surbiton) (Con)
Figures published today reveal that there has been a 30% increase in the number of acid attacks over the last two years. These brutal attacks leave their victims with a life sentence, which is often longer than the sentences that the perpetrators receive. May we have a debate on ways of tackling acid attacks, including better regulation of the most corrosive substances?
Chris Grayling
I had a brief discussion about this very matter with my right hon. Friend the Minister for Policing, Crime and Criminal Justice a while ago. I know that it is a matter of great concern to Home Office Ministers, who have been considering and discussing it in recent days. It is clearly a matter of great concern, because the lasting impact of an acid attack on an individual can be profoundly life-changing. We must always condemn such attacks, and always try to stop them. I will ensure that my hon. Friend’s concerns are raised after this session.
Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)
Last Monday saw the deadline pass for responses to the consultation on the Greater Manchester spatial framework, which sets out housing land supply for the next 20 years. It is bad enough that very few councillors in Greater Manchester knew that the consultation was taking place, but it is atrocious that the public did not know either. May we have a debate in Government time on the accountability of combined authorities, to the electorate in particular, but also to the members of the constituent councils?
Chris Grayling
I have listened carefully to what the hon. Gentleman has said. I will pass his concerns to the Department for Communities and Local Government, which will undoubtedly be anxious to ensure that the new systems work effectively. Of course, councils and councillors have a duty to communicate what is going on to their members and their constituents. When that does not happen it is not always the fault of the people at the centre; nevertheless, there is that duty to try to ensure that the message gets out.
Ben Howlett (Bath) (Con)
I was pleased to hear during Women and Equalities questions that the Minister welcomed the publication today of the trans inquiry report. My right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) asked the Leader of the House for a debate on the report in the Chamber. I must defer to the expertise of the Clerks, but as far as I know there has not previously been a debate about the trans community on the Floor of the House. In the light of my right hon. Friend’s report, will the Leader of the House host such a debate?
Chris Grayling
I think that that would be a very sensible thing to do. The deputy Chair of the Backbench Business Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman), is present, and will undoubtedly have noted my hon. Friend’s question. In order for such a debate to take place, a formal request must be made to the Committee, but I think that both the time that it is able to provide and the time that is available in Westminster Hall present ideal opportunities for discussion of the report, and of an issue that I suspect has not previously been debated on the Floor of the House, although it is a very real and genuine issue.
Brendan O'Hara (Argyll and Bute) (SNP)
The Leader of the House will be well aware of the fate of six British sailors in Chennai, including my constituent Billy Irving, of Connel, near Oban. Having been detained for nearly two years, they were each sentenced to five years’ rigorous imprisonment in an Indian jail. The case, and the sentence, has shocked and caused great upset to the men and their families. Will a Foreign Office Minister make an urgent statement to the House as soon as possible about what the Foreign Office plans to do to help these men?
Chris Grayling
I know the hon. Gentleman has been a vigorous campaigner on behalf of these gentlemen and their families. After this session of questions has finished, I will pass that message to the Foreign Office and ask it to respond to him. Of course, such situations are much more challenging to address once a court has ruled, because we have to respect the justice systems of other countries, but I absolutely understand the concerns. It may be that these gentlemen choose to appeal, and if they do so I would expect the usual consular support to be made available.
Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)
It has been reported that President Obama will be visiting this country in May, no doubt at the start of his farewell tour. More disturbingly, it has also been reported that he will be invited by the Prime Minister to comment on the merits of Britain staying in the European Union as part of an increasingly desperate attempt to shore up the increasingly threadbare proposals for us to stay in the EU. Will the Leader of the House, as the representative of this House, write to the United States ambassador, not only to welcome President Obama to this country, but to make it clear to the ambassador that the President should not be commenting on very important domestic issues, important to the people of this country?
Chris Grayling
I think I can reassure my hon. Friend in that I suspect such a letter is not needed, because I have no doubt that the American ambassador closely follows the proceedings in this Chamber and that the comments of my hon. Friend will be reported to him. I am sure that message will filter back to the Americans.
Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)
May we have a debate on the rather bizarre decision reached by the fisheries Minister, the hon. Member for Camborne and Redruth (George Eustice), at the European fisheries and open opportunities meeting, whereby gillnet fishing is to be allowed to continue of the endangered bass species, whereas domestic anglers are told they are to have a zero-take bag? It seems to me and many domestic anglers an absolutely unfair decision that stops their recreational fishing while hugely increasing the take of an endangered species by fishermen, including in the fisheries Minister’s constituency.
Chris Grayling
The hon. Lady is not the first Member to raise this concern. I am not aware of the detail that has prompted the decision, but I can understand why hon. Members think it is somewhat strange. I will ask my hon. Friend to write to her after this meeting to explain the reason for that decision and what, if anything, happens next.
Mr David Burrowes (Enfield, Southgate) (Con)
Can the Leader confirm that, sadly, the Government have a new year’s resolution to further deregulate Sunday trading in the forthcoming Enterprise Bill? Why do the Government not publish the results of their Sunday trading consultation, which may have got lost in the Christmas decorations bag, and realise that this is a new year’s resolution that makes no business sense and no family sense, and should be broken as soon as possible?
Chris Grayling
I know my hon. Friend feels very strongly about this issue, and I would simply assure him that if any proposals are brought forward, the House will be properly informed and all appropriate information will be provided.
Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)
After the Legislative Grand Committee on Tuesday, there were some rather forlorn-looking Clerks in the Division Lobbies packing away iPads that had not been used, having been specially set up to record English votes for English laws. Given that these tablet devices have been paid for and exist, why not put them to use to record all Divisions in the House as the first step towards a 21st-century system of electronic voting?
Chris Grayling
I think that is the intention. The House of Lords is already using iPads to record Divisions, and it seems to me entirely logical that we should do the same. The system is now in place for the double majority votes, and it is my hope and expectation that we will move to general recording in the very near future. There is no reason not to do that.
Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)
Businesses across York have been seriously impacted by the floods as people have stayed away due to the images of floodwater. York has dried out, cleaned up and is open for trade. May we have a statement from the Business Secretary on the costs of the floods to businesses and further support to be made available for affected businesses, and will he make it clear that the best way to support cities that flooded, such as York, is to visit and take advantage of the fantastic bars, cafés and shops?
Chris Grayling
May I first extend my good wishes to the hon. Lady and her constituents and commend them for the work they have been doing to mop up after the floods? She is absolutely right: York is a large place and the floods were deeply damaging to parts of the city—but only parts of it. Many businesses were unaffected, and many others have done a sterling job in turning things around quickly and reopening. We should be encouraging people to go into the city to visit, to shop, and to eat and drink, to ensure that its economy flourishes. That is true not only of York but of Carlisle, the centre of Manchester and elsewhere.
Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
Next week, the High Court will hear a judicial review brought by, among others, my constituents Rebecca Steinfeld and Charles Keidan, who wish to enter into a civil partnership but cannot currently do so, in breach of their article 8 and article 14 rights. We are aware of the Leader of the House’s love of the Human Rights Act—perhaps he will apply for Shami Chakrabarti’s job, given that he will be looking for one soon—but this is a matter for Parliament. Will he find Government time to legislate to allow different-sex couples to enter into civil partnerships?
Chris Grayling
The hon. Gentleman has made this point before, but if this matter is before the courts, it is not appropriate for us to discuss it today. The Government have considered the matter before and they do not currently have proposals to make a change, although Ministers and this House will always keep it under review.
Stewart Malcolm McDonald (Glasgow South) (SNP)
The Energy Secretary has noted her frustration that the five-year low in wholesale energy prices has not been passed on to consumers, but quite frankly, my constituents are less interested in what frustrates the right hon. Lady than in finding out what action she is going to take as Secretary of State. May we have a statement from her to tell us exactly what she intends to do to help hard-pressed businesses and households that are currently paying through the nose?
Chris Grayling
The most straightforward option is to shop around. There have been price reductions, and they tend to be among the smaller, newer entrants to the market. We have taken significant steps to encourage a broader range of providers to enter the market, and the number has risen from six to the best part of 30 providers. There are now some much better deals around. The way to get a cheaper price is to shop around, and we should do everything we can to encourage people to switch easily and to chase the best option.
Liz McInnes (Heywood and Middleton) (Lab)
May we have a debate on the recent report from the Museums Association, which reveals that nearly one in five regional museums has closed a part or a branch to the public over the past year, with the north of England being particularly affected because of reductions in local authority funding from central Government?
Chris Grayling
We cannot dictate what local authorities do with their money, but what I can say is that in the spending review we protected the money that goes to cultural institutions precisely because we recognise their importance. We as a Government will continue to do that, but it is for local councils to set their own local priorities.
Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)
The Leader of the House will be aware that the Welsh Grand Committee meets from time to time. Indeed, I think he appeared in front of it in Wrexham once. He will therefore be aware that any time the Committee meets in Wales, its members may make representations and speak in either English or Welsh. However, when the Committee meets in a Committee Room in this place, its members are permitted to use only English. In view of the fact that there are two official languages in Wales, and that we have a Welsh Grand Committee coming up on 3 February, will the right hon. Gentleman make a commitment that all its members may use either English or Welsh?
Chris Grayling
I will not give the hon. Lady a commitment about that, but she makes a serious point and I will take a look at it. Clearly it is important that that happens in Wales, and I was not aware that it was not possible in this building. I will go and take a look at that for her.
Justin Madders (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)
Every piece of evidence shows that scrapping student grants will deter students from poorer backgrounds. Regardless of the merits of the proposal, is this not also about democracy? The proposal, which did not appear in the Conservative manifesto, will affect more than 500,000 people, and it is going to be decided in a back room by a small number of people. Is that not a shoddy way to do business? Is it not about time that the Government showed the courage of their convictions and allowed a full debate and a full vote on the proposal on the Floor of this House?
Chris Grayling
If Labour Members feel so strongly about this matter, they could use the Opposition day next Tuesday to debate it. A statutory instrument of this kind cannot pass into law, against the wishes of Members of this House, until it is voted upon the Floor of this House. Every night, as part of the remaining orders of the day, we address motions, and if people disagree with them they pray against them and they are then divided upon. That can happen, and it will happen if the Opposition choose to make it so. I remind the hon. Gentleman that, for all the stories that have been told by the Opposition in recent years, the number of young people from deprived backgrounds going to our universities has actually being going up, not down.
Paula Sherriff (Dewsbury) (Lab)
May we have a debate in Government time on cervical screening for women under the age of 25, too many of whom have died after being refused a smear test? Emma Louise Fisk died at the age of 25 after being refused a smear test approximately 10 times, having been erroneously diagnosed with a urine infection. Many Members across the House will welcome the opportunity to ask Health Ministers whether it is time to offer young women tests on request, as well as to do more to promote take-up of smear tests among women of all ages and ethnicities.
Chris Grayling
It is always a difficult challenge for the health service to set the framework within which it offers tests. The hon. Lady makes a point that has been raised before. It is tragic when situations such as the one she describes take place. I will of course ensure that the Health Secretary is made aware of the concern that she has raised. None the less, these things must be a matter for the professionals to decide what to do and what not to do, but she makes an important point and I will pass it on.
Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)
Today, we have a debate on space technology. In sharp contrast, the Leader of the House may be aware that the Department dealing with child tax credits will take faxes but not emails for MPs’ constituent inquiries, which is hardly 21st-century technology. In a written answer this week, the Treasury advised me that that was because standard emails are not secure, and yet the Department for Work and Pensions responds to emails that contain sensitive information. I am concerned that that implies that MPs’ emails are not secure. Can we have a proper ministerial statement, or a debate, on the security of the IT systems managed by the Government?
Chris Grayling
The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. The matter of parliamentary emails is under discussion as it is of ongoing concern. The new head of security, who has been in place for a few months, has said that he regards ensuring integrity and security around our IT systems as an important area. I assured him that both the authority of this House and Mr Speaker are indeed concerned to ensure that that is the case.
Points of Order
(8 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. The Leader of the House has twice now said that the student finance measure, which started consideration in Committee at 11.30 this morning, will automatically be voted on by the whole House, as it will end up appearing on the Remaining Orders of the Day, but that is not the case. I say gently to him that he does not understand the rules. The simple situation is that, because the measure is going through the negative process, unless there is a motion formally tabled and carried in this House that says it shall not pass into law by 23 January—the motion must be tabled by him, by Government, or, theoretically, by us on an Opposition day—it cannot come to pass. He should not inadvertently mislead us by suggesting that this will happen automatically. If he is saying that he will table such a motion and allow for a debate, we would be very grateful, but he should not inadvertently mislead the House.
Mr Speaker
I am sure that the shadow Leader of the House is not making a speech to, or at, the Leader of the House. What he is really doing is asking for my guidance, which I am happy to provide. If that guidance happens to coincide with his own interpretation of matters, I dare say that he will dance around the mulberry bush in exultant celebration. Let me tell him and the House what the position is. I understand that the regulations are indeed being debated in Committee as we speak as a result of a reference moved by Ministers in response to a prayer—that is a motion against the regulations. I am sure that the House is with me so far. That is a perfectly commonplace, almost prosaic, procedure. It is open to Ministers to bring forward the prayer for decision in the House without further debate, or it can be brought forward by the Opposition on an Opposition day for determination by the House. That is the situation.
Mr Speaker
If the hon. Gentleman is quizzical, I would not wish him to remain so.
Chris Bryant
Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker. I am grateful for that guidance. May I seek a little bit more? I was not sure whether you heard the Deputy Leader of the House say, “Yes, that is what’s going to happen,” because that is not what, thus far, the Government have said—
Chris Bryant
That they will bring forward a motion, so that there is a vote. It does not happen automatically. As I understand it, the Government have to decide to do it. If the Leader or Deputy Leader of the House would nod to indicate that that is what they are going to do—
Mr Speaker
Look, the hon. Gentleman is an extremely important Member of this House, and no one is more keenly conscious of that fact than he, but it is not for him to seek to persuade, cajole or exhort people to nod. If the Leader or Deputy Leader of the House wishes to give the House a clear indication now of the Government’s intentions in respect of this matter, specifically the centrality or otherwise of the Chamber to its resolution, either of them is perfectly free to do so, but neither of them is under any obligation. It is a case of speak now or, if not forever hold your peace, for the time being do so.
The Deputy Leader of the House of Commons (Dr Thérèse Coffey)
Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker. I am not going to announce the business of the House, because the Leader of the House has already done that, but any Member can go and participate in that debate now. It is then for the Government to decide whether to bring the matter forward, as you have already pointed out in your guidance, Mr Speaker.
Mr Speaker
I think we will leave it there for now. Right hon. and hon. Members will make their own assessment, and I thank the Deputy Leader of the House for what she has said.
Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe: UK Delegation
(8 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Mr Speaker
We now come to the Select Committee statement. Mr Bernard Jenkin, the Chair of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, will speak for no more than 10 minutes, during which time, I remind colleagues, no interventions may be taken. At the conclusion of the statement, I will call Members to put questions on the subject of the statement and call Mr Jenkin to respond to these in turn. Members can expect to be called only once. Interventions should be questions, and should be brief. Front Benchers may take part in questioning. I call the Chair of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee of the House, Mr Bernard Jenkin.
Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for the opportunity to make this statement on PACAC’s report on our brief inquiry into the appointment of the UK delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, which is published today.
When the membership of the new delegation was announced in November, there was some disquiet among some right hon. and hon. Members, including myself and other members of the Select Committee, about the way the delegation was chosen and appointed. Concerns were raised by colleagues and the media that the way some Conservatives voted to defeat the Government on an amendment to the European Union Referendum Bill might have influenced those decisions.
It has been established practice, until this Parliament, for the existing members of the delegation to choose to retire from it, and for potential new members to express an interest in joining. This was not the case in November, when certain right hon. and hon. Members were simply removed from the delegation by fiat. Some of those so removed had wanted to continue, including my hon. Friends the Members for Christchurch (Mr Chope) and for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), and my right hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs Gillan). The House should note that my right hon. Friend is a member of PACAC, but she therefore recused herself from the Committee’s proceedings on this matter.
Following a debate in this House to elect a new delegation for the present year, which saw a Back-Bench motion defeated by the payroll vote, PACAC received a letter from my right hon. Friend the Member for North Shropshire (Mr Paterson) and the Committee resolved to invite the Leader of the House to give oral evidence on the matter. We also received written evidence from my hon. Friend the Member for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale), who is the newly appointed leader of the UK delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. We also received written evidence from my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch, although it was very late in the process. I apologise to him for the fact that we had completed and resolved to make our report before his evidence reached me or the members of the Committee. I do regret this and apologise to him for it. Nevertheless, his evidence is published on our website. It would not have altered the substance of our recommendations, but it speaks for itself.
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe does not much restrict how its delegates should be appointed. It Rules Committee states that delegates are
“elected . . . or appointed from among the members”
of each Parliament
“in such manner as it shall decide”.
My Committee heard that the Conservative party used a system based on patronage of the leader or the so-called usual channels, meaning the Whips Office. As such, PACAC concludes that the Government have not broken any rules of the Assembly. However, the Rules Committee of the Assembly said that the UK Parliament should
“review with the utmost diligence”
the way in which the delegation is appointed to
“bring it fully into line with . . . democratic principles”.
Parliament is not bound to take any action on that advice. Nevertheless, we recommend that the House should revise the way in which delegates are chosen in the future, on the basis that this is how a great Parliament makes decisions, and we should represent the highest standards of democracy and accountability to our fellow European parliamentarians. We therefore recommend that, in future, the delegation should be elected, not appointed by the Prime Minister as now, and moreover elected by the membership of the House of Commons along similar lines to those on which the House now elects members of Select Committees, but also providing for the gender balance required in this case.
This means that the House can object to the inclusion of delegation members who may be considered unsuitable, as is the case with motions on the appointment of Select Committees. This has not been the case before. Following the success of the Wright Committee’s recommendations to reform elections to Select Committees, it seems only right that the same principles should be extended to parliamentary delegations. The key recommendation of this report is that future delegations are chosen by free, fair and open elections. Subject to the approval of this recommendation by the House, the Procedure Committee would consider how the reform might be implemented, also so as to reflect the gender balance requirement.
We recommended that this system of election could be extended to other delegations, such as NATO, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly.
I very much hope that the House will welcome this proposal for democratic reform in the way that the UK appoints its most significant parliamentary delegations, and that the House will vote to approve it soon.
Melanie Onn (Great Grimsby) (Lab)
Yet again, we appear to be intruding on the private grief of the Conservative party. Although I take no joy in that, I welcome the statement and the report to which it refers. It echoes the collective view from the Opposition Benches that the UK delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe should be chosen on a democratic basis. We wholeheartedly agree with the proposals in the report.
Will the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) please confirm that this is the first and only such examination of how this House chooses its parliamentary delegation and that, if the report is agreed, under the rules of the Council of Europe it will be incumbent on the Conservative party to comply with the report’s recommendations?
Mr Jenkin
I believe it is the first time that any review of the procedure has been undertaken. That complies with the request made to us by the Rules Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly, but it is a matter for the House as a whole how it takes this matter forward. The Committee cannot bind the House on how it should proceed. Perhaps the official Opposition will provide time to ensure that the House has an opportunity to debate our recommendations.
Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) and the members of his Committee for this very thorough report. What does he intend to do to try and ensure that his recommendations are carried forward, even in the face of implacable opposition from the Government? How can this House of Commons take control of the matter and ensure that its own choices are appointed to the Parliamentary Assembly?
Mr Jenkin
I would recommend either that Back-Bench business time be provided so that my hon. Friend can bring forward a motion, or that that is done by Her Majesty’s official Opposition, who clearly feel strongly about the matter. I imagine that every member of my Committee would support that.
Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)
As a member of PACAC, I am delighted to support the report and to applaud our Chair on what he has said. Do the Government accept that there has been a cultural change over the past 15 years and that we now decide most things like this by election? The power of the Whips to stuff Committees with their favourites has more or less disappeared, certainly for Select Committees, and that is a very welcome change.
Mr Jenkin
I very much agree that there are now different expectations about how these matters should be decided. I have in my hand a written ministerial statement issued only yesterday, entitled, “UK Delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe”. Admittedly, it only removes one peer and appoints another, but it was issued by the Prime Minister. He, of course, is a parliamentarian and the leader of a political party, but I think that the expectation now is that these matters should be handled by the two Houses and clearly ought not to be decided by the Executive. We all know what “the usual channels” means; it means decisions being made in secret, reasons not being given, and there being very little accountability. I think that people expect us to improve on that in today’s age.
Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)
I very much welcome what my hon. Friend has said about Members being elected to the delegation, rather than appointed. We await the Government’s formal response to the report, but has he had any indication that they might be sympathetic to its conclusions, and can he confirm that it was agreed unanimously by the Committee?
Mr Jenkin
I can confirm that the report was agreed unanimously. The only evidence we have taken from the Government is the oral evidence from the Leader of the House. As we are learning, what a Minister’s private thoughts might be on certain matters might not reflect what they say as a Minister. I hope that the Government will reflect on the Wright Committee and the success of Select Committee elections and recognise that times are changing. The days when they could hand out delegation places to Members of Parliament on the basis of grace and favour are over. That does not win us respect in the Council of Europe or among other parliamentarians across Europe, to whom this House should be setting an example.
Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)
As the longest-serving member of the UK delegation to the Council of Europe, I congratulate the Committee, and particularly its Chair, on the impartial way that this matter has been dealt with. Never in all the years that I have served in the Council of Europe did I envisage a day when one of its committees would tell the UK, which has been the gold standard for democratic integrity for the past 70 years, that we should bring our standards of democratic accountability up to those of Azerbaijan and Bulgaria. This has been a shameful period for the United Kingdom. It is not just the delegates who are not elected; neither is its leader. Neither Conservative delegates, nor those from other parties, have any role whatsoever in that. We will be going back on the spirit of the Wright reforms unless that is changed quickly.
Mr Jenkin
I pay tribute to the longest-serving member of PACAC, or whatever name it had in previous Parliaments. The hon. Gentleman has been an enormous fund of institutional memory on that Committee, and that is extremely useful. During our inquiry, he pointed out that his party already has a form of elections for its delegates that provides for the complexity of providing gender balance. Some of the objections that have been raised to say that we cannot do this are therefore clearly confounded by the experience of his party.
I think it would be a mistake to say that this episode has brought shame on our country. The hon. Gentleman is right to make comparisons with other countries that do things better. However, the Rules Committee made it clear that people might have misunderstood the confusion of roles that we have in this House whereby the Prime Minister is also leader of the governing party and sits as a parliamentarian. The more classical separation of powers that is expected does not exist in our constitution. That is not a matter of shame for us, but we are now a little behind the times. We should be demonstrating how, in our procedures, we expect the best, and the most open and democratic, practices to be adopted—not from the age of deference but the age of popular democracy.
Mr John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)
I, too, commend the Chairman and the Committee for this report. I confess to finding it strange that the Prime Minister should have sought, in a fit of pique, to exclude troublemakers from the delegation to the Council of Europe, because in my time as a Whip we thought that was one of its purposes. Why does the Chairman think that the Prime Minister did not heed the unfortunate experience of Tony Blair and Robin Cook when they disastrously tried to intervene to change the chairmanships of the Transport and Foreign Affairs Committees? Can he explain this case of prime ministerial hubris without any regard to the inevitable arrival of nemesis?
Mr Jenkin
Without straying too much into Greek terminology, I think that what Prime Ministers have they tend to want to keep and not give up. There was perhaps a failure of imagination about the effect of what people wanted to do, but that has provided this House with an opportunity to review, to debate, and, I hope, in due course to decide on how to make sure that we bring our procedures into the democratic age.
Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on his statement and the way he made it, and thank him and his Committee for producing this report in a most timely fashion since the controversy arose. He has lifted the stone from the rather murky, grubby world of the use and abuse of Government patronage. I congratulate him on doing that and support his recommendations.
With the Select Committee example, we have a perfect opportunity to elect all our delegations to international bodies on a full, free and fair basis. As a member of the Backbench Business Committee, may I invite him to present to us his case for his recommendations to form part of a motion that could be voted on by this House? Now that the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Melanie Onn) has said that we have the support of Opposition Front Benchers, and given the importance that the Council of Europe attaches to motions of this House, but not necessarily to the views of Her Majesty’s Government, it would be a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate that this House is fully behind his recommendations.
Mr Jenkin
I am very grateful for, and flattered by, my hon. Friend’s invitation. It is important to say that were I to undertake to do this, I would want some assurances from those who say they support these proposals that they will make strenuous efforts to make sure that people turn up and vote for them, because we often have debates in this House where very few turn up, and then the Government decide to take no notice. The Member for Great Grimsby (Melanie Onn) is nodding and saying that that may well be the case, so it will be a very worthwhile thing for me to do. I will consider it and hope to bring forward a motion proposed by every member of my Committee.
Backbench Business
(8 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Space Policy
(8 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Dr Philippa Whitford (Central Ayrshire) (SNP)
I beg to move,
That this House notes the scientific, cultural and technological opportunities arising from exploration of outer space and the significant contribution the space industry makes to the UK economy; further notes the increased public interest in space exploration resulting from Major Tim Peake’s mission to the International Space Station (ISS); welcomes the global co-operation that has led to the development of the ISS over the last forty years; takes note of the shortlist of airports and aerodromes that could host a UK spaceport published by the UK Government in March 2015; and calls on the Government to bring forward further advice and support for organisations considering developing such facilities so that they might be operational by the Government’s target date of 2018.
If hon. Members read the motion, they will see that it covers the incredible breadth and depth of the space industry and its amazing potential. I hope that that will be covered during the debate by Members from different parts of the United Kingdom. Some people are likely to stoop to using some fairly poor puns. At this point I would like to register the fact that I accept no responsibility for that. I lay the blame at the feet of the Prime Minister, who has stooped to using some pretty shocking puns at Question Time recently, something for which he needs to be penitent.
Some people who follow the media will be aware that our former First Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond), has used as a travelling pseudonym the name of that famous captain of the USS Enterprise, but for a debate as important as this, I felt we should contact the real McCoy. I therefore have a message to the House of Commons from William Shatner:
“Space is one of the last known frontiers, mostly untouched by mankind and his politics. In opening a debate on this subject my hope is you take the tenets of Star Trek’s prime directive to universally and peacefully share in the exploration of it. I wish you all a wonderful debate. My best, Bill”.
As some people will have seen, we have also had a message on Twitter from George Takei—otherwise known as Mr Sulu—wishing us luck as we venture to the stars.
This is not a debate about fictional astronauts. We tried to get the debate on this day to honour a real astronaut, Major Tim Peake, who is currently in the international space station. We sought it today because tomorrow he will be making a spacewalk. Contrary to some slightly sloppy journalism, he is not actually the first British astronaut. That honour fell to Dr Helen Sharman from Yorkshire a quarter of a century ago, in 1991. I find it incredibly appropriate that, prior to that, she was a research chemist for Mars. [Laughter.] It’ll get worse.
However, Major Tim Peake is our first astronaut through an increased engagement with the European Space Agency. While Helen Sharman was on the Mir station, he is in the international space station, and tomorrow he will certainly be taking part in the very first British spacewalk. It will start, hopefully, at 11.30 GMT tomorrow morning. I would encourage all schools, children and youngsters of all ages to log on to principia.org or NASA TV on the internet, where it will be shown, as it truly is an historic moment. He has been tasked with changing regulators on the solar panels. As they are high-voltage regulators, the walk has to be carried out entirely on the dark side.
I am a member of the parliamentary space committee. We had the great opportunity to have a private tour of the “Cosmonauts” exhibition in the Science Museum, which I would recommend to anyone. The museum spent four years negotiating with Russia to bring incredible artefacts to this country—the space capsule of Tereshkova, uniforms of Gagarin and all sorts of pieces of hardware that even people in Russia did not know existed. What struck me as we went round the museum was the fact that, during points of incredible friction between Russia and the US and across the world, back channels always remained open. Co-operation always continued on the international space station. We have seen that in these few years of setting up the exhibition, during which we have had the Ukrainian crisis, Crimea and friction over Syria. If we can work so well together in space, it would be great if we could work a little bit better here on earth.
Any Members who were in the Chamber when I made my maiden speech will remember that I referred to Prestwick in my constituency as being on the shortlist for consideration as a space port. I remember that whenever I talked to anyone about that during the election, they would always just laugh, because in this country we think that space is for other people—the big boys: north America, Russia and maybe even China, but not us. That is something we have to change. We need to believe in what we can do, and I think Major Tim Peake’s mission will achieve that. We see the interest of school children and the Science Museum was packed on the day of the launch, and we had Members in this place watching it live on screen. We hope it will lead to an interest in STEM subjects—science, technology, engineering and maths—and an absolute belief in the space industry here in the United Kingdom.
The space industry is new, but the UK has a proud aviation history, which includes Rolls-Royce and supersonic flight. We need to take the next step and grasp that opportunity. The industry has changed over the past five years, and I applaud the decisions taken in 2010 that led to the formation of the UK Space Agency. It is now an industry with a turnover of £11.5 billion. It employs 35,000 people, three quarters of them in graduate jobs, and a third of its production is exports, but the vision of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills is that it should grow to become a £40 billion industry. For that, we really need to take action.
If it was not a political decision, there should not really be any great doubt that the choice should be Prestwick. We already have almost everything that is needed. We have a runway that is touching 3 km. We are in a coastal position, to allow start-off over the sea. We have the northern air traffic control centre in our campus, which allows the planning of what will be some pretty clever management of airspace, and obviously we have relatively empty airspace. We are close to Glasgow University and Strathclyde technology catapults and we have, uniquely, an aerospace cluster on the airport campus. It contains BAE Systems, Spirit AeroSystems and many others, all of whom are interested in the idea of a space port.
Up the road from us is Clyde Space, which makes small CubeSats that are only a litre in size. Early communication satellites were weighed in tonnes and were the size of a double-decker bus, but the UK, through Surrey Satellite Technology, has led since the ’80s in producing satellites that are about the size of a fridge. That is a step change. It has been shown that if the cost of getting a satellite into space gets down to the tens of thousands, everyone is going to want one. We will have to look at regulating that, otherwise space will be full of junk, but it enables all sorts of possibilities. However, we do not have a domestic launch site. That is why the aim is to have a UK space port by 2018.
As well as all the physical attributes of Prestwick, 20 years of Met Office data show that, despite preconceptions, it has the clearest weather, compared with Newquay, which people would presume is the closest contender. Low cloud is suffered by Newquay 31% of the time and only 11% of the time at Prestwick. Less than 5 km visibility is suffered by Newquay 15% of the time and only 4% of the time at Prestwick. I live in Troon, which is next door, and I can vouch for the fact that we have a weird little weather system, locally known as the Prestwick hole. People can fly into it, drive into it or walk into it. They can be surrounded by thick cloud, but they will look up and see a large hole of pure blue sky. That is what has made Prestwick the clear weather airport for the United Kingdom for decades.
I call on the Minister to look not just at having one space port. I think this is an industry that will mushroom. We need to accept that all sorts of sectors will develop that we have not even thought about. It will diversify. This is a real industry. It is not about saying, “Beam me up, Scotty,” or fretting about the dilithium crystals that we see on the telly; it is a multi-billion pound industry. I call on the Minister to be imaginative, to be brave and to be boldly going where no Minister has gone before. [Hon. Members: “Ooh!”] Nearly done.
Dr Whitford
Oh, I am sure the Minister will have about two hours more.
Prestwick was Scotland’s first ever passenger airport and it was founded by Group Captain David McIntyre, the first man to fly over Everest. That is the kind of imagination and drive we need. I call on the Minister to please be imaginative and to support the industry across the entire UK so that it can live long and prosper.
Dr Phillip Lee (Bracknell) (Con)
It is a privilege to follow the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford). In fact, I am beginning to question why we are not in the same party, because every time she speaks I find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with her on a variety of different issues.
The hon. Lady will not know that, in my maiden speech in 2010, to some colleagues’ surprise I spoke about the UK space industry. In fact, I was advised by some wise owls in these parts that I should not speak about the space industry, because I would be ridiculed as the spaceman of the House of Commons.
A year or so later, I secured an Adjournment debate in this Chamber, in which I discussed the rather esoteric subject of microgravity. During my speech, I spoke about the value of protein crystal investigation, the potential for doing a variety of biotechnological and medical experiments in space, and how that could advance our knowledge base. Major Tim Peake is doing all those experiments now. I like to think that that Adjournment debate led in part to the Government’s decision to invest in the European Space Agency’s European Programme for Life and Physical Sciences. That investment led to Tim Peake, whose field of expertise is microgravity, travelling on the rocket to the international space station.
The space industry has hardly any presence in my constituency, so why did I decide to talk about it in my maiden speech in 2010, and why did I subsequently take up the House’s time to talk about microgravity in an Adjournment debate? It was because, as the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire has already eloquently pointed out, there is something about space and the exploration thereof, particularly manned exploration and flights, that is truly inspirational to everybody. Whenever I visit schools during their science, technology, engineering and maths week, invariably I see pictures there of planets and rockets. There is something about space and the exploration of it that inspires young people. When engineers were asked why they had done an engineering degree at university, up to 40% of them said that they had done so because of the exploration of space and that their interest had first been stimulated by images from space.
I made my maiden speech in an Opposition day debate on industry. I thought it was important to talk about the space industry, not only because I think that the future of this great country is wedded to the success of science and technology and that that will increasingly become the case, but because the space industry is, in and of itself, so inspirational and such a great success that it needs as much support as possible from Governments, of whichever colour. The previous Labour Government did some very good work and UK space policy made some significant advances as a result. I hope and expect that this Government will follow suit.
When I made my maiden speech, the estimated size of the space industry was £6.8 billion, but the figure now is £11.6 billion. That increase has happened in five or six years. The space industry has grown so successfully during that time that we would struggle without the tangible value it provides.
I have been vice-chairman of the parliamentary space committee pretty much ever since I made my maiden speech, and I have often experienced pushback when I talk about the value of manned space flights. As the hon. Lady has said, there is a sense that somehow space is for others, not for Britain, that the exploration of space is very expensive and that we should be concentrating on other things. However, let us remember that for every dollar the US Government spent on the Apollo space programme, there was a remarkable $13 dollar return on their investment.
The returns were not just financial. In December 1968, a very famous photograph was taken by Bill Anders on Apollo 8—the so-called “Earthrise” photograph. The value of that photograph cannot be calculated in financial terms alone. Imagine where the environmental lobby would be if it did not have a photograph of the earth as seen from the moon. Imagine how those astronauts felt when they put up a hand and hid the earth with their thumb. Our perception of this wonderful planet was changed by that investment by the US Government. Of course, it was driven by a race with the Soviet Union, but the return was not just financial. We recognised the fragility of this planet and how fortunate we are.
I would argue that, in the process of the achievement of putting the first man on the moon in July 1969, man rediscovered the value of exploration. Now we face the next challenge, which is to place a person on the surface of Mars—perhaps it should be a woman. Increasingly, women are deployed in fighter jets because of their ability to withstand G-force, so perhaps it will be a woman who first stands on Mars. I think that Britain should be part of that. The cost may seem large, but we should consider it in proportion to the rest of the money we spend as a nation and, indeed, as a world. If we are not prepared to explore space, push back our boundaries of knowledge and discover things that we did not realise we were going to discover, then what on earth are we about as a species?
Space is an exciting subject and I cannot think of another subject that is so truly inspirational. British Governments, of whichever colour, should play a greater part in it and recognise that they have a role to play in mitigating risk and that private investment alone will not bring it about. If we do that, this country will have a very bright future indeed.
Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)
I think this is the first time I have been called to speak in the Chamber without there being a formal time limit on speeches, but I will do my best not to go to infinity and beyond. I thank my co-sponsors of the motion, and the Backbench Business Committee for giving us the time to have this debate at relatively short notice. As my hon. Friend the Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford) has said, the debate has come at an opportune moment, the day before Major Tim Peake makes his spacewalk.
Adjournment debates secured by the hon. Member for Bracknell (Dr Lee) notwithstanding, I understand that this is the first time since a 2005 Westminster Hall debate that the House as a whole has considered space policy, so this debate is very timely indeed. It is great to hear that today’s important deliberations have been recognised by good wishes from Captain Kirk and Mr Sulu themselves. Indeed, our very own chief Trekkie, my right hon. Friend the Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond), who usually occupies the spot on which I am standing, has sent us his best wishes as well. On space issues, there is a close link between the inspiration provided by both science fiction and science fact. Perhaps I will come back to that later.
It is also appropriate to finish the week in which the English votes for English laws procedures were used for the first time by discussing matters about which there can be no question but that Scottish National party Members have a mandate to speak and vote on. Later today we will discuss the House of Lords, which is reserved. Schedule 5, part II, section L6 of the Scotland Act 1998 proudly and clearly reserves to the Parliament of the United Kingdom,
“Regulation of activities in outer space.”
If a Starman waiting in the sky read that, he might think it was quite a claim or question whether Parliament really has the power to regulate the infinite majesty of all creation, although I am sure some Members think that it does. However, the explanatory notes to the legislation make it clear that the reservation applies specifically to matters regulated by the Outer Space Act 1986.
The 1986 Act gave effect to a number of international treaties on the exploration and, for want of a better word, the exploitation—I will touch on that later—of outer space. The principles behind the treaties are hugely important, particularly those in the 1967 United Nations outer space treaty:
“The exploration and use of outer space…shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries…and shall be the province of all mankind”,
and:
“Outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.”
My hon. Friend the Member for Central Ayrshire spoke powerfully about the role played throughout the cold war by the development of the international space station, which demonstrated that global co-operation was possible even at a time of significant political tension. The ISS has been described as the most complex international scientific and engineering project in history. It is the largest structure that humans have ever put into space. It can be seen on a clear night if not quite with the naked eye, except perhaps through the Prestwick hole, then certainly through binoculars or a home telescope. It was the result of collaboration between five different space agencies, representing 15 countries. It has been permanently occupied since 2 November 2000, or just over 15 years, which is a truly remarkable achievement.
It will be interesting to hear whether the Minister will recommit the Government to such principles of space law today. In particular, will he offer any reflections on the possible impact of recent legislation passed in the United States recognising the right of US citizens to own any resources they obtain from asteroids? A number of academics and observers have expressed concern about that, especially if other countries begin to follow suit. Indeed, Gbenga Oduntan, a senior lecturer in international commercial law at the University of Kent, has said that the US Space Act 2015 represents
“a full-frontal attack on settled principles of space law”,
and is
“nothing but a classic rendition of the ‘he who dares wins’ philosophy of the Wild West.”
Space should be for exploration, not for exploitation in any sense that excludes anyone from the benefits it can provide, or what the motion calls
“scientific, cultural and technological opportunities”.
In drafting the motion, we were very careful to list those aspects of space exploration and opportunity before mentioning the economic impact of the space industry. Indeed, UKspace, the trade association, has said that the Government must
“ensure its positioning maintains the balance between economic growth, excellent science and the inspiration of young people”.
As we have heard, we have certainly lived through an inspiring era of space exploration. In recent years, there has been huge interest in the Philae lander and the Rosetta mission, the evidence of water on Mars and the New Horizons fly-by of Pluto. I was particularly struck by NASA’s use of the “children will never know” hashtag when images were first beamed back from Pluto. The new generation of children will never know a day when they could not see images of Pluto in such great detail. Sadly, children born today will also never know the thrill of the space shuttle, which certainly inspired me when I was growing up. I remember watching the final launch of Atlantis back in 2011, and thinking about all the other things then going on in the world.
Patrick Grady
That is a fair point. It is important to recognise the huge achievement of all the astronauts of various heritages and from various parts of the United Kingdom. There is certainly no intention to play trumps.
Dr Philippa Whitford
Did not that gentleman change his nationality? He had dual nationality, and did not fly with the Union flag on his suit, as Helen Sharman did.
Patrick Grady
My hon. Friend was absolutely correct to pay tribute to Helen Sharman. I remember that as well. I was particularly young at the time, but I will leave Members to work that out for themselves, if they want to look up my biography.
The shuttle programme was a huge inspiration to many people. It is a very sad loss, but if its end several years ago was a low, we are now going through something of a renaissance. There have certainly been a number of highs recently, as I have mentioned. The fact that 15,000 people attended events to watch the launch of the Principia mission just before Christmas, including those of us in the Jubilee Room and later in Portcullis House, demonstrates how the international space station continues to serve as an inspiration.
Many of us who watched the amazing opening ceremony of the Glasgow Commonwealth Games will remember that, just when we thought it could not get any more exhilarating, a live broadcast was beamed down from the ISS. I was not at the ceremony, but with thousands of other people on Glasgow Green on that great day of celebration. There was a real coming together, with exactly the kind of inspiration that the hon. Member for Bracknell spoke about. It was humanity at its finest: people coming together from all over the world to take part in sporting endeavour and being supported by their fellow human beings hundreds of miles above the ground. It was particularly appropriate because, as we have heard and will continue to hear, Glasgow—and indeed Scotland—plays a significant role in the modern space industry and in space science.
In December 2015, my old university, Strathclyde, hosted the annual Canada-UK colloquium on the future of the space industry, which was attended by the Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Culture, Europe and External Affairs. Delegates visited two companies in the city, Clyde Space and Spire, which specialise in cube satellites technology and data. In the margins of that event, the First Minister strongly backed the calls that we have heard and will no doubt continue to hear for a spaceport to be located in Scotland. She pledged that the Scottish Government will do whatever they can to ensure that one of the bids is successful.
In my constituency, the University of Glasgow has one of the leading centres for space science and research in the UK, or indeed in the world. Space Glasgow brings together more than 20 academics from a range of disciplines to co-ordinate research, especially under the key themes of exploring and understanding space, mission analysis, risk and technology.
One recent achievement has been the university’s involvement in the launch of the European Space Agency’s LISA—laser interferometer space antenna—Pathfinder spacecraft. The launch in December marked the end of a decade of work for a team from the university’s institute for gravitational research, which helped to develop the craft’s sensitive optical bench. The bench is a hugely complex and important technology. It has a laser interferometer. [Interruption.] My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North West (Carol Monaghan) congratulates me on my pronunciation. It was developed, built and tested by the university’s team, and is capable of detecting changes in distance between test masses of as small as 10 picometres. It is an outstanding scientific achievement in its own right, and the images and knowledge that the Pathfinder will produce will no doubt help to inspire generations to come.
Carol Monaghan (Glasgow North West) (SNP)
Can my hon. Friend explain to the House what a picometre is?
Patrick Grady
A measurement of picos—[Laughter.] My hon. Friend may be able to enlighten us later, if she catches your eye, Madam Deputy Speaker.
Like any academic discipline, research in space science and technology costs money and requires certainty. I am happy to back calls from researchers for greater transparency in the relationship between the UK Space Agency and research councils on funding decisions. It would be useful to hear from the Minister how the Government are engaging with research departments at the cutting edge of this important technology. Much of this technology has an impact on our daily lives, especially in the west, where we rely on satellite technology for everything from weather forecasting to our mobile phones.
We have spoken of the inspiration that space exploration can provide, so it is important that Governments in the UK and Scotland continue to support science and technological education, as well as initiatives such as dark sky parks. In boasting of our satellite technology industries, we must also remain vigilant about the risk of space debris, as my hon. Friend the Member for Central Ayrshire mentioned. Too many of our oceans and geological ecosystems are poisoned by the unthinking results of attempts at technological progress, and the same must not be allowed to happen in near or outer space.
Those of us on social media will have seen the internet activity about NASA’s recruitment of a planetary defence officer recently. That is not as outlandish or as “outspacious” as it might sound. It is not simply about the risk of asteroids—I know that former Members who are no longer with us used to champion that issue—but about the risk of near-Earth objects too. If the satellites we put into space are not properly managed and regulated, there is a risk that they will crash into population centres.
Patrick Grady
That is a helpful contribution that demonstrates the point that we are making about the importance of the space industry, not only to the economy but to the greater collective good.
I spoke of the relation between science fiction and science fact. NASA recently collaborated successfully in the production of the movie, “The Martian”, which is about a man stranded on the planet after a mission goes wrong. It is based on a realistic understanding of the technologies and science that would be involved in a mission to the red planet.
I have spent the little free time I have had over the past 18 months reading through Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, which is rightly described as a “future history”. It was written in the 1990s with exceptional clarity and foresight. It was forensically researched, to the extent that after reading it for several hours, one can easily look out of the window and expect to see a Martian landscape unfolding. The trilogy is also a well-observed study of human societies and the possibilities open to mankind in building an economy and polity from scratch. There is much to commend in, and much to learn from, how science fiction authors have used the inspiration of space exploration to reflect on our current earthbound condition.
This is a valuable opportunity for debate, and I look forward to hearing further contributions from Members and a response from the Minister, particularly on the questions of ensuring the neutrality of and common access to space, support for education and science, the preservation of dark skies and the minimisation of space debris. We have talked about nationalities and laying claims. Scotland lays claim to one astronaut so far—Brian Binnie, who was brought up in Aberdeen and Stirling, and has test piloted a number of private space flights. Let us hope that the inspiration from the many space missions, which are growing in number, and not least Major Tim Peake’s, will encourage more young people to pursue careers in the sector and that, before long, we will see more astronauts from Scotland and across the UK who will have the opportunity to contribute to the good of humanity, to explore strange new worlds and, if Hansard will allow a split infinitive, to boldly go where no one has gone before.
Mrs Sheryll Murray (South East Cornwall) (Con)
I rise to put the case for Cornwall. We have heard a lot about Scotland, but we did hear some references to Newquay in the opening speech.
I want to put it on the record and make Members aware that Cornwall is already the home of the Aerohub. Newquay has a runway that can accommodate the fastest and largest civilian and military planes. Formerly the home of RAF St Mawgan, Newquay is an ideal location for the new space hub.
Cornwall more widely has a lot of knowledge and history relating to space. Goonhilly downs had the first dish, Antenna 1, nicknamed Arthur, which started operating in 1962 and linked with Telstar. That led the way in UK communications. My constituency has the Caradon observatory, which Ken and Muriel Bennett funded themselves. It is in an ideal location. It takes fantastic photographs, thanks to the dark skies over Bodmin moor, that are published in space magazines.
I did not intend to make a contribution today, but I felt that I should point out that Cornwall has an extremely good case. It is one of eight locations that is being considered. I just wanted to make the case, as a Cornish Member of Parliament, and to say that we are still there. Being successful in this bid would not only be good for Newquay, but superb for the county that I call home.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
It is a pleasure to speak in this debate and to hear the other contributions.
It is always a pleasure to hear the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford). I look forward to hearing her speak about health issues, because she brings her wealth of knowledge to the House. Her contributions are always well worth listening to because we learn from them. That is why I enjoy them and I want to thank her. We have found out today that her knowledge goes beyond health issues: it extends to space policy and to places where no man has gone before.
Here we are in the Chamber with the chance to speak about this issue. It is always very nice to see the Minister in his place. I think that I can honestly say, without fear of contradiction, that if the Minister is in the House, I will be on the other side ready to ask him a question, and vice versa.
It is always good to consider this important and too often overlooked issue. Although it is not pertinent to Northern Ireland at the moment, I want to make sure that the Province is part of the Government’s strategy for the space sector. That is why I wanted to make a contribution. I want to put down a marker for Northern Ireland and to ensure that we have the chance to be part of the strategy.
Northern Ireland has one of the youngest workforces in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, as the Minister will know. We have a lot of well-educated young people with high skill sets who would benefit from jobs in the space sector. I believe that that would go some way to addressing the brain drain in Northern Ireland. Although that is declining, it is something that we need to get to grips with.
Perhaps in his response, the Minister will tell us how the space policy can interact with Northern Ireland. How can we get some of the benefits and spin-offs of it? How can we be part of the strategy of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland? We are better together, as he would say. It is good to see all the Members who are in the Chamber, united within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Mr Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Jim Shannon
I am very happy to give way, although I will probably regret it.
Mr MacNeil
The hon. Gentleman will be aware of the press stories today mentioning Stornoway. Indeed, the name David Bowie is linked with it as well. Just a little bit north of Malin Head, the hon. Gentleman will see the Outer Hebrides. It is a fantastic place—near Northern Ireland—for such space adventures.
Jim Shannon
Earlier, the hon. Gentleman was waxing lyrical about black puddings; now he is doing the same about Stornoway in a different way. It is always good to hear from him.
Jim Shannon
Absolutely.
Ensuring that the space sector has a place in Northern Ireland and is aware of what we have to offer will go some way towards addressing the brain drain issue of too many of our young people emigrating. I would like to hear from the Minister how the space policy can better connect with Northern Ireland.
Northern Ireland has a proud history of air flight, although it is not linked directly to space policy. Henry George Ferguson, who was better known as Harry, a brother Orangeman, was a Northern Ireland engineer and inventor who was noted for his role in the development of the agricultural tractor. He was also the first Ulsterman and Irishman to build and fly his own aeroplane. The first ever airport in Northern Ireland was in my constituency of Strangford, in Newtownards, and was built in about 1910.
Northern Ireland has a fantastic aerospace industry with Magellan and Bombardier, which has been established for many years. I believe that there is a role for those aircraft companies to play in space policy and development. They can and should be part of it.
The space sector is fundamental to the future UK economy. I welcome the Government’s civil space strategy and the goal that the space sector will contribute £40 billion a year to the UK economy by 2030.
Dr Philippa Whitford
The point that I was trying to make in my opening speech was that the bid talks about a UK spaceport, whereas I think there will be different sectors. One sector that will come in the not-too-distant future is hyperbolic sub-orbital flight. Once we get past the Virgin Galactic model of a plane and a wee rocket, we will have the combination of jet and rocket engines, such as SABRE—the synergistic air-breathing rocket engine—which will go from standstill to orbit and back down. We will be able to fly to Japan in a short period of time. Different sites around the UK may therefore follow totally different routes. That should be enabled, not blocked.
Jim Shannon
I thank the hon. Lady for that significant and important intervention. She shows the vision that all of us in this House should have. There are no barriers to what we can do. Some of the things that are in “Star Trek” are not impossible, so let us look forward to those developments. I look forward to being able to travel from A to Z—from Belfast City to Heathrow—in a matter of seconds. If that is ever possible, we will be able to get here and back a couple of times and to do business at home and here, all in the same hour. Is that possible? I do not know, but I hope it will happen.
Thinking back on how space has been discovered, I am always mindful of the first time man stepped on the moon. It was one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. For me, and I think for many others, that showed us the immensity and size of the universe that God created, and it focused our minds on God’s power and the fact that it was not for us as children, and that he is in total control of the universe.
Mr MacNeil
The hon. Gentleman quoted the historic phrase, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”, but what about the seriousness with which the space industry considered the Isle of Man a number of years ago? Those in the know in the space industry said that only the United States, Russia, China and India were ranked above the Isle of Man for the likelihood of getting the next person on the moon. That shows that if the political will is there, a lot can be achieved.
Jim Shannon
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. We should believe in what we want to achieve, and that goal is achievable if we are determined to make it happen.
The Deregulation Act 2015 is an encouraging development that will allow the UK to be more competitive globally in this future industry. It is important to consider that and to ensure that we are world leaders in offering somewhere for the space industry to do business. We want to be part of that business across the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The 2010 space innovation and growth strategy is another welcome development that seeks to create a partnership between industry, Government and academia to develop, grow and make use of new space-related opportunities.
This debate is important because of the possibilities of what can be achieved, which enthuse us all. Although there were encouraging developments during the last Parliament, it is disappointing that space did not receive a mention in the Government’s 2015 manifesto. I am sure that the Minister will correct that when he responds, and clearly set out Government policy and strategy. I hope this is not a sign of the Government taking their eye off the ball.
The Government are hoping that the new regulatory framework enabled by the Deregulation Act will allow the creation of a commercial spaceport in the UK by 2018—again, a marvellous vision of what can happen in future. That is a welcome development because commercial space travel is an industry in which we can, quite literally, reach for the stars. In “It’s a Wonderful Life”, James Stewart talked about lassoing the moon. We are not going to lasso the moon; we are going to reach it and beyond, and it is important that we have that possibility.
The value of the space sector in the UK has grown from £6.5 billion in 2007 to £11.8 billion in 2014—it has almost doubled, and there is the potential for it to double again. With Tim Peake’s recent mission sure to rekindle interest in the space industry, that trend is sure to continue, and the ability to offer commercial space travel will make us world leaders in the space industry.
Dr Lee
I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman remembers this, but he was one of the few Members of the House who attended my Adjournment debate on microgravity. Prior to that I had been contacted primarily from America by Boeing and various other companies on the subject. They pointed out that the microgravity research industry had a potential $100 billion of growth. The hon. Gentleman is right to point out the future potential for the space industry.
Jim Shannon
I do remember that. It was one of those Adjournment debates that I am known to attend, and I remember intervening along those lines. It was three or four years ago.
Something else that I enjoyed, and that I think was positive, took place last week when Tim Peake was able to make radio contact with young people in a school. The inspiration that that gave to those young people was fantastic, as was the fact that it happened. Those young people were inspired, and they had a photograph and a TV show that showed him in their school making direct contact. I know it was a bit rehearsed, but it was exciting for us to watch. How much more exciting must it have been for the children, both male and female, to have that ambition and inspirational drive to try to be the next Tim Peake in space? As we seek to obtain secure jobs for the future, we need more such encouraging developments, and this has been a welcome opportunity to contribute to a debate on an issue of great importance to the future of our country and its economy.
In conclusion, the new national space policy, the Deregulation Act, and the space innovation and growth strategy are all signs that we are heading in the right direction. The positivity that comes through this debate will be noted not just in this Chamber by MPs, but outside the House and further afield. We can play our part in space travel and policy in future, and I hope that off the back of this debate we can maintain momentum and ensure that those plans turn into real delivery for the “better together” space industry and future economy of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
I thank my hon. Friends the Members for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford) and for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady) for securing this debate.
Tim Peake’s six-hour adventure tomorrow, as part of a team of two Tims, to replace a solar power connection unit in space will be watched with awe by children and adults alike—hon. Members will be glad to hear that I removed from that paragraph a cliché that has already been used.
Tim’s iconic voyage into space, living and working on the international space station, is beamed into our lives tweet by tweet, which is fascinating. He has paid tribute to David Bowie’s “Starman”, and he sends us extraordinary aerial views of the planet, alongside spacesuit selfies. He really gives a feeling of life on the space station, as well as those iconic visions and views, and he raises our aspirations to the farthest frontiers. Let us make the most of this chance to spark young people’s interest in the careers of the future.
The spirit in which this motion is presented is to be greatly appreciated, and there is perhaps potential for not just a single spaceport site, but for a number of sites across the UK. Members with vested local interests in a possible spaceport site in their constituency will inevitably take the opportunity to set out their individual stalls—that is our representative duty. However, the proposal to ensure that fantastic scientific, cultural and technological opportunities arise from UK spaceport development must benefit the United Kingdom as a whole.
With that semi-apology, I will turn to the possible spaceport site at the former RAF camp near Llanbedr. It is in a coastal location surrounded by sand dunes between Cardigan bay and the hinterland of Snowdonia. The site has a 50-year track record of airspace management and operations. It comprises three main runways, the longest of which is oriented in such a way that flights pass over sparsely populated areas. Unique among all the candidate sites, Llanbedr already has access to 2,000 square miles of segregated airspace over Cardigan bay. The airfield was bought by the Welsh Government in 2004 as a strategic asset, and since 2008 it has been leased by Llanbedr Airfield Estates on a long-term lease.
So far the site has mostly been used for testing, evaluating and developing remotely piloted air systems and unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly known as drones. Its most recent initiative relates to the use of drones for protecting fisheries. The site is included in the Snowdonia enterprise zone, which has facilitated improvements including a £1.5 million spend to upgrade its facilities and infrastructure. The Civil Aviation Authority has rightly identified safety as the overriding operational principle for a spaceport. That applies not only to any members of the public and workers using that port, but also to the “uninvolved public”. That would imply that the combination of relative isolation, coastal location and segregated airspace satisfies those requirements as fully as possible.
It is safe to say—others have already made an excellent case for this—that the economic potential for a spaceport, both in the immediate locality and further afield, is immense. The county of Gwynedd is to a great degree dependent on public sector employment and the leisure industry. The constituency of Dwyfor Meirionnydd suffers from seasonal and minimum wage employment, and although official unemployment figures are low, chronic economic inactivity is a very real issue. The demographics of the area indicate a steadily ageing population, as young people move away for higher education and employment. That is the price we pay for dependency on the seasonal tourism industry, a shrinking public sector, and scant Government investment in well paid employment.
Of course, this is in no way simply a local investment in a far western corner of the United Kingdom. Llanbedr has the potential to benefit the whole of north Wales, with its educational powerhouses in the University of Bangor, Wrexham’s Glyndwr University, Grwp Llandrillo Menai, and Coleg Cambria. Indeed, it goes much further than that, because the northern powerhouse would have that development within easy reach, and it is the nearest site to the international travel hubs of Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Cardiff and London. It is also the closest candidate site to the UK space gateway at Harwell in Oxford.
This has the potential to make a real difference to Gwynedd, and indeed to the economy of the wider area and the UK as a whole, yet we are still waiting for the Government to bring us out of the limbo of expectation by providing the operational criteria for the UK spaceport. It is impossible to move ahead, as we do not yet know what we are bidding for. It is difficult even to quantify, in terms of jobs both locally and further afield, until we know the operational criteria. We need them as a matter of urgency. The uncertainty impacts locally, as caravan sites in the area tell me their customers are reluctant to commit to new contracts until a definite decision is made about the future one way or another.
I spoke to a student at my local sixth-form college, Coleg Meirion-Dwyfor, who happens to live in the next village to Llanbedr. He told me that his fellow students think this is a cloud cuckoo project that will never happen. How could it ever happen in somewhere like Meirionnydd? But then I could see a flash of hope and a realisation that yes, this could happen, this could happen here and I could be part of it. Like Buzz Lightyear, we can turn falling with style into infinity and beyond.
Mr Iain Wright (Hartlepool) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to contribute to this debate. I congratulate the hon. Members for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford) and for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady) on securing it and I thank the Backbench Business Committee for agreeing to it. There have been far too many references to “Star Trek” at the expense of “Star Wars”, so let me try to even it up a bit. Space policy has not been debated as much as it should have been in this House given how important it is, but I am pleased that, as a result of the tenacious attitude of the hon. Members for Central Ayrshire and for Glasgow North, the force has awakened. [Laughter.] That’s the only thing you’re going to get.
As has been mentioned, Tim Peake’s mission on the international space station is a fantastic achievement. I think the whole House and the whole country wish him well as he embarks on his spacewalk tomorrow. His mission is important for a number of reasons. First, he is undertaking practical experiments and research that will have positive applications back on earth, a point to which I will return in a moment. Secondly, as has already been mentioned, Major Peake’s space mission is undoubtedly inspiring and motivating a whole new generation, rather like a previous generation was inspired by the Apollo programme. I remember the inspirational words of President Kennedy:
“We choose to go to the moon…and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard”.
That inspiration and ambition are incredibly important.
The young people looking at what Major Peake is doing—following his journey and progress on Twitter, Facebook and so on, and perhaps even interacting with him as he conducts experiments in space—will have their eyes opened to the enormous and often unlimited potential available to them in their lives and careers. They might not necessarily want to become astronauts—I still have a wish to be an astronaut; I think everyone in this debate does—but they will see the dizzying potential and scope of science, technology and engineering. I hope that the impact of Tim Peake’s mission into space will last for decades, as young people are inspired to go on to have an impact on science and research throughout the 21st century.
The third reason why Major Peake’s mission is so important is that it showcases a true British industrial success: the UK space industry, and that is what I want to focus on. Most people walking the streets today will not be aware, as the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire said, that Britain has a space sector. People will perhaps automatically think of NASA and, possibly, Russia. They might consider a space industry linked with putting people regularly into space or, as the hon. Member for Glasgow North said, with missions such as New Horizons and the exploration of Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. Major Peake’s journey gives us the opportunity to celebrate a great British economic success and highlight what I hope is a shared ambition—it certainly is in today’s debate—to see the sector grow.
I think the Minister would agree that the UK space sector is the very model of the type of modern, successful sector that Britain should be focused on: innovative and high value, and providing well-paid and highly rewarding —in every sense—careers. It taps into Britain’s strengths, based on the very best of science, engineering and world-class British research, but with a very clear nod to British excellence in professional services, such as legal, financial and regulatory work. It is a rapidly growing sector throughout the world—perhaps it is best to say above the world—and the British comparative advantage should be used to capture even more wealth and value for this country in the future.
We have been quite canny in this country in identifying precisely where in the space sector, and throughout its value chain, Britain excels. We have skills in upstream activities, such as satellite construction. I visited Airbus in Stevenage and saw the great work that goes on there. I saw satellites being built and walked on the surface of “Mars”, which was absolutely fantastic. Our real strength and potential, however, lie in the industry’s downstream activities, such as user equipment, applications, services and data. Our strengths in professional services such as legal, regulatory and financial services allow Britain to lead the world in raising capital to finance space technologies, as well as the expertise to provide licensing arrangements. It is these downstream activities that will increase demand in the future so that Britain is well placed for future growth.
The hon. Member for Central Ayrshire and others have already mentioned the figures, but it is important to reiterate just how successful the UK space sector has been in recent years. It generates almost £12 billion for the UK economy, which is almost double the value of the sector just a short time ago in 2007. The industry directly employs 37,000 people in this country. That figure rises to 115,000 when one considers the supply chain, and supported and indirect jobs. UK space has seen an annual growth rate of 8.6% since 2008-09.
Madam Deputy Speaker, I think you were in the Chair yesterday when we discussed, in an Opposition day debate secured by the Scottish National party, some of the structural weaknesses in our productivity and trade positions. Frankly, if all other sectors in the British economy were performing at the same rate as the UK space industry, this country would be doing well. Productivity is three times the national average, with a value added of £140,000 per employee in the sector. Exports are twice the national average, representing about a third of the sector’s turnover. That success bodes well for the future. The global space industry is set to grow even further to about £400 billion by 2030. The UK space sector’s ambitions are challenging but achievable; the national space policy’s objectives are for Britain to have a 10% market share in the global space industry, provide £40 billion of value to the British economy and employ an additional 100,000 workers by 2030.
I hope there is a real consensus across the House, regardless of party affiliation, for that ambition, and for backing the Government and building on the back of previous support for UK space, regardless of which party is in government. Tribute must be paid to Paul Drayson, who launched, as it were, much of the Government’s interest in UK space. To be fair, David Willetts continued that policy in an excellent way throughout the coalition Government, providing all-important policy continuity and certainty that transcended Parliaments, and allowed confidence in the sector to grow and gave potential investors the reassurance that has provided much of the success for British space.
Given the characteristics of the UK space sector—a high-value, innovative, productive, export-focused industry that has identified our specific key strengths within the sector and built on that comparative advantage to secure more global market share in the future, assisted by a strong and long-standing partnership between industry, Government and research to provide policy certainty—it is surprising that the Government do not want to shout more about the virtues of an industrial strategy. An industrial strategy has been part of the success of the UK space industry. The Secretary of State seems to have abandoned such aspirations, with the possible exceptions of the aerospace and automotive industries. That seems wrong. I am pleased that the Minister on the Treasury Bench is the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Life Sciences. I would single out life sciences as another great skill for Britain. It is a marvellous sector, so why is it not also classed as strategically important? That approach is very important.
In his autumn statement, the Chancellor announced a movement of research funding away from grants to loans, with the exception of the aerospace and automotive sectors. That runs the risk, as mentioned yesterday, of investment not being attracted to Britain. For such a successful and promising sector as space, that is worrying. Will the Minister consider expanding the definition of the aerospace sector to include space so that it can take advantage of the security of research funding and grants?
Jim Shannon
In seeking to advance the space industry, is it not important to involve universities and their expertise and knowledge? Is partnership with universities not also part of this?
Mr Wright
That is incredibly important. Britain’s unique blend of strong leadership and partnership between industry and Government, through things such as the UK Space Agency and the Space Leadership Council, and our world-class research expertise and strong university base, means we are well positioned to capture as much market value as possible.
Will the Minister accept—I believe he personally believes it—that industrial strategy works and commit to ensuring that the Government embrace such an approach so that sectors such as space and the life sciences can be exploited as much as possible for the benefit of Britain? I mentioned that the national space policy set out an ambition for 100,000 additional jobs in the space industry in the next 15 years—I think we would all sign up to that—but given the skills shortages in engineering and science-based industries throughout the economy, and the difficulty of encouraging girls and young women to consider science, technology, engineering and maths subjects in school, college and university and then as a career, what is he doing to address barriers to growth in the UK space sector? What further assistance, in terms of outreach activities, internships and apprenticeship opportunities, will be provided to motivate and inspire girls and young women to think about a career in space?
In criticising the space industry, it is often said that interest and investment in space is a luxurious folly and that, at a time of austerity and crisis in public services, we cannot afford a space industry: why are we sending a man into space, when patients are lying in hospital corridors? This is a false argument. To a vast extent, the UK space industry is driven by private sector investment—Government investment in the past 15 years has averaged 0.015% of total investment—and the value it creates grows the economy, employs people on good wages and increases tax revenues, thereby helping to fund public services. Research in space or in the space industry has positive applications on earth—for example, satellite technology and food crops or experiments into materials and how they react. Major Peake, while on the international space station, is carrying out experiments to measure pressure in the brain that could have important applications in serious trauma care. Investment in space results in tangible benefits for society on earth.
I am not just talking about the cost-benefit analysis. I was struck by the comments of the hon. Member for Bracknell (Dr Lee). Industry is important, and the bottom line is crucial, but as he said, exploration and imagination are fundamental to the human spirit, and it is difficult to think of anything comparable to space when it comes to letting our imaginations run riot. It is vital that we ensure an interest in space by showing what space can provide. The UK space industry is a huge success story, and has the potential to grow still further and inspire a whole generation, but that requires an ongoing partnership between industry, the Government and research. This debate shows that there is great consensus and that many people support the Government in ensuring that the UK space industry realises its potential.
Drew Hendry (Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey) (SNP)
I have much to thank my hon. Friends the Members for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford) and for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady) for. Anyone observing me in the Chamber today will have seen me smiling broadly all the way through this debate. It is an incredibly exciting opportunity. I remember, as a young child, playing with my Airfix kit of the Apollo 11, with its detachable parts and so on, seeing how it all worked, so it is exciting to be in the Chamber today discussing the future of space policy—there it is, up on the annunciator; what an opportunity! It is just a shame there is so much space on the Benches—but I will try to avoid the puns and conduct myself with gravity.
I want to talk about the exciting opportunities out there. Yesterday in the Chamber, we discussed trade and industry and innovation, and again I want to talk most today about innovation and the skills required. There are so many wonders in space and so many things we can learn that we cannot comprehend at the moment. Without the investment that hon. Members, including the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright), have talked about, and without making sure we can learn those things, how can we hope to take full advantage of the opportunities to develop ourselves as a race? There are stars out there 1,500 times bigger than our sun, and how much do we know about them? 3c303 is a galaxy with a black hole in the middle of it that has the biggest electrical current ever detected in the universe. There are fantastic opportunities to find out how that happens. What can we learn from that about how we conduct our lives and protect our planet into the future? I was stunned to find out there was a gigantic raincloud out there, floating in space, that is not just the size of the Pacific ocean, but 100,000 times larger than the sun. It is an amazing thing to comprehend, but we do not know enough about these things. We have to invest.
The Scottish Government see huge potential for the space industry in Scotland, and we are pleased that the UK Government and the Civil Aviation Authority do too. We should be exploring these opportunities jointly. The Scottish Government have committed to supporting science and technological development in education and industry, having recognised science’s contribution to a sustainable economy. The hon. Member for Hartlepool talked about opportunities. The space industry, 16% of whose employees are in Scotland, is growing by 7.5% a year. These are encouraging figures, but we must do more. There is a recruitment exercise to ensure that there are members to join the Scottish Science Advisory Council. The Scottish Government have engaged with the world-leading science sector on the post of chief scientific adviser for Scotland and are currently advertising for the post, which is the right thing to do just now. They are continuing to invest in four science centres and to support science festivals in Scotland. They continue to promote the value of science as a career for young people.
In my previous career as a councillor in the highlands, I was passionate about getting our young people interested and encouraging them to lift their sights and see the opportunities available, not just to us as a set of countries on these isles but to them. There are rewarding and meaningful careers and they can build something important for themselves. As a new councillor eight years ago, I saw an advert put out by the European Space Agency calling for the next generation of recruits to come forward. As an enthusiastic councillor, I thought I would put out a press release across the highlands saying, “Young highlanders should come forward.” I was disappointed that it was met with scepticism from my colleagues on the council. They thought it was a mad idea to encourage highland children to get involved in the space industry. I was desperately disappointed by their attitude, but it highlighted to me the need to change people’s attitudes to these opportunities and how they could take advantage of them.
I am pleased to say that one development from that is the science skills academy, which is starting up in the highlands. It is a collaborative enterprise that brings together organisations such as Highlands and Islands Enterprise, the Highland Council and a range of private businesses and engineering firms, as well as other non-governmental operatives in the highlands. It aims to encourage young people from pre-school, throughout their education and beyond, to take advantage of the opportunity of gaining these skills, which directly transfer not just into the aerospace industry but to and from oil and gas, renewables and so forth. These are similar skill sets that can be transferred across. Embracing this into the future provides enormous opportunities. I hope that future attitudes in the highlands will be changed, but there is a job of work to be done in this Chamber, in the Holyrood Chamber and in all the devolved Administrations to make sure that we get the word out to our young people to raise their sights and look for an opportunity.
I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Central Ayrshire for telling us that Helen Sharman was the first astronaut from Britain in space. It is important to repeat that message because we need to encourage young girls and women to consider these opportunities. Tim Peake is a fantastic ambassador for space and I have great respect for what he has already done in a short period of time, but let us imagine the impact if he had been Tina Peake and that message had gone out to young girls and women about such opportunities. When it comes to encouraging young girls and women into engineering just now, there are clear systemic problems in our culture that must be tackled. I call on the Government to join me and others to make sure that we change this attitude over the coming years.
Some 11% of engineers in the sector are women, but 21% of engineer graduates focused on the sector are women. This is the lowest percentage female employment rate in the sector in Europe, and we have the lowest retention rate in Europe. That is at a time when there are significant skills shortages at every level of the industry.
We have heard that many people are not aware of the opportunities in the space or the aerospace sector. I was delighted yesterday to meet Bridget Day, the deputy programme director for the national aerospace technology exploitation programme. I crave your indulgence, Madam Deputy Speaker, because I would like to read something she sent to me, at my request. She said:
“I have worked as an Engineer in the Aerospace industry for nearly 40 years. I worked for 30 years in the supply chain for a heat exchanger manufacturer in Wolverhampton, starting as a graduate apprentice and becoming Engineering Director. In my personal experience there has been little progress in encouraging women into engineering. I currently lead a team of engineers helping aerospace supply chain companies with new technology”—
within NATEP, as I have said. She continues:
“In a team of 24 there is only one other woman”,
That is a shocking figure. She continues:
“I know that engineering is considered difficult, dirty, and dying by the general public. This means that parents and teachers often encourage young people away from engineering, thinking that industry is something in the past and not for the future. The increasingly ‘green’ views of our youth are annoyed with industry building on green belt land and taking priority over wild life. So the reputation of industry publicly is not what my experience is. I have had a very varied working life, every day something different, everyday keeping me interested in solving problems with new ways of thinking, new materials, new possibilities. The amount of new possibilities is better than ever before and NOW”—
she capitalised it—
“is a great time to become an engineer. We are very short of engineers. As a woman in engineering I am often the only woman in the room, usually only 5% are women even at a large event. There is an assumption that I am the secretary and not that I am the boss. My reputation is never assumed, like a man’s often is, I always have to earn it.”
Jim Shannon
If I had been allowed to ask two questions at Women and Equalities questions this morning I would have raised this issue. The Government need to target girls-only schools and introduce the STEM industries, including engineering, to those girls.
Drew Hendry
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his substantive point about engaging young girls and women with these industries, and I absolutely subscribe to that view. As I have said—I will continue to repeat it here until we get it right—this is an issue that we need to tackle together to ensure that girls are able to take advantage of these opportunities.
Carol Monaghan
Does my hon. Friend agree that one serious issue that has not been properly taken up is our major shortage of STEM-qualified teachers. Unless much more attractive and lucrative wages can be offered, this shortage will continue and it will impact on the number of girls coming through.
Drew Hendry
My hon. Friend is absolutely right that education is the key. I mentioned the science skills academy, and the idea behind it is to influence children as they develop and give them these opportunities, but also to try to reach out to society in general and to say to parents and grandparents that they need to talk about this. It is also about saying to education professionals and to those who make the investments that lead to their recruitment that this issue has to be taken incredibly seriously.
Stakeholder activities going on at the moment are to be encouraged. For example, I congratulate The Telegraph on creating the women in space jobs resource, which includes educational resources encouraging women into STEM subjects. Another example is the Royal Society of Aviation, which established the women in aerospace and aviation committee in 2009.
On solutions, we need to increase public awareness of the UK space industry and its value to the economy. We need to increase engagement with young people through projects such as Scottish Space School. There will doubtless be others of which I am not aware, but we need to make sure that this sort of thing carries on. I support calls for the need to concentrate funding on research and development projects. We absolutely need to stop thinking about what is happening today and start thinking about the opportunities for tomorrow. We need to work to increase peer support to encourage female graduates to enter and remain in the sector.
Let me finish by citing Professor Alan Smith, head of the department of space and physics at University College London, who acted as rapporteur for an event hosted by the Scottish Government and the Civil Aviation Authority. He said:
“Scotland has embraced space. Space feels at home in Scotland.”
Let us make sure that all of us and all our children get the opportunity to feel at home in space, too.
Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)
It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey (Drew Hendry). He made some excellent points about women and equality in the industry. As a civil engineer, that chimes with me. My profession has seen a lack of women over the years, although it is doing its best to try to remedy it by engaging with schools. My hon. Friend has shown, both yesterday and today, that he is a great advocate for technology, and his enthusiasm certainly shone through in his speech. I congratulate, too, my hon. Friends the Members for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford) and for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady) on bringing forward this timely debate. I welcome the chance to participate in it.
Let me start with a confession. Anyone who knows me personally will probably be somewhat surprised that I have chosen to speak in a space-related debate. Unlike the Members who have spoken previously, when I was growing up I never had the same fascination with space. Science fiction movies did not do it for me. Although I was born in 1970, I have still not watched the early “Star Wars” movies—[Hon. Members: “Shame!”] Now I have got that confession out of the road, I should have everybody on my side. At least it shows they were listening to me.
Carol Monaghan
I am concerned that my hon. Friend has not watched the earlier “Star Wars” movies. Is he suggesting that he has watched the later ones?
Alan Brown
I have seen one or two, and I took the children along, so it was a family activity. I could not say what happened in them as I do not recall.The good news is that—in view of the earlier lack of interested nods—there will be no more puns in my speech.
I appreciate the importance of the science, technology and commercial aspects of the space industry, and I am right behind the United Kingdom Government’s proposal to focus on making the UK the European hub for commercial space flight and related space sector technologies. I also applaud the ambitious growth targets that have been set.
What other reasons have I for speaking in the debate? One of them was touched on by my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady): it is great to be able to make a speech that is not preceded by the words “From now on there will be a three-minute limit on Back-Bench speeches”—although some Members may wish that there was a three-minute limit on mine.
The main reason for my participation, however, is my wish to give an unashamed plug to Prestwick airport, which I would like to become the United Kingdom’s first space port hub. It is in the neighbouring constituency rather than my own, but I can appreciate the benefits that it would bring to the surrounding area in general, and many of my constituents are already employed in the aerospace industry.
Unfortunately, my constituency is among the top 15% in the UK in terms of unemployment, and 200 skilled manufacturing jobs have recently been lost from a factory in Kilmarnock, so a jobs boost would be most welcome in my constituency and the wider area. However, despite the headline unemployment rate, Ayrshire in general has a great engineering pedigree, and there are still many successful engineering and manufacturing companies in my constituency and its neighbours. As we heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Central Ayrshire, there is already a cluster of aerospace-related firms around Prestwick, and I know that they could easily expand to service a new space port. We have also heard that nearby Glasgow already contains space technology companies, including Clyde Space and Spire. That would be another advantage of choosing Prestwick.
The UK Space Agency has made clear that its activities are about much more than direct space technology, covering climate change analysis and other beneficial research on such matters as health and ageing, as well as materials innovation and plasma physics. I realise that, given that ongoing work, successful partnerships will already be operating, but there is no doubt that if Prestwick were chosen to be a space port, it could form links with the Scottish universities, which are among the best in the world. That is another advantage. As for transport infrastructure, Ayr Harbour is nearby. Prestwick also has a railway halt, and close links with the motorway network. I believe that it is easily the most accessible location on the shortlist that the Government are considering.
Yesterday I attended a breakfast hosted by the all-party parliamentary group for aerospace. One of the discussion points, which was also raised today by my hon. Friend the Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey, was education, and preparing kids for qualifications in STEM subjects—science, technology, engineering and mathematics—and technology design. The Scottish Government are making great strides with that in their curriculum for excellence, and the local authority of which I was a member before becoming an MP has produced a STEM programme for primary schools, as well as successfully running a business enterprise initiative for secondary schools.
In Scotland, the wider implementation of the Wood report has led to a recognition that school leavers must have a greater understanding of the working environment and what will be expected of them in that environment, and, crucially, of the fact that higher or full-time further education is not for everyone. Along with the Scottish Government's investment in modern apprenticeships, that has given Scotland—and Prestwick in particular—a head start when it comes to renewing interest in STEM subjects and technology design.
Ayrshire is also home to the campus of Ayrshire college, which has recently won awards and, moreover, is willing to work in partnership with industry to develop tailor-made courses. An excellent example of that is the partnership that has been established to create courses for wind turbine technicians. That came about because the industry realised that, owing to the growth in renewables, there was not enough qualified expertise for the operation and maintenance of wind turbines. A new £53 million campus is due to open in Kilmarnock, which I expect to present fantastic opportunities for links with the space industry.
Prestwick has one of the longest runways in the UK, and it does not suffer from fog problems. It is often used when flights are diverted because of problems elsewhere. Unfortunately, there are not enough commercial flights from Prestwick to enable it to make a profit, but that does mean that there are no capacity or logistical issues that would prevent the creation of a space port there. In fact, if that mitigated some of the losses that are currently being covered by the Scottish Government, there would be benefits for Scottish taxpayers, and funds would be freed up for investment elsewhere in Scotland. Ayrshire and Dumfries and Galloway are also home to the Dark Sky project, which could provide more links and other benefits if the space port were located at Prestwick.
The Scottish Government are very supportive and positive about development in this sector, as was demonstrated by Fiona Hyslop's attendance at the annual UK-Canada colloquium in Glasgow just before Christmas. The conclusions reached at that event will be presented to both Governments, and I am confident that they will underline the strong case that I expect to be made for Scotland in general. I urge Ministers to pay due heed to those conclusions.
Let me now move slightly away from the subject of Prestwick, although I am reluctant to do so. I agree wholeheartedly with the motion: this seems to be one sector for which the UK Government are outlining a positive vision. Like many of my colleagues, I have often complained in the Chamber about the need for the Government to spend more money on social justice, rather than on projects that some people consider to be vanity projects. However, as was pointed out by the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright), wider benefits, which could be long-lasting, accrue from this investment.
There is no doubt that Major Tim Peake's mission could inspire another generation of scientists, explorers, engineers and innovators. If the benefits are to continue, however, and if the proposed space port is to have any chance of being an operational venture by 2018—with no loss of momentum, or of the interest that is currently being generated—the Government must set clear guidelines for the submission of the final bids. The final decision-making process must be transparent and non-political, in order to ensure the best possible value for money and future success.
However, given that the Government like to cut red tape and bureaucracy, if they do not want to go down that route, they could simply award the space port location to Scotland in general or, more specifically, to Prestwick. Alternatively, in the light of the speeches that we have heard so far, we could have a show of hands in the Chamber today. That would solve any problems.
Gavin Newlands (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (SNP)
So far, this has been a very interesting debate, and I congratulate my hon. Friends the Members for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford) and for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady) on initiating it through the good auspices of the Backbench Business Committee.
The fact that I have had an interest in space from an early age has proved most useful since my election last May, as the Government’s social and fiscal policy is from another planet and completely alien to me. However, we are here to debate a subject which need not be, and, in fact, should not be contentious, and which will hopefully generate a fair degree of unanimity throughout the House.
Like many youngsters, I grew up fascinated by the stars, learning about the different planets, the missions of astronauts, and the work of NASA and other space agencies. I am sure that I am not the only Member present who dreamt of becoming an astronaut. It was either that or a football player. You can be sure, Madam Deputy Speaker, that the one thing that no one in the Chamber grew up aspiring to be was a Member of Parliament, yet here we all are: astronaut, footballer, ballerina—rejects all. We may have lost out on our childhood dreams, but that does not mean that we cannot help the kids of today to fulfil theirs.
This is a dream that many children have, both girls and boys. There is something about space that captures the imagination of youngsters from an early age, and while many will never quite reach their dream, thinking big will undoubtedly lead to a fulfilling career. During the summer recess, I visited Gallowhill primary school in my constituency. More than half the kids put their hands up when asked if they wanted to be an astronaut when they grew up. I am sure that other Members will have had similar experiences when visiting schools in their constituencies, and I expect the number to become even higher as children learn about, and are inspired by, the important work that astronaut Tim Peake is currently doing at the International Space Station.
Moving on to the economic benefits of the UK space industry, it will no doubt surprise many outside this Chamber that in 2012-13 the UK space industry contributed £5.1 billion to our economy, which is the same amount as the railways. The latest figure is over £11 billion, and across the UK the space industry supports 68,000 jobs. It is hoped that the industry’s output will grow to £40 billion by 2030.
Locally, the space industry is worth around £16.5 million a year to the Scottish economy; more than 30 companies in Scotland operate in the market. When talking about the contribution that Scotland makes to space exploration, we have to mention the impact and work of Glasgow-based Clyde Space. Clyde Space produces a number of products used by NASA and the European Space Agency. In 2014, it secured £1.2 million in funding to produce power systems that will be used for two ESA satellites.
One of the products of which Clyde Space is particularly proud is its UKube-1. This product was jointly funded by Clyde Space and the UK Space Agency and is the first satellite to be both designed and built in Scotland. The UKube-1 has been described as the most advanced nano-satellite ever made and Clyde is rightly proud of its innovation. I mention that as it underlines the point that there are companies throughout the UK who are producing high-quality products that aid the work not only of the UK Space Agency, but of the ESA and NASA as well.
It is important to note what we are doing to help nurture the astronauts, scientists and engineers of tomorrow, but first I want to make a wider societal point about dreams and ambition. I was struck by something Lord Empey said during a meeting with the aerospace industry yesterday. He was making the point that in Britain we tend to stifle ambition in the young, as opposed to fostering and positively supporting it. For too long a significant section of society—and I include myself in this—have had a play-it-safe, “walk before you can run”, “don’t get ideas above your station” mentality. It has changed, but changed far, far too slowly. I do not pretend to have the answers, but I think we would do well to acknowledge that fact and work towards an equality of ambition and opportunity across all our young regardless of their background. A good start would be for aspirational industries such as aerospace to formulate a collective strategy and a curriculum enhancement that would engage with children early on and throughout their school career. As I heard yesterday, there are many companies doing good work in this area, but there is an ad hoc approach and very much a postcode lottery for children.
The pupils in my local area of Renfrewshire have been lucky; we have been fortunate that the Mission Discovery programme has come to Renfrewshire for the last two years. It is an educational programme—launched and supported by Renfrewshire council, the University of the West of Scotland and the International Space School Educational Trust—and it provides an exciting opportunity to 15 participants from the first and second year to learn from astronauts and other experts in space and science, as well as recruiting 15 paid mentorship positions for those in the third or fourth year.
Mission Discovery recruits astronauts, astronaut trainers, scientists and NASA leaders to help train local people studying in the area. The programme involves students working alongside space experts to carry out a number of tasks, including formulating an idea for an experiment that can be done in space. Not only the students benefit and enjoy this programme; the experts also value the time working alongside the students. In fact, former NASA astronaut and president of the United Space Alliance, Mike McCulley, said:
“Mission Discovery was, by far, the most comprehensive, interesting, and educational endeavour I have been involved with.”
The Mission Discovery programme was a great success in Renfrewshire. The students gained practical knowledge which aided their studies, and the programme made a real addition to their CVs. Programmes such as Mission Discovery help equip students with the necessary skills to be able to gain a career in the space industry, and that is vitally important as we attempt to grow the industry. Mission Discovery is a fantastic programme and I would urge other local authorities to attempt to bring it to their areas.
The potential of the UK space industry is huge and I expect that, used correctly, Tim Peake’s mission and spacewalk can act as a catalyst for fully realising that potential. To that end, I welcome the “National Space Policy” publication and hope that the Government can work with the sector to improve and increase the opportunities for the UK space industry. The growth of the space industry should not be viewed in a vacuum. If we achieve the goal of capturing 10% of the global market by 2030, that will create real opportunities for us, helping to create 100,000 new jobs for the youngsters I have spoken of and generating £40 billion for the economy.
I have some concerns about whether the Government will achieve the ambitious plans that they have set for themselves; they have not hit too many targets of late. To achieve the goals that the UK Government have set, they will have to commit more public funding to the sector. We have seen in other policy areas that the fixation with austerity has hindered investment, and I worry that this same economic mindset will prevent the Government from achieving the goals set out in the “National Space Policy”.
The amount of public spending allocated to the UK space industry has to increase; in 2013, UK Government spending on civil space research and development ranked seventh among all OECD countries. However, contrary to my natural instincts, I will not end my contribution on a sour note. I wish the Government well as they work towards achieving the vision set out in the “National Space Policy”. Having a vibrant and successful space industry is vital to growing our economy, creating jobs and contributing to our research output, and I hope that the Government can take advantage of the large amount of public interest and enthusiasm surrounding the UK space industry.
Carol Monaghan (Glasgow North West) (SNP)
I want to start by paying tribute to the original spaceman. I am not talking about Yuri Gagarin; I am talking about the legend who was David Bowie, and I am sure the House will join me in sending our condolences to his family.
I grew up in the 1970s and ’80s and there are three things I remember vividly from my childhood. The first was the excitement of the power cuts. That was maybe not so exciting for the industries, but, for me, as a child getting the candles out and wandering through the house in darkness always holds great memories. I remember Margaret Thatcher coming to power, too—probably the less said about that the better—and I remember space. I remember the space programme and the space shuttle programme, which started in 1981, with great excitement.
That excitement took off for me when the space shuttle made a surprise visit to the Paris air show in 1983, and for it to get there it had to piggyback on a jumbo jet. I was at primary school in Glasgow at the time, and we knew the jumbo jet would be flying over at some point in the morning. We had been told that when we heard the jumbo jet we had to stand, quietly put our chairs under our desks, line up at the door and all go carefully outside. Of course all order was abandoned when the noise of the jumbo jet was heard. Chairs were thrown, people climbed across desks, people were knocked down in the rush—[Interruption.] It was the west end of Glasgow. Eventually, out we went to see the incredible sight of the space shuttle perched—precariously, it seemed—on the back of this jumbo.
It was that single event in my childhood that sparked a major interest in me both in science and technology and particularly in physics. It was how I ended up choosing to study physics at university and eventually becoming a physics teacher, so the inspiration offered by space stretches across all strands of society.
At this point, I want to mention another physicist. He is a far more famous physicist than I am and has done great work for space: Professor Brian Cox. It was a great treat for my pupils at school to see clips of Professor Brian Cox taken from his wonderful DVDs “Wonders of the Solar System” and “Wonders of the Universe”. It never surprised me that the academic students would be interested, but what was really surprising to me was that the less academic ones wanted to see him as well, and regularly would say to me, “Miss, are you going to stick on that professor guy?” They enjoyed that. I was lucky enough to be at the Science Museum on 15 December for Tim Peake’s launch. There were thousands of schoolchildren there, and their enthusiasm and excitement reminded me of the incident from my childhood with the jumbo jet.
One of my colleagues asked me a couple of days ago: “What is the point of this debate? Is it really that important? Why does space exploration matter?” Well, it is absolutely crucial that we have this debate and it is timeous to have it at this point. I want to talk about the three aspects of space exploration that I think are most important. First, there are only two industries that push innovation in great leaps and bounds: defence and space exploration. Space spin-offs have found their way into all aspects of our everyday lives, through materials such as Teflon, solar cells and robotic arms, which have led to the development of prosthetic limbs. The basic memory foam mattress was developed as a result of providing cushions for astronauts during take-off. There is also a story about the space pen that NASA spent a great deal of money developing, only for the cosmonauts of the time to decide that a pencil would work just as well in zero-gravity conditions.
Space technology has wide-ranging applications. For example, the damping system on the launch pad has special fluid dampers to ensure that the launch can take place in a stable manner, and when the Millennium bridge just down the road developed vibration problems in the first couple of days after its opening, it was those same dampers, taken straight from the shuttle’s launch pad, that provided the solution. Such applications happen throughout. Those spin-off technologies do not simply have an impact on our lives; they also have huge economic benefits, and it is important that we recognise that.
Secondly, the satellites that are in orbit have become fundamental to the way in which we live our lives. The largest satellite in orbit around the Earth is of course the Moon, which is of fundamental importance to our lives. It creates the tides, which create great benefits for life in the tidal areas. Artificial satellites that have been put into orbit provide us with television from around the world through satellite broadcasts that come to us via geostationary satellites in high Earth orbits more than 22,000 miles above the Earth.
Drew Hendry
Does my hon. Friend agree that micro-satellite technology is providing some really exciting opportunities to dramatically reduce the cost of putting satellites into space while still performing the functions previously carried out by larger machines? Does she also agree that, on that basis, there should be much more investment in innovation in order to take forward that work?
Carol Monaghan
Absolutely. It is often not understood that satellite launches take place regularly. The next such launch is in fact on Sunday, but we have not heard very much about it in the news. The micro-satellites that my hon. Friend has just mentioned are providing us with more and more great services.
Patrick Grady
Geostationary satellites were first conceptualised as science fiction by Arthur C. Clarke. This reinforces the point that I was making earlier about the inspiration that space provides to the creative and cultural scene, which has a knock-on effect in scientific applications.
Carol Monaghan
Absolutely. It is really important that science fiction writers continue to write, because they often provide ideas and encouragement for creativity and development.
Satellites are also important in other areas. I have mentioned television; I could also mention communications, and weather and climate monitoring. It was satellites up in space that first photographed the issues with the polar ice cap, and we have now been able to compare the photographs that were taken 30 years ago with those that are being taken now, which are showing the real impacts on the ice cap.
Dr Philippa Whitford
The United Kingdom obviously has the potential to be part of a world network of satellites, in that the geostationaries are likely to be launched from America, the United Arab Emirates and Singapore, whereas Australia and the northern hemisphere will be launching satellites into polar and sun-synchronous orbits. Obviously, another blatant punt for Prestwick is that we are further north.
Carol Monaghan
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. Different areas can no doubt provide different services.
Possibly the most famous satellite is the Hubble space telescope. I have been asked why we should not simply view the stars from a dark area of the Earth, such as Chile or Hawaii. The answer is that the Earth’s atmosphere is a fluid. Let us try to imagine viewing images through water in a swimming pool. That gives us an idea of what it is like trying to view space from the surface of the Earth. Getting out of that fluid and putting the Hubble space telescope up there have enabled us to get images that would never have been considered possible in the past.
The third really important, and really exciting, aspect of space exploration is the possibility of living in different environments. It was thought for a long time that two things were required for life to exist: an oxygen-rich atmosphere and liquid water. However, we have now seen evidence, even on Earth, of life existing in extreme areas—for example, at very deep pressures in the ocean and in very cold parts of the world. That gives us real hope that there might be life in other places, even within our own solar system. It also gives us the opportunity to think of living further afield beyond the constraints of the surface of the Earth.
We have mentioned astronauts already. I have counted seven British-born astronauts, although I might have got that number wrong. Two of them are space tourists, and a number of them moved to the United States in order to pursue their careers, but what was really exciting about Helen Sharman and Major Tim Peake is that they were both living here in the UK. That gives our youngsters great hope.
We must not forget, however, that space travel is extremely dangerous, particularly during take-off and landing. The Challenger disaster in 1986, in which seven astronauts were killed as a result of faulty seals in the solid rocket boosters, is an example of that danger. In describing the dangers of re-entering the atmosphere, I shall refer again to the fluid I mentioned earlier. Let us imagine skimming stones on the surface of a lake. That is what it is like trying to get a spaceship back into the Earth’s atmosphere. It has to enter at a particular angle and at a particular speed. If it gets those things wrong, it will bounce off the atmosphere like a skimming stone. If the angle of entry is too steep, it will burn up very quickly. It is a very precise operation. We also remember the Columbia disaster in 2003.
When I was at the Science Museum just before Christmas with all those children, they cheered and shouted as the rocket was launched. I did not cheer and shout at that point, however, and the people in ground control at the European Space Agency also waited until the rocket had got into orbit proper before the celebrations really started. That is the point at which it is considered to have become a lot safer. We must pay tribute to the bravery of these astronauts. Theirs is a dangerous job, albeit a glamorous one.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford) mentioned, Tim Peake is to do his spacewalk tomorrow. He will be outside the space station for more than six hours, which is no small task. It is highly technical and highly dangerous, and we wish him all the very best.
I have been pleased to hear so many Members talk about the importance of science, technology, engineering and maths and of getting girls involved in those STEM subjects However, to do that, we need teachers in place, and a serious policy of recruitment and retention of teachers. We need to think about how we will attract people from other areas into teaching.
A few years ago, I was lucky enough to meet a NASA astronaut, who was talking to a group of my school children. He was asked by one, “What do I need to study in order to become an astronaut?” His answer was great. He said, “It doesn’t matter. You must follow what you are passionate about—be that material science, engineering, physics, chemistry, biology or medicine. Follow what you are passionate about and then other things will follow.” That is an important message for our young people.
Finally, I ask the Minister to commit to the space industry not just financially, but in terms of advertising and ambition. As my hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North (Gavin Newlands) said, we must have the ambition and we must say to our young people, “This is for you and it is available to everybody.” On the back of Tim Peake’s mission, which has been so inspirational to watch, we really need to get the message out there that space is open for business. I now call on the Minister to make it so.
Yvonne Fovargue (Makerfield) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Members for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford) and for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady) on securing this timely debate and the Backbench Business Committee on allowing it. I also congratulate all hon. Members who have made contributions today on showing such expertise and passion for the subject. I join everyone in paying tribute to Major Tim Peake. We all watched his take-off at the end of last year with fascination and awe, and I wish him every success over the course of his mission, and particularly with his spacewalk tomorrow.
I was particularly excited today to hear that there are ongoing discussions about a live link-up between Parliament and the international space station, not least because I would love to see in Hansard the phrase, “Ground Control to Major Tim”.
As the first UK astronaut to join the international space station, Tim Peake’s journey is a significant milestone in this country’s involvement in space exploration. I hope that this new interest in space exploration and travel inspires young people across the country and helps them to pursue careers in science and technology.
It is appropriate at this time, as the hon. Member for Glasgow North said, to pay tribute to those who lost their lives in the Challenger disaster, particularly Christa McAuliffe, a teacher, who went into space to inspire young people. On 28 January, it will be 30 years since that disaster, and we pay tribute to all those involved.
Tim Peake’s achievement bears testimony to human ingenuity and progress, and it highlights the potential for the successful collaboration between Government and industry. The UK’s new national space policy, which aims to increase the UK’s share of the global space economy to 10% by 2030, has been worked on by specialists from Government, academia and industry. Its commitment to supporting the growth of the commercial space sector, underpinned by our world-class academic research, is particularly welcome. We on the Labour Benches support that kind of partnership, and believe that the Government should be doing much more of the same in other sectors.
Continued support for the UK’s space industry is vital, as many Members have told us. It contributes some £11.3 billion to the economy, and supports a number of vital public services, including medicine, disaster relief, defence and transport. Although we associate the industry with space travel, it also impacts on all our lives on a day-to-day basis. I am talking about things such as satellite television, smartphones and sat-navs—I would never leave the house without my sat-nav. We are benefiting from technology produced by the UK space industry.
The industry is important to all our lives, so we need a long-term strategic goal for the sector. It is disappointing that the space, innovation and growth strategy reports that the ad hoc nature of Government funding for space programmes has hindered strategic planning. Although the Government’s direct investment in the space industry is welcome, it must be accompanied by a wider strategy for skilling up future generations, and ensuring that the UK is leading the way when it comes to research and development.
We have heard from many hon. Members about the importance of the next generation of scientists and engineers. We must equip them with the skills that will allow them to undertake those jobs of the future. Unfortunately, the widespread shortage of skills in science and technology, the Government freeze on 16-to-19 funding and in the adult skills sector, and the huge upheaval in colleges from area reviews will not be helping that aim. I have particular sympathy with those who talk about bringing more women into this sector. We need to encourage our young girls and women to see that this is not a dirty engineering sector, but an area of great opportunities. I am concerned that we do not do that early enough. When girls are around the age of eight to 10, they are absolutely enthused by science and technology, but by the time they reach 16, the enthusiasm has waned considerably. We need to keep the enthusiasm going. As the hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey (Drew Hendry) said, we need to offer encouragement and to look at the careers advice that we give to young women from all backgrounds.
Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)
May I just say that it is so encouraging to see the number of women pilots in the Royal Air Force, particularly women fighter pilots who are showing not just that they are the equal of men, but that, sometimes, they can beat them hands down?
Yvonne Fovargue
Obviously, as a female myself, I would say that, quite often in many professions, we have to be not just as good as men, but better than men to prove that we are their equal.
We cannot hope to achieve the Government’s target of growing the number of jobs in the space industry if we are not equipping the next generation with the necessary skills. Will the Minister tell the House what assessment he has made of the impact that cuts to the skills budget will have on the future success of the UK space industry? Furthermore, what is he doing to encourage young women to enter the industry?
If our space industry is to prosper globally, we must be pioneers in the field of research and development, but our public investment in R&D has not kept pace with our international competitors. We spend less on research as a share of GDP than France, Germany, the US and China, all of which are increasing their commitment to science and technology. In 2013, UK Government expenditure on civil space research and development was only seventh amongst OECD countries, well behind some of our competitors.
Investment is vital to science, but so is regulation. It is also important that the Government’s regulatory regime creates an environment that enables growth in the satellite and space sector. Will the Minister explain what is being done to enable new players, such as small and medium-sized enterprises and start-ups, to access the market? As in many UK industries, businesses’ ability to access finance remains a concern. What is the Minister doing to improve access to finance for companies in the space industry?
Throughout the debate, we have heard much about the achievements of space travel and innovation, and the considerable benefits they bring to our economy. Tim Peake’s journey to the international space station has the potential to inspire a new generation and reignite the passion for space exploration felt by my generation when we saw man first set foot on the moon. This Government have to capitalise on that in the coming months and years and continue to work in partnership with the sector, allowing us all to reach for the stars.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Life Sciences (George Freeman)
I thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and the Speaker’s Office for granting the debate, and congratulate the Backbench Business Committee on securing it. I think it shows the House at its very best, capturing the mood of the nation and setting out an inspiring and challenging vision of how in the years ahead this country can do so much more in this exciting field.
As many hon. Members have said, the debate is timely. Major Tim Peake floats in orbit above us, looking down, and tomorrow he will conduct the historic and serious spacewalk. He is the first British European Space Agency astronaut and the first British astronaut to enter the international space station. The debate is also timely because of the sad passing of the iconic David Bowie, whose lyrics in so many ways provided a backdrop to my generation’s childhood and captured, at the time of the Apollo missions, the existential challenge and opportunity of pushing the boundaries of space, time and culture. That provides a rather extraordinary and unpredictable but moving backdrop to this moment in space.
Bob Stewart
I rise as the Member for the coolest constituency in the country. David Bowie lived and played in my constituency, and we are hoping that the bandstand where he played will be saved and restored properly. That is not happening at the moment.
George Freeman
I am glad that my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart), David Bowie’s constituency, rose to speak at that moment.
This debate and story is about more than the space endeavour alone. It is about business—the UK space industry is an £11.8 billion industry, employing 35,000 highly skilled people. It is about extraordinary technology in optics, communications, rocketry and engineering. It is about an activist industrial policy and strategy, for which I am delighted to confirm our support, to encourage leading technologies and industry. I pay tribute to the work done by Paul Drayson and by my great friend and colleague David Willetts, now a Member of the other place, who in 2012 was instrumental with the Chancellor in securing the £80 million for the international space station, which was crucial to securing Tim Peake’s role in it, and in securing the money for the reaction engines programme, on which this country is leading.
This debate is also about science, not just in space, but solar and earth science. Taking in rocketry, engineering, climatology, optics and communications, this is a deep science project to inspire all. It is about women in science, as others have said. Dr Helen Sharman was the first British woman in space, and the Italian Samantha Cristoforetti was the first European Space Agency woman astronaut; she did inspiring work and has become something of a legend and a role model for girls and women in science. It is also about our perception and consciousness of our environment. The “Earth dawn” photo changed perceptions of the fragility of the Earth’s ecosystem.
The debate on space is also about geopolitics. Who, in the appallingly dark days of the cold war and intercontinental ballistic missile threats in which many of us grew up, could have imagined that we would now have an international space station in which Americans, Russians and people from across the world work together for the good of all? It is about defining a new common space for all and a new approach to our defence and security through common leadership. It is not a subject I get to speak much about at the Dispatch Box, but today’s debate makes it possible to talk about mankind’s destiny—the questing spirit deep in us all and in society to inquire, discover, imagine, explore and make possible whole new worlds and opportunities.
This debate is also about the power of ambitious, positive, global, purposive and internationalist leadership to inspire and unite to produce a better politics from us all. No one spoke better on that than JFK, in his inspiring inaugural address in 1960, when he famously said, on a frosty morning in Washington at the very height of the cold war,
“my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”
He launched America on a mission of internationalism, and two years later, in his Apollo speech, announced that America chose to go to the moon not because it was easy, but because it was hard. He did so in the spirit of internationalism and of appeal to the best instincts of mankind. It is a beautiful thing, I think, that on the moon is left an inscription stating that mankind came to the moon in a spirit of freedom and peace. That mission captures so much that is best about our society and what we want to achieve.
It is for those reasons that the Prime Minister asked that we harness the inspirational power of Major Peake’s mission to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers and to bring the country together. All of us found it difficult to avoid the excitement associated with the launch and arrival of the first British ESA astronaut at the international space station. We held celebration events in Edinburgh, London, Cardiff and Belfast, at discovery centres throughout the UK, and here in Parliament. The Science Museum in London attracted almost 11,000 visitors, and if the sheer exhilaration of the 5,000-plus primary schoolchildren at the museum translates into an increase in future sciences, Tim Peake’s mission will already have achieved its goal. In all, 35% of the viewing public watched the launch, and a further 3.8 million people watched the Soyuz spaceship dock with the international space station that evening.
Our Government are providing £3 million of support to the education and engagement programme associated with Tim Peake’s mission, and we have been lauded by the ESA as the country doing the most to invest in and promote educational outreach. We will measure whether the excitement inspires young people to take up STEM subjects—several Members rightly commented on that—and increases public understanding of and engagement with science through an evaluation study being undertaken by York University. It is the first such research since the Apollo effect study in the 1970s.
The Peake mission is possible because of a decision made at the 2012 European Space Agency Council of Ministers meeting by the then Science Minister, David Willetts, which resulted in the UK joining the international space station and the related European programme for life and physical sciences—ELIPS. The UK made a further investment at the Council of Ministers in 2014. The total investment, which exceeded £80 million, provides substantial value for money, giving UK scientists access to a laboratory that has cost others up to $100 billion and is testament to international collaboration in science. The three man crew on the Soyuz, which launched on 15 December, comprised Tim Peake, the American Tim Kopra and the Russian commander Yuri Malenchenko. It is early days, and evaluation of UK involvement is ongoing, but the current results are incredibly exciting.
Experiments for the ELIPS and subsequent experiments undertaken on the space station are selected on the basis of science excellence, which plays to UK strengths. We sometimes forget that this is a massive international set of experiments up in space. In the most recent competition, the UK won more than 10% of awards for experiments, although UK involvement in the space station is at about 5% of costs, so we are punching above our weight. About 40 to 80 scientists across the UK are involved.
Space is not just about national exploration; it is about critical national infrastructure and services, such as weather forecasting, satellite navigation and satellite television. Space-based technologies are used for tackling many global challenges. Satellites can assist with tackling illegal fishing, efficient urban and rural land use, resource management, safe implementation of autonomous vehicles, and myriad further uses underpinning new technologies and new markets. For example, over half the essential climate variables needed to understand climate change derive from our satellite observations.
The UK space sector is undoubtedly a massive and growing success story. There are real prospects for the young people inspired by Tim Peake and the Rosetta mission to work in our very strong and vibrant space economy in the future. It is currently worth more than £11.8 billion to the UK economy. That is growing at about 8% a year, which is three times faster than the average non-finance sector. It is characterised by an incredibly highly skilled workforce of more than 37,000 people, half of whom hold at least a first degree. Those direct jobs each support more than two jobs in the wider economy. The sector has a general value added per job of £140,000, three times higher than the UK average.
To reflect the strategic and economic importance of the sector, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills launched the national space policy on 13 December to coincide with the Peake mission. It showcases how deeply space now impacts on our daily lives, not least in the field of satellite data and information. It describes how the sector is a unique, strategic national capability which delivers science and innovation, national security, essential public services and prosperity. The policy spells out how the UK Space Agency has brought together the roles and responsibilities of 17 different Government organisations and other partners, such as research councils and Innovate UK which are involved with space.
Space-based activity is a long-term endeavour with international collaboration, industrial co-investment, skills development and considerable planning at its heart. Stability and certainty are important, and the national space policy is the Government’s expression of our long-term commitment to seeing it through and to putting in place a policy landscape to support that investment.
The UK’s involvement in space ranges from fundamental underpinning research into the origins of the universe, to understanding and protecting our planet, through to supporting the research that leads to UK companies launching entirely new multimillion-pound telecommunication satellites. Some 25% of the world’s telecommunication satellites are substantially built here in the UK. Satellites operated under the disaster charter and earth observation data procured commercially were critical to effectively targeting the response efforts on the ground in the recent floods.
This is an exciting time for space. In 2016 the UK will be building the main experiment on the Plato mission that will search for new earths orbiting other stars, in pursuit of answers to the profound question about life elsewhere in the universe, and will precipitate key contracts for UK companies. We look forward to a major European Space Agency Council of Ministers meeting in November/December 2016, where we will negotiate to ensure that the UK continues to play an influential part and benefits fully from European Space Agency programmes. The programmes that we are looking forward to in particular include the UK-led biomass experiment that will calculate the capacity of the world’s forests to store carbon. As well as improving our ability to control climate change, this offers a considerable opportunity as UK companies are poised to win contracts to provide the craft that will host the experiment in orbit.
2017 will see the launch of the joint European-Japanese BepiColombo mission which will set out on a voyage to Mercury, using a very efficient ion drive electric propulsion engine manufactured by UK firm Qinetiq.
In the field of space flight, through companies such as Clyde Space and SSTL, the UK has become a leader in the manufacture of smaller satellites and has largely secured cost-effective launch by arranging “piggy-back” launches with larger satellites in a competitive launcher market which is not yet sustainable but is growing fast. This is connected to the growth of commercial constellations of tens or even hundreds of low-cost small mass-produced satellites that can provide ubiquitous communications across the globe or near real-time imagery from low earth orbits.
Indeed, we believe that commercial space flight is a market which, when combined with the emerging trend to use large constellations of small satellites, could provide a cumulative economic benefit to the UK of £20 billion by 2030. This will provide new and long-term manufacturing and service jobs and will stimulate high tech growth. This includes exciting developments such as single-stage to orbit launchers, the engines for which are being pioneered by Reaction Engines, a rapidly growing company in Oxfordshire.
This is the context for the UK to explore having a launch capability. We believe there is at least a two-stage process to achieving it. The first part of our ambition is for the UK to become the European hub for commercial space flight and related space sector technologies. The initial focus is on creating the necessary legislative and regulatory framework that will enable commercial suborbital space flights alongside existing civilian and military airspace operations. Alongside this, it is the Government’s intention to select a preferred location for a UK spaceport that will be capable of operating horizontal commercial spaceplanes. We are closely examining what this process will look like, to ensure that it is fair, transparent and robust.
We will seek to draw on established Government approaches to appraisal and will ensure that the preferred location meets a number of key criteria—that it can deliver a spaceport technically capable of operating horizontal commercial spaceplanes, that it will be commercially viable, that it can ensure the safety of the uninvolved public, and that it takes into account the potential environmental impacts of the spaceport and will deliver local and national economic growth. These criteria are likely to form the core of any selection process, though we have not settled on the final criteria.
Drew Hendry
The Minister is outlining an exciting programme of opportunities and economic development. He has heard from a number of Members today about the need to encourage girls and young women to get involved in the industry. Will he take that message away to the Government and do something practical to promote that?
George Freeman
Yes, I certainly will. There are a number of initiatives in place which I have not had time this afternoon to set out, but I will happily take that point on board. We are seized of the importance of promoting women in the sector.
Developing a UK spaceport and a commercial suborbital operation are crucial steps to building the capability and credibility for a UK launch capability, with the aim of launching small satellites from the UK.
I shall touch on some of the key points that hon. Members made. I congratulate the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford), whose introductory speech set the scene beautifully. I was delighted that she referred to me as a Minister prepared to boldly go where no Minister has gone before. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (Dr Lee) who, in his maiden speech, was quick on to this subject and has been a leading advocate and vice-chairman of the space committee. It is great to see the cross-party support for this project.
A number of colleagues, particularly from Scotland, spoke about the importance of the Scottish cluster. In this field as well as in other technology areas, Scotland has a powerful cluster. Despite a number of powerful bids being made from Scotland, Wales and Cornwall, hon. Members would not expect me today to pre-empt the process of selecting appropriate sites, but I can assure them that we will conduct that process fairly, openly and against proper criteria. All their bids have been heard clearly today.
Let me address some of the key questions that have been raised. There was a question about our priorities. I hope my comments setting out our commitment and the commitments set out in the recently launched space strategy go some way to clarifying that. I was asked about research funding. In the autumn statement the Chancellor announced the historic ring-fenced increased commitment to science capital and revenue, and the Government are in the process of working through with the research councils how that science funding will be allocated to various projects. We will shortly make announcements on how we see that being taken forward.
There were questions about growth and what we are doing to ensure a joined-up strategy for the sector. We are working widely with industry to identify the key markets that we see delivering the main growth. The Space Leadership Council, jointly chaired by my hon. Friend the Minister for Universities and Science and the president of the UK space trade association, is actively working to develop a set of policies, and the blueprint for growth which was set out in our recently published national space policy sets out the framework that we intend to follow.
On the timing of the announcement of the spaceport location, as hon. Members know, this is an entirely new market. It is moving quickly, but there are complex issues to be dealt with in relation to regulations and the legal basis for safe flights that we need to get right. That work is ongoing, and I hope that my comments today have reassured Members that it is being taken seriously. The Government expect to be able to announce how we proceed as soon as we can in 2016.
Important questions were asked about space debris and regulation. This area is governed by the Outer Space Act 1986. No licence is issued to operators of space assets unless they can show that they are compliant and safe, and minimising space debris is part of that process. Technical failures do occur, but we remain vigilant. The strategic defence and security review set up a cross-governmental committee, chaired by my hon. Friend the Minister for Universities and Science, to further ensure security in space, particularly in relation to space debris.
A number of hon. Members asked about careers in STEM. We have allocated £3 million to support education programmes to help young people benefit from Tim Peake’s mission, and reaching out to girls and women is an important part of that. The European Space Agency has acknowledged that the UK is doing more to support that work than any other nation in the project. We are providing practical tools for teachers and lecturers.
There was a question about the University of Glasgow and how the Government are engaging with cutting-edge research facilities. Through the work of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the Natural Environment Research Council and the Science and Technology Facilities Council, we are actively looking at how we can use those research centres to support this project.
The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon)—on a previous occasion he described himself as a stalker of mine, because we appear to speak in all the same debates —made a powerful plug for Northern Ireland. The Government fully recognise the benefit that Northern Ireland’s space industry and universities play in our space policy. That is why we were delighted to convene and take part in an event held in Belfast to mark Tim Peake’s launch.
My hon. Friend the Member for a bit of Cornwall—the precise part escapes my memory right now. [Interruption.] My hon. Friend the Member for South East Cornwall (Mrs Murray) raised the important issue of Newquay airport. My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has said previously from the Dispatch Box that he recognises the importance of Newquay in this and in the wider Cornish economy. As I have said, we will look at all bids in time.
We have heard a lot of quotes in today’s debate—some more original than others—not least from David Bowie. I wanted to close with one that we have not heard. In “An Occasional Dream” he sang about
“tomorrows of rich surprise… Some things we could do”
He sang:
“We can be heroes, just for one day”.
I think that this debate, and indeed this whole topic, captures the sense in which good politics can bring people together to achieve the very highest goals. I am grateful to colleagues for raising it and pleased to be part of a Department that is committed to this sector and to achieving everything that this country can do in this very exciting race.
Dr Philippa Whitford
We called this debate to celebrate Major Tim Peake’s spacewalk tomorrow, and obviously the incredible work he is doing to engage children and young people. Many Members have spoken about the need to engage girls, in particular. I do not think that there is really a clash between us on whether Tim Peake or Helen Sharman is the first British astronaut; they are people we should be promoting together. There is no friction between them. Indeed, she has given him her copy of Yuri Gagarin’s book to take there as a souvenir. Having spent 33 years in surgery, I know what it is like to be in a man’s world. I remember being told formally during my third year at medical school that women could not do surgery. We have come a long way.
We have heard from Members from all UK nations bidding for their site, which I think is absolutely right. We have also heard about the incredible breadth of the industry, and there are many things that we have not even thought about today. I am grateful to hear from the Minister that the structure and licensing will be looked at, because I think that is really important. I look forward to the day when our hubs are called not aerospace, but aero-space—aero, hyphen, space—and I expect that we will have multiple clusters and hubs. A time may even come when we need more than one space port; perhaps one for tourism and suborbital parabolic flights to Japan or north America, and one for getting satellites up—satellites that will end up being the size of a packed lunch.
I am grateful to all Members who have taken part in what has been a fascinating debate. We want to encourage our young people simply to aim for the stars.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House notes the scientific, cultural and technological opportunities arising from exploration of outer space and the significant contribution the space industry makes to the UK economy; further notes the increased public interest in space exploration resulting from Major Tim Peake’s mission to the International Space Station (ISS); welcomes the global co-operation that has led to the development of the ISS over the last forty years; takes note of the shortlist of airports and aerodromes that could host a UK spaceport published by the UK Government in March 2015; and calls on the Government to bring forward further advice and support for organisations considering developing such facilities so that they might be operational by the Government’s target date of 2018.
House of Lords Reform
(8 years, 10 months ago)
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Martin John Docherty (West Dunbartonshire) (SNP)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered House of Lords reform.
Not since 2011, when the then Deputy Prime Minister presented the case for reform, have Members of the House of Commons been offered the opportunity to debate and discuss the House of Lords on the Floor of this House. Therefore, before proceeding any further, I wish to extend my grateful thanks to the Backbench Business Committee, and to the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) especially, for agreeing to this debate and for some sage advice, which was critical, given my novice plea.
During the general election there were various mentions of House of Lords reform. Critically, the Conservative party limited its vision in its manifesto to addressing only the size of the House of Lords, for clearly size matters to the Tory party. At its present velocity of expansion, the House of Lords will soon exceed the National People’s Congress of China. It has already exceeded the size of the European Parliament, which is elected by over 400 million European citizens. Clearly, Parliament envy will soon see even this House displaced by the Prime Minister’s expansionary tactics.
I know that at the previous general election the British Labour party took a more pragmatic view. I give credit where credit is due by recognising the work the previous Labour Government did to limit the hereditary peerage, although that work was sullied by the cash for honours scandal uncovered by my hon. Friend the Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil). I wonder where my Labour colleagues are today.
At least on these Benches we have spoken with one voice. At the general election the Scottish National party placed our proposal before the entire community of Scotland: “Abolish it!” If this Parliament is to work as an effective and legitimate legislature in the British state, its upper Chamber should resemble less the congress of a communist state and more the revising and advisory role of a Parliament of a 21st century liberal democracy.
Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)
I agree with the hon. Gentleman about abolition, which is a theme I wish to speak about later. Does he agree that the power of patronage of Prime Ministers to appoint people they choose to the House of Lords is even more pernicious than having hereditary peers, who at least have the advantage of being independent?
Martin John Docherty
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. He need not worry, because I will get there.
Let us return to the hope of many Members of this House—a hope that is shared, in particular, by my hon. Friend the Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart), who cannot be here today—that any future reform of the upper Chamber should not only consider its size, but limit it and remove with haste its ability, as an unelected and unaccountable Chamber, to generate legislation. That is an affront to my constituents and an aberration at the heart of the British political system.
Only a few months ago the Government were keen to play down any reform agenda. Their latest antics have the right hon. Member for Tatton (Mr Osborne) as Citizen Camembert rather than Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the Prime Minister playing the good cop and leading man as the Black Fingernail. This is indeed a farce, if not a “Carry On”.
While many Members across this Chamber would seek a long-term resolution of the undeniable illegitimacy of the upper Chamber in its present form, the Government tinker at the edges with the Strathclyde review, a botch job done in jig time for Christmas. Although the review offers a way forward, it seems to confuse the role of the House of Lords. Is it to be a mere stamper of Government policy, or is it a revising Chamber that tackles the Government on the tough subjects of the day? Critically, all options would offer an additional burden on the workings of this House and highlight the behemoth that is the Palace of Westminster. If the report were at least linked in some way or form to improvements in working practices such as electronic voting, which would allow us in this place to deliberate more robustly, in more depth, and with reduced recourse to statutory instruments, it would have been a slightly more useful document. For the record, however, I wish to commend Lord Strathclyde and all those involved for seeking to overcome the Government’s obstacles.
While the report is welcome, it highlights the Dickensian, if not medieval, machinations and dubious working practices of this Parliament. It accidentally shows the Alice in Wonderland antics of the so-called liberal democratic practices of the mother of Parliaments. If the review was worth the paper it was written on, it would be my hope, and that of my hon. Friends, that it would seek to uphold the nature of our polyarchy and at least promote its first pillar, namely that control over Government decisions about policy should at all times constitutionally be invested in elected officials—Members of this House elected by their constituents, from whom they derive their political mandate.
Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate and apologise for being unable to stay for the whole thing. He speaks about the legislative powers of Members of the House of Lords. Does he agree that even more pernicious and insidious is the soft power that is held by unelected Members? They can spend much time in all-party groups, have access to Ministers behind the scenes and all the other trappings that are not visible or even open to scrutiny through live coverage of the Chamber because they happen behind the scenes.
Martin John Docherty
I could not agree more. The way that operates within this Parliament is pernicious.
Sadly, I believe that in this Parliament, at least, the aspiration and will for change are a lost cause, given that in the previous Parliament alone the Prime Minister appointed 200 new unelected, unaccountable members of the peerage, and a further 45 in the short period in which my hon. Friends and I have been returned to this House. Appointees covering the great and the so-called good include, of course, large-scale donors to political parties and former bigwigs of county halls the length and breadth of the country.
Of the peerage, let me turn specifically to a certain cadre—the archbishops and bishops of the established Church of England. While much has been made of likening their position to that of the theocrats of the Islamic Republic of Iran, my direct challenge to them is this: they have no place in debating—or voting on, should it occur—the civic or religious life of Scotland. I draw Members’ attention to early-day motion 952, submitted by my own hand and signed by many of my hon. Friends from Scottish constituencies, which calls on the Lords Spiritual to desist in their well documented, historical interference in the affairs of the community of Scotland since the times of our late and noble King David. Their interference must end if this Parliament is truly to reflect the broad kirk of representation and communities of this political state.
Let us turn our gaze on the other members of the peerage of the realm. Yes, I will admit, through gritted teeth, that within their ermine-clad utopia there are a few souls who work hard. Yet, as exposed by my hon. Friend the Member for Perth and North Perthshire in a debate in Westminster Hall only a year ago, we can see the limited work of so many who stipulate that their position is to stand for Scotland in the upper Chamber. The peerage has no constituency—we all recognise that—and yet they purport in that unelected Chamber to ensure that our constituents’ needs are met. One prime example is those peers who have given attendance and full participation a cursory glance and claim substantial sums of taxpayers’ money for the privilege of access to the Bishops’ Bar.
Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)
May I ask the hon. Gentleman, and his colleagues, whether he would like to have a member of the SNP in the House of Lords? I think that would be good idea.
Martin John Docherty
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for a good laugh, but the answer is no.
As per convention, I shall name no names, but I direct hon. Members to acquaint themselves with the debate held in Westminster Hall on this very day one year ago, where the record of the peerage is seen to be damning indeed.
Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)
The hon. Gentleman is delivering a great deal of passion in his speech; it is just a pity that his passion is not shared by the public at large, or indeed, evidently, by Labour Members. What would he say to those who do not necessarily disagree with some of what he is saying but for whom, nevertheless, this is a low priority?
Martin John Docherty
Democracy is never a low priority in the Scottish National party. That is why the people and community of Scotland returned my hon. Friends in such numbers.
Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)
Does my hon. Friend agree that there is little democracy in the fact that those who have been rejected by the electorate can then find themselves along the corridor from us, making law?
Martin John Docherty
I could not disagree with my hon. Friend on that very important matter.
The upper Chamber and its shenanigans reflect more a debauched imperial Roman senate than a functioning democratic parliamentary Chamber, bowing and scraping in a place in which the modern world is seen as an inconvenience. Since my election to this House, I have visited the unelected, unaccountable Lords, where I took my place in the Members of the House of Commons’ balcony—a lofty vantage point across which to view the stoor and the oose of ages. It would seem that their lordships are followers of the Quentin Crisp school of housework. Like him, they firmly believe that after the first four years, the dirt doesnae get any worse. Four years of accumulating dust is nothing compared with the accumulation of centuries of privilege and unaccountability. It must end.
There are those who will see this as nothing other than Celtic hyperventilation against a conspiracy of anomalies, arrogance, absurdity, vanity and venality that poses as a pillar of the mother of Parliaments—and they may be right.
Patrick Grady
It is not simply a matter of vanity. In 2005, as I am sure Members are aware, the Scottish National party had a democratic vote at its conference never to accept seats in the House of Lords, confirming a convention that had been in place since the 1970s. At no point in the party’s history has it ever considered taking a position in the unelected Chamber.
Martin John Docherty
I certainly agree with my hon. Friend. For as long as I am the Member for West Dunbartonshire and a member of the Scottish National party, that is what I will be sticking to—saying no to seats in the unelected, unaccountable House of Lords.
Wayne David (Caerphilly) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on what has so far been a very colourful speech. He has been very clear about the SNP’s position, but his partners in this House are Plaid Cymru, which does have Members in the other place.
Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
We do not have a separate jurisdiction.
Martin John Docherty
My very hon. Friend has given the answer from a sedentary position: Wales does not have a separate jurisdiction. That in itself is a disgrace and one of the main concerns for my hon. Friends in Plaid Cymru.
As I said, all this could be seen as pure Celtic hyperventilation about the unaccountability of the House of Lords, yet there are Members from beyond the Celtic fringe—although I wonder where they are today—who find the unelected and unaccountable nature of the House of Lords an affront to liberal democracy.
Kelvin Hopkins
May I inform the hon. Gentleman that there are some English people—I am English from generations back on all sides—who believe we should have one democratic Chamber, not an unelected Chamber full of place persons and hereditaries?
Martin John Docherty
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. I do, of course, count Cornwall in the Celtic fringe.
Any debate that links the Government and Her Majesty’s Opposition to some of the most damning political consequences and incompetence, as highlighted in the last Parliament by my hon. Friend the Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar, will fill even those Members—those hardy souls—with dread. Cash for honours sends a collective shiver down the spine of this House and, indeed, our parliamentary system. I seriously doubt that we have seen the last of it, not only in the upper Chamber but even here. The appointment process exposes beyond doubt the privileges of those Members of the House of Lords. In reality, there is no substitute for democracy and direct election.
Chris Law (Dundee West) (SNP)
I am delighted to join the Chamber to hear my hon. Friend’s speech at such late notice. Does he agree not only that this debate is vital—it is a sheer disappointment that more Members are not here—but that it is incredibly perverse that we are about to reduce the number of democratically elected MPs in this Chamber from 650 to 600, at the same time as the House of Lords is ever increasing?
Martin John Docherty
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his interjection. He raises an important point. I am grateful that the Front Benchers of Her Majesty’s Opposition are here, but where are the great reformers? Where are the Liberal Democrats, the great changers of the British constitution? They are in the House of Lords.
As to the future—I wish to address my hon. Friend’s question directly—one clear clarion call should go out to the British Labour party and the British Liberal party: no more appointments. Enough. Stop. Renew, here today, the commitment to reform—not piecemeal; not lacklustre; not fiddling while the parliamentary democracy of this political state is sullied by the illegitimacy of the House of Lords. Be clear. Be concise: no more Labour or Liberal peers. Call the Government’s bluff. Call the bluff of the unelected, unaccountable mire of cronies and warmehrs. Join us in demanding an end to privilege and patronage at the heart of Government.
There will be Members who will seek a resolution to this issue: unicameral or bicameral, one or two Chambers. I am open to persuasion about a bicameral system, although a unicameral system, as evidence from across the world shows, is no less a robust and decent system of parliamentary liberal democracy. If a bicameral system is to exist, here in this Parliament, then let it be fully elected. Let it be representative of the communities and nations of this political state. Let it reflect the lived experience of my constituents. While I am no Unionist, I believe in the sovereign will of the community of Scotland. If we should remain in this place, my constituents have been clear: change, and soon.
With a Prime Minster appointing more peers than Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and all before, I doubt that change will come, and the consequences for Scotland and the Union are well known. When unelected and unaccountable peers of the realm can stipulate the governance of Scotland while the evidence and proposals from its elected Members of the House of Commons are thrown in the Thames, the case for the re-establishment of a sovereign, democratic and independent Scotland is made not by members of the Scottish National party, but by the very apogee of the British state. It would be easy—indeed, it is easy—for me to vent frustration at the pace of House of Lords reform, but that is not enough.
Today, just like every other day, I am wearing a tie, as deemed by convention in this House. The tie I am wearing today represents to me hope for a more equal and just society, in which the pupils of Bonhill Primary School in the mighty Vale of Leven—whose tie this is—should hope to live. That hope should be placed in a Parliament that reflects them and their peers, not a Parliament in which the oligarchs, cronies and chancers of an upper Chamber go about their business unelected and unaccountable. Let us be in no doubt that those pupils will place that hope closer to their experience and, indeed, to their need at home in Scotland. For sure they know,
A prince can mak a belted knight,
A marquis, duke, an’ a’ that;
But an honest man’s aboon his might,
Guid faith he mauna fa’ that!
For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
Their dignities, an’ a’ that,
The pith o’ sense, an’ pride o’ worth,
Are higher rank than a’ that.
Several hon. Members rose—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Natascha Engel)
Order. There are nine Members who wish to catch my eye before 4.30 pm, which is when I want to bring in the Front Benchers to wind up. That calculates at roughly 10 minutes each, so if Members can informally keep to about 10 minutes, that would be great.
Martin Vickers (Cleethorpes) (Con)
I congratulate the hon. Member for West Dunbartonshire (Martin John Docherty) on securing this debate and on his interesting, entertaining and, I think it is fair to say, at times angry speech, quite a lot of which I agreed with, because I would sweep away the House of Lords and replace it with an almost entirely elected Chamber.
I accept the fact that, as my hon. Friend the Member for South West Wiltshire (Dr Murrison) said in an intervention, the issue is not exactly top of the charts for our constituents. I have only one constituent who writes to me about it and other issues, such as the changes to the Act of Settlement.
Dr Murrison
My hon. Friend is an extremely assiduous constituency MP and I suspect he spends most of his weekends knocking on people’s doors to get their views. Is he able to recall the last time a constituent on the doorstep badgered him on the subject of House of Lords reform? I am really struggling to remember the last time a constituent troubled me on that matter.
Martin Vickers
My hon. Friend is right. I cannot recall anyone on the doorstep raising this particular issue, even when it was being debated day in, day out in this Chamber. The fact that it is not on the public’s agenda suggests that it will not be on the Government’s agenda—and, of course, it is not. The fact that the public do not care a great deal gives the Government an opportunity to kick it into touch.
Had I been here in the late 1990s when Tony Blair was tinkering with the House of Lords and sweeping away most of the hereditary peers, I would probably have been opposed to that, as a typical traditional Conservative. It would appear to me that they were doing no great harm, and if we are to be ruled by an unelected body, I would rather it be an unelected House of Lords than an unelected European Commission.
The reality, however, is that we cannot go on as we are. Changes, both significant and minor, have been made to our constitution over the centuries and we have tended to muddle along and accept them. On the whole, I think that the system has evolved into one which, with all its faults, gives us a better existence and life. We are well governed and have a functioning, honest judicial system and the like, so I think we have a lot to be thankful for with regard to the way in which things have evolved over the centuries.
Personally, I would go for a 90% elected upper House—or senate, as I would want to call it. The hon. Member for West Dunbartonshire addressed the issue of bishops, archbishops and so on. My remaining 10%, the unelected Members, would be faith leaders. Mostly, they would be Christian leaders, since we are a Christian nation, but they would include representatives of the Church of Scotland.
Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)
As a practising Christian, I must say that I am not comfortable with defining any nation as a Christian nation, or indeed as a Jewish or an Islamic nation. Is it not more correct these days to say that we are a group of nations historically ruled by people who in their words purported to follow Christianity, but whose actions were very far from the true teachings of Christ?
Martin Vickers
It is certainly true that there are now fewer practising Christians throughout the UK than there were in the past. As the hon. Gentleman rightly says, however, our heritage is of a Christian nature and the eternal virtues taught by the Christian Church are the basis of our society.
Kelvin Hopkins
The hon. Gentleman may have noticed that, in the last census, some 31% of the population said that they had no religion and that they do not feel that they would be represented be people of faith. I am a vice-chair of the all-party humanist group. Does the hon. Gentleman not think that humanists should also be represented?
Martin Vickers
Humanism has always seemed to me to be the absence of faith. We could debate the hon. Gentleman’s rather philosophical point endlessly, and I would be very happy to do so some time.
The hon. Member for West Dunbartonshire referred to a unicameral system. It would be a mistake to move to a system with only one Chamber. However, I would point out that, with devolution, Scotland is almost a unicameral Assembly; I will leave that matter to Scottish National party Members.
Patricia Gibson (North Ayrshire and Arran) (SNP)
Although the Scottish Parliament has one Chamber, it has a very strong committee system. It is not an Assembly, but a Parliament in which the Government sit.
Martin Vickers
In essence, however, it is fair to say that Scotland is becoming almost a unicameral nation.
It is often said that we benefit from the expertise of experts, many of whom are ex-experts. Many people at the other end of the corridor have a great deal of expertise and a lot to offer society, but that does not necessarily mean that they should be Members of the legislature. Over the years, Governments have found ways of including all sorts of people they wanted to bring into the process of governance—by establishing royal commissions, boards of inquiries and committees for this, that and the other—and it would be perfectly possible to get eminent lawyers, scientists and doctors into a group that provided the expertise that those of us in this Chamber certainly need.
Dr Murrison
I am very pleased that my hon. Friend has raised the issue of experts. If the public think about the upper House, they often think of it as a Chamber full of experts. Many of them are experts, but the trouble is that there is nothing more “ex” than an ex-expert. That point supports the argument he is advancing. To avoid the ex-expert phenomenon, should we put a limit on the number of years for which peers serve?
Martin Vickers
I certainly agree that, if we are to continue with an appointed or predominantly appointed House, a time limit would be desirable.
The point about such experts is that they tend to be London-centred experts. The reality is that an expert—a doctor, a scientist or whatever—is far more likely to be appointed to the upper House if they are from Kensington than if they are from Cleethorpes. There are exceptions. A few weeks ago, I was privileged to attend the swearing in as a Member of the upper House of the leader of North Lincolnshire Council, which covers part of my constituency. Not only has Baroness Redfern, as she now is, served the community through elected office, but she has roots deep in the Isle of Axholme, the part of North Lincolnshire from which she comes. However, peers such as the noble Lady are few and far between. It is a very metropolitan gathering.
It is often said that if there were two elected Houses, there would be power grabs by one House over the other. One mistake in the Bill that was introduced three or four years ago was that it said that the powers of the upper House would stay pretty much the same. That is fine, but it should be laid down in statute if we are to move in the direction that I am suggesting. Other countries seem to manage with two elected Chambers that rub along reasonably well, without constant power grabs by one or the other. It is important that the lower House should retain the power over financial matters. Any conflicts between the Houses should not be passed over to the judiciary. That is why the situation should be laid down clearly in any statute.
As I said in response to my hon. Friend the Member for South West Wiltshire (Dr Murrison), whether there is an appointed House or an elected House, there should be time limits. If I recall correctly, the Bill that was brought forward by the then Deputy Prime Minister in the last Parliament proposed terms of 15 years. Perhaps that was too long, but it would give people, although many of them may be party people, the independence that is necessary in an upper House.
Bob Stewart
I seem to remember that under the proposed legislation that was introduced in the last Parliament the elected Members of the House of Lords would have been elected by huge electorates of 3 million or 4 million people. Inevitably, people elected under such a system would say, “I had 2 million people voting for me and you had a poxy 66,000. Whose mandate is more important?” That was one of the problems that I had with the proposed legislation in the last Parliament.
Martin Vickers
I agree. I was not happy with that part of the proposals.
I am an advocate of first past the post when it comes to elections to this House, but I acknowledge that some form of proportional representation would be more appropriate for an elected upper House. Having said that, we must accept that people do not identify with massive areas or regions, such as those to which my hon. Friend refers. They tend to identify with their town or village and their county, as well as with their country. We need to devise a system that recognises those innate loyalties.
In closing, I urge the Government not just to tinker. I suspect that we will have more tinkering with the Strathclyde proposals, which I am not particularly enthusiastic about. The Government should go for it. I would rather have a Conservative Government reforming the House of Lords, because Conservatives recognise the value of evolution within the constitution and do not want to go for a big bang change. We have an opportunity to think carefully about this matter over the next year or two and to put forward serious proposals. We must recognise that an appointed House—an unelected Assembly—is not acceptable in the 21st century. It is time to think seriously about the way forward. I urge the Minister to acknowledge that it should be a Conservative Government who put forward the proposals. I very much hope to hear some dramatic proposals at the end of this debate.
Steven Paterson (Stirling) (SNP)
It is a pleasure to speak in this debate, and I will start by reading an amendment that was moved in this place during a debate on the House of Lords by a former leader of the Labour party. It was to add the words,
“the Upper House, being an irresponsible part of the Legislature, and of necessity representative only of interests opposed to the general well-being is a hindrance to national progress and ought to be abolished”.
I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiments of that former Labour party leader, Mr Arthur Henderson. He tabled that amendment during a debate on the House of Lords on 26 June 1907—never let it be said that Westminster rushes to reform. Predictably, the amendment was defeated, although it was part of a national debate that led to the introduction of the Parliament Act 1911, which made the supremacy of the elected Chamber over the unelected Chamber clear and beyond doubt. That was a very good thing, but we must go further.
I contend that radical change to the constitution is overdue, and that there is no place for a bloated, unelected Chamber of retired politicians, cronies and placemen in the modern day. It is 105 years since the Parliament Act, and I ask the House—not before time—to embrace democracy in all that we do. That means moving to an elected second Chamber and the abolition of what we currently have. Democratic change is normal, and we must move towards that.
We must bring the governance of the United Kingdom into line with the 21st-century standards of democratic accountability to be found across the developed world—we would all like to think we are part of that. In 2016 we have a Tory Government who are committed to the protection of this unelected, unaccountable, political establishment, and whose only desire to reform the House of Lords stems from the Lords’ own efforts to stymie and oppose Government legislation. That problem was created because the previous Government were so effective at stuffing the place with their own appointees, and this Government would rather stuff more voting fodder into the already bloated second Chamber in order to get their way. Perhaps they are not content with the fact that the UK has the second largest appointed parliamentary Chamber after the Chinese National People’s Congress, and they want to show the world that when it comes to undemocratic and unaccountable government, nobody does it better than the UK.
In 2015, 45 new peers were appointed to the House of Lords, including 26 on the Government side. Make no mistake, the House of Lords is not impotent, despite the fact that the Parliament Act 1911 has only been used, I think, seven times. The Chamber possesses the ability to halt legislation that affects no fewer than 64 million people. That is not the democratic will of the people; it is the will of 821 unelected, permanent peers, 92 of whom hold their seat for their entire lives simply through an accident of birth.
Mr Douglas Carswell (Clacton) (UKIP)
A small clique in Downing Street gets to determine who sits in the Lords. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that that gives rise to a fundamental unfairness and means that there is no correlation between the number of votes cast and the composition of the Chamber? For example, it is possible for a party to get 4 million votes in an election, but have zero appointed peers. Is that fundamentally unfair?
Steven Paterson
I understand the hon. Gentleman’s point, and I think that it is fundamentally unfair and that we must move to democracy. Appointing peers is ridiculous and disgraceful in this day and age.
Dr Murrison
I am noting the hon. Gentleman’s comments on appointees, and such appointments are ultimately made by people who are elected. The concern that people overseas have, particularly in countries that are developing their democracies, is that here in the mother of Parliaments we still have as part of our legislature Members of the House of Lords who are hereditary peers. Although I have the greatest affection and admiration for many of them individually, and they give great service, it is a rather difficult thing to explain to people in other countries who are growing their democracies and who look to the United Kingdom for a lead.
Steven Paterson
The hon. Gentleman makes a very good point, and we must move to democracy. That means that the hereditary peers—they really do stick in the craw—will be among many who have to go. We should have elections to determine that, and perhaps we should be holding conversations about how, not whether, we do that. I would certainly like us to move towards that point.
Bob Stewart
I support the idea of UKIP having a Member of the House of Lords. It is rather sad that there is no UKIP Member of that House, and I look forward to it happening. May I suggest that it might give the hon. Member for Clacton (Mr Carswell) a certain amount of pleasure if that Member’s first name was Nigel?
Steven Paterson
I will let the hon. Member for Clacton (Mr Carswell) speak for himself on that one. My own view is simply that, whatever the country, people should get the representative Government they vote for. Whether I happen to agree with the hon. Gentleman’s party or not, if people vote for it then that is who they should get as a Government—that is what I believe in terms of democracy.
How does the crooked, anti-democratic nature of the House of Lords manifest itself? To answer that, let us consider for a moment the curious case of the quite inappropriately named Liberal Democrats. The Liberal Democrats were hammered at the ballot box—not before time, many of us would say. That happened first in Scotland in the 2011 Scottish Parliament elections, when they were reduced to a rump of five MSPs out of 129, and was followed up at the UK general election last year when they were reduced to a rump of just eight MPs out of 650. In a democracy, the people speak and the message is sent. That is not the end of the story, however. The Liberal Democrats defy democracy thanks to the House of Lords. There are an incredible 111 of them along the corridor there sitting—or sleeping—on the red benches, grazing, collecting their tax-free £300 when they pass go, occasionally contributing to the debates and maybe even voting. They are down at the other end of that corridor, unelected and unaccountable. They are Westminster’s own political zombies. We really have to move forward. They are not elected and the people’s views must be paramount.
Some would say that the House of Lords provides access to expertise that cannot be found among MPs in the House of Commons. I acknowledge, because I have met some, that there are some Lords who certainly have expertise, but there are many hon. Members in this place and it cannot be beyond the wit of this place to find experts on a range of issues.
Kelvin Hopkins
The hon. Gentleman talks about expertise. It would be possible to have an advisory body of experts. The Lords have legislative power—that is the difference.
Steven Paterson
Indeed. The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. There are a number of things we could do and that suggestion is certainly one of them.
One of the many problems with the House of Lords is that it is stuffed to the gunnels with former politicians who failed to win seats but are none the less looked after by the powers that be. One of my predecessors as MP for Stirling is one such. Michael Forsyth has not won an election since 1992. In his 14-year career as MP for Stirling, he was democratically chosen by the people of the constituency to serve in that role. He has now spent 17 years in the unelected Chamber along the corridor. This illustrates a fundamental problem. There is a long, long list of such former political big beasts out to pasture at the end of the corridor; former elected politicians of such inestimable stature as Jeremy Purvis, for example. There are then those apparently picked at random, perhaps for saying the right things at the right time to help the party in government, or making the requisite donation to their political party.
Wayne David
The hon. Gentleman makes many trenchant criticisms of the other place, a number of which I agree with. In the interests of even-handedness, however, does he accept that the House of Lords does some good and effective work in holding the Government to account, and that from time to time it makes a very principled stand, such as on tax credits?
Steven Paterson
Even a broken clock is right twice a day, but that does not mean you do not need a new clock.
Margaret Thatcher, at the end of her term as Prime Minister, said:
“I calculate that I was responsible for proposing the elevation to the Lords of some 214 of its present numbers.”
My problem is that some of those 214 are still there after all this time: unelected spectres interfering in legislation to this very day. The serious point here is that they have legislative authority over the lives of millions of people across the UK with no democratic mandate whatever. Radical democratic reform or outright abolition of this tired, antiquated and undemocratic institution is necessary and long overdue. Just as successful reform was passed in 1911, reform in 2016 must effectively represent the necessary change to bring our democracy, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century.
Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
I congratulate the hon. Member for West Dunbartonshire (Martin John Docherty) on securing a debate on this most overdue of reforms to the UK’s political system. As he said, what might seem like Celtic hyperventilation and hyperbole to some, to others is passion to mend that which is wrong.
As we have heard, membership of the House of Lords is fast approaching 1,000. As we have also heard, it is one of the largest Chambers on earth, second only to that in China, which, it is worth remembering, has a population 28 times the size of the UK’s. Of course, not one of the 1,000 peers in the other place is elected by the public, although a few are elected by their peers, which is interesting. The House of Lords does not reflect the political views of the people or society in general. Over three quarters of peers are male and over half are over 70. I wanted to work out their combined age, but it was far too difficult, and we would have got into dinosaur aeons, I suspected. Seats are guaranteed for bishops of the Church of England, but not for the Church in Wales or the Church of Scotland, let alone for any other faith. Do the Government consider a non-Christian to be less of a citizen than a Christian? I hope not, but the existence of the House, in its present form, suggests otherwise.
I was astounded to learn that the fudged compromise whereby 92 excepted hereditary peers, who survived the cull of 1999, not only continue to attend the House of Lords and influence the democracy of the UK, but are replaced by yet more hereditary peers in in-house elections. I thought they were a tail that would gradually disappear, but, no, they are self-perpetuating. The evident democratic injustice of people being there because they were born to that position is perpetuating itself. The House of Lords is crying out for reform.
Plaid Cymru sees no place for a patronage appointments system in a modern democracy. None the less, for as long as decisions affecting Wales continue to be made there, we will push for Wales to have an equal voice in that Chamber. After all, we are not as fortunate as Scotland. Wales has not had a separate legal jurisdiction since 1536.
Wayne David
I hear what the hon. Lady says about the Acts of Union in 1536 and 1542, but what on earth does that have to do with membership of the House of Lords?
Liz Saville Roberts
Most of the laws made here also affect Wales, and if we are to influence them, we must take part. We have long been cursed with the “for Wales, see England” mentality, although things have changed since 1999 and might well change again in the elections this spring.
The House of Lords should be elected through the single transferrable vote system, with a Welsh constituency and weighting to ensure that Wales is heard in all matters. Some value the apparent freedom with which the second Chamber can hold the Government to account, but I remind them that more than 70% of peers vote along party lines and that 25% of those appointed since 1997 are former MPs who either resigned or were voted out by the public. It is the only legislature in the world where losing an election helps a person win a seat.
I appreciate that many in the other place are considered experts in their fields, but we have heard mention of the ex-experts. I do not accept that this is an argument against democracy. If they are experts in their fields today—as opposed to 20 years ago—they should be persuaded to stand for office in a local public election. I also suggest that the House takes note of figures from the Electoral Reform Society, which found that 27% of peers had “representational politics” as their main profession prior to entering the Lords. Most of them were MPs. A further 7% were political staff, and twice as many peers worked as staff to the royal household than worked in manual or skilled labour, which is extraordinary, given that most people work in the latter.
Bob Stewart
I am listening intently and enjoying this debate a great deal, because I agree with so much of it. Would it be a good idea for sections of society, such as doctors, teachers, dustbin men—if that is the right term these days—and nurses, each to have a part of the House of Lords that they appoint, so that they can decide who represents them?
Liz Saville Roberts
Were we to legislate for such a thing, we would need to consider that in detail, but we ought to consider whether these representative bodies actually represent society, and we should be judging them accordingly.
The House of Lords is not the oracle of all-encompassing knowledge that many would have us believe. I remind Members that while the Houses of Parliament include almost 1,000 Lords and, at present, 650 MPs—it is interesting to note that the number of Lords is going up and the number of MPs down—the Welsh Parliament, which is responsible for the NHS, education, economic development and many other vital policy fields in Wales, has only 60 AMs. When we discount Welsh Government Ministers and other office holders, only 42 of those 60 AMs are available to hold the Welsh Government to account and scrutinise legislation. That is 42 Members to scrutinise everything from the NHS to education, from business support to inward investment, and—soon—to hold the Government to account on income tax policy. That is 42 Members in Wales in comparison with the Palace of Westminster in England, which has in excess of 1,500 MPs and peers holding the UK Government to account on their performance.
I suggest that a proportionately elected second Chamber with a drastically reduced number of peers, coupled with an increase in the size of the Welsh Parliament, would make the UK a far more modern, balanced and effective democracy. This debate has indeed shone a light on the long-overdue need for reform, but it is now up to the Government to bring forward proposals to ensure that our democracy adheres to modern standards and reflects society and its views.
Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to speak in this debate, which I greatly welcome. I particularly enjoyed the speech by the hon. Member for West Dunbartonshire (Martin John Docherty). It was entertaining, but also serious, making many important points. The House of Lords has, of course, been in the news again recently, and the Government are clearly threatening change to rein in our allegedly noble colleagues. Yesterday’s debate in the other place seemed to suggest that even Conservative peers were not entirely happy with what the Government want to do. My interest in speaking today is to argue for a unicameral Parliament. The majority of legislatures across the world are unicameral, and some European nations—Sweden, for example—have chosen to become unicameral. We should at least discuss that possibility and, I hope, move towards that system in time.
When I first entered the House in 1997, the New Labour Government—I emphasise New Labour with a capital N—established a royal commission to consider possible reforms to the House of Lords. Shortly into my time here, I attended a Labour party so-called regional policy forum—I am sure that Mr Deputy Speaker would understand what regional policy forums were like. It was in Watford on a Saturday afternoon with about 25 to 30 party members attending. A chairman had been allocated by the party machine, and we were addressed by a learned professor from the royal commission.
The terms of reference set out by the Government for the royal commission made no mention of abolition of the House of Lords as a possible option. I asked why that was, and suggested that abolition should be a possible option for discussion. Another member suggested that we should have a show of hands to test opinion and see how many members at the meeting favoured abolition—an innocent little test of opinion. At this, the chair became very agitated and said, icily, that there would be no votes. Clearly, not even a show of hands in Watford among a small number of Labour party members on a Saturday afternoon—it was no doubt raining outside—was allowed to express a majority view that we should abolish the House of Lords. I suspect that there was probably a majority for abolition in that room, but it was not to be discussed. It was clear that our leaders wanted to keep the House of Lords in some form and that discussing possible abolition was not to be tolerated. It was most interesting.
Some reforms were later enacted by the Blair Government, and remain in place, but abolition is still not being discussed. Some longer-standing Members may recall the later discussions and debates on reform, and the series of votes on possible alternatives that took place in March 2007. One Division effectively permitted a test of opinion on possible abolition of the House of Lords. Among Labour Back Benchers, 169 of my hon. Friends voted for a bicameral Parliament, but 155 of us voted against that, effectively in favour of a unicameral Parliament and the abolition of the House of Lords. That was almost half of the Labour Back Benchers, showing a substantial body of support for a unicameral Parliament. The fact that this option was deliberately excluded from consideration by the earlier royal commission was, I think, a scandal and clearly a political fix.
I tabled an early-day motion to that effect at the time, which received the support of 50 Labour Members, some 14 of whom are still Members today. It was clear that that was due to the simple fact that the Prime Minister at the time wished to retain his power of patronage to appoint Members to the Lords, for a number of reasons. I might add that, subsequently, many argued strongly for an appointed House of Lords, and for retaining a substantial proportion of appointed Members even if it became democratic.
One of those reasons was obviously the ability to offer Members of the House of Commons the prospect of elevation to the Lords, both as a means of keeping control and reducing the potential for rebellion in the Commons and, possibly, to help to persuade older Members with safe seats to agree to retire at a convenient time for the party machine to slot leadership supporters into those safe seats.
Peter Grant
I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman recalls that, last time there was a major review of the boundaries in Scotland, the Kingdom of Fife was reduced from five parliamentary constituencies to four. The then Member of Parliament for Dunfermline, East, by the name of Gordon Brown, found himself without an obvious successor seat. The MP for Kirkcaldy agreed to retire from the House, Mr Brown became the MP for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, and very shortly afterwards the former MP for Kirkcaldy became a Member of the House of Lords. Is that the kind of democratic process to which the hon. Gentleman was referring?
Kelvin Hopkins
I do not wish to mention particular examples, because there are still hon. Members here who may or may not have experienced this process, but in my party I want individual Members to have the power, rather than party machines, and I certainly do not want leaders to have the power to select candidates.
I used the word “possibly” about selections of this kind because I cannot prove that such things occurred, and I do not wish to imply any criticism of other hon. Members who may have been selected in strong party seats. That may, of course, occur in other parties as well. It is clearly the case, however, that successive Prime Ministers, before and since, have jealously guarded their powers of patronage. I want to see those powers taken away in the interests of a more vigorous, intensive democracy in this House and outside, and to rein in the excessive power of the Executive.
I think that this is a serious matter, and I hope that, as and when we come to discuss the possible future of the House of Lords, the possibility of a unicameral Parliament and getting rid of this patronage will be raised again.
Gavin Newlands (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (SNP)
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for West Dunbartonshire (Martin John Docherty) for securing the debate and opening it in his own inimitable and passionate style, and to the Backbench Business Committee for allocating time for it.
I am grateful for the opportunity to discuss how and why the second Chamber should be reformed to allow Parliament to work more effectively and democratically for the electorate throughout the United Kingdom. In its current form, the House of Lords can only be seen as an affront to democracy, and it has no place in a modern democratic decision-making process.
Since my election in May, I have become familiar with the strange traditions that surround this place. There are many outdated rules and conventions that range from the slightly odd to the ridiculous, and from trivial matters such as fancy dress to much more important issues like 15-minute votes which stifle the democratic process. However, the most outdated relic with which we have to deal is the unelected second Chamber of peers. What does it say about us that here, in the 21st century, we need to rely on an undemocratic body that includes religious leaders, defeated MPs, party cronies and donors to oversee and scrutinise the work of the democratically elected representatives of this place?
That bloated and out-of-date Chamber is the second largest legislative body in the world, with 821 peers. It is second only to the National People’s Congress in China, which has a similarly undemocratic basis. The number of peers in the House of Lords is growing continually, and after the recent election we saw the Government appointing party loyalists to “serve” there. Kenneth Gibson, a Member of the Scottish Parliament, has obtained figures showing that nearly 75% of those appointed to the Lords since the election are defeated, retired or deselected MPs, or former advisers. The United Kingdom also stands out among other western democracies in giving religious leaders seats in its legislature, as of right.
The Scottish National party does not put forward any individuals to be appointed to serve in the House of Lords. We have a long-standing opposition to that costly, undemocratic and bloated Chamber, and will continue to oppose it at every opportunity. In contrast, all the other parties regularly put forward individuals to serve as peers. In fact, 586 of the serving peers come from one of the main political parties that are represented in this Chamber.
As well as the long-standing democratic outrage, there is the equally long-standing financial cost of having such a ridiculous Chamber. In 2014-15 it cost nearly £95 million to run the House of Lords, with over £20 million going on Lords expenses and allowances. If we contrast that with the £87 million it cost to run the Scottish Parliament, we can easily see why so many of our constituents are royally fed up with the Chamber.
Kwasi Kwarteng (Spelthorne) (Con)
I appreciate that the hon. Gentleman is new to the House. I have been here for five years now and I just want to say that not a single constituent of mine has ever mentioned the House of Lords. How many of the hon. Gentleman’s constituents have brought up this subject?
Gavin Newlands
This point was made earlier on. Although many other issues do come up and this is far from being the No. 1 topic of conversation on the doorstep, it has certainly come up many times, and I am about to come on to the question of public levels of support.
It is clear to most people that the second Chamber needs radical reform if we want to be able to call ourselves a true modern democracy. In a YouGov poll of September 2015 people were given a range of options, and it found that 41% believe the House of Lords should be entirely elected, but crucially only 5% thought that the system was acceptable in its current format.
Even though the recently published Strathclyde review did not comment on the composition of the House of Lords, it provides an ideal opportunity to discuss the future of the House of Lords in more detail. This review was hastily announced by a Government in a petty huff following their humiliating defeat on tax credit cuts in the Lords. It is clear that this review was set up to curb the second Chamber’s ability to hold this Government to account. These issues need to be properly debated, not pushed through hastily without the revising Chamber having full powers of scrutiny.
The UK Government want to muzzle the Lords in the same way as they have already muzzled charities and others who have criticised welfare reform and austerity. I accept that the Government have a majority of MPs in this Chamber; however, they should not confuse that with having a majority of wisdom. On matters of parliamentary procedure and set-up, the Government should be willing to listen to, and work with, those with different views, whether they be other MPs, parties or Parliaments, outside organisations, or indeed the second Chamber.
The SNP does not support the current approach to the House of Lords, how we pay those who attend and the privilege associated with it, but we have to acknowledge that on occasion the Lords can be useful, for example in helping to force the recent tax credits U-turn. The recent Lords review on the impact of the planned cuts to employment and support allowance led by Cross-Bench peers is another example of the kind of invaluable review of policy that we need a second Chamber to take forward.
I do not support an unelected second Chamber and believe fervently that the House of Lords must be abolished. In such an eventuality, there is the option of having a unicameral Parliament, as outlined previously, with a beefed-up Committee structure somewhat like that of the Scottish Parliament, rather than a bicameral set-up. However, for the purposes of this debate I have presumed there is a settled will for having two tiers. Whatever arrangements are made, we must be able to properly scrutinise and hold this Government to account.
I have to be honest and admit to being very conflicted when we are forced to rely on the unelected Chamber to defend the welfare state against the cuts planned by this Conservative Government. It took the House of Lords, as flawed as it is, to tackle the planned cuts. It may well be down to the second Chamber to face the Government again as they seem determined to cut ESA, further penalising disabled people, some of whom lobbied Members in Westminster Hall yesterday.
It highlights the absurdity of the UK’s current constitutional arrangement that we are relying on unelected peers to protect us from some of the worst aspects of this Government’s policy agenda. This situation has caused a lot of anger in Scotland. Why are we forced to rely on unelected peers to defend our fellow citizens and their families? Scotland has seen unprecedented levels of democratic engagement during and after the referendum, so the idea of having to rely on this outdated, out-of-touch and undemocratic institution to defend the welfare state does not sit well with people—and it does not sit well with me.
The second Chamber in its current form is nothing more than an affront to democracy, and the way successive Governments have used the patronage system to reward party loyalists is only the tip of the iceberg. We recently learned that once again friends of Cabinet Ministers have been rewarded for their services with a place in the Lords. The numerous former MPs, special advisers and party aides who were awarded peerages after the election make the House look like a dumping ground or a retirement plan for party cronies. The numerous expenses scandals involving the Members of the second Chamber also do nothing to improve people’s image of the Lords.
Whatever my feelings on this issue, however, I recognise the benefits of having a second Chamber at Westminster with the current Government in office. We do not need to reinvent the wheel. A range of reviews have been carried out into the current set-up, and several organisations have done a lot of work on the issue and come up with several options. Groups such as the Electoral Reform Society and the University College London constitutional unit have carried out in-depth research into the House of Lords and possible alternatives to it. We need a comprehensive and transparent debate on this matter in Government time, but I imagine that this Conservative Government would be reluctant to grant such a debate, judging by the way in which they have rushed through the Strathclyde review.
Labour and the Conservatives have been guilty in the past of failing to follow through on their intentions to reform the House of Lords. The introduction of the Parliament Act 1911 was the first indication of any Government’s intention to reform the Lords, but after 105 years we are still waiting for any real reform to take place. The recent tax credits U-turn shows that the second Chamber has its place, but we need a Chamber that can hold the Government to account and properly scrutinise legislation. At the moment, the House of Lords is just one more outdated Westminster relic that should be consigned to history. Until that happens, and until we have a second Chamber that actually works, I will continue to speak up for change. It is time to ensure that we have a modern and flexible democracy by abolishing the medieval House of Lords. We need to look ahead, not backwards.
Patricia Gibson (North Ayrshire and Arran) (SNP)
When I first wandered into the Chamber today, I thought I had come into the wrong debate, because the Annunciator shows the title of the debate as “House of Lords reform”. Neither my colleagues nor I believe that there can be any reforming of something that is so deeply undemocratic and rotten to the core.
There is no doubt that the general public across the UK are deeply disengaged from and alienated by much of what goes on in this place. It is dangerous for democracy when the very people it is intended to serve lose so much interest and faith in it. We can come up with warm words and grand ideas about how to tackle that, but perhaps the single most important thing we can do to repair some, although not all, of the damaging rift between those of us who serve and those whom we seek to serve would be to hear the calls—a deafening din in Scotland—to abolish the House of Lords. It is no better than a carbuncle on the face of democracy across the United Kingdom, and there is a deep sense of frustration with it across communities in Scotland. It has already been pointed out that this archaic, outdated and medieval and anachronistic institution has no place in any state that purports to be a modern, enlightened and forward-looking democracy. Just to be clear, we do not simply object to the personnel in the House of Lords, although we do; we do not recognise its legitimacy or its right to legislate over the citizens of the UK.
Kelvin Hopkins
I agree very much with what the hon. Lady is saying. The hon. Member for Spelthorne (Kwasi Kwarteng) suggested earlier that this subject never came up on the doorstep. Does she agree that that is because people’s first concerns are jobs, housing, poverty and the health service? However, if people are asked about the House of Lords, many would say that we should abolish it.
Patricia Gibson
I absolutely agree with what the hon. Gentleman has just said. When people talk to us on the doorstep, their priorities are of course job security, benefit sanctions and putting food on the table, but if we scratch the surface, we find that the House of Lords is universally hated, across the UK in my view. There might be small pockets of support among what might be called traditionalists, but for the ordinary man and woman in the street, the House of Lords is an affront to modern democracy.
What I am about to say has already been mentioned earlier in the debate. That is one of the disadvantages of being so far down the speaking list. It is bad enough that the House of Lords is unelected, but it really is quite incredible to think that we are the only state in the world apart from Iran that has clerics pontificating on legislation. That further illustrates the absurdity of this relic.
Despite all the plaudits and feeble attempts to justify the other place, perhaps by those who have pals or cronies there or those who seek to retire there themselves when the voters reject them, it cannot be justified to retain those who are unelected. They have often been actively rejected by the voters. It is arguably worse that some of them have shied away from presenting themselves to the voters at any time at all, despite having political ambitions. That really makes the House of Lords a laughing stock in the eyes of the rest of the world.
Steven Paterson
Does my hon. Friend share my disappointment that this Government, who made their one MP from Scotland Secretary of State, had to aggrandise or ennoble someone and put them in the House of Lords to fulfil the role of deputy—Under-Secretary of State—in the Scotland Office?
Patricia Gibson
Indeed, I wholeheartedly agree with my hon. Friend. I wish to add my disappointment at the fact that the Leader of the Opposition, who considers himself to have very left-wing credentials, has co-opted Members of the House of Lords into his shadow Cabinet. That is a travesty if ever there was one.
I may have been a huge fan of the political novels of Anthony Trollope in my formative years, but I have no wish to live in the 19th century. Madam Deputy Speaker, if you will indulge me for just a moment, I feel that I must share some figures with the House. My hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North (Gavin Newlands) has shamed me into doing this, and marital relations would become strained if I did not mention the fact that the distinguished—certainly he is in my house—MSP for Cunninghame North unearthed some figures that showed that nearly 75% of appointments to the Lords are defeated, retired or deselected MPs or former advisers. After every election, we actually hear the stampede towards the ermine, from this place to that place. If this matter were not so serious, I would be laughing. We have hereditary peers and Church of England bishops—I have often wondered whether that means that God is an Englishman.
Martin John Docherty
Does my hon. Friend agree that if God were a Scotsman, he still would not want a place in the House of Lords?
Patricia Gibson
Absolutely. We have in the Lords cronies, party donors, party-placed men and women—although there are fewer women than men—failed politicians, and retired politicians who are looking for a wee hobby in 2016. Perhaps that was fitting in Anthony Trollope’s time, but, for the love of God—Madam Deputy Speaker, forgive me—let us get a grip. I bet that when we do get rid of this relic, just like the smoking ban we will wonder why it took so long and why we waited so long. No one on these Benches is saying that there are not some folk in the House of Lords who are well intentioned or who have much expertise and skill to offer their country’s legislative process. No one is even saying that we should not enter into a debate about the relative merits of a second Chamber to revise legislation. That is a debate that we could and should have in the future. What we are saying is that anyone who seeks to pontificate over, revise, introduce or influence legislation in our Parliament should be elected by the people whom they purport to serve. It is as simple as that.
I am almost embarrassed to repeat the numbers for China’s National People’s Congress—as I have now made comparisons with China and Iran, I can see that we are in good company with those beacons of democracy.
Alison Thewliss
In his book “The Point of Departure”, the late Member of Parliament for Livingston recalled an incident at a Europe-Africa summit. A president of one African country said that they could not be criticised for failing to introduce full democracy after only 50 years of independence when Britain had failed to get rid of the hereditary principle after 500 years.
Patricia Gibson
As I have said, we are becoming a laughing stock all over the world.
In addition—and this is a very, very serious point—we are told that these are austere times. We cannot afford to help the so-called “benefit scroungers”, but we can afford to help the “strivers”—and the House of Lords is full of them. We must punish families with more than two children, because everyone knows that if a person has a third child, they are clearly trying to get money out of the taxpayer. Yet here we have in the House of Lords what many of my constituents would call a trough. It is costing £94.4 million. This dripping roast, as my constituents would call it, costs more than the Scottish Parliament—elected, accountable, forward-thinking, enlightened and representative of the people—and has even more Members than the European Parliament.
In my view, Clement Attlee was being extremely kind when he described the House of Lords as
“like a glass of champagne that has stood for five days”.
I much prefer the analysis that the best cure for admiring the House of Lords is to go and look at it. When we sanction vulnerable folk on benefits who are five minutes late for an appointment at the jobcentre, when we hammer women born in the 1950s by moving their retirement age further away, when my constituents see Scotland’s budget being squeezed and we hear this being called “a sustainable economic plan”, I and many others ask how that sustainable economic plan impacts on the waste, the affront to democracy, the dripping roast that is the House of Lords—and these people dare to pontificate on Scotland’s constitutional future. Even the Lords themselves hardly take it seriously: attendance is around 60%, although it has improved recently, perhaps because the dripping roast is drying up and much must be suckled in the dying moments of the House.
What a tragedy it is that the 2015 Conservative manifesto indicated that the party did not consider House of Lords reform a priority. No, let us instead prioritise bashing the vulnerable and taking benefits away from the poor. The Strathclyde review was a wasted opportunity —then again, turkeys do not vote for Christmas. They can tinker at the edges all they like; they will never make this affront to democracy palatable enough for the people in my constituency that they see it as having any legitimacy. Let us abolish this carbuncle on the face of democracy. Let us listen to the people. Then, they may begin to listen to what this place has to say. I urge the Minister to screw his courage to the sticking place, to get a grip and to get rid. It is time the UK grew up.
Ronnie Cowan (Inverclyde) (SNP)
When the first automobile engines were developed, they were dirty, unreliable and inefficient, but they evolved and improved. When I want to get from A to B in a timely, reliable and comfortable fashion, I look to use a suitable vehicle. I do not use the 45-year-old project that I have propped up on bricks in my garage. Although there is a place in my heart for the 1967 Sunbeam Alpine with twin Venturi carburettors, a 1725 cc engine with overdrive, a soft top and skinny tyres, I recognise that it does not fulfil the necessary criteria for day-to-day driving. Over the past 100 years, transport, communications, healthcare, education, foreign policy and defence have all evolved and are barely recognisable from their younger selves, yet the House of Lords has not kept pace. Utilising the House of Lords as an effective, efficient second Chamber of this Parliament in this day and age is as practical as using a horse and cart to travel down a busy motorway.
We have continued to govern from a cloistered and privileged place rooted in the past. Parliament should reflect the society it wishes to create. The House of Lords does not reflect any society that I wish to be part of. No doubt, there are capable, compassionate people who wash up in the Lords and who do care, can help to govern and are, in fact, the very people who could and would be democratically elected to a second Chamber, but far too many are there by accident rather than design. We require a second Chamber that reflects the 21st century—a Chamber that represents all religions and none; a Chamber that sits during recognised working hours; a Chamber that is elected and is not inhabited by the fourth generation offspring of long-forgotten generals, admirals and landowning aristocracy; a Chamber where seats cannot be bought for political favour; and a Chamber that is accountable for the behaviour of its Members.
Of course, reform of the House of Lords is not a new idea. The proposal to elect Members directly was first made over 100 years ago. It is probably due for a Second Reading any day now. Much more recently, when the lords a-leaping refused to play ball with the current Government and kicked out the proposals on tax credits, the Government sprang into action and ordered a review—nay, a rapid review, and who better to chair a rapid review of the relationship between the two Houses of Parliament than a former Leader of the House of Lords, a hereditary peer who had never been elected to any Chamber?
The outcome of the rapid review was—hon. Members should not get too excited—a new procedure. This new procedure would
“invite the Commons to think again”.
But Lord Strathclyde did not leave it there. Oh no. With the full force of Parliament he wielded his mighty pen and suggested—yes, suggested—that a review should take place, to be known henceforth as “son of rapid review”. The Government responded and allowed a full debate—in the House of Lords. On the back of this earth-shattering outcome, we all went home for Christmas and forgot all about rapid review and his offspring.
Not surprisingly, MPs continue to ask questions regarding the reform of the House of Lords. As recently as 14 September 2015 the Prime Minister responded to such a question by assuring us that he will be
“looking, with others, at issues such as the size of the Chamber and the retirement of peers.”
By size I presume he meant the number rather than the dimensions, as he is the Prime Minister who has created more peers than any other Prime Minister since the system was overhauled in 1958. I can only presume that he has looked, with others, and decided that we do not have enough.
There are many ways in which the House of Lords could be reformed—a Chamber composed of Members elected directly by the electorate, set terms for elected Members, a significant decrease in the number of Members, a secular Chamber, a fair distribution of seats for the UK’s nations and regions, and measures to encourage a more diverse range of candidates, designed to represent civil society and minorities. There are many possible changes that could improve the House of Lords, but rather like the old joke, “How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb?—One, but the lightbulb has to want to change,” the House of Lords has to want to change, and this place has to want to change it.
Is reform required? Unquestionably. Are there many practical ways in which this could be done? Of course there are. Is there a will? If there is a will, let us hope that it did not bequeath a hereditary peer to the next ermine-robed incumbent in a long line of ermine-robed incumbents. Let us make this will a testament to reform. I appeal to this Government. If they genuinely want change, they should put it on the agenda and make it happen. If not, if they are content with the status quo, they should stand up and say so.
Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)
I commend the Backbench Business Committee for making time for this debate and congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for West Dunbartonshire (Martin John Docherty) on his outstandingly passionate speech. I hope he will not mind my mentioning that he has had other reasons over the past week for earning our warm congratulations and best wishes. We all wish him well in the new life that he is leading. All the best to him.
My hon. Friend started the preparations for the birthday of Robert Burns by quoting from not only the greatest work that Robert Burns ever wrote, but arguably the greatest humanitarian work in the history of literature. I was a bit disappointed because I thought he was going to continue with a section of that song that would almost sum up this debate in a few words:
Ye see yon birkie ca’d a lord,
Wha struts, an’ stares, an’ a’ that,
Tho’ hundreds worship at his word,
He’s but a cuif for a’ that.”
I have to confess, Madam Deputy Speaker, that I was very careful indeed not to check the dictionary before I came in here because I have a nasty feeling that if I had done, I would have realised that the word “cuif” could not be used in the Chamber. I am not entirely sure what it means.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)
Order. The hon. Gentleman should know that as far as I am concerned, anything said by Robert Burns can be used in this Chamber.
Peter Grant
I am very grateful indeed, Madam Deputy Speaker, not least because I intend to quote the bard later on.
I find it astonishing that when we started the process of review of and consultation on how to repair the fabric of this undoubtedly magnificent and historic building, it was based on the assumption that Parliament would continue to operate in exactly the same way as it presumably always has done. May I suggest that a golden opportunity was missed to start to reform the processes of not only this Chamber, but the second Chamber?
Indeed, this might be an opportunity to ask ourselves why we need a second Chamber at all. Other modern, inclusive, democratic countries manage perfectly well with one Chamber. If we think about it, the argument that the second Chamber is good at scrutinising and checking the actions of the first Chamber suggests that we are saying that the first Chamber is not doing its job, so perhaps we should literally get our own House in order and then consider whether we want another House just down the road.
Kelvin Hopkins
I agree with what the hon. Gentleman has said. In my speech I mentioned Sweden, which has abolished its second Chamber. Does he appreciate that Sweden has not become undemocratic as a result? It is as democratic as it was before.
Peter Grant
The hon. Gentleman makes a valid point. Imagine that this Parliament had historically consisted of a single, elected Chamber. Then imagine that someone comes along and suggests that we need a second, unelected Chamber in order to become more democratic. They would be laughed out of court.
I think that there are options available to us if we are prepared to look at having a second elected Chamber, assuming that we need a second Chamber at all. That would give us a chance to elect the House of Lords on a different electoral cycle from that of the House of Commons, in order to avoid the temptation for Governments to time their announcements and legislation with a view to getting re-elected in a few years’ time. It would give us the chance, importantly, to elect a second Chamber by a different electoral method to help even out some of the undoubted inequities that exist in the first-past-the-post system. Yes, the SNP benefited from that system at the general election, but the system was not fair when it worked to our disadvantage, and it is no fairer when it works to our advantage.
Comments were made earlier about the place of the representatives of the Church of England in the House of Lords. I will defend and warmly commend the actions of a number of Churches and faith groups in helping to act as a social conscience of our nations. I think of the important work that various Churches have done in critiquing benefit sanctions and nuclear weapons, or in reminding us that the refugee crisis is about human beings, not burdens on our benefits system. I hope that faith groups, including humanists, who in my view are a legitimate faith group, will continue to do that. However, in this day and age should they have an automatic right to make laws that apply to the majority of citizens in these islands who choose to follow a different interpretation of their faith? I fully appreciate that that will be a difficult conversation for many, but it is one that we really cannot shy away from for very much longer.
It can be argued that there is a benefit in allowing people from all walks of life to play a part in scrutinising legislation, rather than just the relatively narrow “political elite”. There are two problems with that argument. First, the House of Lords is not a representative sample; if anything, it is more dominated by the political elite than the House of Commons. Secondly, the House of Lords does not just scrutinise legislation; it can block it. It can even initiate legislation and ask us to scrutinise it.
As the hon. Member for Luton North (Kelvin Hopkins) mentioned, if there are benefits in having experts who are not Members of Parliament, or lay people, advising and scrutinising legislation, why not set up a system that allows appointed people to scrutinise and examine, but not to legislate or to overrule the will of the democratic Chamber? That is an option that I think is well worth further investigation.
There will be those who appeal to a deity called tradition, as if tradition was always a good thing. I think that tradition is important. Our traditions are what make us who we are, and if we lose sight of who we are, then we really are in trouble. But if we allowed tradition to be the judge of what happens in future, we would still be sending children up chimneys and down mines, and we would still be exploiting slaves from other parts of the world. More topically, if we continued to judge things according to the traditions that applied in this Chamber for so long, the right hon. Gentleman the Secretary of State for Scotland would have had to resign this week. Thank goodness we have moved away from traditions that were indefensible 300 years ago and are no more defensible today.
What does it say about democracy in this Parliament when the only organisation that consistently blocks any kind of proper reform of the House of Lords is also the one with the biggest vested interest in not reforming it? Most people in these islands simply cannot understand that. Even those who are not 100% convinced that the Lords should be abolished cannot understand why, when what is supposedly the sovereign Chamber in Parliament takes a decision to reform the House of Lords, the Lords itself can block any attempts to do so.
Even without legislation that can still be blocked or delayed indefinitely by the Lords itself, party leaders could give commitments that would get rid of some of the potential abuses, which, let us face it, we all know have happened. Although it is not possible to point to an individual appointment and know for certain that it was based on financial transactions, or on a deal made when somebody was still a Member of Parliament, the fact that the system can be vulnerable to that kind of abuse means that in the eyes of the public it very probably has been abused in that way in the past.
Let us look at the three worst abuses, which cause a lot of concern. I invite the Minister not to commit to dealing with them but at least to give serious consideration to how the parties could, right now, start to make the appointment system of the House of Lords a bit more acceptable, pending a proper and rapid review sometime in the next two or three hundred years. First, politicians who get kicked out by the democratic process can come back, arguably better off than they have been here, by being appointed to the House of Lords. Why not ban appointments of former MPs to the House of Lords, at least for a period of five or 10 years afterwards?
Secondly, there seems to be a high correlation between new appointments to the House of Lords and previous donors to party coffers. I am told that about 25% of all recent appointments by the Prime Minister were of people who had made substantial donations to the party coffers. I do not object to people giving money to causes they believe in, but there is an issue there that damages the reputation of this place in the eyes of the public. Why not set a limit and say that anybody who has donated above a certain amount to a political party cannot then take a place in the House of Lords, again possibly with a five-year or 10-year cooling-off period?
Finally, there is an abuse of the system that we have seen here. Page after page of improvements to the Scotland Bill put forward by the people who were elected to represent Scotland were rejected by MPs who have no mandate to represent Scotland, and then promptly reintroduced by those same MPs through their friends in the House of Lords. When the amendments came back to the House of Commons a short time later, the people who had voted against them trooped through the Lobby to vote for them. That is a wrong use of the process. Why not invite the Government to consider the possibility of putting themselves under a voluntary ban whereby they will not introduce major legislation in the Lords unless it has been passed by this Chamber first, and will not introduce large numbers of significant amendments in the Lords when they have had the opportunity to have them considered in this place first?
Even those changes would not go far enough for me, or for a lot of people, but they would at least start to show the people of these islands, in good faith, that the Government are serious about tackling an appointments system, in particular, that has no place in a representative democracy.
Earlier, someone referred to Westminster as the mother of Parliaments. I have heard the story that once, during a hustings debate probably somewhere north of the border, somebody announced in a very pompous manner that he was proud to serve in the mother of all Parliaments, and a voice from the back asked him if he had any idea who the father was. I am not going to say which of those comments I prefer.
I started by quoting the greatest poem, or song, that Robert Burns ever wrote, but I think that the greatest piece of writing by Robert Burns is, surprisingly, not a poem or a song, but a piece of prose:
“Whatever mitigates the woes or increases the happiness of others—this is my criterion of goodness. And whatever injures society at large, or any individual, in it—this is my measure of iniquity.”
The way that Members of the Lords are appointed right now means that we have an iniquitous situation in this Parliament. If the Lords is not prepared to accept fundamental reform, then it can, will and must be abolished.
Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP)
I am delighted to speak on behalf of the SNP in this Backbench Business debate on the House of Lords. I am pleased that my hon. Friend the Member for West Dunbartonshire (Martin John Docherty) secured the debate, although I am rather glad that he spoke some time ago, so that everyone could forget how brilliant his speech was by the time it came round to mine.
As has been mentioned, this issue is not something that gets people exercised. However, I would suggest that, in Scotland, membership of the SNP is not insubstantial. There are quite a few members of the SNP, and at the SNP conference in Aberdeen, at which there were 3,500 delegates, there was a huge cheer when it was suggested that the House of Lords should be abolished. This is something that gets members of the SNP excited. It is something that genuinely gets mentioned on the doorsteps when we knock on doors. It is perhaps not the first thing that comes up—absolutely not—but parliamentary and constitutional reform come up a lot on the doorsteps in Scotland.
I am particularly pleased that this debate follows the one on space policy, because this place—these Houses of Parliament—is in another world from the one I normally inhabit. I have spoken to people previously about why they should dislike the House of Lords. Within the SNP and among people I have spoken to, there is a visceral, immediate dislike of the House of Lords, but people should not dislike it because the Lords swan along in ermine robes; they should dislike it because of the level of power that the House of Lords has.
This is not a way to run a democracy. Nobody creating a democratic system afresh would come up with the undemocratic, unwieldy and unaccountable second Chamber that we have. The hon. Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers) mentioned that the UK muddles along, and that is what has happened. It has happened with parliamentary reform and, as I will mention a little later, with reform of the Standing Orders in this place as well.
This is bicameralism at its worst. Of the 192 parliaments recognised by the Inter-Parliamentary Union, 77 are bicameral and only the UK, Belgium, Zimbabwe and Lesotho have hereditary legislators. Belgium does not really count, though, because its hereditary legislators are related to the monarch and do not vote on anything, so the wonderful United Kingdom—proud defender of democracy; the mother of parliaments—is a member of a very select group that allows landed gentry to make law for our countries. Zimbabwe and Lesotho and us—there is nothing good about this situation.
I would like to take Members back to 1997. It is some time ago now, and things have changed a fair bit since then: I was still in primary school, Hanson were topping the charts with “MMMBop” and the Labour party was popular in Scotland. The Labour manifesto in 1997 said:
“The House of Lords must be reformed…the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords will be ended by statute.”
Despite a massive majority for the Labour party in 1997 and a clear manifesto commitment to rid our democratic system of hereditary peers, nearly 20 years on we still have 92 of them—92 Lords who are allowed to make legislation because their family owned land.
I was talking to a peer recently about hereditary peerages. The defence mentioned was that there was a hereditary peer who could trace her family back 400 years. The nature of humankind is that all our families can be traced back 400 years; otherwise, we would not be here. It is ridiculous, patronising and wrong to argue that a tithe paid to a monarch hundreds of years ago should qualify any individual to make legislation. The Conservative Government make all sorts of claims about working hard being the best way to get on in life and achieve a high-salary job, for example. There is a wilful downplaying of the inbuilt advantage accorded to those whose families owned large country estates. Many of those estates were won by force and held by oppression. There is not a meritocracy in these islands. Working hard does not necessarily get anyone anywhere; where they are born and who their family are does.
Having said that and made clear my absolute disagreement with any system that accords a higher level of importance to anyone simply because of an accident of birth, I want to make clear my absolute lack of regard for the appointments system for life peers. Cross-Bench peers tell me how rigorous the process is for appointing them. I agree that it is thorough and they have to make major commitments to how much time they are going to spend in the House of Lords. However, there is no compulsion on the Prime Minister to ensure that non-Cross-Bench peers—or even Cross-Bench peers, for that matter—are appointed in that way. There is also no limit on the size of the Chamber, and one of the best ways to receive an excellent salary for life is to donate money to either the Conservative or Labour parties and be appointed to the House of Lords.
I want to expand on what my hon. Friends the Members for North Ayrshire and Arran (Patricia Gibson), for Paisley and Renfrewshire North (Gavin Newlands) and for Glenrothes (Peter Grant) have said about former parliamentarians. Since 1997, 152 former parliamentarians have been ennobled. Twenty of them were given peerages within five years of losing an election to the House of Commons. So within five years of being rejected by the electorate, they were given a seat in the other House to make legislation for the people who had rejected them. It is a ridiculous situation.
The reforms enacted in 1999—which I admit were good and took us a step along the way, but nowhere near far enough—did have an effect on the behaviour of the House of Lords, including on the turnout figures. However, they also made the House of Lords more powerful, because peers felt that they had more of a right to be there and to make decisions about legislation, but that is not the case. The House of Lords is still an unelected legislature and it should not be making laws for this country. There is no accountability. Members of the public cannot access the Lords—they do not know who they are. Peers are out of touch. There is no compulsion on them to listen to people in the general community. What they learn about the general community is often garnered from newspapers, and we all know that they are not a true reflection of society.
The House of Lords is also massively lacking in diversity, which has been mentioned by various Members. Only 26% of peers are female, which is even worse than the figure for this place. The record in the House of Commons is deplorable, but the record in the House of Lords is much worse. In June 2015 there were more people who had been peers for more than 30 years than there were peers under the age of 50, and there were only two peers under 40 among the entire 800-odd Members of the House of Lords. That compares hugely unfavourably with elected politics in the UK. It does not constitute representative democracy.
The youngest age at which a current Member of the House of Lords received a life peerage was 32. Although I fundamentally disagree with appointments for life, it is bizarre that half of our legislature should exclude anyone who I would class as young. It is no wonder that, as a result, young people do not trust the democratic system. They look at this place and they see a bunch of old people who they cannot relate to. If we look at elected Members as a whole, we will see that we are still woefully unrepresentative.
As has been said, some peers, particularly Cross Benchers, work very hard, but that cannot be used to legitimise the existence of the second Chamber, which is incredibly expensive. Some Cross Benchers have been, and continue to be, very active in their areas of work and fields of expertise, but there is no check on that. As the hon. Member for South West Wiltshire (Dr Murrison) has said, people become ex-experts—their expertise goes away—very quickly.
The House of Commons has utterly failed to amend or rewrite the Parliament Acts to make any meaningful change to the House of Lords, which has not happened for the best part of 20 years. Actually, we have not made much change to the powers of the House of Lords since the Parliament Act 1911 and, subsequently, the Parliament Act 1949, which just tinkered with it. As I have said on previous occasions, I do not believe that the procedures of the House of Commons are fit for purpose. Given the opportunity, I would tear up the Standing Orders and start again, dramatically reducing the Executive privilege accorded to the Government of the day, thus requiring them to use their majority far more often.
The situation in the House of Lords is even worse. It is all done on the basis of convention. The Government got into such a pickle over tax credits because there is a convention—there is nothing in legislation—that the House of Lords does not vote on such things. On paper, the House of Lords is an incredibly powerful institution, and that is something we need to change.
The House of Lords is not a revising second Chamber. Nobody who makes the case for a revising second Chamber can hold up the House of Lords as the place that can revise legislation. It can still introduce primary legislation. It is not elected, but it can introduce legislation on behalf of the people of this country. It should not do so.
Martin Vickers
The hon. Lady is making a powerful speech. As she knows from mine, I share her ambition to do away with an unelected second Chamber. However, can she explain her party’s support for membership of the European Union, where real power lies with the unelected European Commission? The European Parliament is really a sideshow.
Kirsty Blackman
The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point, which I am sure will be discussed at length during European debates. Today, however, we are discussing the House of Lords, which is something that we have the power to change. Members of this place could pass a new Parliament Act. Elected Members have the ability to make mass changes to the House of Lords, and we should make big changes to it.
Peter Grant
Does my hon. Friend agree that it would be beneficial to introduce some of the European Parliament and European Commission’s ways of working to this place? For example, the European Parliament has the power to sack the entire European Commission. Does she support giving the House of Commons the right to sack the entire House of Lords? I think that is what the hon. Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers) was referring to.
Kirsty Blackman
I would be delighted if the House of Commons had the ability to sack the entire House of Lords. In fact, I think the Conservative Government would have been quite keen to sack the entire House of Lords earlier in the Session.
Martin Vickers
I just remind the hon. Lady and her colleagues that this Chamber has the power to sack the Government.
Kirsty Blackman
I am coming to the end of my speech, so I will now wrap up. The power of the House of Lords is dramatically greater than it should be. It has the ability to appoint people who have been rejected at the ballot box. People troop into that House rubbing their hands with glee at the untaxed £45,000 a year they can now earn. The expenses system and the payments system for the House of Lords—getting £300 day, which is classed as an allowance, and is not taxed—are abominable. That should not be happening.
The composition of the House of Lords is ridiculous. It is unrepresentative, and in no circumstances should it include hereditary peers and those appointed by religious organisations, whether from the Church of England or of any other religious organisation. I do not think there is any place for religious appointments in a legislative system. Lifetime appointments to any legislature are undemocratic. There are peers sitting there who have been peers for 70 years, which is an incredible length of time. Some of them are no longer active, but they still have the right to troop into the House and vote. How good is a peer at voting if they have been a peer for 70 years? They have a length of experience behind them—fair enough—but most people want to sit with their feet up and watch TV by the time they get to such an age. Appointments for high heijins and party donors are wrong and should not be happening.
The House of Lords is beyond reform. People have tried to reform it in the past, but it is still not an elected, accountable second Chamber. We need to abolish it.
Wayne David (Caerphilly) (Lab)
I genuinely congratulate the hon. Member for West Dunbartonshire (Martin John Docherty) on opening the debate and on his very colourful and well-informed speech. I must say that many good points have been made. I emphasise the point made by the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Patricia Gibson), which is that we must have a debate. It is very important to recognise the complexity and difficulty of reform, and we must begin by having an honest debate.
I congratulate Scottish National party Members on the consistency and uniformity of their arguments, by and large. They showed discipline. The number of times I heard reference to China’s National People’s Congress, I would not like to say. The hon. Member for Inverclyde (Ronnie Cowan) did talk about reform, rather than abolition. I welcome that because it is healthy to have a difference of emphasis within a political group, if not a complete difference.
Few people would genuinely say that our parliamentary system does not need fundamental change. It is important to remember that the biggest change to the composition of the second Chamber came under a Labour Government, when we secured the abolition of most of the hereditary peers. That was the start of a reform that we must complete as soon as is practicable, and it must be a radical reform. I say radical reform, rather than abolition of the second Chamber, because I am not convinced that we should move away from a bicameral parliamentary system.
Kelvin Hopkins
Clearly we have a difference of view on this. My hon. Friend says that there has not been enough discussion about reform. There has been a lot of talk about reform, but there has not been much of a debate about the alternative of having a unicameral Parliament. That is what I want to see.
Wayne David
I respect my hon. Friend’s view. That is one of the discussions that we need to have in this Chamber. He is perfectly right that we need to discuss not just how reform might be brought about, but whether we even need a second Chamber. I am of the view, although I am willing to take part in a debate, that we should have a bicameral system. There is a need for a second Chamber to scrutinise, modify, suggest amendments to and delay legislation, although I think that legislation should always emanate from this House.
It is deplorable that we are seeing two sustained attempts not to introduce more democracy into the second Chamber, but to exercise control over the second Chamber’s ability to hold the Executive to account. It is important to remember that this Government have appointed more Conservative peers than Margaret Thatcher did in her 11 years as Prime Minister. There is also a debate taking place about Lord Strathclyde’s report, which I would argue is all about undermining the ability of the other place to hold the Government to account.
We know why the Government are trying to control and weaken the Lords. It is not because they believe in democracy or because they have accepted the arguments of the SNP, but because they do not like to be scrutinised or challenged, no matter where it comes from. The issue is not the primacy of the House of Commons over the House of Lords; this is about the Government trying to minimise challenge and push aside opposition.
In the last Parliament, a great deal of time and effort was spent on debating reform of the House of Lords. Sadly, it came to nothing because the Liberal Democrats refused to have a constructive dialogue with reformers on the Opposition Benches and because—it is important to remember this—the Prime Minister did not deliver on his promise and Conservative Back Benchers defended the status quo.
What is needed now is a nationwide debate about the kind of democracy we need for the 21st century. The 19th-century, highly centralised nation state based on London is surely a thing of the past. Decentralisation must be the order of the day, not just to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but to the regions, cities and localities of England. There is therefore a strong case for a second Chamber—call it a senate if you like—made up of representatives of the nations and regions of the UK, possibly with people drawn from local government as well. Such a second Chamber might be made up of indirectly elected representatives or directly elected representatives. It would have the advantage of providing informed scrutiny by individuals drawn from all parts of the United Kingdom. It is a shame that most Members of the other place are either drawn from, or have a focus on, London and south-east England. That cannot be acceptable.
When we talk about fundamental change to our constitution, it is important to remember three things. First, there must be debate and dialogue between all political parties and, if possible, a high degree of consensus about what kind of changes are needed. If it is believed that political advantage is a motive behind any constitutional change, that change will not work effectively and will ultimately fail. Secondly, it is important not to see Lords reform in isolation from other changes that are needed for our democracy. I have already referred to devolution, but I believe that in our country there is a widespread thirst for popular engagement. No longer are people prepared simply to sit back and allow those who are unelected to make important decisions. It is therefore important to have a broad perspective when considering changes to our democracy.
Thirdly, we must not believe that there can be a top-down approach towards political reform, or that we are the repository of all knowledge on these matters. The people of our country need to be fully engaged in the debate on democratic renewal, and that is why we believe that there needs to be a people’s constitutional convention. Such a convention ought not to be made up of the great and good; rather, it should draw in people from all walks of life and all parts of the country. It must be focused in its discussions, and it must also inspire and enthuse people so that we give our democracy fresh life and inspiration.
The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (John Penrose)
I add my congratulations to the hon. Member for West Dunbartonshire (Martin John Docherty) on securing this debate, and I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting it. I think he said that it was his beginners plea when he made his case, but he knocked any sense of being a beginner into a cocked hat with his speech. He hoped that we would forgive his tendency for Celtic hyperventilation—I think that was the phrase he used. He was also kind enough to mention that he counted Wales and certainly Cornwall as part of the Celtic fringe. I may not represent Cornwall but I have a Cornish name, so I am glad to hear that he would include me in that group. I will try not to hyperventilate either, and the hon. Gentleman made a powerful and good case.
We also had the opportunity to compare and contrast our debate with the previous debate on space policy, which contained many quotes from David Bowie. In this debate we had many quotes from Robbie Burns. I will leave Members here present and those reading Hansard later to come to their own conclusions about the relative merits of those two bards, one ancient, one modern. I suspect that they will both be clasped firmly to different people’s hearts during this debate.
Let me echo a point made by a number of colleagues during the debate and ask: where on earth are the Liberal Democrats? Where have they got to?
John Penrose
Many of them are in the House of Lords. They are reduced to a small number of MPs, and none of them is here today. I regard that as a real tragedy because in the last Parliament, and in previous Parliaments, they—they have not been the only ones—were pressing the case for reform of the Lords and other constitutional reform. All of a sudden, when they are hugely over-represented in the House of Lords relative to their representation in this House, they are nowhere to be seen. They are Macavity’s cat when it comes to reform of the Lords and this debate. That is a tragedy, and people will draw their own conclusions about their relative levels of interest.
The hon. Member for West Dunbartonshire encapsulated a series of criticisms about the Lords, which have been widely echoed by many Members. I will not go through them all in huge detail when summing up the debate, but broadly speaking he made the point in a variety of different ways that the level of democratic legitimacy in the House of Lords is incredibly low. The only group that are elected are the 92 hereditary peers, and they are elected from an electoral college.
There are other criticisms—that the House of Lords is very large, and the bishops and hereditaries should not be there—that buttress the central charge of a lack of legitimacy and democratic principle in the Lords as it is currently constituted. I agree and that is reflected in my personal voting record on the issue. The hon. Member for Luton North (Kelvin Hopkins) mentioned the series of votes on the issue in the 2005 Parliament. It was my first Parliament and I voted consistently for anything that would increase the level of democratic involvement in the House of Lords. In the 2010 Parliament, we had an incredibly long and drawn-out attempt to reform the House of Lords. I do not think that anyone could claim that there was not a determined attempt—probably the most determined attempt for several generations—to reform the House of Lords and to make it more democratically legitimate. I voted consistently throughout for those reforms, even though the form of election might not necessarily have been to everybody’s taste—even mine. They were a step in the right direction, however, or at least they would have been had they been passed. I cannot argue, therefore, either from a personal or Government point of view, that the central charge is not valid. That is why the Conservative party’s election manifesto said we remain committed in principle to reform. Our approach is not driven by an opposition to the central charge made by the hon. Member for West Dunbartonshire and echoed by many other hon. Members today.
Kelvin Hopkins
The Minister talks about making the House of Lords more democratic, which is second-best to abolition. How will he deal with the real problem: prime ministerial patronage?
John Penrose
If I can ask the hon. Gentleman to hold his horses, I hope to come back to that later. I am sure he will pick me up on that if I do not address it sufficiently.
At this point, I should declare a small, non-financial family interest. A couple of years ago, my wife was appointed to the House of Lords. When she was appointed, I had to point out to her that I had a long track record of voting multiple times to abolish her, and anybody like her, from the House of Lords in due course. She has forgiven me and I am sure the House will be delighted to hear that relations over the family breakfast table are not too strained. However, I can reassure hon. Members that my personal views have not changed, despite the family involvement. Given the chance, I would vote to make them far more democratically legitimate.
I started by assuming, I think not necessarily entirely correctly, that the SNP was exclusively and purely a unicameralist party. I think we have heard support for that view during the debate from many SNP Members, the hon. Member for Luton North and, to some degree, my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers). I hope I am not putting words in anybody’s mouth, but I think I heard some degree of qualified willingness to at least consider a more democratically legitimate second Chamber as an alternative to the perhaps favoured unicameralist view.
Peter Grant
Just to clarify that point, the view of the SNP and the Scottish Government was that, had we won the referendum last year, we would not have needed a second Chamber in Scotland because the Scottish Parliament works effectively. This Parliament, in the view of the SNP, is not working effectively and so a second Chamber is beneficial, but it must be democratically elected.
John Penrose
That is very helpful in clarifying the SNP’s view and it leads me to talk about opportunities for reform. I, and the Government, would certainly favour keeping a second Chamber and making it more effective if the opportunity ever presented itself. There are huge advantages to having an effective second Chamber here. I say that because often the level of scrutiny imposed on any Government by the second Chamber is not a comfortable experience. It has not always been a comfortable experience for previous Labour, Conservative or even coalition Governments. Even though it is not necessarily easy or comfortable—on occasions it can be incredibly frustrating—I believe it is democratically justified and desirable, and that it results, at least in Westminster, in better law. I went along to the Lords yesterday and stood at the Bar, listening to its debate on the Strathclyde review. I challenge anybody to say it was not a high-quality and capable discussion, conducted at a high level and very clearly expressed. It has a great deal to offer, regardless of its legitimacy, and our democracy would be the poorer without a revising second Chamber.
As colleagues on both sides have said, however, we need to be careful about the Lords’ powers and composition. The problem is agreeing not on the need for reform but on how we do it. As the hon. Member for Stirling (Steven Paterson) said, we should be discussing not whether change is needed but what kind of change could be achieved. That is where we all come up against a serious and fundamental practical problem. While many people agree that some kind of reform and improved democratic legitimacy for the upper House is vital, agreeing on its form and creating a democratic consensus about what it should look like—as opposed simply to agreeing that there should be something—is a great deal harder. And that is what politics is all about; it is about forging the necessary democratic consensus. I think the hon. Member for Caerphilly (Wayne David) mentioned the need for a democratic debate.
We need to forge a democratic consensus not on the need for change but on the form it should take. That is where the previous attempt in the last Parliament came unstuck. There were far too many competing recipes for what the revised House of Lords might look like and a plethora of different approaches. It came unstuck not because of a lack of ideas but because there were too many ideas and not enough people agreed on any one of them, and therefore the opponents of reform won through.
Wayne David
I agree with the Minister. Do we not need to learn the lesson that, if any good fundamental reform is to take place successfully, there must be cross-party dialogue and debate and an attempt to find consensus across the House?
John Penrose
I would broaden out that point. It is hugely helpful, although not essential, for any constitutional change to be made with some cross-party agreement, if only because—this is one of the fundamental points of Britain’s unwritten constitution—people need to be happy not just with how things work when they are in government but when the shoe is on the other foot and they are in opposition, because they need to bear it in mind that at some point they might not be in government. Good Governments and good Oppositions remember that point and proceed with caution and agreement wherever possible. It is not always possible, but when it can be done, it should be.
The challenge is not to agree that change is necessary but to define precisely what form it should take and to form a sufficiently large consensus to overcome the forces of inertia, which, if we are not careful, naturally tend to win—I do not know whether it is inertia or entropy, but either way, it is what happened last time.
Alison Thewliss
Will the Minister agree that part of the difficulty in arriving at a consensus is the many vested interests served by the Lords and the history of the appointees to it? It would be useful to bring in members of the public to open up the outlook on what a new constitutional arrangement might be.
John Penrose
That is one of the principles that underlie the support of the many people who are in favour of an increase in democratic legitimacy. With a democratically elected second Chamber, it is much, much harder for the forces of reaction and special interests to win through, because the antidote to most of those things is normally greater democratic involvement. So I think the hon. Lady’s question enclosed its own answer, if I can put it that way; I certainly support her point.
Our problem therefore is choosing—not if, but how. There are currently too many different forms of possible election that could be looked at. There is the alternative vote, for example, and dozens of different forms of proportional representation. I regularly get letters from people who are cleaving to one or more of dozens of different kinds of electoral system. I am not sure what the democratic consensus would be on which one would be right, but I know that without a democratic consensus on choosing one, we will not be able to win the argument and get it done.
My hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) interestingly suggested something based on occupation rather than on geographical constituencies, and all these ideas are possible. They would all create alternative franchises that would not clash directly with the one used for this Chamber. Finding a non-clashing democratic mandate would be an advantage, but until such a thing can be done, we are inevitably on the back foot.
Kirsty Blackman
I hope the Minister is not saying that because it is so difficult, we should not do it. As the hon. Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers) suggested, now might be a good time for this Conservative Government to think about taking this forward. If hardly any Members keen to maintain the House of Lords in its current form are willing to pitch up, it clearly means that there is an appetite for reform. Now is the time.
John Penrose
The hon. Lady made a series of powerful points, many of which I agreed with, but on that particular one I am respectfully going to disagree with her for a couple of reasons. We have heard from a number of different sides that the level of unprompted interest in the Dog and Duck in reform of the House of Lords is remarkably low. It might be quite high if we went along to the Bishops Bar, but that is probably the only bar in the entire country where that topic of conversation would come up naturally. Members of all parties are right to say that, when prompted, many people will agree that it is important to reform the Lords in some way. Without that prompt, however, it ranks a long way down people’s lists of priorities.
We need to form and forge a democratic consensus, but it is difficult for all of us to do so when the issue is low down the list of priorities because other things are more urgent, more immediate or loom larger. It would be wrong to overstate the appetite for reform and wrong to ignore the practical difficulties of achieving it. I do not want to assume that because something is desirable but not simple, it can therefore be wished for and produced with a wave of a magic wand. We all understand, as elected politicians, how hard this is, and we can all see the trail of failed attempts to make big reform changes. We have seen how difficult equally talented politicians, some of them extremely talented politicians, have found it.
That said, there is a possibility for smaller steps to be made. In the last Parliament, there was a series of small reforms. I do not want to let anyone get the impression that we think that small reforms are a substitute for more thoroughgoing things, but in many cases they represent progress in the right direction. It would wrong to let the best be the enemy of the good. When in the last Parliament, the House of Lords chose to change the rules on the retirement of its Members, this House agreed with it and it was a step in the right direction.
Many other issues are currently being discussed in the House of Lords, led by senior parliamentarians at that end of the building, including further reduction of the size of the House of Lords, looking at retirement ages and doing all sorts of other things. Those might not be to everybody’s taste as a complete answer—many certainly do not deal with the point about democratic legitimacy—but they are steps in the right direction, and I think we should encourage their Lordships to proceed with them. We must not be guilty of saying that just because it does not fulfil our perfect world scenario, we should not give it at least the time of day.
I encourage House of Lords Members as well as hon. Members here present and others elsewhere—anybody who is interested—to try to address the question of how to achieve greater democratic legitimacy. What kind of franchise can be chosen that will not clash with the franchise of this Chamber? What levels of powers do we think should be approved for the upper Chamber?
Incidentally, there has been some criticism of the Strathclyde review today. Let me gently suggest to those who are critical that, while they may wish that the review had a broader mandate, at its heart is the aim of making the primacy of the elected House apply. I hope that Members can at least agree that that is desirable. The outcome will of course depend on which of the options are followed, but the current formulation would move us towards a much more regularised and clearly defined system of powers between this House and the upper House. A series of options are being considered in respect of the length of stay of those who are currently in the upper House, under the existing system, along with such matters as retirement ages. All those things are vital, but if we are to have reform, I urge all Members who are present today to try to create a democratic debate, and perhaps form a democratic consensus, with the aim of reaching a conclusion.
I want to give the hon. Member for West Dunbartonshire a chance to sum up the debate for a couple of minutes—and perhaps to give us a little bit more Robbie Burns; I do not know—so I shall do something unusual for a politician, and sit down and keep quiet. I thank everyone who took part in the debate for their useful and thoughtful contributions. I should also respond to some of the comments made by the hon. Member for Glenrothes (Peter Grant), because he asked me particularly to do so. He made a number of specific suggestions about people who might or might not be appointed to the House of Lords. I will take that as a submission, and will relay it to those in the House of Lords so that they can consider it as part of their current deliberations.
I look forward to hearing the hon. Member for West Dunbartonshire sum up the debate.
Martin John Docherty
I thank the Minister for participating in the debate, and I thank the hon. Member for Caerphilly (Wayne David) for informing the House about how we can make progress in the reform of an upper Chamber. I should make it clear, however, that for me and for my fellow SNP Members, the mandate from the constituencies of Scotland is that the reform must begin with the abolition of an unelected, unaccountable peerage which can generate legislation in that other place.
I also thank the hon. Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers), the hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Liz Saville Roberts)—I managed to say that very quickly—my hon. Friends the Members for Paisley and Renfrewshire South (Mhairi Black), for North Ayrshire and Arran (Patricia Gibson), and for Inverclyde (Ronnie Cowan), the hon. Member for Luton North (Kelvin Hopkins), who is no longer in the Chamber, my hon. Friend the Member for Stirling (Steven Paterson), who I know is about to leave the Chamber to go home, and my hon. Friend the Member for Glenrothes (Peter Grant). I especially thank my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman), who did much of the groundwork for the debate.
Let me now place before the Minister a couple of caveats on reform. The appointment of ex-Members of this place should be forbidden for a minimum of 10 years. It is abhorrent that those who are thrown out of public office by the electorate can be duly thrown into the upper Chamber. The 26 archbishops and bishops of the Church of England should be removed immediately and prevented from debating the legislation of the civic and religious life of Scotland.
John Penrose
Will the hon. Gentleman clarify his point about former MPs? Would he draw any distinction between those who were defeated and those who have retired?
Martin John Docherty
No.
Members of the House of Lords should be automatically forced to retire by the age of 80. Even members of the Roman Curia are forced to retire as cardinals of the Roman Church. Fundamental, real change requires abolition.
This is an issue in Scotland. It may not be seen as an issue in the rest of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland—and I know that the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) would have been present if he could have been—but to us it is an issue of inequality that is at the heart of our liberal democracy. I reject the House of Lords, because my constituents told me to reject it—for they are nothing, at that other end of the Corridor, but a bunch of sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beasties, and their time is up.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered House of Lords reform,
Hinkley C Connection Project
(8 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
James Heappey (Wells) (Con)
I am grateful for the opportunity to raise this important local issue in the Chamber today. I should start by saying that, while I am very critical indeed of the plans for connecting Hinkley C to the national grid, my support for Hinkley C itself is unwavering. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose)—who has just done a fine job at the Dispatch Box and is leaving the Chamber—my right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox) and my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgwater and West Somerset (Mr Liddell-Grainger), who have been engaged in the battle over these pylons for many years, as have my predecessors as the Member for Wells. I also congratulate, and pay tribute to, the councils and parish councils, particularly Mark, Badgworth and Biddisham, the Allertons and Cross and Compton Bishop parish councils, which have all worked tirelessly to represent the views of their parishioners over the past seven years so that their objections can be known. Equally, I congratulate the campaign groups and the fantastic public engagement that has meant that church hall and village hall after church hall and village hall have been filled with people wanting to make very clear their views on this pylon line.
With the announcement looming, therefore, I wanted to raise today a few issues that I think are yet to be resolved. I know there are certain constraints on the Minister given that the Department acts in a quasi-judicial role in this decision, but I hope she will be able to consider the issues I raise, and talk about the technical issues even if not in specific reference to the Hinkley Connection project itself. I am also grateful for the response I have had from my noble Friend Lord Bourne to the letter I wrote to the Secretary of State last week, in which he has assured me that the representations that have been made to the Department since the conclusion of the planning inspector inquiry—and which I assume will be included—will be considered.
My remarks will fall into three areas: first, Government policy as I see it; secondly, the fact that these pylons are untested and unwanted; and thirdly the importance of visual amenity and the impact that damaging that would have on our local economy.
It is clear from the Secretary of State’s recent speech which reset the Government’s energy policy that there is enthusiasm for marine energy generation. Offshore wind is the method that has been mentioned most keenly, but I think I am right in saying that there is an excitement for the opportunities presented by tidal and wave technologies, provided that—the Minister will nod, I am sure—they do not ask for too much money in delivering them. None the less, if marine energy generation is to be a key part of the Government’s vision for the renewables sector in the future, it stands to reason, given the fantastic natural resource in the Bristol channel and the Severn estuary waiting to be harnessed by these technologies, that we might put in place a transmission infrastructure now that will service everything that might come in the future, rather than just Hinkley Point itself.
Yesterday and the day before I was with the Select Committee on Energy and Climate Change on a trip to Brussels, and although the “team Juncker” banners around the place were not too welcome to these Eurosceptic eyes, our meeting with Vice-President Šefcovic, who is responsible for energy union, was very refreshing indeed. He made some very interesting points about the plans that the EU and the Governments of the UK, the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, France and Germany have for a North sea energy grid. If we are looking at putting infrastructure in place under the North sea to facilitate marine generation and interconnection between the different countries that surround the North sea, why should it be so difficult to do so in the Bristol channel and the Severn estuary?
James Heappey
If Vice-President Šefcovic speaks with such conviction about the opportunities for subsea interconnection and transmission in the North sea, I do not see why it should be such a leap for National Grid to become excited about it elsewhere. Indeed, National Grid shares my enthusiasm and that of the Government for marine energy generation schemes. In its “Future Energy Scenarios” document, it talks keenly about the opportunities for tidal and wave energy, and indeed for offshore wind off the south-west of England and the south Walian coast and out into the Irish sea.
There is a disparity in the timelines that National Grid has used in its submissions for this planning application. It has done a cost-benefit analysis over 30 years, as far as I can tell, yet its “Future Energy Scenarios” document clearly sets out the opportunities for tidal and wave energy generation over the next three, four, five and six decades, so that extends to 60 years. The transmission line itself will extend far beyond that, so if we apply National Grid’s own policy, there will be an opportunity to see the cost of connecting Hinkley C to the grid not just as a cost but as an investment because it aggregates the cost across all that might come in the future. Elsewhere, National Grid has been much more on the front foot with regard to undersea solutions. It has spent £1.1 billion connecting Scotland to England through the western link, which includes converter stations at either end, of the kind that it says are too expensive to construct in Somerset.
Ludicrously, National Grid also has a visual impact provision project, which is using £500 million of bill payers’ money to take down existing pylons and put the cables underground, yet this project will put up new pylons on equally sensitive landscapes. I have looked at the plans, particularly those for the Dorset area of outstanding natural beauty, and it is clear that there are pylons outside that AONB that will be removed because they can be clearly seen from within the AONB. That will also apply in the Mendips. The cables will go underground through the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Weston-super-Mare, but anyone who sweats their way up to the top of the Mendips will see pylons stretching for miles in every direction.
Then there is interconnection. I am going to be slightly cynical and suggest that National Grid’s rampant enthusiasm for interconnection—which is under the sea—compared with its utter disdain for going under the sea in the Bristol channel, might have something to do with the opportunity to raise revenue from interconnection. I sincerely hope that that is not the case, but I have an inkling that National Grid applies its enthusiasm for interconnection using undersea technologies only when there is a revenue-raising opportunity attached to it.
As far as I can see, there is also an inconsistency in the existing legislation, which needs updating. The Communications Act 2003 clearly states that when a mobile phone mast is put up anew, there is a statutory requirement for the visual amenity to be considered. In the legislation governing the siting of pylons, however, there is no such provision. We just have the out-of-date Holford rules, which I will come to in a second. What we have seen in the mobile phone industry is that, because there is a statutory requirement to consider visual amenity, there has been a very clear effort to camouflage masts. Masts have got smaller and smaller, and more is spent on where they are sited, but, as far as I can tell, National Grid has not shown the same effort.
Let me turn now to the Holford rules. Rather than going through all of them, I will draw out a couple of the key points. The Holford rules are guidelines, and it is important that we note that. The siting of pylons comes down to guidelines, but the siting of mobile phone masts comes down to legislation. Rule 1 of the Holford rules says:
“Avoid altogether, if possible, the major areas of highest amenity value”.
That includes areas of outstanding natural beauty. I have said already that I see a clear inconsistency in putting pylons underground through the AONB, but not necessarily through the land that immediately abuts it, no matter how important that might be to the overall effect of the AONB.
Rule 2 says:
“Avoid smaller areas of high amenity value, or scientific interests by deviation”.
It clearly sets out the importance of missing out sites of special scientific interest. The Somerset levels have many areas that have been so designated.
Rule 4 states:
“Choose tree and hill backgrounds in preference to sky backgrounds”.
But we are talking about the Somerset levels here; there are no hills and there are no trees. Rule 5 says:
“Prefer moderately open valleys with woods”.
The same applies.
Rule 6 says:
“In country which is flat and sparsely planted”
we should keep high voltage lines to a minimum as far as possible so as to avoid a “concentration or ‘wirescape’.” As other transmission lines are in close proximity to the new line, and the wires in the new pylons are more concentrated, that rule simply cannot apply and is another flaw in National Grid’s plans.
If the decision next week is not to our liking in Somerset, I wonder whether the Energy Bill, which will come forward shortly, might be an opportunity for my right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox) and I to reintroduce the amendment that he proposed to the previous Energy Bill that sought to insert in that legislation the same provision for pylons as currently exists for mobile phone masts. Will the Government consider working with us on that, as that would give us an opportunity retrospectively to use that legislation to amend the decision next week if it is not to our liking in Somerset?
I wish to talk about the T-pylon. Although National Grid is very chuffed with it, we in Somerset have real concerns about it. The Minister’s constituency is not too far from the National Grid’s test centre in Nottinghamshire. It is a beautiful part of the world. With its rolling hills, it is quintessentially rural England. This is where National Grid has tested the T-pylons. I have seen photos of them, and I have seen videos on National Grid’s website bragging about their brilliance. My observation is that the terrain looked a whole lot more hilly and a whole lot more dry than the flat, wet Somerset levels.
I am very concerned indeed about whether these pylons are ready to be employed under tension on a very wet landscape with a very high water table and where the weather will bring all sorts on pressures for them. There is also a danger that if they require additional concrete, it could affect the ability of that land to drain, and could therefore cause flooding. Equally, if it is decided that more concrete is not needed and if the sort of floods we saw in the winter of 2013-14 arrive so that the foundations of the pylons are under water for anything up to two months, will the foundations stand the test of that flood and remain solid; or are we risking leaving our newest nuclear power station without a grid connection because of the inappropriateness of the design?
The security of these pylons is another issue. Any number of terrorist organisations would delight in the opportunity to hit our infrastructure, and taking out a pylon might seem a reasonably easy way of doing so. I am sure that the lattice pylons that have been employed across our grid over many decades will be well tested in this area. I hope that the Minister can reassure us that the T-pylons have been similarly tested.
National Grid claims that the T-pylon is a wonderful concession to the people of Somerset and that we are hugely fortunate to be the first to receive it. It is a concession in National Grid’s eyes, but no one else’s. The lattice pylons that would have conveyed 420 kV of electricity would indeed have been the height of Nelson’s column—they would have been monsters. The new T-pylons, though, are still the same height as the roof of Westminster Abbey, so we are not talking about any massive improvement.
Their height is not the aspect that people least understand, though; it is their width. I wonder whether the camera operator for the Chamber has it in him to zoom out, because it needs to be understood that the width of the T-pylons is the width of the Chamber—not the floor of the Chamber, but wall to wall, from the back of the Press Gallery to the back of the Strangers Gallery. That is the size of the T-bar, plus the hanging rings on to which the wires go. Indeed, the hanging diamonds to which the transmission lines connect are about 10 metres in height. That means that if the T-bar and the hanging diamonds were to be put into this Chamber, they would fill it from floor to ceiling, from wall to wall. These are monsters, and we are seriously considering putting them across one of the most beautiful parts of this country. What is more, lattice pylons are 90% air, whereas T-pylons are solid structures. They concentrate the wirescape and are solid white pillars—exactly like wind turbines. That leads me to my final point, which is about visual amenity.
We have rightly been rejecting applications to build windfarms across the country because of the impact they would have on our landscape. Locally, in the immediate vicinity of the proposed pylon line, we have rejected applications for two small windfarms, at Pilrow and Huntspill. I applaud the Government and the planning inspector for making those decisions, but how ridiculous it is that having turned down those big white pillars, which are roughly the same size—in some cases smaller—than T-pylons, we are now seriously considering next week approving dozens of exactly the same thing, strung out over 40 miles of the Somerset countryside. It makes no sense to me. The pylons, in effect, constitute a giant windfarm. Surely the same logic should apply.
No attempt has been made to value the visual amenity of the landscape. Everything has been about the cash involved in going underground or undersea, yet the land has huge value. The view from the AONB is important, the sites of special scientific interest are important, and the landscape is valued and loved by local residents. Surely that has a value, too. More important still, and perhaps offering a more quantifiable value, is the fact that this area is the shop window not just for Somerset but for the whole south-west. I do not know whether you have ever holidayed in the south-west, Madam Deputy Speaker, but if you have, you will know that you trudge your way along the M4 corridor or down the M5 from the midlands, you queue to get through Avonmouth, and then you come up over the hill and are released into the south-west of England. The Somerset levels extend before you; Glastonbury Tor is off in the distance in the east, the sea to the west.
Every holidaymaker who goes to the south-west of England—I do not flatter myself that millions are watching this evening—will know the stretch of motorway that I am talking about, because for so many it is where their holiday in the south-west starts. The visitor economy in Somerset is worth £1.3 billion a year. The pylon line will run almost parallel with the M5 in exactly the part of the country I have been describing. As people come over the Mendips they will crest the hill, and instead of the magnificence of the Somerset levels, with the sea and Glastonbury Tor on their right and left, they will see these giant white monoliths. It would be unforgiveable to allow Somerset’s shop window to be spoiled in that way.
Madam Deputy Speaker, I know that today you have been treated to some wonderfully highbrow cultural references—Bowie and Burns. I am afraid I am going to lower the tone by quoting Sebastian the lobster from Disney’s “Little Mermaid”. You will forgive me, Madam Deputy Speaker, for addressing you as “darling” just for the purposes of this quote:
“Under the sea, under the sea
Darling it’s better down where it’s wetter,
Take it from me.”
Don’t just take it from me, though, Madam Deputy Speaker. Take it from my colleagues in constituencies along the pylon line, from my predecessors, and from the district councils, the parish councils and the thousands of Somerset residents who have engaged in the consultation process and made their opposition clear throughout.
Not enough consideration has been given to the strategic options that are available for other ways of transmitting power from Hinkley to the grid. Those have been resisted throughout on the basis of cost, yet there is the western link connecting Scotland and England, there is interconnection going on all over the place, and there is the visual impact provision project of the national grid taking down pylons elsewhere. The proposal has been resisted throughout on cost, yet no consideration has been given to the value of this land for other industries, most notably tourism.
Going under the sea is commonplace elsewhere, yet it has never been seriously considered for Somerset. We have turned down wind turbines on visual amenity grounds, yet we are considering dozens of solid white pillars as high as Westminster Abbey and as wide as this Chamber, and we are going to string them out across 40 miles of the most beautiful countryside in the United Kingdom.
We do not know what is in the Planning Inspectorate’s recommendation. It may well be that this, my longest speech in the Chamber, will have been in vain because good news is already on its way, but if it is not—I appreciate that the Minister can give no indication today; I would not put her on the spot and ask her to do so—I ask that if bad news could possibly be on the horizon, all the points that I have raised today and that have been raised in this place by my predecessors and my colleagues in neighbouring constituencies are looked at one last time, and that a delay in making the decision be considered while those matters are looked into. I know that we would all be delighted to come and see the Minister to discuss our concerns further.
There is precedent. I was searching hard and saw that a pylon line between Llandinam and Welshpool was refused, despite the planning inspector’s recommendation, because it would have impacted adversely on the visual amenity and on the environment, and other methods of connection did not appear to have been adequately considered.
Next week Somerset will rejoice or the decision will be reviled. Those pylons are untested, untried, unpopular and unwanted. We should be going under the sea, investing in infrastructure for the future and protecting a wonderful landscape. I hope next week to discover that the Minister agrees.
The Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change (Andrea Leadsom)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Wells (James Heappey) on securing this debate on the Hinkley Point C connection project. He has spoken with enormous passion and I agree that he lives in a beautiful part of the country. He has made a powerful speech, and I know that this project is a matter of great interest to his constituency as well as to others along the proposed route of the electric line.
I know that my hon. Friend recognises that the delivery of new energy infrastructure is essential for ensuring that the lights are kept on and bills are kept low for UK businesses and domestic consumers. I am aware that energy infrastructure projects of all sorts can have real impacts on local communities. It is also the case, however, that such projects can bring real benefits, so finding the right balance between the impacts and the benefits is a key issue in decision making by the Secretary of State.
Hon. Members will be aware that consent for the proposed Hinkley Point C nuclear power station, which would have a generating capacity of 3.2 GW, 7% of the UK’s electricity demand, was granted by the Secretary of State in March 2013. EDF and CGN signed a strategic investment agreement in October 2015. EDF has confirmed that it will take a 66.5% stake in Hinkley, with CGN taking 33.5%, demonstrating a clear commitment from both parties.
Nuclear power offers clean, affordable, safe and reliable energy and is vital to the UK’s cost-effective transition to low carbon generation. Existing nuclear plants across Britain currently provide around 16% of the electricity generated in the UK, but most existing plants are due to close by 2024. The Government have therefore prepared the ground for new nuclear power stations through a package of reforms and regulatory measures that remove barriers to investment and give developers confidence. Alongside gas and renewables, new nuclear is therefore an important part of our energy mix, now and in the future.
As part of delivering new electricity generating capacity, new transmission infrastructure is also needed. Network companies, such as National Grid, submit proposals for need and funding for new network infrastructure to the industry regulator, Ofgem, and for planning consent to the relevant planning authorities. These proposals are based, through stakeholder engagement, on an assessment of requirements for existing and new generation and, of course, the costs and impacts of different connection options. Network companies seek to identify opportunities to provide savings for the consumer by giving consideration to future possible connections in an area to ensure that the most efficient overall design is delivered. In doing so, an assessment of the risk of future connections not materialising is required to avoid stranded or underutilised assets, the cost of which would ultimately be passed on to consumers.
This approach is reinforced by the Government’s national policy statements for energy, which set out the framework for factors to be considered when consenting to an infrastructure project of national significance. They make it clear that, for electricity networks, proper consideration should be given to other feasible means of connection, including underground and subsea cables. This includes costs, environmental impacts and network operability issues. The Government do not have a preference on the various network options. Instead, we expect network companies to use the most appropriate technologies available for the particular project, in line with planning and regulatory requirements.
New T-pylons have been proposed for some sections of the route. I have heard loud and clear my hon. Friend’s message that he is not a fan of T-pylons. They were developed following an international design competition held in 2011 by my Department, alongside National Grid and the Royal Institute of British Architects, to help identify a new pylon design that would meet transmission safety and reliability criteria and would also belong to the 21st century. The winning design was produced by Danish architects who have since worked with National Grid to develop and test prototypes that have informed the final design being proposed for parts of the connection.
The T-pylon is an interesting design. It is around 15 metres shorter than existing transmission lattice pylons and has the potential to reduce the impact on the landscape. I welcome this innovation as an alternative option that National Grid can use when designing overhead transmission lines in future. However, whether they are ultimately used as part of specific transmission projects, including Hinkley Point C, will be subject to both regulatory and planning approval.
The Planning Inspectorate completed its examination of the application for development consent for the Hinkley Point C electric line connection last July. The application is now with the Secretary of State for a decision. Hon. Members will understand that, as the decision is now under consideration in the Department, I cannot take part in any discussion of the pros and cons of this particular proposal.
In a previous debate in March 2012 on electricity transmission in north Somerset—before the Hinkley Point C connection application was submitted to the Planning Inspectorate—the then Energy Minister encouraged individuals and organisations with an interest in the proposal to engage with National Grid. I know that a number of hon. Members took note of that encouragement and were among the many people who made representations to the Planning Inspectorate during the examination of the Hinkley Point C connection application. Prior to examining the application, the Planning Inspectorate indicated that it would cover a broad range of topics that it considered to be of importance in assessing the potential impacts of the proposed connection. The topics on which views were to be sought included flood risk, landscape and visual effects, socioeconomic effects, traffic and transportation, and public rights of way. The inspectorate’s report was submitted to the Secretary of State on 19 October 2015, along with its recommendation on whether consent should be granted or refused. It will now be for the Secretary of State to consider her decision in the light of that report and all relevant information. She intends to announce her decision no later than 19 January 2016, which is the end of the three-month decision-making period set out in the Planning Act 2008.
Large energy infrastructure projects inevitably attract considerable interest from people who may be directly affected by the proposals, as well as people who have views on energy projects in a more generic way. In the case of Planning Act applications, it is for the Secretary of State, as decision maker, to consider all the arguments that are made for and against these projects and that are set out in the Planning Inspectorate’s report.
James Heappey
I sense that the Minister is moving away from a discussion of the T-pylon on to other things. Before she does, may I push her to clarify the technical issues that I raised about exactly how the T-pylon has been tested in a landscape similar to that in which it might be employed in Somerset, and the security concern I raised? Those are technical issues rather than planning issues, and one would hope that the Department already has the clarification at its disposal.
Andrea Leadsom
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising that again. As he is aware, the design has been tested and piloted, but it is absolutely the case that there will not be any compromise on any issues of safety and security—I can assure him of that. On the very specific technical points, I can write to him with further evidence. He should rest assured that whatever transmission method is used, it will be properly tested and robustly measured against all possible threats.
I assure all hon. Members that the Secretary of State’s consideration of the Hinkley Point C connection application will be rigorous and fair, taking into account all the many issues that have been raised by those who are for and against, and in the Planning Inspectorate’s report. I hope that hon. Members are reassured that concerns raised by interested parties about the Hinkley Point C electric line connection are being thoroughly considered throughout the planning process.
I thank my hon. Friend again for his constructive and thoughtful remarks. He has done the people of north Somerset proud by raising this issue in such an impassioned way. I can assure him that they and he do not have too much longer to wait for the decision.
Question put and agreed to.
Education (Student Support) (Amendment) Regulations 2015
(8 years, 10 months ago)
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The Committee divided: - Ayes: 10 / Noes: 8 - Question accordingly agreed to.
The Committee divided: - Ayes: 10 / Noes: 8 - Question accordingly agreed to.
Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)
On a point of order, Mr Percy. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I have never raised a point of order in five and a half years as a Member of this House, which I hope reflects the seriousness of the issue that I put to you.
This follows on from the question that I put to the Prime Minister yesterday, which was on the appropriateness of this Committee considering the regulations. You will be aware that the matter was raised by the shadow Leader of the House in an exchange with the Leader of the House on 10 December, and in reply the Leader of the House, who speaks for the Government on the business of the House, said:
“On student finance regulations, the hon. Gentleman is well aware that if he wants a debate on a regulation in this House all he has to do is pray against it. I am not aware of any recent precedent where a prayer made by the Leader of the Opposition and his shadow Cabinet colleagues has not led to a debate in this House.”—[Official Report, 10 December 2015; Vol. 603, c. 1154.]
A prayer was subsequently laid. It was signed not simply by the Leader of the Opposition and the shadow Cabinet but by 80 colleagues from seven parties and one independent, so there is no precedent for this matter to be debated in Committee. Would it therefore not be in order for you to suspend this sitting and return to the Leader of the House with the proposal that we debate the matter in the Chamber so that all MPs have an opportunity to contribute?
The Chair
I thank the hon. Gentleman for raising his first point of order and for giving me the opportunity to respond to my first. He has put his case strongly, and it is on the record. He will be aware, however, that as Chair of this Delegated Legislation Committee, I have no authority to suspend the sitting in the way he wishes or to require the matter to be debated on the Floor of the House. All I can say is that he has made his case and has put it on the record very clearly. I encourage him to pursue that further through the appropriate channels.
Before I call the Opposition spokesperson, I point out that this statutory instrument has been the subject of a report by the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments, which was published this morning. I have arranged for the relevant extracts of the report to be made available in the room this morning.
Mr Gordon Marsden (Blackpool South) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That the Committee has considered the Education (Student Support) (Amendment) Regulations 2015 (S.I., 2015, No. 1951).
May I add my appreciation to that of my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central at being able to serve under your chairmanship for the first time, Mr Percy?
The bundle of measures before the Committee are a miscellany, to put it politely, but at their heart is the proposal to scrap maintenance grant support for disadvantaged students and replace it with a loan system. I will address the specifics of the regulations shortly, but for now I observe that the policy change is not an isolated one; it is part of a pattern that is also happening across other areas of Government. It is mirrored by the changes that were debated in the House on Monday, which removed NHS bursaries for nurses and other staff, and it has been foreshadowed by changes that the Government have made to education support and protection over the past three to four years. That included, of course, the scrapping of 24-plus loans in further education, which is particularly relevant to the case before us today.
As the Minister will be aware, the Government released figures in October 2015 showing clear evidence of the deterrent impact on learners that I and others warned about when loans were introduced as replacements for grants in January 2013. The figures showed that in 2014-15, only £149 million of the £397 million allocated for the process had been taken up, or 62% less. Not surprisingly, people in the further education community lamented the lost opportunity of £250 million that could have helped some of our most disadvantaged learners. With that in mind, my first question to the Minister is whether he took any of those figures into account, particularly their impact on older learners, when formulating the proposals in these regulations.
The truth of the matter is that the Government have ducked and dived to avoid further debate on their direction of travel, and particularly on freezing the threshold, which is not specifically part of these regulations, although it is referred to in the assessment that comes with them. We have seen how they have dealt with the regulations before us. My hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central has referred eloquently to the failure to bring the debate to the Floor of the House, but I also draw to the Committee’s attention the equality impact assessment that the Government have produced, which is on the table at the back of the room. It runs to some 60 pages, so I am not sure how many Members will have the opportunity to consider it in detail today if they have not read it already. The equality impact assessment was slipped out without ceremony at the end of November, and it came out only after a campaign and legal moves.
Stephen Barclay (North East Cambridgeshire) (Con)
That was several weeks ago.
Mr Marsden
Well, there might have been weeks to read it if the Government had actually made it available, but they did not.
This is the document that almost dare not speak its name, not least because the detailed evidence of impact tucked away in its pages, to which I will refer later, is belied by the bland conclusions appended to it that it will be all right on the night. What is driving panic measures such as the threshold freeze is the Government’s dawning recognition that their whole set of financial assumptions about repayment in other areas that underpinned their swingeing fees increases is producing a black hole for them and for future taxpayers.
Mr Percy, I am sure that you and those of us who have been here under all sorts of Governments will have observed the rule of thumb in this place that there are two ways for Ministers and their advisers to present and package things that they feel might be unpalatable. One is to bundle in the controversial bits with more technical or anodyne measures that might lull the reader into a false sense of security. Here is an example of such wording in the impact assessment:
“The following maximum grants and loans for living and other costs will be maintained at 2015/16 levels in 2016/17”.
Another way is to entitle the document innocuously, to increase the camouflage. Both methods have been employed on this occasion.
This is not a bit of incidental tinkering with existing financial regulations. It represents a major departure and reversal of policy, only four years after the Government hailed maintenance grants for students from disadvantaged backgrounds as an essential element in their strategy for fairness and in the acceptance of tripled tuition fees. I am afraid the measures are typical of the ideology-driven but evidence-light approach that this Government too often employ. They will affect probably 500,000 of England’s most disadvantaged students and define their futures for good or ill. Has the Minister made, or had given to him, any breakdown, geographical or otherwise, of that total figure and its impact on higher education institutions? If not, why not?
The statistics about those institutions helpfully provided to me by the House of Commons Library amount to a Domesday Book listing the numbers of students who will lose their grant under the new rules. Institutions in all parts of the country will be affected, both old universities and new ones. Further education colleges will be affected, of course, because they make an increasingly valuable contribution, 10% and more, to higher education for the group of people affected. Of course—this is not irrelevant in today’s circumstances—Scottish students who are taking courses at English universities will be affected.
There are a number of disadvantaged students studying at higher education colleges, and the Association of Colleges tells me that many of the colleges that deliver higher education are in northern towns—Blackpool and Blackburn are cited. Cornwall and the south-west also help to provide the large number of places at HE colleges. The association has said in specific response to these regulations, “We have real concerns about the proposed change as many of the students may never earn enough to pay back the money and the policy does appear to penalise poorer students. The new system therefore needs careful monitoring to ensure it is as fair as possible.”
These changes will affect significant numbers of students, from the north to the south. On the basis of the figures for 2014-15, for example, 14,728 students at Manchester Met University will be affected; 8,167 at the University of Manchester; 1,527 at my own excellent further education college, Blackpool and The Fylde College; 10,924 at Nottingham Trent University; 4,897 at Bournemouth; and 3,738 at King’s College. The other institutions that I have not had the opportunity to mention are far from incidental. The list will be a roll-call of lost opportunities if this issue is not handled carefully.
However, despite this being such a major issue, as my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central has observed the Government have refused to bring the changes to the Floor of the House and prefer to try to sneak them through the delegated legislation route, whereby it can be debated and voted on by only a handful of MPs. As he said, there is cross-party support on the issue.
Importantly, the shadow Business Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Wallasey (Ms Eagle), in her letter to the Secretary of State explaining why there needed to be a full debate on these measures, wrote that scrapping maintenance grants for lower income students and replacing them with loans would have a regressive impact and should therefore receive further scrutiny from Members of Parliament. That was why she went on to call for a debate on these measures in Government time. She also made the practical point, which I will come on to, that the change would not improve Government finances in the long term, and she also made the link with the adverse impact of freezing student loan repayment, which I have touched on briefly.
Can the Minister explain why the Secretary of State did not deal adequately with any of those points in his reply? As my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central has asked, will the Minister also explain why his Department has ignored the words of the Leader of the House in December and is prepared to break the precedent of debates in the House under these circumstances?
Turning to the impact of the regulations, of course we can only speculate on the future cohorts of people who come in, but we have some reason to make those speculations on the basis of existing experience. The National Education Opportunities Network, which is the professional organisation for widening access to education in England, and the University and College Union are currently undertaking research with more than 2,000 final-year A-level and level 3 students to look at how costs influence the HE choices they make. The interim findings from that research show that more than half the students who are deciding not to go into HE are taking that decision because of the lack of direct financial maintenance grant support that they had envisaged for the year ahead. If research suggests that a large number of students are deciding not to go to university due to that lack of support, why are the Government risking even more students dropping out by introducing the regulations?
A study by economists at the Institute of Education in 2014 showed that a £1,000 increase in grants would create a 3.95% increase in participation, and that the removal of grants would see participation levels fall. In fact, the institute said that it should also be of grave concern that more than a third of students had told a recent survey that they would not have chosen to go to university if they had not had access to maintenance grants. Does the Minister not fear a severe drop in participation levels, given that statistics indicate that the accessibility of a maintenance grant is a deciding factor for many when choosing whether to go into higher education? His equality assessment, which has been circulated, as I have said, states:
“At an aggregate level there is currently no evidence that the 2012 reforms, which saw a significant increase in HE fees and associated student debt levels has had a significant impact in deterring the participation of young students from low income backgrounds.”
That is debatable, because the safety net of maintenance grants, introduced in 2012 with that tripling of fees, is now being removed.
My hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State wrote in her letter praying against the regulations:
“Labour are concerned that this change won’t improve Government finances in the long-term.”
Hon. Members might say, “You would say that, wouldn’t you?” but perhaps more cogent is the view of the Institute for Fiscal Studies:
“The replacement of maintenance grants by loans from 2016–17 will raise debt for the poorest students, but do little to improve government finances in the long run.”
The IFS states that in the short term, Government borrowing will drop
“by around £2 billion per year. This is because current spending on grants counts towards current borrowing, while current spending on loans does not.
In the long run, savings will be much less than this. The amount of money lent to students will rise by about £2.3 billion for each cohort, but only around a quarter of these additional loans will be repaid. The net effect is to reduce government borrowing by around £270 million per cohort in the long run in 2016 money—a 3% decline in the government’s estimated contribution to higher education.
About two-thirds of those eligible for the full maintenance grant will repay no more as a result of this reform because they will end up with the additional debt being written off.”
There is the rub. Will the Minister tell us what conversations he has had with his colleagues in the Treasury about the accuracy of those predictions, and why his Department is embarking on a leap in the dark that will, as the IFS makes clear, diminish the contribution to higher education and do little to address the black hole?
The IFS states:
“Students from households with pre-tax incomes of up to £25,000 (those currently eligible for a full maintenance grant) will have a little more “cash in pocket” whilst at university. But they will also graduate with around £12,500 more debt, on average, from a three-year course. This means that students from the poorest backgrounds are now likely to leave university owing substantially more to the government than their better-off peers.”
It also states:
“The poorest 40% of students going to university in England will now graduate with debts of up to £53,000 from a three-year course, rather than up to £40,500. This will result from the replacement of maintenance grants”.
The removal of those grants threatens access to higher education and, importantly, follows on from the removal of the national scholarship programme, which was designed to help students from low-income households. The programme has been scrapped, just as the Government are doing to maintenance grants.
In 2012, when the Government tripled tuition fees, they tried to sweeten the pill by talking up the centrality of the maintenance grant to ensuring that the most disadvantaged could still access higher education.
“The increase in maintenance grant for students from household with the lowest incomes, the National Scholarship Programme, and additional fair access requirements on institutions wanting to charge over £6,000 in graduate contributions should ensure that the reforms do not affect individuals from lower socio-economic backgrounds disproportionately.”
That is what the Conservative-led Government said in 2011-12 through the Minister’s predecessor, but the regulations will disadvantage the same groups of students the Government promised to protect two years ago. In June 2011, the Minister’s predecessor, David Willetts, pledged in Parliament:
“We want students from a wide range of backgrounds to benefit from the reforms. We are increasing maintenance grants and loans for nearly all students”.—[Official Report, 28 June 2011; Vol. 530, c. 770.]
He had previously defended the measure as a quid pro quo for the trebling of tuition fees, saying:
“Our proposals are progressive, because they help to encourage people from poorer backgrounds to go to university, because of the higher education maintenance grant, and because of the higher repayment threshold. That crucial commitment to taking progressive measures is one of the reasons we commend these proposals to the House.”—[Official Report, 3 November 2010; Vol. 517, c. 940.]
Does the Minister accept that the Government have now broken both those promises? His colleague, who is now Lord Willetts, must be revolving in his ermine at the way his promises have been so lightly regarded by the Government.
Lucy Frazer (South East Cambridgeshire) (Con)
Does the hon. Gentleman accept that there is a bit of a non sequitur in what he says? On one hand he says that the debt will be increased, but on the other he says that it will be written off. If both propositions are true, there should be no detrimental effect on the students involved.
Mr Marsden
The hon. Lady needs to look more carefully at the differential impacts. The point that I, and I am sure my hon. Friends, would make about this is that debt aversion depends on where someone is coming from. It is perfectly possible to have a situation with those common factors. It is not, however, at all clear from any of the evidence that has been put forward that that would not be a significant disincentive.
I was talking about the things that were said previously: those words will do little to enhance the Government’s alleged commitment to increasing social mobility. The Government and their predecessors set great store by the principle of “nudge”—actions that persuade people to change their behaviour for the better. I remind the Minister that is possible to nudge people away from desirable outcomes such as getting higher education, rather than towards them. The question that the Minister and his colleagues must answer is what attention they have devoted in the regulations, which are highly specific, to preventing that.
A new BIS study included in the impact statement by the Government says that more than half the applicants said they felt put off by the cost of university. Also, for poorer applicants, tuition fee loans and the income-contingent repayment threshold were more important in persuading them to apply, despite the costs. However, the Government seriously underestimate the effect that the grant and the cost of universities have on student decisions. That is backed up by what the Sutton Trust has said:
“Shifting grants to loans may move them off the balance sheet, but it could also put off many low and middle income students and tip the balance against their going to university. Since grants were reintroduced, there have been significant improvements”—
and we welcome that—
“in participation from full time less advantaged students, and this will be put at risk by today’s Budget plans.
The reality is that the Government has miscalculated the levels of repayments it will get from its student loans under the new fees system. Rather than penalising poorer students, it should have a fundamental review of the repayments system. We need long term solutions not a short term fix.”
Research from the NUS that was published yesterday by Populus shows that parents are concerned that the Government’s plans to scrap the maintenance grant will discourage their children from applying to university. Two fifths of those with a combined income of £25,000 or less believe that their children would be discouraged from applying to university if grants were replaced by loans. More than half the parents believed that the plan to scrap grants undermined the Government’s objective of increasing access to university for poorer students.
I want to deal with some other surveys that have been conducted. The changes may well pile even more pressure on to students to alter their work-study balance while pursuing a degree. According to the 2015 Endsleigh survey, produced by a company that has specialised in the area for many years, already 77% of students must work to help fund their studies, using time that could be spent on academic work. That already high number looks set to increase further with the removal of maintenance grants.
The Government claim that they want to strengthen our skills base and that they have given more support for postgraduates. The initial steps that were announced on that are welcome; but there is a risk that they will be undercut because of the debt aversion of the group of students who will lose their grants. The NUS found that after a student finished their undergraduate degree, access to a maintenance grant could also influence their post-study choices.
I want to turn my attention to the specifics of the equality impact assessment that BIS produced for the regulations. It concedes, for example, that black and minority ethnic students, in particular, will be disproportionately worse off than others following the removal of maintenance grants:
“We believe that the proposed changes will disproportionately affect people from ethnic minority backgrounds. This is based on evidence of debt aversion in this group and the increased likelihood for these students to receive the full maintenance grant. We have assessed that there is a small risk to the participation of students”—
given participation rates—
“both from high and low socio-economic backgrounds”.
Additionally, there is risk to the outcomes of these students if they choose not to take out the additional loan available.”
However, a recent BIS study also stated that non-white applicants were likely to cite the importance of maintenance grants in overcoming their concerns about costs. Thus the removal of the maintenance grant will seriously discourage BME students from attending HE institutions.
There is potentially bad news for older learners as well. The equality analysis states:
“Mature students will be disproportionately impacted by the policy proposals to remove the full maintenance grant and replace with additional loan as well as the freezing of targeted grants. The proportion of students aged 21 and over that claim maintenance grant support is significantly higher than their representation in the population of all student support claimants. The available evidence points to the cost sensitivity and debt averseness of this group. The policy change presents a risk for the participation of older students in higher education.”
The assessment has worrying words for disabled students as well:
“As for all students from low income backgrounds we expect the risk to participation of low income disabled students…to continue to be mitigated by the high average returns to HE investment and the repayment protection for low earning graduates.”
That, of course, assumes that current ratios quoted in that respect will remain the same with the massive expansion of the cohort entering full-time work in the next 10 to 15 years. There is no evidence whatever on that.
However, the Government have conceded in the assessment that disabled people will also be disproportionately affected by the decision not to protect the real value of disabled students’ allowances. The assessment says:
“Students from low income backgrounds will be able to access DSA at same level in cash terms but may be disproportionately affected by the freezing (real terms reduction)”—
a term the Government were reluctant to use at the beginning of the equality impact assessment—
“of DSAs and dependants grants.”
For all of the groups that I have cited so far, I and the rest of the Committee want to know what the Government propose to do to mitigate those disproportionate impacts, which their own equality impact assessment so candidly concedes will be the case.
In addition, there is the separate worrying implication that a significant number of would-be students may be discriminated against under these regulations because of their religious beliefs. The impact assessment states:
“There is evidence to suggest that there are groups of Muslim students whose religion prohibits them from taking out an interest bearing loan. This means that this group of students will no longer have access to funding for living costs as non-repayable finance is no longer available. This could lead to a decline in the participation of some Muslim students.”
The complacency about the failure to have available a sharia-compliant alternative to grants that will be withdrawn borders on discrimination. Does the Minister agree that the regulations as they stand will restrict Muslim students from accessing valuable finance, while the removal of grants threatens to weaken further their ability and capacity to carry through their higher education studies?
The Government claim that they are making an alternative to traditional loans available that is sharia-compliant, but it is not there yet, is it, Minister? Yet the Government have known about the issue since April 2014. Will the Minister guarantee that the change will not be implemented until there are firm regulations in law for an alternative finance proposal that will be acceptable to people of the Muslim faith?
Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)
I want to share my own example, because these matters are often seen as hypothetical. I started my undergraduate degree in 1990, the first year that voluntary loans were introduced. I did not take one of those because Muslim students are very risk-averse and debt-averse and do not want to carry interest-bearing loans. Does my hon. Friend agree that these are real people, not just hypothetical examples?
Mr Marsden
My hon. Friend makes an absolutely real point. We are not just dealing with statistics—although the statistics of potential discrimination and deprivation are frightening—we are dealing with lots of individual case histories. In the area my hon. Friend mentioned, she precisely underlined why the Government need to get a grip on that particular issue, which they have not so far.
Huw Merriman (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)
I, too, want to talk about a real situation. I listened to the hon. Gentleman’s speech, but, as somebody who failed my 12-plus, came from a very low-income family, went through university, just missed out on a grant, went to bar school, took out loans, worked all the way through it and was able to do so, I find it somewhat patronising to be told that it is not possible to do that. These loans will not be paid back before the person is earning. If they are earning money, it seems only fair that they give something back so that more people from backgrounds such as mine can go to university.
Mr Marsden
It is always dangerous to draw general a conclusion from ad hominem examples. I and other Members of this House can quote lots of examples. I can quote examples from my casework of people who have come to me at a later age who have been deterred. The onus is on the Government when making these changes to demonstrate that they will work, not by making ad hominem arguments—however much I applaud the hon. Gentleman for doing what he did to get to where he is today—but by looking at the broad statistics and the analysis that has been put forward today.
Mr Marsden
I will not take another intervention from the hon. Lady. She has had one. [Interruption.] I did answer the first. The hon. Lady will have an opportunity to speak later if she wishes to.
The equality analysis makes reference to the damaging effect that the proposed regulations will have on female students. As my colleague, the shadow Equalities Minister, said to me, the changes will have an unfair impact on women—especially mothers. When the Government increased fees, the number of mature students fell, so I think we can expect exactly the same effect with these loans. The impact assessment also states that female students will be particularly affected by the freeze to childcare grants, parents’ learning allowances and ESAs, given their significant over-representation in these populations. What action does the Minister plan to take to protect female students from the cumulative negative impact that the change could have on their ability to pursue higher education?
Those details from the Government’s own impact assessment should surely give them pause for thought, given that they threaten to affect the most debt-averse groups. Worryingly, it appears that the Government are yet to produce an up-to-date estimate of the impact that the shift from grants to loans will have on the resource accounting and budgeting charge, which calculates the cost to the Government of the higher education funding system, based on—this is relevant to the issues that other Members raised—how much students are expected ultimately to repay of their loans.
In November, my hon. Friend the Member for Ashfield (Gloria De Piero), asked about that issue in a written question. She received the following bland reply:
“This estimate will be updated in Summer 2016, alongside publication of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills accounts.”
Given, as I have already emphasised, the IFS’s scepticism about the savings that the changes will make, will the Minister tell us why his Department did not obtain an up-to-date estimate before proposing the changes? Is that not a dereliction of duty on a key question, both for sound government finance and for cost-benefit analysis? Summer 2016 will be way too late, as by that time the new regulations could have deprived 500,000 or so young people of their grants and set a potentially perilous alternative in motion. This Government proposal was not in the Conservative party manifesto. For all those reasons, I and my colleagues will vote that the proposal has not been adequately considered.
The Chair
There is only an hour left. I will call the Minister towards the end of the debate, and, as Mr Marsden indicated that he would like to respond, he will have five minutes at the end. Many Members wish to speak, so I ask that they limit their speeches as much as possible so that we can get everybody in.
Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Percy, not least because of your track record of keeping your promises on tuition fees. It makes a nice change to be on the inside, debating the issues, rather than outside, protesting as president of the National Union of Students. Because of my experience as both president of NUS and chief executive of the Helena Kennedy Foundation, which is a national charity that supports disadvantaged further education college students to access higher education, primarily through the award of non-repayable grants, the regulations are of particular interest to me.
Members on both sides of the Committee should be in no doubt about the substance of what we are debating. This is not a usual statutory instrument that involves some tinkering with thresholds or levels, or amends an existing policy framework in the way that statutory instruments normally do. This is a major change in Government policy, and this Committee has no business discussing it. This should be debated on the Floor of the House of Commons, because the result of the regulations that the Government are railroading through Parliament today is that students from the poorest backgrounds will graduate with the highest levels of debt. How can that possibly be fair?
We must consider this change in the context of broader changes to Government higher education policy and student support, which see students graduating with levels of debt unprecedented in the history of higher education in Britain—indeed, the highest levels of student debt in the world. It is now clear that it will not be the highest earners who end up contributing most to the cost of their higher education. It will be people on middle incomes and on lower incomes who, over the course of their career, will contribute most, which makes this policy even more unfair.
We should not forget—I certainly have not forgotten—that the very existence of student grants is a direct result of concessions hard fought for and hard won by both student campaigners and Members of this House who, under successive Governments over a number of years, have made a powerful case that if we are asking students to contribute more towards the cost of their higher education, it is only fair that those from the poorest backgrounds receive a higher level of non-repayable financial support through grants, to enable them to access higher education. What we see this morning is the unravelling of that settlement and the breaking of promises made a mere five years ago by the coalition Government.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool South stated, when the coalition Government trebled tuition fees in 2012, they said:
“The increase in maintenance grant for students from household with the lowest incomes, the National Scholarship Programme, and additional fair access requirements on institutions wanting to charge over £6,000 in graduate contributions should ensure that the reforms do not affect individuals from lower socio-economic backgrounds disproportionately.”
Since then, we have lost the national scholarship programme. Student grants are about to go. How long is it before this Government hit the reverse gear in its entirety on all of the progress that has been made to ensure that higher education is accessible to the many and not the privileged few, as has been the case in the past?
Jo Stevens (Cardiff Central) (Lab)
This change, as my hon. Friend says, comes just five years after the coalition Government trebled tuition fees to £9,000. Will he join me in recognising the different choices made by the Welsh Labour Government, including providing tuition fee grants, so that Welsh students pay around one third of what their English peers pay?
Wes Streeting
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for her intervention. It just goes to show the difference that a Labour Government can make and what happens when we lose elections. In the short time she has been in this House as the hon. Member for Cardiff Central, she has already shown herself to be a doughty campaigner for the many students she represents in her constituency.
We should all be concerned about the way in which the Government have conducted themselves in relation to this process. My hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool South highlighted from the Government’s own equality impact assessment the disproportionate impact that the change may have on mature students, women, people from working-class backgrounds, people from ethnic minority backgrounds and, in particular, Muslim students.
What a disgrace it is that the National Union of Students had to threaten the Government with legal action in order to ensure that they conducted a full and comprehensive equality impact assessment. It should be a concern for all Members that, although the NUS has seen the interim assessment that the Government used in order to embark on this policy process, the Government refused to publish the assessment that they looked at when going ahead with the policy.
Only 18 Members can vote in the Committee this morning, yet this issue will affect students in every constituency across the country. There will inevitably be a knock-on impact on Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland through Barnett consequentials, and of course there are students from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland who still choose to study at English universities. It is therefore even more surprising that we find ourselves here on a Committee that most of our constituents have never heard of, away from the eyes of the public—this debate should be taking place on the Floor of the House. This Government should remember that they have a majority of just 12, elected on a minority share of the vote. Even when we had Labour Governments with landslide majorities after 1997 and 2001, those Labour Governments were always prepared to put their policies before the whole House so that Members could properly debate their consequences and fight for amendments, changes and adjustments, many of which were secured and won.
I appeal to Conservative members of the Committee to think very carefully about how seriously they take their role as scrutineers of the Government and as effective legislators, because it is not the job of Members of Parliament to come to this place and simply allow the Government of the day, whatever our respective political colours, to railroad such dramatic changes in policy. It is our job to scrutinise, to hold the Government to account and to ensure that we remember that, whatever our political affiliations, we are sent to this place by our constituents to champion their interests.
How can any Member look themselves in the mirror this evening and say that this issue has been properly considered? We have already heard from the shadow Minister about the potential detrimental impact that this measure could have on people from under-represented backgrounds in higher education. How can it possibly be justified that in a mere 90-minute debate we allow something such as this to go through without sending a message to all our constituents that such a significant decision was not taken without the fullest of parliamentary scrutiny? That is what the Leader of the House promised when he gave an assurance to the shadow Leader of the House that if a prayer was tabled in the usual way by the Leader of the Opposition in an early-day motion, it would be very unusual not to debate it on the Floor of the House.
So why are we not on the Floor of the House? It is because this Government, in the short time they have been in office since May, have already established a clear track record of ducking scrutiny, avoiding debate and seeming to believe that, on a slender majority and a minority share of the vote, they have the will and the ability to do anything they please. Well, I think that students, their parents and their grandparents across the country will be appalled at what is taking place today. Despite the activities of the clever Chancellor, the clever Whips and their clever colleagues, people are very much aware of what is taking place today. I am sure that people will be aware of who made these decisions today, and it is appalling that the Prime Minister, the Chancellor and their Conservative friends on this Committee could allow something so significant to slip through without the scrutiny it deserves.
On that basis, I urge all Members to say that this issue has not been properly considered and debated, because quite simply it has not. The impact of these changes could be detrimental to the people we were sent here to represent.
Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Percy. Members may wonder why an SNP Member would speak in a debate about English education funding. This issue was brought to my attention by the wonderful Vonnie Sandlan of NUS Scotland only on Tuesday evening—that is why we came along today—which is entirely unacceptable and inappropriate. I pay tribute to Philip Whyte from NUS Scotland for providing me with excellent figures on exactly why this is pertinent to students in Scotland. I thank him very much for the detailed figures that he managed to put together in that very short length of time.
This process is unacceptable—the lack of consultation, the lack of due process and the lack of understanding of the measure’s consequences for students in Scotland, particularly the poorest students who, as Opposition Members said earlier, will be adversely affected. In Scotland we have made the positive decision not to introduce loans so that education in Scotland is free, people in the poorest areas of society can reach university and the poorest students do not get into astronomical debt. The NUS briefing quotes debts of up to £53,000 for a three-year course. Because the poorest students will now be receiving maintenance loans, rather than grants, they will come out with more debt than their richer colleagues, which is absolutely appalling.
Corri Wilson (Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock) (SNP)
Does my hon. Friend agree that that is another example of a stark contrast? Scotland is progressive in achieving education that is accessible to all, based on the ability to learn, not the ability to pay, while England is taking a regressive approach, making it harder for the most disadvantaged to access further education.
Alison Thewliss
I absolutely agree. Debt and disadvantage are being compounded by the actions of this Government.
Lucy Frazer
I should have declared an interest in that my husband works in the sector. Opposition Members are saying that the measures will disadvantage people and put them off studying as a result. Of course we must encourage all people, particularly the disadvantaged, to go into higher education, but the figures show that disadvantaged people have not been put off going to university by the fees. State school applications have increased from 88% to 89%, and applications from lower socioeconomic groups have increased from 30.6% to 32.6% in recent years, showing that people have not been put off.
Alison Thewliss
We cannot tell exactly what will happen as a result of these further changes and what impact they will have. I speak from my own experience: I graduated from university in 2004, and only since taking this job have I been able to make any impact on paying back the loan that I took out then. That loan was relatively small compared with the loans that we are discussing. How long will people be saddled with debt, and what impact will it have on their life chances and their ability to make progress in their lives? It is an absolutely appalling circumstance, and it is creating an even more indebted generation than the one before it. It is ridiculous. The impact in Scotland will be greater, because we have four-year degrees rather than three-year degrees as in England.
I will quote from the figures sent to me by the NUS in Scotland, which notes that in the academic year 2013-14, a total of £1.59 billion was awarded to applicants in all cohorts. In 2014-15, for post-2012 students, a provisional total of £1.5 billion was awarded. Assuming that that averages out over the three years, it implies an annual reduction of £500 million, contributing to a £50 million reduction in the cash DEL—departmental expenditure limit—available to Scotland per year. For comparison, Student Awards Agency for Scotland figures for 2014 show that the social grant and bursary awards made to Scotland for Scottish-domiciled students totalled £63.6 million. That is a significant impact.
On the impact on Scotland since the introduction of tuition fees in England, when direct cash DEL teaching grants provided by the Higher Education Funding Council in England to English universities were cut by more than £3 billion, assuming a straight consequential, the result is a £300 million reduction in cash DEL available to Scotland. The spending review proposes a further £120 million reduction in the teaching grant by 2019-20, which will result in a consequential to Scotland on top of the impact of these measures, including for nursing students.
The impact on us in Scotland is unfair. Decisions here by a Government we did not vote for and who have one MP in Scotland are resulting in decisions that John Swinney will have to make in our budget, which is decreasing. We have no impact on those decisions, and our Government cannot change them. The decisions taken by this Conservative Government and the previous coalition Government have had the effect of skewing the Scottish budget in further education. The departmental expenditure limit, which includes the teaching and research budget and the grant and bursary budget, has been reduced, and the annually managed expenditure budget, which goes on loans, has increased. We do not want an increase in loans; we want the DEL, but we cannot have that, because decisions here have reduced it. Those decisions affect the Scottish budget, and we must find the money that we want to spend on grants and bursaries from somewhere else within it. That is unfair. We want to support our students. Our students in Scotland deserve support, particularly where, due to demographic differences, they have not yet had the chance to go to university because they are put off by loans.
The point made by a Labour Member about minorities is true as well. It will particularly affect constituencies such as mine in Glasgow, Central, which is probably one of the most ethnically diverse constituencies in Scotland and contains Strathclyde University and Glasgow Caledonian University, as well as bounding on Glasgow University. All those universities could be affected by that decision.
Dr Huq
Does the hon. Lady agree that the difference between what is happening now and what happened for my generation is that I had a full grant and my fees paid completely? I pity this generation. It was doable not to have a voluntary top-up loan in 1990, but what is happening now is disastrous.
Alison Thewliss
I will finish by absolutely agreeing with that. When the hon. Lady and I went to university, we came out with some debt, but not a crippling debt of up to £53,000, which is an astronomical amount of money for anybody from any background to consider if they want to go to university. I urge the Government to reconsider and to speak directly to the Scottish Finance Secretary John Swinney and to the Scottish Government to assess the impact of these decisions on the Scottish budget. I doubt very much that the Minister has consulted the Scottish Government.
Dawn Butler (Brent Central) (Lab)
Thank you, Mr Percy. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. Following the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford North, I want to say that many people are pleased that he is on the inside, fighting on important issues such as this. I am confident that people on the outside will be scratching their heads and wondering why such an important decision is not being debated on the Floor of the House. It relates to our future doctors, nurses and teachers, and the Government are stifling their opportunity to go to university. This Conservative Government need to think carefully about those people’s aspirations and what they are doing to them. The Institute of Fiscal Studies states:
“The replacement of maintenance grants by loans from 2016–17 will raise debt for the poorest students, but do little to improve government finances in the long run.”
For a Government who pride themselves on their economic competence, can you please explain that one? It just does not make sense. Explain why you are making a decision that you know will not help to balance the books.
The Chair
Order. May I remind the hon. Lady that when she says “you” she is referring to me and I am certainly not doing anything?
Dawn Butler
Isn’t that the truth? I would hate to put this pressure on you. You have my sincere apologies, Mr Percy.
This Government know that the change will not help to balance the books. Instead, it will cause more poor people to plummet into debt. Genuinely, what have poor people ever done to the Minister? Why are the Government intent on victimising poor people? Governments are supposed to help people succeed. Instead, this Government are sending a clear message: if you are young, disabled, a woman, black, Asian, minority ethnic, Muslim or if you are not wealthy, they are going to make sure that if you aspire to go to university, you will leave with debts of up to £53,000, compared with well-off counterparts whose debts will be £40,500, which is eye-watering enough in itself.
Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)
Does my hon. Friend agree that there will be an impact on universities? The University of York, for example, has incredible diversity and has really reached out to people from diverse backgrounds. All of that work will go to waste if the regulations are introduced.
Dawn Butler
I agree. I am sure that universities are thinking, “Help us, but not in this way.” This Government’s decision does not help them at all.
The Minister will no doubt say that students will have a little more money in their pockets as a result of the change. As with all good cons, that is partly true, but it is a little like loan sharks or payday loans. They will get a bit up front, but they will be paying an awful lot more in the end. We again see a situation in which those who can least afford to pay are being asked to pay more than their wealthier counterparts.
Cynics might say that this is a PR stunt because, as grants count towards current borrowing, the Government can remove the figure from their books by turning grants into loans so that it looks like they are borrowing less. One might call it creative accounting. The Institute for Fiscal Studies states that
“the national accounts...will fall by...£2 billion per year”,
as the shadow Minister stated, but it adds that, in
“the long run, savings will be much less”.
This is another betrayal of parents and young people in Britain.
In 2012, the coalition Government raised tuition fees, resulting in fewer people in my constituency going on to further education. One thing that helped to soften the blow, however, was the acknowledgment of the centrality of maintenance grants, which ensured that the most disadvantaged could still access higher education. Today’s proposals were not in the Conservatives’ manifesto. Why are they doing this? Why are they doing it in such a secretive, underhand, clandestine way? I just do not understand.
The National Union of Students did a great thing in fighting to force the Government to do a full equality impact assessment. That revealed a concerning risk to the participation of students from poorer backgrounds—women students, black and minority ethnic students, mature students, disabled students and Muslim students. It seems that the only group that is not really affected are white, wealthy men.
Wes Streeting
Of course, the other group that is not affected by these changes is right hon. and hon. Members who enjoyed their university education for free and who received a grant. Is it not time, when debating student finance issues, to recognise that what is good for the goose is good for the gander?
Dawn Butler
Of course. I thank my hon. Friend for that excellent intervention.
I want to end with a question to the Minister. What does he think about the equality impact assessment? [Interruption.] He is busy chatting at the moment, so I will repeat my question: what does the Minister think about the equality impact assessment?
The Chair
Before I call Paul Blomfield, I should tell him that I plan to call the Minister at about 12.40 pm. There is another Member who wishes to speak—they are not members of the Committee, but that is perfectly in order—and I would also like to call them. I call Paul Blomfield.
Paul Blomfield
Thank you, Mr Percy. I will respond to your injunction to be brief. I will not repeat the points that others have made, although I do support them.
Let me start on a consensual point. I have some sympathy with the Minister. In a moment, he will be defending a policy he cannot really agree with. He has the university sector at heart. He is doing some good work on opening up the debate on undergraduate teaching quality. I am sure he cannot be happy with the proposals he is having to defend. I guess they were forced on the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills by the Treasury—probably as a punishment for miscalculating the resource accounting and budgeting charge, or at least in an attempt to recoup the money. Unfortunately, it is not simply the Department that is being penalised—it is the half a million students who will lose maintenance grants.
On another consensual point, I would like to talk about one of the Minister’s predecessors, whom I also have high regard for: David Willetts. When David was shadow Education Minister back in 2009, he was keen to challenge the then Labour Government on the importance of maintenance grants. On 3 November, he said:
“The Minister tells the House about broadening access to university, but does he not recognise that it is students from the poorest backgrounds who are most desperate when they cannot get their maintenance grant or loan?”—[Official Report, 3 November 2009; Vol. 498, c. 737.]
That is absolutely right—that was a Conservative Opposition spokesman.
Subsequently, I remember my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford North was protesting outside the House while we debated the coalition Government’s proposals inside the House. Again, David Willetts was keen to argue for maintenance grants—as the justification for the changes that were being made. Maintenance grants were the progressive flagship of the policy that the Government were putting forward. He said:
“Our proposals are progressive, because they help to encourage people from poorer backgrounds to go to university, because of the higher education maintenance grant”—[Official Report, 3 November 2010; Vol. 517, c. 940.]
Again, he was right.
When David Willetts reflected, in June 2011, on the impact of the changes that had been made and tried to defend them against those of us who were critical of them, he said:
“We are increasing maintenance grants and loans for nearly all students...to make sure that institutions fulfil their outreach and retention obligations to people from disadvantaged groups.”—[Official Report, 28 June 2011; Vol. 530, c. 770.]
Yet again, in September 2012, he announced:
“we are also increasing maintenance support for students at university this year”.
He went on to say:
“The maintenance grant and support for bursaries are going up. That is why”—
I repeat, “That is why”—
“we still have record rates of application to university, and we should celebrate and remember that fact.”—[Official Report, 11 September 2012; Vol. 550, c. 216.]
Time and again, this is the consistent policy trajectory from the Conservative party. They said that maintenance grants were essential and important, but suddenly, in the July Budget, the Chancellor threw them out of the window.
I come back to the impact assessment because it is important. It took legal action—judicial review by the National Union of Students—to force the Government to carry out the equality impact assessment that we have seen. I understand—I am happy to give way if the Minister wants to intervene—that although the original impact assessment before the decision was made has been shared with the NUS, it has not been published. The Department has refused to publish it. There was an impact assessment before the version that is itself a devastating critique of the Government’s proposals. I presume, because it has not been released, that the first assessment was even more devastating. We as parliamentarians have not had the opportunity to consider it, although we are debating the issue today. That adds to the scandal layer upon layer. The matter is not in the manifesto, was not debated at the general election and was not allowed to be debated on the Floor of the House. We being asked to consent to a very dodgy process.
In view of the pressure of time—I want to hear from the Minister and to have the opportunity to challenge him—I will say no more about that and will support my colleagues in saying that we should, as I hope will Conservative Members, recognising the trajectory of the Government’s policy over the last seven years, vote against these proposals.
Jim Fitzpatrick (Poplar and Limehouse) (Lab)
Mr Percy, it is a pleasure to see you presiding in the Committee today. I will be brief.
I start by echoing the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) that the Minister is held in high regard, so it is disappointing that he has brought these regulations to the Committee. However, we have been here before. Maintenance grants were abolished by the Labour Government between 1997 and 2001. Looking round the room, I think only my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool South (Mr Marsden) and I were here at the time.
For me, the issue was huge and still is. The vast majority of my young people in Poplar and Limehouse—the constituency was Poplar and Canning Town then—were not impacted by the introduction of tuition fees at £1,000, and I supported it. I still support tuition fees, not at £9,000 but at a more moderate level. The income threshold for my young people meant that they would not have to pay tuition fees. My worry was about those who were just above the threshold for whom grants were critical in allowing them to go on to higher education.
The issue is personal because my two brothers in Glasgow went to university and college, presumably only because they received a grant. I do not think my parents could have afforded to pay for my brother to go to Glasgow University and my other, younger brother to go to Glasgow Art School and then Dundee Art College. It was my only rebellion during the 1997-2010 Labour Administration. Conservative Members should know that standing on principle is not an impediment to promotion. In fact, it get may get them noticed. They should think long and hard, because this is a major issue. To the credit of the Labour Government, they changed their mind a few years later because they recognised the impact of the measure and restored maintenance grants.
The Prime Minister, to his credit, speaks a lot about social mobility but, as we have heard, many people think this measure will impact on social mobility. My hon. Friends have outlined the case very strongly and much better than I could. I appeal to the Government on behalf of my young constituents not to proceed with these regulations today. I congratulate the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool South, on the very powerful case he has mounted, supported by other Opposition Members. This measure reflects badly on the Government and it reflects even more badly on them that we are dealing with it in Committee, rather than in the full glare of the public in the Chamber, where many more colleagues, who would have wanted to contribute, could speak. This issue is fundamentally important for those people in our society who need a helping hand up. We need to ensure that they can share the great life that we all live in Britain.
The Minister for Universities and Science (Joseph Johnson)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Percy. I welcome the chance to set out the case for this statutory instrument, which details the higher education student support arrangements for the 2016-17 academic year. It is, as hon. Members said, an important instrument, and its provisions touch on some of the principles that guide the Government’s higher education policies.
The instrument includes an increase in loans for living costs for current full-time students, as well as a number of policy and technical changes to ensure that the student finance system remains fair. The most significant provision is the change to the student support package for new students, and I will devote the majority of my remarks to this.
Before discussing the content of the instrument, I would like to clarify the parliamentary process—an issue raised by a number of Opposition Members. Changes to student support are made annually through secondary legislation, through amendments to the Education (Student Support) Regulations 2011. There are a number of hon. Members here who are not able to vote in the Committee, but who have none the less made valuable contributions to this important debate, illustrating the fact that Parliament is having an opportunity to examine this measure.
These regulations are made under the Teaching and Higher Education Act 1998, which was passed under the previous Labour Government. Today’s Delegated Legislation Committee therefore follows the procedure agreed by Parliament. This debate follows an early-day motion in the Commons, and I understand that the other place will also get the chance to consider this instrument following the tabling of a motion yesterday by Lord Stevenson of Balmacara.
Mr Marsden
I share other Opposition Members’ respect for the Minister and I sense that he is in a dilemma because he is not entirely comfortable with this process. He is trying to justify it by saying that it is due custom and practice. He is absolutely right about that, but any Government have the ability to break due custom and practice. I know that only too well, because I sat in this House in 2006, when we had the great casino debate. That measure was obviously going to affect Blackpool and could have been brought to a Delegated Legislation Committee, but because of the strength of feeling on the matter in the House, the Government of the day allowed a 90-minute debate on the Floor of the House. If we can debate casinos on the Floor of the House for 90 minutes, why cannot we debate this issue?
Joseph Johnson
I am glad that the hon. Gentleman acknowledges that we are following due custom and practice. I will carry on explaining the Government’s intentions in bringing this instrument before the Committee.
The instrument provides that those students beginning courses in 2016-17 will qualify for increased loans for their living costs while studying, instead of maintenance grants. An eligible student whose family income is £25,000 or less and who is living away from home and studying outside London will qualify for up to 10.3% more living costs support in 2016-17 than they would receive under current arrangements. That is an additional £766 of support, and that increase in support for living costs has been called for by individual students. Indeed, the 2012 report by the National Union of Students entitled “The Pound In Your Pocket” indicated that there are two main considerations for students when deciding whether to go to university. The first is whether they have the means to meet their costs when needed, and the second is whether the eventual benefits of higher education will outweigh the costs. With these regulations, we are ensuring that students from the most disadvantaged backgrounds have access to more support than ever before. Students understand the value of obtaining a degree.
Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab)
I think that all the speeches so far, certainly from Opposition Members, have demonstrated clearly, as has the impact assessment, that this legislation will have a massively detrimental impact on social mobility. We understood that social mobility and aspiration were at the heart of the message that the Minister’s party wishes to put across; a party that claims to be a one nation Government. Does social mobility still feature in the Minister’s party’s claim to be a one nation Government?
Joseph Johnson
Yes, indeed it does, and is motivating our decision to increase the amount of support that will be available to students going into higher education in this country. We want everybody who can benefit from higher education to be able to go to university.
We are delighted to see more people applying to university, more people getting in and more people getting on to their first-choice courses than ever before. Critically, we are delighted that more people from disadvantaged backgrounds are applying and going to university than ever before, and we want those trends to carry on.
Dr Huq
Has the Minister seen the research on these new arrangements for the Institute for Fiscal Studies? The poorest 40% will graduate with debts of up to £53,000 a year, as opposed to £40,000 at the moment. How does that square with his party’s claim to be the party encouraging fiscal responsibility and social mobility?
Joseph Johnson
Accessing university is a transformational experience for many students, especially for people from disadvantaged backgrounds. We want more people from disadvantaged backgrounds to go to university and receive the benefits that can bring. I will now explain exactly why—
Rebecca Pow (Taunton Deane) (Con)
I have come hot-foot from a delegation of students who came up from Somerset College in my constituency this morning, some getting on the train at 5 o’clock to meet me, because they knew I was on this Committee. I want to express their heartfelt concerns about the dropping of the maintenance grant and the switch to loans. They believe it will have a serious impact on people from low-earning backgrounds, particularly women, single-parent families and mature students—which they all are.
I fully understand that the Government want to get more people into further education and the concern about the debt that we were left by Labour. We would not even be discussing this if it were not for that and the deficit. Will the Minister assure me and those students that he has their concerns at heart and that we will still enable people from disadvantaged backgrounds to access further education?
Joseph Johnson
My hon. Friend makes some points that I will now address head-on. Students understand the value of obtaining a degree. On average, graduates will earn £100,000 more than non-graduates over a lifetime. Because of the progressive nature—this is the vital point—of the student loan system, loans will start to be repaid only when students are earning more than £21,000. That means that the lowest earners will repay nothing.
As our equality analysis indicates, the grant-to-loan switch will only significantly affect students from low-income backgrounds whose annual average lifetime earnings are £30,000 or more. Critically and crucially, that is to say that only those who benefit from increased earnings as a result of undertaking higher education will be affected.
Peter Heaton-Jones (North Devon) (Con)
On that point, I have been approached by members of the student union of Petroc College in Barnstaple in my constituency. I also had a very constructive meeting with them over the summer. The point that the Minister is making goes to the heart of their concern, which is that the changes the Government are making might have the effect of lessening the opportunity for students from less well-off backgrounds to attend higher education. Could the Minister take this opportunity to provide some reassurance to that student union about the Government’s intentions?
The Chair
The Minister has been very generous in giving way to interventions. Can we ensure that interventions are kept short and include a question from now on?
Joseph Johnson
I shall briefly touch on that. Critically, just to repeat, what my hon. Friend’s students must remember is that the grant-to-loan switch will only significantly affect those whose annual average lifetime earnings are £30,000 or more. That should be a considerable comfort to his constituents.
The change to replace grants for living costs with loans was announced in principle at the July 2015 summer Budget. The change helps balance the need to ensure that affordability is not a barrier to higher education, while ensuring that higher education is funded in a fair and sustainable way. This was a manifesto commitment. It is there in black and white.
Joseph Johnson
In the manifesto. Read it. It is available in all good bookshops.
Let me put the regulations in context to explain why the Government believe that they strike the right balance in ensuring these two things. In the previous Parliament, the Government took significant steps to ensure that university was open to those from all backgrounds. The policy of removing the artificial cap on student numbers, announced in the autumn statement 2013, reflected Lord Robbins’ principle from half a century ago that university places
“should be available for all those who are qualified by ability and attainment”.
Striking progress on social mobility through higher education has already been made. The proportion of students from disadvantaged backgrounds entering higher education is up from 13.6% in 2009 to 18.5% in 2015. That represents the highest proportion of students from those backgrounds entering higher education ever, and it is an achievement that we can all be proud of.
We are taking further steps on social mobility, as announced in our Green Paper. The Prime Minister has set out clear ambitions to double the proportion of the most disadvantaged students starting higher education by 2020 from 2009 levels, and to increase the number of black and minority ethnic students by 20% in the same period. We will be setting out further steps as part of our response to the Green Paper and through new guidance to the director of fair access.
Joseph Johnson
I am going to press on, if the hon. Lady does not mind. As we enable more people to benefit from higher education, we must also ensure that the system remains financially sustainable. The higher education landscape has changed drastically since Robbins set out his principle. The overall higher education participation rate 50 years ago was around 5%, while it is now close to 50%. Despite the expansion in numbers, the evidence shows that graduates have continued to benefit as the demand for higher education and skills has grown in a more developed economy.
While respecting Robbins’ principle, the Government cannot fund higher education as if the changes of the past 50 years had not happened. Given the advantages accrued by those who go to university, it is not right to ask those who do not benefit directly to meet all the costs of those who do benefit from higher education.
Wes Streeting
I am on page 35 of the Conservative party’s 2015 manifesto. Amid all the information about repayment thresholds and the cap on numbers, there is no reference whatever to student grants.
Joseph Johnson
The hon. Gentleman will see references to ensuring a sustainably funded higher education system balanced in the interests of the beneficiaries of the system and the taxpayers underwriting it. It is clear and transparent. It is in black and white.
It is right that graduates contribute towards the cost of their education while being protected from the costs upfront. That is what is delivered by the progressive system of taxpayer-backed student loans with generous repayment terms that we introduced during the previous Parliament.
Joseph Johnson
I need to make some progress, I am afraid. I will allow my hon. Friend to intervene shortly.
The changes set out in this statutory instrument come at a time of increased resources going to universities. Total income has risen from £24 billion in 2012-13 to £26 billion in 2013-14, and is forecast to rise to £31 billion by 2017-18. Our system supports the financial sustainability of the sector while ensuring that higher education is open to all. As the OECD’s director of education put it, England is
“one of the very few countries that has figured out a sustainable approach to higher education financing”.
He recently added that England has
“made a wise choice — it works for individuals, it works for government.”
Paul Blomfield
The Minister makes constant reference to what has happened in the past. We are concerned about the impact of these proposals, given that his own impact assessment—as my hon. Friend the Member for Blackpool South mentioned—identified that there would be a negative impact on a number of critical demographic segments. Is the Minister concerned about that? As he has not answered the question I raised previously, I will also ask him about the original equality impact assessment, which is not the one that has been published. It has been shared with the NUS. Will he make that available to Members of Parliament?
Joseph Johnson
We published the full equality impact assessment on 5 December, which, in reference to the earlier comments made by the hon. Member for Blackpool South, gave the Committee plenty of time to analyse it and go through it closely before today’s meeting. The Government have been fully transparent with respect to the equality impact assessment.
Mr Marsden
On a point of order, Mr Percy. The Minister is playing with words in terms of 5 December. Actually, the date on the impact assessment is November, so obviously they got it out even later. The fact of the matter is that the membership of this Committee, with the exception of himself and myself, was drawn up only a few days ago, so how Members could be expected to know that they would need to look at it in December is another matter.
The Chair
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his point of order. I think it is more a point of debate, and he has made his point on the record.
Joseph Johnson
None the less, I repeat what I said, which is that we were accused of not publishing the equality impact assessment until a few days ago. We published it on 5 December online, and it has been available for all interested Members of Parliament to scrutinise.
Joseph Johnson
These equality impact assessments were released to the NUS. The equality duty is an ongoing duty on Government, impact assessments are refined as new evidence emerges, and we published the most up-to-date version of it on 5 December. The Committee has had well over a month to assess that impact assessment. The changes to student support contained in the regulations work in the same spirit as the last Parliament’s reforms. The Government were elected on their fiscal record, with a commitment to eliminate the deficit. This change makes a significant contribution to achieving that goal. Converting maintenance grants to loans will generate grant savings of around £2.5 billion a year, which will have an immediate impact on the record-breaking deficit that this Government inherited. We do not recognise the estimates of the economic saving cited.
Joseph Johnson
I am going to press on and conclude my remarks, because the shadow Minister needs to make his closing remarks, too.
Those who disagree with the provisions contained in the regulations should submit their proposals to generate equivalent grant savings from elsewhere. I note that the Labour party has in the past year proposed competing higher education funding policies, although they share one common feature—their significant cost to the taxpayer. Labour’s leader said in July that fees should be removed completely, with grants retained. That was costed by the Labour party itself at £10 billion. Ahead of the election, it was briefly proposed that fees be reduced to £6,000, which would have cost £3 billion. Those policies move us backwards. They are unsustainable.
I was therefore particularly interested to read Ed Balls’ comments in this week’s Times Higher Education, where he spoke about the “blot on Labour’s copybook”:
“We clearly didn’t find a sustainable way forward for the financing of higher education.”
He said that if the electorate
“think you’ve got the answers for the future, they’ll support you.”
We have set out a clear plan for the future to ensure that higher education finances are sustainable and that more people can benefit from higher education. Has the Labour party decided on its approach?
When the tuition fee reforms were made in the last Parliament, there were those who predicted a sharp fall in participation in higher education, particularly by those from disadvantaged backgrounds. However, that did not come to pass, and the latest application figures from UCAS, although provisional, show that, in spite of our proposed changes to maintenance, application figures are similar to last year’s figures.
The hon. Member for Blackpool South referred to the grant-to-loan switch in FE. Loans were introduced in the further education sector in 2013-14 to remove the barrier of meeting the upfront cost of tuition fees; we are debating loans for living costs in HE, and I do not believe that is a valid comparison.
Joseph Johnson
I have only one or two minutes, so I will not give way. We should remember that switching support for living costs from grants to loans allows us to increase the upfront support provided to students from the lowest income backgrounds. In taking the decision to proceed with this policy, the Secretary of State and I considered an equality impact assessment, which we have published. That impact assessment sets out the risk to protected groups. It also explains that those risks will be mitigated by a number of factors, including the 10.3% increase to the maximum loan for living costs for the lowest income students, the repayment protection for low-income, low-earning graduates and the high average returns to higher education.
We will, of course, monitor the outcome of the policy through the data available from the Higher Education Statistics Agency and the Student Loans Company and the work of the Office for Fair Access. We will also continue to listen to stakeholders and colleagues in the House and the other place. In the meantime, I am grateful for the points that have been made by hon. Members today. However, the evidence from the coalition’s fee reforms has been that participation is fairly insensitive to greater debt. The equality analysis made the point that such changes have a
“limited impact on students decision making”.
Students understand that graduate debt is not the same as commercial debt. Graduate debt is paid back through a repayment system that takes account of ability to pay and, crucially, it allows individuals to make one of the best investments—in undertaking higher education.
The instrument allows us, in a time of fiscal restraint, to ensure that universities remain well funded so that they can continue to act as engines of our economy and of social mobility in a time of increased student numbers. For those reasons, I commend the regulations to the House.
Mr Marsden
I thank all my hon. Friends, and Government Back-Bench Members, for their contributions. I am sorry that time does not permit me to draw more on them. I want to make two or three points before we close. First, the Minister moved into very broad territory at the end that was not related to these Committee proceedings at all. I put a list of specific questions to him, not least on the sharia issue. I hope that replies to those questions will be forthcoming promptly for the sake of all Committee members, particularly the Government Members who have expressed concerns.
Let us be straightforward: nobody is accusing the Minister—I certainly am not—of having bad faith in this matter, or of not wanting to proceed in a proper and progressive manner, but there is an old saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. If we will the ends of social mobility, we must also will the means. The whole point that we have made in this debate is that this process was not in the manifesto. Frankly, I thought that what he said about the generalised point was fairly risible; I thought it was only the Chancellor of the Exchequer who worked on the principle “Always read the small print, even if it’s not there.” I hope that the Minister will not follow that particular principle.
The truth of the matter is that if the Government stretch the process and nudge people away for too long, the envelope being stretched will eventually be broken. That is what we are saying. If the Minister and his colleagues are so confident about their policies, why did they not bring them to the Floor of the House? More to the point, why did they not consult independent experts and various representative organisations? Why did they not commission some research from any of the reputable independent policy bodies?
Last month, with a number of other MPs, I sat in this corridor listening to the hundreds of students who came to lobby us. Their message was a constant one: scrapping maintenance grants will leave people struggling to go to university. Incidentally, when the Minister answers, I hope that he will answer the points made by Opposition Members about the Barnett consequentials.
If the Minister and his colleagues believe in their case, why have they not brought it to the Floor of the House? There is an old saying that a speaker who knows he has been given a poor brief marks the paper at a certain part of his response, “Argument weak here—shout like mad”. The Minister is a courteous man, so shouting like mad is probably not on his agenda, but the brief that he has been given has simply folded up the Government’s tents. The proposals should have been made to the whole House, and no amount of the bravura and bluster that the Prime Minister gave my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) in the House yesterday while dodging his question about the grants will alter that fact.
We have talked about consequences. We have talked about our own experiences. I was a tutor for the Open University for 20 years, and I know that the experience of many of the students whom I taught was that they had been put off higher education at an earlier age by the costs. Such things do not alter just because we are in the digital world of the 21st century. I appeal to the Minister to think again, to consider specifically the issues brought today and, for goodness’ sake, if he really thinks that he has a good argument, to put it on the Floor of the House.
Westminster Hall
(8 years, 10 months ago)
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BACKBENCH BUSINESS
(8 years, 10 months ago)
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VAT Evasion: Internet Retailers
(8 years, 10 months ago)
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Chris Heaton-Harris (Daventry) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered VAT evasion and internet retailers.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hanson. I think it is for the first time, so I hope that I will obey House procedure sufficiently not to get into trouble and be told off.
First, I thank the Backbench Business Committee for giving me time to talk about this subject with those who are interested. I only bid for the debate before the Backbench Business Committee on Tuesday at 2.30 pm, so to receive a chunk of time in Westminster Hall so quickly is a great honour and a bit of a surprise. Consequently, a number of Members who wanted to participate could not be here. For example, my right hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs Gillan) is holding a dementia event in the House at the moment, and even though she has been in this House for 23 years she still struggles to be in two places at one time. Thus she could not be here today to talk about how one of her constituents in particular, Mr Richard Allen, has been so gravely affected by the issue I will describe.
I guess I should open by giving a snapshot—a festive one. I do not think I am a cheapskate, but before Christmas I was looking for some cheap presents for my family online. I was particularly aiming for bargains available for next-day delivery. I hope Members will be interested to hear about these bargains; some of them might be partial to online shopping themselves.
Looking around, I was able to find an Apple iPhone 6 Plus, with 16 gigabytes, in gold. It was being sold at £572.64, which was £46.36 cheaper than buying it directly from apple.com. I found that offer online from a British-based seller. If I had purchased that iPhone—I did not, as it was way too expensive and far outside my ballpark figure—I would have been saving a great deal of money, and because it was a British-based seller, I would have been supporting a British small or medium-sized enterprise. I am a Conservative and we are, after all, in this together, and supporting SMEs is part of an important long-term economic plan.
I thought that price was a tiny bit unusual, but I did not spend too long thinking about it as I was Christmas shopping. I probably would not have thought of it again until, at one of the last events before Christmas where I met constituents, I met a business-savvy constituent of mine who had contacted me because he found himself in trouble. I bought him a cup of tea, we sat down and we went through what had been going on with his business.
My constituent had 20 years of experience in e-commerce, website development and internet marketing, and had set up an online retail business in 2010 selling goods on his own website, eBay and Amazon. He told me:
“Our sales grew to £689,000 a year by 2013 and we ranked in the top 5 sellers in our market sector on eBay. In early 2014, in the space of 6 months, our sales collapsed from £57,000 to £21,000 a month. In the past 18 months, our sales have increased to £30,000 and we struggle to compete on a daily basis”
with what was happening online among his competitors. He said:
“My company has now lost over £550,000 in sales and we are currently losing £25,000 in sales a month”.
He believes that is because a “VAT fraud” is taking place. He went on:
“Almost all of our UK based competitors have seen equally dramatic loss in business, with some shutting up shop completely.”
He said that many of his UK competitors had made their staff redundant and moved out of their warehouses. He himself has lost his life savings and is talking about selling his house. Some individuals are close to bankruptcy. He told me that he now lived in rented accommodation, running a business from his dining room.
He gave me an example of what is going on. He sells bicycle lights for £11.99, making a £1 profit, while other online sellers currently sell the same product for £7.99. That competition in price is a no-brainer for the consumer; the two products are identical, so which one would any of us choose to buy? That means that his turnover and profits have halved in two years.
If someone flicks through the website for that other retailer, which might well be a UK-based company, it seems to have a legitimate VAT number. However, it might be neither legitimate nor a VAT number, and then my constituent might have a problem, because that competitor would have an unfair advantage. My constituent told me that he has been ill with the stress that he has been caused, and he estimates that he and his family can last only another six months at the current pace, at the end of which his business will collapse.
Let me go into some more detail, because Members might wonder what caused such a change of fate for my constituent and his business. He told me the precise reason for it; he believes that it is VAT evasion. Of course, that is why I asked for the debate, and I intend to explain a little further the background to the problem and its growth.
Online marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon do not make it compulsory for sellers to display verifiable business information, such as an accurate company name, a physical business address and a VAT number. It is simple to see, through the online seller information, when a company is not UK-based and displays no VAT number. Several foreign companies have now decided to have a UK-based company number and, as I have said, they have put some sort of number in the field that shows they have a British, or even German, VAT number.
For non-established taxable persons—companies from outside the UK that warehouse in the UK and dispatch goods from the UK to customers in the UK—the correct procedure is to register for VAT as soon as they have any stock in the UK. Since 1 December 2012, all NETPs supplying goods in the UK have been required to register for VAT and to apply VAT to all sales from their very first supply of goods or services onwards. There is no threshold.
Sellers on online marketplaces used to advertise their business locations as UK-based, yet they would be a foreign company. That could be spotted through delivery times. When I used to go online, the delivery time for those companies would be from 21 days to 63 days, because the product was coming from China. That no longer happens. Consumers made a choice—they could pay a bit extra for goods that would turn up in the next few days; or a bit less for goods that would turn up after quite a long time.
To combat that problem, the online retailers introduced marking systems to allow customers to rate down a seller for late delivery, causing the seller from afar some problems and prompting the growth of fulfilment centres, as some retailers tried to overcome the bad reviews that they were receiving.
If we put together those two issues, it is suggested that small overseas sellers in their thousands are now importing goods into the UK in advance of orders and not properly registering for VAT. Sellers can then arrange for the online marketplace to dispatch the stock from its UK warehouses once orders are placed. Through that route, they not only reduce delivery time but benefit from the added bonus of avoiding VAT charges. They can therefore charge lower prices than their UK-based, VAT-paying competitors.
Chinese-owned fulfilment companies in the UK provide special eBay and Amazon fulfilment services for Chinese and other non-UK businesses. Chinese sellers allegedly send their stock, pre-packed and barcoded, to fulfilment centres in China. The stock is then forwarded on in bulk to their UK fulfilment centres. How Chinese sellers move their stock into the UK is unclear, as is whether they pay any duty at the time. Indications suggest that by using the low-value consignment relief and low-value bulk import procedures, Chinese sellers are bringing in vast volumes of goods, many of which are undeclared. They appear as items already sold to the UK, but they have been pre-sold and are held in UK fulfilment centres. Presenting themselves as a UK entity enables the sellers to claim that they are under the VAT threshold as a reason for not displaying a VAT number. That is an illegal practice, and it threatens the viability of UK SMEs in online retail, since those committing VAT fraud can undercut prices and provide fast delivery from their UK-based stock. British retailers say they are being put out of business by such foreign companies, particularly from China, selling their products through e-retailers such as eBay and Amazon.
To return to my Christmas shopping trip, I decided I would buy a handful of extra cables for my Apple iPhone. When I was clicking through the system, I thought the cables were being sold by a UK-based company, with VAT charged. I just looked at the price on the screen—I did not realise that I was almost certainly buying from a company that, although registered in the UK, had a fake VAT number. I did not realise that I probably would not be paying VAT on the cables.
By failing to account for VAT, sellers are acquiring a distortive advantage over UK businesses in the marketplace. The final price paid for goods by the consumer is much lower than it would be from UK competitors. Chinese and other non-UK businesses therefore now dominate many market sectors on eBay, and there are huge numbers of them on Amazon, too.
The unbranded Android smartphone and tablet market sector on eBay.co.uk generates sales of some £80 million a year. Chinese sellers account for 40% of those sales in the UK, representing about £32 million a year. The top Chinese seller in that market sector, which lists stock located in the UK, makes annual sales of £2 million a year and is not VAT-registered.
Adding insult to injury, fraud breeds fraud. Due to built-in online algorithms, those that sell more on web marketplaces get a prime position at the top of searches and listings. Given that they are then the first listing a consumer sees when searching for an item, they sell even more, pushing their VAT-paying competitors further out of the picture and ensuring that they remain at the top. That means that the sellers can monopolise online marketplaces, leading to price distortions in UK online retail and VAT-registered companies being unable to compete. Not only does that result in the UK taxman losing money from unpaid VAT, but the knock-on effects for UK business and competition are huge.
I will give some specific examples that have been highlighted to me. Photo Direct is making sales of just under £10 million. If it is evading tax, that equates to £1.67 million in VAT evasion a year. It started trading on eBay.co.uk 12 years ago in July 2003. It is one of the largest VAT-evading companies found trading on eBay and it runs two eBay business seller accounts. It specialises in selling VAT-free cameras, iPhones, iPads and tablets. Its stock is housed in the UK. It is using a Hove-based PO box not displaying a VAT number or full company name. In December 2014, it made sales on eBay of £838,412. Its bestselling item was the familiar Apple iPhone 6 Plus 16GB in gold, which is the one I described slightly earlier. Photo Direct sells it for £572.64, which is £46.36 cheaper than Apple.com. That item alone accounted for £36,649.21 of sales. On contacting the seller to inquire whether a VAT receipt would be issued for a £2,000 camera, the seller confirmed that the price does not include VAT. Its PayPal account traces back to a business in Cedarhurst, New York, called Robscamerastore.
Another example: eBay seller My-elink is run by CSJ Communications Technology Ltd. It started trading on eBay.co.uk eight years ago on 14 November 2008. CSJ Communications Technology operates seven eBay business seller accounts, all using the same company name and VAT number. Combined sales were £5,812,308 last year, equating to an expected amount of VAT of just under a million pounds, or £968,718. A company name, an address, which is in China, and a UK VAT number—150540153—are all listed. However, the VAT number is not registered to the Chinese company CSJ Communications Technology; it is registered to Pocketdeal Ltd, a UK-registered company that was incorporated on 23 August 2012. The VAT number does not belong to CSJ Communications Technology.
Those kinds of evasion have been found to occur online on at least the two major platforms I have already mentioned: Amazon and eBay. The extent of the evasion is dramatic. If I read out a list of the sellers that have been accused of committing such fraud, Members here today might become a little bored with me, but I will not let that stop me. The founders of vatfraud.org, working alongside trading standards officers, have identified 500 VAT-evading overseas business seller accounts.
To start with, I will go through a small range of the UK eBay sellers with no VAT numbers. I have talked about Photo Direct, but the eBay sellers universal-electronix, richmondcam, mechanic_warehouse and right89hifi all have turnovers of more than £3 million a year. Further down the list, the 37th largest seller without a VAT number is digitalbravo2014. It had a mere third of a million pounds of sales. The company is registered in the United Kingdom with UK stock, but has no VAT number.
Transferring platforms, I could talk about Amazon stores with no VAT number listed. I could direct Members to Ringke Official UK Store, which sells phone cases and accessories. It is registered in Texas and has no VAT number listed on its Amazon.co.uk page. It also offers Amazon Prime free delivery. I can buy from that seller and get my goods much quicker than from another retailer, with the advantage of possibly not having to pay VAT. Zeto UK sells portable phone chargers, games, computers, headphones, electronic accessories and so on. It has no VAT number listed anywhere on its page, and its orders are filled by Amazon. Inception sells mainly Apple products. It has a customer services address in Manchester, a business address in Hong Kong, no VAT number listed and orders fulfilled by Amazon.
I will move further down that list of case studies. They are from vatfraud.org, so they are all online for Members and others to have a look at. When the case study was done, Rearth USA LLC, an iPhone and smartcase provider, was one of the largest sellers of such items on Amazon.co.uk, Mr Hanson. You might even have looked at the goods online yourself. It also has Amazon stores in other EU countries with no VAT numbers listed. A secret shopper bought a product from this company and asked for a VAT receipt. The company stated it was in the process of applying for one, apologised and refunded the notional VAT that would have been paid by the customer for that good.
So we have companies that are listed with VAT numbers that are not correct VAT numbers. We are able to check whether a VAT number is listed to the company we might have bought from. The European Commission website has free access, so it is easy to do so. A handful of such companies are trading on Amazon at the moment: JEDirect, Ipow-Official and EasyAcc U. There are also companies with no VAT number listed and none provided when asked. These include Hayesmall; Gugou; SLEO Accessories; Buyee, which has a UK local delivery service as well; InstaNatural EU; Ulike; Oxford Street; and Nestling Store. There are hundreds and hundreds of such companies.
Some, like GIL ENTERPRISE, state that all their prices include VAT but, again, refuse to provide a VAT receipt should someone ask for one. Companies with VAT numbers that do not match their business name populate the websites in great numbers: Avantek UK, which has the business name Claybox Ltd, and Simple Tek, which has the business name Shen Zhen Shi Futian Qu Sai Ge Dian Zi Shi Chang Qun Jian Dian Zi Shang Hang, so perhaps Simple Tek is better, but it is not right.
BUTEFO has the business name Shenzhen Kuanchuang Technology Company; LERWAY Technology Company has the business name shenzhenshi leerwei keji youxian gongsi; and Bravo Tech has the business name Wuhan Value Link E-Commerce Ltd. They all have VAT numbers that do not match their business names. I have pages and pages of such companies. To be sure of myself, I checked with the Clerks about privilege before I started talking today.
There are literally hosts and hosts of such companies out there trading in the United Kingdom. Anyone in this Room could go to the website—Amazon or eBay—and look for a good online, believing it was from a UK-based seller; it might even have a UK limited company number; and yet it is actually none of those things and is not paying VAT to HMRC.
It is alleged that the sellers are committing VAT fraud by failing to supply a VAT number, by presenting themselves as UK companies when they are not, or by fraudulently giving out a VAT number that does not belong to them. They despatch their stock in the UK on Amazon or eBay.co.uk. The combined sales on a list of more than 500 companies come to £300 million a year. If these sellers were allowed to trade for another three years, with the growth that they have at the moment they would generate estimated sales of £1.2 billion; if they evade VAT, they would evade about £200 million between them; and eBay would earn about £110 million in seller fees from them. These are just a sample. I am afraid it is likely that there are many more non-UK sellers committing VAT fraud on eBay, Amazon and other sites.
Paul Miloseski-Reid has been the lead officer on e-commerce for UK trading standards for the past nine years. Based on an analysis of thousands of marketplace traders, he estimates that up to £2 billion of VAT is being lost to the Exchequer each year. Paul estimates that online sales adding up to £10.8 billion annually come from overseas sellers who are not paying VAT. This huge number does not tell the full story. On top of the £2 billion that is lost through unpaid VAT, there are millions lost elsewhere through the indirect effects of this fraud. There is the loss of revenue and profit for UK businesses that are undercut and beaten on price and delivery time. Then there is the loss that comes from companies closing and the loss of jobs; the loss of corporation tax; the loss of PAYE and national insurance; and the loss of import VAT and duty through low-value bulk imports. Those are all big losses to our Exchequer. If we couple those with the fines that should be owed and backdated VAT payments, the £2 billion that could be recouped would undoubtedly be much more impressive and larger.
With such a large amount of money on the table, it may seem odd to Members that the practice is allowed to continue, but the firms involved insist that responsibility for charging the correct VAT lies with the sellers using the sites, and eBay and Amazon say that they cannot be held liable in cases of evasion. However, third party liability for VAT is now an established legal principle in the European courts. It was developed to combat VAT carousel fraud where some of those involved in the fraud were not necessarily the party fraudulently claiming the VAT refunds. Axel Kittel v. the Belgian Government and the Belgian Government v. Recolta Recycling SPRL were joined cases that introduced a test in 2006 for VAT fraud, which became known as the “Kittel principle”.
As HMRC explains on its website,
“The test in Kittel is simple and should not be over-refined. It embraces not only those who know of the connection but those who ‘should have known’. Thus it includes those who should have known from the circumstances which surround their transactions that they were connected to fraudulent evasion. If a trader should have known that the only reasonable explanation for the transaction in which he was involved was that it was connected with fraud and if it turns out that the transaction was connected with fraudulent evasion of VAT then he should have known of that fact. He may properly be regarded as a participant for the reasons explained in Kittel.”
The term “online marketplace” is not really a good description of what these websites actually do. In reality, rather than just offering space for retailers to operate like a marketplace would in the real world, they offer marketing, as well as payment and fulfilment services to third-party sellers. They not only advertise the goods but are handling the stock, issuing invoices and collecting payments. Some of them also offer the complete warehousing and fulfilment solution. Such websites claim, however, that they are unable to police sellers even if they were obligated to do so, which is obviously not true. It is not unknown for the websites to police sellers in relation to the products that they sell. Until the practice was banned by the EU, some of them prevented sellers from offering items on other websites at lower prices. If the websites can track something as complex as that, they can easily identify sellers who should be accounting for VAT on supplies.
Such websites regularly police sellers with regard to money laundering rules, EU directives and the like, and sellers have to provide details of their company address, passport details, copies of tax returns and other detailed information. Even to be able to start placing goods with them, the websites make their sellers sign up to terms and conditions that enable them to demand any data they require, including detailed sales figures and VAT data. It is therefore beyond doubt that these websites are able to establish the VAT status of a seller on their website. They could, and should, easily identify and exclude sellers that should be registered for VAT but are not. At the very least, they could detect and remove sellers that are using invalid VAT numbers, but they seem unwilling or unable to do even that.
The websites go far beyond what would normally be understood as the remit of a marketplace. The cost of the services provided in these so-called marketplaces is billed to the seller and included in the sale price of the item. It can, therefore, be demonstrated that the websites are effectively part of the production chain and so part of the supply chain. The websites objectively benefit from any fraudulent VAT transactions because the final sale price includes the VAT that should have been paid—fraudulently evaded VAT—from which they calculate their commission.
The websites benefit from the transactions and participate in them, they are part of the supply chain, and they are fully aware of the VAT status of the sellers on their site because they request VAT details from all sellers. They are also aware when supplies are made by sellers in the EU and in volumes that exceed the VAT registration value threshold. For all those reasons, they clearly do know, or at least they really should know, that VAT is due when sellers make such taxable supplies available for purchase in the EU. According to the Italmoda judgment, they are liable for any evaded VAT, as is any company in the supply chain upstream of the perpetrator. It is also a criminal offence for anyone to know about VAT fraud and not report it.
eBay has certainly been made aware of specific cases, and, bearing in mind the introduction of the non-established taxable persons provisions and the luxury of Amazon’s huge, lovely, wonderful legal department—which is definitely watching our proceedings—it is difficult to imagine that both companies have no idea that VAT evasion is occurring on their websites. The findings I have described and all the accompanying information has been reported to HMRC’s VAT fraud team, the Treasury and trading standards. The latter has been working with vatfraud.org to identify non-UK businesses with stock located in the UK that are not displaying VAT numbers. Trading standards submitted an initial list of 150 such non-UK sellers to eBay, asking the sellers to update their business information and provide VAT numbers in compliance with the EU electronic commerce directive 2002. eBay stated that it was the duty of HMRC to establish which sellers were VAT-registered.
The issue has been growing and left unchecked for some time, and we do not know the full extent to which it might have damaged UK small and medium-sized enterprises and how much VAT we might have collected had it all been paid correctly. A former HMRC inspector tried to deal with unregistered sellers on eBay a number of years ago, and told me that HMRC came to a dead end when eBay refused to co-operate. Yet, under EU law, HMRC could have tried to establish liability on the part of eBay. VAT evasion on online market places is a problem across the internal market. If the UK initiated action in the courts, I cannot believe it would not be supported by the European Commission, other member states, and all legitimate VAT-paying businesses in the EU. Establishing VAT liability for fraud on online marketplaces would end a problem that undermines fair competition across the EU. It would also reaffirm the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s stated intention to make positive reforms to the EU’s internal market.
The problem has existed for long enough, and it is not difficult to find, as I did in my office last night, when in just a few moments of amateur detective work we found a factory in my constituency. There is a service whereby people can register their official UK company name and address. We found that more than 900 businesses had registered. By clicking through a number of them, we found that a vast number of Chinese-registered businesses had a UK company registered in my constituency. Some were trading on these online platforms, and we could find none with a VAT number. If my staffers and I, who are no experts, can find that so quickly in my constituency, I am sure HMRC can.
Yesterday, a number of Members raised this matter at a meeting of the Public Accounts Committee. It was reported quite widely in many newspapers. I was pleased to see that the head of HMRC, Dame Lin Homer, testified that HMRC is taking the issue seriously. Perhaps a little prod from my hon. Friend the Minister would be helpful to ensure that it is taking it very seriously. Today’s Financial Times, though, reported a worrying statement that was made in the Committee: will the Minister comment on the head of HMRC saying that e-retailers were not accountable for evaded VAT? I do not believe that that is the case, based on established tax and European law.
I would really like to know why something that is so easy for us all to spot and prevent has been allowed to grow to such a size. In a way, I feel a bit guilty myself for not clocking something so obvious. When I went online before Christmas, I was thinking, “That’s not a bad price. It’s probably a Chinese company, but they say they are UK-registered, and I am going to get my good in a day or two’s time, so I’m just getting a good deal, aren’t I?” I failed to clock that, if a deal looks too good to be true, it probably is. Unfortunately, in this case, not being true is costing the tax collector, our Government, billions of pounds each year. I would like to think that the motion we are debating is the beginning of the end of that practice.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr David Hanson (in the Chair)
Order. The hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford) has indicated that he wants to participate in the wind-ups, so I call Nick Herbert.
Nick Herbert (Arundel and South Downs) (Con)
Thank you very much for calling me, Mr Hanson. It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris). I congratulate him on securing the debate and on the excellent way in which he explained the problem. He gave a thorough introduction, so there is little need for me to repeat his explanation of how this fraud is happening.
My interest in the topic dates from last year, when my constituent, Mr Neven Juretic, came to see me at one of my surgeries to explain what had happened to his business. I believe the Minister has met Mr Juretic—I am sure he will tell us more about that—who in 2010 set up an online retail business that grew very fast. He had a turnover of several hundred thousand pounds and employed quite a few people locally. It was all going well for the business, which was one of the top five sellers in its market on eBay, when suddenly, in 2014, it underwent a catastrophic loss of revenue, such that sales are now only about 5% of their previous level. That forced him to lay off a large number of his staff. He lost significant assets and now fears that his business faces bankruptcy.
Mr Juretic wondered what had suddenly caused the sharp loss of sales. He became aware that it was not because his competitors were selling better goods at better prices by running more efficiently and doing a better job than him, but because they were able to undercut his prices by about 20%. When he further researched the matter, he found that they were able to do that because, as my hon. Friend set out, they were evading VAT on their sales, which placed him at an immediate disadvantage. He teamed up with other retailers in the same position, and they have done an enormous amount of work. He set up vatfraud.org, to which my hon. Friend referred, which details the scale of the problem and sets out their concerns about the relative inaction in dealing with it.
There seem to be three sets of losers. First, there has been a change in retail practice as ordinary high streets have been affected by the growth of online marketing. The global trend is that people increasingly prefer to buy from online retailers. There is nothing wrong with that, but it has had an impact on our high streets. That is fine, provided that those online retailers sell fairly.
Secondly, there has been an impact on online retailers themselves, and small businesses are going under. Those small retail businesses were at least contributing to the economy and substituting for the high street businesses that were affected by the change in the way the market operates. The change is in consumers’ interest, no doubt, but those small businesses, such as the one in my constituency, were growing and employing local people, resulting in a change in employment patterns. They were successful UK businesses, and they are being clobbered.
Thirdly, there is a potentially significant loss of revenue to the Exchequer. I am sure the Minister will be the first to tell us that he wants to ensure that more revenue flows to the Exchequer, and that he wants to prevent a haemorrhaging of funds at a time when resources are in short supply. The fraud we are discussing has multiple effects, and it appears to be taking place on a substantial scale that justifies more effective action to tackle it.
Mr Juretic and his colleagues say that they have made some progress with trading standards, which is willing to investigate the issue, but they say that there has been inadequate co-operation between trading standards and Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. Their complaint is that they do not think HMRC is addressing the issue sufficiently seriously. As my hon. Friend said, it is possible to do research oneself and identify companies that are not properly VAT-registered, yet are selling stock that is clearly warehoused in the UK. That is the essence of the fraud. Mr Juretic and his colleagues identified 500 such companies—why is it not possible for agencies to go after those people? I ask the Minister in the spirit of openness, why has that not happened? It is clearly in the interest of the Exchequer and our national interest to ensure that businesses are not defrauded. Why is it not possible to go after those companies? After all, there is an audit trail, so it should be possible to identify companies that are not properly VAT-registered. They are meant to have a number, so they should be susceptible to that kind of compliance.
The situation is infuriating not only to the businesses that are affected but to the literally millions of law-abiding, tax-paying, VAT-paying small businesses that regularly find themselves at the sharp end of the tough VAT enforcement that we have in this country. HMRC never treats small businesses with kid gloves when it comes to paying their VAT. The hard workers, the strivers and those who employ a lot of people all pay their VAT and are absolutely slammed if they do not, so when they see that overseas companies are able to commit this kind of fraud, they get very angry about it. I feel angry on behalf of my constituent, given what happened to him.
Can there not be a more effective compliance mechanism? Is there a reason why it is so difficult? Perhaps there is, but it is important to communicate that to Mr Juretic and his colleagues, because at the moment they feel that there is just inertia. They have had a lot of meetings with HMRC and others, but they do not feel that they are getting anywhere. Their suggestion, which we should consider seriously, is that we should set up a special unit to focus on online retail businesses, given that that new sector is a huge growth area. It would be able to demand VAT numbers and pursue non-compliant companies.
What is the proper responsibility of the fulfilment houses? My hon. Friend the Member for Daventry was not willing to let them off the hook. At the moment, companies such as Amazon and eBay say, “We don’t have responsibility for this. If you bring us evidence that there are companies that have evaded VAT, of course we will take them off our websites and won’t allow them to advertise, but it’s not our job to police them.” I think that raises a big public policy question. Given that those businesses, which are often international businesses, make large sums of money that do not find their way to the Exchequer as tax revenue, what responsibility do they have to ensure that people who sell in their marketplaces are selling properly? At the very least they should comply with efforts to track down companies that appear to be defrauding the Exchequer and the taxpayer, but perhaps they have a bigger responsibility to undertake proper checks themselves.
How hard would it be to insist that those companies require businesses to have a verified VAT number before they are allowed to advertise? It should not be hard. Amazon, eBay or anyone else could make a simple request. If somebody who is clearly a business rather than an individual—in the case of eBay, they come through that side of the website—wants to advertise, they should have to provide a VAT number, which is checked, and they should be allowed to advertise only when it is found to be valid.
If HMRC were to make a concerted effort and the authorities were to go after those companies, it would be possible to tighten up compliance quickly. At the moment, my constituent and his colleagues feel that a concerted effort is not being made, that the authorities are not co-operating sufficiently with each other and that the fulfilment houses are passing the buck by saying, “We don’t have any responsibility for this.”
We need to take the issue seriously, for the reasons I have set out. If there are real obstacles, of course I will listen to the Minister and relay his comments to my constituents. They have asked perfectly fair questions, as I am sure they did when they met him. If we do not take tougher action on this issue, it will be a growing scandal and an embarrassment to HMRC and the Government. It is in the interests of all of us to clamp down on it, and I hope the Minister will tell us that he plans to do that.
Ian Blackford (Ross, Skye and Lochaber) (SNP)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hanson. I thank the hon. Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris) for securing this important debate. We have heard two wonderful, passionate speeches, which conveyed the anger that many people feel towards the devastation that can be caused in our constituencies as a consequence of VAT evasion. As well as anger we have had humour, wit and wisdom, for which I thank the hon. Member for Daventry and the right hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert).
Online retailers evading VAT clearly has an impact on the legitimate economy in this country. There has also been a clear impact on jobs and on individuals in both the constituencies already mentioned, where businesses have been put at risk of going under. HMRC has a responsibility to take the matter seriously given the loss to the Exchequer and the impact on the economy, and I hope that the Minister will address that in his response. Given the growth of the industry and its importance, it was a worthwhile suggestion that consideration should be given to the establishment of a special unit at HMRC. Those who operate marketplaces, the likes of Amazon and eBay, also have a responsibility. For the life of me, I cannot quite understand why they would want to walk away from the issue. They have to consider the reputational damage to their businesses. If awareness of the problem grows, UK consumers would unquestionably expect to see Amazon and eBay take things more seriously.
I am grateful to the “fight against VAT fraud” campaigners, who have done so much to highlight the matter in great detail and who have brought forward case studies and other evidence. We have to take the matter seriously. HMRC has a duty to demonstrate that it is enforcing adequate measures to protect against VAT fraud, but online retailers must also recognise their responsibilities to society.
We have heard much about the figures from the campaigners, but the National Audit Office’s report on HMRC’s 2012-13 accounts stated that the total tax gap was estimated at £32 billion, of which £9.6 billion was related to VAT, equating to 10.1% of the actual VAT that could theoretically be collected. There is a wider point here about tax evasion, and we can all imagine the impact of £32 billion on the nation’s accounts and what it would do to the deficit and to our ability to invest in our public services. The NAO estimated that missing trader intra-Community fraud constituted between £0.5 billion and £1 billion of the VAT tax gap, but that was before the growth of these largely Chinese online retailers. It would be safe to assume that the figure has increased significantly over the past two or three years.
The hon. Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris) already mentioned the fact that the “fight against VAT fraud” campaign has identified more than 500 fraudulent retailers, generating as much as £300 million in sales in 2014, and there is the potential for growth over the coming years. The figures are eye-watering and must be taken seriously. The Government have a responsibility to do that, but so do the platform operators. Corporate governance and corporate social responsibility best practices should lead to these institutions recognising their responsibilities in establishing a fair marketplace and one where they have a duty of responsibility to make sure that those using their platforms are legitimate, and are meeting their VAT obligations and their obligations in all areas of taxation.
There are also wider issues with some retailers which seek to mitigate their own responsibilities to pay tax in the UK through various mechanisms. While this country has welcomed the likes of Amazon into our marketplace and recognises the attraction of such operators in adding to consumer choice, Amazon and others must recognise their social responsibility and that paying an appropriate level of tax is the price of doing business in this country. In providing a platform for other retailers, Amazon, eBay and others have a duty to make sure that businesses established outside the UK, but who are warehousing and dispatching goods located in the UK, are paying VAT. Such ventures are classed as non-established taxable persons, often referred to as NETPs.
The “fight against VAT fraud” campaign, which was established by legitimate retailers, has made a number of recommendations. Among them is the registration of VAT numbers, as mentioned by the right hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs, which must happen and could be done quickly. The campaign also states that a failure to display a VAT number and VAT status could be seen as a breach of UK tax laws, a theory which is informed by the rules and regulations under the EU distance selling arrangements. The issue was the subject of a parliamentary question, answered on 16 December, when the Minister said:
“There is no requirement in tax legislation for a VAT-registered person to declare to a customer that they are registered or to provide a VAT registration number, unless they make a supply to another VAT-registered person, in which case they are obliged to issue a VAT invoice including their VAT number. However businesses are required to comply with the Electronic Commerce Regulations 2002 concerning the provision of this information.”
That should be revisited. It would at the least provide some transparency. If retailers have to have a VAT number when selling to other VAT-registered persons, what is the issue in extending that to all transactions?
The matter needs to be considered in the wider context of the debate on tax evasion and avoidance. The Scottish Government’s approach to devolved taxes demonstrates that we are serious about tackling tax avoidance in Scotland. We have taken a simple, clear but robust approach to tackling artificial tax avoidance. The Scottish general anti-avoidance rule was established by the Revenue Scotland and Tax Powers Act 2014 and will allow Revenue Scotland to take counteraction against tax avoidance arrangements that are considered to be artificial, even if they otherwise operate within the letter of the law. The Scottish general anti-abuse rule is significantly wider than the corresponding UK GAAR as set out in the Finance Act 2013, which is based on a narrower test of “abuse” rather than “artificiality”. Sadly, we have only limited powers to tackle tax avoidance on the land and buildings transaction tax and the Scottish landfill tax, but I expect that is a debate for another day. Under the current powers, including the Calman income tax powers, we have no power to tackle income tax avoidance, which falls to the UK Government and HMRC. Even after Smith is implemented, because income tax will be shared, we will still not have powers to tackle avoidance, which will also remain with the UK Government and HMRC.
The UK tax system is complex and inefficient. Unnecessary complexity, through exemptions, reliefs, deductions and allowances, creates opportunities for tax avoidance. HMRC attributed a £7.1 billion tax gap to evasion and avoidance in 2013-14 out of a total tax gap of £34 billion. Isobel d’Inverno, convener of the tax law sub-committee of the Law Society of Scotland and director of corporate tax at Brodies, has said:
“The general anti-avoidance rule that we have got in the Scottish legislation is much fiercer than the UK one. It’s a very much firmer ‘Keep off the grass’ sign than the UK one is. Revenue Scotland also appears very determined to collect all the tax that is due. There’s a whole series of different things that suggests they're going to have a far more pro-active approach to stopping tax avoidance.”
In conclusion, we are dealing here with the specific issue of the VAT avoidance of many online retailers, but we are all responsible, particularly the UK Government, for making sure that we act tough on tax avoidance.
Rob Marris (Wolverhampton South West) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to appear before you for the first time, Mr Hanson. This has been an important and fairly short debate. The hon. Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris), whom I praise for securing the debate, indicated when seeking it that he thought an hour and a half would be enough because the issues are quite simple. The solutions are quite complex, but the issue we are ventilating today is clear. It is about fraud. It is not tax avoidance, it is tax evasion.
I thank the House of Commons Library and Retailers Against VAT Avoidance Schemes or RAVAS, which I met on 17 November last year. At the same time, I also met Neven Juretic, who is the director of Maikai Ltd and a constituent of the right hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert). Mr Juretic suffered considerable losses, as the right hon. Gentleman outlined today. I also met Paul Miloseski-Reid, the UK lead trading standards officer. I have to salute Mr Juretic for the immense amount of work he has done not only in successfully lobbying his excellent local MP, but in producing an excellent document that proposes a number of solutions, as well as outlining the scope of the problem that our country faces.
The sector is huge and growing. The House of Commons Library tells me that UK average weekly internet retail sales are £1.1 billion, or about £57 billion a year, and growing. That is more than 15% of all UK retail sales, and the figure has gone up by two thirds since 2010—it is growing massively. Many of the frauds involve small consignments, such as tablet computers or iPhones, and the number of small consignments arriving in the European Union from outside the EU has gone up from 30 million in 1999 to 115 million in 2013, the latest year for which I could get figures. No doubt the number will have gone up considerably since then.
According to HMRC’s preliminary estimate of the tax gap for 2014-15, 10.4% of it, or £13 billion, is VAT. No hon. Member is suggesting that a crackdown on internet retail sales fraud would recoup all of that amount, and not all VAT fraud in the United Kingdom is to do with internet retail sales, but it is a big and growing problem.
The European Union requirement on companies—and individuals, I think—to register is covered by the EU electronic commerce directive, which we adopted in 2002. That is going back 13 or 14 years, and given the pace of change it is likely to need revisiting. It certainly needs to be enforced. I am unclear about whether the provisions of the directive are being enforced in the United Kingdom, but that might be because of my misunderstanding of what it entails.
My understanding is that a non-EU person trading in the EU—the wording in legislation is a “non-established taxable person”—is required to register for VAT if making “taxable supplies” under the meaning of the principal VAT directive, regardless of whether trading is above the £82,000 threshold for registration required of a UK or EU company. Apparently, therefore—the Minister will correct me if I am wrong—legal persons from outside the EU are breaking that directive when goods are sold over the internet into the United Kingdom, yet there appears to be insufficient, if any, enforcement.
Mr Juretic proposed various solutions in his excellent report on billion-pound frauds. I am sure that the right hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs looked at those, and he has mentioned some of them. I am not sure that we need a specialist unit, but many of the solutions that Mr Juretic floated are worthy of discussion in some detail. I will not discuss them all today, but HMRC ought to be looking at them and at similar things. That gentleman has considerable experience, has the bit between his teeth and has done a huge amount of work.
The National Audit Office, too, has looked at the issue in some depth—in about 2014, because it was covered in a report on HMRC’s 2012-13 accounts. I might be putting a gloss on what was said by the NAO, which can speak for itself, but my understanding of the report is that the NAO was not convinced that the steps taken by HMRC on online VAT retail fraud were sufficient. The report made some suggestions.
We need action from the Government. I have a considerable amount of time for the Minister: he is mild-mannered, clever and dogged, and he has had his brief for a long time. He can probably remember, as I do, discussing VAT carousel fraud in Finance Bill Committees about eight years ago, which was the fraud du jour. There was a huge amount of fraud, and Labour, in government, put through measures that were largely supported by the then Opposition party, which now forms the Government. The then Opposition certainly entirely supported the principle of cracking down on VAT fraud, because not only is it an attack on much-needed Government revenue, but it means that there is not a level playing field for businesses such as that of Mr Juretic.
VAT fraud puts people in the UK out of work. It is not a victimless crime that is only about money. It is about jobs, people’s lives and how we as a society trade. That is changing, so we need to make changes to trade honestly. Consumers in this country are not getting a fair deal in knowing what they are buying and from whom.
I have personal experience of the situation, with a company called LightInTheBox—not that it was fraudulent. I tried to buy a tablet computer from it. I understand that sometimes such goods come from overseas, even from outside the European Union, so I looked carefully during the transaction, but I was never told that the computer was coming from outside the European Union. I thought, “Great, a standard tablet computer,” but it took six weeks to arrive and had come from China. I also had a demand from the Post Office to pay approximately £50 in import duties—understandably, because the goods had come from outside the European Union, addressed to me. I got the money back from LightInTheBox, incidentally—an honourable company, which paid my money back and accepted the computer back.
Though I say it myself, I am an educated person and I am of average skill at using the computer, but I do not believe that I was told, when I made that purchase, that the tablet computer was coming from outside the European Union. That might have affected my purchase, because things take longer to arrive from outside the EU and there is the possibility of customs duties, which are quite properly payable on something imported into the EU. It is easy to get caught out. People who want to act honestly as consumers might quite unwittingly be aiding and abetting fraud. It is not about consumers saying, “Oh, I’ll have a bargain. I don’t care about VAT”, although I accept that some might be like that. Other consumers want to play it straight but are misled by websites.
The Government must take some responsibility, because they have been in office for nearly six years. This fraud undoubtedly existed before, so when my party was in government we could have done something about it, but it has gone up massively since then, commensurate with the increased number of online retail sales. None of us knows for sure how much fraud there is, but we know that it is going on. Its extent is a bit unclear, which is one reason why HMRC seems not to have taken the issue as seriously as it should. Had it done so, we would know a bit more.
There has been a series of parliamentary questions, written and during debates, going back almost two years to February 2014. In what I think was a debate in Westminster Hall—the Minister will know—judging from Hansard, my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan) asked questions. Subsequently, my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Toby Perkins) and my hon. Friend the Member for Salford and Eccles (Rebecca Long Bailey), now a shadow Treasury Minister, asked written questions. In the Lords, Lord Lucas has asked questions. This is an ongoing concern of Members of both Houses, and the Government should move a little more quickly on it.
When I read, as the hon. Member for Daventry did, remarks that the newspapers attributed to Dame Lin Homer in the Public Accounts Committee yesterday that the Revenue had been investigating online trading VAT evasion since the spring of 2015, my heart was not filled with joy. Dame Lin has, to say the least, a mixed track record of success in public service. To be fair to her, other people had indicated that the Government were looking at the matter, including the Minister in the debate here almost two years ago. He said:
“HMRC is working to identify and address the main risks posed by commercial online operating models for routing goods into the UK.”—[Official Report, 26 February 2014; Vol. 576, c. 409W.]
It was good that HMRC was looking at it two years ago, but what has happened in the intervening period? The Minister will no doubt tell us, but for those of us not in HMRC—I suspect this is the case for the hon. Member for Daventry, though he can speak for himself—it is not entirely clear what has happened since the Minister said the risks were being investigated. That is troubling.
Lord Ashton said, I think last autumn, that this was being considered at a senior level, so the Government are aware of it and Members in both Houses have been pushing the Government, but we hear reports from Mr Juretic—Mr Miloseski-Reid also referred to this—about insufficient co-operation between HMRC and trading standards. That is taking place against a backdrop where in many parts of England, and I suspect Scotland as well, local authority income is dropping, yet trading standards comes under local authorities and for some of those authorities a strong trading standards department may appear to be a lower priority than, for example—and understandably—social care for the elderly. In that case, what gets the chop? Unless HMRC really seizes this problem, it is likely to get worse.
The Government have made a bit of movement in the draft Finance Bill 2016, which laudably has been published. I laud the Government for the number of consultations they carry out on possible changes to tax-related matters—there are probably dozens outstanding at the moment. The draft Bill has 88 clauses and clause 79 touches on this matter, though, as I understand it, it does only touch on it, because it deals only with data gathering. It is important to gather data to know who is selling what to whom and who is registered and so on, but while the Government, with all their resources, are probably more correct in their assessment of law than I am, I am not sure whether they have got it right on the law in relation to retailers such as Amazon.
It is easy to focus on Amazon. I am sure that it is not only Amazon that has questions to answer in this regard, but it is an enormous company with enormous sales in the United Kingdom, so some of us—I think the hon. Member for Daventry did to some extent—use it as a bit of shorthand for mass online retailers. That is fair enough, and he may well be right that they are watching us. Despite my reservations about reports of working conditions at Amazon, I do use it for internet purchases. I did not buy the said LightintheBox tablet through Amazon.
I, like I suspect many people, have registered my credit card details with Amazon. I have a username, password and so on with it—in fact, it is the only organisation with which I deal that I ask to remember my credit card details. When my credit card statements come, charges for purchases I have made are taken from my credit card account in the name of Amazon, through its different permutations, because Amazon has different legal entities in the European Union. It does not just say Amazon; it will also have some initials or a qualifier that shows which part of the Amazon empire it came from.
I am not a contract lawyer, but as a lawyer who knows a bit about contract law—I knock about on it—that says to me, as a consumer, that I am buying from Amazon. When I make a purchase, I do not give my credit card details to another company; I give them to Amazon. On the face of it, when I look at my credit card statement, I see the money is going to Amazon. Therefore, I have a contract with Amazon.
It is often but not always the case—Amazon also sells direct—that transparently, as part of the purchase process, that order is fulfilled by another company. I do not have a contract with that other company; I have a contract with Amazon. Amazon presumably has a contract—it certainly has an agreement—with that fulfilling company, which might be Bloggs Lighting Ltd or whatever, but my contract is with Amazon. If Amazon has a contract with me and, one surmises, with Bloggs Lighting, Her Majesty’s Government have, on VAT fraud and evasion, considerable leverage with Amazon to say, “You, as a legal entity”—or several legal entities as in Amazon’s case—“trading in the European Union are selling to UK consumers and the goods are delivered in the UK.” That is because I am buying from Amazon.
That is my understanding of contract law. The Minister may be able to dissuade me and tell me that I have misinterpreted it, but, if that is the case, we should take another look at the law. As I, as a consumer, am buying from Amazon, it should be dealing honestly with me and dealing legally with those companies from which it buys the goods that it sells on to me.
Amazon should therefore be susceptible to legislation in the United Kingdom as to how it conducts its business. That legislation should not simply be the data gathering in clause 79 of the draft Bill, although that would be helpful. The legislation should also be that Amazon must ensure that those companies from which it buys goods that it then sells on to UK consumers online are VAT registered if their turnover is above the UK threshold or if they fall under the other legal architecture for VAT registration. That is because one imagines that, often, those companies are doing quite a bit of business with Amazon—Bloggs Lighting may sell a lot of lighting stuff to consumers who go on to Amazon.co.uk. Therefore, morally or legally, I do not think Amazon can step back and say, “We are an intermediary.” The hon. Member for Daventry may know that, in the school playground in the west midlands, when the teacher says, “You did something,” they say, “It wor’ me, Miss,” which means, “I am not guilty; I did not do it.”
Chris Heaton-Harris
Is there not an incentive for Amazon and other e-retail marketplaces to sort this problem out? They earn their money from commission on the total price charged. While the market might have grown a bit, the cut that Amazon would receive from a £10 item would be better than the cut from £8 it might receive for a similar good that might have been sold in the way that I detailed in my speech.
Rob Marris
I certainly agree with the hon. Gentleman. To take that on one step, if someone were to buy an Apple iPhone through Amazon for, say, £500, which retails from Apple online at £600, and if the reason for the price difference is not a more efficient business model but VAT evasion, Amazon is at least morally complicit in that, because it gets a cut of a £500 sale that it would not have had if the consumer had gone direct to Apple. Therefore, in that example there is a moral risk to Amazon, and, I think, a legal risk, that it is benefiting financially from fraud, because it gets a cut of a sale that would not have been made had the fraud not existed. It needs to look closely at what it is doing.
The Minister said in a written answer on 26 February 2014:
“HMRC (in liaison with Trading Standards and other agencies) is undertaking intelligence driven investigations and projects to address concerns relating to the activities of online companies, including undervaluation of goods at import.”
That is very welcome, but it was two years ago that HMRC was undertaking those investigations and projects. I hope the Minister can tell us today that some of those investigations have at least made progress in the past two years. I realise that some of those investigations may have taken place and, in legal or criminal terms, led nowhere—that is the nature of investigations. We might find that there is smoke but no fire, as it were. In other cases, we might see smoke, investigate and find fire. Either way, I regard that as progress. If something looks a bit odd and we investigate it, we will sometimes find there is nothing illegal going on, and we will sometimes find there is something illegal going on. Will the Minister tell us how those investigations have proceeded and how many there have been?
The Minister also said in that written answer:
“Where the online trader is a non-EU company, HMRC has no jurisdiction.”—[Official Report, 26 February 2014; Vol. 576, c. 409W.]
I understand that, but two things occur to me. First, the 2002 EU electronic commerce directive should be enforced in the United Kingdom. Secondly, if HMRC has no jurisdiction over those non-EU companies, some but not all of which will be Chinese, HMRC should, as I have stressed, look at the companies over which it does have jurisdiction—for example, Amazon or eBay. Those are two of the major companies engaged in online retail sales in the United Kingdom, and those sales should be subject to UK jurisdiction. I understand all the difficulties of different legal jurisdictions, both within and without the European Union, but we need to get a grasp on this.
Simple data collection, as provided for in clause 79 of the draft Finance Bill 2016, is a step forward but is not sufficient. I hope the Minister will reassure us today that some of the investigations to which he referred two years ago have led somewhere and borne some fruit, and that HMRC will look seriously at the suggestions put forward by Mr Juretic in his report. If the Minister cannot enlighten us today as to which of those he thinks are worthy of a closer look, perhaps he could write to Members. I hope the Government will look closely at what legal powers it could take to address the Amazons of this world and of this jurisdiction.
The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Mr David Gauke)
It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for the first time, Mr Hanson. It was not that long ago that you and I were debating tax matters in your long and distinguished period on the Labour Front Bench, as my shadow. I note that four of the five shadows I had in the previous Parliament are no longer serving on the Labour Front Bench. I hope the hon. Member for Wolverhampton South West (Rob Marris) will not see that as in any way ominous.
Rob Marris
I see Mr Hanson has had a promotion, so he should be congratulated.
Mr David Hanson (in the Chair)
With due respect, I have had a release after 17 and a half years.
Mr Gauke
Yes, that is a very long sentence. I hope you are enjoying your new role, Mr Hanson.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris) on securing this debate and setting out the case so well. I also congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) on his passionate speech. He is correct to say that I have met Mr Juretic and listened carefully to the points he raised.
I will turn to specific points, but first I want to acknowledge the important work that Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs is doing in collaboration with other agencies, both in the UK and internationally, to tackle tax evasion, which, as the hon. Member for Wolverhampton South West pointed out, is what we are talking about today. Tackling tax evasion in all its forms is a priority for HMRC. Last year, HMRC collected and protected a record £26 billion in revenues from compliance activities and secured more than 1,200 prosecutions using intelligence, sophisticated risking systems and smart data.
The phenomenal growth in online sales in recent years, which we have heard about this afternoon, has made many people’s day-to-day lives much easier but presents significant challenges for HMRC. That is because the supply chains are often very complex and involve a number of different entities. Suppliers can be located overseas and their records are not always available alongside the goods. All those factors combined make it much more difficult to spot where tax and duty have been paid.
To make things more complicated, HMRC is looking for frauds taking place in the midst of large volumes of legitimate trade. It is far from our, or HMRC’s, intentions to get in the way of legitimate trade, so HMRC is mindful of the need to target its activities proportionately. Nevertheless, this is a significant issue that we are determined to tackle. Building on its expertise in tackling evasion, HMRC has brought together specialists from across the Department and established in spring last year a taskforce to tackle the specific customs and VAT frauds that we have been talking about. That taskforce currently has more than 75 live investigations open into businesses or entities suspected of flouting the rules, and that figure is expected to grow to 150 before the end of the 2015-16 financial year.
Retailers Against VAT Abuse Schemes has highlighted about 500 businesses that it alleges are complicit in these frauds in some way. My hon. Friend the Member for Daventry drew attention to that list, and other hon. Members have referred to it. I assure the House that HMRC has examined the RAVAS list closely. For reasons of taxpayer confidentiality, I am not in a position to know, let alone say, what conclusions HMRC has reached in respect of each of the companies listed by RAVAS. However, it would only be fair for me to say that one cannot assume every company on the list is non-compliant.
At this point, I should touch on VAT registration numbers, which a number of hon. Members raised, including the hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford). Not all sellers are required to be VAT-registered. Overseas sellers that supply goods, located outside the UK, have no requirement to be registered for UK VAT. If they are compliant, in those circumstances, they would pay import VAT at the border. Of course, that would be a sticking tax, as they would not be entitled to reclaim that VAT. There are complications in this area, and the absence of a VAT number does not, in itself, suggest that a seller is breaking VAT law.
[Philip Davies in the Chair]
The issue is if sellers are claiming to be outside the UK and selling from outside it, but are in fact storing goods in a warehouse in the UK and dispatching them from the UK to a customer here. That changes the circumstances, but I want to be clear that the absence of a VAT number does not necessarily mean that fraudulent activity is occurring.
HMRC is working jointly with other Government agencies, including carrying out joint visits with trading standards and sharing intelligence with UK Border Force, to address risks across the entire supply chain to ensure that all sellers who sell online pay all the taxes that are due. To give hon. Members a flavour of that work, in an operation just before Christmas, HMRC and trading standards seized goods worth half a million pounds. As HMRC’s programme of activity continues, and both its operational intelligence and understanding of fraud improve, it expects to make more interceptions and seizures of illicit goods.
I should stress the point about illegitimate and legitimate trade. HMRC has the powers to seize or detain all goods in a warehouse, for example, but it also has to think about the potential impact of its actions, for instance, on the end consumer. If HMRC were seizing goods that subsequently turned out to be there legitimately, I suspect many of our constituents would want to raise concerns.
We recognise the concerns that have been raised by compliant businesses. Clearly, it is very important that non-compliant businesses should not be allowed to establish any unfair advantage over compliant businesses, as that would distort competitiveness. Again, that point was rightly made by a number of hon. Members. Tackling these frauds is just as much about maintaining a level playing field for business as it is about collecting the tax and duty that should be paid.
That operational work is the first strand of HMRC’s work to tackle these frauds. The second strand is engagement with the online platforms on which goods are sold.
Rob Marris
Before the Minister moves off the first strand—perhaps he is planning to address this point later—23 months ago he talked about the investigations that were going on. He tells us today that there are 75 live investigations. What he could tell us, which would not breach taxpayer confidentiality, is whether there have been any prosecutions—which would be in the public domain—in the last five years for this sort of fraud.
Mr Gauke
I will have to write to the hon. Gentleman with details on that. I am not in a position to give any numbers this afternoon, but I understand his point.
Turning to online platforms, I can tell hon. Members that a meeting with the top online platforms took place recently, at a very senior level, to explore the role that they can play in preventing such frauds. HMRC is proactively following that up to see how it can work with the platforms to tackle the fraud and better quantify the scale of that. However, having looked at the matter, HMRC’s view is that online platforms have no liability for unpaid VAT where the operator merely provides a marketplace for businesses to sell goods.
I know that this point was raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Daventry, and although I am loth to get too much into a legal argument, he mentioned the Kittel case. It is worth bearing in mind that the Kittel case applied in the context of MTIC—missing trader intra-Community—fraud, or carousel fraud, which the hon. Member for Wolverhampton South West and I debated some years ago. Irrespective of that issue, it is worth pointing out that the Kittel case has been used by HMRC in the context of withholding repayments of input tax to members of a supply chain. It is a civil case, not a criminal case, and in HMRC’s view, the important difference here is that all members of a supply chain in MTIC fraud have, at some point or other, title of the goods, enabling them to reclaim input tax. That is not the case when an online platform is involved in providing services relating to the sale. Therefore, HMRC does not believe that Kittel applies in these circumstances in the way that my hon. Friend suggests.
It is also worth pointing out that there are many parties involved in a transaction where this type of fraud may occur—for example, fulfilment houses, payment providers, freight forwarders and agents, and online marketplaces as well as online sellers. HMRC is not limiting anti-fraud work to marketplaces only, although it recognises that they play an important role and is prioritising its engagement with them in the coming weeks.
The third and final strand to tackling this issue is putting together an effective set of policies that can make this sort of fraud harder to perpetuate in the first place. As hon. Members will recognise, unilateral action is not going to solve the problem by itself, as there is an important international dimension to these frauds. They affect the revenues of other EU member states as well as the United Kingdom, and we are in close dialogue with them about how best to combine our efforts to tackle such frauds.
Rob Marris
Welcome to the Chair, Mr Davies. Would the Minister therefore say that in this respect, it would be advantageous to the United Kingdom to remain a member state of the European Union, because of that international dimension and the international action to which he referred?
Mr Gauke
I do not know whether that intervention was for my benefit or for the arrival of our new Chairman —Mr Davies, it is a great pleasure to see you in the Chair this afternoon.
The point I would make is that whether we are inside or outside the European Union, international co-operation is very much necessary in such cases. As an example of that, the customs aspects of these frauds—it needs to be emphasised that this is a customs as well as a VAT issue—are on the agenda for the meeting of the directors general of all EU customs services on 26 March. There is some evidence that the UK has been particularly targeted for these frauds because of our much greater take-up of online shopping. That will make it all the more important that we work closely with our international counterparts, for the benefit of the UK and more widely. HMRC already works closely with the European Commission and OLAF, the EU’s anti-fraud unit.
Of course, there is a lot more to be done, not least as online retailing gets ever more popular worldwide. All taxes are kept under review, and HMRC is considering whether there need to be policy changes or other changes to the rules that apply to online sales. However, for effective longer term solutions, we will need to continue our engagement with other EU member states, the Commission and the OECD, and I would like to assure hon. Members that that dialogue is already under way.
Our goal is simple: one where the customer continues to enjoy the benefits of being able to buy goods conveniently through an online platform, but where unscrupulous businesses cannot undermine, through fraudulent activity, businesses that do the right thing. Although there is still much work to be done, I hope that hon. Members will appreciate the strong and collaborative efforts that HMRC is making to tackle this issue.
Chris Heaton-Harris
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies, and I welcome you to the debate.
When I bid for time for this debate at the Backbench Business Committee, I was hoping to get 90 minutes sometime at the end of January so that I could secure the support of the former Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, the right hon. Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge). I served on that Committee with her for five years, and we had plenty of conversations about online marketplaces, how much tax they pay and how much tax they should pay—she was very interested in the issue.
Given that we had just 24 hours’ notice of the debate, I am pleased that we have the Minister, the shadow Minister and the SNP spokesman here. I am also pleased that my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) was able to attend and talk about his constituent’s experiences.
Obviously, I was pleased to hear about the investigations and goods seizures that are going on, because my constituent would like to be assured that HMRC is not reacting slowly to a situation that is developing extremely quickly. More and more of these companies are being formed, and dormant companies that have already been registered are being activated and used in the way I described.
I am pleased that there have been high-level meetings with the top online marketplaces, and I would be fascinated to find out their reaction to the inquiries that are taking place.
Rob Marris
I do not seek to draw the hon. Gentleman on the timing, but perhaps he could say whether he understands why some Members, certainly on the Opposition Benches, feel a little frustrated—he may or may not express a similar view—about the apparent lack of urgency with which HMRC is dealing with this growing problem.
Chris Heaton-Harris
I have to say that I am with my constituent on this. I am particularly frustrated that it has taken a while for HMRC to publicly gauge the level of activity, although I have no idea what might have happened behind the scenes—having been a member of the Public Accounts Committee, and having had many a private briefing from HMRC over the last five years, I know that some things are best left unseen by the public eye. However, it has been frustrating for retailers who feel they are being unfairly competed against.
As I said, I was pleased to hear about the high-level meetings between the online retailers and officials. However, I was frustrated by the quote from Dame Lin Homer—the Minister repeated it today—suggesting that the Government and the tax authorities perceive no liability on online retailers. Even a tiny hint in a different direction would change behaviour very quickly.
There will be negotiations in the coming weeks, however. There is also the meeting on 26 March about the customs elements of this fraud. Potentially, there will also be opportunities to investigate this matter further in the Finance Bill and to look at the possibilities for giving the Government a helpful nudge so that they are as engaged as the Minister has been.
I thank everybody for their attendance, and I thank you, Mr Davies, for your kind guidance over the 13 minutes you have been here.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered VAT evasion and internet retailers.
Written Statements
(8 years, 10 months ago)
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Government Consultation Principles
(8 years, 10 months ago)
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The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (Mr Oliver Letwin)
Today, I am publishing a revised set of Government consultation principles. These principles are intended to produce clear guidance to Government Departments on the conduct of consultations. They have been amended in the light of comments from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, and demonstrate the Government’s desire to engage more effectively with the public.
We will use more digital methods to involve a wider group of consultees at an earlier stage in the policy forming process. We will make it easier for the public to contribute and feed in their views, and we will try harder to use clear language and plain English in consultation documents.
We will also reduce the risk of “consultation fatigue” by making sure that we consult only on issues that are genuinely undecided.
A copy has been placed in the Library, and can be found online at:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/consultation-principles-guidance
[HCWS467]
Children's Social Care Reform
(8 years, 10 months ago)
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The Secretary of State for Education (Nicky Morgan)
I am today announcing a series of changes that will radically transform the children’s social care system.
Social workers change lives. They have the ability not just to improve the circumstances of vulnerable children but to change them, and therefore their futures, entirely. That is why supporting social workers, and giving them the tools they need, is a priority for this Government. We must give every child the best start in life and make sure that every child can fulfil their potential—regardless of the circumstances they were born into. And we must make sure our support for the most vulnerable is at the heart of that commitment.
I am, therefore, announcing that:
With the support of my colleague the Secretary of State for Health, it is our intention to establish a new regulatory body for social work to drive up standards with a relentless focus on raising the quality of social work, education, training and practice in both children’s and adult’s social work. It will also set standards for training and oversee the rollout of a new assessment and accreditation system for children and family social workers. Over time, it will become the new regulatory body for social work, in place of the Health and Care Professions Council. It is our intention to bring forward any necessary legislation when parliamentary business allows.
We want to raise the quality of social work and overhaul social worker education and practice to improve the recruitment, retention and development of social workers. We are doing this by providing definitive statements on the knowledge and skills that social workers should have and display at three important levels, approved child and family practitioner; practice supervisor and practice leader and we are rolling out a national, practice-focused, career pathway through the development of an assessment and accreditation system based on the highest levels of skill and knowledge. Schemes like Teach First have helped transform teaching into one of the most prestigious and high status professions in the country, and we must now do the same for social work. And that is why we will be investing a further £100 million into Frontline, and into our specialist course, Step-up.
I am also granting three further councils—Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire and Islington—freedoms to innovate, to improve frontline children’s social work and to develop new systems of delivering social care and trialling new ways of working with families. These new councils will join the six areas that are already part of the programme, as announced by the Prime Minister in December last year—North Yorkshire, the tri-borough authorities (Westminster, Hammersmith & Fulham, and Kensington & Chelsea), Leeds, Durham and Richmond and Kingston.
In addition, Government funding of up to £20 million will be made available for a new “What Works Centre”, with the aim of making sure social workers and others across the country are able to learn from the very best examples of frontline social work. The new centre will run from later in the year.
Supporting social workers, and giving them the tools they need, is a priority for this Government and a personal priority for me as Secretary of State. These reforms are about getting it right for social workers, so that social workers can get it right for our most vulnerable children and families.
Copies of my speech and the paper “Children’s social care reform—A vision for change” will be placed in the Libraries of both Houses.
[HCWS469]
Foreign Affairs and General Affairs Councils
(8 years, 10 months ago)
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The Minister for Europe (Mr David Lidington)
My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs will attend the Foreign Affairs Council on 18 January and I will attend the General Affairs Council on 18 January. The Foreign Affairs Council will be chaired by the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Federica Mogherini, and the General Affairs Council will be chaired by the Dutch presidency. The meetings will be held in Brussels.
Foreign Affairs Council
The expected agenda for the Foreign Affairs Council will include Syria, Iraq and Ukraine. The Jordanian Foreign Minister will attend lunch where discussion will focus on Syria, Iraq, Daesh.
Syria
Ministers will exchange views on the International Syria Support Group meeting in December and the adoption of UN Security Council resolution 2254, as well as the prospects for the talks between the Syrian parties in early 2016 and the situation on the ground.
Iraq
Following the FAC conclusions on Iraq agreed at the December FAC, Ministers will have an opportunity for an in-depth discussion of the political and security situation in Iraq. This will come at an important time, given the recent capture of the town of Ramadi from Daesh. We expect the discussion to focus on what more the EU and member states can do to support long-term security, stability and prosperity in Iraq. We will also use the opportunity to look forward to the review of the EU ISIL/Syria/lraq strategy to be completed in March.
Jordan
Ministers will be joined for lunch by the Foreign Minister of Jordan, Mr Nasser Judeh. Jordan is a key ally in the fight against Daesh, and is host to over 630,000 refugees from the Syria crisis. At the upcoming Syria donor conference the UK aims to secure increased international support to Jordan’s long-term economic resilience and stability. Ministers will discuss measures that the EU can take and the full range of regional issues.
Ukraine
Ministers are expected to exchange views on Ukraine’s reform programme and agree a set of priorities that will direct the work of the EU’s support group to Ukraine. We also expect Ministers to discuss what further support the EU can give Ukraine for the implementation of its reform programme, including on strategic communications.
General Affairs Council
The General Affairs Council (GAC) on 18 January is expected to focus on the presidency work programme and preparation of the European Council on 18 and 19 February 2016.
Presidency Work programme
The Dutch presidency commenced on 1 January. The Dutch Foreign Minister, Albert Koenders, will set out the presidency’s programme and priorities for the current semester. The programme is based on the presidency trio programme, developed jointly with Slovakia and Malta, but will focus on four main themes: jobs and growth; labour mobility; the Eurozone; and a Union of freedom, justice and security.
Preparation of the February European Council
The GAC will prepare the agenda for the 18 and 19 February European Council, which the Prime Minister will attend. The draft February European Council agenda covers: the UK’s EU renegotiation, migration, and economic issues.
[HCWS468]
Immigration Detention: Vulnerable Persons
(8 years, 10 months ago)
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The Minister for Immigration (James Brokenshire)
The Government are committed to an immigration system that works in Britain’s national interest, and commands the confidence of the British people. Coming to the United Kingdom to work, study or visit is a privilege, not an unqualified right. Accordingly, the Government expect anyone who comes to the UK to comply with their visa conditions and, if they do not, to return home voluntarily at the first opportunity.
We have put in place a robust legal framework, which prevents the abuse of appeals procedures and encourages timely and voluntary departures by denying access to services, such as bank accounts, rental property, the labour market and driving licences, to those with no right to be here. Where individuals nonetheless fail to comply with immigration law, and refuse to leave, we will take enforcement action to remove them from the UK. Where it is necessary for the purposes of removal, and taking into account any risk that an individual may abscond, this will involve a period of detention—which of course can be avoided if the individual departs voluntarily. The Government are clear that in these circumstances it is in the public interest to detain and remove such individuals, and the vast majority of those in detention are, accordingly, those who have made their way to the United Kingdom unlawfully or breached their conditions of entry, have failed to make their case for asylum, or are foreign criminals.
It is a long-established principle, however, that where an individual is detained pending removal there must be a realistic prospect of removal within a reasonable time. Depriving someone of their liberty will always be subject to careful consideration and scrutiny, and will take account of individual circumstances. It is vital that the system is not only efficient and effective but also treats those within it with dignity and respect, and takes account of the vulnerability of those detained.
It is against this background that in February last year the Home Secretary asked Stephen Shaw to conduct a review of the welfare of vulnerable individuals in detention. His review is being published today (Cm 9186). It makes recommendations for operational improvements, for changes to the policy on detaining vulnerable people, and for changes to the provision of healthcare services in detention. Copies have been laid in the House. The Government are grateful to Mr Shaw for his review, welcome this important contribution to the debate about effective detention, and accept the broad thrust of his recommendations. Consistent with our policies, we will now take forward three key reforms, working across Government and the national health service and with private sector providers.
First, the Government accept Mr Shaw’s recommendations to adopt a wider definition of those at risk, including victims of sexual violence, individuals with mental health issues, pregnant women, those with learning difficulties, post-traumatic stress disorder and elderly people, and to recognise the dynamic nature of vulnerabilities. It will introduce a new “adult at risk” concept into decision-making on immigration detention with a clear presumption that people who are at risk should not be detained, building on the existing legal framework. This will strengthen the approach to those whose care and support needs make it particularly likely that they would suffer disproportionate detriment from being detained, and will therefore be considered generally unsuitable for immigration detention unless there is compelling evidence that other factors which relate to immigration abuse and the integrity of the immigration system, such as matters of criminality, compliance history and the imminence of removal, are of such significance as to outweigh the vulnerability factors. Each case will be considered on its individual facts, supported by a new vulnerable persons team. We will also strengthen our processes for dealing with those cases of torture, health issues and self-harm threats that are first notified after the point of detention, including bespoke training to GPs on reporting concerns about the welfare of individuals in detention and how to identify potential victims of torture.
Second, building on the transfer of healthcare commissioning in immigration removal centres to the NHS, and taking account of the concerns expressed by Mr Shaw about mental healthcare provision in detention, the Government will carry out a more detailed mental health needs assessment in immigration removal centres, using the expertise of the Centre For Mental Health. This will report in March 2016, and NHS commissioners will use that assessment to consider and revisit current provision. In the light of the review the Government will also publish a joint Department of Health, NHS and Home Office mental health action plan in April 2016.
Third, to maximise the efficiency and effectiveness of the detention estate, and in response to Mr Shaw’s recommendation that the Home Office should examine its processes for carrying out detention reviews, the Government will implement a new approach to the case management of those detained, replacing the existing detention review process with a clear removal plan for all those in detention. A stronger focus on and momentum towards removal, combined with a more rigorous assessment of who enters detention through a new gate-keeping function, will ensure that the minimum possible time is spent in detention before people leave the country without the potential abuse of the system that arbitrary time limits would create.
The Government expect these reforms, and broader changes in legislation, policy and operational approaches, to lead to a reduction in the number of those detained, and the duration of detention before removal, in turn improving the welfare of those detained. Immigration enforcement’s business plan for 2016-17 will say more about the Government’s plans for the future shape and size of the detention estate.
More effective detention, complemented by increased voluntary departures and removing without detention, will safeguard the most vulnerable while helping control immigration abuse and reducing costs.
[HCWS470]
House of Lords
(8 years, 10 months ago)
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Social Housing Sector
(8 years, 10 months ago)
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Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe
To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether their plan to limit housing benefit in the social housing sector to the Local Housing Allowance rate will apply to those living in supported housing.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Freud) (Con)
My Lords, the introduction of local housing allowance limits to the social sector will apply to both housing benefit tenants and recipients of the housing element of universal credit from April 2018, but only where new tenancies have been taken out or renewed after April 2016. The department has jointly commissioned an evidence review with DCLG to look at the size and scope of the supported housing sector. The research results will guide our consideration for future policy development.
Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe (Lab)
My Lords, I welcome what the Minister has said, but it is really not enough. Only the inclusion of specified accommodation will solve the problem and protect the most vulnerable from an unintended consequence of the proposed legislation. I cannot stress enough the need for urgency. Supported housing providers have to decide in the next few weeks whether or not to continue to support those developments, so there is a real urgency on this issue. I remind the Minister that the LHA cap was announced in the Autumn Statement without either consultation or an impact assessment. It may be an unintended consequence but, now that it has been highlighted, can the Minister please assure the House that it will be addressed quickly and before the Report stage of the Welfare Reform and Work Bill?
Lord Freud
The measure will come in in 2018 and there will be regulations within that timescale. As I said, we have this major review—the first really substantial review—and we have been working on that for more than a year now. That will inform our whole policy approach to what is a very important sector, and I hope it will put it on a much sounder footing than it has been.
Baroness Eaton (Con)
Could my noble friend tell us the terms of reference and the remit for this review?
Lord Freud
We are collecting evidence about the size of the sector, who it supports, where the funding flows are coming from and how it is supported. There are various support sources, including the Supporting People fund and RR. We look to publish this report later this year.
Lord Best (CB)
My Lords, the review to which the Minister refers is extremely welcome. Has he heard the news that the major housing associations providing extra care housing for older people, which saves the state an enormous amount of money in hospital and residential care fees, have put their programmes on hold awaiting the outcome of this review? If he has heard that news, could he respond to the urgency of the situation?
Lord Freud
We are talking to the relevant supported housing associations—it is a variegated sector. There are a couple of issues that are concerning them at the moment, and this is one of them. We are looking, as we develop a dialogue, to get a policy that works for this sector as soon as we possibly can.
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
My Lords, the other issue that is probably concerning the sector is that the Welfare Reform and Work Bill is forcing all housing associations to cut their rents by 12% over this Parliament—money that will almost all go directly to the Treasury. It is a double whammy. I spoke this morning to the head of Depaul UK, a small charity that houses 700 young homeless people in the north-east and around the country, dealing with kids who have come out of prison or have escaped abuse and exploitation. It has already absorbed cuts of 30%. If this policy goes through, the support workers who teach the young people how to live, cook, pay the rent and go to work and get them ready for independent living simply cannot be paid for. If this goes ahead, Depaul will pull out of hostel provision altogether. Is that what the Government want?
Lord Freud
As my noble friend Lady Williams made clear on Monday night, this area is under active consideration within the timetable of the Bill.
Lord Stoneham of Droxford (LD)
My Lords, I declare an interest as the chair of Housing & Care 21, one of the housing associations referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Best. Can I ask the Minister whether he really understands the urgency of this issue? He talks about 2018, but the housing associations involved will have to start telling people in the next few weeks what they can expect under the current government policies. The review has to be quick. How quickly can the Minister respond in order to help housing associations that are currently delaying their decisions?
Lord Freud
We are aiming to develop our policy on the back of the information that we get in the spring, and we will be working with the whole sector to develop policy. As for the other issue that the sector is concerned about, which I discussed in the last question, that is within the timetable of the Bill.
Lord Hylton (CB)
My Lords, does the Minister appreciate that there is a complete difference between ordinary tenants and tenants in supported housing? These are people coming out of prison or with learning difficulties and all kinds of other handicaps. They require hand-holding and mentoring before they can reintegrate with the rest of society.
Lord Freud
I thank the noble Lord for that question, because I absolutely understand the substantial distinction between standard provision of housing and supported housing, which in the context of the actual payments is now specified allowances.
Baroness Gardner of Parkes (Con)
For the purposes of clarification, can the Minister confirm exactly what is supported housing and clarify that it in no way involves aids for disabled people in housing of any variety?
Lord Freud
This is a variegated sector, which is exactly what we are discovering now. Supported accommodation or specified accommodation, using the other definition, effectively looks at the services that are provided to support people. I suspect that some of them will supply aids of some kind, but the real thing is the actual service elements that are provided for people.
Baroness Sherlock
My Lords, perhaps the noble Lord could ask his noble friend Lord Strathclyde to do the review. That might speed it up.
Lord Freud
I constantly consult my noble friend Lord Strathclyde about absolutely everything.
Education: Unregistered Schools
(8 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Storey
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have for regulating unregistered schools.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Lord Nash) (Con)
My Lords, we are taking robust steps to tackle unregistered schools. We are working closely with Ofsted and are pleased that it has agreed to take forward prosecutions in relation to settings operating illegally as unregistered independent schools. We have also consulted on introducing a new system to regulate out-of-school education settings which teach children intensively, and we will intervene and impose sanctions where there are safety or welfare concerns.
Lord Storey (LD)
I am grateful for the Minister’s reply. He will be aware of the unannounced inspection of the premises of three unregistered schools in Birmingham, where some frankly appalling practices were found, including health and safety issues, safeguarding issues, homophobic and misogynistic material et cetera. First, can he assure us that the advice letter from the chief inspector in which he suggests that there should be an urgent meeting between Ofsted and local authorities to review policies and procedures will be followed through? When that meeting has taken place, can the results be shared with Members so that we can see that this matter is being put right? Secondly, can the Minister indicate how we should deal with Sunday schools and communion classes, which may fall into the category of unregistered provision?
Lord Nash
On the first point, I assure noble Lords that we are working very closely with Ofsted and I would be very happy to write to the noble Lord about it. We do not propose to regulate institutions such as Sunday schools and one-off residential settings which teach children for a short period every week. We are looking specifically at places where children receive intensive education, which we think will be defined as more than six to eight hours a week.
Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)
My Lords, are the Government looking at madrassahs that teach fewer than 12 children? I gather that 12 is the number which means that some inspection can be done but, as the noble Lord will know, many madrassahs have fewer than 12 children.
Lord Nash
We are not specifically looking at madrassahs but we will be covering institutions such as those to which the noble and learned Baroness referred in our call for evidence, which has just closed. We will consider all this in the legislation we propose to bring forward in relation to institutions teaching above six to eight hours a week.
Lord Elton (Con)
My Lords, my noble friend is looking for bad conduct. Does he agree that he is also seeing a good deal of very valuable instruction given to children who need to be integrated into our society and are handicapped in many ways because of their ethnic or geographic origin?
Lord Nash
We are concerned about the point my noble friend makes and about isolated communities, which is an area that Louise Casey has been asked to look at to see how we can improve integration. We are very active in our whole-school approach to making sure that children are brought up to understand enough about the different religions and beliefs in this country that they can be prepared for life in modern Britain.
Lord Lexden (Con)
Will my noble friend ensure that independent schools that intend to become members of one of the independent schools associations do not have registration procedures that are unduly burdensome, while at the same time providing for the full inspection that is required?
Lord Storey
Are there plans to review the arrangements for home education to ensure that they cannot be exploited in order to avoid registration?
Mental Health Services: Serving Military Personnel
(8 years, 10 months ago)
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Baroness Tyler of Enfield
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the support available to serving military personnel with mental health problems, and what plans they have to establish a 24-hour mental health helpline for serving soldiers.
The Minister of State, Ministry of Defence (Earl Howe) (Con)
My Lords, the Ministry of Defence is absolutely committed to looking after the mental health of our Armed Forces and provides a range of community-based healthcare in line with national best practice. Out-of-hours care already includes the free 24-hour mental health helpline run by the charity Combat Stress, which receives funding from the MoD, and the Big White Wall, which is a 24-hour online community. There are therefore no plans to provide an additional helpline.
Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)
I thank the Minister for his Answer. Will he say whether the Government consider it satisfactory that serving Armed Forces personnel are currently having, and under current plans will continue to have, to rely on support from the charitable sector for urgent mental health issues which occur outside of Monday to Friday normal office hours? With the very best will in the world, those charities will not have access to the in-house mental health records, know about their situations or the medication that they are taking.
Earl Howe
My Lords, there is no point in duplicating a service that already works very well. We work in close partnership with Combat Stress, which provides an extremely effective service, and, if necessary, signposts the individual to the right service according to need. There are helplines available for veterans as well, which we run on a 24-hour basis, but we do not see the need and there is no evidence that we should be looking at duplicating that service.
Lord Craig of Radley (CB)
My Lords, do the Government accept that, as a result of operations over the last decade and more, there are many more potential and actual mental health problems among serving personnel? The Minister suggests that this can be helped by charities, but what information is given to serving personnel that these charities are available? It seems to me that there is not enough information available to serving personnel on this issue.
Earl Howe
The noble and gallant Lord raises a very important issue. I do not believe that there is any shortage of information available. Personnel are given briefings and advice on whom to contact if they think they need help. These are reinforced by publicity material such as posters and leaflets in all unit primary care centres. Information is also available online on the MoD’s area of the GOV.UK website. Similar guidance can be found on the NHS Choices pages. I believe that there has been a significant improvement in the provision of this kind of information in recent years.
The Lord Privy Seal (Baroness Stowell of Beeston) (Con)
My Lords, we have plenty of time; we started early. I leave it to the two noble Lords to decide between themselves.
Lord Campbell-Savours
My Lords, when many of our young men, who are little more than teenagers, are being hounded by public interest lawyers, the Iraq Historic Allegations Team and the Iraq fatalities investigation unit, is it fully appreciated that they may have been under intense pressure in combat—even in a state of panic and mental stress—when they have been involved in individual incidents? Is this not what happens when we send young men and women to war?
Earl Howe
My Lords, as someone who has returned to being a Defence Minister after a break of 20 years, there is no doubt in my mind that the Armed Forces have come a very long way in that time. They take the mental health of their personnel extremely seriously. As one would expect, the model adopted is one of best practice, prevention, early detection and the ready availability of evidence-based treatments. This applies not just during a deployment but pre-deployment and post-deployment as well.
Lord Robathan
My Lords, I am sure that the whole House would welcome the improved understanding of mental health issues in the Armed Forces, and, indeed, the improved provision for those who, sadly, develop mental health issues. But would my noble friend agree that most of the Armed Forces are not affected by mental health issues when they are serving and that there is a danger, by concentrating on this, that serving personnel are undermined because they feel that they are being pitied, rather than respected for the excellent work that they do?
Earl Howe
I hope that service personnel do not feel that way, and rather that they feel well supported, but my noble friend is right. It is notable that incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder, for example, is extremely low in the UK Armed Forces in numerical terms. One can attribute that, in very large measure, to the services and support that are now available to Armed Forces personnel, both in this country and on deployment.
Lord West of Spithead (Lab)
My Lords, my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours is absolutely right: it is outrageous that we are chasing, many years later and in an open-ended way, the men and women who have tried to protect us. Can we not carry out an urgent investigation into firms of solicitors that I know use agents in Iraq—and no doubt will in the future in Afghanistan—effectively to ambulance chase to get cases? We are constantly seeing these cases, which cost immense amounts of money and cause mental anguish to our men and women, so they affect the issue we are talking about. We really need to get a grip on this.
Earl Howe
As the noble Lord rightly points out, there has been extensive coverage and publicity on this very issue in the press in recent weeks, and I share his concern. The fact of the matter is, though, that it is not the Government chasing our armed services personnel. Every time a complaint is raised, we have a duty to investigate the complaint. It is not a matter of hounding Armed Forces personnel but rather of trying to get to the bottom of the complaint as quickly as possible. Indeed, many of these complaints have been found to be without foundation, but I share his concern about the behaviour of certain law firms.
Lord Touhig (Lab)
I am sure that the Minister and many other Members of the House will be aware of the excellent work done by the organisation Combat Stress. In a well-researched report published recently, it revealed that there had been a fourfold increase in the number of veterans who had asked for help for mental health conditions over the last 20 years. Its research suggests that this will continue. The good news is that Combat Stress has treatments that work, but it needs additional funding to deliver them. Has the Minister’s department had discussions with Combat Stress about this need for additional funding and, if it has, what is the outcome?
Earl Howe
My Lords, yes, we do have regular discussions with Combat Stress, with which we work very closely in partnership, as I have already indicated. It is interesting that, while the number of military personnel assessed with a mental disorder has risen steadily in the past couple of years, the level of mental illness remains broadly comparable with that of the general population. Although it may sound strange to say it, I think the rise could indicate good news rather than bad news, in that the more we address stigma in mental illness, the more we encourage people who need help to come forward. I hope that is attributable to the better services that are available.
Lord Deben (Con)
Will my noble friend tell me when last we had a thoroughgoing investigation into what other forces do in this area? Is this not surely something about which we could learn a great deal from, and teach a great deal to, others who are concerned with what must be a universal problem among the major forces of NATO? A comparative piece of work might very well be valuable.
Earl Howe
My noble friend hits on an extremely important point, which is why, in 2003, the Ministry of Defence commissioned the King’s Centre for Military Health Research, which is part of King’s College London, to conduct a long-term research study following a cohort of more than 20,000 members of the Armed Forces. That study continues with the same cohort. In so doing, comparative information is emerging about the performance of other armed services around the world. We can take credit for the fact that the incidence of mental illness in our own armed services compares very favourably indeed with that of some other armed services around the world.
Baroness Jolly (LD)
My Lords, men and women seeking this sort of support require anonymity and are anxious about that, as, indeed, they are about quality. Therefore, will the Minister explain to the House whether anonymity is protected, how this service is regulated and when it was last quality tested?
Earl Howe
The noble Baroness is quite right that anonymity is important to many people and, of course, record-keeping is scrupulously observed in that sense. At the same time, some people feel that it is important to identify mental illness when it occurs. That is why peer support among a unit, for example, features very large, particularly when armed services personnel are on deployment. Anonymity in that sort of instance is difficult to achieve by the very nature of the support that we wish to see personnel give to their peers.
Hong Kong: Kidnapping of British Subjects
(8 years, 10 months ago)
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Baroness Falkner of Margravine
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what discussions they have had with the Hong Kong and Chinese authorities regarding the kidnapping of British subjects from Hong Kong.
The Earl of Courtown (Con)
My Lords, my right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary raised our deep concerns about the disappearance of British citizen Mr Lee Bo with the Chinese Foreign Minister on 5 January. We have requested further information from the Hong King authorities and are pressing the Chinese authorities for consular access. We continue to call on both the Hong Kong and Chinese authorities to protect Hong Kong’s high degree of autonomy and the rights and freedoms of its people.
Baroness Falkner of Margravine (LD)
I thank the Minister for that reply. As he knows, Mr Lee Bo was the fifth person to disappear from Causeway Bay Books in the past three months. Given that the 1984 Sino-British joint declaration guarantees free speech as well as Hong Kong’s judicial independence until 2047, are the Government engaging with other partners—Australia, the United States and other countries, as well as the Hong Kong authorities—to secure his release and are they planning to raise the issue at the Security Council if they do not gain any comfort from the Chinese authorities?
The Earl of Courtown
My Lords, the noble Baroness mentions a number of important points. I should first say that my right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary told the House of Commons earlier this week, on 12 January, that if these allegations of Chinese security agents taking Mr Lee Bo out of Hong Kong are proven, it would be an “egregious breach” of the joint declaration. Perhaps the noble Baroness would also like to hear about a press conference held by the Chief Executive of the Hong Kong SAR, Mr CY Leung, on the afternoon of 13 January, in which he said that, because there had been reports of mainland authorities arresting or abducting the person in Hong Kong, if that were the case, it would not be acceptable under the principle of one country, two systems—Hong Kong people ruling Hong Kong with a high degree of autonomy—and would not be acceptable under the basic law.
Lord Soley (Lab)
My Lords, as I understand it, it would be not just a breach of the agreement between Britain and Hong Kong but a breach of China’s own laws if people were kidnapped by members of their security forces—the police, particularly. I understand that there is an element of double standards in what the Chinese Government are saying and what they may be doing, but has this been taken up with the Chinese Government? If police officers who serve in China are involved in kidnapping citizens in other territories, is it not against China’s own law and should that not be put to the Chinese?
The Earl of Courtown
The noble Lord, Lord Soley, is quite correct in what he says and if I have anything more to add on this I will write to him. It is also quite correct that other countries were involved; a citizen of one of the Scandinavian countries, who is part of this publishing group, has also gone missing.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, we have obviously condemned the abduction of South Koreans into North Korea and some of us have condemned rendition for other purposes by other countries. Are we now giving different advice to British citizens of Chinese origin about travel to both mainland China and Hong Kong, if they have been involved in any form of political activity?
The Earl of Courtown
I do not think that we are at present, but what also concerns us is what is happening in Hong Kong in the media and the publishing sector, where books are being published that could perhaps be deemed critical of the Beijing leadership. There is a certain amount of self-regulation going on, which cannot be a good thing.
Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)
My Lords, obviously our thoughts are very much with those who have disappeared and, in particular, for their welfare, but at least one of them is a British citizen. What does the Minister think the implications are of the Chinese Foreign Minister’s statement, in which he said that, based on the basic law of Hong Kong and Chinese nationality law, the person in question is first and foremost a Chinese citizen? China does not and will not recognise dual nationality of its own citizens, so what are the implications of that statement in the light of this case?
The Earl of Courtown
My Lords, perhaps there are two things that I can tell the House and the noble Lord. First, with respect to this individual case an initial report was made to the police by the wife of Mr Lee Bo. She later withdrew that complaint but the police are still carrying out the investigation. In addition, Mr Lee holds a British passport and, in line with this, we stand ready to offer consular assistance to him and his family.
Lord Wilson of Tillyorn (CB)
My Lords, these are very troubling cases, particularly that of Mr Lee. Does the Minister agree that the rule of law is vital for the prosperity of Hong Kong and the peace of mind of its citizens, and that it is in everybody’s interest—including that of mainland China and Hong Kong—that the rule of law, which up to now has been maintained very effectively, should continue properly?
The Earl of Courtown
My Lords, with all his experience on this subject, the noble Lord is quite right about the importance of the rule of law and the relationship between the United Kingdom, Hong Kong SAR and the Chinese people. It was only in the recent past that we had the state visit of President Xi to the United Kingdom. It should be noted that both Her Majesty the Queen and President Xi mentioned Hong Kong in their speeches.
Business of the House
(8 years, 10 months ago)
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Baroness Stowell of Beeston
That the debate on the motion in the name of Lord Turnberg set down for today shall be limited to 3 hours and that in the name of Lord Campbell-Savours to 2 hours.
National Health Service
(8 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Turnberg
That this House takes note of the ability of the National Health Service to meet present and future demands.
Lord Turnberg (Lab)
My Lords, I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to open this debate and delighted that so many noble Lords have agreed to speak. I very much look forward to the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Watkins of Tavistock. I am only sorry that speakers have only three minutes to express their views.
It seems entirely possible that one or two noble Lords might draw attention to the parlous state of funding of the NHS. They may even echo Matthew Parris when he wrote:
“Our health service is heading, if not for the rocks, then for the sandbank of chronically sub-optimal performance and monthly threats of insolvency”.
It is tempting to say that this cannot go on. But of course it always does, because of the people in it—the nurses, the doctors, the physios, the porters and so on—who work their socks off to do their very best, despite the lack of resources. They regard it as a privilege to work in a service that aims to care for people and their ills, as indeed did I during most of my working life. When the NHS works well, there is nothing quite like it and the public know that. But when staff morale is at a low ebb, as it certainly now is, and when we have a Secretary of State who seems quick to lay blame but is quite incapable of showing the least sign of appreciation of the staff, then that impacts directly on patient care.
I would not want to be ungrateful for the bit of light relief provided by the Chancellor in the recent spending review, even though that was partly achieved by robbing the budgets for public health, education and NICE. It is hard not to feel, as do the Health Foundation and the Nuffield Council, that this is just another emergency bailout—a temporary fix—when the basic underfunding continues apace as the NHS tries to cope with an ever increasing demand. Having said all that, I hope that I do not disappoint the Minister if I say that I will not be taking that line, at least not yet. What I want to do is to lay out what would be an ideal system for providing total care for the population in the community and in hospital. None of what I say will be entirely foreign or original. Perhaps you know what they say about originality: it is the art of concealing your sources. My sources will be obvious.
The ideal service would have to be completely joined up, with social services, general practice and hospital care integrated. That is so often talked about but rarely achieved because it requires the integration of management and, often, the budget. The silos of primary and secondary care would disappear as GPs were able to work as a team across the divide, in and out of hospital, perhaps even under the same management. This may be a pipe dream, and many—perhaps most—GPs would object, but enough may see the advantages, especially now when they are under such unsustainable pressure that so many are thinking of giving up. Health visitors and district nurses, as well as social workers, could be employed by the hospital so that they could be completely integrated. They would be able to see their patients in hospital as easily as in general practice and the community, without this delaying referral system we have set up.
We had a debate before Christmas about the problems of the care home sector. A number of significant private providers are threatening to go out of business with the potential loss of a large number of care home beds. Currently, about one-third of acute hospital beds are already occupied by patients who would be better cared for in the community. Even more pressure may be put on those beds as care homes are lost.
Would it not be much better if hospital trusts opened their own care homes? A bed in their care homes would cost them about half what a hospital bed costs them, and the trusts would save money and beds—a no-brainer, you might think. Your Lordships may ask where these care homes might come from, but most trusts have obsolete stock that could be rescued, and what about the homes that private providers may vacate? It would need a little capital, but the potential rewards are enormous.
What about those isolated mental health services? At the moment they are far from providing the equity of esteem with physical illness services that everyone talks about. Would they not stand a better chance if they were more joined up with other health services?
There are two other elements in this brave new world that I should touch on briefly. First, why do patients who need to be checked up from time to time by their consultant always have to spend hours travelling to and from the hospital and waiting to be seen? Consultants and patients have telephones, for heaven’s sake. We could do much more if we could get round the tariff system that rewards hospital trusts for out-patient visits but not for telephone calls. The noble Lord, Lord Prior, and I have discussed this before. We are making nowhere near enough use of IT, the internet, remote monitoring devices built into vests and so on. Patients deserve much better.
The other area I should briefly mention is medical research. I should express my interest here as scientific adviser to the Association of Medical Research Charities, which puts around £1.3 billion a year into research. Research should underpin our integrated NHS, and we must take advantage of our excellent basic research capacity and link it with our unrivalled access to the whole NHS population. It is worth remembering that about 50% of our increasing lifespan is the result of advances gained from research.
I suspect that noble Lords will have noticed that much of the full integration I have described requires local authorities and hospital trusts to agree to a single management system and, where possible, a merged budget. That is something that has eluded successive Governments for ever, it seems. What about the idea of patients being given their own personal budgets, which could ease the transition? Perhaps the Minister could say where we have got to with that.
It is not difficult to see why there is resistance. Social services and GPs are reluctant because they see their precious limited resources being used to prop up the hospitals, while the hospitals have historically seen themselves as providers of acute care and only reluctantly as having a responsibility to the community. It does not help when both are financially squeezed. So is it an impossible dream? It seems to me that we do now have an opportunity to go some way along that route, with increasing recognition by all parties that they cannot go on as they are. It will be difficult, but I did not just dream up these ideas.
We have had excellent example of good practice around the country in Torbay and a number of other places for ever, it seems. But most of my ideas have emanated from Salford Royal Hospital, where David Dalton, its chief executive, has already set up much of this integration and has agreement for more. Here I must admit to some pride in speaking about that hospital, because it is where I spent most of my working life as a professor and consultant. It used to be called Hope Hospital, and has obviously taken advantage of my leaving to do great things.
The hospital trust has been employing its own health visitors for some time. It even has two general practices in its employ, one providing out-of-hours services and the other with responsibility for looking after all the residents of care homes in Salford—both in addition to their normal practice.
Incidentally, all 49 of the other general practices in Salford are linked into the hospital’s electronic case records system. The hospital is now virtually paperless, and GPs and hospital staff have access to all the clinical information about their patients wherever they are. From April this year, agreement has been reached between the trust and the local authority that adult social care, including domiciliary and residential care, will come under the trust’s management with a merged budget—remarkable. Perhaps equally exciting is the fact that the mental health trust will in April be contracted through the new single integrated care organisation, a chance to see much better cohesion between mental and other services.
Salford Royal no longer sees itself as simply a hospital but as part of the community for which it provides for the health and care of all of Salford’s 250,000 residents. All those remarkable developments have been possible only because of inspired leadership in both the trust and the local authority, and it has taken many years of patient negotiation between them, and much legwork with the GPs. Salford is of course a nice, circumscribed, if deprived city which sees itself as progressive, and it has the big advantage of having just one CCG.
None of that has required another health Bill to reorganise or, as Ray Tallis has put it, to redisorganise the service. I have lived through no fewer than eight NHS Bills during my 16 years in this House; that is one every two years, and we certainly do not need any more. I have spoken about the Salford experience because that is what I know best, and it may well not be replicable everywhere else, but Sir David Dalton’s report for the Government of a year ago presented a series of different ways in which closer integration has been able to occur. It does not have to be the hospital trust that manages the budget. It could, for example, be some form of unified joint management system. Much more important is inspired and inspiring leadership—not available everywhere, I fear. It has been that leadership that has produced the essential elements of team-working together, with all members feeling appreciated for doing a good job. That is something that the Government could take to heart.
We have heard about the 25 so-called integration pioneers that NHS England talked about last year. Can the Minister update us on them, and on the pilot schemes in east London announced recently? Then there is the much heralded devolution of budget to Greater Manchester, of which Salford is of course an important part. That is clearly the route that the Government want to take, but therein lies the rub. First, in devolving responsibility, the Government get themselves off the hook if things go wrong. That is what devolution means.
Secondly, merging two inadequate budgets by itself may improve efficiency but is unlikely to be sufficient. It would be a huge blow to the Government’s devolution agenda if Greater Manchester failed for lack of funds. It would mean a big step back for the integration that we desperately need and would put off anyone else thinking of taking the same route. It is inevitable that money must come into it, and, to their credit, the Government have recognised that and have now agreed to provide transitional funding for Greater Manchester of £450 million over four years—just over £100 million a year. Whether that will be sufficient remains to be seen, but it is undoubtedly helpful and should be welcomed.
Although it is good to know that the Government are aware of the need for some temporary funding, there remains the more serious, longer term sustainability of the NHS and, in particular, social care. Almost everyone recognises that the UK spends one of the smallest proportions of GDP on health of almost all European countries: about 6.5% of GDP, compared to an average within the EU of about 9% or 10%. Social service funding is even worse off. All of that is in the face of increasing demand from an ageing population and a frightening increase in the number of patients with dementia. Almost every day we read in the papers of yet another failure or crisis.
We can become more efficient, and I have tried to indicate one way that we might be able to do just that, but short-term injections will not be the solution. We must find a way to provide a more sustainable level of funding to bring our services up to the standards of our neighbours in Europe. It is true, as Mark Britnell describes in his book, In Search of the Perfect Health System, that nowhere in the world has a perfect system, and many Governments struggle. But that is no excuse for starving our own service and having to accept an increasingly inadequate level of health and social care. If we are to gain the advantages of integration that we can clearly see in a few places, we must have the sustainable resources to do it. Of course, there is a separate debate to be had about how we fund our health services, which is something for cross-party discussions, royal commissions and so on, and I do not want to get into it today, although I suspect that other noble Lords may do so.
Meanwhile, the Government must get into the habit of valuing their staff and not blaming them; they must try to show that they are supporting and not confronting nurses and doctors all the time. I am sorry to end, as I started, by decrying the low level of government funding and criticising their attitude to NHS staff, but I do so only against the background I described of what it is possible to achieve by an efficient system of integration. Mark Britnell in his book finds that the most important reason why people are proud to be British is the NHS. Its fairness and accessibility to everyone, regardless of ability to pay is a precious resource, and we must not let it fail.
Lord Fowler (Con)
My Lords, I did not agree with everything that the noble Lord said, but I congratulate him on how he set out the pressures that the health service faces and will face in future. As he forecast, it is for reasons like that that I advocate a royal commission to examine the future financial—and I emphasise financial—requirements of the health service and propose ways in which that demand can be met. My proposal has absolutely nothing to do with the current industrial dispute. Indeed, I suspect that the BMA would not be a natural supporter of such an independent investigation. Basically, I want a commission to investigate how we can continue to afford a National Health Service providing care irrespective of income, which is what everyone in all parties wants, while recognising the financial challenges of an ageing population and the extra cost involved in medical advance. At the same time, we must recognise that public spending on health should not crowd out all other areas. I also want to see good education, a strong police service and—if noble Lords are interested, we are debating this subject next Thursday at about the same time—better prisons. If this is not an intrusion into private grief, I want a strong defence policy as well.
It is against that background that I would set out four requirements for a royal commission. First, it should be absolutely independent; it should be neither a political body nor an insider body. Secondly, it should look at how we finance the health service, otherwise there is absolutely no point. What we want are the best ideas on financing a service that we all value, irrespective of party, and we should re-examine old policies—for example, policies such as prescription charges, which mean at the moment that 90% of prescriptions are prescribed free. Thirdly, a royal commission should look at all the options; it should certainly examine experience, particularly in other countries of Europe, but it should investigate the potential of a health tax—a ring-fenced contribution to the costs of healthcare, which would have the advantage of connecting the taxpayer much more closely to the cost of the health service that they finance.
Fourthly, and lastly—and personally I regard this as crucial—a royal commission should investigate the long-term savings and benefit of better public health. Both Governments have failed here. The national health basically remains a sickness service, not because that is what Health Ministers want but because that is what the Treasury allows. The Treasury will try to provide resources for treating the casualties, but it is very reluctant to invest in preventing those casualties. It says that you cannot show that it will work, when the evidence is clear that prevention policies can and do work, not least in the 1986 AIDS campaign, which reduced not only HIV but all other sexual diseases at the same time. Even worse than this general failure is the fact that the Treasury has now chosen public health as the one area in the whole of the health field where spending is to be reduced, which is an entirely retrograde step.
There is a vast amount to do, and what we do now has implications for years to come. I believe that a royal commission has the potential to provide a proper base on which to face the financial challenges and to win public support.
Baroness Pitkeathley (Lab)
My Lords, I am indebted to my noble friend Lord Turnberg not only for securing this debate but for his long-term contribution to health debates and the development of health policy in your Lordships’ House. Like him and many noble Lords speaking today, I am greatly committed to the NHS. In fact, I owe my life to it. No price can ever be put on that, and no acknowledgment is enough.
Many statistics will be traded here today but I am not going to engage in that. I shall focus on the wording of the debate so far as future demands are concerned and offer my thoughts on what the NHS needs in order to be the institution we know, love and admire into the next century.
In my view, there are two essentials. First, to have a viable health service you have to have a social care service which works. We are all familiar with the reasons why the post-war settlement set up different systems of care: men died at 66—one year after retirement—and women at 68 or 69, so you did not need much social care in those days. Now, with our ageing population, the contrast between a health service free at the point of use and a social care system which is means-tested and publicly funded only for those with heavy needs results in a lottery, so the type of ailment you have will determine the financial support you get to cope with its effects. There is no equity. Moreover, efficiency is hampered by a lack of integration in organisation as health and social care are separately commissioned. Look at the 3,000 hospital beds today occupied by people fit to leave but stuck there because funding or assessment has not been resolved. The economic cost of this is huge but to it must be added the cost of the human misery caused by this situation.
We simply must move to a single, ring-fenced budget for health and social care which is commissioned in one place and within which entitlements are understood. We hear constantly that health and social care are becoming better integrated. In the 18 years I have been in your Lordships’ House, I have lost track of the number of times I have heard that assurance from Ministers on all sides of the political divide, but progress is piecemeal at best. We have to hope that somewhere, sometime and soon we will have a Government with enough vision and courage to disregard the five-year focus of any Government and propose a proper reassessment of the post-war settlement to reflect the current and future needs of our ageing nation. It can be done with vision and commitment, as my noble friend has shown us in Salford.
The second thing the health service needs—here I echo the noble Lord, Lord Fowler—is to focus not so much on curing illnesses but on the prevention of illnesses. Statistics are legion about the illnesses which are debilitating to the individual and expensive to the NHS, and the obvious way of tackling them is to prevent them arising in the first place—for instance, diabetes, so associated with obesity; strokes, so associated with high blood pressure; and lung diseases, so associated with smoking and lack of exercise. Yet time and again we hear that nowadays prevention programmes run statutorily or by the voluntary sector are being cut because they are long-term investments and may not pay off, so to speak, for as much as 10 or even 20 years, so they make easy targets. Does the Minister agree that this is short-sighted? We are at a point where only far-sighted, perhaps controversial, but courageous actions will preserve for the long term our much-loved and much-admired NHS.
Baroness Brinton (LD)
My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, for securing this important debate. I also want to thank all the people who work in the NHS at the moment. We need to recognise that much of it works very well, despite the pressures which I am sure we will focus on during this debate.
My starting point is that the world is changing. With the demographic time bomb, a large increase in the older population and the conditions associated with that, comorbidities and the changes in the technology delivering medical services, our NHS is facing perhaps the biggest challenge of its time. That is before we even start to look at the financial allocation.
I, too, want to focus on public health. There are concerns about the £200 million in-year cuts which are impacting on the ability to help the public prevent their own need to call on the health service.
I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, on the fantastic AIDS campaign. We need a public campaign on how to use the health service now. The number of people who bypass the GP and go straight to A&E, despite what has been done on this subject, is still appalling. Talk to any emergency doctors and they will tell you that there are plenty of people who they should not be seeing there.
The noble Lord is not the only person asking for a commission; my colleague Norman Lamb in another place has also said that we should have one on the entirety of health and social care, for all the reasons that noble Lords have mentioned. We have been talking for years about full integration, and I shall come on in a moment to an example of where I see one particular small project working very well.
Our NHS faces a much bigger crisis, and that is staffing—both nurses and doctors. Not only are we exporting a large number of them—over 5,000 doctors applied for certificates to work abroad, and many of them have gone—but I am not sure whether noble Lords are aware that UK doctors make up only 63.5% of doctors currently registered in the UK. That means that over one-third of our doctors have been foreign-trained. Some 91,000 of our nurses at the moment have trained abroad—that is, one in seven. It is an enormous number. We may have separate debates on how we do not train enough and how 10,000 nursing places have been lost. We have been thinking on a very short-term basis about medical education over the past five years, specifically since the removal of the SHAs. It is vital that we start to plan longer-term. Hiring doctors from abroad may work in the short term but often causes problems in their own areas and countries. While some trusts work closely with other countries—such as the West Hertforshire trust, which works with nursing schools in the Philippines—that is not universal.
My final point is about good integration. Hertfordshire is launching the Sloppy Slipper Swap this month, funded by the county council and the CCG. Some 4,000 people in Hertfordshire have trips and end up in hospital. Most of those are at home and are caused by poor footwear, so it is great to see a fully integrated campaign run by the libraries to ensure that people have access to education and a free pair of slippers, as well as advice about winter warmth. That is the sort of project that we need to see replicated throughout the country.
Lord Filkin (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, for this extremely important debate. I declare an interest as chair of the Centre for Ageing Better, a new What Works Centre that does what it says. I will focus on the implications for the NHS of an older population and I shall seek to look 10 years forward, as I think it is essential that we do so in order to address this question.
The starting point is that we are living longer, and this is a cause for enormous celebration and thanks. There are people in this Chamber and in our society who are alive now who would not have been without the changes and successes of medical science. So we should address this as a fantastic opportunity to consider how we benefit from longer lives, rather than seeing it as a disastrous crisis.
Nevertheless, we have to face up to the scale of change and challenge. The ONS tells us that in 10 years’ time there will be 40% more people aged 85-plus. We know what that implies for the NHS in terms of demand and cost. We know that it means many more people with long-term conditions—there are some estimates in Ready for Ageing? if noble Lords want illustrations—and we know from the five-year forward plan that long-term conditions drive 70% of NHS costs. So one way or another there will be a major increase in the proportion of GDP that we spend on health and social care over the next 10 years. Wanless estimated about 11% of GDP; the King’s Fund report by Barker estimated about 12%. Those give us the scale of increases in GDP spending that we are likely to make by one means or another.
What should we do? I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Fowler; it is not the model that is wrong. The model of the NHS is fundamentally equitable and relatively efficient and low-cost compared to others. The question is essentially: how do we fund an NHS and a social care system to address this?
Prevention is critical; it has been talked of, so I will say only two sentences on it. Wanless said in 2002 that unless we address prevention we will hit a crisis; the NHS Five Year Forward View said that we have now hit that crisis because we failed to address prevention properly. At present there is no ambition, plan, leadership or social debate about how we will make the major shifts in personal attitudes and behaviours that will avoid self-inflicted damage and cost to individuals and the public purse later on. Many lives are poorer because of that, so we have to address it, and although it will be slow to make change, it is fundamental to success.
In conclusion, on how we as a society pay for between 11% and 12% of our GDP on health and social care to benefit from longer lives, the question is clearly how we do it in a way that is fair to all people. We need to recognise that many of today’s pensioners are better off than ever. Pensioner poverty has been largely eradicated, and pensioners have a very privileged tax and benefit status—I celebrate that personally. However, in truth the question is: what is the political agreement with the public? Is it essentially, “We will protect you in a privileged tax and benefit position” or “We will commit as a society and as politicians to protect the quality of health and social care that you will need in an equitable way in our society so that you will benefit from your longer lives”?
Lord Lansley (Con)
My Lords, I join noble Lords in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, for this debate and I look forward to the maiden speech from the noble Baroness, Lady Watkins. With regard to debates, I put on record that it would be very useful for this House in particular each year in the late autumn to debate the draft mandate that the Government give to NHS England. That is the primary basis upon which the accountability through the Secretary of State to Parliament should be exercised. It was not debated here or in the other place, and it should have been.
I am very proud that, as my party’s spokesman over nearly 10 years, we made unambiguous and absolute our commitment to the values and constitution of the NHS, as my noble friend Lord Fowler equally made clear, and that we made a commitment to increase the budget of the NHS in real terms. Frankly, in the last Parliament it was 0.5% in real terms on average per year; the long-term average has been something over 4% in real terms per year, so the pressure on NHS budgets is unambiguous.
I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, that the only reason that in 2014 the Commonwealth Fund could say that we had the best healthcare system among leading economies was because NHS staff deliver a superb service with modest resources. Over the last five years, they continued to deliver substantial efficiencies; in doing that they met the so-called Nicholson challenge of delivering £20 billion. We did it in part not least because—my noble friend the Minister and his colleagues hid this away on 21 July last year—the reform process cost £1.4 billion but delivered £6.9 billion of direct savings during the course of the last Parliament.
However, we need to do more in the future. Time does not permit me to do more than list the things we need to do. We need an NHS digital infrastructure that is user led and that delivers what the Wanless report called for but which did not happen. We need a preventive system. In the creation of Public Health England, the responsibilities of local authorities and the public health strategy in the White Paper of 2010-11 there is a strategy, but it needs to be funded, as my noble friend said, and as Wanless recommended, it needs to be delivered. On commissions, Wanless is a cautionary tale. To agree that a large amount of money should be available for the NHS does not necessarily deliver the preconditions for the success of that service in using that money effectively. We also need new models of care—integrated and personalised care—and better procurement, on which I look forward to hearing from the noble Lord, Lord Carter of Coles. We need the Dilnot report on social care to be implemented, as we heard in the debate before Christmas. Not least, we need tariffs for the acute sector to be realistic, even if challenging in terms of quality and efficient care.
Finally, we need a long-term future for the NHS, and I am not just referring to the next £20 billion of efficiencies over the next five years. There needs to be an understanding that, while there is a requirement to continue to be efficient, there is light at the end of the tunnel and that when we get to 2020 and beyond, the NHS budget, having gone down from 7.8% to probably 7.1% of GDP, does not go down any further and prove unrealistic in relation to rising demand. From that point onwards, for the subsequent five years, NHS England can then build a vision around a commitment to a sustained level of NHS funding relative to the income and wealth of this country.
Lord Rea (Lab)
My Lords, in my three minutes I will concentrate on one section of the NHS Five Year Forward View, published 18 months ago, headed “Getting serious about prevention”. It makes the point that we are reaping the consequences of failure to prevent chronic diseases that would be largely avoidable if only suitable changes in behaviour could be made. The former Chief Medical Officer exhorted people to change their so-called “lifestyles” and live more healthy lives—I think we know the list.
The five-year view does not emphasise sufficiently that these diseases are all strongly related to social conditions. As Sir Michael Marmot has shown, there is a gradient in both mental and physical health through all socioeconomic groups from the top to the bottom. Health education messages to change behaviour are, however, less effective in the lower part of the spectrum. Poverty and inadequate housing may make it more difficult to give up harmful habits such as smoking, drinking or comfort eating, which can give momentary relief from economic and social pressures. Changing behaviour where it matters most is therefore the most difficult; powerful underlying pressures, some from the tobacco industry and parts of the food industry, are pulling in the opposite direction.
Professor David Gordon and his colleagues at Bristol University have drawn up an alternative list of desirable health behaviours to those advocated by the CMO. They take a rather different approach, which goes like this: “1. Don’t be poor. If you can, stop; if you can’t, try not to be poor for long. 2. Don’t live in a deprived area. If you do, move. 3. Don’t work in a low-paid, stressful manual job. 4. Don’t live in damp, low-quality housing”. There are six others, which I am afraid time precludes me from listing.
Those suggestions all have a direct bearing on health and longevity, but they lie outside the remit of the NHS and are mostly the responsibility of local authorities and other departments of state. If they were adequately funded, a great load could be lifted from the NHS, which at present is carrying a burden for which it is not really designed. I suggest that the continuing financial crisis of the NHS will not be solved until it is properly funded and other departments of state whose responsibilities have a bearing on health are enabled to carry their full share of maintaining the nation’s health and well-being.
Baroness Afshar (CB)
My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, for putting this debate on the table. In dealing with this question, I consulted the army of doctors, specialists and carers who enable me to be here today and to function. I asked them, as well as my colleagues in the department of health economics where I used to work, what kind of solutions they thought would deal with the problems that we face.
The general response was the suggestion that is already on the table—that you cannot have good health without having good preventive care at the very beginning, without having good food at schools, without having timetable slots for gym sessions and exercises, or without enabling the next generation to grow up healthy. The problem with the NHS is that people like me are now surviving and are costing a great deal. I am constantly in a variety of hospitals, being pumped and tested and put together. We are expensive—but I hope that we render some services.
On the other hand, what is absolutely required, more than care, is preventive measures. Also, my colleagues from health economics pointed out to me that, in terms of state funding, the NHS has been improving faster than the input to it, year after year since 2010. Essentially, efficiency is increasing; unfortunately, the burden that is put on that efficiency is increasing faster.
We cannot deal with that by looking at the National Health Service simply in terms of health and medication. We absolutely need to prevent people rushing to the NHS because their GPs are overstretched and they cannot get easy access to them—calling an ambulance ensures that they do get access to the NHS, whereas getting themselves to the GP is often costly and time-consuming and involves a great deal of waiting. So what is needed is to enable patients to have better access to GPs.
I do not think that that is served by having round-the-clock services in hospitals. I had dinner with a group of GPs last night. Many of them said to me, “It doesn’t matter whether you get your toenail removed on a Monday or a Saturday”. Hospitals perform a great many functions that do not need to be provided on a seven-day basis. We need to be able to separate what needs doing now, how we do it, and, particularly, how we secure the next generation’s health.
The Lord Bishop of Leeds
My Lords, I am very grateful for the opportunity to speak in this debate. Much of what I was going to say has been said and I do not intend to repeat it. I have surveyed some of the National Health Service foundation trusts in my diocese and there are common threads, both of opportunity and concern: financial, operational and clinical. Yet it ought to be said that some of the administrations of these health services are doing heroic work at a time of enormous complexity and constraint. Again, as has been said about the need to raise morale among staff, we should at least thank and congratulate those who are making the system work despite the challenges.
As demands rise, constraints are harder to deal with. I will throw into this that questions around PFI will have to be addressed at some point because of the deficits that some of our trusts are facing. One obvious issue here is that collaboration across key organisations at a system or place level is made difficult when each is bound by an independent regulatory regime and independent internal governance arrangements.
The relationship between health and social care was raised earlier. Social care is means tested. If you want to shift people out of acute beds in hospitals and into social care, there has to be a smoother route for doing it; obstacles should be handled or dismantled.
Finally, in relation to questions about the future, I will raise the question of chaplaincy—not as a bit of special pleading but because chaplaincy recognises the holistic nature of the care of people. In a debate such as this, we very easily talk about money, finance constraints and administration systems, but looking at the whole needs of people, so that they cease to be just medical cases or numbers or bed throughput, will be increasingly important.
Lord Winston
My Lords, I hope that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds will forgive me for my intemperance. Normally, I do not interfere with the bishops, except when I am playing chess. I also apologise, if I may, to the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Prior. I feel very deeply about what I am going to say, and it will be uncomfortable. I want to assure him of my respect for him and my recognition of his commitment to the National Health Service. However, what I have to say is important.
According to independent international observation, we have the best National Health Service in the world, often funded at a lower level than almost any other equivalent in Europe. However, I am not sure that it can remain so after the 2012 Act, which of course was introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, whose idea it was.
The one thing that makes our National Health Service as good as it is, is the quality of academic medicine and research that goes on in our universities. Jeremy Farrar has pointed out that the reason he became such a good doctor is that he did research. In spite of the ludicrous boasts that we are doing more research in the NHS and that every patient will be part of research, sadly, this is really not happening. As Professor Geraint Rees, the notable neuroscientist at UCL has said, the culture of the NHS has become increasingly inflexible and actively hostile to clinical academic training. Why do I say that? It is because it is inflexible in allowing research-oriented doctors to move to different regions to get experience. The system makes it difficult for research-oriented doctors to return to clinical training, and the career that I had would now be impossible. Doctors wanting to do research find it extremely difficult to persuade seniors and managers that they should spend time doing this, and the current problems doctors face are a shocking example of what is happening.
The fact is that research takes time: it takes time to read, to reflect, to discuss, to think, to write, to publish and to talk to patients to explain why the research is so important. I see prospective medical students in schools all over the country and they show one thing: they cannot get into a university to do medicine unless they demonstrate their altruism and an understanding that they will need to be ethical, their commitment to justice, and the notion that they are going to have to be extremely diligent. As you see, they go through medical school with all those principles—the notion of justice, public service and, above all, diligence—drummed into them at every stage in every university.
But what have the Government done? I congratulate the current Secretary of State on one thing. He has certainly united the most diligent, altruistic, committed, intelligent and well-trained workforce in the country; they have gone on strike almost unanimously. The fact is that the attitudes that are being pushed on to the doctors are, ultimately, extraordinarily destructive, and the Government have a major responsibility for that. The future of our NHS is imperilled by this change of attitudes.
Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)
My Lords, these are challenging times for the population’s health and the healthcare system, for reasons already set out very clearly in today’s debate. What some commentators have called a near existential crisis of the social care sector has brought some services close to breaking point.
The much-heralded greater efficiency and productivity improvements in the NHS, very important as they are, are being pushed to their limits and will not close the projected £30 billion funding gap. At best, they are like sticking a plaster on a health and care system that needs major surgery. As we heard the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, set out so eloquently, for a sustainable and long-term approach we need to set up a totally new model of integrated health and social care.
We all know that the NHS is not only a public good but a top public priority. The Government have acknowledged this priority in the recent spending review, and the commitment to an £8 billion increase in NHS funding by 2020 is very much welcomed. But frankly, that is only going to stabilise NHS services in the short term, and a lot of it will be taken up with addressing the growing deficit facing NHS trusts and foundation trusts. Critically, it will not, in my judgment, allow the implementation of the seven-day services requirement nor the much-needed investment in new care models.
We also need to understand where this £8 billion is coming from. Cuts to other parts of the Department of Health budget will clearly have knock-on implications for the NHS. So it is of real concern that other health spending, such as public health, education and training, and capital, is expected to fall by more than £3 billion. My key point today is that it is critical that the additional money does not come at the expense of funding for mental health or, indeed, social care. The coalition Government pledged a transformation in mental health services with almost a £1 billion investment, something that the Prime Minister made much of in a carefully packaged re-announcement earlier in the week. While this investment is hugely welcome, it still does not properly address the fundamental disparity between the ways in which physical and mental healthcare are funded and delivered.
The NHS England five-year forward plan had many good things to say about new and more joined-up models of care. These models are fundamentally about abolishing long-standing boundaries between GPs and hospitals, between physical and mental health and between the health and social care sectors. There is so much more to do as well joining up the community services, prevention and public health.
As has already been mentioned by my noble friend Lady Brinton, my right honourable friend Norman Lamb has recently proposed the creation of a cross-party commission on the future of the healthcare system. I strongly support this. The work needs to explore the various tax and fiscal options as part of the solution to the funding gap—something, frankly, which politicians of all stripes have long shied away from. I hope the Government will welcome this initiative.
Baroness Watkins of Tavistock (CB) (Maiden Speech)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, for tabling this debate, in which it is a great honour as a Member of this House to make my maiden speech.
My career started in 1973 as a nursing student in close proximity to this House at Westminster hospital where, on a more personal note, I was fortunate to meet my husband, a surgeon. I thank him for his support and encouragement in embracing my appointment to this House. Although I do not mean to be controversial today, I can assure your Lordships that this is difficult for me, having extensively argued the merits of investment in nursing versus medicine, surgery versus mental health, and acute care versus community care throughout the 40 years’ experience I have as a nurse and regular practice with a surgeon at home. In turn, this led me to a deputy vice chancellor role at Plymouth University, with responsibility for student affairs, including a range of health programmes. I have more recently been involved in chairing academy schools, working as a non-executive director in the NHS and the Aster Housing Group. I also undertake charitable work in drug treatment centres and in the care of older people.
I thank noble Lords on all sides of the House for the warm welcome that has been extended to me since my arrival and all the staff of the House for the assistance they have given me. I also thank my two supporters—my noble friend Lady Emerton and the noble Lord, Lord Kestenbaum—and my mentor, my noble friend Lord Patel, who tells me that he is watching this from India.
The vision for the NHS is for a modern, efficient and sustainable NHS where care and compassion matter. It has been argued that an integrated approach could both improve the quality of care for patients and improve productivity. Numerous studies have shown that an increase in the number of registered nurses in hospital and community settings is associated with clear benefits for patient mortality rates and other key metrics. Patient outcomes are enhanced if care is co-ordinated and, where necessary, delivered by registered nurses. If hospital admissions are to be reduced, rapid assessment in patients’ own homes from a range of healthcare professionals is vital. Yet are we doing enough to ensure that we are training sufficient numbers of healthcare professionals to achieve and sustain integrated care as outlined in our strategy?
In the early 1980s, as a “nursing officer for change”, I worked in a large mental hospital where over 1,000 beds were closed and replaced with community-based services. The key to the largely successful project was that all clinical staff were provided with further education and development to prepare them for the changes in their role. Community care is now the norm for those who have mental health and learning disability challenges, and most care is successfully delivered in a range of health and social care settings. I would argue that we are not so successful in providing acute healthcare intervention in people’s own homes, as evidenced by increasing admission rates to hospital, yet other countries successfully provide more care in the community. We hardly have an ideal situation at the moment.
Key to successful community care for people with the most acute medical problems and long-term conditions is the number and kind of nurses that are available to work in a range of settings, yet we know that we have an international shortage of qualified nurses which is estimated to be at least 20,000 in the UK alone, resulting in increased agency staff costs and, perhaps more important, reduced continuity of care. Happily, the number of nursing places in universities is set to rise this year, but for the next three years we will have the lowest output of registered nurses because of previous short-term cuts. The noble Lord, Lord Willis of Knaresborough, has indicated that we need to put training at the very heart of the NHS agenda, and that lifelong learning is essential. If we want a thriving healthcare structure, we must ensure that we have a workforce that is provided by the voluntary, social enterprise and independent sectors as well as the NHS. We need to recruit, train and retain care assistants, who provide support for individuals in their homes working with registered nurses.
In a recent letter to the Times, the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, concluded that the NHS is currently remarkably robust considering the level of investment. I agree, yet as others have said today, funding remains relatively stable in real terms and the only way to resource the future is to redesign our service to meet future challenges. Nursing is pivotal to this. In the current situation, the role and complexity of nursing is poorly understood, especially the role of the registered nurse with a degree. I can assure noble Lords that degree-level nurses are not too posh to wash, but can do so only if they have enough time to do it with care and compassion, as well as overseeing others who can deliver care well. The Guardian recently suggested that NHS leadership is ailing, but pointed to the Florence Nightingale leadership scholarships as an area of good practice. We must provide more opportunities for leadership development to ensure a supply of competent leaders who are able to respond to changing demand and lead the redesign of services for a sustainable NHS.
I have argued that registered nurses are pivotal to greater NHS productivity. This will require valuing and investing in the profession not only in terms of education and opportunity but by demonstrating for tomorrow’s care workers kindness and compassion in employment terms, so that this, in turn, is reflected in the care they give not only to us in this House but to society at large in the four countries of the United Kingdom.
Baroness Emerton (CB)
My Lords, it is my great privilege to welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Watkins of Tavistock, to the House and to extend warm congratulations to her on her most excellent maiden speech. It is an indication of the expertise that we can look forward to in her future contributions.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, for the opportunity to debate this important topic, which is to see how the NHS can be turned from a national sickness service back into a national health service. The rapid development of scientific knowledge, the growth of technology and research into the etiology of disease have led to valuable treatments for many conditions, and continue to do so, but at the same time the concentration on public health that was a priority at the inception of the NHS—preventing disease and promoting the health and well-being of the population—has decreased, although it remains a very important ingredient. Highly technical treatments and shorter hospitalisation now are appropriate but, because of the lack of community support, hospital beds become blocked.
As a retired nurse with 62 years’ experience, I am aware that the intent has always been to preserve the place of public health, but it has been overshadowed by the more exciting treatment side. The well-being of patients remains a requirement for nurses in the nurses’ code of conduct. A few lines refer to the fact that well-being in public health and care standards should be included in the syllabus of the nursing degree.
The NHS constitution also includes well-being as a responsibility of all staff. However, it is recognised within the Five Year Forward View that public health remains in urgent need of revival. That is for several reasons, the most important being the health of the population and the cost-effectiveness of a healthier population. Recently, Simon Stevens said that we cannot put more on the overstretched NHS staff. Healthcare professionals are the key to the future of the National Health Service. Unless they take a lead in promoting health and prevention of disease, nobody else will have the knowledge or the skills to take that forward. I do not refer just to doctors and nurses but to social services and all charitable contributors.
There is an in-built resistance to breaking down professional and organisational barriers but we must have the right leadership—leadership has been mentioned several times this morning—to take forward the health service so that it is not only a sickness service. It should be possible to influence and persuade lateral thinking and bring the holistic culture to health. It should start with the promotion of health, the prevention of disease, the treatment of disease and the well-being of the population, which should provide an evidence-based and cost-effective service.
The idea of the royal commission is good but, my goodness, a royal commission takes a long time. This is an urgent need and perhaps we may ask the Minister for a full debate on public health quickly.
Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)
Perhaps I may remind the House that this is a time-limited debate. Although most speeches have finished when three minutes is still showing on the clock, speeches have reached their permitted limit when three minutes first shows on the clock.
Lord Mawhinney (Con)
My Lords, the wording of our debate in part says,
“the ability of the National Health Service to meet present … demands”.
I think we all agree that when it meets present demands, it does so in an exemplary way. The problem is that it does not meet all demands and the failure to meet demands is increasing. I picked four important points at random and was interested that, at least in part, they overlap those inadequacies to which the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, drew attention.
There is very little integration between health and social services. We are sad about that at the community level but is it realistic to expect that to happen if, at the government level, there is not integration between health and social services? Perhaps the time has come to reverse the decision to separate them that was made some years ago. Thousands of people urgently need hospital treatment who cannot get it because beds are blocked by frail, elderly, blameless people who cannot otherwise be cared for. That is a failure in demand.
All around us, GP surgeries are closing, some of them permanently. I think 20 closed permanently in the county of Northamptonshire just last year. No one knows how many are being shut on a short-term basis because we cannot get the GPs to keep them open. It is a failure of demand when two or three weeks elapse before you can see your GP and when your chances of dying are 16% greater if you happen to be admitted to hospital over the weekend.
One of the problems with the NHS is that it is embedded in politics. That is not a new phenomenon: it was true when I was on the Front Bench doing my thing 25 years ago; it remains the case. Any chance to change the structure for the future has to deal with that political problem. Maybe a royal commission is the way forward, or something smaller, independent, with public consultation could lead the way. I can think of no place better than your Lordships’ House, which is full of expertise, common sense and vision, to lead the way to make it possible to engage the politicians who now lead us, on both sides of the House, to look at the possibility of a better future.
Lord MacKenzie of Culkein (Lab)
My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend Lord Turnberg for securing this important and timely debate, and join in the welcome of the noble Baroness, Lady Watkins of Tavistock. It is good that we have another nurse in this House. In my memory it is the first time in some 16 years that we have had three nurses speak in quick succession in a debate. If anyone with any influence out there is listening, we need even more nurses in this place.
It goes without saying that unless we have a highly skilled and well-educated nurse force there are implications for the future of the health service. But now, without any consultation whatever with the Royal College of Nursing, the Royal College of Midwives or UNISON, we are hit with the Chancellor’s CSR announcement. It is the same sort of attitude that my noble friend Lord Winston referred to so far as the medical profession is concerned. There was no reference whatever to the nursing and midwifery professions about the changes to the pattern and funding of nurse education. That announcement has come out of the blue and provides that, from 2017, student nurses, midwives and others will have to pay their university tuition fees and that, at the same time, their bursaries will be scrapped. Thus will end free education for nurses and midwives. The justification is to allow more applicants to get into university—to allow more to get past the so-called cap on places. Listening to the Chancellor’s announcement, you would have thought that the dreaded cap was nothing whatever to do with the Treasury and the restrictions on funding for university places for student health professionals.
There are few, if any, graduate professions as ill rewarded as nursing, so I am not sure how the Chancellor thinks that his plans can work if potential nursing students are to be faced with what for many will be career-long indebtedness of perhaps up to £50,000, to be paid back immediately on qualification from a miserable starting salary of about £21,000. Quite clearly the Chancellor and the Department of Health have been seduced by the Council of Deans of Health and Universities UK because the whole plan seems to be more about income for universities and, at the same time, savings for the Government than it ever has to do with workforce planning and the alleged possibility of more university places.
In a Written Answer to me the Government admitted that they do not collect data on how many student nurses leave university because of financial reasons, yet they now pray in aid the fact that there will be more money available from loans, as if the bursary system was a primary retention problem. To look at the figures, if the present percentages at universities are replicated, then many of the 10,000 so-called extra places will go to increasing numbers of midwifery and other health profession students. It will leave probably 6,000 extra places for nurses—2,000 per annum. Unless my maths is badly wrong, we will potentially have some 22,000 nursing students per year. That is the better part of nearly 3,000 fewer places than we had under Tony Blair’s Government of some 10 years ago. As with so much, we had the numbers right then, and we need to get back to that Labour figure if we are serious about tackling nurse staffing in the NHS.
Very close to home, a member of my family who has a number of degrees, is a skilled practice educator and teaches at university from time to time was until very recently still paid as a staff nurse. That is not a reward for 30 years’ continuous practice and education that will encourage nurses to take on a huge debt to come into our profession. With the greatest respect to the Minister, for whom I have the highest regard, we have either to start to pay nurses properly for their duties and responsibilities or else we have to do a quick U-turn if we are to get more students into university. We have to look carefully at what we are doing here and we have to work with those who represent the nursing and midwifery professions, which at the moment the Government have manifestly failed to do.
Baroness Williams of Crosby (LD)
My Lords, this is a very important debate and I wish there were more time for it to be conducted. I thank the noble Lord who initiated it. However, we are living in a fairyland in which we are talking about further improvements in the NHS, most notably a 24/7 service, at a time when the existing structure is under the most desperate threat. As we all know, another £200 million is to be cut from preventive measures but no one has so far mentioned the £22 billion of savings that the NHS is supposed to find through productivity agreements over the next five years. The ideal that we all share of bringing together social care and the NHS is largely vitiated by the Treasury’s inclination to continually cut local authority spending at a time when we are talking about improvements in, for example, preventive measures. That shows we are still denying the harsh facts in front of us.
It will be a great advance if we can even keep the NHS together for another couple of years. The noble Lord, Lord Winston, rightly said that it is being preserved at present through the extraordinary dedication and commitment of its badly paid staff, whose work is inadequately recognised. We owe them a great deal for keeping the NHS going but we simply cannot continue to think that we do not have to address the central issue of steady, consistent and adequate funding. We are nowhere near doing that.
In listening to the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, I remembered the very detailed study of the Barker commission published in October 2014, which was drawn up with the aid of the King’s Fund but has still not been discussed in this House or anywhere. It proposed that spending on health and social care should reach a figure of between 11% to 12% of GDP by 2025. We are still not discussing that proposal and still pretending that it does not exist. The noble Lord, Lord Fowler, rightly mentioned two difficulties. First, can a royal commission provide an adequate response within a year, or even less, because it is crucial that it does? Secondly, it is absolutely essential that any measures adopted are supported by all parties. We have to have an all-party response for which we all bear responsibility and we must not invent new ways to spend money that we do not have. If I may say so, in the noble Lord, Lord Prior, we have the kind of person who can go to the Treasury and say, “It is no good taking away with one hand what you give with the other because that simply leads to extreme frustration and even to desperation”.
We need a royal commission that conducts its business much more rapidly than is usually the case. We also need to debate the Barker report. However, we must recognise that, more than anything else, we need sustainable, steady and consistent funding, including funding drawn from taxation, because without that we will not be able to save the NHS.
Lord Warner (Non-Afl)
My Lords, except to congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Watkins of Tavistock, on her excellent maiden speech, our restricted time means that I will skip the usual niceties and nuances and concentrate on the absence of a credible funding system.
We are in the middle of a decade when we expect the NHS to cope with substantially increased demand and service expectations on an annual budget increase of roughly 1% a year in real terms for 10 years. Before this decade, successive Governments provided the NHS with a real-terms annual increase averaging 3% to 4%. It is virtually impossible, I suggest, to retain a good-quality labour force, meet rising demands, improve quality, and redesign service delivery on a 1% annual real-terms increase for a whole decade, ending up with 7% of GDP, roughly, being spent on our NHS.
By 2020, the combined health and care system will face a funding gap, I would suggest, of some £35 billion a year, with the 2015 spending review closing that gap, on the most favourable interpretation, by about £10 billion. The rest of the money comes from our old friends: pay restraint, new ways of working, and better productivity. I accept that the NHS could use its existing resources much better but, even if the NHS delivered all the proposals of the noble Lord, Lord Carter of Coles—a very big “if”—it would not close the funding gap. The 2015 spending review totally fails to deliver a credible funding strategy and actually makes a bad situation worse by failing to provide any kind of viable funding system for publicly funded adult social care or public health. The NHS and social care are confronted not with a managerial or professional failure but with a failure by politicians across the political spectrum to engage with the public on how we fund a sustainable, integrated health and social care system over the longer term.
To have good-quality and readily accessible health and care services, largely free at the point of clinical need, the public have to be helped to understand that they must pay for them, whether through more taxation, some form of co-payment, or a combination of the two. To get to grips with this rather politically unpalatable truth, we need an authoritative, independent inquiry that will work quickly to examine the possible options for new funding streams to provide some buoyancy and future-proofing. The Front Benches in both Houses need to get behind the ideas of either the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, or the Liberal Democrats, outlined by Norman Lamb in his 10-minute rule Bill. We need to start acting now to future-proof the NHS’s funding.
Lord Bradley (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Turnberg on obtaining this timely and wide-ranging debate. I declare my health interests as shown in the register. I will concentrate my short contribution on mental health, which I believe has never been higher on the public’s agenda.
The NHS currently spends only about 13% of its budget on mental health treatment and support, including GP time, prescriptions and secondary mental health services. However, evidence from prevalence surveys shows that only 25% of people, including children, with common mental health problems receive any treatment. There has been a great deal of talk in recent years of parity of esteem between physical and mental health and I welcome recent announcements of additional funding for mental health services, but the funding gap is still huge.
The King’s Fund and the Centre for Mental Health identified that a third of people with long-term physical conditions—4.6 million people in England—have a co-morbid mental health problem, most commonly depression and anxiety. The cost of care for this group is 45% extra and more still for those with multiple conditions. This adds up to an additional cost of £10 billion nationally each year. The extra costs are for a variety of reasons, including poorer self-care and condition management. This can increase the cost of prescriptions, cause or lengthen the hospital admissions and dramatically increase both morbidity and mortality.
At least £1 billion more is spent on the cost of staff mental health in the NHS, at least half of which is likely to be hidden, as staff present at work but may be struggling to do their jobs as well as they would wish. A significant part of the £14 billion cost of untreated mental health care could be saved while offering better healthcare. For example, liaison psychiatry in acute hospitals has been found to save £3 to £4 for every £1 invested, cutting costs by an average of £5 million per hospital.
Crucially, earlier intervention is vital in all areas of mental health care. There is clear evidence that investing in perinatal mental health care, parenting programmes to help families to manage children’s behaviour, treating childhood depression, anxiety and conduct disorder, promoting mental health in schools and early intervention in psychosis all generate savings far in excess of their costs.
I hope that the Government will also invest in liaison and diversion services and that the Treasury will shortly approve the business case for mainstream funding of these services. Huge savings can be made here in the criminal justice system and the health service. By investing wisely in mental health support, the NHS may be better able to sustain itself. Reaching out to people with physical conditions and symptoms whose mental health needs are unmet will improve health at a lower cost. I hope that such integrated proposals will be pursued by the devolution of health and social care in Greater Manchester, building on the work of Salford that my noble friend Lord Turnberg so well described.
The Lord Bishop of St Albans
My Lords, I am glad to congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Watkins, on her maiden speech. Due to the pressure on time, I want to focus on one very small area, which has been alluded to by various noble Lords but which I want to develop a little. It is the pressing and vital need to reboot the concept of a social contract, which lay at the heart of the national health system as envisaged by Beveridge and which balanced rights and responsibilities, not least against the background of living in a time when people have increasingly emphasised rights and perhaps downplayed the sense of duty and responsibility.
In 2013, PricewaterhouseCoopers produced a report on the 65th anniversary of the NHS, which identified two key factors that would be essential for the future of the NHS. One of them was the extent to which people took personal responsibility for their own health and care, and that of their families. Then last year, when the independent research published by the Commonwealth Foundation revealed the UK’s health system to be at the top of the league among nations in the developed world, the one area where we did not score highly was in the prevention of illness. That report highlighted the particular problem of large numbers of people in this country with unhealthy lifestyles.
It is deeply concerning that so many illnesses are caused by addictions to alcohol and smoking, while we have the highest rate of child and adult obesity in Europe. Estimates of their cost vary but just those three areas could well be costing as much as £17 billion per annum. To address these issues requires a deep cultural change across our nation, along with a renewed emphasis on personal responsibility for our health and for exercise, for people of all ages. But of course these sorts of changes are some of the hardest to make. The need for a new social contract between citizens and the NHS is urgent, with a much greater emphasis on what we need to do in response to what the NHS provides. Indeed, this message needs to be reinforced every time anyone comes in contact with the NHS.
While laws and taxation have a contributory factor, we need to create a climate which celebrates health and people taking responsibility for it, for them and their families. There is a great deal of evidence that one of the most powerful factors in bringing about such behavioural change is the influence of peer groups. We need to work consistently with health campaigns, sports and leisure clubs, statutory and voluntary youth and children’s groups, schools, colleges, churches and everybody from the Mothers’ Union to the WI and the University of the Third Age to think how we can celebrate the need for personal responsibility. It needs to be undertaken over the long term; we are talking in terms of decades. If we are to see significant change then the evidence of the campaign to reduce smoking, which has halved since the 1970s, shows that it can be done but will take time and consistency.
Lord Colwyn (Con)
My Lords, I declare my interest as a now fully retired dental surgeon with over 40 years’ experience and a fellow of the British Dental Association.
All too often when we speak about our health system, oral health is conspicuously absent from the debate, and this morning is no exception so far. Both the Government and Opposition seem united in seeing a more integrated approach to delivering health and social care services as the key to ensuring the future sustainability of the NHS. It is essential that dentistry is factored in and included in any wider health strategies, and that the interplay between oral health and general health, and dentistry budgets and other NHS budgets, features in any discussions on healthcare provision.
An excellent report published by the Faculty of Dental Surgery reveals how much further we need to go in our fight against tooth decay. A third of five year-olds in England are still suffering from caries, and within that group the average child has at least three teeth affected. It is simply shocking that in this day and age tooth decay—an entirely preventable condition—continues to be the most common cause of hospital admissions among five to nine year-olds, with 500 primary school-age children requiring hospital treatment every week. This not only causes the children and their parents unnecessary stress and pain but is also a complete waste of NHS resources, costing the taxpayer over £30 million a year.
A fifth of five year-olds eligible for school meals have severe or extensive tooth decay, compared with just one in 10 among those from more privileged backgrounds. The situation is particularly alarming considering that approximately 90% of dental problems are preventable and the damage they cause is cumulative and costly. We must also raise awareness of the risks of tooth decay, especially of the impact of sugar consumption on children’s teeth. I fully agree with the BDA that no option should be left off the table in the efforts to end Britain’s addiction to sugar. Possible measures range from lowering the recommended daily allowance, through action on marketing and labelling, to possible sales taxes.
I also urge the Minister to consider investing in a national oral health programme to drive improvements in children’s oral health in England, following and learning from the success of such programmes in Scotland and Wales. I once again urge the Government to consider the overwhelming worldwide scientific evidence which clearly points to fluoridation being a safe and effective way to fight caries and narrow the significant inequalities in children’s oral health across the country, and to encourage local authorities that do not yet use this resource to introduce water fluoridation schemes.Noble Lords will all agree with me that a shift in focus from treatment to prevention is crucial if we are to ensure the NHS will be able to face the challenges of the future. This statement is as true in the area of dentistry as it is elsewhere in our health system.
My time is up. I was going to say a few things about oral cancer and the importance of the dental team in the new tobacco control strategy, and was going to bring your Lordships good news of a dental treatment that does not involve drilling.
Lord Bhattacharyya (Lab)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Turnberg for securing this debate and declare my interest as an engineer and chairman of the Warwick Manufacturing Group at the University of Warwick. I also run the Institute of Digital Healthcare jointly with the medical school.
Two years ago, I was treated for pneumonia at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham, a fantastic new hospital led by an outstanding former nurse, Dame Julie Moore. The care I received was immaculate, and I understood then why the NHS is sometimes called our other national religion. However, I see it as our national science. After all, it is the subject of many experiments and is constantly being tested.
One current test is higher care standards, which requires more medical staff on wards. As a result, agency staff costs have soared. Monitor expects the bill to be over £4 billion this year, blaming a fundamental mismatch between supply and demand for medical staff. A lot of companies have made very good profit exploiting this, and it is rather ironic that Ministers are now proposing a cap on rising bills as the answer. The truth is that, whether in energy or agencies, price caps are a short-term fix. The solution is to increase supply.
Several medical schools, including Warwick, offer four-year medical degrees for graduate entrants. Such graduates do very well both academically and in their career. Warwick graduates are currently second only to Cambridge medics in gaining specialty training places. Shorter courses also mean qualified students can contribute to the NHS earlier. Four-year graduate entry degrees broaden access, attract quality applicants and give faster returns on public spending. It would be ludicrous to close such programmes. Yet medical schools could be forced to do so, as EU legislation demands that medical qualification takes five years. Currently, the fifth year for graduate entrants is the first-year foundation programme. During this time, graduates are provisionally supervised under the GMC before full registration as an independent practitioner is granted.
However, after the Greenaway review, the Government proposed merging degree graduation and full registration. This would unintentionally make four-year courses impossible, as removing the year under provisional registration would leave graduate entry courses short of the EU demand for five years’ training. To resolve this, graduate entrants could continue to do their first foundation year under provisional registration, and I understand the GMC may favour such a solution. We must innovate to attract outstanding medical students, then get them working as soon as we can. To achieve this, I urge the Government to pledge that future graduate entrants will retain the option of a four-year medical degree.
Baroness Ludford (LD)
My Lords, I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, for this important debate. I have my own recent family reasons for having the deepest gratitude to wonderful NHS staff, who deploy life-saving skills. I also have a niece who is a junior doctor.
However, I want to concentrate on diabetes. There is huge potential—it is a no-brainer—to spend more wisely. Four million people live with diabetes, and they cost the NHS £10 billion a year—£1 million an hour—which is 1/10th of its budget. The total cost to individuals and society is £24 billion and rising fast. My particular focus is on those who are insulin-injecting, predominantly with type 1 diabetes. I have some, albeit second-hand, experience of this, having been with my husband for the 40-odd years since he was diagnosed. The NHS has never included me or learnt from me; for example, when it comes to coping with hypos. I should mention that my husband already has access to the technology I will refer to, that he is chairman of a health trust and that he was, for several years, chairman of the UK branch of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.
NHS England’s Five Year Forward View last summer referred to diabetes only as a preventable illness resulting from,
“the nation’s waistline … piling on the pounds”.
This completely ignored and insulted those with type 1, whose diabetes is not caused by obesity. As well as the integration of services, I urge an “invest to save” approach to both research and care. Around 400,000 people have type 1 and although they account for only one in 10 of those with diabetes, they consume, on some estimates, half of the £10 billion that diabetes costs the NHS annually. As much as 80% of the cost of treating people with type 1 is spent on avoidable complications. Two reports from the National Audit Office, and one from the Public Accounts Committee of the other place—a second is in progress—have been scathing about NHS care failures.
How do you invest to save? First, you do it in research. The glittering prize is a cure. JDRF and the researchers it funds do excellent work, but the UK Government spend only £6.5 million a year—10p per head of population—on diabetes research, backed up of course by crucial EU funding that Brexit could put at risk. This spending is puny and inexplicable.
Secondly, you invest to save in devices for self-management. The key to keeping type 1 diabetics well and avoiding debilitating and expensive complications of organ damage is good blood glucose control through self-management. Insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitors have proven benefits in the management of type 1 diabetes, and NICE guidance attests to their cost-effectiveness. Testing without finger pricks now exists, and NICE needs to look positively at this. Yet only 7% of people with type 1 in the UK have a pump, compared to 15% in Germany and 40% in the US. Only 1% or 2%, mostly self-funded, have a CGM.
I conclude by saying that spending to save on diabetes is an easy win; there is no excuse not to do it.
Baroness Masham of Ilton (CB)
My Lords, there are some excellent specialist units doing exceptionally high-quality work with good leadership and splendid teams of skilled staff which are world-class, and patients are grateful for their correct diagnoses and care, but there are also hospitals which have inadequate equipment, lack of staff and leadership and poor morale. Patients are often misdiagnosed and have a poor standard of care, causing concern and lifelong problems. There should always be good communication, honesty and transparency. Patients should feel safe and have faith in those people looking after them.
The big question is how this can be achieved across the country when demands are growing and we have to rely so much on staff from other countries. It is refreshing when one finds keen, enthusiastic doctors who love their job. The present situation with dissatisfied junior doctors is very concerning. A satisfactory solution must be found.
Patients who have had an operation and are in need of rest and recuperation should not be subject to a noisy and stressful environment. They need a well-organised, peaceful ward with a responsible sister in charge, so many people say, “Bring back matron”. Many people across the UK are anxious about the money spent on agency staff, who cost a monumental amount of funds and may not have the necessary commitment. This situation is milking the NHS.
It is vital that infection control is treated as a priority in the NHS. It will come to the fore as antimicrobial resistance comes to dominate acute hospital care. The UK had the global lead in infection control, appointing the first specialist infection control nurses. If they suffer cuts, it will be a disaster.
Worldwide, the lives of billions of people are affected by zoonosis, diseases transmitted from animals to humans. This is an immense public health problem. Bush meat, which is meat that comes from wild animals captured in developing regions of the world such as Africa, was the origin of HIV and Ebola. Thousands of tonnes of bush meat are coming into the UK each year. It is illegal to bring bush meat into the United States of America; it is very strict. Should we not do likewise? One never knows what dreadful diseases are around the corner.
Lord Carter of Coles (Lab)
My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend Lord Turnberg for securing this debate and congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Watkins, on her excellent maiden speech. I also declare my interests as being those on the register.
We have heard that the public value the NHS so greatly, and we know from the Commonwealth Fund studies that we rank very highly in healthcare systems in the world, yet something is clearly wrong. We need to address the question of funding, but in this brief speech I should like to focus much more on what we need to do now in the short term to equip the Minister to go back to have those necessary arguments with the Treasury to secure the correct level of funding.
The interesting thing is that we have a great system. Somebody said the other day that we have done everything right once. What we have failed to do is build on the great experience that we have built up in a number of areas. If we look at quality or use of resources, we see unwarranted variances right across the system. The noble Lord, Lord Lansley, asked about procurement. The fact is that in some hospitals we are sometimes paying double and using twice as many staff to get the same outcomes. We need to work on a national system which delivers consistency, not only in quality through the CQC but in the new arrangements that are being put in place through the NHS improvement agency, to make sure that everyone is doing the same thing right. We have not learnt from the great achievements that we have in many places in the system.
The second area is one on which many people have spoken: the whole question of the right care in the right place, the flow through the hospitals—people call it workflow in industrial situations and increasingly in healthcare. One big thing that has emerged from the speeches of other noble Lords is the whole question of discharge from acute hospitals. There are 130,000 acute hospital places in England, and probably 10% of them are blocked, so 13,000 beds are being used inappropriately.
The third point is collaboration. Others have talked about integrated care. Salford is a wonderful example. Northumbria proves what we can do: integrated acute, community and social care. We know how to do all this; we do not need to look to consultants to tell us. The NHS knows that what we have to do is organise to deliver it. Critical to that will be the 1.4 million people who work in the NHS. I think it is equalled only by the Chinese army and Indian railways in size of workforce—and possibly Walmart. I suggest that the other three have a high degree of leadership. We probably need to get away from leadership by bullying to leadership by leadership, so that the system can actually deliver.
I repeat that we need to equip the noble Lord, Lord Prior, to go back with those right arguments. Those of your Lordships who read the Guardian on Monday may have noted Matthew D’Ancona’s little piece. I end with this quotation:
“The custodian of the NHS”—
we are all custodians, I suggest—
“who truly seeks to safeguard its future must fight for internal efficiency, restless reform and the changing needs of patients, as well as for extra cash”.
Lord Freyberg (CB)
My Lords, this debate is about present and future demand and how we best manage it. In doing so, we need to include all rare disease, not just the big killers. Individual rare diseases may not kill many, but collectively they are a significant part of the disease burden.
Mesothelioma is such a disease. In the recent mesothelioma debate, the Government confirmed that 60,000 are expected to die from that terrible disease over the next 10 years. An international comparison by the Eurocare group shows that the UK survival rate at one year is 36%. Sweden’s is 46%. In other words, one in 10 patients more dies here than in Sweden, or 6,000 lives over the next 10 years. The disease is identical and the treatments identical. This is therefore a matter of care quality management.
We see this pattern across cancer. The British Journal of Cancer published the latest international performance assessment. Here is a sample of the one-year survival rates for 2005 to 2009. In lung: Sweden 41%, England 31%. In colon: Sweden 82%, England 73%. In ovarian, Sweden 79%, England 64%. This sounds remarkably like the England football team’s latest performance against Sweden. Perhaps, as in football, we should turn to Sweden for management advice.
Sweden has driven improvements in its service not by chucking more money at the problem but in the way it manages the service. Hospital quality is published at a granular level, not some meaningless general level. Patients with a specific disease know which hospitals to avoid. Some of your Lordships will recall the Colchester cancer scandal. What did not come out in the media at the time is that the East of England Cancer Registry foresaw such an issue many years before in research showing that smaller centres had worse outcomes than larger ones. They may still do, but who is to know without the data?
Yesterday I tabled a number of Written Questions for the Minister on the data that the Minister already has in the National Cancer Intelligence Network in Public Health England, which could help patients to get better care if it was published, such as cancer-specific hospital performance data. I am sure that the Minister would agree that these are important issues, and that the reasons they are not being published should be investigated. Once these investigations have happened, will the Minister agree to meet me—I would be grateful if the Minister could reply on this point in his wind-up—to see how these results could be put into the public domain? I believe that these figures are an important component in seeing improvements in cancer care.
Baroness Donaghy (Lab)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Turnberg for initiating this debate and congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Watkins, on her wonderful maiden speech.
It is quite a while since I have spoken on health or social care matters, but I am fearful for the future. The ingredients of broken promises on social care funding, inadequate funding of the National Health Service, increasing demand and creeping privatisation mean that the pressure cooker may one day explode. The Government seek to avoid blame by making doctors and nurses subsidise our health provision, and finding a scapegoat in local government for the failures of social care. Student nurses are paying for their own training and working for nothing in the NHS for half their time; their pay has been capped and they are paying for their lodgings; safe staffing ratios have been scrapped; and nurses are doing even more outside work for the privilege of working up to 70 hours a week. That does not create a positive climate for the future.
The Government need to take a step back on the junior doctors dispute, which has been badly handled. The overwhelming vote of 98% on a 76% turnout is not just a problem for the Government; it places an enormous responsibility on the doctors’ leaders, because any settlement is going to look like a comparatively poor deal. It is important to allow ACAS to get on with its job. I read a very moving letter in the paper from the father of a junior doctor, who said of his son:
“He regularly works weekends and nights, and spends much of his ‘free’ time adjusting his sleep patterns. He almost always works between one and three hours extra daily because of understaffing … His social life is almost nonexistent due to exhaustion and antisocial hours”.
All that is on a basic pay of £28,000 a year, and he is paying for his own insurance fees as well as very expensive examinations.
Finally, the recent hasty announcement to devolve health budgets to five London boroughs is not genuine devolution. It is more like being persuaded into a life raft only to find the substantial figure of Boris Johnson jumping in at the last minute. Apparently, he is going to oversee the process—clearly, part of the “Keep Boris Busy” campaign. The massive funding gap for social care will be slightly narrowed at the expense of healthcare, and the London boroughs will take the flak. These piecemeal experiments will lead to more complex structures, more contracting out and huge dividends for management consultants, who will hope to increase their £600 million a year income. The losers will be patients and the elderly. I really am fearful for the future of the NHS.
Lord Taverne (LD)
My Lords, the National Health Service is facing its most serious financial crisis since its birth. The Health Foundation estimates that there will be a £6 billion funding gap by 2020, which I suspect is likely to be an underestimate, given the growing number of hospitals unable to stay within their budget.
I very much support the proposal of the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, supported by others, too, for a royal commission, but if there is no royal commission there should be strong support for Norman Lamb’s proposal, supported by two former Secretaries of State for Health, Conservative and Labour, for a powerful independent commission. One of its recommendations should be to fund health and social care through a specially earmarked, hypothecated tax. The Treasury hates hypothecated taxes. I believe that I am the only former Treasury Minister speaking in this debate, although that was a long time ago, when Roy Jenkins was Chancellor. But the health service is a very special case; its need for funds is greater and grows faster than almost any other public service, and much faster than GDP. At the same time, it is Britain’s most cherished institution. People would be prepared much more readily to pay for its needs than through general taxation if there were a special tax for the health service. The obvious special tax would be a reformed, progressive system of national insurance contributions, which in their present form have neither rhyme nor reason and should either become part of income tax or, much better, finance a special NHS fund.
I have one final, more general point. The needs of the National Health Service are, perhaps, one of the clearest illustrations of why we should reject the Government’s strategy on making us a low-tax, low-spending country, with public spending reduced to 36% of GDP, the lowest in the major countries of the European Union. Health and social spending are already the lowest. Low tax and low public spending societies are the most unequal and dysfunctional; they lower the quality of life of their citizens in numerous ways, as convincingly argued in that seminal book, The Spirit Level, and in Joseph Stiglitz’s splendid volume, The Price of Inequality. One of the main tasks of opposition parties in this Parliament should be to expose the dire consequences for our society of the Government’s declared central aim to shrink the state. One of its most notable casualties would be the National Health Service.
Baroness Grey-Thompson (CB)
My Lords, in the time I have today, I am going to concentrate on a very specific area, that of wheelchair services. I declare an interest as chair of the National Wheelchair Leadership Alliance, which was set up after NHS England supported two national summits, and a huge weight of academic evidence and case studies offered a compelling case of why action was needed. A 10-point charter was developed which received significant support from the public, Members of both Houses, CCGs, the industry, wheelchair services and charities, to name a few.
It is simply not understood how important the right chair is. In our campaign, I sat in a wheelbarrow. I am not proposing this as a cheap solution to wheelchair services, but in a few minutes it became very painful and it provided a shocking image. We chose a wheelbarrow because it may have a seat, wheels and handles but it does not give independence. That is what the wrong chair means.
During this work, we have seen some dreadful cases, including long waiting times and people dying before they received their equipment. No one is trying to do a bad job—quite the contrary—but it is a Cinderella service and a complete postcode lottery. A cushion can cost £250, while a pressure ulcer from the wrong cushion can cost £100,000 to fix.
The mandate consultation came at a perfect time, and I am delighted that we merited mention in the response. I understand that the mandate is a strategic document and is not meant to be prescriptive, but the response dismisses a focus on individual services. This contradicts the Government’s aim for integrated healthcare, because wheelchair services may be a single service but the outcomes have an impact on every government department. Because of having the wrong chair or not having a chair, children are missing school and people are missing work; it is costing the NHS significant amounts of money through injury and harm. If disabled people cannot get to work, how can Her Majesty’s Government hope to halve the employment gap for disabled people? One person told me that through access to work she would have five-sevenths of her specialised chair funded, but she had to leave it at work at the weekends because it was not for personal use. That is totally ludicrous—how could she get to work in the first place?
I know we have limited time, but I have a few questions for the Minister. Will he elaborate on whether further work has been done on the cost-benefit of providing the right wheelchair? Will he provide an update on the work of NHS England’s data dive and tariff, which is very welcome and crucial to moving this debate forward? Will he confirm that the number of responses to the mandate consultation in this area was among the highest received? Why have the wider benefits of providing the right wheelchair not been taken into consideration? I am not asking for more money; I am just asking for a genuinely integrated approach. Finally, as we are limited for time, can I meet the Minister, as this has been a problem for 30 years and affects millions of people?
Viscount Younger of Leckie
My Lords, we are tight on time. May I give a further reminder that in the final stages of this debate, Back-Bench speeches should be concluded when three minutes first appears on the clock?
Baroness Redfern (Con)
My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, for bringing this debate to the House. There are demands on our health service, and it is clear that a rapidly ageing society puts great pressure on our NHS in many different ways. My contribution to this debate will focus on local efforts to support these services.
As noble Lords will be aware, responsibility for public health now rests with local authorities, and that is working well. Councils now play a pivotal role in looking at what can be done to care for people in their own community. Integrated care is essential to meet the needs of the ageing population, to transform the way that care is provided for people with long-term conditions and to enable people with complex needs to live healthy, fulfilling and independent lives.
Locally we are delivering the better care fund programme to ensure a transformation in integrated health and social care. For example, in North Lincolnshire, we have joint senior management at clinical commissioning group and local authority level. We recognise that an enhanced out-of-hospital model, enabling health and social care professionals to provide more joined-up services closer to people’s homes and communities, should form the basis of any system-wide model of care. We connect local areas to local GP practices to offer new ways of working with social care, community healthcare, mental health services, voluntary and community organisations and other key stakeholders. We have local teams to enhance existing community services and have already delivered, as I have mentioned before in the House, five well-being hubs, which are fully operational, and are currently developing satellite hubs. These hubs target the most vulnerable people and provide interventions on a one-to-one basis. They actively work with hospital teams to create support links for service users admitted to hospital, helping with discharge. We are also looking at ways to work differently with the intermediate care services. We engage with users to make sure they have the confidence to access services and work, in order to reduce any delays in processing care which could damage that confidence. We are also piloting the healthy and active passport, which will give citizens access to services and schemes aimed at improving health and well-being.
We simply cannot ignore the impact of an ageing population and the pressures it puts on healthcare, both local and national. The current efforts to address projected pressures offer a way to a brighter future for older and vulnerable people, and I welcome the Government’s initiatives to support local areas. They are fundamentally about moving away from a sickness service and towards a system that enables people to live independent and healthy lives in their own communities. We must create wellness, not just treat illness. Through hard work, imagination, commitment, and not working in silos but together, we can meet head on the challenges presented by our increasingly elderly population and aspire to make this country the best to grow old in.
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)
My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, for promoting this debate. I am also grateful to the NHS for keeping me alive when I had cancer, and for the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Watkins. I look forward to hearing more from her in future.
I shall quickly say something on personal responsibility, public health policy and corporate social responsibility, which I do not think has been touched on so far. On personal responsibility, as leaders, we have to be much more courageous, honest and open about the need for individuals to understand and accept that they are ultimately personally responsible for the state of their health. We need stronger campaigning. As was proved by the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, when he dealt with AIDS, if people are willing to be honest, open and courageous, we can carry all levels of the country, be they poor or rich. People need to be given many more facts about their lifestyles and the damage that arises from some of what they are eating and drinking. Those of us who use the health service should learn the cost of the services that are being provided. Each time I go to the health service, I should be told the cost of the medicines. If there is a combination of all that, we will start to raise awareness and knowledge and to create a different approach to personal responsibility. I will say no more on that because the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans more than fully covered it.
Linked to that is progress on policy on Public Health England. It is an outrage that £200 million has been chopped from its budget when we face so many problems with the increasing number of people going to the health service for treatment. Fortunately, it was one of the successes of the 2012 reorganisation, with its evidence-based recommendations on sugar taxes and alcohol abuse, for example. We need to co-ordinate policies at different levels to avoid the clash of one organisation trying to reduce alcohol, and the Chancellor then cutting taxes on alcohol last year, meaning that we now have more people drinking than before. We need to get the co-ordination of policy right. This is being addressed by Public Health England.
Deep down, most politicians believe that what they are saying is correct and that they need to take action, but regrettably, we too frequently run away from putting such things into practice. We have too many knee-jerk reactions, such as we had from the Prime Minister on the question of a sugar tax.
In the light of our experience with the responsibility deal, there needs to be a radical review of people’s relationship with the private sector. Retailers, especially supermarkets, food and drink manufacturers, producers and distributors need to accept that they have greater social responsibility than they have been prepared to accept so far for some of the health-related problems in this country. They have to face up to the fact that they need to embrace that change in culture and accept more responsibility for those problems. The Government have failed to achieve real progress with them on a voluntary basis. They should be faced with legislation if they will not move.
Lord Rennard (LD)
My Lords, I draw the attention of the House to my entry in the Register of Lords’ Interests. Last autumn, the Chancellor secured some good headlines by promising an extra £10 billion in real terms for NHS England by 2020, representing an annual increase in NHS spending of 1.75%. But beneath those headlines, NHS cost and demand rises by 3.5% to 4% a year. When trying to explain the problems of the rising cost of pensions and healthcare, I often begin by saying that when I was at school, 40 years ago, male life expectancy was just 67. A man approaching retirement then might well have worked and paid taxes since he was 15. After 50 years of contributions, he would retire at 65 with a pension and the health service would have to provide for him and look after him for just two years. A man who retires this year at 65 will probably live another 20 years. His state pension will have to be paid for from general taxation for 20 years, not two years, and towards the end of his life there will be, on average, a period of eight years when he will be in poor health and in need of greater health and social care support.
In providing for women and men like him, the NHS delivers good value for money compared to healthcare systems in other countries. We achieve a lot by spending just 8.5% of GDP on health compared to the OECD average of 8.9%, but our figure is due to fall to 7.8% by 2020.
If we want a better health service, we have to look at the fact that France, Germany and Holland all spend about 11% of GDP on health. We will certainly never match those levels if the Chancellor is to succeed in his aim, set out in the Autumn Statement, of reducing the overall level of government spending from about 41% of GDP to just 37%. It would, however, be a very brave politician who argued for more than a very modest increase in the basic rate of taxation, even though it is now 15p in the pound lower than in 1975-76, 10p in the pound lower than in 1979-80, 5p in the pound lower than in 1988-89 and 2p in the pound lower than in 2000-01. It may be politically unacceptable to reverse those income tax reductions, made for political advantage, but the time must have come for a hypothecated health and social care tax. I hope that this idea will be considered further by the cross-party commission being launched by Norman Lamb.
Lord Desai (Lab)
My Lords, as a professional economist—the only one speaking in this debate—I should say that any service that is free at the point of use will perpetually suffer from excess demand. The NHS is no different; more or less since its founding, it has faced a continuous demand for more money and the public fisc has been unable to quite meet it, so we have had a history in which it is perpetually in a funding crisis. At the same time, though, there is a great deal of satisfaction with the service, so we need to understand how it works.
We have to be careful about the fact that the percentage of GDP spent on health is not a good measure of outcomes; it is a measure of inputs. As someone has said, we have one of the best-ranked health services, despite not being the highest-spending nation. The highest-spending nation is probably the United States, which has a lousy health service.
Having said that, we need to make the user more aware of the costs of the service, as my noble friend Lord Brooke said. In many previous debates, I have suggested that every user of the NHS be given an annual return showing what they have used it for and how much that has notionally cost the NHS. They should be made aware that even if they miss an appointment it costs money. Whatever they have had, somewhere it has been paid for. They do not have to pay for it themselves, but they ought to be made aware that there is a cost to each thing that they do or indeed do not do. At the same time, we ought to provide people with another sheet of paper showing how the total NHS money is spent, just for information. People ought to understand what their money goes on. Right now they do not understand, and they take it for granted.
I shall say just one more thing because my time will be up very soon. We have made all sorts of predictions about what proportion of GDP should go on health. I can more or less tell the House, with all the certainty that I can command, that the era of high growth is over and that for the next 10 or 15 years the GDP growth rate will not be high, and nor is inflation. Whatever we do, we will have to find ingenious ways to achieve efficiency, perhaps by nudging users to be more economical with their use of the NHS, and somehow changing behaviour so that we do not always take for granted that there will be more money, and if there is not more money, it is someone’s fault. One of the last—no, I do not think I have any more time.
Lord Taylor of Warwick (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, for securing this debate. He and other noble Lords have spoken with much wisdom, expertise and experience. My only qualification in this area may be that I was a board member of the North West Thames Regional Health Authority, a member of the Solihull Family Practitioner Committee and a board member of SCAR, the Sickle Cell Anaemia Relief charity.
As a schoolboy, I attended a university open day as a precursor to studying for a medical degree. I recall that we had to walk through a laboratory where some experiments were being carried out on dead bodies donated for research. It is still vivid in my memory. I passed one corpse that had been drained of all body fluids and dissected lengthways, so that I was looking at a half-body. I recalled that in the Bible Lazarus had been raised from the dead, but I thought to myself, “But that Lazarus was not cut in half; this guy is going nowhere”. I decided at that point that medicine is a special calling, and perhaps it was not calling me. So I have every admiration for members of the medical profession. I just hope that the BMA and the Government can reach an agreement. With the prospect of two further doctors’ strikes, it is surely the patients who will suffer.
It is said that some 40% of diseases are related to lifestyle. Smoking and alcohol abuse are major problems. As the saying goes, Bacchus has drowned more men than Neptune. We need an effective national plan for preventable illness, otherwise the impact of lifestyle-related diseases and longer lifespans will put even greater strain on resources. This may have to be a part of an open, independent inquiry or commission charting the way forward, as the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, stated. It could include an international comparison of the way that other countries deal with these issues, especially the means of funding the service. The inquiry needs to examine a more holistic approach to health, involving health promotion, sickness prevention, mental illness and social care. We have excellent health foundations, such as the Nuffield Trust and the King’s Fund, that can help with this.
The third Gospel was written by Luke, who was a doctor of medicine, but, as a Greek, he was a non-Jew, a foreigner. I mention that to highlight the tremendous contribution made by ethnic minorities to our NHS. Some 37% of doctors and 27% of nurses are from black and minority ethnic backgrounds. In London, 40% of the NHS workforce are from BME communities.
In my student days, my idea of a balanced meal was a biscuit in each hand. Since then, I have had to learn the value of healthy nutrition and exercise. There is nothing permanent in life except change, and there has to be change in our approach to the NHS in order for it to meet its present and future demands. As John F Kennedy once said, our task now is not to fix the blame for the past but to fix the course for the future.
Lord Parekh (Lab)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Turnberg for introducing this debate with great wisdom and erudition. While I entirely agree that the principle underlying the NHS is noble and widely acclaimed, in practice it leaves much to be desired.
Noble Lords have concentrated on funding and other things but I want to concentrate on the more elementary aspect of some of the practices that characterise the NHS. It is very striking, for example, that doctors are inundated with paperwork so that they have hardly any time to talk to their patients or spend much time with them. It is also striking that when a GP refers a patient to a consultant, the consultant’s letter does not arrive until about two or three weeks later, either because—so I am told—he does not have the typing facilities or because he would not use electronic devices to communicate with the GP. I cannot understand why this sort of thing should go on in this age.
As we have talked about our ageing population, it is worth bearing in mind that more and more of our people suffer from Alzheimer’s, dementia and other conditions. The result is that they forget to take many of the medications prescribed for them, or for some reason they take it earlier when they feel ill and stop when they begin to feel better. It may be a good idea to remind them in some way from time to time that they have forgotten to take their medication. I gather that some experiments are being done, and there is no reason why the NHS cannot be technologically more imaginative. Why can blister packs, for example, not be devised so that they warn patients at the appropriate time that they should be taking their medication? Or, for example, why should chemists not be able to monitor whether a particular medicine has been taken by a patient and, if necessary, ring them up and tell them they should be taking it? Therefore, technologically, we ought to be able to produce smarter and more sophisticated packages of medication than we do.
My third point has to do with some of the infrastructure of our surgeries, some of which are located in old terraced houses. Doctors would love to provide all kinds of services but they are unable to do so because of the cramped environment in which they have to function. I cannot see why local authorities and other bodies cannot provide purpose-built medical facilities where GP services can be housed. This would mean that GPs could provide the kind of services they would like to and patients would not be cramped and would feel much more comfortable.
My last point has to do with the way the Government have treated junior doctors. Doctors remain our main asset, and if they are alienated and feel resentful they may leave in large numbers, which would be no credit to our society.
Lord Cormack (Con)
My Lords, I will begin by making an appeal to those who arrange these matters in this House. A three-minute time limit in a debate such as this is absurd, and it is certainly absurd to allow a maiden speaker—we heard a very good one this morning—only three minutes. When times are allocated, a little could be taken off the Front-Benchers to give a little more for a maiden speech. I also endorse the plea made by my noble friend Lord Lansley for a proper annual debate—I do not refer to the Queen’s Speech—on the National Health Service.
Time allows me to make just two points. The National Health Service may indeed be the best in the world. If it is, that is because it is the creation of all political parties, and it is very wrong for any politician to seek to make a political football out of it. Your Lordships’ House sets a much better example than the other place when it comes to debating the NHS.
My second point is very simple. My noble friend Lord Fowler made an eloquent plea for a royal commission. I was privileged to take part in a debate that was instituted by the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, just over a year ago, when I made for the third time a plea for a commission or an inquiry. I repeat that plea again today and endorse what my noble friend Lord Fowler said. It is important not only that we take the NHS out of the party political arena but, as the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, said in her excellent speech, we have to look to the future because the health service is in crisis. A sticking plaster is not the solution. To lurch from one financial crisis to another does not only the NHS but the whole nation a disservice in the process. As I have said before, we must have a plurality of funding. Whether that comes from taxation—hypothecated or not—compulsory insurance, extra charges such as penalties for those who do not keep appointments or from a combination of all three, we must have a plurality of funding and take away this continual crisis.
We are all beneficiaries of the National Health Service and we will all depend on it in the future. I therefore urge the Minister to give some indication that he has sympathy for the idea of a commission and, at the very least, I should like some sympathy for my noble friend Lord Mawhinney’s plea for a body to be set up in this House, where there is a greater accumulation of expertise on this subject than anywhere else in the country.
Lord Harrison (Lab)
My Lords, like the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, I too will concentrate on diabetes, which absorbs 10% of the national budget—some £10 billion—which will inevitably grow as we move from the current figure of 3.5 million diabetics to some 5 million in 2025. We have epidemics of type 1 and type 2 diabetes. I report from the front; as a high-risk foot person with diabetes I attend a monthly podiatric clinic. Those lists are now being slimmed, including for diabetics. The clinic tells me that it is as worried as anything because future problems, which inevitably arise from diabetics with poor feet, will not be identified. Similarly, I stand here today because I benefit from the shoes that are made for me in Liverpool to protect my feet because of the neuropathy I have—I have no feeling in my feet. That enables me to stand here today and enables other people to be economically active. We must not contract these services, as is now happening, with delays falling upon delays.
Diabetes UK has identified that four out of 10 diabetics do not get the necessary care processes. It has identified that some 135 amputations as a result of diabetes take place every week, when four out of five of those amputations are preventable. What are the Government doing about that startling statistic? The Diabetes Think Tank also recognises that 95% of diabetic care is self-administered, and we should concentrate on this area. However, in January two years ago for some reason the Government gave up the Patient Experience of Diabetes Services survey, which had been so useful in analysing what diabetics felt about the services they received. I therefore invite the Minister, as I did when he first came in, to attend the Diabetes Think Tank, and I hope that he will be able to attend it. I commend what my noble friend Lord Turnberg said in introducing this debate, that there are enormous opportunities in sharing best practice with our colleagues within the European Union which we are about to neglect.
I finish on an optimistic note. When I was declared a diabetic in 1969, they said, “You’ll get a medal after 40 years if you survive that period”. I can now report that I have long been past the 40-year mark, but an 88 year-old type 1 diabetic has recently received the HG Wells medal—he was a diabetic—for surviving for 80 years.
Lord Bew (CB)
My Lords, like other noble Lords I thank the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, for securing this debate and for the wise speech which he gave in introduction. I will address one issue only: the cost to the NHS of litigation arising out of cases of alleged medical negligence. Of course this is not a new problem. For at least five years, those who seek to join the UK Register of Expert Witnesses have been told that alternative dispute resolution—ADR—is becoming an increasingly important adjunct to litigation, and in significant parts of the UK this idea has taken grip. None the less, it is hard to believe today that all opportunities for early resolution are being taken in the NHS. There are still cases on treatment issues that may have lasted over decades, which involve hundreds of documents that cover several years. This is obviously very difficult for the patients and inevitably involves a drift of financial resources out of the NHS toward the legal profession.
Finally, in the same context it is important to draw attention to a change in the guidance for experts in such cases. In 2007 there was a total ban on payments to experts that depend on the outcome of the case. This was softened in 2014 but is still greatly discouraged. This is a surprising development and not consonant with the need to protect at all cost the resources of the NHS financial position, which, as every speech in this House today has indicated, is inevitably difficult, and is likely to be for some time to come.
Lord Mitchell (Lab)
My Lords, first, I thank my noble friend Lord Turnberg for securing this debate. He is not only my noble friend but a personal friend. Few have committed more to the NHS than him. To the noble Baroness, Lady Watkins, I can say, “It’s over. You can relax, and you did really well”.
I speak as a parent of a junior doctor who qualified at the University of Nottingham and now is a resident doctor at NYU medical centre in New York. It might be interesting if I were to compare and contrast aspects of the two systems as seen through his eyes.
The first aspect is the teaching. At NYU each resident receives around 14 hours of high-powered classroom teaching each week. The regime is free food, phones off, high concentration. Lectures are given by specialist consultants. As he puts it, “Every day I lunch with giants”. At Nottingham he was lucky to get two hours per week.
As for attitude, at NYU he feels a valued member of the team; in the east Midlands he and all his colleagues felt underappreciated. Most NHS medical staff were disgruntled and demotivated. Of his colleagues in Nottingham, a third either left the profession or went to work abroad. Each one had cost the NHS £300,000 to train but, when they left to go elsewhere, no one noticed, no one took responsibility, there was no exit interview and no one cared.
Then there is the pay. In his final year in Nottingham, he earned about £40,000. It is true that his basic pay was £23,000 but, with unsocial hours banding, the pay soon mounted. At NYU he earns $60,000—exactly the same amount—but in the United States almost all junior doctors carry student loans in the region of a quarter of a million dollars, and repayment starts immediately.
Finally, there are the hours. Last month in New York, he worked 80 hours per week, as he has done every month. He works six days every week, including many weeks on night shift. Even on daytime shifts, he leaves home at 5 am and often gets home at 8 pm.
The American junior doctors are the ones with really unsocial working hours. They are the ones who struggle to make ends meet and the ones who should be complaining, but there are no picket lines to be seen on First Avenue and 32nd Street. The question is why? Let me hazard a guess. In much of the UK, junior doctors—indeed, even senior doctors—are treated as objects: cogs in the wheel or items on the spreadsheet to be moved here and there at will. There seems to be little realisation that to get the best out of people you have to encourage them, you have to integrate them as part of the team and, most of all, you have to make them feel valued. It is called leadership. Looking at this junior doctor crisis, there seems to be little of that in evidence in our NHS but it is what we really need.
Baroness Walmsley (LD)
My Lords, we are on the last lap. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, for telling us about the enlightened approach of Salford Royal Hospital. It has obviously made great progress since I worked in Manchester and it was known as the “No Hope Hospital”.
It is no coincidence that the London Olympics highlighted the NHS in its very creative opening ceremony. We are all very proud of it, particularly the staff, but it would be stating the obvious to say that it has numerous problems. At a time when it faces unprecedented increases in demand, the NHS has been given its most challenging funding envelope ever. The future of the health service is in jeopardy unless we do something radical. As the noble Lord, Lord Rea, said, it cannot get out of this hole by itself.
That is why my right honourable friend and former Health Minister Norman Lamb introduced a Private Member’s Bill in another place a week ago. He called for the establishment of an independent commission to examine the future of the NHS and social care system, to take evidence and to report its conclusions to Parliament. I pay tribute to those on the Conservative Benches who have called for something similar, but I think that a royal commission may take too long and that something quicker is required.
Norman Lamb was supported by two former Secretaries of State for Health, Members from all parties and the chief executives of more than 40 organisations in the sector. I join with his call today in this debate, along with many of your Lordships. When you get agreement from so many from all sides of health and social care, it is clear that you are reflecting a real need. The purpose of the commission would be to consult widely to find solutions to the massive challenges that face the health and care services, and to establish a sustainable—a crucial word—new settlement which takes into account present and future demands.
In order to calculate future demand, we need no crystal ball—we have a lot of evidence to help us. We know that since the Second World War demand has gone up by about 4% every year. For example, thanks to successful new diagnostics, treatments, drugs and surgical procedures, half of people diagnosed with cancer now survive the disease for 10 years or more compared with only a quarter 40 years ago. Other chronic conditions are also now managed better than ever. We should celebrate all this while being realistic about what it means.
We have heard about the predicted gap of £30 billion in NHS funding by 2020 unless something is done. The Government have committed to providing only £8 billion of this and expect the NHS to find the other £22 billion through efficiencies and new models of care. However, experts involved in the process are unconvinced that this can be done.
The King’s Fund’s Quarterly Monitoring Report, published in October 2015, included a survey of NHS finance directors’ views on their ability to achieve 2% to 3% productivity gains per year, which would be needed to achieve that saving. The vast majority were sceptical to say the least. Eighty-four per cent of NHS trust finance directors and 88% of CCG finance leads felt that there was a “high” or “very high” risk of failing to achieve the target. Here are a few respondent comments:
“I feel strongly that the low-hanging fruit has been taken. The modus operandi needs to change fundamentally”.
“When plans are not credible then it is impossible to enthuse people”.
“Increased national pressures/tying of hands … make it difficult to achieve big savings”.
“The £22 billion challenge requires productivity gains significantly over what has been achieved over the past few years”.
“Unless there is a national debate about what the NHS can provide then there is no way that the NHS can deliver within the financial envelope”.
Jim Mackey, chief executive of the hospital regulator, NHS Improvement, put it in colourful language—and I quote him verbatim—saying that the efficiency targets set by the Government are,
“unachievable and, frankly, bloody stupid”.
That is what he said, my Lords.
Given that the recently announced increases in funding will be swallowed up mostly by paying for the £2.2 billion of deficits in NHS and foundation trusts, increases in payments to pension funds, apprenticeship levies and the new minimum wage, it is pretty clear that this extra money will do nothing to address future increases in demand. Meanwhile, social care funding has been cut in real terms and faces a funding gap of £6 billion by 2020 according to the Health Foundation, but this does not take into account the effect of the new minimum wage in a sector where so many workers are on the minimum wage. The LGA estimates that this will add a further £1 billion to the gap. Now Ministers have decided to stop the £1 billion payment-for-performance element of the better care fund and, instead, have mandated local targets for the reduction of delayed transfers of care. So the Government give with one hand and take away with the other.
Did the Chancellor provide the answer to these problems in the autumn spending review? I think not. The new provision for councils to raise a 2% social care precept would provide only an extra £1.7 billion by 2020 if every single council did it. In poor areas the ability to raise significant extra funds in this way is in inverse proportion to the need—not a very clever solution.
The increase in the better care fund will not come until 2019. Sadly, this will mean that the better-off will be able to pay for good care and the poor will get either no care at all or a substandard package—the best their poor stretched local authority can manage—adding further to our appalling health inequalities. The inevitable pressure that these cuts to social care will put on the NHS is obvious and has been clearly outlined by Simon Stevens, the head of NHS England. So current and projected NHS funding does not allow the service any chance of fulfilling the mandate, mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, put upon it for the next five years by the Government themselves. Beyond 2020, it will just get worse if nothing is done, and our precious NHS will no longer be the envy of the world. Mention of the mandate reminds me to endorse the call of my noble friend Lady Tyler and the noble Lord, Lord Bradley, on mental health. We need to find new answers.
All Governments pledge themselves to protect the NHS, yet our spending as a proportion of GDP is low, as we have heard, compared to that of other developed countries. According to the Office for Budget Responsibility, it will decline further by 2020. The position of social care is even more dramatic.
What is the point of growing our economy if we do not spend the money on the things that most of the population would like it spent on—and what they vote for? Given what we know about rising demand, it makes no sense at all. The consequences of the Government’s failure to address this are very serious and completely contrary to what they say they want according to the latest mandate. Standards will not rise, new technologies will be unaffordable and services will not be able to address our health inequalities—an absolutely top priority in my book.
The silly thing is that nobody really believes in the ability of the system to fill the gap through efficiency savings and new models of working, desirable though they may be. Money is so tight at the moment that many parts of the system are struggling with crisis management, let alone improvements. To make things worse, there are numerous financial disincentives. For example, where is the incentive for acute hospitals to work with local services to keep patients out of hospital when they rely on the payments for activity when they come in?
The social care system is living on borrowed time. Eligibility criteria are getting tighter every day. Will the Government face this crisis head-on, take politics out of it and support my right honourable friend’s call for a commission to bring together all the evidence, the brains and the expertise available?
I think it boils down to five simple questions. How much should we be spending as a country and how should it be raised? How can we spend it better and have all services reach the standard of the best? How can we end the artificial divide and conflicting incentives between health and social care? How can we minimise future demand by avoiding preventable diseases? How can we reduce health inequalities? It is time for a new Beveridge commission.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, if the Minister is going to have any time at all, I should cut my contribution short. First, I declare an interest as president of the Health Care Supply Association and the barcoding association GS1, because I want to comment on the remarks of my noble friend Lord Carter on efficiency.
I very much welcome this debate. I was very taken with my noble friend’s description of the ideal world. I wonder if noble Lords think, as my noble friend Lord Carter does, that elements of that are in existence in the NHS at the moment, and that the issue is how to get that going in every part of the NHS. That is one of the essential conundrums.
I will focus also on the very important contribution of my noble friend Lord Winston, who talked about the risks to our medical research. Our medical research has always been one of the best in the world. On it our whole life science sector has depended. The fact is that we in this country have always had a very strong, innovative pharmaceutical and diagnostic industry. When my noble friend says that all of that is at risk, we need to listen.
There is no doubt—I pick this up consistently—that there is a hostility in the NHS to the kind of time that is needed for doctors to practise in research, and even to take part in Royal College activities. This has really got to stop. Seeing the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, here, I have to say that the introduction of NHS England does not help, because, for all the fine words that are in both the mandate and what NHS England says, I do not see any commitment in NHS England to these kinds of issues.
I will raise one further issue in aid of that. Our record on the introduction of new, innovative medicines in this country is a disgrace. We have some fantastic inventions, but the NHS is pathetically slow in introducing them. The noble Lord probably knows very well that we have an accelerated access review under the chairmanship of Sir Hugh Taylor. The word on the street is that it is simply not going to get anywhere because the NHS is not going to play ball and is not going to insist that NHS bodies invest in these medicines. A whole sector of our economy is at risk because of this. I know that the Minister is as concerned as I am and I hope that he might say something.
I come to the issue of junior doctors—not to talk about the dispute but because both my noble friends Lord Winston and Lord Mitchell raised the issue of why junior doctors are so disengaged. Anyone who has met them will know how angry they feel. It is partly about the Secretary of State’s manipulation of statistics—which, frankly, given the brightness of junior doctors, was always going to be very unwise. It is also about their distrust of management. Part of the problem is that they just do not believe that, locally, NHS employers will do the right thing.
My noble friend is right. Why are junior doctors treated so abominably by NHS employers? Why can they not get access to decent hot food at night? Why are the junior messes not in places where they can go and meet? I do not know what can be done to get this home to the NHS. Anyone who meets our juniors knows that they are the brightest of the bright and are hugely committed—yet, somehow, we seem to have made them wholly disenchanted with the NHS. It is a very serious issue.
This brings me to the issue of leadership, which my noble friend mentioned. In June last year, the noble Lord, Lord Rose, produced an excellent report on how to enhance and improve leadership in the NHS. He asked the Government three questions. How do we get better leadership? How to we recognise it? How do we find and mature the people who are needed to lead the NHS? I am afraid that there has been virtually no response to this from the Government. That is very disappointing. In fact, all that has happened is that the turnover of chief executive officers has continued at an alarming rate. Again, as one of my noble friends said, we have got to get rid of leadership by bullying. There is a bullying culture throughout the system and it is having a corrosive impact on the ability of people locally to lead organisations.
Of course, funding is very important. I do not need to repeat all the arguments that noble Lords have put forward. Essentially, they concern growing population and demographic pressures. We in this country spend less on health than any comparable country. The OECD figures that came out just before Christmas were very convincing on this. The Government’s claims in the Autumn Statement frankly do not ring true. We know that they are front-loading some of the money for the next five years, but the annual increase from here to 2020 will be 0.85%— even less than the average increase from 2010 to 2015.
At the same time, we know that half of that extra money has come from raiding the budgets of Health Education England and Public Health England, from capital funds and from the cost of pension payments. At the same time, what do Ministers do? They pile on more pressure. Not a week goes by without another press release from the Department of Health or an announcement by the Secretary of State that something else has got to be done. No wonder his credibility is shot in the NHS.
Of course, the gap between the money that is going in and the £30 billion per annum that it is generally believed will be required by 2020 is huge. I pay great tribute to my noble friend Lord Carter, because obviously he is helping the NHS to see if it can close part of that gap. I am sure that is right and that, on procurement in particular, a much more cohesive national approach is needed—but at the end of the day, there is still going to be a gap.
Should there be a royal commission? I cannot help repeating Harold Wilson’s famous diktat that royal commissions take minutes and waste years. That is, of course, when they are used simply to postpone a decision. I understand why noble Lords want some kind of neutral and impartial commission to look into those issues. However, we have already had the Barker commission, and I doubt whether anyone is going to improve on that. In the end, it is a matter of political will. I say to the Minister that, at the very least, what we seek is some honesty from the Government: admit that the financial gap is not going to be met and stop piling on the pressure.
Baroness Williams of Crosby
I apologise to the noble Lord, but there is a question that is central to this: would he and his party be prepared to take part in an all-party commission, possibly a parliamentary one, in order to get the quickest possible effective answer for the terrible crisis that has been outlined in this debate?
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, this is a time-limited debate and I want to leave the Minister a little time to respond. I would certainly be very happy to discuss the issues with noble Lords here—I like the idea of a group of politicians in this House looking at it. On the subject of a royal commission, I do not think I can go as far. In the end, we sometimes have to have the courage of our convictions and come up with proposals to sort this out.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health (Lord Prior of Brampton) (Con)
My Lords, first, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, for bringing this debate, and I thank the 45 people who have contributed to it. That shows that the noble Lord has touched an important nerve. The future of the health service and of social care in this country is hugely important.
The noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, talked about his experience at Salford, where they have a fantastic hospital with a joined-up system. This shows that it can be done. Around the country, there are hospitals and healthcare systems that are doing it; they are doing a fantastic job by good standards. Of course, that requires great leadership, and leadership is not something that can be cloned; there just are not that number of great leaders in any system. However, in Salford, under David Dalton, they have a great leader.
The fact that it can be done lies behind the work that the noble Lord, Lord Carter, has done. Hospitals around the country are achieving great performance. However, the noble Lord, Lord Carter, has uncovered a huge amount of what he would call “unwarranted variation”; that could be unwarranted clinical variation, operating variation or any other kind of variation. That has to be addressed, and the noble Lord, Lord Carter, has given us a methodology for doing that. He, along with other noble Lords in this debate, points out that unless we can crack delayed discharges in hospitals and delayed transfers of care, many of our hospitals are going to struggle.
I also pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Watkins. In her maiden speech she very properly reminded us of the importance of training and community-based services. Her mentor, the noble Lord, Lord Patel, who was watching as she gave her address, is no doubt watching me from India as I speak to the debate.
I want to mention two particular contributions. The first is the speech by the noble Lord, Lord Winston. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, picked up on his point about academic medicine. That is a crucial issue and one that I cannot address head-on today, but perhaps we might have a meeting involving others, including Hugh Taylor, to talk about it further. The second is the contribution by the noble Lord, Lord Mitchell, about the contrast between his son, who is a junior doctor, working in England compared to working in New York. I thought that that was a very revealing contribution, if I may say so.
I want to preface all my remarks by paying tribute to not just junior doctors but to all those who work for the NHS and in social care. They do an extraordinary job and have a true vocation, and many noble Lords have experienced the benefit.
This is the third general debate that we have had on the NHS since the election. The first was introduced by the noble Lord, Patel, and the second by the noble Lord, Lord Crisp. In that debate, we talked very much about prevention. We could be here for many hours talking about prevention. The noble Lord, Lord Rea, talked about the importance of housing and employment, and there are so many other issues that we could talk about in the context of prevention. Therefore, I hope that noble Lords will excuse me if I do not address prevention as much as they might like me to.
I want to go back to June 1948 for a minute, and to Nye Bevan talking to the Royal College of Nursing. He said:
“We shall never have all we need. Expectations will always exceed capacity. The service must always be changing, growing and improving—it must always appear inadequate”.
The noble Lord, Lord Desai, made the point that when you have a service that is free, demand will always exceed what we can provide. Nye Bevan saw that back in 1948, and it is important to hold on to that when we look at our funding situation at the moment.
We do have a plan: the NHS Plan. The NHS Five Year Forward View was produced by Simon Stevens of NHS England and supported by all the arm’s-length bodies. It is not the Prime Minister’s plan, it is not my plan and it is not the Secretary of State for Health’s plan. It is the NHS’s plan. It called for £8 billion of real investment over that five-year period, and the Government have given the NHS that amount of money: it is £16 billion in cash terms and £8 billion, or arguably £10 billion, in real terms. This is broadly what the NHS wanted.
The NHS is actually doing quite well. I will come back to some areas where it is not doing as well as we would like but, broadly speaking, it is doing quite well. The Commonwealth Fund said that it is first overall compared with other OECD countries, scoring highest on quality, access and efficiency and second on equity. In the recent Economist review looking at end-of-life care, we came out top. However, that is not perfect. The noble Lord, Lord Freyberg, pointed out that our cancer outcomes are not as good as they should be. The noble Lord, Lord Bradley, talked about mental health, and clearly we can do better there and in other areas too. There is too much variation in what we do. However, if we look at medical research, the quality of our education in most of our medical schools, medical publications and clinical outcomes, the NHS can still be regarded as a world-class health service.
Other noble Lords have already made the point that we do this at very low cost. In America, they spend 16% of GDP on healthcare; we spend around 8% and most of Europe spends around 10% or 11%. We do it at very low cost and we get very good results. On that basis, when people say that it is not affordable—an issue my noble friend Lord Fowler and others have raised in this debate—I say that it is affordable. We are doing it at 8% of GDP at the moment but we could choose to spend 10% or 11%: the country can afford good healthcare. I would argue that we are providing good healthcare at the current level of spending.
There is no evidence that a tax-funded system is any less efficient or effective than other systems of funding healthcare. Indeed, I would argue that, on the contrary, the NHS, for the reasons that I have given, is an efficient system. The OECD made a more neutral comment, saying that,
“no broad type of health care system performs systematically better than another in improving the population health status in a cost-effective manner”.
Therefore, I do not think there is an argument for questioning whether we can afford a good healthcare system in this country.
I turn to the various questions that were raised. Is it affordable? Yes, it is affordable, and we are demonstrating that. Is a tax-funded system viable? Yes, it is viable, and I will go further and say that there is evidence to suggest that it is more viable than any other way of funding a healthcare system. Do we have a viable plan in this country? Yes we do, and I will come to that in a minute. Do we need another plan or another commission? I do not think we do. It would be an enormous distraction at a time when we have a five-year forward view. At a time when the whole of the health service is committed to that view, there would be immense concern if we embarked on yet another review or commission of any kind. We would go through a two-year hiatus waiting for that report and would not be able to get on and deliver what we have at the moment.
What is that plan? It falls into two parts. First, can we make the existing system more efficient? The answer is: of course we can. We have some of the best hospitals, wards, clinics, laboratories and specialties in the world in the NHS. Our problem is that there is so much variation across the system—clinical variations, staffing variations, property utilisation variations, procurement variations, pharmacy and medicines utilisation variations and back office costs variations—all of which have been identified, as shown by the extremely important work done by the noble Lord, Lord Carter, assisted by clinicians such as Professors Tim Briggs and Tim Evans. They have given us an improvement methodology based on transparency which will deliver huge improvements over the next five years. A great deal of their work is mirrored on commissioning through the use of the Right Care programme and the Atlas of Variation that has been developed largely by Dartmouth in the USA.
The second part of our plan concerns the new models of care—an issue raised by the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg—and we have already seen these operating effectively in Salford.
This is a move from institutions to systems. We are now trying to develop a place-based care, a population-based care. Although there were many benefits from foundation trusts—I believe wholly in the principle of earned autonomy—one of their unintended consequences is that they have created a fortress mentality in some parts of the country. The King’s Fund has used the analogy of the tragedy of the commons, where everyone is looking after their own interests rather than the interests of the wider system. It has also left patients having to navigate a complex, unjoined-up series of different organisations. We will see over the next four or five years the emergence of new systems of care, including PACS and MCPs, and the Accountable Care Organisation, ACO, will become increasingly familiar to us.
We will also see different outcome-based payment systems and incentives as we move to integrate with social care. There will be many cynics and sceptics because some people, as the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, said, have seen all this before. We have been talking about integrated care for 20 odd years. I think it is different this time—but I would say that, wouldn’t I?
We have to ask why change is so difficult in healthcare—and not only in the NHS. Why has there been such dramatic change in car manufacturing and retailing across the world, when healthcare systems have proven much more difficult to change? Interestingly, in the 2000 NHS plan, echoed in the five-year forward view, were two comments: that we have a 1940s system delivering care to a 2016 population with entirely different needs to the population of 1948; and that healthcare has been slow to move, not only in the NHS but around the world. Changing that system will be difficult but very important.
Why am I optimistic about it? First, we have a narrative. The five-year forward view gives the whole service a very powerful narrative around which it can combine and work together. Secondly, the architecture of the system is not perfect—I know that the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, is sitting behind me—but it is serviceable. We do not need another top-down reorganisation. We can work with the bodies created through the last reorganisations, and NHS England is now building resources and a team of people who can truly deliver on its plan. The new purpose of the NHS is based around improvement and learning rather than regulation, which is important, and the independent CQC.
There are two other reasons for optimism. Transparency will be a much better improvement mechanism than targets, regulation, competition and the command and control structures that we have had in the past. The financial crisis we have gone through has made hospitals look more radically at how they can change their models of care. Finally, we have not spoken in the debate today about the huge impact that technology will bring in empowering patients to look after themselves and take greater personal responsibility, as other noble Lords have mentioned.
I have to conclude. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, for introducing this fascinating debate, which has raised important issues. I look forward to reading it in the cold light of day over the weekend.
Lord Turnberg
My Lords, it has been a fascinating debate and I am grateful to all speakers who have participated in it. It is amazing how much information people can pack into three minutes. It has been very helpful. I was bowled over by the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Watkins.
There is no way in which I can summarise the debate in no time at all but one or two themes have emerged. Everyone agrees that we should focus to a greater extent on prevention. That makes it seem even more ridiculous that we are cutting funding for public health at this time. Most people agree that there is a need to integrate services across the social care/hospital divide, and most people feel that we should begin to appreciate our staff to a much greater extent than we do. To alienate them at a time when we need them so desperately is counterproductive.
On the point that we are seeing a rise in demand and the costs of healthcare, I detected more than a hint from the noble Lord, Lord Prior, that he might believe that the spreading of good practice—there is all sorts of good practice around—and increasing efficiency will solve the funding crisis. I suspect he is the only speaker in the debate, on either side of the House, who believes that. It focused the minds of most people on how we fund the gap.
If one thing has come out of this debate it is that we have begun to think about how—
The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Stedman-Scott) (Con)
My Lords, the time allotted for this debate has now elapsed. I must now put the question that this Motion be agreed to.
Flood Management
(8 years, 10 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
The Lord Bishop of Leeds
To ask Her Majesty’s Government how they intend to review their long term strategy for flood management, particularly in rural areas that do not qualify for large-scale flood defences.
The Lord Bishop of Leeds
My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to put to the Government the Question before us. If there was a sound track to this debate it would probably include Phil Collins’s “In Too Deep”.
It is important to note the destructiveness of the recent flooding, given that the news agenda moves on very quickly and communities which found themselves at the heart of a sympathetic nation quickly feel themselves to be forgotten. For some of the communities in my diocese, the recent floods come in the wake—almost literally—of other occurrences in recent years. For them the need for longer-term and more joined-up measures is obvious.
I pay tribute to civic leaders, emergency services, public service workers, members of the Armed Forces, the Environment Agency and local volunteers, many of whom sacrificed holidays and family time over Christmas to support victims of this appallingly destructive flooding. Churches in many of the affected communities offered refuge, sanctuary and practical support in providing meals, clothing and the distribution of emergency resources. In places such as Kirkstall in Leeds, Bingley, Ilkley, Mytholmroyd, Hebden Bridge and Sowerby, people got stuck in. The Sikh charity Khalsa Aid helped in Hebden Bridge, and I know that Muslims worked hard to provide relief and help in Cumbria as well as affected parts of Yorkshire and Lancashire. These impressive stories demonstrate that perhaps the parable of the Good Samaritan still echoes through this generation in the costly and practical support of one’s neighbour. It is also appropriate here to salute the insurance companies, many of which have been praised for the speed and nature of their response to those flooded. Affected churches have greatly valued the service of the Ecclesiastical Insurance group in particular during recent weeks.
The Government’s response to the latest flooding in Yorkshire and Lancashire has involved repeated use of the word “unprecedented”. Of course, by definition a unique event is unprecedented, but it is of no comfort to people who have lost their homes or businesses that an event is unprecedented, nor does it help when the enormity of the immediate flooding happens to be greater than the last time, which also ruined homes and businesses and in some cases left people uninsurable—hence the Question in this debate.
I shall give some numbers. Around 16,000 properties have been affected in northern England and Scotland. At the end of December, KPMG estimated that the total cost of flood damage would exceed £5 billion. The Association of British Insurers estimates that claims will total £1.3 billion. The average domestic claim will amount to £50,000, up from an average of £31,000 in 2013-14. Around 3,000 families are now living in alternative accommodation while their homes are being repaired. In Calderdale alone, flooding hit 2,500 homes, nine schools and 1,250 businesses, and as many as 40% of those businesses could be uninsured. Infrastructure damage is estimated to be at least £20 million. Damage to homes and businesses also has a knock-on impact on the wider ability of the local economy to recover and function.
There is still the possibility that more flooding could be on the way because the winter is but young. Understandably, the Government are moving into recovery mode. Almost £200 million has been made available for investments in recovery, including money for repairs and upgrades to existing defences, money for local authorities to repair infrastructure, grants to home and business owners for the improvement of personal flood resilience, and grants for farmers whose land has been flooded and crops destroyed. All this is welcome. However, the much-publicised Flood Re scheme, which will help to provide flood insurance to at-risk homes, will be launched only in April. This will guarantee affordable premiums, as many homeowners cannot afford the current premium levels in high-risk areas. But Flood Re is not going to be available to small businesses or buy-to-let properties, meaning that they will almost certainly face an increase in premiums. The fact that Flood Re is not yet in force means that many people will not have been insured for damage caused by the December floods, potentially those who would have been waiting for Flood Re to come into effect before securing insurance. The Times reports that up to £1 billion of damage will have been sustained by uninsured people.
No rational person believes that all risk of flooding can or should be eliminated. But people do not always understand why, when following one disaster a case is made for enhanced protection, yet that protection is quickly scaled back once memories begin to fade. During the recent flooding in Leeds, the Lord Mayor of Leeds went as far as to question whether this would have been tolerated in London, and whether England’s third city deserves the same level of investment as its first. Furthermore, in this context it is clear that swingeing cuts to local authority funding must inevitably diminish the ability of such authorities to respond effectively to local disasters and recovery from them. It is claimed that northern metropolitan councils have faced disproportionate cuts which have then had an impact on the maintenance of bridges, drains and other essential infrastructure. We are also seeing the threatened closure of local front-line services at the same time as emergency response needs are evident.
Two immediate points must be addressed by all parties to the debate about planning for future flood protection: first, the amounts that have already been spent, and which might have to be spent in the future in reactive recovery, should not be counted against the resources needed for long-term protection planning; and secondly, the insurance costs and access to adequate insurance by people and businesses in what are now vulnerable areas must be managed in a way that allows both recovery and a future for those affected. Surely the changes to weather patterns in recent years indicate that similar events can be expected in the future and we need to be building resilience to address them. Prevention might be financially expensive, but it will certainly be cheaper than the cumulative costs of non-prevention over, say, a decade or two.
However, the finances only hide the human costs: businesses closed or lost, homes ruined, families and children forced into temporary homes with all the consequent disruption to schooling and the best circumstances for learning and growing. These costs go beyond pounds and pence. So questions remain about how the Government will address these challenges in the longer term, and no doubt other speakers will touch on other aspects of this matter. But noble Lords might well seek reassurance that the recently instigated national flood resilience review, chaired by Oliver Letwin, will pay serious attention to the strengths and weaknesses of current worst-case-scenario planning in the light of the future impact of climate change, recent substantial cuts to the Environment Agency in the form of a 15% funding cut and the loss of 1,500 staff, along with the need for whole-catchment approaches to flood prevention and water management.
Rural communities are particularly vulnerable where funding decisions are driven by a return-on-investment calculation which means that many schemes will not be considered cost-effective on paper. I hope that this debate will touch on such challenges and urge Government to take long-term views in future planning. I look forward to hearing how the Government intend to review their long-term strategy for flood management, particularly in rural areas that do not qualify for large-scale flood defences.
Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate the right reverend Prelate on securing this debate and I echo his thanks to all concerned in the recent floods which particularly affected North Yorkshire, rural areas in Cumbria, and parts of Leeds and Lancashire. I refer to my interests in the register, in particular that I am a vice-president of the Association of Drainage Authorities. I would like to answer the right reverend Prelate’s question directly by saying that to tackle the long-term strategy, we should simply work more with nature. I shall draw on the example of a project that I was particularly closely associated with while in another place as the Member of Parliament for the constituency that includes Pickering.
I believe that the Pickering pilot project was a partnership approach that could be used in other places, particularly those that feed into catchment areas around Leeds, Cumbria, Lancashire and York. We have to accept that there is no one-size-fits-all solution, so we have to adopt a mix-and-match attitude to land management. We should drain where drainage is appropriate, dredge where dredging is appropriate, desilt and clear away weeds where that is appropriate. Working with nature is less capital intensive and less physically engineered. It allows water either to slow down, as we did in the Pickering scheme, or speed up so that it moves away from flooded areas, whichever is appropriate. In adopting a full catchment management system, or in the case of Pickering a sub-catchment management system, that is precisely what we did. We took a smaller reservoir, which was less engineered and therefore less costly, and I am delighted to say that the scheme really stood the test of the recent floods in North Yorkshire.
Farmers have a role to play in this by temporarily storing water on their land but hopefully without falling foul of the reservoir safety Act. I believe that the European Commissioner in Brussels, Phil Hogan, is keen to reward farmers through the new system of basic farm payments for the public good that farmers provide by retaining water upstream and taking it away from areas downstream, be they farmland, towns and villages, or even cities like Leeds and York, thus keeping them safe.
The key is to work with nature and to adopt a full capital management system. As regards funding, perhaps I may say that there is no bottomless pit. We have to lever in private sector funding. The Pickering approach was exemplary. It was a partnership approach involving the county council, Ryedale District Council, the town council of Pickering, the Environment Agency and the Forestry Commission, all planting new trees and cutting down existing ones, creating dams and, indeed, taking 200 years to create a new peat bog. I believe that Pickering shows the way forward. It does so also by merging the total spending budget and having a capital spend that is the equal of £2.3 billion and matching that with maintenance. I think that that answers the right reverend Prelate’s question.
Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)
My Lords, I declare an interest as a former chief executive of the Environment Agency who did, along with my chairman, turn up when there were floods. I am also chairman-designate of the Woodland Trust. Flood prevention, of course, is not about flood defences or inappropriate development in the flood plain: it is much wider than that.
I want to make two points. First, to echo the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, it is about managing land at a catchment scale for resilience against the increasingly frequent warmer and wetter winters, and more extreme events, that we are likely to see. It means better soil management by land managers to avoid compaction, bare ground and run-off. It also means appropriate planting of trees in the upland upstream areas to help alleviate flows.
I commend the Environment Agency in working with the natural processes programme, which is looking, among other things, at the right trees in the right place and on the right scale; tree cover in the flood plains in riparian woodlands; cross-slope woodland; tree shelterbelts; gully woodlands; and the restoration and creation of increasing numbers of wet woodlands. We cannot say that this is a single-bullet solution—planting trees will not solve the entire problem. But tree cover in the appropriate place can reduce flood peaks by up to 40%. Infiltration of water on the ground is 60 times more effective in treed areas than in grazed areas.
I urge the Minister to ensure that all regional flood and coastal committees consider how natural flood risk management can best be deployed in their areas. The Environment Agency and the Forestry Commission opportunity maps showing where trees and woods are most likely to reduce flood risk in England should be promoted more widely to help projects use them across the country. I also urge that the new Countryside Stewardship scheme’s first-year arrangements are closely watched to make sure that they are having an impact in supporting woodland planting in areas where it is likely to reduce flood risk. I also commend to the Minister the Woodland Trust’s report, Stemming the Flow, about the role of trees and woodland in flood protection. Indeed, I commend the Pickering experiment, which the noble Baroness clearly described.
Secondly, floods do not just happen in flood plains. Surface water flooding is becoming an increasing problem. We need to build resilience into new buildings and to retrofit property-level protection measures in existing buildings, which means waterproof surfaces, resilient electricity supplies and individual housing flood defence remedies. The measures are known to pay for themselves after simply one flood. In flood-risk management, the cost of remediation of floods is almost directly proportionate to the degree of heartache. Such measures are the least we can do for those recently flooded and those who, without such measures, will be flooded again in the future.
Lord Greaves (LD)
My Lords, I remind the House of my registered council interests. This is a tale of two small towns and what happened on Boxing Day. Barnoldswick and Earby are twin towns in that part of the Lancashire district of Pendle which used to be in Yorkshire. They are both prone to flooding. Water rushes down from the surrounding moorlands on to a glacial plain where they are built and the two towns straddle the Pennine watershed at its lowest point. Both have suffered from periodic, catastrophic flooding over the past 150 years. This year, on Boxing Day, the heavens opened.
Barnoldswick, which is locally known as Barlick, escaped this time for two reasons. The first is a series of local works over the past 20 years and more which were mainly the initiative of the local district council and local people. I pay tribute particularly over that time to the work of my colleague, Councillor David Whipp, whose decades of work in this area have been heroic. At the danger point, when it happened, a small estate called Ghyll Meadows turned out to be the most vulnerable point. Early on Boxing Day morning, David went out to inspect the defences and decided that they were not going to hold. He called on what I can only call a heroic local community to turn out, particularly using social media, networks and contacts which had been built up for this purpose over the years. More than 200 people turned out. They built a new barrier with sandbags provided by the district council. Improvised sandbags came from all sorts of places. A local builder’s yard opened to provide material and a local farmer provided machinery. Legions of people swept away the water that was seeping through the new improvised barrier.
Unfortunately, they were not so successful in Earby. They managed to withstand Storm Desmond but then came Storm Eva. Earby had the same history and the same storms in December. On Boxing Day, the local becks overflowed. More than 50 houses and local businesses were badly flooded. Earby has a local scheme ready and waiting to go. It has been agreed by staff at the Environment Agency but is waiting for funding. It is not the district’s responsibility but the district council has £168,000 in the bank account towards it but it is waiting for the rest.
The problem of Earby is unique. It is part of Lancashire. Therefore, it is part of the north-west Environment Agency. In all ways, its administration and representation of councillors and others is with Lancashire and the north-west. But, unlike the rest of Lancashire, the water in Earby drains eastwards. It joins the great River Aire and flows through Leeds. No doubt, some of the Earby water joined the rest of the water to flood Leeds this year. It is part of the Environment Agency in Yorkshire. It comes under the Yorkshire Regional Flood and Coastal Committee and is in direct competition with the rest of Yorkshire and the horrific events that happened there.
But east is east and west is west. Earby is stuck between the two on the Pennine watershed. Will the Minister spend a little time looking at Earby and working out how its problems can please be funded?
The Lord Bishop of St Albans
My Lords, I thank my right reverend colleague for today’s debate. Due to the shortage of time, straightaway I shall focus a little more on whole-catchment flood management. A renewed focus on this approach has been one of the notable outcomes of the current flood crisis, helped of course by the exemplary work of the Pickering slow-the-flow scheme, which the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, described so eloquently.
The potential of whole-catchment approaches—for example, using meandering rivers, planting trees and building permeable dams to slow water in upland areas and reduce peak flow further downstream—is enormous. In the long term, it provides a cheaper, more environmentally friendly method of flood management, which works, as a number of people have already said, with natural processes rather than constantly trying to hold back the tide. Such approaches also have the benefit of being effective across a catchment, rather than simply focusing on one or two high-value areas, and so can help to lower the flood risk in rural hamlets and villages that might otherwise not qualify for flood protection.
Yet, generally, Governments and local authorities have been slow to embrace such proactive approaches, for a number of reasons. First, the whole-catchment approach will help to mitigate the risk of small and medium-sized floods but there is little evidence that they will protect homes from floods with the highest levels of water. For towns and villages to be protected from the heaviest flooding, some form of flood defence barrier is usually needed. It would generally be cheaper for the Environment Agency to build that barrier a bit higher than to invest in both a barrier and a whole-catchment approach to flood management.
If the Government are serious about a whole-catchment approach, Defra and the Treasury need to look again at how they value those projects and be willing to take into account a wider range of factors—for example, environmental benefits—when they make those valuations. Will the Minister assure the House that a review of how the Government value measures such as this will be included in the national resilience review?
Secondly, a proper whole-catchment approach to flood management will require reconsideration of how we currently approach planning and development, not just on flood plains but in upland areas, too, where increased run-off can raise flood levels further downriver. According to the CEO of the Environment Agency, 13% of housebuilding is currently being undertaken in flood plains and that percentage is increasing. Will the Minister inform the House whether the Government will consider giving the Environment Agency new powers to properly regulate developments across at-risk catchment areas?
Finally, dialogue with farmers is vital if we want to take more proactive approaches to slowing the flow of water off upstream land. Redirecting subsidies to incentivise farmers to plant more trees in key areas, to build temporary reservoirs that can hold floodwater back, and even to allow their land to flood in instances of high flood risk, are all things that I hope the Government will look at closely.
Lord Patten (Con)
My Lords, to people who have recently suffered flooding, as we have just heard from the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, or who are fearful that they may well experience flooding in future, it is no consolation at all to know that the science of flood prevention is not wholly agreed on or resolved in every area all of the time. That is a very important point. Secondly, many of the ideas that will lead to flood mitigation over the years, which both right reverend Prelates have highlighted—it is good to see the Anglicans here en masse this afternoon talking about flooding issues—will take many years to take effect.
On the first point, if you put a bunch of hydrologists, geologists, geomorphologists, soil engineers, arboriculturalists and others into a room and ask them what can be done to mitigate flood problems in different areas, such as both right reverend Prelates have pointed out so clearly, you will sometimes find very different answers coming forward. Mr Rory Stewart, the responsible Minister in another place, who is very far-sighted and has great clarity of mind, has pointed out that we do not have a settled scientific agreement in some areas. We need to work very hard to bring that about. We have to be open about that to flood-prone and flood-threatened areas.
The second point is that many suggestions can be made about how we can get rid of or stabilise water flow. My noble friend Lady McIntosh pointed out that we can reinstate bogs, but also that that can take a century or more to have an effect. Even reinstating peat bogs where there are some remnants of them can take many decades. While it is a very good piece of rural housekeeping to ensure, whether it is local authorities or farmers with their bridges and culverts, that pinch points are clear on a regular basis on a very local scale, it is also clear that we need to look at longer-term suggestions, such as letting rivers meander more once riparian interests are taken into account. You cannot just tell a river to get meandering: it takes 10, 20 or 30 years before meandering takes any effect.
Lastly, I entirely agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Young, that tree planting is very good at anchoring the soil, as it also is when you can persuade farmers not to plough or plant uphill or downhill in rows. There is great debate about tree planting: what sort of trees should be planted, their effects on the landscape, and the interrelationships with natural habitat. There is no doubt at all about it: whatever else, whether you plant little whips or bigger standards, it takes a while—sometimes decades again—to get the trees coming up to the right height to do this.
It is very important that we are honest and open as a Chamber and across the party-political divides that these things cannot just be fixed overnight and that we need long-term, integrated strategies, as was again pointed out by both right reverend Prelates. I am absolutely sure that my right honourable friend Mr Oliver Letwin, the Cabinet Minister responsible, will take that fully into account in his far-sighted review that is coming down the track towards us.
Lord Judd (Lab)
My Lords, I believe that the House should be deeply grateful to the right reverend Prelate for having had this debate. I can say with practical experience of some years as director of Oxfam that the real challenge is to keep the focus when the reality of the long-term consequences of what has happened are being felt by the people in the front line. That is when our support and interest becomes vital.
We are faced with an immediate, immense humanitarian economic and social crisis, but also with another example of an inescapable wake-up call of the relevance and importance of what happened at Paris. We must not allow that to become empty rhetoric or a self-congratulatory exercise in successful diplomacy. We have to make a reality of the aspirations of Paris and we should be judged by what happens and how soon it happens.
Meanwhile, we cannot ignore the size of the problem. I live in Cumbria. Bridges are down all over the county and communications disrupted. Yes, mountains, at least in part, actually shifted. Families are broken and incomes ruined for individual families and for communities. All this must, of course, have immediate remedial action, but immediate remedial action cannot be allowed to become the enemy of the strategic priorities. I mentioned Paris, but more practically on the ground—I am glad to note that some of these points have been mentioned in the debate—is the attention to tax structures that encourage flood defence work by all those who want to undertake it.
This means recognising the inescapable link between the uplands, the flood plains and those in the front line. I live on a fell side. I look down on the flood plain below me. It fills with water. Of course, we in the local community say, “Where does all this water go?”. It does not get rid of the water. That is why a far greater range of upland activity is necessary. Tree planting, upland reservoirs, farm reservoirs, the rest: all this must be looked at.
I conclude simply by saying that, in this situation, amelioration can become the enemy of strategy. We have to be as firm on the strategy as we are on the practical immediate action. Paris could too quickly become a gigantic historical irrelevance.
Lord Curry of Kirkharle (CB)
My Lords, I declare an interest in this debate as a trustee of the Tyne River Trust. I know that I speak for us all when I say that our thoughts and prayers are with all those affected by this dreadful flooding. I am very grateful to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds for proposing the debate. I firmly endorse his comments on Flood Re.
We would be naive to think that this will not happen again or that it is as bad as it gets. We need to ensure that the UK has a long-term flood management strategy in place to prevent damage to property, farmland, roads and disruption of people’s lives. I recognise and commend the swift action taken by the Government in response to the flooding crisis, but the problem is that we need to cease being reactive and instead put in place a long-term strategy that will help prevent events such as this.
The floods that affected Cumbria also affected Northumbria, where I live. Here, the flood barriers that were reinforced and rebuilt 10 years ago were not breached; the water just overflowed. To build ever- higher flood defences is not the solution. We would simply demolish the bridges if we did that.
I stress the seriousness of the situation for the farmers who have been affected by this. While it is very welcome that funds have been made available—the charity sector in particular has been very helpful and made significant impact; I am a trustee of the Prince’s Countryside Fund which has been delighted to help in this crisis—my deep concern is how difficult it may prove to be to access these funds. The application for funds during the Somerset flooding proved to be too arduous and complex for many farmers to benefit. For busy farmers trying to clear their land and cope with the stress of the experience, it was far from helpful. Will the Minister ensure that the system is as simple as possible, while still of course adhering to public sector requirements?
A further issue is that farmers can claim the support only after the funds have been spent. This policy fails to recognise the massive cash-flow problems that farmers will experience off the back of this bad winter. The fact that some have still not received their BPS payments is a major concern. Some have had stock losses. Therefore, the cash-flow issues are serious. I hope that the Government will look at changing this policy to consider advancing payments—either 50% or 75% of the payment—to allow farmers to carry out the work and invest as proposed. What we need—this has been reinforced this afternoon—is a policy for flood risk management that is integrated with other land use. Reliable and evidence-based policy is needed to inform both the practitioners and the policymakers to design appropriate solutions.
A balance needs to be struck between the interests of environmentalists while not being detrimental to the livelihoods of farmers. It is clearly inappropriate to dredge every ditch, stream and river. Precious environment would be lost if we did so. Neither should we rule out carefully selected targeted dredging where it is appropriate. We need to see much more integration between the range of bodies that have responsibilities within individual river catchments, not just the Environment Agency but Natural England, the river trusts, national parks, local authorities and so on—the LEPs and others. One size does not fit all. Not for the first time we often see individual bodies operating within silos. Farmers need to be compensated for the work they do in holding water to protect urban areas downstream. At present this service is unrewarded and comes with great costs. Clearly, we need to include that within integrated solutions.
Lord Inglewood (Con)
My Lords, as I think many of your Lordships may know, I am a Cumbrian. At the outset, I declare the interest that I am making a claim in respect of flood damage. Somebody put it to me: do you think you have to declare property currently under water? I have also been a member of the North West Water Authority’s regional land drainage committee. However, I must emphasise at the outset that I am a great deal less badly affected than many of my neighbours. I pay tribute to my local MP, friend, neighbour and Floods Minister, Rory Stewart, for the way he has led the Government’s response.
In thinking about flooding, it is terribly important that we all recognise that, despite being within the national jurisdiction, the British weather does not recognise parliamentary sovereignty. If it is getting wetter for whatever reason, and regardless of those reasons, we have to deal with the consequences of that. Against that background and what seems to be the likelihood of future flooding, we need as a country to be absolutely clear about what is a public responsibility, and what flows from that both administratively and financially, and what is a private responsibility and the same consequences that might flow from that.
I was very pleased that the right reverend Prelate talked about insurance, because it seems to me that the role of insurance in this area is of considerable importance. For example, I heard tell locally—this may be apocryphal for all I know—of a person who has been flooded more than once. His insurance company said, “Yes, we shall certainly give you some more insurance but, of course, the first loss is half a million”.
Something very important that has not been touched on is the attitude and role of the banks in the context of their corporate and social responsibility when their customers get into financial difficulties because of this kind of thing. As an individual, I believe that it is important that we respond to these general problems by working with nature, but there is a whole series of nuts-and-bolts issues that need to be thought about and clarified. Do you canalise water or let it spill out over open land? How should we deal with, and respond to, problems directly caused by earlier mitigation flood defence works? How do we respond to problems caused by people constructing buildings, living in houses or working in premises that are known to be liable to flooding? In extreme cases, should we approach these premises as we approached slums in the old days and simply demolish them? Reference has been made to future building on the flood plain. Should we allow it and, if so, under what conditions to mitigate any possible disaster that may ensure?
It is of paramount importance that we are clear about all these things, because unless and until we are clear, we will never have a sensible, long-term policy about flooding and all we can do is do what we have done recently, which is clear up the mess. In the longer term, the only way of making sure that we do not have a mess is to have a good long-term policy.
Lord Stone of Blackheath (Lab)
My Lords, in July I spoke in the Moses Room, warning of imminent flooding. The right reverend Prelates might be amused that I joked that my Hebrew name, Abram, should be changed to Noah. In biblical times, it seems that he was the only human who knew what was coming. Today, we all know that the changes in climate mean that floods are more likely. I shall not talk about this global effect of human activity now. I want to bring to the notice of the Minister the causes of flood damage resulting from our inability in this country to apply proven community methods of river management, working with the water cycle to manage rivers so that they do not flood.
As the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, said, many recent trials have shown the success, affordability and financial effectiveness of natural catchment measures in the UK. For this to happen on a larger scale, we need to encourage the buy-in and engagement of the whole river community, develop financial support for these projects from bottom up and arrange long-term financial backing, and we need to allocate a small proportion of land, both private and public, to create natural interventions. The Flow Partnership is a social enterprise and charity that is known and respected by the Government and has long-term experience in India, Sweden, Slovakia and here in the UK in dealing with both floods and droughts in this manner. It can help Her Majesty’s Government, first, to create practical examples of what works at low cost and then to form a long-term strategy that would address these difficulties and save millions of pounds in future damage liabilities.
Employing natural catchment measures has multiple benefits. As well as climate change mitigation, it involves the whole community working together, increases biodiversity, improves river quality and, of course, prevents flood damage. Her Majesty’s Government ought to see the diversity of landscapes—wetlands, forests and ponds—as an interconnected system of the whole water cycle. Working with it communally could build for us a resilient future and make the population safer from floods.
In December, I wrote to the Prime Minister’s office about the way flood defences are mistakenly financed and contracted by the Government and fall into the trap whereby the construction companies are judged by output, not outcome. A huge structure is built. Yes, it is on cost and on time, but it does not work. That is why the Flow Partnership is developing a strategy of community-funded natural catchment measures. These measures are effective and relatively easy to put in at a 10th of the cost. They increase the storage capacity of the river catchments and can be implemented widely. Its methods have been successfully trialled in Belford, Northumberland, and three other catchments by the Environment Agency. Despite the success that such trials evidence, the work is at the moment stalled due to the lack of appropriate funding sources. A river and landscape bond—an enterprise bond—which could be created if backed by the Government, would attract local and business investment and would reduce flood risk in the riparian areas of the UK at a fraction of the cost, time and effort than is now the case. I suggest that the Government should meet the people involved, allocate a small budget for them to work, say, on the River Dearne, and enable them to put the river and landscape bond into place. This would be a way for us to make safe 100 rivers in the UK, and perhaps even to export this methodology in future as a benefit to the world and, of course, to the UK. Thank you.
Baroness Parminter (LD)
My Lords, I, too, pay tribute to those who have assisted those who have been devastated by the recent floods and commend the Government for the level of financial assistance supplied so far to those local authorities. However, on that point, is the Minister now in a position to answer the question I asked in this House on 7 December—namely, given that it is a time-limited application, will the Government be applying to the European Union Solidarity Fund for assistance that can be given to local authorities to invest in new infrastructure?
It is clear from what colleagues have said that we need a comprehensive review of our ability to manage flood risk in the future, first because of our need to adapt to climate change. We need only consider the extremes of weather in December and the fact that already nearly 2.5 million homes are at between one to 100 years’ risk in the UK. On that point, it is disturbing to note that in Defra recently the staff of the climate change adaptation team have been reduced from 38 to six. That is an extremely worrying indication of the Government’s priorities in this area. I hope that the review looks at staffing levels as well as overall resources elsewhere.
I wanted to briefly cover two points. First, the current conventional approach to flooding that has been taken by both the Environment Agency and the Treasury focuses very much on project-specific approaches and, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds said in his opening remarks, on a cost-benefit ratio, which does not help those in rural areas in particular, where the numbers are far less than in urban areas. We have therefore seen political pressures from Members down the other end, and rightly so, for more concrete measures to be put in places where they can be seen. While it is welcome that £2.3 billion has been spent on concrete proposals and flood defences, we cannot see that there has been any real forward movement to ensure that natural capital is taken into consideration in the decisions about where flood defences can be put, particularly, as others have said, around the upper catchment areas.
Under the coalition Government, the Natural Capital Committee was established, which made it quite clear that although, as the noble Lord, Lord Patten, said, there is underlying uncertainty over some areas of the science, in three areas there was a clear economic rationale for where money could be spent and benefits could be seen: woodland planting, peat restoration, and wetland restoration. At the moment, the national infrastructure plan seems to stand in splendid isolation, with no consideration of any forms of natural capital. It merely looks at hard, concrete forms of roads, flood defences and other infrastructure. I would hope that the review would look at the national infrastructure plan.
Secondly, as other noble Lords have said, the scale of housing that this Government are looking to move is incredible. I do not doubt their commitment to achieving that, but we have to ensure that the review also looks at the planning implications of this massive increase in housing and infrastructure.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)
My Lords, I am extremely grateful to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds for promoting this debate and to all noble Lords who have taken the opportunity to look beyond the short term. I apologise that I cannot refer to all the excellent contributions but, in the limited time that I have, I would like to raise the following points.
First, it would be helpful if the Secretary of State would acknowledge, unequivocally, that the unprecedented rain and flooding we are confronting today is the result of climate change. It is not an unusual freak of nature; it is part of a trend. It was predictable that climate change would make the UK warmer and wetter and that is exactly what has happened. This is why, as my noble friend says, the outcome of the Paris talks is so important.
Secondly, we welcome the Government’s announcement of a national flooding review. It is crucial, however, that it is based on the best independent research and evidence about river flows and catchment management—I take the point, of course, that this is a developing science. We know, for example, the advantages of reafforestation in upland areas in absorbing excess water, but we need better scientific advice on where to locate new plantations of trees and woods to maximise their impact. Equally, sustainable drainage systems have a role to play, for example, in reinstating lost wetlands and providing essential flood relief. They also have the added advantage of providing social and environmental benefits.
Every time we add something new to the landscape, or interfere with natural water flows, we risk unforeseen ecological consequences and potential conflicts. All the evidence so far suggests that leaving rivers and streams to meander—with wood and vegetation accumulating as natural obstructions—will slow the river flow and limit flooding. Yet the Secretary of State announced last week that farmers are to be given greater powers to dredge and clear water courses to prevent their fields flooding. Apart from the adverse impact of speeding up rivers and streams, this seems to contradict a previous Environment Agency report, which concluded that rivers that are artificially dredged silt up more frequently and the only real solution is to tackle the creation of silt upstream. What independent advice was received before this announcement?
I do not pretend that managing the sometimes conflicting interests of farmers and urban communities is easy. Flooding fields may be necessary; farmers need to be properly compensated and we need to properly evaluate the effects on food production. Surely, though, we also need to take a stronger stance on clearing land, for example, for grouse shooting, which has little public benefit and has been identified as one of the sources of the recent flooding above Hebden Bridge.
Finally, these conflicts underline why the government resilience review needs to be free from the influences of vested interests, transparent in its work and authoritative in its recommendations. I hope that the Minister can reassure me on these issues in his response.
Lord Gardiner of Kimble (Con)
My Lords, I am most grateful to the right reverend Prelate for securing this debate. Across the United Kingdom, many people have endured their homes and businesses being flooded and devastated. I echo what other noble Lords have said today in expressing my deepest sympathies to all affected. December last year was the wettest on record and the wettest calendar month since records began in 1910. In relation to what the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, said about climate change, the view is that the recent heavy rainfall is consistent with this general picture, but it is not possible—and many scientists will say it is not possible—to say that any individual event is directly caused by climate change.
The impacts were, undoubtedly, particularly severe in Yorkshire, Cumbria, Lancashire, Greater Manchester and, more recently, in Scotland. Our thoughts are with all those who suffered and we must now use all our energies to help them to recover from this dreadful experience. We clearly owe an enormous debt of gratitude to all those who served during this extremely difficult time, including the fire and rescue service, police, military, Environment Agency, and local authority workers. I also echo what the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds said about what churches and other faith groups did and what the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, said about the many volunteers in his part of the world. It shows that we have a great country where the good Samaritan is at large.
Recognising the threatening weather forecasts, the Government held daily COBRA meetings, allowing all necessary resources to be deployed early and ahead of the flooding. The emergency services, Environment Agency, and military were on the ground and able to provide immediate help. Supporting assets, including high-volume pumps and rescue boats, were made available to local commanders in all areas. Indeed, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds has referred to this. The Government have committed almost £200 million for recovery in addition to our significant, ongoing investment. This funding includes £50 million to rebuild and improve damaged flood defences and £40 million for transport infrastructure. A community recovery scheme for councils to spend on local priorities will provide grants of up to £5,000 for resilient repairs to properties and funding will provide help through rebates on council tax and business rates. Farmers will be able to claim up to £20,000 to restore damaged agricultural land. The noble Lord, Lord Curry of Kirkharle, spoke of his support and, clearly, we need to ensure that support is engaged in a user-friendly manner.
The noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, asked about the EU Solidarity Fund and I will write more fully to her on that. However, the UK taxpayer would still pay for the majority of the funds received, because we would pay more into the EU budget and it would reduce our rebate. We feel that we needed to act quickly; the support packages we have already announced are designed to deal with the urgent needs of those affected.
In terms of investment in flood infrastructure, the Government have committed to spend £2.3 billion on a six-year capital programme to 2021. That means that we will be investing £2 billion in flood defences over this Parliament—a real-terms increase on the £1.7 billion invested in the last Parliament and a real-terms increase on the £1.5 billion spent between 2005 and 2010. Our six-year capital programme gives communities a much clearer view of when schemes will be built. It is intended to reduce the flood risk for over 300,000 households and around 420,000 acres of agricultural land, while avoiding more than £1.5 billion worth of direct economic damages to farmland and securing 205 miles of railway and 340 miles of roads. In addition, government investment will be supported by a further £600 million of partnership funding—£250 million has already been secured, with sources for the other £350 million identified.
The right reverend Prelate’s Question is about how we can help rural areas which may not qualify for large-scale interventions. My noble friend Lady McIntosh of Pickering referred to partnership funding, an approach which means that some rural locations that previously had little prospect of any government funding could now be eligible for a share. The Stroud rural sustainable drainage project is an example of successful rural schemes going ahead with partnership funding. While capital schemes increase the number of people protected by flooding, we know it is also vital that we keep our existing flood defences in good condition. That is why the Government have also committed to protecting the £171 million per year spend on maintenance in real terms over this Parliament.
Partnership working is a key part of flood risk management. I welcome the work of the 118 internal drainage boards, or IDBs. These locally funded and operated public bodies, based predominantly in rural areas, manage water levels and reduce flood risk for local communities. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, asked about dredging and the noble Lord, Lord Curry, also referred to this matter. Dredging will be effective in some areas and inappropriate in others. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State’s announcement about making it easier for landowners to dredge relates to agricultural ditches in low-lying areas, where maintaining the flow of water is important to lowering flood risk in the local area. This bears out the fact that different scenarios will work in different parts of the country by having, for example, different trees and uses of contours, as has been said. It is all about the flexibility that we now need to have.
In many places, however, the IDBs are now working on behalf of the Environment Agency to the benefit of the local community. There are numerous examples where this approach is working well. In Lincolnshire, for instance, the excellent partnership of the Environment Agency, IDBs, local authorities and others has produced a strategy for flood risk management across the county. After the dreadful flooding in Somerset, moreover, the Somerset Rivers Authority was established to give local people much more control and power over flood risk.
In Cumbria, my honourable friend Rory Stewart has worked tirelessly as Flooding Minister—that is an absolutely non-partisan thing to say. Those in the locality have echoed this. My noble friends Lord Inglewood and Lord Patten also referred to it. My honourable friend will chair a new floods partnership, bringing together local expertise to publish an action plan this summer. The partnership will consider improvements to flood defences, review upstream options for slowing tributaries to key rivers and build stronger links with the local community. My honourable friend Robert Goodwill is also acting as flood envoy to Yorkshire. Such partnerships are to be encouraged across the country, led by groups of local people who know the flood risk in their area and what should be done about it, with government playing a key role in strengthening and facilitating them.
The noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, and other noble Lords asked how we intend to review flood risk management. Recent events represent an important opportunity to assess our approach and there are undoubtedly lessons to be learned from what has happened. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State has announced the national flood resilience review, to which my noble friends Lord Patten and Lord Inglewood referred. This is to be set up to ensure that the country can deal with its increasingly extreme weather events. Work to consider forecasting and modelling, the resilience of key infrastructure and the way that we make decisions about expenditure has already begun. It is expected to conclude this summer.
That review’s work complements the Natural Capital Committee; I think this was the point that the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, was taking us towards. The committee is already developing the catchment-based approach, including slowing the flow upstream. Many of your Lordships referred to this. I listened very carefully to the points that the noble Lord, Lord Stone of Blackheath, made. My noble friend Lady McIntosh of Pickering spoke of the Slow the Flow project in Pickering, which is working with the natural environment to reduce flood risk. The noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, spoke of the range of opportunities for working with and enhancing the natural environment. That is a way forward for us to ensure that we are in a much better position and was echoed by the right reverend prelate the Bishop of St Albans.
We all have an extremely interesting and valuable range of reviews in prospect. I very much hope that we are now into a period of recovery, where we can look to help those affected back into their homes and businesses—although, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds said, we are clearly in a position where the winter and its floods could continue. We should all be very grateful for what the emergency services, the military, the fire service and volunteers may have to do. However, our aim in government is to ensure that long-term investment will help to make our country more resilient. Partnership funding has already made many more rural schemes viable and through working in partnership, and with the active engagement of local communities, we can help to manage flood risk. I assure your Lordships that I will take all the comments made today and share them with my ministerial colleagues, and that the Government and Ministers will be using all the energies that we have to ensure that the whole country is as well protected as possible.
Identity Documentation
(8 years, 10 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Campbell-Savours
That this House takes note of the potential use of identity documentation in dealing with the challenges of assuring the identity of individuals.
Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)
My Lords, it being a Thursday afternoon, I have received many apologies from Members unable to attend this debate, for which we are all grateful. The issue of identity cards is the issue in British politics that refuses to go away; it haunts political debate. It is not that it is the unique preserve of any political party. Identity cards have wide support in both Houses of Parliament, across the political divide and in the electorate.
The Labour Government did at least try to develop a scheme. They started in 2002 with a national consultation under the heading Entitlement Cards and Identity Fraud: A Consultation Document but, following legislation, the whole programme was plagued with arguments over whether it should be a national identity card or an entitlement card. This finally led to a climbdown as it was moved from a compulsory to a voluntary scheme. The 2010 election then killed the whole programme. The national identity register, a crucial component in the scheme, was then destroyed on 10 February 2011. The personal details of everyone issued with a card under the pilots were also destroyed. We are now left with biometric residence permits for non-EEA foreign nationals, but only because Europe requires them and the system of national insurance cards is completely out of control. The coalition effectively destroyed the whole programme, leaving us exposed to an explosion in identity fraud and crime that permeates every aspect of our national life.
Nevertheless, to be fair to the Government, they have recognised the need to tackle the issue, in particular on the internet. With that in mind, the Government’s identity assurance programme, IDAP, was launched. Under the IDAP model, people assert their identities to government via a series of private sector identity providers. I understand that PayPal, Cassidian, Experian, Verizon and a number of others have at some stage been in the frame. However, although they build relationships with HMRC, PAYE, the DVLA and other departments or agencies, they lack access to the necessary biometric data such as fingerprints, digital iris recognition and facial digital photographs. Their programmes are undermined, despite the “hub”, by the lack of a national identity register to underpin the process of identity assurance. I sense that this approach is born of the mistaken assumption that it will save money. What it fails to heed is that public confidence in identity assurance cannot rely on private provider systems preoccupied with profit and shareholder value. Such identity assurance programmes will fall down as disastrously as did Vodafone, PA Consulting, EDS and others, all of which have lost data over recent years.
Card opponents tell you that the state equally stands accused of sloppy data handling. They quote HMRC’s loss of two CDs in 2007, leaving millions at risk, along with other examples. They did happen. But Germany has built a secure system with a reputation for impenetrability based on a range of biometrics. The system leads the way in Europe, and if they can do it, we can do it. Germany is leading a whole group of European nations, including Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Cyprus, Finland, Estonia, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Greece, Gibraltar, France, Italy, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malta, Spain, Slovenia, Portugal, Poland and Holland. Most of those regimes require a passport or a card holding data which we refuse to hold. They are all building systems of identity assurance in which their publics can have confidence. Why can we not do the same? That is the background to the debate.
What do we want? Charles Clarke, former Home Secretary, summed it up perfectly in 2006 when he said that we want,
“a universal scheme for everyone legally resident in the UK”.
His scheme required a fingerprint, a photograph and a signature. I would go further, with iris recognition or even DNA added. If whatever data are finally approved were not to be stored on the card itself, the card could secure, through a protocol and a strong process of authentication and tiered authorisation, access to data, perhaps under three headings: “generally available”, “sensitive” and “highly sensitive”. The accessible information on the chip would relate to information held on the national identity register. The chip would have different layers of defence against physical attack, fault attack and side-channel attack. To compromise a properly designed system, you would have to manipulate the national identity register, which I would say is an impossible task. Again, the German system shows the way. I understand that EU passports are already common criteria evaluated, which means they already achieve best practice for attack resistance.
At this point, I thank Professor Keith Mayes of the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway University for helping me to understand the complexity of such systems. The issue for many of us is whether you hold the data on the card or whether the card authorises access to the national identity register. I believe that the cards should be an access tool to a server, enabling the card to establish basic ID as simply as possible.
What is the purpose of the card? We know that the CBI believes that a single source authenticating personal data would be the best protection against fraud. It foresees reduced costs in maintaining back-up systems. A recent government report entitled Future Identities highlighted that people often have several identities, on and offline. We are told that this, among other factors, is now costing us nearly £30 billion a year in fraud. National identity cards with sophisticated biometrics would help combat that fraud. You might compromise a photograph or a signature, but digitised information is hard to replicate. You certainly cannot have two iris patterns on one eye, two different fingerprints on one finger, or even two different types of DNA.
The purposes of a national identity card fall under four headings: to reduce fraud; to establish entitlement to services; to provide security assurance; and to check identity more generally. In defining the benefits, I have consolidated all three tiers and levels of access I previously referred to—generally available, sensitive and highly sensitive. I see the benefits coming as follows: when using banking or financial services, including credit or debit cards; when buying or selling property and vehicles; when making mortgage applications; when making credit transfers; when entering credit, rental, hire or leasing agreements; when boarding aircraft and other forms of public transport; when accessing public buildings and the workplace; when sitting exams and driving tests; when seeking to reduce HMRC’s tax collection costs; when voting; when establishing identity during police inquiries; when tracing the identity of someone who is deceased; when verifying “fit and proper” in the professions; when carrying out checks on workers at airports and in the caring professions, in particular when early decisions are required; when establishing proof of identity; when tackling impersonation, whether in examinations or, as I have said, driving tests; when tracking the background of false accusers; when tracing bail abscondees; when tracing persons engaged in road traffic offences; when dealing with illegal subletting; when accessing public services, public benefits and pensions; when challenging disability fraud; when dealing with council tax and housing benefit fraud; when establishing on-street identity—if I had longer, I would go into that in much greater detail; when establishing entitlements to concessionary travel and relief from congestion charges; and when investigating organised crime, including money-laundering and trafficking.
The card would be of particular benefit to the Government in checking entitlement to European Union health cards and access to national health services, including hospital treatment. It would give the Government the opportunity to sort out the disaster over the allocation of national insurance cards, and the problem of multiple passport irregularities. It would also bring us into line with other states whose cards already substitute for a passport.
Following the Government’s decision to legislate on illegal working, we should also not underestimate the benefit of the card for the private sector—for landlords checking on illegal tenancies, and for insurance companies in dealing with insurance fraud. The scheme should be tailored to allow them sufficient access at the lowest tiers to establish basic identity in carrying out both statutory and non-statutory duties. The scheme would be particularly helpful to the Director of Labour Market Enforcement proposed in the Immigration Bill. It would underpin his work. Most interestingly, the card would be useful in the enforcement of human rights, particularly for that group of women—invariably in the ethnic minorities—who, with tightly controlled family conditions, are denied basic human rights and even their identity.
I now come to the final benefit, which is crucial. Income tax collection in the UK is not without its problems. It is not helped by the system of self-assessment and reductions in revenue and personnel. Many people in the UK live outside or on the margins of the tax system. They pay no or little tax, yet they often earn substantial incomes while drawing extensively on public services. We who pay our taxes resent the freeloaders, be they foreign or UK nationals. We believe that the state should act to stop this abuse. It is costing the country billions. A national identity card with relevant biometric data would be a powerful tool in ensuring that people pay the state for the services they receive.
I recognise that at first glance, the list of benefits I have identified may appear onerous or perhaps even intrusive, but it is a pick-and-choose agenda which can be tailored to conditions nationally at any particular time. It is an agenda whereby identity today is verified with bank cards, passports, driving licences, utility bills, bank statements, council tax demands, national insurance cards and even marriage certificates—all sources of identity information today. We have all been asked for them at some stage in our private lives. All of them have their weaknesses, causing public concern.
The consultation originally carried out by the Labour Government not only recorded a majority in favour of national identity cards but, astonishingly, found that 75% were in favour of providing all three types of biometric data—fingerprints, a facial digital photograph and an iris digital photograph—such was the level of concern at the time. Today, the cry for reform is greater than ever, and I want this whole debate reopened.
Lord Ramsbotham (CB)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, on initiating this debate and salute him for his persistence in pursuing the issue. I also thank Mary Santo for her typically helpful and informative Library Note.
My strong support for the introduction and general use of identity cards stems from my time on active service in Northern Ireland when commanding my battalion in west Belfast in 1974 and the Belfast brigade from 1978 to 1980. In 1974, whenever we wanted to prove the identity of someone we had stopped, we had to carry out what was called a P-check, which meant contacting the company base in the area in which the person stopped claimed to live and asking for their identity to be confirmed by checking the P-cards that were held on everyone known in the area. Often, this took some time, and I well remember being increasingly nervous when having to wait for 45 minutes for a check to be carried out in another battalion’s area while standing on a street on which the IRA was very active.
In 1979, it was decided that the whole system should be automated, all the old P-card data being transferred to a computer database. This process proved the inefficiency of the old system, one person being found to have 13 different spellings of his name on 13 different cards. Within days, the operational value of almost instant response had proved the spend-to-save value of the cost of automation.
In 1974, it was almost impossible to persuade members of the public to talk to us, largely because of their resentment of internment without trial, which, fortunately, was ended in 1975. When I returned in 1978, that situation had changed somewhat, with more people being prepared to talk, but the overt presence of armed troops on the streets was an impediment to normality, many people citing frequent P-checking, particularly when newly arrived regiments were getting to know their areas, as a particular irritant. My RUC opposite number often used to say how much easier it would be, for both police and Army, if everyone had to carry an identity card, not least in countering false identity—which sentiment I note with interest quoted in the Library Note as being felt by many policemen today. In consequence, I have always thought that human rights are more likely to be protected than breached by identity cards, because they can be used to prove both who someone is, or is not.
I am not going to go into the technicalities of how this can be done with an identity card, because I know that the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, will discuss biometrics, for example. Instead, because time is limited, I want to mention another practical use of identity cards of which I have long been in favour, not least because of its value in countering false identity. Every time someone is received into prison, they are given a new prison number, which is inefficient because it denies automatic access to previous records without a considerable amount of checking and comparing data. After prisoners are released, they have to apply to a jobcentre for any benefits to which they may be entitled, which takes time, during which they have to try to live on their £46 discharge grant.
When I inspected the prisons in the UAE for an extradition case, I found that prisoners were given identity cards, using the same number as their national identity card, which they could then use for many purposes such as access to medical provision, use of the library, or to record canteen purchases. But staff told me of the immense value of no longer having to carry out much time-consuming bureaucracy. How much simpler it would be on our prisons if an identity card number could also be used as a prison number, an NHS number and a national insurance number, all of which is perfectly possible given the power of current computer systems. Not only would this make life easier for the overstretched staffs of our overcrowded prisons but it would enable automatic access to medical records and transfer of records of treatment during imprisonment. A prisoner’s entitlement to benefits could be processed in prison, obviating avoidable temptation to reoffend in order to survive.
I dispute the Government’s continual refusal to consider the introduction of identity cards—largely, it would appear, on grounds of cost. I invite the Minister to consider that, from the point of view of many public servants, their introduction would be a spend-to-save measure.
Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)
My Lords, I too am grateful to my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours for giving us the opportunity to debate this extremely important topic. I was shocked to discover the other day that it is slightly more than 40 years since the first episode of “Fawlty Towers” was broadcast on television. I am sure that many remember that first episode, which introduced Basil Fawlty to the nation; he was a hotel owner, as many probably remember. He comes across a person describing himself as Lord Melbury, with whom he naturally forms a sort of fawning relationship, believing everything that he says. Lord Melbury, of course, as those who have seen the episode will know, is a con man. Because Basil Fawlty has no means of verifying the identity, he gets taken for a ride with all the ensuing consequences.
The principle of enabling citizens to verify each other’s identity is actually an extremely important one, and has become more important in the 40 years since then. It is a matter of considerable regret to me that the last Labour Government attempted to mis-sell the concept of identity cards and identity assurance in that way. I am quite clear that identity cards would not have been a magic bullet against terrorism, or serious or organised crime, but it would have been an assistance; it would have made things easier for the police and security services, and would have saved time in verifying, but it would not have solved those fundamental problems. But that simple idea of having an identity register and connecting oneself to it would have enabled citizens to prove who they were and—as the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, has just told us—who they were not, very quickly. It would have been tremendously easy. At the moment, when we have to verify our identity, we are required to produce a passport or driving licence. I do not have a driving licence, simply a passport, which I have to find and not lose. You are then required to produce a recent utility bill, sometimes two, at a time when the utilities are trying to get us all to manage our accounts online, so we do not have that piece of paper which signifies our name and address. In my case, at least one utility has my name wrong. It is mis-spelt. That does not matter in the provision of the service concerned, but it is a pain in the neck when I am trying to prove I am who I think I am.
We are now increasingly reliant on being able to demonstrate who we are and to satisfy other people about that. It is more necessary than it ever was. It is becoming increasingly important online, so some mechanism which would span this and enable us to identify ourselves online is crucial. It is a protection for business—as in the case of Basil Fawlty—and for the public. Who am I dealing with online? Who am I dealing with face to face?
Concerns expressed about the idea of a state-run identity system are either about cost—and as the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, has already indicated, they are not very convincing—or are something to do with civil liberties. Let us be clear that if the state does not take on this function, others will. In fact, I am surprised that we have not yet got a series of major commercial operations offering us an identity service of this sort. Some of them do so on a fringe basis, but there is nothing that is comprehensive and effective. Would that be any less scary if you are worried about your personal privacy than the Government providing the service?
We already give out an enormous amount of information, such as via supermarket loyalty cards. One such scheme identified that a woman was pregnant before her family knew and started sending her material about pregnancy, which caused a certain degree of embarrassment. There are phone data and payment cards. Until I switched it off, my mobile phone, in a rather obscure location, produced a map of my favourite places. For all I know, it still does. Certainly, that data may well reside or be updated on a regular basis on a Californian server. It tells them—or me, if I did not know it already—where I spend a large amount of my time. If you looked at the map, you would find I spend a large amount of time at this end of the parliamentary complex. I try to confuse it by spending a lot of time in Portcullis House, but it was still clear. That gave one marker, as far as I was concerned. It demonstrated that I spend most nights in north London on the borders of Haringey and Islington, another marker. When I was heavily involved in the Metropolitan Police, it would demonstrate that I spent a lot of time just opposite St James’s Park Tube station. You are beginning to get a pattern, but what is the significance of being told where I go for my morning coffee on my way to work? We already have all sorts of things managing our identity and intruding on our privacy. Would it not be better if we had a simple system on which everyone could rely that was run on our behalf by our nation state?
Lord Marlesford (Con)
My Lords, I am basically on the same side as the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, on this matter. However, I approach it from a slightly different point of view. The key words in the Motion are,
“assuring the identity of individuals”.
Why is this Motion so opportune and sensible at the moment? It is because the Government of this country are faced with a huge challenge to their most basic responsibility: to assure the safety of individuals. That is of course a challenge faced by all EU Governments. The threat of Islamist terrorism, although quite different, is as great as that which the West faced during the Cold War, and certainly far greater than that which the UK faced during the Irish Troubles. This is a moment when the acceptance of the balance between privacy and national security has shifted, and must shift, dramatically.
“Identity documentation” is no longer the key phrase; rather, it is “identity verification”. There has been a tendency to assume that the value of identity documents, whether passports, driving licences or ID cards, can be enhanced by the inclusion in them of biometric data. Indeed, that may be the case in the majority of instances. Where it really matters, though, in serious crime and above all in terrorism, it is a dangerous illusion. For the sophisticated criminal or terrorist, it is not a problem to replace on any document the biometrics of the legitimate holder with those of the person who is carrying the document. The biometrics will match so that when you produce the document, yes, it matches and you are who you say you are, but you will not be.
The only secure method of identification is for the biometrics of the person to whom an identity document has been issued to be matched online with biometrics stored centrally at the time of issue. For that, what we need is not a secure document but merely a secure number. What is urgently needed in the UK is the abolition—the abandonment—of the chaotic multiplicity of identity numbers and the introduction of a single identity number. This should be used for passports, national insurance and tax, driving licences and other state permits, as well as for the National Health Service. It would of course be the primary number used for the security, police and prison services, as the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, said. It would be possible for the standard number that everybody had to have an added prefix, or something added on after it, to separate it according to its use, and of course to build in all the necessary safeguards so that access to the fundamental data could be restricted according to the authorisation of the person applying to get the information, so it would all be stored and very safe.
Over the years I have asked Parliamentary Questions on what I have just described as the chaos, and, frankly, I have had the most absurd answers. With regard to travel documents, the Government still lack records of what other passports a British passport holder possesses. Not surprisingly, we have had the dangerous absurdity in increasingly numerous cases of terrorist suspects on bail skipping out of the country, either because they have failed to surrender their passports or because they have had second or third passports that no one knew about. I am putting down an amendment to the Immigration Bill once again, for the third time, to deal with this. It should of course be standard practice to cancel any passport electronically so that the actual document is unusable.
The Government do not even know how many national insurance numbers there are in use and say that it would be too expensive to find out. Non-British nationals can obtain our national insurance numbers even if they only have time-limited visas. The Department for Work and Pensions does not cancel the numbers when they expire; it just keeps them, so there must be millions more than the entire population. To give the House an example of that, there are approximately 72 million live NHS numbers in England and Wales, while the population of those two countries is 56 million. Presumably, some 16 million non-residents are on the books of the NHS. Can we really afford this?
I believe that the survival of European civilisation, which historically has been based on democracy, Christianity and the nation state, is today under challenge from the jihadists of Islamic State. We must act to defend it, and I hope that the Government take this debate as a starting point for urgent action.
Lord Maxton (Lab)
My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours for obtaining this debate and for the excellent way he introduced it. I hope the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, will not mind if I do not follow him directly down that route, but I can inform him that I believe his suggestion is very close to what the Government intend to propose at some point in the near future.
I will take this debate one stage if not several stages further. We are living through a technological and scientific revolution that has changed the world more in the last 50 years, and will increasingly do so in the next five or 10 years, than has ever happened before in the history of mankind. That is the world we live in. I want to move from the idea of an ID card to what I would call a smart card for all. Such a card would of course do all the things my noble friend said as regards introducing security, giving people the right to know what is on it, and so on. However, I want that to be a smart card which enables people to put on to it all the information we hold.
Every one of us in this Chamber and probably in the Houses of Parliament as a whole has a form of identification. I hang it around my neck, because I do not assume that the policemen at the gate automatically know who I am. At the end of the day, that is an ID card. It opens doors—I have only to put that on to a door and I can open it. I have a driving licence in my wallet, a passport at home, bank cards and a whole series of membership cards for different organisations. Why should I not just have one card, with some form of identification on it—a fingerprint or an eye scan, or whatever it might be, or even DNA, as my noble friend suggested? That would mean that I could get rid of all the various forms of ID I have at present because I would have one card. I accept that people might say, “But you might lose it, so maybe we should have three or four cards”. Despite what the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, says, people will not find it easy to reproduce it, so even if you lose it, it will become just a piece of detritus that you can leave. Eventually, however, there will be a chip in the back of your hand, all the information will go on to that, and you will put that on to things.
Turning to the commercial aspect, the Government are talking to the banks about the idea of them paying for some of this. Banks and those who deal online, such as travel agents, or people who sell online on Amazon, will increasingly want some form of ID—a way in which they can establish the identity of the person who buys their goods or who goes to the bank machine, and know that that person is who they claim to be. Therefore, the banks may in the first instance put an extra slot in the bank machine so you can put in your ID card and then your bank card. It would be even better if the bank could put its banking services on to that single card, so you put one card in the machine, put your fingerprint on it or let it scan your eye, and then the bank could say you are the right person.
That is the world we live in. The technology is already there. I am sorry to have to say this to my noble friend Lord Harris of Haringey, but the fact is that the Apple iPhone 6 is available with a fingerprint control, and you can bank with it and buy almost any goods with it. So we already have the technology. You have to use some form of card—although, I accept, not an ID card—on London Transport buses because they will not allow you to use cash any more. Cash will be a thing of the past—in the next 10 or 15 years it will have gone. Cheques are already going and cash will go next.
That is the world in which we live. If this place does not keep pace with that technology, we will be in very grave danger of not keeping up with what is going on in the world outside, and if that happens, we will start to lose democracy itself.
Lord Marlesford
Perhaps I may tell the noble Lord that in York, none of the machines taking cards would work because of the awful floods, and people could not buy food from the supermarkets. They needed cash.
Lord Scriven (LD)
My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, for initiating this debate. However, I am going to break the cosy coalition of those who believe that the state is the sole, and safe, guardian of my identity. I say that because I have listened to the debate and am still not clear what the problem is. It is not for me, as somebody who does not believe in ID cards, to defend the status quo; it is for those who want a change to prove that there is a problem and that ID cards are the effective solution.
Let us look at the real world outside this cosy Chamber and see what is happening in the countries that have ID cards. Many noble Lords have mentioned different countries, such as Germany, Spain, Italy and France, in talking about crime. Can any of those noble Lords or those yet to speak who wish to have ID cards point to a direct correlation between a reduction in crime levels and the citizens having ID cards? We need proof, not general statements. Those who suggest that ID cards will reduce the incidence of crime should give the statistics that show a correlation between ID cards and a reduction in crime in Germany, Spain and France.
It is also said that ID cards will somehow be effective in reducing terrorism. I remind noble Lords of the horrific attack and terrorist atrocities in Jakarta this morning and the appalling attacks that we have seen just across the water in France. Indonesian citizens carry ID cards, as do the citizens of France. Have those cards made them any safer? If noble Lords can show me a correlation between identity cards and a reduction in terrorism in those countries, I will support them.
We also hear about identity fraud. Again, I would like to see statistical evidence that there is more identity fraud in this country than in countries that have ID cards. I ask noble Lords to show me the facts. Most identity fraud now occurs online, and in the countries that I have just talked about national ID cards are not used to prove your identity in commercial transactions.
Benefit fraud and taxation fraud, which the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, talked about, have been given as reasons for bringing in ID cards. Most people do not lie about their identity in such cases; they lie about their financial circumstances. So, again, I ask noble Lords who support the introduction of ID cards to give me the facts which show that in countries with ID cards there is less taxation fraud and less benefit fraud.
Lord Campbell-Savours
Perhaps I may put it to the noble Lord that, if the nature of the population of a particular country changes for whatever reason, his argument falls apart because one is not comparing like with like.
Lord Scriven
My Lords, I am comparing like with like, because those who argue that ID cards work are suggesting that somehow the problems that they have suggested will be reduced. The noble Lord next to me made it very clear that he did not believe that they would wipe out these problems, but I am asking for the evidence that shows that they will reduce them: that is all I am asking for. I accept that they will not wipe them out or get rid of them, but I wish to know whether there is scientific evidence in those countries that shows that these problems have been reduced—because if there is not, we do not have a problem and our system works in a comparable way to that of other nations.
The last thing I will say on this issue, because I do not have time to go into the civil liberties argument, is that it is really important for British civil liberties and freedom. Part of what makes us British—the British values that some go on about—is freedom, and the state not having overall control of our identity. In dealing with this issue—and particularly crime and terrorism, where recently this debate has come up most—we would be undermining the very British values of freedom and civil liberty, and the criminals and terrorists would have won, if we were forced to have compulsory ID cards.
Viscount Simon (Lab)
My Lords, a few days ago I listened to an interesting item that is a matter of concern to many people. So far in this debate, noble Lords have covered a number of subjects concerning identity cards. I will address just one problem. If somebody wishes to work with children or if they want to foster or adopt a child, there is a strict process that must to be completed, with a DBS certificate being issued. This involves the Disclosure and Barring Service—the DBS—which was previously the Criminal Records Bureau. A criminal record check is required for types of work known as “regulated activity with children”—and this covers people who do not even meet children frequently.
Having read a little about this matter, I have to say that I am astonished at the number of acts which are covered. An incredibly large number of people apply for a job for which the employer is required to request a DBS check and has to wait for a certificate. This is sent to the applicant, and the employer has to ask for visual confirmation of approval. The time it takes to complete the necessary check depends on the level of the check, the details provided by the applicant wanting to work with children and, finally, which police forces need to be involved in the check. Generally, it takes about eight weeks to get a DBS check. It must be remembered that a lot of people wanting to work with children are unemployed and might want to work as soon as possible.
However—this is why I am raising the matter—the current process that is meant to take eight weeks rarely achieves that, and there are those who are still waiting after three or four months. Why? The programme indicated that this delay was due to the number of applicants and to the police force involved, and it was said that there were approximately 120,000 people waiting in the Metropolitan Police area—which gives an idea of the number of people who want to work with children.
There has to be something that will overcome this problem. How about a special identification card for everybody to carry which can be updated when necessary, specifically for those who want to work with children? Would this not be an easy and cheap way out of these difficulties? It would be much cheaper than the current system.
Lord Blair of Boughton (CB)
My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, for introducing this debate. I take the view that ID cards are an idea whose time has come and I support exactly what the noble Lord, Lord Harris, said about an increasing number of people—a more and more rapidly increasing number of people—living a lot of their lives online and being quite prepared to give up information freely online. ID cards—state ID cards—are a natural extension of this process. My expertise, such as it is, is in security, and it will be on that aspect in the main that I will talk briefly.
False identities are an absolutely staple terrorist tactic. In answer to the questions from the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, in these troubled times it is not so much about the prevention of terrorism but its investigation. The police and the security services have an increasingly desperate concern in long-term inquiries, and sometimes in emergency inquiries, to establish the identity of individuals.
Lord Scriven
Is it not the case that, following the two major terrorist attacks in the UK, particularly the one in London, of the 99 recommendations given, quite a lot of those were about people already known and the security forces not acting on the data that they knew? It was not about a lack of data.
Lord Blair of Boughton
I am sure there were some recommendations like that, but perhaps when I have finished the noble Lord might see the opposite side of the coin.
It is this search for identity that lies behind the troubled development of the DNA database. The same reason lies behind the coming forward of the investigatory powers Bill and the question of ID cards.
I remind the House of two names: Kamel Bourgass and Manfo Asiedu. Bourgass was convicted in 2003 of the murder of Detective Constable Stephen Oake in Manchester. He was sentenced for that and other terrorist offences to 25 years in prison. Manfo Asiedu was the fifth bomber in the failed London attacks of 21 July 2005. He ran off across Wormwood Scrubs, throwing his device to the ground. He received 33 years’ imprisonment as a sentence. The thing that connects these two men is that at the time of their conviction we did not know who they were. As far as I can accept, we still do not know who they are. We know that the names they have given are not their right names. This is simply absurd. The links that we might have been able to establish to other plots and other people had a system of ID cards been in place are pretty obvious.
I need to make one issue clear, and here I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham: nobody I know in the police or security services who has considered this seriously sees a need for people compulsorily to carry identity papers in the street. This is not a question of a police officer demanding papers from somebody walking down the road. However, in the case of serious crime and terrorism, the police need, as soon as possible, to establish identity. These days, it would not be difficult to create a system that would not be intrusive but would be of huge assistance in those inquiries.
As the Foreign Secretary said today, speaking about Jakarta, these are troubled times. These troubled times are on our very doorstep. I speak now to the Minister: I never understood why, as far back as the 2005 general election, the Conservative Party resisted the idea of ID cards. After Paris, after Istanbul, after Jakarta, I do not think the public will understand why the Conservative Party is still resisting the idea. It is an idea whose time has come.
Lord Berkeley (Lab)
My Lords, I want to focus on some of the issues that I have been investigating in my work to try to encourage more rail freight, passenger services and other traffic across the channel, the pretty disastrous camps that have been created in Calais and the pressure that is on many people who want to come to this country.
Before I do that, I would like to reflect on something. We have been talking about the different identification required for different events, including people going into buildings and so on. More and more, organisations require that but, on the other side, nobody is required to carry any ID at all. A couple of years ago, I was invited to go and visit Prince Charles in Clarence House to advise him on rail freight. I turned up on my bike and the security guard said, “Where’s your driving licence?”. I told him that I did not need a driving licence because I was on a bike—I did not have one anyway. “Where’s your passport?”, he said. I am afraid that I then said, “Are you a foreign country?”. I offered my House of Lords pass, but that was rejected out of hand. There needs to be some consistency. It is lovely being amateur like this but, given today’s problems, it is pretty ineffective.
I have talked to a lot of people about the problem in Calais. It is dramatically affecting cross-channel traffic, including businesses, passenger services, freight services, lorries, cars, trains and so on. It affects not only France but Germany, Italy and other countries.
As to what documentation people need to show the authorities, I agree with my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours that the Germans have got it right, for many reasons. They still have a terrible fear of what the Stasi did to them over 25 years ago and are keen to have data that do not leak everywhere. We should try to get all the different immigration and other services together and come up with a common approach which would allow you to go on a train from, say, Germany to London without getting off at Lille and wasting two hours while you have to go through security again. The fact that they cannot reach agreement means you have to go through this 19th century procedure.
One of the issues that arises in many discussions is: why do people want to come to this country? Clearly the Government do not want too many people here, unless they are going to be useful and work and so on, and so they are stuck in Calais. We have had many debates as to the reasons. Clearly one is that we speak English and, like most of the rest of the world, the country they come from probably speaks English as a second language. If they have family and friends here, one can understand why they want to come here.
The evidence I have gathered from talking to a lot of people is that one of the great attractions in getting here is that you can survive without any ID. You can work cashless. Whether that is in the restaurant or café trade, agriculture or anything else, there are a lot of places where you can get by without having to pay tax or declaring anything. You do not need any social security identification but you can probably still be treated in hospital if anything goes wrong. If you visit a hospital in France as an emergency, you will be treated. Otherwise you will have to show an ID, a passport, an insurance card(?) or something.
Having an identification requirement in this country—I am not expert but other noble Lords have provided good information about it—would reduce the pressure on us. We should not think that this problem will go away because, if the Calais situation is tightened up, which the Government are quite good at doing, all that will happen is that people will go round the coast, to the west and to the north, and choose other ways of getting in. As we saw in the press, one of the Paris bombers apparently came into this country and out again without being detected. So detection must be properly carried out.
We need some form of identification in this country together with enforcement. I notice that there is a clause in the Immigration Bill that allows the Government to take away driving licences from people they do not like, but what else can they take away? It would be better if the system were co-ordinated because eventually the message would get back to people who are trying to come here that we are no better or more attractive than any other part of Europe. We hope that you will think carefully before trying to come to this country because you think you can work here on the cheap, without paying tax and without having any ID.
Earl Attlee (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, for introducing this fabulous debate.
In answer to the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, the problem is that we do not have one clean, reliable identity database. Can any noble Lord, or anyone inside or outside the Chamber, tell me why we get so excited about DNA profiling? My DNA profile is a matter of fact: I cannot alter it; it will not change with my age; it is not a choice that I have made. One of its beauties is that it can be boiled down to 70 characters of 16 groups plus a gender marker. This could be put on to a computer database which can easily be searched.
To verify every citizen’s identity à la the old ID card system is an exceptionally time-consuming, intrusive and expensive process, which is why it was binned in a former Parliament. It is also a pointless exercise because most citizens are honest and have a driving licence that is reasonably accurate. We have similar problems with Criminal Records Bureau checks because essentially they are trying to establish identity. We could give every citizen access to the driving licence system, even if they do not have the ability to drive, and then put more effort into cleaning up the relevant database. I agree with much of what my noble friend Lord Marlesford said because the advantage of the driver number is that it is easily determined from one’s name and date of birth.
But I would go further. I would capture the DNA profile and fingerprints of every UK citizen and link them to what is currently the driver number. The DNA profile would be loaded into the national DNA database with its current very strict access controls. The fingerprint data would have broadly the same availability as the data collected for the biometric residence permit, with some facility for banks and building societies to verify a card. One’s DNA profile and fingerprints are both matters of fact, and of course there is no need to carry a card because authorities can test fingerprints with mobile equipment. Having a card is simply a convenience; it is about the underlying reliable identity system.
Much more sensitive, I think, is who a citizen has been communicating with and where in the UK he or she has been, a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey. I will deal with some of the most obvious DNA worries. The first is genetics. My understanding is that the DNA profile does not have enough information in it to identify a genetic disorder or predisposition to a particular illness. In any case, my second point is that the national DNA database will check only if a profile from a crime scene matches a subject profile. It will not generally provide a subject profile to law enforcement authorities or anyone else, and there is no need to do so.
My third point is that an innocent British citizen abroad would be disadvantaged if he is matched to a crime scene profile because the local law enforcement agencies could become lazy and think that they have “got their man”. Actually, the current system has this weakness. Let us take as an example a 25 year-old British lad on holiday who had been involved in a punch-up in the UK five years previously. He would be in the same unfair situation. This would not happen if all UK citizens were on the database without any discrimination. In the event of a nasty incident with a crime scene DNA profile available, it would not be so remarkable if a Brit matched the crime scene profile.
Finally, there is the argument that central government is incapable of managing a big IT system. The fact is that the Home Office is successfully managing the DNA database. As I understand it, only around 40 officials can actually access it, and presumably there is only one normal point of access, while the records hardly ever need to be edited or updated because of their nature; they are matters of fact that do not change. That is rather different from other records such as health records. In my view, public and political opinion on the use of DNA profiling is governed by fear and misunderstanding rather than logic. We should give all citizens a reliable system of identity rather than go for an intrusive and bureaucratic process of trying to verify everyone’s ID.
Lord Desai (Lab)
My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours for introducing this debate. I always thought that it was a great pity that the last attempt by the Labour Government to have identity cards was abandoned on the grounds of research by, I am ashamed to say, the LSE that it would be too expensive. As noble Lords know, India has just instituted an almost universal identity card system called Aadhaar, which 900 million people have already got.
The Aadhaar card has been extremely useful for transactions with banks, claiming subsidies and accessing the welfare state, especially for very poor people who normally do not have proof of identity. The fact that they have very easily provable identity—I think because of the biometric data—has not only liberated a lot of people but reduced costs across both private and public transactions. If we are going to have this, could we ask the Indians to do it for us? They would probably do it for one-tenth of the price of anyone else and they are very good at it.
Let us not demand too much of such a card. First, having a universal identity card in everyone’s possession shows universality of membership of a community. It is very important that we are all part of the same community. Secondly, in relation to what the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, said, everything about me is known. It is not possible for me to have my individuality hidden and under just my control. As many noble Lords have pointed out, Walmart and Google know it. Recently I was writing a book and I was told that my book had to be more interesting because someone reading a book on a Kindle reads only four paragraphs at a time. Therefore, every fifth paragraph has to be exciting. Any time I use a phone or a Kindle, or do anything, somebody has mapped me. So I am not a free citizen.
We need first of all to make quite sure that our different numbers—our national health number, our national insurance number and so on—are co-ordinated. If we are to use a driver’s licence, people like me who do not drive will have to get one. We need some form of identity with a photograph and biometric identity information. It should be universal, and be able to be used for all bank transactions and any purchases, including bus travel and so on. If we do that, the saving in transaction costs would be enormous. The World Bank has admitted that just having these cards is saving India $1 billion per year, which is a great saving.
There will be terrorism anyway. In terms of separating people, those who have identity cards might be easier to map and those who do not have them definitely can be treated as suspects. The use of ID cards will not get rid of terrorism but it will ease our lives in many other ways, which is why we should do it.
Lord Oates (LD)
My Lords, I am pleased to speak in this debate. If ever I wondered about the need for a Liberal party, I do not wonder after hearing the comments today. I was proud to be part of the coalition Government in 2010 who repealed the Identity Cards Act 2006 and who ordered the destruction of the national identity database. I am also proud that my party has been consistent throughout its history in opposing national identity card schemes. Indeed, it was the only party that opposed from the outset the Labour Government’s attempts to impose identity cards in 2004. I am also pleased to follow my noble friend Lord Scriven in opposing the suggestion again today.
There are many reasons, both of principle and practicality, why a national identity card scheme is a very bad idea. The most important issue of principle is that it would fundamentally alter the relationship between the state and its citizens. It violates the fundamental traditions of Britain that have kept our liberties safe.
We need to be really clear about what a national ID card system, with a national ID card database, actually means. For the first time in our peacetime history, the state would have the power to demand information from every person in the land, not in order for them to travel or gain an internationally recognised travel document—a passport—or to prove that they have complied with the driving test, or even to gain access to a public service, but simply because they exist. For the first time in peacetime, every person in this country would be compelled to attend a designated place, to be fingerprinted and to have their biometric data taken from them. On every occasion that a citizen moved house the state would have the right to know. More than that, every citizen would be under a duty to inform the state, and a penalty of severe fines, if they moved their premises.
An ID scheme is being discussed here as if it is just some administrative system. It is a fundamental departure from the way we operate in this country. I can think of no other common-law country in the world that operates a national identity scheme—none. Indeed, we have heard comments from noble Lords telling us how popular a national identity system would be. I wonder about that, because there are two common-law countries that thought about introducing such a system: Australia and New Zealand. They backtracked pretty rapidly because as soon as the public actually knew what it meant they changed their views on it rather quickly. Indeed, I can think of no other democracy in the world that operates a national ID scheme that does not offer its citizens the protection of a written constitution and a Bill of Rights.
Lord Desai
Does the noble Lord not think that India is a democracy? Does it not have a written constitution? It has an identity card: 900 million people have such cards.
Lord Desai
But does the noble Lord not believe that India is a democracy? He said that no democracy has it, but India is a democracy.
Lord Oates
India has a written constitution. I said that no democracy in the world operates a national identity system that does not have and does not afford its citizens the protection of a written constitution, which India does, and a Bill of Rights, which India also does. The noble Lord makes my point rather clearly.
I will rapidly wind up my comments, but I want to address a couple of specific things. The noble Lord, Lord Blair, told the House about circumstances in which the police and the security services did not, and still do not, have information about who somebody actually is. He also said that the police would not need to stop people and demand papers from them, but in those circumstances it is not clear to me how he could be absolutely sure that the people he refers to would have had documents. If the police are not checking for them, it would certainly be possible for people to avoid that.
The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, had a lot of faith in biometric data, but as we have heard evidenced, 10% of French biometric passports have been found to be forged. The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, spoke about illegal workers and tax evasion, but as we know, places such as Italy, France and other countries with ID cards still have to deal with those problems.
A national identity card system would not protect us from terrorism, or stop illegal immigration or illegal workers. But above all, it would violate the fundamental principle that, in this country, it is the state that accounts to the people; it is not the people who have to account to the state.
Lord Hughes of Woodside (Lab)
My Lords, I join those who have congratulated my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours on initiating this important debate and, indeed, on his powerful speech.
I am one of the dwindling number in your Lordships’ House who carried my identity card during the war when I went to school. I had no problem with that: indeed, I was rather proud to have an identity card. Now, of course, the argument is made that that was wartime. Make no mistake, we are currently in a de facto war situation. Call it ISIS, call it Daesh, call it what you will, but the growing number of terrorist groups means that we are at war. In these circumstances, we have to use every instrument we can to try to protect ourselves.
The noble Lords, Lord Scriven and Lord Oates, have elevated the carrying of identity cards to some great principle and say that it is quite wrong that the state should be involved. They have argued that identity cards do no good at all. No one in this House has argued that the use of identity cards is a silver bullet and will solve the problems we are experiencing—of course they will not. However, they are a necessary tool which I believe must be used.
The second argument is the civil liberties one. Again, the noble Lords, Lord Scriven and Lord Oates—perhaps according to the script—promote that argument. Civil liberties are not absolute; they cannot be absolute. No organised state can operate on the basis of vanity. The noble Lords say that the state does not demand this and does not demand that. How far do they take that argument? Are they saying, for example, that it is wrong for the state to say that, if someone wants to drive, they must have a driving licence? Is that the case? No, of course not. That is the trouble with taking things to ridiculous extremes. To say that identity cards pose all sorts of challenges is quite mistaken. It is the duty of a state to protect civil liberties. Indeed, I would be the last to allow the state to infringe my civil liberties. However, civil libertarians have a right and a duty to defend and nurture the state and the society which make those civil liberties available. That is where I part company with the Liberal Democrats in particular as they do not recognise that those of us who are involved in society in this country have a right to defend ourselves and, indeed, to make things better.
Of course, there are many different identity schemes around. For example, I carry a driving licence, as do many people. I also carry a bank card, two supermarket loyalty cards and my Automobile Association membership. I say “Automobile Association membership” in case saying AA membership is misunderstood. I also carry my Labour Party membership card and an organ donor card. People ask why it is necessary to carry anything else. It is vital that we understand that although these different cards cover a broad spectrum, it could be argued that the cards I carry are perfect cover for someone who is up to no good. It just depends how you look at it.
We have to understand that all cards currently in use are vulnerable to one extent or the other. Of course, the use of biometric passports is improving the situation. However, the fact is that there is concern about cards being used in counterfeiting. In the dangerous world in which we live, it is necessary to defend ourselves and at the same time protect our civil liberties. A discussion about identity cards is valuable. Today’s debate will not solve everything but I hope that it will reignite the campaign to introduce identity cards.
The Earl of Erroll (CB)
My Lords, I want to look at this from a practical point of view. Will the ID cards or a national database work? The first thing I want to know is what is it for? People think that it will help with payments and with fraud but what I want to know is that someone has paid their bill, I do not really need to know who they are. With travel and passports, is this a great reliable thing with the Government issuing it? In 2007, it was admitted that there were 10,000 fraudulently obtained but real passports issued by the Passport Office, because even it cannot protect against everything.
In terms of access, we have House of Lords passes to get in here; we do not really need an ID card especially for that. On medical and NHS matters, we have a number for that. Could it be amalgamated with something else? The problem is that expatriates go abroad; that is why there are more NHS numbers than we have people. All those expatriates can come back here at any point and demand services.
You might want to prove your qualifications; you have a driving licence for that. I suppose you could try to amalgamate things into one card but would you have to change the card every time you got a different qualification? Actually, everything is online now—all they do is look you up. You are not even going to have the paper part any more that says what your speeding offences are and so on.
The other thing such a document could be for is collecting tax, with the NINO, or the national insurance number—but, “Oh, there are far too many of those”. Foreigners working here receive entitlements by paying in and if they come back here to work later on, they are entitled to benefits. If they come and retire here they are entitled to their past history. We have lots of people on the system who may come back. It is not one-to-one so we should not want it linked to ID cards.
So the ID card is going to identify the bad guys—great. Will it work? Does it say “terrorist” or “crook” on it? What does the CRB check, as it used to be called, tell you? What it says is that you have not been caught yet. This is the trouble with these things. The 2004 Madrid bombers, for instance, were stopped by the police, who had no idea that they were terrorists and let them go. Does a card tell you where the bail-jumper is? It does not have a special tracking device on it to tell you who is a bail-jumper; it does not do anything like that.
I point out that 35 million tourists come to this country every year, for eight days each on average—that is just the tourists; there are also all the businesspeople. That is an awful lot of foreign identity documents, issued by all sorts of places which I do not think I had better name; let us call them Ruritania in general, although I can tell you that an awful lot are issued by states that have no interest in helping us whatsoever. How do you check that a document belongs to a particular person, otherwise it is just a flash-and-go card; you look at the picture and maybe it looks sufficiently like the person: “You’ve grown a beard, okay, I won’t worry”? There are portable biometric readers but the trouble with biometrics is that they change with age; even DNA can change a bit but I do not know enough about it to know whether all or just a critical bit changes. What I do know is that, within the limited accuracy of laboratory test results—because they are always reduced to a set number of points that can be compared electronically—you will find that you have duplicate thumb or finger-prints, which, visually, you might be able to see are different. It is the same thing with a portion of DNA; usually it is said to be a one-in-6-million match. That means that, with that level of accuracy in the testing, there are 10 people in the UK with the same DNA as you. Given that most of the population are in the south-east, it means that quite a few of them are close to where you are. So, by coincidence, quite a few people could be stopped who might be mistaken for you.
Another big problem is false negatives. You stick your cash card into the wall to take out some money and you stick your ID card in alongside, you put your thumb on the reader and it then says you are not you. But you have a bill to pay or you have to pay a chap who is trying to do you for dropping litter on the ground—with all these new police powers or local authority powers we are getting. You cannot take out the money so you have to spend the night in jail because it has said that you are not you. The false negatives are very difficult; the moment you try to eliminate them, you lessen your biometric uniqueness. You have to blur it a bit more, because there are huge problems around that.
What I really worry about, which has been mentioned already, is the Gestapo/Stasi issue. Whenever the state has had a huge amount of knowledge about us, it has used it for its own ends. I will mention that at the very end.
It also helps fraud if you have a single number. The US experience of having a single tax number to link all your details makes it much easier. If you can get that off someone plus a couple of other bits, you get everything on them. It is much easier to impersonate them there. Here, it is much harder to get everything and there is therefore friction between the different silos, when something does not quite match if you catch the crooks. They have half your information but not all of it. Of course, if we link up all the databases it will be a magnet for the crooks and spies. The first thing I would do as a foreign agency would be to have someone in there to get the details so that I could put in implants, create identities and so on. It will only give us a false sense of security.
You can actually get a good feel for how someone is by building up a profile of what they do online. Their digital footprint is probably much more critical nowadays. With online feedback and references, you can discover whether people are good or bad by other people in the community telling you whether they are all right. That is how we do things in real life: we get references about people.
To finish off, I recommend a very good miniseries of “Doctor Zhivago” that was done in 2002. Interestingly, it was nothing like the old David Lean romance but all about how a powerful apparatchik with access to information can control a family for his own nefarious ends. We should just be careful that we do not end up with a J Edgar Hoover in the UK starting to control things because he has access to the databases. I am not entirely paranoid but, just because I am, it does not mean to say that they are not out to get me. Another thing I do not want to see is cordon and search to trawl for illegal immigrants or bail-jumpers, for example—how else are these people to be found?—because of the ID card. All I can say is that if you are eating your dinner and the waiters at your great occasion have all been hauled off for checking but did not have the right ID cards, you are going to be pretty cross.
Lord Rosser (Lab)
My Lords, first, I add my thanks to those expressed already by so many others to my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours for securing this debate. It provided us with a real trip down memory lane to be reminded by my noble friend Lord Harris of Haringey of an early episode of “Fawlty Towers” and then to be fascinated by hearing about his favourite places.
As my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours said, both Conservative and Labour Governments, and the Home Affairs Committee in the other place, have at differing times expressed an interest in, or introduced, identity cards. In May 1995, the Conservative Government published a Green Paper on identity cards. In 1996, the Home Affairs Select Committee in the other place concluded in a report that the balance of advantage to the individual citizen and to the public as a whole was in favour of some form of voluntary identity card, subject to a number of provisos. The committee also stated that only a compulsory card, or one that carried details of immigration status, would have an impact on preventing illegal immigration. The Queen’s Speech of the 1996-97 parliamentary Session then included a commitment by the then Government to publish a draft Bill on the introduction of voluntary identity cards.
In 2004, the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee published a report, following its own inquiry and the publication of a draft Bill by the then Government, which concluded that the Government had made a convincing case for proceeding with the introduction of identity cards. The committee said that the test should be whether the measures needed to install and operate an effective identity card system were proportionate to the benefits such a system would bring and to the problems to be tackled, and whether such a proposed system was the most effective way of achieving this goal. It also expressed the view that the scheme proposed by the then Government would represent a significant change in the relationship between the state and the individual—a point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Oates, who was opposed to going down the road advocated by my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours.
The Labour Government then passed the Identity Cards Act 2006, which created a framework for national identity cards in the UK and a national identity register. The rollout of compulsory ID cards for foreign nationals began in November 2008 and the rollout of the identity card to UK residents began on a voluntary basis in November 2009. The then Government argued that the Act would achieve less illegal migration and illegal working, enhance the UK’s capability to counter terrorism and serious and organised crime, reduce identity fraud and lead to more efficient and effective delivery of public services. That was not a view shared by the incoming 2010 Conservative-led coalition Government, who immediately passed an Identity Documents Act cancelling identity cards, which ceased to be a legal document for confirming a person’s identity in January 2011 and ceased to be a valid travel document. However, as has been said, the UK Border Agency continues to issue biometric residence permits to non-European Economic Area foreign nationals staying in the UK for more than six months to provide evidence of the holder’s immigration status in this country.
In his speech, my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours made his case for identity cards in his typically powerful and persuasive manner, and raised a number of points which require a full answer from the Government if this debate is to have any meaningful purpose and not simply turn out to be little better than a talking shop. On previous, very recent occasions when the issue of identity cards has been raised, both in this House and in the other place, the Government’s response has been that they considered money that would have been spent on identity cards had been and was being more usefully spent on better equipping security forces and better securing our borders.
There are two points on that. First, to suggest that we have improved and are improving control of our borders by using money not being spent on identity cards seems a rather doubtful claim from a Government who are nowhere near achieving their own declared objective of net migration in the tens of thousands, who apparently have large numbers of asylum seekers whose claims they have rejected still in this country without even knowing where they are, and who have no real idea how many people are in this country with no authority to be here.
The second point is that the Government appear to see identity cards as an inferior option to investing in other means of improving security and control rather than as potentially another complementary string to the bow. If that is the Government’s argument and I have not misrepresented it, they have to make their case, including by responding in detail to the specific and clear points made by my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours about the potential wide-ranging benefits of identity assurance and an identity database. As has been said, many other European countries have identity card systems in one form or another in which they appear to have confidence, so it is not some revolutionary, untested idea.
As my noble friend Lord Harris of Haringey and others have said, we also live in a society where, in the light of technological developments, the amount already known about an individual, or which can relatively easily be found out about an individual, by both commercial and other organisations and the state is considerable and seems to expand by the year. As a result, the extent to which it can be claimed that an identity card system and an identity register represent some further unacceptable intrusion into privacy is one on which there are likely to be very different views.
In the House of Commons earlier this week, the Government were asked by both a Conservative and a Labour Member to reconsider the question of ID cards in the light of issues concerning immigration and the identification, detention and deportation of illegal immigrants, as well as the introduction of digital services, national security and the protection of UK citizens from terrorism. In his speech, my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours laid emphasis on how he considered the benefits of identity assurance went way beyond those areas and into addressing the increasingly worrying area of identity fraud.
I have to say that this is a Government who are prone, on occasions, to making hasty decisions on security and border control issues. There was the issue of control orders, which the Government decided they could not countenance but then found they had to bring back in all but name. Then there was the Government’s determination to opt out of EU directives on justice and home affairs issues, only to find, when reason prevailed, that it was in the national interest to opt back in to the key matters. Perhaps this was when the Government finally appreciated that Europe and co-operation were not the causes of security issues and other problems, but rather the potential solutions to them.
Given this Government’s track record in this area of, on occasions, acting first and thinking second, the issue raised by my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours deserves not to be hastily dismissed as it has been on previous occasions. Instead, the case that my noble friend has made today deserves to be considered carefully in the light of the current situation—particularly in respect of increasing identity fraud, the need for identity assurance, the threat of terrorist activity and apparent levels of illegal immigration—and given an evidence-based response, irrespective of whether the Government decide they are going to change their approach or not.
I hope that that is what the Government’s line will be today: that, without any commitment to change their current stance, they will nevertheless set up a review of the advantages or otherwise of the introduction of an ID system giving identity insurance, including looking at the position in other countries that have such systems and the benefits or otherwise that those systems actually bring—an issue raised by the noble Lord, Lord Scriven.
In today’s environment, all measures that might further enhance security and address other significant problems and issues, including identity fraud, merit careful and full consideration of their advantages and disadvantages so that decisions made on what measures it is in the interest of our nation and our citizens to adopt are clearly evidence-based.
The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Bates) (Con)
My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, for securing this debate and continuing an exchange which we had when he raised his Question in your Lordships’ House recently.
At the outset, let me say that I may well disappoint the noble Lord by the nature of my response, because the Government’s position is that identity cards as described—and certainly as introduced by the previous Labour Government—failed essential tests in that they were expensive. I realise that the sums talked about— £85 million—may not in the current scheme of things seem large, but back in times of austerity in 2010 they were very significant. Where something was not delivering the expected benefits, the decision was made to use that funding elsewhere.
I totally agree with the noble Lord’s analysis of a growing problem. We need to look at it very carefully. A number of noble Lords spoke about the changing nature of commerce and the way the state interacts with citizens, which raise a number of serious questions about how we establish our identity and keep services and information safe. That is why the Government issue a number of identity documents at present. Some 54 million people—84% of the population—have a passport. Increasingly, those passports carry biometric data, which can be used at special e-border gates that are being introduced. Sixty per cent of the population carry a photo driving licence. I understand that that does not apply to the noble Lords, Lord Berkeley and Lord Harris, but a large proportion of the population does.
Several noble Lords rightly pointed to the fact that, outside of identity cards, there is an EU agreement that all people coming from outside the EEA into that area for a period in excess of six months should be required to have a biometric residence permit. So far, 2 million of those documents have been issued. Moreover, there is a similar European requirement for an application registration card for those claiming asylum in any EEA member country. That applies in this country as well.
I should say at this point that I fully support the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, about collaboration with our European colleagues on security grounds being critical to the safety and security of people in this country. I shall come to some of the measures to which he referred later.
The first point is that there are already a large number of established and robust identity documents. The British passport is recognised as a gold standard in the international community, in terms of its ability to frustrate the fraudsters and those who would seek to copy these documents. Then there is the legislation we introduced just last year on specialist printing presses, which ought to be clamped down on—and the penalties should be increased.
So we have, first, already a large number of identity documents that could be called upon in certain circumstances to establish and verify people’s identity.
Lord Campbell-Savours
Would the Minister confirm that there are no biometric data in the form to which I referred in my contribution for those 600 UK citizens who have gone to join ISIS and who may well return to the United Kingdom in the near future to carry out terrorist offences? Would he confirm that we do not hold biometric data on those persons, unless they committed a crime in the United Kingdom in the period before they left to go to Syria or Iraq?
Lord Bates
In the strict way in which the noble Lord poses the question, of course, the answer would be—
Lord Bates
Well, in one way, of course, that would be the answer. But let me unfold this, if I can. First, as a result of the counterterrorism legislation that we introduced last year, the Government are now able to intervene and seize someone’s passport before they actually leave the country. Secondly, as a result of that legislation there is the ability to have a controlled or managed return for the individual to this country. Additional passenger name recognition registration information needs to be supplied in advance, and since April, we have introduced exit checks for people leaving this country. Therefore, those people would have needed genuine passports, which would have been checked at the border.
Lord Bates
We do not know the specific type of passports they were travelling with in that instance. But additional elements have been introduced to improve our security, and I may just go through a few of them. Certainly, the passenger name records directive was agreed at the Justice and Home Affairs Council following the Paris attacks last year. We have the biometric residence permit, the application registration card, and the Prüm requirements for the exchange of databases. We are part of the Schengen information-sharing system with our European colleagues, and we are going to be part of the second-generation Schengen system. We are part of the European criminal records information system for sharing data across borders. Of course, I appreciate that people will feel that additional information is required, which is one reason why we are introducing the Investigatory Powers Bill. We are also investing heavily in our border security: £380 million of investment is going into the borders and immigration citizenship system, and the digital services for the border security programme, to which we have committed. We have committed an additional £64.5 million to the Channel ports to improve security there, and we have announced a further £1.9 billion to be spent on intelligence and security matters.
Lord Berkeley
That is a lovely list of what is happening and what he is doing, but did the Minister read the piece in the Guardian on Monday, which I briefly referred to, which said that two of the terrorists came and in out through Dover without being checked? I remember that some time last year before the election, when the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, was a Minister, I complained that lorries and cars were not being checked going into Dover, and her answer was that if we checked everyone we would cause a traffic jam. That is a pretty bad reason.
Lord Bates
In the wake of the terrorist attacks, we have introduced 100% border checks at scheduled arrival ports in the United Kingdom. I cannot see how that assertion would stack up with the evidence.
Lord Marlesford
What matters is the proportion of people who are checked when they arrive and leave. What is the figure in each case now—not what is planned, not what is hoped for, but now?
Lord Bates
I gave the answer in another context. We have introduced 100% checks for scheduled arrivals at main UK ports, and in April we introduced exit checks for scheduled departures from UK ports.
Lord Marlesford
Is my noble friend saying that 100% refers to exit checks as well?
Lord Bates
I am saying that the exit checks apply at scheduled departure ports. That is quite a precise statement. That covers the vast majority of people who come in and out of this country.
Lord Marlesford
I am sorry, I must ask my noble friend: are 100% of the people leaving the UK checked or not?
Lord Bates
The short answer is no by my noble friend’s definition, but at the principal ports of entry and departure 100% are checked.
Let me cover some of the additional points that have been raised. The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, raised some very interesting points about prisoner numbers. I will share them with the Ministry of Justice and look at whether there could be greater use of existing identity numbers for people in prisons to allow better and easier access to different sorts of information.
The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, made the point that better identity information might lead to greater tax revenues. The UK has one of the smallest tax gaps in the world, which is a reflection not only of the effectiveness of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs but of the tax rates that are levied on people.
On the argument that we ought to have more information in fewer places, to the point where we receive all information in one place, as the noble Lord, Lord Maxton, postulated might happen in future, multiple sources of data help reduce some security risks. If all DWP, health, passport, criminal record, DVLA, HMRC, DBS and DNA data were in one place, it would make their cybersecurity extremely vulnerable. My noble friend Lady Shields is Minister for Internet Safety and Security, and I will make sure that the contents of this debate and noble Lords’ contributions to it are drawn to her attention.
It is right to talk about the balance between liberty and security, as the noble Lords, Lord Scriven and Lord Oates, said, but it is also correct that without security there can be no liberty. However, their points were made, and I have noted them. An important guarantee of those liberties is the rigorous, independent system for checking where access may have occurred. For example, we have a Biometrics Commissioner, an Information Commissioner and even a Surveillance Camera Commissioner. They are all important guarantees to citizens that their information is handled carefully.
The noble Viscount, Lord Simon, mentioned the Disclosure and Barring Service. I shall write to the noble Viscount about that. There is a service standard on the Disclosure and Barring Service which would be substantially less than the three-month to four-month term that he mentioned. We will therefore need to find out why, in those particular circumstances, that was not being met.
The noble Lord, Lord Blair, challenged me—this is a very important point—to say from a Conservative perspective why Conservatives are so opposed to this. As a number of noble Lords have mentioned, this is not an ideological position; it was a Conservative Government who first introduced and discussed the idea of having an identity card, so it is not something to which we as a party are ideologically opposed. However, we have hardly been guilty of changing our mind on this at frequent intervals; we set out our position very clearly, from 2005 onwards, that we were opposed to ID cards. I recall taking part in debates from the other side of the House during the passage of that legislation and around that time, so we have been very clear for 10 years that we do not believe that to be the way forward.
The noble Lord, Lord Blair, is a distinguished former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. As we were preparing for this debate, I asked what representations we had received from the police and security services saying they believed that an ID card as proposed would be essential for them in tackling fraud or crime.
Lord Maxton
Will the Minister make clear exactly what the Government are doing about identity numbers, or whatever they might be, in relation to the provision of services by the Government?
Lord Bates
Let me finish this point, then I shall come to that one. The point that I was making is that this is not something that has been repeatedly asked for. We are not repeatedly approached by ACPO, the College of Policing or the security services asking us to consider reintroducing it. I hope the noble Lord, Lord Harris, will appreciate that that is not an insignificant point; there is no growing clamour from the police and security services that our society is at risk and there is a great gap here. What they are asking for are additional powers such as those proposed in the investigatory powers Bill and in the counterterrorism legislation that was introduced last year.
With regard to people coming to this country, where the noble Lords, Lord Scriven and Lord Oates, both had a point was in saying that where countries have ID cards there is little evidence that their crime levels are significantly lower than ours—our crime levels continue to fall—that their experience of terrorism was greater or less or was affected by that, or that they had less legal migration to the country. Through the Immigration Bill, we are seeking to make it much more difficult for those people who are here illegally to operate within this country—to gain employment, get a driving licence or a bank account, or to rent accommodation. All those things are being put forward in this system.
As I draw to a close, I shall deal briefly with the point made my noble friend Lord Attlee, who asked about DNA. We have looked at the match of DNA. One of the things that we have signed up to is the exchange of DNA databases. I know he is arguing that the DNA database ought to be much more widely held, and even compulsory. We would not go that far, but we believe that DNA can play a crucial role in resolving crimes and acting as a deterrent. That is why we signed up to the Prüm measures, which will allow those exchanges of information to be made.
A number of other points were raised in the debate, but I can simply say that the Government have certainly not set their face against this in an ideological way. We have considered the case that has been made and have found it wanting. That debate will continue. The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, said in his introduction that this area of debate will not go away. I suspect that it will not; we will continue to look at it but will also make vigorous and critical arguments as to the many things we are doing to maintain our security and keep our civil liberties in place as well.
Lord Campbell-Savours
My Lords, I am indebted to all noble Lords who have spoken. To the Liberal Democrats who spoke during the debate I say that I fully recognise the traditional commitment to civil liberties of the Liberal Party and its successor, the Liberal Democrats, but I ask them to ponder my case. If my liberty is compromised due to the unfettered and unaccountable actions of another, I have been subject to an injustice. In those circumstances the card helps protect my liberty. That is at the heart of the case that many of us have put. I therefore say to the Liberal Democrats that it may be that in these times they have the whole argument the wrong way round and that they should be thinking more in terms of protecting those whose liberty is accosted or compromised.
The comments made by the noble Earl, Lord Erroll, on the inaccuracy of biometrics were very interesting. Would he refer me after the debate or at some later stage to the sources of that information? I promise him that I shall read them in some detail. I thank the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, for his comments on DNA and, in particular, for his reference to the National DNA Database being secure. Of course, he acted as a Minister here for a department that was responsible for that area of government policy.
I thank my noble friend Lord Berkeley for reinforcing my comment that survival without ID in the United Kingdom is possible; indeed, you can operate outside the system without paying taxes while enjoying all the services. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Blair of Boughton, for pointing out that the ID card could be a powerful tool in investigating criminal activity.
I fully support my noble friend Lord Simon’s comments on the need to expedite criminal background checks. That is a problem at the moment and the card would certainly help in doing that.
I am very interested in the advanced thinking and perceptive thoughts of my noble friend Lord Maxton, who talked about smartcards for all and, ultimately, the chip in the hand. Can we imagine a society in which we will have a chip in the arm or hand which holds all these data and which itself replaces the card?
Finally, the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, has given me another subject to put on my list of benefits—that is, the benefits within the prison system of greater access to prisoner identity and how that helps the prisoner, not only the prison system. I am very grateful for the debate and I thank noble Lords.
Cultural Property: Hague Convention
(8 years, 10 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Baroness Andrews
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their plan for ratifying the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict.
Baroness Andrews (Lab)
My Lords, I am extremely grateful to have secured this debate this evening. I first sought it six months ago. In fact, if anything, it has become more timely. I am particularly grateful to all the noble Lords who are remaining in the Chamber and will be contributing. It is not the best of times. It is a very unfashionable hour and it is extremely cold, and I really appreciate the effort that noble Lords have made to take part. I am very grateful to the Minister for the hard work that she has already done on this matter.
I offer particular thanks to Dr Peter Stone, who holds the UNESCO Chair in Cultural Property Protection and Peace at the University of Newcastle. He has been extremely generous with his help, and I know that he is well known to many noble Lords. I also offer thanks to Dr Mike Heyworth of the Council for British Archaeology, and to a young lady called Eleanor Clare Williams, who provided me with invaluable research assistance.
It was in June last year that the Government finally announced, 62 years after signing the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, that they were ready to ratify the convention and to join the other 126 nations which had already done so. They included the USA, although when the USA agreed to ratify the convention in 2009, it did not agree to ratify the protocols.
At the same time, the Government announced that this legislation would be supplemented by a cultural protection fund to support the work of cultural protection in areas of armed conflict. However, apart from the useful confirmation from the Minister on 2 July last year that the UK would indeed ratify both the protocols attached to the convention, there has been silence. At least, that had been the case until today, when, with exquisite timing, I am delighted to say that the Government published their consultative document on the cultural protection fund. It is very good to see it now in the open for consultation, which will last until 19 February. I hope that this debate will make a contribution to that process.
This is not the place to speculate on why we have been so negligent in ratifying the convention or on how this can be reconciled with our leadership role in so many other areas of heritage protection across the world. I would be interested in any comments that the Minister can make. However, this debate essentially presents the opportunity for the Government to tell us, in short, when the legislation will be introduced, what form it will take and what the overall timetable is for implementation.
Given the apparent lack of action on the part of government, it is just as well that there has been progress in other areas—not least in the very welcome formal creation of the international Blue Shield under Dutch law. I hope that that will be a very important step on the route to it becoming the equivalent of the Red Cross for heritage.
We have also seen the creation of our own all-party group on cultural property, which now sits alongside the All-Party Parliamentary Archaeology Group. In addition, a raft of work is now being done across the UK to record the threat to cultural property beyond the Middle East. There is also evidence of an increasingly close understanding between civil and military leadership, seen most notably in the UK with the creation of the British Army’s cultural property protection working party, led by Lieutenant-Colonel Tim Purbrick. It is using as a basis the four-tier approach to best practice developed by the Blue Shield and there is a commitment to the creation of a relevant capability within the new 77 Brigade.
What we have today, therefore, is a growing sense of urgency, which has been underlined by the grotesque failures in Iraq and is now fuelled by the increasing barbarity in Syria. The events of the past six months have, I believe, changed the game. They have made the effective application of the convention more urgent than ever, both as a clear framework of principles and criteria and also as the means of attributing individual responsibility and securing justice through the International Criminal Court.
In recent months the world has been witness to an increasing incidence of cultural nihilism targeted at the destruction of one of the world’s greatest civilisations—a civilisation which has certainly shaped our values and cultural history. The consultative document published today puts it well, saying that throughout history culture and heritage have often been targeted for destruction by those who oppose others’ values, beliefs and ways of life. Indeed, in the past, the destruction of cultural heritage has often been a specific weapon of war and propaganda, targeting monuments of great significance—for example, the Mostar Bridge in Bosnia. However, cultural heritage is equally vulnerable to ignorance and collateral damage, and in Syria at the moment, to opportunistic looting—a very toxic and lethal mix. Across Syria, as Francesco Bandarin of UNESCO put it, vast regions are classified as “distressed cultural areas”—sites such as the ancient city of Apamea, where early Roman settlements are being swiftly and ruthlessly destroyed. If the Minister permits, I will send her two images of the extent of the damage to Apamea, which has happened very quickly.
In Palmyra itself, the amphitheatre has become a performance space for the theatre of cruelty: a place of execution. In effect, the monument has been taken hostage and its greatest champion and curator, Khaled al-Asaad, was brutally murdered at the age of 82. As an example of collateral damage, the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, who cannot be here today, told me of the damage to the Ottoman mosque in Sur, in Diyarbakir, Turkey, which has been largely destroyed, this time in the conflict between the Turkish Government and the Kurds.
There is, I believe, not a day to be lost in ratifying the convention and protocols so that the UK can finally show its commitment to the protection of universal cultural heritage, establish consistency with our own pride in our own history, and signal our shared human values and culture. If anything—and this is more important—we should do so because we recognise that long and sustained peace cannot be achieved if cultural heritage is destroyed in areas of conflict. This view is rooted in the experience of the military, not least in Iraq.
Cultural property has always been a casualty of war, but it is equally true that military theorists and strategists alike argue that to destroy cultural identity is to create enemies for life. Stretching from 1625, when the Dutch scholar Grotius wrote On the Law of War and Peace, to the evidence presented to the Chilcot inquiry in 2010 by the UK heritage agencies, the case has been made in different ways. In 2010, the agencies documented the different ways in which,
“by failing to provide for the protection of cultural property, Coalition planners made it considerably more difficult for troops on the ground to win hearts and minds”.
There was never a more telling need for the protection of cultural property as an exercise in soft power.
The result of that understanding, over time, has been the refinement of legal frameworks, whether for the protection of civilian life or for the protection of cultural identity and property. The Hague Convention and its protocols are the culmination of that and are designed to provide as effective a framework as possible for the implementation of protection.
Given both the convention’s ethical and political importance and its strategic value, it is very disappointing that it has taken the UK so long to prioritise its ratification. There was a missed opportunity in 1999 when the Second Protocol was presented—especially since the Government at the time recognised that the provisions of the convention had been tightened to make it more enforceable. Indeed, a Bill was available in 2008 to do just that—but parliamentary time was not found.
So I come back to the question I put to the Minister, and to some related issues. When will parliamentary time be found? What progress has actually been made on the drafting of legislation? Will the 2008 Bill as redrafted be used as the basis for ratification? Can she give us an idea of the precise parliamentary timetable and of the process? Can she assure me that it will be accomplished during this Session? Can she also assure me that the DCMS will be able to command the support of other departments and that policy is being effectively co-ordinated—and, if so, how? I am sure that she is aware that UK heritage bodies are fully in support and see no difficulties in our taking this step,
Clearly, the involvement and support of the MoD and the armed services in making the convention as effective as possible will be crucial. It is in their interests to do so. There is a great deal of evidence of their understanding and involvement, especially since Iraq, in promoting the value of cultural protection. Can the Minister therefore confirm that the MoD also sees ratification as a very positive step? Can she also tell me something of the response of the other armed services, in particular the Air Force, and whether equal action is being taken?
On the funding of ISIL, does the Minister also agree that as long as civilian populations are impoverished and made desperate, ISIL will be able to profit in different ways from the proceeds of the illicit trade in antiquities, and that there is likely to be no brake on looting and exploitation? Can she tell me whether any strategies are in place to deal with this, either in the area or, for example, by tackling the illegal trade coming into the UK?
I turn to the proposals for the new fund for cultural property. The funding is enormously welcome and came as something of a surprise. However, does the Minister agree that it has to be managed as smartly as possible? I am sure she is aware of the recommendations made in the open letter from the UK national committee of Blue Shield in October to the Secretary of State, which emphasised the paramount need for co-ordination to organise and direct existing work in the field, as well as for training and capacity. This is extremely important. It must not be just another layer of activity. It is needed to support the work of the established organisations, including Blue Shield, which have done so much with so little so far.
Finally, does the Minister agree that the UK is not alone in realising its responsibility towards the protocol? Five members of the UN Security Council have not ratified the convention, but France and China are actively considering doing so. There is a considerable prize if we act quickly now and establish ourselves as global leaders rather than slow learners.
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, for securing this timely debate on what I term the “international monuments men” convention. If it were possible, this debate should not be happening in either Chamber but under the arch of the House of Commons, which was damaged in the Second World War and which Prime Minister Churchill insisted be put back in an unrepaired state. Although parts of the Palace of Westminster belong to the Queen, in many senses it belongs to the British people, and much of what your Lordships point out to our guests on the tourist trail would not be here had it not been for the wise stewards who removed many of the monuments prior to the Second World War. These prudent actions mirror the principles in Article 3 of the Hague convention.
My interest in this issue arises from a principle and, as is so often the case, a person. First, the principle: Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights outlines freedom of thought, conscience and religion or belief, and the right, either alone or in community with others, in private or in public, to manifest that religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship or observance. Obviously, this manifestation often includes buildings and monuments, which then form part of the cultural heritage of a nation. YouTube and social media perhaps further encourage the wanton destruction of ancient places in times of conflict, such as the Arch of Triumph in Palmyra. Current events are reminiscent of 16th-century iconoclastic riots associated mainly with Huldrych Zwingli, the early 20th-century mass destruction of Buddhist monasteries in China and the Tuareg uprising in 2012, which saw the destruction of 15th and 16th-century Sufi shrines in Timbuktu, Mali.
Secondly, the person is the inspirational Tasoula Hadjitofi, who was a refugee from northern Cyprus, which suffered widespread destruction of cultural heritage. The NGO she founded, Walk of Truth, has, alongside the London mayor, just launched the cultural crime watchers initiative to provide a way for people, especially refugees, to pass on intelligence on these looted artefacts. At an event in Parliament, Tasoula brought along four frescos that had been rescued, two of which have been identified since being put on display. It will be a privilege to see them returned to the Prime Minister of Cyprus on behalf of the Cypriot people later this year. If, as everyone hopes, Cyprus can be reunified, they might even be returned to the church ceiling from which they were stolen.
Turning to the convention, although signed in 1954 and in force from 1956, for many years the UK did not believe that the legislation was effective. But after the Balkans conflict, we saw the adoption of the second protocol, with clear criminal sanctions which the UK was involved in securing. Since then, there has been no good reason not to ratify the convention. Since 2004, the UK Government have said they will do so. However, I join the noble Baroness in wanting to know a precise parliamentary timetable for that. Sometimes the devil is in the detail, so I am grateful for the assurance today that the protocols will be ratified along with the convention.
Preserving cultural heritage is an important part of the reconciliation and restoration of the people affected by conflict, and not only in terms of the livelihoods that are often attached to cultural heritage. The UNESCO world heritage site in which we stand brings incalculable financial input into tourism. More importantly, when homes and neighbourhoods are destroyed and then the people eventually return, the presence of cultural heritage is cathartic and healing. It is harder to bring about peace when the environment in which people live has been destroyed.
Lakdhar Brahimi, the former UN and Arab League Special Envoy to Syria, said the following:
“Destroying the inheritance of the past robs future generations of a powerful legacy, deepens hatred and despair and undermines all attempts to foster reconciliation”.
Consider the significance of the Pope’s visit to the Central African Republic in December. He not only visited the Muslim community; he visited the mosque. It is important for the reconciliation of the religious communities and for the return of Muslim refugees that their religious buildings remain. The same is true for the diverse communities who, it is to be hoped, will one day return to their homes in the Middle East.
Her Majesty’s Government have played a leadership role on the international stage by trying to sever the finance to IS and similar groups, whose trade in artefacts was a key source of income. However, even though it may have declined, the trade in looted art, beyond its initial sale, enables organised criminal gangs to launder their money. Any object for sale whose provenance is not verifiable is suitable for this. The Metropolitan Police Art and Antiquities Unit is tasked with monitoring this trade but it has very few staff. I would be grateful if the Minister asked whether additional resources can be made available from counterterrorism funds to support this unit. The same routes that are used for the illegal trade in drugs, arms and humans are used for these looted artefacts. Therefore, any disruption of those routes will have the collateral benefit of affecting these other global illegal trades.
The need to ratify is now urgent. We are a global leader, but we are the only permanent member of the UN Security Council not to have ratified the convention. Given that 127 states have ratified it, this can only be said to be disappointing. The cultural protection fund announced last year is now out for consultation. However, it seems obvious that we must secure Syria’s heritage as well as Iraq’s, using whatever means we can. I commend the cultural protection team at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport for emailing me with details of the consultation on this matter. Such proactivity is helpful when the pace of life and of emails is so fast. I will pass the details on to the interested parties I know.
The irony is that the UK is fulfilling much of the substance of the convention through the special police unit, military units and the £3 million dedicated to the Iraqi emergency heritage management project run by the British Museum. The legislation is not complex and the matter is now urgent. Perhaps I will be forgiven if it is heretical to suggest that we might use a sitting Friday, in this Chamber at least, to pass the legislation.
Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Andrews and congratulate her on securing this debate. Her commitment and knowledge of heritage are unsurpassed in this House.
It is extraordinary that we are still having to hound the Government in Parliament to ratify the convention. It induces in me personally a mixture of incredulity, embarrassment and anger. As the noble Baroness just mentioned, the convention dates back to 1954: 45 years later the United States of America ratified the convention and the protocol was introduced. This removed the last vestige of excuse for our own Government not to ratify.
I was the Minister at DCMS with responsibility for heritage and cultural property between 1998 and 2001. We were determined to ratify and I pay tribute to Hillary Bauer, the director of the Cultural Property Unit, who pressed the case across Whitehall with the greatest energy and ability. In 2004, my successor, Lord McIntosh, was able to announce the intention of the Government to ratify. We then had another long interval before the draft Bill was provided in 2008. That was approved by everyone, with only minor drafting changes thought necessary. In 2009, another Heritage Minister, Barbara Follett, had to announce that the Government would ratify at the “earliest possibility”. In 2011, Ed Vaizey said the same. Later that year, the Secretary of State for Culture, Jeremy Hunt, said it. In 2014, poor Mr Vaizey—for whom I have the greatest admiration and I was delighted to see the tribute to him in a letter to the Times earlier this week; he is the longest lasting Minister for the Arts and I hope he will be an eternal fixture in that capacity—announced that it was a priority of the Government to ratify, but on the very next day DCMS officials wrote to interested parties to explain that the Cabinet committee had not been able to grant drafting authority for the Bill.
On a number of occasions, the noble Lord, Lord Renfrew, and the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, have pressed the Government on the matter in this Chamber. Last February, in an excellent debate in the House of Commons introduced by Mr Robert Jenrick, Members of Parliament from all parties pressed the Government. The Minister, David Lidington, said again that the Government were committed to ratification but it had not yet been possible to secure parliamentary time. The excuse that it has not yet been possible to secure parliamentary time is on the level of “the dog ate my homework”; it is pathetic. In June last year, the Secretary of State, John Whittingdale, announced not only that it was the Government’s intention to ratify, but that the cultural property fund would be set up and a summit would be held. All of that is greatly to his credit. In October last year, he said again that it was the intention of the Government to ratify, but we are now in January 2016. At least we have the announcement of the consultation document, but we do not have a Bill.
It would be comic if it were not tragic and, actually, humiliating. There can be no excuse. All the political parties are agreed that we should ratify. The whole of the UK heritage community seeks it, including the Council for British Archaeology and the British Museum, which has sought to do so much in the afflicted regions of the Middle East. The scholarly community is agreed, as of course is the UK Committee of the Blue Shield, and I add my tribute to Professor Peter Stone. The DCMS wants to ratify and, to my observation, the problem has never lain with the Ministry of Defence. We are also told that the FCO would like to ratify. What is the problem? Where is the blockage? Is there some substantive policy difficulty that we have not been told about? Is it simply that the business managers have not been bothered to make the time for this legislation? In the period between 2004 and 2016 there have been huge swathes of parliamentary time. Moreover, the Bill could go through on a fast track, but it should not be a handout Bill given by the Government to a private Member; it should be a government Bill because this is a proper government responsibility. When the Minister responds to the debate, will she please be candid with the House and tell us what the real reason is for the Government’s persistent failure to take the steps necessary to ratify the convention?
Why is this important? It is essentially because the UK is the only significant military power in the modern world not to have ratified the convention. We are a major presence that is engaged in a major way in the Middle East. We were leading belligerents in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and we have now embarked on a policy of air strikes in Syria. Equally, we have been deeply engaged in north Africa, particularly in Libya, where catastrophic damage has already been done to its heritage and much more is threatened. As the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, told us, Islamist fundamentalist iconoclasm has spread to Mali. The signal that is given by our failure to ratify is profoundly unfortunate. I would say that it is effectively a nod and a wink to the vandals, looters and traffickers. It betrays a lack of moral seriousness on the part of the Government, an impression that is unfortunately compounded by our propensity to sell weapons in the war-torn region of the Middle East. It is a scandal.
I do not want to be misunderstood. Ratification by Britain would not have stopped ISIL from its depredations. Its members would still have destroyed the Temple of Jonah, they would still have looted the ancient city of Nimrud to make money for ISIL and would have destroyed the buildings to generate propaganda. They would still have shown the world their video of ISIL members engaged in the destruction of ancient treasures in the museum at Mosul. Equally, they would still have done what they have done to Palmyra, about which all of us grieve.
In a grotesque parody of government, IS would still have established its ministry of antiquities, which ensures that it maintains a monopoly on the sale of antiquities in the region and the areas that it occupies, and issues licences and extracts levies. We would not have been able to stop starving Syrians selling cultural property that they could lay their hands on to enable them to feed their families.
More than ratification and legislation is needed. ISIL is a full-blown criminal enterprise dealing in cultural property to finance terrorism. It is engaged in assisting money laundering. This is much more than cultural outrage, yet Her Majesty’s Government appear to be pussyfooting in the face of this problem.
What is the Government’s assessment of the state of affairs in the UK antiquities market? We need a cross-governmental drive on law enforcement which engages the police, the National Crime Agency and HMRC. We need to be sure that the Government are intent on regulating and policing the market. As has been said, the police need to be properly resourced.
We need collaboration between the public and the private sectors. The Government need to ensure that dealers in antiquities maintain the proper standards and apply due diligence. They need to make sure that collectors, with whom ISIL seeks one-to-one relationships, know that they will be pursued and prosecuted if they are found out. They should work with insurance companies and ensure that transport companies that engage in this kind of business understand the risks that they run. They should work closely with archaeologists, museums, NGOs and, of course, other Governments. They should be learning from the experience of achieving international agreements on the matter of blood diamonds and a similar model might be helpful in relation to blood antiquities.
UN Resolution 2199, which was passed last year, requires member states to take appropriate steps to prevent the illegal trade in cultural property coming from Iraq and Syria. What is the Government’s precise policy to conform with that resolution?
What is their strategic vision? What do they see as the role for Blue Shield? What is their relationship with Blue Shield? There is an opportunity to lead here. We are told that the Government are intent on developing soft power—here is a perfect opportunity.
ISIS’s “cultural cleansing”, to use the phrase coined by Irina Bokova, the director-general of UNESCO, and its obliteration of the history of cultural and religious diversity in the Middle East will be traumatic for many generations to come. The longer the destruction continues, the longer it will take to establish peace. History will not be kind to a Government who dither and procrastinate over this problem. We need action, not words. The noble Baroness is a true blue Conservative. She will know that that is the title of a past Conservative manifesto. We need leadership and delivery. In April, it will be World Heritage Week. If the Government have not ensured the passage of ratification by then, I shall despair.
The Lord Bishop of Portsmouth
My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, for this debate and for the very important Question that she asks of the Government Front Bench. In June 2015, the Ministry of Defence answered a Written Question, as we have heard, on the timetable for ratifying the Hague convention. A Minister stated:
“The Government believes that protection of cultural property in the event of armed conflict is a priority and remains committed to that task”.
She confirmed the,
“plan to introduce legislation to ratify the Convention”,
as we know,
“as soon as Parliamentary time allows”.
The Answer continued with a reassurance:
“Respect for cultural property is already upheld across the Armed Forces and they currently act within the spirit of the 1954 Convention. This respect is incorporated into military law”.
I wholeheartedly welcome that commitment and ask the Minister if she can recognise both the embarrassment of the present and lengthy delay in ratification, which successive Governments since 2008 have pledged to end, and the compelling practical, cultural and humanitarian reasons for speedy rectification of this inordinate delay.
To act within the spirit of the convention is indeed right, and to respect cultural property, but we should agree to be bound by the principles and to implement law to ensure that the treaty is upheld. If there was some reason to hesitate over the 1954 protocol, I accept because of too low a level of criminal responsibility and some lack of clarity in terminology, those matters were surely addressed in the 1990 protocol. If there are no other issues and reservations, I hope that the Minister will welcome the encouraging nudge I offer and tell us that parliamentary time will be committed to this matter.
Cultural heritage is a mirror of our humanity. A good proportion of my time is spent in historic buildings—as well as here, in churches and cathedrals. I am deeply aware as I minister of the spiritual and cultural identity, as well as history, built into the fabric of those buildings and actively shaping that worshipping community today. Buildings cannot be considered merely as historic monuments, so whether it is the deliberate destruction of pre-Islamic remains by militant Islamic groups, as in Palmyra, or the deliberate targeting of religious buildings to destroy communities, as in the case of Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi from Mali, these atrocities do more than inflict physical damage. They are a callous assault on the dignity and identity of people, their communities, and their religious and historical roots.
As we know, these are current issues for two principal reasons. The first is with regard to the actions of military forces during conflict. Our own national conviction that cultural heritage is important is reflected in a century of legislation that protects not just buildings and sites but the sites’ settings and character. The earliest evidence of hominid occupation in northern Europe at Happisburgh, the still-used routes of Roman roads, the castles of the Norman conquest, the important national and religious identities of the Celtic nations, our great cathedrals and churches, and the bunkers dotting the landscape as evidence of the Cold War all form part of a rich tapestry, to which the state has given importance to protecting. As the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, reminded us, during both world wars there were large-scale and some smaller efforts to protect important cultural heritage. I think particularly of the removal of York Minster’s magnificent medieval great east window to protect it from Zeppelin raids in the First World War. It is entirely right, then, that the same legislature that has done so much for its own heritage should accord equal importance to its part in protecting the heritage of other nations during times of conflict.
Secondly, as we have also heard, this matter is current because trade in looted antiquities is a most pressing and immediate problem. I understand that the current situation is that it is illegal to remove items from, or sell on items received from, Syria since 2011 and Iraq since 1990. However, the enforcement of this law is up to individual countries and the lack of a paper trail is not putting many buyers off. Although the major auction houses are increasingly acting within the spirit of the convention and not selling suspect items, there are enough small and private sources which continue to sell items on. It can be almost impossible to prove an item was looted, especially as museum records from the originating countries have often been destroyed.
Ratifying the convention and protocols is one way in which the United Kingdom can make law enforcers take this problem far more seriously. Pursuing cases through the courts would provide a more effective deterrent than the current situation. Buying these items funds war and terror, and by not taking the strongest possible stand against the illegal trade the UK can be seen as complicit in this.
Finally, it seems to me that the conflict in Syria gives renewed urgency to this matter. The ratification of the convention is necessary not just to strengthen the United Kingdom’s ability to deal with issues of looted heritage, it is a vital part of taking an international stand against the destruction of cultural and built heritage which is part of the identity of local communities, and is also part of our shared humanity.
The Earl of Clancarty (CB)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, for the opportunity to speak in this debate and congratulate her on her excellent and comprehensive speech. For his extensive briefing, I also thank Peter Stone of Newcastle University, who, I should add, holds, from the beginning of this year, the first UNESCO chair in Cultural Property Protection and Peace, which is a coup for this country.
The debate of the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, is well timed. A number of things are coming together and there is now both increasing interest and activity, prompted of course, in part, by the terrible destruction wreaked in the Middle East in the last year in particular—destruction which, as the noble Baroness said, also included the tragic death of the Syrian archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad, who gave his life to protect his country’s heritage.
There is a growing sense that we in this country need to do much more than we are. Within Parliament there has been the launch of a new All-Party Group for the Protection of Cultural Heritage, and in October a one-day summit was held where the Government could hear presentations from a variety of experts. The Government have announced a hugely welcome £30 million cultural protection fund. My sense is that crucially, the British Armed Forces are not only now convinced that protecting culturally significant sites helps and does not hinder military action, but they see the importance of being proactive. My understanding is that Lieutenant Colonel Tim Purbrick, who has written the Army Headquarters paper on cultural protection and whose talk some of us attended at the All-Party Parliamentary Archaeology Group, is currently introducing the new team which is planned to be part of the new 77th Brigade. Excitingly, they will be the UK’s monuments men and women for the 21st century.
The convention is now backed by every party and all departments. The time has clearly come to ratify the Hague convention. If, at the end of this debate, we hear the words “when parliamentary time allows”, there will surely be a groan around the House. We need a commitment from the Government that the necessary legislation will be introduced in 2016.Will the Minister confirm this?
Ratifying the treaty will not bring back what has been destroyed at Nimrud and Palmyra, but it will hugely help with the future. UK ratification, following the US as recently as 2009, will not only strengthen the treaty itself but will allow the UK the necessary international moral authority which it so far lacks. But that should be just the start, because the UK has an opportunity—a crucial opportunity—to take the lead in building a strategic vision for cultural property protection, in a sense leapfrogging everyone else. Given our experience and research facilities in our museums, universities and institutions, there is the potential to do so. But to enable this we need most immediately to do two things. The first is to ratify the second protocol of 1999, which, among other things, crucially defines the conditions of individual criminal responsibility. None of the permanent five has yet done so, not out of any specific concern for the protocol—44 states have ratified the second protocol and France and China, I understand, are considering doing so. I am pleased that the Government intend to do this.
The second necessary thing to achieve is to use part of the cultural protection fund to set up a co-ordination centre in London that could then become the international headquarters of the organisation of the Blue Shield, the emblem of the 1954 convention and the umbrella organisation for heritage NGOs. If this happened, as the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, has suggested, it would be the cultural property equivalent of the setting up in 1863 in Geneva of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Will the Minister take careful note that establishing such a co-ordination centre as the priority use for the new cultural property fund is backed by the British Museum, the Museums Association, the Council for British Archaeology, the British Institute for the Study of Iraq, and the Art Loss Register, among many others? The worry at present, however, is that the fund will be used mainly for local, if not insignificant, projects and that, at the end, there will be no legacy. The consultation document launched today, which will run to 19 February, while full of good things in terms of localised protection, training and education, makes no mention of co-ordination. As Peter Stone says, an endowed core team would provide the strategic vision, credibility, and focal point for the efforts of the international community’s actions regarding cultural property protection long into the future. We have this window of opportunity to take an effective leadership role in cultural property protection and become its international centre, both real and formal, and we should not lose it.
On a separate if related issue, it is important that we try to do something about the trade in illegal artefacts. We know through anecdotal evidence that there is a trade in London in illegal antiquities and this must be addressed. It is worth noting that in the 13 years since the Dealing in Cultural Objects (Offences) Act came into force, there has not been a single prosecution. I find it extraordinary that while so much scholarship in these areas is built on the principle of provenance—I am thinking of art objects more generally—the antiques trade, including auction houses, is still very secretive, when it suits, about previous ownership. I wonder if there should be buyers’ rights legislation for antiquities.
Finally, to put this debate into a human context, it is important to protect our living culture as well as the past. It is, of course, people who built our cultural heritage in the first place. There is no more extreme case at present than the plight of the poet and artist Ashraf Fayadh, who has been in jail in Saudi Arabia for the last two years. He was charged with apostasy and, in November, sentenced to death, against which an appeal has been made. He has strong links with the UK, helping to foster British-Saudi cultural relations through arts projects between the two countries. The literature and arts communities around the world have expressed huge concern. I mention Ashraf Fayadh in particular today because a worldwide reading of his work, organised by the Berlin International Literature Festival, is taking place at this very moment in many cities in Europe, Canada, the United States, Egypt, China and many other places, including London.
In this spirit, I want to read just a few lines from his poem “Asylum”, translated from the Arabic, from his collection Instructions Within. It has a particular resonance in Europe as well as the Middle East, given the upheavals we are currently witnessing:
“Asylum: To stand at the end of a queue.
To be given a morsel of bread.
To stand!: Something your grandfather used to do.
Without knowing the reason why.
The Morsel?: You.
The homeland: A card to put in your wallet.
Money: Papers that carry images of Leaders.
The Photo: Your substitution pending your return.
And the Return: A mythological creature ... from your grandmother’s tales.
End of the first lesson.”
Ashraf Fayadh is not the only artist currently held in prison and is certainly not the only wrongly held prisoner, but I ask the Minister, in her capacity as the Arts and Culture Minister, to convey the huge concern being expressed by the arts community in this country to the Foreign Office and ask what action the Government are taking to help secure his release.
Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)
My Lords, I, too, am grateful to my very dear and noble friend Lady Andrews, who initiated this debate. Like many other noble Lords, I was utterly shocked when the first images appeared on our screens of ISIL militants destroying antiquities in Iraq. We then saw it repeated in Syria, at Palmyra, but with the horrible news of the murder of Khaled al-Asaad, the caretaker of that important site. Because of my interest in antiquities, I have visited Syria and to see that destruction is just so horrifying. As I, like others, watched the hacking into historical artefacts and saw them being toppled and ground into the dust, I felt almost as deep a wound as when I hear news of bombings and killings. I questioned my own moral compass. I wondered why I was feeling such grief over the loss of things—artefacts and art—and why it was so sickening. Why were we having such visceral responses to this? It is because of the very thing that many have mentioned, particularly the right reverend Prelate who spoke. This is about the destruction of our common heritage and sense of who we are as a people. It is about our humanity, and our shared humanity at that.
The deliberate destruction and theft of cultural heritage by Islamic State is not just mindless vandalism but ideological. That is the horror of it because it is justified by invoking the part of traditional Islamic thinking about Tawhid and the idea of the Islamic religion being monotheistic. But it is being invoked in a literal way to oppose anything that is other or different, so it has justified the destruction of monasteries and shrines, too, if they are of the Shia tradition. There is the destruction of churches, because Christianity is in their sights, and of ancient temples and statues, especially if they are of human form. This is all part of the Salafist tradition, which has its source in Wahhabist Saudi Arabia. It is a corrupted form of Islam.
The motivation is to eradicate utterly that with which it disagrees. It is an attack on the identity of peoples, their belief systems and who we all are. Our shared cultural heritage, which should be teaching us tolerance and respect for diverse humanity, is invoked for the very opposite purposes. We should be concerned about what this all means: a return to year zero, in the way invoked by Pol Pot, leaving no traces of any previous culture or civilisation so as to provide a new platform for that which is being promulgated. We should be very clear why we should feel this so deeply and why this moment is a time for acting with urgency.
Despite the UN’s ban on the trade of artefacts looted from Syria since 2011, we have seen extensive smuggling out of the Middle East and into the underground antique market of Europe and North America. The horror of those crimes has to be met with a proper response, but it is more than that. We are seeing other crimes. This destruction is a war crime under Article 8 of the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court. I saw only recently that Mrs Fatou Bensouda, the lead prosecutor at that court, has insisted after the destruction of sites in Mali by Ansar Dine that perpetrators will be held accountable because these are war crimes. However, they are not only war crimes. Those of us concerned with international law would all recognise that they also constitute crimes against humanity because of what they are doing to the identity of peoples.
That is why I heartily endorse the appeal to government by my noble friend Lady Andrews that urgent steps should be taken to make progress on ratifying the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. It is a source of shame to us that we have this history, described so powerfully by my noble friend Lord Howarth, of this being agreed time after time by Ministers, yet we still stand here today without having legislated.
ISIS cannot silence history and we should be making that message clear. ISIS cannot erase great culture from the memory of the world. We should be sending a message that perpetrators of these crimes will be held accountable, and delays in legislating are unjustifiable. We have to find time to get this legislation through. I hope that the Minister will be the bearer of good news today and will not just rely again on the idea that time is not available. This is urgent and is something that speaks to who we are.
Lord Redesdale (LD)
My Lords, in winding up from these Benches I have always taken the attitude that there is no point in writing a speech, because you will be following someone else, and it is particularly dangerous to read from a prepared briefing if somebody has already eloquently set out what is going to be in it. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, for initiating this debate, but will not follow her in asking the Government when they are going to ratify the convention. Although of course it is quite dangerous for a Liberal Democrat after the election to use the expression “I’ll eat my hat”, I have never known any Minister to declare ahead of the Queen’s Speech coming out that time has been found and that a specific measure will be part of the next Session.
There is a danger here. As the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, knows—he has been a great advocate of archaeology and heritage—this has been an issue on every single agenda of the All-Party Archaeology Group for decades now, and it seems rather a shame that it was taken off. I very much hope the Government will ratify the convention, because it is slightly embarrassing when you look at a map of the world and realise that Britain is one of the last major powers not to have done so, even though, through the work we have been doing, especially through the work of the British Museum, we are seen as a leading light in the world of heritage.
The noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, raised an issue that I also had difficulty with, which is the feeling of shock and horror that came about through the destruction at Palmyra especially, a city I have visited. Of course there is the issue of why we are so upset by that when the beheadings and other outrageous acts of Daesh are so much at the forefront of people’s minds. I suppose it is because it is trying to destroy our heritage. It is a shock tactic which has been used very effectively. That seems to be the basis of many of the actions it has undertaken.
We are of course dealing with this and there is a great deal of movement behind it because Daesh is using the proceeds of the looting of antiquities, which is being done on an industrial and organised scale, to fund its activities. Although the RAF is targeting the wellheads to reduce the amount of money going into the coffers of this organisation, a great deal of money is coming through artefacts which end up on the international art market. As was pointed out, this is not an international art market that operates outside the UK: a large number of Mesopotamian artefacts have appeared in the underground British marketplace. A number of us in the Room pushed through the Dealing in Cultural Objects (Offences) Bill specifically to deal with artefacts looted after the last Gulf War.
I very much hope this issue will be pushed forward in terms of the military aspects. The issue there is how we deny the enemy the ability to conduct warfare by reducing the resources that it has. The fact that the MoD is looking at creating a modern monuments team, as the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, mentioned, could be very useful in this area. I would like to volunteer personally for such a unit. Apparently, they are looking for people with an archaeological degree, which I have. Indeed, I was a student of Professor Stone—not a great one, I have to admit. They are looking for ex-officers in the Army—I was informed that a large number of archaeologists are ex-officers in the Army, which is an interesting fact I had not known before—with knowledge of the Middle East.
It is particularly important to realise where these artefacts are going. They are not just going to Britain and America, although we should realise that after the latest Gulf War, some of the artefacts looted from Baghdad museums, with their serial numbers, were on sale in the US. They are also going to the Gulf states. It is very important to understand that there is a large marketplace there and to deal with it.
I would happily join that unit, but my great disability, which is abject cowardice in the face of danger—and having to explain it to my wife—might hinder me from undertaking that voluntary duty. Building the knowledge base within the MoD will be important. That is not the only country or the only war in which that was used as a tactic. It has been used many times in the past and probably will be in future.
The MoD and RAF have made a great effort to do as little damage as possible. We had great discussions during the Gulf War about targeting solutions and making sure that we did not drop bombs on Iraq’s heritage, because it was a war against not the people of Iraq but its regime. There has been recent targeted bombing of Libyan government forces, ensuring that their military assets were destroyed without destroying cultural assets.
The most interesting area is the development of the protection of cultural property fund. We must be extremely grateful to the Chancellor for being so generous in introducing it. Those are words I never expected to say in this Chamber, but it is worth bringing them out at this point. A large amount of money is involved in archaeological terms, and we must be very careful about our use of it, because it does not come around very often. I very much hope that we spend it not only on specific projects, where it will be desperately needed, but to leverage greater funds from other countries around the world. If Britain could be seen as the country that was bringing a great deal of knowledge and expertise from our institutions—I, as an alumnus of Newcastle University, would be keen to see the fund under the chairmanship of the UNESCO chair that has been created there—that would have enormous value. One problem with archaeology is that it is a living subject. It is not just about artefacts in the ground; it is knowing how they relate to our history and can be used to understand where we come from as peoples.
I finish with two questions. First, I could go into great detail about how I would want the money spent, but I ask the Minister to meet Professor Stone, Blue Shield and other interested parties—perhaps before the DCMS consultation—to understand how we could make this a long-term solution and leverage further funds and knowledge. I ask that specifically because that conversation could indicate how the questions should be asked in the consultation. Secondly, I follow the excellent suggestion of the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, that we use a Friday specifically, because Fridays are usually reserved for Private Members’ Bills. If this is not going to be a hand-down Bill in the other place, would it be suitable for a Private Member’s Bill in this place? I ask only because the Dealing in Cultural Objects (Offences) Bill was a Private Member’s Bill thought through in quite an area. I say that tongue-in-cheek, of course, because it would be incredibly embarrassing if this was not government legislation.
Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)
My Lords, it is the second time this week that the Minister and I have been the last act of the day, and I promise to be much briefer than I was on Monday.
I start by thanking my noble friend Lady Andrews for initiating this important debate, or perhaps I should say “timely debate”, as timing is clearly the crux of the issue. The convention entered into force 60 years ago and has now been ratified, as we have heard, by 127 states. The UK signed it in December 1954, the month of my birth—do show your shock. We have been publicly committed to ratifying it and its two protocols since 2004. As my noble friend pointed out, Labour published a draft Bill for consultation in 2008 which proposed the necessary legislative changes and was backed by the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, whose inquiry’s main purpose at the time was to establish whether it would unduly constrain military operations. Of course, the MoD told the committee that the Bill would not have this effect.
As we have heard, the Government’s announcement last year that a new cultural protection fund would be established to help address recovery from acts of cultural destruction overseas is the first positive news on the convention and its protocols since the publication of the draft Bill. I received a copy of the draft consultation document on the fund today, in the foreword to which the Secretary of State, John Whittingdale, says that he is,
“determined that this government once and for all ratifies the 1954 Hague Convention and accedes to its two Protocols”.
While I very much welcome this commitment, my fear is that if it is not done immediately our inaction will continue to undermine our moral authority to speak out on, as well as to help to protect against, the destruction and theft of cultural heritage.
We have recently witnessed—and we have heard descriptions in today’s debate—in the Middle East and north Africa the terrible destruction of cultural property and heritage sites, most notably and devastatingly by Daesh in Iraq and Syria. As my noble friend Lady Andrews said, five members of the UN Security Council have not ratified the treaty, but France and China are now actively considering doing so. As she said, we could retrieve the credibility which has been lost over years from delay and procrastination by acting now. As my noble friend Lord Howarth said, all sides in both Houses support ratification, and I have absolutely no doubt that everyone will co-operate in ensuring its speedy passage through parliamentary stages. I say with the greatest of respect to some speakers that the time is not for more debate but for action and implementation. Like others, I ask the Minister to break with convention and give a clear commitment to a timetable that will achieve implementation in this Session.
Like other noble Lords, I am aware that the Government have acted to comply with the spirit of the convention. As the right reverend Prelate said, in a response to a Question from Sir Nicholas Soames, the MoD has stated:
“Respect for cultural property is already upheld across the Armed Forces and they currently act within the spirit of the 1954 Convention. This respect is incorporated into military law through the UK Manual of the Law of Armed Conflict, our targeting policy, training, and in battle area evaluation and assessments. The Armed Forces must comply with the Rome Statute which makes intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes … a war crime”.
My noble friend Lady Andrews also reminded us of Blue Shield. I read with interest about the new cultural property protection capability. Having specialists working in war zones alongside commanders to advise on how to locate, protect and save cultural riches is vital. However, as many noble Lords have indicated, the key to success will be the ability to collaborate with other agencies and the police to stop the black market smuggling of priceless artefacts which, as the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, and my noble friend Lord Howarth reminded us, has become an important source of funding for insurgent and terrorist groups. Will the Minister set out the progress that has been made on the new unit and how it is functioning and collaborating with other agencies?
The work of the MoD and the implementation of the convention show that cross-departmental co-operation is vital. This also applies to the new cultural protection fund, which the consultation document proposes will be administered by the British Council, a non-departmental public body of the FCO, working in partnership with DCMS. How does the Minister see this co-operation working in practice? Who will lead? As my noble friend asked, is she confident that DCMS will be able to command the support of other departments to ensure the policy is effectively co-ordinated?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and Department for Culture, Media and Sport (Baroness Neville-Rolfe) (Con)
My Lords, I start by paying tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, who was a distinguished chair of English Heritage and has been a persistent advocate of cultural protection. I thank her for bringing this crucial issue to the attention of the House today and for welcoming the consultation document we today issued to experts, including noble Lords in this House.
It is helpful for those of us who love heritage and want to protect culture in war zones to hear such a wide level of support for early legislation. I will set out the Government’s plans for the ratification of the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict 1954 and—to pick up the question from my noble friend Lady Berridge—its two protocols. First, it is crucial to acknowledge the wider circumstances and the importance of the UK in championing and protecting cultural heritage globally, as so many noble Lords have said. Cultural heritage sites and collections of great importance in the Middle East and north Africa, especially in Syria, Iraq and Libya, are currently at significant risk of attack, degradation and destruction.
Indeed, in recent months the world has witnessed the wanton destruction and exploitation of cultural heritage by Daesh. How tragic it was to see the devastating iconoclastic attacks on such important and beautiful sites as the Temple of Bel in Palmyra and the demolition of what remains of powerful and advanced civilisations at sites such as Nimrud and Hatra. I very much look forward to the troubling photographs from the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews. As part of our comprehensive strategy to degrade and defeat Daesh, the UK must do what we can to prevent what the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, rightly called “the destruction of our common heritage”, and to support the recovery of affected sites.
Cultural heritage is not just of aesthetic and academic importance; it comprises priceless assets for humanity that are fundamental to people’s shared sense of history and identity. Through our history and unique expertise, we carry a vital responsibility to support cultural protection overseas, and recent events have confirmed the urgency of this role. We are taking concerted steps to meet that responsibility.
I turn to the questions and points raised by noble Lords. Unfortunately, I cannot make the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, eat his hat, but I can reiterate the Government’s clear and firm commitment to ratify the Hague convention and its two protocols at the first opportunity. New legislative measures are necessary in order for the UK to ratify the Hague convention, although of course we signed it years ago and largely implement its provisions, as the noble Lord, Lord Collins of Highbury, was kind enough to acknowledge. The draft Bill that we have published provides an excellent template for the changes to UK legislation that will be needed to meet our obligations under the Hague convention. We are now in the process of building on that substantial draft so that a suitable government Bill can be introduced. I agree that that is a better approach than a Private Member’s Bill.
Once the legislation has been introduced, the UK will deposit an instrument of ratification with UNESCO—in Paris, rather suitably—and the convention and its protocols will enter into force three months afterwards. Our Armed Forces already act as though bound by the Hague convention, and we have extensive arrangements in place for the protection of cultural property through our dedicated heritage and museum sectors. As part of the implementation process, we will take steps to raise the awareness of all relevant parties of their obligations under the treaty.
Since the inception of the legislation it has enjoyed widespread public, cross-departmental and cross-party support, passing pre-legislative scrutiny by the Culture, Media and Sport Commons Select Committee, under the now Secretary of State, a well-known enthusiast. We are working closely with other government departments, heritage agencies such as Historic England and law enforcement agencies to ensure that any outstanding issues are resolved so that the draft Bill is up to date and ready for introduction.
In view of his compelling examples of UK cultural sites, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Portsmouth will be interested to know that we are also working on a statement that will set out our approach in determining what cultural property in the UK will be afforded general and enhanced protection, in the event of armed conflict, for example—a gruesome prospect, but it is completely right to do that work. We will also describe our policy on taking the protection of cultural sites into account when planning military operations and in the aftermath of a military operation.
It is important to note that the Hague convention and its protocols already inform our Armed Forces’ law of armed conflict doctrine and training policy, particularly with regard to respect for cultural property, precautions in attack and recognition of the blue shield. A joint military cultural property protection working group, established in early 2014, is developing the concept of a unit of cultural property protection specialists, as the noble Lord, Lord Collins, said. In the near future that unit will start to recruit specialists, perhaps reservists with cultural expertise, pending final approval. The working group will be reviewing cultural property protection training within the Armed Forces.
The Government are taking concerted action against Daesh, the main perpetrators of cultural heritage destruction in recent times. The UK is a leading part of a global coalition of 65 countries and international organisations, including many in the region, which are united to defeat Daesh on all fronts. As well as attacking it militarily we are also squeezing its finances, disrupting the flow of fighters with exit checks, challenging its poisonous ideology and working to stabilise areas liberated from Daesh.
The noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, asked about Ashraf Fayadh. I will have to pursue this with the FCO and will write to him about the case.
We understand that oil and extortion are the two main sources of Daesh funding, accounting for about 80% of its revenue. It also generates a small amount of revenue from selling looted antiquities and from donations from misguided individuals. Although looted antiquities provide a minor revenue stream, we take this very seriously, and the UK has an effective legal framework to tackle the illicit trade. We are working with our international partners to prevent the illegal trading of Iraqi and Syrian antiquities, including here in the UK, through the implementation and enforcement of UN and EU sanctions. Therefore, there is both use of sanctions and collective endeavour, which, quite rightly, I have heard a lot about this evening.
The noble Lord, Lord Howarth, asked about our policy to conform to UN Security Council Resolution 2199. The UK co-sponsored this important resolution, taking steps to prevent Daesh benefiting from trade in antiquities among other sources of revenue, and the sanctions imposed by the resolution are fully implemented and enforced in the UK.
The issue of looted antiquities smuggled out of conflict zones such as Iraq and Syria through the black market is inherently complex, as we all know, which is why we seek to work with international partners to prevent illegal trade, including through sharing intelligence via the enforcement agencies and international sanctions, as I have mentioned. As all noble Lords have said, collaboration is key.
I am pleased to confirm to my noble friend Lady Berridge that in the recent spending review, the Government pledged their enduring support to the police nationwide and protected police budgets in line with inflation, which is obviously important to the work of the Metropolitan Police Service’s Art and Antiques Unit.
Lord Howarth of Newport
Will the noble Baroness respond more specifically to the important point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, about the funding of the Metropolitan Police’s art and antiquities squad? It is miniscule, almost non-existent—as I understand it, it is having to raise its own money. We ought to do better than that, should we not?
Baroness Neville-Rolfe
I have explained to the noble Lord and to my noble friend that the police budget has been protected, and I take the point that the House thinks that more resources should be spent on this. I will certainly think about that. However, I have found in other areas with similar issues, such as intellectual property, that bringing the different enforcement agencies together can make a big difference.
In October last year, the Government announced that we are providing £3 million for the British Museum to work with experts from Iraq to set up a rescue archaeology programme. This will enable Iraqi archaeologists to be trained in the UK and Iraq in specialist techniques. The programme will be the first in a series of new initiatives to protect global cultural heritage.
The Government have committed £30 million to a new cultural protection fund, as has been said. This will seek to support local communities in protecting and restoring their cultural heritage in ODA-eligible countries in global conflict zones, helping to provide them with long-term sustainable socioeconomic stability. The cultural protection fund is intended to be executed in co-ordination with our international partners and international heritage organisations. It will be designed both to complement and to bolster existing initiatives. Today, we began consulting experts on the most effective ways of using this fund, and I would be delighted to meet the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, and the Blue Shield committee.
Last month, the Government further underlined their commitment to ratification of the Hague convention and its two protocols by making a public pledge in conjunction with the British Red Cross. Although depressing, recent events have given a greater sense of urgency to legislation and to ratification of the convention.
I cannot say more other than that my Civil Service career was helped by leading the Bill team as an official as the then Food Safety Bill went through Parliament. Sadly, it took Edwina Currie and salmonella in eggs to get us the long-awaited Bill slot that we needed to update the food safety rules, and it could be that Daesh will be the infection which brings about new legislation in this instance.