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Oral Answers to Questions
(8 years ago)
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Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (SNP)
Wayne David (Caerphilly) (Lab)
The Secretary of State for Wales (Alun Cairns)
The Welsh economy approaches EU exit from a very strong position. Since the vote to leave the EU we have seen economic inactivity continue to fall in Wales while employment has risen to a record high. Businesses continue to show confidence in the economy, with new investment across the UK fundamental to prosperity in Wales.
Margaret Ferrier
Wealth inequality in the British state hits Wales hard, with Welsh gross value added just scraping 71.4% of the UK average. EU structural funds have been key to combating this home-grown unfairness. Will the Minister guarantee today continued future UK funding to replace in full the lost EU regional money?
Alun Cairns
The hon. Lady raises an important issue, and I would say that Wales has been the fastest growing part of the UK outside London since 2010. She makes an important point in relation to the future of structural funds. She will also appreciate that they are meant to be a short-term boost to the economy, but after 16 years and after £4 billion has been spent, west Wales and the valleys have 64% of UK GVA. I am sure we need to use this opportunity to be positive and do something better with similar structural support.
Wayne David
Does the Secretary of State’s answer to that last question imply the Government intend to change the agreed priorities for the spending of the structural funds?
Alun Cairns
The hon. Gentleman will appreciate both that his constituency has experienced some significant falls in unemployment since 2010 and that after all that money has been spent those areas voted in the strongest numbers to leave the EU. The point I am making is that the current programme has not worked and has not fitted those communities. Exiting the EU presents an ideal opportunity to revisit this and look to see what we can do better for the hon. Gentleman’s constituency and other communities in Wales in need.
David T. C. Davies (Monmouth) (Con)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that the people of Wales voted clearly for Brexit and they do not need to be represented by the SNP or the Welsh Assembly Government who are ignoring their views, but will be pleased to have a Conservative Government and an excellent Secretary of State for Wales who will carry out their wishes?
Alun Cairns
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his kind comments, but of course we have a close and constructive working relationship with the Welsh Government and all devolved Administrations because it is in our interests to get the strongest deal for the whole of the UK. After all, as my hon. Friend will recognise, the most important market for Welsh business is the UK market, and getting the best deal for the whole of the UK is in all our interests.
Stephen Crabb (Preseli Pembrokeshire) (Con)
The automotive and aerospace sectors are of enormous strategic importance for the Welsh economy. Given that Brexit probably will not mean retaining full membership of the single market, will my right hon. Friend nevertheless commit to do everything he can to retain full single market-style benefits for those critically important sectors in the Welsh economy?
Alun Cairns
My right hon. Friend raises an important point. He recognises the strength of the automotive and aerospace sectors, and I would point to some significant major investments the UK has landed. We are all familiar with Nissan investment in Sunderland, but it is equally important to the Welsh economy—Calsonic Kansei in Llanelli is a supplier to Nissan in Sunderland. We want to maintain the most open market arrangements, and the confidence shown by Nissan demonstrates it understands the priority we are placing on that.
Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)
This week Hybu Cig Cymru, the Farmers’ Union of Wales and NFU Cymru have all made the overwhelming case in favour of tariff-free access to the EU for our world-class Welsh red meat. What is the Minister doing to ensure the voice of agriculture is heard in government?
Alun Cairns
The hon. Gentleman raises an important point and the Under-Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Aberconwy (Guto Bebb), was at the winter fair in Builth Wells yesterday in Llanelwedd where he met the FUW and the NFU. We are in close dialogue with the farming unions in Wales and across the whole of the UK. Clearly Welsh agriculture is an important part of the Welsh economy and of our export market, and we want to maintain the most open trading relationship possible in its interest.
Hywel Williams
Welsh agriculture is spectacularly successful in EU markets; 93% of our excellent Welsh beef and lamb exports go to EU countries. What steps is the Secretary of State taking to ensure French, Italian, Spanish and German people continue to eat Welsh meat in the future?
Alun Cairns
The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. I too want to ensure that those across the European Union and elsewhere have the opportunity to benefit from the excellent produce that comes from Wales, including Welsh beef and Welsh lamb. We want to be global leaders in free trade. We also want the most open trading relationship with Europe that we can possibly get, and that is our determination and focus in our negotiations.
Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)
I ran a manufacturing business in south Wales for 13 years, and it is a great place to do business. We manufactured and sold all over the world. Does the Secretary of State agree that the fall in the pound as a result of the Brexit vote makes it much easier for Welsh exporters to increase their sales?
Alun Cairns
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his question, because it gives me the opportunity to highlight the fact that Wales now has 37,000 more manufacturing jobs than in 2010. That demonstrates the strength and vibrancy of the Welsh economy. Clearly we want to do all we can to support our manufacturers. The value of the pound will have positive results for some businesses and perhaps present challenges for others, but those exporters who want to grow are clearly in a stronger position.
Jo Stevens (Cardiff Central) (Lab)
The Secretary of State referred earlier to the importance of the automotive industry in Wales. Ford announced in September that it would guarantee around a third of the jobs in its 1,800-strong workforce at Bridgend. Those jobs are vital to the local community and to the supply chain in Wales, but we are still concerned about the lack of commitment post-2020. The lack of any plan from the Government for Brexit is exacerbating the uncertainty and causing doubts about the plant’s future, so will the Secretary of State today commit his Government to giving Ford the same deal that they gave to Nissan in order to secure the future of the Bridgend plant and Ford’s presence in the UK post-Brexit?
Alun Cairns
The hon. Lady has raised an important point. My understanding of the situation is that Ford is continuing with more than £100 million-worth of new investment in the plant. That demonstrates the confidence that Ford has, not only in the Bridgend plant but in the UK economy. This builds on the strength of the automotive sector, which is extremely important to the Welsh economy and to the UK economy as a whole.
Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)
The Secretary of State for Wales (Alun Cairns)
The Welsh economy remains fundamentally strong, highly competitive and open for business. We are part of a strong United Kingdom, and leaving the EU offers Wales an unprecedented opportunity to forge a new role for ourselves in the world, to negotiate our own trade agreements and to reap the benefits of foreign investment.
Alex Cunningham
What discussions has the Secretary of State had with the First Minister about the potential loss of links and connections that have been built up through organisations such as the European Committee of the Regions, and how will he seek to maintain those connections after Brexit?
Alun Cairns
The Welsh Government and I have a warm working relationship. Only last week, two Secretaries of State and two other Ministers met at the British-Irish Council that took place in my own constituency of Vale of Glamorgan. Of course we have strong bilateral relationships, and it is right that we use the Joint Ministerial Council to form the basis of the negotiations as we exit the European Union. I want to maintain the warmest and most constructive relationship possible with the Welsh Government, with all the devolved Administrations and with the Crown dependencies.
Michael Fabricant (Lichfield) (Con)
But does my right hon. Friend accept that this is not just about manufacturing, and that it is not only the exporters of Welsh Black beef who are important? One of the biggest exports for Wales is tourism. People tell me that, with the lower value of the pound, there are more foreign visitors in Snowdonia than ever before and that overseas companies are making more inward investment in Welsh hotels and marketing.
Alun Cairns
My hon. Friend makes an extremely important point. Wales has a fantastic record of attracting inward investment projects. He has focused on tourism, which gives me the opportunity to highlight the fact that north Wales has been named by Lonely Planet as the fourth top place in the world to visit in 2017. It is the only part of the United Kingdom to have been chosen, and that is something that we should celebrate and market to ensure that more people come not only to the UK but to north Wales.
Ian C. Lucas (Wrexham) (Lab)
Inward investment is a key driver of decisions to invest in particular areas, and the manufacturing powerhouse of north-east Wales needs inward investment not only from the private sector but from the Government. Will the Secretary of State put his money where his mouth is and commit the UK Government to matching Welsh Government investment in new infrastructure, including road and rail, in north-east Wales?
Alun Cairns
The hon. Gentleman shows a close interest in the Mersey Dee area and has shown particular interest in the north Wales growth deal, which my right hon. Friend the Chancellor mentioned in the autumn statement. We are keen to progress it and are waiting for details of the bid. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will recognise the major success of that part of the world being chosen for the global F-35 repair centre, which will inject billions of pounds over decades into north-east Wales and MOD Sealand. We should recognise and celebrate that.
Jo Stevens (Cardiff Central) (Lab)
More than £2 billion of capital investment has been made over the past decade across Wales in social housing, transport, energy, water and education through the European Investment Bank. What plans has the Secretary of State put in place to mitigate the potentially disastrous consequences of leaving the EU on pre-existing EIB loans to organisations and public bodies in Wales? Crucially, what plans does he have to replace the funding that the EIB has been able to provide?
Alun Cairns
Our negotiations with the EIB will run in parallel with our negotiations with the European Commission. The hon. Lady has a responsibility to try to instil confidence in investment in Wales, not to undermine it. Only last week, the Chancellor announced a further capital injection of £436 million. I would hope that the hon. Lady would want to welcome that, not undermine investment, employment and jobs—it really does not become her.
Alberto Costa (South Leicestershire) (Con)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Wales (Guto Bebb)
Wales is an attractive destination for overseas investment, and the UK Government remain committed to providing certainty and stability for businesses in Wales. Our country has a tremendous opportunity to forge stronger relations with international partners. I am passionate about selling Wales to the world and continuing to increase global investment in Wales.
Alberto Costa
Does my hon. Friend agree that recent announcements of investment in Wales, such as the F-35 global repair and maintenance hub in north Wales, represent a vote of confidence in the UK’s economy as a whole?
Guto Bebb
I could not agree more. Such investment is welcome, and I pay tribute to the Secretary of State for Defence for his part in ensuring that that investment came to north Wales. North-east Wales is an engineering powerhouse in the UK economy, and the investment in the F-35 project is welcome and further enhances engineering opportunities for young people in north-east Wales.
Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (PC)
At the beginning of this year, FieldMaster Tractors Ltd, a tractor assembly company in my constituency, signed a joint venture agreement with Longhua, a Chinese company, that would have created 40 jobs in my constituency with aims of expanding. Last week, the owner received notification from China that the deal was off due to uncertainty about our future trading relationship with the European Union. Does the Minister recognise that the UK Government’s dithering over Wales’s future relationship with the single market and the customs union is costing jobs now?
Guto Bebb
I am disappointed to hear that news and would be more than happy to discuss it with the hon. Gentleman—any loss of investment in Wales is to be regretted. He is wrong, however, to talk about dithering. The Government are clear that we want strong trade relations with the European Union and with the rest of the world. Any Chinese investor looking at the UK knows that this country is friendly to investment from all parts of the globe.
Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)
Guto Bebb
I agree with my hon. Friend; investment in Wales is most welcome. We need to diversify the Welsh economy. Manufacturing jobs in Wales have increased and the engineering sector is second to none in the United Kingdom. That is based on attracting inward investment. On a recent visit to Deeside, I saw again how Airbus is acting as a catalyst for small business development in north-east Wales. We need a combination of inward investment and home-grown companies that are able to build on the expertise provided by companies such as Airbus.
Christina Rees (Neath) (Lab/Co-op)
Some businesses may not invest inwardly in Wales because they would have to pay two apprenticeship levies: the UK Government levy and the Construction Industry Training Board levy. Under the Barnett formula, that will not result in extra funding for Welsh apprenticeships. Will the Minister reassure potential investors that they will be able to claim all levies for training and will be able to use the money for workforce development with local further education providers?
Guto Bebb
I am surprised to hear that question from the hon. Lady; the apprenticeship levy is important, but the settlement between Her Majesty’s Treasury and the Welsh Government has been welcomed by the latter as both fair and comprehensive. It is therefore essential that she and other Members call on the Welsh Government to make sure that the money allocated through the apprenticeship levy is spent where it is needed.
Gerald Jones (Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney) (Lab)
Given that the UK Government and, in particular, senior Ministers are currently doing their best to offend the international community, it falls to Wales and the Welsh Government to promote inward investment. So will the Minister join me in congratulating the Welsh Government on the role they have played in promoting Wales and securing the highest level of inward investment on record? Furthermore, what support will he give to ensure that this success is sustained following the UK’s exit from the European Union?
Guto Bebb
I thank the hon. Gentleman for the question. It is important to state that the relationship between the Welsh Government and the UK Government on this issue is very productive. I recently visited Wales with a Minister for International Trade, and the Secretary of State for International Trade will be in Wales on Friday. We work constructively with the Welsh Government to ensure that we sell Wales and the United Kingdom as a good place to do business. We have a strong relationship, which the hon. Gentleman should welcome.
Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Wales (Guto Bebb)
We are committed to transforming prisons into places of safety and reform. We recently announced a major overhaul of the prison system, and in the autumn statement we announced funding for 2,500 extra front-line officers across the UK.
Mrs Moon
The Minister will be aware that it is not just numbers of prison officers, but the skill base they bring with them that is important. Parc prison has a wonderful record with its “invisible walls” scheme in building links between prisoners and their families. More than 500 children a week visit their fathers, and 69% of inmates have contact with their families. Will he work with me to get the Treasury and the Ministry of Justice to provide funding so that the scheme carries on after 2017?
Guto Bebb
I pay tribute to the hon. Lady for the work she does with Parc prison in Bridgend. The relationship she has with Parc prison is indicative of the way an MP should work with such a facility. I pay particular tribute to Parc as a prison that has highlighted the importance of ensuring that family ties are maintained while prisoners are serving a sentence. The good practice shown in Parc should be repeated across the prison estate, and I would be delighted to co-operate with her in pushing this issue forward.
Chris Elmore (Ogmore) (Lab/Co-op)
Over the past five years, the number of violent attacks on prison officers in Welsh prisons has risen by more than 138%. What discussions have Ministers had with the Justice Secretary about tackling violence in Welsh prisons?
Guto Bebb
My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has regular discussions with the Department in question on this issue. No member of staff working on behalf of the state should be threatened or subject to violence in their workplace, so it is essential that we support prison officers in that context and crack down hard on anybody who is responsible for violence within or outside the prison sector.
Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
I speak as the co-chair of the cross-party justice unions parliamentary group. HMP Berwyn is due to open in less than three months’ time. Given that the National Offender Management Service is committed to ensuring that it gives equal treatment to English and Welsh in Wales, will the Minister tell the House how he is monitoring the language skills of staff in Wrexham? The MOJ has told me that:
“Data on the number of bilingual Welsh and English speakers…is not collected centrally.”
Guto Bebb
First, I hope that the hon. Lady welcomes the fact that the prison in Wrexham is being built, as it is a significant investment in north-east Wales and a significant opportunity for the north Wales economy. On the Welsh language issue, it is fair to say that the Department responsible has made it clear that the number of jobs being created at Wrexham will reflect the demographic realities in north Wales, and as a result there will be Welsh-speaking staff in the prison at Berwyn. That will be a great improvement on the current situation, where Welsh-speaking prisoners end up in the estate in England.
Mr Speaker
Order. A lot of very noisy private conversations are taking place. I must advise the House that we have many distinguished visitors here today, not only from across the country, but from Iraq and Egypt. We wish to show them that in our ancient democracy we can, when we try, conduct ourselves with due decorum, which will now be brilliantly exemplified by Mr Nigel Huddleston.
Nigel Huddleston (Mid Worcestershire) (Con)
Karl MᶜCartney (Lincoln) (Con)
The Secretary of State for Wales (Alun Cairns)
Since the referendum in June, I have had discussions with a wide range of stakeholders across Wales, from the Wales Council for Voluntary Action, to the farming unions, the CBI Wales and the Institute of Directors in Wales, to hear their views on how to secure the best deal for Wales and the UK as we leave the EU. Those conversations are informing my discussions with Cabinet colleagues, as well as with the Welsh Government.
Nigel Huddleston
Does the Secretary of State agree that we should not just focus on businesses as we leave the EU? We should also consider the implications for the third sector, charities, local authorities and universities in Wales.
Alun Cairns
My hon. Friend makes an extremely important point. I have already talked about my warm relationship with the Welsh Government, but of course the UK Government should also have a warm relationship with universities, charity groups and environmental groups, as well as with businesses directly in Wales. The Welsh Government have an important part to play, but we also have a direct relationship with those key stakeholders.
Karl MᶜCartney
Does my right hon. Friend recognise that there is more than one voice in Wales and not simply the voice of the Welsh Government, who still cannot accept that the majority of Welsh people voted to leave the European Union? We must therefore engage with all Welsh stakeholders and partners who are key to ensuring that Brexit will be a success for everyone in the UK.
Alun Cairns
My hon. Friend raises an important point. Of course we engage positively with the Welsh Government, and we will continue to do so. I have already had scores of meetings with key stakeholders in Wales. My hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Wales was at the Royal Welsh Agricultural Society’s winter fair yesterday doing that very thing—engaging with Welsh farmers and with Welsh farming unions.
Mr David Hanson (Delyn) (Lab)
Given the uncertainty over the single market and the Prime Minister’s failure to raise steel when she met the Indian Government recently, what steps will the Secretary of State take in the near future when he meets trade unions representing the steel industry to discuss the impact of the loss of the single market?
Alun Cairns
I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will do all he can to instil confidence in our ambitions to gain the most open trading relationship possible. He rightly raises steel. I am sure that he will recognise that we are in a much stronger position now than we were back in March. That is a result of reduced energy costs for the sector of £109 million. We have changed the procurement rules, offered flexibility in environmental packages and implemented strong pan-EU anti-dumping measures, which will reduce the threats of imports by more than 90% in a whole range of sectors.
Mr Mark Williams (Ceredigion) (LD)
The success of the Welsh red meat sector has meant that £225 million has been ploughed back into some of the most fragile rural communities in Wales. In his meetings, has the Secretary of State heard that message, and will he push the case for access to the single market to protect those very communities?
Alun Cairns
Like the hon. Gentleman, I have a lot of confidence in the Welsh red meat sector. I am sure that our European nations do not want to go without our high-quality Welsh red meat. We are determined to support our farmers in gaining the most open trading relationship possible, so that European nations can continue to enjoy the quality of Welsh produce.
Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Wales (Guto Bebb)
I recognise that many businesses in Wales have an important relationship with the EU, but, as a whole, Welsh businesses export more to countries outside the European Union. In leaving the EU, we will seek new opportunities for businesses across the UK, including in Wales, as we build on our strengths as an open, dynamic trading nation.
Susan Elan Jones
The Minister will know full well that he has not really answered my question. Can he tell us whether his officials have made any estimate of how many jobs in Wales will be lost if the UK leaves the single market and what he and his Government are planning to do about it?
Guto Bebb
I am somewhat disturbed by the hon. Lady’s comments. Time and again, I hear Opposition parties talking down the Welsh economy. I want to talk up the Welsh economy, as do the Welsh Government. As we start this process, we have fewer people out of work in Wales now than since 2010, and our economy is growing faster than many parts of the UK. She should be talking up Wales, not talking it down.
Mr Speaker
I am happy to hear the voice of North East Hampshire on question 7. Mr Jayawardena, get in there.
Mr Ranil Jayawardena (North East Hampshire) (Con)
Guto Bebb
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. North Wales has a huge contribution to make in terms of employment not just in North Wales but throughout the UK. The Government’s emphasis on having a north Wales growth deal is dependent on linking north Wales to the northern powerhouse. To develop that link, I was pleased to visit north-east Wales and Chester recently with the Minister responsible for the northern powerhouse. There is an appetite in north-east Wales to work on a cross-border basis for the benefit of our local economies.
Nick Smith (Blaenau Gwent) (Lab)
Will the Minister confirm the completion date of the rail electrification and all the work that needs to be done between Cardiff and Swansea, please?
Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)
What is the Minister going to do with preposterous suggestion that the priorities for future support for farmers in Wales should be decided on the basis of the UK, where there are many millionaire and billionaire farmers, rather than on the basis of Wales, where there are small farmers? Will he stand up for Welsh priorities, made in Wales for Welsh small farmers?
Guto Bebb
I was at the winter fair yesterday in discussions with farming unions and other interested parties in relation to the Welsh agricultural sector. The agricultural sector in Wales wants a settlement that will be good for the sector in Wales and good for the UK. We know that we can produce the best food in all the world, and we need to ensure that we have opportunities to sell it not only to the rest of the European Union but on a global basis. We are confident we can do that with support from this Government.
Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)
The Prime Minister (Mrs Theresa May)
I am sure that the whole House will join me in wishing people across the United Kingdom and, indeed, the whole world a very happy St Andrew’s day.
This morning I had meetings with ministerial colleagues and others, and in addition to my duties in this House I shall have further such meetings later today.
Caroline Lucas
May I suggest to the Prime Minister that “having your cake and eating it” is not a serious strategy for Brexit and that Britain deserves better that having to rely on leaked documents to know the Government’s plans? How on earth can she expect MPs to vote to trigger article 50 when she refuses to give any clarity on what kind of Brexit she is pursuing and whether it will involve us still being members of the single market? Is it arrogance, or is it incompetence?
The Prime Minister
I have answered this question many times in this House. The hon. Lady asks specifically about the single market and trading with the European Union, and I have been very clear that we are ambitious in getting the best possible deal for trading with and operating within the single European market.
Mark Menzies (Fylde) (Con)
The Prime Minister
I commend my hon. Friend on the hard work he has put in in relation to this project. I understand that there is to be a significant sum of funding from a developer and that my hon. Friend has been working with the developer and the county council on this issue. The local enterprise partnership has submitted a linked bid to Highways England that is being actively considered, and I understand that my hon. Friend is meeting my right hon. Friend the Minister of State for Transport this afternoon to discuss this in more detail.
Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)
May I join the Prime Minister in wishing everyone a very happy St Andrew’s day wherever they are celebrating it, all around the world?
Last week, the autumn statement revealed the abject failure of this Government’s economic strategy. Economic growth was revised down; wage growth was revised down; business investment was revised down; and borrowing and debt were revised up, yet again. Surely now the Prime Minister accepts that her predecessor’s long-term economic plan was actually a failure.
The Prime Minister
I will give the right hon. Gentleman some facts. The IMF says that this will be the fastest-growing advanced economy in the world this year. Unemployment is down. We have record numbers of people in employment and we have companies such as Nissan, Jaguar Land Rover, Honda, ARM, Google, Facebook and Apple investing in the UK, securing jobs here in the United Kingdom. That is what a good economic plan does.
Jeremy Corbyn
The Government did tell us that the deficit would be eradicated by 2015. That was then advanced to 2020, and now it has been advanced to whenever in the future. The right hon. Lady quotes the IFS, but she is being a little selective. It went on to say that the prospect for workers over the next six years was “dreadful”, creating
“the worst decade for living standards certainly since the last war and probably since the 1920s”.
Is it not fair to say that those who are just getting by are suffering all the pain for no gain?
The Prime Minister
Given that the right hon. Gentleman cannot distinguish between the IMF and the IFS, it is probably a good job that he is sitting there and I am standing here. Let me tell him what we are doing for those people, and let us think about those people who do find life difficult, who are struggling to get by, who have a job but worry about their job security, who have a home but worry about paying the mortgage, and who are worried about their children’s education and whether their children will be able to buy a home. What measures have we taken? We have increased the national living wage—we introduced the national living wage. We are increasing personal tax allowance, taking more people out of paying tax altogether. We are increasing the number of affordable homes being built. But we can only do this if we have a strong economy, and it is our plan that delivers that strong economy.
Jeremy Corbyn
Wages have stagnated; home ownership is falling; homelessness has doubled; and queues at food banks are rising every day. If the Prime Minister really believes the economy is doing well, why are her Government forcing through £2 billion of cuts to in-work support, cutting the incomes of working people and leaving many households over £2,000 a year worse off?
The Prime Minister
The right hon. Gentleman starts his question by talking about home ownership. Let us be very clear what is happening in respect of housing. House building starts fell by 45% under Labour in 12 years. They have increased by over two thirds since the Conservatives were in government. Yes, we are making changes to the welfare system. He and I have a fundamental difference of opinion about the welfare system. I think what is important in the welfare system is that we remember those who are benefiting from it and we remember those who are paying for it. The universal credit system is there to ensure that work will always pay. I believe in a welfare system that does help people to get into work, that does encourage people into the workplace. He believes in a welfare system where people are able to live on benefits.
Jeremy Corbyn
The last Labour Government took 800,000 children out of poverty. Under the right hon. Lady’s Government, child poverty is rising and now covers 4 million children across this country. Our people are suffering because of the policies of her Government. People are paying the price for her failed economic experiment. The Government have even now abandoned the previous Chancellor’s pledge that their so-called national living wage would be paying at least £9 per hour by 2020. What is the new pledge on living wage?
The Prime Minister
The pledge on living wage is set out in the autumn statement and is as it always has been. The right hon. Gentleman talks about poverty. Actually, we are seeing fewer families in absolute poverty and fewer families in relative poverty. I come back to the point I have been making in answer to his previous questions: it is only possible to do these things by having a strong economy. The one thing we know is that the policy that would not deliver a strong economy is Labour’s policy to increase borrowing by £500 billion. He talks about the impact on people in work. Let me remind him of what the former shadow Treasury Minister said: Labour’s policy to increase borrowing would lead to double the income tax, double council tax, double VAT and double national insurance. That will not help anybody who is in the workplace and just about managing.
Jeremy Corbyn
I am not entirely sure where the Government’s credibility lies on borrowing, since they are borrowing even more, the deficit is increasing and people are suffering. When the Prime Minister talks about children in poverty in response to my question, I simply remind her 4 million children are living in poverty—children going hungry to school in this country because their parents do not have enough money to feed them properly. It is a disgrace and should be addressed.
In the autumn statement last week, the Chancellor spoke for over 50 minutes. During that time, he did not once mention the national health service or social care. Some 1.2 million people are lacking the care they need. Why was there not one single penny more for social care in the autumn statement?
The Prime Minister
There is absolutely no doubt that the social care system is under pressure; we recognise that. If we just look at the fact that there are 1 million more people aged over 65 today than there were in 2010, we see the sort of pressures on the social care system. That is why the Government have already acted to put more money into the social care system: more money through the better care fund—£3.5 billion extra through the better care fund—and more money through the social care precept. But it is also important that local authorities and the NHS work together to ensure, for example, that people have the social care they need, so they are not ending up blocking beds in hospital. There is some very good practice up and down the country, and sadly there is some not so good practice. What we need to do is make sure everybody is giving the best possible service to people who need it.
Jeremy Corbyn
There is a tragic parallel going on between an underfunded NHS and an underfunded social care system all over the country, and the Prime Minister knows it. Indeed, she might care to listen to the Tory leader of Warwickshire Council, Izzi Seccombe, who says that her council has been “cut to the bone”, and who says on social care:
“right now we have a £1.3 billion gap which is not being funded.”
It is a real crisis in every social services department all over the country and, indeed, in almost every NHS hospital.
Next year, this Government are handing back £605 million in corporation tax cuts, rising to £1.6 billion the year after that and £7.5 billion over the next five years. So could the Prime Minister explain to the more than 1 million elderly people not getting the care they need, to the 4 million people on NHS waiting lists and to the millions of pensioners worried about losing the protection of the triple lock why there is not one penny extra for the NHS or social care? Just what is this Government’s real sense of priorities?
The Prime Minister
The right hon. Gentleman talks about funding social care and funding the national health service: £3.8 billion extra is going into the national health service this year. Under Labour’s plans, we would have seen £1.3 billion less going into the national health service. Social care funding is going up under this Government. At the last election, the shadow Chancellor—lately of “Strictly” fame—said local authorities would get not a penny more. Conservatives are putting money into the NHS and social care—Labour would deny it.
Seema Kennedy (South Ribble) (Con)
The Prime Minister
First of all, may I just say that I am sure the whole House would want to join me in commending Jo’s family for the very dignified way in which they dealt with matters as the court case was going through. It must have been very harrowing for them.
I am very pleased that my hon. Friend and the hon. Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves) are taking forward the work of the commission on loneliness. Earlier this week I was able to support the “Good Morning Britain” 1 Million Minutes campaign, which is encouraging individuals to give 30 minutes of their time to help—to be with—somebody who is lonely. We have, over the years, I think, failed to understand the impact that loneliness has on people’s psychological health but also their physical health. Ministers will look forward to receiving the results from the commission and to working with my hon. Friend and others.
Angus Robertson (Moray) (SNP)
A very happy St Andrew’s day to everybody celebrating in Scotland and throughout the world.
There is literally nothing to celebrate about the humanitarian catastrophe befalling the people of Syria at this time. The situation in the besieged city of Aleppo is described as so bad that it
“could be one of the biggest massacres of civilian population since World War II”.
What can the UK and the international community do to end the suffering of the people of Syria?
The Prime Minister
The right hon. Gentleman is right to draw attention to the appalling situation in Syria, and particularly the indiscriminate attacks that we see on civilians in Aleppo. The United Kingdom has been working with France to bring forward an emergency discussion on this issue at the UN Security Council; that will take place later today. We want to see a cessation of hostilities. We want to see an opportunity for humanitarian aid to have access to Aleppo, and we will be pressing for that at the Security Council.
Angus Robertson
It is extremely welcome that the discussions are taking place in the United Nations, and we wish success to all those who are supporting a humanitarian solution to the crisis. However, things are so bad that the agencies are saying that in Aleppo the situation is a “descent into hell”. Time is absolutely of the essence. I know the Prime Minister is seized of this matter; we are in agreement. Can I please appeal to her: can absolutely everything be done now to alleviate the situation of the poor people of Aleppo and of Syria?
The Prime Minister
The right hon. Gentleman is right about the horrific situation in Aleppo. I can assure him that the Government are pressing hard and we are doing everything that we can in relation to this. We have consistently looked at what the possible solutions might be, to see whether there are other avenues that we can press for. I think the Security Council debate is very important. There is an important message to send to Russia: that it use its influence with the Assad regime to stop these appalling atrocities in Aleppo and let humanitarian aid through.
Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)
The Prime Minister
My hon. Friend raises an important issue which matters both to her and me. I think the phrase that was used by the Lawyers’ Christian Fellowship was “the jealously guarded principle” of that ability to speak freely, as she says, respectfully and responsibly about one’s religion. I am happy to welcome the publication of this report and its findings. Of course, we are now into the season of Advent. We have a very strong tradition in this country of religious tolerance and freedom of speech, and our Christian heritage is something we can all be proud of. I am sure we would all want to ensure that people at work do feel able to speak about their faith, and also feel able to speak quite freely about Christmas.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
The Prime Minister
The hon. Gentleman raises a very important point. I know that the hon. Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) spoke very movingly from personal experience in the debate that she called on this issue. I do not think that anybody who has not been through the death of a child can possibly understand the pain that that brings, not just immediately but thereafter, as parents see others grow up while their child will not.
I recognise the issue that the hon. Gentleman has raised about the cost of children’s funerals. As he has said, there are measures in place for families who have particular hardship cases, where money can be given. It is open to local authorities to waive fees, and some local authorities do that. We have left this as a decision for local authorities, and some do, indeed, waive those fees.
Kelly Tolhurst (Rochester and Strood) (Con)
The Prime Minister
I agree with my hon. Friend. I believe that there are now nearly 11,000 more children in good and outstanding schools in my hon. Friend’s area than there were in 2010. We want to provide a good school place for every child. She references the good work being done by grammar schools in her area to improve the quality of education in primary schools, which is one of the issues that we are looking at in our consultation on education. We want to remove the legal ban on expanding or opening new grammar schools, but we also want to see grammar schools working to improve standards across the education system generally.
Margaret Greenwood (Wirral West) (Lab)
The Prime Minister
The STPs are about local people determining the shape of health services in a local area, to deliver the best service for local people. Obviously, every area will be looking very closely at the plans that are being brought forward. It is important that we see, in those STPs, health services increasingly working with local authorities to ensure that they are providing the right, holistic level of care for people in their area.
Claire Perry (Devizes) (Con)
The Prime Minister
As I mentioned earlier, we have seen a significant rise in the number of people in employment in this country, and that is because we have got the strong economy that we have. However, I recognise that employment and types of employment are changing. Technology is the driver in many cases. That is why I have asked the chief executive of the RSA, Matthew Taylor, to conduct a review of and report on modern employment practices, so we can ensure that the legislative framework is absolutely the right one for the economy of the future and the jobs of the future. That shows that it is now the Conservative party that is the party of working people.
Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)
The Prime Minister
I am very pleased to say that, over the past three years, nearly 600,000 more disabled people have got into the workplace. I think that is very important. Of course, we want to ensure that all those disabled people who are able to get into work are given the support needed to do that. That is why we have been ensuring not just that this is about benefits, but that this is about the support package in total that people are given. They do have individual support through the personal independence payment for the particular long-terms costs that they have incurred because of their disability. It is also the support package that is provided to people in the work group in employment and support allowance that enables them to get into work. Nearly 600,000 more disabled people in work—that is something the right hon. Gentleman should be celebrating.
Mr Peter Lilley (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)
The Prime Minister
I can assure my right hon. Friend that, as I said earlier, I would hope this is an issue we can look at at an early stage in the negotiations, and of course there will be two years of negotiations. I think it is right that we want to give reassurance to British citizens living in the EU and to EU citizens living here in the UK, but I think the reaction that we have seen shows why it was absolutely right for us not to do what the Labour party wanted us to do, which was simply to give away the guarantee for rights of EU citizens here in the UK. As we have seen, that would have left UK citizens in Europe high and dry.
Mr Stephen Hepburn (Jarrow) (Lab)
The Prime Minister
There are nearly 30 more doctors and over 950 more nurses in the South Tyneside NHS Foundation Trust compared with 2010. This year, the South Tyneside clinical commissioning group will be getting increased funding. Health funding in the hon. Gentleman’s area is going to be £2.7 billion this year, and that will be increasing by 2020-21. It is this Government that are putting more money into the national health service; it is the Labour party—a former shadow Health Secretary from the Labour party—who said that more money for the NHS was “irresponsible”.
Chris White (Warwick and Leamington) (Con)
The Prime Minister
My hon. Friend is absolutely right in what he says about his own constituency and the midlands engine in relation to the development of jobs and for the strong economy of the future. That is why we will be developing the industrial strategy for the whole of the United Kingdom, which is an important part of the Government’s plan for the future. It is looking at issues such as infrastructure and skills, ensuring that we can build on the best and encourage the growth that we need for the economy of the future. The midlands engine and the part of the country that my hon. Friend represents will be an important part of that growth for the future.
Kirsten Oswald (East Renfrewshire) (SNP)
The Prime Minister
We have a very clear visa system, and decisions are taken according to its rules, but as the hon. Lady will have seen, the Home Secretary has heard her comments. I suggest that if she sends her the details, she will look at the case.
Suella Fernandes (Fareham) (Con)
The Prime Minister
I am interested in the results of the Legatum Institute commission’s report on this issue. I believe absolutely that free trade is the right way to go—it is through free trade that we increase growth and prosperity—which is why I have said I want this country to be a global leader in free trade and why we will not just look to forge new trade deals with other countries as we leave the EU but see how we can improve trade with other countries before we leave it, so that we will continue to strengthen our economy. I am sure that the Secretary of State for International Trade will be happy to meet my hon. Friend to discuss the results of the commission’s report.
Mr Speaker
I warmly welcome the hon. Member for Blyth Valley (Mr Campbell) back to his place.
Mr Ronnie Campbell (Blyth Valley) (Lab)
Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’ll be able to tell you more about it next week, when I meet my consultant.
What plans does the Prime Minister have to make super-economic zones? The Blyth estuary was given an economic zone by the last Tory Chancellor, as we have acres and acres of land around that river. I hope that that is in her mind.
The Prime Minister
I join you, Mr Speaker, and others in welcoming the hon. Gentleman to his place. It is good to see him back in his usual position, and I wish him all the very best.
As part of our industrial strategy, we are looking around the country at where there are opportunities for economic growth and how we can encourage them to be taken up. It is important that economic growth and prosperity be spread across the whole country to ensure an economy that works for everyone.
Stuart Andrew (Pudsey) (Con)
The Prime Minister
I assure my hon. Friend that I recognise the role played by the creative and digital industries in our economy, the excellent example of Leeds and the vibrancy they bring to the economy there. I am pleased that we are able to invest a further £1 billion in gold standard broadband, which will bring better connections to 2 million more homes and businesses, and I am sure that Yorkshire will have a very central role to play in this.
Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)
Yesterday, the Prime Minister’s Government published a Green Paper on corporate governance, emphasising the importance of gender and race diversity. I congratulate her on that, but why has her Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport blocked the appointment of a black woman to the Channel 4 board? Does she not think there is a woman or a black person in the country worthy of being on the board of Channel 4?
The Prime Minister
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for the welcome he has given to the corporate governance Green Paper that we have produced, which of course covers a great deal more than simply issues of gender and diversity in corporate governance and on corporate boards. I am not aware of the particular case that he mentioned. In looking at public appointments, however, I would say that a very careful process is undertaken to ensure that the people who are appointed have the skillset and the requirements needed to carry out the role. I will look into the issue he raised, but this is always a question of the right person for the job. Issues around the sort of question that he has raised do not come into it; it is about who is right for the job.
Michael Tomlinson (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (Con)
Mr Donald Tusk’s response to my letter on reciprocal rights has already been mentioned. I congratulate the Prime Minister on her work with individual member states in this important matter, but does she share our disappointment and will she join me in calling for this important matter to be raised in two weeks’ time at the next European Council meeting?
The Prime Minister
I recognise the concerns of my hon. Friend and other Members on the particular issue of the rights of EU citizens and UK citizens variously living here in the UK and in the other member states of the European Union. I hope it is something that we will be able to address at an early stage. We have not yet triggered article 50 and the negotiations will have up to two years to run, as set out in the Lisbon treaty. As I say, I hope we will be able to address this at an early stage to give people the reassurance they need.
Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)
A year ago this week, my constituent Deborah Pearson lost her niece Julie, who is believed to have been unlawfully killed in Eilat, Israel. A year ago, the Prime Minister’s predecessor was good enough to give me support, as was the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, but after a year of writing letters, having meetings and putting pressure on the Israeli authorities, the family is no closer to having justice for Julie. Will the Prime Minister meet me and my constituent to understand what further pressure can be brought to bear so that the family can get answers and understand who brought this terrible crime against their family member?
The Prime Minister
I understand the concern that the hon. Lady rightly shows for her constituent, and obviously her constituent’s deep concern to find out what happened in this terrible tragedy. I understand that the appropriate Minister in the Foreign Office is actively working on this question. I will ask him to respond to the hon. Lady and to meet her to discuss what more can be done and to set out exactly what the Foreign Office is doing on this issue.
Bill Presented
Withdrawal from the European Union (Article 50) Bill
Presentation and First Reading (Standing Order No. 57)
Mr Peter Bone presented a Bill to require Her Majesty’s Government to notify the European Council by 31 March 2017 of the United Kingdom’s intention to withdraw from the European Union.
Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time on Friday 16 December, and to be printed (Bill 104).
Petition
David Rutley (Macclesfield) (Con)
I rise to present a petition of over 1,100 residents of the Macclesfield constituency on the subject of climate change.
The petition states:
The petition of residents of Macclesfield,
Declares that climate changes impacts upon both people and places; further that the rapid progress towards ratification of the Paris Agreement is to be applauded; further that the UK requires a low carbon investment plan to transform the economy in line with the Climate Change Act 2008; and further that 1,100 individuals have signed a local petition on the same matter.
The petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urges the Government to publish an ambitious low carbon investment plan.
And the petitioners remain, etc.
[P001986]
Football Supporters (Access)
Wednesday 30th November 2016
(8 years ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Football Supporters (Access) Bill 2016-17 View all Football Supporters (Access) Bill 2016-17 Debates Read Hansard Text
A Ten Minute Rule Bill is a First Reading of a Private Members Bill, but with the sponsor permitted to make a ten minute speech outlining the reasons for the proposed legislation.
There is little chance of the Bill proceeding further unless there is unanimous consent for the Bill or the Government elects to support the Bill directly.
For more information see: Ten Minute Bills
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Justin Madders (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to require football clubs to provide tickets to matches at a discount for persons under a specified age; to require local authorities to consider the needs of match going supporters when approving kick off times; to require football clubs to set aside a proportion of transfer fees paid for the development of football facilities for local clubs and young people; and for connected purposes.
Football is our national sport. We invented the modern game and we have the most popular league in the world, viewed by millions around the globe. I grew up playing and watching the game, and loved every minute of doing so. Although I still play and watch when I can, I have less time to do so now, and when I play I do not move quite so quickly around the pitch, but I still enjoy it and score the odd goal. As a supporter, however, I find that the difference between the game I grew up watching and the game now is incredible. I remember being able to turn up just before kick-off and pay on the gate. If I did not manage to see the match in person, that usually meant that I would not see it at all, because at that time televised games were the exception rather than the rule.
While there were plenty of good players then, nowadays we have many of the best players from all over the world. There are fantastic modem stadiums, there is huge media coverage of every millisecond of every Premier League game, and of course there is more cash in the sport than it has ever seen before. Despite all that glamour and cash, however, there are things we could be doing better. Our teams, by and large, still flatter to deceive on the international stage, and the proportion of young home-grown talent breaking through each year appears to be less and less.
Not only are there fewer youngsters out on the pitch, but there appear to be fewer in the stands as well. During the 1980s, a much higher proportion of match-going fans were younger. Surveys undertaken at the time suggested that about 20% of match-day fans were in the 16-to-20 age group. I suspect it is no coincidence that the average age of a match-going supporter now is in the 40s: those same fans have grown up with the match-day experience being a part of their life that they have retained. However, the proportion of young people going to games now is much lower, and some surveys even suggest that it is considerably less than 10%. Cost plays a huge part in that, with ticket prices far outstripping inflation at most clubs. If we do not make more provision for younger supporters, we shall risk empty stadiums in 20 or 30 years’ time, because the fans of the future will have been driven away by sky-high prices.
I believe that it is time to make provision for our younger fans. The first element of my Bill will require all football clubs to provide 10% of their tickets at discounted prices for young people under the age of 22. We have a lower minimum wage for people under 22, and many of them are in full-time education or apprenticeships. The price of a match-day ticket is beyond the reach of many young people, and when our prices are compared with others around Europe, we know that there is an awfully long way to go. That criticism is not levelled solely at Premier League clubs; far too many Football League prices are too high as well. The match-going ritual was part of growing up for my generation, and I do not want to see the next generation miss out on that.
A second measure in the Bill would require local authorities to consider the needs of match-going supporters when approving kick-off times. They are currently required to take account of safety and police advice, but I believe that the needs of the supporter should be considered as well. A number of high-profile games have been moved to times that make it impossible for travelling supporters to attend via public transport. There are countless examples of matches being moved at short notice, in particular to accommodate the demands of television companies. The money that television coverage has brought into the game is of course welcome, but that should not mean that the interests of the match-going fan are entirely subservient to the needs of the TV scheduler.
One high-profile example was the occasion on which Everton and Manchester United played in the FA Cup semi-final in April this year. A late 5.15 pm start meant that fans risked being left with no train back home to the north-west from Wembley after the match, particularly if there was extra time or penalties. However, that does not just apply to the big games. At the other end of the scale, at the start of the season in the non-league, Eastleigh football club’s game against Barrow was moved to a 12.30 pm kick-off to accommodate television broadcasting, which left fans with a 10-hour, 600-mile round trip. How could anyone seriously expect supporters to travel sensibly to and from that game on public transport?
The Bill requires councils to make an assessment of the availability of transport links before a final kick-off time can be approved, so that travelling fans have a realistic chance of being able to get to the game. That is particularly relevant as we approach the traditional Christmas fixture list, when public transport options are more limited. Games are currently scheduled to kick off at midday on Boxing Day and 5.30 pm on New Year’s Eve. How can either of those times be remotely sensible on those days?
There are also the fans who have gone to considerable trouble and expense to make travel arrangements well in advance of the game, only for the time and, on some occasions, the day of the game to be changed at the last minute. What about the shift worker who has made arrangements with his employer, possibly swapping shifts with a colleague for time off, only to find that the game has been moved at a few days’ notice? How many people have to make complicated arrangements to juggle their various commitments when the fixture list is released at the start of the season, only to find that the original fixture list becomes increasingly worthless as the season progresses?
The third part of the Bill would require football clubs to set aside a proportion of transfer fees for the development of football facilities for local clubs and young people. That would apply only to fees paid by Premier League clubs, which, during the last transfer window alone, spent £1.2 billion on players. A levy of just 0.1% could raise an extra £1.2 million for grassroots football. I know that money does go to support grassroots football, but it is not enough. Given the cash washing around the Premier League at the moment, I believe we could take further steps to ensure that a little of that unprecedented wealth helps to secure the future for our players and to improve facilities for all.
A study of the amount paid in agents’ fees by Premier League clubs showed that £46.5 million was paid in agents’ and intermediaries’ fees in the four months from October 2015 to January 2016. That is money leaving the game. Much as I would like to, I am not suggesting we outlaw agents’ fees all together; I am merely using these figures to demonstrate that huge sums are going through the game that are not benefiting players or clubs, and certainly not the fans.
We should be concerned about the declining number of home-grown players coming through the leagues. Last season, 35% of Premier League players were English—a huge decrease since the opening 1992-93 campaign of the Premier League, when 69% of the players were English. A survey last month showed that just four Premier League teams had given more than half their game time to home-country players, compared with 11 teams in Spain and 17 in France.
There are huge questions about how professional clubs operate and how our younger players can hope to get a chance against the imported superstars, but one thing we can do is improve the standard of facilities for younger players of all abilities, and indeed everyone involved in grassroots football. We know the pressure that local authorities are under to balance the books, and there is little left for discretionary spending on improving sporting facilities. Often pitches are in poor condition, with poor drainage—there are areas where there is more mud than grass—and many pitches have few or no changing facilities connected to them.
That really hit home with me recently, when I saw for myself a local pitch used for kids’ football, where the goal at one end of the pitch was smaller than the other because of vandalism. We cannot expect the superstars of tomorrow to emerge if we do not invest in them, and we should not tolerate second-rate facilities for our national sport. There are plenty of distractions and reasons why kids might find something to do other than play football. We should do what we can and make sure that at least a little of the wealth flowing through the game trickles down to support the grassroots.
Football is more than just a game. It is certainly more than just a business. It is an integral part of our culture and it needs to be nurtured and protected. The fruits of this golden age in the sport should be used to help secure its future for everyone. I believe that this Bill will achieve that aim.
Question put and agreed to.
Ordered,
That Justin Madders, Alan Brown, Carolyn Harris, Stephen Kinnock, Ian C. Lucas, Christian Matheson, Jason McCartney, Karl MᶜCartney, Ian Mearns, Paula Sherriff and Jo Stevens present the Bill.
Justin Madders accordingly presented the Bill.
Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time on Friday 24 February 2017, and to be printed (Bill 103).
Mr Speaker
We have no intelligence on the question whether it will be televised—well, actually we do, and it very likely will. [Laughter.]
Opposition Day
Chilcot Inquiry and Parliamentary Accountability
(8 years ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
16:01 - The House divided: - Ayes: 70 / Noes: 439 - Question accordingly negatived.
Alex Salmond (Gordon) (SNP)
I beg to move,
That this House recognises that the Chilcot Inquiry provided substantial evidence of misleading information being presented by the then Prime Minister and others on the development of the then Government's policy towards the invasion of Iraq as shown most clearly in the contrast between private correspondence to the United States government and public statements to Parliament and to the people and also in the presentation of intelligence information; and calls on the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, further to its current investigation into the lessons to be learned from the Chilcot Inquiry for the machinery of government, to conduct a further specific examination of this contrast in public and private policy and of the presentation of intelligence, and then to report to the House on what further action it considers necessary and appropriate to help prevent any repetition of this disastrous series of events.
I move the motion on behalf of myself, my hon. Friends and hon. Members representing seven political parties across this House—[Interruption.] I see Labour Members are already in an excitable state; I just said “Members of”.
It is a great pleasure to move this motion on St Andrew’s day—Scotland’s national day. The leaders of the political parties complimented Scotland in their remarks at Prime Minister’s questions. When the SNP parliamentary group discussed what motion should be tabled, there were many obvious candidates: Scotland in the world or the meaning of St Andrew’s day—a broad debate given that this is a St Andrew’s day motion. However, we thought it would be better to focus on issues of signal importance to the people. The second debate to be moved by my hon. Friends this afternoon will be on the injustice perpetrated on the WASPI women—Women Against State Pension Inequality—to see whether a debate can advance their cause. This debate is on the issue that has dominated the past two decades of politics, both here and internationally: the war in Iraq.
One hundred and seventy-nine Members are left in the House of Commons who were present when the debate on the war in Iraq took place in March 2003. I remember the figure exactly, because the same number of British soldiers died in the conflict. The deaths of thousands of American soldiers and 200,000 Iraqis, the birth of Daesh in the prison camps of Iraq and the conflagration in the middle east are all directly sourced to the disastrous decision of March 2003. The intention of today’s debate is not to rerun the Chilcot debate of July—we have had that debate—but to try to identify from that debate how we can take matters forward in terms of parliamentary accountability.
I mentioned a few seconds ago that Members from seven political parties in the House put their names to the motion. We do not want to rerun the Chilcot debate, because the generally accepted view of both the press and the public was best summed up in the headline in The Times the day after Chilcot:
“Britain fought an unnecessary, disastrous and potentially illegal war in Iraq because of Tony Blair’s misguided and personal commitment to George W Bush, the Chilcot report concluded yesterday.”
That is a reasonable summary of the general tenor of the reaction to the Chilcot report. What was unstated and unsaid in the Chilcot report was what to do with both the amassing evidence, and what to do in terms of parliamentary accountability if, as we believe, this House and the public were grievously misled into that disastrous conflict.
The hon. Members representing seven political parties in this House commissioned a report from Dr Glen Rangwala of Trinity College, Cambridge. I put the report in the House of Commons Library this morning. All Members would do well to give it a good reading. The report considers, in exact terms, the statements made over a period to this House—not just in the March 2003 debate—and takes into account Chilcot’s findings from the wider canvas of information now available, and contrasts and compares the two. It might help the House if I make a few remarks on Dr Rangwala’s general findings.
In summary, from late 2001 to March 2003, Tony Blair repeatedly made three interrelated statements to the House of Commons: no decision had been taken to use military force against Iraq; military action could be avoided by Iraq’s disarmament of its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons; and regime change was not the goal of Government policy. The report of the Iraq inquiry, published on 6 July, demonstrates conclusively and authoritatively that each of those three statements was untrue, and that their falsity was known to Mr Blair. Mr Blair backed up his claims about the need for Iraqi disarmament by asserting there was conclusive evidence of Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction and that these weapons were a threat to the UK’s national security. On both points, those statements contradicted the intelligence assessments put to Mr Blair.
Ian C. Lucas (Wrexham) (Lab)
Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that Hans Blix, the arms inspector carrying out an inquiry at the time of the vote in March 2003—I was present and voted against intervention—believed at that time that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction?
Alex Salmond
I am aware that Dr Hans Blix asked for more time to complete the process of inspection and was denied that by the then Prime Minister and President of the United States of America.
Ian Austin (Dudley North) (Lab)
It was not just Hans Blix who thought that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Even countries that thought we should not go to war—Russia, France and Germany—thought Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, too. In fact, the only way Saddam Hussein was able to enslave the people of Iraq was by leading them to believe he had weapons of mass destruction.
Alex Salmond
And those countries the hon. Gentleman mentions voted against the war in Iraq for very good reasons.
Rather than speculate on that, thanks to the Chilcot report we now know what evidence the Prime Minister had at his disposal from the Joint Intelligence Committee, which on 15 March 2002 stated:
“Intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction…and ballistic missile programmes is sporadic and patchy… We continue to judge that Iraq has an offensive chemical warfare (CW) programme, although there is very little intelligence relating to it. From the evidence available to us, we believe Iraq retains some production equipment, and some small stocks of CW agent precursors, and may have hidden small quantities of agents and weapons… There is no intelligence on any BW agent production facilities.”
That highly qualified assessment from the Joint Intelligence Committee was presented to the House of Commons as a certainty that Iraq possessed weapons that were an immediate danger to the United Kingdom.
Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)
Does the right hon. Gentleman share my concern that if we do nothing following the seven-year, £10 million inquiry and take no steps towards accountability for the clear evidence that the former Prime Minister was fixing the evidence around the policy to go to war, it will be almost impossible to begin to restore the faith that has been lost in our political system?
Alex Salmond
Yes. The loss of faith in the political system is another dramatic consequence of the disastrous events in Iraq.
Alex Salmond
Let me finish this point, before I give way to the right hon. Gentleman.
This point was raised in the Liaison Committee, when Chilcot was asked about weapons of mass destruction. He was asked repeatedly whether a reasonable person could have come to the conclusion the Prime Minister had come to. The best exchanges were between the Chair of the Committee and Sir John Chilcot on the well understood test of a reasonable man. The Chair asked:
“Would a reasonable man—another human being—looking at the evidence come to that conclusion?”
Sir John Chilcot replied:
“If you are posing that question with regard to a statement of imminent threat to the United Kingdom”—
The Chair said: “I am.”
Sir John Chilcot went on:
“In that case, I have to say no, there was not sufficient evidence to sustain that belief objectively at the time.”
Given the length of time the Chilcot inquiry spent considering this exact point, it may be the opinion of many hon. Members that Sir John Chilcot’s expression of this carries rather more weight than that of hon. Members desperate to defend the indefensible.
Mr Hanson
Did not Sir John Chilcot, when asked this question in the Liaison Committee, say:
“I absolve him from…a decision to deceive Parliament or the public”.
We cannot have it both ways. We have had the Chilcot report and parliamentary accountability: Chilcot said that the former Prime Minister did not deceive this House or the public.
Alex Salmond
The trouble with that intervention is that the right hon. Gentleman does not go on to read the next sentence in that exchange, which I shall read for his erudition:
“However, he also exercised his very considerable powers of advocacy and persuasion, rather than laying the real issues, and the information to back the analysis of them, fairly and squarely in front of Parliament or the public. It was an exercise in advocacy, not an exercise in sharing a crucial judgment”.
Mr Kenneth Clarke (Rushcliffe) (Con)
As the right hon. Gentleman is aware, I agree with his description regarding the catastrophic nature of the invasion of Iraq. I agree with him that the former Prime Minister has a lot to answer for. He will no doubt continue to do so, although he was cleared by Chilcot of deliberate misbehaviour. Does the right hon. Gentleman not accept that if we turn post-Chilcot debates into an attempt to pursue and hound Tony Blair, the whole thing turns into a party political argument, with Labour Members trying to defend the position of their Government?
Will the right hon. Gentleman go on to address—he is entitled to go on for a bit—the most important matter: how do we ensure that the system of Cabinet government, handling intelligence, and taking on board and properly communicating defence advice to all members of the Cabinet and to Parliament, cannot be repeated, so we do not have another catastrophic foreign policy decision? By personalising the issue we will, if we are not careful, lose the point, which is whether we are satisfied that everything possible is being done to ensure that cannot happen again.
Alex Salmond
As the Chilcot report concluded, this was very much a personal campaign by the Prime Minister in doing things unbeknown to both Cabinet and certainly Parliament. I am going to address the point the right hon. and learned Gentleman makes, but the question of parliamentary accountability is in my estimation central to this case. Committees of this House have been examining the conduct of the processes of government. If he reads the minutes of the meeting that the Committee to which we intend to refer the question of parliamentary accountability held with the Cabinet Secretary, I do not think he will find much reassurance that there has been a tremendous advance in the process of government. The overwhelming impression is that a headstrong Prime Minister could still create a situation where sofa government drove a country into an illegal war. I suggest that parliamentary accountability and an examination of statements made to Parliament and public against the facts as we now know them would be a valuable additional sanction and tool in restraining future Prime Ministers from any such course of events.
Ann Clwyd (Cynon Valley) (Lab)
I was here in 2003. I was a frequent visitor to Iraqi Kurdistan. The Kurds believed prior to 2003 that chemical weapons were going to be used against them again. The Iraqis were in the Gallery; it is a pity we are not having this debate in front of them, because they could point out their concern at the time, and their pressure for this country to help them in their action to overthrow Saddam Hussein. It was not simply an idea that Tony Blair had in his head; we had a full debate in this Parliament in 2003 and I, among others, voted for the action.
Alex Salmond
The right hon. Lady’s position on that issue has been consistent through the years, but that was not the case presented to this Parliament. The case presented to this Parliament was that there was a real and present danger to the United Kingdom that required the abandonment of diplomacy internationally and the immediate process to war.
Several hon. Members rose—
Alex Salmond
I say this to Labour Members, and correct a point made by the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke): it is not all Labour Members. Many Labour Members, throughout this whole sad story, have been prepared to vote with their conscience in condemning their own Government. Indeed, we are all well aware that the leader of the Labour party would, if he was free to do so, be joining us in the Lobby this afternoon.
Several hon. Members rose—
Alex Salmond
I say again to Labour Members that I am not really interested in the civil war in the Labour party; I am interested in the real war that took place and resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Therefore, it is reasonable and important to consider whether parliamentary accountability can be a major weapon of this House in making sure such events do not happen again.
Mr Nigel Dodds (Belfast North) (DUP)
I wish the right hon. Gentleman and Scots everywhere a very happy St Andrew’s day. He mentioned seven parties; none of my party’s MPs in this House has signed this motion. I do not for one minute doubt the sincerity of many Members who have signed the motion and their desire to get to the truth, but is he not, following on from the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), in real danger of turning a very important issue into a party political issue—the SNP trying to attack the Labour party—rather than making it an issue of real national concern, drawing the lessons that need to be learned? That is one of the reasons we did not sign up to his motion.
Alex Salmond
I would have been very pleased if the right hon. Gentleman had made it Members from eight political parties signing the motion, but the whole point of the cross-party group, which has been working on this issue for months, is to make it not a straight party political issue. As for attacking the Labour party, I think it is more that Labour Members wish to attack me in this debate, but I do not mind that because I am driving on to make the points of parliamentary accountability and the information we had from the Chilcot report that make it unsustainable to argue other than that this Parliament was grievously misled.
The report in the Library—
Alex Salmond
If the right hon. Lady will forgive me, I will make some progress.
The report in the Library from Dr Glen Rangwala analyses this in enormous detail and I hope Members read it, although even that report is not exhaustive. The right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) in the Chilcot debate in July listed five, as he put it, clear instances of misrepresentation in a single speech from the Prime Minister—in the war speech, the greatest speech of his life, in March 2003. I want to look at just three of the key things that have arisen and that we now know about from the Chilcot report.
The first of those things is the question of prior commitment. Through the long debates on Iraq, many of us suspected that the Prime Minister had given commitments to the American President which were unrevealed to this House and to the public. The Chilcot report outlined these in spades. The famous phrase
“I will be with you, whatever”
will go down in infamy in terms of giving a commitment. Chilcot says that after giving such a commitment it would be virtually impossible for the Prime Minister to withdraw from it.
Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (SNP)
My constituent Mr Matt Walton, an ex-serviceman, contacted my office several months ago regarding the Chilcot report. Matt is clear that Mr Blair’s actions ensured that many of his colleagues’ tragic fates were already decided before they left the UK. Does my right hon. Friend agree that it is an outright scandal that ex-members of the armed forces are even thinking this way, and that the then Prime Minister has utterly let down those who were allegedly sent out to protect us?
Michael Gove (Surrey Heath) (Con)
The right hon. Gentleman is making a fascinating case, but I do not think he does himself a favour when he refers to this communication with President Bush and says that it was a commitment to military action come what may. There were in fact specific areas where the Prime Minister said that progress would need to be made before he could commit to military action, and he also said that there was a need to commit to Iraq for the long term. I simply say that because, if we are going draw appropriate lessons from history, yes, absolutely, draw critical lessons, but please put them in context.
Alex Salmond
The right hon. Gentleman will understand that my point was that no evidence or information about these commitments was ever presented to this House or to the general public. Indeed, it was not, as we know from Chilcot, presented to the Cabinet. Only Downing Street officials saw that letter and advised the Prime Minister, apparently, not to send it, which he did anyway. The Foreign Secretary, Mr Straw, saw it after the event. It has been said by some that that phrase did not mean what it clearly seems to mean. I just point out that after the Foreign Secretary did see the letter to President Bush, he himself wrote in a memo to the Prime Minister on 11 March 2003, when things at the United Nations were not going well:
“We will obviously need to discuss all this, but I thought it best to put it in your mind as event[s] could move fast. And what I propose is a great deal better than the alternatives. When Bush graciously accepted your offer to be with him all the way, he wanted you alive not dead!”
The Foreign Secretary was referring to being politically dead, not really dead like the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. That point shows with absolute seriousness and clarity that there was no doubt in the mind of the then Foreign Secretary of the extent of the commitment that had been made, and there was no doubt in the mind of the Chilcot inquiry when it commented on the range of letters and correspondence to the President of the United States, which it said would have made it very difficult for the UK to pursue any independent policy after the commitment had been made. That is what the inquiry says on the question of prior commitment.
Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)
It is a matter of regret that this is being turned into a party political debate. It is worth remembering that 139 Labour MPs voted, against a strong three-line Whip, against the war, including Members who are present now. The great majority of Conservative MPs did not, but with honourable exceptions—half a dozen of them. Three Select Committees of this House were gung-ho for the war, and what is on trial today is the reputation of Parliament. It is Parliament who voted for an unnecessary war that ended in the deaths of 179 British soldiers, as we have been reminded. The loved ones of the British soldiers need the truth and they need a debate, and a serious debate, not a party political row, which this is turning out to be.
Alex Salmond
I very much welcome the hon. Gentleman’s intervention. As I have been trying to point out, that is why Members from seven parties in this House have put their names to this motion.
There is a real argument, which has been put forward by the hon. Gentleman, me and others who voted against the conflict, that if we suspected there was something grievously wrong with the Prime Minister’s case, why did other people not come to the same conclusion as the late Robin Cook—that in his estimation weapons of mass destruction did not exist in respect of a clear imminent threat being commonly expressed? Why did other people not see that? The hon. Gentleman and I have to understand that when the Prime Minister went to the Dispatch Box in March 2003 and told the House conclusively that a real and present danger to the United Kingdom existed, it was reasonable even for those with misgivings to think that he must be seeing something that they were not seeing and that he must know something that they did not know. Those Members were thereby misled into the Lobby to vote for the conflict.
Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)
My right hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North (Joan Ryan) has been trying to intervene for ages.
Alex Salmond
No doubt, but I think I have been more generous in giving way to Labour Members than they have ever been to me in any Committee or debate that I can remember. I say this reasonably gently: when I first came to this House, the Scottish National party had three Members here and the Labour party in Scotland had 50. I was used to taking constant interventions, and that was entirely legitimate. It did not faze me at all when I was a young Member, and it certainly does not faze me now. So let us make some progress.
On the question of the imminent threat, Chilcot said after assessing all the evidence that the then Prime Minister was engaged in advocacy, not in presenting the facts. On the question of a prior commitment, the Chilcot report is full of expressions from the Prime Minister to the President of the United States of America that were not known to Members of this House or to the general public. That information gives a totally different view of the reasons for conflict that the Prime Minister was then presenting to this House. For example, back in December 2001, the then Prime Minister said in a letter to President Bush that
“at present international opinion would be reluctant, outside the US/UK”—
I do not know how he read opinion in that way—
“to support immediate military action though, for sure, people want to be rid of Saddam. So we need a strategy for regime change that builds over time.”
The Prime Minister said repeatedly and consistently in this House that regime change was not the objective of Government policy. He stated that the Government’s objective was to stop a clear and present danger to the United Kingdom. I have yet to see a more clear example of misleading people.
Lastly, and I think most pertinently, Chilcot identified the damage done to the authority of the United Nations. These were among the clearest and most resounding points in his report. In this troubled world, we have never needed an effective United Nations more than we do at this moment. That undermining of the UN was clear in the actions of the Prime Minister and in his presentation of why the second resolution was not to pass. Such a resolution would apparently have gone down by 11 votes to four. The Prime Minister repeatedly told the public that the only circumstances in which there would be a war without a second resolution were if one country expressed an unreasonable veto or stood out against international opinion and was not prepared to sanction action in Iraq. We now know beyond question from Chilcot that that was not the case.
We know that the then Prime Minister was misrepresenting the views of the Government of France and of President Chirac, for example. Even on the day of the debate, he continued to misrepresent the French position. The damage to the authority of the United Nations Security Council and to the consistency of international relations is inestimable. In a radio programme last year, as I recall, Sir Stephen Wall was asked specifically whether the Government had lied about the intentions of the French and withheld information on that matter. His answer was yes. The damage to international relations and the question of the unreasonable veto, as the then Prime Minister put it, are at the heart of this misrepresentation.
In recent weeks we have heard a great deal about checks and balances in political systems, particularly as people across the world are crossing their fingers and hoping for the best in the White House. We have been hoping that the institutions of office have a restraining effect and that the mad tweeter will become a sensible President.
James Morris (Halesowen and Rowley Regis) (Con)
The right hon. Gentleman is right to talk about prime ministerial accountability to this House, and he is making a powerful case, but is not the real lesson from Chilcot the need for a policy response from the Government to ensure that this kind of thing does not happen again? For example, the creation of the National Security Council was a policy response from the Government to ensure that we have better information sharing and that decision making in Government is improved. Is that not the critical point in this debate?
Alex Salmond
It is certainly an important point, and it is one that is being pursued by the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee and other Committees of this House. When the Cabinet Secretary was repeatedly challenged on whether the changes to the flow of information to the Intelligence and Security Committee would make a decisive difference to a Prime Minister who was hellbent on pursuing a particular course of action, answer came there none. It is not enough to say that we are going to change the institutions of government or that we are going to learn the lessons of post-conflict analysis, although we have been promised a paper on that in the near future. There has to be an essence of parliamentary accountability.
Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
I was the Chair of the Committee when the Cabinet Secretary was asked that very question, and I can assure the right hon. Gentleman that my Committee does not necessarily take the advice of the Cabinet Secretary on our recommendations. We will be making recommendations that we are confident will prevent such events from happening again. Should this motion be carried, we will respect the view of the House and extend our inquiry in order to respect that view. I do not know, however, whether we can satisfy the rather less reasonable terms in which the right hon. Gentleman has presented his reasonable motion. That will be for the House to judge.
Alex Salmond
The motion speaks for me and for the other Members who have signed it. I welcome that intervention from the Chairman of the Select Committee. I looked at his robust questioning of the Cabinet Secretary and I am now filled with more confidence that significant recommendations will come forward.
What Iraq demonstrates is that there are currently no effective checks and balances in our system, that the Prime Minister had the ability to create the circumstances in which this House followed him into an illegal conflict, and that all the memos from the higher echelons of the civil service will not mean a thing—rather like the Cabinet Secretary’s evidence to the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee. That should be of little surprise to us.
Joan Ryan
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. According to my reading of Chilcot, the report states that there was
“no falsification or improper use of intelligence”,
there was “no deception of Cabinet” and there was
“no secret commitment to war whether at Crawford Texas in April 2002 or elsewhere”.
As we have been told, Chilcot made it clear to the Liaison Committee that Tony Blair had not deceived Parliament. Sadly, I think the only deception is in today’s motion. Its opportunistic nature does not serve this issue or this Parliament well.
Alex Salmond
In relation to the right hon. Lady’s intervention, I have already corrected one of her hon. Friends and suggested that they carry on to the next sentence after the ones they have cited from Chilcot. Also, the Liaison Committee’s questioning of Sir John Chilcot found explicitly that a reasonable person could not have drawn the conclusions that the then Prime Minister did, and that he presented those conclusions to the House as an advocate rather than as a conveyor of information. I ask the right hon. Lady to go back and look at those points, because they concern every Member of this House regardless of their political party.
Chilcot shows that we have a system of non-accountability. We waited six years before establishing a proper inquiry and, as we found out in The Observer a week past Sunday, it was structured in such a way as to avoid blame. It was deprived of judicial expertise and could not even pronounce on the legality of the conflict. It was wrestled with over the release of the diplomatic correspondence with President Bush, which more than any other factor provides the Prime Minister’s motivations. It was seven years before it reported. After all this time, some people in the press and elsewhere say, “These things are in the past. Let the dead bury the dead.” Many dead people have been buried, the carnage continues, and the real issue, to quote the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin), is how to stop it happening again.
Memories will fade. A whole generation has grown up and reached adulthood since the war in Iraq. Soon, less than a quarter of Members—perhaps none—will have lived through the experience of the vote on Iraq and that fateful decision in March 2003. The motion presents an opportunity to introduce another check and balance into a system that is clearly deficient. It would start a process to create a precedent so that any future Prime Minister will know that he or she will have to account for their actions not only to history, but to this House of Commons. A long time ago, I made a speech in this House in which I suggested to Mr Blair that he might answer to a higher power than this House. I understand that he found it offensive, but I absolutely believe it to be the case none the less. In the meantime, in the here and now—here on earth—is it not important for us to find a parliamentary process by which a Prime Minister who grievously misled this House and the people into an illegal war can finally be held to parliamentary account?
The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Chris Skidmore)
Let me start by expressing my condolences and sympathy to those who lost loved ones in Iraq and to those who still bear the scars of the conflict. Whatever our views on the conflict, we can surely all agree on one thing: the bravery and courage of British servicemen and women in Iraq was exemplary. We owe it to all those who died or were wounded in Iraq—be they servicemen or civilians, British, Iraqi or any other nationality—to learn lessons from the conflict.
There can be little doubt that Sir John Chilcot’s report is detailed and forensic, and for that we should all be thankful to Sir John and the other members of the inquiry panel. At the inquiry’s outset, the Government of the day committed to provide the fullest range of information and to giving it unhindered access to Government documents. Sir John confirmed in his appearance before the Liaison Committee that the inquiry had total access to all UK Government material right from the start, including the most sensitive categories. The inquiry saw more than 150,000 Government documents and an unprecedented amount of previously classified Government information has been released. Some 7,000 documents were referenced in the inquiry’s report, and more than 1,500 documents were published alongside it. The papers include records of key Cabinet discussions, notes from Mr Blair to the US President, records of conversations between the then Prime Minister and other Heads of Government, records of meetings between senior UK and US officials, and Joint Intelligence Committee assessments.
The inquiry concluded that mistakes and failings were made that could have been avoided at the time and for which hindsight is no defence. The inquiry’s report is a salutary tale of what happens when not enough opportunity is given to challenge and debate a policy or approach. When asked by the Liaison Committee to sum up one key lesson of the report, Sir John Chilcot said:
“If you press me very hard, I will say it was a failure to exert and exercise sufficient collective responsibility for a very big decision, and then to scrutinise and supervise its conduct and implementation.”
As the then Prime Minister, the former Member for Witney—it is good to see the present hon. Member for Witney (Robert Courts) in his seat about to make his maiden speech—said in his statement to the House on 6 July:
“On the issue of misleading Parliament, there is nothing in the Chilcot report that I can see that points to deliberate deceit, but there were clearly occasions when more information, or better information, could have been presented.”—[Official Report, 6 July 2016; Vol. 612, c. 907.]
He also said:
“As for how people should account for themselves, it is for them to read the report and explain why they did what they did.”—[Official Report, 6 July 2016; Vol. 612, c. 902.]
At his appearance before the Liaison Committee on 2 November, when considering whether Mr Blair had misled Parliament and the public, Sir John said that he absolves Mr Blair
“from a personal and demonstrable decision to deceive Parliament or the public—to state falsehoods, knowing them to be false. That I think he should be absolved from.”
He also made the following point about the legal basis for military action, saying:
“The way in which the legal advice about—the basis for it was highly unsatisfactory, but that is not the same as saying it was illegal, and therefore that something should follow or some effect should be procured. One can’t say that.”
He also reminded the Committee that before the invasion of Iraq
“the whole intelligence community, and not only in the United Kingdom, were strongly of the belief—and had, they thought, sufficient intelligence to support it— that Saddam did have weapons of mass destruction available for use.”
The decision to go to war in Iraq has had a profound and lasting impact on politics in this country, on the families of those who lost loved ones in Iraq and on those who were injured. Clearly, it was a tragic and seismic episode in our nation’s history. Lessons should be learned and that process is ongoing. The Government are considering the lessons identified by the Iraq inquiry, many of which had already been recognised with changes made before Sir John published his report. The Prime Minister’s National Security Adviser is currently leading a process with our national security Departments to consider further improvements. We fully recognise that ensuring that lessons are properly learned and embedded will be a long-term process.
Alex Salmond
The Minister mentioned Sir John Chilcot’s evidence to the Liaison Committee. The passage in which Sir John concludes that a reasonable man could not have come to the conclusion that Mr Blair did about weapons of mass destruction was followed by the Chair saying:
“So he misled the House, or set aside evidence in order to lead the House down a line of thought and belief with his 18 March speech”.
Has the Minister read that passage in the evidence?
Chris Skidmore
The important thing to recognise is that the Chilcot report—in paragraph 537 of the executive summary—explicitly does not question Mr Blair’s belief at the time that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. Paragraph 533 states:
“There is no evidence that intelligence was improperly included in the”
September 2002
“dossier or that No.10 improperly influenced the text.”
In paragraph 491, the report is explicit that
“Cabinet was not misled on 17 March”
2003.
Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)
One of the lessons we can learn is that there was no plan for reconstruction. If we are to learn that lesson, we should bear that in mind when considering reconstruction in Syria or Iraq.
Chris Skidmore
The hon. Gentleman is right that there are lessons for modern-day conflicts. I hope that this debate will give Members the opportunity to put their views across on which lessons should be learned. We had three days of debate on the Chilcot report itself, and I hope that we can move forward by coming up with proactive, positive recommendations.
Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)
The Minister mentioned the establishment of the National Security Council as one thing that followed from the situation in Iraq. I draw to his attention the recent report of the Foreign Affairs Committee on events in Libya in which we were critical of Prime Minister David Cameron’s failure to use the NSC properly and of the lack of detailed input into the situation in Libya, that was considered by the Government at that time.
Chris Skidmore
The hon. Gentleman has put his comments on the record. I understand that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office will formally respond to the Committee’s recommendations, so I will leave it at that.
The National Security Council is a dedicated, standing Cabinet Committee that meets regularly at both ministerial and senior official level and has the right range of information to take forward informed decisions and to hold collective responsibility at the highest level. It provides collective strategic leadership on national security and crisis situations, with a built-in challenge function, making clear recommendations to Cabinet on military interventions, and formally recording both decisions and operational actions. The Attorney General attended the NSC regularly until April 2016, when he became a full member, and formal written legal advice is now provided and discussed at relevant NSC meetings and presented to Cabinet before any decisions on military intervention are taken.
The Government have integrated their overarching strategic approach with pragmatic, costed delivery mechanisms, including for military equipment, in a national security strategy, and strategic defence and security review, which is refreshed and adjusted in the light of developments every parliamentary term. The SDSR and refreshment of the national security strategy in 2015 brought this work together in a single integrated document. Cross-Whitehall working continues to improve, with creative policy making designed and delivered collectively across national security Departments and agencies to ensure that we understand, as far as is possible in dynamic and evolving threatening situations, what we want to achieve, and the implications for and impacts on ourselves and others. In support of this work, we set up joint units and taskforces where issues cut across several departmental responsibilities.
The Government are committed to understanding and acting on the important lessons drawn by Sir John Chilcot and his colleagues, but we recognise the need to continue to improve, whether working across the national security community or the wider civil service, hence the importance being given by the collective senior leadership to civil service reform and learning.
Mr Kenneth Clarke
I am grateful for the Minister’s remarks about the improvements being made, and the Cameron Government did make improvements by introducing the NSC, but—I say this with hindsight—we still invaded Libya after too cursory a discussion in Cabinet, and somehow we did not look properly at what the consequences would be. We talked only about the imminent threat of a massacre in Benghazi, which took everybody in to the intervention.
The Minister says the Government are considering further improvements, so will he invite my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister to consider setting out some principles: about the amount of notice the NSC has of such decisions, the length and fullness of discussions—that applies to Cabinet, too—and the right of individual members of the Cabinet to have access before a meeting to security advice and defence advice if they wish to prepare themselves for the discussion?
Chris Skidmore
I thank my right hon. and learned Friend for his recommendations. I am sure the National Security Adviser will be listening closely to this debate, and the fact they have been put on the record means it will be important for him to have regard to them. I am sure my right hon. and learned Friend will understand that at the time he mentions we were facing a bloodbath in Benghazi, that intervention was vital and that we would not now row back on that intervention.
Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
I do not wish to add to any difficulties in this respect, but one problem is insufficient military input to the NSC; it all comes in through the voice of one man, the Chief of the Defence Staff. The Defence Committee has suggested that one way to strengthen the NSC would be to constitute the Chiefs of Staff Committee as a sub-committee of the NSC. In that way, a Prime Minister with a bee in his bonnet would not be able so easily to sweep away military concerns.
Chris Skidmore
I thank my right hon. Friend for his separate recommendation and note that the Minister for the Armed Forces is in his place and listening carefully. That is not a new recommendation, but we will consider closely all recommendations from this debate.
Although it is right to learn the lessons identified by the Chilcot report, we should ensure that we avoid learning the wrong lessons. As the then Prime Minister said on the day the report was published,
“it would be wrong to conclude that we should not stand with our American allies when our common…interests are threatened”
and that
“it would be wrong to conclude that we cannot rely on the judgments of our brilliant and hard-working intelligence agencies”.
He said that it is “wrong” to question the capability of our military, who
“remain the envy of the world”.
Perhaps most crucially, he said that it is wrong to
“conclude that intervention is always wrong.”—[Official Report, 6 July 2016; Vol. 612, c. 888.]
This has been a long and exhaustive inquiry. Sir John and his colleagues have had access to thousands of official documents and reached their conclusions—
Chris Skidmore
No, not now.
Lessons are being learned and will continue to be learned from what happened in Iraq, and so the Government can see no merit in undertaking any further inquiries into the Iraq war.
Fabian Hamilton (Leeds North East) (Lab)
I am grateful for the contributions made so far, especially the Minister’s. When we reflect on the matters we are debating this afternoon, it is very important that we first pay tribute, as the Minister did, to the hundreds of British servicemen and women and civilian personnel who lost their lives during the conflict in Iraq and that we send our thoughts to all the thousands of others who are still living with the injuries they suffered when serving in our armed forces.
We must never forget the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians who died during the conflict, and subsequently as a result of the sectarian violence and terrorist outrages that have followed. They must all be uppermost in our minds when we talk about learning from the mistakes that were made in Iraq and ensuring that future Governments do not repeat those mistakes.
No matter whether we are one of those Members who voted against the war, as I did, or one of the many, on both sides of this House, who in good faith and good conscience voted in favour of the invasion, it is incumbent on us all to learn the lessons about what went wrong and, indeed, to apologise for what has been exposed by Sir John Chilcot as the collective failing of our institutions.
It is a little over four months since this House spent two full days debating the contents of the Chilcot report, and a week after that debate we spent several hours asking questions about it to the then Prime Minister, David Cameron. Much has changed since that debate, but in terms of the arguments we have heard about the evidence presented in the Chilcot report, I would say, with great respect, that we have, thus far, heard nothing new today.
The right hon. Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond) has a long-standing contention—we have heard him set it out again just now—that, first, Parliament was deliberately misled by Tony Blair and his Government in the run-up to war; secondly, that intelligence allegedly known by Ministers to be false was deliberately presented to this House and to the public; thirdly, that this was all designed to deliver on a private pact that Tony Blair had made with George W. Bush to go to war with Iraq; and that the evidence for those contentions lies mainly in the six words written in a memo from the then Prime Minister to the then President.
Although I have listened very carefully again to the argument made by the right hon. Member for Gordon, we all know that those were exactly the contentions that Sir John Chilcot spent several years looking into, alongside all the evidence from memos and records of conversations, and from his many interviews with hundreds of witnesses. So let me say once again that Sir John deserves our thanks and our praise for conducting that vast but vital task with great care, diligence and objectivity.
The Chilcot report was the fifth, and hopefully the final, inquiry into the Iraq war. The first was published on 3 July 2003, before the tragic death of Dr David Kelly, before the capture of Saddam and while the search for weapons of mass destruction was still going on. That inquiry was undertaken by the Foreign Affairs Committee, on which I served at the time. My right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Ms Stuart) is the only other member of that Committee still sitting in this House. On looking back at the conclusions of that report, I note that on chemical and biological weapons we said:
“we have no doubt that the threat posed to United Kingdom forces was genuinely perceived as a real and present danger and that the steps taken to protect them were justified by the information available at the time.”
We were critical of the prominence and emphasis given to the 45-minute claim in the September 2002 dossier, saying that greater uncertainty should have surrounded the presentation of that and other claims. However, we concluded that those claims were
“well founded on the basis of the intelligence then available”
and that
“allegations of politically inspired meddling cannot credibly be established”.
We were highly critical of the February 2003 dossier—the so-called dodgy dossier—and the fact that Tony Blair had inadvertently presented it as “further intelligence” on the Floor of the House without realising its true provenance. However, that was 13 years ago. Four inquiries later, with the benefit of millions of pages of documentary evidence and hundreds of key witnesses to which my colleagues and I did not have access at the time, the conclusions have remained fundamentally the same.
There are many serious lessons to learn from the Chilcot report, and I will address them in a moment. However, on learning those lessons, we will do ourselves and future Governments no favours if we spend even more time in this House and in the Committee Rooms examining contentions that the Chilcot report and four other inquiries—at exhaustive length—have already found to be incorrect; nor will any of us benefit if we continue to try to turn a collective institutional and international failure in Iraq into an attempt to pillory and scapegoat one individual. Let me be clear: I totally disagreed, as many other people did, with Tony Blair on the Iraq war. I voted against our Government because I thought that our then Prime Minister was simply wrong, but never for one second did I believe that he was acting in bad faith, and I do not do so now.
Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)
I rise to support my hon. Friend. Like him, I voted against the war at the time. Nothing has happened since then to make me think that I was wrong to do so, but I did not for one minute think that Tony Blair lied to this House, or attempted to mislead me. I just came to a different judgment. The problem is that in the minds of those who believe that we were misled, there is no report that will ever convince them otherwise, but it is time to learn the lessons for future generations and to move on.
Fabian Hamilton
I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention, because he captures the mood that was prevalent at the time. Many of us wanted to vote against that war and we did so with a clear conscience because we felt that it was the wrong approach to resolving the problems in Iraq. I will go on to say a bit more about what should be done now.
Sammy Wilson (East Antrim) (DUP)
I was a Member when that vote was taken. I suspect that, with hindsight, many people would look again at the way they voted. Does the hon. Gentleman accept that, whether the commitments to the House were made in good faith or bad faith, the central point of being able to hold the Executive to account for the basis on which they go to war, for their actions afterwards and for the way in which they prepare our troops for battle is important? It provides an important role for this House, which is to scope out ways in which it can avoid mistakes in the future.
Fabian Hamilton
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. The important words he used were “in the future”. We must be held to account by the people who elected us—by the public of this country—and we must hold our Government to account for the decisions that they bring to this House for approval. It is very clear, as Sir John Chilcot said, that this was a collective and institutional failure.
Caroline Lucas
Does the hon. Gentleman recognise the results of the freedom of information requests a few weeks ago that demonstrated precisely that the Chilcot inquiry had been designed to “avoid blame”. Sir Gus O’Donnell has been quoted as saying that he recommended using the inquiry’s terms of reference to prevent it reaching
“any conclusion on questions of law or fact”
or to attributing any blame. If we look at the Glen Rangwala report, which simply puts the evidence in front of us—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Natascha Engel)
Order. May I make a plea to those who are looking to catch my eye later on to keep their interventions to the minimum, as there are a very large number of people wishing to contribute to this debate?
Fabian Hamilton
I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention, but no, I do not recognise those results, because I do not know the context in which those words were said. All too often speeches and phrases are taken out of context. I do not believe for one minute that Sir John Chilcot and his whole report and all the years and the time that he spent were there simply to mislead the public.
Let me try to make some progress. As I have said, I never for one second believed that the then Prime Minister was acting in bad faith, and I do not do so now. For those reasons, I will be urging my Labour colleagues to vote against today’s motion. I will urge them to do so to enable the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee to focus properly on the real job of its inquiry, which is to analyse the conclusions that Sir John has actually reached, based on the evidence that he gathered, and to look at the lessons that he says should be learned from his report.
Mr Jim Cunningham
One factor that has not been fully explored in this debate is the Attorney General’s role. Many of us who had doubts about this war were told that it was legal. Has my hon. Friend had a look at that, and is he satisfied that the Attorney General’s decision was right?
Fabian Hamilton
At the time, the Foreign Affairs Committee did look into that matter. I have not examined it since then—in the past 13 years—but I believe that Sir John Chilcot does make reference to it in his report.
If there is one serious risk that we now face, it is to assume that all the lessons from Iraq have been learned and that the mistakes made there could never happen again. That is particularly important now, while we have in place a relatively new Prime Minister, who may in due course face her own decisions over peace and war, and who may herself need to come and make a case before this House.
Listening to the former Prime Minister’s response to Chilcot back in July, I understood that, although he acknowledged that lessons needed to be learned, his clear implication was that that had already been done. He said that by establishing the National Security Council there could be more questions from Ministers about intelligence assessments and more questions from the military about shortcomings in planning, yet, as the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis), the Chair of the Defence Committee, has pointed out, there is insufficient input from military sources to make that credible.
The former Prime Minister said that creating the conflict and stability fund meant that we were better placed to prepare for the aftermath of conflicts and to prevent the kind of power vacuum that sectarian and terrorist groups exploited after the Iraq war. Although we welcome the theory behind innovations such as the National Security Council and the conflict and stability fund, the reality of what has happened in Libya and elsewhere over the past five years—this is what my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes) pointed out—does not give confidence that they are working in practice. It suggests even more clearly that the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee has an important job to do over the coming months in ensuring that the real lessons of Chilcot—for Whitehall, for Ministers and for Parliament—are truly being learned.
Let us consider for a moment what Chilcot discovered in relation to civilian casualties as a result of coalition action. The Chief of the Defence Staff predicted that casualties would be in the “low hundreds”. When the reality became clear, the then Foreign Secretary said:
“We need to find ways of countering the damaging perception that civilians are being killed needlessly, and in large numbers, by coalition forces.”
When the truth became overwhelming, a private secretary to Tony Blair told him that casualty data must be suppressed because
“any overall assessment of civilian casualties will show that”
the coalition is
“responsible for significantly more than insurgents.”
Chilcot concludes:
“The Government’s consideration of the issue of Iraqi civilian casualties was driven by its concern to rebut accusations that coalition forces were responsible for the deaths of large numbers of civilians, and to sustain domestic support for operations”.
When we hear Ministers say exactly the same from that Dispatch Box in relation to civilian casualties in Yemen, is it possible to argue that anything has changed or that any lessons have been learned? I do not believe that that is the case. The mistakes of Iraq are being made all over again. We need to ensure that the National Security Council and all the other measures adopted are working, because I do not believe that they are at the moment.
In conclusion, I believe that the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee needs to examine the Chilcot report, not for what it tells us about the past but for what we can learn from it for the present and the future. Whether in relation to Yemen, Libya, Syria or the ongoing battle to restore stability and end sectarian conflict in Iraq, we must look forward and learn the lessons that have practical consequences for us all today. With instability growing throughout the middle east, eastern Europe and beyond, we may face even bigger challenges tomorrow, and that is why I cannot support the motion. I understand why its proposers have tabled it, but they are fighting an old war and raising once again contentions that have already been dismissed by five—five—separate inquiries. How many more do we need? In doing so, they risk distracting the attention of this House and the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee from what should be their true objective, which is to learn the real lessons from Chilcot and ensure that we never need such an inquiry again.
Sir Roger Gale (North Thanet) (Con)
From time to time, Members of this House of Commons have the burden of debating whether to send our finest young men and women into harm’s way, and sometimes to their deaths. I do not believe that any Member of this House, on either side, ever takes that decision lightly, and we need always to take that decision based on the best possible information.
At the start of the second Iraq war, my young constituent Lieutenant Marc Lawrence, serving on a Sea King helicopter, was killed. That in itself is possibly a matter for a further inquiry, but I know that that loss was devastating to Marc’s parents and I believe that they have a right to know that their only son lost his life in a just cause and that his sacrifice was worth while.
Madam Deputy Speaker, I voted to send that young man to his death. On the eve of the vote, a significant number of Members then on the Opposition Benches, including myself, had grave disquiet about the cause on which we were due to embark. I and about a dozen colleagues met the then Leader of the Opposition, my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith), and the shadow Foreign Minister, the then Member for Devizes, Michael Ancram. The Leader of the Opposition told us on Privy Council terms that he had been informed on Privy Council terms by Mr Blair that the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction and that there was a 40-minute threat to UK interests and that therefore our support for the motion before the House the following day was vital.
I am afraid that I cannot concur with the hon. Member for Leeds North East (Fabian Hamilton). I sat on those Benches and listened to the tone of the debate as well as to the words that were said. I have to say that I believe that the House was deliberately misled. There were no weapons of mass destruction, as we now know, and there was no 40-minute threat. I think that it is plain—I am convinced that it is plain, sadly—that Mr Blair had made a pledge to President Bush that the UK would be delivered and that he was determined to deliver the UK in support of that war.
We cannot let this matter rest. We owe it to our armed forces to see this through. I support the call to ask the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee to take further action. My hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin), the Chairman of the Committee, has indicated to me privately, as he has indicated on the Floor of the House today, that his inquiries are ongoing and that further recommendations will be made. I am grateful for that.
I resent the fact that this is described as an opportunist Scottish National party motion. Technically, yes, this is an Opposition day debate, but the motion has cross-party support and I am grateful that the Government have effectively recognised that this is a House of Commons matter and should never be a party political matter.
I am not interested in a witch hunt against a former and discredited Prime Minister. I concur entirely with my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) when he says that we must seek to take every measure to try to ensure that these circumstances do not arise again. We cannot bring back the dead, but we can help to prevent further and unwarranted sacrifice of the men and women of our armed forces. I am not interested in the outcome of this vote. Whatever the outcome, I hope that my hon. Friend the Chairman of the Select Committee will help to ensure that the right measures are taken so that we never, ever face such circumstances again.
Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)
I am delighted to follow the hon. Member for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale), because we went through the same experience of this House at that time. Although we like to feel that we take our decisions on an intellectual basis, I know that my feelings on this are motivated by strong emotion and what happened to my father in the war. He volunteered as a 15-year-old—he lied about his age—to go to the continent and stop the Huns bayoneting Belgian babies. He returned broken and badly wounded in 1919, extremely grateful to the Germans for having saved his life when he was dying in a foxhole. He could have bled to death.
My motivation—this should be our highest motivation —is the interests of our armed forces. They need an absolute assurance that any decision to put their lives at risk is taken in the most serious way after the most searching inquiries are carried out. We owe them that. I believe that another inquiry is necessary, and that is one on the decision to go into Helmand province in 2006 at a time when only six members of the armed services had been killed in the war. We went in in the hope that not a shot would be fired and 450 of our servicemen died as a result. That is what we must do now—that is what we should be taking on, not a tribal party row in this place. It is not appropriate; it is not right. We must look to the reputation of Parliament.
As has been said, we were misled. Whether it was deliberate or not—the expression “sincere deceivers” has been used in the United States about what happened in that war—we know that after that debate 139 of my comrades on the Labour Benches voted against the war, which was a very courageous thing to do as we were under great pressure, but 50 others had grave doubts about the war. They were, in my view, bribed, bullied or bamboozled into voting the wrong way and many—
Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab)
Bribed? You can’t say bribed; that’s outrageous.
Ian Austin
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Is it in order for a Member of this House to allege that other Members of this House were bribed—paid—to vote a particular way? Should he not produce evidence for it? What a disgrace.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Natascha Engel)
The hon. Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn) did not accuse a specific individual of taking a bribe. The hon. Member for Dudley North (Ian Austin) is perfectly entitled to ask him in an intervention whether he will withdraw what he has said, but this is not a matter for the Chair.
Paul Flynn
I am not suggesting that anyone took any money. There are such things as political bribes, with inducements and offers, of which we are well aware in this place. There was a very heavy operation here to convince Members to vote for war. We must look at the situation then.
One Back Bencher wrote to Tony Blair—I speak of Tony Blair with no animus against him. I campaigned for him to be Leader of the House. I have congratulated him again and again on the work that he has done for the Labour party, but it is not the case that there was one failure. It was a failure of the three most important Select Committees in this House, who were all cheerleaders for the war. There were all those who went around saying, “If you knew what we know—we’ve got this secret information—you would certainly vote for war to go ahead.” I believe it was in that circumstance that the decision was taken.
One letter to Tony Blair warned in March:
“Our involvement in Bush’s war will increase the likelihood of terrorist attacks.”
It said that attacking a Muslim state without achieving a fair settlement in other conflicts in the world would be seen by Muslims from our local mosques to the far corners of the world as an act of injustice. I believe we paid a very heavy price for seeming to divide the world between a powerful, western, Christian world which was taking advantage of its other side, who were Muslims.
I am certain that in his mind Tony Blair was sincere. He was proved to be right on Kosovo when many people criticised him, and on Sierra Leone he was right. He was convinced on that that the others were wrong and he was going to prove it. One of the pieces of information that he quoted was an interview with Hussein Kamel, who was the son-in-law of Saddam Hussein. It was quoted in the document as evidence of weapons of mass destruction. According to the interview, Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons, biological weapons, nuclear weapons, which he did say in the evidence. But in the same interview, which was conducted in 1995 and was already old news, Hussein Kamel said, “Of course, we got rid of them after the Gulf war.” What was in that dodgy dossier was half the story—evidence, yes, that Saddam had had such weapons, but also evidence that he no longer had them, and that was never published.
What Chilcot said in his report was not the absolution that people believe it to be. He said that the decision to invade was taken
“before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted”
and that military action was
“not a last resort”.
According to the strictures of modern philosophy, that means it is not a just war. Chilcot said that Saddam posed no “imminent threat”. In effect, he declared the war needless.
Colin Powell has confessed that he was fooled and lied to, and that he regrets bitterly that he did not follow his natural instinct and avoid the war. Strangely enough, most of the people who were advising him at the time have said that they were wrong and the war was a terrible mistake.
I believe that this House must accept what Chilcot is saying and not take an aversion to it that pleases our political point of view. The issue is one that the loved ones of the 179 have been following. They have gone through years of torment asking themselves, “Did our loved ones die in vain?” Chilcot has reported, and his report was that the decision was taken not just by a Prime Minister but by all those who were gullible enough to believe that case. There were a million people who walked the streets of this country and demonstrated. It was not a clear decision.
We fall into the trap time and again of believing that our role in Britain is to punch above our weight militarily. Why should we do that? Every time we do, we die beyond our responsibilities.
Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab)
I obviously was not here in 2003, and as a student at the time, was part of that anti-war generation that my hon. Friend describes. I am troubled by his language in describing colleagues, some of whom are still here today, as “gullible” in voting for the Iraq war. I never agreed with it then and with hindsight I certainly do not agree with it, but I never doubted either the integrity or the intelligence of the people who took a different view then and continue to take a different view today.
Paul Flynn
I am not questioning their good faith in any way; I am sure that they voted that way.
Paul Flynn
I will stick to the word “gullible”. Three Committees of people who are great experts—the Intelligence and Security Committee, the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Defence Committee—all took the same view. They were all told stories about the weapons of mass destruction. The evidence was, and the evidence is there now, that those did not exist, and there was a very selective choice of evidence—as in the quotations of the son-in-law of Saddam Hussein—that the Committee members believed and chose to believe.
If we do not recognise that as a problem for this House, we will make the same mistakes again. We are going to face such decisions in future. The House will have to decide whether we are going to order—that is our power—young men and women to put their lives on the line, on the basis of what? Faulty evidence, ineffective evidence. That was the conclusion of Chilcot.
I am on the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee and I look forward to taking part in the inquiry, but I do not welcome the kind of debate that we have got.
Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)
The hon. Gentleman makes a compelling case, to which I am very sympathetic, but I wonder, given the case that he is making, if he agrees that it is a matter of some disappointment that a majority of his colleagues in the parliamentary Labour party have decided to set themselves against the motion before the House today, and that this will look like they are closing ranks to protect their former leader?
Paul Flynn
There is a great deal that I regret about things that are happening within the Labour party at this moment. In the brief cameo appearance that I had on the Front Bench, I called for this debate. I called for a debate to take place on these lines. Of course I want to see the debate. We cannot pretend that after all these years of investigation, the Chilcot inquiry is a trial without a verdict at the end. We must take that responsibility ourselves and we must reform this House to make sure that we can never again take such a calamitous decision, which led to the loss of 179 British lives and uncounted numbers of Iraqi lives. That was a terrible, terrible mistake and we must not repeat it.
Robert Courts (Witney) (Con)
Mr Speaker, thank you. It is a great honour to catch your eye this afternoon and to follow so many distinguished speakers.
There is an important link between west Oxfordshire and the debate we are having this afternoon. As Colonial Secretary, Mr Winston Churchill was in great part involved in the setting up of modern Iraq. I think it is also right to say that Mr Churchill was responsible for the setting up of the Chilcot inquiry—or perhaps it just seems that way.
We are speaking this afternoon of past Prime Ministers. I wish to speak of a great Prime Minister. David Cameron represented Witney for 15 years. He was a great Prime Minister and a brilliant MP for west Oxfordshire. He found the Conservative party bleeding after three successive election defeats. He picked it up, restored its faith in itself, and returned it to government. I know at first hand the effect that his leadership had upon the party, the country and its fortunes, because I was there, on the streets, and I felt the turning of the tide. There is perhaps no greater tribute that I could pay David Cameron than to say that he made the Conservative party believe in itself again. He made it fresh, dynamic, and able to communicate with modern Britain. He created a new generation of Conservative politicians, and I am one of them. The record in this House speaks for itself— 1,000 jobs a day created while he was Prime Minister and an economy rescued from the brink of ruin. The party and, if I may say so, the country, will forever be in his debt.
In west Oxfordshire, it did not matter who someone was, where they lived or how they voted; if there was a local issue, he was always happy to help them. It is, of course, always the case that we attend with alacrity to constituents’ concerns, but when I see a letter from “D. Cameron, Outraged, of Dean” complaining about his dustbin collection or myriad other issues, it may be one letter that I do not leave until the end of the day.
It is a daunting task to sit in this House. Some weeks ago, I was in private practice at the Bar. I am now surrounded by great experts in law, the military, social justice, the economy and the constitution. The range of talent and experience in this House is awe-inspiring. But I do have ties to this House and an example that I can draw upon. In 1945, Albert Stubbs won the seat of Cambridgeshire for the Labour party. [Laughter.] He was a famous trade unionist, and he won his seat by a majority of 44 by getting out on his motorcycle, riding around the villages of Cambridgeshire and signing up the workers to the union. He was known for his hard work for the people of that area and his interest in rural issues.
That record is one that I aspire to when I look at the people of west Oxfordshire. Hon. Members need not worry: I am not about to execute the fastest defection in political history. I mention Mr Stubbs because he was my great-grandfather. I must watch my words carefully at this point, because his daughter—my grandmother—will be watching on the television, and if I put a foot out of line I am going to get a very strongly worded letter. I do therefore acknowledge at this stage that Mr Stubbs would be horrified by my politics, but I hope he would at least approve of my work ethic.
I have spoken to the House of my admiration for Winston Churchill, and I thought it would be a good idea if I went back to the records to see whether there was perhaps an exchange between my hero and my forebear. I went to Hansard and I searched for an exchange, and I expected the contrast of the famous parliamentary wit and the working-class warrior. I was thinking of a combination of Pitt the Younger and Charles James Fox, and I found in the “Thanks to Services” debate from 1945 just such an exchange. The great man—speaking from the Opposition Bench, of course—paused in his speech, took an intervention from Mr Stubbs, told him he was “ignorant” and went back to his speech. I do not know who was right or wrong in that exchange; I merely hope that I will manage to avoid such a rebuke in the course of my career.
West Oxfordshire is a landlocked constituency, but it is perhaps best toured by taking a look at its rivers. If we were charting the course of the Windrush downstream, we would start at the beautiful town of Burford—stone-walled, slate-roofed and a glowing gateway to the Cotswolds. The proclamation of Edward IV; the home of Speaker Lenthall, the most famous protector of this House; and the execution of the Levellers—it shines with history.
We could travel downstream to Witney, the famous market town. My predecessor, in his maiden speech, noted that there was only one blanket factory left in Witney and that most of the beer was brewed elsewhere. Sadly, there are now no blanket factories, although the Blanket Hall is well worth a visit. But the Wychwood brewery has an astonishingly high market share of real ale, and there are wonderful ales. It supplies many of the wonderful pubs in west Oxfordshire, where one can go to enjoy a pint or watch the world go by—I will just have to be careful I do not leave my children behind. [Laughter.]
Alongside the Evenlode, we see the beautiful town of Charlbury and, at Cornbury Park, a world-beating charity, SpecialEffect, using video games and technology to enhance the quality of life of people with disabilities. Alongside the Evenlode, the Dorn and the Thames, we see a wealth of wonderful wildlife—for example, at Chimney Meadows—that inhabits the stunning countryside of west Oxfordshire.
But it is the thriving market towns of Witney, Burford, Chipping Norton, Charlbury, Carterton and Eynsham, and the villages that connect them, that give west Oxfordshire its distinctive character. These are filled with clever, industrious, creative, hard-working people creating world-beating industries in IT, Formula 1, travel and clothes, and each year hosting thousands of visitors from across the world. If the rivers are the lifeblood of west Oxfordshire, the market towns are the beating heart.
I pause at this stage to fly, as it were, to proud, modern Carterton and nearby Brize Norton—home of the Royal Air Force’s transport fleet and centre of transport operations. It is, of course, from there that so many flew to Iraq, and, sadly, many have flown back having given everything. Their sacrifice is remembered in the moving repatriation garden at Carterton.
My grandfather and my great-uncle were Bomber Command veterans, and the care of elderly veterans is a particular concern to the people of west Oxfordshire, and particularly those in Carterton, whose very lifeblood is tied up with the wellbeing of that thriving airbase and the people who have served in it. Such veterans are people who have asked for little but given everything; they are the people to whom we owe our freedom, and the care we give them now tells us much about not only our compassion but our sense of duty, and we must not let them down.
I also pause to pay tribute to the men and women of today’s Royal Air Force. They are the heirs of those who fought in canvas and wood machines above the trenches of Flanders 100 years ago. They are the heirs of those who formed the few in 1940. They, together with the Army and Royal Navy, are the people whose strength and bravery make possible the civilised debate that we have in this House.
We must not forget that those who defend our freedom now are no less requiring of our care than their forebears. Sometimes the scars are visible, and I commend the charities that do so much to help those whose injuries are physical, but we should not forget that, so often, the wounds are not visible—that a person may leave the conflict, but the conflict will never leave the person.
I have met many people in my work at the Bar whose lives are blighted by psychiatric illness, and I urge all Members to remember all those who need a little more understanding, both in the armed forces and in the wider public. That underlines the importance to everyone of the health services that underpin this care: the surgeries in our towns and, in my constituency, the hospitals in Witney and Chipping Norton.
I have spoken of rivers that seem to surge with history, and it is perhaps the Glyme that has the most fame—flowing down through famous Woodstock, royalist-garrisoned in the civil war and now with the world heritage site of Blenheim Palace.
Lastly, at the close of our tour, I come to the quiet little village of Bladon, where I live. The sun climbs slowly to illuminate the village in the shallow valley, as it has for 1,000 years. The local red kite floats lazily over the church tower. The river flows through Blenheim Park, round past the yellow sandstone cottages. It is an attractive but typical small west Oxfordshire settlement, with one pub, an active pop-up shop and the thriving church community of St Martin’s, which is where I was married and where my son, Henry, was baptised. But it is also the reason why this small Oxfordshire village is world-famous. I rise for the first time in this House on the birthday of Sir Winston Churchill. He now lies in Bladon churchyard. I walk past his grave every Sunday morning—my house is a stone’s throw away—so his words resonate particularly with me.
Winston Spencer Churchill loved this House and, throughout his long career, defended its strengths and traditions. So, as we come to the end of our tour, following the Thames from the southern bank of my constituency to outside the door of this palace, I would like to pause to consider his words about what it is that we do here. He said:
“The object of Parliament is to substitute argument for fisticuffs”—[Official Report, 6 June 1951; Vol. 488, c. 1179.]
and that the House of Commons
“is the citadel of British liberty; it is the foundation of our laws…I do not know how else this country can be governed other than by the House of Commons playing its part in all its broad freedom in British public life.”—[Official Report, 28 October 1943; Vol. 393, c. 405-06.]
If I may say so, we must all remember that. No matter how great the issues or how strong the passions, the very fact that we can have these debates is proof positive of why our system of representative democracy works.
I am acutely aware of the trust set in me by the people of west Oxfordshire. I will ensure that the voice of the Windrush is heard loudly on the banks of the Thames, and I will strive every day to deserve their trust. Every day that I set foot in this Chamber, I will remember that to sit on these Benches is to breathe fresh life into Churchill’s words—an honour without measure. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”]
Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)
It gives me great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Witney (Robert Courts). I congratulate him most warmly on an excellent maiden speech. He talked with great descriptive beauty about his constituency. He used humour and he was serious. He talked about his own family’s political journey in having a Labour grandfather. My family has had a political journey in the opposite direction: of my two grandfathers, one was Liberal and one was Conservative. I noticed, however, that he did not talk about the political journey of his predecessor but one—an interesting journey that took place rather more recently than his grandfather’s. I thought that what he said about his predecessor was absolutely right, at a time when a lot of people are saying not very nice things about the previous Prime Minister. I am really pleased that the hon. Gentleman said what he did and put it on the record. I thank him for that.
Before addressing the motion itself, I would like to consider what we might be debating today instead. We could be debating the crisis in the national health service and social care. We could be debating the devastating impact on living standards of the Government’s autumn statement. We could be debating what the Scottish National party Government in Scotland might be doing with the powers they have, but resolutely refuse to use, to mitigate that. Or we could have used this precious debating time to put pressure on the Government to drop food and medicine to the people of Aleppo, who, as the French Government said today, are facing the worst massacre of civilians since the second world war.
But no, we are debating the motion before us—and why? SNP Members are furious, livid and incandescent with rage that Sir John Chilcot did not find that Tony Blair lied. After seven years and five independent inquiries, the lie that our former Prime Minister lied has finally been laid to rest, and SNP Members cannot stand it. The motion, of course, does not talk about lying. However, the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas), who supports the motion, let the cat out of the bag when she told The Observer on Sunday
“The Chilcot report confirmed Tony Blair lied to the public, parliament and his own cabinet in order to drag us into the Iraq war.”
She has clearly not read the Chilcot report; it did no such thing.
Without going over the detail as we did in a very full debate on this back in the summer, let me remind the House briefly of what the Chilcot report did say. Volume 4, paragraph 876, says clearly that there was no falsification or improper use of intelligence. Volume 5, paragraph 953 says that there was no deception of Cabinet. Volume 1, paragraph 572 onwards, says that there was no secret commitment to war either at Crawford in April 2002 or anywhere else. Although outside the body of the report, as a number of hon. Members have pointed out, Sir John Chilcot himself, in his appearance before the Liaison Committee, said:
“I absolve him”—
Tony Blair—
“from a personal and demonstrable decision to deceive parliament or the public—to state falsehoods, knowing them to be false.”
Some people just cannot give up. Some people do not seem able to accept the possibility that reasonable people can come to different views on a difficult subject but do so in good faith. Some people cannot accept—
Mr Bradshaw
No, the right hon. Gentleman had half an hour and a lot of Members want to speak.
Some people cannot accept that however much one disagrees with a decision taken, it can still have been taken in good faith. So here we are debating a motion that seeks to distort and rewrite Chilcot and, in effect, put Tony Blair back in the dock. I am delighted that my own party is having none of this nonsense and that we will be voting against this mendacious opportunism in an hour and a half’s time.
I think there may be another reason why some people persist in trying to claim falsely that there was deliberate deceit in all this. They are more than a little nervous that as we look at what has happened in Syria, and is still happening in Syria today, where there was no intervention and we left a brutal dictator to continue to slaughter his own people, history will prove our former Prime Minister right.
Several hon. Members rose—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Natascha Engel)
Order. I am going to suggest an informal limit of six minutes and see how we get on. It may be necessary to put a formal limit on, but we will start with six minutes.
Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
It is a pleasure to begin by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Robert Courts) on an outstanding maiden speech. I have a history of sometimes disagreeing with hon. Members from Witney, but on this occasion it was fantastic to be able to nod in agreement and pleasure at every remark he made. He has got off to a tremendous start in this House, and I am sure he can tell from the reactions of Members on both sides of the House the good wishes that flow to him today. Make the most of it!
I welcome the fact that Scottish National party Members and other parties’ Members have chosen to bring forward this subject for debate today. I speak as somebody who voted and spoke in favour of toppling Saddam Hussein in 2003 and who has come to believe that that was entirely the wrong decision to take. It is therefore with a degree of humility that I address the two reasons that I voted and spoke in the way I did: first, because I believed what I was told about weapons of mass destruction; and, secondly, because I had a naive view that if Saddam Hussein were removed we might see something like the emergence of democracy in Iraq—and of course we saw nothing of the kind.
Mike Gapes
I am extremely grateful. Does the right hon. Gentleman accept that if Saddam Hussein had not been removed, it is very likely that his son Uday, or someone else of a similar nature, would have inherited, and that the problems we have seen writ large in Syria since 2011 would have been even worse in Iraq?
Dr Lewis
I accept the first part of what the hon. Gentleman says. It is highly probable that if Saddam Hussein had not been removed, things would have gone on in Iraq in the brutal, dictatorial way in which they had gone on previously. The problem is, as we have learned from what happened in Iraq and in Libya, that one can remove these brutal dictators, but instead of seeing democracy emerge one sees re-emerging a deadly conflict, going back more than 1,000 years, between different branches of the Islamic faith. The hon. Gentleman knows my view on this because, as I hope he remembers, in the arguments we had when the same proposition was put forward to deal with President Assad as we had dealt with Saddam Hussein, I made the same argument then as I make now—that in a choice between a brutal, repressive dictator and the alternative of a totalitarian Islamist state, I am afraid that the brutal dictator is the lesser of two evils. If we have not learned that from what happened in Iraq, then we truly have not learned any lessons from Iraq at all.
At the Liaison Committee meeting on 2 November, we had the opportunity to speak to Sir John Chilcot in person and to ask him directly to interpret the results of his own inquiries. I was particularly struck by the fact that of the two arguments I mentioned earlier—the one about the weapons of mass destruction and the one about the naive belief that democracy would emerge if we got rid of the brutal dictator—he was more censorious on the latter than on the former. He said that if the Prime Minister of the day had not exaggerated the certainty of his claims about weapons of mass destruction it would have been completely clear that he had not misled the House in any way. Sir John said:
“Exaggeration—placing more weight on the intelligence than it could possibly bear—is a conclusion that we reached on the Butler committee and reached again with even more evidence in the Iraq inquiry.”
He went on to say something rather curious. I put it to him that one argument that I had found convincing was when Mr Blair had said that there was a real danger of the weapons of mass destruction that were believed to exist in the hands of dictators getting into the hands of terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda. Sir John went on to say:
“On the other hand, I do not know that, in putting forward the fusion argument, Mr Blair related it very directly and specifically to Saddam passing weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups.”
I was surprised that Sir John made that statement. In the debate in March 2003, Tony Blair had said that
“there are two begetters of chaos: tyrannical regimes with weapons of mass destruction and extreme terrorist groups who profess a perverted and false view of Islam…Those two threats have, of course, different motives and different origins, but they share one basic common view: they detest the freedom, democracy and tolerance that are the hallmarks of our way of life. At the moment, I accept fully that the association between the two is loose—but it is hardening. The possibility of the two coming together”—
that, I think, is what Sir John meant by fusion—
“of terrorist groups in possession of weapons of mass destruction or even of a so-called dirty radiological bomb—is now, in my judgment, a real and present danger”.—[Official Report, 18 March 2003; Vol. 401, c. 768.]
We discussed in the debate on the Chilcot report the fact that there were plenty of references in the documents of the Joint Intelligence Committee and other intelligence organisations to the intelligence services’ real belief that Saddam still retained some weapons of mass destruction. I share Sir John’s conclusion that Tony Blair was guilty of exaggeration of the certainty with which knowledge was held about Saddam’s supposed possession of WMD, but that he was not guilty of lying to the House about that belief.
I have real concern with regard to the second argument, and it is on that argument that I believe the then Prime Minister Tony Blair will be held to have rather seriously misled the House. I revert to my exchange with Sir John Chilcot on 2 November, in which I said to him:
“I would like you to tell us to what extent Mr Blair was warned of the danger that, far from democracy emerging, Sunni-Shi’a religious strife would follow the removal of the secular dictator, who gave these warnings, and how and why they were ignored. In particular, I would just quote back to you a briefing note from your report which Mr Blair himself sent in January 2003 to President Bush.”
I ask the House to pay particular attention to this note, which Mr Blair sent to President Bush before the war began. The quote is as follows:
“The biggest risk we face is internecine fighting between all the rival groups, religions, tribes, etc. in Iraq when the military strike destabilises the regime. They are perfectly capable, on previous form, of killing each other in large numbers.”
I put this to Sir John:
“Mr Blair knew that and he said it to President Bush, so why did he ignore that terrible possibility that he himself apparently recognised?”
This is Sir John’s reply:
“I cannot give you the answer as to why. You would have to ask him. But what is clear from all the evidence we have collected is that this risk and other associated risks of instability and collapse were clearly identified and available to Ministers and to Mr Blair before the invasion. I can cite all sorts of points, but you will not want me to go into that detail now. It is in the report.
There were other signals, too, from other quarters. Our ambassador in Cairo, for example, was able to report that the Egyptian President had said that Iraq was at risk—it was populated by people who were extremely fond of killing each other, and destabilisation would bring that about.”
Mr Kenneth Clarke
Was my right hon. Friend present when I intervened on the then Prime Minister in a debate on Iraq and asked him what he thought about the risk of causing great instability across the middle east by invading Iraq? My recollection is that he laughed at me from the Front Bench and asked me what sort of stability I thought Saddam Hussein represented.
Dr Lewis
I believe that that is the most serious charge against Tony Blair. It was not that he did not believe that there were weapons of mass destruction, but that he knew—better than did those of us who did not have the advice of experts to give us a wiser steer—that if we removed the dictator the result would be internecine, deadly, lethal chaos, exactly as we saw it. I am not reassured when I hear from Members on the Front Bench that the National Security Council will prevent the same thing from happening again. When the same prospect came up over Libya, and when the Chief of the Defence Staff put it to Prime Minister Cameron that there would be the same consequences in Libya as there had been in Iraq, he was brushed aside. Until the Chiefs of Staff are properly integrated into the National Security Council, we can have no assurance that those deadly errors will not be replicated.
Several hon. Members rose—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Natascha Engel)
Order. I am afraid that my informal speech limit was an abysmal failure, so I will have to impose a six-minute limit to start with. It will have to go down, unfortunately.
Ian Austin (Dudley North) (Lab)
I start by paying tribute to everybody who served their country during the war in Iraq, and to those who tragically lost their lives. It was a pleasure to listen to the maiden speech by the hon. Member for Witney (Robert Courts) and to the speech by my right hon. Friend the Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw). I am afraid I cannot say the same about the speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn)—oh, he has gone—or the speech by the right hon. Member for Moray, neither of whom could find a word to say about Saddam Hussein; there was not a word about his use of chemical weapons against the Kurds, not a word about his brutal repression of his opponents and not a single word about his brutality. What a disgrace!
The right hon. Member for Moray was completely wrong when he blamed the conflagration in the middle east on the war in Iraq. The truth is that Libya was already in a brutal civil war before western air forces prevented Gaddafi from killing innocent people in Benghazi. Toppling Saddam did not fuel the rise of Isis or cause the conflict in Syria. As Martin Chulov, The Guardian’s middle east correspondent and expert author of a definitive study of ISIS, says:
“The Syrian civil war was not driven by Isis. It fed directly out of the Arab awakenings and was a bid to oust a ruthless regime from power.”
That is what started the conflagration in Syria, and for the right hon. Gentleman to blame it on Britain is completely wrong.
Alex Salmond
First, I am not the hon. Member for Moray. Secondly, I did not mention Libya in my speech; I think that the hon. Gentleman is confusing me with other people. Will he address the point about Sir John Chilcot’s clear statement that Tony Blair acted as an advocate in terms of the evidence for weapons of mass destruction, as opposed to giving the House the facts?
Ian Austin
I apologise for getting the name of the right hon. Gentleman’s seat wrong. I have obviously not paid him the huge respect that his sense of self-satisfaction, to which we are all so frequently treated, deserves. I want to say—he has asked his question about three times—that it is perfectly in order for a Prime Minister to set out his case and to try to persuade people in this House and elsewhere that the course of action he is advocating is the right one.
I want to put this debate into context. Last week, we had the autumn statement, which is a disaster for working people in Scotland, and yesterday we learned that Scottish councils face a £553 million black hole. SNP Members do not want to debate any of that. They do not want to debate the educational attainment gap between the richest and the poorest that is growing in Scotland. They do not want to debate the fact that Scotland has the lowest percentage of university entrants from the poorest families. They do not want to debate any of that. They do not want to be held to account on their record. They do not want to discuss any of that. Despite all of that—all the problems faced by the people of Scotland, whom they are sent to this House to represent—they do not have a word to say about it. If we look at their recent Opposition day debates, we can see that they chose to debate this today, House of Lords reform in October and Trident last year, instead of the issues that people in Scotland worry about day in, day out—education, the health service, housing. They come here to score party political points, choosing motion after motion to divide the Labour party. That is what this is about—[Interruption.] That is what this is about, and they should be treated with the contempt—[Interruption.] Look at him laughing, as if Iraq was a subject for humour, as if it was a joke.
Ian Austin
Sit down! We’ve heard enough from you. Sit down! I want to say this: the Chilcot report—
Sir Roger Gale
The hon. Gentleman is doing the House no service. This is a very serious issue. Those of us on the Government Benches who have lent our names to the motion did so in the interests of our armed forces. That is what we are here to discuss.
Ian Austin
I accept that, and I paid tribute to the armed forces right at the outset. I now want to discuss the Chilcot report.
The Chilcot report will clearly never settle arguments about whether the war in Iraq was right or wrong, but it should lay to rest allegations of bad faith, lies or deceit. It finds, first, that there was no falsification or misuse of intelligence by Tony Blair or No. 10 at the time; secondly, that there was no attempt to deceive Cabinet Ministers; and thirdly, that there was no secret pact with the US to go to war. That means there is no justification for saying, as the co-leader of the Green party did at the weekend:
“Tony Blair lied to the public, parliament and his own cabinet in order to drag us into the Iraq war.”
That is not true. Whether SNP Members like it or not, the truth is that Chilcot rejected allegations that Tony Blair said one thing in public and another in private. People can be for or against the war, but it is not true to say that Tony Blair lied about it. We have heard repeatedly this afternoon Sir John Chilcot’s response to the question when he absolved Tony Blair of any attempt to mislead or lie.
Let us be honest about this: the right hon. Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond)—I think I have got that right—has many skills, achievements and attributes, but I do not think that even the most sycophantic member of the SNP fan club would claim that self-effacing modesty or the capacity for self-examination are among them. Let us look at his record and judgment on international issues. In 2014, as Putin’s tanks massed on the border of Crimea and after NATO had warned that Russia
“threatens peace and security in Europe”
and had criticised
“President Putin’s threats against this sovereign nation”,
he said he admired “certain aspects” of Putin’s leadership and that it was a “good thing” he had restored Russian national pride—
Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Is the hon. Gentleman in order to pursue these particular matters when we are in fact having a very serious debate on Iraq? [Interruption.]
Madam Deputy Speaker (Natascha Engel)
Order. This debate is about the Chilcot inquiry and parliamentary scrutiny. I have given the hon. Member for Dudley North (Ian Austin) quite a lot of leeway, but I would be very grateful to him if he got back to the subject we are debating.
Ian Austin
This debate is also about judgment, and the right hon. Gentleman’s judgment has been found completely wanting at every stage. It is also about intervention—whether Britain intervened rightly or wrongly—and about the consequences of that intervention. For example, when Britain was intervening to save lives in Kosovo, he said it was an action of “dubious legality” and condemned it as “unpardonable folly”. He demanded a ceasefire and urged the urgent start of talks with Milosevic. When challenged, he said that
“we shall see if I am right”.
History has proved him completely wrong—
Madam Deputy Speaker
Order. This is not a debate about the right hon. Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond); it is about the Chilcot inquiry. I would be grateful to the hon. Gentleman if he moved back to that subject.
Ian Austin
This is the final point I want to make: of course we should learn lessons from the invasion of Iraq, but we must also learn lessons from successful interventions, such as those in Kosovo, but the right hon. Gentleman ought to show some humility and apologise for his mistakes and lack of judgment over the decades.
Sir David Amess (Southend West) (Con)
I have to tell my hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Robert Courts) that the House is at its best when listening to a maiden speech, but I am afraid it went rather downhill after that. He made an absolutely brilliant speech. He commanded the House, and he brought in a great sense of humour. He was set a very high bar, in following a former Prime Minister, but who knows what will happen in the future. I am very jealous that he lives in the wonderful village of Bladon.
I rise, with pride, to support the motion. It is rather unfortunate that there is bad blood between the Labour party and the SNP—no doubt, if the Liberal Democrats were in the Chamber, there would be bad blood between them and the Conservatives—but I wish to concentrate solely on the lessons to be learned following the Chilcot report.
There are only 179 of us left who were in the House that fateful night in March 2003. To my utter shame, I did not follow my 15 colleagues in voting against the war, so the one lesson I have learned is not always to accept at face value everything that is said at the Dispatch Box. That is a big lesson I have learned. I pay tribute to all Members, including those from other parties, who were much wiser than I was. I genuinely thought that the weapons of mass destruction were targeted on our country and that they could reach here in 40 minutes. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale) had a briefing with 11 colleagues, but I was not privy to that. I regret the way that I voted. I congratulate my hon. Friend on his speech, with which I entirely agree, and my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) on his speech. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) intervened, and I congratulate him on everything he said.
As we have heard, the Chilcot report took seven years and cost £13 million. It found that military action had been taken before peaceful options had been exhausted; that the reliability of evidence on Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction was overstated; that the legal justification was far from satisfactory; that rather than bolstering the UN, the UK helped to undermine it; that UK armed forces were poorly prepared; that warnings about the consequences of removing Saddam were not taken seriously; and that the UK overestimated its ability to influence the US. I would have thought that was pretty damning.
My hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin), who is not in his place, did an excellent job with his inquiry. He put it to the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood:
“Chilcot actually says, ‘Most decisions on Iraq pre-conflict were taken either bilaterally between Mr Blair and the relevant Secretary of State or in meetings between Mr Blair, Mr Straw, and Mr Hoon, with No. 10 officials and, as appropriate, Mr John Scarlett and Sir Richard Dearlove and Admiral Boyce’.”
In further questioning, he put it to him:
“Yes, but when the Prime Minister sent another letter to the President of the United States, using those now very famous words ‘I will be with you whatever’, he was advised by officials that this position should be shared with other Cabinet colleagues before he sent the letter and he refused to do so.”
The Cabinet Secretary replied:
“I certainly agree with you that private memos from the Prime Minister to the President of the United States setting out…the…position…should have been subject to collective approval”.
My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe also said that.
Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)
I was not in the House at the time of the vote, but I was a civil servant, and I wonder whether my hon. Friend would comment on the fact that the proper involvement of officials, rather than sofa government, could have prevented some of the excesses in 2003.
Sir David Amess
My hon. Friend makes a wise point. It is yet another lesson to be learned.
On 13 July, there was an exchange between my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) and my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe. My right hon. Friend said:
“It seems from the Chilcot report that, at some point between December 2001 and possibly March 2002 but certainly by July 2002, Mr Blair effectively signed Britain up to the American military effort… Under American law, to go to war on the basis of regime change is entirely legal. They do not recognise the international laws that render it otherwise, so for them regime change is a perfectly legitimate casus belli.”—[Official Report, 13 July 2016; Vol. 613, c. 360.]
My right hon. and learned Friend intervened and said that
“with hindsight…given that Hans Blix was perfectly willing to carry on with inspections, if the Americans could have been persuaded to delay for another month, all this could have been avoided… The Americans dismissed Blix, however, and regarded him as a waste of time; they were trying to get him out of the way.”
My right hon. Friend replied:
“That is exactly right. That should have been the stance that Mr Blair took, but he did not. He chose instead to come to Parliament to misrepresent the case… Finally, Mr Blair was asked by Tam Dalyell”—
a great parliamentarian—
“about the risks of terrorism arising from the war, but the Prime Minister did not give him an answer—despite having been told by the JIC and by MI5 that it would increase both the international and domestic risk of terrorism and would destabilise the states in the area.”—[Official Report, 13 July 2016; Vol. 613, c. 362.]
I am grateful that my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex has said that whatever the result of today’s debate his Committee will look at this issue again. In six years, the former Prime Minister involved us in wars in Iraq, Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan. I am very concerned about that record. With hindsight, I should not have been partisan. Instead, I should have listened more carefully to the wise words of Robin Cook and Clare Short. We owe this to all those British servicemen and women who lost their lives as a result of the Iraq war. The world has been completely destabilised by the disastrous decision that Parliament took, and the general public will not understand if, after spending all that time and money on the Chilcot report, we do not put in place a mechanism by which lessons can be learned. I also think that the former Prime Minister should be brought before a Select Committee.
Martin Docherty-Hughes (West Dunbartonshire) (SNP)
I also congratulate the hon. Member for Witney (Robert Courts) on his maiden speech, although I note that he had 12 minutes, while I had only six for mine. I have a feeling of déjà vu.
As I did in the two previous debates on this issue, I start by declaring an interest: my brother served on the frontline in Iraq and served two terms of active duty in Afghanistan. I do not therefore participate lightly in this debate.
Many in this Chamber and outside never thought we would reach this point in placing a motion before the House with cross-party support calling on the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee to conduct a further specific examination of this contrast between public and private policy and to report to the House on any actions it considers necessary. It was a disastrous series of events that still dogs the path to peace in the middle east and has played a part in undermining unity in the western democracies against an expansion in non-democratic forces both near and far. It was the former Member for Sedgefield who stated the obvious. We need only look at a section of a note from him to the then President of the United States headed “Extending War Aims”:
“There is a real willingness in the Middle East to get Saddam out but a total opposition to mixing this up with the current operation. All said: we know what you want, you can do it, but not whilst you are bombing Afghanistan....I have no doubt that we need to deal with Saddam. But if we hit Iraq now, we would lose the Arab world, Russia, probably half the EU and my fear is the impact of all that on Pakistan. However, I am sure we can devise a strategy for Saddam deliverable at a later date.”
It would seem that the soothsayer whispering a self-fulfilling prophecy in the ear of the then President of the United States had a clear picture of the outcome of the decision to invade Iraq: Saddam removed—done; losing support in the Arab world—done; allowing the Government of the Russian Federation to cast themselves as a defender of state sovereignty—done; a divided Europe—done; undermining the stability of the state of Pakistan—done; inflaming a sectarian divide—done; undermining the credibility of liberal democracy—done. Therefore, to restore the integrity of our sense of democracy it is critical that the House recognises that the inquiry has substantiated the fact that the former Member for Sedgefield and others misled Parliament on the development of the then Government’s policy towards the invasion of Iraq.
This position cannot and will not—at least not in this debate—go unchallenged. Even the former Member for Sedgefield’s advisers suggested in their evidence to the inquiry that a decision to support regime change in Iraq had been made by the time of, or at, the Crawford Ranch summit in April 2002. For example, Sir David Manning, foreign policy adviser to the former Prime Minister, gave evidence to the inquiry, stating:
“On the one hand the prime minister was very clearly urging the president”—
of the United States—
“to go back or adopt the UN route and coalition strategy but was absolutely prepared to say that at the same time he was willing to contemplate regime change if this didn’t work.”
Fundamentally, as far as I and my SNP colleagues are concerned, this undermined the credibility of the UN and its ability to play its true role in delivering peace.
In May 2005, The Sunday Times published a leaked classified document written by the Cabinet Office’s defence and overseas secretariat, entitled “Iraq: conditions for military action”. It stated:
“When the Prime Minister discussed Iraq with President Bush at Crawford in April, he said that the UK would support military action to bring about regime change, provided that certain conditions were met”.
Then in a memo dated 28 March, ahead of the summit, Colin Powell himself told the president:
“On Iraq, Blair will be with us should military options be necessary.”
If we can achieve anything in this debate, surely, as I have stated previously, it must be to enhance the debate about the nature of our constitutional democracy and the duties of the Government in their attitude to war and peace. I will reiterate again, as I did on the publication of the report, that the words,
“I will be with you, whatever”,
will be forever associated with the former Member for Sedgefield and will be his political epitaph. They will forever live, too, in the scars of those who were casualties of the war, whether members of our armed services or Iraqi civilians, and of our democracy itself. That is the true legacy of
“I will be with you, whatever.”
Mr Pat McFadden (Wolverhampton South East) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Witney (Robert Courts) on his maiden speech.
The central accusation in the motion is not a rerun of whether anyone was for or against the Iraq war. As we heard eloquently from my hon. Friends the Members for Leeds North East (Fabian Hamilton) and for Eltham (Clive Efford), many Members who voted against the Iraq war will vote against the motion, because they know that that is not what it is about. Instead, the central accusation is that the former Prime Minister lied in making the case for it. The motion does not use that word, but that is the implication.
Sir John Chilcot made some serious criticisms of the decision making in the run-up to the war and in the aftermath, but he did not say that the decision was taken in bad faith. In fact, his report says of the intelligence presented:
“The JIC accepted ownership of the dossier and agreed its content. There is no evidence that intelligence was improperly included in the dossier or that No.10 improperly influenced the text”.
In paragraph 806 of the report, he says:
“There was nothing in the JIC Assessments issued before July 2002 that would have raised any questions in policy-makers’ minds about the core construct of Iraq’s capabilities and intent.”
In March 2002, the JIC said that it was
“clear that Iraq continues to pursue a policy of acquiring WMD and their delivery means”.
These views on Iraq’s capability and intent were not purely British; they were shared by intelligence services throughout the world, including in those countries that were vehemently opposed to military action.
Of the meeting with President Bush at Crawford, the Chilcot report said that Mr Blair said that it was important to go back to the UN and that he sought to persuade Mr Bush to act within a multilateral framework, not a unilateral one. At paragraph 802, the report said:
“Mr Blair and Mr Straw sought to persuade the US Administration to secure multilateral support before taking action on Iraq; and to do so through the UN.”
So the accusation of lying is not true and is not backed up by the Chilcot report.
Ian Austin
Other countries, not just Britain and America, believed not only that Saddam Hussein had WMD, but that he had actually used them, perpetrating the largest chemical weapons attack against civilians in history and killing thousands in a brutal attack on his own people.
Mr McFadden
That is absolutely true, and it is a great shame that the Iraqi MPs who were watching from the Gallery earlier on cannot be heard in today’s debate, because I am sure that they would make that point.
What is true is that the Iraq war and its aftermath raised major questions about military intervention, post-conflict responsibility and our capacity and willingness to act in the future. To go to war is a heavy responsibility and perhaps the most difficult judgment that any leader can make.
There is a temptation to think that history in Iraq began with our intervention. In his opening statement, the right hon. Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond) said that everything could be traced back to the 2003 intervention, but history in Iraq and the use of violence in the country and in the wider middle east did not begin in 2003. As my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley North (Ian Austin) said, chemical weapons were used in the Anfal campaign against the Kurds, which began long before then, as did the brutal repression of the Shi’a uprising following the first Gulf war.
Liz Kendall (Leicester West) (Lab)
Is my right hon. Friend aware of the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks, including in Yemen in 1992, Mumbai in 1993, in Nairobi and Tanzania in 1998 and, of course, in New York on 11 September 2001? Terrorist attacks did not begin with what happened in Iraq in 2003.
Mr McFadden
I could not agree more with my hon. Friend. I believe that there is a new imperialism afoot, which seeks to trace everything to western decisions to intervene or not intervene. Until we understand that violent Islamist jihadism has an ideology of its own, we will never be able properly to confront it, let alone overcome it. We have to understand that, despite our history, it is not always about us.
Mr McFadden
I have already given way twice.
The controversy over the Iraq war and its aftermath has coloured every decision this Parliament has made on military intervention since—most notably, the vote in August 2013 not to take military action in Syria, following President Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his own people. Who can say for sure what the consequences of that vote were, but we have a duty—do we not?—to reflect on them as we watch Aleppo being blown to bits night after night on our television screens. We can tell ourselves that because we did not intervene in 2013, we do not bear responsibility for it, but that is of little comfort to the children of Aleppo, as the bombs rain down on their heads in a horror seemingly without end. There will not be a Chilcot report on Syria because we did not take the decision to intervene, but are the consequences for the victims any less real?
There are certainly lessons to learn from the experience of Iraq and Syria, but they lie not in the sort of detective hunt based on false accusations of lying set out in the motion, but in asking ourselves serious questions about when we should intervene and when we should not and how we live up to the responsibilities that come from intervention. Perhaps most seriously of all, is it really a morally better position never to intervene if the consequences are encouragement for dictators and no defence for their civilian victims?
In the aftermath of the Chilcot report—we have heard a lot about it in today’s debate—there will be a process to learn lessons. Committees will be formed; processes will be changed; the National Security Council might be changed in one way or another— and it might do some good, because we need the best processes that we can, but this is not the heart of the matter. Nothing—no process; no Committee; no Council—will remove the responsibility of a Prime Minister and of MPs to make a judgment on military intervention. In the end, it is a judgment. That is what leadership is all about.
Several hon. Members rose—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Natascha Engel)
Order. I am going to drop the time limit down to five minutes.
Kirsten Oswald (East Renfrewshire) (SNP)
Since we debated the publication of the Chilcot report in July, I cannot be alone in hearing constituents express their doubts about the likelihood of any action on its findings—recalling previous occasions where evidence of failures was debated in this place, only to see the issues disappear without trace as the months and years moved on. Since the time when the matters on which Chilcot reported took place, we have watched the Arab spring rise and fall, Daesh has taken large swathes of the middle east back to the dark ages, and a resurgent Russia provokes NATO—just as the hammer-blows of an ill-thought-out Brexit and the rise of Trump threaten to destabilise the relationships on which the alliance depends.
Already, those of us who believe the public still need answers see others characterise the Iraq war and the events that led up to it as ancient history. This is not a new phenomenon. In the 2010 Labour leadership race, David Miliband said:
“While Iraq was a source of division in the past, it doesn’t need to be a source of division in the future. I said during the election campaign that I thought it was time to move on.”
But, of course, as the Chilcot report makes clear, it is decidedly not time to move on.
The exchanges in July’s debate showed that the route to military action was settled directly between Bush and Blair. One of them was driven by a determination to finish the job left unfinished by his father, while the other was convinced that if he said yes to each step along the road to war, he could drag America back from the brink at the 11th hour.
“I will be with you, whatever”,
wrote Blair, as he subcontracted to Bush the decision on whether the war would go ahead. He committed UK troops to go, if that was what Bush decided. The report is damning on this point. Sir John said in launching his report:
“We have concluded that the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted.”
It might have taken many years and millions of words for the UK to catch up on what its Prime Minister did, behind the scenes, in our name. In the US, the verdict was arrived at long ago and the conclusion was clear: the Iraq war was not an innocent mistake; there was no need to argue over flawed intelligence; and the Bush Administration wanted a war and everything else was pretext. Blair’s decision to hitch the UK armed forces to that wagon of deception is not something that we can allow layers of events to silt over.
The public have long demanded—and deserved—an explanation and action. The families of the servicemen and women killed in Iraq deserve to know the truth, and deserve to know that this will not happen again. Their loved ones were marched to war behind a dodgy dossier that was designed to mislead. Those with family members in the UK armed forces expect to see military intervention used to root out injustice and instability. Instead, that is what the Iraq war left in its wake.
On top of the dishonesty about the reason for going to war, the consequences appear to have received no thought from those leading the charge. If there was any post-invasion plan, it was the Bush Administration plan—to leave behind an Iraq deliberately weakened, politically and militarily. The result of that flawed policy was the first appearance of Daesh, growing from the ashes of the discarded Iraqi army—an Iraqi spark that became a flame in the war in Syria and threatens to engulf communities across the middle east, Europe and beyond.
Some right hon. and hon. Members would like us to move on. I was struck in July by the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) who drew attention to the need to learn the lessons of Iraq in advance of the intervention in Libya, only to be told: “We are not putting boots on the ground, so it isn’t an issue for us.
However, if we move on from Iraq now and leave the drawing of lessons from these events for another day, how many more Iraqs, Syrias and Libyas will there be?
In July, in response to the hon. Member for Bridgend, the hon. Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) said that he had voted for intervention in Libya because he was
“terrified that people would be killed.”—[Official Report, 14 July 2016; Vol. 613, c. 489.]
But, of course, people were killed, and are still being killed, in each of those countries and many more. They are dying as they flee once-thriving communities. Much of the destruction is still rooted in that flawed pact between Bush and Blair, and until we understand how we got here, it is not clear how we will find our way back. Why does that matter now? There are many reasons. Two of them are the largest aircraft carriers ever purchased by the UK Government. They are designed to project UK power across the globe, but to what end? If the policies driving the use of those vessels are not open to democratic scrutiny or review, will they and their associated air power add to our security or undermine it?
Since the launch of the Chilcot report, we have seen an increasing number of appearances by the former Prime Minister. He has read the runes and believes that scrutiny is over for him. However, I know that Members in this Chamber believe that the armed forces’ sacrifice means that any decision to send them to war must be made with integrity and based on fact. In this case it was not, and we must scrutinise that further.
Joanna Cherry (Edinburgh South West) (SNP)
I rise to address a misapprehension that seems to have developed that the report of Sir John Chilcot’s inquiry has cleared the then Prime Minister of misleading the House. As the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) said earlier in an intervention, papers released recently as a result of a freedom of information request—after quite some resistance from the current Government—have shown that the Iraq inquiry was designed from the outset to avoid blame and to reduce the risk that individuals and the Government could face legal proceedings.
The hon. Member for Leeds North East (Fabian Hamilton) is shaking his head. I can give him copies of the civil service memos that were released as a result of that freedom of information request. My point is, however, that not having been charged with investigating blame or accountability, or indeed the legality of the war, Sir John Chilcot—for whom I have the greatest respect—is in no better a position to absolve the then Prime Minister of blame for misleading the House than anyone else who has carefully considered the evidence and the analysis of it that Sir John has set out.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond) indicated that he had placed in the Library a detailed report that carries out that analysis and suggests that the House was misled. I am not saying that; it was said by an independent expert who has looked at the evidence set out by Sir John Chilcot. Gordon Brown, the former Prime Minister, said that the inquiry would help us to learn lessons that would strengthen UK democracy, foreign policy and the military forces, but how is democracy strengthened if the House does not scrutinise the evidence and consider issues of blame and accountability when so many people have died?
I am conscious that I do not have much time, but I want to talk briefly about what those memos—the memos that were released after the current Government had fought so hard to prevent their release—show us. They show the thinking and advice at the highest level of government prior to Gordon Brown’s announcement of an inquiry. They show that many officials who took part in the events that the inquiry investigated—including the former spy chief Sir John Scarlett—were involved in setting it up. They reveal that senior civil servants, under Gordon Brown, went against Whitehall protocol when they appointed a civil servant with significant involvement in Iraq policy during the period covered by the inquiry to the key role of inquiry secretary.
The documents, a series of memos from Whitehall officials, cover a four-week period in May and June 2009, and they show that the officials favoured from the outset a secret inquiry to be conducted by Privy Counsellors. In a memo to Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet official Ben Lyon advised that the format, scope and membership of the inquiry could be designed to
“focus on lessons and avoid blame”.
It was noted that a parliamentary inquiry of the sort suggested by the former Foreign Secretary, Lord Hurd, would
“attract a daily running commentary”,
like the Hutton inquiry. Gus O’Donnell also advised against appointing judges or lawyers who would adopt a “legalistic” focus. Indeed, as we know, there was no legalistic focus. The inquiry did not look at issues of blame and accountability. That is the reason for this cross-party motion: it is intended to enable the House to look at those issues now.
Joanna Cherry
The motion is supported by members of seven parties. It has been made clear this afternoon that Labour Members do not support it, and I think that that speaks for itself, as does the behaviour of some speakers. My point is that the purpose of the motion, which has the support of seven political parties, is to ensure that the House does the job that the then Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, said the inquiry would do—namely, to ensure that democracy was properly served.
If the House does not examine the outcome of Sir John Chilcot’s findings properly and if it does not look at those issues of accountability, democracy and justice will not have been served. That is the point of the motion.
Phil Wilson (Sedgefield) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Witney (Robert Courts) on his maiden speech. I know how difficult it is to make a maiden speech when your predecessor was Prime Minister, and the hon. Gentleman did an excellent job.
I want to make a couple of points about why the motion is about more than just Chilcot, and about how divisive it actually is. My predecessor was Member of Parliament for Sedgefield for a quarter of a century. For 13 of those years he was the leader of the Labour party, and for 10 he was Prime Minister. I have known Tony Blair for more than 30 years, probably longer than anyone else who is in the House today, and I am proud to say that he is a friend of mine. When I am called a Blairite, which is sometimes seen as a term of abuse, I wear that term proudly as an accolade.
I met Tony Blair in 1983, when he first became the Labour candidate for Sedgefield, in the community bar in Trimdon village. He believed then, as he does today, that the Labour party had a great ability to do good, but his opponents are angry about what he achieved. What he did achieve were great things, from the minimum wage to devolution in Scotland and the creation of the Scottish Parliament, which I would like to say the SNP used a bit more than it does at present. We also became, under Tony Blair, the party that was patriotic. It became “cool” to be British under his leadership and premiership. There is a reason why Conservative Members, in particular, do not want to see another Tony Blair. Given that he kept the Tory party out of power for the longest period since 1762, I understand their disquiet about those years.
Our opponents want to put as much distance between Tony Blair and the Labour party of today as they possibly can. My message to my colleagues today is, “Do not fall into that trap”, and I am pleased to note that Labour Members will oppose the motion. There is another reason why it is wrong. It is not about the rights and wrongs of the war in Iraq; it is essentially about calling Tony Blair a liar, and continuing to do so. That is mendacious, and it is an attempt to second-guess Sir John Chilcot, who said:
“I absolve him from a personal and demonstrable decision to deceive parliament or the public—to state falsehoods, knowing them to be false.”
The SNP motion is part of a strategy to divide the Labour Benches. It is party political, divisive and cynical.
Angela Smith (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is making an excellent argument exposing the mendacity of the SNP’s motion. Does he agree that the legacy of our former Prime Minister involves a commitment, ongoing to this day, to peace in the middle east, making him a figure that Labour Members should be proud of?
Phil Wilson
We should be proud of Tony Blair. We know about the efforts he is putting into the middle east and interfaith dialogue around the world. He spends most of his time with his charities trying to achieve those aims.
Some people want to define themselves against Tony Blair and the 1997 to 2010 Labour Governments. To them I say, “Be careful, because it is not useful or a good idea to define yourself against success.” Like all Governments, Labour did things that generated criticism, disagreement, frustration and anger, none more than on Iraq. I sincerely accept that people outside and Members of this House have strongly held views on the rights and wrongs of the Iraq war, but let us disengage from this witch hunt pursuing a line of criticism abandoned by the Chilcot inquiry. Tony Blair did not lie.
My message to the SNP is this: “Use your Opposition days to talk about the issues that affect Scotland. You use such debates to deflect from your own weaknesses. You have no vision; your policy platform is absent. Labour gave you a Scottish Parliament. Use it. Look to yourselves before you start criticising others.”
Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)
The Iraq war is one of the great disasters to befall the world in this century. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed and injured—men, women and children, the culpable and the innocent alike, the invading forces and the often unwilling defenders. Saddam’s vile tyranny was replaced by endless war. Here in the United Kingdom families grieve for their loved ones, lost forever, and survivors who served their country so faithfully suffer terribly. Terrorism spreads across northern Africa and Europe and is indeed a menace worldwide. Today the threat level here in the UK is again at “severe”; an attack is highly likely.
Compared to all that, misleading the House of Commons and the damage done to our reputation might seem to rank somewhat lower, but it is significant none the less, and damage has been done. Trust in Parliament, in Government and in individual MPs has declined disastrously, which is coupled with at best scepticism, and at worst widespread cynicism, about our democratic processes.
I was a Member of this House at the time of the march to war and I have a particularly vivid memory of Mr Blair presenting the House with the so called “dodgy dossier”. Even on first reading, it seemed to me it was a cut and paste exercise. I also took part in the enormous protest against going to war and was astonished by the variety of people joining in—not just the usual suspects but a true cross-section of society. There are many causes of the steep decline of trust in politicians and in our work, but some of the blame can be traced back to the way we were taken to war in Iraq, to subsequent disastrous events there, and to the public perception that no one has really been held to account.
As The Observer revealed last Sunday in a report concerning this debate:
“A spokesman for Blair declined to comment. But, privately, his supporters say similar motions have been tabled before without gaining significant traction among MPs.”
Hywel Williams
I will not, as time is short.
Unsurprisingly, there is much cynical public resignation. Last summer, we had a two-day debate and there was a debate in the other place. On 26 October, the hon. Member for Southend West (Sir David Amess) asked the Prime Minister for reassurance that, in respect of the Chilcot report, she had, as he put it,
“a cunning plan to ensure that action is taken”.
In reply, the right hon. Lady said that the National Security Adviser was leading an exercise to learn the lessons from the Chilcot report, before adding:
“There is much in it, and we need to ensure that we do learn the lessons from it.”—[Official Report, 26 October 2016; Vol. 616, c. 277.]
Although that is most assuredly the case, for me there is a further question: who is this “we”?
I know nothing of the National Security Adviser. I have no doubt that he is a capable, industrious and conscientious public servant, but he is appointed by the Prime Minister and he reports to the Prime Minister. The House of Commons decides its own ways of working and of holding the Government to account, hence this proposed referral to the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee
“to conduct a further specific examination of this contrast in public and private policy and of the presentation of intelligence, and then to report to the House on what further action it considers necessary and appropriate to help prevent any repetition of this disastrous series of events.”
Given that the Prime Minister’s answer of 26 October is only partially relevant, I will refer to two more recent matters on the presentation of intelligence information. First, on the basis of that information was it reasonable to conclude that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the UK and so go to war? In evidence to the Liaison Committee on 2 November, Sir John Chilcot said in respect of the alleged imminence of the Iraqi threat to the UK:
“As things have turned out, we know that it was not.”
That is, the threat was not imminent, but he seems to be saying that a correct judgment on the matter is only possible with hindsight—“as things…turned out”. Significantly, he concluded by saying:
“As things appeared at the time, the evidence to support it was more qualified than he”—
Mr Blair—
“in effect, gave expression to.”
That prompted a further question from the Chair, referring to the
“test of whether a reasonable man would conclude that this evidence supported going to war.”
Sir John replied:
“If I may say so, that seems an easier question for me to answer, because the answer to that is no.”
The second point I would have liked to make is on the question posed by the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) of absolving Mr Blair, but unfortunately I have no time.
Mr Blair said, famously:
“I think most people who have dealt with me, think I’m a pretty straight sort of guy and I am.”
Referral of this matter to PACAC will give him yet another opportunity to convince the world of his “pretty straight” credentials.
Several hon. Members rose—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Natascha Engel)
We will have to drop the time limit to four minutes.
Ronnie Cowan (Inverclyde) (SNP)
I am delighted finally to be speaking in this most important of debates.
From the outside looking in, many people assume that this place is corrupt. Let us be honest: politicians do not have a good reputation. I know the vast majority of MPs are hard-working, diligent and honest, but every example of corruption, perversion, laziness, greed or dishonesty does not just taint the perpetrator; it casts a shadow over all of us and this place. The only way to convince the citizens of the UK that they have a Parliament to be proud of is through ruthless honesty, even when it hurts. The alternative is an electorate who are dissatisfied and feel disfranchised, and so disengage from politics and politicians. We have a duty to support the mechanisms of a democracy. We must respect, cherish and protect them. We do not own them; we are simply guardians who pass them on to future generations. That is why we must investigate thoroughly any possibility that the principles we claim to hold so dear have been abused.
The Chilcot inquiry highlighted serious shortcomings and misgivings. The report stated that the UK invaded Iraq before all peaceful options had been investigated. We now know that there was no imminent threat from Iraq or Saddam Hussein, and that the reasons for our invasion were predicated on flawed intelligence. Crucially, this flawed intelligence was not challenged as it should have been. Quite astoundingly, there is no formal record of the decision and the grounds on which it was made that led to the invasion that started on 20 March 2003.
The rush to war was so fast that our troops did not have time to stockpile the necessary equipment—uniforms, boots and body armour. A lack of helicopters and armoured vehicles made it more dangerous for our forces. By July 2009, 179 members of our armed forces had died. We will never know how many Iraqis died, but conservative estimates suggest at least 150,000, with millions more displaced from their homes. How did this come about? How did this place get it so wrong? How were so many MPs misled?
In 2003, it was already US policy to change the regime in Iraq. Five years earlier, in 1998, President Clinton had signed into law the Iraq Liberation Act. It was
“the policy of the U.S. to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq”.
In 2003, Prime Minister Tony Blair threw his hat in with the US. Chilcot demonstrated clearly that Tony Blair bypassed his Cabinet, instead relying on his so-called “sofa government”. Key decisions on the future of the country were made in informal meetings, sometimes involving only a couple of the then Prime Minister’s friends, and without the input of senior members of the Cabinet. That is not how to solve a problem. The invasion of Iraq was an object lesson in how to escalate a problem. If the mission was to perpetuate instability in the middle east, it is mission accomplished.
The last line of the motion we are debating today is crucial. It calls on the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee to
“report to the House on what further action it considers necessary and appropriate to help prevent any repetition of this disastrous series of events.”
As I deliver this speech, our forces are involved in the battle of Mosul, so we can see that the ramifications of decisions made back in 2003 are still with us today.
In conclusion, we are voting today to instruct the Committee to
“conduct a further specific examination of this contrast in public and private policy and of the presentation of intelligence”.
I would say to any Members who were here in 2003 that, with all due respect, their responsibility to the future should outweigh their duty to the past. Supporting the motion today can only enhance the reputation of this place. It should be welcomed by all fair-minded elected Members.
Michael Gove (Surrey Heath) (Con)
I must apologise to the House for being absent during part of this debate. I was called to participate in a delegated legislation Committee upstairs.
It is a great privilege to speak in the same debate as my hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Robert Courts), who gave an outstanding maiden speech and paid appropriate tribute to his predecessor. I also pay tribute to the hon. Member for Sedgefield (Phil Wilson) for the generous words he said about his predecessor.
Talking of distinguished party leaders, the debate was opened in fine style by the right hon. Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond), a former First Minister of Scotland. He laid out his case, as he does always, with passion and verve and commitment. Unfortunately, skilled as an advocate though he is, as he was laying out the prosecution case against the former Member for Sedgefield, he did not have the evidence to sustain his case. The truth is that the Chilcot report makes it clear that at no stage was there a deliberate attempt by Tony Blair to mislead the House. More than that, the Chilcot report makes it clear that there was a proper legal basis—a Security Council resolution—for the decision to go to war.
Joanna Cherry
The right hon. Gentleman has been out of the Chamber, so he may have missed my contribution. I made the point that papers recently released, as a result of a freedom of information request, clearly show that the inquiry was not charged with looking at issues of blame, accountability or legality. Does he accept that?
Michael Gove
It is clear from what was published in the report that a decision was taken by Sir John Chilcot—I will not have any criticism made of him or any of those responsible for the report—that there was no deliberate misleading of this House. It is quite wrong to suggest otherwise. More than that, the right hon. Member for Gordon sought to suggest that the note passed from the former Prime Minister to President Bush saying that he would “be with you, whatever” was the equivalent of a political blank cheque. It was no such thing. When Mr Blair wrote that note he made it clear that there needed to be progress in three key areas: the middle east peace process; securing UN authority for action; and shifting public opinion in the UK, Europe and the Arab world. He also pointed out that there would be a need to commit to Iraq for the long term.
In judging Mr Blair—I think history will judge him less harshly than some in this House—we need to recognise that his decision to join George W Bush at that time was finely balanced. In reflecting on when this House decides to send young men and women into harm’s way, we also need to reflect not just on the consequences of acting but the consequences of not acting—the consequences of non-intervention.
Alex Salmond
The right hon. Gentleman will remember Chilcot’s findings on page 112 of the report. The note was not discussed or agreed with any colleagues and led to the possibility of
“participation in military action in a way that would make it very difficult for the UK subsequently to withdraw its support for the US.”
Does he not accept that Chilcot found the note to be of huge significance in binding the UK to George W Bush?
Michael Gove
It was not a blank cheque. It was not a binding statement. It was of significance, but, as I have explained, Tony Blair at the time laid out to George Bush that certain steps were required before he would agree.
The point the right hon. Gentleman does not attend to is the consequences of inaction: Saddam Hussein remaining in power in a country he had turned into a torture chamber above ground and a mass grave below. Power would inevitably have passed on to his sadistic children, Uday and Qusay, who would have carried on their genocidal conflict against the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs. They would inevitably have taken advantage of the erosion of international sanctions to restock their chemical and biological weapons arsenal.
Whenever we think about the consequences of action, we very rarely think about the consequences of inaction. In front of us now, however, is a hugely powerful reminder of the consequences of inaction: what is happening in Aleppo at the moment. I was not in this House when the decision was taken to vote on whether to take action in Iraq, but I was in this House in the previous Parliament when we voted on whether to take action in Syria. I am deeply disappointed that this House did not vote to take action then, because as a direct result of voting against intervention we have seen Bashar Assad, backed by Vladimir Putin and the anti-Semitic leadership of Iran, unleashing hell on the innocent people of Aleppo.
I have a lot of respect for the SNP position on many issues, but when asked about what is happening in Aleppo and in Syria it has no answer; it can put forward nothing that deals with the huge, horrific humanitarian disaster that is unfolding. My own view is that there is much that we can do both to relieve suffering and to put pressure on Russia, Iran and Syria, but once again the long shadow cast by Iraq, which certainly should call us all to search our consciences, means politicians are sometimes fearful of making the case for intervention now and certainly those like the SNP who are opposed to intervention are emboldened to make their case for neutrality when we are confronting evil.
Joanna Cherry
I do not know whether the right hon. Gentleman was in the House on Monday, but if he was or has read the newspapers he will have seen that I and many of my colleagues signed a letter asking the British Government to take action in relation to Aleppo by way of dropping aid on the city. We are not without answers, and I wonder if he would care to withdraw that suggestion.
Michael Gove
I was happy to sign that letter as well. It was initiated of course by the hon. Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), both of whom, as I have, have argued consistently for muscular intervention in Syria to help the suffering people of Aleppo, and it is simply not good enough—although I have great respect for the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry)—to say we wish to drop that aid but not to be willing to go further to ensure that appropriate pressure, diplomatic and otherwise, is placed on those people who are responsible for mass murder.
It is all very well to look back on Iraq and say that mistakes were made; of course they were, but if we are going to have an Opposition day debate on foreign policy in this House at this time, it is a dereliction of duty to look backwards and try to blame Tony Blair, when the responsibility on all of us is to do something to help the people of Aleppo who are suffering now.
Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion)
Few would now dispute that the Iraq invasion was the biggest foreign policy failure of recent times. The Chilcot report provides detailed confirmation that military intervention was by no means a last resort, and that all other avenues were not exhausted.
Caroline Lucas
I will make a bit of progress and then I will.
Chilcot also showed that Iraq posed no immediate threat to the UK, and, crucially, that hindsight was not necessary to see those things. That seven-year Iraq inquiry, which cost £10 million of public money, also officially recorded detailed evidence of the vast discrepancy between the former Prime Minister’s public statements and his private correspondence. If we do nothing about that and take no steps towards accountability for it, it is unclear to me how we begin to restore faith in our political system.
Sir John Chilcot made it clear earlier this month that Tony Blair did long-term damage to trust in politics by presenting a case for the Iraq war that went beyond
“the facts of the case”.
Sir John told MPs he could “only imagine” how long it would take to repair that trust.
That need to restore trust in politics is a key reason why I support the motion. This should not be pursued as a personal or party political attack, and this should be reflected in our language and approach. This process must be based on the facts and the evidence.
Paul Flynn
Does the hon. Lady recall that world public opinion, especially in the Security Council, was greatly influenced by a presentation by Colin Powell in which he showed photographs of what he thought was biological weapons equipment? He has since retracted and said he was hopelessly deceived, that the pictures were nothing of the sort and that there was no threat from those weapons. He has shown some penitence; would it not be better if those responsible in this House showed some penitence as well?
Caroline Lucas
I am grateful for that intervention and, unsurprisingly, I agree.
The evidence in the Chilcot report does show that Tony Blair was responsible for fixing evidence around a policy while telling us that he was doing the opposite. It shows he was treating his office, the Cabinet, this House and our constitutional checks and balances with disrespect amounting to contempt. For that he should be held responsible.
But more than that, accountability must mean ensuring that any future decisions are taken with systems in place that guarantee proper Cabinet and parliamentary scrutiny and discussion.
In his report Chilcot does not judge the former Prime Minister’s guilt or innocence, and, as we have recently learned, secret Cabinet documents show the Chilcot report hearings were set up precisely to stop individuals being held accountable and specifically to avoid blame, and that is another key reason why we need a Committee to look at the issue of accountability.
Hon. Members have already cited numerous examples of what could be called misleading statements, deception, untruths or whatever word we choose, but I want to add just one more. Tony Blair stated in March 2003 that diplomacy had been exhausted in efforts to seek to avoid an invasion of Iraq. Yet the Chilcot report shows, without question, that this was not the case, and central to his case was the role of France. To get support from his own MPs, Blair argued that diplomatic efforts to secure a resolution had been exhausted, because the French President was unreasonably threatening to veto any resolution. That was not true, and Chilcot shows that Tony Blair knew it. In a phone call with George Bush on 12 March 2003, Blair and Bush agreed publicly to pretend to continue to seek a second UN resolution, knowing that it would not happen, and then to blame France for preventing it. [Interruption.] I suggest that those who are saying from a sedentary position that that is not true look at paragraph 410 of page 472 in volume 3, section 3.8—
Caroline Lucas
No I will not.
Chilcot then reveals that Tony Blair did two misleading things. First, he told his Cabinet the very next day that work was continuing in the UN to obtain a second resolution and that the outcome remained open. Secondly, he went on to repeat a deliberate misrepresentation of the French position at Prime Minister’s questions on 12 March, in spite of the fact that, just minutes before, the French ambassador had telephoned No. 10 again to correct this repeated distortion. Blair did this again in his key parliamentary statement of 18 March 2003 and he also included it in the war motion before the House.
In short, the French position was to request more time for weapons inspectors, with war an explicit possibility, but Tony Blair kept deliberately taking out of context phrases from an interview by Chirac given on 10 March, saying that they showed that France would veto in any circumstances. France kept correcting that untruth, as the Chilcot report shows in black and white. Chilcot records that despite this Tony Blair instructed Straw to “concede nothing” in talks with the French Foreign Minister who was, in essence, calling for more time. Tony Blair needed to continue the misrepresentation of France to provide cover for his failure to get UN support for war.
Hon. Members have covered a great deal of other evidence in the debate, including the gross misrepresentation of Iraq as a growing threat to the region and to this country. Blair said that Saddam’s weapons programme was “active, detailed and growing”, and that the intelligence behind that assertion was “extensive, detailed and authoritative”, yet the Joint Intelligence Committee had said just six months earlier:
“Intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction…and ballistic missile programmes is sporadic and patchy.”
I appreciate that it is hard for Labour Members to hear some of these facts, but to barrack us for citing what is in the Chilcot report is deeply disrespectful and shows that we are not learning from that hideous escapade.
Roger Mullin (Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath) (SNP)
One of the most ridiculous arguments put forward here today by a number of hon. Members is that the Scottish National party has no right to have a debate on Chilcot and that we should choose subjects that are of concern to Scotland. I say to them: tell that to the Scottish families whose sons died in that war. Tell it to the Scottish families whose sons were injured and who will have to live with their scars, both physical and mental, for the rest of their lives. Tell it to those people—
Roger Mullin
I will not give way, for the very good reason that I tried often to intervene on—
Graham Jones
I have a family who suffered. He should give way. It’s a disgrace—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)
Order. The hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Roger Mullin) is not giving way.
Roger Mullin
Thank you very much, Madam Deputy Speaker.
I want to compliment one speech that I heard today, and it is that of the hon. Member for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale). In his usual understated way, he made some of the most telling observations about why we should still care about what happened and about the need to learn the lessons. I cannot see how it can be argued that we can learn the lessons if we are unwilling critically to review the results of the Chilcot process.
I was critical when my constituency predecessor in Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath set up the inquiry—as I am critical now—that it was not a judge-led inquiry. I have also been critical in the House about Sir John Chilcot’s decision to invoke the Maxwellisation process, because he was not required to do so. That process allowed those who were criticised in the report to be the only ones to be given notice of what was being said about them and the only ones allowed to introduce new evidence into the process. For those reasons alone, this House needs to review and make its own judgment about the evidence. For me and many hon. Members from whom I have heard today, it is most telling that people recognise that the most important thing about the Chilcot report is not his personal views or interpretation, but the evidence that was presented, which this House is required to review.
I for one have confidence in the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, particularly in its Chairman, the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin), whom we are asking to take this forward. If there is any reason at all for why we need further consideration by the Committee, it was given by the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) when reporting some of his conversations with Sir John Chilcot in the Liaison Committee. He asked a question about Mr Blair and if I quote him correctly, Sir John’s response was:
“You would have to ask him.”
How does this House ask him without asking him?
Ms Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh (Ochil and South Perthshire) (SNP)
I pay tribute to all those who served, lost their lives or were injured in Iraq, to their families and to everyone who currently serves in our forces. I am delighted to support the motion that my colleagues have so ably put forward.
The scene was set in forensic detail by my right hon. Friend the Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond), who started by asking what we should do in parliamentary terms in the light of the inquiry’s findings. It is reasonable to consider parliamentary accountability as a tool that this House should actually use. He went on to highlight that no checks and balances currently exist in the system. Like all of us, he looks forward to the report of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee and its recommendations.
The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, said that lessons should be learned and that the Government are considering them. I believe that he meant that, so does he agree that further specific examination of the contrast between public and private policy and presentation of intelligence vis-à-vis the then Prime Minister is desirable to help to prevent any repetition of past events?
The hon. Member for Leeds North East (Fabian Hamilton) spoke about pursuing one individual. That individual was the then Prime Minister, who gave differing statements in private and in public—statements upon which, as we heard today, Members of this House relied. If statements were different in private and in public, why should we not debate that? To use the current context, how would we and members of the public feel if we thought that our Prime Minister—heaven forbid we were to be in such a situation again—was having private discussions with President-elect Donald Trump that differed—[Interruption.]
Ms Ahmed-Sheikh
No, I will not. How would we feel if those discussions differed from the information that the Prime Minister presented to the House?
I welcomed the maiden speech of the hon. Member for Witney (Robert Courts), who spoke with great eloquence and some good humour, and gave us a whirlwind tour of his constituency. He rightly paid tribute to the work of the organisations that exist there. I welcome him to the House.
The right hon. Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw) and the hon. Member for Dudley North (Ian Austin) seemed to suggest that they should have some say in the motions that the SNP brings to this House on our Opposition days. We will decide that, thank you very much. What we choose will be based on our constituents’ interests, which are at the heart of all that we on these Benches do. The Labour party can debate what it wants on its Opposition days. Let me be clear: we are not required to be sensitive to the Labour party’s ongoing issues when choosing what to debate. That is its problem. We will remain sensitive to our constituents’ issues and continue to stand up for them.
I thank the hon. Member for Southend West (Sir David Amess) for his support for the motion. He made an excellent speech, as did my hon. Friend the Member for West Dunbartonshire (Martin Docherty-Hughes), whose brother served. My hon. Friend quite rightly did not speak lightly and used his customary passion, conviction and principles, which the House so often enjoys. My hon. Friend the Member for East Renfrewshire (Kirsten Oswald) spoke of the necessary further scrutiny. My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry) discussed how Sir John Chilcot was not charged with investigating blame and therefore is in no better position than anybody else to absolve the then Prime Minister.
The hon. Members for Arfon (Hywel Williams) and for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas), whom we also thank for supporting this motion, gave informative speeches with huge insight into this matter. My hon. Friends the Members for Inverclyde (Ronnie Cowan) and for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Roger Mullin) also spoke very well indeed, and I thank them for their contributions.
This is an important debate, not simply because it is about a former Prime Minister, but because it is about the fate of 179 servicemen and women who went to war and did not come home. It is about their families, and the mental and emotional scars they bear. It is not about us—it is about them. And it is about the hundreds of thousands of dead and injured civilians in Iraq and beyond. It is also about Parliament—this institution—and about protecting the integrity of our democracy. When our democratic institutions are under immense stress and public faith in the political process is at a low ebb, it is vital for our democracy that we can reassert that the discussions we have here in this House may be contentious and controversial, but they are carried out in a way that recognises and does not distort the facts at our disposal. If we choose to look the other way, what hope is there for restoring the public’s faith in this Parliament?
Today, we have a chance to take a significant step towards restoring parliamentary authority. This issue is above party politics, which is why I am glad to have the support of colleagues from across the Chamber and from Members from seven separate political parties. To his great credit, Sir John Chilcot’s report forensically and repeatedly dismantles the public pronouncements of Blair as a catalogue of failure and neglect of the principles and duties of government. Chilcot stated that the actions of the Blair Administration were crucial in undermining the authority of the UN Security Council and that despite repeated declarations to the contrary, Blair personally committed the UK to joining the US in invading Iraq before all peaceful and diplomatic options had been exhausted. We have heard loud and clear about the following words today:
“I will be with you, whatever”.
Parliament must recognise that and must act.
Ms Ahmed-Sheikh
I will not give way, and I ask that Members also afford me the respect that I afforded them when they were speaking in this debate.
We must demonstrate that, a decade on from this disaster, we have listened and learned so that we are not doomed to repeat these deadly mistakes—that is what this is all about. It is about making sure that we do the right thing for the future. We know that the conflict and instability that has engulfed the region in the past few years was undoubtedly fuelled by the ideologically driven recklessness of Blair and Bush, but it is also clear from the lack of post-conflict planning in subsequent conflicts, both in Libya and the humanitarian disaster infolding in Syria, that we have not yet fully embraced the changes that need to take place if we are to play a progressive role in an increasingly dangerous world.
Parliament must be at the centre of this process if it is to reassert its integrity at the heart of our democratic process in holding the Government to account. That is why the motion supports the current work of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, which is examining the lessons to be learned from Chilcot on the machinery of government. This matter is not in the past; it is being spoken of in a Committee, and we are asking that that be extended further.
Today, MPs have a choice to make, and each of us, but perhaps Labour MPs in particular, has to make an important decision. We need to decide whether we act to address the issues raised by Sir John Chilcot and seek to reassert the place of Parliament at the heart of the democratic process, or whether to stand by while public confidence in this place is eroded even further. In the Lobby, we can stand up for parliamentary democracy and the importance of integrity, or we can look the other way. We can choose to learn from the lessons of the past or we can seek to brush this damning report under the carpet. I know the path that I will choose to take, and I hope MPs from across the House will support me in that endeavour.
The Minister for the Armed Forces (Mike Penning)
Let me say at the outset, as the Armed Forces Minister and as a former serviceman, that I would like to pay tribute to those who did not come home, to those who came home with injuries that are going to be with them for the rest of their lives, physically as well as mentally, and to their loved ones, who have to live with those memories. It is for us, as parliamentarians, to live with the decisions that we make in this House. At times, these decisions are enormously onerous, but they are not as onerous as those of Prime Ministers and Ministers in Departments such as mine, which send our troops around the world, as we are doing today.
May I say at the outset that there is no perfect answer to the debate that we have had today? I sat in this House in 2003, not in the Chamber as a Member of Parliament, but in the Press Gallery as adviser and head of news and media for the Leader of the Opposition. I went to many briefings, and sat with the Leader of the Opposition for hours on end while we deliberated what Her Majesty’s Opposition were going to do. Many of my hon. Friends, some of whom are still in the House, made really difficult decisions on that night on how they were going to vote. Some voted with the Government and some voted with their party, but many voted with their conscience. With hindsight, some of the decisions that were made, which have been debated in this House this afternoon, were wrong. If I had been a Member at the time—it was another two years before I was elected—I am sure, based on what I knew, that I would have voted to go to war. We all have to live with our decisions.
We can debate this matter, but many Members made up their minds on it a long time ago. I do not think that there is a huge number of people in the House today who have changed their minds, but this Parliament is doing its job. I will not in any shape or form—either as a Back Bencher, which is what I was and which is what I probably will be in the future, or as a Minister—criticise any party for the motion that they bring forward on their Opposition Day; nor will I criticise a Back Bencher for the subject that they may wish to debate.
I was commenting to the Leader of the House a moment ago about the fact that people from seven different parties signed up to the motion. I said that there could have been more names had the motion not advertently put so much pressure on the Labour party and its previous Prime Minister. At the end of the day, that is what happens when we get motions such as this. Had it been worded differently, we might have had more people going through the Aye Lobby. Who knows?
Some parts of Chilcot have not been discussed. I had the honour of being with the 16 Air Assault Brigade a couple of days before they went into combat on our behalf. We saw in the newspapers some of the real shortfalls in planning that occurred. I was with soldiers who had one magazine of ammunition the day before we sent them to war. We know that we were short of body armour, and that, catastrophically, lives were lost as a result. We all joke that there was not enough toilet paper in the theatre of war. The press made fun of that fact at the time. As a former soldier, I can assure the House that that is one of the most important things. That shortage could have been prevented if we had planned correctly. Chilcot goes into our planning in quite a lot of detail. Some would say, “Well, we had only a short amount of time.” Our armed forces need to be equipped on the basis that they will be doing this sort of thing, so we must ensure that the equipment is in place and that our boys and girls are equipped correctly.
It would be inappropriate for me, in the short amount of time that I have, not to pay tribute to our new colleague, my hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Robert Courts), for a simply fantastic maiden speech. I will not be a hypocrite. I have criticised this House on more than one occasion, because we have too many accountants and lawyers—[Interruption]—and a lot of them are around me at the moment. However, this House has been enhanced by my hon. Friend’s speech and by the way my delivered it. May I ask him what I should do with all those photographs, posters and literature of him that are in the back of my car? Can they be suitably disposed of in a recycling facility? When I came to Witney to help him—I had never been to parts of Witney before, and my hon. Friend is right: it is absolutely beautiful—I was called back by friendly Whips on more than one occasion, so I did not manage to deliver the several thousand posters that his agent managed to give me.
The truth is that my hon. Friend said something fundamentally important: it is a privilege to be here on behalf of our constituents and to bring issues to the fore that concern them. In this case, SNP Members have decided that the Chilcot inquiry is such an issue. I am not going to be hypocritical and say that they do not have the right to do so, but my postbag is about housing, health and my local community. But that is their decision, and I fully respect that. I am not going to say that I have not had any correspondence on Chilcot; by tomorrow morning, I will have a lot more.
At the end of the day, I do not think that anybody wants to criticise Chilcot, his team or the report. It took a long time, and we can go over and over this. Whether the House decides to recommend to my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) and his Committee that they look into this issue further, as I understand Select Committees, they make their own minds up about what they will do. It will discuss this matter whether the motion is passed or not. During the short time a Select Committee—I am looking around for the former Chairman of the Health Committee—we used to have in-depth discussions on what inquiries to do and how far they needed to go.
Alex Salmond
The Minister is making a very balanced speech. In his opinion, having read what he has read, is there a great contrast between the private commitments that the former Prime Minister gave to President Bush and his public statements and assurances to this House?
Mike Penning
I started to read the summary of the Chilcot report, but then read the report at great length, and if the right hon. Gentleman comes to my office he will see the markers in it. It took me several weeks. I respect what Chilcot said, and that is where we are today. If the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee or other Committees want to look at that further, fine, but my personal view and the view of the Government is that we do not need any more inquiries, so we will not go through the Lobby with the SNP this evening.
Question put.
Division 99
Ayes: 70
Scottish National Party: 48
Labour: 7
Conservative: 6
Plaid Cymru: 3
Social Democratic & Labour Party: 2
Independent: 2
Liberal Democrat: 2
Ulster Unionist Party: 1
Green Party: 1
Noes: 439
Conservative: 271
Labour: 158
Democratic Unionist Party: 6
Independent: 2
Ulster Unionist Party: 1
Social Democratic & Labour Party: 1
State Pension Age: Women
(8 years ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
19:00 - The House divided: - Ayes: 234 / Noes: 293 - Question accordingly negatived.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)
I inform the House that Mr Speaker has selected amendment (c) in the name of the Prime Minister.
Ian Blackford (Ross, Skye and Lochaber) (SNP)
I beg to move,
That this House is concerned that the Government is not taking action to alleviate the injustice facing women affected by the acceleration of the increase in the state pension age, despite the House previously voting in favour of such action; welcomes the Landman Economics report into the impact of the changes to pension arrangements for women born in the 1950s, which identifies an affordable solution which would slow down that increase in order to give adequate time for women affected by the acceleration to make alternative arrangements; and calls on the Government to work with the Women Against State Pension Inequality and Women Against State Pension Inequality Voice campaigns further to explore transitional protection for those affected.
It is a pleasure to move this motion in the name of the leader of the Scottish National party, my right hon. Friend the Member for Moray (Angus Robertson), and many of my right hon. and hon. Friends. We have long argued that the Government need to slow down the pace of the increase in women’s pensionable age, and that the increase in pensionable age is happening over too short a timescale. There has also been an argument about whether women were given enough notice of the increase in their pensionable age. Indeed, some Government Members, such as the hon. Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham), have conceded that there were issues with communication. That is putting it mildly.
Thanks to freedom of information requests, we learned two weeks ago that only in April 2009 did the Department for Work and Pensions begin writing to women born between April 1950 and April 1955, and it did not complete the process until February 2012.
Ian Blackford
I will make some progress, and then I will give way.
The DWP wrote to women to inform them about changes in legislation that go back to the Pensions Act 1995, but it did not start the formal period of notification for 14 years. To take 14 years to begin informing people that the pension that they had paid in for was being deferred—that is quite something. Can we imagine the outcry if a private pension provider behaved in such a way? There would be an outcry in this House and, no doubt, legal action. This is quite stunning when we consider that entitlement to a state pension is earned through national insurance contributions, which many women have made for more than 40 years.
Drew Hendry (Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey) (SNP)
Does my hon. Friend agree that these pension entitlements are not a benefit or a privilege but a contract, and they should be honoured?
Ian Blackford
My hon. Friend makes an important point. We are talking about women who have paid national insurance contributions on the basis that they would get a pension. This is not a benefit. It should be a contractual arrangement between the Government and the women involved, and that is what the Government have wilfully removed.
David T. C. Davies
Given the hon. Gentleman’s strong view on the matter, could he tell us whether the Scottish Government have written to pensioners in Scotland about it? Could he also tell us whether the Scottish Government are going to use their many fiscal and tax-raising powers, and their huge budget of some £30 billion, to compensate women in Scotland?
Ian Blackford
The hon. Gentleman might treat pensioners in Scotland and the rest of the UK with a little bit more respect than he has shown by asking that nonsense of a question. Just in case he does not know, pensions are a reserved matter. I would very much like the Scottish Government to have responsibility for pensions. Let us be quite clear: if this Government gave us access to the national insurance fund, we would not treat pensioners in such a shabby way as the Government are doing. That is the reality.
Stephen Doughty (Cardiff South and Penarth) (Lab/Co-op)
I want to go back to the first part of the hon. Gentleman’s argument, when he described the absolute injustice that many of the women who are affected feel. I have met many from my constituency and from across Wales who feel that this is a terrible thing, which must be righted. They expected something; they are not getting it and we need to right that injustice.
Ian Blackford
I thank the hon. Gentleman for that point, and he is absolutely spot on. This is about justice and fairness. It is about people who have paid into a pension and who expected to get that pension—in the case of most of these women, at age 60. The discovery that they were not given adequate notice is a clear reason why the Government must change course and act in a responsible manner.
Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)
The hon. Gentleman has spoken in many debates on this issue, and I pay tribute to him for that. The situation gets worse. The Government, through the back door, are examining the triple lock for existing pensioners. More importantly, responsibility for television licences for pensioners over 75 is being shoved on to the BBC, which will get the blame instead of the Government.
Ian Blackford
Again, I find myself agreeing with the hon. Gentleman.
As a House, we must reflect on the situation in which there are still 1.2 million pensioners in this country living in poverty. I am ashamed when I hear Members of the House saying that we should examine the triple lock, because we should protect our pensioners. One thing on which I will give an absolute commitment is that if we had responsibility for pensions, the triple lock would be secured by the Scottish National party. Pensioners would be secured with the SNP.
Ian Blackford
I will make some progress and then take more interventions. I am aware that many people want to speak.
The Government have changed the entitlement for something that women have paid in for with an expectation of retiring at 60. When the goalposts were moved, the Government could not get around to informing the women affected in a timely manner. A woman born on 6 April 1953, who under the previous legislation would have retired on 6 April 2013, received a letter from the Department for Work and Pensions in January 2012 with the bombshell that she would now be retiring on 6 July 2016. That is three years and three months later than she might have expected, but she received only 15 months’ notice. That is what this Government have done to many women throughout the United Kingdom: 15 months’ written notice on what they thought was a contract they had with the Government, but which has now been ripped up. That is the contempt that this Government have shown for the 2.6 million Women Against State Pension Inequality campaign women throughout the UK.
George Kerevan (East Lothian) (SNP)
Does my hon. Friend agree that the attack was made on the WASPI women because they were an easy target, and that it is the first stage in a Conservative plan to downsize and dismantle the state pension altogether?
Ian Blackford
My hon. Friend may well be right. The Government are of course hoping that with the passage of time this issue will go away, but it will not go away, because the women are angry. If they do not begin to recognise the need to do something, each and every Member of the House will have the WASPI women coming to their surgeries and demanding action. Not only will they be demanding action, but that will run the risk that this Government will be taken to court.
James Cartlidge
The hon. Gentleman is being generous in giving way. Is it still his policy to pay for this change from the national insurance surplus?
Ian Blackford
I will come on to cover that point, but the fact remains that the national insurance fund will be sitting with a surplus of close to £30 billion by the end of this decade. There will be £30 billion of contributions in the national insurance fund. There is no question but that the Government can afford to do this: there is a surplus. The national insurance fund has to retain two months’ cash flow, but that can still be done by putting in place what we are asking the House to do today, which is—as in the Landman report—to push back the increase in women’s pensionable age and to make sure that the women worst affected get recompense and fairness.
Mr Dennis Skinner (Bolsover) (Lab)
The hon. Gentleman has mentioned that the WASPI women will not go away. That is one of the most delightful things about them. Way back, we carried a vote on a Back-Bench motion supporting them in this House. They were not satisfied that there had already been a debate in Westminster Hall, and they were not satisfied that they were holding meetings in every constituency, city and town in Britain. They are like the Grunwick women of 40 years ago, the little Gujarati women who would not give in, and the Tory Government had better realise that the WASPI women ain’t going to give in either.
Ian Blackford
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely correct. He is right that the WASPI women are not for giving in, and those of us on the Opposition Benches—and, I hope, some Conservative Members—are not for giving in either.
Ian Blackford
I want to make some progress, but I will let the hon. Gentleman in later.
The Government, despite not giving reasonable notice, have so far not apologised for how they have treated these women. It is utterly, utterly shameful, and it raises the question: how much notice should be given for changes to the state pension age? The Pensions Commission, which reported in 2005, suggested that at least 15 years’ notice be given on any further increase in pensionable age—15 years, not the 15 months given to so many women. Will the Government not recognise that appropriate notice has to be given and make changes?
Given the Government’s failure to give proper notice, I tabled a written question to the Secretary of State, which I received an answer to yesterday. My question was:
“To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what his policy is on the minimum written notice to be given to people who will be affected by future changes to the state pension age.”
I received the following response:
“The Government has committed not to change the legislation relating to State Pension age for those people who are within 10 years of reaching it. This provides these individuals with the certainty they need to plan for the future. We recognise the importance of ensuring people are aware of any changes to their State Pension age and we use a number of different means to do this…Anyone can find out their State Pension age with our online calculator or the ‘Check your State Pension’ statement service.”
According to the Minister who responded, the Government accept that they should not change legislation for those within 10 years of pensionable age. That is all well and good, but what is the point if they do not inform those directly affected?
Yesterday, in response to a further question, a Minister stated that,
“following the Pensions Act 1995, State Pension estimates, issued to individuals on request, made the changes clear.”
“On request”! It should not be done on request. People should not have to ask the Government to inform them; that is this Government’s responsibility. It almost seems like a script from the comedy, “Yes Minister”, rather than a Government acting in a proper manner.
Ian Murray
The hon. Gentleman has been dogged in pursuing this matter with colleagues from all Opposition parties. He mentioned “Yes Minister”. In 2011, I sat on these Benches as the then Liberal Democrat Minister pushed through the Pensions Act. Is he as astonished as I am that, having now left the House, that former Minister now says that the Act was wrong and unfair to women?
Ian Blackford
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely correct that the previous Pensions Minister has made these comments. In fact, the last Pensions Minister in the other place, Baroness Altmann, made similar comments. Everyone can see the deficiencies in the Government’s policy except the Government themselves.
Mr Shailesh Vara (North West Cambridgeshire) (Con)
If the former Pensions Minister is to be referred to, it would be helpful to put the facts correctly. He said that the difference required was £30 billion. He went to the then Chancellor of the Exchequer and Prime Minister and asked for £3 billion. Then, when he was given a concession of £1.1 billion, he said, “That’s a hell of a lot of money.” So let us be clear: the difference was £30 billion but he only asked for £3 billion, which is a tenth of what the hon. Gentleman is arguing about.
Ian Blackford
We are not talking about concessions; we are talking about these women’s pension entitlement. How dare the Government talk about concessions, when people have paid into their pension and deserve to get it!
This is not a comedy but the reality of a Government letting women down.
Callum McCaig (Aberdeen South) (SNP)
There are suggestions from Conservative Members that money does not grow on trees, and that is correct, but this money came from these women paying in through national insurance. It did not grow on trees; it came, hard-earned, from their own pockets.
Ian Blackford
My hon. Friend is quite correct. We keep hearing about fiscal responsibility and how we cannot afford it, but of course we can, because the surplus is there in the national insurance fund.
When the new Prime Minister took office, the first thing she did was bring a motion before the House asking us to renew the Trident missile system, and effectively every single Conservative Member went through the Lobby and gave the Government a blank cheque. They can invest in weapons of mass destruction but they are not prepared to give women pensioners their just deserts.
Several hon. Members rose—
Ian Blackford
I will take some more interventions later, but I must make some progress.
As I have mentioned, this is not a comedy; it is the reality of a Government letting women down. The failure to write to those affected is a failure of responsibility. It is an abrogation of responsibility. To pass the buck and say that anyone can use the online calculator is, frankly, stunning. All prospective pensioners ought to be treated with respect. Some 2.6 million women were not effectively communicated with, and many are now struggling to cope financially with a later pensionable age than the one they had planned for.
Let us look at what is taking place currently. I have highlighted the current sharp increases in pensionable age, but they need to be gone over again for the simple reason that, so far, the Government have simply not got it and will certainly need to do so. A woman born on 6 March 1953 will have retired on 6 March 2016 at the age of 63. A woman born a month later, on 6 April 1953, will have retired on 6 July aged 63 and three months. A woman born on 6 May 1953 will have retired a few days ago, on 6 November, aged 63 and six months. A woman born on 6 June will have to wait until 6 March 2017, when she will be aged 63 and nine months. A woman born on 6 July 1953 will not get her pension until her 64th birthday in July 2017.
Ian Blackford
I hope that the Government are beginning to get the picture. For each month that passes, women’s pensionable age is increasing by as much as three months. We should just dwell on that—a three-month addition to pensionable age for each month that someone was born later than their neighbour, friend or colleague.
I spoke about a woman born in March 1953 who retired this year at age 63, but a woman born a year later, in March 1954, will not retire until September 2019, when she will be aged 65 and a half. [Interruption.] Conservative Members seem to think that this is funny, but we are talking about women who are being significantly disadvantaged over too sharp an increase in women’s pensionable age. Those Members might find that acceptable, but I am afraid that I, my colleagues and many millions of other people in the country certainly do not. A woman born six months later, in September 1954, will have to wait until she is 66 in September 2020. Over an 18-month period, a woman’s pensionable age will have increased by three years.
As we keep saying, we are not against equalisation of the state pension age—[Interruption.] My colleagues and I have said that in every speech we have given in this House. We have made it crystal clear, as have the WASPI women, that we agree with equalisation. It is the pace of change that is the problem, and Conservative Members are burying their heads in the sand over it and are refusing to face the reality.
Mhairi Black (Paisley and Renfrewshire South) (SNP)
I must echo the very clear position that my hon. Friend has outlined. Does he agree that anybody who believes that, purely because someone is a woman and happens to have been born at a certain time they should lose out, is advocating a very warped and strange definition of equality?
Ian Blackford
Absolutely. Of course we have to face the gender inequality that has been with us, with women paid less for such a long time and women gaining less access to occupational pension schemes, but Government Members just seem to want to make things worse. As we keep saying, we are not against equalisation of the state pension age; it is the pace of change and the lack of appropriate notice that are the real issues.
Graham Evans
I am most grateful. If Germany can introduce equalisation of the pension age in 2009, why cannot the United Kingdom do the same? We are behind the game.
Ian Blackford
I am absolutely dumbstruck! I do not know how many times we have to say it, but we are not against equalisation. We support it. It is the pace of change imposed by the Government that is the problem.
While we are on the subject, the Government might wish to consider the fact that the Polish Parliament met on the 16th of this month and agreed to reverse the increases in pensionable age because they recognised the unfairness. Perhaps we should take a leaf out of the Poles’ book, rather than this one.
Ian Blackford
I want to make some progress, because I know that many other Members want to speak.
We should remind ourselves what a pension is. It is deferred income. Women, and men, have paid national insurance in the expectation of receiving a state pension. That is the deal, plain and simple. You pay in, and you get your entitlement. You do not expect the Government, without effective notice, to change the rules. What has been done to the WASPI women has undermined fairness and equity. The 2.6 million women affected by the increase in pensionable age have an entitlement to a pension and a right to be treated fairly: no more, no less.
The Government often state that the increase in pensionable age under the 2011 Act means that no women will have to wait longer than 18 months for their pensions. That is disingenuous, as it comes in addition to the changes in the 1995 Act, which are still in the process of being implemented. It is a fact that women’s pensionable age is increasing by six years over a very short period. That is the issue. That is the reality. It is the impact of both Acts. The Government have a duty to be truthful about this matter.
Let me now turn to the Prime Minister’s amendment. So much for her comments about supporting those who were “just about managing”. Many of the WASPI women are not managing, and this ill-conceived, patronising amendment from the Government is frankly contemptible. Although the Chancellor confirmed in last week’s autumn statement that the triple lock would remain for the duration of the current Parliament, he has ordered a review of the cost of the guarantee and whether it is affordable. We in the SNP remain fully committed to the future of the triple lock to ensure dignity in retirement for all our pensioners. Any roll-back by the UK Government will leave pensioners vulnerable.
The Government’s commitment to pensioners needs to be questioned. We already know that, in reality, although the new headline flat-rate state pension will be £159.55 a week, many people will get less if they contracted out of second or additional state pension top-ups over the years. With the Chancellor and others wavering on the future of the triple lock, only the Scottish National party can be trusted to protect the rights of pensioners in Scotland. [Laughter.] Members may laugh, but I am glad to say that pensioners throughout the United Kingdom will be listening, and they will be watching the behaviour on the Government Benches.
The amendment is something that we might expect from a student debating society, but not from a Government who are taking the plight of the WASPI women seriously. What is it going to take for the Government to recognise that they must do something to deal with the unfairness of the sharp increase in pensionable age? Over the last few weeks, 240 petitions relating to the WASPI campaign have been presented to Parliament by Members on both sides of the House, which shows that this issue affects all parts of the UK. Parliament and the petitioners should be given more respect by the Government, and I hope that when the Minister responds to the debate he will withdraw their amendment. The issue is not going to go away: the WASPI woman are angry, and will be lobbying MPs in the weeks and months ahead. The Government must act.
This is not the first time that women have had to campaign to defend their rights. In the House, we frequently pay homage to those in the suffragette movement who campaigned for voting rights for women. There are similarities between the suffragettes and the WASPI women. The suffragettes were known by the acronym WSPU, which stood for the Women’s Social and Political Union, and they were well known for wearing purple, as do the WASPI women. The Government of the day, of course, stood steadfast against the demands of the suffragettes for many years before they were eventually forced into doing the right thing. My message to the present Government is not to be as pig-headed as previous Governments in opposing a campaign which, as I have said—and as was pointed out earlier by the hon. Member for Bolsover (Mr Skinner)—is not going to go away. I say to them. “Show compassion. Show that you can do the right thing.”
Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP)
Does my hon. Friend share my bafflement that in the face of evidence, in the face of campaigning and in the face of the many women who come through the doors of our surgeries to raise this issue, the Government have not yet changed their mind? This is not about equalisation; this is about a campaign against the WASPI women.
Ian Blackford
My hon. Friend is quite correct. The Government ought to reflect on all the petitions that have been launched in good faith, including by Conservative Members.
Lady Hermon (North Down) (Ind)
The hon. Gentleman will understand that in Northern Ireland this change is having a negative impact on thousands of women. I am one of them, but I will have a pension from this House; thousands of women will not enjoy that privileged status. On 13 July, a new Prime Minister walked into No. 10, giving an opportunity for this Government to set a different tone. The Prime Minister has a golden opportunity to deliver on the hopes and expectations that she revealed on the steps of No. 10.
Ian Blackford
The hon. Lady makes a strong point. I appeal to the Government to listen to what is said by Members in all parts of the House, including on the Government Benches. They can do the right thing today and deliver justice for the WASPI women. They have a chance to show that they really do care about the women who have been left behind.
Although it is simply shocking that we are still debating this issue without resolution, should we be surprised? Historically, women have suffered decades of gender inequality, and while the Tories tell us that the changes are about equalisation and fairness, they continue to push women further into hardship by delaying their pensions and ensuring that their austerity cuts continue to fall firmly on their shoulders.
Dr Alasdair McDonnell (Belfast South) (SDLP)
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the WASPI women should be commended for the civil, decent and reasonable way they have campaigned? We have met them all in our constituencies. He just made the point that women had a gender pay gap and a resulting pension gap even before the changes, so an already unfair situation is compounded. Does he agree that the failure to introduce better transitional arrangements exacerbates the existing inequality?
Ian Blackford
I fully agree. I commend the dignity shown by the WASPI women in their campaign. They have been an inspiration to us all.
Ian Blackford
No. I have to make progress, because many others want to speak. I have been generous in giving way.
We also need to remind the Government that the House has already backed a motion calling on them to take action. It was passed on 7 January this year, and it is worth reflecting on its contents. It called on the Government
“to immediately introduce transitional arrangements for those women negatively affected by that equalisation.”
Why have the Government ignored the will of this House? Does parliamentary democracy mean anything, or can it simply be ignored by a Government who choose to disrespect not only this House but the 2.6 million WASPI women? It is an affront to democracy that despite this House having voted for the Government to take
“action to alleviate the injustice facing women affected by the acceleration of the increase in the state pension age”,
the Tories are intent on resisting the will of the people. It is abundantly clear that we have won the argument. As well as winning the vote unanimously in Parliament for the UK Government to introduce transitional arrangements for the WASPI women, the Tories continue to shrug their shoulders at the will of the House. In various debates on this issue, we have won the argument. The UK Government must realise that, with the support of Members on both sides of the House, we will not be abandoning the WASPI women as they have done. We and the constituents we represent should be given more respect and consideration by the UK Government.
David Rutley (Macclesfield) (Con)
On the point of fairness, will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Ian Blackford
Fairness! [Laughter.] For the last time, and because of his sheer cheek, I give way to the hon. Gentleman.
David Rutley
Not once has the hon. Gentleman told the House that he will pay the £38 billion price tag. That will increase national debt, and future generations will have to pay for it by having a much higher pensionable age. How does he answer that question about fairness?
Ian Blackford
That was pathetic.
There will come a time when not only the SNP but the Government Back Benchers who have pledged to support the WASPI women and the general public will question the role of this place, if it is not to listen and respect the will of the people. With internal dissent growing in the Tory party over cuts to employment and support allowance and the reduction in the work allowance, the cracks are beginning to appear. Maybe now is the time for them to change tactics and start listening to the Conservatives they claim to represent. I understand the motivation of those Members who have put their names to amendments (a) and (b), but I ask them to support the SNP today.
The SNP commissioned research to challenge the UK Government’s figures. A number of options are available to the Government, but we believe option two can give immediate relief to those women who are next to face delay in this Parliament. The Government must act now.
Several hon. Members rose—
Ian Blackford
With your forbearance, Mr Speaker, I am aware that I have been on my feet for quite some time and I want to move on to my concluding remarks. I have been generous in allowing others to come in, but I will not be taking any further interventions so that I can finish and allow others to speak.
Our report is a stepping stone. It should be adopted to help to end this injustice. We hope the UK Government welcome the report and act now to end this inequality. The SNP Westminster parliamentary group’s report detailed modelling by Landman Economics of the impact of different options for compensating women affected by the 2011 Act. One option was a return to the timetable in the 1995 Act, whereby women’s state pension age would rise from 63 in March 2016, to 65 in April 2020. The report estimates that reverting back to the 1995 Act for women would cost £7.9 billion between 2016-17 and 2020-21.
The Government estimate that the accelerated state pension age in the Pensions Act 2011 saved about £30 billion from both women and men from 2016-17 to 2025-26. However, that is simply not the case. The £8 billion cost is affordable given the surplus in the national insurance fund, which rightly should be used to end this injustice. The fund is in surplus and, according to the Government’s own Actuary’s Dept, is projected to be at a £30 billion surplus at the end of 2017-18. It is time the Government paid out. After all, the WASPI women paid in and helped to create this surplus. They now need to be given their due.
The Minister said that it is simply too expensive and that public spending is complicated. We will not be fobbed off. The report was carried out by a credible and sound model that has been used previously by independent economists. Again, the matter returns to priorities—too expensive by comparison with what other expenses? The Tories have a choice here: this is not a necessity.
While we are trying to get the Government to act, others elsewhere are doing just that. Measures were brought forward by the Polish Government on 16 November to reverse the increase in pensionable age from the previous planned state pensionable age of 67 to 60 for women and 65 for men as of October 2017. The Polish Prime Minister claimed that there were enough state funds from more efficient tax collection for earlier pensions. Well, well! Of course, the parallel here is that we know the national insurance fund is in surplus. We can afford to put in place mitigation. If Poland can do it, what about a rich country like the UK? It is all about choices.
We published in our report the scale of increase in pensionable age in each European country. Only two countries are seeing a rapid acceleration of pensionable age for women in line with the UK: Italy and Greece. Is anyone on the Government Benches prepared to defend the increase in women’s pensionable age of three months per month? We have given the Government an option and, unlike their Trident nuclear weapons commitment, it is costed. I say to the Government that we are not going away. More importantly, the WASPI women are not going away.
In conclusion, today is Scotland’s national day. With deference to Rabbie Burns, if he will forgive me, I would like to adapt one of his better known pieces of work:
“Women, wha hae wi’ WASPI bled,
Women, wham WASPI has af times led;
Welcome to your gory bed,
Or to victory!
Now’s the day, and now’s the hour;
See the front o’ battle lour;
See approach proud Theresa’s power—
Chains and slavery!
Wha will be a traitor knave?
Wha can fill a coward’s grave!
Wha sae base as be a slave?
Let her turn and flee!
Wha for Pensions rightly earned
Freedom’s sword will strongly draw,
WASPIs stand, or WASPIs fa’,
Let them follow me!
By oppression’s woes and pains!
By your daughters in servile chains!
We will drain our dearest veins,
But they shall be free!
Lay the proud usurpers low!
Tyrants fall in every foe!
Liberty’s in every blow!—
Let us do or die!”
Justice for the WASPI women!
The Tory Government have ducked their responsibility for the WASPI women for too long. It is time to face up to the reality. Pensions are not a privilege; they are a contract and the UK Government have broken it.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Speaker
Order. In a moment I shall call the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions to move the amendment in the name of the Prime Minister, but first I must advise the House that no fewer than 13 Back Benchers wish to contribute to the debate, and they should be heard. The Secretary of State, equally, will want to respond, and probably comprehensively, to what he has heard, which is perfectly proper. I therefore ask Members to have some regard for the interests of each other.
The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Damian Green)
I beg to move an amendment, to leave out from “House” to the end of the Question and add:
“welcomes the planned average rise of £550 a year for 3 million women, including those born in the 1950s, who receive the new state pension; further welcomes the increase of over £1,100 per year of the basic state pension since 2010 as the result of the triple lock, which will also benefit such women; and recognises that the state pension must reflect the welcome rise in life expectancy in order to remain sustainable for generations to come.”
We have heard the case put fully by the hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford), and I want to start my response by putting this debate in full context. The pensions system, along with the whole welfare system, needs to change to reflect the reality of today. What has happened in recent decades is not only that we are all living longer, which is welcome, but that we are able to work for longer as we become healthier. Of course this does not apply to everyone, and I will come to those who need financial help. However, although this is often a divisive debate, I hope the whole House can accept these four principles: first, that men and women should receive their state pension at the same age, a principle first set out more than 20 years ago in the Pensions Act 1995; secondly, that the age at which all receive a state pension has to rise as life expectancy rises; thirdly, that all who need help because they cannot work should receive appropriate support; and fourthly, that for most people work is beneficial not only because it provides an income, but because it gives them greater control over their own lives.
State pension age increases cannot be looked at in isolation. They fit into a wider array of changes, including changes in life expectancy, the huge and very welcome progress made in opening up employment opportunities for women, and the wider package of reforms we have introduced to ensure a fairer deal for pensioners, particularly the new state pension.
The state pension system for people who reached their state pension age before 6 April this year was extremely complex. The new state pension brings greater clarity by helping people to understand their pension more easily, and it is much more generous for many women who have been historically worse off under the old system. On average, women reaching state pension age last year get a higher state pension over their lifetimes than women who reached state pension age at any point before them, even when the accelerated equalisation of state pension age is taken into account. By 2030, over 3 million women stand to gain an average of £550 extra per year as a result of these changes.
Fiona Mactaggart
I probably should declare an interest as a woman who was born on 12 September 1953. The Secretary of State’s remarks about women’s extra income throughout their lives does not pay the bills today for WASPI women, and that is their problem. They do not disagree with any of his four principles—they accepted the equal pension age—but they have planned their lives responsibly, and in return the Government have been irresponsible.
Damian Green
I will come to the specific point that the right hon. Lady raises later in my speech, as she would expect.
The new state pension works hand in hand with automatic enrolment, enabling many more people to save in a workplace pension. Together, the new state pension and automatic enrolment, along with reviews of the state pension age, are designed to form the main elements of a sustainable basis for retirement income in the decades to come. We want to ensure economic security for working people at every stage of their lives, including retirement, and that is why we are protecting the incomes of millions of pensioners through the triple lock. Living standards for pensioners have been rising steadily for many years. In 2014-15, the proportion of this group living in a low-income household was nearly the lowest on record, in terms of the proportion and of pensioner numbers. That is the general position, which it is important for the House to recognise.
Neil Gray (Airdrie and Shotts) (SNP)
How much notice would the Secretary of State expect his own private pension provider to give him of such significant changes? Would he be happy with as little as 15 months’ notice?
Damian Green
We are discussing the state pension, not private pensions—[Interruption.] My principal pension is that of a Member of this House, so all aspects of it are exactly the same as those of the hon. Gentleman’s pension.
Let me deal with the group that is principally affected by the changes. Of course I have met many of those women in my own constituency. There was clearly a problem, and that is why a substantial concession worth £1.1 billion was introduced in the Pensions Act 2011. As a result, no woman will experience an increase of more than 18 months, and for 81% of the women affected—more than four in five of them—the increase will not exceed 12 months compared with the previous timetable. This concession benefited almost 250,000 women who would otherwise have experienced delays of up to two years. The introduction of further concessions cannot be justified, given the imperative to focus public resources on helping those who are most in need.
Andy Burnham (Leigh) (Lab)
The Secretary of State talks about those in need as though the WASPI women are not in need, but of course many of them are. He has talked about resources, but what price justice? What price doing the right thing? These are the women who brought us up, who now care for older relatives and who are the mainstay of their communities. They are not some militant group. At a time when this House has a low standing, I believe that his dismissive attitude towards them will damage not only the Conservative party but politics as a whole in the eyes of the women who have made this country what it is today.
Damian Green
I am not being remotely dismissive, and if the right hon. Gentleman will be patient, I will come to the measures that the Government are taking to help women in that age bracket. I can absolutely assure him that I am not being dismissive.
Mr Vara
Does my right hon. Friend agree that one of the luxuries for the Opposition is proposing to spend money that they do not have? Does he also agree that the comments from the Opposition parties ring hollow, given that these matters were not mentioned in their manifestos? They were not mentioned in the Labour manifesto or the Scottish National party manifesto.
Damian Green
My hon. Friend makes a pertinent point.
I want to deal specifically with some of the issues raised by the hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber. He talked about communications. Since 2000—a long time before the 2011 Act—the Department for Work and Pensions has issued 14 million state pension estimates, which include mention of the state pension age. Between 2003 and 2006, the Department issued about 16 million automatic pension forecasts, which were accompanied by a leaflet about equalisation. There was also a media campaign in 2004. After the 2011 Act, as the hon. Gentleman admitted, the Department wrote to all those directly affected. There has been quite a significant communications campaign, going back more than 15 years.
Melanie Onn
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. He says that media and publications campaigns have been undertaken, but does he accept that some of the women did not receive any notification of the latest changes, which extended the period before which they would be entitled to access their state pension?
Damian Green
It is obviously impossible to talk about individual cases without talking to the individuals. All I can say is that the DWP tried hard after the 2011 Act and wrote more than 5 million letters to people’s most recent addresses.
Damian Green
I feel that the hon. Gentleman has had his fair share of the time, having used more than 35 minutes of a three-hour debate, and I want to turn to the specific option that he proposed. He mentioned the Landman Economics report that modelled the impact of several options. The SNP’s preferred option would roll back the 2011 Act entirely, returning to the timetable in the 1995 Act. He said that that option would cost £8 billion, but I disagree. Our analysis suggests that the cost has to go beyond 2020-21 and must include the effects on national insurance payments and tax collection, which his economic model entirely ignores, and that it would cost over £30 billion.
Even if we accept the hon. Gentleman’s figures, his other suggestion is that the costs could be met from the surplus in the national insurance fund that he conveniently discovered. In fact, there is no surplus in the fund because it is all used to pay contributory benefits. If we take from the national insurance fund £8 billion, £30 billion or whatever number one cares to mention, we take it from people who receive benefits. The surplus of £16 billion that he identified is two months’ expenditure—an advisory level recommended by the Government Actuary as a prudent working balance. The money has been put there by a Treasury grant to maintain the fund at the recommended long-term balance. The Government Actuary does not forecast a long-term surplus, so this convenient pot of money for the SNP does not actually exist.
James Cartlidge
May I add to that? Others have tried to alight on this fund as a source of expenditure, but the then Financial Secretary Ruth Kelly said in 2003:
“The national insurance fund provides security for those contributory benefits. It is ring-fenced and cannot be used for other Government expenditure.”—[Official Report, 21 October 2003; Vol. 411, c. 231WH.]
Damian Green
I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who is knowledgeable about such matters.
The hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber used to work in the financial services industry and has been a fund manager, so he knows what he is talking about. However, he must know that his characterisation of the national insurance fund as involving some kind of individual contract that relates what someone gets out of it to what they pay in is not true. The state pension is a social security benefit, funded through national insurance contributions.
Ian Blackford
I am grateful. I actually talked about a cost of £8 billion for this Parliament, which is affordable given the current surplus in the national insurance fund. Please do not twist what I said.
Damian Green
I did not twist what the hon. Gentleman said at all. Is he prepared to take £8 billion from people who receive contributory benefits? That is the only way that he could pay for it.
Returning to the hon. Gentleman’s characterisation of the national insurance fund, he gave the impression that it involved an individual contract. As he knows perfectly well, the national insurance scheme operates on a pay-as-you-go basis, meaning that today’s contributors are paying for today’s social security entitlements and pensions. Those who previously paid contributions were paying for the pensioners of that time. In other words, contributors do not accumulate an individual pension fund. It is not like any individual’s pension fund of moneys paid, which is personal to them. Instead, payment of contributions allows them, or their spouses, to access a range of social security entitlements. It is not an individual contract or fund. I gently suggest that the hon. Gentleman knows that perfectly well.
Moving on to the issues that affect the WASPI women, I absolutely accept that getting into work will be difficult for some older women, so I want to say what we are doing to help them and also what we are doing for those who simply cannot work.
Maggie Throup
Does my right hon. Friend agree that, however well intentioned, the message of the WASPI campaigners has been severely damaged by the hate campaign on social media and in constituency offices against MPs, such as me, whose viewpoint is different from the campaigners’? Will he condemn that and say that it must stop?
Damian Green
I deprecate any form of personal abuse. I think that one of the problems of modern politics is that everything becomes personalised. I have not been aware of such abuse, as every WASPI woman I have met has been entirely polite and entirely reasonable, and I would wish that to continue.
Steve Rotheram (Liverpool, Walton) (Lab)
Does the Minister accept that the fundamental issue here is not equalisation, because that has been agreed, but fairness? He can give comfort to the 63,000 WASPI women in Merseyside who, through a quirk of their birthdate, will be hit hard and penalised. He can announce transitional arrangements that would give them some comfort that that is not going to happen.
Damian Green
I was coming on to discuss what we are doing and what we will do for this group. Supporting older claimants to remain in the labour market, and tackling the barriers to their doing so, is a key priority for the Government. To support that aim, we have abolished the default retirement age, so most people can now retire when the time is right for them, and we have extended the right to request flexible working for all. Flexible working is particularly important for this group of people, who may well have caring responsibilities.
Fiona Mactaggart
The Secretary of State will be aware that many of these older women are putting together two or three jobs, all of which are paid at less than £108 a week, as a result of which they do not get any national insurance contributions and that will affect their future pension. What is he doing about that? They can have their tax claimed, but they cannot get credits for a future pension.
Damian Green
What we are trying to do is what I am talking about, which is remove barriers to work, so that it is easier for these people to work. The arrival of universal credit makes it easier for people to extend the hours they work, so that they do not hit the old cliff edges under the other benefits. Paid employment maximises people’s opportunities to build up savings—the point the right hon. Lady was just making—and helps to maintain social networks, and it is beneficial to health, provided the employment takes into account the person’s broader circumstances.
Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)
I appreciate that the SNP’s proposal is not economically viable, but does the Minister accept that some women, including in my constituency, had to give up work for health reasons and were therefore not able to pay in, and they are not able to return to the workplace either? It does not seem that we have yet put in place adequate measures to be fair to those people, who cannot change their situation.
Damian Green
Absolutely, I quite take the point that my hon. Friend makes. Clearly, specific issues need to be dealt with for this group, and I am going through several of them now. Some of these people will not be able to work, as I made clear at the start; this touches on one of the four principles I set out at the start of my speech. Working-age benefits are specifically designed to help such people, and I wish to make it clear that this group of women will be entitled to working-age benefits. If there are barriers to their claiming them, we need to remove those barriers.
Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)
I, too, accept that the SNP proposal is totally ludicrous because it is totally unaffordable, but can the Secretary of State give me assurances on what can be done for WASPI women who say that they are finding it difficult to get back into work, with the jobcentres not geared up to help them, and who may have been out of the workforce for considerable time and do not have the skillset needed to get a good job?
Damian Green
Absolutely, and if my hon. Friend will bear with me for 30 seconds while I make one further point, I will then deal with precisely the point she raises, as I absolutely recognise it as an issue for many of these women. I should point out that the current average age of exit from the labour market for women is 63.1, which is well above the state pension age of 60 that the SNP proposal would take us back to. The number of older women aged 50 to 64 in work in 2016 stands at more than 4 million, which is a record high. That is one reason why the Government have extended the right to request flexible working and why job search requirements for those who are not in employment are adjusted to take account of individual circumstances. One purpose of the Green Paper on work and health that we have just produced is precisely to look at much better ways to join up the health, welfare and employment systems, so that we can deal with health conditions or disabilities that may be particularly prevalent in older women who want to work. We need to make the system much better than it has been in the past at removing those barriers, so that people can work.
Victoria Borwick (Kensington) (Con)
Will the Secretary of State, or a member of his team, personally examine some of the individual cases so that the women affected can prove that they are suffering hardship?
Damian Green
Absolutely. We are always willing to look at individual cases. My hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Pensions has already done so. More widely, we introduced older claimant champions last year specifically to support older claimants. They work in jobcentres with work coaches and employers to raise the profile of this group and highlight the benefits of employing older jobseekers.
Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)
My right hon. Friend is being very generous, and I very much respect the interest that he has taken in this matter. On the older people’s champions and in answer to my parliamentary question, since April 2015 his Department has appointed seven such champions to cover every jobcentre in the country, which sounds good, but, in practice, it will really not make a lot of difference, will it?
Damian Green
So far, we have appointed older people’s champions at a regional level. This is the first step to a system that needs to improve. My hon. Friend and I will be at one on that, because this is an increasingly important part of what we need to do. One thing that I hope these older claimant champions will be able to achieve is to spread best practice. I am conscious that there will be different standards of practice in different jobcentres—I am talking about the capacity to deal sympathetically with older workers, particularly those who may not have been in a jobcentre before. We must get better at that.
Andy Burnham
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way again. I hear what he is saying about people working, but it is difficult for many older women in this position to run a car. It is something that they often cannot afford, yet free bus passes are not available in all parts of the country. They are available to women at 60 in London, Scotland and Merseyside. People’s ability to access work is different in different parts of the country. In Greater Manchester, they do not have that help. Will the Government do a very practical thing today and commit to helping all women into work by extending that free bus pass on the same basis all over the country?
Damian Green
The right hon. Gentleman, who has other fish to fry in the Manchester area, will know perfectly well that bus passes are the responsibility of the local authority, rather than national Government. I will of course urge everyone in the Manchester mayoral election to vote Conservative, but it may be that he has the chance to do something about that matter at some stage in the near future, as successive Mayors of London have done.
Apart from the older claimant champions, we have appointed Andy Briggs as business champion for older workers. He is the chief executive of Aviva, which is one of the most enlightened companies in dealing with older workers, and I am delighted that he has accepted this job, as he will work with employers not just to retain older workers, but to retrain and recruit them. If women in this age group are finding it difficult to find work, there will be more employers out there who are actively looking for them. We have also established carers in employment. We are carrying out pilots in nine local authorities at the moment. I recognise that people in this group are quite likely to have caring responsibilities, and combining those with work is inevitably complex. Ensuring that businesses are suitably sympathetic and flexible in dealing with that is one of the very important steps forward that we need to take as a society in the next few years.
David Rutley
My right hon. Friend is making some important points. In the way that he is providing support for people who are born in the 1950s and ’60s to stay in employment for longer, does he not agree that that will also help the cultural change, which will enable future generations to stay in work longer? Obviously, that will be a requirement given the demographic changes.
Damian Green
My hon. Friend hits the nail on the head. We are in the early stages of this change, and it will be increasingly important for future generations, assuming that we continue to live longer and be healthier for longer.
Peter Aldous (Waveney) (Con)
My right hon. Friend is making some very good points. He touched on the issue of carers. Is he aware that many of the WASPI women have dual caring arrangements, looking after not only husbands who might be ill but parents who might be very elderly?
Damian Green
Indeed. Like my hon. Friend, who has considerable expertise in this area, I have read the reports that suggest that the gap between childcare responsibilities and elderly care responsibilities for many families will get narrower and narrower. We are now piloting people who will teach employers how to deal with workers who are also carers. As with the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield (David Rutley), we are in the early stages of a journey that will become hugely important for society and the whole workforce in future decades.
Let me make some progress, as I am conscious of the time. I said I wanted to deal with women who find it impossible to work, and of course the system needs to be designed to deal with problems such as disability that prevent them from working and mean that they are most in need as they approach state pension age. We are committed to supporting these vulnerable groups, spending around £50 billion a year on disability benefits, which equates to more than 6% of all Government spending. Carer’s allowance and related benefits provide financial support and safeguards for carers and their families, including those who are disabled or who are ill, and this week I was pleased to announce that the earnings limit for carers will be uprated by £6, which will help those with caring responsibilities.
Early in the new year, we will propose a new strategy specifically for elderly workers—the fuller working lives strategy—and I would be very happy to deal with colleagues on both sides of the House who have suggestions about how we can specifically help older workers in general and, specifically, older women. I do not believe that a monopoly of wisdom in this area lies in Whitehall. We will propose a new strategy that will involve many Departments, but we will also need to include ideas from employers, charities and Members and their constituents.
Stephen Gethins (North East Fife) (SNP)
The Secretary of State talks about reaching out to other Departments. This point has been made by my SNP colleagues, but we are about to spend £167 billion on weapons of mass destruction—the figure has gone up because of the collapse of the pound. Will he charge his colleagues in the Ministry of Defence to see whether they can find the £8 billion we are proposing from there?
Damian Green
The defence of this country is hugely important, but not, I think, a direct issue for this debate.
I hope that the House will see that I am extremely open to ideas to help this group of women but in ways that reflect the modern world of work and do not blur the lines between working age benefits and pensions.
Several hon. Members rose—
Damian Green
I think I have been very generous in giving way.
It should go without saying that any idea needs to be not only practical but affordable. None of the ideas proposed that concentrate purely on the pensions issue achieve this. The acceleration of the pension age for both women and men was necessary to ensure the state pension’s sustainability in the light of increasing life expectancy and increasing pressure on public resources. For those who face hardship, we continue to provide a strong and well-functioning welfare safety net. I am always looking for ways to improve that. Of course there has been a considerable concession of £1.1 billion to lessen the impact on those most affected. As I have set out, we not only continue to increase the employment prospects for women above the age of 60, but provide the new state pension, which gives people greater security, choice and dignity in retirement. This is a balanced and affordable package for older women—and men—and I commend the amendment to the House.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Speaker
Order. On account of the number of would-be contributors to the debate, I am afraid that it is necessary to impose with immediate effect a five-minute limit on each Back-Bench speech.
Tracy Brabin (Batley and Spen) (Lab)
Thank you for calling me, Mr Speaker. It is a pleasure to speak in this important debate. I commend Scottish National party Members for tabling the motion, using their limited Opposition day time on the issue of accelerated state pension equalisation. I pay tribute to Members from my own party who have campaigned tirelessly and fiercely on the issue, alongside admirable WASPI campaigners. I support amendment (a).
The treatment of WASPI women seems like politics-by-Excel-spreadsheet in its crudest form. The decision to make the lives of working-class women even harder has thrown into turmoil the lives of up to 4,100 women in Batley and Spen, as well as many thousands across the country. It is a decision that moves the goalposts unfairly for women born in the 1950s. We have heard plenty of examples from Members’ constituencies today. I would like to share some from mine.
One woman works in a care home. She was approaching retirement age and, having had a long and fulfilling career, she was looking forward to an equally rewarding retirement looking after her daughter’s children. Her plans would have allowed her daughter to go back to work, get a career back on track and provide for her family. Although I support equalising the pension age, the clumsy way in which that has been introduced means that her daughter will not be able to seek the employment she wants, because of the cost of childcare, and it has caused great distress to my constituent, who is genuinely unsure whether she will be able to do such a physically demanding job for another five years.
Ministers may remember that during Question Time I asked about the assessment that they made of the knock-on effect on families. To be fair, I received an answer, but unfortunately not an answer to my question. I wrote to the Minister that day to ask for more information and I have yet to receive a reply. Perhaps when he sums up, the Minister will be good enough to shed some light on the issue.
The next example is from a letter I received just the other day. A woman born in 1954 was looking forward to retiring within three months of her husband and spending the precious years ahead together, living on money from savings and the state pension that they were promised. Now she will have to wait not months, but years.
Andy Burnham
Like my hon. Friend, I have a very vibrant WASPI group in Leigh. Does she know that today the Secretary of State described the Government’s treatment of WASPI women as fair? How does she think her constituents to whom she refers will react to that?
Tracy Brabin
This is indeed about fairness, compassion and humanity towards women who have contributed so much to our society and are now left with difficult choices. One such woman is my constituent whose dilemma is to continue working, even though she does not feel physically able, or to stop working and spend the money that she has saved for retirement on getting by. She sent me questions to ask the Government. What can they offer her to make her life easier? Why cannot the Government phase in the change, understanding that life choices at this stage in the women’s lives take proper planning? Why can my constituent not have what she is entitled to after 40 years of working and paying in? Those are good questions.
Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (SNP)
I welcome the hon. Lady to her place. My constituent Patricia has been severely affected by the changes. After spending years looking after her late husband Billy and then her mother, she now has to live off her hard-earned savings. Patricia feels under immense stress, knowing that the money will not last long, and she is anxious about finding work at this stage in her life. Does the hon. Lady agree that such instances are all too common, and that this demonstrates that those who are suffering are the ones who we should be helping the most?
Mr Speaker
Order. Members should not use the intervention opportunity as the chance of a compressed—but not very compressed—speech.
Tracy Brabin
I thank the hon. Lady and agree that there are many constituents out there who feel the same. We have felt the anger in the Chamber today and we are right to be angry. Our constituents’ lives have been thrown into turmoil. The former Prime Minister admitted that something had to be done, but we are still waiting. The Chancellor’s big finish to his autumn statement—to some laughter on the Government Benches—was to abolish the autumn statement. A far more elegant and just end to the statement would have been a commitment to justice on women’s state pensions.
Melanie Onn
The Government have previously accepted that the changes were an unintended consequence of their policy. Does my hon. Friend not think that now is the right time for them to accept that if this was an error on their part, they should make amends properly?
Tracy Brabin
I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend, because although the answers and solutions may not be forthcoming today, the questions and the calls will not stop. For as long as our constituents feel they have been mistreated, we—the party of justice, compassion and humanity—will keep up the fight.
Nadine Dorries (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)
There has been much agreement in the Chamber today about equalisation, but I am probably unusual in that I am not actually sure I agree. Maybe, when the majority of men become carers, and when all men have a menopause, I might, but I am not sure I do now.
I feel very sorry for my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, because he has come to the Dispatch Box to pick up a mess that has been created by others. We knew equalisation was taking place, but the former Chancellor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tatton (Mr Osborne), decided he would move things from 2026 to 2020.
I am terribly sorry to say this to the Secretary of State, but I am one of the WASPI women. I am also one of those who were not written to and informed about this, and I think the DWP knows where I live—I have made that point before. Many of these women were not informed and not able to plan, and that is because the former Chancellor wanted to save £30 billion.
I understand that the former Chancellor may have wanted to save that money. I also understand that the SNP is never going to be able to achieve anything in this debate. It is never going to be in power. When it makes financial claims, as it is trying to at the moment, that absolutely shows how unprepared it would ever be to be a party of government. The claim about the £30 billion is ridiculous, and the SNP is doing the WASPI women an injustice.
The crude way the former Chancellor tried to slip this £30 billion saving under the fence by moving from 2026 to 2020 without informing women was wrong, and many women are suffering as a result. I am not saying that, financially, we can achieve what most people are asking for. However, in the spirit of fairness, amelioration and pouring some oil on troubled waters, would the Secretary of State please go away and have a look at whether we can do something just around the edges, for some of the women, or perhaps the older women, in this group—I am 21 May 1957, by the way. I do not mean that we should deal with all of it or do something for everybody, but that in the spirit of fairness, there may be something we could do.
Obviously, I have constituents who are in this situation, and I have heard from lots of the WASPI women. I am actually appalled at some of the comments I have seen on social media, and I have stopped engaging with the WASPI women on social media—not the core campaigners, who are a very decent bunch of ladies—because some people have hijacked their cause for social media and unpleasant purposes. However, I have engaged with many of the WASPI women, and their stories are very difficult.
I do not know how many women in the Chamber or the House are of my age, but I would not like to be in the position where I thought I was going to get my pension but then had to get another job, because nobody would employ me. Who would employ a woman facing her 60th birthday? Despite the fact that we have a lot of skills and life experience, and that we are probably very good employees, it is difficult for women of a certain age to get employed. You become faceless when you reach a certain age.
Jo Churchill (Bury St Edmunds) (Con)
I thank my hon. Friend for giving such a powerful and impassioned speech, but could I correct her in saying, “Who would give me a job at my age?” I gave two ladies in my office who are in exactly that age group a job, because—I think this is what the Secretary of State was driving at—there is a change in culture.
Nadine Dorries
I thank my hon. Friend. I actually have a member of staff in my office who is older than I am, but I also know of many friends who are being made redundant and have lost their jobs. Recently, in fact, a whole group of people in a company—all women over a certain age—were made redundant, and they all know that it was because of their age. It is not the case that most employers want to take on women in their 50s and 60s—it just does not happen.
Nadine Dorries
No, because it takes up other people’s time. If the hon. Lady wants to speak, she should put in to speak. [Interruption.] I am sorry, but it is a fair point—a lot of people want to speak.
I ask the Secretary of State please to go away and have a look at this, because that would be a generous and healing statement on the part of the Government. We would be able to show that we are a kind, considerate and caring Government—because we are—in doing something for these women and making things a bit better for some of them, going forward.
Patricia Gibson (North Ayrshire and Arran) (SNP)
I confess that today I am in deep and utter despair because once again I find myself, for the fifth time, in a similar debate about the WASPI women. Each time, the junior Ministers who were rolled out for the occasion had what I can only call the brass neck to listen to plea after plea that the Government should and must act on this issue, and then respond by saying almost nothing at all, but characteristically taking a very long time to say it in vague and woolly terms. Today, however, we have the big cheese—we have the big gun rolled out—but his bullish and dismissive response was, quite frankly, astonishing.
I would say to all Members of this House—I am not referring to the hon. Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Nadine Dorries) but talking about something that was said much earlier in the debate—that they should be very careful about trying to portray the WASPI women as a band of mad militants who go around threatening MPs, because that could not be further from the truth. We are talking about women who have acted with dignity throughout this campaign and organised themselves simply to access that which is already theirs by rights. Some Members have disingenuously suggested that we in the SNP are arguing against equalisation. It is the old trick of people trying to misrepresent their opponents when they fear they are losing the argument—in this case, losing it on rational grounds, on ethical grounds and on financial grounds.
Patricia Gibson
I will make some progress.
Despite four previous debates, a UK-wide petition that in my own constituency attracted 2,534 signatures, potential legal action against the Government in which they must surely fear a humiliating defeat—it is possible that the WASPI women will win a case against the Government on mis-selling of their pensions—and a report from the Work and Pensions Committee concluding that
“more could and should have been done”
to communicate these changes, we still appear to be no further forward. How utterly frustrating! It is frustrating for us in this place, so can the Secretary of State begin to imagine how frustrating it must be for the women caught up in this nightmare? Well, 4,800 women in my constituency are caught up in this nightmare, as are many more across the United Kingdom.
When will this Government wake up to the fact that pensions are not a benefit, despite the chuntering earlier that suggested otherwise? They are a social contract, which has been cruelly broken. It is time for the Government to step up and take responsibility for the way in which this entire matter has been mishandled.
Patricia Gibson
I really am conscious of the time. Under the solution offered by the SNP, which was outlined by my hon. Friend the Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford), it would be possible to increase women’s pension age to 66 in the 2020s. The UK Government’s view on this, even after mistakes in the process have been laid bare for all to see, has been characterised by intransigence and wilful stubbornness. The Government have ducked their responsibilities in this matter for far too long. It is time to do what is right, fair and just. It is time for the Government to waken up and realise that pensions are not a privilege and they are not, as I have heard them referred to in another debate, a promise or a benefit.
A contract has been broken, and the breaking of that contract marks a fundamental shift between the Government and those they purport to represent. When contracts can be torn up and ignored, what does that say about a representative democracy? It is time for the Government to stop telling us that they have no choice. When it comes to writing blank cheques for Trident, there is a choice, so they have a choice here. It is time to make the right choice for WASPI women.
Mr Shailesh Vara (North West Cambridgeshire) (Con)
I think we all recognise that in the world of politics, there are very few easy solutions, and solutions are certainly never cheap. As far as the matter that we are debating is concerned, the cheap version—to undo the Pensions Act 2011—would cost some £30 billion, and to undo the Pensions Act 1995 would cost many billions more. We must recognise that any pension scheme that we have must be sustainable, and the Government have a duty to keep it so. It would be irresponsible for the Government not to act with a view to keeping the pension scheme sustainable.
Much has been said about transitional arrangements. It is important that colleagues realise that there have already been transitional arrangements. Those who take the trouble to read Hansard will find that on Second Reading of the Pensions Bill of 2011, the Minister speaking for the Government said,
“we will consider transitional arrangements”.—[Official Report, 20 June 2011; Vol. 530, c. 52.]
On Report, the Government delivered on their promise, because they made a concession worth £1.1 billion and reduced the time period from two years to 18 months. For 81% of the women affected, the increase in the time period will be no more than 12 months. It is fundamentally wrong to say, as the last line of the SNP motion does, that there should be transitional arrangements.
Mr Vara
Forgive me; I am mindful of the time limit.
If people want to seek a change to what has already been done, they should have the courage to say so. They should say that they do not accept the transitional arrangements that have been made, and that they want further changes. To say that no changes were made is, frankly, disingenuous. As far as notification and the 1995 Act are concerned, let us not forget that the Labour party was in government for 13 years and it did very little—in fact, it did nothing—in the way of notification, even though some 10 Pensions Ministers could have done so. In 2012, research by the DWP found that only 6% of women who were within 10 years of reaching their pension age thought that their state pension age was still 60.
There are, of course, a number of other factors that need to be taken into account. It is wrong that debates such as this focus solely on state pension age equalisation and its impact on the women concerned. We have to take account of life expectancy, which is increasing. [Interruption.] It is good news, but nevertheless we have to take it into account. Employment prospects for women are far better than they have been at any time since the state pension was introduced in 1940. There is record female employment and record employment for older women. The Government have worked hard to engage with stakeholders and employers to make sure that they recognise and value all the contributions that older workers can make. There are also our broader reforms. We have protected the winter fuel payment, permanently increased cold weather payments, created a new and simpler state pension system, abolished the default retirement age and extended the right to request flexible working.
Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr Vara
I will not give way, because I want to leave other hon. Members as much time as possible in which to speak.
We must also mention other countries. Nine EU countries, including Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands, introduced equalisation as far back as 2009. I conclude by simply saying one thing: we have had many debates on this issue and the Government have repeatedly made their position clear, which is that they do not intend to revisit this issue. The issue was not in the Labour or the SNP manifesto, and by continuing to debate it, Labour and SNP Members are doing a disservice to the good women affected by giving them false hope. They should understand that doing so is opportunism pure and simple and political irresponsibility of the highest order. They should not give these good women false hope, and they should recognise that the Government will not give way.
Ian Blackford
On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. We are being traduced by the hon. Gentleman. For clarification, this matter was in our manifesto, and perhaps the hon. Gentleman will correct what he has said.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
I think we all know that that is not a point of order, but, not to worry, it has been put on the record.
Carolyn Harris (Swansea East) (Lab)
If I may say so, this is starting to feel like déjà vu. The story is now one that we are all familiar with, and the injustices are being experienced right across the country. However, at the risk of repeating the same old argument, I am going to continue just in case anyone is in any doubt about where I stand on this matter.
Because of the 2011 pension changes, over 500,000 women born in the 1950s are now unable to collect their pensions until much later than they thought. Most Members will have substantial numbers of women in their constituencies who are affected by the changes. These women have worked hard all their lives, holding families together and, in many cases, holding down jobs. These women have been the carers of their children and grandchildren and, in many cases, of elderly parents. These women are the backbone of this country.
Chris Elmore (Ogmore) (Lab/Co-op)
As always, my hon. Friend speaks with great passion on a subject that she cares about. One of the things about the women born in the 1950s is that they were actively encouraged to give up work when they had children, so their pensions are actually smaller now than they would be had they taken maternity leave, and they are therefore at more of a disadvantage. Does she agree that we owe these women justice because they have been the backbone of this country for decades?
Carolyn Harris
I think my hon. Friend already knows my answer, but I would most certainly never disagree with him.
The Government’s refusal to engage constructively on this issue has left many of these women very angry, and it has left many Members on both sides of the House frustrated at the Government’s bloody-mindedness. I will not cite facts and figures or offer Ministers examples, because they have heard them all before, but I will just give them a warning. The women affected by the pension changes—the WASPI women—as well as their families and, increasingly, the general public are getting more angry and they are getting better organised. They are not going away, and we are not going to stop talking about the issue. Those of us who object to this situation, who I would even go so far as to say are offended by this Government’s inaction, will stand up week on week in debate after debate to put forward the argument for the WASPI women until they get the justice they deserve.
Craig Mackinlay (South Thanet) (Con)
The Work and Pensions Committee, of which I am a member, worked on this issue at length earlier this year, and the SNP-commissioned report by Landman Economics draws upon much of our work—indeed, copies much of it. I certainly hope that the SNP did not pay too much for its report.
It is clear that there was a gross inequality in the old system, which had been untouched for some 70 years. It was very much a “kick it down the road” subject that few wished to touch, but we as Conservatives did touch it, because it needed touching. That said, I have not only taken the WASPI women’s concerns on board, but actually done something about it. I wanted to hear directly from local constituents about their own experiences, and to that end I held a Thanet WASPI forum on Saturday 21 May. It attracted not only local constituents but others who had heard about it from across Kent. In all, 100 women came.
I have also encouraged WASPI women to come to my surgeries and met campaigners, as have many right hon. and hon. Members from the across the House, outside Parliament. I have written to, and discussed the issue with, current and former Pensions Ministers and Secretaries of State, and I have presented a WASPI petition to the House. Few could have done more to understand the issue, to listen to the problem and to try and get a solution. I have tried to come up with a single solution, but therein is the problem: WASPI does not speak with one voice. The reason is that no one solution fits all the problems.
David Rutley
I commend my hon. Friend for his efforts in trying to better understand this challenge—no doubt it is a challenge and there are people having to cope with this—but does he agree that the question ultimately comes down not just to the complexity of the solution but to affordability?
Craig Mackinlay
My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. Given the state of the nation’s finances in 2010 and that 70-year-old inequality, something had to be done.
WASPI women find themselves in a difficult situation, having started out in a more traditional era of British life. Back then, women were more likely to be at home. If in work, they were unlikely to have been on a well-paid career path. Often part-time work would feature and low-paid work was the norm. The problems do not end there, though; this generation has parents themselves benefiting from increases in longevity, hence an extended caring function often falls upon them, while many WASPI women often support grandchildren as well.
The majority view among women at my forum was that there should have been no change at all to the 1995 Act and that the retirement age of 60 should have prevailed. Now, that clearly is not sustainable. None of the Opposition parties proposed it in their manifestos last year, and indeed this option—option 1 in the Landman Economics report—has been discounted even by the SNP. At £30 billion, it is simply too expensive and unfair. The SNP report advanced other options: option 2 was to wind back the 2011 pension change, which accelerated the age increase; and option 3 was a slowing down of the 2011 Act—a sort of Pension Act 2011-minus.
An option 4, suggested by Labour Members, is that pension credit be used to bridge the gap, but the great problem with that is that it might actually discourage work, or even encourage people to stop work altogether. Option 5 is for an actuarially reduced pension at an earlier age. I floated that with many WASPI women, and some supported it, given an appropriate discount rate. It could work—it works in the USA and Canada—but then another group of WASPI campaigners do not want to hear of it, and my worry is that, in 10 years, we might have a group of WASPI women who, having accepted less for longer, are now in poverty. I have discussed all these issues with my WASPI women, and there is very little agreement.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
On the question of what is acceptable, does the hon. Gentleman understand that many WASPI women, having been born in the ’50s and done physical work, are physically unable to continue working and cannot be expected to do so? Moreover, those born in the ’60’s and ’70’s have a chance to retrain, whereas the WASPI women do not and are physically unable to work on their knees for physically demanding jobs. Surely that has to be a consideration.
Craig Mackinlay
I fully understand the hon. Gentleman’s point, and I will cover some of those issues as I progress.
On the contract that many Members say was there, there was no contract for the Government to implement the triple lock, which has done more to alleviate poverty in older age than any other measure before it. There was no contract about the implementation of the new state pension, which will provide £155.65 per week on 35 qualifying years of national insurance. These were choices made by Conservative Governments and were done for the right reasons. We will have increased the take-home pension by £1,100 a year since 2010. Many people welcome these things, which were done for the right reasons, as I said. WASPI women have the right to work for longer because they are not forced into retirement any more. If they are unable to work, there is a benefit system, which I support and hope would carry them through.
Craig Mackinlay
I already have given way twice, and I do not have much time.
I have an option 6 to offer to Members today, which I even offer to Landman Economics for free. It has to be understood that later-age employment is difficult. Employers are not always as enlightened as they could be in recognising the value of older employees. I am grateful to colleagues here who have taken on older employees. I would offer a lighter-touch approach by the Department for Work and Pensions in jobseeker’s allowance and employment and support allowance claims with no need to prove endless CV writing and job clubs and less formal job coaching, and advice on a simpler footing.
Finally, one of the most active South Thanet WASPI campaigners, still very much annoyed with me and the Government, recently came to see me. As a result of the changes, she had taken up an offer by Jobcentre Plus and she wrote to me to pass on to it how good it had been. We do not see much of that in our surgeries. Because of the great service she had received—she also attended a jobs fair that I had put on—she had found a job. I have never seen her so happy, but that would not have happened unless the changes had moved her in that direction.
It is very clear that one solution does not fit all. I would have supported the amendment proposed by my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), if it had been available to vote for this afternoon. I have to say to SNP Members, however, that I am sorry, but I am unable to support their rather blunt motion. As ever, I am afraid, it is pure political grandstanding, offering very few answers. There is an answer out there, and it will be found, I am sure, by the excellent work of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State. I encourage WASPI to speak to us with one voice, so that we can reach a solution that is right for the majority.
Dr Roberta Blackman-Woods (City of Durham) (Lab)
I thank SNP Members for bringing forward this debate, and I pay tribute to the WASPI women and their supporters up and down the country for their tireless campaigning on this important issue in the face of an obstinate Government who refuse to listen to their very rational arguments about the need for better transitional protection and arrangements for this group of women.
Most of all, I want to pay tribute to the WASPI group in Durham, which was formed after a visit to Parliament in June. I attended a meeting it held in my constituency on 10 November. I wish that the Secretary of State, who is no longer in his place, the Under-Secretary of State for Pensions, the hon. Member for Watford (Richard Harrington) and indeed the hon. Member for North West Cambridgeshire (Mr Vara) had been there to listen to what the women had to say. Most of them had until recently been simply unaware of the changes to their retirement ages, and most of them will now have to wait years to receive their pension. Most of them had already had two significant changes made to their pension age. These women described in great detail the strain that their current situation was putting on them and their families. Many of them had planned to retire in order to care for family members, and were now having to balance social care needs with full-time work often across a range of different jobs. All were job-seeking.
One point that the Secretary of State did not acknowledge earlier was that for an older woman, trying to get a job in a depressed labour market is extremely difficult. Nor did he recognise that it does not matter how many older champions women have. If no jobs are available in their local labour market, women of any age will be unable to find employment, but it will have a negative impact on older women in particular.
Furthermore, the Secretary of State did not acknowledge two important factors: the regional disparities in the ages at which women will remain fit and active enough for work—especially if they have been involved in more strenuous occupations—and the differing ages of mortality across regions and, indeed, within specific areas. None of that has been factored into the Government’s thinking, and that, in my view, is also pretty atrocious.
One of the things that I was asked to do by the women whom I met on 10 November was to write to the Secretary of State, and I did so on their behalf. I must say that I was pretty appalled by the response that I received. It answered the case relating to the equalisation of the pension age, which was not the issue that had been raised.
Tom Elliott (Fermanagh and South Tyrone) (UUP)
The hon. Lady was right to say that equalisation was not the issue. The issue is the fairness, or rather the unfairness, of the transitional arrangements. We have heard that there are transitional arrangements, but they are unfair.
Dr Blackman-Woods
Absolutely, and that was the point that was being raised. It concerned the way in which the changes were being implemented and the lack of proper transitional arrangements, rather than the equalisation issue itself.
I am pleased that Labour Front Benchers have come forward with an answer, or a partial answer, to the problems highlighted by the WASPI campaign. I am pleased that they have announced that we will not abandon those women to live in poverty, and that under the Labour plan, pension credit will be extended to those who were due to retire before the chaotic pension age increase introduced by the Conservative-led coalition Government and supported by the previous Conservative Government. Labour’s proposal is to return eligibility for pension credit to the state pension age timetable of the 1995 Act. With the qualifying age continuing to increase to 66 by 2022, that policy would cost the Government only £860 million rather than the ridiculous £30 billion figure to which they have referred; they say that they cannot do anything because of that huge figure. The Landman Economics report, which has already been mentioned today, outlines some other policies that they could adopt.
It is simply not acceptable for the Government to say that they are not going to do anything. The message that they need to hear from us this afternoon is that we will continue to support the WASPI women and their campaign—we will continue to raise questions and initiate debates in the House to support them throughout the country—until they do the right thing by those women, and introduce proper transitional arrangements that will protect them from the hardship that they are currently experiencing.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. The good news is that I must reduce the speaking time to four minutes so that everyone can speak for the same amount of time.
Graham Evans (Weaver Vale) (Con)
I am grateful to you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for giving me the opportunity to speak in this important debate. I am a little surprised that there are so few Members on the SNP Benches.
There is a clear need for equalisation of the state pension age. We are all agreed on that. We have an ageing population. People are leading healthier, longer lives. Given that an ever greater proportion of the population are drawing pensions, while an ever smaller proportion are contributing through national insurance, the pension system risks becoming unsustainable without the important measure that we debated and voted on in 2011.
On the most fundamental level, however, we as a House should champion equality. The new single-tier pension is much fairer and simpler. People who have worked for 35 years will receive £8,000 a year. It is a very simple process: 35 years of work will give us £8,000. I have already worked for 35 years, but I will not qualify for my pension until I am 67; the same applies to Mrs Evans. As we all live longer and healthier lives, that will increase, I am sure. Let us make that clear, here and now. The single-tier pension also takes into consideration for the first time the time off that people take to have children—maternity and paternity leave.
I supported the measure. When I was a member of the Work and Pensions Committee we investigated the matter. I contacted the DWP to find out my retirement date, and I have to say to the Minister that the document I received was rather drab—not the most exciting document to read. The first time I went through that process, in 2013, I was told I was going to retire at 65; when I did it in 2014, the answer was 66; and the following year it went up to 67. I had to read the documents very carefully indeed, so I think people can be forgiven for not realising that their retirement date had changed. I encourage the Government to take a look at the personalised documents that are regularly produced, with a view to perhaps introducing a little colour—for example, making the retirement date red and easier to see.
Mr Pat McFadden (Wolverhampton South East) (Lab)
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his comments about information, but this is not a small mistake. I have constituents who will lose £30,000 or more by the shifting of the goalposts. Does he not think that because of the failure to communicate the changes, the Government have a duty to look again at transitional arrangements for the women affected?
Graham Evans
I do not agree, because, to be fair to the DWP, it has communicated with people. I think it could communicate better, as I have just described, but following the 1995 Act the Department issued a leaflet, among other press and publicity measures including direct mailings, to advise the public of the changes. In 2004, during the 13 years of Labour Governments, the DWP ran an information campaign distributing more than 2 million pension guides alongside adverts in the press and women’s magazines to complement an interactive online state pension calculator. In addition, all state pension statements issued from 2001 would have included as standard the new state pension age as determined by the 1995 changes. Since then, more than 11 million statements have been issued.
The Government have been notifying women of the changes. Those most affected by the 2011 changes were written to directly. That involved sending out more than 5 million letters between January 2012 and November 2013. Research carried out by the DWP found that 6% of women who were within 10 years of pension age thought that their state pension age was still 60. However, those efforts were not wholly successful. Had they been, we would not be here now debating this subject. There are lessons to be learned by Governments of all colours, present and future, on effective communication of such important matters. Those who planned for their retirement want to live the retirement they planned for.
After the 2011 changes, the Government passed an amendment to the Bill that provided £1.1 billion-worth of transitional funding, delaying the equalisation of the state pension age. We have already considered this matter and taken mitigating action. The new state pension has been brought forward a year and many women will be significantly better off than they would have been. By 2030, more than 3 million stand to get an extra £550 a year. Likewise, the introduction of the triple lock, which ensures that the state pension rises by inflation, wages or 2.5%, whichever is greater, ensures that the basic state pension will be over £1,100 a year higher than it was at the start of the last Parliament.
To undo the 2011 changes would cost £30 billion in addition to the loss of £8 billion in tax revenue. To undo the 1995 changes—
Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)
Here we are again. By my calculation, we have had no fewer than 10 debates in Westminster Hall and the Chamber since 2 December last year. In 20 years, I have never known such parliamentary attention on a single subject that was either not instigated by the Government or subject to proposed legislation. We have had over 240 petitions, mass demonstrations by WASPI women all over the country, the best attended all-party group meeting—I am proud to be a co-chair of the group—and unparalleled activity in this Chamber.
As hon. Members have said, this problem is not going to go away: WASPI women are not going to go away and we are not going to go away, yet throughout the entire past 12 months there has been no movement whatever from the Government. There has been no recognition of the very real hardship now being suffered by some of the WASPI women, and no recognition of the disproportionate impact of pension equalisation falling on a minority—albeit a significant minority—of women. We have had three Secretaries of State for Work and Pensions who, notwithstanding my respect for the current incumbent, have refused to engage with WASPI women and sit around a table to hear what hardship is like in real life.
Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)
The WASPI women in Cheltenham I have spoken to broadly recognise that the SNP’s plan to reverse the entire equalisation process, at a cost of billions of pounds we do not have, is unrealistic and inappropriate. Where individuals can establish exceptional hardship due to circumstances beyond their control, however, is it not right to examine cost-neutral transitional measures?
Tim Loughton
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I will come on to that in the very limited time available.
I am concerned that the Government’s amendment to the motion is just another example of them sticking their head in the sand and hoping the problem will go away. I acknowledge the wisdom of Mr Speaker in selecting the Government amendment, rather than those in my name and other hon. Members, but it appears to have little to do with the subject of the debate—the effect of pension age equalisation on WASPI women. I welcome the average rise of £550 a year for 3 million women. I welcome the increases in the basic pension, which the Secretary of State talked about. I welcome the introduction of the triple lock. Frankly, however, to produce such an amendment adds insult to injury. WASPI women will not be able to enjoy those benefits for up to six further years. That is the whole point. These women will not qualify for the benefits for a much longer time and they need help now. In addition, and despite what we have heard, women’s life expectancy actually fell last year for the first time in many years. The Chancellor, understandably, recently declined to guarantee the triple lock for years to come. By the time many of the WASPI women qualify, they will not be able to enjoy the security of the triple lock. That is why I cannot support the Government amendment. I urge hon. Members to refrain from supporting it, too. Frankly, to vote for such a disappointing and inappropriate amendment would be an insult to the many WASPI women who have campaigned so hard.
I also have a problem with the SNP motion. Mr Speaker, you were lucky enough not to be here when the hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford) spent 36 minutes losing my vote. SNP Members have been unilaterally pushing this cause. I am grateful that they do so, but in Scotland they do not have to pay for it. That is why we never hear solutions from the SNP. The motion references the Landman report, which relies heavily on the magic money tree known as the national insurance fund. We know the fund has been in deficit and that the Government, who have a responsibility for pensions up and down the country, had to top it up. The SNP suggestion is, in reality, a pension fund-raiding exercise.
I am disappointed that Mr Speaker did not choose my amendment, simply because it asked for a dialogue to be opened up—that we prioritise looking at the most extreme cases of hardship, which we all now see in our surgeries. The amendment does not commit to specific substantial spending and it certainly does not call for a reversion to the pre-1995 status quo. We support pension age equalisation. It is just that the speed of the transition process has led to unintended consequences for a large number of women. Many hon. Members have seen cases at first hand in their surgeries. We just want to talk.
Robert Neill
I agree that it is regrettable that we were not able to debate my hon. Friend’s amendment. I would have supported it. Does he agree that we are where we are, and that we should not go down the extravagant SNP route? We should take the Secretary of State up on his offer of dialogue to find something constructive for those most in need.
Tim Loughton
I agree. I am grateful to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for seeing a delegation from the all-party group just a few days ago, even though there is no preparedness to discuss specific options. He has, however, offered to look at examples of hardship, particularly where women are being offered very inappropriate and impractical jobs by jobcentres up and down the country. We have examples from all over the place of women aged 65 being offered bar jobs in a nightclub or a job stacking shelves at 4 o’clock in the morning. It is just not working in practice. We need to be much more sensitive and sensible to the particular work needs of these women if they do indeed have to go back to work, and transitional arrangements cannot hold them back from doing that.
I also made the point earlier about there being just seven of these older people champions at jobcentres up and down the country. We do not need to go over the issues again. We heard them today, and we have heard them nine times before: the poor communication; the little notice or no notice of the change; the fact that women from the 1950s worked in very different environments, where they did not get equal pay or childcare benefits, or have access to occupational pension schemes, and typically worked part time. I believe if we proceed on these lines it will be a breach of trust between hundreds of thousands of women who have worked hard, brought up families and done the right thing—and some of them also have caring responsibilities—and the Government.
The state pension system is founded on the contributory principle. This is not a state benefit for which no prior commitment is involved, yet this group of women, who have been paying national insurance contributions over many years in good faith, now stand to have their reasonable expectations dashed.
I urge the Government to think again and to talk, and let us come up with a sensible proposal.
David T. C. Davies (Monmouth) (Con)
There are times when Conservative Members support our Ministers and their policies because we know that they are doing something great to reform the country, whether it is giving more choice in the national health service, freeing up schools from local authority control or even delivering on Brexit. There are other times when we support our Ministers because we know they are taking difficult decisions for all the right reasons, because one of the centrepieces of this Government’s policy is to bring Britain’s books back into the black, to pay off the deficit and to solve the financial problems created by Labour Members, and that is what this is all about today.
We all have accepted, I think—perhaps bar one—the principle of the equalisation of the pension age, and we all accept that people are living longer, which is a wonderful thing, under our national health service. As a result, it is going to take us longer to get our pensions. However, there has been an issue with the transition. I meet women affected in my constituency, and they are honourable, decent women. They say to me that they were not informed. I am told that back in the 1990s and early 2000s, when different people were in office, they were in fact informed, but I believe these women; they clearly did not know what was going to happen.
I appreciate the help the Government have already given, but I ask them to continue to look at what is going on in jobcentres—what officials there are to help with special cases—to draw more attention to that, and, if the finances improve, to make further help available if at all possible. But I absolutely reject the ludicrous proposals put forward by SNP Members today. They have come up with an uncosted proposal that even they say will cost at least £8 billion, but which the DWP has said would cost about £14 billion. They do this knowing perfectly well that, if they chose to, they could find all the women affected in Scotland and use the powers they already have to raise taxes, cut costs elsewhere or indeed borrow money—although that might be rather harder to do because even The Guardian has reported that they borrowed £50 billion up until 2020, and they may well find there are very few people left who would lend them the money.
The reality is that SNP Members jump up and say, “This is nothing to do with us,” but, frankly, foreign affairs have got nothing to do with them either, yet that has not stopped them talking about Brexit. If they wanted to do something about this issue, they could, but they are not going to do anything because what they are really doing is playing political games—building up people’s hopes, knowing full well that they are not prepared to take the decisions that they ask my hon. Friends on the Front-Bench to take.
SNP Members wrap themselves in the flag of the suffragettes. The Conservative party needs no lessons from them in its support of women’s rights.
David T. C. Davies
I am not giving way.
I remind Opposition Members that it was a Conservative Government who equalised the voting age between men and women; that the first female MP to take her seat was a Conservative; that the Conservative party—
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. Stopped in your prime, Mr Davies.
Jo Churchill (Bury St Edmunds) (Con)
I will try to keep this swift in order to give other colleagues a chance. I agree with just about everything that my hon. Friend the Member for Monmouth (David T. C. Davies) said, although there is one point: the Work and Pensions Committee has stated that with hindsight previous Governments could have done a lot better in communicating. I would throw a slight challenge to Labour Members: they had 13 years—[Interruption.] The changes had been announced, and women like myself did not receive any communication about them. I too have met my WASPI women, and I sympathise with the principles of their campaign. However, I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for South Thanet (Craig Mackinlay) that this is a complex issue.
My first point is about affordability. This is not a movable feast, as my hon. Friend the Member for North West Cambridgeshire (Mr Vara) pointed out. If the proposal is indeed affordable, I would urge SNP Members to put their money where their mouth is—as my hon. Friend the Member for Monmouth suggested—and to pay those 100,000 women.
Jo Churchill
I am sorry; I am not taking interventions.
I draw hon. Members’ attention to the fact that the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland has called into question the reliability of the figures that the SNP has been trying to sell to us. So let us look at this problem. We are living longer. If I start work at 16 and get a pension at 66, I will be receiving that pension for a third of my life. A third of babies born this year will live to 100. We are not a party that kicks the can of difficult decisions down the road. Can we create a policy without a cliff edge? No. My sister and I will go through a difficult period between 2026 and 2028, because she is 18 months older than me and will retire a full year earlier. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale (Graham Evans), I have seen the pension age go up. We have had to make adaptations and it is tough.
Should we not be looking at this differently? The motion tells us that all women want this solution. That is not the case. I have had women write to me to say that they felt they had been informed. I would not want us to go backwards in this regard. I believe, as many hon. Members do, in the equalisation of the pension age. That is right and proper. Moreover, we should be fighting to remove the gender pay gap, which is not due to be equalised for 43 years. That is a much bigger problem. There are some exceptions, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) said. A constituent of mine volunteered overseas and lost her professional registration. She now has a low-paid job, but she plans and she saves. I am grateful that the Minister is looking into these cases.
I will not support the motion. It ignores our children. Our generation has done better than they have done. They have tuition fees, soaring rents and difficulties with housing. I oppose the motion because it is financially unsustainable.
Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)
As other hon. Members have commented, this is our umpteenth debate on the WASPI campaign. We have already covered this ground in huge detail. Indeed, the Work and Pensions Committee produced an extensive report on this subject, entitled “Communication of state pension age changes”, in March this year. So what is new today? What has changed? In my view, there are three things.
First, the WASPI campaign has split into two. The original campaign required a reversal of the Pensions Act 1995, which was all about equalising women’s pensions with men’s, but three of the five original founders have resigned over disagreements over what constitute fair transitional arrangements.
Secondly, the WASPI campaigners born between 1953 and 1955 are now close to receiving their state pension. Many of them will start receiving it in 2018, and all of them will receive it before the 2020 election. That fact is convenient because it means that Labour Members, who did not put this issue in their 2015 manifesto, will not be able to put it into their 2020 manifesto either, because it will no longer be relevant.
Thirdly, Scottish National party Members believe that they have found a way to fund a reversal of the Pensions Act 2011, which was accelerating the equality of women’s pensions. In fact, they have gone further than that. The Daily Business quoted the hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford), in whose name this debate is taking place, as saying that he had found a solution:
“The Tories have tried to wash their hands of this crisis…which is why the SNP decided to do the work for them.”
In doing the work for them, the hon. Gentleman has identified that the national insurance fund—which funds welfare benefits—is the source of the £8 billion he believes will rectify the situation. The Government believe that it would cost £30 billion. His suggestion is arguably the most extraordinary of all time in this House. It is irresponsible, inappropriate and inaccurate, and it is seriously worrying that the hon. Gentleman, who has worked in the pensions industry for a long time, believes that he has done the work. His work needs serious improvement.
Interestingly, the SNP leader said that this is an issue on which the
“UK government must make transitional arrangements”.
However, while pensions remain a UK Government responsibility, things could be done by the SNP Government. The powers have been devolved, and the Scottish Government could use them now. The SNP is leading the WASPI campaign up the garden path. It is to be regretted that good women, some of whom are in trouble, are being so seriously misled by ostensibly serious politicians. We should turn the motion down.
Huw Merriman (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)
I am delighted to be called. Like many Government Members, I have the greatest of sympathy for constituents who have been left incredibly frustrated by the changes. Indeed, this group of people have held an expectation for many decades but have then found themselves, without notification in some cases, with little time to make things up. However, the ultimate point is that if reversing the changes will cost up to £39 billion, it is wrong of this House to raise expectations and suggest that the problem can be solved without any intelligent rationale for where the money will come from. Others will always have to pay. It will be a question of having to reduce spending on essential services that are listed in our manifestos. Health is a huge issue in my constituency, and I would like more money for social care, but I am realistic about what we can afford.
Huw Merriman
I will not give way, owing to the time. Will we see services cut to pay for this proposal, or, as is so often the case, will it be left to future generations to foot the bill?
My next point is crucial. Individuals in their 20s and 30s—often termed the packhorse generation—have had to pay tuition fees, which I and others did not have to pay, and are living with expensive private rents and cannot afford to get on the housing ladder. It will be left to them to pay—a generation that will be fortunate indeed to retire at 66, let alone 60. Many of them do not even have occupational pensions. The Opposition may scoff at some of the points made by Government Members, but they should ask themselves whether they are really thinking of those individuals in the same way as we are and protecting their futures.
Huw Merriman
I will not give way.
I raised my next point when I slipped over to the other side of the Chamber. Manifestos are where such changes should be proposed and where we should stand up and be counted for what we believe in. We should not jump on bandwagons mid-term when we do not have to cost things. This proposal was not in the Labour manifesto. I have looked through the SNP manifesto—it is a gripping read—and it contains a reference to not supporting pension changes above the age of 66.
Huw Merriman
The hon. Gentleman says, “Rubbish,” so he can then state where it is. It does not appear at all in three sections. This is a cynical move that mismanages the expectations of the most vulnerable, who need looking after. They do not need cheap gimmicks from the Opposition that do not have intelligent costings. On that basis, I am going to do what is right for generations to come and not support the motion.
Peter Aldous (Waveney) (Con)
I am grateful to you for getting me in, Mr Deputy Speaker. I will be brief. I will not hear any aspersions cast against the WASPI women. The women whom I have met have been completely sincere. I have received much correspondence from people facing difficult and challenging circumstances.
In Waveney, 2,249 people have signed a petition and the Conservative-controlled Waveney District Council unanimously passed a motion in support of the WASPI petition. There is an injustice here that we need to correct. I acknowledge that the finances are tight, something which I fear the SNP has not taken on board, but there are times when we need to do the right thing. This is one of those times. I urge the Government to sit down with the WASPI women and engage the experts in the DWP and the Treasury to come up with a fair, considered and affordable solution.
Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)
Once again, the injustices suffered by 50s-born women at the hands of the coalition and now the current Government dominate proceedings here in Parliament. Labour Members would give our eye teeth to have the powers to help the people we represent, but, sadly, all we can do is continue to try to help the Government out of the hole they are in. This will be the fifth time in the six weeks since I took on the shadow Pensions Minister role that I have spoken in Parliament about the WASPI women’s plight, which has been created through poor communication and mismanagement. Sadly, even our low-cost option to extend pension credit to those who need it has been turned down flat by the Secretary of State and his Pensions Minister. I would have said that it had also been turned down by the Treasury, but at Work and Pensions questions last week, it was revealed that the Secretary of State had not even bothered to run it past the Treasury, so it could not even consider the matter.
As I have said before, the Pensions Minister is a decent man, but he disappointed me by failing to fight for the WASPI women and he has done so again by refusing to set up a special proactive helpline for those affected to ensure they all access the social security benefits he says are sufficient to meet their needs. Labour Members do not believe they are sufficient, and we all know that hundreds of millions of pounds—if not billions—in social security to which many people are entitled is left unclaimed because people simply do not know that they are eligible. I have no doubt that that applies to many of the 50s-born women, including members of WASPI and WASPI Voice.
Perhaps the Government need reminding of the hardship that the poorly managed changes they have put in place have caused to 2.6 million WASPI women. We have heard from one woman who had her pension age moved back and could no longer afford to pay the rent, so she went spiralling into debt and was on the verge of losing her home. We heard about another who is struggling to keep her sick husband out of care, so that they can hang on to their family home, and is doing so without the state pension income that she was planning to use to keep them going in her retirement. Many Members have outlined similar cases, which are repeated reminders of the Government’s failure.
Some of those examples were given in a full speech from the hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford). It was just a shame that he had to murder the words of our national poet towards the end. The Secretary of State spoke of four principles and asked for support. We support those four principles, but principles are no good without action, and it is the WASPI women who are suffering because of the inaction.
The hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) reminded us that some women never had the chance to build up contributions because of ill health or other reasons, and saw no provision for them—I do not either. My hon. Friend the Member for Batley and Spen (Tracy Brabin) spoke of the turmoil of 50s-born women and of the care worker planning to help her daughter return to work by caring for her grandchildren. Neither of those things can now happen.
The hon. Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Nadine Dorries) suggested a different equalisation—for the majority of men to become carers and to suffer the menopause. One may be possible, but I hope the other will not. She, too, wanted more action to help the older WASPI women. My hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) spoke of the women affected as the backbone of our country—women who have probably sacrificed more than any of us.
The hon. Member for South Thanet (Craig Mackinlay) wanted a relaxation of the rules on JSA and ESA. Will the Minister consider that idea from someone on the Conservative Benches? My hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham (Dr Blackman-Woods) spoke of the need for vacancies in the labour market for women. If the vacancies do not exist—and they do not in the north-east, where I am a Member, too—people cannot get a job.
We must remember that the two main campaigning groups WASPI and WASPI Voice agree with equalisation of the state pension age, but this is about the means by which that is achieved. Contrary to what the Government say, we still need fair transitional arrangements in place to support the most vulnerable, and there have been plenty of options put forward by Labour that this Conservative Government have not properly considered.
The Government are now getting themselves into a deeper hole, as one of the WASPI campaign groups is planning to mount a legal action, with their representatives preparing legal guides for women who may have intentions to pursue maladministration complaints against the Department for Work and Pensions. That will be costly, too. These women are organised and they are taking the steps that they feel are necessary to make this situation right, but the Government are burying their head in the sand, hoping that it will all go away if they ignore it for long enough. One hon. Member said earlier that if we get to 2020, it will be too late, but it will never be too late for the WASPI women.
As we near the end of this debate, it is important to remember that, through devolution, the Scottish Parliament does have the power to provide top-up benefits for people in Scotland, but it has yet to act. We have already heard that the last joint working group on welfare shows that the SNP Scottish Ministers at Holyrood do not even feel confident enough to implement any of their new social security powers quite yet and have asked for the timetable to be pushed back. I suspect that there will be no joy for the Scottish WASPI women there.
Alex Cunningham
No, I will not.
Assuming that the SNP Scottish Government do have the powers to help the WASPI women, Scottish Ministers should overcome their shyness, make a real decision and agree to step in and aid the 250,000 women in Scotland. Not to do so will be seen as a missed opportunity.
Alex Cunningham
The hon. Gentleman, who opened this debate, spoke for 35 minutes; I have 10 minutes.
If the Scottish National party in government in Scotland did that, it would further highlight the injustice faced by other WASPI women across the rest of the UK who would still get nothing. That is why we must have a UK-wide solution to the problem. We do not want one that sees British women in different parts of the United Kingdom treated differently on social security because of where they live.
We have said that the proposals are not fair, have not been implemented properly and are damaging the most vulnerable, but the Government have made it clear that they do not care about the plight of women up and down this country. Those women are frightened of these proposals because they do not know how they will cope. The Secretary of State spoke about the older people’s champion. We could have a champion in each and every department across the country, providing a special helpline for the women affected.
Under our proposals, we are calling on the Government to extend pension credit to those who would have been eligible under the 1995 timetable, so that women affected by the chaotic mismanagement of equalisation will be offered some support until they retire. That will make hundreds of thousands of WASPI women eligible for up to £156 a week. We will not stop there. We are developing further proposals to support as many of the WASPI women as possible. Importantly, they will be financially credible and will be based on sound evidence and supported by the WASPI women themselves.
It is disappointing that the SNP chooses to cost only the option in the Landman report—the one mentioned in the motion—to the end of this Parliament. This accounting trick has led it to promise the WASPI women that it has a long-term solution, but that is not the case. The measure will cost £8 billion until 2020, but more than £30 billion if it is to help affected women up to 2026. Sadly, this has confused the debate, when clarity was needed. As I have mentioned, if the SNP actually wanted to support the WASPI women rather than play games, it would have acted already in Scotland.
The Government could have done something in the autumn statement to support these women and then used the Pension Schemes Bill currently in the other place to put the changes into law. They still have time to do so in the new year.
I have had numerous emails, phone calls and meetings with women all over the country who are begging and pleading for Parliament to act. They are at their wits end. If they are not already suffering the full impact of the changes, they are dreading them, as they know this Government will require them to survive on very little—including those who are single or incapable of working.
My party believes in standing up for the most vulnerable, and that is what we are doing today. We will to do that tomorrow, and we will continue to support the WASPI women in this fight. For that reason, we will support the SNP motion today, but we hope to have the real cost of its proposed solution up to 2026 properly acknowledged. Only Labour is taking a detailed look at the evidence and trying to find the best way forward to help dig both the Scottish and UK Governments out of the hole they are now in. Let us make it clear once again: it is not a Scottish, English, Irish or Welsh solution that we need, but a UK-wide solution, and this Government must act.
Mhairi Black (Paisley and Renfrewshire South) (SNP)
I have to start by saying that I am feeling very, very humbled here today, because the Conservative Benches are the busiest that they have ever been for me, talking on this issue.
Unfortunately, I have to start off on a negative point. Earlier, the hon. Member for Erewash (Maggie Throup) talked about Members of Parliament finding themselves continually criticised for their point of view, whether that be on Twitter or when they meet people on the street or in their surgeries. The response to that should be for MPs to go away and reflect on whether they are in the right position and have the correct opinion. You do not turn round and call an entire fantastic, intellectual campaign hate-filled. You do not accuse them of having a hate campaign; you listen to them and you form your views.
We have debated this issue five times, I believe, so this is the fifth time I am speaking on it. It is important to reflect back on how we ended up in this position. Nearly a year ago today, I stood pretty much on this spot and argued for the WASPI campaign. I argued that this problem was happening and explained how it came about, and I tried to give the Government the benefit of the doubt. We said, “You have to accept that the Government have messed up. You have to accept that problems have been created and you have to come up with something.” It is truly an embarrassment to this House that we are still waiting on a Government plan for making this better.
The SNP went away and spent our own money to get a constructive report. We could easily have said, “Get rid of the ’95 Act altogether;” we could have said a million and one things, but instead we went away and found credible economists, put together a cracking report and tried to build a bridge that all parties in this House could cross. Instead—[Interruption.] If the Secretary of State wants to make an intervention, I am more than happy to take it. Until then, I suggest he listens.
When we put forward our report to the Government, so that they could listen to it, what was their response? In the Westminster Hall debate a couple of weeks back, the Minister said that,
“the Government’s position is very clear: this was not a contract. State pensions are technically a benefit.”—[Official Report, 15 November 2016; Vol. 617, c. 44.]
That utterly pathetic response shows that this Government are determined to wriggle out of their responsibility for these women.
A Government Member said earlier that we now say to women that they have to pay in 35 years of national insurance and that that is how they are entitled to their pension, but the women we are talking about have paid in for 40 years, for 45 years and some of them for 50 years, yet we are being told that they are still not entitled to their pension. The Government are refusing to pay women what they are owed, and I am sure that the 2.6 million women will remember that the next time they are standing at the ballot box in an election.
The hon. Member for Weaver Vale (Graham Evans) said earlier that Germany made these changes in 2009 and he asked what the problem was with our doing it in 2011. I would point out to the hon. Gentleman—who, by the way, has a majority of 806, if I remember correctly, which I imagine consists of a lot of WASPI women who will remember his speech at the next election—that our report shows that the only other country in Europe that has made this level of change at this accelerated pace is Greece. As I said in the last debate, that is a country that a couple of weeks ago was teargassing pensioners who were campaigning and protesting against austerity measures. Is that really what we want to base our arguments on? Is that the kind of model we want to follow?
This has been said a million and one times in the debate, and I have been biting my tongue the whole way through because of the incredible hypocrisy and lack of knowledge on these Benches—I was going to say on the Conservative Benches, but now unfortunately I have to add the Labour shadow Minister to that. Scotland does not have the power over pensions. If anyone wants to dispute that, I suggest that they get the Scotland Act 1998 and go to section 28, and they will see that in all the reserved matters that we are entitled to top up, pensions is not included.
Even if we did have the power to create pensions, and to fix them, I tell you something—and I think I speak for my colleagues not just in this Chamber but up the road as well—we are sick to the back teeth of using taxpayers’ money to fill all the holes that this Government create: a Government with policies that we have never voted for in Scotland, that we actively rejected in the general election. We cannot be expected to plug every single hole that this Government create with their shambolic policies.
The Government now say, as my hon. Friend the Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford) alluded to earlier, that they will never make changes to pensions unless people are within 10 years of reaching pension age. How can they justify that position but not do anything for these women, who have been told that they have to wait six or seven years to get their pensions?
The hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Huw Merriman) said that this was not in our manifesto. If he goes to page 21 of the 2016 manifesto for the Scottish elections, he will see it says that we support the WASPI campaign. He said that he would vote against our motion tonight because it is the younger generation who will pay—people in their 20s and 30s. I am included in that category, funnily enough, and I have to say that the issue is bigger than just the WASPI generation, because I want to know that when I am paying national insurance throughout my working lifetime, I am not going to be shafted at the last hurdle—that I am not going to be told at the last minute that the goalposts are moving. This is bigger. This is about the Government setting a precedent that pensions can change anywhere at any time, and that is not a healthy position for any Government to have.
The issue is altogether bigger than WASPI. The justification for the change is that we do not have enough money and this is about austerity. But the thing is that it is women that suffer under austerity. That is the reality; whether it be pensioners, single mothers or young women, it is always women that bear the brunt of this austerity.
Alan Brown
On affordability, is it not the case that the Government can revisit the £20 billion of tax giveaways in the last Budget—£8.5 billion in corporation tax and £5.5 billion in capital gains, inheritance tax and higher tax threshold relief? The Government can revisit those in the forthcoming spring Budget.
Mhairi Black
My hon. Friend makes his point very eloquently.
The Women’s Budget Group has done tremendous work. I urge Ministers to look at it and see the impact that they are having on women’s lives because of the Government’s detrimental policies. The group’s director said:
“We’ve known for some time that the poorest households and women have shouldered the greatest burden of austerity measures.”
In fact, 85% of the burden is forecast to fall on women by 2020. These women are not unfortunate casualties. They are not people who just happened to get unlucky. This Government cannot claim ignorance. They cannot plead innocence and say that they have no idea of the impact that they are about to have on people’s lives. These women, for whatever reason, are suffering under Conservative policies for no other crime than the fact that they are female and they are poor. That is the reality of what this Government are doing.
The legacy that this Government are leaving is absolutely shambolic and no amount of sympathy and flowery words from hon. Members is going to pay bills for people. It is not going to move things forward; it will not make sure that your citizens have a good, high-quality standard of life. The idea that the £8 billion spread across five years, as proposed in our report, is not affordable is an absolute joke. The national insurance fund, as we have said multiple times, will be sitting on a surplus of £30 billion. That figure has been disputed from the Government Benches, but it is worth pointing out that it comes from the Government Actuary’s Department. It is a Government figure.
In every one of these debates I have said that politics is about choice, and I have lambasted the Government for choosing to bomb Syria instead of paying pensions. I have lambasted them for spending billions on Trident. I have had a go at them for doing up this Palace of Westminster for £7 billion, which funnily enough we can afford. I understand that sometimes it can be quite dull when politicians repeat things time and again, but now there is something new. We can now also afford to pay up for the Queen’s house; we can now find the money to refurbish Buckingham Palace. So my question to the Minister would be this: are we going to be doing up Downing Street anytime soon? Are there any other houses filled with millionaires that need to be done up—that need a lick of paint? It is a ridiculous notion that we can afford to fork out money for palaces—literally, palaces such as this and Buckingham Palace—but we cannae pay pensions. It is a joke.
Our job here is to represent; it is to maintain democracy, to make sure that people watching at home feel as though they have a voice, to make sure that they feel there are people listening and standing up for them. When you see the quality of the debate that we have just sat through, no wonder people are quite depressed and disillusioned with politics. We have debated this subject five times. We have had 240 petitions all across the House. People are affected by this. Every single Member who handed in a petition has not just a professional duty but a moral duty to walk through that Lobby tonight and vote with us, because if they do not, as my WASPI mother would say, hell slap it intae ye at the next election.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Pensions (Richard Harrington)
I have been to quite a few Opposition day debates in my six and a half years here, but I have never known one when there were no Back-Bench speeches from the party that brought the motion forward. I found that very sad. [Interruption.] I do apologise to the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Patricia Gibson)—there was one.
That does not mean that we have not heard extensively from the hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford), who opened the debate. He has kindly referred to me in the past as an honourable man—in fact, a principled man—and I would say exactly the same thing to him, as I would, indeed, to my shadow from the Labour party, the hon. Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham). However, they painted the Government as heartless and as people who are not interested in pensioners, and that is absolutely untrue.
We have had a lot of platitudes and clichés about how taxing millionaires more could fund the WASPI pensioners. Everybody says, “We believe in equalisation.” Everybody says what the problems are. Everybody talks of hardship. Everybody talks of examples from their constituencies. But when it comes to it, the Opposition have a licence to say anything they want—the Government have to make hard decisions. This Government and their predecessor—
Richard Harrington
I am sorry, but, for the moment, there is not time to take interventions.
Governments have to take hard decisions. The can that was kicked down the road for many years by the Labour party had to be dealt with by the coalition Government. I would just like to refer to some of the fallacies mentioned by Opposition Members. The hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber, in moving the motion, talked about the 1995 Act as if there was absolutely no communication from the Government—as if the DWP and everybody else suddenly forgot to talk about it. Well, that is not true. There were leaflets produced. There was an extensive advertising campaign. There were articles in women’s papers. In addition, millions of people, who decided they were going to sort out their pension, applied, quite properly, to the DWP; in fact, more than 14 million people applied and received full details of what their pensions were. I mention that because it would appear that there was absolutely no communication whatever. After the 2011 Act, that was a direct mail campaign, where individual letters—
Richard Harrington
I will not give way. I have a very short time left.
There was actually very good communication. However, I would like to mention the various contributions we have had. My hon. Friend the Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Nadine Dorries), who was among many speakers from the Government side, said that women, including herself, were not informed following the 2011 Act. In fact, as I have just shown, millions of letters were sent between January 2012 and November 2013. She said it is difficult for women over the age of 60 to find employment, and she said nobody would employ her. Actually, more than 4 million women in her age group are in employment—more than ever.
From the Opposition, we have had the argument, which I have had to deal with on many occasions, about the state pension being a contract. It is not a view but a question of fact that the state pension is a benefit, not a contract. As my hon. Friend the Member for North West Cambridgeshire (Mr Vara) said, promises are cheap. The Government have to actually deal with facts.
I have much sympathy for Members who spoke of constituents who are finding it difficult to access the benefits system. [Interruption.] Someone has shouted from a sedentary position, “What are you going to do about it?” As hon. Members will be aware, and as the Secretary of State mentioned, we have a system of helping through the benefits system people who may need looking at. We have older claimants’ champions, and we are getting more of them. We will find a way to help people to find their way into the benefits system. For any constituents who are finding this difficult, if the Department can have their name, address and national insurance number—I have asked for this on many occasions—I will be very happy to personally see what the position is and get them the help they need to get through the benefits system. We hear a lot of talk from hon. Members about their constituents, but the actual factual details I get are few and far between.
Let me move on to the famous economic report from the Scots Nats. I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham), who described it as irresponsible and inaccurate. I really could not have put it better myself, because it is, as my hon. Friend the Member for North West Cambridgeshire said, raising false hopes by saying to our constituents that this is a small problem that can quite easily be dealt with. I remind hon. Members that even the SNP costs this at £8 billion, and the Department, as I have written to the hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber, has assessed it at nearer £30 billion. We have looked at every alternative. We have looked at more than 25 options that have been mentioned to us about the WASPIs, and there simply is not a viable option, either because of cost, complexity or practicality.
The luxury of opposition is promising everybody money without having to consider how to pay for it. I view this as very irresponsible.
Ian Blackford
I must tell the House that the figures in this report, which has been produced by Landman Economics, are based on the Institute for Public Policy Research model, which has been tried and tested. It really ill behoves the House to traduce the economists who have produced these figures based on a Treasury model. When we had the debate two weeks ago, the Minister said that the cost was £14 billion. How come we have gone from £14 billion to £30 billion? It is the Government’s figures that do not make any sense.
Richard Harrington
I apologise to the hon. Gentleman—I could not hear the end of what he said because of the noise. I am not disputing that this was produced by proper economists—I accept that fact—but it is about what timescale they look at, in this case going to 2021, and how they brief. But okay, fair enough: even by the SNP’s calculations the figure is £7.9 billion, which should apparently come from millionaires or from Trident. Government is not like that; these are completely separate issues. This country has a proud record on state pensions. This Government, and the predecessor coalition before it, did not have the luxury, partly because of the economic mess Labour left us in, of kicking the can down the road and ignoring these very, very serious issues.
The benefits system is available to people, and if they are not having the access to it they should, we will help them. I give an undertaking to look at every way that the benefits system can be used to help people who are in difficulty. Contrary to what some hon. Members have said, my door is open to people so I can speak to them. I hope I have shown that. I took this job to help pensioners, not to not help pensioners. It has been irresponsible to imply—
Mike Weir (Angus) (SNP)
claimed to move the closure (Standing Order No. 36).
Question put forthwith, That the Question be now put.
Question agreed to.
Question put accordingly (Standing Order No. 31(2)), That the original words stand part of the Question.
Climate Change
David Rutley (Macclesfield) (Con)
I rise to present a petition of over 1,100 residents of the Macclesfield constituency on the subject of climate change.
The petition states:
The petition of residents of Macclesfield,
Declares that climate changes impacts upon both people and places; further that the rapid progress towards ratification of the Paris Agreement is to be applauded; further that the UK requires a low carbon investment plan to transform the economy in line with the Climate Change Act 2008; and further that 1,100 individuals have signed a local petition on the same matter.
The petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urges the Government to publish an ambitious low carbon investment plan.
And the petitioners remain, etc.
[P001986]
Paisley (Cultural Contribution)
Gavin Newlands (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (SNP)
I am grateful for the opportunity to lead today’s debate on Paisley’s cultural contribution to the world. I am sorry to disappoint the undoubted millions tuning in from Northern Ireland, but I am most definitely not talking about the hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley)—despite his party colleagues alluding to that fact on Twitter earlier this afternoon.
It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Deputy Speaker, although I know that Renfrewshire’s ain, Madam Deputy Speaker—the hon. Member for Epping Forest (Mrs Laing)—was hoping to chair the debate, but is otherwise engaged addressing a haggis, which is as good an excuse as any in this place. I know that she has taken a keen interest in developments in Paisley of late and will no doubt be bending the ears of the rich and powerful at her Burns supper this evening.
However, I am perhaps underselling Paisley’s contribution. As Paisley’s Member of the Scottish Parliament and fellow Buddie, George Adam, is forever telling everyone, Paisley is, in fact, the centre of the known universe. Given that I am forever being compared to Gerard Butler and that he and I were born in Paisley and are proud Buddies, I think that George’s point is well made. I should point out for the uninitiated that a Buddie is what people from Paisley are called.
This debate is a sheer fluke of scheduling, as it just happens to coincide with Paisley’s bid to be named UK city of culture for 2021. I am not an impartial observer, but to my mind Paisley is one the UK’s greatest towns. The Paisley pattern is quite literally famous all over the world and represents the legacy of our one-time place at the centre of the world’s textile industry. Our rich and proud history is second to none, and people should not just take my word for it. Ian Jack, writing in The Guardian said:
“There is probably no more unjustly neglected town in these islands; there is nowhere of comparable size—77,000 people—that has such a rich architectural, industrial and social history and that once mattered so much to the world.”
It is for that reason that I would like to use this opportunity to touch on the town’s positive future, should it be named as the UK city of culture in 2021.
For those unaware of the town, Paisley is the largest town in Scotland, with a population of around 77,000. We are proud to have Paisley Abbey, to accommodate a world-class university in the University of the West of Scotland, and to be home to the St Mirren football club; and we are proud of our industrial heritage, particularly in our heyday with the Paisley mills, which made the town an economic powerhouse.
In so many ways, Paisley well and truly punches above its weight in the impact that it has had on the world. Our cultural strengths are there for the world to see. We are the birthplace of music superstar Paolo Nutini, who earlier this month outlined his backing for Paisley being named UK city of culture and spoke about the “romance of the town” and its importance on his own career. Dr Who duo, David Tennant and Steven Moffat, also hail from the town and regularly come back to Paisley to support local causes, as does Hollywood superstar, Gerard Butler, whose family stay in the Gallowhill area of Paisley, which I am proud to represent.
The list of famous Paisley Buddies that have forged a career in culture, media and sport is almost without end, including such names as: Andrew Neil, John Byrne, Kelly Marie, Gerry Rafferty, Tom Conti, Archie Gemmell, Chris Brookmyre, Alexander Goudie, Owen Coyle, Shereen Nanjiani, Phyllis Logan, Kenneth McKellar, Robert Tannahill, David Hay, John Byrne, Fulton Mackay—[Interruption.] I am pleased now to see the hon. Member for North Antrim in his place.
Gavin Newlands
The hon. Gentleman is being very cheeky, but I will give way to him.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. I rather think that the hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley) should be here for at least five minutes before anyone gives way to him. Come on!
Mr Deputy Speaker
I shall assume that the hon. Gentleman is here to intervene later.
Mhairi Black
Would my hon. Friend like to congratulate the hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley) on wearing the traditional Paisley attire?
Gavin Newlands
My hon. Friend is correct, and he would be right at home at St Mirren Park if he wore that outfit on a Saturday afternoon.
Gavin Newlands
I will in two minutes.
Let me return to my list, which is extensive. Other famous Buddies are Kenneth Gibson MSP—I would be under threat of death if I did not mention him—Paul Lambert, and two of Scotland’s most weel-kent weather forecasters, Heather “the weather” Reid and Sean Batty.
While I am listing famous Buddies, it would be remiss of me not to give a quick mention to those outside the area of culture who have left an indelible mark on the world. From the world of business, there is the Coats family, of Coats threads fame, which once owned one of the UK’s largest businesses. James Coats, and his sons who followed him, built up a business empire supported by vast mills along the River Cart. His son Thomas was particularly philanthropic towards his home town, and funded or donated some of Paisley’s finest buildings. Marion Robertson decided to try and use an oversupply of oranges to her husband James’s greengrocer business to make marmalade. The result was to prove very popular, and the enterprise is still going strong as the company that makes Robertson’s jams.
Ian Hamilton was a renowned lawyer, but is perhaps better known for something a little less legal. Ian was the mastermind who led the repatriation of the Stone of Destiny to Scotland from that building across the road, much to the authorities’ embarrassment. I note that Perth is trying to use the stone as part of its fledgling bid, but it was Paisley that helped to get the real one back before returning a replica via Arbroath Abbey—allegedly.
Members may not instantly recognise the name May Donoghue, but the case of Donoghue v. Stevenson has had huge repercussions throughout the legal world since the other place along the corridor ruled on it in 1932. May Donoghue had been enjoying an ice cream float in the Wellmeadow café in the town, but when she poured out the remainder of her ginger beer into the glass, a partially decomposed slug fell out. She suffered from shock, and was later treated for gastroenteritis. Having got nowhere with the café owner, she decided to sue the manufacturer, David Stevenson. Her lawyer’s argument centred on the fact that Stevenson had a “duty of care” to the consumer, even without a direct contract, which had not obtained before that landmark ruling. The case is still taught in law schools, and has been quoted at the start of millions of damages actions throughout the world.
Buddies are rightly proud of all those who have made their mark, but Paisley is arguably more famous for the distinctive teardrop pattern that is world renowned. There are competing thoughts about the origins of the Paisley pattern, with some historians even suggesting that it can be traced back to ancient Babylon. However, although shawl production began elsewhere, because of the huge scale of shawl production in Paisley, which started in 1805, the pattern was given the name “paisley”. Paisley’s mills have long closed, but the impact of the paisley pattern can still be seen on catwalks throughout the world, as my tie so stylishly highlights.
Ian Paisley
I am not wearing a paisley pattern, although it is true that I once chatted up a girl and told her that my great-great-great-grandfather had invented the pattern and that he was a friend of Mr Tartan—but that is not the point. The point is that not everyone is lucky enough to have a town, or a city, named after them, and I am delighted about that.
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on drawing our attention to the important issues of raising cultural awareness and the identity of the great towns and cities in this nation of ours. I hope that Ministers will continue to ensure that the whole of our nation is properly represented around the world, and that that includes all the great things that flow from the various towns, but in particular—Paisley.
Gavin Newlands
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. Perhaps one day, if he perseveres, he will be granted his own debate about his contribution to the world.
Paisley has produced an abundance of actors and actresses of stage and screen. One reason why that has been so, especially over the last quarter of a century, is PACE Youth Theatre. PACE was founded in 1988 by David Wallace, and has now grown to become the largest youth theatre of its kind in the UK, with a current membership of about 2,000. The success and attraction of PACE mean that more than 200 young people are on a waiting list for a place there at any given time throughout the year. As well as putting on shows for thousands, including the perennially sold-out pantomime and shows touring Scotland, PACE delivers up to 34 workshops each year that not only improve on the performance skills of those who attend, but aim to increase confidence and improve communication and self-expression. The list of those who have enrolled in PACE includes James McAvoy, Paulo Nutini, “Game of Thrones” actor Richard Madden, and “Star Wars” actor James McArdle.
Gavin Newlands
I thank my hon. Friend for her contribution.
However, PACE amounts to a lot more than the acting or singing careers that it has helped to kick-start. It is about the lives of all the kids who attend its workshops. Founder David Wallace explained that better than I could when he said:
“We aren’t all about finding the next Annie. If that’s what a member is looking to achieve then that’s great.
However, for me and the team, it’s about providing our members with essential life tools such as self-confidence, team work and motivation and allowing those individuals to create their own pathways geared towards a successful and happy future, whatever that career may be.”
Paisley is lucky to have David and PACE. Long may they continue their fine work.
Ronnie Cowan (Inverclyde) (SNP)
I cannot let the moment pass without adding one more name to the long list of famous Paisley Buddies. My late father, Jimmy Cowan, was a Paisley Buddy. He played for the mighty Greenock Morton, but he also played 25 times for Scotland, including in two famous victories against the auld enemy at Wembley, one in 1949, when the English forward line was Matthews, Finney, Milburn, Mortensen and Pearson. We won 3-1 that day. My father was a famous Paisley Buddy and a Greenockian; I am happy to be a buddy of Paisley.
Gavin Newlands
The fact that my hon. Friend’s father played for Morton was why I left him out of the list—[Laughter.]
Paisley’s rich architectural culture runs through the town, from Paisley Abbey and the town hall down the high street to the museum, Coat’s observatory and Coat’s memorial church, often described as the Baptist cathedral of Europe. One of the town’s not so well known facts is that it has the highest concentration of listed buildings anywhere in Scotland outside Edinburgh, but the jewel in Paisley’s architectural crown is the abbey, which dates back more than 850 years. The building is known as “the Cradle of the Royal House of Stewart”. Marjory Bruce, the daughter of Robert the Bruce, was married and later died in the abbey after a riding accident near the Gallowhill area of the town. Her son survived this accident and grew up to become Robert II of Scotland, the first of the Stewart monarchs.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
As an Ulster Scot descended from the Stewarts of the lowland of Scotland, it is a real pleasure for me to hear the hon. Gentleman’s speech. Does he feel that there is a golden opportunity for Paisley’s traditions and culture to be twinned alongside the Ulster Scots of Northern Ireland, with their history, their culture and their language?
Gavin Newlands
It is not in my power to grant the hon. Gentleman’s wish, but I note the keen interest of the Democratic Unionist party in tonight’s debate—that is two interventions from DUP Members on a debate about our Scottish town.
Gavin Newlands
Absolutely, and I thank the hon. Gentleman for it.
The abbey is absolutely stunning and when you pay a visit, Mr Deputy Speaker—not if, when—be sure to keep an eye out for the 25-year-old embellishment by the stonemasons who replaced one of the gargoyles on the roofline with a replica of the xenomorph alien from the Alien films. I would hope that the committee looking at the refurbishment of this crumbling edifice could perhaps take a leaf out of the abbey’s book.
Benjamin Disraeli once warned his cabinet that they should “keep an eye on Paisley.” Disraeli might have been speaking about his fear of the guid folk of Paisley, rather than the hon. Member for North Antrim, becoming the source of revolution, but that quote is as true today as it was in the 18th century. Paisley is well known for its radicals. This is marked by a monument in Woodside cemetery which celebrates the 1820 martyrs, Baird, Hardie and Wilson—three of the leaders of the 1820 radical war who were executed for their part in it. That insurrection started largely because of savage cuts in workers’, mainly weavers’, pay and conditions.
Paisley’s radical past is celebrated annually during the “Sma’ Shot Day” festival. The sma’ shot was a cotton thread that bound the shawls together, but the sma’ shot was unseen in the finished garments, so the manufacturers—known locally as “corks”—refused to pay for the thread. The weavers had no choice but to buy the thread themselves, as without it the shawls would fall apart and the weavers would not be paid for their work. A long dispute followed. The Charleston drum, which was beaten through the streets of Paisley to summon the weavers in times of trouble, was beaten to rally the weavers to protest. After a long and hard struggle, the manufacturers backed down and the weavers were paid for the sma’ shot.
Mhairi Black
Bearing in mind Paisley’s phenomenal political history of responding to economic inequality, does my hon. Friend agree that the current Prime Minister could do with taking the advice of the once Conservative Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, who said, “keep your eye on Paisley”?
Gavin Newlands
I think my hon. Friend speaks for herself, as she did so very well in the previous debate.
On the first Saturday of July, the beating of the Charleston drum rallies the people of Paisley to a gathering outside the town hall. A procession is held through the streets of Paisley led by the Cork, an effigy of one of the manufacturers defeated by the Paisley weavers, which is then set on fire.
Paisley is fortunate to have two great education institutions in the shape of West College Scotland and the University of the West of Scotland. Both do a fantastic job at providing high quality and inclusive education. UWS is also the home of the internationally acclaimed sculptor, Alexander—or Sandy—Stoddart, who is the Queen’s official sculptor in Scotland. Sandy created the monument to the Rev. John Witherspoon, a Paisley minister who became one of the signatories of the American declaration of independence. The original is positioned at the entrance to the university’s Paisley campus, with an exact replica at Princeton University in the United States where Witherspoon moved to when he became the university’s president. UWS, which was founded in Paisley in 1897, is also playing an important role in creating the cultural superstars of tomorrow through its highly successful school of media, culture and society. The school offers industry-ready degree programmes designed by staff with wide-ranging experience in broadcasting, film, journalism, music, performance and the visual arts.
The guidance that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport issued in 2014 said that the
“UK City of Culture should be expected to deliver a high quality cultural programme that builds and expands on local strengths and reaches a wide variety of audiences, creating a demonstrable economic impact and catalyst for regeneration as well as contributing to community cohesion and health and wellbeing.”
Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith) (SNP)
Eight years ago, I was lucky enough to attend the National Mòd, Gaeldom’s premier event for music and traditional arts, which was held in Paisley. It was an extremely good event. Paisley proved to be a wonderfully hospitable host. Does my hon. Friend agree that this is a perfect example of Paisley showing that it is capable of hosting tremendous cultural events in the future?
Gavin Newlands
I could not agree more with my hon. Friend. The economic impact of that event on the town was massive, with a 6:1 return on the council’s investment. I know that the council is hoping to host the event again, hopefully in 2021 to coincide with Paisley being UK city of culture—obviously, we will be the city of culture in 2021.
We have not received updated guidance for those competing to be named UK city of culture. I hope the Minister can advise on when it will be published. Given that the hon. Member for Epping Forest received an unilluminating written response yesterday, I have my doubts. The second part of the guidance, on the need for a wider economic benefit if named UK city of culture, is critical to Paisley.
As I have said, Paisley is a special place. Our built environment matches that of any in the UK and the tenacity of Paisley buddies is second to none. We are a town with a rich history and the chance to have an equally bright future. However, despite all that I have said, Paisley has its challenges, which are deep-rooted in the fabric of the town. Poverty is a blight which afflicts too many. Shamefully, that includes generational poverty. In Renfrewshire, more than one in five of our children are growing up in poverty. In the affluent areas of Renfrewshire, boys are expected to live 16 years longer than those who stay in the poorest parts of Paisley—separated by only a few miles.
Paisley is home to what is statistically Scotland’s most deprived area. Ferguslie Park, an area I represent, topped the Scottish index of multiple deprivation, confirming the generational nature of poverty in parts of Paisley. This is something that Citizens Advice Scotland refers to as poverty breeding poverty. Yet despite this, the community still has a strong sense of pride. One of the area’s most famous sons, John Byrne, sums the area up perfectly:
“Paisley is a remarkable place. I support the bid wholeheartedly. I thank Ferguslie every day of my life for providing me all the information I ever needed about life, it was the best place I have ever been.”
Anne McLaughlin (Glasgow North East) (SNP)
Speaking of sons and daughters of Ferguslie Park, I am sure my hon. Friend will thank me for wheedling this in. Just to prove that people can fight the odds and achieve, one of the daughters of Ferguslie Park is heading up Paisley’s city of culture bid. Does he agree that nobody is better placed than Jean Cameron from Ferguslie Park to win that bid for Paisley?
Gavin Newlands
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention, and I could not agree more with her point about her friend—and my friend—Jean.
As policy makers, the thought of kids waking up hungry, going to school hungry and going to bed hungry should motivate us all to ensure that we design more effective policies to prevent any child from living a life of hunger. That is why securing the title of UK city of culture is so important to Paisley. I believe it will generate a transformational change that will provide us with some of the tools to tackle our challenges head-on. For that reason, I believe this title means so much more to the town than those of other competitors bidding for it. Our bid will connect our communities and it will help us to take co-ordinated action against poverty through economic growth and opportunity.
Securing the title will bring around 1 million visitors to Renfrewshire in 2021. It will generate an estimated economic impact of around £50 million across our area. It will create hundreds of new jobs for local people and help grow our economy. It will breed new confidence in the town and make everyone believe that they are part of something special. It will transform Paisley’s image nationally and cement a deeper sense of pride in Paisley. However, more importantly, the lasting legacy of being awarded city of culture is that it will help us tackle poverty in an innovative manner and make it easier for every child and family in Renfrewshire to access cultural activity.
We all have our reasons for wanting to see Paisley named UK city of culture. I was born in Paisley, and lived in the Seedhill area of the town for five years before moving to Renfrew—just north of Paisley—where I still stay. I will always have a deep affection for the town. That goes without saying, and not just because I was born there. Some of the proudest moments of my adult life revolved around representing the town during the 15 years—three serving as club captain—I spent playing for Paisley rugby club. Everywhere we played, I was proud to wear the Paisley crest on my top, although I think at times we could have done a better job in representing the town, as we took a doing quite frequently. The same pride that I felt playing rugby is growing stronger again throughout Paisley. Buddies are proud of their history, and they are proud to be a welcoming place that has opened its arms to people from all over the world, evidenced recently with the arrival of our new neighbours from Syria.
Paisley has a lot to offer the world, but there is far more to come from our famous town. We are a town with our challenges, but if anyone researches our proud history, they will come across countless examples where the people of Paisley rose and overcame these challenges. We believe that winning the title of city of culture will serve as another example of Paisley seizing the opportunity and shaping a new, positive future for the town.
The Minister for Digital and Culture (Matt Hancock)
It is a great pleasure to respond to the hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North (Gavin Newlands), and I begin by congratulating him on securing this debate on securing the UK 2021 city of culture bid for Paisley. I also congratulate him on, in so doing, uniting the United Kingdom almost like never before and on seeing so many Members representing different parts of Scotland and England and some good Ulster Scots also supporting his bid. This is about the UK capital of culture, and long may the UK capital of culture continue to be. That is enough of that point, but I think it is well mentioned.
Paisley has a fascinating history, and I note the excellent work Renfrewshire Council has done in putting this bid together, and there are some exciting plans to revitalise the town and create a new sense of optimism and pride, building on the wonderful history. The heritage, particularly in textiles, is important and global. The Paisley pattern transformed the town into an international textile producer, with tens of thousands of people employed in the thread mills.
The resurgence of the pattern in the 1960s led to the Beatles wearing Paisley print and the creation of Fender’s unique pink Paisley Telecaster guitar, and it is wonderful to see the pattern coming back into fashion again today, as represented by so many Members. That is demonstrated not only by the Member for Paisley himself but my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Scotland, who sits next to me resplendent in his Paisley pattern tie, which brings together the best of the UK, because it is made by Ted Baker, showing Britain coming together. But there is more than history and more than just the Paisley pattern. There are fantastic historical buildings, including the 12th century Paisley abbey and the neoclassical town hall. In fact, the town has one of the highest concentrations of listed buildings anywhere in Scotland.
Support has been given over the past decade to Paisley and across Renfrewshire by the Heritage Lottery Fund, which is also supporting the public realm improvements that are taking place in the town. These will turn Paisley’s historic core into a better place to work, live and visit, by converting empty buildings and enhancing the area’s historic townscape. Should the bid be successful, I am sure that that would create a wonderful backdrop to a UK city of culture.
The town already has some important cultural assets. PACE Youth Theatre is one of the largest youth theatres in the UK, and runs workshops to improve young people’s communication skills, confidence and self-expression. The Spree festival of comedy, music and arts is held during the October school holidays each year, with free activities for families to enjoy. This year, one of the most prestigious events in the Scottish musical calendar, the Scottish album of the year awards, were held in Paisley. And of course there is the Paisley Museum, with its superb collection of Paisley shawls as well as other objects and displays relating to Paisley’s history, art, textiles and natural history. The development of the museum is the flagship project in the council’s regeneration programme, which aims to tell the story of Paisley’s history and transform the town over the next decade. It is great that the council is placing culture at the centre of its regeneration plans.
That brings me to the broader point about the role of the UK city of culture. The impact and importance of culture in improving and anchoring the redevelopment of a town is increasingly being recognised. We have seen this across the past cities of culture, including Derry/Londonderry and Liverpool, as well as in Hull. It is estimated that being next year’s city of culture will deliver a £60 million boost to Hull’s local economy in that year alone. The city has seen investments of more than £1 billion since winning the city of culture title in 2013, and thousands of jobs have been created. This is about improving place and about giving a sense of optimism and positivity to a community. It is about strengthening the whole community. We have seen the cultural offer underpin the regeneration of towns and cities across the country from Margate to Newcastle and from Glasgow to Liverpool, and I hope that it will happen in Paisley, too, notwithstanding the result of this competition.
The hon. Gentleman asked some important specific questions, and I can tell him that we will be bringing forward the formal competition for the UK city of culture 2021, along with guidelines for application, early in the new year. I am delighted that there is such a coalition of support for Paisley’s bid, not just from Ulster but from Paolo Nutini and other cultural icons from the town. Ministerial colleagues from the Scotland Office, including my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, have met representatives of Renfrewshire Council to hear about their vision for Paisley and their bid to be the UK city of culture. This is the third UK city of culture competition and it promises to be incredibly exciting. I am delighted that Phil Redmond has agreed to continue as the chair of the panel for the 2021 competition. He brings a wealth of experience from previous competitions. I am sure that Paisley will engage in the formal process once it starts in the new year.
I wish the hon. Gentleman and his colleagues at the council and elsewhere well. I hope that the UK city of culture competition can bring our country together and provide the anchor for regeneration and redevelopment, for a sense of community and for a strengthened sense of place. I hope that he will play his part as we take this forward. There is only one thing that I am duty bound to deny him. I cannot give him the answer that he seeks. I cannot announce today that Paisley will win the competition, not least because other towns and cities, including in Scotland, are planning to apply. I look forward to the SNP meetings when those various plans are discussed. I can tell him, however, that it will be an open, fair, free and frank competition with towns and cities from right across the UK applying. In the past, the competition has brought the power to transform cities and towns, and I hope that it can continue to do so. I am really excited to see what the next step in that journey will bring in 2021.
Draft Coasting Schools (England) Regulations 2016
(8 years ago)
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The Committee divided: - Ayes: 10 / Noes: 6 - Question accordingly agreed to.
The Minister for School Standards (Mr Nick Gibb)
I beg to move,
That the Committee has considered the draft Coasting Schools (England) Regulations 2016.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray.
Earlier this year Parliament debated and approved the Education and Adoption Act 2016, which for the first time gave the Secretary of State powers to identify, support and take action in coasting schools. It also placed a duty on the Secretary of State to set out in regulations what “coasting” means in relation to a school. The draft regulations, which were laid before both Houses on 20 October, fulfil that requirement.
The Government are dedicated to making Britain a country that works for everyone, not only the privileged few, which means providing a good school place for every child—a place that offers children the opportunity to fulfil their potential and to go as far as their talents will take them. Over the past six years, thanks to our reforms and the hard work of school leaders and teachers, nearly 1.8 million more children are in schools rated good or outstanding than in 2010, and it is a pleasure to see my right hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath, the former Secretary of State for Education, in the Committee.
Our free schools and academies programmes have meant that strong schools and school leaders have been able to extend their success more widely throughout the school system to open up a greater diversity of provision. Our new, rigorous national curriculum and redeveloped qualifications are equipping children with the knowledge they need to succeed. However, a good school place is still out of reach for too many children, so we know that there is more to do. Our coasting schools policy is about identifying schools, whether academies or maintained schools, that are not doing enough to help pupils fulfil their potential. We want to ensure that such schools have the support they need to make improvements so that every child has access to the best education.
To target support at the schools that need it most, we have developed the coasting definition set out in the draft regulations. The definition is clear, transparent and data-based so that schools will be in no doubt about whether they have fallen within it. It focuses on the progress that pupils make in a school, recognising the differences in intake by looking at the starting point of pupils rather than only their attainment. It considers performance over three years, so that we can identify and support schools that have struggled to stretch their pupils sufficiently over a number of years, not those that have simply suffered an isolated dip in performance.
The definition will identify those schools that are struggling to ensure that pupils reach their potential. It will allow the right support to be put in place so that they may improve and give pupils the excellent education they deserve. As the Committee can see, the three-year coasting definition contains interim measures for performance in 2014 and 2015, and new measures from 2016 onwards. That is because the accountability system against which performance in primary and secondary schools is measured changed in 2016. I am aware that that makes the coasting definition more complicated in 2016 and 2017, but that approach is fairer to schools. The coasting definition is therefore based on the measures that schools were already working to in those particular years. The definition will, of course, be simpler from 2018 when the interim measures no longer apply.
Subject to Parliament’s approval of the draft regulations, regional schools commissioners will identify and start to support the first coasting schools early in the new year, once the revised 2016 results are published. A school must be below the coasting thresholds in all three years—2014, 2015 and 2016—to fall within the overall coasting definition. A primary school will fall within the definition if in 2014 and 2015 fewer than 85% of pupils achieved level 4 or above in reading, writing and mathematics, and less than the national median percentage of pupils achieved expected progress in reading, writing and mathematics; and in 2016—
Graham Jones (Hyndburn) (Lab)
The Minister has raised the crux of the 2016 Act, which I have raised previously. A coasting shire school with a great intake of pupils, such as in Hertfordshire or Buckinghamshire, is not going to fail the second of those assessments and be below the national median because its pupils will probably do quite well. What assessment has the Minister made of which schools will fall under the definition of coasting by indices of deprivation, demographic and urban geography?
Mr Gibb
The hon. Gentleman raises the issue of attainment in a primary school, so I assume his intervention is based on the primary school definition rather than secondary school definition, which is based purely on progress. We are unapologetic for including attainment as well as progress in the primary school measure, because it is important that every young person at primary school reaches a certain threshold of achievement if they are to succeed at secondary school.
In response to the hon. Gentleman’s specific question, where the schools that fall within the definition appear geographically and in terms of deprivation will become clear once the final figures for primary schools are published later this month. We will then see specifically which schools fall within the definition of coasting.
As I was saying, the regulations mean that a primary school will fall within the definition if in 2014 and 2015 fewer than 85% of pupils achieved level 4 or above in reading, writing and maths, and below the national median percentage of pupils achieved expected progress in reading, writing and maths; and if in 2016 fewer than 85% of pupils met the new expected standard in reading, writing and maths and the school’s progress scores were below minus 2.5 in reading or below minus 3.5 in writing or below minus 2.5 in maths.
A secondary school will fall within the definition if in 2014 and 2015 fewer than 60% of pupils achieved five or more A* to C grades at GCSE, including English and maths, and below the national median percentage of pupils achieved expected progress in English and maths; and if in 2016 the school’s progress 8 score was below minus 0.25.
That definition of coasting, with the exception of the thresholds for the 2016 progress scores, was first published in June 2015 and informed much of the debate and scrutiny during the passage of the Education and Adoption Bill in the first Session of this Parliament.
Graham Jones
I am grateful to the Minister for being candid. I understand that there is a bigger attainment element because there is no progress 8 in primary schools but, in secondary schools, there is an attainment level assessment. In years 2014 and 2015 the assessment is based on A* to C GCSE grades. There is an attainment aspect of secondary school forced academisation because that is essentially what we are talking about. The proposed legislation is about forced academisation of working-class schools in working-class neighbourhoods. Is that not true?
Mr Gibb
To take the last part of the hon. Gentleman’s intervention first, it is not about forced academisation. It is about ensuring that the eight regional schools commissioners can target additional support to those schools in whatever area of the country—north or south, wealthy or less wealthy—to ensure that they have the right support to ensure that every pupil in those areas fulfils their potential. It is about getting national leaders of education, and getting stronger schools to support schools that are not performing as well as they ought to be, to ensure that parents can be confident that when they send their child to a local school it is a good school. That is the objective of this Government and I am sure that that is his objective.
Graham Jones
I appreciate the Minister’s sentiment, but I question the application. The right hon. Member for Surrey Heath, who is in the room, is a big advocate of academisation. That policy seems to be carrying on. I went to what might be described as a Conservative school. It was guaranteed to get 60%. Forty years ago when I was there, I thought it was coasting. Why should it be exempt? Under the 2014 and 2015 element of the assessment, it would be exempt, yet the working-class school down the road was far better, although the intake did not have the ability.
Mr Gibb
Yes, but the hon. Gentleman is referring to the position as it was. The metrics on which schools were being held to account for many years was the proportion of their pupils who achieved five or more good GCSEs. We have changed that. From 2016, the judgment will be based on progress 8—the level of progress made by the school. That will deal with all the issues to which the hon. Gentleman refers. We want to spread the measure over three years to ensure that one particular year does not lead to a school falling into the definition. What we cannot do when providing a legal definition of coasting is go back and have different metrics from those that the schools expected at that time. That is why we have combined an attainment figure and a progress measure for the years 2014 and 2015. It is complex, but we believe that is the fairest way to hold schools to account.
We held a public consultation on our proposed coasting definition in autumn 2015, which sought views on the definition and on an illustrative version of the regulations. A range of views were expressed in the responses. Although there was some disagreement with the premise of identifying coasting schools, as the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee recognised, there was wide support, including among those who were otherwise opposed to a definition, for the use of a progress measure as the basis of a coasting definition. Many respondents felt that that was the fairest and most effective way of identifying those schools that are failing to ensure that pupils reach their full potential.
I am aware that the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee was concerned that the regulations would have a greater impact on schools than suggested in the accompanying explanatory memorandum. I reassure the Committee that that is not the case. Since the scrutiny Committee reported, we have published a statistical note with our provisional estimates of the number of schools that will meet the definition when revised 2016 results are published. That shows that about 800 schools—just under 5% of schools with eligible results—are likely to fall within the definition based on their provisional data. Some of those schools may also be below the floor standard or be judged inadequate by Ofsted. They would already be working with regional schools commissioners to improve their performance. For those schools, being identified as coasting will not necessarily lead to any additional action.
Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)
The Minister identifies 800 schools falling within the category. Will he tell us how many of them are locally maintained schools? I have a figure of about 400, but he can come back to me later if needs be.
Mr Gibb
The hon. Gentleman asks a perfectly reasonable question and I will come back to him during the debate to give him those precise figures if they are available.
As I was saying, falling within the definition will be the start of a conversation. Regional school commissioners will talk to all the schools identified, whether they are academies or maintained schools—I respect the hon. Gentleman’s point—to understand the wider context and decide whether additional support would help them to improve. The RSC may decide that a school is supporting pupils well or has a sufficient plan and the capacity to improve itself, and that therefore no further support is required. Alternatively, the RSC, working with the school, may consider that additional support is needed from, for example, a national leader of education or a high-performing local school. The RSC will then work with the school to help it to put that support in place.
In some cases, the regional schools commissioner, following discussions with the school, may think that a more formal approach is required. For maintained schools, the RSC may use the Secretary of State’s power to require the school to accept support or to change the membership of its governing body. For academies, the RSC may issue the academy trust with a warning notice setting out the improvement action required.
We expect that the regional schools commissioners will use the Secretary of State’s power to direct a coasting maintained school to become an academy, or to move a coasting academy to a new trust, in only a small minority of cases, which addresses head-on the point made by the hon. Member for Hyndburn.
Graham Jones
I accept that point. Will the Minister roll that argument on and tell me how a coasting free school will be affected?
Mr Gibb
The coasting definition in the regulations applies just as much to free schools and academies as it does to maintained schools. If having worked with the trust board of that free school there is a concern that it is unable to improve standards, there will be a re-brokerage of that school to another multi-academy trust with a stronger track record of school improvement and overseeing academies.
We do not believe that the regulations will place a significant or unreasonable burden on the schools system. All schools will already be working to ensure that they continue to improve and provide the best education they can for their pupils. Where more support is needed to help a coasting school to improve, we will ensure that that is put in place. Structural change through conversion to an academy or a change of academy trust will happen in only a small minority of cases and only where it is not possible to achieve the necessary improvement in any other way. Where that is the case, we will provide the new sponsors of the schools with additional funding to support the change. It is not unreasonable or overly burdensome when it is the only way to ensure that pupils receive the excellent education that they deserve.
I know that the Committee supports our ambition to ensure that all pupils, whatever their background, receive an education that enables them to fulfil their potential. I hope that, having seen the detail of our proposed coasting definition and heard about the principles that underpin it, the Committee will also agree that the definition set out in the regulations is the right one. I therefore commend the regulations to the Committee.
Mike Kane
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. This is the final stage of the legislative journey to implement the Government’s commitment to identifying coasting schools, but the idea of coasting schools came about under the last Labour Government, who saw them as schools at risk of failure. Labour identified the issue quite a few years ago, so it has been quite a journey to get to this point.
As the Minister has pointed out, the draft regulations give extended powers to the regional schools commissioners to intervene, yet today we learn that one of the Government’s key performance indicators for the commissioners is not standards, but how many schools they get converted into academies. Just this afternoon, Schools Week says:
“The government continued judging regional schools commissioners (RSCs) on how many schools they converted into academies…despite fears about a conflict of interest”.
That prompts the question whether the RSCs are independent arbiters in terms of judging whether our schools are failing, successful or coasting.
Although RSCs were introduced as a pragmatic response, we need to ensure that there is proper oversight. I think that there is a capacity issue. The Select Committee on Education says that RSCs are part of a
“complicated system of…accountability and inspection”.
That prompts the question whether they are fit for purpose. The Education Committee says that a
“fundamental reassessment of accountability and oversight for all schools will be required in the future to provide coherence”
and talks about ensuring
“that RSCs have the capacity to cope with planned expansion of their role.”
The Minister has already said that what we are discussing could affect 800 schools. We know from previous debates that the Department for Education is groaning under the weight of the MAT—multi-academy trust—initiative, whereby more schools are leaving local authority control and being directly controlled from Whitehall. That situation will be exacerbated very quickly, with 800 schools coming online.
The Select Committee says that the role of RSCs “remains unclear”, that they do not have effective relationships and that there is a “lack of transparency” and an issue about decision making. It says that without attention to those issues, they will come across as “undemocratic and opaque”.
One measure of the opacity is the report by Martin George in The Times Educational Supplement that none of the regional headteacher boards, which meet monthly to decide whether a school is coasting or doing well,
“have published minutes since June”.
So schools do not know; they are not getting the information. The Select Committee Chair, the hon. Member for Stroud (Neil Carmichael), told The Times Educational Supplement:
“There’s a paucity of useful information available online about the work of headteacher boards…The Department for Education…and RSCs need to up their game and ensure up-to-date information is published to ensure there is transparency and accountability.”
The ultimate tool in the regulations is that which forces schools to academise, but the Government need to think again about whether blanket academisation is the only vehicle to support the raising of standards. There is a mountain of evidence that academisation is no silver bullet, so let us look at the evidence. The Department’s own statistical working paper says that at key stage 4, more than half—54%—of MATs are performing significantly below average for adding value, and a further 13% are estimated to be performing slightly below average.
Michael Gove
Will the hon. Gentleman enlighten the Committee by reminding us how many more children are in schools that are good or outstanding now, in comparison with 2010?
Mike Kane
I remind the right hon. Gentleman of what Tim Brighouse said about the right hon. Gentleman’s stewardship of the Department for Education, namely that
“there has to be coherence between what you say and what you do”.
There has been a decline in standards in our school system under this Government; there is no doubt about that. Currently, two thirds of multi-academy trust pupils are making less progress at key stage 4 than pupils nationally. If we look at other measures in the report, we will see that three in five schools—nearly 60%—are performing below average for improvement in the value added at key stage 4. That means three in five MATs are improving pupil progress at key stage 4 more slowly than schools with a similar starting point.
Claire Perry (Devizes) (Con)
I want to share with the hon. Gentleman my experience of being a governor of two schools in my constituency as they went through both the academisation and the MAT process. Perhaps rather than reading out what frankly sound like incorrect statistics, he should go and talk to schools. The turnaround in those schools and, indeed, the schools they have sponsored as part of the MAT initiative is astonishing, and it has been done at a time when we all could accept that the exam regime is getting tougher, not easier. I think he is factually incorrect.
Mike Kane
I am grateful for the hon. Lady’s intervention, but with 20 years of governance experience, 10 years as a practising teacher and eight years on a local education authority, I am not going to take any lectures about our commitment to education.
At key stage 2, half of MATs are performing below average for adding value, and more than a third are below average for improvement in adding value. Those statistics need to be out there. The main finding is that on all value added measures, more MATs are performing at the extremes of significantly above or significantly below average than are performing close to the average. That is true for both key stage 2 and key stage 4. Performance levels vary widely among MATs.
Chris Philp (Croydon South) (Con)
May I draw the shadow Minister’s attention to the answer to the question raised by the former Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath? Some 1.4 million more children are in good or outstanding schools now than before. Does the shadow Minister’s analysis of multi-academy trusts and free schools account for a school’s performance before it was academised? In my constituency—I suspect that this situation is similar to that in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Devizes—the schools that were taken over and academised were failing schools that are now succeeding.
Mike Kane
What we have seen is an estate that has disintegrated and been nationalised and privatised in equal measure. As I have said, we have seen standards going down, which I will come back to in a moment.
In its executive summary, the Department mentions historically underperforming schools. The fact is that three quarters of schools in its analysis are sponsored academies, but the report finds a near to zero correlation between performance and either academy type or length of time open. That is true for key stage 2, key stage 4, value added and all improvement measures.
What data are being used to define “coasting”? Will they include 2016 primary school data, which are, in everybody’s opinion, extraordinarily dodgy? That comes from the national schools commissioner, Sir David Carter, who said that those would not be used. So did Ofsted, but we are already hearing of schools having to use those data to define themselves as coasting. A primary school is coasting if it meets the 2016 part of the definition—in other words, if fewer than 85% of children achieve the expected standard at the end of primary and if the average progress made by pupils is minus 2.5 in English reading, minus 2.5 in mathematics or minus 3.5 in English writing.
However, in 2016, primary assessment reforms were undermined by errors and delays. Two papers—key stage 1 and key stage 2 spelling, punctuation and grammar tests—were leaked, which led to the key stage 1 paper being made optional and the Minister having to make a statement to the House about the leak of the key stage 2 paper. Guidance on teacher assessment for writing was not only issued unacceptably late; it was also subject to repeated correction, clarification and updates.
Pupils taking the 2016 assessments were doing so after two years of studying the new national curriculum, despite four years’ worth of curriculum content being assessed. One can only imagine the immense workload and pressure that trying to cover so much in so little time generated for teachers and pupils. I visited primary school after primary school in Wythenshawe and Sale East to see the pressure that had been placed on those teachers because of the confusion and chaos that Government policies implemented at the heart of the curriculum and its assessment.
Ofsted warned its inspectors to use extreme caution when basing judgments on the 2016 data, especially the writing data. Only 53% of pupils met the expected standard, which is significantly below the attainment element of 85%. The brand new tests this year were rushed, chaotic and confusing, and there are major concerns with the assessment of writing and reading tests. We know from schools in our constituency that the pressure on heads has been appalling. How does all of that sit with the Secretary of State’s commitment, on 19 October? She said:
“I want to be clear that no decisions on intervention will be made on the basis of the 2016 data alone.”—[Official Report, 19 October 2016; Vol. 615, c. 36WS.]
I have some questions for the Minister. I said earlier that 800 schools appear to be at risk of being declared as coasting. My data show that on 15 December nearly 400 local authority-maintained schools will be publicly labelled as coasting. Will the Minister confirm or deny that? Have the regional schools commissioners notified all of those schools, Ofsted and the local authorities involved? If the regional schools commissioners decide that the local authority should be involved, how will that be funded after the education services grant finishes in September 2017? If the regional schools commissioners decide that intervention is required, are they sufficiently equipped and funded to carry out or commission the school improvement role, and are there sufficient multi-academy trusts waiting to take over, particularly for those small primary schools? I know that that is a huge concern, particularly for rural schools in the constituencies of many Conservative Members.
I have asked the Minister a series of questions, and we are extraordinarily concerned about what happened with the 2016 assessments and how that will impact on the regulations. We also have concerns about the lack of devolved regional schools commissioners, who are accountable only to the Secretary of State and whose independence is being tainted by the fact that one of their key performance indicators is how many academies they create on their watch.
Robert Flello (Stoke-on-Trent South) (Lab)
It is a pleasure, as ever, to see you in the Chair, Mr Gray. I will make just a couple of points, if I may. First, I certainly do not think it is a political point to say that every child should fulfil their potential, and I therefore do not think that anybody wants to see a school that coasts or deliberately allows its pupils not to fulfil their potential. Sadly, what is a political point is the means by which that potential is achieved. We have heard numbers bandied about on more children being in good schools and all the rest of that, but I pay tribute to the teachers and senior leadership teams who, despite everything, are performing phenomenally under huge pressure, and who are helping our children to be the best that they can be.
This instrument will not win any prizes for plain English. A slight bugbear of mine is when measures have quotes such as “‘PTREADWRITTAMATX’ column” and so forth. It takes me back 30-odd years to when I was messing around with my first computer and looking at coding. My fear is that the measure is some sort of code, and that the result is automatic academisation. I will come to that point shortly.
The explanatory memorandum states:
“Once a school has fallen within the coasting definition, Regional Schools Commissioners (RSCs) acting on behalf of the Secretary of State will engage the schools to consider its wider context, and decide whether additional support is needed”.
It is a shame that it takes a mathematical calculation to require the regional schools commissioners to do something. I am sure that better regional schools commissioners are already all over their schools, but the way the measure is structured suggests that there is no engagement, which I am sure there is. Not only would a non-professional non-teacher think that the instrument is gibberish, they would also be slightly if not very concerned that the engagement of commissioners happens only when a mathematical problem arises and when various points are triggered from something that is, at first sight, unintelligible.
Another concern is the time delay—the measure talks about looking at things over three years. It may well be that a school has not been performing particularly well for a year and starts to trigger the tests. By the end of the three years of tests, we are potentially into the fifth year of that school not performing well, by which time pupils will have passed all the way through that school without it ever being identified as coasting. I would like a situation whereby, if a primary school has problems—[Interruption]. Bless my hon. Friend the Member for Hyndburn. If a primary school has been identified, can support therefore be offered to the secondary schools that those children are going to, to ensure that they do not suffer in their education?
I wanted to share my concern about paragraph 7.9 in the explanatory memorandum, which states:
“Intervention will not be automatic.”
The Minister repeated this point. It is a shame that there is not already support, but if support is not automatic, it seems to contradict the requirements that the commissioners try to get more schools to be academies. I am therefore concerned not only that that intervention will be automatic, but that the automatic default position will be for the school to be made into an academy.
You will be delighted to hear, Mr Gray, that I will not detain the Committee any more than I already have, but I would like the Minister to address my points and concerns. I beg him please in future to have statutory instruments that do not use such awful phrases, albeit in inverted commas.
Mr Gibb
The hon. Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East, the shadow Minister, asked about the RSCs’ KPIs. We are reviewing the RSCs’ KPIs to ensure that they do continue to reflect the RSCs’ new role and remit appropriately. The revised set of year 2 KPIs will be published in the academy’s annual report later this year. The year 3 KPIs are being developed as we speak.
Mr Gibb
No, what I am saying is that the KPIs are evolving in the same way as the role of the regional schools commissioner is evolving. As that role evolves, and as new responsibilities are given to the regional schools commissioner, so the KPIs have to be revised and amended to reflect those new responsibilities.
The hon. Gentleman asked about the split between academies and maintained schools. As far as primary schools are concerned, he is right. On the basis of the provisional data for 2016 and the previous two years, about 373 local authority primary schools will fall within the definition, along with 106 academies. In terms of secondary schools, 151 local authority maintained schools and 176 academy schools fall within the definition.
Graham Jones
I am grateful for the Minister’s generosity in giving way and tackling some of these questions. Is this a quota for the number of academy schools? We see figures such as 400 out of 800 schools, or the figures that the Minister has just given. Are they quotas that ought to be achieved by those making the decisions about how many academy schools there should be?
Mr Gibb
No, there is no quota. Coasting is not about academisation, as I have tried to say a number of times. The measure is about ensuring that schools get the support they need to improve, so that the pupils at those schools get the education they deserve in order to fulfil their potential. That is what this is about in toto. I hope the hon. Gentleman accepts that.
The split between academies and maintained schools at secondary level reflects the fact that more than 60% of all secondary schools are now academies. The sponsored academies have a history of poor performance, which is why they became sponsored academies. I am not surprised by the split of the numbers of academies and the numbers of maintained local authority schools at key stage 4 at secondary level that would fall within the definition.
The hon. Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East asked whether we will name those schools that fall under the definition. Coasting is not about naming and shaming, and we will not publish a list of schools that fall under the definition. It is about support. The first coasting schools will be identified after the final 2016 results are published. We will not make that contact on the basis of the provisional results because they change.
Mr Gibb
I will come back to that point in a moment. All of the definition of a coasting school is based on published data. If parents want to go through the definition, they will be able to identify that. In addition, once a school has been notified that it falls within the coasting definition, it will inform parents of that fact.
The hon. Gentleman asked whether the regional schools commissioners have the capacity to take on that role with coasting schools. Alongside this restructuring, the number of staff delivering the regional schools commissioner remit has grown to reflect the growing number of academies and free schools, and the expanded scope of the regional schools commissioner remit, including responsibilities for coasting schools. Because of those new responsibilities, there are approximately 350 full-time equivalent staff members across the eight regional schools commissioner-led regional teams. As their responsibilities change, there will be changes to staff numbers.
The hon. Gentleman asked whether the regional schools commissioners have the expertise to decide what action to take in a coasting school. Regional schools commissioners have a wealth of experience to draw on when making decisions. They have been appointed by the Secretary of State for their extensive knowledge of the education sector in their regions. They are supported by headteacher boards made up of local outstanding headteachers, chief executives of multi-academy trusts and local leaders.
The hon. Gentleman raised the same question that Opposition Members raised about the academies programme. Sponsored academies are improving faster than their predecessor schools, but my right hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath, the former Secretary of State, asked the key question in the debate: how many more children are in schools judged good and outstanding today compared with when Labour left office in 2010? He asked the hon. Gentleman that question and answer was there none. We were helpfully aided by my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South, who provided the answer when he said that 1.4 million more pupils are in schools graded good or outstanding today than in 2010. I have an announcement to make, and I hope the Committee is paying attention. There are now 1.8 million more pupils in schools graded good or outstanding today than in 2010, and nearly 90% of schools are judged by Ofsted to be good or outstanding.
The hon. Gentleman asked whether there were enough sponsors. Over the past five years, we have delivered 1,726 sponsored academies and have 957 approved academy sponsors. Over the next five years, as the number of sponsored academies continues to grow, regional schools commissioners will continue to work with existing sponsors to help them expand. In addition to growing existing sponsors, there is a pool of high-performing schools that we can draw on. To reiterate the point that I have made several times during the debate, the coasting measure focuses on support. We expect regional schools commissioners to pursue an academy solution only in a small minority of cases.
The hon. Gentleman raised the issue of funding and the education services grant. In 2016-17, the Department has provided more than £50 million to fund accredited system leaders. As of 1 November, there are more than 750 teaching schools, 1,150 national leaders of education and 500 national leaders of governance, present in every region in England. New designation criteria for NLEs and teaching schools will increase that further still. We are also considering what new funding might be made available to schools to support improvement, including for coasting schools. We expect to make an announcement on that shortly.
Mr Gibb
Within the context of this debate, it is obviously key that schools are properly funded. We have ensured that core school funding has been a priority. We also want to ensure that there is fair funding and we will be making an announcement shortly on the second stage of that consultation. We consulted on the principles behind the national fair funding formula. We are absolutely determined to ensure that the historical anomalies and unfairness of the current funding system are addressed, which is something that was not delivered by the last Labour Government.
Graham Jones
Coasting schools—or even failing schools, because they are not coasting—could be an issue in my constituency because of falling school rolls for example. That would deplete school funding and resources and make the school unable to provide the quality of education that would be expected at a school with a full roll. Will the Minister take such considerations into account when discussing the funding formula and coasting schools? My constituency has a declining population, for example, and that clearly has an impact on the school roll, school budgets and, therefore, school performance.
Mr Gibb
The hon. Gentleman will notice from the first stage of the consultation all the different factors that will lead to determining the fair funding formula. They include things such as low prior attainment of pupils and sparsity. There will be a fixed sum for every school to enable small schools to cope with fixed costs. All the issues that the hon. Gentleman raises are reflected in the principles established in the first stage of the consultation. The decisions that we are making now are on the weighting of those factors, which we will announce and consult on very shortly.
I want to refer to the issues raised by the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent South. He is right and we accept all the criticism that he makes. The regulations are complex. That is because from a legal point of view they have to pinpoint precisely and unambiguously which elements of the performance data the coasting definition relates to. The only way to do that is to refer to the unique column names in the data files that underpin the performance tables each year. We recognise that that does not make the regulations particularly user-friendly, but it was necessary to draft them in that manner to ensure that they were legally effective.
Schools will not have to rely on the regulations to understand the coasting definition; the requirements are also set out clearly and in plain English in the wider technical guidance on accountability for primary and secondary schools. Schools also understand where those numbers come from for their own school and nationally. On that basis, I hope that the Committee will support the regulations.
The Chair
The Question is that the Committee has considered the draft Coasting Schools (England) Regulations 2016. As many of that opinion, say aye. [Hon. Members: “Aye.”]. To the contrary, no. I think the ayes have it. The ayes have it. Order, order.
The Chair
Too late, mate. Sorry. [Interruption.] Order. Am I right in thinking that Opposition Members are changing their minds?
The Chair
Let’s just do the thing again, for the sake of good order. I do not want any complaints.
Question put.
Ministerial Correction
(8 years ago)
Ministerial CorrectionsRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Culture, Media and Sport
(8 years ago)
Ministerial CorrectionsRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Karen Bradley
I agree with the hon. Gentleman about the bravery of Andy Woodward. I understand that during the time I have been on my feet, over 250 reports have been made to the NSPCC helpline, of which 51 are in Cheshire alone.
[Official Report, 29 November 2016, Vol. 617, c. 1403.]
Letter of correction from Karen Bradley:
An error has been identified in the response I gave to the hon. Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) during the urgent question on historical sexual abuse in football.
The correct response should have been:
Karen Bradley
I agree with the hon. Gentleman about the bravery of Andy Woodward. I understand that during the time I have been on my feet, over 250 reports have been made to the police, of which 51 are in Cheshire alone.
Homelessness Reduction Bill (Second sitting)
Wednesday 30th November 2016
(8 years ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Homelessness Reduction Act 2017 View all Homelessness Reduction Act 2017 Debates Read Hansard Text Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 30 November 2016 - (30 Nov 2016)
Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)
I beg to move,
That the Order of the Committee of 23 November 2016 be amended, by inserting at the end—
“except on 14 December when the Committee will meet at 10.00 am.”
Let me explain, for the benefit of the Committee, that we intend to proceed as much as possible by consensus. I have had a request on behalf of three members of the Committee who will be visiting Berlin with the Communities and Local Government Committee. They will be travelling back that day, so we will meet slightly later to allow them to attend this Committee and play a full part in proceedings.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 2
Duty to provide advisory services
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Bob Blackman
In many ways, this substantive clause, on which we have been given notice of no amendments, goes to the very heart of the Bill. The current position is that advisory services are provided by local authorities to priority need households, but not to non-priority need ones. The measure will require each local authority to provide advisory services on all local housing authorities for all applicants. Authorities will have to provide information and advice to any person who goes to them from their area. The advice must cover: the provision of preventing and relieving homelessness; the rights of homeless people or those threatened with homelessness; the duties of the authority; the help available from the local housing authority and other agencies; and how to access the available help.
The idea is that each local authority should design its own service. We do not want to take away the flexibility of local authorities to design their help and advice service, but clearly they should design such a service with certain listed vulnerable groups in mind—for example, care leavers, who are covered in the Bill for the first time, and victims of domestic abuse. The Bill allows local housing authorities to outsource the advisory services, if they so choose, to a third party such as a contractor or a specialist agency.
The measure has been included in the Bill to ensure that local housing authorities provide detailed advice and information to all households in their area, including those that are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless, so that households can be empowered to seek support and solutions to their current situation. That is a far cry from what goes on at the moment. Currently, many local authorities, as we discovered through the Select Committee process, do not provide such services to non-priority need homeless people. Clearly there are local authorities that do provide such services, and we do not want to hamper their ability to do so.
The measure ensures that everyone has access to a similar type of help in the first instance. People who face the terrible crisis of being threatened with homelessness or, worse still, have suffered homelessness will get help and advice; they will not just be shown the door by a local authority. It is quite clear that the existing law does not specify the type or quality of advice and information that must be provided on homelessness and its prevention, and nor does it require that advice to be tailored to the needs of local people, particularly the needs of certain groups. Evidence that we secured through the Select Committee process suggested that some local authorities provide minimal or, even worse, out-of-date information. The measure means that, for the first time, local authorities will have to provide that service to people in this terrible position.
Michael Tomlinson (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (Con)
Will my hon. Friend clarify how he envisages the interplay between this local authority advisory service and charitable organisations such as Routes to Roots, which is just outside my constituency but within Poole?
Bob Blackman
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. Local authorities will clearly have to design the service with local needs in mind. We cannot prescribe every single way in which they can choose to provide the help and advice that individuals in their area will need, because to do so would hamper their creativity. The whole idea behind the Bill is to turn on its head the attitude, which has existed in some local authorities, that they will not help someone unless they are in priority need. Local authorities would now be required to provide help and advice to anyone and everyone from their local areas who is threatened with homelessness. For example, my hon. Friend’s local authority may choose to outsource its role to a charity or another third party; that is its choice and we do not want to hamper it. What matters is that the individuals receive the help and advice they need to guide them in the right direction.
Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)
I am not a member of the Select Committee. What would drive a council not to want to provide that service? What kinds of factors would influence them to have such a negative attitude?
Bob Blackman
One of the clear ways, which we covered in some detail on Second Reading, is the fact that for 40 years, thanks to legislation, we as Members of Parliament have encouraged local authorities to concentrate all their resources on priority need households and not to provide help and assistance to single homeless people or non-priority need households. The idea behind the Bill is literally to turn that on its head so that everyone will get help and advice. The key issue is that local authorities have funding pressures and so must concentrate on what they have to do to meet a statutory need, rather than necessarily on what they would like to do. For 40 years local authorities have rationed the help and advice given to individuals threatened with this situation. When this Bill, hopefully, becomes law, local authorities will be planning for how they will meet that particular need.
Will Quince (Colchester) (Con)
An amendment will be considered later relating to other advice that might go alongside the advice on homelessness and housing. Might citizens advice bureaux, which exist in many towns up and down the country, be commissioned to do that, on the basis that they can offer advice not only on homelessness reduction, but on other areas that a local authority homelessness adviser might not be able to advise on?
Bob Blackman
When an individual threatened with homelessness approaches a local authority for help and advice, one of the pieces of advice that they might be given is to go to a citizens advice bureau. Citizens advice bureaux are not resourced to provide that service at the moment. Under the Bill, however, if local authorities choose to outsource it, they will need to fund it as part and parcel of the process. That could be good news for citizens advice bureaux and other organisations up and down the country.
David Mackintosh (Northampton South) (Con)
Given my hon. Friend’s experience in local government, I am sure that he will agree that many people who present to local authorities as homeless and in priority need are covered under the current legislation and funded. However, does he agree that if many of those people had been given the advice that is proposed in the Bill, they might not have found themselves in those circumstances in the first place?
Bob Blackman
We are extending the prevention duty to 56 days so that local authorities can intervene early. My aim in introducing this Bill is to ensure that no one ever becomes homeless, because they will seek help and advice at an early stage and the local authority will identify an alternative property for those people who are threatened with this situation. That might take some time and it might not be realisable in the first place, but if an individual, a family or others approach the local authority at an early stage and are given help and advice, the homelessness that often happens can be prevented. There can be nothing worse for any family than being forced to wait until the bailiffs arrive, and then having to present themselves at a local housing office with their bags packed and nowhere to sleep. The idea is to stop them getting to that stage.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Mr Marcus Jones)
My hon. Friend is making a powerful case. With regard to the points made by my hon. Friends the Members for Mid Dorset and North Poole, for Colchester and for Northampton South, does he agree that the £20 million fund for prevention trailblazers, which will drive better prevention work within local authorities even before the Bill comes into effect, will be valuable, particularly as the bidding process is now open? We are expecting bids from people working with charities, not-for-profit organisations and other parts of the public services to help prevent people from becoming homeless.
Bob Blackman
I thank my hon. Friend for that timely intervention on the ingenuity of local authorities to meet the needs of local residents. It is good news that the fund is available, and I would encourage every local authority to bid for it and to start thinking about creative ways to help people threatened with homelessness. We want to prevent those individuals from becoming homeless in the first place. Local authorities can now get their thinking caps on, get creative and bid for that fund. I understand that up to 20 local authorities might be successful in this bidding round. I hope that it is oversubscribed, so that the Minister will have to find extra money to support that initiative in the run-up to the Bill hopefully becoming law, with every local authority in the country having to provide that service.
The advice given will be different depending on the needs of the individual, the family or the sets of individuals who are applying. The idea is that the advisory service should be designed to meet the needs of particularly at-risk groups, such as care leavers or victims of domestic abuse—those are two examples, but there are many reasons why people become homeless. It is not easy to categorise those areas, so the key is that the advisory service should be individualised. It should not be a basic service where someone turns up and has a look at a computer; it should be individual and with people who have been trained with this in mind.
The most important point about the clause is that those threatened with homelessness will get effective information right across the country. It will help every household threatened with homelessness or, worse still, those who become homeless. They will get the information they need. I believe that this has been supported throughout. There is a cross-party consensus, so I hope that everyone in the Committee will see the benefit of the clause and that we can then go forward.
Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Chope, for the first substantive sitting of this Committee. I echo what the Bill’s promoter said: as far as possible, there will be a consensual and hopefully constructive atmosphere throughout our proceedings, because the substance of the Bill is supported by those on both Front Benches. We have already seen two indications of that. First, I am grateful for the change in the sittings motion, which is mainly for the convenience of Opposition Members so that they can come here direct from Berlin, filled with European bonhomie, in order to engage in our proceedings. Secondly, no amendments have been tabled to this clause. However, it is an important clause and I would like to make one or two comments.
Michael Tomlinson
It is great to be on a Bill Committee where there is cross-party support. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the burdens on local authorities are not especially onerous and that the associated costs, specifically in relation to clause 2, will therefore be relatively minimal?
Andy Slaughter
No, I do not. All the right points have been made in relation to how we can either not provide a service or provide lip service. If we want to provide a good quality advice service—in other words, trained staff who know what they are doing and who can spend time with often vulnerable people—it will require a substantial increase in resources. That is obviously only part of the equation, and I accept that other duties in the Bill will be more onerous. There will, however, be additional demands on those small authorities that might not have anybody, or only one person, who does that as part of their job. I will not go into the detail now, but I put the Minister on notice that, at some point in Committee, we hope to hear clearly from the Government what resources will be made available, in cash and percentage terms; how those resources will be delivered; and how prescriptive they will be. Will there be a specific advice budget?
Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)
Happy St Andrew’s day to the Committee and to you, Mr Chope. Is the hon. Gentleman aware of the Scottish experience? We abolished priority needs in homelessness, but we had a 10-year run-up before doing so. Does he agree that, given the steps in the Bill to make advice available to everybody, the resources and planning need to be considered carefully?
Andy Slaughter
The hon. Lady makes a good point, and I have no doubt that the Committee will hear a substantial amount about the Scottish experience. I do not know whether anyone here is qualified to talk about the Welsh experience, which also underlies much of the Bill.
It is almost a truism to say that, if we are to address this issue, we cannot address it piecemeal. We have to consider not only how services are resourced, but the potential outcomes so that we can see, I hope, a seamless link from prevention through to advice and resolution. If there are lessons to be learned from Scotland, the hon. Lady will not be slow in recommending them.
Will Quince
I have listened carefully to the hon. Gentleman, and I still fail to understand his exact point. My understanding is that local authorities already have this duty—it is a function that they should be performing. In my experience—I will not follow his advice in making partisan attacks on my Liberal Democrat and Labour-run local authority—the advice currently being given is, in many cases, poor and inaccurate. That is an issue not of funding, but of giving good quality advice.
Andy Slaughter
I respectfully disagree with the hon. Gentleman. I am trying to be factual, at least according to my own experience, and my experience is not uncharacteristic. I saw nods from members on both sides of the Committee when I described what Members have to deal with as a consequence of local authorities not dealing with issues and of advice simply not being available.
It is an issue that local authorities have not been doing what they should have been doing, but the reason for that is that they do not want to resource the service. Therefore, they either resource the advice inadequately through insufficient training, or they deliberately do not resource it in order to avoid incurring the additional expenses that result from accepting people as homeless, giving them proper advice and providing a solution to their housing problems. I agree with the hon. Gentleman that there has to be a change in mindset, but we cannot just wish for that and think it will happen.
Michelle Donelan (Chippenham) (Con)
Does the hon. Gentleman accept that there is a postcode lottery in terms of the service that people get? If someone is homeless in one area, they might get a completely different service from that available in another. We need more than a change in mindset; we need a change in the legislation, which is perhaps why we are all here today.
Andy Slaughter
Yes, there are different attitudes in different areas. Some of it may be policy-driven, but some may be resource-driven or demand-driven in the way that authorities respond. Well motivated though the Bill is, I am not sure that simply enacting it will resolve that issue. It will take not just funding, but careful policing, both by Government and the homelessness charities, which will no doubt monitor the Bill’s implementation —just as they monitor the current problems—to ensure that local authorities live up to their duties.
I do not want to talk for too long, so let me exemplify what I mean by the difficulties arising from the clause. What it proposes is materially different from the existing situation, because the clause is far more specific and onerous in its description of the categories of people who should be given advice and what type of advice should be given. Let me mention a point from each side of the argument, namely what Shelter and the Association of Housing Advice Services told us in their briefings. I am grateful, as I am sure are other hon. Members, for all the briefings we have had. Although local authorities and charities have different views, I do not think that any of the bodies involved disagree on the need to improve how these issues are dealt with, and the fact that the concerns being raised by local authorities are legitimate. Had I known of Shelter’s concerns earlier, I may well have tabled an amendment to that effect.
Shelter is concerned that although groups were rightly specified relatively recently in legislation—under the previous Labour Government—as being a particular concern, such as persons leaving prison, persons leaving hospital, victims of domestic abuse and care leavers, we should not forget the categories of priority homeless: pregnant women, children and older people. I raise this with the Minister because the Government may consider amendments in the other place as well, and it would be sensible to consider whether the list, which is obviously not closed, should include those categories as well.
Let me mention what AHAS said: is specifying the needs of groups with complex or specific problems—perhaps people with mental health problems or those leaving custody—placing a particularly onerous burden on local authorities? In other words, instead of being asked to provide general advice on how to deal with homelessness and what is available in the area, will they be asked to cater for the needs of people in those circumstances, which would better be dealt with by specialist agencies? AHAS raised the possibility of a legal challenge, which might say, “Yes, a perfectly adequate degree of advice was provided for somebody who doesn’t have those needs, but the local authority should have gone further. It should have spent more time, more money and been more concerned about dealing with these people because of their specific needs.” I would be interested to know whether, on those two points, the Government share the concerns that I and local authorities have.
I make one final, general point. I have not attempted to deal with this; it is beyond my drafting skills. There is something slightly odd about the Bill: it applies to England and Wales, but most of the duties it imposes are on housing authorities in England. There are areas of legislation that are now different in Wales—for example, NHS legislation or the Children Act 2004. That might mean that, say, care leavers who have been in the care of Welsh authorities will now come under the purview of English housing authorities, but will still be owed a duty in that way. I ask the Minister and the Bill’s promoter to go away and look at whether we have covered those angles in their entirety.
Will Quince
It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East and the hon. Member for Hammersmith. One issue I have with the current system is the short-sightedness of the approach of some local authorities. I do not want to do down local authorities, because many of them up and down the country do a fantastic job of offering high-quality advice. However, as my hon. Friend the Member for Chippenham said, too many local authorities throughout the country offer advice that is frankly terrible—advice that suits the local authority, as opposed to the individual who faces the threat of homelessness. It is that postcode lottery that I am sure clause 2, and the Bill in general, will address.
We all know that there is a huge cost to homelessness, but we should never forget the huge social cost that comes with it, especially for those who are vulnerable—we have discussed some of the groups that fall under that category. When we look at homelessness, we know from some of the families who come to our surgeries that the people involved have considerable complex needs, which make addressing and preventing homelessness a particular challenge.
Take the example of a family who realise that they are failing to meet their monthly rent in the private rented sector. There may be all sorts of reasons for that. Let us say that they are £200 a month short. At the point at which they realise that they are starting to fall into arrears, they approach their local authority. Their local authority says, “Well, actually the best thing for you to do is wait until your landlord serves you with notice because your arrears have become so considerable—then let’s talk.” They get served with a notice and they go back to the local authority. The local authority then says to them, “Well, wait until the legal proceedings have been commenced and you are then forced out of that property by a bailiff.” Only last week, I met a family who were forcibly evicted from their house while the children were in it. The bailiff smashed the window and came in, the children were scared and crying and the family phoned me. That is disgraceful. That kind of advice should never be given, in my view, but if it is given, that should happen only in very rare circumstances.
Flip that on its head. Say that we applaud the family who recognise at the earliest possible opportunity that they are in difficulty or have a problem. They know they are getting into arrears, but they do not want to let down their landlord and they do not want to make themselves homeless, so they approach the local authority. The local authority says, “Actually, it’s £200 a month. Let’s sit down with you, let’s work with you and let’s see what we can do.” Even if the local authority decided, “You know what? For the sake of £2,000 to £2,500 a year, we will cover that cost”, that would be money well spent, given the cost of helping that family post-eviction. Not only have the family gone through that traumatic ordeal, they now have considerable arrears and a county court judgment against their name. Never again will they be accepted into the private rented sector, and—let us be honest—across all our constituencies, social housing is not readily available, especially for larger families.
Even when the council accepts that it has a duty to help and house the family after they are evicted via a bailiff, they are rarely put in temporary accommodation in the town where they seek help. In my constituency, people are often sent to neighbouring towns, away from their schools and their places of work, which puts both of those in jeopardy.
The point is that it is a huge disruption to their lives. However, the local authority then has very minimal options, because what does it do if it does not have the social housing and particularly those large houses? Its option is to look back to the private rented sector, but what landlord will help somebody who has a CCJ against their name, as well as a record of arrears and not paying their rent?
Moreover, what does what we are saying to those landlords do for the reputation of local authorities up and down this country? I am not a landlord and I will not defend the private rented sector, although it is very important to our housing options, but landlords often have mortgages, so six months of someone not paying rent affects their family, too. The likelihood of their then going on to be reasonable and help those who in the past have got into trouble financially, or indeed those who have a CCJ, is minimal at best.
I welcome the clause for several reasons, largely because of the duty it places on local authorities, to which, as effectively a branch of Government, individuals go for help at possibly one of the most vulnerable and emotionally difficult periods of their life. Those individuals need to rely on that support and have faith that the advice that they are given is not only the best advice but the right advice.
We know that, at the moment, some of the advice being given by local authorities across the country is not right, is against Government advice and is in the interests of the local authority, not those of the individual. Ironically, I believe that giving such advice is not in the medium to long-term interests of the local authority; it is in its short-term interests.
My hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East raised a very good point about detailed advice on rights, because such advice should absolutely be tailored to each and every individual case. I mentioned earlier the complex needs of those facing the threat of homelessness. No one family and no one individual is the same as another family or individual. In one instance, it might be the case that paying that £200 in rent arrears was not only the most financially advantageous but the most socially advantageous thing to do. In other instances, it may not be, but we need to ensure—as this clause does—that when local authorities offer advice to vulnerable people at very difficult times, they give the right advice, including the different options that are open to them.
My hon. Friend hit the nail on the head when he said we should empower families in such a position not just to rely on the state but to consider the different options available to them to prevent their becoming homeless in the first instance. If we do that—if we offer that help and advice at the first possible instance—we will then have the best possible chance of preventing homelessness: preventing that social cost but also the huge financial cost that would otherwise fall on our local authorities.
Consequently, I wholeheartedly support this clause. It is absolutely the right thing to do and it ensures that, across the country, people will be offered consistent advice that is right for them as individuals.
Mr Clive Betts (Sheffield South East) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Chope.
It is also a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Colchester. He made many points that I would certainly want to associate myself with. Looking back to the Communities and Local Government Committee’s first report on homelessness, we drew attention to many of those issues, including the shortage of affordable homes to rent, particularly social housing, in many parts of the country, and the need to provide more homes of that kind. In the autumn statement, it seemed that the Government were moving more into that territory, although we are still trying to work out precisely how far they have moved. Maybe at some point the Minister could illuminate us on that.
There are many reasons for homelessness in individual cases, although the ending—for various reasons—of tenancies in the private sector is now the main one. In our Select Committee’s report on homelessness, we also drew attention to the increasing problem of the growing gap between rents and the level of local housing allowance that is paid in the private rented sector. If that level is frozen now for the next few years, it will become a more difficult issue and a bigger reason for the continuation of homelessness.
Those are all factors that, in general, we need to take account of, but the particular reason that I support the clause is the evidence we heard in the Select Committee. We all sat for several hours, listening to many witnesses with direct experience of being homeless. We also had a private conversation with some young people who were still being dealt with by the homelessness system at the time, and they talked to us confidentially about their experiences. It all created an impression that, in many cases, people go to their local authority and do not get the service they deserve. The clause is an attempt to put that right.
The Crisis mystery shopper exercise really affected all members of the Select Committee. Crisis sent someone out to local authorities, not declaring who they were, simply to find out what it was like to be homeless in that local authority area and to present before the local authority. It was revealed that people got inadequate advice and support in 50 out of 87 visits. That is a pretty staggering number—50 out of 87 got it wrong and did not give help and support. That goes along with many comments we heard about support, assistance and advice being unprofessional and sometimes inhumane. We cannot allow that to continue.
I slightly part company with Government Members in that I do think we are asking for a new burden on local authorities. At some point, the Minister will have to respond to that. I hope that there are helpful and constructive discussions with the Local Government Association; I am a vice-president of the LGA. To some degree, when local authorities, even the better local authorities that take their responsibilities seriously, have limited resources—we should not pretend that local authorities do not have limited resources, because they are more limited than they were—they naturally tend to deal, as a first priority, with those people who are in priority need. If they have resources to spend, they tend to be spent on people in priority need—people with children, for example—who present themselves. That family needs rehousing, so that is where the effort and support goes. If a young person, a single person, a couple without children or people in other circumstances turn up, they will get what is left. The person at the local authority has only a bit of time—a few minutes—to say, “Here’s a list of estate agents’ telephone numbers. Go and phone them.” We heard that, in some cases, those phone numbers were actually out of date. That is what people often get.
There is a code of guidance, which I am sure we will come to later in our discussions of other matters. The code of guidance is not always followed by local authorities, but it is guidance, not an absolute and utter requirement. There is a difference, to my mind, between having a code of guidance and having something on the face of an Act, which I hope the Bill will become. The duties in the clause are substantial, asking local authorities to look at not simply preventing homelessness, but the issues around care leavers, young people in prison or youth detention, people who have been in the armed forces, domestic abuse and people leaving hospital. The measure demands an awful lot of support and expertise within local authorities if they are to discharge that long list of responsibilities properly.
It is absolutely right that getting these things done in a proper way can ultimately save money. Homelessness has a cost not merely for the individuals, but for society as a whole and for public services. Very often local authorities have to spend the money—hopefully spend it well to stop homelessness, to help people in these situations and to prevent them from having other future problems—but the savings then come to other public bodies including, probably, the criminal justice system in due course, the health service and others.
Yes, it is absolutely right that we are changing the legislation and placing a stronger requirement on local authorities, but that is a new burden. It is one that is absolutely right, but it is a very big ask to get all these responsibilities carried out in a proper way. We will return to resources in due course but, to my mind, the measure does not really ask local authorities to do what they should be doing anyway; it asks them to do an awful lot more. I fully support the asks in the clause.
David Mackintosh
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Chope. I am particularly delighted to serve on this Committee because I served on the Communities and Local Government Committee and asked, with other Members, for the homelessness inquiry to be undertaken. I chair the all-party parliamentary group on ending homelessness. I see many cases in my constituency and through the work we did on the Select Committee where a range of different advice is offered. We even see different advice offered within the same authority, so this legislation is needed to mainstream the issue.
Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Chope. I am pleased to see this clause in the Bill. I particularly welcome the emphasis that runs throughout the Bill on shifting resources into prevention, so that we stop as many as people as possible becoming homeless in the first place.
The Bill will drive a change in culture and we need legislation to drive that change in many local authorities. The culture that prevails has come about because the existing requirements on local authorities, as well as the pressure of resources, force councils into a position in which they support the people they have to support. Resources are not currently available to support all the people councils have to support, and it is necessarily the case that many people fall outside the scope of local authority support. I agree entirely that local authorities should have the flexibility to devise and design services at local level that are appropriate to the needs that present themselves.
The hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole indicated that he does not believe the provision of advice services constitutes a set of new burdens on local authorities, but we delude ourselves if we think the provision of meaningful advice does not constitute a series of resourcing requirements that result in a set of new burdens on local authorities. It is important that the Committee acknowledges what we mean and the implications of the clause for local authorities. We should ensure that the clause can be effective in delivering the outcomes that we all want.
I am a member of the Select Committee on Communities and Local Government. I too heard and saw the evidence that that Committee received during the homelessness inquiry. We saw evidence of local authorities being unable to support many people presenting as homeless in two different categories. We saw evidence of very poor practice—that came through strongly from the Crisis mystery shopper exercise. Some local authorities were simply not interested in helping or advising anybody they did not have to advise. In some cases, even people eligible for support were not receiving support of any kind of quality or meaningfulness. We also saw overwhelming evidence that the systems that exist to support homeless people in local authorities are at breaking point—they are overwhelmed.
The problem faced by many local authorities is to do with the wider housing crisis that we face in this country. We saw evidence of advice that was not up to date, as other hon. Members have said. Referral to third-party organisations that are already overstretched is a common form of advice. Local authorities are saying, “Go and see the local advice agency, go to the local law centre, go to the citizens advice bureau.” Residents turning up to those places find that they have to wait in a long queue and that they cannot get an appointment immediately, and then find that those agencies are not in a position to provide meaningful advice because the housing that people ultimately need is simply not available. We saw evidence that advice was being provided for people to contact organisations that could and should be able to provide alternative housing, but which themselves had been forced to increase their threshold for accessing their support.
I have an example of a constituent who was given a list of organisations that she could telephone who would provide alternative housing because that was what she needed. She phoned them. As a single person, she was not considered to be in priority need, and every one of those organisations required a nomination from a local authority in order to access their services. Such advice is not in any way meaningful.
I want to ensure that we introduce clause 2, and that it will result in the provision of meaningful advice to people seeking support from local authorities. The provision of meaningful advice is to a large degree about the provision of meaningful options. I can say to my constituent, “I advise you to contact your local authority to seek their support with housing.” The local authority will say, “We simply do not have any social housing available and we have a list of many thousands of people already waiting for that housing.” That is not meaningful advice for me to provide to my constituent. We need to focus on the issue of meaningfulness.
Two things are important in ensuring that we deliver: first, we need to be clear that, in introducing a new duty, it cannot be acceptable for a local authority to discharge their duty, and to be considered to have discharged their duty, by providing advice that is poor quality or out of date, or not the best possible advice that can be provided. I flag up to Government Members the need for the provision of detailed guidance to accompany the Bill to make it clear to local authorities what constitutes the discharge of their duty to provide advice. The guidance would also make it clear that the Government will not stand for the continued practice of passing the buck to external agencies who cannot themselves provide that advice, resulting in a situation in which people are not meaningfully helped. Detailed guidance is important.
Secondly, we need to locate the clause firmly within the wider debate about the expansion of housing provision, including social housing, and the expansion of support for advice and support agencies that people need when they are at risk of becoming homeless. I wish to assert my view that the clause imposes new burdens on local authorities, and I would like a response from the Government on the question of what resources will be made available to enable those new burdens to be met. Otherwise we give ourselves a pat on the back in this House that we have enacted something that talks about the provision of advice. If the measure does not make the necessary difference on the ground, we have failed and we will be held to account. With those remarks, I am pleased to support the clause.
Mr David Burrowes (Enfield, Southgate) (Con)
It is a pleasure to be involved in the debate on clause 2, which in many ways is at the heart of the Bill. If we get clause 2 right, we will have made a big difference in reducing homelessness. Following on from comments made by hon. Members on both sides of the Committee, including the hon. Member for Sheffield South East, the point I wish to make is that it is about ensuring that good practice is enshrined. As other hon. Members have said, good practice is not always followed.
On behalf of the vulnerable, and as the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on complex needs and dual diagnosis, I welcome the Bill and the duty to provide advisory services. Those groups of people often miss out and do not properly access the advice that they need. If they could access advice earlier at a preventive stage, it could prevent greater complexity, greater cost and crisis management.
I recognise that the Bill enshrines good practice and codes of guidance, as has been said. However, if properly applied, the Bill also places an additional burden on statutory services. If one looks at the example of the Bill, one sees the burden applies not least to persons leaving hospital. St Mungo’s has been particularly active in highlighting the scandal that 70% of homeless people who are in hospital are then discharged on to the streets. That must end, and the Bill must help it to end. Local authorities including mine in Enfield sign charters, but it is one thing to sign up to a charter and another to ensure that there is a link between health, social care and housing—that needs to happen and often does not—to ensure that support and advice is provided at the point when people need it most on leaving hospital. That is why it is welcome to see that explicitly included in the Bill. Frankly, it is neglectful that that does not happen and we need that statutory duty and provision.
I welcome, through the good endeavours of the Select Committee, the addition of victims of abuse and domestic violence. I pay tribute to Agenda, which is a charity representing the interests of women and girls at risk. I understand that it gave evidence to the Select Committee and made the point that the reality is, sadly, that the victims of abuse are not getting the proper advice that they need, which we will know from our constituency case work.
Indeed, in my surgery on Saturday, a victim of domestic violence came to me and said that she needed desperately to move from her house with her young child. Recently, her shed had been burned down by her abuser and her car had been vandalised. She went to Enfield Council to seek advice and was met, sadly, with indifference. I recognise that within Enfield Council there are some excellent housing officers, and in many ways they are overstretched, but she was met with a yawn and someone saying, “Well, we can’t help everyone.” That attitude towards my constituent in a state of absolute vulnerability is shameful and must end, which the Bill will help to do. She has simply been told, “We will get back to you in 10 days,” but then there is another 10 days and another 10 days. She has not heard anything from the council in terms of meaningful advice. The Bill and the clause will help.
May I draw attention to one detail? Within the draft Bill and what would have been the new section 179, people with a learning disability were included as a group, although the provision was not limited to them. That is not included in the Bill before the Committee. Hon. Members will know from experience that those with learning difficulties and disabilities are particularly vulnerable and have problems accessing meaningful advice. They may not fall within priority need or appear at first communication to do so, but because of their learning disabilities they may not be able to communicate those needs properly. There is therefore a need for specific and meaningful advice for them. I ask my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East and the Minister to help me to provide reassurance that the category of
“persons suffering from a mental illness or impairment”
properly includes people with learning disabilities and that, in practical terms, they will receive the meaningful advice they need.
Mr Jones
My hon. Friend is making an extremely good point, and in responding I should declare my interest as a member of my local Mencap society. Obviously, adults with learning disabilities are an extremely important group that need to be supported. I reassure my hon. Friend that they are indeed dealt with within that definition. I additionally reassure him that that will be clarified within statutory guidance that will go alongside this Bill.
Mr Burrowes
I am grateful to the Minister for that reassurance.
For adults who are struggling to get a diagnosis of autism, clarification is needed in the guidance on the level of evidence necessary to ensure that the duties are triggered. I welcome the clause.
Michael Tomlinson
It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Chope. I rise to address one or two points that have been made in this constructive debate, and I speak strongly in favour of clause 2 as drafted.
I agree with almost everything that the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood said, and she is right that there is no point in setting out more detail in the Bill if the Bill does not impose additional duties and burdens, but my point is slightly different. There are heavier burdens and financial duties elsewhere in the Bill, and I had a measure of agreement on that from the hon. Member for Hammersmith. I do not minimise the additional duties set out in the clause—far from it. I will address one or two details, but I anticipate that in Committee we will hear further detail from the Minister on funding.
I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East, who commented on the interplay between local authorities and local charities and organisations. I mentioned the Routes to Roots organisation in Poole. Each year, the youth worker at the parish church of Lytchett Minster & St Dunstan’s at Upton organises the great Dorset sleep out. You can join us next year, Mr Chope, if you happen to be free on that date—I will perhaps need to give you lots of warning.
Michael Tomlinson
The hon. Member for City of Chester and other hon. Members are more than welcome to join, too. It is a fun occasion that makes a serious point. It does two things. First, it raises money for the charity. Secondly, it raises awareness of homelessness. People picture Dorset and Poole as a leafy part of the country and ask why on earth we have homelessness, yet even today people are sleeping rough on the streets of Poole. One evening a few weeks ago, we heard from two people who had formerly been homeless—they were not homeless in Dorset—but are happily now homed in Poole. Had the measures in the Bill to provide advisory services already been in place, they would have helped those two individuals no end by pointing them in the right direction.
Michelle Donelan
Does my hon. Friend agree that the clause will free up charities to help people via other mechanisms rather than fighting for them to get the advice they need? My local charity in Chippenham, Doorway, has shared that with me.
Michael Tomlinson
My hon. Friend is right. It is about flexibility. Local authorities will have a duty under the Bill, but I would like far greater interplay between local authorities and charities. The relationship works well in some areas, as we have heard from Members on both sides of the Committee, but the aim of the clause is to raise standards across the board.
My final point is on the detail. I am particularly pleased that proposed new section 179(2) of the Housing Act 1996 lists
“former members of the regular armed forces”,
which is right and proper. It also lists
“persons released from prison or youth detention accommodation”.
I am sure the Government’s ambition and intention is to reduce reoffending—if it is not, it should be. There are three key planks to that. One is housing, and the other two are education and employment. If housing or advisory support on housing were available, it would be a big step in the right direction. I strongly support the measures in clause 2.
Mr Jones
It is a pleasure to respond to clause 2 on the second day of our consideration. It is obvious from this first debate that my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East has chosen well because Members on both sides of the Committee are not only capable and knowledgeable but have spoken with immense passion and power. It is obvious that the members of this Committee care about the enactment of the Bill.
The Government welcome the duty to provide homelessness advisory services and hope it will go a long way in helping to provide access to the same high standard of information and support for everyone. It does not help to prevent homelessness if local authorities provide minimal and out-of-date information but, technically, they could still be acting within the law. The measure is a key first step to addressing that. Having said that, some local housing authorities provide relevant and up-to-date information and, in some cases, tailored advice, and they need to be commended.
The clause will help to ensure that all local housing authorities step up to the standard of the best by providing detailed advice and information to all households in their area while empowering people to seek support before their housing concerns turn into a housing crisis. We hope local housing authorities provide more personalised advice that meets the needs of households that are likely to be at risk of homelessness, and advice that targets the vulnerable groups identified in the clause.
Earlier, I mentioned some prevention trailblazers. The best local authorities include Newcastle, where staff work to gather information to identify people at risk of becoming homeless so they can target their advice and support far earlier so that people do not end up in a housing crisis. That is the spirit in which the clause sets out further obligations for local authorities, and what we expect to happen.
To ensure that the measures work in practice, we will work with local housing authorities, homelessness support organisations and others to review and update the guidance on how local housing authorities should comply with the new duty. In doing so, we will look to Wales, which has a similar duty enshrined in legislation in section 60 of the Housing (Wales) Act 2014, and to other good practice such as that which I mentioned in England.
As I mention Wales, may I respond, in order to assist my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East, to the point made by the hon. Member for Hammersmith about the extent of the legislation regarding England and Wales? I reassure him that we have discussed the Bill with Welsh Government lawyers and are satisfied that the approach taken in the Bill correctly addresses the devolution points he raised. I have some responses to assist my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East in a few other areas.
A number of hon. Members mentioned the issue of funding for the Bill. I reiterate that we are absolutely committed to funding the costs of the Bill. As the hon. Member for Sheffield South East, who chairs the Select Committee, mentioned, we are still working with local authorities and the LGA to identify the costs of the Bill. Given how the Bill has been brought to the House, the timescales have been tight, particularly for the Select Committee’s scrutiny process and the tabling of amendments.
We are now dealing with changes to clause 1 to deal with challenges raised by a particular stakeholder group, so we are still finalising the costs. We expect to be able to come to the Committee shortly with the final details of those costs. I can reassure people that when we come back with that final detail, we will be taking into account the costs as a result of clause 2.
Andy Slaughter
The Minister has said that he will come back to the Committee, so I am assuming that we will have something in time for next week’s sitting or the one on 14 December.
Mr Jones
As I have said, I will bring those costs to the Committee as soon as is practicable, but the hon. Gentleman is not making an unreasonable point. I hope to be able to satisfy his request. It is important that the Committee should have the chance to see what the costs are.
The hon. Gentleman made a point about AHAS and the information duty. AHAS raised an issue about councils going beyond the provision of just homelessness issues. I want to be absolutely clear that the measure is about a duty to provide advice and information relating to homelessness only; it is not about local authorities going beyond that. Local authorities can signpost to other services, but we expect them to work with local partners to help address wider issues, and that is what the best authorities are already doing.
The hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood raised a point about the Bill, and the clause in particular, being about changing culture at the local level, and I very much agree. I also agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester about reinvigorating the role of housing officers so that they can get back to a position where they genuinely feel they are helping people—as he rightly pointed out, that is why most housing officers took up their roles in the first place. We have seen a similar change in culture in Wales, which bodes well for the Bill. We will make absolutely clear that the revised guidance on what constitutes good advice will accompany the Bill once it makes its passage through the House and into law.
I will conclude by saying that the Government are extremely pleased to support clause 2. We think it will bring about a real shift in culture and enable people who hitherto have not received good advice and assistance to receive the support that they absolutely need.
Bob Blackman
I will respond briefly to the debate. I thank all Members for their contributions and for serving on the Committee.
Those threatened with homelessness or those tragically becoming homeless need to get the help and advice they need as early as possible: that issue is clearly at the heart of the Bill. I turn to some of the points that have been made; if any individuals want further clarification, I am happy to deal with that. Several Members have referred to the mystery shopping exercise conducted by Crisis, which fed into the Select Committee report. The inquiry and the pre-scrutiny of the legislation are one of the benefits this Committee has—we have the benefit of real evidence of the experience across the board. The reality is that the experiences individuals are receiving from local authorities are relatively poor, generally speaking. Some local authorities do a good job, but the majority do not. That is clearly an issue, because advice services are so important.
I will not go into the hon. Member for Hammersmith’s views on his own council. I could have a view of my own council, and I am sure several other colleagues could, too, but the reality is that we want to see all local authorities brought up to the standard of the best on advice and help.
My hon. Friend the Member for Colchester referred to another key issue. We do not want people to get to the point of incurring huge debts and having county court judgments and so on, which mean that they are not able to get accommodation anyway. We want people to get help and advice early.
The hon. Member for Sheffield South East, Chair of the Communities and Local Government Committee, and the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood, also a member of that Committee, referred to the resources required. We are looking to the Minister to come forward with the resources. I accept that these are considerable extra burdens on local authorities. The expertise that will be required is important and unless that is properly resourced, the help and advice needed will not be available. That part of the process is quite clear.
Mr Betts
I beg to move amendment 1, in clause 3, page 4, line 44, leave out from “particular” to the end of the paragraph and insert—
“(i) what accommodation would be suitable for the applicant and any persons with whom the applicant resides or might reasonably be expected to reside (“other relevant persons”);
(ii) the schooling arrangements for the children of the applicant and of the other relevant persons; and
(iii) caring provided to or by the applicant and the other relevant persons;
(iv) the location and natures of the employment of the applicant and the other relevant persons.”.
This amendment would ensure that the assessment of an applicant’s case takes account not only of suitable accommodation for the applicant and those residing with the applicant but also their schooling, caring and work arrangements.
The Chair
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
Amendment 3, in clause 3, page 5, line 2, leave out “and”.
See amendment 4.
Amendment 4, in clause 3, page 5, line 5, at end insert—
“(d) what other support the applicant is or may be entitled to from any public authority under any other enactment.”.
These amendments would ensure that, when assessing a case, the local authority must consider any other duties which might be owed, whether by it or by another authority, for example a care-leaver who has applied as homeless may be owed additional obligations under the leaving care provisions of the Children Act 1989.
Mr Betts
We had a very good debate on clause 2. It is a long time since I heard the Minister say, “I’ve got the money and I am going to spend it.” What welcome words! I think that is what the Minister said—he is not correcting me, so we will say that is what the Minister said; we will see in due course how much the money actually is when agreement is reached, as it hopefully will be with the LGA.
There is a similarity between what I am going to say and the debate that we have just had on clause 2. Clause 2 details a whole range of responsibilities for local authorities in terms of the advice and support that they give to people who present themselves as homeless, irrespective of whether they are in priority need. In clause 3, we come to the personal plan and to the eventual offer that is likely to be made to individuals who are homeless.
We heard in evidence to the Select Committee that there were also problems in that regard. I probably want to tag the name Daisy-May to the amendment, because we heard from Daisy-May Hudson, a young, very intelligent, very determined lady. Her family had been made homeless and ended up in temporary accommodation for about a year. She not only gave evidence to the Select Committee, but made a video that was shown to Select Committee members about her experiences. The way in which the family were treated was pretty horrific. As they put it, the brusque letters that came saying no to this and that were really heart-wrenching for them.
One particular issue came to mind, which is why I decided to table the amendment. I say straight away that I want to see something in the Bill that deals with this issue, and if the Minister has a better way of doing it, I am open to hearing from him. The similarity with clause 2 is that requirements relating to what is suitable accommodation, particularly in terms of its location, are all contained in guidance. The Minister has armies of civil servants—hundreds of people—to advise and assist him with his responses and to help him to draw up amendments and alternative wording, so if he can look to them and come up with a better of way doing this, I will always be open to suggestion.
As a Back Bencher, I rely on the expert advice from people in the House—and it is expert advice; it is important to recognise that. The Clerk of the Committee helped me to draft the amendment and drafting advisers on the Select Committee helped us throughout our process. People in the House of Commons Library also helped me to find the right words in the guidance. There is a lot about the suitability of accommodation and its location in the Homelessness (Suitability of Accommodation) (England) Order 2012, which goes into detail about what authorities should be doing on suitability and location in respect of recognising people’s employment, caring responsibilities and education.
However, when Daisy-May gave evidence—indeed, this is in her film—we heard that the family were made an offer of accommodation, but that it was two hours away from her sister’s school. It was completely unsuitable and was just not a reasonable offer. Despite the fact that the family had provided a lot of evidence—medical and other supporting evidence—it was all pushed to one side. As they said, they got a letter and a form to send back with three lines to fill in to say why the accommodation was not suitable. That authority gave a token response, saying, “Here you are. This is the accommodation. If you don’t like it, say in three lines why you don’t.” It was a completely inappropriate way to deal with the matter.
The difficulty is this: eventually the family got a different offer, but only because they threatened to take the case to court—I think they had the help of Shelter, but I may be mistaken in that respect.
David Mackintosh
I thank the hon. Gentleman for mentioning this important point. I share his view that the video that Daisy-May Hudson presented to us in the Select Committee aptly deals with all these issues and should be viewed by every member of this Committee, so that they can see the issues that people face. I want to see provisions on that in the Bill, and I think the Minister might touch on that later.
Mr Betts
I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say. I draw a parallel with clause 2, which will be on the face of the Bill—hopefully on the face of the Act—because the current guidance is not always observed; it is not as strong and does not give people as strong a right to the services that we think they ought to have. I am making the same point with the amendment. Currently, the suitability of the location is contained in the guidance. An authority should take account of it, but in the end it does not have to. Now, perhaps people can take a judicial review against the authority, but we should not be relying on applicants in very difficult circumstances to get appropriate advice and take a JR against the local authority to ensure that the will of this House is implemented.
Michael Tomlinson
Following the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton South, would the hon. Gentleman release the video that he is talking about, or get permission to have it released, so that those of us who do not have the privilege or pleasure of being members of his Committee can have the benefit of seeing it as well?
Mr Betts
I certainly will. The Select Committee saw it, and I believe that it was also sent to its members so that we could view it on our own computers. I think that there are licensing issues with the ownership, but I will certainly go back to the Clerk of the Committee to see whether it can also be released to members of this Committee. That is a very helpful point and I will try to achieve that.
The purpose of the amendment is to put on the face of the Bill the requirement to take account of those issues when drawing up the plan with a view to looking at what accommodation might be suitable. I entirely understand that it might not be possible in some parts of the country—particularly London. It might be that an authority has no suitable accommodation in-area and therefore, in the end, must go out of borough. That might be inevitable in some areas.
In other parts of the country, including mine in Sheffield, although there is a shortage of suitable accommodation and it is not always possible to have regard to all the factors when an allocation is eventually made, when considering a suitable offer authorities should at least have regard to where children are at school and where caring responsibilities are in place, either for or on behalf of the individuals who are homeless or threatened with homelessness. If people are in work, authorities should look at whether they can continue to get to their job and whether they will lose their job as a result of being found a house. Where possible, authorities should have regard to those things, but they do not always do so. I have had letters on behalf of constituents from my local authority saying, “We can’t really take account of those issues. It’s going to be one offer, and that’s it.” That is not acceptable. If it can be done, it should be done.
Christian Matheson
Is the point of my hon. Friend’s amendment therefore to overcome the idea that when an offer is made the local authority has discharged its duty and can walk away from the problem?
Mr Betts
Exactly. It is not always possible, and some people will become homeless in areas where there simply is not a local authority property of the right size available, and where one will not become available for some time. Of course that is the case, but in other areas a little more thought and effort by the local authority could achieve a much better offer to meet people’s needs according to the code of guidance.
Alison Thewliss
The hon. Gentleman is making an excellent case. Does he agree that getting it right in all those cases will increase the sustainability and the likelihood of success in the new accommodation? If people are supported by their family networks, schools and employers and are able to maintain that, they have a greater prospect of having a successful, happy life.
Mr Betts
That is absolutely right. We must not find somebody family accommodation, only for them to lose their job. If a family is homeless or threatened with homelessness, that affects the whole family, and the young people in particular. If a young person who has already been through a traumatic experience is studying at school for their exams, and if their family goes through that trauma and they suddenly find that they have to move school at a crucial time and possibly travel for two hours to get to the new school, they might drop out. All those things add to their problems.
There might be other ways of doing this. It might be—I am sure the Minister has even better advice than we do—that the clause can be amended so that the local authority has to take account of the code of guidance when drawing up a plan to provide suitable accommodation for a family in priority need. I will await the Minister’s response, but we have to toughen up the clause. It is no use simply saying that the code of guidance is there; we have to do something to make sure that it is followed in practice when families are in real need and when they need a suitable offer in the right location, wherever that can be achieved.
Will Quince
I intend to speak only very briefly. I have great sympathy with the point being made in the amendment tabled by the hon. Member for Sheffield South East. We have all seen these situations, certainly in constituencies around London. My constituency is 50 or so miles outside London and my constituents regularly come to me for assistance because the council is putting them into temporary accommodation in Ipswich. Although it is only 20 miles away, that is a long way for people who do not drive: they are 20 miles away from their school, their place of work, their support network or their family. We know the considerable burden that places on those who are in very vulnerable situations and are going through a crisis.
However, I have some concerns about the enforceability of what the hon. Gentleman proposes, partly because the requirement already exists in article 2 of the Homelessness (Suitability of Accommodation) (England) Order 2012. In my view, the solution is not duplication of existing secondary legislation, but the Government ensuring that that legislation is given more teeth and enforceability. As well-meaning as the amendment is, my fear is that it will not achieve anything, because the existing legislation already ensures that local authorities have to take into consideration the suitability of accommodation for the applicant and issues such as schools, caring requirements and work arrangements. Subject to the Minister’s approval, the obvious answer is for the Government to take the hon. Gentleman’s concerns away and look at how to ensure that the existing legislation, which already requires local authorities to do what he asks, is given teeth and enforceability.
Andy Slaughter
Before I speak to the amendments in my name, may I briefly express my support for the amendment tabled by the Chair of the Communities and Local Government Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East? I am surprised that Government Members are not prepared to support it; I ask the Bill’s promoter to encourage his colleagues to do so. Although the hon. Member for Colchester is absolutely right that there is case law and guidance on locality, it is fair to say that it is often more honoured in the breach than in the observance. The consequence is a lot of unnecessary litigation, where advice and lawyers are available to assist with it, and a lot of work. My office spends a huge amount of time on this issue, trying to persuade local authorities not to move people out of the area or to bring them back after they have been moved, when it has proved impossible for the family to continue to live as they did before.
I had a case in my surgery this week in which a family with three children were living in temporary accommodation that was so poor, with damp and disrepair, that the local authority needed to move them somewhere else. There is nowhere available in the borough at the moment, so it is seeking to move them outside London. All the kids are in local schools. My view was that the family had been in temporary accommodation for 10 years in a variety of places, so surely the solution was to find them permanent accommodation. That just showed that I am not completely in touch with everything that goes on, because my senior caseworker said that it is not exceptional now for people to spend 10 years in temporary accommodation. That gives a little insight into the real problems that occur, particularly in London boroughs but elsewhere too. That point needs to be emphasised, so I strongly support what my hon. Friend said.
Let me deal briefly with the amendments standing in my name. I entirely accept that I am placing those additional burdens on local authorities that I warned against about an hour ago. That is why I am particularly keen to hear the Minister come forward with his bag of cash at the earliest opportunity. Nevertheless, if we are to legislate for the long term, we need to make clear what we expect housing authorities to do.
Michael Tomlinson
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way, and I am delighted by the smile on his face as he presents his amendments. Does he not see that, as drafted, the obligation on local authorities is so wide that they would have to look across multiple different authorities in order to fulfil it? I think he notes that by his smile. Is this not just placing unreasonable burdens on our local authorities?
Andy Slaughter
I will turn the point around and say that the objective of the Bill is either to pay lip service to a problem or it is designed to tackle a problem. When individuals in housing need, owed duties by the state, present themselves, they will receive advice and assistance. That point was made by a number of hon. Members on both sides of the Committee in relation to the list in clause 2. That is not an exhaustive list, though it could be quite onerous. We will later consider, under clause 10, the way that other public authorities should assist local authorities in discharging their duty, and that is the other side of the equation. I will not say anything more on that because I am conscious of the time. I will simply say that if we are going to look at the different approach that local authorities need to take, we should be as comprehensive as possible.
If I may be allowed two sentences, I think they will evolve neatly into talking on clause stand part. I am conscious that, as we will probably find in every clause, there are caveats from homelessness charities that the proposed legislation does not go far enough and caveats from local authorities that it places undue burdens. The AHAS does not see the need for a plan that it believes would be extremely onerous in the bureaucracy, the drawing up, the modifying and the review of that. Shelter would say that there is no statutory right to a review on the plan and that that itself should be reviewed. I think we have probably got it about right. There is a need for a plan. I do not accept what local authorities say on that point. I am conscious of the example that the LGA gave in relation to this. It used the example of Stoke-on-Trent Council, which believes that the administrative costs around prevention work will require four more homelessness officers at about £35,000 a year each, just in relation to dealing with those issues.
I will stop there, Mr Chope, by urging support for the amendments in my name and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East. We are, a little bit, creating a wish list and talking in a vacuum until the Minister makes clear what resources he intends to provide.
Helen Hayes
I wish to speak briefly in support of amendment 1, which arises directly from evidence we heard in the Communities and Local Government Committee, as the Chairman of that Committee has already said. It also speaks directly to the experiences of my constituents and some of the most devastating cases in my time as a Member of this House and, before that, as a local councillor.
As Members well know, homelessness is one of the most devastating circumstances that can befall someone in the UK today. In such challenging circumstances, people will often hang on to every little bit of stability that they can, in particular for their children. Which of us would not do that? My local authorities do everything possible to place people in borough when they have to provide families with temporary accommodation. When they place people outside the borough, they do everything they can to find accommodation in neighbouring boroughs, so people do not have to travel long distances.
The first of two cases that I particularly recall involved a family placed in temporary accommodation in Edmonton who were travelling with their children to primary school in Dulwich every day. That is a very long distance, by any stretch of the imagination. The train would have been the quickest way to make the journey, but they could not afford that, because they were a family facing homelessness. They had to leave their temporary accommodation in Edmonton at 5.30 every morning to travel with their children to my constituency for school, because they were part of a stable school community and knew that their children were receiving good support there.
More recently, a family living in temporary accommodation —a hostel in Dulwich—were travelling every day to Leytonstone with their daughter to attend primary school. Similarly, because they were a family in destitution and without any money, mum was sitting on a park bench in Leytonstone for the duration of the school day before collecting her daughter and travelling back to Dulwich. Such circumstances are devastating.
The other sets of circumstances covered by the amendment are, straightforwardly, invest-to-save provisions. I can recall countless constituents who have come to my surgeries to tell me that the local authority is suggesting that they move to accommodation further away, but they are fearful of what that would mean in terms of loss of support from their family and community networks. Furthermore, most often, they are constituents with mental health difficulties. As we know, and it seemed self-evident when I was talking to them, if they were forced to move from their support networks, their families and the people they rely on to maintain some stability in their lives, there would be additional costs. Not only would those individuals be much more likely to be forced into a crisis, but there would be additional costs to the NHS and to social services arising from people being moved away from their informal networks of support.
The final set of circumstances covered by the amendment involves people who are in employment. We all applaud anyone facing homelessness who manages to sustain their employment. That is a difficult enough thing to achieve in the best of circumstances, but if as a consequence of homelessness people are forced to move a long distance from their employment, so that they could not afford the travel costs or time, the burden would become unsustainable. That, too, would be a false economy. The state should be doing everything to ensure that, where possible, employment can be sustained.
For those reasons, I hope that the promoter and the Government will accept the amendment, because the matters that it covers are so important that they should be on the face of the Bill.
Mr Jones
On amendment 1, tabled by the hon. Member for Sheffield South East, local housing authorities must already have regard to the significance of any disruption that would be caused by the location of the accommodation to the employment, caring responsibilities or education of the person or members of the person’s household under article 2 of the Suitability of Accommodation (England) Order 2012. I therefore do not agree that an amendment to repeat that point is necessary.
To expand on that and to reassure the hon. Gentleman, local authorities must by law take account of the factors included in a suitability order. If an authority acts illegally, as he pointed out, households would have redress by review and on appeal. My Department intervened in a Supreme Court case on just this point to ensure that the order and the guidance are followed.
Mr Betts
I hear the Minister, but the fact is that local authorities often do not do that. It is okay saying, “Well, there are reviews and we may eventually get to legal action,” but when a family is homeless and desperate for accommodation—they will probably be in temporary accommodation—that is not a great help.
Another problem is that the words “must” and “should” seem to be used interchangeably. The Minister said that local authorities must have regard to the guidance, and he used the word “must” with regard to medical facilities, but the word used in paragraph 53 of the supplementary guidance on the 2012 order is “should” not “must”. Is that not a problem? Could we at least look at toughening up that guidance by putting in a few more “must”s instead of the “should”s that are currently in it?
Mr Jones
I have great sympathy with the hon. Gentleman’s points, certainly where local authorities are not complying with the 2012 order in the way that is intended. The existing power in section 210 of the Housing Act 1996 allows the Secretary of State to make an order—secondary legislation—to strengthen the definition of “suitability”. Such an order may specify the
“circumstances in which accommodation is or is not”
suitable or
“matters to be taken into account or disregarded in determining whether”
the accommodation is suitable.
We expect councils to adhere to both the 1996 Act and the 2012 order. As I say, that Act gives us significant powers where the order is not followed. I reiterate that that is not guidance but an order, and councils must adhere to it. The Bill must serve as a reminder to local authorities that the order must be adhered to, and I put local authorities on notice that if it is not, we can review and change the regulations through the 1996 Act. Should councils not respond to the Bill or the order that is already in place, I am certain that we will seek to do that.
David Mackintosh
Does the Minister think that that would be a good thing for the Communities and Local Government Committee to look at?
Mr Jones
I always welcome the Select Committee’s work, and if councils do not respond in the way that we ask them to respond—that is, by adhering to the 2012 order, the importance of which is reiterated in the Bill —it perhaps would be sensible for the Select Committee to look at the issue again.
I agree with what the hon. Member for Sheffield South East said on Second Reading about recognising the importance of speaking to people from the very beginning about addressing their housing needs. We are talking about the important first step in creating the culture that we all want. We need a more co-operative and effective relationship between local housing authorities and those they try to help. That is why clause 3 is really important. However, I do not think it is necessary to amend the Bill, as the hon. Member for Sheffield South East would like.
Amendments 3 and 4 tabled by the hon. Member for Hammersmith would require local housing authorities to consider a further requirement when assessing the applicant’s case. There would be a requirement to consider,
“what other support the applicant is or may be entitled to from any public authority under any other enactment”.
The amendments would create a very broad duty. Local housing authorities would need to investigate the legal duties of multiple authorities to identify whether such a duty were owed. There could be a scenario, for example, where a local housing authority would have to undertake a mental health assessment to establish whether a person is owed duties in respect of any mental health issues that they may have.
Owing to their wide-ranging nature and the general requirements that the amendments would bring to local housing authorities, the proposed changes would place an unacceptable burden on those authorities. As I mentioned previously, local housing authorities already have to take into consideration a wide range of factors, including the significance of any disruption that would be caused by the location of the accommodation to the employment, caring responsibilities or education of the person or members of the person’s household; and the proximity and accessibility of the accommodation to medical facilities and other support.
Successful prevention, as the best local authorities already know, takes a broad view in assessing needs. Many of the things we are looking at here will be dealt with in the personal housing plan, which is covered in the substantive clause.
Andy Slaughter
To look at this the other way, does the Minister not think that it could be helpful to local authorities in identifying other organisations or other resources that should be brought into play? What was good on clause 2 in relation to specifying people with particular needs may also be good on clause 3.
Mr Jones
There are many ways in which the Bill broadens the support that people will get. As the hon. Gentleman knows, later in the Bill there is a duty to refer. Organisations will therefore have to notify local authority housing teams of people in certain circumstances as they pass through the NHS system in hospital A&Es and so on. The hon. Member for Sheffield South East is proposing a broad provision. As I said, it is difficult in terms of its workability. The challenge would be massive for local authorities, which would almost have to become experts in massive areas of work that they are simply not in a position to be experts on.
However, the hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that local authorities can work in a better and more collegiate fashion across public services and other organisations that can help people who are homeless or becoming homeless. In many ways, the Bill will seek to achieve that. I therefore do not think it is necessary at this point to support the amendments that the hon. Gentleman has tabled.
Mr Betts
I have a difficulty because I do not think the provision is satisfactory. Equally, I understand that the Minister wants to see what is in the code of practice or code of guidance implemented. From a Select Committee point of view, we had a clear view: we were concerned that these matters were not being properly addressed in terms of location when offers were made to people who qualify as homeless persons. We are trying to find a way forward that keeps some unanimity, but gives us more reassurance that something will be done. I take the point made by the hon. Member for Northampton South that there could be a role for a Select Committee, but there is also a role for Government.
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Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme
(8 years ago)
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Helen Whately (Faversham and Mid Kent) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the seasonal agricultural workers scheme.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gapes. It is also a pleasure to see other colleagues here today, including members of the new all-party group for fruit and vegetable farming, of which I am the chair. I am grateful for the opportunity to raise British growers’ concerns about recruiting workers in the coming years. I will focus my comments on the fruit and vegetable industry, but I emphasise that a flexible, seasonal workforce is vital for other parts of the food and farming industry, such as sheep and poultry farming. The industry as a whole is worth more than £100 billion to the nation’s economy. Within that, horticulture is worth £3 billion. Fruit and vegetable farmers have a vital role to play in making us all healthier.
As the Minister knows, I represent the beautiful constituency of Faversham and Mid Kent in the heart of the garden of England. When I drive from Headcorn on one side of my constituency to Faversham and the surrounding villages on the other, I see fields full of great British fruit. Depending on the season, there are strawberries, raspberries, blackcurrants, apples, pears, cherries and plums. Apart from growing healthy local food, fruit and vegetable farmers are part of the fabric of rural life. British growers employ thousands of people across the food and drink sector, look after the environment and contribute to the local and national economy, but they are facing tough times. They are worried about the speed of the introduction of the national living wage, face uncertainty over our future relationship with Europe and struggle with falling farm-gate prices and declining profitability. While recent yields have been good and the volume of strawberries sold in the UK has increased dramatically, around half of fruit farms are making less than a 2% margin and fruit farmers’ incomes have fallen by 43% over the past five years.
From speaking to local farmers, I know that opinions were split over Brexit, but one thing that all growers are worried about is access to labour, particularly since our decision to leave the European Union. The horticulture industry needs thousands of seasonal workers every year to pick and pack their produce. The British Growers Association estimates that the horticulture industry employed 80,000 seasonal workers this year and forecasts that that need will increase to 95,000 by 2019. The vast majority of those seasonal workers come from the European Union, and they do demanding work hand-picking fruit and packing it into punnets with care and speed. We should put on record the fact that we welcome those seasonal workers to Britain and are grateful for their contribution to our economy. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] It is getting harder for farmers to recruit seasonal workers. The National Farmers Union’s end of season labour survey found that in 2015, nearly a third of growers had experienced problems recruiting workers. Some 69% of growers expect the situation to get worse by 2018.
Sir Henry Bellingham (North West Norfolk) (Con)
I, too, represent an area with a large number of horticulture businesses, including fruit farms, soft fruit and glasshouses. We have a big food production sector, too. Does my hon. Friend agree that we need action immediately? The old seasonal agricultural workers scheme worked extremely well before 2013. We need a trial scheme to be brought in as soon as possible.
Helen Whately
I completely agree with my hon. Friend about the need to bring something in soon. My farmers are asking for a new scheme to be trialled as of next year because of the problems they are already experiencing in recruiting workers for next year, but I will come on to that point.
Organisations that recruit seasonal workers, such as AG Recruitment in my constituency, have told me that there are four times fewer people looking for jobs than last year. The NFU surveyed seasonal worker recruitment companies, and nearly half said that between July and September 2016 they were unable to meet the demands of the sectors they were supplying. That compares with nearly 100% being able to recruit enough workers in January, February and March this year. One farmer in my constituency, Tim Chambers, has told me that normally he would expect around 80% of his workers to ask for a place next season as they leave. So far this year, it has been only 50%. David Figgis, another local farmer, says that compared with last year the number of seasonal workers he has been able to recruit to start in the new year has halved. There is already a problem recruiting workers, before we have even left the European Union.
Mr Julian Brazier (Canterbury) (Con)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on the excellent speech she is making. It chimes exactly with what I am hearing from growers in my patch. May I add that seasonal workers exactly fit the Government’s immigration policy, because the controlled environment that growers and farmers provide ensures that these are people who come and go, having done an excellent job in between?
Helen Whately
My hon. Friend is completely right about that, and I will come on to that point. Under the previous scheme, we know that the vast majority of seasonal workers went home after working. It is not a question of immigration.
Coming back to the current problem of recruiting workers, one issue is that the falling pound means that wages sent home are worth less than before. It is a fact that EU workers are feeling a lot less welcome, and many of these workers have a choice as to where they work. They do not have to come and work in the UK; they are in demand across the whole European Union. Another farmer in my constituency, Simon Elworthy, has told me that there is a genuine risk of British fruit going unpicked next year because of a shortage of labour.
Seema Kennedy (South Ribble) (Con)
Like other Members, this issue affects parts of my constituency. The west Lancashire part grows a lot of vegetables. Will my hon. Friend note that when we met the NFU, it said that it was not just the UK that was reliant on migrant labour? We need to put paid to that myth that all the workers could be UK-grown—all OECD countries are reliant on labour from outside their borders to pick fruit and vegetables.
Helen Whately
My hon. Friend is completely right about other OECD nations. I will mention other countries that have seasonal agricultural workers schemes for exactly that reason in a moment.
Another point that has been made by several of my local farmers is that because of the shortage of labour, there is a risk that British fruit farmers may go out of business. I mentioned how tight their margins are, but if we add to that an inability to pick all the produce because of a labour shortage, they will struggle to stay in business. One consequence is that we will probably see the cost of British fruit go up. That will happen just at the point when we want to improve our balance of trade. Fruit is a sector where I would argue we are among the best—and perhaps are the best—in the world. I suspect that my colleagues who, like me, have strawberry growers in their constituencies agree that you cannot beat a great British strawberry. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] The noise around the room suggests that there is consensus on that point. Despite that high quality, there is a risk that we may see British produce replaced by imports. What an enormous shame that would be. It would clearly not be a good thing economically.
David Simpson (Upper Bann) (DUP)
I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this debate. I am sure she will agree that it is not just about the farmers struggling on workers or prices, but the processors that process the fruit or vegetables. In Northern Ireland, some of those factories are dependent on people from other countries, who can make up 40% and 60% of their workforce.
Helen Whately
The hon. Gentleman makes an extremely good point. I am focusing my comments on pickers, because that is the most visible part of the supply chain in my constituency, but there are hundreds and thousands of workers involved in the whole supply chain—between the plant and the table, so to speak—including large numbers of packers, processors and all that. The whole supply chain is affected.
Jo Churchill (Bury St Edmunds) (Con)
I thank my hon. Friend for securing this important debate. The issue is not only about processing in factories. In my constituency of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, a big farming area, up to 95% of factory workers are migrants. The issue is not only about fruit and veg, but about bacon and so on. Beyond that, the jobs cannot necessarily be done by my own constituents. I have only 635 at the moment who are looking for work. That is a big problem, too.
Helen Whately
My hon. Friend rightly refers to the large number of people working in the supply chain. Most of us—I know this is the case in my constituency—do not have many people looking for work.
Farmers have told me how their EU workers are genuinely worried at the moment about their legal rights to be in the UK. There are also concerns about their safety following reports of attacks on migrant workers. I hope the Minister will reiterate that the status of EU workers in the UK remains unchanged. It would be helpful to communicate that clearly to EU workers in the UK to make absolutely sure that they feel welcome and understand that legally they are allowed to remain and work in the UK while we are in the European Union.
The recent referendum result was decisive and, rightly, the Government plan to negotiate a Brexit deal that controls free movement. However, that creates a challenge for an industry that relies on seasonal migrant labour largely from the European Union. This is where the Government may be able to help. I want the Minister to look into piloting a new seasonal agricultural workers scheme, known as SAWS, for 2017, next year.
We used to have a seasonal agricultural workers scheme until 2013, as my hon. Friend the Member for North West Norfolk (Sir Henry Bellingham) has mentioned. Similar schemes exist in other OECD countries, including New Zealand, Canada, the US and Australia. Organisations from the NFU and the Fruit Advisory Services to the Migrant Advisory Committee agree that our old seasonal agricultural workers scheme worked well, as my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Mr Brazier) mentioned. SAWS had robust entry and exit checks, which meant that more than 98% of those who came to work in the UK returned home when their work was complete. For that reason, those coming to Britain under SAWS did not count towards immigration figures. This debate on SAWS should not be seen as part of a wider debate on immigration. It is very much about the workforce for a specific sector.
Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)
I thank the hon. Lady for giving way and I congratulate her on securing this debate. On the seasonal workers who return home after they have worked here, whom she has mentioned several times, it is obviously the case that they are able to secure employment here more easily and more readily than is the case closer to home in their own nation states. As in so many other issues relevant to the Brexit negotiations, their countries benefit from the moneys that they earn here and return to their own nation states to spend, so it is not a one-way system; it is a two-way process that should benefit farmers in the UK and the workers’ countries of origin as well.
Helen Whately
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his comments. On the new scheme that we would like to pilot, we would expect it to include all the positives of the old scheme: oversight by the Home Office; checks on arrival and departure; restrictions on the length of placement; and independently accredited standards.
People often ask, “Why can’t British farmers employ British labour to do all the work? Why do we look to recruit people from overseas?” I have brought this up with farmers in my constituency. I know that they and many others have tried to recruit locally, and it is possible to recruit small numbers locally. I held a jobs fair in Maidstone a couple of months ago. Representatives were there from the local fruit farms and they recruited workers on that day. However, the problem, as mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St Edmunds (Jo Churchill), is that there simply are not enough people looking for work. It is almost a downside of the very low unemployment rate that we have, which overall is clearly a good thing, but the fact is that there is not a swathe of people looking for work.
Julian Sturdy (York Outer) (Con)
My hon. Friend is making a powerful point, and I refer Members to my declaration of interest. On a good labour supply, horticultural farmers and producers often plan 10 years ahead, so they are planning for well into the 2020s at the moment. For them to plan, they need a good labour supply and Government policy to deliver that, or they will not invest now for the longer term.
Helen Whately
My hon. Friend makes a very important point about the investment decisions made in the farming sector where plans are made years in advance. It takes a long time for fruit plants to produce a crop, so farmers have to plan ahead and they need to feel secure about their future workforce. There is a short-term and a long-term problem, so reassurance is needed.
On the scale of the problem, in the picking season, farmers in my constituency need thousands of extra workers. A single large farm needs about 1,000 extra workers in the peak picking season. Across my constituency, between 5,000 and 10,000 seasonal workers are needed, and it is a pretty long season because strawberries can now be grown from March to October. However, in my constituency, only a few hundred people are on jobseeker’s allowance, so there is a big gap between the scale of the demand and the number of people looking for work. There is a real problem of numbers.
The days of fruit picking as a holiday job for students are long gone. We not only have a very long season, but supermarkets put enormous pressures on farmers, demanding absolutely impeccable quality and consistency of product that has to be available at high speed to meet demand. That involves picking at a very fast rate, which requires workers who are experienced and physically fit. Although the work is seasonal, workers do it for a significant period of time, often year after year. They cannot just show up and do the work for a couple of weeks. That is a myth that I want to debunk.
Nigel Huddleston (Mid Worcestershire) (Con)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on a concise debate. I have similar issues with growers in the vale of Evesham in my constituency. On the supermarkets that she mentioned, does she agree that they have an important role to play on pricing in their negotiations with farmers, because the price point is another pressure on many of our farmers?
Helen Whately
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. Supermarkets clearly have an important role to play on price. We want the price to reflect the cost of production. However, there is a balance to strike. If prices go up significantly, will British consumers still buy the product at the same rate? It is not an easy nut to crack. I will do my utmost to make sure I am concise, as my hon. Friend commented, and I am coming to the end of my speech.
Although some say that we should solve the problem through British recruitment, there is another approach that I have sometimes heard proposed, which is that we should solve the problem through mechanisation. These days all fruit and vegetables could be farmed mechanically using robots without a substantial workforce. There have definitely been significant advances in mechanisation. Lots of processes are now much more automated and mechanised. The horticulture industry is investing in mechanisation. I recently heard about a machine that has been developed for the robotic picking of strawberries, but that is some way off. It may be a decade or so before that becomes a real prospect.
Mike Weir (Angus) (SNP)
The hon. Member for Mid Worcestershire (Nigel Huddleston) made a point about price. Many of the machines are extremely costly and investing in them will not solve the problem of the prices paid for produce. The machines are possibly a dead end.
Helen Whately
The hon. Gentleman has made exactly the point that I was coming to. Mechanised fruit picking for many fruits is some way off, and it would be expensive, particularly in the early years. Many parts of fruit farming are capital intensive, so we could introduce new technologies only gradually; otherwise the product would be completely unaffordable. It will take some time, so he is absolutely right.
I will briefly repeat my requests to the Minister. Will he reiterate that the status of EU workers in the UK remains unchanged and emphasise that farm workers in the UK should and must feel welcomed, because we value their contribution to the economy? Will he look at issuing some guidance to farm workers confirming their legal rights to remain in the UK?
Will the Minister look at trialling a new seasonal agricultural workers scheme from next year? That would be welcomed across the agricultural sector, especially by fruit and vegetable farmers in my constituency who want to be able to carry on producing great, fresh and healthy British fruit and vegetables.
Angela Smith (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab)
It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gapes. I congratulate the hon. Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Helen Whately) on securing this very important debate and on the way she presented her case. As she did so well, there is no need to go through the statistics again on why we need such a scheme. However, I underline the points she made about the need to plan ahead, given the challenges faced by the agricultural sector in particular. We know that labour is still at the heart of agriculture in the UK and we need to consider the issue in terms of other agricultural sectors, not just horticulture, such as livestock and poultry.
I understand the argument from Migration Watch that we need to focus on innovation in industry and that to introduce a seasonal workers scheme would detract from the importance of investing in technology and skilling up the workforce, but I accept the points made by the hon. Lady about the time needed to deliver that kind of step-change in the industry and the difficulties that will be faced. I am confident that the industry will invest and innovate, but as she said, it will take time, and the agricultural sector does not have time when it comes to fulfilling its labour needs in the immediate future and the medium term—because of Brexit. Therefore, although Migration Watch has a point, that is subsumed by the immediacy of the needs faced by the industry.
The hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds (Jo Churchill) made a point about the high levels of employment in some parts of the country—not in all, but in some—that make it genuinely difficult to fulfil the needs of the farming sector. I represent a constituency with farming in the western aspects and unemployment in my constituency is 1.9%. That is perhaps unusual for a Labour constituency, but there is a real challenge for rural areas to fulfil employment needs and it is not always easy for people living in urban areas to travel to the countryside and do that kind of work.
The fact has to be faced that British workers are keen on permanent work and the supply of British workers to work on the land is not what it was. I grew up in an area where every morning women would pile into the Land Rover at the end of the street and go off to work on the land. That no longer happens. My own mother worked on the land in the horticulture sector, on and off over the years when she needed the money. The transitional nature of that work is something that the British workforce nowadays finds difficult to accept and we have to tackle that reality. I know that the National Farmers Union has some ideas on how to tackle that obstacle.
We are where we are and we cannot allow the industry to be damaged by a refusal to face the fact that we need to find labour over the next few years. The impact of Brexit is already being felt by the sector when it comes to labour supply, so I absolutely support the case made by the hon. Member for Faversham and Mid Kent.
The Government have a responsibility seriously to consider the need for a seasonal labour supply scheme for the agricultural sector and to place the need for such a scheme in the context of an overall plan for Brexit. I do not think that we can run away from that argument this morning; it is really important. Agriculture wants certainty from the Government on labour supply over not just the next one or two years but in the medium term; the sector needs certainty on what Brexit is going to look like. It is not just the agricultural sector of course—the financial services sector, manufacturing and every part of our economy need that certainty—but we have to acknowledge that agriculture is very dependent on the European Union for much of its funding and for much of its supply of labour, so it is particularly vulnerable to how the Government respond to Brexit and handle the negotiations for Brexit with Brussels.
Are we going to have a Canada-type deal? Are we going to have Canada-plus? Are we going to have a deal along the lines enjoyed by Norway or Switzerland, or are we going to stay in the single market? The Government need to start answering those questions. Are we going to conclude the negotiations in the two years, once article 50 has been triggered, or are we going to need a transitional deal?
It is not just agriculture that needs certainty. The Country Land and Business Association points out that rural tourism is also very dependent on seasonal labour:
“Tourism Alliance data notes that one in four workers within the tourism sector are non-UK nationals. As such, the decision to leave the EU and the potential to limit the availability of a non-UK workforce will undoubtedly be of significant concern to these businesses.”
The evidence shows that urban tourism can stay open to some extent through the winter, perhaps with more limited opening, but rural tourism tends to close its doors. There is a real challenge here for the Government. We really need some certainty from the Government on what their plan for Brexit is going to look like.
Very good points have been made on the case and need for investment in the farming sector and for security in relation to labour supply if we are to give the agricultural sector—farmers—the confidence to invest. I agree strongly with those points. Certainty is everything in business—agriculture is no different from any other part of the economy in that respect—but the point can be made more strategically. If farmers and other rural businesses are to have the confidence to invest for the long term and to innovate and invest in the technology that enables them to become more profitable in the long term, they need not only the scheme under discussion this morning but a clear sense of the strategic direction being pursued by the Government on Brexit. I hope that the Minister will address that point; farmers up and down the country really want to know where Britain is going on Brexit. It is of huge importance to them and to the farming sector in my constituency and I look forward to the Minister’s response.
Scott Mann (North Cornwall) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gapes. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Helen Whately) on securing this important debate.
I welcome the opportunity to acknowledge the contribution that seasonal workers make to our rural economy. They are critical to UK agriculture plc. It is worth noting that a small number of seasonal workers are British citizens who go to work in the fields in the summer and autumn months to increase their pay packets, but the vast majority are non-UK nationals. I will focus my contribution on them, because they play a very large part in the north Cornwall workforce during the summer months.
We are facing a seasonal worker shortage at a time when UK food production may need to increase to meet the country’s needs. I believe that implementing a new seasonal workers permit scheme for non-UK workers would give farming businesses certainty at a time when they need it. Without such a scheme, the UK could be at a significant disadvantage, as many other developed countries around the world have a seasonal workforce. At this crucial time when we are withdrawing from the European Union, we need to give the agricultural sector certainty about future workforce planning. Farmers and other rural businesses need assurances about the labour market and about how any future schemes will operate, so they are confident that they will have that role in the long term as the UK removes itself from the European Union.
It is also worth looking at an accommodation strategy to house seasonal workers in the summer months. A lot of farm-based businesses in north Cornwall have raised the problem of accommodation with me. Having such a policy would mean that people coming to Britain to work knew they had somewhere to stay before they agreed to come. A seasonal scheme would also benefit other rural and coastal businesses, which face similar increases in trade throughout the summer months. Tourism Alliance data show that one in four workers in the tourism sector, in which north Cornwall plays a huge part during the summer months, are non-UK nationals. A dedicated strategy to meet increasing pressures during the year for farmers and the tourism sector would be welcome.
Prior to 2014, there was a quota-based seasonal workers system that enabled farmers to recruit temporarily from overseas. It took a pragmatic approach to labour, and it was controlled through the UK Border Agency and managed by contracted operators. I ask the Minister to consider learning from what worked back then and to implement a strategy to check workers in and out. It should be overseen by the Home Office and managed by licensed operators, and it should not just support EU citizens but be open to the wider world. I ask the Minister to consider an accommodation strategy to cope with temporary population changes, and a 12-month permit in conjunction with other industries, such as food processing or tourism, that would enable us to offer a full year’s work to committed non-UK workers.
This debate has been a great opportunity to put the farming case for seasonal permits. I look forward to the Minister’s response.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
As always, it is a pleasure to speak in this Chamber. I congratulate the hon. Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Helen Whately) for bringing forward this issue and for comprehensively setting the scene for us all to try to follow. My contribution will obviously be from a Northern Ireland perspective. My plea, like the hon. Lady’s, is for us to help our seasonal workers.
I hail from Strangford, and my constituency has some of the finest agricultural land in the entire United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. I represent the home of the trademarked Comber spud, which is a treat to any palate across the United Kingdom. Nobody who has had a Comber spud will ever want any other kind of spud—I say that with great respect to Members who will probably make a plea for their own areas.
The land in Strangford is so fertile that we can sometimes have three harvests in a year, as opposed to the two that farmers in other areas of the Province have. We have some of the lowest levels of rainfall—I hope I do not tempt providence by saying that, but that is what the stats say and they have been accumulated over a number of years. That is wonderful news for our farmers, who struggle to make ends meet and put food on all our tables. However, as my mother used to say to me when disciplining me for misbehaving as a young boy, “You reap what you sow.” That is a solid principle. The harvest must come in or it is all for naught. If farmers do not have the labour to bring in the harvest, the result is clear: a waste of food and money. That is unconscionable.
Jo Churchill
Is not the point also that the industry is constantly pushing the boundaries of innovation and increasing productivity, thereby fulfilling what the Government are asking it to do by improving production and productivity? If we are not careful, we will constrain the one thing it really needs, which is a decent seasonal workforce.
Jim Shannon
I thank the hon. Lady for those very wise words. I am sure the Minister is listening intently. I fully endorse what she said, and I am sure others do too. Governments have encouraged the agricultural sector to grow, and with that growth has come the complications for seasonal workers, which we are debating today. I hope that point is taken on board.
When there was a labour shortage in 2008, horticultural businesses lost an average of £140,000 as crops were left unpicked in the fields and retailers were left to try to fill their shelves with imported produce. We are not too old to remember 2008 and the peculiar difficulties that farmers and retailers faced. A shortage of labour puts at risk horticultural businesses, which contribute £3 billion to the UK economy and employ about 37,000 people on a permanent basis. We must address that issue, because we are possibly facing the same scenario again. I know that from my constituency, and I am sure the hon. Member for Faversham and Mid Kent and other hon. Members who have spoken and will speak later will endorse that view.
The briefing outlines the situation that we are currently in. I declare an interest: I am a member of the Ulster Farmers Union, the sister organisation of the NFU, of which I am also a member. The NFU 2015 end-of-season labour survey has shown for the first time since the seasonal agriculture workers scheme closed that growers are starting to struggle to source an adequate supply of seasonal workers to meet their needs. Some 29% of respondents stated that they experienced problems in 2015, and 66% said that they predict that the situation will worsen by 2018. That cannot be allowed to happen. This debate is an opportunity to address that problem at an early stage, and I hope the Minister and the Government will do so.
Those data were collected pre-referendum, with full freedom of movement within the European Union. Since the referendum, labour providers have reported a marked drop-off in interest from EU workers in seasonal work. That was demonstrated by the results of the NFU labour providers survey, which shows that between July and September 2016, 47% of labour providers said they were unable to meet the demands of the sectors they were supplying. That is almost half; it is a colossal figure. That compares with the 100% of labour providers who said they were able to recruit sufficient numbers of workers during January, February and March this year.
That is not good news for our farmers, for our constituents or for us in this place. Many crops produced in the United Kingdom are seasonal, which creates a structural problem that requires the annual recruitment of sufficient seasonal workers. Those jobs are fluid and flexible, but they do not provide the stable, permanent wage that people need. I say this gently: farmers do not want to undercut wages by bringing people in to do the work; the fact is that they cannot get enough labour to do the work at the right time.
I was taken by the figures that the hon. Member for Faversham and Mid Kent mentioned—I think she referred to 1,000 workers for one section of land. Think about that for a second. That is 1,000 workers who have to be housed and looked after. That is a colossal figure, and it is for just one place, not the whole of the United Kingdom. That puts where we are into perspective.
In my constituency, we have Willowbrook and Mash Direct, which are local agri-food producers. I know how hard they work to encourage local people—those at home—to work for them, but the reality is that a large portion of their workforce is not from Northern Ireland. In one of those factories the figure is 40%, and in the other it is 60%. We need seasonal workers in Strangford, across Northern Ireland and throughout the whole of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Those companies could not operate without a seasonal workforce, and I know they are not alone. The NFU said that the industry currently uses about 80,000 seasonal workers, and that figure is expected to rise to 95,000 by 2021. The projected figures show that we need more seasonal workers; we must not decrease the number we already have. A flexible workforce is needed across food and farming—an industry worth £108 billion to the nation’s economy. The input of agri-food, therefore, makes a massive contribution to the economy, as anyone who represents an agri-food sector or constituency knows—those who do not probably know from the facts and figures.
Workers from across the skills spectrum are needed throughout the industry—for example, in livestock and poultry businesses to process and pack meat. Cereal farmers need workers to weed crops and drive complex machinery. Farming is not as simple as it was years ago. There is more complexity to it today, and bureaucracy as well—there is a certain level of regulation to meet to move products throughout the world. Dairy farmers need workers with high levels of animal husbandry skills. I am old enough to remember the small milking ventures in my constituency, because I had many friends in farming. The systems were easy to work with then, but with all the complexity and technology today, people need a degree to work in a milking parlour.
The UK is not alone in the need to outsource help; Canada, the US and other countries do the same. My own son applied to go to Australia for a year on a work permit visa to see the country while working on different farms—he fell in with a girl, which of course put an end to all that, but that happens sometimes in this world, so he did not take up the opportunity in Australia. That scheme appeals to many young people wishing to take a gap year, and the Australian Government have made it easy for young people to do it, at great benefit to farmers and their economy. It is an opportunity to see other parts of the world, and to learn a wee bit more about farming and how people do things there.
The scenario is clear. We once had an extremely successful quota-based scheme for seasonal agricultural workers, which enabled farmers to recruit temporary overseas workers to carry out crop growing, harvesting, on-farm processing and packing. I have been informed that it was robust and effective, controlled by the UK Border Agency and managed by contracted operators. It has provided a pool of labour for the horticulture industry for the past 60 years. Exceptionally high rates of return to home countries meant that the seasonal agricultural workers scheme was never an immigration issue.
We must bring something similar into play as a matter of urgency, and that is why the debate today is so relevant to our times. The NFU has called on the Government in 2017 to trial a substantial fixed-term work permit scheme for agriculture and horticulture targeted at non-EU workers. That is what the farmers in my constituency and I are calling for in today’s debate. This country knows how to carry out such a scheme, because we have had one before. We only need to bring it back and update what is necessary.
The NFU has said that a new seasonal agricultural workers scheme could include “all of the positives” of the previous SAWS arrangements, but with “new criteria” that could include oversight by the Home Office—UK Visas and Immigration; I hope the Minister will respond to this point—management by licenced operators, and checks on arrival and departure for scheme workers. The scheme could be open to workers from anywhere in the world, have independently accredited scheme standards and include restrictions on the length of the placement period.
I ask the Minister gently but firmly to indicate how willing the Government are to take into account where we are, and to address the needs before we have to address a crisis. We should go from this debate in Westminster Hall and proactively put in the time and effort needed to bring a pilot scheme into play by 2017. That is what we are all asking for, and I look to the Minister for leadership. We need help, our constituents need help, and we need to make progress, as the hon. Member for Faversham and Mid Kent said, to ensure that our agriculture sector can grow even more, producing more jobs, and so that great product, the Comber spud, can continue to be available for palates and plates throughout the United Kingdom and further afield.
Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge and Malling) (Con)
I am delighted to be following so many illustrious hon. Members and, in particular, to be speaking in a debate called by my neighbour and hon. Friend the Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Helen Whately), who has done an awful lot in the 18 months that we have been in this place to represent the farming and agricultural communities that overlap our areas so much.
It is a huge privilege to be at this important debate, because the question it asks is fundamental and, in many ways, will shape British agriculture not only for the next season, or even the next two or three seasons, but for the next generation. The danger, however, is that we could see British agriculture going from being an industrial heart of innovation and technological improvement, and from providing taste explosions such as those from the strawberries my hon. Friend was describing, to a desert—perhaps simply a commuter belt of dormitory villages.
The question is therefore fundamental to what we want our countryside to be in the next 20 or 30 years. I am pleased that my hon. Friend spoke with such passion and eloquence, and that so many voices from around the United Kingdom—I am sure we will hear from Scotland shortly—are speaking out, because it is not simply a matter for the garden of England, which we all know is the most beautiful part of the kingdom, and it is not simply a matter for soft fruit farmers; it is a matter, as everyone has mentioned in different ways today, of migrant labour in the different areas.
We must get the system right, because if we do, we will have migrant labourers who are able to come, perhaps for a period of a few weeks or months, depending on whether they are here for tourism, fruit picking or other areas of the agricultural industry, and then to go. They will take their revenue and go home, continue their education, rejoin their families, or whatever it might be. If we get it wrong, we will have a real problem, because either we will have to close down large swathes of British agriculture, and perhaps swathes of tourism, or we will have done something that we did not intend, which is to create permanent migrants. The alternative to temporary migration when the economy is such a strong draw, as our growing economy is after six years of tough decisions, is that migration becomes permanent.
Communities might be complaining about a few thousand fruit pickers every now and again, but the pressure from people coming with their kids and families will be quite different. We should recognise that we are talking about a fundamental question for the United Kingdom industry. If we are to get this right, it must be a temporary migration scheme open to many other industries, not just agriculture. Such a scheme would open up an enormous opportunity for the UK to grow flexibly and create space for innovation.
One of the big problems for companies is that hiring workers is great, but firing them is not. No one wants to lay people off, in particular as companies innovate and come up with new ideas and new technologies, and as the agricultural sector revolutionises how we grow food in this country—as it has done, let us not forget, for the past 300 years, because we invented so many of the great reforms on land that allowed people to leave the soil and go to the cities, which led to the urban and economic regeneration of the United Kingdom that enabled us to become the powerhouse of the world. Those innovations are carrying on, but if we force people to have workers on permanent contracts, innovation will be discouraged, because the economic and emotional cost of moving people on and letting them go creates a drag. For an innovative sector such as agriculture, what we want and really need is temporary workers. They fill the seasonal hole and they allow innovation.
We can get this right, because here in the UK we are combining so many wonderful things. I joked a little about the garden of England perhaps becoming a desert, but the truth is that it is not one. It is already a centre of innovation, and what people often forget—I know that the Minister will not, because he has looked into this carefully—is that agriculture and technology work incredibly closely together.
Were the Minister to visit Kent, he would be very welcome at East Malling research centre, which is at the forefront of agricultural innovation. Not only are the people there developing new forms of apples and strawberries—some even better than the ones grown in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Faversham and Mid Kent, however extraordinary that might seem—but they are coming up with innovative ways of using water, so that food can grow in areas where water is very much at a premium, in particular in sub-Saharan Africa. They are also looking at the robotics that my hon. Friend referred to. Those areas are really challenging, but because we are blessed in Kent, we get the two of them working side by side and developing together, and that innovation spreads to the rest of the world.
Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)
I am reluctant to interrupt my hon. Friend’s fabulous speech, which we are all enjoying, but as a fruit farmer’s daughter and a fruit farmer myself, I feel it is imperative to ask whether he agrees that these agricultural workers are a fairly unique breed. They must be both skilled technologically and strong physically. The type of work we ask them to do is unusual, skilled and often back-breaking. As such, they are a group of people who need to be able to move around—perhaps even more than other migrant workforces.
Tom Tugendhat
I completely agree. My hon. Friend knows very well that we share a passion for the British apple. As my right hon. and hon. Friends here will know, it is now russet season. May I strongly encourage those who have not had a Kentish Russet this season to do so? They are truly the champagne of apples—well, the English champagne of apples. They are the most fantastic product.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Faversham and Mid Kent said, we are talking about creating a system—I know the Minister is listening carefully and following the theme of this debate—that allows innovation in the agricultural sector to increase. As a boy in Kent, I did quite a lot of fruit picking, and I know that many other people did that too. My picking was not quite of the standard that my dear friend Marion Regan would require, as I was not packing for Wimbledon, which is where her strawberries go. We used to go as kids to a pick-your-own farm. Of course, we ate half the stuff before it got into the punnet.
Getting the system right would not mean some return to the halcyon days—which have not existed for a long time—of east-end Londoners going hop picking in the summer, because those east-end Londoners, thank God, now have very good jobs and spend their holidays all around the world. I am afraid that the idea that hop picking in Kent is an alternative to Ibiza is simply not credible for large swathes of people. Perhaps it is for some.
The change that we as a nation voted for on 23 June means that we have to reinvent ourselves and remember some old skills. Some of those skills are to do with imagination and creativity, which was the extraordinary thing about the seasonal agricultural workers scheme. Although other OECD countries copied the scheme, it was innovative when it came in. Indeed, extraordinarily, it almost—I do mean almost—still exists. It was last operated in 2013, which is only a few years ago. One of the many organisations that operated it, the Harvesting Opportunities Permit Scheme, or HOPS, stopped only then, and it still runs a recruitment agency for agricultural workers, so it could easily be brought back. We are not talking about a complete redesign; we are talking about switching back to a scheme that worked extremely well until only recently.
None of that will compensate for the many workers deciding not to come because they will take a 10% or 15% pay cut if they are paid in pounds but want to take their money back to parts of the world where they spend in euros, so a new scheme will not be a direct replacement. It will not simply turn on the tap immediately. We must recognise that there are still challenges for farmers, not just in Kent but around the country, but such a scheme will go some way to offering opportunities. If we look at the issue seriously, as I know the Minister will, we will create the flexible scheme that Britain needs, that farming needs and that many of our friends in Europe need.
We are of course about to enter—in some ways, we already have—the toughest negotiations the world has ever seen, on hundreds of lines of Government business, industry, migration and any number of other questions. Everything is to play for. As we started those negotiations, we must demonstrate our good will towards our European neighbours. Whatever people may think about the European Union, we are all friends with our European neighbours, and we must show them that we are open. We must show them again that we are believers in free trade. We created the rule of law and the system of international agreement—that system was created largely in the Chamber not far from here. If we remind them that openness is something that we feel we still share, and that we are not just willing but actually very happy for their young men and women to come and do a significantly better job than I ever did in Kent’s strawberry fields and take money home to enrich their own communities, that will go a little way—perhaps not far, but certainly a little way—to showing our good will to our European friends in particular, but also to people around the world. That would be an important gesture, not just for us but for them.
May I briefly sum up and ask the Minister a few questions, which I know he will be delighted to answer? Will he consider introducing a pilot scheme as soon as possible? I mentioned HOPS, which I am sure would be delighted to assist, should the Home Office be willing to engage with it. I am sure that he will not need to give reasons why he will not, so I shall skip over any explanation he might otherwise have given. Will he please collect data from that pilot scheme and share them with Members and groups such as the National Farmers Union, which has done a lot of work on this issue, and the Country Land and Business Association, which likewise has devoted an awful lot of energy to supporting not only the agricultural sector but all industry in rural areas? That would allow us to evaluate and, yes, to adjust. We do not pretend for a moment that the first scheme that will roll out will be perfect. It will not be, but we would be happy to work with him on that.
Jo Churchill
Does my hon. Friend agree that as the industry has been so proactive in asking us to have those discussions, it behoves the Government to involve the industry—the NFU, the CLA and so on—in developing the scheme that is most appropriate to service the issues that have come to light during this debate?
Tom Tugendhat
My hon. Friend makes an absolutely essential point. Not only does it behove the Government to consult the industry widely because of all the efforts it has made, but we simply will not get a very good answer unless we do that, because the experts are the people who are doing the work, not the ones who are legislating on it. I am sure that my hon. Friend the Minister will be only too willing to meet members of the NFU and the CLA. I remember his willingness to meet all manner of groups in his former occupation as aviation Minister, when he listened carefully to the people of west Kent and came up with absolutely the right answer. We will skip over that.
My last point is this. We have offered evidence that businesses will not survive if they rely solely on UK workers—a point that my hon. Friend the Member for Faversham and Mid Kent made extremely well. The farmers in my community need help now. I know that the Government, my hon. Friend the Minister and the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural affairs are listening. I urge the Minister to act with a little alacrity, because as my hon. Friend the Member for Faversham and Mid Kent said, the season for strawberries is not in June; it is in March.
Mike Weir (Angus) (SNP)
I am pleased to speak in this debate under your chairmanship, Mr Gapes. I congratulate the hon. Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Helen Whately) on introducing the debate. I am a member of her newly formed all-party parliamentary group, and I look forward to doing much important work in this area.
I represent a constituency that sits in the middle of the Scottish soft fruit and potato areas, and I will concentrate today on soft fruit growers’ particular problems with agricultural employment. When I was growing up, I picked strawberries, raspberries and indeed potatoes. Everyone did in those days, but the world has moved on and—dare I say it—the industry is much more professional. Part of the reason for that is the spread of cultivation methods, with different berries now grown—blueberries are an important crop in my area—changes in the industry and the increasing demands of the major supermarkets.
Recent trends show increasing use of polytunnels as against open-field production for growing soft fruit. Indeed the season can now last for up to nine months of the year. This is a vital part of the Scottish economy, particularly for areas such as Angus. The soft fruit sector alone contributed many millions of pounds to the Scottish economy in 2015. The total for the horticultural industry in the UK, as has been said, is over £3.8 billion.
Most of the growers in my area rely, to a greater or lesser extent, on migrant labour. Many previously utilised the SAWS scheme, but since its abandonment they have relied on labour from other EU nations. With the prospect of leaving the EU, the future of those people is uncertain and it would be an utter disaster if we got to the positon where they too had to leave the EU, because that would lead to the complete collapse of many of those industries. The NFU has called for an assurance for EU workers already in a position to have the right of residency in the UK, which is a call I heartily support. I know the Minister will give the usual response, but Ministers really have to grapple with that. I appreciate that there are difficulties with our European neighbours, but that is important to the industries and, if it is not dealt with, we face real disaster. Many people have settled in our communities and become an important part of them. It is ridiculous that we cannot assure them that they remain welcome here.
The original SAWS scheme relied principally on young workers, often students. It is a huge pity that the issue of young people coming to work in the UK agricultural sector became tangled up with more general immigration. It is worth noting in passing that it is a two-way street. When I was at university I remember many people went to France to pick grapes, for example. Many of our young people also benefited from those opportunities.
Mike Weir
I will make some progress, if the hon. Gentleman does not mind. The vast majority of those who came to work in agriculture were here specifically for a short period and always intended to return to their home nation at the end of their visa period. Indeed, as the NFU points out, there was a 98% return rate. Unfortunately, as in many other areas, there is often a serious collision between perception and reality.
Under the previous scheme, some 21,250 visas were issued in its last year of operation for workers to come to the UK for periods of between five weeks and six months. In the last year of the scheme, I was told by Angus Growers, a producers’ group that covers Angus and the surrounding areas, of about 2,000 people whom it employed at the peak of the season the majority came through the SAWS scheme. It now employs many people from other EU nations.
It is worth pointing out the benefits to the UK of young people coming here. They not only earn money that they can take back to their home nation but learn English and gain a good impression of our country from the people they meet. That is an exercise in soft power and, if we end up outside the EU, we will have to look seriously at our relations with other parts of Europe and the world.
According to “Rural Scotland in Focus 2016”, launched this week by the Scottish Government, three quarters of Scotland’s migrant farm work is undertaken in Angus and Perth and Kinross, with the vast majority in the horticultural sector. Those areas—my area and adjoining areas—which are the heart of the Scottish fruit sector, rely on those workers. They should not be seen just as a form of cheap labour. Many companies have tried to recruit local workers and, as has been said by Members who are no longer in their place, one of the problems is that there are not sufficient local unemployed people to take up such posts.
Mike Weir
It is the Scottish Government’s success—the hon. Gentleman is getting it wrong. There are many more migrant workers employed in my area than there are unemployed people, and not all of those who are unemployed are capable of the labour required, because picking raspberries, strawberries and potatoes is not easy labour—I speak from experience a long time ago. Indeed, my local authority, in conjunction with growers, set up a berry scheme with the aim of providing opportunities for the long-term unemployed that had some success but not enough to take the place of those coming for work. A seasonal workers scheme is therefore necessary.
If we are unable to get sufficient seasonal workers to come, that would have a devastating effect on the local industry. I stress that horticulture provides jobs not just in picking but in the whole infrastructure behind that, from administration, processing and packing to transporting the fruit which, by its nature, has to be done quickly and efficiently. That provides many full-time jobs for local people as well as for seasonal migrant labour.
As has been said, there are real concerns that fruit and vegetables could remain unharvested if growers cannot obtain sufficient labour. The growers and agricultural industry in general are aware of the issues that surround the use of migrant labour, but they rightly point out, as I said, that many of them are students who come to this country, and there are genuine benefits to the UK from their coming and going back.
One issue that has not been touched on is what happens if the labour is not here? Some larger growers have already invested in farms in eastern Europe and are likely to invest more there. There has been talk of the great British strawberry, but unless we tackle this issue our export markets may disappear as that becomes the great Polish strawberry or the great Romanian strawberry. It is in our interests.
The National Farmers Union, with the support of horticulture and fruit growers, has come up with proposals for a renewed SAWS scheme, which it hopes would match its demands and tackle concerns about the use of migrant labour. In a rare degree of unanimity in the Chamber, I think we are all supportive of that, and perhaps of a trial, but, if the Minister is to go down the road of a trial, may we have one that takes in all parts of the United Kingdom, unlike for the post-study work visa, which, despite Scottish concerns, was for only a few English universities?
I make no bones about the fact that I firmly believe all existing EU workers should have the right to remain, but the NFU proposal is a sensible and genuine attempt to come up with a scheme that would meet Government objectives and allow this valuable industry to have the labour it requires. I urge the Minister, along with everyone else in the Chamber, to give that serious consideration.
Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gapes. I congratulate the hon. Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Helen Whately) on her passionate defence of her position. We would not want the pricing model of the British strawberry to go the same way as Toblerone or Marmite—or, worse still, for it to be outsourced entirely. The discussion has highlighted the often overlooked yet crucial role of economic migrants in the rural economy and shown that we need carefully managed migration policies if we are to ensure that we will not be worse off as we voyage into these uncharted post-Brexit waters.
Whatever side of the argument we are on in that debate, we must all agree that a thriving agricultural sector is vital to the strength of our rural economy. The figures I have say that 302,000 people work in agriculture and that the total income from farming, although it is declining, was in excess of £3.75 billion in 2015. We have heard slightly different figures in the debate, but agriculture is the lifeblood of hundreds of communities up and down the country. Within that, the horticultural sector is an important plank of British agriculture. It contributes £3 billion to the UK economy. However, the nature of the life cycle of crops and fruits means that inevitably it relies on seasonal workers. Figures in the Financial Times yesterday put the seasonal workforce at 80,000, 98% of whom are from the EU.
I certainly do not want those jobs to disappear. It is of course right that British people should be encouraged to work in agriculture, but realistically the seasonal nature of much of the work means that it will be difficult to achieve that in the short term. As we have heard, there are gaps that need to be plugged. My hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith) eloquently dealt with the arguments of Migration Watch, and the hon. Member for Faversham and Mid Kent described the difficulties with mechanical fruit picking. How do we resolve all that?
Obviously, agricultural workers, whether from the EU or of any other origin, should be allowed on UK farms seasonally, or permanently, and the Government need to work out a system that would guarantee a stable and predictable flow of farm workers. Most developed countries have some sort of temporary migration programme; it is not unusual. I believe that they even have one in Poland, in which they take workers from Moldova and Ukraine. It is not a bizarre idea; we have had it for a long time in this country. Economists value such systems and say that there is a triple benefit—I will not say triple lock; that is a bit controversial at the moment. There is a benefit to the host state, because the labour gaps are plugged; the system is good for the state that the migrants come from, because it does not engender the brain drain that we hear of.
Mrs Helen Grant (Maidstone and The Weald) (Con)
As the shadow Minister knows, there has been a terrible increase in hate crime since the referendum, 85% of which is race-related. Does she agree that that disgraceful behaviour not only threatens our identity and values but causes many overseas workers to reconsider whether to choose this country for work?
Dr Huq
The hon. Lady anticipates a later part of my speech. I was going to refer to yesterday’s Financial Times, which reported that a chap called John Hardman, of HOPS Labour Solutions of Kenilworth, 20% of whose recruitment is for agriculture jobs—I think it is an employment agency—said:
“Post-Brexit, Romanians and Bulgarians have had the view that Britain is a xenophobic, anti-European place and that they can go to Germany, Holland and Belgium, with better conditions and earn better wages, since the devaluation of the pound has reduced their net income by 15-20 per cent.”
The hon. Member for Faversham and Mid Kent and other hon. Members alluded to such conditions. We do not want that to happen; it is a good point.
The hon. Member for Angus (Mike Weir) pointed out that for the migrants themselves there are many benefits, including those to do with language. Such schemes are seen as good, and we had one from 1948 to 2013. Originally, the point of it was the opportunity for cultural exchange, with young people in war-torn Europe gaining the opportunity to contribute to the reconstruction of its economies—including Britain’s—by offering seasonal labour. In 2009, 21,250 agricultural workers were given short-term permits under the scheme. All of those were from Bulgaria and Romania, as Britain had started to use the scheme to ensure that citizens from countries newly admitted to the European economic area could contribute to filling those identified labour shortages. Along the way there have been adaptations; under the Labour Government in 2005 the Gangmasters Licensing Authority, which we established to give trade unions an effective voice in the prevention of exploitation of tied labour, was incorporated.
There has been a large degree of consensus in the debate that the scheme was a sensible, managed and welcoming migration policy, but in 2013 the Government decided to scrap it—quite controversially. Conservative MPs for Kent and Essex constituencies voiced concerns at the time. Fast forwarding, yesterday’s Financial Times contains some alarming things. The NFU, which many hon. Members have mentioned, is publishing a new survey later in the week. The article reports its worries that
“the supply of pickers for late-season crops such as potatoes and brassicas—cabbages, cauliflowers and turnips—was only enough to meet 67 per cent of the industry’s needs.”
There is a shortfall there. The article also states:
“In a letter to Robert Goodwill, the immigration minister, dated November 10 and seen by the FT…the NFU’s deputy president, warned: ‘There is a clear emerging labour crisis in the industry’ and ‘a very real risk that British fruit and vegetables will be left to rot unpicked in British fields in 2017’.”
We do not want to get to that point, obviously.
To some extent there were warnings in 2013. The British Growers Association said that scrapping the scheme would have
“a significant and damaging impact on investment and production decisions affecting the UK with immediate effect”.
The NFU, again, also gave a warning at that time. Even the Government’s Migration Advisory Committee predicted:
“In the medium- and longer-term, farmers are likely to experience increasing difficulties in sourcing the required level of seasonal labour from the EU (including the UK) labour market.”
I was speaking in a debate in this same 9.30 slot a week ago; I am having an attack of déjà vu. It was a debate on the effect of Brexit on higher education. Some of the questions are enduring ones about, short term, allowing people in and out. These are not migratory flows that would have a long-term impact. There has been an unusual level of consensus in the debate; I do not think that anyone has argued against bringing the scheme back temporarily.
Researchers from the University of Sussex have found that the working conditions of agricultural workers have not changed in any substantial way since the closure of the scheme. As a result, attracting sufficient British workers to the task is becoming increasingly challenging. Those claims are worrying and, given the post-Brexit climate that we are heading into, they need to be properly addressed and considered. The Government need to work with employers and unions to see what impact the scrapping of the scheme has had on jobs, wages and working conditions.
The NFU is calling for the reintroduction of a migration scheme for agricultural workers to be piloted, with a particular focus on students, as the hon. Member for Angus mentioned. Perhaps the Minister could at least commit to offering a proper, comprehensive assessment of the impact of scrapping the policy. Has there been an increase in labour productivity in the sector that will feed through to higher wages? Are jobs disappearing in agricultural firms? As those firms will be unable to produce goods without access to labour, it would be good to have a level-headed assessment.
The Government cannot say that they were not warned. Anyone who hopes that leaving the single market will allow the Government to liberalise migration policy in the agricultural sector will be as disappointed as the curry chefs who were told by the International Development Secretary that, if we voted to leave—
Dr Huq
I am in the last minute of my speech, and I should prefer to wind it up: my apologies.
The Government aim to reduce immigration to the tens of thousands whatever the economic costs, and insist on the mantra “Brexit means Brexit”, even though we do not know exactly what that means. They include student numbers in the calculations, despite the overwhelming evidence that the public do not want that. They seem to have boxed themselves into a corner, because they will not be able to liberalise immigration in a sector when the economic case and rationale are clear.
I know the Minister from his previous incarnation. He is a very reasonable chap. I had a win for my constituents because of his actions; so I hope he can do the same thing today. We have seen that dogmatic quotas and targets can result in counter-productive policies. I hope that he will listen to the hon. Member for Faversham and Mid Kent about having just a temporary trial scheme next year and about seasonal agriculture workers being at the forefront of the negotiations.
The Minister for Immigration (Mr Robert Goodwill)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gapes. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Helen Whately) for initiating this important and informative debate, and I congratulate her on her elevation to the chairmanship of the all-party parliamentary group for fruit and vegetable farming. She presented her case with her customary eloquence and passion, and I am grateful to her and to all hon. Members who have participated. I assure all hon. Members that I will reflect very carefully on the points that have been raised.
When I was appointed as the Minister for Immigration, I was interviewed by the Home Office staff magazine. One of the questions they asked me was, “If you weren’t a politician, what would you be?” I note in passing, and with relief, that they asked the same question of all of my ministerial colleagues at the Home Office, rather than it being a question solely for myself. I replied, “I’m a farmer, first and foremost. Politics has always been the other thing I do. My family have been on the same farm in north Yorkshire since 1850.” Indeed, I have carried out many of the same jobs as the hon. Member for Angus (Mike Weir); I suspect my father should have been arrested for using child labour, given the age at which I began doing those tasks.
It is important that we consider the issues before us today. I understand the position of the farming community and, every bit as importantly, I absolutely appreciate the importance of food and farming industries as a crucial component of the UK economy and of the fabric of rural Britain. I will just put the hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq) right on one point before I move on: seasonal workers do not contribute to net migration figures; someone has to be here for more than a year to count towards those. Indeed, the reason the seasonal agricultural workers scheme was closed was not because it was unsuccessful, but because the Government were required under EU law to lift the restrictions on Bulgarian and Romanian nationals, who then had unrestricted access to the labour market.
The issue of how we meet temporary labour needs in the agriculture sector is a long-standing one. In the past, the immigration system made provision for a seasonal agricultural workers scheme, under which overseas workers were admitted to for up to six months to undertake crop harvesting. Those arrangements worked very well indeed. The reason why the seasonal agricultural workers scheme was phased out was because the sector had access to an expanded pool of labour, following successive accessions of eastern European countries to the European Union.
As part of our commitment to reduce net migration, the Government’s consistent position has been not to introduce new migration schemes for non-EU nationals to meet labour needs at lower skill levels. The previous seasonal agricultural workers scheme was phased out on the recommendation of the Migration Advisory Committee at the point at which restrictions on the employment of Bulgarian and Romanian nationals were lifted. While the UK remains a member of the EU, EU nationals continue to enjoy the right of freedom of movement in accordance with the UK’s treaty obligations, and employers in the food and farming sector can continue to recruit EU workers to meet seasonal labour needs.
It is not the Government’s policy to admit non-EU nationals to meet labour needs at lower skill levels. However, I appreciate the concerns that have been raised about whether the present situation is sustainable. I met Minette Batters, the deputy president of the National Farmers Union, and Ali Capper, who is also from the NFU, at the beginning of the month. They raised that very point with me, and I have undertaken to reflect on it carefully. Indeed, at the Conservative party conference in Birmingham, I met the president of the NFU, Meurig Raymond, who also raised that very point.
I know there are concerns that the UK’s impending exit from the EU, or even the fall in the value of sterling, might lead to an immediate shortage of labour as EU workers go home, although the data do not support that so far. The most recent labour market statistics were published by the independent Office for National Statistics earlier this month. They cover the period up to September 2016—after the referendum—and show that the number of EU citizens in the UK labour force was higher in the quarter to September 2016 than it had been a year earlier.
Not only that, but the number of workers from the eight countries of eastern and central Europe that joined the EU in 2004, and from Bulgaria and Romania—the countries most commonly associated with low-skilled labour—are also up year on year. To be precise, there were 129,000 more workers from those countries in the UK in the third quarter of 2016 compared with a year earlier. That does not suggest that there is a major exodus from the United Kingdom although, as I have said, I will continue to monitor the situation carefully.
The Government wish to ensure that any decisions we take on the short-term need for seasonal migration schemes do not pre-empt future decisions about how the immigration system will work post-Brexit. As I am sure hon. Members will understand, there are constraints on what I can say about the future arrangements for EU citizens who want to work in the United Kingdom; the way in which we will control migration post-Brexit is yet to be determined. One of the opportunities of Brexit is that we will be able to control both the numbers of migrants from within the EU and the activities that they undertake when they are here.
Angela Smith
Can I read from the Minister’s comments that the Government’s plan, if they are to control and restrict freedom of movement, is to leave the single market?
Mr Goodwill
I think that question goes above my pay grade. The Leader of the Opposition will have an opportunity to ask the Prime Minister about that at Prime Minister’s Question Time—presumably once he has finished paying tribute to Fidel Castro.
What I can say is that, in framing those future arrangements, the Government will give careful consideration to the needs of the agricultural sector and, of course, every other part of the UK economy. The Government have made it clear that we will work with sectors of the economy to ensure that the potential impacts of Brexit are understood and taken into account when developing our approach. However, we will also be mindful that, in voting for the UK’s departure from the EU, the British people sent a clear message that gaining more control over the number of people who come here from Europe must be a priority in our negotiations.
There is no doubt that there is a debate to be had about whether workers admitted to the UK to undertake seasonal work on a temporary basis are an immigration issue. For example, they may not, as I have said, count towards the official net immigration statistics produced by the ONS if their stay is less than 12 months. However, they certainly have an impact on the communities where they are located, and they do use public services.
A wider issue is the balance to be struck between short-term fixes and the longer-term sustainability of the sector. The horticultural sector has clearly acquired a profound dependence on migrant labour. A Gangmasters Licensing Authority survey following the closure of the seasonal agricultural workers scheme found that, of the 234 farms that responded, only eight had employed any UK nationals at all to undertake seasonal work. Whether we arrived in that position because UK workers have ceased to be available to growers, or because migrant workers have become more readily available to them—or both—may be an academic point now. However, it is still sensible to ask whether the Government should act to perpetuate that dependence in future.
I will deal briefly with a couple of points raised during the debate. My hon. Friend the Member for Faversham and Mid Kent asked about those EU citizens who have already settled here. The Prime Minister has made it clear that she wishes to protect the status of people already here. Indeed, the only circumstances in which that would not be possible would be if British citizens’ rights in EU member states were not protected in return.
Points have been made about the reaction following Brexit and potential xenophobia. I am meeting the Romanian ambassador later today and I will make the point that this country still welcomes people to come and work here. Indeed, as long as we remain a member of the European Union, those people are free and welcome to come here and participate in our vibrant, thriving economy.
My hon. Friend the Member for North Cornwall (Scott Mann) made a point about accommodating seasonal workers. I agree that it is important that we look at accommodation, not only because we need to ensure the welfare of the migrants, but because the lack of rural accommodation is a barrier to the recruitment of UK workers. The working group on seasonal workers in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs continues to look at how increasing the availability of accommodation can be incentivised. Employers can offer some accommodation costs against the national minimum wage. My hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat) said that non-EEA seasonal workers coming here temporarily do not impact on the migration figures. I mention in passing that I have two Egremont Russet trees in my orchard and I can attest to the quality of their fruit.
This has been an excellent debate, and I repeat my thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Faversham and Mid Kent. I will allow her a few moments to sum up before the end of the debate.
Helen Whately
I thank the Minister for the time and care he has taken and for his comments. I particularly thank all hon. Members who have contributed. It has felt like a pretty lively debate. We have had strawberry wars about who produces the best strawberries. We have debated which the best apples are—the Russet performed very strongly; it is the English sparkling wine of apples, perhaps. We have also heard Kent compared to Ibiza. There has been a lot of emotion in the room as well.
To be serious, we have talked about how times have changed. Many of us have at some time picked fruit at a young age—who knows who was the youngest—and done our bit in the past. However, people do not work on the land any more, as the hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith) said, so we need a reliable supply of seasonal workers for our farms. I urge the Minister to keep looking at this, and to look not only at the overall figures for EU migrants but specifically at the agricultural sector to see what is happening to it. It is absolutely vital. As my hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat) said, this is an existential question.
Motion lapsed (Standing Order No. 10(6)).
Criminal Justice System: Equality of Access
(8 years ago)
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Gerald Jones (Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered equality of access to justice in the criminal justice system.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gapes. I am pleased to have the opportunity to discuss this important topic. In the past six years, many lawyers have spoken of their fears about access to justice. When they do, they are often accused of special pleading, as if only lawyers care about people being able to use the protection our laws afford us.
There is a problem in this country with the debate about access to the courts and the provision of legal aid. The Government say that our legal aid budget is generous. The Government speak about court users, who must contribute to the running of the courts, as if most people have nothing better to do than spend their lives in court or as if people relish rushing off to court as often as they can. The truth of people’s attitude is, of course, quite different. I can do no better than quote a giant of the Labour movement and labour law, Lord Bill Wedderburn. In his seminal 1965 book “The Worker and the Law”, he wrote that
“most people want nothing more from the law than that it should leave them alone”.
The truth is that most people would hope never to have to use the courts—the employee who is being underpaid or unfairly treated, the businessperson owed money by a customer who will not pay or the mother who is injured in a car accident on the school run. For those who commit criminal offences, the situation is very different, but no doubt many of them wish the law would leave them alone.
There have been cuts to legal aid funding in many areas of law since 2010. It would be wrong to suggest that cuts have been visited only on criminal legal aid, and it is important to put things in context. First came the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012. At that time, the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) was the Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor. The Act removed eligibility for publicly funded legal assistance from a raft of areas of social welfare law. For those seeking legal help with debt advice, there is no support—no support for housing advice, unless someone faces being made homeless, and no support for welfare benefits advice; the latter is particularly troubling. Past figures show that many appeals against the Department for Work and Pensions are successful. Between December 2014 and June 2015, 53% of those who appealed against fit-for-work decisions had that decision reversed. People would have to go to court far less if the decisions of Government Departments were better.
The cuts have given rise to a geographical concept I have never heard of before: a legal aid advice desert. The Law Society has a campaign devoted to the eradication of the cuts. There are areas of the England and Wales jurisdiction where legal aid advice for housing cases is disappearing. My constituency of Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney shares with the neighbouring area of Rhondda Cynon Taf just a single provider of legal aid housing advice.
The figures show that civil legal aid cases have decreased dramatically since LASPO became law. In July this year, Young Legal Aid Lawyers, along with the Legal Action Group and the Legal Aid Practitioners Group, wrote to the Prime Minister. They explained that in 2012-13, before LASPO, there were 724,243 civil law cases funded by legal aid. By 2015-16, that figure had plummeted to just 258,460. As they told the Prime Minister, that is a picture of justice denied. The Act removed most private family law matters from the scope of legal aid. Divorce proceedings, child contact arrangements and financial and property disputes are no longer eligible, save where there is evidence of domestic violence.
At the time of LASPO coming into force, the Government made a commitment to review the effects of the Act within three to five years. We are squarely in that timescale now. The calls for that review to start have reached a crescendo. In recent months, the Trades Union Congress and Amnesty International have produced reports highlighting the scale of the problem. I pay tribute to both organisations for their work. It is surely time that the Justice Secretary set that review in motion. Perhaps her reason for not acting is that she is in possession of another review—a review of the effect of employment tribunal fees—that the Ministry of Justice appears to be sitting on, which we strongly suspect is because that review is critical of the fees.
In 2013, the then Justice Secretary, the right hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling), introduced more reforms. He sought to impose restrictions on the availability of judicial review; to restrict the ability of foreign nationals to receive publicly funded legal assistance; to remove publicly funded legal assistance for nearly every area of prison law; and to make further cuts to immigration law and to family law. A proposal for competitive tendering for criminal legal aid fees was also floated, but later abandoned.
The right hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell asserted, without providing evidence, that the legal aid bill was spiralling. He also asserted, without providing evidence, that the public had lost confidence in the legal aid system and that campaigners were using judicial review as a tool to block his Government’s unimpeachable legislative programme. We can debate whether the economic argument was ever really made out. However, those reforms were a further restriction on access to justice. Worse still are the restrictions on judicial review, which can only be characterised as a flagrant set of measures to reduce Government’s accountability to the people.
During the past six years, we have witnessed a curious sight little seen before. Outside the Old Bailey here in London and outside courts across the country, we have seen the strange sight of gowned and bewigged lawyers protesting against cuts to legal aid. That, in turn, gave rise to more curious sights still: a huge and grotesque papier mâché likeness of the right hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell being carried aloft around Parliament Square, and the barrister and former Tory MP Sir Ivan Lawrence taking to a platform erected in Old Palace Yard to call on the legal profession to strike. If 2016 has been the year that saw old certainties undermined, perhaps we should have seen it coming from that moment alone.
The question is, what brought criminal lawyers to that point? The profession has not seen a rise in fees for more than 20 years. While it is abundantly clear that many QCs have done and continue to do well from legal aid, the position is very different for the majority of junior barristers. Some reported at the time not being paid for their work or paying more in travel to get to court than they would receive for the court appearance itself. Solicitors firms throughout that time have had to do much more with much less.
The profession told of a real and present fear that it simply could not take more cuts. Diminishing fees would mean greater case loads and pressure to accumulate more clients and devote less time to those cases, all in order to stay afloat. For some professionals, that would mean compromises in quality and integrity that were a bridge too far, and they feared that firms willing to stack ’em high and sell ’em cheap would prevail.
It was rumoured that long-established and trusted law firms would disappear and that those that had been a presence on the local high street and had served their local communities for decades would be replaced by warehouses of inexperienced and exploited paralegals. It was also rumoured that removing those firms from the high street would leave no physical presence, which would be replaced with a faceless website and call centre run by G4S, Tesco or even Eddie Stobart.
The Government abandoned their restructuring of criminal legal aid and opted for more cuts. Mr Grayling imposed a reduction of 17.5% on solicitors’ fees, a huge reduction in resources that would have serious implications for any business. The cut was to be introduced in two stages: an initial 8.75% reduction last year with a planned further cut of 8.75% cut in April this year. The second cut was postponed for one year by Mr Grayling’s successor, Mr Gove.
Mike Gapes (in the Chair)
Order. The hon. Gentleman is aware that we normally refer to hon. Members by their constituencies, not their names.
Gerald Jones
I am sorry, Mr Gapes.
It is hoped that the new Justice Secretary will shortly confirm that there will be no further reduction, but the warnings from lawyers to the Government have continued. They have warned about the future of the justice system, miscarriages of justice, and two-tier justice with one law for the rich and another for the poor. That is the peril we risk creating if ordinary people are denied proper legal representation.
Wealthy defendants in criminal cases sometimes seem to have unlimited resources and create the mistaken impression that justice can be easily bought or easily evaded. That may be unpopular. People convicted of the most serious offences may have benefited from legal aid. Newspapers often howl with outrage at the sums involved, but such cases are often the longest and most complex. The answer is not to deprive people of representation. If the state and the public choose and demand that certain activities are to be criminalised, a cost is involved. It is the mark of a civilised society.
We must ensure that those who want representation are represented. Only then can we be confident they are properly tried, and properly acquitted or convicted. A proper trial means competent prosecution and defence, and since 2010, the Crown Prosecution Service too has seen significant restraint. Its budget has been cut by around 25% and its staff has been reduced by 2,500. The Government will say this has not led to any problems and cannot be blamed for trials collapsing, cases being dropped or disclosure of important evidence being missed, but the truth is that the service is stretched and that has implications for access to justice.
Access to justice does not apply only to those accused. Victims of crime also need access to justice. They must be confident that their case receives the attention it deserves, that it is adequately resourced and that it is handled with care and expertise. Austerity has made access to justice more difficult for thousands of people, not just for the reasons I have given. Yes, the Government have cut legal aid and the budget for the Crown Prosecution Service, but they have also closed courts around the country. In February, it was announced that 86 courts and tribunals would be closed, but it was reckoned that 97% of citizens would be able to reach their required court within an hour by car. That is fine for those who have a car and drive, but what about those who do not? Many people rely on public transport and for them the journey time is greater. With those closures and greater travelling times comes a diminution in the principle of local justice.
Holly Lynch (Halifax) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. Two of the courts that were closed across the country were in my constituency. Some of the reasoning was that the closures would facilitate a roll-out of technology and that access to justice would be more available than ever, but nothing has replaced the closure of those courts. There has been no technology, no hubs and no additional video link technology. We are left with a significant deficit in access to justice.
Gerald Jones
My hon. Friend makes an interesting and correct point, which underlines the position across the country where access to justice has been denied to too many people. It has been replaced not with an improved service, but with a diminution in the principle of local justice.
The Government have rightly looked at technology to ameliorate some of the problems. Trials have been launched with greater use of video links, including for defendants who need not appear in court unless necessary. Mobile vans have been parked near witnesses’ homes to allow them to give evidence without going to court. However, there are other examples, to which my hon. Friend alluded. Solicitors in Exeter were left frustrated by a new court system enabling all defendants to appear over a video link from local police stations to Plymouth magistrates court but which, however, denied them proper and private consultations with their clients. Technology must be utilised, but it must not be assumed to be good in and of itself. It must not be adopted without allowing defendants a proper defence—there must be no compromise on that.
We are worried about access to justice. One of the first acts of my right hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) on becoming leader of the Labour party was to ask Lord Bach to convene a commission to assess access to justice in our system, and it is considering what can be done to improve the current situation. An independent group of commissioners is looking at the whole system. They have been invited not for their party sympathies, but for their expertise. An interim report was recently launched and is already a great piece of work with innovative and exciting ideas. It is hoped that it will be finalised next year.
Lord Chief Justice Thomas observed earlier this year that
“our justice system has become unaffordable to most”.
There can be no greater indictment of the position we find ourselves in today. I hope the Minister can offer some reassurance but, sadly, I do not hold out much hope.
The Minister for Courts and Justice (Sir Oliver Heald)
I join the welcome to you in the Chair, Mr Gapes. I congratulate the hon. Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney (Gerald Jones) on securing this debate on an important subject.
Access to justice is at the heart of everything we do in the Ministry of Justice. The sad thing about the hon. Gentleman’s remarks—of course he is entitled to point to areas where things are unsatisfactory—is that he did not talk about the context. The context is that there are far fewer cases and that, because of that, in some parts of the country courts sit for only a quarter of the time they could sit. Therefore, we are working against a changing picture, and not least against the background of the Government spending £1 billion to modernise our courts and tribunals. Every time one introduces modernisation, one has fewer unnecessary directions hearings; and one enables witnesses to give evidence by video link. Any of these changes affect the sort of court estate we need and issues of access to justice, but in a positive way. It is clear that he has concerns about access to justice and I hope that I can reassure him.
We are still spending a great deal of money on legal aid. The changes the hon. Gentleman referred to were made by the then Lord Chancellor, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), to concentrate legal aid on matters of most importance to individuals—for example, when a home was a risk, where someone’s livelihood was at risk because of the threat of imprisonment in a criminal case, or where someone might lose their children in a care case involving domestic violence. I think most of us would agree that my right hon. and learned Friend concentrated the effort where it was most needed. I do not think it is seriously arguable that he did not.
A review by March 2018 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offences Act 2012 was promised; it has to be completed by a particular date in March 2018. We have only just entered the period in which the review might have started, so it is not as though we have been dragging our feet for years. The review will go ahead.
To say that in this country we do not have debt and housing advice is incorrect. What is the citizens advice bureaux network doing? It is providing just that. On Friday, I opened a new bureau in Letchworth, where the debt and housing advice from Citizens Advice is well regarded. Shelter, which has a contract with the Legal Aid Agency, is a fantastic organisation giving advice about housing matters. The Department for Work and Pensions puts a great deal of effort and time into welfare benefit advice and giving people information.
The hon. Gentleman suggested that there were legal aid advice deserts for housing law. That is not so. Every part of the country has housing advice available. The point about housing advice is that in some areas of the country there are many more housing cases in which people might lose their homes than there are in others, so the provision is not exactly the same in each place, but it is national. The fact that there is one provider with a number of offices in one place does not mean that there is no advice. There is advice from that provider, and often the provider is very expert. If we said that that area had to have two firms, we would reduce the amount of work available to the provider that has the expertise, so it is not as simple a question as the hon. Gentleman suggested.
I was glad that the hon. Gentleman mentioned Sir Ivan Lawrence. I do not remember the occasion in question, but I pay tribute to his contribution in this place over many years before his retirement.
Turning to access to justice more generally, I think it is true to say that our courts and tribunals are open to everyone, regardless of their circumstances and location. As my right hon. Friend the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Chief Justice and the Senior President of Tribunals made clear in their joint statement in September, a modernised Courts and Tribunals Service must be just, proportionate and accessible. It would be undermined if it were not. However, the services that our courts provide at the moment do not always accommodate our citizens’ busy lives or meet customers’ accessibility needs. Access to justice is not just about how close people are to a court. Our programme will reduce the need for many customers to attend court. Modern technologies offer significant benefits in that respect, and we intend to explore every opportunity to use those technologies to make access to justice easier.
Holly Lynch
To return to my point about the courts in my constituency having closed, I completely buy the notion, if we are starting from a position of what is best practice in supporting vulnerable victims and witnesses through the court process, that having old-fashioned buildings was not necessarily the best practice that we would like to see, but nothing—no technology, digitalisation or modernisation of the justice system—has come in to replace the courts in my constituency. Can the Minister give me any information on what might be happening?
Sir Oliver Heald
I am of course happy to look into the situation in Halifax and write to the hon. Lady, but I will make this point to her. Because our courts are used for only about 50% of the time, we are trying to use them more fully and to have courts that are more modern and have modern communications—wi-fi, video links and so on—so we are closing some courts and investing the money in improving the remaining ones. That is the overall plan.
The Lord Chief Justice gave this example—a Welsh example—the other day to the Select Committee on Justice. Wales is mountainous in parts and has road issues and so on, but in Dolgellau, where the court was closed, a video link has been established so that it is easier for local residents to give evidence and they do not have to travel to Caernarfon, for example. There are areas where such changes have already been made. There are some areas where we are proposing to make suitable alternative arrangements, and we have a more general programme of considering questions such as whether it is possible to sit a court for a particular case in, say, the town hall or another public building. Such courts have been characterised as pop-up courts. We also have that initiative, which we are working on at the moment. Attempts are being made, but I will of course write to the hon. Lady about Halifax.
A significant amount of the work of magistrates courts will be conducted online. That will of course mean less attendance at courtrooms. It will increase the speed of the process, save money and remove the need for defendants to attend court at all. Our ambition is for attendance at a court building to be reserved for the more serious cases, in which there is to be a trial or there is a serious issue of sentencing.
We are making a lot of progress. The common platform programme has already introduced the ability to plead guilty online for certain traffic offences, as part of the single justice procedure whereby one magistrate deals with the cases. We have introduced wi-fi into all criminal courts, and the programme will continue so that we get an end-to-end digital process. The police will build a digital file, which will go to the CPS, which will put it into the right condition for court. Then, once it is going to court, all the users of the system will be able to draw down that information, that case file. The judge will be able to give directions online. We will have far fewer ineffective hearings and hearings that it would be possible to avoid by using technology.
Many vulnerable people come into contact with the courts, and it is important, through the changes, to ensure that they are helped to access digital services. We are currently consulting on how to improve their access to the digital process, as part of the announcement that was made in September.
The hon. Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney represents a constituency in south Wales. He will know that, during the consideration of court closures in that area, particular efforts were made to find suitable alternative provision; we have discussed places such as Dolgellau. I appreciate that some individuals may find themselves in difficult circumstances when needing to attend court. Anyone who has a concern about travelling to court on the same transport as the person they are accusing or anything of that sort should make it clear to the police and the CPS that they have that concern. Arrangements will always be made to ensure that witnesses can get to court in a satisfactory way.
It is right to thank the hon. Gentleman for initiating the debate. It is important to recognise that we are in a period in which crime is falling, the number of cases is falling and the way in which we do the work is changing, so he is right to say that, when it comes to legal aid for criminal cases, there is a case for discussion and seeing whether it is possible to improve the two main legal aid schemes: the advocates scheme and the litigators scheme. I can assure him that the Ministry of Justice is in productive discussions with both parts of the profession—the Bar and solicitors—to see whether we can find legal aid schemes for their work that are more attuned to modern needs, but that also fit in with career progression and all those things that are of concern to the Bar and solicitors. We are doing that actively at the moment; we are in discussions with them.
The hon. Gentleman recalled some remarks that were made at the time suggesting that judicial review would be dead following the changes made by the then Lord Chancellor, who is now my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Transport. In fact, more than 4,500 cases were started the following year, so I think he is right to feel that that did not happen after all.
The hon. Gentleman mentioned the review of employment tribunal fees. I cannot tell him the outcome yet, because we are still doing it, but I think it is good that the Government are prepared to review that issue, just as we are also reviewing the immigration fees at the moment. I do not think that should be criticised; I think the hon. Gentleman should welcome it.
Question put and agreed to.
ESA and Personal Independence Payments
(8 years ago)
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Angela Crawley (Lanark and Hamilton East) (SNP)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered employment and support allowance and personal independence payments.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Dorries. First, I wish all my constituents a happy St Andrew’s day. It is a privilege to bring the difficulties of many of my constituents to the House for consideration, and those of the people across the UK who have experience of trying to access support when they need it most through either employment and support allowance or personal independence payments. Since I became an MP, a large percentage of the constituency casework that I or my staff have dealt with has been a result of ESA and PIP issues.
Owing to the very nature of the benefit that they are trying to access, these people are vulnerable. Many are experiencing serious illness for the first time in their lives and are facing a huge process of adjustment. That is hugely stressful, and this process is hugely stressful for those individuals, who often feel dehumanised and part of a process. The assessment procedure only serves to make things worse. Of the ESA and PIP cases that my office has dealt with—I will discuss one particular case in detail today—many have involved complaints about the assessment process. These assessments are often inhumane, needlessly stressful and unfair to claimants. Many other cases have required intervention following unsuccessful personal independence payment claims, the vast majority of which have been overturned on appeal.
My constituency is sadly not an anomaly when it comes to appeals figures. The latest statistics on appeals against PIP decisions show that 65% of appeal decisions found in favour of the claimants. Not only does that highlight a deeply flawed system, but it clearly shows that a number of people who are subjected to these highly stressful and often prolonged, protracted processes to get the support that they need are ultimately entitled to that support. The statistic of 65% of appeals overturned evidences that, and unless the Government can tell me statistics to the contrary, I am going to assume that their system is not working. It suggests that the system needs to be radically reformed. The high appeal and overturn rate is unacceptable—and unsuccessful on the Government’s part, if they are trying to drive down the number of illegitimate claimants—particularly when it impacts so negatively on the claimants who require this support the most.
If you will indulge me, Ms Dorries, I want to turn to the case of my constituent, Donna. I have the permission of my constituent to raise this issue, and they have asked me to do so in order to illustrate the impact of the benefits system on their life and to highlight the serious inequality they face. Donna, who lives in Carluke, is a mother of two children. She has a supportive husband. She established a café called the Hope Café, which is a mental health charity, and she is an advocate and a champion for supporting those with mental health problems. I commend Donna on her bravery in opening up to me so fully about her experiences with the Department for Work and Pensions. She has given me permission to share her story in full, because she hopes that it will illuminate the effect of malpractice and the effect that the assessments had on her life.
Donna became seriously ill with severe depression and anxiety 10 months ago. She told me that her mental illness made her believe that her two young children, aged eight and 10, would be better off without her in their lives. She told me that her mental illness made her believe that she was useless and worthless and had no skills worth sharing with the world. It made her think that her close friends and family were ashamed of her for being weak. That is the mindset of someone in the grip of depression, and it is incredibly difficult to break out of. Months later, thankfully, she is recovering, and as her background is working in mental health, she is keen to use her personal story to highlight the flaws in the benefits system and hopefully improve the process for others.
Donna went through the application process for both personal independence payment and employment and support allowance, which she found, in her own words, extremely harrowing. She first contacted my office to ask whether we could intervene to support her, as she was required to attend capability assessments for ESA and PIP. Donna, being logical and thinking that this would be an end in itself, asked whether she could endure one assessment. We are aware that this is not how the process works. Instead, Donna underwent an employment support work capability assessment and was asked back for a further personal independence assessment. On both occasions, she endured the lengthy assessment procedures, because these are classed as two separate benefits and the assessments are carried out by two separate providers. She found both assessments incredibly difficult. She told me that the questions she was asked made her re-live the worst days of her life, and she felt that if she had not got the award, it would have been overwhelming. At points, it made her want to give up.
Let me make the point clear: people experiencing severe depression already feel worthless. Being rejected for financial support gives concrete evidence for what they believe, in their minds, to be fact. For many people, it is the last straw. Donna told me that she was not surprised that, as a result, the suicide rates that she deals with every day are increasing.
Donna told me that her illness affected not only her, but her whole family; however, she has been lucky to have great support from her family and friends. Many others are not so lucky. For many people, where would they be without family support? At the point of rejection from the benefits system, who are they supposed to turn to? Donna’s case highlights the fact that no consideration is given to the detrimental effect of the system on the already overwhelmed mental state of a person going through the assessment process. The reason they are in that position in the first place is often because of circumstances beyond their control. Consideration must be given to each individual applicant and their circumstances. The recent film “I, Daniel Blake” by Ken Loach highlights both the hard-hitting, honest and gritty reality and the brutality of this Government’s policies.
Donna also brought up the fact that assumptions are made about claimants based on the observations of the health care professionals. She asked for a copy of her medical assessment report and was disgusted that comments were noted about her appearance, personal grooming and whether claimants are tired or sweating. The comments were as follows:
“Looks tired…looks thin…underweight, clothing loose, dark circles under eyes ... unkempt, untidy … unwell … troubled … sweating … pale … facial expression showed no emotion but was tearful … restless … fidgety… difficulty coping due to anxiety … seemed agitated … poor rapport, poor eye contact … withdrawn … self-harm thoughts identified … no delusion … no obsessive ideas … unable to complete five rounds of ‘serial sevens’ … unable to calculate correct change when asked a sum … unable to spell ‘world’ backwards … unable to remember three objects first time … had insights into their illness.”
I ask the Minister: is this the kind of system that the Government have set out to achieve? Is this a system that offers fairness, dignity and respect? Where, ultimately, is the humanity in that process? Although many of those factors may be indicative of illness, many are circumstantial and subjective, given the particular illness that someone may or may not be assessing. For example, how would Donna’s entitlement have been affected if she had been immaculately dressed, had been having a good day or did not exhibit some of the behaviours outlined in that prescriptive list?
It has taken Donna 10 months to feel better. For seven of those months she has been awarded personal independence payment, and for the past four months she has been receiving employment support allowance. Access to those benefits has been vital to her recovery. Donna wishes to return to work when she can, and she can manage her own health. She knows her limitations, yet at this stage, due to her recovery, she faces the prospect of losing those benefits, which help her to sustain her family at this already difficult time. She is all too aware that if the support is removed too soon—which could mean pushing her back to full-time work—while she is at a vital stage in her recovery, she could end up right back at the beginning again.
Like physical illnesses, mental illnesses take a long time to heal, and there is no consideration of that in this process. Donna suggested that it would be helpful to her health to have a phased return to work—as a professional in this area, she knows only too well about recovering from depression—whereby she could still claim benefit and return to work slowly to build up her strength. Permitted work was explained to Donna, but as she knows only too well from her professional experience and from talking to others, as soon as a claimant lets the Department for Work and Pensions know that they are able to work for a few hours, they are ultimately called for reassessment and asked to go back to work full time. Donna told me that she would like to do a few hours a week volunteering, to get back herself back on her feet, but the criteria apply even to voluntary work. There is no middle ground.
Donna’s case illustrates that the work capability assessment is not fit for purpose. Sadly, that chimes with the calls from mental health organisations across the country, including Citizens Advice, the Disability Benefits Consortium, Mind and the Scottish Association for Mental Health. They have highlighted that the tick-box method of the work capability assessment fails to identify claimants suffering from debilitating mental health problems, and it certainly fails to take their needs into consideration.
I mentioned figures for personal independence payments earlier. Similarly, the latest figures show that 59% of initial ESA decisions were overturned on appeal. The Government have made one small concession on ESA by scrapping the retesting of chronically ill and disabled claimants—so one small part of the system now relies on common sense over bureaucracy—but that has simply fixed one part of an altogether broken system. Although exemptions from repeated assessments for chronically ill claimants and those with long-term illnesses are welcome, it is extremely disappointing that the Department for Work and Pensions and the Secretary of State have not considered that for PIP claimants.
I hope the Minister will take heed of the problems I have discussed with the work capability assessment and consider the effects that the process can have on the mental wellbeing of claimants. I respect the hard-working staff at the Department for Work and Pensions who ultimately are asked to administer this Government’s policy. My constituents and people up and down the UK deserve a social security system that is designed to offer people dignity, respect and fairness. It is time that the Government stepped up to their responsibility. We are all citizens, we are all human and we all deserve respect.
Let me add that when the responsibility for personal independence payments is devolved to Scotland—I am sure the Minister will come to this point—we will look to design the system appropriately. As she will be aware, it takes time to get the system right, because ultimately we are talking about the most vulnerable people in society. They deserve a social security system that gives them fairness, dignity and respect. I am sure we can all agree on that.
Nadine Dorries (in the Chair)
I now call Mr Shannon—you are on the list, Mr Shannon. Did you put in to speak?
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I did indeed, Ms Dorries. Absolutely. I am more than happy to be called—I am just surprised to be called right away.
Nadine Dorries (in the Chair)
You are first on the list today; I know it is unusual.
Jim Shannon
The first shall be last and the last shall be first. Whenever it happens, it is always good to be called. Thank you very much, Ms Dorries—I actually thought that the hon. Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson) might have been asked, so I was looking at him, but no doubt he will participate at some stage.
I thank the hon. Member for Lanark and Hamilton East (Angela Crawley) for setting the scene well. We are back to discuss this matter again in Westminster Hall, and it would be remiss of me not to give a Northern Ireland perspective on where we are. I am grateful that the Minister is in her place and all of us in the House appreciate it when she responds. I will give my opinion today—and others will give examples—of where the system is falling down. I have to highlight those key issues because my staff and I deal with them every day of the week. We see people across the table from us with angst and anxiety and all the associated issues of stress, and we say, “How can we help them and do things better?” I will speak about some of those things today.
I have recently spoken about the changes to the employment and support allowance work-related activity group and what that means for people. The biggest issue is that the Government need to understand the difference between “ill” and “unable to work”. That, in a nutshell, is what the debate is about—the interpretation by the Department for Work and Pensions of what it means to be ill and what it means to those people who sit across the table from me every day and tell me they cannot work. The hon. Member for Lanark and Hamilton East referred to people being pasty, sweaty and anxious, and my staff and I see those things every day of the week.
In the last month, we have seen in my office a former ward sister, a former construction business owner and a social worker, all of whom are now on ESA. Let me be clear: I do not believe for a second that those people are choosing not to work out of laziness. Who would want to go from earning £500 a week down to £75? People do not, but that is what happens.
The inference from the Government in this whole policy is insulting—I say that with respect—and more importantly, is based on a false premise that cannot be allowed to stand. I have to challenge that in the House, respectfully and kindly, and say it to the Minister and Government directly. As hon. Members know, I do not criticise—I do not feel that that is necessarily what I do—but I need to highlight the issues and ask nicely for genuine compassion and understanding.
The rationale seems to apply to PIP applicants as well. PIP is supposed to be for the help that people need to work. Apparently, the PIP assessment is intended to provide
“a more holistic assessment of the impact of a health condition…on an individual’s ability to participate”
in everyday life. It covers sensory impairments, development needs, cognitive impairments and mental conditions, as well as physical disabilities. Those five categories cover everything—medically, physically, healthwise——that there can be. The assessment looks at the extent to which the individual is capable of undertaking various activities. For some activities, someone can score points to help to meet the threshold for PIP if they can undertake that activity only by using an “aid or appliance”. That could include such things as artificial limbs, colostomy bags, walking sticks and non-specialist aids such as electric tin openers and long-handled sponges.
I want to highlight two cases, one of which involves a young lady who has ulcerative colitis. My age is such that I can probably remember the day she was born. I have got to know her very well over the years due to her diagnosis with this unseen disease, and how it has affected her and other people in my constituency. She worked in the civil service but was granted medical retirement before 30 because her employer could no longer facilitate her working. A Government employer could not accommodate her ability to work one day and not the next, as her illness dictated.
I understand the reasons why the Government and the civil service had to take a decision and say, “Look, we are going to have to terminate your employment.” However, that is where the problem started, and I cannot understand how they expect someone else to employ her when they let her go. It should be understood why this lady is no longer able to work and why her employer, the civil service—she was Government-employed—had to let her go. Why is this young lady in this conflicted position? She is asked, in respect of PIPs, “What job can you do? Where can we find you some work?” Let us be honest: that wee lassie would love to work if only she had the opportunity, but she cannot because of her disability. She is on ESA and is dealing with the stress of the proposed changes. We should never underestimate the impact of the stress of this position. I stress that as strongly as I can, because I see that all the time. She rang to make an appointment for her PIP form to be filled out. How will she be assessed? That is the question I am asking. She is currently on the higher-rate DLA—deservedly so, by the way. Will that be taken away from her? Ministers would say no, but the experience we have had so far in my office is raising fear in our mind and the minds of constituents. I see that all the time.
The young lady’s condition has not improved one iota since her last DLA application. If anything, I would suggest that it has worsened, and there is real concern that the PIP changes will not help. The stress makes her even more ill. It is a vicious cycle that is repeated over and over again. The PIP is for people who need help for hygienic purposes and for safety issues, but the problem is that that is not being translated into the new proposals. I genuinely hold the Minister in the highest esteem. From her response, we need to understand how the system works and how it can help the people on whose behalf we are here to make a plea, so that we can take away the stress and hassle.
On 11 March, it was announced that the number of points awarded in the PIP assessment would be halved for aids and appliances for “dressing and undressing” and “managing toilet needs”. Why would the Government reduce the points for things that are needed? I cannot understand that. As a result, 290,000 claimants will no longer receive the daily living component, and a further 80,000 will receive the standard, rather than the enhanced, daily living component. Budget 2016 estimated additional savings of £1.3 billion a year by 2019-20. That is great but where does it leave my constituent, who needs help during the night?
Nadine Dorries (in the Chair)
Order. Mr Shannon, lots of people wish to speak. Would you try to keep your speech to about nine minutes so everybody has an equal amount of time? Thank you.
Jim Shannon
I did not realise that. I will try to go at my Northern Ireland speed, which is very fast. The young lady I was talking about needs her sheets changed at night, and often replaced entirely, as well as someone to come in and take care of her during her bad periods. Her DLA paid for a carer to help her. Will PIP do the same? The answer should certainly be yes, but the points system is not set up for illnesses such as ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease. The Crohn’s and Colitis UK website contains a link to a PDF offering help and advice on the PIP for sufferers. The PDF is 70 pages long—that is how complex the system is and how much help people need to fill out the application. If that does not put off someone who is seriously ill, I do not know what would.
Is this what was intended by the Government’s welfare reform? Did they intend to make it so complex and intricate that many people will give up and live in sub-standard conditions, rather than get the help they need to live with their illness? We should be concerned about people retreating inwards, their lack of confidence and the problems they face.
Ms Dorries, you have given me a time limit. I just have two more paragraphs to get through very quickly. I wholeheartedly believe that the new system is failing people. I had a doctor on the phone to say that his patient’s decision was made without the assessor taking the time to request any information about the patient from the surgery. The doctor said, “Jim, if he doesn’t get this help he will have to go to a nursing home at 46 years of age.” The care packages that health trusts put in place are not sufficient to handle people who are not able to pay privately for the additional support they require. On their behalf, I again ask the Minister, most sincerely, kindly and humbly: please look at this benefit, remember why it was set up and understand that, for many, it is the difference between having support to live and simply being able to exist. Do not continue to push these ill people, many of whom suffer from mental health problems due to the stress and strain of long-term illness. In this House, MPs are called to protect and help the vulnerable, but that is not what this new ESA and PIP system does.
Justin Tomlinson (North Swindon) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, which seems almost a daily occurrence this week, Ms Dorries, given the Bill Committee I am also serving on. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Lanark and Hamilton East (Angela Crawley). This is an important debate and a topic that regularly comes up, particularly in this room, which shows the importance of Westminster Hall. We are fortunate that we have a Minister who is very engaged and proactive when it comes to listening—particularly when the system is not quite working as it is intended to—and when it comes to acting and working with experienced charities, policymakers and all sorts to bring us all together. What we all want, regardless of which side of the House we sit on, is a fair system that supports the most vulnerable in society. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), who, during my time as a Minister, was really proactive and constructive on this issue. I had many good meetings with him to discuss specific issues and lessons we could learn from Northern Ireland, and to share best practice.
Two issues have been raised: PIP and ESA. I gently remind Scottish National party Members that Scotland could take responsibility, certainly for PIP. During my time as a Minister, I had a good relationship with my counterpart in the Scottish Parliament. He was aware that Scotland could take on that responsibility as and when it was ready.
Some 1.8 million people have already gone through the PIP process, which is considerably better than the old DLA system, and that is widely accepted by the vast majority of charities who represent people who have been through the system. Under DLA, only 16% of claimants got the highest rate of the benefit. Under PIP, it is 23.5%. It is far better at identifying hidden impairments and fluctuating health conditions. For example—this has been highlighted in the two previous speeches—under DLA, only 22% of those who had a mental health condition accessed the daily living component, yet under PIP, 66% did. For the higher rate of mobility, it was 9% under DLA; it is 24% under PIP.
The new system is far better and more streamlined. The assessors are there to help people to fill in the forms. The fundamental problem with DLA was that it was, in effect, self-diagnosis. People would fill in a very long, complicated form. A lot of people did themselves an injustice by not highlighting all the issues they faced, often because they took them for granted. For example, they might think, “I can’t sleep at night. That’s just the way it is”, but they did not then highlight that in their forms. The forms were complicated, so people would not necessarily know which were the right bits to put down.
Even worse, 70% of claimants on DLA had an indefinite award. It is very attractive for MPs to say, “We don’t want anybody ever to go through an assessment”, but the reality was that, under DLA, 70% did not. That sounds great, yet one in three claimants’ condition changes so significantly within 12 months that they should be on a different benefit. The vast majority of people who go through the system have a deteriorating condition, so if their condition has changed, it has probably changed for the worse and it is highly likely that they would therefore go from the lower rate to the higher rate of benefit.
That was the single difference that contributed to why, under DLA, only 16% of claimants got the highest rate, and 23.5% get it under PIP. There were people who, for 10 or 20 years or more, were on a benefit below that which they were entitled to. They were unaware that they could have had an opportunity to go up. It is right, therefore, that we assess people to ensure that they are given the correct benefit.
Now, common sense kicks in. If someone is on the highest rate of benefit, they have a deteriorating condition. Unless there is some miracle cure, they are likely only to be reassessed at the end of the 10-year period, and it would probably be very light touch. In effect, someone would phone and ask, “Has there been a miracle cure?” The answer would probably be no, and they might ask, “Can you provide the GP’s evidence that there has not been a miracle cure? That’s fine. You will go through.” It is those who are on the cusp of going from the lower benefit to the higher benefit who will have another assessment. The system is programmed to say, “This person nearly meets the highest rate of benefit. I suspect they will need it in nine months’ time.” It will automatically trigger a reminder to people that there is a reassessment, so they are not left languishing. I urge hon. Members to be careful in trying to stop people having an opportunity for an assessment.
In cash terms, in 2010, DLA delivered £12.7 billion of benefit support. The combined DLA and PIP is now at £16.6 billion. When the scheme was first launched, the time until assessment was terrible. We had lots of debates here on that. I was not the Minister then, but I was warned when I first went into the role that we would have almost weekly debates. Some people were waiting up to a year for their assessment. That was unacceptable. For nearly 18 months now, it has been in a settled state, taking about seven weeks for an assessment and 13 weeks for the whole process, end to end, which is well below the initial target of about 16 weeks. Again, charities and those with a huge amount of experience accept that the system is working well. The forms have been streamlined. They are still longer than we might like, but it is always a balancing act because, if we do not capture all the information, people could miss out on the benefit they need. I repeat that the assessors are there to help the claimant. The Government set the amount of money and the points that are required, but the assessors are there to ensure that the form is completed.
I have sat through assessments, and I have seen two different extremes. I saw the assessment of a practising nurse, and the assessment was super-quick. They used lots of very long words of which I had no understanding, and they were able to breeze through. At the other extreme, I saw an individual for whom English was not his first language. He had a mental health condition and was socially isolated. If he had self-diagnosed under DLA, he would not have qualified, but the assessor spent one hour and 10 minutes teasing out and piecing together the jigsaw to make sure that all the challenges he faced in his everyday life were accurately reflected. He would have ended up getting a higher benefit than he would have received under DLA.
I urge those who criticise the assessments to go and view one, which can be arranged. They will have their eyes opened, because too many people claim knowledge based on a film that is there to make money, rather than based on the real world. Frankly, that is an insult to the huge amount of hard work that these trained professionals do to help some of the most vulnerable people. The facts are there to compare DLA with PIP.
Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)
Rather than commenting on the film, which is a dramatic portrayal, will the hon. Gentleman comment on the “Dispatches” programme? That was not fictional; it was an actual portrayal of the assessment process that people go through.
Nadine Dorries (in the Chair)
Mr Tomlinson, the same applies to you as applied to Mr Shannon.
Justin Tomlinson
I will not be long. I am glad that the hon. Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams) intervened. I have a feeling that she will not let me intervene on her later, so I can link this in nicely. The “Dispatches” programme showed an isolated incident that was totally unacceptable. The individual was moved, and rightly so. That is why we have external inspectors. Remember that we are talking about 1.8 million people, and I urge her to take up my invitation to go and view an assessment. Hearsay is not the right way to hold Governments to account. This is so important that people in positions of responsibility need to invest some time in going to see what is actually happening.
Justin Tomlinson
It is not patronising. This is an important subject.
There have been further improvements, including the removal of the 28-day rule for terminally ill people. That cross-party campaign has made a huge difference to those who are terminally ill, and it is a welcome measure. There is ongoing training, and I would like to see automatic recordings of all assessments, which would help the appeals process. That requires a change in the contract, which I understand is the intention.
It is also right that assessors now encourage people to bring somebody with them into the assessment, which is particularly helpful for people who are not necessarily articulate, for whom English is not their first language or who would not have the confidence to display all their challenges.
As the hon. Member for Lanark and Hamilton East said, the ESA and PIP assessments are not a million miles apart. I have too often heard of cases where someone has done one assessment one month and the other assessment the next month. In respect of the Green Paper, many organisations will lobby for some serious data sharing.
In conclusion, because I have focused on PIP, I will briefly address ESA. The Green Paper is a wonderful opportunity, as the charity Scope said, because disabled people need “expert, tailored employment support”. We need to focus on what individuals can do, rather than on what they cannot do. It is important to provide tailored support, to recognise that people have fluctuating health conditions and to utilise the best parts of the universal credit system to allow for flexibility and common sense, particularly in relation to voluntary work that builds confidence to get people back into work. We need to provide ongoing support, through a specific named coach, when people go into work for the first time. I will continue to pitch, as a matter of importance, the small employer pilot, which was so successful that it should be rolled out across the rest of the country as quickly as possible. We need to unleash the opportunity for disabled apprentices. Everyone agrees it is a great thing, and we have signed it off. We now need to see it making a real difference, particularly for those with a learning disability.
Siobhain McDonagh (Mitcham and Morden) (Lab)
I thank the hon. Member for Lanark and Hamilton East (Angela Crawley) for securing this important debate. I will focus on some of the logistical issues around PIP that could be improved at local level, drawing on the experience of the excellent Merton centre for independent living in my constituency.
Merton CIL is a user-led disabled people’s organisation that delivers a range of services to disabled people across Merton. The practical experience and casework of its members has brought together a range of issues in relation to both ESA and PIP that demonstrates how disabled people are facing a significant and unfair disadvantage when accessing the benefits to which they are rightly entitled. Disabled people have been disproportionately hit by welfare reform, with the cumulative cuts to benefits and social care affecting them, on average, 19 times more than non-disabled people.
Merton CIL’s experience has shown that PIP assessment centres are amazingly inaccessible. Some of my constituents in Mitcham and Morden in south-west London have been asked to travel as far as Deptford and east London to get to their assessment centre, journeys of about two hours each way, which is unacceptably difficult for many disabled people, many of whom pass their local centre en route to faraway destinations. Even the local centres in Wandsworth and Croydon are difficult to get to, because many disabled people in south-west London lack transport links. Unbelievably, some centres have no disabled parking, and others are not accessible for wheelchair users. Most have cramped and unpleasant waiting areas. All that demonstrates a lack of consideration and thought into practicalities. It is imperative that all PIP assessment centres should have an audit of accessibility and should be fit for purpose for use by disabled attendees.
Research has also shown that the practice of overbooking appointments for assessment centres is commonplace and is based on the assumption that some people will not turn up, but the practice causes great distress and inconvenience to those who do. Shockingly, an assessor told Merton CIL that she had 20 assessments on her list per shift but that she expected to do only six in the time available.
Many of my constituents have had to wait hours to be seen, or have had their appointments suddenly cancelled less than an hour beforehand. Many disabled people need to wait a substantial length of time even to get an appointment, and then to be kept waiting for hours on end, or to have a last-minute cancellation, after weeks of preparation and after getting someone to provide transport and to attend the appointment is completely unacceptable.
Finally, and perhaps most worryingly, inaccurate assessments for both PIP and ESA are widespread, making the wrong decisions and causing a lot of pain to individuals who are entitled to those benefits. PIP works on a points system, and Merton CIL has witnessed many assessments in which people are assessed as having zero or very few points, with the result later being overturned in tribunal. For some of my constituents, their assessments were so far removed from their lived experience that they felt sure that their notes had been mixed up with someone else’s.
Some of the disabled residents to whom I have spoken say that they have felt intimidated by aggressive assessors. Meanwhile, Merton CIL advocates who have attended appointments with residents have sometimes been prevented from asking questions or taking notes, in direct contravention of DWP guidelines. It is crucial that providers address that at local level by working with individual centres and staff.
There is a range of other ESA-related problems, such as the practice of arranging unnecessarily frequent repeat assessments, the unfair and sudden stopping of ESA payments and the difficulty of successfully contacting the DWP to correct issues. We all know of the terrible pain and hardship that come with the appeals process, and it cannot be acceptable that two thirds of people applying for PIP and ESA are being forced to undergo a lengthy appeals process in order to access a benefit to which they are entitled.
I hope the Minister will address some of the basic practical issues with the administrative process and with access to assessment centres in order to ensure that every centre is reasonably accessible by public transport and has disabled parking. People should expect to be seen when they receive an appointment.
I am sorry that I will be unable to be here for the Minister’s speech, but I wish those practical issues to be addressed.
Corri Wilson (Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock) (SNP)
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Lanark and Hamilton East (Angela Crawley) for securing this important debate.
I was recently contacted by a constituent after his DLA was stopped when he failed to attend an assessment that he knew nothing about. A missing letter resulted not only in the loss of more than £400 a month in DLA payments but, because he was no longer in receipt of DLA, he had had more than £30 a week in severe disability payments taken off his ESA. If that was not enough, he had his plus one bus pass taken away. This gentleman suffers from severe mental health issues, including dementia, depression and anxiety. He also has a heart condition that needs regular monitoring. The lack of funds and the bus pass being taken away has meant that over the past few months he has now missed at least three health appointments. His dementia means he has memory problems, obviously, and because he is no longer in receipt of DLA he has now lost his carer and is solely responsible for his own medication. When he asked about all these changes he was told that he did not have a good enough reason for missing his appointment. The decision to remove his DLA will stand, and his failure to attend the assessment means he is not eligible for PIP. His appeal will not be decided until the new year.
While my office is looking into ways of helping this man, the fact remains that the Department for Work and Pensions, and by extension the Government, think it is perfectly acceptable to leave a man with dementia and a life-threatening heart condition with zero support for more than four months, just because he missed one appointment that he has no memory of being notified about. Sadly, he is not alone
The Government’s ongoing transition from DLA to PIP means that thousands of disabled people are losing out. According to DWP statistics, of the more than 46,800 claimants in Scotland who have been reassessed from DLA to PIP, only 77% were successfully awarded the new benefit. Almost 11,000 people lost their award and were left at the mercy of the system. Despite the rosy picture painted by the hon. Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson), the system is seriously failing people. As we have heard today, I am not the only MP with a large number of constituents who have lost access to the higher-rate mobility component. Taking away a person’s mobility vehicle makes it significantly harder for them to sustain employment or education. It reduces their options, increases their dependency on family members and adds to social isolation.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Lanark and Hamilton East mentioned, the latest statistics and appeals against PIP decisions show that a staggering 65% of appeals find in favour of the claimant. Coupled with almost 60% of initial decisions on ESA assessments being overturned, a reasonable person would be left wondering about the cost-effectiveness of a system that routinely makes such bad decisions. When we add in the recent United Nations report that describes the austerity policies of this Government as amounting to “systematic violations” of the rights of disabled people, it is clear that the system is deeply flawed.
The Government’s Green Paper on disability employment support is a critical opportunity to get the system right for sick and disabled people, but one cannot help but be sceptical when they insist on pressing ahead with cuts to the ESA work-related activity group. The Government claim this will incentivise disabled people into work, despite there being no actual evidence to support this. The real barriers to returning to employment, such as ill health, the attitudes of employers, skills barriers, reasonable adjustments and the availability of suitable jobs are not addressed by cuts in financial support. In fact, creating additional financial pressure can make people less likely to return to the labour market, as the added stress damages their already fragile health.
By carrying out cuts to ESA WRAG, the Government are sending a clear signal that they do not recognise the additional barriers faced by those currently unable to seek work. People with the most complex needs often have higher costs related to work activities, as they need to spend money on transport and communication support to go to interviews, attend training courses and secure work experience. The cuts to ESA WRAG will further penalise people who are already struggling, and will not address those additional issues. Cuts to ESA should, as a minimum, be delayed until the provision suggested in the Green Paper is tested and shown to support disabled people into employment, including people with complex needs.
Some 15% of the UK benefits system is being devolved to Scotland, and I am pleased that the Scottish Government are committed to ensuring that the mistakes the UK Government have made with PIP and the assessments are not repeated. The priority is the safe and secure transfer of social security powers to Scotland to ensure that everyone who relies on benefits will receive the right amount at the right time. Nobody should fall through the gaps, and everyone should be treated with respect and dignity. That is the social security system I would like to see, but on current form I think it is unlikely that that is the system that will be seen in the 85% of the system still reserved here at Westminster.
Patricia Gibson (North Ayrshire and Arran) (SNP)
I wish to offer my thanks and congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Lanark and Hamilton East (Angela Crawley) on securing this debate. I am delighted to participate, although I really wish it was not necessary. I intended my contribution to be brief, but I am afraid that my efforts to help the hon. Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson) will make it a wee bit longer than I thought it would be.
I wish that the austerity agenda—a political choice—did not fall so heavily on the shoulders of those living with disabilities. I wish that the UK Government would put an end to the revolving-door culture of work capability assessments for those seeking to claim personal independence payments, although I think we all welcome the removal of the merry-go-round of reassessments for those with chronic conditions. I wish that those who find themselves grappling with a health condition or a disability that limits their ability to work—indeed, their ability to live as full a life as they would wish—did not feel as though they were being punished for it. I wish that those claiming personal independence payments, or seeking to claim this benefit, which is gradually replacing disability living allowance, were not confronted with such a flawed system that needs radical reform.
Justin Tomlinson
I am sure the hon. Lady will welcome the fact that an extra £3 billion is now being spent to support those on DLA and PIP compared with DLA alone in 2010, and the fact that 23.5% are on the highest rate compared with 16% on DLA. That is good news.
Patricia Gibson
The hon. Gentleman would do well to remember the fact that, according to OBR figures, although more money is being spent, that is down to the fact that demand has increased, so we should treat those figures with a little more caution.
The fact that the system is flawed is demonstrated by the fact that 65% of appeal decisions found in favour of the claimants, which means that that 65% initially had their application turned down, causing untold stress and anxiety about how they would cope in future. The hon. Gentleman spoke of work capability assessments as an opportunity. Well, I am afraid that my constituents in North Ayrshire and Arran did not see this process as an opportunity. Perhaps the constituents of North Swindon found it so, but certainly in my part of the world, that was not the case.
Justin Tomlinson
To be clear, I said PIP assessments were an opportunity; not the work capability assessments for ESA, which need to be reformed.
Patricia Gibson
Surrounded by such a wealth of opportunity, it is hard to keep up. Nothing in the system that my constituents experience is seen as an opportunity. It is seen as extremely negative, intimidating and humiliating. When the hon. Gentleman talked about the assessments, perhaps I misunderstood him, but if I have I certainly am not alone. One might think that these assessments always resulted in somebody’s entitlement or benefit being increased, but I can assure him that in my constituency that is almost never the case.
The hon. Gentleman, perhaps in the interests of trying to be helpful to the Chamber, talked about how we should go and see an assessment taking place. Perhaps this is just me—I have not done a survey or anything—but these assessments are not a spectator sport. We are talking about people’s lives. The people who go through them very often find them humiliating and damaging. If I were to go through one of those assessments, the last thing I would want is an audience. Perhaps I might want a member of my family, or a close friend, but I certainly would not want my MP, who would in effect be a stranger, although their name might be well known to me. I certainly would not want the occasion to become a spectator sport. We must be careful about MPs filling the galleries when people are having their lives exposed and deconstructed by strangers.
This is a debate about social justice. Employment and support allowance is a form of financial support for people with life-limiting conditions whose ability to live a fully satisfying life, something we would all hope for, is effectively removed. That should be remembered during debates such as this one—and during the assessments. The hon. Member for North Swindon has informed the Chamber that the assessors are there to help, and I am sure that they think so too, but claimants feel stressed. They are confronted by assessors who are, by definition, strangers and who have little or no knowledge of their condition. We have all heard stories: for those who have not heard them, Parkinson’s UK can keep them going all day. There are stories, for example, of people with Parkinson’s being asked by the work capability assessor, “How long are you likely to have Parkinson’s for?”
We know that the criteria for work capability assessment are flawed and that people whose conditions fluctuate are always at risk of what might, strangely—as it is all relative—be called a good day. Such things are not taken into account by the work capability assessment, and nor is the impact of pain and fatigue, or the degenerative nature of conditions such as Parkinson’s. As a result, too many employment and support allowance applicants are placed in the work-related activity group, instead of the much more appropriate support group, which recognises that the claimant is simply not well enough to work. I reassure the hon. Member for North Swindon that I know that the Government have reversed the need for repeated work capability assessments for the chronically ill—that is welcome, but it simply does not go far enough. It is a matter of great concern to all fair-minded people that from April 2017 people placed in the employment support work-related activity group will receive £30 a week less than someone in the same situation today. That makes the failure of the system more alarming.
Flawed criteria are a particular difficulty for people with conditions such as Parkinson’s in receipt of disability living allowance—I could mention a range of conditions but time forbids it—when they are being assessed for PIP. Under DLA, if a person could walk no more than 50 metres they would be eligible for support. For PIP that distance has arbitrarily—randomly, it seems—been reduced to 20 metres. That is such a short distance that it is not a useful or helpful estimate of a person’s mobility. Given the fluctuating nature of some conditions and the failure of the process to register such fluctuations, many people are losing their Motability vehicles, on which they rely heavily.
The hon. Member for North Swindon will be interested to know that recent investigations found that under DLA 82% of people with Parkinson’s received the full mobility payment, whereas under PIP that has dropped to 40%. That is a massive drop, and those people lose their vehicles within 28 days of an assessment decision being made against them. I do not see how anyone can come to this Chamber and say that that is acceptable. Those people are being isolated in their own homes and effectively punished for their illness. Their dependence on family members increases.
Nadine Dorries (in the Chair)
Order. Will the hon. Lady apply the restriction of nine minutes to her speech?
Patricia Gibson
I am being pressed by the Chair to conclude my remarks.
Everyone welcomes the Green Paper. What we do not welcome is the headlong rush to cuts before there can be proper analysis, which could be used to correct the system. We need an evidence-based and compassionate approach. Frankly, I do not see that. We should all want the same thing: we should all want to support people with disabilities into work, and to support those who cannot work. We need to make sure that we do that properly, and I urge the Minister to reflect on that and on all the suggestions made today.
Nadine Dorries (in the Chair)
Ms McGarry, I did not get notification that you put in a request to speak, but I could call you for a few minutes if you concluded in three or four minutes.
Natalie McGarry
Thank you, Ms Dorries; that was an oversight, and I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in the debate. I thank the hon. Member for Lanark and Hamilton East (Angela Crawley) for securing the debate. She made an excellent speech, in which she articulated her constituency case well. She opened the debate in good style, with a lot of information.
Two weeks ago, there were two lengthy debates in the House of Commons on the Government’s punitive welfare reforms—specifically cuts to the ESA work-related activity group; 127 MPs laid down a marker and said that the Government must pause, reflect and reconsider the cuts. The Government did not oppose the motion, and some would be forgiven for thinking that it was a sign that they were listening to our concerns. It feels as if we have debates such as this one week in, week out; but if we have to keep bringing the matter back to the Chamber we will. The time for conciliatory debate that does not powerfully challenge the Government is over. It is right for constituents and Members to be angry, especially when there is no evidence that cutting ESA WRAG incentivises people into work.
The people of Glasgow East—like people across Scotland and throughout the UK—listened to the Prime Minister speaking on the steps of Downing Street when she promised to fight injustice and lead a Government for the many, not the few. However, by the time the Chancellor stepped away from the Dispatch Box on Wednesday, the benefit of the doubt had evaporated. Sometimes what a person does not say is more telling—or more damning—than what they do say. The Chancellor of the Exchequer spoke at length—6,092 words—but failed to mention ESA once. He could even find the time and words to ask whether the shadow Chancellor could dance, but no words could be found for disabled people or ESA.
Since the Government announcement of punishing cuts, MPs of all colours and stripes have railed against them. The matter is so important that it keeps being brought back to the Chamber, and the Minister is constantly called back to answer. I appreciate that the Minister of State is present to do that today. The case seems to be devoid of logic and compassion. Reducing ESA to the rate of jobseeker’s allowance is wrong for a number of reasons. People on ESA are already assessed as unfit for work, whereas people on jobseeker’s can actively seek work. It is therefore unsurprising that ESA recipients should need more support, for longer, than JSA recipients. Indeed, more than half of ESA WRAG recipients are on welfare support for more than two years. Such long time periods are linked to higher associated costs of illness and disability.
It is extraordinarily perverse and callous to expect those with illness and disability to suffer on £73 a week for a prolonged period of two years. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) made that point forcefully: why would someone with a job at £500 a week want to go down to £73 a week, if they could help it? I cannot, and I never will, understand how any elected representative or Government could support proposals that serve no purpose other than picking the pockets of the sick and disabled, and putting them through the trauma of a broken and unfair PIP or ESA assessment. Where is the humanity in that? Like other hon. Members, I look forward to seeing the Green Paper; but before then it is time for the Government to rethink the assessments, and to pause the cuts to ESA WRAG.
Neil Gray (Airdrie and Shotts) (SNP)
It is a pleasure to take part in the debate, Ms Dorries. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Lanark and Hamilton East (Angela Crawley) for securing the debate and for the way she set out the case, highlighting how pressing the issue is, as our postbags show. She raised a case of great concern—the experiences of her constituent Donna. The assessment notes that my hon. Friend read out struck me as closely mirroring a constituency case that I am now dealing with. A gentleman, who had been in work, suffered mental health problems and as a result of them fell out of work. He was assessed for social security support and failed. Some of the notes from the assessment that my hon. Friend quoted were very similar to his. Sadly, my constituent committed suicide. The harrowing cases that we have heard today are very concerning.
I also note the contributions from other Members today. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) rightly asked why on earth someone who had previously had £500 a week would choose to receive £73 a week. That is not a choice that anyone would make. He also highlighted the apparent dichotomy that is at play: the Government are telling his constituent that they are unable to employ him, while expecting employers to employ people who are in a similar position. I hope that the Minister will reflect on that.
I listened carefully, as I always do, to the contribution of the former Minister, the hon. Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson). He gave a stout defence of the Government and of his own record in government. As always, I want to be as constructive and as consensual as possible, but I must remind him that the accounts that we have heard today and in previous debates are personal testimonies from constituents, not just hearsay. I do not know whether that was a slip of the tongue from the former Minister, but the experiences of the constituents that were highlighted today are not just hearsay.
The hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) rightly highlighted the disproportionate impact that welfare cuts are having on those with disabilities. They are affected many times more than those without disabilities. That appears to fly in the face of the commitment from the previous Prime Minister, David Cameron, to protect those with disabilities in the social security system.
I welcome my hon. Friend the Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Corri Wilson) to her place as the Scottish National party’s new disability spokesperson. She highlighted another very troubling constituency case; I hope the Minister has taken heed of it and will commit to looking into it.
My hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Patricia Gibson) is absolutely right that this debate is centrally about social justice. She also rightly highlighted the indignity felt by our constituents when they go through these processes. If the Government are to get this right, they need to look at how people feel they are being treated. Whether the Government agree or not is irrelevant; what is important is what the people who experience the system feel, which is clearly different from what the Government feel.
The hon. Member for Glasgow East (Natalie McGarry) rightly said that, when it comes to ESA WRAG, we are not going away. I will focus on ESA WRAG for the majority of my speech, because this is a further opportunity to quiz the Minister on her plans. On 17 November, a motion on ESA that I moved in a Backbench Business Committee debate with the support of eight other parties was carried by Parliament. In that debate, the Minister took an intervention from the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Mr Burrowes), who supported the motion. He pressed her on potential financial mechanisms that would
“fully compensate for the loss of the WRAG payments for new claimants”.
The Minister replied:
“Yes. Let me give my hon. Friend that reassurance.”
Perhaps my interpretation of “fully compensated” is different from the Minister’s, but I understood from what she said that new ESA WRAG claimants would be getting equivalent financial support through the mechanisms outlined by the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate:
“the hardship fund, the flexible support fund and the third-party deals”.—[Official Report, 17 November 2016; Vol. 617, c. 464.]
I tested that in a written question but I did not get a clear reply, so I hope that today the Minister will take the opportunity to say what she understands “fully compensated” to mean.
The Chancellor appeared in the autumn statement to undermine the Minister’s apparent pledge. The Chancellor said in response to the shadow Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell), that the savings of £330 million from the ESA WRAG cut would now be invested in a package of support, as opposed to direct financial help. Presumably, he meant the Green Paper package, which is currently being consulted on and which was previously budgeted as £60 million next year. That is as clear as mud to me and to the many others who are looking on and trying to understand what the Government are going to do, how much they will commit and the mechanism by which that will be implemented.
The only thing that the Government have been clear about is that they want to cut ESA WRAG. They have not said what is coming in to replace it. They have really put the cart before the horse. I understand that fresh Ministers are perhaps flogging that horse to catch up, but the plans for halving the disability employment gap appear to be falling away; we do not know whether that is still a commitment. The cuts to ESA WRAG and the system to replace the Work programme should have been consulted on first.
The point has been made across this Chamber today and it has repeatedly been made across the House in previous debates: the Government have it the wrong way round. It is like announcing that they are going to scrap the TV licence in April, but only now going through the process of deciding how it should be replaced, with no guarantee to the BBC of how much financial support it would receive. In fact, this will probably receive a third of the public funds, but get practical support in order to generate better outcomes. That just does not wash. It may be a policy that appeases some people, but it is clearly not the way to treat anyone. It has no evidence of being any fairer or delivering better outcomes, because we have no idea how the system is going to work.
I must critique what appears to be the Government’s main motive, which is that for someone to get an extra £29 per week on top of jobseeker’s allowance is a disincentive to work. Here is what my constituent Janice had to say when she got in touch with me this week:
“Being unemployed and reliant on benefits is demeaning and depressing. Employers need to focus on what people CAN do rather than on what they can’t. There are ways to work around: many can work from home with flexible hours and would jump at that opportunity.”
Does Janice strike the Minister as someone who chooses or wants to be out of work? Of course not. She is like hundreds of thousands of sick and disabled people up and down the land who desperately want to work. Cutting the money they could receive will not change their minds or incentivise them any more than what already motivates them: dignity, self-worth and getting a job that they can sustain. Cutting away that vital support will add an layer of stress and worry and, with additional work search costs, will hinder their ability to find the work that they so desperately crave. The MS Society points to research published last year by Scope’s extra costs commission, which says that living with neurological conditions such as multiple sclerosis can cost people an extra £200 a week.
I plead and hope that the Minister will say what she and the Government plan to do to help people by providing additional employment support and financial support. She must realise and accept that people who are in ESA WRAG are in that category because they are currently unfit for work; they have an illness or a disability that means that they cannot currently work. ESA WRAG is often their only income and yet, from April, people on ESA WRAG who are sick or disabled will somehow be expected to sustain themselves on the same rate as jobseeker’s allowance. The Government must think again.
Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)
It is lovely to serve under your chairmanship again, Ms Dorries. I congratulate the hon. Member for Lanark and Hamilton East (Angela Crawley) on securing an excellent debate. It has been really constructive and has brought to light more cases to show the Minister and the former Minister, the hon. Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson), how people experience the cuts, how sick and disabled people experience the assessment process and the indignity they too often face. I wish Donna all the very best and I hope she continues to recover. It is the personal stories that bring this issue to life.
I thank all hon. Members who have contributed so well today—I should have started by saying happy St Andrew’s day. It is so important to understand what people are going through and to put a human face to it. The former Minister said, “Go and observe one of these assessments.” He is right that we should all try to do that, but I am sure he is aware of observational bias. We should not take our own observations as the only form of evidence. Up and down the country, we are hearing and seeing examples of what sick and disabled people are going through every day.
This is the first opportunity that I have had to discuss this issue with the Minister, and I want to focus on what the hon. Member for Airdrie and Shotts (Neil Gray) also focused on. We will not go away and this issue will not go away. We will continue to campaign on it, because it is a real injustice: £1,500 a year from the most vulnerable people, the poorest of the poor, some five million people—I will not continually repeat the statistics that we repeated in the two debates just two weeks ago.
What is so disappointing is that all the evidence—from the UN committees investigating human rights concerns and breaches of the convention on the rights of persons with disabilities, from our own Equality and Human Rights Commission, from the Government’s Social Security Advisory Committee, from a whole list of well-respected charities, such as Parkinson’s UK, Scope and so on, and even from the Government’s own Back Benchers—is being completely ignored. We heard about the Backbench Business Committee debate, when the motion was carried without contest, which is almost unprecedented.
The strength of feeling in this House has been expressed, yet what was so absent in the autumn statement was anything that sick or disabled people could grasp for how their lives would be made better. Their lives have been made a misery over the last six years and it will get worse. I know that the Minister is new in her post and she has said some very positive things. We have also heard very warm words from the Prime Minister, but when it comes to doing anything, the Government have put their hands in their pockets and turned away. We cannot have that. It needs to change.
The Government have put forward arguments about incentivising claimants and argued that cuts will incentivise people into work, which is quite disgraceful, really. It implies that people are making a choice. As we have heard, people are not making a choice to live on £70-odd a week when they have had a decent living before. They do not choose to do that. As the fifth richest country in the world, we have an obligation to treat people with dignity and respect. It is about choices.
I want to pick up on the point that other Members have made about what other discretionary funds people might be able to draw on. I was going through the Minister’s earlier speech last night, and the flexible support fund was mentioned. We need to understand some things about that fund. First of all, it was investigated recently for fraud. The former Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith), tried to claim that it was being supplemented by £15 million a year to cover the costs. That is not the case; it is actually £15 million from 2015 alone. That fund does not go anywhere near to matching the loss that people will experience and the in-year deductions that will be made as a result of these cuts.
I will finish on a point that was raised in my constituency. We all have hundreds of different cases; my case load has gone up exponentially as people have been subjected to these increased cuts. I want to talk about John Ruane, who has a brain tumour. As a consequence, he has three to four epileptic fits a week. I was contacted by his surgeon, because John was refusing to have a life-saving operation, as he had passed his work capability assessment—how could that happen to somebody with a life-threatening condition?—and he was worried that he would be sanctioned, in the same way that we saw in “I, Daniel Blake”. John had no means of support, and it has taken us months to sort this out. He has now, finally, had his ESA reinstated, but he was scared of being sanctioned because of what had happened, and the stress that he was placed under, as well as the indignity, just is not right. That is one case; I could cite loads of others.
Within the context of ESA, we cannot ignore the work capability assessment. Again, more than two years ago the Work and Pensions Committee raised the WCA as an issue in its report on ESA:
“Simply ‘rebranding’ the WCA by taking on a new provider will not solve the problems: a fundamental redesign of the ESA end-to-end process is required”.
Very briefly, I want mention another one of my constituents, a young woman who is going through the PIP process. She was a high-flyer, in a good career, and she is only in her 30s, but she is suffering from Lipedema, Dercum’s disease, fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome. She has pain in every part of her body, but particularly in her hands. She cannot even cook or prepare her own food. She has gone through the PIP process and she feels that it is just like a slap in the face. She needs that support to enable her to recover, and she feels that she is being thwarted at every turn.
This is about choices—choices about what we do. It is about whether we as a country feel that it is right to support our most vulnerable people or to support those on the top incomes—which is what the autumn statement analysis shows that we did. We on the Opposition choose that we should protect and support the most vulnerable in our society. This is about choice, and I hope that the Government will listen and do something about it.
The Minister for Disabled People, Health and Work (Penny Mordaunt)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Lanark and Hamilton East (Angela Crawley) on securing this debate and all hon. Members who have contributed to it.
These are important services and they are at the heart of our nation’s values and its interests. Of the 2.5 million people claiming incapacity benefits, 1.3 million also claim PIP or DLA. A further million claim PIP or DLA, but not incapacity benefits. Many of these people will also access other support and state services, as well as support provided by partner organisations.
What we do is vital, not only to enable someone to meet their living costs and endure, but to support their ambitions. We have that dual responsibility. In addition, I am very conscious, because of the combined areas that I look after, that I have the largest budget of any Minister in any Government Department. That is a huge responsibility to the general public, who fund it, and to those whom these services are designed to help. It is a responsibility that I take very seriously indeed.
PIP and ESA are entirely different benefits, designed for different purposes, and each has its own legal criteria. ESA provides support to those who face barriers to work and looks at what work a person can do, rather than focusing on what they cannot do. Unlike ESA, PIP is non-means-tested and available to disabled people regardless of their employment status. PIP provides a contribution towards the extra personal costs arising from their disability or health condition and can be paid on top of other benefits.
The PIP assessment is designed to treat all health conditions and impairments fairly, and the assessment criteria take into account the impact of all impairments, including mental health, on an individual’s ability to carry out a broad range of everyday activities. That breadth is one of the benefits of the new system in comparison with what went before, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson), who outlined some other improvements that the system makes.
The title of this debate refers to two benefits, but understandably much of the debate has focused on people, and quite rightly so, as the hon. Member for Airdrie and Shotts (Neil Gray) said. In developing our policy and delivering our services, we need to remember that it is not just about those who have been featured in today’s debate. It is also about those who have not been featured and who rarely get a mention: those who are not on benefits and are not yet in crisis, but are financially fragile; those in ill health; those with multiple caring responsibilities who do not qualify for carer’s allowance; and those who, despite hardship, do not for a variety of reasons access the benefit support available to them. Our concern and our support should stretch beyond the reach of our benefits. What we take forward from the Green Paper and all we do in the interim must have help for those people in mind.
ESA and PIP are massive systems, and both have rightly undergone, and will continue to undergo, continual improvements. Contrary to what the shadow Minister said, we have made many changes. Recent changes include the announcement that we will stop ESA reassessments for those with severe health conditions and disabilities. In designing the changes, I have asked that we plan ahead and see whether we could have permission to share information with local government. That could enable local authorities to stop requiring those very same people to fill in forms for locally administered schemes. In his speech, the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) outlined some of the potential benefits of doing that when he mentioned social care and other services.
With ESA, we now have clinical data to hold contractors to account. I pay tribute to the DWP’s chief medical officer and her team for the work they have done on that and on data sharing. We have trialled greater flexibility on the time given to the early stages of an application process to ensure that all the health information is available to the assessor. That is the best way to cut down on incorrect decisions being made at that early stage.
Penny Mordaunt
If the shadow Minister will forgive me, I will make some progress.
We are rolling out that trial. The past presence test will no longer apply to claims for DLA, PIP, attendance allowance and carer’s allowance with regard to refugees, people with humanitarian protection status and their families. We are extending hardship payments. The ESA appeals process has been reformed, with mandatory reconsideration clearance times down from 35 days to nine. The number of weeks and the percentage of case load having to go to appeal to get the right decision are both reducing. Huge strides have been made in identifying hidden impairments, including through training of staff.
The hon. Member for Lanark and Hamilton East spoke at length about the factors of appearance. Many people might look perfectly together and presentable but have deeply hidden issues. We have done a huge amount in training staff to recognise that, and more is planned. The Secretary of State has announced his focus on the use of sanctions with those with mental health conditions, and the Green Paper gives us the possibility of major reform to different parts of the system in unison. In that consultation, we want to examine how we might simplify and improve the assessment process and how we can use information better to effectively support people, such as sharing data—with claimant consent—with support organisations and other state services. The reform of the work capability assessment—which we have not been able to do to date because it requires primary legislation—is a focus of the Green Paper. We could separate out decisions on entitlement to employment support and entitlement to financial support.
Penny Mordaunt
I will just make a little progress, because I have some announcements to make.
The Green Paper also looks at statutory sick pay and other issues that would have benefited people such as Donna—if I have understood her situation—by enabling a phased return to work, which is obviously what people need. Rather than having someone continually jump through hoops, we want that support to be wrapped around the individual, whatever situation they have been landed in. Not only does that support need to be exactly what they need, when they need it and personalised—whether it is delivered by a jobcentre, a GP practice nurse or another—but their experience of the whole system has to be what they need, when they need it. Having to wait for an assessment to be carried out before someone can have a conversation about their situation and hopes is not smart. We need a joined-up, common-sense approach in all we do. We should not just start thinking about what assistive technology or equipment someone might need when they hit the employment market. We need to think about that when they are at school or college and receiving careers advice.
Penny Mordaunt
Forgive me, but I will make some progress.
That kind of quality support can be reached only through stellar local working. That is why the Green Paper consultation is more than an information-gathering exercise; it is a call to arms. We have to build new commitments and shared outcomes locally. I urge all Members to help us in the consultation process and to come along to the drop-in event in the House on Monday between 3 o’clock and 5 o’clock. It will offer information specific to Members’ constituencies, guidance on how to run an event or get involved in one, as well as bringing partners together to respond to the consultation and thinking about what needs to be done in the local area. During the consultation process, we will continue to develop those networks, facilitated by the flexible support fund, and also busting some of the myths about what local services we will commission to support those on benefits.
I briefly turn to Motability, which the hon. Members for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Corri Wilson) and for North Ayrshire and Arran (Patricia Gibson) particularly focused on. Members will know that a scheme has been set out—I am very grateful to Motability for doing that—to try to help with the transition from DLA to PIP. It is a challenging time for individuals. That scheme is the £175 million package that Members will be familiar with, which enables individuals to keep their car for seven weeks, allows them to buy back their old vehicle and offers a one-off payment of £2,000 to help to meet their continuing Motability needs. Motability is also helping to pay for new adaptions to non-scheme cars, with insurance thrown in. We are aware of how difficult it is—despite that mitigation and the other sources of transport subsidy that might be available—for an individual to be told that they will lose their vehicle with only a few weeks to make alternative arrangements.
There are other problems too. I want to outline one that is of particular concern to me. It relates to people leaving the country for extended periods longer than 13 weeks. That is a problem for students, but it is also a problem for someone who might want to take up a career opportunity, a sabbatical or other opportunities that require travel. Our systems must be able to support someone following their dreams and ambitions. They must enable a person to thrive, so this situation should not be left to stand. We have been discussing with relevant Departments ways to enable PIP claimants to keep their vehicle pending appeal, and we are exploring options to allow those who are not in receipt of the higher Motability component to have access to the Motability scheme. I am also exploring how claimants who are out of the country for extended periods can be better supported. We have a plan and the Treasury’s blessing. This week I have written to Motability to ask for its help in delivering that plan. I anticipate that the plan will require some changes to its processes, but I know that it will do all it can to help us in this matter, as it has in the past. We have a remarkable and unique partnership with Motability, and I hope in my tenure to maximise that.
I have spoken at length about the work-related activity group. Time is short but, briefly, we are looking at a range of measures to help to ensure that someone’s experience of these systems—that is fundamentally the heart of what Members have been discussing today—can be improved and that we are aware of all the issues. That includes looking at developing service user panels to create a real-time reporting mechanism on people’s experiences. We can use those panels to design our benefits systems. There are a raft of other measures that I do not have time to outline today, but they will help us to do that. I will bring forward measures shortly.
The final thing I will do before I hand over to the hon. Member for Lanark and Hamilton East is reassure her that I will be there to assist when devolution transitions further powers to Holyrood. I am already talking to her colleagues there about how we can get the best outcomes for the issues she mentioned. Again, this comes down to all Members of this House—whichever part of the country we represent and whatever our political hue—working together to get the best outcomes in the systems. I hope that all Members will come to the drop-in session next Monday.
Angela Crawley
I thank you for that, Mrs Dorries. I thank all hon. and right hon. Members—
Nadine Dorries (in the Chair)
Order.
Motion lapsed (Standing Order No. 10(6)).
Road Safety: Sentencing Review
(8 years ago)
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Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered road safety and the Government’s proposed sentencing review.
It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bailey. In January 2014, I stood before the House of Commons and called on the Government to review the sentencing guidelines for maximum penalties for driving offences that lead to death or serious injury. I urged the Government then to make changes to the rules and guidelines set out by law that mean that drivers who end the lives of innocent people on our roads sometimes have their sentences reduced to mere months.
Judith Cummins (Bradford South) (Lab)
In Bradford, our local “Stop the Danger Drivers” campaign calls for tougher action to tackle these criminal drivers. Does my hon. Friend agree that tougher action is needed to tackle dangerous driving, which blights so many of our local communities?
Susan Elan Jones
I agree with my hon. Friend 100%. Right across the country there are people concerned about this issue.
Susan Elan Jones
It is again a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bailey.
In January 2014, I raised the issue of the need for a sentencing review for maximum penalties for driving offences that lead to death or serious injury. Many Members of Parliament stood with me and explained why the issue mattered to their constituents and why the review is so desperately needed.
Let me begin by talking about why this issue matters so much to me and my constituency. In the village of Overton in my constituency, a nine-year-old boy was tragically killed in 2009 while crossing the road. The driver who so carelessly mowed young Robert down was unlicensed and uninsured. He hit Robert, took his life and then drove away. He did not stop to help and did not report the accident. He resprayed his car to hide the evidence, attempting to cover up his crime. The driver who took Robert’s life incurred a pitiful sentence of 22 months, yet that was the very limit of what was possible under the law for that offence. That man hit a young boy and took his life, and after driving away and leaving that child to die he was sentenced to a grand total of 22 months and a four-year driving ban.
Craig Tracey (North Warwickshire) (Con)
My constituent, Sean Morley, was similarly knocked over and left to die by a driver who left the scene. Does the hon. Lady agree that the sentence needs to reflect the severity of the crime? Currently, it is prosecuted under hit and run, so people get the same sentence that they would have got if they had knocked off a wing mirror.
Susan Elan Jones
I agree totally. That shows that this is a cross-party issue that affects communities across the country.
That driver served only 10 months in jail. Clearly, that cannot be right. Almost two years ago, I asked the Government to reconsider the arrangements for sentencing. Currently, those who cause death by driving in the way I have described face a number of charges and a wide scale of sentences, ranging from mere months to 14 years, but the reality is that sentencing guidelines mean that there must be a large and, frankly, improbable series of aggravating factors for a judge to issue anywhere near the maximum sentence. Tougher penalties are not being used, because judges are being held back by guidelines that prevent them from handing out longer sentences. I know from the many families I have spoken to that there are instances when tougher penalties were very much needed.
In 2004, the Labour party was right to fight for higher maximum penalties. The Government, encouraged by the tireless campaigning of many Members from all parties, were equally right to incorporate new rules on drug taking while driving into the Crime and Courts Act 2013 and to amend the Road Traffic Act 1988. We know that there is a tremendous amount of cross-party support on the issue in this House. Both of those Governments can be rightly proud of having introduced changes that go in the right direction, but there is much further to go.
I have spoken about Robert Gaunt from Overton in this House previously, and I wish I could say that that case is tragic but unique, but it is not. Innocent people have been killed by drivers who have been given low sentences across our country, and it has continued since I raised this issue in 2014.
Liz McInnes (Heywood and Middleton) (Lab)
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for bringing this important subject to this Chamber. I just wish we had longer than half an hour to talk about it. My constituent, Joseph Brown-Lartey, was, sadly, killed by a dangerous driver. I have talked about him before and I am working on the Justice for Joseph campaign. I want to make the point that, as my hon. Friend said, she and indeed all of us present have been working on the issue for many years, but we do not seem to be getting anywhere with the Government. I hope that this debate will push it forward.
Susan Elan Jones
I agree wholeheartedly with my hon. Friend. Again, that highlights the point about diversity —she represents an urban constituency, mine is predominantly rural. These issues occur absolutely everywhere.
The average sentence served by a driver who kills or seriously injures another human being while driving is, believe it or not, only 11 months. Families are losing loved ones because of reckless, dangerous and negligent driving, and the law is not doing enough to hold those responsible to account. Innocent families are being let down by the system and the punishments given simply do not fit the crimes committed.
Let me explain the situation. If a driver is caught driving with
“a deliberate decision to ignore (or a flagrant disregard for) the rules of the road”,
the starting point for judges when sentencing is eight years. That can be longer for a number of reasons, such as when a person is killed or when the driver is driving a stolen vehicle. Let us reflect for a moment on how subjective that is—“a deliberate decision” about, or “ a flagrant disregard for” the rules of the road. If a driver is seen to be creating significant danger—the lowest level of seriousness—the starting point for a sentencing judge is three years and the maximum term is five years. If a driver is injured, the sentence is shortened. If the victim was a friend, again the sentence is shortened; and on and on we go.
As I said in 2014, it is absolutely right that our criminal justice system differentiates those who make a mistake, commit a crime and acknowledge it, and those who flee, hide and pervert the course of justice, as in the case involving Robert Gaunt in Overton. I wholeheartedly support the provision of a range of different sentences for driving offences—indeed, our country’s justice system is built on that—and I am calling for a logical development of the existing system and more consideration of the sentences given.
As a result of the rules and guidelines set out by the law, drivers who end the lives of innocent people on our roads have their sentences reduced again and again until, bit by bit, they decline to mere months. Drivers who plead guilty before their trials have their sentences automatically reduced by a third, and most will be released on licence after serving only half their given sentences. For the families of those who are killed, that is clearly not justice—nor is that justice for the rest of society.
After the injustice of cases such as that of Robert Gaunt and many others like it nationwide, people from my constituency launched a petition calling for sentences for this sort of crime to be increased. More than 1,300 names were added online and a further 2,000 collected on paper. The campaign continued, even though a change of Government meant an early closure of the online petition. Many of those who signed had probably never signed a petition before, and perhaps have not since, but they did so on that occasion out of a passion for justice for Robert and for other victims of road accidents throughout our country.
Almost two years ago, as I said, I asked the Government to look at the maximum penalties for driving offences that lead to death and serious injury. I asked for the same thing that the family of Robert James Gaunt was calling for back in 2009—but we are still waiting today.
In response to a recent parliamentary written question on this issue, the Government stated:
“It is our intention to commence a consultation before the end of the year which will look at driving offences and penalties.”
I welcome that, and I am pleased that the Government are still willing and open to do something. However, almost two years ago, that same commitment was made to me when I brought the issue to the House of Commons. I and other Members of Parliament who were passionate in support of a sentencing review were told that one would take place and that justice would be offered to those who had lost loved ones so tragically.
If we change the law and the sentencing guidelines are reformed properly, that will bring some measure of justice. I hope that that would give people who are uninsured or unlicensed grounds to pause before they get behind the wheel of a vehicle. So let me be absolutely clear why I am here today: we urged the Government to act; the Government promised to hold a review; and the review has not taken place. It is taking far too long.
Since 2009, my constituents have been calling for changes, and many others across the country and across party have been making the same plea. At a recent meeting of the all-party parliamentary group for transport safety, I had the opportunity to ask the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, the hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Andrew Jones), who has responsibility for road safety, why that has taken such a long time. He admitted that there had been considerable delay. In response to a recent question in the House of Lords by Lord Berkeley on this issue, the Government responded that the criticism that they had taken too long was “fair”.
The Government keep telling the House their intentions. I am pleased that they intend to conduct a review. I am pleased that their intention is to take this matter as seriously as everyone in this Chamber does, but it has been almost two years since I was promised in the House of Commons in 2014 that a review would take place. On that occasion, the Government told me that a sentencing review would start, but for all the promises we have been given, I have yet to see anything actually happening. Intentions are grand and fine things, and they are to be welcomed, but they are not much use if we do not get a real review and if sentencing guidelines are not reformed. It is now time to see real results.
I have been urging the Government to look at the issues since 2011. I will continue to raise them again and again until action is taken, and many, many colleagues in this House feel similarly. It is time for the Government to give us the review that Members of Parliament are calling for. It is time for the Government to deliver on the promises they made to me almost two years ago. Most important, it is time for us to give families the opportunity to receive the justice that they have waited so long for. It is time for a review, and I and many others will keep asking for it until it arrives. This is not about politics; it is about justice. It is time for us to move on with the issue. I have left the Minister a considerable amount of time in which to respond and, I hope, to make some commitment on a timeline for when justice can be expected.
Mr Adrian Bailey (in the Chair)
I understand that Mr Jake Berry wants to contribute. To be clear, the revised time for the conclusion of the debate is 4.43 pm. We want to hear the Minister’s reply, so brevity would be much appreciated, but before I call Mr Berry, may I confirm for the record that you, Susan Elan Jones and the Minister, are quite happy for me to do so?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Sam Gyimah)
indicated assent.
Jake Berry (Rossendale and Darwen) (Con)
Thank you, Mr Bailey, for calling me. I congratulate the hon. Member for Clwyd South (Susan Elan Jones) on an exceptionally good, thoughtful and thought-provoking speech. I want to add to it only briefly—I, too, want to give the Minister as much time as possible to respond.
I want to draw attention to an issue that I raised in Prime Minister’s Question Time on 25 November 2015. On 3 August 2015, an intoxicated John Morton offered Amy Baxter, aged 27, and Hayley Jones, aged 32, a lift home in his car. He crashed that car. The injuries that Amy Baxter suffered are so severe that she did not see her children for seven months, because of her head injuries. Even after that, it was too distressing for those children to see her. She is paralysed from the neck down. Her injuries have been life-changing. The issue is not just about death; it is also about serious injuries caused by dangerous driving.
Unbelievably, when Mr Morton pleaded guilty in March 2015, he was simply sentenced to a three-year driving ban, a fine and a 20-week overnight curfew. That is an appalling thing for the family to deal with. They feel that he really has had no punishment whatever for causing life-changing injuries to one of their family members.
But it gets worse than that. Three weeks after Mr Morton was given his overnight curfew, he went to Bolton magistrates court to have his tag removed to enable him to go to a stag party in Portugal. When the family came to see me, they said they felt like that was another sentence with which the magistrate had slapped them in the face. That is absolutely disgusting behaviour by our courts. I do not for one moment blame the magistrates, because I do not believe that they have the sentencing guidelines or flexibility to attach real punishment to people such as Mr Morton.
I wanted to contribute to the debate to say that I certainly have not forgotten Amy Baxter’s tragic injuries and the fantastic campaign that her mother, my constituent Pauline Baxter, has run. Following my question at Prime Minister’s questions to the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, I went to see my right hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), who was at the time Secretary of State for Justice, and he told me, as he told the hon. Member for Clwyd South, that something would happen and there would be a review of sentencing. Amy Baxter’s is just one more appalling case, and I say from the Government side, reflecting cross-party support for the hon. Lady’s call: “For goodness’ sake, let’s get on with it.” We have had promise after promise. How many poor mothers like Amy Baxter have to see the drink-driver who caused them life-changing injuries not punished properly before the Government will take action? I hope that the Minister will respond with something concrete, because there is frustration on both sides of the House about the intolerable delay in the Government’s review of these sentences.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Sam Gyimah)
May I say how wonderful it is to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bailey? I thank the hon. Member for Clwyd South (Susan Elan Jones) for securing this debate on road safety and the review of driving offences and penalties, and all hon. Members for their contributions. She first highlighted the tragic death of her constituent, Robert Gaunt, as far back as 2009. Young Robert’s death, which could have been avoided, must have been devastating for his family and friends, as she rightly and understandably outlined.
Many of us have had road deaths in our constituencies that need not have happened. It will be no comfort to victims and their families, but we should not lose sight of the fact that despite the significant increase in road users, our roads are getting safer and road deaths are at their lowest ever. In the time allotted to me, I will look at some of the issues that the hon. Lady raised.
On sentences and sentencing guidelines, once offenders are charged and convicted, their sentencing is a matter for the independent courts, which decide on sentences having considered the full details of the case and the offender. The courts are best placed to decide on just and proportionate sentences. My hon. Friend the Member for Rossendale and Darwen (Jake Berry) also referred to the sentencing guidelines in his passionate speech. Those guidelines are produced by the independent Sentencing Council, and the courts are required to follow them in deciding on a sentence, but it is worth stressing that a judge may depart from them if it is in the interests of justice to do so. The council plans to review those guidelines in due course. One good thing about them is that they lead to greater transparency about the sentences that are imposed and ensure that there is some consistency. A review of the guidelines for motoring offences involving death is on the Sentencing Council’s work plan, as I have alluded to. That review was postponed following the Government’s own review, which I will talk about. New draft guidelines will be subject to a full public consultation shortly.
Both hon. Members raised the question of maximum penalties. It is worth stressing that although sentencing is a matter for the courts, we all know that Parliament sets the legal framework within which the courts operate. Maximum penalties are set by Parliament to cover the most serious imaginable behaviours for specific offences, which is why the maximum penalty is rarely imposed. When deciding what sentence to impose, the courts are required to take account of all the circumstances of the offence and the offender, and any mitigating or aggravating factors. Some people have suggested that the courts should impose the maximum penalty in every road traffic case that results in death. However, imposing the maximum penalty for any death in any circumstance for any offence would be contrary to our system of justice. Making all sentences the same would remove the courts’ ability to single out and highlight the most serious cases and offences.
The issue of release was raised, and it was suggested that those who plead guilty can get up to a third off their sentences at the judge’s discretion. In fact, under statute, all offenders serving determinate sentences are released automatically at the halfway point; that is not the case just for driving offences.
Despite what was said, the Government have taken some action, although we want to ensure that the courts are able to respond appropriately to the full range of cases that they are likely to face. Changes have recently been made to the law. In the past, where offenders caused very serious injuries, the offence with which they were charged related solely to their driving, not the harm they caused to the victim. The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 created a new offence of causing serious injury by dangerous driving, with a five-year maximum penalty. In addition, in the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015, the Government increased the maximum penalty for causing death or serious injury when driving while disqualified. The previous maximum was only two years; that has now been increased to 10 years. That came into force in April last year. Those changes mean that there is now a range of offences dealing with dangerous driving that have appropriate maximum penalties and more properly reflect the harm caused.
The hon. Lady raised the issue of failure to stop in the event of a so-called hit-and-run. Failure to stop is a summary-only offence with a six-month maximum penalty, because it is designed to deal only with drivers who fail to stop and report an incident. Where there is evidence that the driver caused death or serious injury, or the driver was found to have been driving carelessly or dangerously, separate charges apply. Where the driver seeks to evade detection, they may be charged with perverting the course of justice, which has a maximum penalty of a life sentence.
I touched on reduction of sentences as the result of a guilty plea, and I want to expand on that slightly. The sentencing guidelines provide a sliding scale of reductions, depending on the point at which the plea is made. The maximum reduction is a third, for a plea at the first reasonable opportunity; the recommended reduction falls to 10% when the offender pleads guilty on the day of the trial. Where the case against the offender is overwhelming, the guidelines provide for discretion on the part of the judge to give a lower reduction.
Susan Elan Jones
I am rather perplexed. The Minister is not providing total support for the existing guidelines. We are all very much under the impression that the Government want the sentencing guidelines to be reviewed. Can we have absolute clarity that they will be reviewed, and may we have a timescale for that?
Mr Gyimah
If the hon. Lady will bear with me, I am trying to deal with the points she raised and how the law stands. I will then come on to what further action the Government will take.
On murder and manslaughter—an issue that has been touched on—I understand why in many cases causing death by driving is thought to be equivalent to attacking someone with a weapon. Under the current law, the Crown Prosecution Service can and will charge a person with manslaughter when the evidence supports that charge, it is the public interest to do so and there is a reasonable prospect of a conviction. Successful prosecutions have secured manslaughter convictions in driving cases.
Careless and dangerous driving has come up in such debates and there have been suggestions that the distinction between careless and dangerous driving should be abolished and replaced with one offence of bad driving. What amounts to dangerous driving is determined not by considering the driver’s state of mind or intentions, which in the context of driving is often difficult to ascertain, but by examining the nature of the driving.
The law sets out an objective test designed to compare the driving of the defendant in the specific circumstances of the case against what would be expected of a notional careful and competent driver. In general terms, if the court considers that the driving falls far below that standard and it would be obvious to a competent and careful driver that the manner of driving was dangerous, it will find that to have been dangerous driving. Our law needs to reflect that while the harm caused in homicide cases and fatal driving offences is the same because someone has died, the culpability of the offender for the death may be significantly different.
Of course hon. Members want to know what happens next in the Government’s review. There can be nothing more tragic than the loss of a child, or any life, especially when that loss was avoidable. I know that there are concerns about sentencing for some driving offences and about the maximum powers available to the courts, as we have heard in the debate. It is important that those serious offences are considered in relation not just to the range of driving offences but to the full range of criminal offences to maintain proportionality within sentencing.
As I acknowledged in a debate only two months ago in this place, for too long those concerns have not been acted on. At that time, I reaffirmed the Government’s commitment to consult on the offences and penalties for driving offences resulting in death and serious injury and I do so again today. It is very much the Government’s intention that the consultation will be delivered, as promised in the previous debate, before the end of the year. I intend to honour that commitment.
Susan Elan Jones
I hope that the review comes soon, because people have been waiting for it for a very long time.
Question put and agreed to.
Homophobia in Sport
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Mr Adrian Bailey (in the Chair)
Before I call Stuart Andrew to move the motion for the next debate on homophobia in sport, I should inform Members that, owing to an administrative error, reference to evidence taken by the Culture, Media and Sport Committee relevant to the debate has not appeared on the Order Paper as it should have done. I convey the apologies of the House Authorities to that Committee and to hon. Members present for the debate.
Stuart Andrew (Pudsey) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered homophobia in sport.
I point out that the error on the Order Paper is not my fault—promise. I am pleased to have secured what I think is an important debate, because, for me, sport has the potential to be a great equaliser in society. It brings together people from many different backgrounds to participate and spectate in the best possible spirits—although, indeed, as a Leeds United fan, shall I say perhaps the spirits have not always been the best of late?
We have made great progress. There are great examples of some of our leading athletes who have felt able to come out. I am proud to mention two from my county. Nicola Adams, whom I am proud of, said at the time that she was worried about how everyone would react, so she used to say that she was single rather than that she was with a girl. She felt like she was lying all the time, and she did not like having to do that, so, in the end, she thought, “Well, this is who I am. And if there is nothing I can do about it, why should I hide it?” Keegan Hirst, the rugby player from Batley, said:
“I tick every macho box. How could I be gay? I’m from Batley for goodness’ sake. No one is gay in Batley.”
Those are two brave individuals who have come out and brought a bit of a spotlight on to the issue.
We notice most sharply that we have a problem when one of our nation’s most successful athletes thinks that sexism and homophobia are still huge problems in sport and that they are inextricably linked. Sue Day, the former women’s rugby captain, said:
“If she has got physical strength or something that is not perceived to be feminine, then she must be a lesbian. If a man is gay”
people think
“he can’t possibly be good at sport because he is not masculine enough”.
She went on to say:
“There is a huge amount of sexism in sport. The men have been allowed to play sport for many years whereas the women haven’t. Sexism and homophobia are so inextricably linked.”
Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that many of those views start at an early age? At school, when we divide our children into certain genders and certain sports, that only reinforces these things. I played football growing up, but there were not many girls playing it—I had to play hockey; I was not allowed to play football at times. Do we need to widen access to all sports so that all genders get the opportunity to experience sports of all kinds?
Stuart Andrew
I am grateful for that intervention and I certainly agree. We can look at some of our successes—I think of the England women’s football team and the British hockey team—which are fantastic, but we need to encourage more choice in sport for all genders.
The perception that Sue Day spoke of is widely expressed in sport at all levels by professionals and spectators alike. I cannot emphasise enough how welcoming and inclusive sport is becoming, and much credit for that must go to the spectators. The vast majority of fans find the shared bonds of loyalty to their team far more important than anything else, but we must aim for the best on the field as well as off it. There is clearly some significant work to do.
I do not want to be perceived as being only critical of the situation in our sports clubs and among our spectators, because I am not. There is much good practice from clubs and governing bodies and great examples of spectators working together on the issue, but we need to pull all of that work together. When clubs get behind such initiatives they can have a huge impact, but we need some national direction. I would be interested to hear from the Minister on what the Government are doing in that respect and what progress there is from national governing bodies.
A great deal of good work being is done across the country by fans, clubs, coaches, professional leagues and governing bodies, but now is the time to bring that together. With the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport undertaking an important inquiry on this issue, we must build on the momentum to take a bold and strategic step forward so that we can start tackling the problem at all levels.
Iain Stewart (Milton Keynes South) (Con)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. I agree that some central direction is necessary to bring together all the good work happening at club level. One thing that prevents senior sporting stars from coming out is a feeling that they might lose corporate sponsorship if they were to reveal their true sexuality. Would it not be useful for the big corporate organisations to say it would not matter a jot to them or affect sponsorship if a footballer or rugby player or whoever decided to come out?
Stuart Andrew
My hon. Friend makes a valid point. In some aspects of sport—I will come on to football in a bit—huge amounts of money are spent on sponsorship, and I can understand why some players may fear that that would be a problem. He makes a strong point that I think all sponsors need to think about when drawing up those deals.
To come back to the inquiry that is happening at the moment, I commend the previous Culture, Media and Sport Committee report into racism in football, which also highlighted the prominence of homophobia in football and has done much to bring the issue into the open. I look forward to the important report from the current inquiry. Its terms of reference touch on some of the things I will raise, including looking at the experience of gay sportsmen and sportswomen and what those tell us about different sports and the progression of attitudes in general; the approach of governance bodies throughout sport; and how homophobic abuse compares with other forms of harassment.
I will also look at how successful governing bodies have been in tackling the issue; how homophobia is being tackled at school; what action is being taken by teachers and coaches involved in youth and amateur sport to ensure homophobia is challenged at an early stage; and whether football has a particular problem with homophobia in comparison with other sports. I will outline some of the problems that we still have in sport, including the effect on athletes, the potential loss of great talent, and the general lack of participation and the drop-off rates among LGBT athletes.
One thing that triggered my effort to secure the debate was a recent BBC Radio 5 live survey. I have to say that it included some positive figures, but one thing that struck me was the finding that 8% of football fans would stop supporting their team if one of its players came out as gay. The majority were obviously positive about it, but when we consider the huge number of spectators who go out and watch football every weekend, 8% is a significant number. Knowing how passionate and loyal many supporters are about their teams, the fact that something like that was a trigger to stop them supporting their team alarmed me.
The “Out on the Fields” report is one of the world’s biggest studies of homophobia in sport. It studied gay and straight people worldwide. Statistics from the UK in the survey showed that 77% of participants have witnessed or experienced homophobia in sport; 85% believe that an openly gay person is not safe as a spectator; the most likely location for people to hear abuse in sport is in the spectator stands, followed closely by the school PE class; and that most people surveyed believe that sport is more homophobic than the rest of society.
Mrs Helen Grant (Maidstone and The Weald) (Con)
I thank my hon. Friend for securing such an important debate. Does he agree that this type of behaviour is abhorrent and inexcusable? Whether in the locker room or the playground, it should not be explained away as “banter” or simply “having a joke”, or that the person on the receiving end is overly sensitive. Such behaviour often amounts to hate crime or harassment, which carry serious criminal penalties.
Stuart Andrew
I completely agree with my hon. Friend. Language is incredibly important, and the wrong language can lead to much more dangerous actions if we are not careful. She is absolutely right that that needs to be tackled and understood, and washing it away as banter is unacceptable.
The “Out on the Fields” survey also found that 70% of gay men are completely or partially in the closet when playing youth sports, with many making the choice to give up sport so that they can lead an open life. What a sad choice that is. An online survey of more than 1,200 sports fans across Britain conducted this year for Stonewall looked into homophobic, biphobic and transphobic attitudes and experiences among sports fans. It found that 72% of football fans had heard homophobic abuse while watching live sports in the past five years. Disappointingly, 22% of 18 to 24-year-olds said they would be embarrassed if their favourite player came out as gay, while 22% were likely to agree that anti-LGBT language is harmless if meant only as banter. However, there were some positive trends. Some 88% would be either proud or neutral if their favourite player came out as gay, while 63% said more should be done to make LGBT people feel accepted in sport, so there is a basis of positive work for us to build on.
YouGov polled some 2,000 LGBT people for Stonewall’s 2013 “Gay in Britain” report, which found that more than 60% of gay and bi men, and nearly 40% of lesbian and bi women, expected to face discrimination from opposing teams, spectators, officials and fellow teammates when taking part in sports. LGBT young people frequently felt unwelcome or had negative experiences when taking part in sport. Research by the University of Cambridge involving more than 1,200 young people, again for Stonewall, found that 23% had been bullied while taking part in sport. Furthermore, METRO Centre’s 2014 “Youth Chances” survey found that 24% of trans young people felt that their gender identity had stopped or reduced the chances of their participating in sports groups or organisations locally.
I will come on to football, because it is the one sport which thousands of people go to watch every week and is followed as a national treasure. I think, if we are honest, it is the focus of concerns about homophobia. Those concerns are not limited to football, but it does seem to have a particular problem. As I said, it is by far the biggest sport in the country, so it could therefore be the leader in this area and drive change across sport and throughout society. Some great work is happening. Stonewall greatly welcomes the FA’s four-year action plan, which runs until this year and outlines the FA’s plans for the inclusion of LGBT people in football. It covers key areas, including education, sanctions, steps to encourage reporting and partnership working. It is vital that progress on the plan is reviewed and a clear series of next steps is put in place.
There has also been some fantastic work by some of our clubs, such as Crystal Palace, which has a full-page LGBT fan group page in its programme for each match. Fan groups, such as the Proud Lilywhites of Tottenham Hotspur, the Gay Gooners of Arsenal and the Proud Canaries of Norwich City are all good examples, because visibility is valuable in tackling some of these issues; I believe that fan groups are a key element of that strategy. Last weekend, the Premier League, the Football Association, the English Football League, the Rugby Football Union and sports clubs across Britain hosted a rainbow laces takeover organised by Stonewall. Teams such as Manchester United, Arsenal and Liverpool laced up during training sessions and showed public support for the campaign on their social media channels.
However, to go back to that survey and the reasons why I tried to secure the debate, an article was printed in the Daily Express, the online version of which attracted some appalling comments. I am not going to read them out because I do not think they are appropriate. As ever with these things, these people hide behind an anonymous name and have not got the guts to come out and say these things publicly. If people suggest that there is not a problem, those words prove otherwise.
I mentioned the survey finding that 8% of fans would stop supporting their team if it had a gay player. That, together with the sponsorship issue, may be a reason why no major footballer in this country has felt able to come out as gay. That concerns me. As I said earlier, that means we do not get the best of them, but I am more concerned about their mental health. It must be incredibly difficult for someone to understand their sexuality but feel that they cannot come out. As a gay man myself, I know how difficult it is to not have the confidence to go public and the relief you feel once you have done it.
When that survey came out, Greg Clarke from the FA said that now may not be the right time to come out. I am a fairly level-headed person, and I always try to give people the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he made those comments from the perspective of wanting to protect players. I can sort of understand that, but saying, “Now’s not the time,” is a very different point and sends quite a negative message to the players and the general public. Now is exactly the right time for us to address this.
Martin Docherty-Hughes (West Dunbartonshire) (SNP)
I thank the hon. Gentleman for securing this debate. He is a well-known and very vocal defender of LGBT rights in the Chamber. Does he agree that the FA and the Scottish Football Association will be left behind, given the fact that our society is far more forward-thinking than they are with their reactionary and homophobic attitude to LGBT rights in sport?
Stuart Andrew
Absolutely. They need to catch up with the times. I look back in awe at how far society and this country have come in my lifetime. When I was in my teens, which feels like a billion years ago, the age of consent was 21, and now we have equal marriage in our country. That is fantastic. To say that now is not the time for gay players to come out is just not acceptable. The hon. Gentleman is right.
It is really important that there should be an onus on the clubs to support players and develop LGBT-inclusive stadiums and friendly environments. We talked a moment ago about banter. Football can sometimes lead the way. Show Racism the Red Card was a great campaign that has changed attitudes. People are now careful about what they say when they are watching football, but if someone makes a homophobic statement, how do they know the person next to them is not from the LGBT community? They need to think about that and how it makes people feel. That campaign showed how we can change and challenge racist attitudes, and we need to do exactly the same with homophobia.
There is a clear business case to be made to clubs about how detrimental concealing any aspect of a player’s identity is to their wellbeing, to their high performance and to attracting and nurturing new talent. We should push for more co-ordination between the FA, the Premier League and other leagues across the country. As individual clubs have a great deal of autonomy, the leagues need to be the driving force behind this work. I want to outline what action should be taken by sport’s governing bodies, which have to drive this if we are to achieve consistent progress across all levels of sport.
National governing bodies of sport have a responsibility to ensure that steps are taken to tackle homophobic, biphobic and transphobic abuse in sport and to increase LGBT participation. It is essential that that is done at both a grassroots and professional level. They should start by researching why we have such low participation rates. Unless we understand that, we cannot get to the root of the problem.
NGBs should take a clear zero-tolerance approach to this abuse by ensuring that appropriate sanctions are in place and that cases of abuse are monitored, recorded and dealt with appropriately. That means training staff appropriately—everyone from stewards and match officials at games to coaches and players. The most common place that we hear this abuse is, unfortunately, on the terraces. We must tackle that homophobic banter. The invisibility of gay people in the crowd can be a real issue.
We must make significant investment in supporting that work, with key deliverables for the short, medium and long term. NGBs should develop action plans to encourage wide participation. Those should be produced in partnership with LGBT sports organisations, clubs and supporters. The Amateur Swimming Association ran LGBT roadshows to get people to engage with its audit in partnership with the Government Equalities Office steering group, Pride Sports, Ditch the Label, Transsexuals in Sport and Stonewall. More of that should happen.
It is key that NGBs support grassroots clubs. Targeted guidance, training and resources should be produced that are easy to implement in these environments. Stonewall has developed a plain-English best-practice toolkit for grassroots sports clubs and would welcome input from NGBs in developing and promoting that further. I hope they will take it up on that.
The FA should lead the way on this issue. It is the wealthiest governing body, with the most participating clubs, and it can lead the charge, following the best practice of smaller organisations such as the Amateur Swimming Association. A co-ordinated, consistent and maintained strategy to deal with this is important. We need joined-up working and consistent pressure to apply and spread much of the excellent best practice. Crucially, we need to investigate the participation and drop-off rate as part of that strategy. The loss of talent because people feel that their sexuality is not compatible with their sport is alarming, but no governing body is looking into that.
I am aware that there has been some great work. The “Out on the Fields” report came about following calls from SportScotland, with the support of the Australian federal Government. We ought to work with the FA and others to renew the charter that is coming to an end this year and ensure that we have clear and achievable objectives and expectations. We must also make gay people more visible through the support and promotion of LGBT fan groups. We need to achieve a situation where we fully understand the issues and are committed, in a measurable and achievable way, to achieving the positive outcomes that most of us want to see, not only for the sake of LGBT people in sport but in order for sport in this country to flourish.
Nobody should have to make a choice between being open about who they are and continuing to take part in sport. That choice will ultimately cost people personally and will leave sports across the country without talent that could be adding so much to our future success. I hope we will be able to do as much as we can. All of us were very proud when Britain came back from the Olympics with so many medals. Let us be proud of every area of sport that truly reflects every part of our society.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Adrian Bailey (in the Chair)
Order. The debate must conclude no later than 5.43 pm. We need to get on to the Front-Bench speeches no later than 5.23 pm. The Chairman of Ways and Means ruling is that the Scottish National party and official Opposition Front Benchers have five minutes and the Minister 10 minutes in a 60-minute debate. That leaves the Back Benchers with approximately five minutes. I hope Members will bear that in mind.
Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew) on securing this debate and on his excellent speech, which was detailed and heartfelt. I could not help but agree with everything he said.
Perhaps I should declare an interest in this subject, as an openly gay MP who plays a lot of sport, in particular football. I grew up playing football as a wee girl in West Lothian, and I have to say that at the age of 11—which was probably about the peak of my football talents—there were not many girls playing or a huge amount of encouragement.
Although I thoroughly enjoyed running rings round the boys in my school and the local community, it was unfortunate that, up close, there was a lack of support for girls. It was not until I got to university that I was able to play alongside other young women in a proper, structured setting. Funnily enough, in my University of Stirling team was a Scottish women’s national team player, Leanne Ross. The rest of us might have been a bit below par, but Leanne made up for it and she will be part of the Scottish women’s team when it goes to the European championships.
I care passionately about diversity and equality, particularly in football, because I played it growing up and still play occasionally. I worked at my local club, Livingston football club, selling everything from pies to pints, and I have been to my fair share of international and Scottish and English premier league matches. It is fair to say that in general terms women’s football does not have anywhere near the sort of issues that the men’s game seems to have. I have found that women’s football is generally very welcoming to women, whatever their sexuality. However, as the hon. Member for Pudsey identified, for women to show sporting prowess seemed to define their sexuality. I tended not to find that when growing up, and I did not receive abuse in that realm. When I played football and a bit of rugby, for the first time in my life I met other women who were gay—and straight—and I felt in a safe space and among people who reflected similar ideals and values as me.
However, I can tell Members—sadly, from personal experience—that hearing homophobic jokes and jibes, and a general lack of acceptance in other parts of my life, prevented me for a very long time from dealing with my sexuality. The major societal shifts of recent years helped me to feel I could come out and that it would be okay. With the support of friends, family and peers in this place, I came out just after I was elected. It was personally challenging, but ultimately liberating. I am extremely lucky—I am always conscious of how lucky I am—not to have experienced much homophobic abuse. I stand on the shoulders of those who came before me and fought so hard for equality. For me, sport in its various forms was a haven and sometimes a sanctuary in the years when I was struggling with and confused about my sexuality, and I felt safe.
It makes me very sad that today we are debating those who experience homophobia in sport and cannot come out and be who they are in their chosen sport. However, there are chinks of light, and the hon. Member for Pudsey alighted on some of them. I hope that discussing and lifting the lid on the issues will challenge people like Eric Bristow, the darts player who made some horrendous comments this week. I hope he sits at home thinking about what he said and realises that such comments and views should be consigned to the dustbin of history.
The Culture, Media and Sport Committee found that abusive posts are sent to football players on social media every 2.6 minutes. I am sure that many footballers do not want to add to that, but when the English Football Association’s chairman made his comments about footballers not coming out, he did himself and the sport an injustice. Believe you me, Scottish football is in no way immune from offensive behaviour, but in Scotland the Equality Network has developed an LGBT sports charter to which a number of Scottish Premier League clubs have signed up. I do not doubt that a lot of good work is being done across England—we have heard about much of it—as in Scotland, but it is incumbent on us all to work with those organisations across the political divide and the various nations of the UK to stamp out homophobia in sport. I am sure that colleagues share a desire to see that happen.
At a time when record sums are spent in football, which is something the hon. Member for Pudsey referred to—Paul Pogba was recently transferred to Manchester United for £93.25 million—how can governing bodies and premier league clubs not have the funding or resources to put into this issue? That cannot be the case. I hope that in years to come, the sexuality of those of us in the public eye—in sport or whatever other walk of life—will be no more significant than whether we have Marmite on our toast in the morning.
Damian Collins (Folkestone and Hythe) (Con)
As Chair of the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport, I want to talk briefly about its inquiry and to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew) on securing this debate on this important subject. When we look back at the incidence of racism in football, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, it is clear that society has moved on hugely. That is something that the Committee has considered throughout its inquiry so far. The sort of racist banter and chanting from the stands that was commonplace at football grounds in the 1980s is simply unacceptable in society today.
The football bodies have strict rules that they enforce against people who engage in racist talk at matches. Fans can be evicted from stadiums and clubs may face sanctions in competitions if there is consistent racist chanting from the stands. That is simply not tolerated because it is not tolerated by society. So the question is: why should it be any different for homophobia? Why is there still more progress to be made?
The chair of the Football Association, Greg Clarke, told the Committee—the hon. Member for Livingston (Hannah Bardell) mentioned this—that he did not believe that now was the right time for a footballer to come out in England. That does not mean that he does not believe the FA’s job is to try to support players who want to come out, but he felt that now was not the right time and that football was probably a couple of years away from the right time. He directed his remarks to the attitude of fans in the stands. I do not think the issue is as simple as that. First, we have received evidence suggesting that there should be more training for stewards and people who work in football grounds to ensure that they are aware of homophobic abuse and tackle it if they hear it from fans, so that those who engage in such behaviour know that they will be ejected.
There is a second question about the culture within a sport like football. Why can Keegan Hirst, a rugby league player from Batley, play rugby league at a Huddersfield football stadium when a Huddersfield football player would find it impossible to come out and play in the same location and the same community? It is a myth that community support for football is not accepting enough, and it is clearly nonsense when seeing Keegan Hirst playing.
Hannah Bardell
The 8% of fans who were identified in BBC’s Radio 5 Live survey were alighted upon by Gary Lineker. Does the hon. Gentleman agree with him that it would be no bad thing if those 8% of fans just stayed at home and kept quiet?
Damian Collins
The hon. Lady is quite right. People engaging in racist abuse would be evicted from the ground. They would have their membership card taken from them. Why should it be any different with homophobic abuse and why should the whole of football bow to a very small vocal minority? If someone like Keegan Hirst, a rugby league player, can come out and play with the support of his club and his team mates, why can a football player not do so as well?
The Committee took evidence from John Amaechi, the Englishman who played National Basketball Association basketball in the United States and who, as a sportsman, came out as a gay athlete. He said it is the job of the managers and trainers of premier league football clubs and elite athletes to know everything about their players. They know what they eat, where they live, what their home life is like and how stable their relationships are because all that has an impact on their ability to play. He said it is impossible for a club not to know that a player is not straight, but whether they know they might be gay is a different matter. It may be wrong for a club to confront an athlete about their sexuality, but they should know enough about them to understand there is a likelihood of gay players in their squad, so they should be able to police the culture and banter in the training ground and the locker room to make sure there is no discriminatory or discouraging language or behaviour.
A number of excellent organisations are seeking to promote the right attitude and to stop homophobia in sport. We should not think the solution to the problem is one or two premier league football players coming out and that the rest of society will fall in line. That is not the solution. There must be a broader movement across society to change the attitudes and behaviour of people who participate in sport and attend sporting events. Stonewall campaigned massively on the issue and will be giving evidence to the Select Committee shortly. My hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey mentioned the rainbow laces campaign. There are also organisations such as Athlete Ally and Sport Allies, which seek to use all participants in sport—all athletes—to support the cause of promoting, supporting and giving respect to gay athletes and encouraging and supporting people if they come out, to change the nature of the debate and the culture as part of a broader change in society.
I welcome this debate. The Select Committee hopes to conclude the oral evidence sessions for its inquiry on 13 December, when the Minister herself will give evidence, and we will produce our report in the new year.
Mr Adrian Bailey (in the Chair)
I call Stuart C. McDonald, who has four minutes.
Stuart C. McDonald (Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East) (SNP)
I thank the hon. Member for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew) for initiating this incredibly important debate and I welcome the work being undertaken by the Culture Media and Sport Committee on this issue.
Sport can be an immensely positive pastime or, for a lucky few, a profession. It brings immense enjoyment and huge health benefits, and can also be an incredibly positive social experience, but sadly, as we have heard, for too long sport has had an uneasy relationship with the LGBT community. That is not just a problem at the top of sport; it is quite possible that at grassroots level, away from the public eye, the level of homophobia is even greater. That creates a real problem with participation of LGBT people in sport, and in some sports in particular, whether as players or supporters or in any other capacity.
One piece of research mentioned in submissions to the Select Committee inquiry suggested that 40% of LGBT people have been discouraged from participation in sport. Another concluded that almost 60% would be more likely to participate if sport was more LGBT-friendly. That is bad for the LGBT community, but also for sport in general. I know that you will be very concerned, Mr Bailey, at the prospect that homophobia means that we will miss out on an LGBT player scoring the goal that finally takes Scotland to the World cup finals, for example. Perhaps more realistically, it means fewer supporters paying large sums of money to be badly disappointed yet again.
To increase the chances of either type of participation by those in the LGBT community, we need serious and persistent action to be taken to ensure that football and all other sports are as open and accessible as possible to the LGBT community. Hon. Members have highlighted various ways in which that could be done, such as by challenging attitudes and the language used in the school sports environment. There is also the significance of professional role models and the need for leadership from governing bodies and politicians and for a broad-based campaign against homophobia.
My hon. Friend the Member for Livingston (Hannah Bardell) mentioned safe spaces, so in the short time that I have left, I want to highlight and pay a wee tribute to the outstanding volunteers across the country who have indeed created safe spaces in sport for LGBT people— homophobia-free places where they know that their participation will be welcomed. No doubt facing a good dose of scepticism and a decent dollop of ridicule, those men and women across the UK are, week in and week out, grafting hard in setting up and then running LGBT-friendly sports clubs. In some ways, they are doing all the things that we have asked for in the debate: showing leadership, providing role models, tackling prejudice and stereotypes, and boosting participation.
Almost certainly the best example of that is the Gay Football Supporters Network national league and each of its member clubs. Established in 2002, 15 clubs from Scotland, England and Wales now take part, and five more take part in a cup competition. From London Titans to the Nottingham Lions, and the Cardiff Dragons to the Leicester Wildecats, opportunities exist for LGBT players across the UK.
I can speak personally from my experience with Edinburgh’s HotScots football club. If you were to watch one of our games, Mr Bailey, you might argue that there was not much “hot” about some of the football that we play, the weather we play it in or, indeed, anything else about the club. However, I can never speak highly enough of the fantastic and supportive environment that the club has provided for me and for so many individuals since its foundation a decade ago. It is a place where no assumptions are made about a person’s sexuality just because they play sports and where two huge aspects of the player’s identity no longer seem to collide badly. That club and others not only provide a safe and supportive space, but do important work in challenging perceptions about LGBT people in sport by regularly taking part in matches against other, so-called mainstream clubs and by running a five-a-side tournament open to other clubs and teams across the United Kingdom. Other clubs, such as Stonewall, Village Manchester and Glasgow’s Saltire Thistle, participate in “mainstream” leagues.
HotScots has a positive relationship with the Scottish Football Association, and I encourage all governing bodies and all hon. Members who have such clubs in their constituency—
Mr Adrian Bailey (in the Chair)
Order. I have to move to the Opposition spokespeople now.
Gavin Newlands (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (SNP)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bailey. I congratulate the hon. Member for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew) on initiating this vital debate, not least because I applied for the exact same debate myself for this week. It has been an excellent debate, with excellent contributions, not least from the hon. Gentleman, who spoke of the challenges facing individuals, such as Nicola Adams, in deciding whether to come out and of the upcoming CMS Committee report on homophobia in sport.
In a good intervention, the hon. Member for Milton Keynes South (Iain Stewart) spoke about corporations playing a role by creating an environment that makes it easier for sportsmen and women to come out.
My hon. Friend the Member for Livingston (Hannah Bardell) spoke of reaching the peak of her football powers at the age of 11, of her history of playing alongside current Scottish internationals and of the women’s game not having quite the same problem as the men’s game. She also spoke movingly of the time when she was struggling with whether to come out.
The Chair of the CMS Committee, the hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins), spoke of the Committee’s review and of his disagreement with the FA chairman’s rather one-eyed approach to the problem. I look forward to the report being published and to analysing the recommendations. My hon. Friend the Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Stuart C. McDonald) spoke of volunteers creating safe spaces for LGBT sports clubs and of the Gay Football Supporters Network national league.
Last Sunday marked 38 years since the assassination of San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk. The Human Rights Campaign notes:
“Harvey Milk dedicated his life to advocate for a better and more equitable society, not just for LGBTQ people, but for all who had been marginalized—whether it was because of their race or ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender identity, age or socioeconomic status.”
Harvey’s vision, in which everyone receives the same dignity, respect, rights and protections, is a vision that we should all work towards.
“Hope will never be silent”
was Harvey’s famous cry. Thirty-eight years is a long time, and although considerable progress has been made, it is clear that the barriers and homophobia that Harvey Milk battled against still exist in our society and, sadly, in certain sections of various sports.
I regularly talk about the power of sport to evoke positive change. Sport can help to improve an individual’s physical and mental health. It can help to lift people out of poverty. Sport can bring people together, as we have heard. The power of sport can also bring about important political change. We witnessed that when the newly elected President of South Africa, Nigel—[Interruption.] Nigel? That is something we would not want to see. Nelson Mandela used the 1995 rugby world cup to unite all of South Africa following years of apartheid. That was around the time I started playing the game.
We should never underestimate the positive change that the power of sport can bring about. The Show Racism the Red Card and Kick It Out campaigns, which have been referenced already, have done a fantastic job in helping to tackle racism. The work that these organisations do helps to make football a safe and more welcoming space for all fans, regardless of their backgrounds. Showing the same attitude and commitment as these organisations is the way we will eliminate homophobia from sport. Tackling homophobia is not the responsibility of one particular group. Rather, it is the responsibility of us all to tackle it head-on and help to eliminate it.
I welcome the work being done by Stonewall to help to make sport inclusive of all. Its Rainbow Laces campaign, which has also been referenced already, is one that we can all support. However, a recent article by PinkNews highlighted the abhorrent abuse on social media meted out to players, teams and Stonewall following premier league football teams donning rainbow laces. That happened just recently—last week, I think. It shows that we still have a long way to go to achieve the vision of football being a safe environment for everyone, regardless of their background.
Following the BBC survey that several hon. Members have referenced, I contacted a range of bodies to find out what they are doing to tackle this important issue. I am pleased that all organisations are doing proactive work in this area and that agreement exists on the need to continue taking action to eliminate homophobia from football and sport more widely.
The worst thing that we can do about homophobia in sport is ignore it or kick the issue into the long grass. That is why I, too, was bitterly disappointed by the comments of the FA chairman, Greg Clarke. He suggested that he was “cautious” of encouraging a player to come out because they might suffer “significant abuse” from fans. He also said that he was unable to offer the required support if a player did come out. To my mind, that is even worse than discouraging players from coming out. It is completely the wrong attitude to take and shows a complete lack of leadership on the issue. Instead of urging people to remain silent about their sexuality, the FA chairman should be doing all that he can to ensure that football is a place for everyone. I know that the Minister feels strongly about that and I hope that she will outline what she and her Department are doing to encourage the FA to come into the 21st century on this issue.
Harvey Milk said:
“Hope will never be silent.”
His words are as true today as they were in 1970s San Francisco, so let the majority of decent, well-natured and friendly supporters speak out against anti-LGBTI remarks made at matches, online or on the training ground. Let us speak out and say that football and sport more widely is for everyone to enjoy, without fear of abuse.
Dr Rosena Allin-Khan (Tooting) (Lab)
It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bailey. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew) for securing this important debate and for ensuring that it takes place today. This is a cause that I know everyone here cares deeply about. I also put on record my support for colleagues in the Culture, Media and Sport Committee for their continued work in examining homophobia in sport.
Personally, as a non-white woman who spent many years playing county-level sport, I know that prejudice can be deeply divisive. However, as a previous report on racism in sport showed, homophobia is becoming a bigger problem than other forms of discrimination. Like racism, like sexism—like any form of discrimination —homophobia has no place in sport. It has no place in our society. As the hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Mrs Grant) said, all too often homophobia is painted as banter or laddish behaviour on terraces and in the playground. A Culture, Media and Sport Committee report stated:
“The FA should work with relevant organisations and charities to develop and then promote a high-profile campaign to highlight the damaging effect of homophobic language and behaviour in and around football at every level.”
The term “at every level” is key here, but it should not just be limited to football; we need to ensure that that happens in all sports.
Tackling homophobia throughout society starts with education. A child believes only in the equality that they are taught by their peers. More work needs to be done to emphasise what is not appropriate in the classroom and in the playground. We need to ensure that our coaches and professional players lead the way in promoting equality and speaking out against all forms of discrimination.
When a young LGBT person has a negative experience, it can have lifelong consequences, such as a rise in mental health issues, including self-harm and depression, failure to attend school and low participation in sport. That is what we cannot afford to see in our country. In a survey of LGBT students who did not participate in sport, almost half said that sport culture was too intimidating and too unwelcoming. A similar number stated that negative experiences led them to avoid sport in school. That can go on to have a long-term, knock-on effect on educational attainment.
All too often, we hear stories about sportspeople posting homophobic tweets. These players are role models to aspiring, young children; these role models are message carriers and children look up to them. If a child sees their favourite player using homophobic language, they will deem it acceptable and attitudes will just not change. These attitudes will transfer over when that young person plays in their junior league. Social networking sites can play a big part in helping to combat homophobia and other forms of discrimination. I was pleased to add my name to a cross-party amendment to ensure that more action is taken on abuse on social networking sites. Many LGBT people continue to feel excluded from sport when it should be the other way round. As the hon. Member for Livingston (Hannah Bardell) said, we must open up sport to anyone who wants to participate and not tolerate racists and homophobes.
Rugby has been a pioneer for LGBT inclusion. That was highlighted by the partnership between World Rugby and International Gay Rugby with the aim of eliminating homophobia in the sport. They have published a memorandum of understanding in which they agree to recognise and respect the common goal of eliminating homophobia and promoting the rights of each player, spectator and official involved.
Football has seen Stonewall’s Rainbow Laces campaign take off in recent years. Just last weekend, we saw players, managers, officials and fans show their support across many of our top divisions. An article in PinkNews this week highlighted the abuse directed at clubs that supported the campaign on social media. Yet let us not believe that this abuse just occurs online; there would have been spectators in the terraces sharing exactly the same vile views as we saw in those tweets. Homophobic remarks are all too common and are unacceptable. Some 50% of football supporters say that they have heard homophobic abuse at matches. Fans can take a lead here, as whether or not we eliminate homophobia from sport is reliant on the response from spectators. I was as shocked as most that 8% of football fans stated that they would stop watching their team if it signed a gay player. However, let us appreciate that nine out 10 fans would not see it as a problem. Let us make it clear that the people in that 8% are in a minority and that their views have no place in football or any other sport.
Up and down the country, from football fields to hockey fields, in the playground or on social media, we must ensure that homophobia is tackled head on with tougher punishments, better education and stronger campaigns endorsed by our sporting role models. We have all heard Greg Clarke’s recent comments, which were met with anger on both sides of the House—I really do believe that. We need to channel our anger into positive action. As the hon. Member for Pudsey said, if 2016 is not the right year for a sportsperson to talk openly about being gay, when is?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (Tracey Crouch)
As always it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bailey. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew) for securing this debate. I am also grateful for the excellent contributions that he and others have made today.
Next year marks the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of male homosexuality in England and Wales. Much progress has been made since then, including the introduction of equal marriage during the previous Parliament. Although my Department welcomes this debate on homophobia in sport, as it does the inquiry by the Select Committee, it is sad that in this day and age we are still having it. My Department has submitted written evidence to the Select Committee inquiry on behalf of the Government, and I look forward to giving oral evidence to the Committee next month. If, because of the time limitations, I do not cover all the issues that were raised during this debate, I am sure that we will do so during the Select Committee evidence session. I have been really impressed by the breadth and quality of the oral and written evidence submitted to the Committee so far, and also by the bravery of those who have spoken out in public about the challenges that we still face.
As hon. Members will be aware, we published our Government strategy for sport and physical activity last December. The strategy committed Sport England to placing
“equal emphasis on the support for LGB&T people in sport as it does for other characteristics protected by the Equality Act 2010.”
It includes a number of other actions to ensure that all under-represented groups can take part in sport and wider physical activity. One of the actions was to ask Baroness Grey-Thompson to carry out an independent review of the duty of care that sport owes to all its participants at all levels. The review is wide-ranging, but I have specifically asked the Baroness to consider any particular issues relating to minority groups, including LGBT people. She will be reporting shortly and I look forward to receiving her recommendations.
Colleagues have asked about the role of NGBs in sport. In our evidence to the Committee, we pointed to some of the progress being made by our sporting bodies to promote inclusion, celebrate diversity and tackle discrimination in all its forms, from grassroots to the elite. We also provided evidence of the support given by the sport NGBs to clubs to carry out a number of anti-homophobia initiatives, working with established organisations such as Pride Sports, Stonewall, Kick It Out and Football v Homophobia.
At the same time, we recognise that homophobia in sport continues to be an issue and does need to be addressed with further action. It should be acknowledged —as others have done—that it feels like this issue is more prevalent in men’s competitive team sports than in women’s. However, I noted from the statistics provided by my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey—nearly 40% of lesbian and bisexual women expected to face discrimination—that maybe the reality is quite different.
As others have acknowledged, sport and physical activity provide enjoyment, improve physical and mental health and wellbeing for millions, and contribute to the country’s economy. Data from the last Active People survey suggested that the percentage of people who play sport regularly who are gay, lesbian or bisexual is slightly less than that of the heterosexual population. Research with the LGBT community in the UK shows that homophobia, biphobia and transphobia in sport are still prevalent, and barriers remain to participation.
We recognise that there could be under-representation or specific barriers to taking part in sports and physical activity for some LGBT people and that that may not be apparent when looking at overall participation levels. My officials and I are working closely with the Government Equalities Office and others across government to identify measures to address that under-representation and break down those barriers. The Government are also working hard with sports bodies in this area. We will measure the success of programmes to increase LGBT participation through the Active Lives survey, which is Sport England’s new way of measuring engagement in sport and activity in England.
I will mention two things briefly in the time that is left. We should acknowledge not only that we broke records in the medals tables at the Rio Olympics and Paralympics, but that Team GB broke another record. Rio 2016 had a record number of out Olympic athletes—44—almost double the number competing at London 2012—and nine out Paralympians. My hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey mentioned Nicola Adams. We had the gold-medal-winning hockey team, which included Helen Richardson-Walsh and Kate Richardson-Walsh, the first married couple to stand on the top step of an Olympic podium together. Tom Daley has made history on a number of occasions, but since he announced that he was in love with a man, after he competed in the Olympics in 2008, he has been publicly supported by very many people, including his fiancé at the games. Lee Pearson, our 10-time Paralympic gold medallist, who has been supported by UK Sport for over 17 years, was chosen as the Paralympic GB’s flagbearer for Rio 2016. He has been openly gay throughout his time competing. Of course, Team GB walker Tom Bosworth, who gave evidence to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, is the first British track athlete to come out as gay. He proposed to his partner on the beach during the Rio games; that is one of my favourite memories of the summer.
The recent launch by Sport England and UK Sport of the sport governance code fulfils a major commitment in our sport strategy. It keeps us at the forefront of global work to ensure good governance in sport. Improving leadership and diversity in the workforce and in governance is central to ensuring that we have the very highest standards of governance across all sport bodies that receive public money. To be reflective of wider society, we need to increase diversity among sporting organisation leaders and to help the sport sector to be more inclusive and welcoming to all.
I want to turn to football, because many people have mentioned it. It is fair to say that football has made a great deal of progress, but it clearly has a long way to go. English football continues to deliver the “Inclusion and Anti-Discrimination Action Plan” for the whole sport. That includes the implementation of football’s protocol to support LGBT players, managers, referees and other participants who decide to come out. The Football Association reports to my Department about the plan every six months, on measures relating to education and guidance to clubs, players and managers, stewards and spectators. Football is assisted in its efforts to address homophobia in the game by well-established anti-discriminatory groups. However, there is evidence to suggest that homophobic chanting and language are still an issue at football grounds, and that, of course, can have a serious impact on those who play football.
Let me turn to the comments from the chairman of the FA that hon. Members have mentioned. When anyone comes out, it is a personal decision. Now could be as good a time as ever for somebody to come out, but the chairman’s saying that is the complete opposite of the kind of support that a player needs. I hope that that will be reflected upon. As others have said, we cannot let a small but vocal minority spoil the game for everyone else.
In conclusion, we have had an excellent debate; I am grateful to all those who have contributed. I am looking forward to appearing in front of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee. Rio 2016 showed us we are moving in the right direction in some sports. Clearly, we have a long to go in other sports—
Written Statements
Homes and Communities Agency
The Minister for Housing and Planning (Gavin Barwell)
Since 2010 the Government have delivered almost 900,000 new homes, including 293,000 affordable homes. However, we need to build many more homes if we are going to create a housing market that works for everyone, and the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) will play a vital role in this.
On 10 February 2016, my predecessor as Minister for Housing and Planning announced to Parliament the commencement of a tailored review of the HCA. I am pleased today to announce the publication of the tailored review.
The agency is the national housing, land and regeneration agency and the regulator of registered social housing providers in England.
The review concluded that functions exercised by the HCA are required, and, with the exception of social housing regulation, should continue to be performed by the HCA in its current form as a non-departmental public body (NDPB). The review recommends that the agency’s regulatory function should be established as a standalone NDPB, reaffirming the Government’s commitment to a strong, independent regulator for social housing. This is a purely administrative change that will not affect the regulator’s powers or operations. This change will result in no increase on existing Government budgeted spending. The regulator will also be part of plans for increased sharing of back office functions across the DCLG Group. DCLG will today launch a consultation on using a legislative reform order to establish the regulator as an independent body. This comes shortly after a consultation issued by the regulator on introducing fees for social housing regulation. Taken together these changes will ensure the regulator remains independent, and retains the powers and resources needed to maintain the confidence of the sector and lenders.
The review has also made a number of recommendations for improving the efficiency, effectiveness and governance of HCA. This includes changes such as improving stakeholder engagement, reducing bureaucracy and ensuring that the agency has the right set of skills. The Chairs of the HCA and the Regulation Committee have welcomed the recommendations. My Department and the agency are working closely together and have developed a timetable for implementation of the recommendations.
The tailored review has been carried out independently within Government and with the full and active participation of the HCA. I would like to thank the HCA and all stakeholders that have contributed to the review. The review is being deposited in the Libraries of both Houses and is available at:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/tailored-review-of-the-homes-and-communities-agency.
[HCWS294]
Scotland Act 2016: Commencement Regulations
(8 years ago)
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The Secretary of State for Scotland (David Mundell)
In March this year, Her Majesty the Queen gave Royal Assent to the Scotland Act 2016, marking an important milestone in fulfilling the UK Government’s commitment to deliver on the Smith Commission agreement, making the Scottish Parliament one of the most powerful devolved Parliaments in the world.
Since Royal Assent, a number of important provisions in the Act have come into force, including new powers in relation to consumer advocacy and advice, gaming machines, equalities, transport, and welfare.
I can today inform the House that the UK Government have made the commencement regulations for the following sections of the Scotland Act 2016:
13: Power of Scottish Parliament to set rates of income tax
14: Amendments of Income Tax Act 2007
15: Consequential amendments: income tax
The regulations ensure that the transfer of income tax powers will occur, as agreed by the UK and Scottish Governments, from 6 April 2017, bringing into force substantial new financial levers enabling the Scottish Government to set income tax rates and thresholds for the earned income of Scottish taxpayers.
In addition, commencement regulations will be made on 5 December for the following sections of the Scotland Act 2016, to be commenced in April 2017:
20: Borrowing
21: Provision of information to the Office for Budget Responsibility
67: Destination of fines, forfeitures and fixed penalties
These commencement regulations represent another milestone in delivering the recommendations of the Smith Commission agreement, and it is a testament to the constructive work between the UK and Scottish Governments.
The two Governments continue to work closely together to ensure a safe and secure transition of the remaining powers in the Scotland Act 2016.
[HCWS293]
House of Lords
Brexit: Immigration Policy
(8 years ago)
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Lord Green of Deddington
To ask Her Majesty’s Government when they plan to outline their objectives for the negotiations concerning the immigration regime for European Union citizens, following the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union.
The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Williams of Trafford) (Con)
My Lords, the Prime Minister has said that Article 50 will be triggered before the end of March 2017. We are still forming our negotiating position and are not going to offer a running commentary. It would be wrong to set out timelines before entering a negotiation. We want to get the right deal for Britain, not just the quickest one.
Lord Green of Deddington (CB)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for that response, and I declare a non-financial interest as chairman of Migration Watch. I entirely understand the Government’s reluctance to set foot on what is likely to be a fairly slippery slope, but does the noble Baroness agree that it is going to be really difficult for the Government to stick out for three or four months with nothing more to say than, regrettably, she was able to say today? Will she therefore study the 10 key objectives that we published today to see whether they provide a suitable framework for this absolutely key aspect of the forthcoming negotiations?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
I thank the noble Lord for that. I have read the report and the recommendations, and I welcome the report. The Government have been clear that as we conduct our negotiations it must be a priority to regain more control of the numbers of people who come here from Europe. It would not be right, therefore, for us to give a running commentary on negotiations.
Viscount Hailsham (Con)
My Lords, in the context of immigration, may I remind my noble friend of the needs of the agricultural and horticultural industries in constituencies such as my former one? They are dependent on labour from abroad, most notably from eastern Europe, and if they are denied that resource they will face very considerable problems.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
I acknowledge what my noble friend says and I hope it will reassure him that we are talking to all sectors, not just the agricultural sector but sectors such as social care, because these things are very important as we move forward.
Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)
My Lords, of course we do not expect a running commentary, but as the Government are assiduously forming their views on this matter, could the Minister perhaps give us a hint as to whether they allow any difference, in their crystallising thoughts, between the free movement of persons, as enshrined in Article 3 of the Treaty of Rome and confirmed at Lisbon and Maastricht, and the free movement of labour? It is, perhaps, an important distinction.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
The noble Lord, as always, makes a very good point. Yes, we must control the numbers of people coming to Britain from Europe but, as he says, we must ensure a positive outcome for those who wish to trade in goods and services.
Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)
My Lords, further to the debate in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and the Minister’s letter in response to that debate, can the noble Baroness give any indication of whether Her Majesty’s Government are thinking about the situation for European Union students in the event of our leaving the European Union? At present they have the same rights as home students; in future they would fall within the immigration flows and therefore be capped within the tens of thousands unless there is a mutually beneficial deal for the EU and the United Kingdom. I refer the House to my interests listed in the register.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
As I think I have said to the House before, we remain absolutely committed to attracting the brightest and best students to the UK. There is currently no cap on the number of international students who come to this country because they help make our education system one of the best in the world. We have a competitive post-study work offer for graduates seeking to undertake skilled work after their studies.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)
Does my noble friend agree that the biggest concern among the business community about our leaving the European Union is that Europeans who have come to this country should be able to remain and continue to work here? Would not the right response to Chancellor Merkel and Mr Tusk be that we do not negotiate with people’s lives in this country? Why can we not make it absolutely clear and end the uncertainty that those people will be allowed to remain here?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
The Prime Minister has been very clear that she wants to protect the status of EU nationals already living here and that the only circumstance in which that would not be possible is if British citizens’ rights in EU member states were not protected in turn. She said today that it was right to give reassurances to both sets of citizens:
“I think the reaction that we have seen shows why it was absolutely right for us not to do what the Labour party wanted us to do, which was simply to give away the guarantee for rights of EU citizens here in the UK. As we have seen, that would have left UK citizens in Europe high and dry”.
Lord Tomlinson (Lab)
My Lords, will the Minister now reply to the very pertinent question asked by my noble friend Lord Reid, which she did not answer? He invited her to draw a clear distinction of understanding between freedom of movement of persons and freedom of movement of labour. On which of the two principles is the government policy currently based?
Baroness Ludford (LD)
Do the Minister and the Government accept that there is cross-party support for the Government to give a unilateral guarantee to EU nationals? We just heard the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, and the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, saying publicly on her Benches that that would give that stability and is the morally right thing to do. By setting an example, it would give us the good will and make it impossible for the 27 countries not to reciprocate for British nationals in their countries. It would cut the Gordian knot and it is the right thing to do.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, I think I have just explained why that might be a foolish position.
Lord Stirrup (CB)
My Lords, recent reports have criticised the efficacy of the methods used to estimate the emigration from and immigration to the United Kingdom, casting doubt on the accuracy and usefulness of the figures themselves. Can the Minister reassure the House that when we are discussing these issues, we will have data on which we can rely?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, for the moment the ONS figures are the figures that we use. As we develop the figures around exit checks, once they have had a bit of time to bed in, they will add to the mix of estimating the migration figures.
Social Security: Claimants
(8 years ago)
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Baroness Lister of Burtersett
To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether, in the light of the public debate around the film “I, Daniel Blake”, they plan to set up a review of the treatment of claimants in the social security system.
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Lord Freud) (Con)
We aim to keep all our policies under constant review to ensure that they continue to function effectively and fairly. The film is one person’s interpretation of the benefit system. I make it clear that our staff, who work incredibly hard day in and day out, are committed to supporting the most vulnerable and helping people who are able to find work to get a job.
Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
My Lords, I fear that Ministers have missed the point of this powerful and well-researched film, summed up in the final words of Daniel Blake’s demand for respectful treatment:
“I am a citizen, nothing more, nothing less”.
What will the Government now do to transform a culture of suspicion and sanctions, the costs of which are highlighted in today’s damning National Audit Office report, to a culture of citizenship for the sake of both claimants and staff?
Lord Freud
The staff of the DWP, who I think are effectively being attacked in that Question and by its implications, have really transformed the way that they approach this. With the work coach transformation they are tailoring requirements to the needs of individuals, following a thorough discussion with them on what their needs are in order to get them to play an economic part in this country.
The Countess of Mar (CB)
My Lords, despite my years of trying to persuade the Department of Work and Pensions to recognise the severity of CFS/ME, is the Minister aware of how utterly demoralised people who have to undergo assessments feel if they are not believed? Even when the derogatory assessment has been overturned by a tribunal, it takes them months and months to regain their self-esteem. Can the Minister please get this matter in hand once and for all?
Lord Freud
I thank the noble Countess for that question. We have been working on this issue with her and her group for some years now, and I am under the impression that we have made a lot of progress on ensuring that the illness is thoroughly recognised.
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
My Lords, the film shows people being sanctioned for a number of reasons which are clearly not serious. For example Katie, a single mum, is moved to Newcastle when she is made homeless and because she is a few minutes late in getting to the jobcentre, because she cannot find it in a new city, her benefits are sanctioned. Can the Minister tell the House that that would not happen in real life? He normally comes here and tells us that sanctions are very rare and a last resort but we discovered from today’s NAO report that over the last five years, 24% of all JSA claimants were sanctioned. Is it any wonder that our food banks are filling up with people using them who are sanctioned for trivial or unjust reasons? Is this not a disgrace?
Lord Freud
There were a whole load of statements there that are simply not true. In the example which the noble Baroness uses, there would clearly be a good reason for someone not being able to fathom the transport in a new place. There are an enormous number of protections for people in the sanctioning process, which has about seven or eight steps: there is a check by the work coach; it goes to the decision-maker; there is provision of information back to the person, who can challenge it with the decision-maker; it can go to dispute resolution, mandatory consideration and then the tribunal. This is not the easy process that is implied. Sanctions are treated very seriously. They are an integral part of the system and are treated with all due seriousness.
The Lord Bishop of Newcastle
My Lords, given that the National Audit Office has today said that there is limited evidence that benefit sanctions work but rather that they result in “hardship, hunger and depression”, can the Minister update the House as to whether Her Majesty’s Government will now commit to a substantial review of the use and implementation of sanctions?
Lord Freud
I congratulate the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Newcastle on her first question. I hope they will not all be as painful in future as this one. I cannot make that commitment. As is said in the report, the reality is that sanctions work. There is a lot of external evidence of sanctions having a substantial impact on employment uptake, whether you are looking at the evidence from Switzerland, the Netherlands, Denmark or Germany. Our own survey shows that people on both JSA and ESA are more likely to accept the rules of the system with the sanction system behind it.
Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope (LD)
My Lords, does the Minister accept that if the National Audit Office is about anything it is about looking for value for money? Will he confirm that one of the important findings of the NAO is that in the fiscal year 2015 there were, for example, DWP sanction benefits savings, so called, just shy of £100 million net of hardship payments? However, the NAO came to the conclusion that the department had done no overall assessment of any kind of the downstream consequential impacts on other public services, so it is impossible to know whether the prosecution of sanctions as currently carried out by the department is effective value for money.
Lord Freud
I am in a difficult position because we are about to make our response to the NAO report, which is a formal process, so I do not have that response. Clearly the NAO concentrates on value for money. It wants more evidence and the department will be looking at providing it with some of that evidence in reply.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
My Lords, the Minister must know that the Government’s own review of mandatory workfare shows that a young person is twice as likely to find work if they drop out of the scheme and three times as likely to find work if they do not participate in the first place. Will the Minister accept that the Government’s review has validity and update social security practices accordingly?
Lord Freud
If the question is about how the benefit system works for the young, we are now running one of the lowest levels of inactivity we have seen for young people. In the benefits system as a whole, we are looking at the highest-ever employment rate and one of the lowest levels of poverty since the 1980s. Household incomes at an all-time high, we have the lowest levels of children in workless households since records began and the lowest income inequality. If the noble Baroness is saying that the system is not working, how do these figures stand up? We are transforming the system and producing real results.
Disabled People: Employment
(8 years ago)
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Baroness Deech
To ask Her Majesty’s Government, in the light of the Work, Health and Disability Green Paper, what steps they are taking to ensure that local authorities use their powers to remove the barriers that stop disabled people getting to work.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Transport (Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon) (Con)
My Lords, local authorities are required to have due regard to the need to eliminate discrimination, advance equality of opportunity and foster good relations under Section 149(1) of the Equality Act 2010. In relation to the transport barriers that can hinder disabled people getting to work, this Government are committed to ensuring that disabled people have the same access to transport and opportunities to travel as everyone else.
Baroness Deech (CB)
My Lords, it is not enough to be committed. The Green Paper sets out complicated inducements and a target for reducing disability unemployment which is for ever receding into the distance. Right now, the Government could require local authorities to, for example, mandate disability training for bus and taxi drivers and have a certain percentage of accessible taxis available for disabled people. They could make sure that local authorities revoke licences where taxi drivers will not take guide dogs. These simple issues will enable people to get to work.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
My Lords, the Government are taking action, as those who participated in—for example—the recent Bus Services Bill will have witnessed. Practical actions are being taken on improving accessibility for disabled people, and that Bill, which has left your Lordships’ House, will initiate a very practical programme of changes. The noble Baroness is right to raise the important issue of accessibility in taxis. In the country as a whole, only 56% of taxis are accessible, but the Government are looking at specific schemes, including one in Birmingham which provides the kind of training she alluded to. On the issue of those refusing access to the disabled or to those who require guide dogs, the Government are specifically looking at Sections 165 and 167 of the Equality Act. We will consider this very carefully and consult on the guidance to ensure that anyone who discriminates in this way against disabled people is covered. We will look at sanctions under the law, including making it a criminal offence.
Lord Pearson of Rannoch (UKIP)
My Lords, declaring my interest as the father of a Down’s syndrome daughter who lives and works in a Camphill community, could I suggest that the Government encourage local authorities to support many more such places, which are care effective and cost effective, and which can provide a complete way of life, including daily work elsewhere? Surely the Government must agree that this sort of life is often just not available under other forms of care in the community, which can be very lonely and unfulfilling, not to mention very expensive.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
Of course the Government are concerned about ensuring a joined-up approach. The noble Lord may be aware that there is a specific consultation within the Department for Work and Pensions, for example, and that a Green Paper has been issued looking at the joined-up approach to work health to ensure that all systems across the board are joined up. We are also looking at the Total Transport initiative specifically across 37 rural areas in England, to see how we can ensure that transport is effective and easily accessible to those in hard-to-reach areas in the country.
Baroness Thomas of Winchester (LD)
My Lords, will the Minister also speak to his colleagues in the DWP about the fact that the accessibility of public transport was not mentioned in the Green Paper on halving the disability employment rate? It should be a vital part of the whole infrastructure of getting disabled people into work. The Access to Work scheme is very good, but it cannot do everything.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
I am of course happy to do that along with my colleagues from the DWP; the very diligent Minister in this House from the DWP will take note of that. I assure the noble Baroness that the Green Paper is there to be consulted on. If there are practical suggestions as to how this can be improved, the Government are of course listening.
Lord Marlesford (Con)
My Lords, what are the Government doing about London transport, where there are far too many Underground stations where less able people have no access to the platforms, either by escalator or elevator? That is really appalling as far as getting to work is concerned.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
According to the statistics on passenger accessibility, London is much better than other parts of the country, but my noble friend raises important issues about the accessibility of platforms in certain parts of the London transport network. TfL has a programme to ensure that that can be delivered in accordance with the needs of all the travelling public, including those who need to travel to work and suffer from disabilities.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)
My Lords, the Independent Living Strategy Group has identified and reported that one in four people has experienced a decrease in paid work or volunteering because of cuts to local authorities’ independent living support in the last 12 months. What are the Government doing to ensure that local authorities have the resources to address this important barrier to work?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
The noble Baroness raises an important point. There are other departments besides the Department for Transport that would input into that, and once I have ascertained that information I will write to her.
Lord Rosser (Lab)
The Minister referred to the improvements that, frankly, we secured to the Bus Services Bill to make bus services more accessible to disabled people. Bearing in mind that he has cited that as an example of what he believes the Government are doing, even though they were heavily pushed from this side, why can they not do more in respect of other forms of transport to ensure likewise that they become more accessible to disabled people?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
The noble Lord is being less than magnanimous on the Government’s position during the passage of the Bus Services Bill, but I will let others be the judge of that on reading Hansard. With regard to other modes of transport, various consultations are under way and I have alluded to one or two of them. I suggest to the noble Lord that he participates fully in those.
Disabled Children: Tax Credit
(8 years ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Low of Dalston
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to compensate families looking after disabled children who lost the opportunity to claim the higher rate of tax credit between 2011 and 2014 due to an administrative error.
Lord Young of Cookham (Con)
My Lords, claimants were able to claim the higher rate of tax credits and many did so at the time. Although it is the claimant’s responsibility to inform HMRC of their eligibility, HMRC’s back-up practice was to take information from DWP to update awards automatically. Last week, we announced that HMRC would issue lump-sum payments to families affected by a breakdown in this back-up to cover what they would have received from 6 April 2016 and ensure that they get their entitlement in future.
Lord Low of Dalston (CB)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for that reply, but I am sure he would agree that we are dealing here with a major injustice: some 28,000 low-income families with disabled children have lost up to £4,400 a year for five years, all because, between 2011 and 2014, the DWP omitted the box from the relevant form for people to indicate whether or not they received tax credits. As the law currently stands, as the Minister has said, the onus is on the claimant to claim what they are entitled to. However, the system of tax credits is extremely complicated for anyone to understand. Does the Minister agree that the law should be changed to place the onus on the Revenue to pay claimants what they are entitled to, so long as they provide the right information about their circumstances? Will he give serious consideration to this?
Lord Young of Cookham
I am grateful to the noble Lord for that suggestion. HMRC will be contacting the 28,000 families directly, automatically adjusting their award and by the end of January making a lump-sum payment backdated to April 2016. I am sure his suggestion of a future change to the law will be looked at sympathetically in order to try to streamline the system and to avoid the problems that he has identified in his Question.
Lord Davies of Oldham (Lab)
My Lords, the Government acknowledge the administrative error in the failure to pay the full entitlement for five years. I want to know, as I am sure does the House, on what principle the decision was taken by the Government, knowing that the families have no recourse to law, that the Treasury should shoulder something less than 10% of the total cost and the families should bear 90%.
Lord Young of Cookham
That is a question that I asked myself earlier this morning. The answer is that HMRC cannot by law backdate beyond the present tax year except in exceptional circumstances, and the circumstances where someone has failed to claim do not qualify. So there would be a risk of legal challenge were HMRC to compensate people in the way that the noble Lord has suggested.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham (Lab)
My Lords, when people have been denied five years of benefit and the Government are willing to backdate that for only six months, who would make that challenge, should HMRC do what is right?
Lord Young of Cookham
I understand the problems of these 28,000 families, by definition with a disabled child and on low incomes, who have failed to get up to £5,000 a year. All I can say is that, if I were still in another place and one of those 28,000 families came to see me at my advice bureau, and I knew there was a legal problem, my advice to them would be to refer the matter to the Parliamentary Ombudsman.
Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)
My Lords, does my noble friend agree that this is precisely the type of case for which the ombudsman was set up? I hope those who, like the Minister and myself, have served in the other place as Back-Bench MPs—although my noble friend has come to high office once again—will take note. This is just the type of case that any Back-Bench MP could present to the ombudsman, and I hope the Treasury—my noble friend has certainly shown himself to be a man of honour—will abide by the ruling of the ombudsman in such a case.
Lord Young of Cookham
I am grateful to my noble friend. I have probably gone way beyond my negotiating remit already, but if it were to be referred to the Parliamentary Ombudsman, I suspect it would be resisted by the Treasury or DWP on the grounds that they were complying with the law but, were the Parliamentary Commissioner to uphold the complaint then, following precedent, I imagine that the government department would then honour the compensation proposed.
The Lord Privy Seal (Baroness Evans of Bowes Park) (Con)
My Lords, it is the turn of the Cross Benches.
Baroness Butler-Sloss
My Lords, is the noble Lord, Lord Low, correct to say that a box was omitted from the form? If a box was omitted that should have been there, it seems to me that the department was at fault and therefore a question of law preventing compensation would not arise.
Lord Young of Cookham
The noble Baroness knows much more about the law than I do. It was indeed the case that, when a parent applied for DLA for a disabled child, they could tick a box indicating whether they were claiming tax credit. If they ticked the box, HMRC was automatically told and the benefit was automatically uprated. That is described as a back-up cover, and the law is quite clear that none the less, notwithstanding the box, it is still the responsibility of the claimant to notify HMRC of the change in circumstances. When you apply for tax credit, it says on the form that if your circumstances change you should advise HMRC. I have looked at this extensively this morning. I have given the reply that I have about the Government’s ability to make compensation for earlier years and the advice that they cannot under the legislation; and I have suggested in good faith a way through that might meet the injustice that many noble Lords feel has occurred.
Arrangement of Business
Lord Taylor of Holbeach (Con)
My Lords, it may be for the convenience of the House if I make a short Statement about recess dates for the next year. As usual, to save Members reaching for their diaries, I should say that dates are listed at the back of this week’s edition of Forthcoming Business and a separate note is available in the Printed Paper Office. In a bid to be helpful to the House, we have gone slightly further ahead this year, in terms of the dates for next year, than we have in recent years. I should therefore particularly stress the usual caveat that the planned recesses are provisional and subject to the usual progress of business.
For Easter, we expect to adjourn at the end of business on Thursday 6 April and return on Monday 24 April. The May Day bank holiday is Monday 1 May, and we will adjourn at the end of business on the previous Thursday, 27 April. For Whitsun, we expect to adjourn at the end of business on Thursday 25 May and return on Tuesday 6 June.
Lord Grocott (Lab)
My Lords, I apologise to the Government Chief Whip for not giving him advance notice of this question, and I do not need an immediate reply, but what consultation has there been with the Commons to marry, so far as is possible, the recesses of the two Houses? He will recall that, in the most recent recess, we had what to me, at any rate, seemed a most absurd situation where we sat on the Wednesday when the Commons did not and they came back on the following Monday when we were still in recess. A bigger brain than mine may have worked out that that is the best way of doing things, but it is not immediately apparent, and it is for the convenience of both Houses if, as far as possible, the recess dates of the two Houses marry with one another.
Lord Taylor of Holbeach
I am grateful to the noble Lord for mentioning that point. He will know that, in fact, the dates have not been announced in the other place up to now, but I anticipate that they will be made available to Members of the House of Commons shortly. I think he will find that they will coincide with our own, because we in this House are the trend-setters, as noble Lords know.
Policing and Crime Bill
Wednesday 30th November 2016
(8 years ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 72-I(Rev)(a) Amendments for Report, supplementary to the revised marshalled list (PDF, 62KB) - (30 Nov 2016)
17:29 - Division on Amendment 48 - Ayes: 246 / Noes: 196 - Amendment 48 agreed.
18:36 - Division on Amendment 106 - Ayes: 179 / Noes: 184 - Amendment 106 disagreed.
Lord Paddick
“( ) Section 2 does not require a police body to enter into a collaboration agreement with a fire and rescue body unless—(a) the relevant emergency services are services for the same area, or(b) the police area is the same as the area of more than one fire and rescue authority taken together.”
Lord Paddick (LD)
My Lords, Amendment 1 is in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Hamwee. Clause 3 covers specific restrictions that apply to collaboration agreements between police, fire and ambulance services—the emergency services—and we welcome government Amendment 2, which adds having an adverse effect on public safety to the existing restriction, if collaboration would result in an adverse effect on efficiency and effectiveness. While I am in a generous mood—it will not last—we also welcome the Government responding to the issues raised in Committee by my noble friend Lady Hamwee and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, around variations in existing agreements and replacement of those agreements with a new agreement, which is government Amendment 3.
We of course support innovative arrangements that are appropriate to the area and develop organically; there are examples across the country where this is happening. However, this is not unqualified support. In Yeovil, Somerset, for example, it has just been announced that the four-storey police station with cells is to be closed and police operations moved to the fire station, which is about a quarter of the size and has very limited parking. Whether the police vehicles or the fire appliances will have to use the nearby public car park is yet to be seen.
Amendment 1 places an additional restriction on collaboration agreements where the emergency service areas are not coterminous or where the boundaries of the police area do not coincide with the area covered by one or more fire and rescue service. The degree of complexity involved, were this not the case, would make such collaboration extremely difficult. On the first day of Committee, the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Bybrook, gave a good example of the issues:
“In Wiltshire, we would have loved to have joined both fire and police under our PCC. That would be the best use of public resources, not just financial, but people and assets as well. But we cannot do that now, because Wiltshire fire and rescue, earlier this year, joined with Dorset fire and rescue. Dorset police work with Cornwall and Devon. Wiltshire police work in collaboration on major crimes with Avon and Somerset and Gloucester. There are two PCCs—the whole thing is a muddle. The barrier is that there is no coterminosity between different public service authorities and this is, I think, probably getting worse”.—[Official Report, 14/9/16; col. 1469.]
For there to be effective collaboration to the degree envisaged by the Government, there needs to be coterminosity. I beg to move.
Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen (Con)
My Lords, Amendment 1, moved by the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, seeks to limit the duty to collaborate so that police bodies would be required to collaborate with fire and rescue services only where they share coterminous boundaries. I see no reason why collaboration should be limited by geographical borders. The Government require there to be coterminous boundaries where a change of governance for fire is proposed, as the core approach of those provisions is to introduce greater democratic accountability by giving a directly elected individual responsibility for both services, with a clear mandate from the electorate in their area. However, collaboration between two bodies does not invoke such issues. Further, the duty, as currently drafted, would ensure that areas where the services are not coterminous, such as Devon and Cornwall, can still maximise the benefits outside a governance change if there is no appetite to adjust boundaries locally.
As the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, mentioned, existing examples of collaborative working between police forces show the benefits that closer working can provide, regardless of geographical proximity. For instance, Cheshire Police collaborates with Northamptonshire and Nottingham police forces on back-office functions, including payroll, accounting, purchasing and HR, via the Multi-Force Shared Service. West Midlands Police led the largest ever police and emergency service collaborative procurement exercise, which includes 26 territorial forces, two non-territorial forces and five fire and rescue services. Together, the services will buy 3,000 vehicles over the next two years, with forecasted savings of up to £7 million over the period of the contracts.
Government Amendments 2 and 3 respond to points raised in Committee by the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, in respect of collaboration agreements. Amendment 2 explicitly provides that no relevant emergency service will be required to enter into a collaboration agreement where it would have an adverse effect on public safety. This has been the Government’s policy intention since conception of the Bill. Indeed, as I set out in Committee, the Government believe that the impact on public safety will be assessed by an emergency service whenever considering the effect of a proposed collaboration on its efficiency or effectiveness. None the less, for the avoidance of any doubt, this amendment makes it explicit in the Bill that no relevant emergency service will be required to enter into a collaboration agreement that would negatively impact public safety.
Amendment 3 clarifies the process for varying a collaboration agreement. We agree that parties to an agreement should also be able to straightforwardly vary terms of an existing agreement, where all parties are in agreement. Parties will also still be able to replace an existing agreement with a new agreement, again with the consent of the parties concerned.
I hope that, having heard my explanation, the noble Lord will be content to support the government amendments in this group and withdraw Amendment 1.
Lord Paddick
In my opening remarks, I welcomed the government amendments and suggested that we would support them. The examples that the noble Baroness gave of collaboration between police forces were to do with requisition and back-office functions. The real issues arise where there is collaboration on operational issues—for example, the sharing of buildings, and particularly where the Government want to encourage police and crime commissioners to take over the running of fire and rescue authorities, as we will hear later this afternoon. That is where the coterminosity issue is most stark. Therefore, while I accept that for requisition and back-office functions the forces do not need to be geographically co-located, real problems can arise on the operational front in these circumstances, and if the PCC has to take over. However, I will consider carefully what the noble Baroness has said and, at this stage, beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
“(8) A collaboration agreement may be—(a) varied with the agreement of all of the parties to the agreement, or(b) replaced by a subsequent collaboration agreement.”
Lord Rosser
Lord Rosser (Lab)
My Lords, I will speak also to our other amendments in this group: Amendments 12, 14 and 18. First, I acknowledge that the Government have moved, through amendments of their own, to improve the very weak and, frankly, in parts non-existent consultation arrangements provided for in the Bill, where a police and crime commissioner seeks to become the fire and rescue authority. We welcome that there is now a requirement to consult with those representing employees affected by the proposals.
However, the Government have not gone far enough to ensure that consultation is meaningful and that gaps do not exist through which a maverick PCC could seek unjustifiably to restrict or curtail the process—and neither are all the considerations covered that a PCC should be required to address if they wish to become the fire and rescue authority. Accordingly, we have put down Amendments 12, 14 and 18 to government Amendments 11, 13 and 17, and we regard our amendments as being part of a single group.
Government Amendment 11 places a requirement on a police and crime commissioner to,
“publish, in such manner as the commissioner thinks appropriate, the commissioner’s response to the representations made or views expressed in response to those consultations”.
In reality, that means that the commissioner could publish very little about the nature of the representations made and views expressed to him or her under the consultation—perhaps not least by those with strong reservations about the PCC becoming the fire and rescue authority. In being required only to publish a response, the commissioner could be very brief and not actually respond to the specific points and arguments made under the consultation.
Our amendments provide for the commissioner to publish, among other things, copies of each representation made and a summary of views expressed under the consultation on the proposal to become the fire and rescue authority. The amendments also provide for the commissioner to set out why the benefits claimed by becoming the fire and rescue authority cannot be achieved by other forms of collaboration, bearing in mind the emphasis placed in the Bill on improving collaboration between services, which we support.
The government amendments provide that consultation on a proposal from the police and crime commissioner also to be the fire and rescue authority should be carried out in such manner as the relevant police and crime commissioner thinks appropriate. Our amendments seek to be a bit more specific, since there may well be very differing views among police and crime commissioners on what constitutes an appropriate manner in which to consult. Presumably there must be some minimum requirements, and our amendments provide for a period lasting not less than 56 days and a requirement before the start of consultation to produce a draft public proposal, a schedule of public meetings and an invitation to make written submissions.
The government amendments provide for the Secretary of State to publish the independent assessment of a proposal from a PCC to become the fire and rescue authority. Our amendment provides, in addition to what the government amendment says, that it should be published at least one month before an order under Section 4A is made, to make sure that it is published a reasonable period of time before the order is made rather than very close to or even after the order is made.
Of course, I hope that the Government will accept the amendments to which I have referred. However, in the event that that is not their intention, I very much hope that the Government, having heard the points I have made and the concerns that lie behind them, and thus the amendments we have put down, might be prepared to reflect further on this matter and consider whether they could at least come some of the way to addressing some, if not all, of the concerns we have raised by putting down further amendments of their own.
We still have Amendment 4, which seeks to delete the clause that enables a police and crime commissioner to be the fire and rescue authority. I want to make it clear that our opposition to this enabling power in the Bill still stands. I do not wish to detain the House longer than necessary by repeating in detail all the points that we made in Committee and that have led us to our view—but those points still stand. Included among them is the fact that fire and rescue service boundaries are not always in line with PCC areas, and the provision for PCCs to become the fire and rescue authorities assumes that the police organisational structure is, and will be in the future, the most appropriate for the fire and rescue service when already evidence exists that that is not considered to be the case in at least some areas. In our view, the emphasis should be on closer collaboration, which is provided for in the Bill, and not on potentially hostile takeovers.
However, what I want to raise in a bit more detail is the potential impact on fire and rescue service personnel and members of a police force if the PCC becomes the fire and rescue authority and, in particular, the implications if the single-employer model is introduced. I have been told—as opposed to knowing it for a fact myself—that the Staffordshire police and crime commissioner has already prepared a business case, at least in draft, for becoming the fire and rescue authority. As I understand it, that involves adopting the single-employer model and harmonising terms and conditions of service. Apparently, the target date for the takeover of responsibility for the relevant fire and rescue service in this case is April next year—namely, in just over four months’ time. If that is the target date, it immediately raises questions about the consultation process that is likely to be adopted—concerns which I have already sought to express in more generalised terms in what I have said so far.
The terms and conditions of service for firefighters are covered by a national agreement; national bargaining applies. Those terms and conditions are set out in what I believe is referred to as the Grey Book, and they cover not just issues relating to pay and hours but disciplinary arrangements and procedures, as well as pensions. What assurances can the Government give—either now or subsequently in correspondence—that, single-employer model or not, the terms and conditions for firefighters will continue to be determined through the current bargaining procedures and that they will continue to be national terms and conditions, including in a situation where the PCC is also the fire and rescue authority?
When the coalition Government presented their Bill providing for the introduction of police and crime commissioners, the key argument they advanced was that nobody knew who was on the then police authorities, what their responsibilities were or how to contact them. The Government argued that PCCs would be visible, accessible and accountable in a way that did not apply to police authorities. If the intention now is that PCCs who become the fire and rescue authority should be able, if they choose, to move away from national terms and conditions of employment under a single-employer model, that is not a power, role or responsibility which, as I recollect it, the Government cited when making their case for the introduction of PCCs.
I hope that the Minister, as well as giving what I hope will be a helpful response to the three amendments to which I referred earlier, will be able to clarify the position in relation to a PCC who becomes the fire and rescue authority—and, in particular, where they propose to set up a single-employer model, what the position will be in relation to the national conditions of service that currently apply for both firefighters and members of the police force.
Lord Paddick
My Lords, I support the amendments proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Rosser. The government amendments in this group do not go far enough—for example, in publishing the results of any consultation in full and on the process of the consultation itself, which we believe simply cannot be left in the hands of a police and crime commissioner. We also oppose in principle that police and crime commissioners should be allowed to take over fire and rescue authorities, for many of the reasons that the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, gave this afternoon and in Committee, particularly, as we dealt with in Amendment 1, the issue around coterminosity. We also share the concerns about the employment implications of merging police services and fire and rescue services in a single employer model under a police and crime commissioner.
My noble friend Lady Hamwee and I have Amendment 19 in this group. The amendment would require that the Secretary of State cannot make an order to provide for the police and crime commissioner to be the fire and rescue authority under new Section 4A unless this has been agreed by all relevant local authorities. This amendment is supported by the Local Government Association.
In Committee, the Minister seemed to want to have her cake and eat it—to use a topical phrase. When these issues were discussed, she said at one point that,
“the Government are not mandating the transfer of fire and rescue authorities to police and crime commissioners. These provisions are locally enabling and acknowledge that local leaders are best placed to assess what would work … in their areas”.
But then later she said:
“Where there is clear merit in a transfer taking place that could benefit local communities, it would be wrong to allow vested local interests to stand in the way”.—[Official Report, 14/9/16; col. 1520.]
Local authority councillors are democratically elected to represent local people. One of their responsibilities is the fire and rescue service. Police and crime commissioners have been democratically elected to oversee policing, based on a manifesto that covers only policing. I believe that the Minister was right to say that local leaders are best placed to assess what would work best in their areas, and wrong to describe as “vested local interests” the democratically elected local authority councillors who do not agree with their police and crime commissioner about the PCC taking over local fire and rescue services. Our amendment is in line with the Minister’s initial comment in Committee, rather than her later comment.
The Minister of State, Home Office (Baroness Williams of Trafford) (Con)
My Lords, the Government came into office with a clear manifesto commitment to enable fire and police services to work more closely together and to develop the role of our elected and accountable police and crime commissioners. The provisions in Part 1 of the Bill, including those in Clause 6, give legislative effect to that commitment.
It is clear that better joint working can strengthen our emergency services, deliver significant savings to taxpayers and, most importantly, enable the emergency services to better protect the public. While there are many excellent examples of collaboration between the emergency services across the country—I draw noble Lords’ attention to the excellent overview of such collaboration recently published by the Emergency Services Collaboration Working Group—the picture of collaboration remains patchy and more needs to be done to make collaborative working the norm. The directly accountable leadership of PCCs can play a critical role in this by securing better commissioning and delivery of emergency services at a local level. This is not about a merger or a police takeover; nor is it an erosion of the brand identity of the fire service. By overseeing both services, PCCs can strengthen the services by maximising the opportunities for innovative collaboration between policing and fire, and ensure that best practice is shared.
It has been said many times before, but I should stress again, that the provisions in Clause 6 providing for PCCs to take on responsibility for fire and rescue are totally locally enabling. A one-size-fits-all approach would clearly be inappropriate and it should be up to local communities to have a say in how their services are provided. PCCs will be able to take on responsibility for fire and rescue only where a strong local case is made that it is in the best interests of either efficiency, economy or effectiveness, on the one hand, or public safety, on the other, and where they have consulted the relevant local authorities and the public. Removing the provisions from the Bill that enable PCCs to take on governance of fire and rescue denies PCCs the opportunity to drive forward local reform. In a number of areas—for example, Essex, Northamptonshire and Hertfordshire—we know that PCCs are already working closely with their fire and rescue authorities to consider the local case.
Requiring there to be local agreement before a transfer of governance can take place, as proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, would introduce unnecessary and unjustifiable barriers that serve to inhibit positive collaboration taking place at a local level. If there are valid reasons for a local authority’s opposition to a PCC’s proposal, these will be identified in the independent assessment process and the Home Secretary will approve a transfer only where a case has been made that it is in the interests of local communities. It would not be right to let parochial local interests—to take up what the noble Lord said—get in the way of reform where there is a clear benefit to the public.
In Committee, I was clear that the Government’s intention is for the process by which a PCC brings forward a business case for the transfer of responsibility for fire to be as robust and transparent as possible. It is important that this process commands the confidence of all parties and that local views are properly taken into account. To provide even greater assurances on this point, the Government have put forward a number of amendments which strengthen the consultation and transparency duties on PCCs. These amendments respond to a number of helpful and important points raised by noble Lords during the earlier stages of the Bill.
First, Amendment 9 will replace the existing duty on PCCs to seek the views of people in their police area with a duty that requires them to consult them. This strengthening of the duty makes explicit the Government’s expectation that PCCs will take local views into account when developing their business case and responds to concerns that the existing duty to seek views is not strong enough. In addition, Amendment 10 places an explicit duty on PCCs to consult with persons representing the views of employees and of members of the police force who may be affected by their proposal. I would expect this to include trade unions and staff associations such as the FBU, Unison and the Police Federation.
Amendment 16 will additionally require the PCC to submit a summary of the responses to such consultation to the Home Secretary to inform her decision on the proposal where the PCC does not have local agreement. It remains appropriate that it is for the PCC to determine the manner in which they should consult local authorities, the public and employee representatives, and Amendment 13 makes that clear. In the interests of transparency, Amendments 11, 15 and 17 will also require the PCC to publish the outcomes of their local consultation and the Secretary of State to publish the independent assessment that she secures of a PCC’s business case, where they do not have the agreement of the relevant local councils.
The noble Lord, Lord Rosser, tabled further amendments to these provisions, which seek to further prescribe the process by which a PCC consults on his or her proposal and the requirements on the Home Secretary to publish an independent assessment. As I have already set out, I am very keen, like the noble Lord, to make sure that the process by which a PCC seeks to take on the responsibilities of a fire and rescue authority is as robust and transparent as possible. However, I hope the noble Lord would agree that many of the points that he has raised are properly a matter for guidance rather than for primary legislation. The circumstances of each local consultation will be different, so we should not unduly fetter local flexibility to put in place proportionate arrangements that recognise the nature of each local business case. The amendments, while well intentioned, risk cutting across the local accountability of PCCs and risk Whitehall dictating matters that should rightly be left to local leaders.
In response to the noble Lord’s important concerns, however, I can be very clear about the Government’s expectation that the PCC’s consultation will be undertaken in an appropriate manner and be of an appropriate duration to allow local people to express their views and for the PCC to have them taken into account. Further, we would expect the PCC’s response to the consultation to cover the matters that the noble Lord has listed in Amendment 12. The Home Office will work closely with the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners and the Association of Police and Crime Chief Executives to ensure that their guidance on the development of PCC business cases incorporates these points. However, I should stress again that it is for the PCC to determine locally how to achieve such outcomes based on the nature of the case, its complexity and its understanding of the best ways to engage with local communities.
Furthermore, government Amendment 17 will ensure that the independent assessment is published as soon as is practicable after the Home Secretary has made a determination. In practice, this will ensure that all parties have sufficient time to consider the findings before an order is made. Adding in what amounts to a statutory one-month pause in the process in every case again strikes me as unduly complicating the procedure for making these orders and risks increasing local uncertainty as the process is drawn out. I might add that having received the independent assessment, there is no assumption that the Home Secretary would necessarily approve a PCC’s proposal. She will base her decision on the evidence presented. I hope that noble Lords will agree that the government amendments set out a clear expectation that there should be a comprehensive consultation, that the process will be transparent, and that local views will be properly taken into account.
I also indicated in Committee that I would give further consideration to the points raised by the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, regarding public safety. As I set out during that debate, public safety is a core function of the emergency services and we consider that any assessment of the impact of a proposed transfer of governance on effectiveness would include an assessment of its impact on public safety. None the less, I am content to make provision on the face of the Bill that puts this matter beyond any doubt. Government Amendments 5, 6 and 35 explicitly provide that the Secretary of State may not make an order transferring responsibility for fire and rescue to a PCC or implementing the single employer model under either a PCC or a combined authority mayor where it would adversely affect public safety.
I shall deal with the other government amendments in this group. As the Bill is currently drafted, when a PCC implements the single employer model and so delegates fire functions to a single chief officer, schemes that may be made by the Secretary of State transferring property, rights and liabilities from an FRA or the PCC-style FRA to that chief officer are one way only. On the terms and conditions for police and fire and rescue personnel, when staff are transferred from an FRA to the PCC, and under the single employer model from the PCC to the chief officer, they would be covered by the principles of the Cabinet Office code of practice entitled Statement of Practice of Staff Transfers in the Public Sector, taking into account the considerations associated with bringing two workforces closer together. For example, we propose that under the single employer model, complaints, conduct and death and serious injury matters for both the police and the fire service are treated on a consistent basis. PCCs will need to consider how to best reflect a more closely aligned workforce locally when preparing their business case, including consultation with the relevant unions where necessary, as I said previously.
On the question whether the proposals will take firefighters, emergency fire control staff and fire support staff out of national pay and conditions, pensions and other arrangements, the terms and conditions of firefighters and control staff are negotiated on a UK-wide basis via the National Joint Council for Local Authority Fire and Rescue Services. The NJC has no statutory basis and it is for PCC FRAs to decide whether to remain members. PCC-style FRAs will also have the same ability as FRAs to negotiate changes to terms and conditions at local level, while remaining members of the NJC, but PCCs would need to approach the NJC if they wished to become members.
Lord Paddick
Before the Minister sits down, could she clarify something? She described the amendments proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, as unnecessary interference in what should be a locally determined matter—the nature of the consultation process. However, when it comes to deciding whether the police and crime commissioner should take over the fire and rescue authority, against the wishes of the democratically elected local councillors, that is not seen as an unnecessary interference in local decisions.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
I hope I have outlined clearly that the Home Secretary would take a view on this issue and on all representations that have been received when making her decision.
Lord Rosser
I, likewise, ask the Minister for some clarification of what she has just said. Am I right in saying that under the single employer model and the harmonising of conditions—if there is to be such—we could end up with different rates of pay, different conditions of service and different disciplinary procedures for firefighters and members of police forces in different PCC areas: that there could no longer be national rates and national conditions of service? That is what I have read into the Minister’s response, because it depends on whether a PCC decides to continue to have conditions of employment determined by the national bargaining body, or whether the police and crime commissioner who has become the fire and rescue authority decides he or she wants to bargain with their own employees in the fire and rescue service and, presumably, the police service, if it is harmonising conditions. Is that a fair interpretation of what the Minister said?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
Before Third Reading I will write to the noble Lord and to all noble Lords who have taken part in the debate, and distribute that response to the House. What I said was the terms and conditions of firefighters and the control staff are negotiated on a UK-wide basis via the National Joint Council, but the NJC has no statutory basis and it is for the PCC-style FRAs to decide whether to remain members. I will write to the noble Lord before Third Reading to outline more detail on what that might look like.
Lord Rosser
I take it that the noble Baroness is going to write, and I am very grateful to her for saying that, if necessary, that means we could come back to this issue on Third Reading. I also ask, genuinely for clarification, and I am sorry I did not pick up the Minister’s response on Amendments 12, 14 and 18 first time, but on Amendment 12, which sets out a number of requirements relating to consultation over what documents should be published and why the benefits could not be achieved through other forms of collaboration, did I hear correctly the Minister say that those requirements would be included in guidance? I do not know whether that will be guidance or regulations.
Lord Rosser
So what I have laid down in Amendment 12 will be included in guidance.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
I agreed that the matters that the noble Lord listed would be covered in guidance.
Lord Rosser
As I understood it, the Minister did not extend that to the items I covered in Amendments 14 and 18. I am seeking to clarify, not to pursue the argument again, that that statement of what would be covered in guidance relates to what I have in Amendment 12. As I understood what the Minister said, that did not extend to Amendments 14 and 18. I am simply trying to clarify what was said.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
I certainly gave that commitment on Amendment 12. I now have all my pages completely out of kilter, but I do not think I gave that commitment on—was it Amendment 14?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
Amendment 18 is a matter for the Home Secretary.
Lord Rosser
Am I also right—I am genuinely seeking clarification—that what the Minister helpfully said on Amendment 12 did not apply to Amendment 14?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
Unfortunately, I cannot find Amendment 14 here, but we have undertaken to work with the Association of PCCs to address in guidance the issues raised by the noble Lord in Amendment 12. Amendment 18 is a matter for the Home Secretary.
Lord Rosser
I would be more than happy if the Minister wishes to write to me to confirm. I am genuinely seeking clarification, rather than trying to reopen the debate.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
The issues raised in Amendments 12 and 14 will be addressed in guidance.
Lord Rosser
So there is an issue of a period over which consultation shall last. The other matters will be covered in guidance. Is that guidance that will go through this House in the form of regulations, or is this guidance that we will not see until it is published?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
I think that this may be one area of detail that I could discuss and correspond with the noble Lord over between now and Third Reading. He and I can meet before Third Reading.
Lord Rosser
That is a helpful response and I take it in the spirit in which it was said. I hope that the Minister will accept, bearing in mind that she has indicated—I do not want to make things difficult—that it appears to apply to Amendments 12 and 14. To put it bluntly, if that does not prove to be the case we can come back at Third Reading.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
Yes, and I hope that it would never be interpreted that I will not follow through on something I say at the Dispatch Box, because I most certainly will meet the noble Lord and discuss the finer detail of the guidance before Third Reading.
Lord Rosser
I assure the Minister that she is about the last person that I would ever suggest would appear at the Dispatch Box and make a statement that she did not mean or which was misleading.
In light of what has been said, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
“(5A) The Secretary of State may not make an order under this section in a case within subsection (5)(a) if the Secretary of State thinks that the order would have an adverse effect on public safety.”
“(5A) The Secretary of State may not make an order under this section in a case within subsection (5)(a) if the Secretary of State thinks that the order would have an adverse effect on public safety.”
(b) from that chief constable to the fire and rescue authority to which the order applies.”
“(c) consult each of the following about the proposal—(i) persons appearing to the commissioner to represent employees who may be affected by the proposal;(ii) persons appearing to the commissioner to represent members of a police force who may be so affected”
“(d) publish, in such manner as the commissioner thinks appropriate, the commissioner’s response to the representations made or views expressed in response to those consultations.”
“(2) Each consultation under sub-paragraph (1) is to be carried out in such manner as the relevant police and crime commissioner thinks appropriate.”
“(ca) a summary of the views expressed about the proposal by persons consulted under paragraph 3(1)(c),”
“(4) The Secretary of State must publish the independent assessment—(a) as soon as is reasonably practicable after making a determination in response to the proposal, and(b) in such manner as the Secretary of State thinks appropriate.”
“(5C) A police and crime plan which the police and crime commissioner is required to prepare may be prepared jointly by the commissioner and the fire and rescue authority.(5D) If the police and crime commissioner and the fire and rescue authority prepare a joint police and crime plan, the plan must also set out the fire and rescue authority’s priorities and objectives, for the period of the plan, in connection with the discharge of the authority’s functions.(5E) Subsection (5B)(b) does not apply to a joint police and crime plan.”
Lord Paddick
Lord Paddick
My Lords, I shall also speak to the other amendments in this group. These amendments, taken together, are designed to allow police and crime commissioners to attend and speak at committees or sub-committees appointed by local authorities wholly or partly for the purposes of discharging the functions of a fire and rescue authority but not to allow police and crime commissioners to vote at those meetings.
Local authority councillors are democratically elected to represent local people on a range of issues, including fire and rescue services. Police and crime commissioners have been democratically elected to represent local people in overseeing the police force for which they are responsible. They have no democratic mandate to vote on issues relating to fire and rescue services, as the noble Lord, Lord Bach, said so persuasively in Committee, at col. 1489. If the police and crime commissioner has persuasive points, the committee that he is present and speaking at will be persuaded, and if his points are not persuasive, he should not be allowed to use a vote to push those views through. The “real influence” that the Minister referred to in Committee, at col. 1544, should come from the strength of the police and crime commissioner’s arguments, not from having a vote to back them up. I beg to move.
Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen
My Lords, Clause 7 enables police and crime commissioners to request to be represented on fire and rescue authorities within their police areas where they do not take responsibility for the governance of the fire and rescue service. This is what we have described as the representation model. Where a fire and rescue authority accepts such a request, we have set out that PCCs will be treated as if they were a member of the authority for the purposes of bringing agenda items, receiving papers and so on, and have full voting rights to ensure that they can take part in the business of the fire and rescue authority in a meaningful and effective way.
The noble Lord’s amendments seek to remove these provisions, which would be a great shame, as we want the PCC’s representation to be meaningful and on an equal footing with existing members of the FRA. To deny PCCs the ability to vote would reduce their scope for influence and I fear that opportunities for fostering greater collaboration would be missed. As my noble friend Lady Williams explained in Committee, in response to a group of similar amendments, we want police and crime commissioners and fire and rescue authorities to consider the representation model as a viable option for promoting greater collaboration between the two services. These amendments would hinder that.
The amendments would also remove the necessity for a fire and rescue authority to publish its decision and reasoning in considering the PCC’s request for membership. I am concerned that to do so would remove transparency and accountability from the process. These provisions enable PCCs to seek representation where they wish to do so, while respecting local fire governance arrangements. The final decision on representation rests with the fire and rescue authority, although we fully expect that in the majority of instances the fire and rescue authority would accept the PCC’s request and, if it did not, its reasons should be made clear to both the PCC and the public. This ensures that the process is fully transparent and open to effective scrutiny.
The provisions in the Bill allow for the representation model to be considered as an opportunity to foster greater collaboration outside of pursuing other governance models. I hope I have been able to persuade the noble Lord of the merits of the approach taken in the Bill and that he will be content to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Paddick
I am grateful to the Minister. I am still struggling to understand why a police and crime commissioner, who is elected on the basis of a manifesto to do with policing, should have full voting rights on a fire and rescue authority. I am not sure that “It would be a great shame” is a particularly powerful argument against my proposal. The Minister said that the police and crime commissioner should be on an equal footing with other members of the fire and rescue authority but did not actually say why. Yes, the final decision rests with the fire and rescue authority but, given the fact that this is in legislation, it would be difficult, certainly following the Minister’s remarks, for fire and rescue authorities to resist a move by a police and crime commissioner to take those voting rights. Greater collaboration surely does not necessarily depend on the police and crime commissioner having a vote on the fire and rescue authority. None the less, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
“(2A) Before making the request the mayor must publish, in such manner as the mayor thinks appropriate, the mayor’s response to the representations made or views expressed in response to any consultations on the proposal.”
“(5A) The Secretary of State must publish the independent assessment—(a) as soon as is reasonably practicable after making a determination in response to the proposal, and(b) in such manner as the Secretary of State thinks appropriate.”
“(6A) The Secretary of State may not make an order under section 107EA(2) in a case within subsection (6)(a) of this section if the Secretary of State thinks that the order would have an adverse effect on public safety.”
“( ) from the chief constable to the combined authority,”
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, the government amendments in this group respond to some very well-made points in Committee about the provisions in the Bill establishing the office of the London fire commissioner.
Amendments 37, 156, 195 and 205 will ensure that no locally elected councillor will have to resign their council position if they are appointed as deputy mayor for fire or deputy mayor for policing and crime in London. In Committee the noble Lord, Lord Harris, made a compelling case for this change with reference to two London borough councillors who had had to resign their council positions when appointed to the position of deputy mayor for police and crime because, when appointed, they were treated as an employee of the Greater London Authority and therefore became politically restricted. I have listened to the case made by the noble Lord and agree that no locally elected councillor should be placed in a situation where they would have to give up their seat to become the deputy mayor for fire or the deputy mayor for policing and crime.
Amendments 38 to 40 are drafting amendments which correct erroneous references to the assembly’s fire and emergency “panel” rather than “committee”. I am again grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Harris, for spotting them. Finally, Amendments 41 and 42 respond to one tabled in Committee by the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, relating to the functions of the fire and emergency committee. These amendments will ensure that there is appropriate scrutiny of the actions and decisions of the deputy mayor for fire, and allow the committee to investigate and prepare reports about any other matters the assembly considers to be of importance to fire and rescue services in London. I beg to move.
Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for responding to the points I made in Committee and introducing these amendments. I suspect that this is a refinement and clarification of the law which is of interest to a tiny handful of citizens of the United Kingdom. None the less, the anomaly created was slightly strange.
However, at the risk of prolonging this only a moment, I seek a little clarification. The amendments, as I understand them, would enable a deputy mayor in these circumstances to be an elected councillor. Does that also remove the restriction on those individuals placed by the Local Government Officers (Political Restrictions) Regulations 1990, which among other things do not allow such a person to hold office in a political party or to canvass for one? It might be a boon to anyone in this position if they were allowed to be elected and stand for election but not to canvass on their own behalf.
It is difficult to disentangle what are three interlocking Acts of Parliament, not all of which seem in the public references to have been updated by subsequent legislation. It seems to me that the Local Government Officers (Political Restrictions) Regulations 1990 might still apply to these individuals, even though the specific issue of election to a local authority has been removed. Having said that, I am sure that the Minister will be able to clarify it entirely to my satisfaction and I am very grateful to her and her officials for responding to this allegedly minor issue.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
I hope it is not going to be another letter because, from my dim and distant memory of local government officers’ political restrictions, I recall that up to a certain level of officer, you are free to canvass and engage in political activity. You are also free to stand for elected office in an authority other than your own. I think I may have to write, now that the noble Lord is heading for the door, on the matter of elected office for local authority officials because that will be looked at in the regulations.
Lord Paddick
My Lords, I thank the Minister for listening to the points raised by the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, and to the issues raised by my noble friend Lady Hamwee. She cannot be in her place today, but she has asked me to pass on her thanks for the amendments that the Government have brought forward in this group.
(e) any other matters which the Assembly considers to be of importance to fire and rescue services in Greater London.”
“(3A) The Assembly may investigate, and prepare reports about, the actions and decisions of the Deputy Mayor for Fire.”
“Fire Safety inspections
(1) The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 (S.I. 2005/1541) is amended as follows.(2) In article 2 (interpretation), in the definition of “fire inspector”—(a) after “inspector”” insert “, in relation to Wales,”;(b) for “section 28” substitute “section 28(1)”.(3) In article 27 (powers of inspectors), after paragraph (4) insert—“(5) This article applies to a person authorised by the Secretary of State under article 25(1)(e) in relation to premises in England as it applies to an inspector; and article 32(2)(d) to (f), with the necessary modifications, applies accordingly.”(4) In article 28 (exercise on behalf of fire inspectors etc of their powers by officers of fire brigades)—(a) in paragraph (1)—(i) omit “, or any other person authorised by the Secretary of State under article 25(e),”;(ii) for “and (3)” substitute “to (4)”;(b) after paragraph (1) insert—“(1A) The powers conferred by article 27 on an authorised person (by virtue of paragraph (5) of that article) are also exercisable by an employee of a fire and rescue authority in England when authorised in writing by such an authorised person for the purpose of reporting to him or her on any matter falling within the authorised person’s functions under this Order; and articles 27(2) to (4) and 32(2)(d) to (f), with the necessary modifications, apply accordingly.”;(c) in paragraph (2), for “, or other person authorised by the Secretary of State,” substitute “or authorised person”;(d) after paragraph (2) insert—“(3) In this article, “authorised person” means a person authorised by the Secretary of State under article 25(1)(e) in relation to premises in England.””
Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen
My Lords, Amendments 44, 45 and 105 are essentially technical amendments to ensure that the strengthened powers of an inspector of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and the powers of an inspector of fire and rescue authorities in England, as provided for in the Bill, work as intended.
Both inspectors have powers to obtain information and to access premises of the relevant organisation which they are inspecting and of persons providing services for that organisation. The amendments ensure that any person providing services or carrying out any of the activities of either organisation by virtue of an enactment, including where there is no contractual agreement, come within the inspection framework. This would, for example, cover police or ambulance staff who are undertaking fire functions as part of a local agreement—an approach which is growing across many police forces and fire and rescue authorities. These amendments will ensure that both police and English fire and rescue inspectors have sufficient powers covering all individuals who are fulfilling an activity which needs to be inspected. The powers to access premises and require information are long-standing and widely used, with established safeguards that will apply to these amendments.
Amendment 43 concerns the enforcement of fire safety in Crown-owned or Crown-occupied premises for the purpose of ensuring compliance with the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005. Presently, the 2005 order defines an enforcement authority with reference to inspectors under Section 28 of the Fire and Rescue Services Act 2004. In the light of the fire inspection provisions in the Bill, it is now desirable to break the link between the inspection of fire and rescue authorities by an English inspector appointed under the amended Section 28 of the 2004 Act and enforcement of fire safety in Crown-owned and Crown-occupied premises under the 2005 order.
We do not consider it appropriate for those charged with responsibility for inspecting the efficiency and effectiveness of fire and rescue authorities in England under Section 28 of the 2004 Act, as amended, to have any powers in relation to enforcing fire safety provisions in Crown-owned or Crown-occupied premises for the purpose of ensuring compliance with the 2005 order. The skill set is entirely different, with fire safety enforcement officers requiring a high level of technical competence in building construction and fire safety management.
However, to deliver this objective we need to amend the 2005 order to ensure that any persons authorised, under Article 25(1)(e) of the 2005 order, by the Secretary of State to enforce the provisions of the 2005 order in Crown-owned and Crown-occupied premises are able to access the powers of enforcement that are necessary to enable them to perform their function effectively.
Without this amendment, any persons subsequently authorised to enforce the provisions in Crown-owned or Crown-occupied premises who were not also appointed as English fire inspectors or assistant inspectors would not, in law, be able to perform their function. I beg to move.
“(e) any other person who is, by virtue of any enactment, carrying out any of the activities of a fire and rescue authority in England.”
(iii) any other person who is, by virtue of any enactment, carrying out any of the activities of a fire and rescue authority in England,”
Lord Paddick
Lord Paddick
My Lords, in moving Amendment 46 I will speak also to the other amendment in the group, Amendment 47. Both are in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Hamwee. This is a straight rerun of the amendments we had in Committee in relation to police super-complaints, which bodies can make them and the authorised persons who can ask the Secretary of State to add or remove bodies from the list of bodies that can make them. In Committee, we argued that the Secretary of State should be required to consult on the regulations that designate which bodies can make super-complaints. These regulations will contain the criteria that will be applied to decide which bodies can bring police super-complaints. New Section 29B, inserted by Clause 25, requires the Secretary of State to consult when she makes or revokes a designation but does not require her to consult on the criteria that she applies in deciding whether to make or revoke a designation. That is the intended effect of Amendment 46.
Amendment 47 relates to the “authorised persons” who can ask the Secretary of State to make or revoke a designation under new Section 29B(2)(b) of the Police Reform Act 2002. Contrary to what the Minister took as our intention in Committee, Amendment 47 sets out a list of bodies that the Secretary of State should specify as authorised persons who can ask the Secretary of State to make or revoke a designated body under new subsection (2)(a), not a list of designated bodies that can make police super-complaints.
Just to be clear, there will be two lists of bodies in relation to police super-complaints. There are authorised persons, who are bodies who can ask the Secretary of State to designate or remove a body from the list of those able to make police super-complaints, and there are bodies that are designated as being able to bring police super-complaints. We believe that the list of authorised persons should include the Law Society, the National Council for Voluntary Organisations and Citizens Advice, and others that should be listed in the Bill. I beg to move Amendment 46.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab)
My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, said, these matters were discussed in Committee. I am very supportive of Amendments 46 and 47. As we have heard, designated bodies will get the power to make super-complaints to Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary, and these complaints can be made where, in the opinion of the designated body, a feature of policing may be harming the public and needs looking at. It is based on a system that works in the private sector and this is the first time it will be used in the public sector. Only designated bodies will be able to make super-complaints, and the process for designating these bodies will be set out in regulations.
When the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Trafford, responds to this debate, it would be helpful if she said something about the timescale for the consultation processes, and when she expects these regulations to be laid before Parliament and come into force. I should also say that I am happy for the negative procedure to be used in respect of the regulations; perhaps the noble Baroness could bring that fact to the attention of the noble Lord, Lord Hyde of Ashton, who is of the opinion that I would never agree to the negative procedure being used for regulations in this House.
The proposals in this section of the Bill are a welcome move and will be a positive benefit to organisations and individuals that have legitimate concerns to raise. We are supportive of them and of these amendments.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, for the opportunity to address the misunderstanding over Amendment 47, which was previously tabled in Committee. However, I am again going to have to disappoint the noble Lord as the Government cannot support either of these amendments. The Bill provides for the delegation of the ability to authorise those who can be designated bodies for the purposes of the new super-complaints system.
I welcome the noble Lord’s suggestions of who should perform this function but I do not agree that this task can be performed by bodies that might themselves want to raise super-complaints, or by multiple agencies. For the system to have legitimacy, we need to avoid a conflict of interest in this role. That is why the Bill creates this distinct role, as we do not consider it appropriate that HM Inspectorate of Constabulary designates the bodies that can come to it with super-complaints.
All three bodies put forward by the noble Lord could potentially add significant value as designated bodies, should they wish to apply. It would be a shame if, for example, Citizens Advice were precluded from raising issues through the super-complaints system. In the interests of a smooth and speedy process, I suggest that this role should be undertaken by an individual or single body, not by a committee.
The critical point here is that the criteria for designation are clear and unambiguous so that authorisation is a simple and objective process. That is why we will consult widely on the criteria in due course, and I encourage all those who have an interest to feed in their views. The noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, asked about timing: it will be in the coming months.
Having consulted to establish clear criteria, we believe it is unnecessary to subsequently consult on any list of bodies deemed to have met the criteria, as required by the noble Lord’s Amendment 46. This risks slowing the whole system down, delaying designation and further delaying the point at which bodies can submit super-complaints to HMIC.
I reiterate the Government’s commitment to consulting widely on the criteria. As part of that process, we would welcome the input of noble Lords on bodies or organisations that may be suitable for designation or for the role as the authorised person. I hope the noble Lord, having considered the Government’s arguments, will feel free to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Paddick
I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, for his support for these amendments and for the explanation given by the Minister. Obviously I am disappointed that she felt she could not support them. Clearly there would have to be a distinction between the role of authorised persons and the role of designated bodies. The suggestions we made were on the basis that these organisations had vast knowledge of the voluntary bodies and third party organisations that work in their areas. There would have to be a distinction if they were appointed as authorised persons, and they would not be able to be designated bodies themselves, but that is something that the Government could make a decision on.
I am grateful for the reassurance around the consultation that will take place over the criteria that will be used in order to decide which bodies should be designated. On that basis, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
“Inquiry into complaints alleging corrupt relationships between police and newspaper organisations
(1) Within one month of the condition in subsection (3) being satisfied, the Prime Minister must commission an independent inquiry under the Inquiries Act 2005 into the operation of the police complaints system in respect of allegations of corrupt relationships between the police and newspaper organisations.(2) The inquiry’s terms of reference must include, but are not to be limited to—(a) how adequately police forces have investigated complaints about police officers in dealing with people working within, or connected to, newspaper organisations; (b) the thoroughness of any reviews by police forces into complaints of the type specified in paragraph (a);(c) in those cases where a complaint of the type referred to in paragraph (a) led to a criminal investigation, the conduct of prosecuting authorities in investigating the allegation;(d) whether and to what extent, if any, police officers took illegal payment to suppress investigations of complaints of relationships between police officers and people working within, or connected to, newspaper organisations;(e) the implications of paragraphs (a) to (d) for the relationships between newspaper organisations and the police, prosecuting authorities, and relevant regulatory bodies, and recommended actions in that respect.(3) The condition in this subsection is that the Attorney-General determines that the inquiry, if conducted effectively and fairly, would not be likely to prejudice any ongoing relevant criminal investigations or court proceedings cases.(4) The Attorney-General must consider and reach a decision on the matter specified in subsection (3) within one month of this section coming into force, and if necessary must reconsider the matter each month until the Attorney-General is able to make a determination as set out in subsection (3).”
Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve (CB)
My Lords, this amendment is also in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton. The second part of the Leveson inquiry was promised by the former Prime Minister in order to investigate allegations of collusion—above all, corrupt collusion—between the press and the police. An undertaking was made to victims of press and police corruption, including those who had lost loved ones at Hillsborough and were then smeared, among many other victims.
The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, when he was Leader of the House, read out the former Prime Minister’s Statement on this matter to this House on 29 November 2012—almost exactly four years ago. He said:
“When I set up this inquiry, I also said there would be a second part, to investigate wrongdoing in the press and the police, including the conduct of the first police investigation. This second stage cannot go ahead until the current criminal proceedings have concluded, but we remain committed to the inquiry as it was first established”.—[Official Report, 29/11/12; col. 338.]
But there has been a shift, and the Government are apparently no longer so committed to Leveson part 2 happening once the criminal proceedings are finished. The noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, answered a Written Question on Leveson 2 on 15 June this year. She wrote:
“Criminal proceedings connected to the subject matter of the Leveson inquiry, including the appeals process, have not yet completed. We have always been clear that these cases must conclude before we consider part 2 of the inquiry”.
So now it is just to be considered, not undertaken.
This is not what was promised to the Hillsborough families or to other victims of press and police collusion or corruption. In the light of the conviction of Mazher Mahmood, the findings of the Hillsborough Independent Panel, the finding that News of the World executives lied to a Select Committee and the apparent continuation of what we might, kindly, call business as usual at some larger newspaper corporations, I do not think we can say that we are sure that the need for Leveson 2 has diminished. The Hillsborough Family Support Group worked with the shadow Home Secretary, Mr Andy Burnham, to table an amendment to the Bill on Report in the Commons which would have recommitted the Government to going through with Leveson 2. It is that amendment that I have agreed to move today.
The Government could have begun proceedings for Leveson 2 weeks ago, when the relevant trials had finished. Doing so would help draw a line under Hillsborough, Orgreave, Daniel Morgan and countless other scandals involving both the police and the press.
I do not think this is a trivial matter. A commitment was made to Leveson 2; the victims want it; the public want it; and, for democracy to function well, we all need it. The Government should get on with what they promised in 2011 and 2012 and begin Leveson 2 now. I beg to move.
Viscount Hailsham (Con)
My Lords, despite the eminence of the noble Baroness, I hope the Government will be robust in resisting the amendment. I have one general principle about it. Over a long time in Parliament, I have been involved directly and indirectly with a very large number of inquiries; I have participated in some. There is a proportionality rule: is the likely outcome of the inquiry and the chances of its recommendations being implemented sufficient to justify the cost of setting it up and the bureaucracy involved? In the majority of cases in which I have been involved, the answer to that question is no, and I strongly suspect that this time the answer is no again.
All of us who have been in public life know full well that there has always been collusion between the police and journalists—certainly ever since I was first in the House of Commons, nearly 40 years ago. It is lamentable, but it has been the case. I doubt that anything else that will be turned up in this inquiry would justify the initial cost.
I have one further point. It is absolutely right that police officers who take money for supplying confidential information—that is, are bribed—should be the subject of criminal procedure. But that is also, in the generality of cases, true of the journalists. What we are dealing with when a journalist pays a police officer is a criminal conspiracy to do an unlawful thing.
Occasionally, there will be instances where the public interest is genuinely involved. But one thing I have noted in recent months and years is the unwillingness of juries to convict journalists for doing this, because quite specious claims of public interest are always invoked. In general, it is public curiosity, not interest, which justifies the process. I very much doubt that we will get juries to see the rightness of what I have been saying, so there may have to be another way forward.
I very much hope that the press industry—editors in particular—recognises the impropriety in the generality of cases of journalists paying police officers for information. The fact that juries will not convict for these purposes is neither here nor there. I would hope that senior journalists would incorporate into the contracts of employment with their journalists a prohibition on doing what I have just described, and that editors and proprietors would be willing to enforce that prohibition.
Reverting to my first point, I am sorry, but I cannot support the noble Baroness’s very eloquent submission to your Lordships’ House.
Lord Paddick
My Lords, I rise to support the amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill of Bengarve. I should declare three interests. First, I was a police officer for more than 30 years, retiring with an exemplary record in 2007 as a deputy assistant commissioner, the equivalent of a deputy chief constable outside London. Secondly, I was a victim of phone hacking. Thirdly, I was party to a judicial review of the Metropolitan Police Service in 2011. This review concluded that the police had failed in their duty to protect my and others’ Article 8 rights to a private and family life under the Human Rights Act, because they had failed to tell us that we were the targets of phone hacking by the press. I was a senior police officer in the Metropolitan Police at the time of the phone hacking. The noble Lord, Lord Prescott, another party to the judicial review, was the Deputy Prime Minister at the time his phone was hacked.
To take up the point of the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, I accept the question of proportionality but the difference here is that the Government promised the victims of phone hacking that Leveson 2 would take place. The former Prime Minister promised that this inquiry would take place and that, I am afraid, rather trumps the noble Viscount’s arguments around proportionality. The inquiry was set up to explore and resolve a number of areas but, in the interests of brevity, as no doubt these points will be covered by other noble Lords, I will focus on just one element.
I discovered that I had been the subject of interest to the private detective employed by News International to carry out phone hacking, Glen Mulcaire, when I was told through my solicitors by the Guardian in 2011. My solicitors contacted the Metropolitan Police, who said that there was no record of my having been the victim of phone hacking. The Guardian sources insisted that I was and the Metropolitan Police eventually admitted that I had been involved as a target. They subsequently disclosed pages from Mulcaire’s notebook which had my name, details of my then partner, our home address and phone numbers and other personal details and that these documents were in their possession and had been in their possession since before 2006. The police also subsequently disclosed an internal memo which indicated that “Commander Paddick” was a target of phone hacking. I was a commander from 2000 to 2003, when I was promoted.
My point is that the Metropolitan Police knew that there was widespread phone hacking and did nothing to investigate it or to warn the victims that their phones were being hacked, even when one of those victims was the Deputy Prime Minister and another was one of its own senior police officers, who was working in the same building as the detectives who had uncovered the scandal. At around the same time, it appears that members of the press whose phones were being hacked by rival newspapers were warned that their phones were being hacked.
There has been no satisfactory explanation of why the police behaved in this way—we need to know why. Leveson 2 should be initiated to find that out. I say that there has been no satisfactory explanation of the police conduct because it has been suggested that the initial investigation, where the Royal Family had been among the victims and which had been carried out by the Counter Terrorism Command as a result, had other priorities. We can imagine that the counterterrorism branch did have other priorities. If that was the reason for not taking the matter further, there was no reason why the police could not have informed other victims to take precautions against using their mobile phones and that no further action would be taken. Indeed, that was the conclusion reached by the judge who heard the judicial review.
Once the royal connection had been dealt with, the case could, and should, have been transferred to the Specialist Crime Directorate of the Metropolitan Police, the most appropriate department at Scotland Yard to investigate such matters, where a scandal of such proportions could have been given the resources required to investigate matters properly. Instead, it was only after the Guardian discovered the extent of the scandal that the Metropolitan Police acknowledged that an investigation was needed and applied the resources required. We have not got to the bottom of the relationship between the Metropolitan Police and the media at that time. That is why we need the inquiry proposed by this amendment.
If a public inquiry is needed and the Government have promised one, it should take place. The sudden deployment of a wholly unnecessary consultation is, or appears to be, a device to give cover to the Government reneging yet again on a promise made regarding the phone hacking issue. If I am wrong and the Government decide after all to recommit to Leveson 2, I am sure this House will simply agree to the later removal of the amendment. In the meantime, it is our insurance policy against the Government letting us down again, and we on these Benches will support it if the noble Baroness divides the House.
Lord Blair of Boughton (CB)
My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Lords who tabled this amendment. I listened to the explanation of the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, the chronology of which I understand, but which may be difficult for others to understand. I totally accept the passion with which he spoke on that issue. I support the amendment but make it clear that I am one of the few Members of the House who gave evidence to Leveson in person and on oath. I support the amendment precisely because it fulfils the previous government commitment. As I was the commissioner at the time the first phone hacking case appeared to arise, which concerned the royal household and to which the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, referred, it would not be appropriate for me to say in this House that I do not accept any further scrutiny of the Metropolitan Police or other police forces over this matter. Therefore, I very much support the idea that Leveson 2, in whatever form, or whether it is through this amendment, should be introduced.
However, given that I gave evidence to the inquiry, I need to make it clear that I shall be very surprised—at this point, I move towards the position adopted by the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham—if a new inquiry uncovers anything involving major corruption in recent years. To that end, I ask the House’s indulgence to allow me to read one paragraph—paragraph 49—of my statement to Leveson, which I made in 2012, which set out my position on the question. It refers to the Met and only to events post-2000. Therefore, it does not refer to Morgan or Hillsborough as that was the question I was being asked: what had I done since I had been the deputy commissioner and the commissioner? It was submitted in spring 2012 and says:
“Whilst I therefore accept that current enquiries may reveal that a small number of relatively junior officers took bribes from the press, I do not believe that corruption in monetary terms lies at the heart of any major problem in the relationship between the”,
Metropolitan Police Service and the press. We can now say that a number of junior police officers were convicted, and rightly so. I continued:
“I believe that where that problem may have become significant is that a very small number of relatively senior officers … became too close to journalists, not I believe for financial gain but for the enhancement of their reputation and for the sheer enjoyment of being in a position to share and divulge confidences. It is a siren song. I also believe that they based this behaviour on how they saw politicians”,
behaving with the press,
“and that they lost sight of their professional obligations. The MPS did not have adequate defences against this behaviour and in previous decades would probably not have needed it”.
In short, what will be revealed by such an inquiry, which I still say is necessary, is behaviour that was wrong, reprehensible and unprofessional, but largely not criminal.
Lord Deben (Con)
My Lords, many of us wish that we were not having this debate at all. I will ask three questions of the noble Baroness who will reply. The first is: will she not agree that there is a promise, and that it is a serious thing not to carry that promise through? That is particularly true given the circumstances in which we live, where large numbers of people have ceased to believe in the integrity, the impartiality and, if I may use a non-word, the upstandingness of those in authority. Therefore when a promise has been made, to renege on it is always harmful but particularly harmful at this time, when not only in this country but elsewhere there is clearly a fundamental feeling among large numbers of people that they have not been dealt with properly by those who are in power, have authority and are able to change the lives of others. Therefore, first, there is the promise.
Secondly, there is the need. Will my noble friend explain why it is not necessary to clear the reputation of the police, and particularly the Metropolitan Police, given that so much has been said about them and so much is thought about them? As somebody who lives much of the time in London, I have to say that the Metropolitan Police’s reputation is not good, has not been good for some time, and needs to be improved. Therefore one has to ask why this would not be a valuable way to ensure that that happened. The noble Lord, Lord Blair, said precisely that—there is a need for that.
There is also a need for the press to face up to the fact that it, too, has perhaps the worst reputation in this country that it has had, certainly in my lifetime, which is getting embarrassingly long. This is a very unhappy time, when we think of the purveying of hate that has been on the front pages of so many newspapers, and the attacks on our institutions and their independence, which we have seen latterly. We therefore have to say to ourselves that this is an opportunity for the press, too, to clear that part of its name which is clearable. For my noble friend Lord Hailsham to stand up today and say that he expects the press kindly to arrange in future that it will sign up to not doing bad things suggests that he has not followed the news over the past months. This is not the mood of a press that is largely owned outside this country, by people who have little commitment to this country, and now has standards wholly different from those which perhaps we might have expected.
My third question to my noble friend Lady Williams is as follows. If the noble Baroness’s amendment is not agreed—or, more importantly, if it is not accepted—and if there is no alternative that we see as satisfactorily meeting the very powerful statement that she made, does my noble friend not agree that the public will think that we have not taken these steps due to the power of the press and our closeness to the constabulary, which leads me back to my first point? That is extremely dangerous at any time and particularly dangerous at the moment. The amendment attacks neither the press nor the police; it suggests that perhaps this is the moment to clear both of unfair allegations and to reveal real allegations, which seems to me a not unreasonable position to take. I hope that my noble friend will enable me to support her in the Lobbies by giving me an alternative to this amendment that meets those obligations.
Lord Clinton-Davis (Lab)
I speak following the very courageous and relevant speech that we have just heard. I do not think that there can be any possible objection to strengthening the law, which is what is proposed. There can be no dispute at all that corrupt relationships between the police and newspapers are highly damaging to both, and they are unacceptable to the public, who must be able to trust both. In a democratic society, which I hope we are, it is absolutely vital that there should be trust in both, and the amendment simply seeks to bolster that position. I can see no objection at all to the purpose of the amendment. I ask anybody here to say what damage it could do to the law. In fact, I think that strengthening the law in this way is absolutely vital, and there should be no question about that.
For many years I practised in the criminal courts. I came across decent police officers who did not bend the truth at all, but I also came across certain police officers who were quite prepared to do exactly that, and in our society that is absolutely unacceptable. I hope that the Minister will appreciate how strongly those of us who have experience in this field feel about this.
I am pretty old now but I still attend this House, although some, including my wife, have some reservations about that. But I was particularly concerned about this issue. Everything which concerns the police is relevant to a democratic society. In my view, it is an absolute necessity as far as this is concerned. There is a gap at the moment, or there may be, that ought to be cured. Many people who have experience in this area recognise that. There should be no question about it.
Lord Rosser
My Lords, I will not detain the House for too long. As has been said, the amendment would require the Prime Minister to commission an independent inquiry into the operation of the police complaints system in respect of allegations of corrupt relationships between the police and newspaper organisations. It also provides that the inquiry would proceed only once the Attorney-General has determined that the inquiry, if conducted effectively and fairly, would not be likely to prejudice any ongoing relevant criminal investigations or court proceedings cases.
As has already been pointed out, in November 2012 the then Prime Minister reminded the victims of press intrusion that when he set up the Leveson inquiry he had also said that there would be a second stage to investigate wrongdoing in the press and the police, and that the Government remained committed to the inquiry as it was first established. However, real doubts about the Government’s willingness to honour that promise have arisen—hence this amendment. Those doubts have been increased by the Government’s recent decision to consult, including on whether to stick by the promises previously given by the then Prime Minister that there would be a Leveson stage 2.
Police and press relations is a significant area still to be addressed. Briefings by the police in the immediate aftermath of the Hillsborough tragedy had a profound adverse impact on the families who had lost loved ones, and on the thousands who had been at the match and returned home in a state of some trauma, only to read a few days later that the police were blaming them for the deaths of their friends and family. The media were also manipulated in the case of the Shrewsbury 24, and part 1 of the Leveson inquiry found unhealthy links between senior Met police officers and newspaper executives—links which led to resignations. There is also, on occasion, an issue around the nature of relationships between the police and the press at a more local level, where sometimes prior information appears to have been provided about a particular person to be arrested or a particular search carried out.
Honouring a repeated undertaking given by a Government through a Prime Minister, to victims in particular, and with all-party support, is the issue that this amendment seeks to address. If, having heard the Government’s response, the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, decides to seek the opinion of the House, we shall be voting in favour of the amendment.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, for explaining the purpose behind her amendment. I also thank the noble Lords, Lord Paddick and Lord Blair, who spoke of their own experiences around this issue. As the noble Baroness explained, Amendment 48 would require the Prime Minister to proceed with what is colloquially referred to as the Leveson 2 inquiry into the relationships between the police and the media.
It is of course vital that the police take seriously their role, both in maintaining their own reputation and integrity and in protecting the community that they are meant to serve. However, given the extent of the criminal investigations related to this issue that have taken place since the Leveson inquiry was established—as the noble Lord, Lord Blair, referred to —and given the implementation of the recommendations following part 1, including reforms within the police and the press, the Government must now consider whether proceeding with part 2 of the inquiry is appropriate, proportionate and in the public interest. The Government are therefore seeking the views of the public and interested parties, including those who have been the victims of press abuse, through the public consultation that commenced on 1 November. The consultation seeks views on whether proceeding with part 2 of the Leveson inquiry is still appropriate, proportionate and in the public interest. As the last of the relevant criminal cases has recently concluded, the Government believe that it is now time to take stock and seek views on the various options. Submissions received from this consultation will consequently help to inform the Government’s thinking. The consultation closes on 10 January. Given the ongoing consultation, I respectfully suggest to the noble Baroness that this is not an appropriate matter for further legislation.
The Government will reach a view on the way forward having regard to the views expressed in response to the consultation. If we conclude that the inquiry should go ahead in its current or a modified form, the Inquiries Act already provides the mechanism for this, so again this amendment is unnecessary.
Noble Lords will also want to take into consideration the fact that part 1 of the Leveson inquiry cost £5.4 million. We can expect part 2 of the inquiry, should it go ahead with its current terms of reference, to cost a similar amount, so this amendment has very real financial implications, as my noble friend Lord Hailsham said.
My noble friend Lord Deben talked about three issues—the promise, the necessity, and the power of the press and its closeness to the constabulary. In terms of the promise, the Government delivered the cross-party agreement by establishing the Press Recognition Panel by royal charter, and legislating for the incentives in the Crime and Courts Act 2013. The time is now right to consult further on these specific areas of part 2 of the inquiry and Section 40, given the time that has elapsed since the Leveson inquiry was set up and the changes that have taken place. It would not be fair to the victims of press intrusion to take a decision based on facts and a situation from five years ago without reflecting on the position today, to make sure that we get the right result and that there are the right protections. We will need to see what comes out of the consultation, as I have said, but ultimately, it is for the Government to take decisions on both matters.
Parliament will clearly need to be involved if the proposed way forward were to repeal Section 40, but we need to wait and see the responses to the consultation. On part 2 of the inquiry, we will of course consult the chair of the inquiry, Sir Brian Leveson, before any decision is made on the future of the process.
In conclusion—
Lord Clinton-Davis
Will the Minister indicate how long she envisages the inquiry will take and how many witnesses will come forward?
Baroness Williams of Trafford
The consultation finishes on 10 January. In terms of anything going forward, we will of course be informed and guided by the consultation and I would not at this point wish to put a timescale on the inquiry.
Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve
I thank the Minister for her reply. She suggests that we have yet to consider whether it is appropriate, proportionate or in the public interest to proceed with this amendment and that we should await the outcome of the consultation. That outcome is nicely timed to be rather too late for this legislation, where the proposed new clause fits very well. It has nothing to do with the commencement of Section 40 of the other legislation, so that one we can set aside. But this one is really a matter of honour for the Government. These were commitments made in public and there were real and identifiable victims, and while of course cost is an issue and the Government would perhaps wish to think about how to contain them, surely it is useful that some of the criminal cases that have been tried have actually done the work of finding out what happened in certain cases. The cost issue is not the same as it might have seemed in advance because some of that has already been sorted. I wish to test the opinion of the House.
Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen
My Lords, the Government are committed to ensuring that those working for the police have the confidence to come forward to report concerns of malpractice and misconduct within the service. Clause 27 inserts new Part 2B and new Schedule 3A into the Police Reform Act 2002. This will provide the Independent Police Complaints Commission with a new power to carry out independent whistleblowing investigations. It gives police officers and staff a new route to raise their concerns directly with the IPCC. As a result, it will give police officers and staff a greater level of assurance around discretion and objectivity by strengthening the protections for whistleblowers, including anonymity.
Amendments 49 and 50 respond to points raised in Committee by the noble Lords, Lord Paddick and Lord Kennedy. The amendments will provide greater clarity about when a whistleblowing investigation can be considered by the IPCC. The amendments modify the definition of a whistleblower in two ways. The first modification is to enable whistleblowers to raise concerns about matters which occurred before they joined the police. The second modification will remove the need for the IPCC to consider whether to start a new whistleblowing investigation where it is already conducting an investigation under Part 2 of the Police Reform Act 2002, or where there is an ongoing whistleblowing investigation.
There will also be no requirement for the IPCC to consider whether to open a new investigation when the concern raised is already being dealt with as a super-complaint. These modifications will provide further clarity on the definition of a whistleblower, ensuring that the new Part 2B provisions will not interfere with the progress of these existing investigations. This will also support the IPCC to effectively implement its duties under the new provisions.
Amendments 51, 55, 63, 64 and 69 are technical amendments to ensure that, as with concerns which involve conduct matters, where the IPCC identifies a concern as relating to a “death or serious injury” matter as defined in Part 2 of the 2002 Act, the matter must be handled under that part. In such circumstances, the whistleblower’s identity will continue to be protected by modifications to Schedule 3 to the 2002 Act specified in regulations. I beg to move.
Lord Paddick
My Lords, I am very grateful to the Minister and to the Government for listening to the concerns we raised around whistleblowing in Committee. We certainly support the government amendments in this group.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark
My Lords, there was a very useful debate in Committee on whistleblowing. The noble Lord, Lord Paddick, and I raised a number of issues; we are very grateful that the Government have listened and tabled these amendments and we are very supportive of them.
“(3A) For the purposes of this Part, a person is a “whistle-blower” if—(a) the person is, or was at any time, under the direction and control of a chief officer of police,(b) the person raises a concern that is about a police force or a person serving with the police,(c) the matter to which the concern relates is not—(i) about the conditions of service of persons serving with the police, or(ii) a matter that is, or could be, the subject of a complaint by the person under Part 2, and (d) at the time the Commission first becomes aware of the concern, the matter to which it relates is not—(i) under investigation under the direction of the Commission in accordance with paragraph 18 of Schedule 3,(ii) under investigation by the Commission in accordance with paragraph 19 of that Schedule,(iii) being dealt with as a complaint under section 29A under regulations under section 29C (regulations about super-complaints), or(iv) under investigation under this Part.”
“29FA Special provision for “DSI matters”(1) Before deciding whether to carry out an investigation under section 29D(2), the Commission must consider whether the concern is about a death or serious injury matter (“a DSI matter”) for the purposes of Part 2 (see section 12(2A)).(2) If the Commission determines that the concern is about a DSI matter for the purposes of Part 2—(a) it may not carry out an investigation under section 29D(2), and(b) it must notify the appropriate authority in relation to the DSI matter.(3) Where the appropriate authority in relation to the DSI matter is notified under subsection (2), it must record the matter under paragraph 14A of Schedule 3 to this Act as a DSI matter.(4) The Secretary of State may by regulations make provision modifying Schedule 3 in relation to a DSI matter that, in accordance with subsection (3), is recorded under paragraph 14A of that Schedule but only for the purpose of making provision for the protection of the anonymity of whistle-blowers.(5) In this section, references to the appropriate authority in relation to a DSI matter have the same meaning as in Part 2 (see section 29).”
“Procedure where DSI matter is revealed during investigation
4A_(1) If, during the course of an investigation under section 29D(2), it appears to the person in charge that the matter may be a DSI matter, the person must make a submission to that effect to the Commission._(2) If, after considering the submission, the Commission determines the matter is a DSI matter, it must—(a) notify the appropriate authority in relation to the DSI matter, and(b) send to it a copy of the submission under sub-paragraph (1). _(3) Where the appropriate authority in relation to the DSI matter is notified under sub-paragraph (2), it must record the matter under paragraph 14A of Schedule 3 to this Act as a DSI matter._(4) Where a matter is, in accordance with sub-paragraph (3), recorded under paragraph 14A of Schedule 3 as a DSI matter—(a) the person in charge of the investigation under section 29D(2) must (subject to any determination made by the Commission under paragraph 15(5B) of Schedule 3) continue the investigation as if appointed or designated to investigate the DSI matter, and(b) the other provisions of Schedule 3 apply in relation to that matter accordingly (subject to regulations under sub-paragraph (5))._(5) The Secretary of State may by regulations make provision modifying Schedule 3 in relation to an investigation that, in accordance with sub-paragraph (3), is recorded under paragraph 14A of that Schedule as a DSI matter but only for the purpose of making provision for the protection of the anonymity of whistle-blowers._(6) In this paragraph, references to the appropriate authority in relation to a DSI matter have the same meaning as in Part 2 (see section 29).”
Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen
My Lords, I hope that this, too, will be good news for your Lordships. This Government’s policing reforms have strengthened the role of the Independent Police Complaints Commission to ensure that it can fulfil its crucial function as a strong police watchdog. The Bill will further enhance the IPCC’s powers and independence. It is important that the organisation can carry out its enhanced role efficiently and effectively and the Bill therefore also provides for the reform of the IPCC’s corporate structure and for it to be renamed the Office for Police Conduct.
In Committee the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, tabled an amendment to include “Independent” in the new name. A number of noble Lords spoke in support of that amendment, highlighting the value of the word in securing public confidence that the organisation is not part of the police. My noble friend Lady Williams of Trafford agreed to reflect on the points that noble Lords made so well in the debate.
The Government remain of the view that the reformed IPCC needs to command public trust, and demonstrate its impartiality and independence, through the quality of its work. The IPCC is independent, and the reformed organisation will continue to be independent. However, the Government also recognise the argument that although the legislation provides for the organisation’s independence from the police, it is important to signal this in its title as well. These amendments therefore provide for “Independent” to be included in the reformed IPCC’s new name, with the effect that it will be called the Independent Office for Police Conduct. I beg to move.
Lord Bach (Lab)
My Lords, the Government, particularly the Ministers, deserve real congratulation on making this amendment. I think all Members of the House, wherever they sit, will be really pleased that this has happened. It will certainly, in a small way, make my life as a police and crime commissioner easier. Having “Independent” in the name of the new body will make it easier to explain how the complaints system works. I congratulate the Government and I am very happy to support the amendment.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark
I, too, thank the Government and the Minister for listening. A number of Members, including noble Lords who had been senior police officers, made the point about how important this is to enable police officers to do their job. I am very pleased that the Government have listened.
Lord Paddick
Lord Paddick
My Lords, Amendment 59 is in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Hamwee. I, too, thank the Government for the change that they have made regarding the word “Independent”. This amendment tries to ensure that that is not simply a cosmetic change and that the new body will be even more independent.
The amendment would change the current position where a member of the Independent Police Complaints Commission cannot be someone who holds or who has held office as a constable in any part of the United Kingdom or someone who has worked under the direction or control of a chief officer or equivalent office in Scotland or Northern Ireland. The current legislation specifically excludes anyone making decisions on casework or investigations, for obvious reasons. The public are not reassured about the independence of the police complaints investigation body if those making such decisions are either former police officers or those who have worked for the police.
The amendment would prevent other members of the new body being serving or former police officers or those who formerly worked for the police. In Committee the Minister said:
“We do not think that there should be statutory restrictions on those who are members of the office—in effect, the board of the reformed organisation. The core functions of the office are set out clearly in the Bill and include ensuring the good governance and financial management of the organisation. These functions are quite distinct from the functions of the director-general. The director-general, as the single executive head, will be solely accountable for all casework and investigation decisions, not the board. It is not right that a suitably qualified individual could not be appointed to a corporate governance role as a member of the board simply because he or she once worked as a police civilian, perhaps for just a short period many years previously”.—[Official Report, 26/10/16; col. 258.]
There is very little trust or confidence in the IPCC among many who bring complaints against the police and many others, including me, because we do not believe it is independent enough. How will having members of the board of the new body—the rebranded body—who are former employees of the police service improve that trust and confidence? It certainly does not do it for me. Although the Minister says that the director-general will be solely accountable for all casework and investigation decisions, in practice he will not be making all those decisions—unless he works 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Even if the board members are there to ensure good governance and financial management, their decisions could be crucial to the effective investigation of serious complaints by deciding the way the rebranded organisation operates, its structure and so forth, and the way resources are apportioned.
The Government keep saying how important it is to bring people with different skills and experience into the police service. If the police service is in such desperate need of new blood, because the Government believe it does not have enough talent of its own, why are the Government so keen for those from the police service to be part of the new body that will be investigating the most serious complaints against the police? Barring those previously employed by the police service from holding crucial positions within the rebranded Office for Police Conduct—with or without “Independent” stuck on the front of it—would be a small price to pay for providing reassurance that it is truly independent. I beg to move.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, the Independent Office for Police Conduct will have a vital role in securing and maintaining public confidence in the reformed police complaints system. That is why the Bill provides for an absolute bar on the new single executive head of the organisation—the director-general —ever having worked for the police. The Government do not believe it is appropriate for the Bill to impose further statutory restrictions on membership of the office beyond the post of director-general.
The corporate structure of the IOPC is radically different from the existing commission model. The new board—the office—will have a majority of independent non-executive members, and its functions are set out clearly in the Bill. These include ensuring good corporate governance and financial management. Importantly, the board’s functions do not include responsibility for investigations and casework decisions, for which the director-general alone will be accountable. This is in contrast to the current position, where commissioners undertake such investigative functions.
If a highly suitable individual applies for a non-executive role, perhaps as a finance expert, it would be wrong to reject them automatically simply because many years previously they worked for a short period as a police civilian, perhaps in a relatively junior role. To ensure that the organisation can deliver high-quality and timely investigations—the predominant driver of confidence—the director-general will wish to ensure that the organisation has a diverse mix of people. As part of this, the director-general may wish to employ a number of people who have valuable policing experience, as the IPCC does now.
Under the new model, investigations and casework decisions will be undertaken by employees, all of whom will be working in a single line management chain reporting to the director-general. The Government fully expect the director-general to decide that certain employee roles, including some senior operational and public-facing positions, should not be filled by those with a police background, but those decisions should be a matter for the director-general.
We recognise that confidence is also driven by the perception of the organisation as impartial and independent from the police. That is why the Bill provides the director-general with an explicit power to determine the functions and roles that are not open to former police officers. This means that the director- general can go further than the current legislation, which requires only that a minimum of six people cannot have worked for the police—namely, the chair and a minimum of five other members of the commission. The Bill also strengthens existing arrangements in relation to transparency by setting out a requirement on the director-general to publish a statement of policy on the exercise of these particular powers of recruitment.
Lord Paddick
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for her explanation. I of course acknowledge the Government’s intention in drafting the legislation as they have. If we were starting with a completely new body with no previous track record, I would be more willing to agree with the Minister. However, this is all about public confidence and perception, and the fact is that under the previous legislation the Independent Police Complaints Commission had six commissioners, all of whom were barred by law from having been employed by the police or having held the office of constable, and now there will be only one. In theory, the rest of the new body could be formed of previous police officers. Now, I understand that that is not likely, but there is the potential for those critics of the police complaints system to point out that there has been a reduction in the number of people statutorily barred from serving on the new body—it has gone down to one.
I accept that there is an explicit power for the director-general to designate certain posts that should not be open to former police officers, but, as I say, this is all about perception. While we are grateful that “Independent” has been shunted on to the front of the description of the new body, we feel that this change—reducing the number of people who are barred statutorily from holding positions in the body—will undermine public confidence in that independence. However, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
“44A(1) Section 29FA (special provision for “DSI matters”) (as inserted by this Act) is amended as follows.(2) For “Commission”, in each place, substitute “director-general”.(3) In subsection (2), for “it”, in both places, substitute “the director-general”.”
“( ) In paragraph 4A(1)—(a) for “it appears to the person in charge” substitute “the director-general determines”;(b) for “the person must make a submission to that effect to the Commission” substitute “the director-general must proceed under sub-paragraph (2)”.( ) For paragraph 4A(2) substitute—“( ) The director-general must—(a) prepare a record of the determination,(b) notify the appropriate authority in relation to the DSI matter, and (c) send to it a copy of the determination prepared under paragraph (a).””
Baroness Jolly
“Forces maintained otherwise than by local policing bodies
After section 26(3)(b) of the Police Reform Act 2002 (forces maintained otherwise than by local policing bodies) insert—“(c) the Royal Military Police;(d) the Royal Air Force Police; and(e) the Royal Navy Police.””
Baroness Jolly (LD)
My Lords, the purpose of this amendment is to enable service men and women to make complaints about their service police to the IPCC rather than to the service police—the Royal Military Police, the Royal Air Force Police or the Royal Navy Police. I submitted this amendment after a really interesting and valuable meeting that I had with the Minister and her officials, which helped my thinking and allows me to ask for clarification about the service police and the IPCC. I am grateful to her for her time.
The Minister and I discussed the issues of the competence, culture and trust of or in the service police and the capacity of the IPCC to take over some of its functions. I remind noble Lords that Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary—HMIC—recommended that oversight of the Royal Military Police, the Royal Air Force Police and the Royal Navy Police should be brought within the competence of the IPCC. I understand that, at the moment, the IPCC is undergoing some change and is not able or willing to look at meeting the amendment’s desired outcome in the immediate future. I also understand that the service police are aware of their shortcomings and are working to address them.
Can the Minister give some indication of the Government’s current thinking about the future, and about which milestones might indicate progress? If there are any recent pronouncements from the MoD on this issue, that would also be helpful. Our service men and women deserve a process for complaints against their service police that is modern, run professionally, fit for purpose and future-proofed. I hope that the Minister can help, and I beg to move.
Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen
My Lords, I would like to reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, that the Government and the service police are fully supportive of the need for independent oversight of the service police. There is already statutory independent oversight of the complaints made against the service police, where those complaints are made through the service complaints process. That process is overseen by the independent Service Complaints Ombudsman and is available to all serving personnel. Veterans and other civilians are not able to use that process and rely solely on the service police complaints procedures, which do not currently have independent oversight. However, I should mention that, since the recommendation in Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary’s 2014 report, the service police forces have adopted a tri-service investigations protocol, which supplements their existing complaints procedure and provides for another force to investigate certain complaints where there could be a conflict of interest or allegations of criminal activity.
There is clearly further work to do on a mechanism for introducing independent oversight into complaints made against the service police. There are a number of options for doing this, including oversight by an existing body or setting up a separate new body to provide it, but a number of logistical and jurisdictional issues need to be addressed. For example, incidents requiring investigation might arise in any part of the UK or indeed anywhere in the world, including dangerous operational theatres, and clearly we would want our oversight arrangements to cater for those occasions.
The Government are therefore considering interim arrangements that will introduce independent oversight of complaints against the service police from veterans and non-service personnel, this being the gap which currently exists. We expect to be able to announce further information about this shortly. The Government remain committed to implementing a single mechanism that will provide for the independent oversight of all complaints against the service police. This aspiration is shared by each of the service police provost marshals, and we intend to update the House on progress in the first half of next year.
On a broader note, I should mention that each of the service police forces has done much in recent years to forge a culture within its organisation that aims to promote faith in its integrity and professionalism within the Armed Forces, military community and beyond. They have each implemented codes of conduct that highlight the expectations placed upon service police personnel both on and off duty. These are akin to those produced by the College of Policing and support the single service’s values and standards and leadership codes, which apply to all service personnel. In addition, all members of the service police are now required to swear an oath which declares that they will always act with fairness, integrity, diligence and impartiality. The Government are determined to ensure that, in both the short term and the long term, there can be independent scrutiny of any instances where those values are called into question. On this basis, I ask the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Jolly
My Lords, I thank the Minister for the clarification and for the meeting. I look forward to recommendations coming out very soon, as she said. In the meantime, I am happy to beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
(iv) any other person who is, by virtue of any enactment, carrying out any of the activities of a police force,”
Lord Kennedy of Southwark
Lord Kennedy of Southwark
My Lords, Amendment 106, which is tabled in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Rosser, would delete the provision that would allow police civilian staff and volunteers to use CS spray or PAVA spray. We had an interesting, if somewhat confusing, debate on this subject in Committee. I think this is a step too far and that the public will be rightly concerned about who is authorised to use these incapacitating sprays.
PCSOs have specific duties and have performed them very well. I pay tribute to them and the work they do. This provision enables civilian staff and volunteers to be designated as PCSOs to use these weapons, which can kill and have unfortunately done so. Equipping volunteers and staff with such weapons, giving them some limited training and authorising them to use those weapons against members of the public is a huge leap and one we need to be very careful about. I do not believe that the Government have made a convincing case about why it is necessary to take this route.
We have heard very little in these debates about special constables, who have the powers of police officers and undertake extensive training. Surely greater recruitment and use of special constables would be a better option if the Government want more officers on the street supporting the full-time police service. I will listen carefully to the debate and, in particular, to the response from the Minister. I beg to move.
Viscount Hailsham
I propose to be brief. This amendment, as has been very fairly pointed out by the noble Lord, removes the substance of new subsection (9B) of the Firearms Act. It is therefore relevant to look at the new subsection to see the extent to which it is acceptable. I am content with one bit of it, welcome another bit of it and remain very concerned about a third bit of it, and I shall deal with each rather briefly.
Lord Hope of Craighead
Before the noble Viscount sits down, can he be a bit more specific about what he has in mind as a self-defence device? If you have a weapon which is capable of inflicting injury, it all depends on the mind of the user. I understand the point he is making, but I am not quite sure that one could have such a category.
Viscount Hailsham
I think one can. I think a Taser is a self-defence device. I know there is a dispute about that and that many take the view that it is unduly dangerous, but I take the view that it is self-defence. I take the view that pepper spray and things of that kind are self-defence. I take the view that a revolver is not. It is that sort of distinction.
Lord Blair of Boughton
My Lords, I am sorry that I missed the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, opening this discussion, but I was somewhere else and I came here as soon as I could. My concern over this is with the concept of volunteers. As the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, says, there is a range of defensive systems here, including the truncheon itself, but I am concerned about giving volunteers Tasers. If you give a volunteer a Taser, all the volunteer has to do once it has gone off is to say that they do not want to be a volunteer anymore and disappear into the distance. Then you have nothing unless you have a criminal inquiry into what happened. My sense is that this set of clauses needs a lot more specificity.
My view is that the police could bring in some designated persons as firearms officers: they could recruit people from the Army and deploy them only to be firearms officers, which would be a logical and a budget-saving thing to do. The idea that we have to have fully trained constables standing outside embassies has always struck me as odd when we could recruit them much more cheaply. But with all those cases, you have a financial arrangement between the chief constable and that person, and they can therefore be disciplined and so on. Obviously if you shoot somebody, you have a criminal inquiry, but that is not the point here. We need to take this piece of the Bill and look at it again, to make sure we have the different types of defensive and offensive weapons, and the people who can use them, categorised. At the moment it feels that we will be opening a door we might find very difficult to close subsequently.
Lord Paddick
My Lords, I start by agreeing wholeheartedly with the noble Lord, Lord Blair, that this seems too broad in what it could allow. As the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, says, it could result in volunteers being equipped with revolvers. I also have the same concerns that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, has about a self-defence weapon being used in an aggressive as opposed to a defensive way.
We support the amendment proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy of Southwark. My noble friend Lady Hamwee and I have Amendment 107 in the group, which says that Clause 38 should not stand part of the Bill and seeks to achieve the same end as Amendment 106, which is to prevent police community support officer volunteers from being provided with CS spray or any other firearm that the Secretary of State might authorise by regulation in the future. My understanding, contrary to that of the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, is that special constables can be equipped with CS spray at the moment, and will continue to be, so I do not think that the changes in the Bill will have the effect he suggests.
The only remarks that I would add to those already made by noble Lords are that police volunteers carry out excellent work and are a valuable addition to the police family. However, with reservations already being expressed about whether paid police community support officers should be using force, and in the absence of any paid PCSO having been authorised to use CS spray by any chief constable anywhere in the United Kingdom—if I remember the debate in Committee correctly—changing the law to allow chief constables to give CS spray to volunteer PCSOs seems both unnecessary and unreasonable.
Secondly, as alluded to by the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, if chief constables need additional volunteers who can exercise the use of force, including with CS spray, because they do not have the resources any more to pay full-time police officers, whatever the rights and wrongs of that, there is a route open to them, which is to recruit more special constables, who have all the powers of a regular police officer and who are paid only expenses. We on these Benches will support the Labour amendment on this issue.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, these amendments return us to an issue that was debated at length in both the other place and in Committee in this House, namely whether it is ever right for designated members of police staff, or the new category of designated volunteers, to carry CS or PAVA sprays for defensive purposes—I stress the point that this is for defensive purposes.
I should point out to the House that, although most of our debates have been about whether it is right for volunteers to carry defensive sprays, Amendment 106 as drafted would also prevent chief officers equipping their existing paid staff, such as PCSOs, with such sprays. I assume this is not intention of the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, but it would be helpful if he could clarify this when winding up.
When we debated this issue in Committee, a number of noble Lords expressed the view that the use of force is somehow incompatible with the PCSO role, and even more so for volunteers. For example, the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, said that the appropriate route for an individual who wishes,
“to volunteer to get involved in the use of force in the exercise of police powers”,
is,
“to become a special constable”.—[Official Report, 26/10/16; col. 267.]
I think he said that again today. However, it is important to put on record that, given the long-standing tradition of policing by consent, I would hope that no one who wishes to help with the policing of their community, as a police officer or a member of staff, whether paid or as a volunteer, does so with a view to using force against their fellow citizens. There are of course myriad roles which police officers, staff and volunteers perform regularly that do not involve the use of force.
Indeed, as we have discussed, the primary role of a PCSO across England and Wales is to engage with members of the public and to carry out low-level interventions such as dealing with anti-social behaviour. However, as was discussed in the House of Commons earlier this month, it is a sad fact of life that both police officers and PCSOs are assaulted and injured on duty. For example, in 2015-16, 270 assaults were reported by PCSOs in England and Wales, and those figures do not include the British Transport Police. It should be noted that this figure includes only assaults that officers report to their health and safety or human resource teams. In some cases, officers will choose not to report cases, as it is usually not compulsory to do so. Therefore, in reality, this figure is likely to be much higher.
We must therefore ensure that chief police officers are able to use their operational experience to make judgments as to the necessary level of defensive equipment and self-defence training that they make available to their officers and PCSOs. The only other option for chief police officers would be to withdraw their PCSOs from areas where there was a threat to their safety, potentially making disorder more likely if members of the community were unable to engage with a familiar face in uniform.
The situation is in essence no different from that of special constables, who are themselves volunteers. They have all the powers of a police officer, and a significant number are trained in the use of defensive sprays. I also point out that a small proportion of specials are trained in the use of public order tactics, so the use of force by appropriately trained police volunteers is not a new idea.
The noble Lord, Lord Paddick, has tabled Amendment 107, which would remove Clause 38 from the Bill. The change to Section 54 of the Firearms Act 1968 made by Clause 38(2) is consequential on the provisions in Clause 37 enabling designated volunteers to be given access to defensive sprays. It therefore follows that if Amendment 106 were agreed to, Clause 38(2) would be unnecessary. However, Clause 38(3) deals with a separate point, making it explicit that special constables are members of a police force for the purposes of the Firearms Act 1968 and therefore do not require a certificate or authorisation under the 1968 Act when equipped with a defensive spray. Accordingly, the amendment goes wider than I believe the noble Lord intends.
A question was asked about the most appropriate route for an individual who wishes to perform front-line policing to join the specials. I think I have already addressed that point but I add that there might be reasons why an individual who wants to volunteer to help to make his or her community safer chooses not to join the specials. These reforms will enable those who wish to help to keep their communities safe to do so even where they are unable to meet the requirements for being a special—the time commitment, for example, or they may be in an occupation where they are prevented from being a special, such as being a Border Force officer, but still have skills or experience that could be of value.
My noble friend Lord Hailsham asked about the order-making power in Clause 37(6) enabling the Home Secretary to make regulations that would allow police staff and volunteers to use a firearm. The power is primarily intended as a form of future-proofing. Should, for example, a new form of defensive spray that uses substances other than CS come on to the market—
Viscount Hailsham
I do not want to press my noble friend too hard on this as she may want to indulge in correspondence on the matter. However, the Explanatory Notes state, with reference to sub-paragraphs (b) and (c):
“This enables the issue of appropriate self-defence devices in future, once such a device has been tested and authorised”.
What is there in the Bill that confines the weapon to be authorised to a self-defensive device? It is open-ended, so it includes offensive weapons.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My noble friend is right that it would theoretically be possible to use the power to enable a firearm in that way. However, the power is subject to the affirmative procedure, as he has said, so it would require the unlikely agreement of the Home Secretary, both Houses of Parliament and at least one chief constable to decide that a staff member or volunteer should be given a gun. I leave it to my noble friend, with his vast experience, to judge whether that would be likely to happen. I take the point that he was making but I want to point out the hoops that would have to be jumped through for that to be achieved.
The noble Lord, Lord Blair, talked about the order-making power for defensive weapons. There is no such thing in the Firearms Act as a “defensive weapon”. It is not the nature of the weapon that is important but how it is used; a baton or a truncheon could be used offensively while a pistol could be used defensively. The consultation was clear that only police officers should use pistols or Tasers, and we think the Bill delivers that.
I shall finish with a quote from Chief Constable David Jones, the national policing lead for Citizens in Policing. He says:
“This is a very positive development … The proposals will open up new opportunities for people to use statutory powers who would like to be part of the volunteering police family but who are unable to commit to the rigorous and intensive selection and training requirements associated with the special constabulary. The proposals will empower Chief Constables to have a much more flexible resource platform … Chief Officers are best positioned to decide how to police their local area most effectively through the empowerment of their workforce, through their understanding and knowledge of the needs of their local communities”.
As I have said at previous stages of the Bill, no chief officer has yet made a decision to designate their staff with the power to carry and use a defensive spray. However, we believe that if a chief officer, using their professional judgment and experience, were to reach the view that it was necessary to issue such sprays to their PCSOs, after they have been well-trained in their use, they should be able to do so irrespective of whether those PCSOs are employees of the force or volunteers. On that basis, I invite the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, to withdraw his amendment and perhaps to address the question that I first put to him.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have spoken in this debate. A number of points have been raised. I say to the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, that my concern all along has been the placing of these weapons in the hands of people without sufficient training.
I agree very much with the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Blair. We have to be very careful about the extension of these powers. As we have heard, so far no chief constable has empowered their present PCSOs to have these powers. The power is there already for PCSOs to be designated but no one has decided to do that yet.
The Government have not made a convincing case for the further extension of these powers. As the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, said, this is a broad power that we are now taking on board. I concur with his remarks about the fantastic contribution made by volunteers to the police service.
In response to the Minister, Clause 37 grants the extension of powers to police civilian staff and police volunteers. This extension is to those other staff who are not PCSOs but are volunteers or other designated staff. I do not see why, if they have not yet been tested on designated PCSOs, they should be extended at this stage. On that basis, I wish to test the opinion of the House.
Lord Paddick
Lord Paddick
My Lords, the amendment in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Hamwee asks that Clause 46 not stand part of the Bill. Clause 46 gives power to the Secretary of State to make regulations that specify the ranks that may be held by police officers other than chief officers of police.
We have been here before—in 1993—with the Sheehy review into police responsibilities and rewards. Among other recommendations of that review was the abolition of the ranks of chief inspector and chief superintendent. After an expensive process of offering chief inspectors early retirement, that decision was reversed, leaving the police service with a deficit of suitably qualified and experienced chief inspectors. One consequence was that overnight—or, perhaps I should say, over the weekend—I went from being a uniformed chief inspector with no experience as a detective to being a detective chief inspector in charge of CID at Notting Hill.
Another recommendation of that report was to abolish the rank of chief superintendent. Instead, in the Metropolitan Police, we had grade 1 and grade 2 superintendents, one in charge and the other a deputy. They were both called “superintendent”, they both wore the same badge of rank, but one was more senior than the other. Such nonsense did not last long, and the rank of chief superintendent was subsequently reinstated. More recently, some police forces have decided significantly to reduce or not appoint officers to particular ranks, as suits the local circumstances of each force.
History has shown us, and present practice continues to demonstrate, that we do not need the Secretary of State to designate which ranks may be held by members of police forces; it is far better to allow chief constables to decide for themselves which ranks they need and which they do not. By all means let the Secretary of State or the College of Policing issue guidance to chief officers as to factors they should take into account when deciding which ranks to have. But, please, let us not make the same, very expensive—in terms of both money and loss of experience—mistake again. I beg to move.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, policing needs a greater say in how it structures its own organisations. It was the College of Policing’s leadership review that initially recommended a review of rank structure. It recognised that the rank structure as set out in the Police Act 1996 and the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011 was not serving the needs of all forces. To support this police-led reform, Clause 46 will give the college the power to recommend regulations setting out what the rank structure should be. Chief Constable Francis Habgood, who is leading the review of the rank structure, is working with the National Police Chiefs’ Council to develop proposals that will work across all forces.
Having some commonality across forces is essential. The public have the right to expect the same high standards of service from every force and there needs to be clarity for the public around the exercise of significant police powers that can impact on civil liberties. Indeed, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, and other legislation, expressly requires certain decisions to be taken by an officer of a specified minimum rank, very often an inspector or superintendent. I note that the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, on pre-charge anonymity specified that an application to a court to waive anonymity has to be made by an officer of at least the rank of inspector. Such key protections for the citizen cannot operate meaningfully without a national rank structure. Furthermore, the Government are committed to a national pay framework for police officers, where again there must be consistency across forces. A consistent rank structure also makes interforce collaboration easier, which is a critical consideration given the many complex challenges facing modern policing that require forces to work together.
This is not to say that every force must have officers of every rank. The Metropolitan Police has, for example, recently announced that it is to do away with the rank of chief inspector and it is open to other forces to follow suit. As I said in Committee, the Government make no presumption about the rank structure that may be proposed by the College of Policing in future. I believe that we should let the work of Chief Constable Francis Habgood continue and not constrain police leaders in how forces should be organised. Parliament will have the opportunity to examine the proposals for changes to the rank structure once the College of Policing has made its recommendations, as these will need to be set out in regulations which will be subject to the affirmative procedure.
I agree that decisions are best taken locally wherever possible, but there are circumstances where we need a clear national framework. This is one such case, albeit one where the reforms provided for in Clause 46 will afford chief officers a measure of local flexibility. With those words, I hope that the noble Lord feels content to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Paddick
My Lords, I thank the Minister for that explanation which, unless I have got completely the wrong end of the stick, seems to me to be completely contradictory. The noble Baroness says that there needs to be commonality across police forces, yet then gives the example of how the Metropolitan police service is not going to appoint anybody to the rank of chief inspector.
The noble Baroness says that it is necessary to have a clear national framework—we have a clear national framework in existing legislation, which specifies the ranks. So I really do not see why we need the Secretary of State to be given the power to make regulations about what ranks there should and should not be. For example, were the Secretary of State, by regulation, to say that there must be officers of the rank of chief inspector, where would that leave the Metropolitan Police if it has decided not to have any chief inspectors, as it apparently has?
The noble Baroness also talked about how it was important for the public for there to be commonality across all forces. If the Commissioner of the Met can decide not to appoint somebody to a rank that the Home Secretary has, in regulations, said that there should be, there will not be commonality across the country. I accept what the noble Baroness says in terms of the need for a national structure—which currently exists. What does not need to be done is for that system to be changed; what is needed is for chief constables to be given guidance as to which ranks they need, which will vary from force to force. The Metropolitan Police, in its chief officer ranks, for example, has a completely different rank structure to other forces. Yet, the Government do not seem to want to change that. Commanders do not exist anywhere other than in the Metropolitan Police and the City of London Police. Deputy assistant commissioners do not exist in any other force. So there is not commonality now and there is no move by the Government to enforce commonality across the country when it comes to chief officer ranks.
I find the Minister’s explanation incomprehensible. However, at this stage, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Stedman-Scott) (Con)
My Lords, if Amendments 108A or 108B are agreed to, I cannot call Amendment 109 by reason of pre-emption.
Clause 61: Limit on period of bail under section 30A
Amendment 108A
Baroness Harris of Richmond (LD)
My Lords, before I move my amendments, some of which are also in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blair, I remind your Lordships of my policing interests, which are addressed in the register. Through these amendments —108A, 108B, 109, 112A, 112B, 113, 113A, 113B and 114—which all address the same issue, I seek to encourage the Government to accept the arguments put forward in Committee to extend the time limit for the duration of bail from 28 days to not exceeding 56 days.
The Police Superintendents’ Association of England and Wales, through its vice-president, Chief Super- intendent Paul Griffiths, has persuaded me that its professional opinion and that of the College of Policing and, without doubt, the academic work undertaken by professors Hucklesby and Zander, ought properly to be taken into account in this matter. Notwithstanding the helpful, but discouraging, letter from the Minister, for which I thank her, I believe that their concerns are rather more convincing than those of a senior civil servant in her department, however well intentioned.
Lord Blair of Boughton
My Lords, I support all the amendments in this group from the noble Baroness, Lady Harris of Richmond—including the one that she did not put forward. My name is attached to some of them but they came in quite a hurry in the last 24 hours and I think I missed some of them as they went through. I am sure that neither the noble Baroness nor I will press an amendment at this stage of the evening. However, I hope that I may be able to persuade the Minister to table an amendment at Third Reading.
I accept that the use of police bail has hitherto been seriously underregulated. I further accept that it has been used far too frequently and without the supervision of more senior officers. I agree with the tenor of this set of proposals. I also accept that in a number of cases police bail has been used in a sloppy, unthinking and unfortunate way. However, it is a well-known dictum that hard cases make bad law—and what is being proposed here is simply bad law. The argument put forward by those supporting this proposal is that the number of police bail cases will reduce. I absolutely agree; they will reduce. But police bail will be used in the most difficult cases because, without it, you cannot impose conditions on the suspect you are releasing. There are times when you need to require that the defendant does not approach the alleged victim—including children. There are times when you will want to impose residential or reporting requirements or the surrender of passports. These are the cases in which police bail will be used.
A drop in the overall number of police bail cases will not reduce this number of serious cases. As the noble Baroness, Lady Harris, suggested, these serious cases are the very cases that require, for example, forensic examination or the interrogation of computer databases. This will be done by third parties outside the police service. When all that has been done, these cases will require detailed consultation with the Crown Prosecution Service, which is also outside the police service. These bodies will handle only these sorts of cases, so they will already have a heavy workload to set against limited resources.
These cases will be investigated specifically by experienced detectives, who will deal only with these kinds of cases and will themselves have a high case load, in which each case will have a police bail clock ticking. We are talking about putting a huge amount of pressure on a system without the resources that would be necessary to complete these cases in 28 days. These cases—79% of the total—just will not be completed in 28 days, which will necessitate a return to the police station for a review by a superintendent, which will be a bureaucratic and unnecessary procedure for a suspect and his or her legal advisers. Furthermore, the 28-day limit will set up false hopes for victims—who will be told about it—that their case will be resolved within 28 days. Those hopes will be dashed.
It is fair to say that the noble Baroness and I have scarcely had time to confer over this matter, although I used the same joke in my speech about the fact that some people do not like experts. However, I know from my own correspondence and from a letter I have seen from the Minister to the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, which has already been discussed, that the Minister herself knows that all the police professional bodies— the National Police Chiefs’ Council, the Police Superintendents’ Association and the Police Federation—have advised in the strongest terms that the provisions may simply be unworkable. So has the College of Policing, which the Minister praised for its work during the debate on the last amendment. If the College of Policing is saying that this is unworkable, why are we proceeding with it? I just suggest that, if possible, the Minister might listen to this and table a government amendment at Third Reading to raise the provision to 56 days. Even if that does not happen—that is the main thing we want to happen—the idea that the inspector’s police bail can only be 28 days, not 27 or seven, is simply absurd. It is simple: what if the 28th day is Christmas Day? The Government should bring forward that amendment: in the inspector’s bail there should be the same phrase of “up to 28 days”, not “28 days”, as that will cause major mayhem.
My first point is: why not listen to the people who really know how the system will work in serious cases? There are many serious cases where it is simply impossible to persuade the forensic companies and the people who understand the nature of digital records to provide this information in time for 28 days, and for it to have been discussed by the Crown Prosecution Service. This is bad legislation, and I urge that it be reconsidered at Third Reading.
Lord Paddick
My Lords, I support what the noble Lord, Lord Blair, and my noble friend have said on this subject. My noble friend Lady Hamwee and I have Amendment 115 in this group; I will not say that it is a compromise, but it is another option.
As my noble friend Lady Harris of Richmond said today and as I raised in Committee, academics, practitioners and the College of Policing all claim that an initial 28-day limit on police bail is impractical, and a government impact assessment, which allegedly takes into account the academic research, says that a 28-day initial limit is workable. I say “allegedly” because, as the noble Lord, Lord Blair, just said, the academic research and the impact assessment come to different conclusions about the workability of an initial 28-day limit. Our amendment effectively suggests that the Government give the new 28-day limit a trial period of two years and then allow Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary to assess whether the new provision is working effectively or not; that is, whether the academics, the practitioners and the College of Policing are right, or the Home Office civil servants are right. Of course, we support much stricter limits on police bail, but they must not impede police effectiveness.
Lord Blair of Boughton
I point out that Amendment 115 would work if it was 56 days as well. In other words, you could have a two-year experiment with 56 days as well as a two-year experiment with 28 days.
Lord Bach
My Lords, I declare my interest as the police and crime commissioner for Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland and say in passing what a pleasure it was to host the Minister in Leicestershire the other day. I know that this matter was briefly raised with her, but neither I nor the chief constable talked about it for long. It was a great pleasure to have her there, and her visit went down very well.
There is a need to reform the present system of pre-charge bail. We all know of cases—of course, none in Leicestershire that I know of—where individuals, to put it mildly, have been carelessly treated by the present system. I personally know of one recent case where the delay has been truly shocking. However, the more the principle is right, the more vital it is that the practical way of putting it into effect is correct too. It is important that the change should work, without causing serious difficulties—the kind of difficulties that both the noble Baroness, Lady Harris, and the noble Lord, Lord Blair, mentioned—and unnecessary disruption for the police.
Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, we can all understand what the Government are trying to achieve with this set of clauses. There have been a number of instances where police bail has been erroneously applied, extended far too long, and the results have been unfortunate for the individuals concerned. The question is whether the solution that the Government have come forward with will work. Every other speech so far has highlighted some of the problems that would arise. The Government are also in danger of contradicting their own objectives in other areas. We heard a lot from the previous Home Secretary, who is now in a more exalted position, about the work that had been done to reduce the bureaucracy within the police force. However, we can say now with certainty that this measure will deliver more bureaucracy and waste more time.
I understand that at any one time there are about 80,000 cases where people are on police bail. Because of problems within the forensic services and problems with the CPS, most of those will probably take longer than 28 days to resolve. The Government are saying, “We know there are these problems over here”—I will not suggest that the problems in the forensic service are anything to do with the decisions of the Government in the last Parliament, but they may well have had an impact. The issues around the Crown Prosecution Service and its ability to review and make decisions on cases are also well known. Therefore a significant proportion of those 80,000 cases will have to go for review.
The Government have two choices at this point. They can say, “Ah, yes. Those cases which come up for review will not be time-consuming”. If that is the case and it is a box-ticking exercise—“Superintendent, please sign this form” and that is it—it is of no value whatever. The reality has to be that if you put a break in the system at a certain point, it has to be a real break that takes a proper amount of time. A submission has to be prepared for the superintendent; the superintendent must have time to consider it; and, of course, if one is brought in to answer police bail and have it renewed, that also involves time for the witnesses concerned.
Either this provision is a complete red herring and will not do anything—in which case one has to ask why we are doing it, because it will not solve the problem—or it will impose a significant burden. I would have thought that a possible sensible solution would be for the Government to bring forward an amendment not necessarily to change the system but so that after two years there will be a review of how well it is working, and for the intervening two years to be spent trying to resolve the problem of the length of time it takes to get forensic evidence and the length of time it takes for the Crown Prosecution Service to do its job.
I have some examples of cases that have necessarily taken a significant amount of time. I know I am sometimes criticised for being too London-centric, so these are from Cumbria. One example concerns an individual who was arrested for stalking—a serious offence of harassment. This person was arrested on 15 August and bailed until 24 October but then had to be rebailed to 18 November, which, as noble Lords will notice, is a period substantially longer than the 28 days required in the Bill. That was because the individual’s mobile phone and computer had to be examined by the high-tech crime unit. The phone was analysed in that period but the computer sat in a queue because there were even more egregious and serious cases to be dealt with.
That is not uncommon. Indeed, I have three or four more examples from Cumbria Constabulary alone and I am sure that, if I sought them, I could obtain plenty of others. The number of such delays will increase the more there is a reliance on evidence that requires the analysis of a mobile phone or a computer because there are simply not enough resources available to the police to deal with the analysis. There is another example where the bail lasted for 55 days while awaiting the forensic analysis of a breath test. There may be some internal procedural issues relating to when the laboratories deal with samples but, again, it is a practical issue not in the control of the police. Surely, if we are to resolve the general difficulty, we have to address why these delays are occurring—and occurring outside the hands of the police.
I hope the Government will take this issue away and look at it again. I think we all accept that the worst cases need to be resolved and that things need to improve to make sure that people do not hang around on police bail unnecessarily for lengthy periods. At the same time, imposing an arbitrary limit or process which will either be a complete mirage or fiction, or where a substantial input of resources will be required for something that cannot be achieved because the resources are not available in the forensic services or the CPS, is simply ridiculous.
Lord Elystan-Morgan (CB)
My Lords, I whole- heartedly support the amendment. It seems to me that the arguments that have been adduced are utterly overwhelming. The current situation is restrictive, and unnecessarily so. I was greatly impressed by what one might call the testimony of my noble friend Lord Blair, who speaks with an abundance of authority and experience on this matter. It is a nonsense to cling to the present restrictions, which are wholly unjustified. Everything that I saw in the 25 or so years that I served as a judge and a recorder supports that.
Lord Berkeley of Knighton (CB)
My Lords, listening to this debate, I found myself wondering, like the noble Lord, Lord Harris, exactly what the Government were hoping to achieve. To be generous, I imagine that they were trying to assist with the rights of the defendant as well as help the police. I can understand if that was the aim but, from what we have heard, neither of those objectives will be secured in this way. Therefore, I hope that the noble Baroness will be able to give a positive reply and that perhaps the Government will put forward their own amendments, as my noble friend Lord Blair suggested.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark
My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Harris of Richmond, in moving Amendment 108A, has made a compelling case. No one wants anybody to be on pre-charge bail any longer than is absolutely necessary. Her amendments seek to take account of the realities on the ground in local police forces, and the Government should accept them and the flexibility that they offer to police forces. She gave detailed figures to support her argument, and my noble friends Lord Bach and Lord Harris of Haringey spoke about the realities on the ground and the risk of a significant burden on police forces.
We should of course set the number of days that an individual can be on pre-charge bail before the matter is reconsidered at a maximum that is necessary, reasonable and proportionate. There should not be a target date, which in the majority of cases will not be met. The noble Baroness suggests in her Amendment 109 that 56 rather than 28 days is a more realistic target to work towards. There appears to be little to be gained from bringing people back only to be rebailed because the inquiries have not been completed—often, as we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Blair, and my noble friend Lord Harris, because other agencies have not completed their work on behalf of the police within 28 days.
Amendment 115, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, would place a duty on the Secretary of State to commission, two years after the passing of this Bill, a report on the impact of the 28 days. That strikes me as a very wise thing to do and I hope that the Government will accept it. We want to ensure that Parliament and Government are informed with proper data before coming to a decision.
Amendment 116 in this group, which has not yet been referred to, is in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Trafford. It responds to the case made by the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, who is not in his place at the moment. The Government listened to that case and I welcome the fact that they have put forward an amendment today.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, I hope that what I say will assuage some of the concerns expressed by noble Lords—through Amendments 109, 113 and 114—about the proposed 28-day period of bail being too short.
In Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, pointed to research conducted by Professor Hucklesby and Professor Zander to justify extending the initial period of pre-charge bail from 28 to 56 days. I point out from the outset that, as part of our reforms, there is a presumption that a suspect who has been arrested will be released without bail—that is, there is a presumption against bail. As the noble Lord, Lord Blair, rightly said, even though he does not agree with the Government’s position, bail has been overused and not used correctly. Over time, there has been a sloppy use of bail, if I may paraphrase what he said. Therefore, in a sense, we start from that position.
In reaching our view, we took full account of the research findings referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Paddick. As I said in Committee, the 28-day period set out in the Bill was not arrived at by chance; we carefully considered the initial period of bail, taking into account the research in drawing up our proposals. We acknowledge that the research concludes that many cases will not be dealt with within 28 days. That is why the system allows for extensions in such cases, but only where such extensions can be justified. We consider that the involvement of superintendents at this stage would enable them to review the cases under investigation within their force and to chase any cases where required. I stress again that a central feature of these reforms is that there is a presumption that a suspect who has been arrested will be released without bail—where there is no bail, no 28-day or any other limit is in operation.
Lord Paddick
Before the Minister sits down—and with the leave of the House, as one would normally intervene to seek clarification from the Minister—I wish to correct what she said about people on these Benches accepting the 28-day limit. That is not the case.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
Perhaps I worded it clumsily, but what I was trying to say is that it would be a sunset provision and reviewed after two years.
Lord Harris of Haringey
Before the Minister sits down, will she address the question of whether or not, as part of their response to this, the Government will take some action to support the improvement of forensic services and the speed at which forensic cases are dealt with? What steps are the Government going to take to improve the resources available to the CPS so that it might deal with cases more quickly? That is a major reason why the 28-day period would be under pressure.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
The noble Lord makes a very good point, and there are in fact other reasons outside the police’s control why 28 days might prove difficult. It is for that reason that we will not only keep it under review but look at any blockages to the 28 days being fulfilled that are outside the police’s control.
Baroness Harris of Richmond
My Lords, I thank the Minister for her response and all noble Lords who spoke in support of the amendments. I guarantee to the Government that the exercise of this will be far more burdensome than they expect and that we will come back to this. These ideas will haunt the Government, because—
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, may I be completely rude and intervene on the noble Baroness? I completely forgot to speak to government Amendment 116. Will she indulge me, while I outline that amendment very briefly?
Amendment 116 responds to a point raised by my noble friend Lord Marlesford in Committee, and to which the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, alluded, when he argued that written notification should be given in all cases where the police decide to take no further action. Amendment 116 complements Clauses 65 and 66, ensuring that notification of a decision to take no further action is always given, whatever the circumstances of a case. I commend the government amendment to the House and apologise for interrupting the noble Baroness.
Baroness Harris of Richmond
My Lords, it is quite all right.
I want to take up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Blair. Have the Government taken into account what will happen if the 28-day period falls over Diwali, Christmas Day, Easter Sunday, the Sabbath, Ramadan, Eid or other religious festivals? This will cause real concern as there is no flexibility to respect these dates.
What about medical appointments, pre-arranged holidays, job interviews, caring responsibilities, academic examinations, funerals? The list is endless. There may be a case for a breach of human rights; certainly it could cause a corrosive relationship between the police and the public because of the length of time and the lack of flexibility. I hope that the Government will look again very closely at what many noble Lords have been proposing. At this stage there does not seem much point in dividing the House, so I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
“(3A) This subsection applies where the custody officer believes that a decision as to whether to charge the person with the relevant offence would be made before the end of the applicable bail period in relation to the person.”
“PACE: duty to notify person interviewed that not to be prosecuted
After section 60A of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 insert—“60B Notification of decision not to prosecute person interviewed(1) This section applies where—(a) a person suspected of the commission of a criminal offence is interviewed by a police officer but is not arrested for the offence, and(b) the police officer in charge of investigating the offence determines that—(i) there is not sufficient evidence to charge the person with an offence, or(ii) there is sufficient evidence to charge the person with an offence but the person should not be charged with an offence or given a caution in respect of an offence.(2) A police officer must give the person notice in writing that the person is not to be prosecuted.(3) Subsection (2) does not prevent the prosecution of the person for an offence if new evidence comes to light after the notice was given.(4) In this section “caution” includes—(a) a conditional caution within the meaning of Part 3 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003;(b) a youth conditional caution within the meaning of Chapter 1 of Part 4 of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998;(c) a youth caution under section 66ZA of that Act.””
Baroness Walmsley
“136A Prohibition on using police stations as places of safety(1) A person may not, in the exercise of a power to which this section applies, be removed to, kept at or taken to a police station as a place of safety.(2) The powers to which this section applies are—(a) the power to remove a person to a place of safety under a warrant issued under section 135(1);(b) the power to take a person to a place of safety under section 135(3A);(c) the power to remove a person to, or to keep a person at, a place of safety under section 136(1);(d) the power to take a person to a place of safety under section 136(3).(3) In this section “person” means a person of any age.(4) The Secretary of State may by regulations made by statutory instrument appoint a date on which this section comes into force.(5) In this section “place of safety” means residential accommodation provided by a local social services authority under Part III of the National Assistance Act 1948, a hospital as defined by this Act, an independent hospital or care home for mentally disordered persons or any other suitable place.”
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, we now move to issues relating to the interaction between the police and people with mental health problems. This amendment would ban the use of police cells for adults detained under Sections 135 and 136 of the Mental Health Act 1983 in the same way as this Bill now bans it for children under 18.
I am very encouraged by the 53% reduction in the use of police cells as places of safety during 2015-16. The police, mental health services, local authorities and voluntary sector partners deserve our congratulations on that. However, that still left 2,100 people taken to police cells—a situation that will have led inevitably to exacerbation of their mental health crisis. I listened very carefully to what the Minister said in response to a similar amendment that we discussed in Committee. I thank the Minister for the meeting that we had at the Home Office to discuss it. I am encouraged by the clearly expressed intention of the Government eventually to reduce the use of police cells to zero, and I hope that the Minister will feel able to accept this modified amendment, which takes account of her concerns.
We got rid of discriminatory mental health legislation only a few years ago, and we are on a journey towards parity of esteem between physical and mental health. The Mental Health Act 1983 is now over 30 years old, and we need further to update how we treat people with mental health problems and enshrine that in statute. At least two police forces have now managed to reach the desirable target of zero use, which proves that use of police cells can be avoided even in exceptional circumstances, so we are not asking for something that has been shown to be impossible; we are asking for something that has been shown to be possible. But we appreciate that it requires the provision of more health-based places of safety, more training, better regulation, better partnership working and more diversionary strategies such as street triage.
That is why subsection (4) of the new clause, which my amendment would insert into the Bill, makes provision for delayed implementation until such time as the Secretary of State is convinced that everything is in place to ensure that there is no longer any need to take people in mental health crisis to a police cell for their assessment to be done. I appreciate that this was not strictly necessary, as implementation is dealt with elsewhere in the Bill, but I included it to make clear what I am asking for. I suggest that an implementation date of April 2019 is quite achievable.
When you are in a crisis, you need compassion and understanding and, with the best will in the world, the police are not the people to give that. That is why the police themselves are keen that the objective of my amendment is achieved as soon as possible. A mental health crisis is a mental health car crash. Nobody who broke their leg in a road accident would expect to be taken to a police station for triage; they would be taken to a health-based place of safety for their needs to be assessed and treated—in other words, an A&E department in hospital. We cannot say that we have achieved parity of esteem between physical and mental health if we continue to treat mental health emergencies in a different way from the way we treat physical emergencies. People detained in this way are not criminals and yet they are treated as such and feel distressed and confused, making it even more difficult to help them get well.
Baroness Howe of Idlicote (CB)
My Lords, I would like to support Amendment 117, moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, which would eradicate the practice of police cells being used as a place for safety for people in crisis. It is an important amendment, both because people who are experiencing a mental health crisis and being detained under the Mental Health Act have committed no crime and because, for those in such a distressed state, being linked into health support is critical.
People who are picked up by the police under the Mental Health Act are detained because of a real risk of harm to themselves or others. Regardless of their age, no one should be made to feel like a criminal simply for being unwell; these people are in need of help and support. They are detained in order that a mental health assessment can be made and for any further treatment and care to be put in place. When you are in a mental health crisis, you are likely to feel overwhelmed and extremely distressed. Your behaviour may seem aggressive and threatening to others, but nevertheless you still need support and compassion. In fact, the people who display the most challenging behaviour are often the most vulnerable—those most in need of health support.
Health-based places of safety need to be equipped to manage someone’s challenging behaviour, and areas such as Merseyside and Hertfordshire are able to do this, where police cells have not been used at all for the past year. This amendment acknowledges that achieving a total ban on the use of police cells in some areas is not yet possible, so it gives the Secretary of State the power to determine a date for implementation. This is important because it sends the message loud and clear that all parties agree that people who are extremely unwell should never be taken to a cell. The amendment will be a lever to ensure that health-based places of safety are invested in and that staff are trained to manage challenging behaviour.
Police cells are clearly never appropriate for people in crisis, and we need to challenge the assumption that sometimes they are. We have already come some way in improving the lives of those with mental health problems, so ending the outdated practice of taking someone in crisis to a police cell is an obvious, achievable and important next step. I hope that the Minister can accept the excellent amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley.
Baroness Meacher (CB)
My Lords, first I must apologise that I was not involved in the earlier stages of this Bill due to a family health problem. However, I want to speak briefly but very strongly in support of Amendment 117, moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley.
This House was responsible for ensuring that parity of esteem between mental and physical illness is enshrined in law—a point already referred to by the noble Baroness. This was rightly heralded as an important advance which, over time, should transform attitudes to mental illness and change the treatment of those suffering from mental health problems. Is it conceivable that we would send a patient with a severe physical illness, perhaps cancer or a heart problem, to a police cell because no suitable bed was available locally? Of course not. We would all regard that as utterly inhuman.
But to send a patient in a mental health crisis to a police cell is even more inhuman than doing that to someone who is capable of understanding what is going on. The patient will probably be frightened enough by their own thoughts and the voices going on in their head. They may not understand what is happening to them. Handcuffs and strange people in uniform will be even more terrifying to such patients than they would be to a physically ill person. I do not know the figures, but I do know about the extreme distress that these situations generate and I have no doubt that a good proportion of those who survive—not everyone does—will end up with post-traumatic stress disorder.
I draw on my experience of mental health services over many years and my supervision of investigations into deaths in custody during my years with the Police Complaints Authority. I want to refer to a couple of cases from that time that come to mind in the context of this amendment. A young man of about 20 years old was detained under Section 136 with no mental health professional available to him. The plan was to take him to a police cell. The police had been warned that the young man could be violent, so a firearms officer was made available, which is perfectly reasonable. The patient had delusions that the people around him were all dead and that he was the only one who was alive. He said to the police officers, “You are dead”, who took this comment to be a threat to life. The firearms officer took out his pistol and shot the young man, who died.
The other case I want to refer to involved a very unwell man taken, again I am pretty sure under Section 136, to a police station, where he was restrained on the floor. We do not know what terrible thoughts the patient had in his mind, but the more he was restrained the more he struggled to get free, and understandably the more force was used by the officers to control him. The patient died on that floor. These patients would probably have recovered reasonably well over a period of a few weeks and might have lived full lives for many decades. We can imagine the feelings of their relatives.
The police officers suffered terribly during the lengthy investigations. I have to confess that those investigations were always lengthy and I am sure that they still are. They did not know whether they would be found guilty of murder or manslaughter. That is an appalling thing to happen to a young man who had gone to work that day assuming that he would do his duty as always, but without the mental health skills he needed to deal with the challenges confronting him. This situation is not fair either to patients or to police officers.
Along with other Peers, I very much welcome the ban in this Bill on the use of police cells for those aged under 18 and the plan to reduce their use for adults. Without Amendment 117, my fear is that it could be many years before the aspiration to end the use of police cells as so-called places of safety is actually achieved. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, has been sensitive to the resource pressures, which I certainly understand, in proposing that April 2019 should be the date by which this aspiration must be achieved. This is a modest amendment that simply reinforces the direction of travel of the Government, which I applaud. I hope that the Minister will give it the serious consideration it deserves and bring forward an amendment at Third Reading.
Lord Rosser
My Lords, I do not wish to repeat all that has been said, but I would like to raise one or two points. The first refers to the statistics on the use of Section 136 of the Mental Health Act in 2015 and 2016 to which the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, has already referred. They show some surprising discrepancies between police force areas on Section 136 cases. For example, Hertfordshire and Merseyside are the two police force areas in which there has been zero use of police cells under Section 136. However, in Lincolnshire, police cells were used under the Section 136 powers on 173 occasions during 2015-16, in the context of a total usage under Section 136 on just 368 occasions. That is a staggeringly high percentage. Equally, one could go through the whole list and point to considerable discrepancies. Surprisingly, although one might have thought that the figure for the Metropolitan Police would be pretty high, the number of occasions in 2015-16 on which people were placed in police cells under the powers in Section 136 was apparently 17, in the context of a total figure of 3,693.
I cannot understand why we have these discrepancies, and I would appreciate it if the Minister commented on that. Is it really about suitable places being available in these areas, or a lack of co-ordination or willpower, or a lack of priority being given to avoiding the need to use police cells? Some response from the Government on that point would be extremely helpful, and extremely interesting.
I want to refer to the letter of 25 November 2016 that the noble Baroness, Lady Chisholm of Owlpen, sent to the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, to which the latter has already referred. It would be helpful—to me, at least—to have some clarification of what parts of the letter mean. It states:
“It is … our intention that the regulations make clear that certain situations, in and of themselves, do not justify use of a police station, for example, because there is no health based place of safety available at that time. Our expectation, which will be reinforced in the guidance that will support the regulations, is that there should be local plans in place to deal with this and other contingencies”.
What does the reference to,
“local plans in place to deal with this and other contingencies”,
mean? Does that mean that places have to be provided, or something else? The letter continues:
“A police station will only be used as a place of safety if it is considered to be the best and safest way to manage a particular individual in the interests of all concerned”.
But what happens if no health-based place of safety is available at that time? Does the sentence I quoted mean that in that situation, if no such place of safety is available, a police cell can be used? Other references in the letter suggest that that would not be the case, and that, in effect, a police cell could be used only when the individual was considered to be a danger to themselves or to others. Again, it would be very helpful to have some clarification.
I may not have heard the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, properly—I am afraid I am all too good at that—but I thought, and I may be doing her a disservice, that she said that the Government had indicated that they intend to reduce to zero the use of police cells. If so, may I have confirmation of that, because I do not think the letter of 25 November 2016 says that? Of course, the statement:
“A police station will only be used as a place of safety if it is considered to be the best and safest way to manage a particular individual in the interests of all concerned”,
still leaves open the possibility of using a police cell, and would not be consistent with the Government’s intention, if it is their intention, in the long term—one hopes in rather less than the long term—to reduce to zero the use of police cells.
I would like to raise two or three other points related to treating people in a situation of mental health crisis. Clause 80 would reduce the permitted period of detention in any place of safety—not just police cells—from 72 hours to 24 hours. Of course, one could argue that 24 hours is still quite a lengthy period for individuals to be detained prior to an assessment of their mental health, wherever they are detained. The proposals do provide for a further 12-hour extension of that detention period. As has already been pointed out, individuals with urgent mental health needs have just as much right to acute and emergency health care as anyone else. If any other forms of emergency health care were provided within a window of only 24 to 36 hours, it would probably provoke some highly adverse comment. Did the Government consider bringing the time limit down further, to 12 hours, say, with the possibility of extending detention by up to a further 12 hours on the authority of, for example, the registered medical practitioner responsible for the person in question’s examination under the Mental Health Act?
I want also to refer to the position—or lack of it—of independent mental health advocates. As I understand it, subject to other powers in the Mental Health Act, they are available to provide independent advocacy and advice to individuals such as those liable to psychiatric detention, or those who have received community treatment orders. Among other important functions, independent mental health advocates help individuals to obtain information about their detention or treatment, and support them in understanding what is happening to them. But as I understand it, individuals detained under Sections 135 and 136 of the Mental Health Act do not have a right to an independent mental health advocate. Surely, detention in any place of safety is a feature of the mental health regime, and one in which independent advocacy, advice and assistance are desirable, if not required. Why is it that individuals convicted of no crime but detained for their own safety can have no access to the independent advocacy and assistance to which they would be entitled during other mental health interventions but not under Sections 135 and 136? A related point is that the PACE codes of practice lay down a requirement to have access to an appropriate adult, but on too many occasions, this does not happen as the code of practice indicates it should.
Finally, for the purposes of the police and criminal evidence arrangements, a police intervention under Sections 135 and 136 is treated as an arrest, and any police involvement in taking a person to a place of safety generates information held by police as to that person’s mental health history, including the recording of a police intervention by way of Sections 135 or 136. The Disclosure and Barring Service provides a system whereby an individual’s criminal record may be checked and, where relevant, disclosed to prospective employers. Ordinary DBS checks result in cautions and convictions being revealed, where permitted, but under enhanced DBS checks, other information held by the police as to their involvement with that individual may be disclosed as well, where the officer responsible reasonably believes it to be relevant and that it ought to be disclosed. Police will hold information as to any arrest they conduct and any involvement they have in taking a person to a place of safety under Section 135 or Section 136. The mere fact of police intervention in response to a person’s mental health crisis is therefore liable to be disclosed. It could therefore have quite significant adverse consequences when it comes to seeking employment.
I understand that since August last year new guidelines have been enforced, requiring constables to disclose as part of such checks only records they reasonably believe to be relevant. There is guidance given relating to Section 135 that indicates that the fact of detention under Sections 135(1) and 136 of the Mental Health Act is unlikely in itself to be sufficient to justify disclosure. Sections 135 and 136 provide the police with powers to remove a person to a place of safety when the person is believed to be suffering from a mental disorder and in need of care or control. Such a detention under the Mental Health Act does not constitute a criminal investigation and should therefore be treated with great caution when considering relevance for disclosure. But, of course, police officers are not mental health professionals. There is nothing to require them to seek the advice of such professionals before making a decision as to the relevance of a person’s mental health.
There is surely a real danger that the police will continue to disclose mental health records. Where a person is processed through the criminal justice system, information relevant to criminal matters may be disclosed as part of an enhanced EBS check. However, the disclosure of an individual’s medical history is an entirely different matter. Will the Government impose a ban on the disclosure of Sections 135 and 136 detentions under criminal records checks? I hope the response to the points I have raised, if not available tonight, might be available subsequently.
Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, for giving your Lordships’ House a further opportunity to debate the continued use of police stations as places of safety for adults. I think we all agree on the importance of taking someone experiencing a mental health crisis to a place of safety that will best meet their particular needs. We can also agree that, almost always, that should not be a police station, irrespective of the person’s age. But where we have not previously quite agreed is on removing outright the option of using a police station for an adult in those very rare cases where it is the judgment of the police officer on the scene that a police station is the safest place—at least initially—not just for the patient but for the public, health professionals or anyone else at risk from the extreme behaviour of the individual.
Let me make it plain that while the Government’s position is that it would be wrong and potentially very dangerous to ban outright the use of police stations as places of safety for adults, we have no intention of leaving police officers without support in making the judgment that a particular situation is of such severity that this would be the correct response. The regulation-making powers in Clause 79 will be used to set out factors relevant to the decision on whether circumstances merit the use of a police station. We envisage that these will cover a range of issues, such as how dangerous an individual’s behaviour is and how serious a risk of harm to themselves or others they represent. We will also look to include provisions to give the officer the opportunity to consult with mental health professionals if it is safe and practicable to do so.
Equally importantly, if the decision is made to use a police station, we must make sure that the individual receives all the appropriate healthcare and treatment they need while they are there. This, too, will be covered in the planned regulations. The regulations will further provide for a regular review of the individual’s condition so that they can be moved to a more appropriate place of safety if the circumstances change—for example, if their behaviour has moderated and the move is in their best interest and can be achieved without delaying the mental health assessment.
I expect that, once these provisions come into force, we will see a further substantial reduction in the use of police stations as a place of safety for adults. But it would be wrong, in our view, to assume that we can reach a point over the next few years when we can say with absolute certainty that there will never be circumstances where the use of a police station as a place of safety for an adult is an appropriate option because their extreme behaviour cannot safely be managed in an alternative place of safety. That being the case, we do not believe that the proposed new clause is an appropriate way forward. However, I want to reach the position whereby police stations are used as a place of safety only in specific, “exceptional” circumstances —and, when they are used, the person taken there must be given the right medical care.
Lots of points were raised during the debate. The noble Lord, Lord Rosser, asked why there were discrepancies in the use of police cells across police forces. There is a range of reasons why this happens. It may include different policies on accepting violent behaviour, but it is also about the fact that, as the noble Lord pointed out, in London, for instance, they are not used as widely as they are in Lincolnshire, which has seen a high rise in the use of police cells. Often that is because Lincolnshire is more rural and there are not so many places of safety available, whereas there are more in London. So there are several reasons why that could be the case.
Lord Rosser
Most people regard Dorset as quite rural, but the number of Section 136 detentions in police cells it had was just 10 out of a total of 429 uses of Section 136. Does that not rather knock on the head the argument that it is something to do with how rural an area is?
Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen
I was pointing that out as just one of the reasons why it might be—but we have to remember that, as we know, mental health is going through a huge change at the moment. As I said in a debate on Monday, I am afraid that we are going from a very low base. We have to be aware that it will take time for these places of safety to be there to ensure that we have an increased number of beds or places of safety for these people to be taken. That is part of the reason for the discrepancy.
To go back to further points raised on mental health, the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, raised an issue related to the respective changes to police powers under Sections 135 and 136 of the Mental Health Act. The noble Lord suggested that the maximum detention period should be reduced further to 12 hours. We are confident that the Bill reduces the maximum detention period by the appropriate amount—from 72 hours to 24 hours. The Government have seen evidence that the average assessment under Section 136 is conducted in under 11 hours. Furthermore, we fully support the target set by the Royal College of Psychiatrists for assessments to commence within three hours. However, there are some cases when it is not possible, due to the condition of the person detained, to conduct a meaningful assessment within 12 hours: for example, if they are intoxicated through alcohol or drugs.
The noble Lord also mentioned duties on police to consult with mental health professionals, with detainees having a right to an independent mental health advocate. The second issue concerned access to independent advice. Clause 78 requires police officers to seek advice from certain specific healthcare professionals, if practical, before making a decision to exercise their powers under Section 136. This is about supporting police officers to make the best possible decisions when they encounter a person who may be experiencing a mental crisis. This provision builds on existing good practice of police forces and local NHS services working together collaboratively, including through street triage schemes. The “if practical to do so” condition will avoid tying the hands of an officer if, in their judgment, they need to use the powers quickly to secure an individual’s safety.
On detainees’ access to advice, for example from a mental health advocate or an appropriate adult, the guidance supporting the implementation of these provisions will set out the expected support to be provided to any person detained at a place of safety under Section 135 or Section 136. Such support can, in our view, most appropriately be provided by health staff already present, rather than another person in a bespoke role, which would introduce delays and jeopardise professionals’ ability to conduct the assessment within 24 hours.
The noble Lord asked whether a person’s detention is disclosable if they subsequently apply for a disclosure and barring service check. In 2015 the Home Office published revised statutory guidance on enhanced DBS checks in relation to Section 135 and Section 136 detentions. The guidance now emphasises that the use of these powers in and of itself is unlikely to be sufficient to justify disclosure. The police are now directed to specifically factor in the behaviour of the detained person at the time, and how long they were detained. The Government’s position is that we cannot wholly rule out the possibility that there will continue to be circumstances in the future when a person’s behaviour is so extreme that it can safely be managed, at least initially, only in a police station. We are not legislating for some future point when that position will cease to be the case, which is what the amendment suggests.
I hope that, with all the things I have set out, and given our clear shared objective of doing what is in the best interests of all concerned, including their safety, I hope that the noble Baroness will be content to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, I thank those who supported my amendment. I was fascinated by the treatise of the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, on other aspects of Sections 135 and Section 136. He is, of course, absolutely right that there is no correlation at all between the use of police cells and the rurality or urbanisation of the area concerned: absolutely none. I have always known that Merseyside is a very special place—because that is where I come from—but apparently in Merseyside there are no “exceptional circumstances”, whereas there are in other places. I cannot understand the Government’s determination to insist that there will be exceptional circumstances in other places if there are none in Hertfordshire and Merseyside.
It is quite clear that the Government are not going to move on this. However, I have to say that I welcome, of course, what the noble Baroness said about regulations. We will have to keep a very careful eye on how these work and whether they achieve our joint objective of bringing the numbers down as low as possible. I very much hope that that is exactly what will happen over the next few years. The hour being what it is, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Walmsley
“Child sexual exploitation: duty to refer
(1) Where the police have a reasonable belief that a child under the age of 18 has been a victim of a sexual offence or other forms of child abuse, the police must refer the child for a mental health assessment by an appropriately trained professional.(2) The Secretary of State must by regulations made by statutory instrument define the meaning of an “appropriately trained professional”.(3) A statutory instrument containing regulations under this section may not be made unless a draft of the instrument has been laid before, and approved by a resolution of, each House of Parliament.”
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, Amendment 118 places a duty on police forces to refer children under 18 who are the victims of a sexual offence or other forms of child abuse for a mental health assessment by an appropriately trained professional. It mandates a currently poorly used referral pathway. I listened carefully to the Minister’s response in Committee and have changed the amendment that I bring forward today. I wish to stress that this amendment does not mean that all these children will need a CAMHS intervention or will have a diagnosable mental health condition. It is designed not only to support children who are the victims of these awful crimes but to inform commissioning decision-makers about the magnitude of the problem, so as to ensure that the right services are in place. We cannot rely on the numbers that reach the clinical threshold for intervention, because these thresholds are far too high, given the shortage of child and adolescent mental health services.
The amendment is deliberately not prescriptive as to who “an appropriately trained professional” would be, leaving this to regulations and local flexibility. This person could be a nurse, school councillor, trained social worker, councillor in a sexual assault referral centre or another appropriate local professional. The amendment strikes the right balance between local and national responsibilities. It introduces a national requirement for a referral pathway and assessment, but it does not set out the how and where, which will be up to local areas to determine. This is responsive to the level of need of these children and the evidence we have that they are not receiving the therapeutic support they need for their recovery.
As I said at the outset, the amendment would not mean that all victims of a sexual offence or other forms of child abuse would meet the clinical thresholds. Some may, but some may need other types of support—for example, school or community-based child sexual exploitation support groups, family support services, or support for parents and children to equip them to understand the emotional impact of abuse. The amendment would deliver the recommendation in Future in Mind, which the Government are committed to implementing in full, that,
“those who have been sexually abused and/or exploited receive a comprehensive assessment and referral to the services that they need, including specialist mental health services”.
The evidence for the amendment is compelling. In the past year the Children’s Society has calculated that more than 40,000 crimes of a sexual nature were reported against children. Each of these 40,000 is a child suffering the effects of horrific crimes, which come with a multitude of long-term effects that need to be addressed. We have only to read the recent media accounts of many footballers who were abused as children to understand the lifelong effects of these terrible experiences. They destroy lives and careers. Analysis by the Children’s Society of referral pathways for vulnerable groups found that less than half of mental health trusts identify children who have experienced sexual exploitation in referral and initial assessment forms. The NSPCC review of local transformation plans found that only one-third of these plans mentioned provision of services to meet the needs of these children. Yet while these figures are appalling, the experiences of the victims themselves show the need for the amendment even more.
Last week the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, and I attended a meeting organised by the NSPCC and the Children’s Society and I want to share with noble Lords the account of Sarah—not her real name—who told her story. I record my thanks to her for sharing her experiences and her powerful message as to why this amendment is needed. Sarah was abused from a very young age by a member of her extended family and this had a long-term impact on her life. As her understanding of consensual relationships developed, Sarah realised that what she had experienced was abuse and as a teenager she suffered from clinical depression and was extremely suicidal. She was later referred to counselling and gradually came to terms with what had happened to her. The abuse had a long-term impact on her mental health, including eating disorders, drug abuse, PTSD and abusive relationships. At the meeting Sarah told us that the support she received was invaluable for her recovery. She thought that the amendment would support young people who had experienced sexual exploitation and help them recover more quickly by ensuring a direct referral from the police.
The amendment will also contribute to parity of physical and mental health. Recently, nine ex-Health Secretaries wrote to the Health Secretary to encourage the Government to,
“make good the promise to achieve genuine equality”,
between physical and mental health. Parity of esteem was enshrined in law by the Health and Social Care Act 2012, yet examples of this being enacted in policy are still rare. We know that nine out of 10 children who have experienced abuse at an early age will develop a mental illness by the time they are 18. Without assessment, how can we know which 10% will not need help? Issues faced include post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, self-harm, depression and, as we have heard, suicide attempts.
This is not a novel idea. There are numerous examples of where preventive public health initiatives have been set up in response to data on the prevalence of certain conditions affecting the physical health of a population. For example, cervical screening is now offered to all women over the age of 25. My first job out of university in the late 1960s was scanning the cervical smears of women with symptoms, so I know how effective screening is at picking up early cancer and pre-cancerous cells so that the patient can be treated early. The current rate of cervical cancer is 12 cases per 100,000 women—0.012%. Since its introduction, the screening programme has led to a decrease in the number of cervical cancer cases by about 7% each year, and it is estimated that up to 5,000 cases of cervical cancer are prevented annually because of cervical screening. That is a terrific record but the prevalence of cervical cancer is a great deal less than nine out of 10.
Viscount Hailsham
My Lords, I hope we do not go down this road. It seems a thoroughly bad idea. Of course there is a good case for voluntary provision. There may be many cases where assessment is highly desirable but this is coercive. It imposes an obligation on the police officer to do what is set out in the amendment.
Baroness Walmsley
I would like to make it clear that it would be only with the consent of the child, so it would be consensual as far as they were concerned.
Viscount Hailsham
That is not what it says in the amendment. Had it been so, I would not object, but we are talking about a piece of legislation, and it is coercive. If the police officer has to do it, presumably the child has to co-operate. You are not dealing just with young children, either. You are dealing with people up to the age of 18 and I would have thought that there were a substantial number of cases where the child would not want to be assessed and would find it pretty traumatic if he or she was. While there may be a strong case for putting in place a voluntary system for doing it, there is absolutely no case for making it coercive. I really hope that the House will not think of pursuing such a policy.
Baroness Howe of Idlicote
My Lords, I think I will leave aside the contribution of the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham. I do not really agree with what he said. My name is on this amendment and I support it because it would create a clear and explicit referral pathway for child victims of a sexual offence or other forms of child abuse for an assessment of their mental health needs.
As we have heard, the amendment would deliver on the Government’s own commitment in Future in Mind and work to put in place policies that go a step towards creating parity between physical and mental health. The Government say that they want to develop:
“A better offer for the most vulnerable children and young people”,
including by ensuring that,
“those who have been sexually abused and/or exploited receive a comprehensive assessment and referral to the services that they need, including specialist mental health services”.
The amendment would deliver on that ambition.
It is important to recognise that the Government have made welcome steps in this area, in particular through their investment of £1.4 billion over the course of this Parliament in children’s and young people’s mental health services. However, there is evidence to show that this is not yet reaching the most vulnerable. According to research from the Education Policy Institute, in the first year of funding, of the expected £250 million only £143 million was released—and of that, only £75 million was distributed to clinical commissioning groups. For 2016-17, £119 million has been allocated to clinical commissioning groups—but this has not been ring-fenced, risking that it will be spent on other priorities.
It is clear from the evidence available and what we have heard today that these young people are at extremely high risk of developing a mental health condition. Lifelong difficulties can result in drug and alcohol abuse, mental ill-health, homelessness, gang affiliation and/or disability if the underlying trauma of their experiences is not met with swift and appropriate intervention. Research has found that up to 90% of children who have experienced abuse will develop a mental illness by the time they are 18. In the spirit of parity between physical and mental health to which we all aspire, in a comparable physical situation people would be screened and have regular check-ups, yet we do not offer the most vulnerable children the same opportunity to receive the help they so vitally need.
National policy is increasingly focused on the social determinants of long-term health. Evidence has shown that adverse childhood experiences are a key risk factor for poor outcomes such as worse health, coming into contact with the criminal justice system and worse employment and educational outcomes over the life course. Children who are victims of a sexual offence are often left without support for their mental health difficulties, which are likely to develop into more entrenched mental health conditions later in life, because they do not meet the thresholds for clinical interventions or because a suitably trained professional does not properly assess their mental health needs.
This amendment would provide national consistency, as we know that the situation across the country is inconsistent and young people are not always getting the holistic assessment they need to meet their needs. Thresholds for mental health clinical interventions are inconsistent across the country and referral routes into CAMHS are varied, with some areas not allowing the local voluntary sector to refer directly. Some sexual assault referral centres refer children for mental health support, but others do not.
In her response in Committee, the Minister mentioned the commissioning framework for adult and paediatric sexual assault referral centre—SARC—services, published in August 2015. However, case-tracking evidence from the Havens in London found that, of the 24 children under 13 who were reviewed, only three were referred to CAMHS and that, of the 56 young people aged 13 to 17 who had their cases reviewed as part of the study, only five were referred. It was acknowledged in the same report:
“Few children are referred to CAMHS from the Havens, most likely as interventions are generally at the forensic examination stage and it is difficult to determine longer term emotional support needs at this … stage”.
It is therefore necessary to ensure that other agencies have a duty to refer for a mental health assessment, in order to guarantee that a young person’s holistic mental health needs are assessed after their traumatic experience.
Alongside providing national consistency, this amendment would introduce a referral for an assessment and enable better understanding of the level of support that needs to be provided both by CAMHS and outside CAMHS. This will lead not only to better responses and referral routes for young people but a greater understanding to inform commissioning at local level, so I hope that the Minister will be able to accept this amendment.
Earl Attlee (Con)
My Lords, I accept the principle in the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, in cases of persistent abuse but I am afraid that I am with my noble friend Lord Hogg. There is—
Earl Attlee
I meant the noble Viscount. I absolutely accept the point made by my noble friend. There is no flexibility in the amendment. After a fleeting grope of a 17 year-old at a Tube station, someone would still be caught by this in totally inappropriate circumstances. So, although I accept the need in serious cases, I am afraid that I cannot advise my noble friend the Minister to accept this amendment because of the lack of flexibility.
Lord Kennedy of Southwark
I am conscious of the late hour and that the next business should be coming on, so I will be very brief. From our Benches, we certainly endorse the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, who, along with the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, has spoken in great detail on it. I do not intend to speak for much longer than that—but what is being highlighted here is very important. I will make one point: the amendment is not suggesting that all young people need is CAMHS; they need a holistic approach, so that their mental health needs can be properly assessed. It is not quite as stark as the noble Viscount or the noble Earl suggested. We certainly support the amendment on these Benches and I will leave it at that.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
I applaud the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, on her intention to ensure that children who have been abused have the proper provision following that abuse, mainly because they are often traumatised by their experiences. I share her desire to ensure that such children receive the support they need, including for their mental and physical health, but I must reiterate my strong belief that the overriding determinant of referral for health services must be clinical need.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
With no coercion, as the noble Viscount says. The important thing is that all children and young people, not just those who are victims of sexual offences, get the right care at the right time, based on their needs—not on a non-clinician’s view of their potential needs, based on their experiences. Furthermore, the amendment makes no reference to obtaining consent.
I think that my noble friend Lord Hailsham referred to that. Individuals, including children or their parents or carers, as appropriate, need to consent to receive treatment. Where a person indicates that they would like to avail themselves of any referral, consent can be sought for the relevant personal details to be passed to the health provider. This is the proper course of action, rather than automatically passing personal details and potentially sensitive information about sexual abuse to a third party, even when that third party is a healthcare provider. We know there is more that can be done to meet the health needs of children and we are taking concrete steps to do that.
The Government wholeheartedly agree that mental health services should be available to children and young people who need them. We are investing significant funding to that end—but, as I have indicated, it would be wholly inappropriate for referrals to mental health services to be the responsibility of police officers rather than appropriately trained practitioners. I stand ready to meet the noble Baroness and other noble Lords who have put their name to this amendment to discuss these issues further, but I hope that at this stage the noble Baroness will agree to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, and the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, for their support. I reassure the noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, that there is nothing coercive about this. I think there is a misunderstanding because a health issue is being debated in a criminal justice Bill. The reason there is no need to mention anything to do with consent in the amendment is that it is quite unnecessary. Any professional who would be doing the assessment has a professional duty to engage with any patient only with that patient’s consent. Indeed, it would be self-defeating even to try to do an assessment because it would not be effective, so it is totally unnecessary to mention consent in that situation. It is perfectly normal that consent is an absolute given in health issues among all health professionals.
I say to the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, that it is not inflexible either because it should not be for a policeman to decide whether a young person has been affected mentally by the situation. It is coercive if you count coercing the police to do the right thing and share the information, but it is not coercive in relation to the children. The police have to share the information, and it is then for the qualified person doing the assessment to decide what level of help—or no help at all—is needed by that child. That is perfectly straightforward and I see no reason why it should not be done.
The fact is that the police sometimes refer children for mental health assessments, but very rarely. Sometimes children go through a lot of barriers before they get to the assessment, and they disengage. They say, “I can’t do with having to tell my story over and over again to a whole series of people”. What should happen is a referral from a police officer directly to the people who can assess—with the child’s consent, of course—as their professional duty, whether that child needs any help at whatever level.
Clearly, I am not going to convince the Minister, but I should like to keep talking to her about this. Indeed, we have a meeting in the diary for next Monday about this very thing, so I would like to do that. Because of that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Walmsley
“Disallowing use of Tasers by police officers on psychiatric wards
(1) A police officer may not use a Taser or electroshock weapon during a deployment on a psychiatric ward save in exceptional circumstances.(2) Any use of a Taser or electroshock weapon on a psychiatric ward is required to be referred to the Independent Police Complaints Commission in such manner as the Commission specifies and not later than the end of the day following the day on which the Taser or electroshock weapon was used.(3) The Secretary of State may by regulations made by statutory instrument define “exceptional circumstances”.(4) A statutory instrument containing regulations under subsection (3) may not be made unless a draft of the instrument has been laid before and approved by a resolution of each House of Parliament.”
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, this is another thing on which I did not succeed in convincing the Government in Committee, but I listened very carefully to what the Government said and have made some changes.
I had been seeking to ban the use of Tasers by police in psychiatric wards, but since the Government feel that their use may sometimes be necessary, my amendment asks the Government to specify very clearly in regulations the exceptional circumstances under which Tasers should be used. Bearing in mind that the use of such a weapon is a very serious issue and has sometimes led to the death of the person who has been tasered, my amendment asks that any use of such a weapon in a psychiatric ward should automatically be referred to the Independent Police Complaints Commission as a matter of course in just the same way as a death in custody is reported and investigated. By that means we would find out in considerable detail what led to such a severe intervention, and that information can be helpful to the police and mental health providers in improving the way they deal with people in great distress who may well have turned to some kind of violence or aggression. The hour is late, and that is all I wish to say. I beg to move.
Viscount Hailsham
My Lords, I agree with the noble Baroness that the hour is late, and therefore I shall be brief. I was here for the debate in Committee on this subject and I was wholly persuaded by the Minister about the undesirability of this amendment. I know full well that Tasers can be very injurious and I know that they are dangerous, but I also know from considerable personal experience that people in psychiatric wards can be extremely dangerous, volatile and violent.
I speak as somebody who was for some years Minister for the special hospitals. There were three mental hospitals in my constituency. I was the Minister for Police for a time and, relatively recently, I was on the monitoring board of a local prison. I know they are different, but in prisons you see many people who ought to be in psychiatric hospitals. The truth is that sometimes there is no choice: people get possession of a weapon and threaten their nurses or pose a very real threat to the other residents on the ward. What is a police officer to do if summoned and faced with a person with a knife? The truth is that in exceptional cases—which I will come to in a moment—a Taser may be necessary. I am certainly not going to go down the road of prohibiting that by statute.
What does “exceptional circumstances” actually mean? I can tell the noble Baroness: when there is a reasonably founded belief that it is necessary in self-defence or in defence of a third party. If I was the Secretary of State and put that into a statutory instrument, so what? Ultimately, it has to be decided by the court. If you look at this amendment and reflect on its consequences for one moment, the police officer is guilty of assault unless he can bring forward the defence. But who is responsible for bringing forward the defence? Does he have to prove that his acts fall within the exceptional circumstances or does the prosecution have to negate their existence? I suspect the latter, but it is extremely difficult for a police officer in those circumstances. It is a legal minefield and good news for lawyers—which is not something I am advocating in this case. It is a thoroughly bad amendment and I hope we hear no more of it.
Earl Attlee
My Lords, I will briefly support the noble Viscount. I would not want to put a police officer in the very difficult position of having to decide whether to get involved in close engagement with someone who is very dangerous or use a conventional firearm, with all the difficulties that that entails.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
My Lords, this amendment brings us back to the use of Tasers. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, for taking on board the points raised when we debated this issue in Committee and coming back with a revised amendment. My noble friends Lord Hailsham and Lord Attlee have given us a flavour of what we discussed then.
Any use of force by police officers in psychiatric wards on patients—or on any member of the public in any setting for that matter—must be appropriate, proportionate, necessary and conducted as safely as possible. When police officers need to attend and use force, they must be able to account for their actions. As the noble Lords, Lord Dear and Lord Rosser, and my noble friend Lord Hailsham indicated in Committee, a blanket ban on the use of Tasers in psychiatric wards would remove this valuable police tactic when they are dealing with potentially very violent situations.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
I do not usually take interventions on Report, although I will acquiesce to the noble Baroness because she did not speak for very long.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
I welcome the fact that the noble Baroness now accepts that there will be exceptional circumstances. My noble friend Lord Hailsham has very clearly outlined what exceptional circumstances would be, and I explained in Committee that it was when all other options for restraint had failed, particularly when the person has perhaps had to be kept at length from the police officer—in other words when going near the person would create a danger for other people.
The Taser was introduced to be used at that intermediate stage. It is to be used where de-escalation at the lower end has already been tried but has failed, and where the officer deems that other options—ranging from the use of lethal force, as my noble friend said, at the higher end—will not resolve the immediate threat in the safest and most proportionate way.
With regard to recording incidents, as the noble Baroness pointed out, each officer who deploys a Taser is required to complete a Taser evaluation form on every occasion where the device is used. The form should be completed prior to the end of each tour of duty, but in any case within 24 hours of the use. The police forces’ lead Taser officer is responsible for reviewing, collating and recording all Taser evaluation forms.
In Committee I explained that new police data were being collected on the use of force by officers, including force used in a hospital setting, to further improve the existing system of recording and reporting. Police forces are working to implement this new recording system and we expect data to be published as part of the Home Office’s annual data return in summer 2018 to ensure that the use of Tasers is absolutely transparent.
I put it to the noble Baroness that effective scrutiny of the use of Tasers is a better way forward than seeking to legislate. No officer will use a Taser lightly and will seek to argue that there were indeed exceptional circumstances. I have already pointed to the anomaly that this amendment would create in respect of the use of lethal force—no one wants to see that happen—if a safer tactic was unavailable. I hope the noble Baroness will feel happy to withdraw her amendment.
Baroness Walmsley
My Lords, I thank the Minister for her reply. Anyone hearing what has been said in the House tonight would think that I was asking for a ban on the use of Tasers. If noble Lords read my amendment carefully, they will realise that that is not what it would do. It accepts what the Government said in Committee, and during meetings that we had at the Home Office, that there may be exceptional circumstances. That is why I am no longer asking for a ban; I make that absolutely clear to noble Lords who have spoken.
However, it is a very serious matter for a police officer to use a Taser, as the Minister herself has said, in which case I think it would be helpful to the police if the Secretary of State were to specify clearly what is meant by “exceptional circumstances”. The noble Viscount, Lord Hailsham, has tried this evening to give a very simple account of what that means, and indeed the Minister has done the same. If it is that simple, why can it not be done? I think it would help the police.
I am aware that, following discussion in another place of an amendment similar to this one, a lot more information is now to be collected about the use of Tasers. I think that is a very good thing, and I look forward to seeing what we can learn from it. However, in this amendment I seek to be helpful to the police and to protect them by making very clear what they can and cannot do, and under what circumstances. But clearly the Government are not going to accept that, so I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Tunisia
Baroness Suttie
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their current political strategy towards Tunisia, and what plans they have to further develop economic, security and cultural relations with Tunisia, in particular in the light of the situation in Libya.
Baroness Suttie (LD)
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have agreed to take part in the debate this evening. In particular, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson, and my noble friend Lord Purvis, who participated with me and about a hundred others from the UK and the Maghreb region in the inspirational British Council’s annual Hammamet conference in Tunisia last weekend. The noble Baroness, my noble friend and I are all also members of the British Council APPG inquiry into building resilience against violent extremism, which is concentrating on looking into successful projects in the region. I am also very grateful to the British Embassy in Tunis, and in particular to Her Majesty’s outgoing ambassador to Tunisia, for the very comprehensive background briefing that I received while I was in Tunis last week. I know that many noble Lords speaking in the debate will also have been regular visitors to Tunisia over the years and will be equally passionate about Tunisia, its beautiful scenery, enormous potential, and the warmth and hospitality of the Tunisian people.
Exactly a week ago, I was attending a dinner with a group of young Tunisian leaders in Tunis. The dinner was organised by UK NGO Forward Thinking, and brought together young activists from NGOs, civic society and young political leaders from the governing parties of Nidaa Tounes and Ennahda. We had a very lively discussion, during which we tackled many of the issues currently facing Tunisia, such as economic reform, corruption, the need for significant reform of the education system and the role of culture and sport in building resilience against violent extremism. Despite the occasionally argumentative nature of our debate around the dinner table, the very fact that we were able to hold such a debate at all is an indication of just how far Tunisia has come since the revolution against Ben Ali’s authoritarian regime six years ago.
If the political revolution has been thorough—as illustrated through Tunisia’s new progressive constitution —this has not been matched over the same period by economic growth. For many ordinary Tunisians, political and constitutional reform has not resulted in a substantial improvement in their living conditions or the creation of real, sustainable jobs.
When speaking to Tunisian politicians and young people, they often highlight the significant disconnect between the political class in Tunis and the other regions of the country. In some cases, the division between Tunis and the significantly poorer interior regions has worsened since 2011. Much of the country’s wealth is distributed to the already affluent coastal towns and cities, and many areas to the south and west of the country continue to face severe social and economic difficulties. Can the UK Government do anything substantial to help bridge the coastal/interior divide in Tunisia—not least as such divisions in the country can provide fertile recruiting ground for Daesh?
On each visit I have made to Tunisia, I have been struck by the highly educated and motivated young people I have met, but Tunisia faces graduate unemployment of more than 30%. Paradoxically, in Tunisia, the more educated someone is, the less likely they are to have a job. There remains a severe mismatch between the education system and the skills required by the labour market. Tunisian companies say that they have vacancies that they cannot fill because of the lack of candidates with the required skills. English language is often a key requirement for employers, and it is clearly an area where the UK can and does play a significant role. Can the Minister give more detail on the Government’s strategy to assist Tunisia in reform of the education system over the next few years, as this is clearly an area of key importance?
Such high levels of unemployment among young Tunisians raise not only economic and educational questions but questions of identity: of ensuring that young people believe that they have a stake in the future of Tunisia. A great many hugely valuable UK programmes on the ground in Tunisia use culture, the arts and dance to reconnect people, or are projects facilitating leadership skills and capacity-building to tackle these issues, but it is important to look at ways to ensure greater co-ordination and scale up and increase the outreach of such projects.
One such positive programme is the British Council’s Young Arab Voices. This programme, which has now reached more than 100,000 young people across the region since 2010, helps to increase English language skills, promotes confidence in presenting an argument and assists the development of critical and analytical thought. I strongly recommend that on any future visit to Tunisia, the Minister witnesses the programme for herself in one of the Tunisian universities.
Key to Tunisia’s future is its economic development. Its current economic model, with its heavy reliance on the public sector, is unsustainable and not delivering for its people. But I believe that there is tremendous economic potential for Tunisia as a service-sector hub for the region, for the development of the renewables sector, and for it to substantially develop its ICT sector. ICT currently accounts for 7% of the Tunisian economy and, with its younger, highly educated population, Tunisia has very real potential to become extremely attractive to the ICT industry.
Foreign investment is heavily influenced by issues such as absorption capacity, administrative reform and an effective fight against corruption. Assisting Tunisia as it moves to tackle these next stages of reform is going to be key in helping to develop a strong Tunisian economy that attracts and sustains both domestic and foreign investment. This week there is a large-scale investment conference taking place in Tunisia. It was obvious from conversations that I had last week that a large amount of hope for the future was being placed on this event. Clearly such conferences are a part of a process and should not be viewed as an end in themselves but, in the framework of the UK’s overall economic strategy towards Tunisia, can the Minister say what concrete measures are being taken to encourage British companies to invest in Tunisia?
The strength of the Tunisian economy is key to so many issues, which brings me on to tourism. If you speak to any Tunisian—in business, politics or civil society—at a certain point they will always bring up the issue of the current UK travel advice, which they perceive as an outright travel ban. Its continued existence in the face of significant security improvements has become a somewhat symbolic issue. In the medina in Hammamet last Saturday evening, a businessman stopped us to say how delighted he was to see British visitors back in the coastal holiday resort. He told us how much he liked the British and how sad he was that British tourists no longer come in any large numbers to Hammamet. Tourism still accounts for about 8% of the Tunisian economy. An increase in tourism equals an increase in employment in many parts of Tunisia. Tourism remains vital to Tunisia.
I am aware that the UK has been significantly assisting Tunisia in helping to improve security measures and training, especially in the hotel sector and in airports, and we were told that great progress is being made in this regard. Can the Minister say when the Government will revisit the issue of the current travel advice and under what conditions they would be willing to change this advice?
In conclusion, I believe that, post-Brexit, the UK needs to review its foreign policy objectives and its strategies for developing increased trade. The Maghreb region offers many possibilities with its young and highly educated populations who are increasingly keen to look to us in the UK for educational and business opportunities. Tunisia was the country where the revolutions in the region began six years ago and remains one of the greatest hopes to lead the way in the region as a democratic model for the future. For this reason, I believe that Tunisia deserves our increased attention and support, most particularly because of the additional challenges that the instability in neighbouring Libya poses. I look forward to hearing the views of other noble Lords during this short debate this evening.
Lord Patten (Con)
That speech was well worth waiting for and I warmly congratulate the noble Baroness on what she said and how she said it. There are three points that I want to turn to: Tunisia in the changing geopolitics of the eastern and central Mediterranean; security; and what the UK can do in the light of Tunisia being more part of the francophone, Mediterranean littoral than of the anglophone sphere of influence. None the less, there is much that we can do.
First, on geopolitics, what seems to be happening at the moment is that we have a period of general disinclination of one great power—the USA—to get more involved on the ground in areas such as this, at the same time as a once-great power—Russia—is ever keener to reassert itself. There is an emerging and growing arc of difficulty where it is doing so, stretching from Tunisia right round the eastern arc of the Mediterranean to Syria and Turkey. The Russians are piling assets and people into the whole region and have now, in Syria, the warm-water, ever-ice-free port that they have sought for centuries.
I do not think that they plan to leave soon—or, indeed, at all. I think the Russians are there to stay in Syria, and we have to get used to that. And their influence will spread further. I may well already be reaching the small country of Tunisia, which is placed geographically at the pivot of the mid-Mediterranean, so it is very strategically located in geopolitical terms. As we have just heard, very few UK tourists—let alone French tourists—go there at the moment. But I am told that the new linchpin of tourism is Russian tourism. The Russians are now coming in increasing numbers to seek sun, sea and Carthage in that country. Russian investment in-country is also greatly increasing in liquefied gas and infrastructure. The Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, showed considerable interest in the place all of a sudden not very long ago. These are very interesting signs of things to come.
Secondly, Tunisia’s security is vital. Tunisia’s own Defence Minister, Farhat Horchani, said on 6 September this year:
“We have a large number of … fighters who arrived from Sirte, or from Syria. I can see no strategy, no cooperation between the states”.
Getting that co-operation on terrorism in the arc of difficulty from Turkey around to Tunisia is vital, yet it is not easy for the West, including the UK, as we found in next-door Libya a few years back. It is terribly easy to go in and kick the door down with air power and missiles; it is exquisitely difficult thereafter to make change stick on the ground. That is one of the problems we have seen in Libya, and one of the problems we will continue to see in the region.
One great hope is that so far political change has happened in Tunisia, with a Prime Minister’s moving without there being rioting in the streets. That happened in a parliamentary way, which I think was an act of considerable political maturity. But we must all be aware that, as we have seen at the eastern end of the Mediterranean arc, elections can be used to bring about a de facto elective dictatorship—for example, President Erdogan in Turkey with his new 1,100-roomed palace, the mass persecution of the media, suppression of dissent and the rest. We do not want to see that in Tunisia under any circumstances.
Thirdly, we have got to do our little bit. I understand that there is about £8 million in the budget this year going forward to be spent in Tunisia. We should do all we can. It is difficult to deal with the foreign travel advice—but foreign travel advice is there to be listened to. I am amazed that there is not similar advice for many areas in Turkey at the moment, where I think there are considerable dangers. For example, only in August this year, the head of the anti-graft body in Tunisia said that the economy would benefit enormously from help because corruption had reached an epidemic stage—he was not talking about tourism. That is not a happy backdrop for the two-day inward investment conference in Tunisia, which closes tonight.
This is set against the background of some 500 foreign firms having left the country since the Arab spring and the terrible terrorist attacks that happened afterwards, with the graduate unemployment of 30% or more that has been left behind. With a little budget we can do a lot to try to help democratic institutions, NGOs, civic society and anti-corruption bodies and support financial sector reform and entrepreneurship.
In all this, our relatively small embassy in Tunisia has done a very great deal in the face of some terrific security problems. It has met the challenges very well under the leadership of our outgoing ambassador, Hamish Cowell. We hope that the embassy staff will hear what the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, said about them tonight, including her thanks to them. We should thank them for what they are doing in Tunis.
Lord Anderson of Swansea (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness on her initiative and I agree with the noble Lord on his geopolitical reflections, particularly with respect to the Russian incursions into the area.
My theme is simple: Tunisia is the one remaining success of the Arab spring and it is in our mutual interest to support its development. Surely success can be measured only in context and in comparison with neighbouring countries. Certainly, Tunisia has many problems. The suicide of that angry youth in 2011 led to the Arab spring, but for most young people the revolution has not delivered and protests have resumed. Unemployment and corruption remain, and terrorist outrages impact massively on the tourist industry and are a disincentive to investment. Development is clearly unbalanced between the coastal strip with its three main towns and the interior with its relative lack of physical and human infrastructure. No doubt Tunisia is still fragile, but compared with its neighbours it is a success.
For all Arab countries there are deep problems of nation-building derived from the Ottoman and colonial periods, and underlying cultural problems, which are outlined in those remarkable five UNDP human development reports in the 2000s. Neighbouring Algeria is marking time with limited democratic advance, Libya is still torn apart by competing militias and Egypt has undergone transition from the Islamic extremism of Morsi to the iron rule of President Sisi. Tunisia is an exception. There is a climate of questioning and debate and a spirit of compromise, illustrated by the 2014 deal between the secularists and the Islamists. Only at the end of July, its parliament peacefully dismissed its Prime Minister.
Internationally, how should we on the north bank of the Mediterranean respond? The migration threat surely shows that, if we do not go to them, they will come to us. Much is already being done by international organisations, of which we are a member, including countering terrorism, assisting in economic development and in security. Thus NATO has a reach into north Africa. EU aid amounts to over a third of Tunisia’s budget deficit, or about 1.35% of GDP. The European Union doubled aid after the revolution and has since released €300 million in EIB loans.
The question is to what extent our aid, in co-operation with our EU partners, will continue after Brexit. At least there must be full co-operation. We will still remain members of the Council of Europe, whose assembly has shown a keen interest in Tunisia and whose Venice Commission has advised on constitutional amendments. Will we be part of a more extended effort to lower tariffs and possibly open our markets more to Tunisia’s agricultural exports?
Bilaterally, with the EU and in co-operation with Tunisia, we need co-operatively to identify problems such as unbalanced development, improving the roads and helping to provide opportunities for young people. As is shown by the brief given by the ambassador, we already assist with border security. The British Council has done great work, as the noble Baroness said, with its Young Arab Voices programme to encourage a spirit of debate and questioning, and from the ambassador’s brief it seems clear that our targets are the right ones. However, although our aid has doubled, it has done so from a very small base.
My final point is that, unless Tunisia is singled out for greater help, it will be a model no longer. If we do not respond positively, the costs to us across the board will be much higher. If the jasmine revolution is to be allowed to crumble in chaos and strife, the last hope of the Arab spring will be dashed.
Baroness Hodgson of Abinger (Con)
My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, for introducing this debate and I congratulate her on her excellent introductory speech. This debate comes at a pertinent time: as noble Lords have heard, we have both just returned from Tunisia, where we attended the Hammamet conference organised by the British Council. This brought together emerging leaders and opinion-formers from across north Africa to identify and discuss solutions to critical issues. Specifically, we learned about the challenges that Tunisia currently faces.
Since the end of French colonial rule in 1957, Tunisia has had two Presidents: President Bourguiba and his successor, President Ben Ali—both dictators. However, President Bourguiba was in fact very forward looking in his vision of a society based on more secular values and gender equality. He introduced the Code of Personal Status—a series of laws focused on addressing gender equality in a number of areas. This included giving women the right to work and to open bank accounts and establish businesses without needing permission from their husbands. He also encouraged tourism in the 1960s, which greatly helped the economy, as, unlike some of its neighbours, Tunisia is not rich in natural resources. However, in the latter years of the dictatorships there was also severe press censorship and oppressive stifling of political opposition.
In 2011, as we have already heard from the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, Tunisia was the source of the Arab spring, or the “Arab source”, as one Tunisian woman once described it to me—the revolution that has had such profound historic consequences for much of the Middle East and indeed the wider world. Without ignoring the death and injury that occurred during the initial demonstrations, of the countries affected by the Arab spring Tunisia is the sole political success, as my noble friend Lord Patten has already said. It is the only country not to have descended into wider chaos and civil unrest, and to have transitioned to become a functioning democracy.
Two elections have been held since and power has changed hands smoothly. The country has adopted a constitution introducing stronger human rights protections, mandating for fair, multiparty elections and allowing for greater freedom of speech. More recently, Tunisia held its first ever public hearings with the victims and witnesses of humanitarian violations perpetrated by the country’s previous regimes. These testimonies were organised by the state-funded Truth and Dignity Commission and were broadcast live on television and radio for the whole nation to follow. This transitional justice marks an important milestone in a country’s quest for openness, transparency and accountability to its people. It is the first time that such an event has taken place in the Arab world.
However, as we have already heard, Tunisia is not without its challenges. We should recognise that western democracy has taken hundreds of years to develop, so Tunisia cannot expect a seamless transition from dictatorship to democracy without some bumps along the way. The clamp-down on freedom of views under Ben Ali had contributed to some young Tunisians leaving to join the fight against the Russians in Afghanistan. In more recent years, Tunisia has in fact become the world’s largest exporter of ISIL fighters, with estimates of between 4,000 and 6,000 Tunisians having travelled to Iraq and Syria to fight for Daesh.
With the situation in neighbouring Libya continuing to deteriorate, there is now increasing concern relating to the influence of ISIL and its reach into the country. The first major assault by ISIL in Tunisia took place in March this year in the border town of Ben Guerdane, committed by fighters who had arrived home from Libya. The threat has continued to grow ever since. Of course, we all remember when 20 people were killed last year at the Bardo museum in Tunis, and 39 tourists, most of them British, were killed on the beach in Sousse.
This year, Tunisia made the unprecedented move of building a 125-mile long barrier along the border with Libya, consisting of water-filled trenches and sand-banks. However, there is a widespread thought that the barrier’s effectiveness will come down to the capacity of those patrolling it. Prior to the Arab spring, Tunisia enjoyed relative stability, and thus the security forces are unprepared to deal with such major terrorist threats—particularly with the number of jihadists who are now thought to be operating across the border in Libya. That is why it is so important to continue to work with the Tunisians, helping them to enhance security, protect civilians and develop capacity to counter violent extremism.
The economy is, as we have already heard, a particular concern, and economic reform has been slow. Tunisia has struggled to attract investment and unemployment is high. As we have heard, more than 30% of its youth are unemployed—curiously that is higher among graduates—and one-quarter of Tunisian companies say they cannot find people with the required skills. The shootings in Sousse and the ensuing travel warnings have meant that tourism from Europe and the US has almost completely dried up, resulting in many Tunisians having been made redundant. There is also very little private sector activity, as historically the Government employed a huge number of people—an unsustainable model—and cronyism was rife, with big business in the hands of the elite and small business not encouraged.
It is widely acknowledged that poverty is one driver of radicalisation. Therefore, as one considers Tunisia’s relative stability and its close proximity to Libya, is there more that the UK can do to help ensure that the situation does not deteriorate? The announcement yesterday of $8 billion in aid and loans to Tunisia over the next four years is very much to be welcomed, but Tunisia also needs inward investment.
Clearly, the travel ban has been devastating to its tourist industry. While we need to protect our citizens, and the memory of Sousse will take a long time to fade, we could still encourage Tunisia to build up more cultural tourism. Carthage is a UNESCO world heritage site and Tunisia has the most fantastic Roman sites, such as Bulla Regia and the wonderful Thysdrus colosseum, built in the 3rd century at El Djem. The UK must also continue to help Tunisia to reform its financial sector and embrace entrepreneurship and private enterprise. Many of the young Tunisians I met last weekend are enthusiastic about looking at new ways of doing business.
In conclusion, Tunisia is a beacon of hope in a troubled part of the world. It is a model to show that a well-functioning democracy is the right way forward for countries across the MENA region. But Tunisia faces challenges, so now is the time for the UK to get alongside and lend our support to help Tunisia achieve full and lasting stability.
Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)
On 17 December 2010, a 26 year-old Tunisian street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, had his goods and equipment confiscated, as he would not bribe a police officer to allow him to continue trading. When he protested, the police slapped him in the face and humiliated him. He went to the regional governor’s office to complain and was rebuffed. He then doused himself in fuel and set himself alight. He died 18 days later. One of his visitors in hospital was the then President, Ben Ali. Five thousand people participated in his funeral procession and the protests grew and grew, in size and over a wider geographical area in the region. The President and the Government of Tunisia fell, and the same happened in other countries. A simple, self-destructive act—a result of hopelessness and humiliation—stimulated what many refer to as the Arab spring, although many, as we have heard, resent that term.
In the subsequent tumultuous six years, Tunisia has undergone widespread change and, in many respects, resisted the pressures from external neighbours. Libya has descended into bloody internal conflict and continues to remain tense, if relatively peaceful, and the MENA region as a whole is at a turning point. This subject is the focus of an inquiry by the International Relations Committee of this House, on which I serve, looking at the changing of sovereignty and of the power balance in the region. Tunisia, as one example of that, gives us many lessons, and it is the particular focus this evening.
I give credit to my noble friend Lady Suttie for bringing Tunisia—its history and opportunities and the pressures that it faces—to the attention of the House. I congratulate her on her foresight. She could not have known when she tabled this Motion a number of months ago how topical it would be, given the recent Hammamet conference I attended with my noble friend and the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson, the ongoing trade discussions in Tunisia and the focus of the international community. All credit is due to my noble friend for such forward thinking.
The British Council in Tunisia allowed the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson, my noble friend and myself to interact with young people in Tunisia, across the Maghreb and the wider region and to have an open dialogue about the pressures and opportunities that the region faces. One contributor at the conference said that only the British Council could bring together a session that included an astrophysicist, an academic, a poet, a textile artist, an economist and a Member of the House of Lords to discuss UK and north Africa issues. But the British Council, as well as the British embassy, is doing sterling work in Tunisia, which I will return to in a moment.
In addition to the work on supporting Tunisia, as my noble friend Lady Suttie mentioned, the All-Party Parliamentary Group on the British Council is also carrying out an inquiry into resilience to radicalisation for young people in the region. As the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson, mentioned, Tunisia is certainly a victim of radicalisation, but, equally, it can show us signs of how we can combat it. One of the most humbling aspects of discussions I had with Tunisian MPs and young people in Tunisia, including in a round table of the International Relations Committee that we conducted last week, was that they were suffering radicalisation but could offer us examples of how to solve the issue. I hope that the Government will respond positively when the inquiry of the British Council APPG concludes its work. From my meetings with delegations from the Egyptian Parliament this week and from the Iraqi Parliament yesterday, I know that we can look to Tunisia in particular for examples of success in combating radicalisation and violence—examples from which we can learn lessons for the region as a whole.
As has been said, Tunisia has not had an easy five years since the uprising and the revolution. The Government in Tunisia are the seventh since 2011. They are currently led by the 41 year-old Youssef Chahed—we wish him well and we wish the stability of Tunisia well. But there is no question that the political instability, as the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, said, has raised considerable concerns within Tunisia. Protests are ongoing and in a way, to pacify protesters, the Government continue to offer more and more public sector jobs. As my noble friend Lady Suttie said in her comprehensive speech opening this debate, private sector unemployment is still high and public sector employment is extremely high. Public sector finances remain perilous. Combined, that shows that considerable economic pressures face Tunisia. We know that the latest statistics show that 23.5% of women are unemployed. We know that the country has a massive underutilisation of a significant part of its economy. With public sector salaries representing half of all government expenditure, we know that the economic situation in Tunisia is fragile.
That is why, as the noble Lord, Lord Patten, and my noble friend indicated, the decision of the British Government not to change their travel advice, which continues to inflict considerable problems on the tourism industry in Tunisia, warrants proper scrutiny. When we were there very recently, I met a trader in the souk in Hammamet who regretted that there were not more British there. The noble Lord, Lord Patten, mentioned the Russians. The trader regretted that there were more Russians there than British tourists. He had learned English not through schooling but through self-tutoring because of the British tourists there. Our Government should clarify their position and I hope that the travel guidance will be reviewed very soon.
One of the reasons why I admire Tunisia is that, when it has gone to the brink with its political and economic difficulties and there has been political cleavage on sectarian grounds, the leaders have stepped back and realised that peaceful and open dialogue is necessary. The global recognition in the form of the Nobel Prize being awarded to the quartet is absolutely justified.
The UK has a significant role to play. I have been to Tunisia three times this year as well as welcoming many of its MPs to the UK, and I have not met a single Tunisian who does not desire much deeper and closer links with the United Kingdom through trade, culture and political support despite all the different pressures that Tunisia faces, including corruption and lack of economic development. I took part in a Westminster Foundation for Democracy process with the Tunisian parliament’s anti-corruption committee, which recognises that this is an issue that needs to be tackled, and the UK has much to offer in support of that. The opportunities for the UK to support Tunisia are huge, and we must not let the Tunisian people down.
I turn to a final aspect, which more than anything else shows me the reason why we need to do this work. The British Council Facebook page alone has 203,000 likes posted by Tunisian people who have a desire to learn English, compared with the House of Lords Facebook page with 9,000 likes. There is a massive desire among Tunisians to learn to speak English and deepen links with this country. I hope that the Government will respond positively to this debate and bring the same element of foresight shown by my noble friend Lady Suttie in offering support to Tunisia and showing that country a hopeful and optimistic way forward.
Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)
My Lords, if I look a little concerned it is not because the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, went over time; it is because I have just heard that Arsenal is losing to Southampton, which makes the evening even more difficult. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, for initiating this debate, which is extremely timely. Tunisia is facing a number of challenges: a growing economic crisis and serious security threats that are aggravated by instability across the border in Libya where two rival factions are battling for control, creating a haven for Islamist militants. The major attacks that we heard about last year were organised in ISIL camps just west of Tripoli, close to the Tunisian border.
Unfortunately, the steady progress made on building democracy has not been matched by building up the economy. The 2011 and 2014 elections were both considered to be free and fair, but on the other hand the economy saw the GDP growth rate fall to less than half of what it was before the revolution. Unemployment stood at 15.3% in 2015, up from 12% in 2010. University graduates comprise one-third of jobless Tunisians. As the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, said, the terrorist attacks have had a major impact on the number of tourists visiting the country. It is worth remembering that in the two years before the attacks, the number of UK tourists going to Tunisia continued to grow, reaching 400,000, which was higher than the pre-revolution numbers.
The FCO advice is based on the information it obtains and of course there is in effect a state of emergency in Tunisia which was imposed after a suicide attack on a police bus on 24 November 2015. As we have read on a number of occasions, most recently on 19 October, the warning has been extended for an additional three months, taking us into January of next year. Since the attacks, as we have heard in the debate, the United Kingdom has been working in co-operation with the Tunisian Government on putting in place additional security measures, gathering intelligence and providing training and support. However, as the FCO says, the intelligence and threat picture has developed considerably, reinforcing the view that a further terrorist attack is highly likely. I too should like to ask the Minister whether she envisages any change to this advice over the next six months. If we are supporting investment in the infrastructure in Tunisia, there needs to be some idea that things will progress, especially given the amount spent on security.
Unlike its oil-wealthy neighbours Libya and Algeria, Tunisia has few natural resources and the years of instability have crimped investment. Economists suggest that other sectors, such as renewable energy, can be a source of growth to compensate for the lost contribution of the tourism sector. As we have heard, the United Kingdom has been running development programmes in Tunisia since the 2011 revolution. To date, our bilateral assistance has been worth around £24 million. As the noble Lord, Lord Patten, said, funding for the 2016-17 programme has increased to £8 million, supporting security, the economy, governance, media and human rights.
In Written Answers to Written Questions from Members of this House, Ministers have stated that the UK Government will,
“continue to encourage Tunisia to set out its plans for economic development and reform, and have particularly underlined the importance of creating jobs for young people”.
What assessment have the Government made of the barriers to economic diversification, and have they considered how support might be better directed to addressing these issues?
As we have heard, a failing economy affects the political situation and, as my noble friend Lord Anderson said, it is vital that we do not avoid giving support. If we do—if we limit ourselves—we put at risk the political situation and the economic situation. The two run in tandem, and that is why the United Kingdom’s support is so vital.
Baroness Goldie (Con)
My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, for tabling this evening’s debate and I welcome the contributions of noble Lords. We may have waited a little time for this debate to take place, but I think we would agree that the wait was well worth while. It was a very important issue to bring before the House and we have all been struck by the nature of the contributions.
Of all the countries that experienced popular uprisings in 2011, only Tunisia has succeeded in making the transition to democracy—a matter commented on by a number of noble Lords. It has undergone a political transformation, with a new constitution, democratic elections and the peaceful transition of power from one Government to another. It is an extraordinary achievement, particularly in light of what happened elsewhere in the region, and immediately next door. The noble Lord, Lord Anderson, spoke powerfully about all this. He addressed the importance of aid, and I hope that my ensuing remarks will not only answer his questions but provide some reassurance.
For much of the same period, the security situation in Libya went from bad to worse. Terrorists and criminal gangs flourished in the security vacuum caused by the Libyan civil war. They sought to destabilise the Tunisian transition by attacking Tunisia’s security forces and its tourism industry, with tragic consequences for British and other foreign tourists in the Bardo and Sousse attacks of 2015.
The UK Government’s strategy since 2011 has been to support the Tunisian Government’s ambition of a stable democracy, not only because it is a worthwhile goal in itself but because Tunisia’s success provides a vital counterpoint to the narratives of Daesh and other extremist groups. Our commitment to Tunisia has grown markedly since the revolution—the staffing levels at the British Embassy in Tunis are an illustration of that. The number of UK staff has grown sixfold since 2011 and trebled in the last two years alone. They are drawn from right across Whitehall, highlighting the breadth of our engagement, from aviation security and economic reform to supporting the Tunisian criminal justice system—something to which my noble friend Lady Hodgson referred. Overall, our funding for work in Tunisia has quadrupled in the last two years.
The noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, asked in particular about economic, security and cultural relations, so I will look at each field in turn. While Tunisia has made great progress politically, it continues to face serious economic and social challenges, to which the noble Baroness referred. The economic inequalities, high youth unemployment and social marginalisation that led to the revolution remain unresolved.
Our strategy is to support economic reforms that will encourage foreign investment, remove barriers to private sector growth and increase investment in those parts of the country that have historically been neglected—a feature that arose during the debate. We are designing a package of programmes focused on improving access to finance for small businesses, helping entrepreneurs to succeed in marginalised areas, supporting the fight against corruption and boosting English language skills for school leavers to meet the demands of Tunisian employers.
There is a significant and growing interest in moving towards a more enterprise-friendly economic model and our expanding portfolio of co-operation is increasingly appreciated. I hope that answers the specific enquiry of the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie. She also asked how we can encourage business to invest in Tunisia. The Prime Minister’s trade envoy, Dr Andrew Murrison, represented the UK at the opening of the Tunisia 2020 conference yesterday, the aim of which is to further encourage progress on economic reform. We reiterated our commitment to supporting that goal, including through the availability of extensive insurance for potential investments from UK Export Finance. I know that a number of your Lordships raised that issue.
Supporting economic reform is vital for Tunisia’s long-term future, but for success to be sustainable it must be underpinned by security. We have dramatically increased our security engagement since the 2015 terrorist attacks to build the capacity of the Tunisian security forces to tackle terrorist threats inside and outside the country, as well as cross-border organised crime and trafficking. My noble friend is absolutely right to stress the relevance of developments in Libya to Tunisia’s prospects. That is why border security and managing returning Tunisian fighters are both vital elements of our support.
Of course, we are not doing this alone. After the Sousse attack we established a mechanism with G7 partners to ensure that international security support is co-ordinated and effectively targeted. It has proved successful and we now seek to apply the same formula to support economic reform. I share my noble friend’s desire to see British holidaymakers return to Tunisia. We keep our travel advice under constant review as we work with the Tunisian authorities and the tourist industry to improve security and crisis response. It is very important to emphasise that we will lift our advice against all but essential travel when we judge that the threshold for doing so has been met. The safety of British citizens has to be paramount.
We are also keen to strengthen our cultural relations with Tunisia. There is a growing appetite to learn English. Indeed the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, specifically raised the subject of education. The Tunisian Minister of Education recently announced his wish for English to become the second language taught in schools, ahead of French. This would be a significant change of direction.
Our embassy and the British Council are adjusting their programmes to respond to the increasing demand, which is clear from the 2,000 children and adults who come to learn English every week at the excellent British Council teaching centre in Tunis. Last year, 7,500 UK qualifications were taken by young Tunisians. More than 10,000 young people have been involved in Young Arab Voices, which provides debate training and skills development through more than 60 active debating clubs across 24 governorates in Tunisia—a project now set to go into high schools across the country. The British Council’s Hammamet conference, to which the noble Baroness referred and which she attended last week, brings together established and emerging leaders from across north Africa and the UK. It is now in its fifth year and seems to be going from strength to strength, which is commendable and encouraging. I pay tribute to the British Council for its very positive work in Tunisia and in the region.
I shall now turn to the contributions of noble Lords, because a number of very important points were raised. The noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, talked about regional inequality, and indeed that is an issue. Regional disparities remain, with the marginalised interior regions continuing to suffer the highest unemployment levels, up to 30%, with poor basic infrastructure and limited access to public services. We encourage the Tunisian Government to deliver Prime Minister Chahed’s promise to tackle regional inequality and will work with Tunisia and our G7 partners to give impetus to economic reforms. The noble Baroness will understand that, in conjunction with what I have already said about our desire to encourage economic reform and assist an enterprise-based economy, this is the most optimistic way forward to resolve these inequalities.
The noble Baroness also specifically raised the issue of travel to Tunisia, as did the noble Lord, Lord Collins. As I have just said, we will keep that under review and work with the Tunisian authorities to support them in improving security. We will lift our advice against all but essential travel, but only when we judge that it is safe to do so. My noble friend Lord Patten raised a number of interesting points, not least the geopolitics of the area, which are very pertinent. Tunisia is strategically highly important and will remain so, by its position and its unique progress on democratic reform in the region. On security, co-operation with our G7 partners, including the US, is strong and our interest in securing the democratic transition in Tunisia is very much shared by these partners.
My noble friend Lord Patten also raised the specific issue of security. He and a number of other noble Lords referred to the situation in Libya. We understand and share noble Lords’ concerns about the uncertain situation in Libya and its potential knock-on effects in Tunisia. We are working with the Tunisian Government and other partners in the G7 to help improve the state of border security and so limit the risk of terrorists crossing freely. This will take time but the importance of maintaining Tunisia’s stability, both as a bulwark against Daesh and as an example of successful Arab democracy, is paramount.
My noble friend Lady Hodgson made the very important point of how developing constitutional freedoms and new rights and privileges are increasingly benefiting Tunisian citizens. That is very important and positive. She too articulated concerns about the situation in Libya and I refer her to my response to my noble friend Lord Patten. The noble Lord, Lord Purvis, rightly emphasised the important diversity of young people in Tunisia. He is absolutely correct and I hope that the recognition by the United Kingdom Government of the importance of education and of the wider civic engagement which we are trying to nurture among young people in Tunisia—with the increasing interest in topical affairs and our provision of facilities to get familiar with the form of debates—will make a positive contribution to their ability to participate very positively in the future of their country.
In conclusion, the noble Lord, Lord Collins, raised a number of important points, including travel. I think I have fairly comprehensively covered travel. I will just observe that tourism, while it is a significant part of the Tunisian economy—at the time of the Sousse attack there was certainly a very active tourist industry, particularly between Tunisia and the United Kingdom—Tunisia is not wholly dependent on it. It represented about 7% of GDP before the 2015 attacks, which is on a par with the ICT sector. The noble Lord also raised the issue of barriers to economic diversification. I hope that the responses I have given to other contributors to the debate will reassure him on that front.
Finally, our strategy in Tunisia is clear, targeted and effective. It is a strategy that we are pursuing in close co-operation with the Tunisian Government and international partners, supported by enhanced funding from the new £280 million North Africa Good Governance Fund—the fund for development spending in north Africa, from Egypt to Morocco. We remain absolutely committed to supporting Tunisia’s new democracy in the months and years ahead.